Bogart Read online

  “I caught a lobster, I caught a lobster,” I shouted, waking everybody up. Soon all the guys were smiling and congratulating me on my big catch. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I was so proud of myself.

  It wasn’t until I was twenty and had become a father myself that somebody told me that my father had placed the lobster in the cage for me to catch. Bogie, it seemed, was being my daddy even when I didn’t know it.

  I’m sure that the way my father treated me, and the loss of my father at an early age, have influenced me in ways that I cannot totally understand. But the most lasting effect of being Bogie’s son is obvious to me; it is the way in which I raise my children.

  Even though I was barely an adult myself when my first wife Dale and I had our son, Jamie, I was determined to put him first in my life. Nothing would be more important. I would be for Jamie the kind of father I wished Bogie had been for me. And I think I was. I hugged my son. I kissed him. I read to him. I played ball with him. I coached his baseball teams all the way through high school. In many ways, I guess, I was being a father to myself, and I’m sure I was a better father to my son because my own father died when I was eight. Jamie is an adult now, but I still have Richard and Brooke at home, and nothing has changed my mind about the importance of putting the kids first. When my kids are my age they will have many memories of times spent with their father.

  That’s important to me, because even during all those years when I was angry about being Humphrey Bogart’s son, I wished that I had more complete memories of my dad. There were some. But far more common were those fragments of memory which became whole only when fitted in to the stories I was told. I remember, for example, taking a train trip with my father. But only in retrospect do I know that the trip was to northern California where we visited my mother on the set of Blood Alley.

  Joe Hyams went on that trip and he remembers the details. He remembers Bogie calling and asking him to come along:

  “We’ll go up on the evening train to see Betty,” Bogie said, “and then, maybe on Saturday, we can go to the zoo.”

  “The zoo?” Hyams said.

  “Sure,” Bogie said. “You and me and Betty and Steve.”

  “Steve? You want me along as a baby-sitter?”

  “Of course not,” Bogie said. “I want you for your company. But you’ve got kids.”

  “So.”

  “So, I figure you’ll know what to do when Steve acts up.”

  Before the trip, Hyams stopped and bought some toys at the five-and-ten. When Bogie saw the toys he thought Hyams was a genius.

  “Toys, yes,” he said. “Great idea! Kids like toys.” He told Hyams, “This is the first time I’ve been alone with the kid. I hope it works out all right.”

  Hyams remembers that once we found our compartments and the train got going Bogie was all for “bedding down the kid” and getting a drink in the dining car. But I was six and I insisted on hearing a fairy tale.

  “I don’t know any fairy tales,” Dad said. “Uncle Joe will tell you one.”

  But I wanted a fairy tale from my father, not Uncle Joe. So Hyams sat on the lower bunk beneath me, making up a fairy tale and whispering the words to Bogie, who would then repeat them to me. According to Hyams I fell asleep, and so did my father.

  Hyams also remembers that quizzical look that Dad often had with me and Leslie, a look that several people have told me about. And Hyams remembers being on that train trip the next day and seeing that look and Bogie saying to him, “I guess maybe I had the kid too late in life. I just don’t know what to do about him.” Then adding, “But I love him. I hope he knows that.”

  *

  It is two days after my first visit to the house. I am inside the house now. I am with my mother. Not quite seventy years old, Bacall is still the glamorous figure she was back then in her twenties, and as she sweeps through the house, narrating her own memories in that trademark husky voice of hers that so long ago said, “You know how to whistle, don’t you.” I try very hard to hear my father whistle. This, after all, was the place where Bogie and Bacall had it all.

  But while the memories come full blown and in living color for my mother, they come for me in shards of black and white. It is as if I am looking at a series of photographs, some of friends, some of strangers. When my mother leads me into what had been the dining room, it is as if I am seeing it for the first time. It is the same with the living room. There is no shock of recognition. But at other moments, a turn in the hall, a glance at the baseboard, I am swept back again to the feeling of being seven years old. The nostalgia is most potent when we stand by the wide white stairway that leads up from the living room to the second floor. Now, almost forty years later, I can feel myself sliding down the banister, I can hear my father’s voice warning me to quiet down. For whatever reason, it is those stairs that most vividly transport me back to those days when I was a tumbling boy and my father was alive.

  Lost in memories, I now see that my mother has led me to the butternut room where Bogie and Bacall entertained their friends. God, I think, the people who used to laugh in this room. Frank Sinatra, John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland…

  *

  2

  Bogie was never wrong about people. If he thought a person was all right, the person was all right. And if he thought a person was a phony, the person was a phony.

  —SAM JAFFE

  Looking back, I can see that Mapleton Drive was an extraordinary street. It was a celebrity enclave, the kind of well-heeled and neatly manicured neighborhood that my father swore he would never inhabit, right up to the day that Bacall talked him into it. On Mapleton, I played with the children of famous people. I took piano lessons with Tina Sinatra at Frank Sinatra’s house. And my closest friend was Scott Johnson, whose father, Nunnally Johnson, was a Bogie pal. Nunnally wrote dozens of screenplays including The Grapes of Wrath, The Dirty Dozen, and The Three Faces of Eve, which he also produced and directed.

  Living across the street from me was Art Linkletter, who was one of TV’s top daytime personalities in the 1950s, with Art Linkletter’s House Party. His daughter, Diane, and I were like Tarzan and Jane, constantly climbing trees together. And next to Linkletter lived Sammy Cahn, the famous composer. His son, Steve, and I liked to hike back into the woods behind my house, where we had a little camp. Sometimes we’d make a fire and roast marshmallows on a stick. Down the street was Judy Garland. Her daughter, Liza Minnelli, was my other close female friend. Liza, of course, is now a superstar in her own right, but then she was, like me, the child of famous people. Her father was Vincente Minnelli, who directed An American In Paris, Gigi, and Lust for Life. By this time, though, Judy Garland was married to Sid Luft, the producer, and their daughter, Lorna, was my sister’s pal. Judy Garland visited my mother often. Judy, as everybody in the world knows, was troubled, and she often came to my parents for comfort.

  Bing Crosby lived down the street with his four sons, who used to cruise up and down Mapleton in their Corvettes. Gloria Grahame lived there, too. And Lana Turner. Liza used to hang out with Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, who, you might remember, got into one of the 1950s’ biggest showbiz scandals when she stabbed to death her mother’s mobster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. The incident was more than a scandal to Cheryl, of course. It was a tragedy that propelled her onto the front pages of newspapers all over America.

  I had many good friends on Mapleton, but after my father died, when I was eight, I gradually lost them. And for years afterward I did not make friends easily. One reason was that I always heard the fearful whisper in my ear: he only likes you because you’re Bogie’s boy. Not surprisingly, my closest friends today are the people who didn’t know or didn’t care that I was Humphrey Bogart’s son.

  It wasn’t until after I got thrown out of Boston University and moved to Torrington, Connecticut, with Dale that I got reconnected, that I began to develop the kind of friendships I had always wanted.

  I had been t
o Dale’s home in Torrington before, and from the moment I saw it, I knew it was home. For me this small Connecticut town was as magical as Brigadoon. The people there couldn’t have cared less that I was Humphrey Bogart’s son. As I saw it, I could hide there and be what I wanted. In Torrington, my friends were not the sons of movie stars or bank presidents. They were guys who drove trucks or worked in factories, or ran auto repair shops. They didn’t have any film projects in development; they didn’t have private swimming pools. These were guys I played poker with, and pickup basketball at the school yard. It was there that I was first able to shed the skin of being the Bogart kid. What I learned then was that friendship is what I really needed and it was what mattered. I learned, too, that if you want to know the truth about a person you should look at his friendships. With his family, a man often acts out of guilt and a sense of responsibility. With women he might be trying too hard to impress, or he’s conniving so he can get laid. And with coworkers, if he wants to get ahead, he’s got to pretend to care about a lot of things that he doesn’t really care about. But with friends, well there’s nothing there but the friendship, and I think it is with his friends that a man ends up revealing who he really is.

  So I knew, when I started asking about my father, that if this was true of ordinary men, it was even more true for Bogie. Though he had many good friends over the years, Bogie did not see it that way. “I have a few good, close friends, that’s all,” my father once said.

  On Christmas Eve, the night before his forty-sixth birthday, my mother threw him a surprise birthday party. She gathered about twenty of their friends, and ordered them to stand in the Roman tub at the Bogart house in Hollywood. When my father came home, Mother handed him a drink, but told him not to get too comfortable.

  “There’s something wrong with the tub,” she said. “Can you take a look at it?”

  When my father went in to check on the tub, there were all the friends, Robert Benchley and Raymond Massey among them, absurdly crowded together in the Roman tub. “Surprise!” they shouted, and “Happy Birthday!” not “Merry Christmas.”

  A party followed, and my father, who had never had a surprise party in his life, was deeply touched, even more than my mother expected.

  “I think he was genuinely surprised,” she says. “Not just by the party, but by the fact that all these people cared enough about him to come on Christmas Eve. Despite all the success he’d had, he didn’t really feel popular. I don’t think he ever really knew how much he was loved.”

  The first of my father’s good friends was Bill Brady, Jr. Brady’s father, William Brady, Sr., was a fight promoter and theatrical producer who would eventually give Dad his first break in show business. It was as a teenager with Bill Brady that my father first saw Broadway shows and moving pictures. Sadly, young Brady died in a fire right around the time that my father was becoming famous in The Petrified Forest. Dad, who rarely displayed his emotions, wept openly over the death of his friend. Years later, he was hit hard again when his pal, Mark Hellinger, died of a heart attack at age forty-four when Hellinger and Dad were trying to get a production company going.

  From early adulthood on, the main thing that Bogie did with his friends was drink. When he was in his twenties he drank with friends in New York’s Greenwich Village. When he was on Broadway he drank with friends in Times Square. When he was a movie star he drank with friends at 21 in Manhattan, and drank with other friends at Romanoff’s when he was home. Of course, heavy drinking was not the politically incorrect activity that it is today. There were no Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and such heavy drinking was considered manly, even a bit amusing. And he also played games. He was a chess expert and very good at card games. He played poker, too. In these games, friends remember that he was always very meticulous, carefully counting out his moves on a Parcheesi board, for example.

  Though Bogie had more friends than he ever realized, he was, by no means, universally loved. “Everybody doesn’t like me, and I don’t like everybody,” he once said.

  One reason that some people did not like him was that he was a world-class needler. It was one more game with him. He liked to test people as soon as he met them, perhaps see if they were worthy opponents. When he first met Frank Sinatra, for example, he said, “They tell me you have a voice that makes girls faint. Make me faint.” And when he met John Steinbeck he said, “Hemingway tells me you’re not all that good a writer.”

  Bogie needled everybody, including Mother. He needled her often about leaving Leslie and me so that she could work. “Look,” he’d say, “if you’re not going to be another Sarah Bernhardt, don’t give up everything just to be an actress.” Or he would find a hole in a sock and say, “You’ve got time to be an actress but no time to darn my socks.” My father, you can see, would have had to make a few adjustments if he lived in this postfeminist era.

  Though my father never used foul language around women and never told off-color stories in their presence, he did not exempt them from his needling. My mother’s friend Carolyn Morris remembers an incident that occurred the first time she met Bogie. It was when she went with my mother to see him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When my mother was first seeing Bogie, it was all very secret because even though he was separated from Mayo Methot at the time, they were still married. So Bacall had asked Carolyn to go with her, to make it more innocent.

  When Carolyn got into the hotel room she could see right away that Bogie had been drinking and was not pleased to see her with Bacall. He’d expected to have Mom alone.

  At the time Carolyn’s future husband, Buddy, was in Florida, so she decided to give him a call from Bogie’s suite.

  “What’s the deal?” Bogie said to Bacall. “You bring your girlfriends up here so they can make long-distance calls on my phone?”

  Carolyn, who was for the first time meeting the man that her friend Betty had been swooning over, didn’t know what to think. He seemed pretty obnoxious to her.

  “Maybe I should put up a sign,” Bogie said. “Public telephone for friends of Bacall.”

  He kept it up all through Carolyn’s call to Buddy. By the time she hung up, Carolyn was steaming. She slammed down the phone and pulled a five-dollar bill out of her pocketbook.

  “Here,” she said. “For the phone call.”

  “I don’t want it,” he said.

  “Take it,” she said. “I don’t want you saying that I’m running up your precious phone bills.”

  “I don’t want it,” he said.

  “I insist.”

  Finally, Bogie took the five-dollar bill and tore it up. It was only later that he and Carolyn became good friends.

  Another Bogie friend, George Axelrod, said to me, “Your father was full of life. He was a demon. When I first met him he liked to get me drunk. He had a great sense of humor, very dry, and he would never laugh at his own jokes. He would mutter, always with a cigarette and always with a drink. I think he was born with a scotch in his hand.

  “But this guy Bogart was always making trouble for people and wouldn’t let them off easy. He liked to shake up the world. He was trying for his own private revolution. He often said to Rock Hudson, ‘What kind of a name is that, what the hell is Rock Hudson?’ Here we had a man named Humphrey making fun of someone else’s name. Actually, Rock and your father were friends. Rock’s real name was Roy and he hated to be called Rock. So your father teased him by calling him Rock all the time. Bogie thought ‘Rock Hudson’ was a pretension, so he kept on it, wouldn’t let up on him.”

  This, I’ve learned, was not the only time my father made fun of names. It was a regular thing with him. One time he met a young writer at a party named Ben Ray Redman. He said to Redman, “You know what’s wrong with you? You’re just another goddamned three-named writer.” Then, I guess Dad was feeling very clever, because he started reeling off a list of three-named writers. “Stephen Vincent Benet,” he said. “Mary Roberts Rinehart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,�
� and on he went.

  Dad wanted to see if people would stand up to him, and sometimes that was a mistake. For example, he met Judy Garland’s third husband, Sid Luft, for the first time at a Swifty Lazar party. Bogie was drinking and started getting on Luft right from the beginning. But Luft, a former test pilot, who was a pretty powerful guy, was having none of it. He picked Bogie off the floor and pinned him to a wall.

  “Put me down, you son of a bitch,” Bogie said.

  Instead of putting him down, Luft kissed him on both cheeks.

  “We’re going to be good friends, you and I,” Luft said.

  “Oh yeah, and why’s that?”

  “Because we’re not going to needle each other.”

  “Oh, we’re not, huh?”

  “That’s right,” Luft said. “And the reason we are not going to needle each other is because I’d have to split your head open.” Then he put my father down. “Right, Bogie?”

  There was a moment of tension, followed by a burst of laughter from my father. Then everything was fine. I think my father liked this sort of thing because he was an actor. This was dramatic. This was bigger than life.

  My father liked to show off. And needling people like Luft was a way to do it. Nat Benchley said, “There are some people who will argue that Bogart was simply an exhibitionist who caused severe rectal pains to all around him, but this argument neglects the fact that he could, when he chose, be as quiet and thoughtful as a Talmudic scholar. If he acted up, there was usually a reason for it, and the reason could often be found in the company.”

  Dad’s tendency to take on people before he knew who he was dealing with got him in trouble one time early in his career when he was working for Twentieth Century-Fox, and still trying to get a foothold in Hollywood. He was a serious golfer, at least then. He was playing with a friend, behind a very slow foursome. When Bogie asked if he could play through, one of the guys in the foursome turned and glared at him.