Into a dingey midtown courtroom bristling with coatless vagrants, embattled landlords, and shuffling peddlers accused of selling fruit and vegetables without a licence walked to-day a familiar courtroom face and figure nicely done up-in a smooth grey suit and a check bow tie. His identity was clinched when the judge heaved the shoulder of his gown and heard the marshal cry, ╥Humphrey Bogart on complaint of Robin Roberts.╙
For the first time in the dreary common round of this petty court, the swarthy Puerto Ricans forgot about their language troubles, the irate tenants about dead rats, and the bums about their discovered nests in empty warehouses.
Mr. Bogart, wearing his famous hunted look, was steered by his lawyer into the small and squalid well of the court. Tapping behind him on limb-breaking high heels came a sultry brunette, her lawyer, and a bosom companion, a round-faced blonde with large eyes and a Dolly Varden hat.
MR. BOGART AT REST
Mr. Bogart, it appears, had been resting after his Hollywood labours in a merry session at a local night club in the early hours of last Sunday morning. His movie star wife, Lauren Bacall, was not with him, and by way of consolation and also as a fatherly tribute to his eight-month-old son, Mr. Bogart bought from the cigarette girl a large panda, a doll, that is. Miss Roberts, a model wickedly accused by Mr. Bogart╒s lawyer of having Hollywood aspirations, tapped over to his table and tried to take the panda from him. Knowing his rights under the penal laws, Mr. Bogart held on to that which was his. In Miss Roberts╒s heartrending version this morning, he seized her wrist and before you could say, ╥Drop the gun, Louie╙ she had been hurled to the floor and suffered thereby grievous bodily harm, with three blue bruises on the chest causing unmentionable hurt to the small of her back.
It probably did not help Miss Roberts╒s case that she had exhibited these wounds on the front page of a local afternoon paper in photographs taken by a studio which specialises in glamourising models with a hopeful eye on Hollywood contracts. Mr. Bogart╒s lawyer brought all this out in a legal recital which had the judge nodding his big face in ominous agreement.
Asked to expatiate on his indignities, Miss Roberts flashed her black eyes and said she had gone after Mr. Bogart╒s panda at the suggestion of the night club╒s publicity agent. Her lawyer backed this up with the remark that Mr. Bogart had tangled once before with the night club╒s sense of decorum and been told never to show his face there again.
This might have seemed to a bystanding peddler to be bad news for Mr. Bogart. But the Judge did not think so. ╥ You mean,╙ he snapped, ╥that this night club did not want Mr. Bogart there again and this publicity agent gets a girl to go and grab his property?╙ That was suddenly the way it looked.
The judge inhaled triumphantly, while Mr. Bogart flexed his jaw muscles and said nothing in his celebrated dead-pan way. His lawyer let slip the fact that Miss Roberts had discovered her bodily grief three days after the tussle happened. Whereupon the judge announced that according to the penal code any citizen had the right to protect his property and even to use force, but only, he cautioned, throwing up a fastidious index finger, ╥sufficient force to protect his property.╙ He decided that there was a reasonable doubt that Mr. Bogart, far from committing a third degree assault, was not actually upholding the relevant section of the penal code.
Accordingly he hardly waited for the defence lawyer to suggest that ╥this is a polite form of blackmail╙ before he waved a big arm and said there was not a court in the land that would prefer formal charges. The case was therefore dismissed, and Miss Roberts shook her raven hair and her blonde bosom companion heaved her chest and rolled her big, big eyes.
A cheer went up from the assembled spectators, bobby-soxers, peddlers, and riff-raff. Mr. Bogart nodded his expert appreciation of American court proceedings, and the lawyers, the blondes, and brunettes swept out to the grinning crowd outside. There a swarm of photographers broke into frog-like stances at the foot of the steps. First came Miss Roberts and her blonde helpmeet. They paused a moment at the top of the steps, took hands, and descended like models into a salon, with a one-two, hip-swinging rhythm. This earned them the raucous boos and cat-calls of the crowd.
Hardly a minute later and Bogart himself appeared, while the traffic stopped in its noonday swirl and a wave of cheers broke from the fans. The photographers begged him for a smile and a wave and urged the crowd to do likewise, which it did in ecstasy.
There was a rush for his waiting cab. Somebody stepped on an old lady╒s terrier and there was the unmistakable crunch of bones. At a rough estimate, there was about a score of delirious fans and loungers suffered grievous bruises on the chest and the small of the back. Bogart was thrown into the cab. The traffic light at Madison Avenue turned from red to green and the cab roared away. Once again, justice had triumphed.
