Bogart Read online

  “I was brought up very unsentimentally, but very straightforward,” my father once said. “A kiss in our family was an event. Our mother and father didn’t fawn over my two sisters and me. They had too many things to do, and so did we. Anyway, we were mainly the responsibility of the servants.”

  He once told a Time reporter, “I can’t say that I loved my mother. I admired her and respected her. Ours was not the kind of affection that spills over or makes pretty pictures. If, when I was grown up, I sent my mother one of those Mother’s Day telegrams or said it with flowers, she would have returned the wire and flowers to me collect.”

  Some of Bogie’s friends have told me that this “I never loved my mother” business is a polite understatement—that, in fact, he could not stand her. Nevertheless, he did take care of her in her declining years, and she was living with him and his third wife when she died of cancer at the age of seventy-five.

  Maud, according to my father, was totally incapable of showing affection. “This might have stemmed from shyness,” he said, “from a fear of being considered weak.” Her caress, he said, was like a blow. “She clapped you on the shoulder, almost the way a man does. When she was proud of you there was no running down the stairs with arms outstretched, no ‘My darling son.’ Only, ‘Good job, Humphrey,’ or something like that.”

  My father’s relationship with his father, while far from perfect, seems to have been less disappointing. Dr. Bogart liked to fish, hunt, and sail a hell of a lot more than he liked to poke around in people’s abdomens with surgical instruments. This sometimes led to friction between himself and Maud, but it was good for father and son. Dr. Bogart loved the open air and he often took young Humphrey with him. Though Bogie would grow up having no stomach for the killing of animals (“Went fishing for ten years,” he said in his pithy way. “Didn’t catch anything.”), his love of sailing was an abiding one and it was the love of his life. Except for Bacall, of course.

  Still, despite what they shared, few words of affection passed between my father and his father before September of 1934. It was then that my father was playing chess for a dollar a game at a chess parlor on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, when he got word that his father was dying. He rushed home. Two days later Dr. Bogart passed away in Bogie’s arms.

  “It was only in that moment that I realized how much I really loved him and needed him and that I had never told him,” Bogie said later. “Just before he died I said, ‘I love you, Father.’ He heard me, because he looked at me and smiled. Then he died. He was a real gentleman. I was always sorry he couldn’t have lived long enough to see me make some kind of success.”

  My own regrets about my father’s death are somewhat different than that. I don’t think much about whether or not I said, “I love you, Father.” If I never used those words I certainly showed my love in the ways a small child does, by climbing on his lap, by coming to him for goodnight hugs and kisses, and by calling him such charming pet names as “blubberhead,” and “slob.” No, my regrets have less to do with how I felt about him, and more with how he felt about me. I regret that he didn’t spend as much time with me as I would have liked, and that he died when it seemed that he was just starting to get the hang of this fatherhood thing. I wasn’t always sure of it, but I am sure now that if my father had lived a full life we would have had the kind of relationship that fathers and sons dream of.

  But, as it is, I still have a few memories. One of them concerns Romanoff’s restaurant. Though my father had gone to Africa to make The African Queen, and Italy to make Beat the Devil, he generally stayed around Hollywood. And when he wasn’t working he was often schmoozing at Romanoff’s restaurant.

  Phil Gersh, who was a partner of Sam Jaffe, remembers my father’s Romanoff’s days well.

  “I’d meet your father at Romanoff’s,” Gersh says. “Bogie always had the same lunch. Two scotch and sodas, French toast, and a brandy. He never looked at a menu. And he never carried money. He’d say ‘Phil, have you got a dollar for the valet kid?’”

  Actually, my father stuck people with more than just the valet’s tip money. It was a running gag for him to see how often he could con somebody else into paying the bill.

  Mike Romanoff, who owned the restaurant, was a close friend of my father. He was known as Prince Michael. As far as anybody knows, no drop of royal blood ever flowed through Mike Romanoff’s veins, but for years he insisted he was Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitri Obolensky Romanoff, a nephew of Russian Czar Nicholas Romanoff. Phony prince or not, Mike was much loved by the Hollywood crowd. He was a guy Hollywood turned to for advice, a regular Ann Landers, and his restaurant was a famous watering hole for movers and shakers. Mike was also one of the few people who could beat my father at chess. It was Mike Romanoff who summed up my father about as well as anybody could in one sentence. He said, “Bogart is a first-class person with an obsessive compulsion to behave like a second-class person.”

  My father had his own reserved table at Romanoff’s. I remember it well. It was the second booth to the left from the entry way. There Bogie would eat his lunch, drink his scotch, and shoot the breeze with some of the best-known people in the world.

  One day, when I was seven, Bogie decided that I should join the world of men. That is, I should be taken to Romanoff’s restaurant and shown off. On this day he wanted to be Daddy. That morning my mother dressed me up in new long trousers and a spiffy new shirt, then she brought me up to the bedroom to be inspected by the man himself.

  My father, wearing gray flannels, a black cashmere jacket, and a checked bow tie, looked long and hard at me. “You look good, kid,” he said. Then off we went, me and Bogie, in the Jaguar.

  Romanoff’s was in Beverly Hills. Dad and I arrived in the Jag at 12:30, my father’s usual time. When we pulled in, the valet took the car and we were led immediately to Bogie’s regular booth. Dad waved to a few of the many Hollywood notables who were already dining, and I’m sure most of them thought it adorable that he had his little Stevie with him. We sat in the booth and Mike Romanoff came over to greet us.

  “Good afternoon, your royal highness,” my father said. His usual greeting to Mike.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Bogart,” Mike said, in his carefully cultivated Oxford accent. “Are you going to be paying your bill today? I thought that might be a pleasant change.”

  “Are you going to be putting any alcohol in your overpriced drinks?” Bogie asked. “That also would be a nice change.”

  “You won’t be needing a necktie today?” Romanoff said.

  “No.”

  Romanoff, you see, had a jacket and tie policy at the restaurant, and he always made Dad wear a tie. One time my father had baited Mike by showing up with a bow tie that was one inch wide and sat on a pin.

  “I see you’ve brought your grandson,” Mike said.

  Mike liked to rib my father about his age. Bogie was a quarter of a century older than Bacall, so when my mother was with Bogie at the restaurant, Mike would say to her, “I see you are still dating the same aging actor.”

  It went on like that for a while. I guess it always went on like that for a while. My strongest memories of that day are the feel of the green leather upholstery of the booth, the taste of creamed spinach, a specialty of the house which I loved, and the steady parade of grown-ups, which I wasn’t crazy about.

  I don’t know everyone who came by to talk on that particular day. But this schmoozing at Romanoff’s was a ritual. It was common for David Niven to stop by at my father’s booth and visit, and for Judy Garland and Sid Luft, and Richard Brooks. And sometimes Spencer Tracy. I’m sure that Swifty Lazar came by on this particular day. Swifty, whose real name was Irving, got his nickname from my father after making three big deals in one day. He died only a few years ago. In fact, the 1987 Chrysler half-wagon which I drive today is one I bought from Swifty. He was known as the first Hollywood superagent, but he was not my father’s agent; he was his friend. Swifty was a small man, with a face like a cherub�
��s, but built as solidly as a fire hydrant. And he was one of the dandiest dressers in Hollywood history. He was once described by my godfather, writer Quentin Reynolds, as “a new kind of beach toy turned out by an expensive sporting goods store.”

  So Swifty came by, and movie stars and singers, and studio heads, all of them smiling at the rare sight of Bogie with a child. They paid their dues to me: “How are you, Stephen?” and “My, don’t you look grown-up!” But then into shop talk they would go…Stanley Kramer had just bought rights to such and such a book, Gary Cooper was filming this, Harry Cohn was pissed off about that, and so on. A lot of celebrities, a lot of fascinating talk.

  Fascinating, that is, to grown-ups, but not to a person whose idea of fun was sliding down banisters and climbing trees with Diane Linkletter. I was not impressed. I was the son of two movie stars, and, more to the point, I was only seven years old. So I was, in a word, bored.

  By the time Bogie was into the brandy, my boredom had begun to take physical form. I was rapping my water glass with a fork.

  “Don’t do that, kid,” my father said.

  I was banging my feet under the table.

  “Cut it out, kid,” my father said.

  And, no doubt, I was making faces, tapping my fingers, fidgeting, and glancing around. Acting like a kid. But the behavior of children was a complete mystery to Humphrey Bogart and, though he was almost continually amused by life, he was now getting less and less amused.

  By the time we left the restaurant that day, we were not speaking to each other. My father’s knuckles were white on the wheel of his Jaguar as he drove, perhaps a little too fast, through the streets of Beverly Hills, anxious to deliver the demon son back to the arms of Bacall.

  I guess my father sometimes thought I was a handful. Once, discussing me with a friend, he said, “One word from me and he does as he pleases.” And my mother’s friend, Carolyn Morris, remembers, “You were challenging. Like your father. You did things your way and if anybody told you how to do them, you would do them more your way. Your dad was like that, very much.”

  When we got home that day my mother was out by the pool reading. Dad led me directly to her, as if I might try to make a run for it.

  “Baby,” he said. “Never again.”

  My mother said nothing. She put her book down and looked at me, as if to ask, What is your side of the story?

  “Never again,” I said, mimicking my father, and off I went to read my comic book.

  In fact, Bogie did take me to Romanoff’s again, a few times. I don’t remember any conflict connected with those visits, so things must have gone better.

  I only have one other memory of causing trouble for my father, and that is mostly because I was told the story years later by David Niven, one of my father’s closest Hollywood friends. He told me about a time when I almost knocked out one of the world’s most famous playwrights in our living room.

  The playwright was Noel Coward. It seems that one night in 1955, Niven and Coward were sitting with Bogie. Noel Coward was visiting on his way to Las Vegas, where he was to make his first Vegas appearance, at the Sands Hotel. Coward wanted to discuss his material with Bogie and Niven. He was very worried about it. Would the Vegas nightclub crowd even understand the sophisticated humor of a British playwright? Bogie and Niven were in the two easy chairs, facing Coward, who sat on the sofa. I was behind the sofa. I don’t know whether I was being ignored or just in a pissy mood, or had something against British comedy or what, but Niven says I began moving ominously behind Coward, eyeing his head as if it were some sort of animal to be stalked. And I was armed with a large brass serving tray. When I got close behind Noel Coward, I lifted the tray and smashed it down on top of his head. It must have stung something awful, even if it was being wielded by a six-year-old. But the famous playwright never turned to look at me. He just looked at my father and, in that clipped British accent, said, “Bogart dear, do you know what I am going to give darling little Stephen for Christmas? A chocolate-covered hand grenade.”

  It was unusual for us to use the living room. It was not fully furnished, but it did contain a few expensive antiques and paintings. When my mother and father brought guests into the house, which was often, my mother was inclined to steer them toward the wood-paneled study, the butternut room, where the furniture was less pricey and more comfortable. And where there was a bar. The butternut room was a cozy room with full bookcases, comfortable chairs, folding tables, and a pull-down screen for film viewing. These guests were famous people: Sinatra, Tracy, Garland, Benchley, Niven, Huston, on and on, and many were very wealthy. But most of them were drinkers. My father was not comfortable with people who didn’t drink. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t drink,” he once said. So my parents’ friends could be rowdy at times and I don’t think Mother wanted them bumping into her paintings and shattering vases.

  Bacall certainly had good reason to worry. My father and his friends were capable of mischief. Once, after John Huston and his father, Walter, got Academy Awards for their work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Dad, who also got an Oscar nomination for the movie, went back to John Huston’s place where Bogie and the director, still wearing tuxedoes, played football in the mud against a movie executive and a screenwriter. They either didn’t have a football or were too drunk to look for one, so, instead, they ran pass patterns with a grapefruit.

  *

  There are many reasons why I did not see a lot of my father when I was a kid. One reason was his work. Another was his boat, the Santana.

  While most people know that Bogie and Bacall had a great love affair, probably fewer know about my father’s other great love affair. It was with sailing. Specifically, it was with the Santana, a fifty-five-foot sailing yacht, which he had bought from Dick Powell and June Allyson. The sea was my father’s sanctuary.

  My father was not simply some movie star throwing money into a hole in the water. He was very serious about the boat and he was an excellent helmsman who earned the respect of the sailing fraternity, despite some well-entrenched prejudices they had about actors with boats.

  My father once answered a question about his devotion to sailing this way: “An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail down what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be.”

  Phil Gersh says that at one point my father used to go out on the boat thirty-five weekends a year. I’d like to say that my father took me most of the time, but that’s not true. There was a long time when I wanted to go, but Dad would not let me on the boat until I could swim. Most of my life I’ve thought that was just his way of not having the kids on the boat, but Carolyn Morris, one of my mother’s best friends, says, “No, I think he was genuinely concerned about your safety. He had respect for the sea.”

  Later, when I could swim, Dad took me on the boat now and then. Carolyn says, “I remember him taking just you on the boat, you and Pete. He didn’t like to show his emotions, but his eyes would give him away. He was really excited about having a boy. He loved you an awful lot and it was important to him that you love the sea.”

  I do remember a trip with my father and Joe Hyams, and Joe’s son, who was about my age. And I remember Pete, the skipper, who was known as “Pete BS” when there were ladies aboard, or “Bullshit Pete” when there were only males. The name Bullshit Pete always made me giggle.

  My mother was prone to seasickness, and by the time I was born her trips on the Santana were rare. That was okay with Dad. He liked his boating weekends to be all male anyhow. “The trouble with having dames on board,” he said, “is you can’t pee over the side.”

  The Santana could sleep two in the master cabin. Four more could sleep in the main cabin. And there was sleeping space for two more ahead of the galley. On the boat my father was a regular Miss Manners. If you made a mess, you cleaned it up.

  I can remember driving down to the harbor in Newport with him. There was a big iron shed there near the water, though I’m not
sure what was in it. Pete would be waiting on the dock by the boat. His real name was Carl Petersen, but Dad always called him “Square Head.”

  There would usually be a couple of young actors on the boat, who worked as crew. Dad would start the engine, and the crew would pull in the lines, and off to Catalina we would go. The trip took about four hours, depending on the wind. Catalina itself was no big deal. It was a fairly barren island with hills, and a lot of goats. The only town was Avalon. The thing about Catalina was getting there. From southern California it was the only place to go farther west. Once there, Bogie would anchor in White’s Landing, north of Avalon. The water was clear there, and there was a beach where I could play. This was a kind of gathering place for other sailing folk. My dad and his friends would set lobster traps, which was illegal. Instead of buoys they would tie liquor bottles to the lines. Sometimes they would get a few lobsters and Bogie and his pals would cook them on the boat.

  On one trip when I was six or seven, I went along and brought an empty cricket cage, in which I usually kept a toy skunk. I’m not sure of just who else was on the trip, but I know that Nathaniel Benchley was, because he also remembered the incident. On this trip I was determined to catch a fish, which I can see now was silly, because a fish could swim through the spaces in the cage. So I propped open the cage with a stick, and for bait I put in some crabs I had found on shore. I hung the cage by a string over the stern of the boat, and every ten minutes I pulled it up to see if I had caught a fish. Even after dark I checked my cage with a flashlight until finally my flashlight fell into the water, and I went to bed, while the adults drank and played dominoes. I figured when I woke up there would be a fish in my cage. So the next morning I woke up early. I have a vivid memory of pulling up that cage, being so excited and filled with anticipation because it was very heavy. I finally yanked it aboard and I couldn’t believe what I saw. I had caught a lobster. Or more accurately, I had caught a lobster with no tail. I was overjoyed. I went crazy with excitement.