27. Humphrey Bogart Was “As Tough as Shirley Temple“
In Humphrey Bogart’s Hollywood heyday, studios effectively owned their actors, lock, stock, and barrel. Actors like Bogart consented to have their names, appearances, and just about all aspects of their private lives changed to suit their bosses’ needs. One of the first things that Bogart’s studio Warner Bros. wanted to change about him was how he talked. He had a mouth deformity that made him speak with a lisp, which the studio thought was effeminate. They could not get rid of the lisp, so they gave him hormone shots and voice coaching lessons to make him speak in a more “manly” low and gravelly voice, often through clenched teeth.
Incidentally, Warner Bros. spread various stories about the cause of his deformity, to buttress his tough-guy image. At various times it was attributed to shrapnel from Bogart’s WWI Navy days, a fistfight, or a beatdown from his abusive father. The actual cause, as Bogart acknowledged, was a childhood accident. In real life, contra the common perception of Bogart as a hard-bitten tough guy, he was a sweetheart. As fellow tough-guy actor, James Cagney put it: “when it came to fighting, [Bogart] was about as tough as Shirley Temple“.
