Blogging with Bogart (1)

„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.)” - fragment din cartea lui Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Hell’s In It

În articolul consacrat de LA Times acestui scandal numit şi Pandagate, Bogart  a invocat în apărarea sa principiile Constituţiei americane: „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.” (articolul dedicat incidentului de TIME Magazine, în 1949, poate fi citit aici)