When the picture’s over Bogart will forget all about you. That’s the last you’ll ever see of him.
—HOWARD HAWKS TO LAUREN BACALL
During the last week of 1943, director Howard Hawks took my mother, then nineteen, to the sound stage where Humphrey Bogart was shooting Passage to Marseilles.
At the time my mother was under personal contract to Hawks, and while he was certainly interested in finding a role for her, he made no mention of it that day. He did tell her, however, that he owned the film rights to To Have and Have Not written by his friend Ernest Hemingway, and that he was hoping to get Bogie for the lead.
During a break in shooting, Hawks brought Bogie over to meet Mom. “There was,” she says, “no fireworks, no thunder, just a pleasant hello and how do you do.” Mostly, Mom remembers being struck by the fact that Bogart was much smaller than she had expected him to be.
A few weeks later there was some Bogart excitement in my mother’s life, but it was not of the romantic variety. It was career excitement. Hawks told her that she would get a screen test for a role in To Have and Have Not.
“And by the way,” he said, “I’ve got Bogart.”
The scene was the famous “You know how to whistle” scene, and Mother rehearsed it over and over with a well-established actor, though she was always embarrassed by the requirement that she kiss him every time she did the scene. Bogie, meanwhile, had gone off to Casablanca to entertain the troops. In any case, it would have been unusual for an actor of his stature to play in a screen test for an unknown actress like my mother, who at that time was still Betty, not yet Lauren. A few days after the screen test was shot, Bogie was back and Mom ran into him at the studio.
“I saw your test,” he told her. “We’ll have a lot of fun together.”
Mom had the role. She was ecstatic. She was also a nervous wreck and would remain that way for the next several weeks.
“On the first day of shooting I was ready for a straitjacket,” she says. She remembers doing the “Anybody got a match?” line again and again, being all knotted up inside, trembling, perspiring. “Your father tried to joke me out of my nervousness,” she said. “He was wonderful about that, trying to put other actors at ease.”
Though Bogie was kind to Bacall right from the beginning, and sensitive to her youth and inexperience, he did not flirt with her. Mom was a flirt, but Bogie had a reputation as a man who never flirted with actresses in his films. So the relationship that began during the filming of To Have and Have Not began as a friendship, which perhaps is why it lasted. From the beginning they called each other Slim and Steve, which is what the characters in the film called each other, even though the characters’ names were really Marie and Harry.
Bogie and Bacall talked nonstop, and probably it was obvious to others before it was obvious to them that something was happening between them. Mom talked about her childhood and her dreams of success in Hollywood. She adored Bette Davis, she said, and Leslie Howard, and she was thrilled to learn that Bogie actually knew them both. It must have been pretty heady stuff. Bogie gave her acting tips and he talked about his early days on the stage. He told her the twenties were “the good old days.” And he talked about his marriage to Mayo. He joked about the fighting with “madame,” as he called her, but Mom could see that he was lonely.
The relationship progressed in this platonic fashion until one day about three weeks into the shooting of the picture, Bogie came by Mom’s dressing room to say goodnight.
“He was standing behind me,” she says. “We were joking, the way we always did. Then suddenly he leaned over and he placed his hand under my chin. He lifted my face toward his and he kissed me. It was very romantic, very sweet really, and your father was quite shy about the whole thing. Then he took an old matchbook out of his pocket and asked me to write my phone number on it.”
That night Bogie called Mom. He just wanted to see how she was doing, he said. They talked for hours.
After that, Mother says, things were different. They lit up when they saw each other. During breaks they gravitated toward each other, as if there were no other place to be. When Bogie played chess on the set, Mom would stand behind him and watch. Where they used to eat lunch separately—Mom from a brown bag at the studio and Dad at the Lakeside Golf Club—now they both went to Lakeside. One day gossip columnist Hedda Hopper called Mom and said, “You’d better be careful or you might have a lamp dropped on your head,” a reference to Mayo’s well-known penchant for throwing things. Another columnist wrote, “You can get your B&B lunch any day at Lakeside,” an item which must have been of special interest to Mayo Methot.
Bogie and Bacall were suddenly giddy with romance. They acted like kids, exchanging cornball jokes like, “What did the ceiling say to the wall? Hold me up, I’m plastered.”
The attraction was real. In fact, the sexual tension between my parents was so palpable that changes had to be made in the script of the movie. Originally, Bogie was supposed to have a relationship with a different woman, but no amount of acting could disguise the fact that Steve wanted Slim and Slim wanted Steve.
Years later Bette Davis commented on this chemistry: “Up until Betty Bacall I think Bogie really was embarrassed doing love scenes, and that came over as a certain reticence. With her he let go and it was great. She matched his insolence. Betty came along at exactly the right time for Bogie. He was mature and she was a kid, and I think he had a ball showing her what life was all about.”
After a day’s shooting they used to drive off in separate cars and then they would pull onto a small residential side street where there was no traffic. Bogie would get out of his car and climb into Mom’s, where they would squeeze an extra twenty minutes out of the day, holding hands and talking love talk. Then Bogie would go back into his car and head for home and Mayo. Mom would follow in her car, and when Bogie turned off for Horn Avenue, he would wave to her, and she would wave back and continue home to Beverly Hills, where she would spend another sleepless night.
Hawks, who had a financial interest in my mother, and probably a romantic one as well, saw the romance developing. He stewed in silence over it for several weeks and then one day he blew up at Mother.
“You damn fool! Bogart’s forty-five years old,” Hawks said. “He’s a boozer. He’s married. This relationship is going nowhere. It means nothing to him. This sort of thing happens all the time, he’s not serious about you. You are throwing away a chance anyone would give their right arm for. And I am not going to put up with it, I tell you.” Hawks threatened to send Mom to Monogram Pictures, which in the context of the time was like telling a young New York Times reporter that he was being sent to the National Enquirer.
Mother was nearly hysterical with tears by the time Hawks finished. It’s not true, she thought, it’s not true. Bogie is not like that. But, still, there was a little part of her that was not so sure. Maybe she was just a Hollywood fling for him. Later, after she cried in Bogie’s arms, she felt better. He assured her that he cared for her, that he would protect her, and that she was too promising a talent for Hawks to let her go.
As the days of shooting passed and Mother looked painfully forward to the day when they would no longer have this movie to throw them together every day, she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep. All she could do was think about Bogie. At night she often spent time commiserating with her friend Carolyn Morris, who also was in love with a married man.
When the dreaded last day of filming came, Bogie and Bacall were parted. He went back to his wife, and she to a pillow to cry on. A week later my father sent his first love letter to my mother.
“I wish with all my heart that things were different,” he wrote. “Someday soon they will be. And now I know what was meant by ‘to say good-bye is to die a little’ because when I walked away from you that last time and saw you standing there so darling, I did die a little in my heart.” He signed the letter, “Steve.”
It was around this time that Mom started driving down to Balboa with Carolyn Morris, to secretly visit Bogie on his coast guard weekends. Carolyn would go off somewhere, and Bogie and Bacall would sit in the car and talk and smooch. Whenever they met this way they each brought a letter, to be read after they were separated.
He wrote, “Baby, I do love you so dearly and I never, never want to hurt you or bring any unhappiness to you. I want you to have the loveliest life any mortal ever had. It’s been so long, darling, since I’ve cared so deeply for anyone, that I just don’t know what to do or say. I can only say that I’ve searched my heart thoroughly these past two weeks and I know that I deeply adore you and I know that I’ve got to have you. We just must wait because at present nothing can be done that would not bring disaster to you.
“It seems so strange that after forty-four years of knocking around I should meet you now and fall in love with you when I thought that could never again happen to me. And it’s tragic that everything couldn’t be all clean and just right for us instead of the way it is because we’d have so much fun together. Out of my love for you I want nothing but happiness to come to you and no hurt ever.”
Howard Hawks was not the only one who was unhappy about the budding romance. My mother’s mother also warned her that she was hurtling toward heartache because Bogart was an actor, thrice-married, in his forties, and, perhaps worst of all, he wasn’t Jewish.
I’m sure that my mother thought her mother was being unreasonable at the time, objecting to the love of Betty’s life. But the generations have an eerie way of repeating themselves and Bacall eventually became the mother who disapproved of her son’s mate. Flash forward to the time when Dale was pregnant and we decided to get married. Bacall was not happy.
“Stephen, you’re too young, it’s too soon, you’re making a terrible mistake.”
“How can it be a mistake for a kid to have a father?”
“But this girl, she’s not right for you.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Well, Stephen, let’s be serious. Torrington, Connecticut! Is this where you see your future?”
And so forth. Mother probably said to me the same things her mother had said to her. But I was adamant. My kid would have a father.
After I married Dale, she and Mom still did not get along. I’m sure Mom resented Dale for getting pregnant and hauling her young son into a less than perfect marriage. But there was another issue. It was that my mother didn’t think I was doing enough to keep the memory of my father alive. At the time Mother viewed all of what I was doing—the failing grades, the blue-collar jobs, the move to Connecticut, the marriage—as denying the existence of my father.
“Stephen, I want you to be proud of being Humphrey Bogart’s son,” she would say, which I thought was code for, “Move to a real city, get a career underway, and do something with your life.”
My mother has never fully understood that I was neither proud of, nor ashamed of, my father; I just didn’t want to be smothered by him. All of my behavior, which she saw as destructive, was simply my trying to outrun his shadow, trying to get away so I could be myself. Mother thought my wife was holding me back in the small Connecticut town, that Dale was responsible for my not expanding, not growing. But that’s how I wanted it.
Though nobody thought my marriage to Dale would last very long, including me, it endured for thirteen years. Of course, much of that was the open marriage phase, but still the marriage lasted longer than any of my father’s.
I don’t know if marriage was on my mother’s mind when she met Bogie, but certainly she was in love. Ever since her father had left her when she was a kid, she had keenly felt the need to love a man, and in Bogart she had found that man.
Mother hated the sneaking around. Not only was she consumed with guilt, but she had to worry about Mayo’s temper. One time Mother went to visit Bogie on a friend’s boat, and she had to hide in the head when Mayo showed up.
While Hawks, my grandmother, and others were against a Bogart-Bacall wedding, the public was all for it. Though word of the romance got into the papers, Bacall never had to take flack as “the other woman” or “home wrecker.” The public loved her and they knew what a looney tunes Mayo was.
On May 10, 1945, Bogie and Mayo divorced. Though Dad was anxious to marry Mom, he had put off the final break with Mayo several times out of fear that she would shoot him, Bacall, herself, or possibly all three. But there was more to it than that. As anyone who has ever been divorced knows, the years of shared experience exert a powerful influence, and leaving is rarely easy. Bogie and Mayo had once been deeply in love. They’d had many great times together and, when she was not drinking, Mayo could be a sweet and dear woman. Despite her jealousy, she was on the whole very supportive of Bogie’s career. It was Mayo who got Morgan Maree to be Bogie’s business manager. And when Bogie’s mother, Maud, became ill with cancer, Mayo welcomed her and treated her kindly until the end came. And when Maud died, at seventy-five, Mayo made all the funeral arrangements. My father was grateful for these things, despite all the savagery in the relationship.
There is, perhaps, one other reason why my father found it so difficult to leave his mentally ill wife. There was another woman in his life who was mentally ill. His sister, Frances, known as Pat, had been in and out of treatment for years. In 1930, Pat had gone through twenty-seven hours of torturous labor before delivering a baby girl, Patricia. The ordeal left her permanently unbalanced. She became manic depressive and had to be hospitalized off and on. In 1935, Maud insisted Pat divorce Stuart Rose, to free him from the burden of being married to her. Then she was transferred to a west coast hospital and my father took over her care. Because of her condition, she was rarely able to see her daughter, but they did correspond. And from time to time, Pat was able to visit her brother, the movie star.
“She was a tall, strongly built woman, easy to visualize on a horse,” my mother recalls. “She looked a lot like your father. She was shy and sweet and totally normal when I saw her. Your father was very gentle with her and she adored him.”
If the problem of Mayo and Pat accounted for some of the sadness my mother detected in Bogie’s eyes, it explained, too, why he was so overjoyed to have a beautiful young woman, sane and sober, who loved him so. Eleven days after the divorce from Mayo, Bogie and Bacall were married on Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm in Ohio. Bromfield, who went back a few decades with my dad, was a well-respected novelist who had fallen in love with the soil and become a farmer. His politics were very different from Dad’s. He was a Republican, but the two men had great respect for each other’s intellect.
The wedding had the potential to become the media circus of its time, with reporters and photographers from all over the world surrounding the house. Despite police guards a few managed to sneak into the house. Mother was a wreck throughout, and she kept running to the bathroom.
Mom writes, “My knees shook so, I was sure I’d fall down the stairs. Bogie standing there looking so vulnerable and so handsome—like a juvenile. Mother as nervous as I, trying to keep her eyes from spilling over, a smile on that sweet face. My knees were knocking together, my cheek was twitching—would any sound come out when I had to say ‘I do’? We turned the corner. When I reached Bogie he took my hand—the enormous beautiful white orchids I was holding were shaking themselves to pieces; as I stood there, there wasn’t a particle of me that wasn’t moving visibly. The judge was speaking—addressing me—and I heard a voice I’d never heard before say those two simple words of total commitment. Bogie slipped the ring on my finger—it jammed before it reached the knuckle, the trembling didn’t help, and then it finally reached its destination. As I glanced at Bogie, I saw tears streaming down his face—his ‘I do’ was strong and clear, though. As Judge Shettler said, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ Bogie and I turned toward each other—he leaned to kiss me—I shyly turned my cheek—all those eyes watching made me very self-conscious. He said, ‘Hello, Baby.’ I hugged him and was reported to have said, ‘Oh, goody.’ Hard to believe, but maybe I did.”
The days that followed were no less romantic than the days that preceded. Mother, who was no cook, vowed to learn all the requisite skills of a housewife in those days, even though Bogie, set in his ways, planned to keep his cook, May, and his gardener, Aurelio.
They lived first at the Garden of Allah, the friendly cluster of bungalows where Bogie had many friends and drinking companions. “It was a great place to be a bachelor,” my mother says. But Bogie was not a bachelor, and already Mother was looking forward to the day when they would live in a house suitable for raising children. Still, the social life at the Garden of Allah was exciting. Bogie’s friends there were fascinating people with keen minds and sharp tongues, most of them writers, all of them drinkers.
Bogie wasted no time getting Mom into the sailing fraternity, or tried to. He introduced her to his Newport Beach boat friends, all of whom were in businesses other than show business, and most of whom thought actors were strange, save for their friend Bogie.
“Your father took me to Catalina on his boat when we were first married,” Mother says. “This was before he bought Santana from Dick Powell. He was so excited. It was important to him that I love the sea as much as he did. He showed me how to steer the boat and I made lunch in the galley. When the boat started to sway I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to be sick. I felt nauseous. I wanted to hide this from your father more than anything because I knew what sailing meant to him. After a while I felt better and we ate lunch, which was a mistake. Again I felt nauseous. Finally, your father caught on and he told me to stare at the horizon, that would settle me down. It seemed to work. We went to Catalina many times after that and I loved the island, but I never really cared for the getting to it.”
The relationship that developed during the early days of my parents’ marriage has often been compared to that of Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies. It was lively, it was romantic, it was witty and loving. It was a verbal tennis match in which Bogie usually won the point but Bacall somehow ended up winning the set.
He said things like: “I should have remained a bachelor. I never learn. You think it’s going to be all right, that you’ve learned all the tricks. You’ve learned that you must put away that bath towel and not leave bristles in the basin after you’ve shaved. And then the next time it’s something different. You have a cupboard for drinks and you want the glasses arranged so you can get at them, and you find your wife likes them fixed in neat pyramids, and you’re wrong again.”
She said things like: “Bogie does nothing around the house, but nothing. He is not a house man. He wants everything to be just so, but he doesn’t build barbecues or stone walls and he has no recipes for spaghetti.” During the four years of their marriage before I was born, Mom was certainly free to pursue her career. Dad had decided that he would not interfere, but he also would make no heroic efforts to help. That is, he would not insist that Bacall be used in any of his films. To Mother, however, it seemed that people forgot she was an actress. They saw her now as Mrs. Humphrey Bogart.
Critically, she went through the wringer. After To Have and Have Not came out, my mother was the hottest thing going. The critics compared her favorably to every big name actress of the day. They predicted great things for her. Next she appeared in Confidential Agent ridiculously miscast in the role of an Englishwoman, and the critics savaged her. They had been wrong, they said. Bacall, they said, had no future. But when The Big Sleep came out they announced that they had been right all along, that Bacall was a great emerging talent with a huge future. She must have had her own big sleep through Confidential Agent they said, cleverly, when in fact Mom had actually made The Big Sleep with Dad first.
It was after Bogie and Bacall made their third movie together, Dark Passage, that Mother talked Dad into buying the house in Benedict Canyon, where I would be conceived. Benedict Canyon was not developed yet, and this was a real farmhouse which was owned by the actress Hedy Lamarr. It had eight rooms all on one floor, a pool, and a yard for ducks and chickens.
Along with the feathered pets at Benedict Canyon, my parents had a few four-legged ones. Louis Bromfield had given them a boxer as a wedding present. Bogie named the dog Harvey, after the invisible rabbit in the James Stewart movie of the same name because, Bogie said, “Harvey’s the invisible hound. He’s never around when you want him.” Later my parents got a mate for Harvey and called her Baby. (In fact, Harvey had been one of Dad’s pet names for my mother when they first started seeing each other and she was supposed to be “invisible.”) When Harvey and Baby had pups, they kept one and named him George.
Oscar Levant said that whenever he visited my parents at the Benedict Canyon house the biggest hazard, aside from my father, was the two large boxer dogs. He says the dogs would snooze all through the evening in the middle of the living room and everybody had to talk loud because the dogs would snore. However, the dogs apparently had another habit more troubling than snoring, because Levant recalls everyone lighting wooden matches to get rid of the smell.
My father was devoted to the dogs. Benedict Canyon was still very rural then, and one night he found that Baby had been bitten by a rattlesnake. He stomped the snake to death, then took Baby to the hospital. When he came back he found that Harvey was being harassed by a wildcat, which Bogie chased off with a rifle. The paper heard about the incidents and portrayed Dad as a hero, standing up for his pets.
I was just a baby at Benedict Canyon, so my memories of the dogs don’t show up until after we moved to Mapleton Drive. One incident gives you an idea of what a dog lover Bogie was.
The dogs often barked late at night and after a while a few neighbors, including Art Linkletter, signed a petition to have the dogs muzzled.
When my father was told about one of the men who complained about the dogs barking, he said, “The son of a bitch doesn’t like dogs? What kind of monster is he? He ought to be glad he can hear the wonderful sound of dogs barking.”
Some time later, after this dog thing had blown over, the same man was circulating a harmless petition concerning changes he wanted to make on his property. Dad was talking on the phone with Sammy Cahn, who just happened to mention that he had signed the man’s petition.
“What?” Bogie said. “You signed it?”
“Sure,” Sammy said. “What do I care?”
“How could you sign anything for that goddamned dog-hater?” Bogie asked.
After Bogie hung up he mulled it over for a long time. He couldn’t stand the thought of his friends helping a man who had criticized his dogs. Finally, he called back.
“Sammy,” he said. “That petition for the dog-hater. Did anybody actually see you sign it?”
“Well, no,” Cahn told him.
“Then it’s not legal,” Dad said, and he hung up.
The same year that Bogie bought the house in Benedict Canyon for his true love, he also bought his other true love, the Santana.
“The boat was owned by Dick Powell and June Allyson,” Mom says, “but Dick was having sinus trouble and he had to stay in dry climates. So he had to sell the boat, which was agony for him, because he was in love with the sea as much as your father was. So we went sailing with Dick and June. Bogie, of course, fell madly in love with the Santana. After he bought that boat Bogie had everything he had ever wanted.”
So it seems that from the moment he met Bacall my father’s life was just one headlong rush to pure happiness, with no bumps along the way, save for splitting from Mayo. And maybe that’s how it was.
But, as with so much of my father’s life, there is another version of the story.
Vera Thompson, a hairdresser and toupee expert, says that she had an affair with my father that began when he was still married to Mayo Methot, and continued long after he married my mother.
Vera says she met Bogie at a wrap party and later that night they went out dancing and drinking. Bogie, she says, called her the next day for lunch.
“Then,” she says, “he surprised me. He said, ‘I’ll go back over to the set and see if they’re going to need me. I’ll play sick or something and meet you at your place in about an hour. Is that okay with you?’”
Vera was surprised, not just because Bogie was married to Mayo at the time, but because Vera, herself, also was married. She said yes.
She says that the affair ended when Bogie got involved with my mother, but that three months after his marriage to Bacall, they resumed their affair. She signed on as his hairstylist she says, and they began meeting secretly at her house, on his boat, and at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She says that she thought my parents would get divorced, at least up until the time I was born, and then she gave up hope of that. In 1982 she put all of this stuff in a book called Bogie and Me.
Is any of this true? Is all of it true? I don’t know, and I really don’t spend much time worrying about it. However, it seems to me that my father was probably a lot hornier than he is generally given credit for. I don’t think that my father fooled with other women after he married my mother. It’s not, of course, that Dad was a saint. But it seems to me that he liked too many other things for him to take the time and energy to be sneaking around with another woman. He was, as I’ve said, a man’s man—a drinker and sailor and poker player—not a lover. Also, he was one of the greatest stars of his day and I don’t think Thompson would be his first choice out of all the ladies who would have been available to him if he had been interested in a dalliance. But, unfortunately, we live in a time when a lot of people are “remembering” that they had an affair with some celebrity who is dead and can’t deny it.
On the other hand, I can’t say for certain that it never happened.
I have learned that there was an impenetrable part of my father, that he did not reveal every part of himself to anybody, including Bacall. We tend to paint legends in absolutes: “Bogie always told the truth.” “Bogie had an unshakeable moral code.” And so forth. But legends start out as human beings, and human beings are never consistent. Nobody always tells the truth.
Bogie, for example, put out a lot of phony stories when he first got to Hollywood. One was that he owned a train station in France. Another was that he went to jail to prepare for his role in The Petrified Forest. And nobody, as far as I can see, has an unshakeable moral code. So did Bogie screw around on Bacall? I doubt it. But if he did, it is not the smoking pistol that proves he was imperfect. He was, like the rest of us, imperfect to begin with.
Horny or not, unfaithful or not, I do believe that my father was a romantic and a man deeply committed to the idea of love.
“I believe in the institution of marriage,” he said. “The institution is right, it’s the human beings who are wrong. I believe in love, but not the ‘one love of a lifetime’ as pretty a tale as that always makes. There couldn’t be just one love. Among fifty million people that would be pretty hard to find.”
“Love is very warming, heartening, enjoyable,” he said, “a necessary exercise for the heart and soul and intelligence. If you’re not in love, you dry up. After all, the best proof a man can give of his belief in love and marriage is to marry more than once. If you’re not married or in love you’re on the loose and that’s not comfortable. Love is comforting, too. It is the one emotion which can relieve, as much as is ever possible, the awful, essential loneliness of us all.”
These are feelings I share with my father. He spoke these words before he met Bacall, so maybe he did find that one love of a lifetime. Everybody seems to agree that they adored each other. I know that I have my own love of a lifetime in Barbara. And I know that, perhaps because of my childhood, I have always put that first. And that is something I have never regretted.
* * *
“Perhaps we should look at the bedroom,” my mother says. I am alarmed. I thought I would avoid it.
“I thought you did,” I said. “When we were upstairs.”
“No,” Mother says. She stares off into space. “I didn’t go in there.”
We move across the dining room. Toward the stairs. I am aware of an airplane somewhere off in the distance. I’ll be flying home to Barbara and the kids soon, I think.
The sound of the airplane brings another memory. It is not really a memory of an event. It is the memory of how I saw the event in my mind when I was old enough to know about it.
It is March 12, 1951. I am two years old. My father has been signed to star with Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen under the direction of his friend John Huston. My father is anxious to work with Huston again, because, he says, “John is my friend and he makes good movies.”
Both Bogie and my mother are going to Africa. They will be gone for four months, one sixth of my entire life at the time.
While my parents are on the dark continent I am to remain in the care of my nurse, Mrs. Hartley, a florid, full-bodied woman who holds me tightly in her arms on the tarmac as I watch my mother and father climb into some mysterious huge metal machine. It is, she says, a big silver bird. Coaxed by Mrs. Hartley, I wave my small hand at Mommy and Daddy one last time. The airplane rolls down the runway. God knows what anxiety I am feeling as I watch the big silver bird fly into the sky with my parents and zoom off away from me. I cling to Mrs. Hartley. I don’t understand why Mommy and Daddy are gone, but at least I have my nurse. And in that moment, while she is holding me, while my parents are disappearing beyond the horizon of the nighttime California sky, Mrs. Hartley is seized with a cerebral hemorrhage and falls dead.
* * *