History's Great Drunks: Humphrey Bogart

“The whole world is three drinks behind.”

(This is one of a series of “History’s Great Drunks” portraits I wrote for Robb Report a couple of years ago. I wrote a bunch of them before editorial shakeups put the kibosh on the whole thing. I don’t remember if any of them ran or not; you’ll eventually see them all here regardless.)

He died in 1957, but Humphrey Bogart was, even decades after his death, a role model for American masculinity. Whether dressed to the nines as Rick in Casablanca or stubbly and disheveled as the fisherman in The African Queen, he was equally appealing to guys and dolls alike. The typical character he played could punch your lights out without thinking twice about it, but was at the same time a sensitive soul who, around women, wore his heart on his sleeve (a role he lived out when he married his great love, Lauren Bacall).

And when it came to drinking, few could match him. Bogie started out drinking a little bit —OK, a lot — of everything, but he eventually settled into what one writer called “a very personal war against Scotch.” By all accounts, his capacity was legendary, as was his ability to turn in brilliant performances while hung over or even stone drunk. On at least one occasion, his heavy on-set drinking preserved his health. While filming The African Queen on location, he was one of only two members of the cast and crew — the other being director and fellow sot John Huston — who avoided coming down with dysentery, thanks to the copious amounts of booze that killed the bacteria in the water.

Aside from his films, Bogart’s greatest legacy may be that he founded the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, a loose-knit crew of carousers which met regularly at his and Bacall’s home during the 1950s. Charter member Frank Sinatra took the idea and ran with it after Bogie’s death, creating his own, better-remembered Rat Pack in Las Vegas.

In the end, it wasn’t the drinking that got Humphrey Bogart, it was the smoking, which led to the esophageal cancer that killed him at age 57. His famous last words — which, as it turned out were made up by an overly imaginative biographer — were supposedly, “I never should have switched from Scotch to martinis.” One thing he actually did say was, “The whole world is three drinks behind.” Alas, since his passing it may have fallen even further back.