wouldn’t do it.
If you’ve done it or experienced it, you don’t want
to write about it, because it becomes a personal
incident. Failure is common to us all. And success is
common to us all, and I think one’s reaction to that
and the reason for failure fascinates me about someone.
I think it’s fascinating to write about success and
failure. That sort of thing I think is interesting. I like
writing about Bogey. Bogey was an amazing character,
because he was one of the few I met among male
actors who was really happy about being an actor.
Why do you suppose that was?
Well, I think he just rather enjoyed it, and I think he
thought it was a perfectly okay profession for a man
to be in. And he thought of himself as pretty good at
it. He had a cool capacity to understand what his
situation was in life. That’s rather unusual.
He knew exactly what was to be
expected of him?
Yes, and you know, when I was getting terribly
excited about what was going to happen in The
African Queen, he said, “Oh Kate. It will work out. It
will work out. They’ve started, they’ve got to finish it.”
He was a nice man. Very kind and a charming actor, I
thought.”
With Humphrey Bogart
doesn’t it? We’ve created so many things that
make a noise. For instance, snow shoveling in the
north with that machine that sucks it up and
blows it out.
In the making of the African Queen,
you said Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
Bacall had “the most enormous
opinion of each other’s charms, and
when they fought it was with the
utter confidence of two cats locked
deliciously in the same cage.” That’s
a great piece of writing. What’s next?
I’ve written a certain amount of stuff and
published a couple of articles on people. I did an
article on Duke Wayne and did quite a number
of things, one called “The Lake,” which was a
disastrous failure. Try to think what it was like to
be a new movie queen and have something in
the theater that was a disaster. I mean a joke. I
was the joke of New York City. And that was
interesting to me, reacting to failure. And how do
you react to failure? And how do you react to
success? I find that interesting.
How do you react to failure?
Pick up and go on?
Well, you have to figure out first why you’ve
failed, don’t you? Where did all this go wrong? I’ve
done things like that, so I wouldn’t be particularly
interested in doing a detailed account of my own
personal life, which is what I think people would
love. That would never interest me, and I
The African
Queen
was one of
Katharine’s
favorite
movies
to shoot.