Humphrey Bogart in publicity still for Dead Reckoning (1947, dir. John Cromwell)
“Bogart did drink. ‘I think the whole world is three drinks behind,’ he used to say, ‘and it’s high time it caught up.’ On one occasion he and a friend bought two enormous stuffed panda bears and took them as their dates to El Morocco. They sat them in chairs at a table for four and when an ambitious young lady came over and touched Bogart’s bear, he shoved her away. ‘I’m a happily married man,’ he said, ‘and don’t touch my panda.’
The woman brought assault charges against him, and when asked if he was drunk at four o’clock in the morning, he replied, ‘Sure, isn’t everybody?’ (The judge ruled that since the panda was Bogart’s personal property, he could defend it.)”
-excerpted from Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s In It
In a 1949 LA Times article about Pandagate, Bogart defended his drunken misbehavior on constitutional grounds: “So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.”
(TIME magazine’s original 1949 article about the incident can be read here)
I’m not sure which quotation I like more, the “three drinks behind” or the “don’t touch my panda.”
