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Young Bogart was sent to Trinity School, an old and select Episcopal institution in New York, and then on, like his father, to Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass, to prepare for Yale. But he was thrown out after three semesters for what was described as ''incontrollable high spirits." Bogart, 18, was unwilling to face his family. He hustled off to a recruiting ship and joined the Navy. He ended up on troopships and spent most of World War I shuttling between New York and Liverpool as a helmsman aboard the captured liner Leviathan. Meanwhile, the family money was dwindling away as the result of father's optimistic but ill-conceived instinct for investment.
It Isn't Easy. After young Humphrey left the service, one of Dr. Bogart's patients—a cigar-smoking, hard-drinking promoter of prizefights and theatrical ventures named William A. Brady—put him to work at $50 a week as the manager of a traveling road company. His most painful duty was paying the actors—they made more than he did. One night, hopeful of financial advancement, he injected himself into a minor role. "It was awful," he recalls. "I knew all the lines of all the parts because I'd heard them from out front about a thousand times. But I took one look at the audience and I couldn't remember anything."
But he kept doggedly on. He was a passably handsome youth, in a slick, Valentino way, and he had a taste for good clothes. He got the second lead in a Broadway play, Swifty. His performance, Alexander Woollcott wrote, could be "mercifully described as inadequate." But gradually he learned. "There's an awful lot of bunk written about acting," he says. "But it isn't easy. You can't just make faces. If you make yourself feel the way the character would feel, your face will express the right things—if you're an actor. There are lots of things. How you walk. Try walking up to a door and opening it some time on a stage. It isn't as simple as you think. You mustn't stand close to anyone on the stage. Two objects together become one object in the eye of the audience. Here's an actor's trick. Keep looking at somebody's hands. Pretty soon he'll feel like his arms are 16 feet long. He'll fall apart trying to put them somewhere. You have to know what to do with your hands. All these things—you get to do them instinctively. I admire good actors —Spencer Tracy, Clifton Webb, Jimmy Stewart, Richard Widmark—they're good."
Shock & Amuse. During the twenties. Bogart went from one Broadway hit to another as a juvenile in romantic parts. He is remembered by old friends as a "well-behaved, agreeable, serious young man," but one who had no sense of direction. Eventually, setbacks and difficulty seemed to provide him with it. He went to Hollywood in 1929 to be the Fox Studio's Gable: "I wasn't Gable, and I flopped." He came back to Broadway—to the Depression and three long years of disappointment and debt. Then Producer Arthur Hopkins cast him (despite the doubts of Bogart's friend, Playwright Robert Sherwood) in a new kind of role: the Dillinger-like gunman Duke Mantee, in The Petrified Forest.