Bogart Read online

  Mother spent much of her pregnancy making home improvements in the middle of the night, and reading books about gadgets. Already she was lobbying for a bigger house because she wanted more children. Bogie told his friend Mike Romanoff, “When other wives are pregnant they’re supposed to demand pickles, ice cream, or strawberries out of season. Mine just wants houses.”

  I became known in the papers as “The most discussed baby-to-be in Hollywood.” Hollywood columnists Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham called often. Did the baby move? Had they decided on a name?

  Throughout the pregnancy Bogie was edgy. He paced. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. At times he must have looked like one of those death row prisoners he had portrayed, waiting for a phone call from the governor. Bogie had no experience with kids so he started trying to get to know the children of his friends. But he tried too hard, it seems, and was often rebuffed, which made him all the more insecure about what sort of father he would be.

  “I can’t say that I truly ever wanted a child before I married Betty,” he later said. (Betty is my mother. She was born Betty Perske. She took her mother’s name of Bacall when she was a kid and her father ran away. Producer Howard Hawks made her Lauren, a name she has never felt comfortable with.) “For one thing, in the past, my life never seemed settled enough to wish it on a minor. I was in the theater in New York, or going on tour around the countryside. And in Hollywood, I was either trying to consolidate my foothold in pictures or was preoccupied by something else. But Betty wanted a child very much, and as she talked about it, I did, too. For one reason, which may seem a little grisly, but true, nonetheless. I wanted to leave a part of me with her when I died. There is quite a difference in our ages, you know, and I am realistic enough to be aware that I shall probably leave this sphere before she does. I wanted a child, therefore, to stay with her, to remind her of me.”

  *

  On the day of my birth Bogie was a wreck. This was in the days when guys stayed out of the delivery room and felt pretty helpless. I know how Bogie felt, because I was not allowed in the delivery room when my first son, Jamie, was born. But I know what my father missed, too, because a decade later I watched Richard and Brooke being born and those births were easily the most deeply felt moments of my life.

  In the labor room Bogie did not do well. He turned white and felt sick. My father had a great tolerance for pain, but he had almost no tolerance for the pain of people he cared about. (Several people recall that a few years later Bogie got sick when a doctor came to the house to stick a needle in me. And a few years after that, when I had my hernia operation, Bogie got sick. Later he bragged to Nunnally Johnson that I had been braver than a soldier.) At 11:22 P.M. on January 6, 1949, I came along. I was named Stephen Humphrey Bogart. I was named Stephen after the character my father played in To Have and Have Not, the film that brought my mother and father together. I weighed six pounds, six ounces, and I was twenty inches long. After the birth, Dad was well enough to yank a flask full of scotch out of his coat pocket and pour drinks for all the other fathers-to-be.

  The press was notified and soon presents for me arrived from Bogie fans all over the world. Among them were several toy submachine guns, which Dad sent back.

  The first present I ever got from my father was a snowman. Incredibly, it had snowed in Beverly Hills on the day I was born. Three inches covered the ground, a rarity in southern California, and when my mother brought me home my father had built a snowman on the lawn to welcome us back. When Mom saw the snowman she felt a lot better about the whole idea of Bogie and fatherhood.

  A few days later she felt even better. My parents had set up an intercom between the bedroom and the nursery, so they could hear me if I started crying. One morning, on his way to work, Dad stopped in and began cooing all sorts of baby talk to me, completely unaware that Mother was listening to him through the intercom. Then she heard him speaking to me, somewhat shyly and awkwardly because he didn’t know what you were supposed to say to babies. She heard him say, “Hello, son. You’re a little fellow, aren’t you? I’m Father. Welcome home.” He would have been embarrassed if he’d known he was overheard.

  Bogie was a proud father, and in family photos you can see him doting over me. In one famous photo you can even see him changing my diapers. But the photo is a fraud. It is, says my mother, the only time in recorded history that Bogie changed a diaper.

  Whether my father avoided baby doo because he wanted to, or because he felt left out, is debatable. It seems that Bogie did suffer the feeling of isolation and abandonment that afflicts many new fathers.

  “Betty gave me a son when I had given up hope of having a son,” he said. “She is everything I wanted and now, Stephen, my son, completes the picture. I don’t know what constitutes being a good father. I think I’m a good one, but only time, of course, can tell. At this stage in a child’s life the father is packed away, put aside, and sat upon. The physical aspects—feeding, burping, changing, training—are matters before the Bogart committee, which is, as of now, a committee of one…Betty. So I won’t take over for a while yet. When I do I’ll handle the boy as I would any human being in my orbit. That is, I’ll let him be himself. I won’t push him into anything or try to influence him.”

  In any case, Humphrey Bogart was by no means the diaper-changing, new-and-improved sensitive daddy of the 1990s, the one you see these days at the changing table in airport men’s rooms. And if he had been, it would not have been a matter of sharing chores to reduce the burden on his wife. We had servants for that.

  When I was born, Bogie was already forty-nine years old. He was on his fourth marriage, this time to a beautiful actress who was twenty-five years younger than him. Bogie was a man set in his ways. He was a man with one rule: I’m going to live my life the way I want to. That’s the way he was, and he had been that way long before I came along. Even when he married my mother, Bogie kept his butler and cook, and his gardener, Aurelio. So Bogie was not about to make major changes in his life just for a baby.

  Besides, he didn’t know how to change his life for a kid. I’ve talked to a lot of his friends about this, and they all say the same thing. Bogie was awkward with children. He didn’t know exactly what to do with kids. He was in awe of them.

  What his agent, Sam Jaffe, said to me is typical. Sam said, “I am the father of three, the grandfather of four, and the great-grandfather of three, so I notice children and I have always noticed how other people deal with them. When I was in the house with Bogie and you kids for the first time, I paid attention. And I will never forget that when you and your sister came down the stairs his look was so…quizzical. He was looking at you children as objects of curiosity, as if he had never seen children. It was as if to say ‘Who are these people? What are you?’ I’ll never forget that. Fatherhood was an unknown thing to him. He came to it late in life. He didn’t caress children, didn’t do any of the things that I did as a father, because it was strange to him. He was not the sentimental type that gushed, though he did cry easily. I’m not saying he was not a good father, just that he had this look of curiosity around children. He was not ready to be a father. I don’t think, until he married Betty, that he ever thought he would have children.”

  (This Sam, by the way, is not Sam Jaffe the actor, who played in the movie Gunga Din and later in the TV show Ben Casey.)

  Because Dad was uncomfortable with kids, there are not many stories about Bogie and children before I came along. But one of them is that when Bogie was married to Mary Philips, he was godfather to the son of his friends John and Eleanor Halliday. Bogie once offered to take the boy to lunch. When the day came, he said to Eleanor Halliday, “For God’s sake, what do you talk to a thirteen-year-old boy about?”

  “Well,” she said, “you’re his godfather. That means you’re supposed to be in charge of his religious instruction.”

  Later, when the boy returned from lunch his mother asked him, “What did you and Mr. Bogart talk about?”

&nbs
p; “Not much,” the boy told her. “Mr. Bogart said, ‘Listen, kid, there are twelve commandments,’ and then he ordered a drink.”

  Adolph Green, who got to know my father when Green and Betty Comden were in Hollywood writing the screenplays for Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon, remembers an incident at Mapleton Drive one day when the pool was being filled.

  “They had been fixing the pool, and now they were pouring new water into it,” he says. “You and me and Bogie were there. You were four or five years old. You were watching them fill the pool. There was a hose pouring water into it, and suddenly you got hysterical. You were shrieking. You thought the pool was going to overflow and you were going to drown. I said, ‘Don’t be silly, Steve, it’s okay.’ But you kept getting more and more upset. What I remember most, though, is your father. He didn’t know what to do. He had no idea how to handle it. He was just shaking his head. I asked him about you, and he said that something else had overflowed recently, a tub or something, so your hysteria had some valid reason behind it. I think your mother must have come out and taken care of you, I don’t really remember. But I do remember Bogie shaking his head, helplessly. He had no idea how to handle a hysterical child.”

  When my sister, Leslie, came along a few years after me Dad fared only slightly better. Because she was a girl he was probably even more afraid of her. But he was also much more affectionate with her. He bounced her on his knee often, though he had done that rarely with me. He played on the seesaw with her. She was Daddy’s little girl, the baby as well as the female, and he gave to her a quality of love that he never gave to me. He didn’t know any better, of course, didn’t understand that a boy needs to be hugged by his father, too. But sometimes when I am lonely, when I feel that life has cheated me out of something important, I wish for the memory of one of those hugs that went to my sister.

  My father liked the idea of having kids. He was proud to have Leslie and me, and he would never hurt us or neglect our basic needs. But he was not about to integrate us into his life. Kids had to fit into his life where it was comfortable for him. My father, for example, didn’t want to eat dinner with the kids. Which I can understand now, having often endured the torture of eating dinner with a two-year-old.

  After I was born, my father’s schedule was pretty much the same as it had been before I was born. He worked every day at the studio, making, on average, two movies a year. He got home at five-thirty. Then he liked to be alone for a while, which is why he didn’t eat supper with us. On many weekends he went sailing. On days off he went to Romanoff’s for lunch. Sometimes he played with us, but not much. He said, “What do you do with a kid? They don’t drink.”

  He would appear, be with us for a little while, and then vanish and do his thing. As a result, I idolized my father, which may come as a surprise to the people who have heard me grumble about him over the years.

  In fairness to my father, the pain of losing him seems to have wiped out most of my memories of him, and he might have spent much more time with me than I think. I have learned about many moments with him that I don’t remember. When I was six, for example, he told a reporter, “The only thing I’m trying to impress on Steve right now is not to steal and not to squeal. When he comes home with some imaginary or real slight suffered at the hands of neighbor kids, I let him know right now that he’s on his own. The other day he started telling me about getting clobbered by a kid up the street. I told him to knock it off. ‘Hit him back,’ I said. ‘I did,’ Steve said, ‘I got him a beauty.’ And that, for the time being, was the end of that.”

  I have no memory of this. I only know about it because I have the newspaper article. In that same interview, Dad said he looked forward to the day when I could take my place alongside him and help him tack the Santana down the Newport Channel. The reporter wrote, “That will be the day, no doubt, when Bogart figures his cup is filled.”

  Though my father did not make great changes in his daily life, there is little doubt that he was affected by fatherhood. He bragged about the fact that I looked like him. He told one friend, “I’ve finally begun to understand why men carry pictures of their children with them. They’re proud of them.” Another friend, Nathaniel Benchley, says, “When Bogie remarried and settled down to raise a family, there came a drastic change. Gentle and sentimental, devoted to his wife and children, he was the antithesis of everything he’d been before and the reconciling of the two sides was like the clashing of gears.” And my mother remembers that Bogie cried the first time he saw me in a school room. She says, “I think the impact of fatherhood caught up with him.”

  It’s understandable, I guess, that my father, who had never spent much time around children, would be uncomfortable with kids. But I wonder if it doesn’t go deeper than that. I wonder if Bogie might have been unprepared to bond with children because of his own parents. Certainly, I have learned that being the child of famous people, or even just highly successful people, can take its toll. My father was also the child of well-known and very successful people and that, it seems, took its toll on him.

  Contrary to the image many have of my father, derived largely from his early films, Humphrey Bogart did not fight his way up from the streets with fists ablazing. He came from wealth and privilege. He was born on Christmas Day in 1899, a circumstance which did not please him as a kid. Once, on my birthday, he said, “Steve, I hope you enjoy it. I never had a birthday of my own to celebrate. I got cheated out of a birthday.”

  He was the son of a prominent Manhattan surgeon, Belmont DeForest Bogart, and a nationally known magazine illustrator, Maud Humphrey, who had studied in Paris under Whistler.

  Dr. Bogart and Maud were a fine-looking couple. He was tall and athletic, a good-looking guy whose tongue could be as sharp as a stiletto. Dr. Bogart could choose the right words and say them in just the right tone to sting people, tickle them, or just make them look ridiculous. This ability to needle was a trait that my father would adopt, and one for which he would be known his entire life. Though my grandfather was strong, handsome, and wealthy, he was less fortunate in other ways. When he was a young intern, a horse-drawn ambulance tumbled on him, and he was never in perfect health after that. In later life, he invested in many businesses that failed, and, because of the pain from the accident, he became addicted to morphine. Maud, my grandmother, was an elegant redhead who drew men to her like beagles to bones. She was a snob who had grown up in the Tory tradition in upper-class Rochester, New York. Bogie often referred to her as “a laboring Tory, if there is such a thing.” She was an Episcopalian who cared deeply about the women’s suffrage movement, and was a worthy adversary for her husband’s debating skills.

  Mrs. Bogart was known by everybody, including her kids, as simply Maud.

  Bogie once said of his mother, “It was always easier for my two sisters and me to call her ‘Maud’ than ‘Mother.’ ‘Mother’ was somehow sentimental. ‘Maud’ was direct and impersonal, businesslike. She loved work, to the exclusion of everything else. I doubt that she read very much. I know that she never played any games. She went to no parties, gave none. Actually I can’t remember that she even had a friend until she was a very old woman, and then she had only one. She had a few acquaintances who were mostly male artists, and she knew the people in her office well. But she never had a confidante, never was truly intimate with anyone and, I am certain, never wanted to be.”

  In the early 1900s, Bogie’s parents were not super-rich, like the so-called robber barons of the time, but Dr. Bogart’s practice raked in twenty thousand dollars a year, which was added to an inheritance he’d gotten from my great-grandfather, who had invented a kind of lithographing process. And Maud, who was in charge of all artistic work for The Delineator magazine, was one of the highest-paid illustrators in the country. So there was no danger of the Bogarts running out of oats. The family, which included my dad’s two sisters, Frances and Catherine, lived comfortably in a four-story limestone house on 103rd Street and West End Avenue, near Riv
erside Drive in New York, which is where a lot of fat cats of the time lived.

  Like me, my father grew up in a world of fine furniture, expensive rugs, polished silver, servants, celebrities, and modern conveniences, which in his case meant that the Bogarts had a gramophone and a telephone.

  If Bogie had a childhood that was materially secure, I don’t think it was emotionally satisfying. For one thing, his mother and father did not get along well. “My parents fought,” Bogie once said. “We kids would pull the covers over our ears to keep out the sound of fighting. Our home was kept together for the sake of the children as well as for the sake of propriety.”

  His mother, who was plagued by migraine headaches, used to work at her office all day, then at night she’d put in many more hours in her upstairs studio. Maud was not one to let motherhood interfere with her work. Bogie was, of course, well taken care of by his Irish nurse. But I was taken care of by nurses, too, so I think I know something of what he might have felt. I think he was probably a lonely kid much of the time.

  When Bogie’s mother did take charge of him, she often took him to the park in his high-wheeled carriage. It was there one day that she sketched the first likeness of Humphrey Bogart. Maud’s sketch of her baby was bought by Mellins Baby Food Company, and, before he could even talk, my father became famous as the “Original Maud Humphrey Baby.” In fact, he was the most famous baby in the world. The watercolor drawings, with lines so fine that they looked like etchings, were published in magazines and books. They were even framed and sold as individual portraits. In these drawings my father has long curls and he’s ridiculously overdressed, which was the stylish thing to do with babies back then.

  When Humphrey got pneumonia, Maud got it into her head that he was a sickly child. “He is manly,” she once wrote of the future tough guy, “but too delicate in health.” That’s about as weepy as Maud got over her son. The fact is that Maud Humphrey was not exactly a candidate for Mom of the Year.