When I was a kid I had it all. Just like Bogie and Bacall. In fact, I had them, too. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. They were my parents.
In the early 1950s we lived in a beautiful fourteen-room house at 232 South Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills, which is a pricey little slice of real estate between Bel Air and Beverly Hills. It was a great house, two stories of whitewashed brick, hidden from the street by hedges and trees. At the entrance to the driveway there was a two-foot brick wall. On it my father had hung a sign: DANGER, CHILDREN AT PLAY.
For years the house was only partially furnished. The living room, especially, always looked incomplete, as if the family had just moved in. I’m not sure why, exactly. I think it was because my mother had promised Dad that if he came up with the money for the house she would furnish it slowly. Dad really wasn’t interested in having a big house. He was the kind of guy who could be happy with two rooms, as long as one of them had a bar in it.
We also had a tennis court, a four-car garage, a lanai with wrought-iron tables and chairs, and an expansive lawn where my little sister, Leslie, and I used to do somersaults and play on the jungle gym that my father had bought us. After we moved in, Mother installed a swimming pool, where even today you can see the footprints that Leslie and I left in the concrete.
Along with the two movie stars and the two kids, there were three dogs named Harvey, Baby, and George. To serve us all there was a maid, a butler, a gardener, and a cook. Just as well. My mother was no cook, and my father was no handyman.
I must have thought that everybody lived this way. Sybil Christopher, who was Mrs. Richard Burton when I was a kid, says she took me to see Hans Christian Andersen when I was six years old and she remembers that when we walked up to the balcony of one of the huge old opulent movie theaters in Los Angeles, I asked her, “Whose house is this?”
The early fifties were an idyllic time and I have many fond memories of Mapleton Drive. But when I think of the house, I think, too, of my greatest regret, the fact that I had so little time there with my father. It is a regret made more poignant in recent years by the fact that I ignored his memory for most of my life. I resented Humphrey Bogart for reasons I only now understand, and for almost four decades I avoided learning about him, talking about him, and thinking about him. It was only with the marriage to my second wife, Barbara, in 1984, and with the birth of our two children, Richard and Brooke, that I began to pull from my shoulder a chip the size of Idaho that had been there since the death of my dad when I was eight.
I think in the early days of our marriage Barbara was shocked when she began to realize that I knew less about my father than many of his fans. Here I was, telling my new wife that the most important thing to me was family, and I couldn’t even score well on a Bogie trivia test at the back of a magazine.
It’s not as though nobody had ever urged me to find out about my father. Mother had been doing it for years. But you know how it is when your mother tells you that you should do something. It’s practically a guarantee that you won’t do it.
I might have gone on forever, fleeing my father’s ghost at every turn. But Barbara wouldn’t let me. She understood how I was feeling about it, understood certainly better than I did, and she didn’t try to change my feelings. She simply showed me how important it was to know who my father was if I really wanted to understand who I was. She let me see that just because I didn’t want to glorify my father, that didn’t mean I had to ignore him.
“Find out about your father,” she said. “Talk to your mother. Talk to his friends. I want our children to know about their grandfather.”
And so I began to read about my father. I delved, reluctantly at first, back into my memories of him. And I visited people who knew him. I talked to people he did business with, like Sam Jaffe, his agent, and Jess Morgan, one of his business managers. I talked to people who had played in movies with him, like Katharine Hepburn and Rod Steiger. I talked to some of his writer friends, like Alistair Cooke and Art Buchwald. And I talked to family friends, like Carolyn Morris, and people who had known him briefly, like Dominick Dunne, and friends who had written about him, like Joe Hyams.
Perhaps if I were not Humphrey Bogart’s son, but just some guy writing about Bogie, I would have spent more time with Lauren Bacall than with anyone else. But she’s my mother. I already know her opinions on the subject. She helped me a great deal, but ultimately she wanted me to do this without having her as a crutch. But I think Mom is pleased. My father has become a character of folklore, and there are so many contradictory stories about him, that I needed to hear what a lot more people other than my mother had to say. Also, Bogart lived more than three-quarters of his life before he met Bacall. So if there are mistakes in this book, and I’m sure there are, don’t blame Mom.
And don’t blame the other people I spoke to. It is the nature of a legend like Bogie that the stories about him get embellished, relocated, even folded in with other stories. The precise truth is always elusive. But there are many people who took the time to tell me the truth about my father as they knew it, and I want to thank them:
Dominick Dunne, Carolyn Morris, Alistair Cooke, Adolph Green, Rod Steiger, Katharine Hepburn, Phil Gersh, Jess Morgan, Sam Jaffe, George Axelrod, Art Buchwald, Joe Hyams, Sybil (Burton) Christopher, Gloria Stuart, Julius Epstein, Bruce Davison, William Wellman, Jr., Joe Hayes, my sister, Leslie Bogart, and, of course, my mother.
I want to thank, too, the many celebrities and writers whose written words have led me to greater knowledge of my father. Special thanks go to Joe Hyams for Bogie and Nate Benchley for Humphrey Bogart. Thanks go also to Katharine Hepburn for The Making of The African Queen, Janet Leigh for There Really Was A Hollywood, Richard Schickel for Legends: Humphrey Bogart, Melvyn Bragg and Sally Burton for Richard Burton: A Life, 1925–1984, John Huston for An Open Book, Gerold Frank for Judy, Bob Thomas for Golden Boy, Charles Higham for Audrey: The Life of Audrey Hepburn, Vera Thompson for Bogie and Me, Edward G. Robinson for All My Yesterdays, and Lawrence J. Quirk for The Passionate Life of Bette Davis.
And thanks also to the writers, too numerous to name, who wrote about my dad in a number of publications over the years. Among the most helpful ones were the New York Times, the London Daily Mirror, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, the Saturday Evening Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Hollywood Citizen News, the Associated Press, American Film, Esquire, Playboy, the New York Post, Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Herald.
Also for their help in various ways in making this book possible I want to thank Chris Keane, Leslie Epstein, Nushka Resnikoff, Ted Eden, Bill Baer, Jeff Alan, Bob Pronvost, Warner Brothers, and the library staffs at the American Film Institute and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
I want to thank my agent, Susan Crawford, of the Crawford Literary Agency for putting me with the right people at the right time.
And a special thanks to Audrey LaFehr at Dutton for having faith in the book, for her support along the way, and for her editorial wisdom in the final stages.
* * *
It is summer of 1993. I am in California.
I have been thinking about my father, Humphrey Bogart, for some time now. I want to write a book about him, but the words have been coming to me only with great difficulty. I have learned about my father, but, unaccountably, I am still reluctant to speak about him, and about what it is like to be his son.
My mother, Lauren Bacall, is in California, too. We have made arrangements to tour the house in Holmby Hills where we lived when I was a kid. The house now is the home of producer Ray Stark and he has graciously agreed to let my mother and me visit.
But now it is a few days before that scheduled tour with my mother. I am alone. I feel compelled to get up early and drive my rental car around the streets of Los Angeles. Inevitably, I drive to the house at 232 South Mapleton Drive. I know that returning to that house will be a powerful experience and I want it to be private. The truth is I want to see the house without my mother. I don’t want her explaining things to me, altering my perceptions.
It is still early morning when I pull up beside the house. My first sight of it is more powerful than I expect. Almost immediately, I feel myself shaking. Though we lived in that house for some months after Bogie died, I feel now as if my father, the house, and my childhood were all wrenched away from me in a single violent moment. I do not cry, but I am overcome with emotion. I know that what fills my heart is sorrow, but it feels like fear. It is not a fear that I want to run from. It is something that I want to face. I want to rush out of my car, rap on the back door of the house, tell the people who live there that I am Bogie’s son, and beg them to let me run from room to room.
But I don’t really want to bother the people who live there. So I sit in my car for a long time, feeling the waves of emotion sweep over me. As I feel the feelings, I also watch myself have the emotions. I have always been able to detach myself from my feelings this way, playing both the patient and the therapist. I think my father did this, too.
“What are you feeling, Steve?” I ask myself.
“Oh, just a little afraid and sad.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No, it’s no big deal. It was thirty-seven years ago, for God’s sake.”
“I see.”
Ten minutes later my hands are still gripping the steering wheel. I stare out at the house, as if it, or I, could do something about the past. From where I am parked I can see the patio where Bacall sometimes served drinks. The pool, where I used to float in a yellow tube that was shaped like a duck. The door from the garage into the kitchen, where my friends waited for me. Soon I became self-conscious, thinking someone will call the police and report a stranger casing one of the expensive houses of Holmby Hills. I decide to leave. Still feeling shaky and scared, I drive off, thinking, God, that’s the place, that’s where my happy childhood ended on January 14, 1957.