Sometimes it seems that I learn more from looking at the losers in history—even Hollywood history—than I do from the lives of those who seem to be victors in life’s competitive struggle. The triumphant, who are usually perceived that way at a distance, are feted anew in biographies and compendiums of a period’s highlights. The also-rans are sometimes given the affectionate sobriquet of “beautiful losers”. Their foolish, noble or flamboyant failings may be most fondly remembered by those who never knew them. Well, here’s a small toast to a less than beautiful loser, a woman whose brief and tragic life has only been seen through the somewhat romanticized prism of several other celebrated lives.

Mayo Methot (1904-1951) is usually referred to as a colorful, if sad chapter during the “wilderness years” of movie icon Humphrey Bogart‘s long apprenticeship at Warner Brothers, following his promising breakthrough role in The Petrified Forest (1936) opposite his friend, Leslie Howard. As Bogart‘s third wife, Methot‘s descent into alcoholism, tempestuous marriage, possible mental illness, spousal abuse and inevitable obscurity are well documented. What seems less well known are her occasionally noteworthy appearances on screen.

I’d never had the sense of “knowing” her through her brief appearances on film until the last year, when TCM trotted out some of her less well known films on their schedule. I was so moved by the beautifully shaded performance that Mayo Methot gave in Virtue (1932), an unruly little Columbia Studios Pre-Coder shown recently on TCM, that I thought that I’d try to look at her life and career separately from the iconic Mr. Bogart for once.

Sounds like a festival of clichés, you say? Not entirely, thanks in large part to Riskin‘s incisive dialogue and Eddie Buzzell‘s brisk direction of this 68 minute morality tale. Most striking of all, the outstanding skill that Methot as Lil Blair showed in her deft interplay with Lombard as Mae illustrates the quality of the dialogue and Methot, in her later rueful moments of reflection on her life, showed an actress of surprising ability, some subtlety and truthfulness. One lively exchange between the two illustrates the rapport between the two characters and the above average quality of Riskin‘s writing:

Lil Blair(Mayo Methot): [at Lil's apartment at the Wellington Manor. "Frivolous Sal" is playing in the background] Danbury. That’s where they make hats, ain’t it? Mae(Carole Lombard): Yeah, I’da gone there, only I got a hat. Lil Blair: I been there once. Great town. They don’t bury their dead – just let ‘em walk around.
Mae:Sounds like just the place for me.
Lil Blair: How ya fixed for money, kid?
Mae: Who me? Oh, I’m OK. Say, money’s the last thing I think about.
Lil Blair: Yeah, every night before falling asleep. C’mere, babe. You can’t kid this old-timer; you’re moving right in here with me.
Mae: I wish I could, Lil, but I can’t take a chance. I gotta lay low for awhile. Runnin’ into that dick wouldn’t be too healthy for me. And in a joint like this? Oh!
Lil Blair: Put that record on again, willya Mae? Gee, that song does somthin’ to me; kinda gives me a funny little pain.
Mae: [sardonically] Where?
Lil Blair: What’s eatin’ ya kid?
Mae: Me? Nothing. I got no kick comin’. I got a beautiful home on Long Island, four or five Rolls Royces… and a big stiff pain in the neck.
Lil Blair: Listen, you’re lettin’ this get under your skin. I wanna tell you somethin’: hangin’ around me ain’t gonna do ya any good. Why don’t you get out? You’re young and pretty…
Mae: Did you ever try it? You’ve been around a long time. Lil Blair:Since I was seventeen.
Mae: You did your Christmas shopping early.
Lil Blair: Mmmm. I found out there wasn’t any Santy Claus, too. Oh, I coulda got out of it once, but I had a rotten break: I fell in love. Don’t ever let that happen to you, Mae. Get out while you can.
Mae: [wistful] Yeah. Try and get out. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s like hopping out of a window; when you jump, you just naturally gotta keep going.

Who was she? Mayo Methot was the daughter of a Portland, Oregon sea captain who sailed to China regularly. He gave his daughter a love of the sea, one of the few healthy interests that she would share with Bogart during their marriage, when they spent much of their time on a 36-foot cabin cruiser. Her mother, Beryl, who fostered her daughter’s theatrical bent, was an independent woman and a notable journalist in Portland at a time when most women’s lives began and ended at the front door of their homes. Mayo never seems to have achieved the kind of lasting self-sufficiency of her mother, but with her support she struck out for Broadway at 18 after an apprenticeship in local repertory work.
“More than you know
More than you know
Man of my heart, I love you so.”

It was probably the last time she would achieve such a singular moment in her professional life. Her New York press clippings from the period on stage extolled “her little blond beauty”, “naïve personality and dramatic skill” and emphasized her “sweet voice”. “The Portland Rosebud” had achieved a level of professional success by the time that Bogart met her for the first time, reportedly at a purely social occasion at the Biltmore Hotel.

Despite her professional achievements, in the turbulent world of show business, a marriage at 19 to Cosmopolitan Productions cameraman Jack La Mond dissolved in 1927. She came to Hollywood in 1930, and soon her second marriage to Percy Morgan, the scion of a socially well-connected California family and the co-owner with his brother of the legendary Cock n’ Bull restaurant on Sunset Blvd., was on the horizon. Methot‘s first appearance in a film appears to have been in a bit part in a film that her then husband, Jack La Mond was working on, called Unseeing Eyes (1923), a silent production starring Lionel Barrymore. With stage work drying up drastically as the Depression set in, she signed a Hollywood contract as the talkie revolution began and stage-trained actors became a desirable commodity.

Unfortunately, Hollywood, finding her unusual looks nearly unphotographable, treated her less kindly than the theatrical world she’d left behind, where her appearance could be softened by the footlights. Photographing as much harder than friends say she appeared in real life, she became typecast as “a nasty, greedy raddled woman.” As her career crept along, parts such as the grasping “Mrs. Semple” in Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) would become her metier. Almost in her thirties, her disappointment keen and professional pride hurt, she found solace in the now habitual drinking that had begun in the early days of the speakeasy era. She must have realized that her ingenue days were done and her appearances in a few noteworthy movies in character roles indicate that she may have had talent flickering inside her.

Methot‘s next film, the prestigious adaptation of Elmer Rice‘s splendid character study, Counsellor-at-Law (1933), seemed to promise better roles to come, since the actress scored a bulls-eye in a small part as a grateful and decidedly libidinous guilty client of star John Barrymore, (who gave a remarkable performance under the guidance of director William Wyler). Wisely, Barrymore‘s character, a successful attorney, shows his streetwise toughness in keeping his husband-killer client at an ethical distance.

One of her co-stars in the movie, future director Vincent Sherman would recall later that Mayo was “a talented actress who was hitting the bottle too much.” Despite this appearance in a good film, the actress, like “the great profile” himself, was not able to rouse herself consistently from her self-destructive path long enough to establish her career in film as a reliable character player assured of employment in the factory-like studio system.

The toll of her life on her appearance became especially obvious in another film, the Perry Mason programmer directed by Michael Curtiz, The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) starring the busy Warren William as Erle Stanley Gardner‘s litigious creation. This film, which astute movie fans will tell you also featured an early bit by Errol Flynn, allowed Methot to play a broad comic role pretending to be a dead man’s widow. While the briskly efficient film is mildly entertaining, and Methot‘s mercenary imposter is amusing, it’s rather sad to see that time has coarsened her face and thickened her body. What was once described as her flower-like appeal has become brassy, blowsy and common.

By the time Methot and Bogart appeared in the same film, Marked Woman (1937), their marriage was almost inevitable. Interestingly, the film was one of the few films in this period of the actor’s career in which Humphrey Bogart had a chance to play a good guy, (albeit a stick figure of a d.a. based on NYC special prosecutor and notable stiff, Thomas E. Dewey). Bette Davis, in a tour de force performance as a feisty B girl who stands up to gangster Eduardo Ciannelli, plays a defender of the vulnerable older character played by Mayo Methot.

When one of the gangsters appraises Mayo‘s character and says “Kind of old, aren’t you? I need young dames here”…”the kind men go for in a hurry”, Davis pipes up in her defense, insuring her presence in the nightclub where she and her cohorts ply their trade. Still, the words of the screenplay, which are about Methot‘s character, could have easily applied to Mayo too: “years of night life have already taken their toll of her simple beauty…”

Bogart, who like Mayo, would soon be divorced from his second spouse, New York actress, Mary Philips, puzzled some friends who could not understand their bond. However, as the actor explained, “I was born with [class], I’ve had it all my life–I can also do without it.” Aside from what some saw as a sexual dance of death at times, Mayo had similar interests in common with her soon-to-be husband: acting, the sea, vivacious conversation, and no less important, drinking and unpredictably eccentric, iconoclastic behavior. She was also fond of keeping house, and cherished their four dogs, which included a Scottie (who can be seen in Bogie’s 1937 film Stand-In) and a Newfoundland named “Cappy”, pictured here.

While today, we might characterize the relationship that developed as mutually destructive, it should be remembered that drinking, in public and private, was much more socially acceptable than it later became. As Humphrey Bogart reflected much later about the death of his 35 year old sister, Catherine, which occurred during this early period of his relationship with Mayo, “She was a victim of the speakeasy era. She burned the candle at both ends, then decided to burn it in the middle.” Yet drinking, for that “Lost Generation” that came into adulthood during Prohibition, was an intrinsic part of everyday life. In Mayo‘s case, it enabled her to be “one of the boys” and ease what must have been a sometimes painful life as a second and third tier player in Hollywood, and eventually, that most invisible of all creatures, a star’s wife.

Publicly, Bogie claimed to admire Mayo‘s combative unpredictability, boasting shortly after their marriage that “I like a jealous wife, I can be a jealous husband too. Mayo’s a grand girl. She knows how to handle me”…”We get on so well together [because] we don’t have illusions about each other”…”I love a good fight”…”We have some first-rate battles. One of the important things to master in marriage is the technique of the quarrel.”

This “technique”, which in the couple’s case involved public and private bouts and the labeling of their home “Sluggy Hollow”, (their boat was just known as “Sluggy”), soon earned them publicity as the “Battling Bogarts” and had them banned from bars, restaurants and night clubs on both coasts. Certainly, Humphrey Bogart‘s frustration with the gangster roles that he was repeatedly handed by his bosses at Warners may have contributed to his mounting unhappiness, but Mayo‘s precipitous decline into alcoholism, depression and increasingly irrational rages also fueled his despair in this period. She would soon “retire”, in her words, she insisted, “to concentrate on” Bogart‘s career.

Sadly, as time went on, her disoriented condition spilled over into Bogart‘s professional life, and despite the fact that he sought treatment for his wife’s out of control drinking and mental state on several occasions, his bond to her had begun to fade even as his career finally began to improve markedly, beginning his remarkable period of work with High Sierra (1941). One perceptive observer, silent actress Louise Brooks, who had known both Bogarts in New York in the ’20s and in Hollywood in the ’30s, remarked that “except for Leslie Howard, no one contributed so much to Humphrey‘s success as his third wife, Mayo Methot…who set fire to him.” Brooks asserted that “Those passions–envy, hatred, and violence, which were essential to the the Bogey character, which had been simmering beneath his failure for so many years–she brought to a boil, blowing the lid off all his inhibitions for ever.”

Still, by the time that Bogart walked onto the set of To Have and To Have Not, perhaps the actor, who had finally liberated his talent, might have felt like a drowning man, unable to save Mayo from herself and deeply sad about his personal life, despite his professional progress. The hope for some domestic happiness came in the person of his 19 year old co-star, with her youthful spirit and talent, willowy form, throaty voice and blonde waterfall of hair. The breaks and reconciliation attempts with his third wife that followed were exceedingly painful for him as for her, but inevitably the end of the marriage came. Mayo moved back to the Portland, Oregon area, where her mother still lived.

On June 9th, 1951, Lauren Bacall, on location with her husband while he filmed The African Queen had to break the news to Bogart that Mayo had been found dead in a motel room in the Portland area. He was quiet for a long time and eventually explained to Ms. Bacall that it was “Too bad. Such a waste. She had had real talent, she had just thrown her life away.”

Found among Mayo’s few things after her death was a crumpled note in Humphrey Bogart‘s handwriting, written, most likely, following some forgotten fight during their time together. The ‘Baker’ he refers to is their mutual friend and confidante, Mary Baker:

Darling
An afternoon with Baker has convinced me that we’re both wrong–me the worst offender—I love and I love you
Bogie

Mayo Methot was 47 when she died from the complications of alcoholism following a reported recent surgery for cancer.

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Sources:
Bacall, Lauren, By Myself, Knopf, 1978.
Brooks, Louise, Lulu in Hollywood, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Meyers, Jeffrey, Bogart: A Life in Hollywood, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997.
Sherman, Vincent, Studio Affairs: My Life as a Film Director, University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
Sperber, A.M. & Lax, Eric, Bogart, William Morrow and Co., 1997.

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Update 3/12/09: As noted by several individuals who emailed me about this, there was a notable difference in Mayo Methot‘s screen persona seen on TCM in a recent broadcast of a B movie. The other night I was bowled over while desultorily watching Brother Rat and a Baby (1940) to spy Mayo Methot as a fellow passenger on a bus with central characters Eddie Albert and Jane Bryan (with baby). What a change in her appearance and demeanor from just a few years before! The poor woman had gone from tough and bouncy and occasionally touching to just tough, wan and shopworn. It must have been particularly humiliating for the actress to appear in a role that was barely noticable after hoping for a career upturn, particularly after her marriage to Bogart. The camera, which was never kind to Mayo‘s looks, recorded her physical deterioration with brutal accuracy here.

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