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In spite of being neither young nor romantically handsome, Bogart is a much-sought-after leading man who gets $200,000 for each picture he makes. He lives with his fourth wife, Actress Lauren Bacall (known as "Baby") and their two children in a $160,000 whitewashed brick mansion in Los Angeles' exclusive Holmby Hills, keeps two Jaguar automobiles (a Mark VII for Baby, an XK 120 for himself), three blooded boxer dogs, and a $55,000 ocean-going racing yacht. Mike Romanoff, the famed phony prince, wise man and restaurateur who is a sometime arbiter of Hollywood society, allows him to appear for meals without a necktie. He is president and principal stockholder of a motion-picture producing company of his own, Santana Pictures, and at times, as in Knock on Any Door, In a Lonely Place and Beat the Devil, is, so to speak, his own high-paid employee.
The Bogart star, furthermore, is currently on the rise. The motion-picture industry, dueling with its enemy, television, is making fewer but at the same time bigger, more grandiose and more expensive films. As in all its hours of trial, its basic schizophrenia stands clearly revealed. It must, quite obviously, make a profit, and in the face of this fact it wavers between prenatal memories of the carnival and feverish dreams of class.
Time has proved that an ex-garment maker can often produce better, more vital, more dramatic, even more sensitive movies than a Yale man. And in yearning for the benediction of the New York critics, the industry can never forget that most of the popcorn eaters who pay its bills, while being good, honest, patriotic, thrifty, well-meaning, healthy, 100% Americans, also tend to be tasteless slobs.
Automatic Excitement. What to do? Whom to trust? In Bogart the harried producer can find comfort. Bogie may bait and bully his betters, but he can act, and he is reliable. His name pulls at the box office. After his years in gangster parts, his appearance on the screen automatically seems to lend a story impact and excitement. Movie fans do not care a whit if he (unlike Jimmy Stewart and Gregory Peck) is killed during the course of a picture. Cab drivers, burglars and women admire him. And on top of all this, as an Academy-Award winner (for his part in African Queen), he also lends a film an aura of distinction.
In the last twelve months, as a result, Free-Lance Actor Bogart has played a surprising variety of important roles. He has not completely divorced himself from gangster parts—he is presently considering a hoodlum role in The Desperate Hours, a Midwestern crime story which he tried to buy himself before Paramount outbid him. Nevertheless, he has not had a gat in his hand in a long time. He not only plays a wealthy Wall-Street type (complete with Homburg, furled black umbrella, Brooks Brothers suit and briefcase), but wins the hand of lissome Audrey Hepburn in Paramount's forthcoming Sabrina. In The Barefoot Contessa, recently filmed in Italy with Ava Gardner, he is a tough old movie director.