You suddenly say to yourself, “Where the hell am I going—what am I doing?” Then, of course, you know what you’re doing—you’re going with your husband who believes in no separations in marriage, who is working. Your life with him cannot stop for your son.
—LAUREN BACALL
Of course, I don’t consciously remember the airport death of Mrs. Hartley. I was two years old. But I have the story from no less a source than Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons, published in the next day’s Los Angeles Examiner.
Little Stephen Bogart, two-year-old son of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, barely escaped injury when his nurse, Mrs. Alyce Louise Hartley, who was holding him in her arms, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died almost instantly.
Fortunately, Carolyn Morris’s mother, who was also at the airport, rushed to take the boy from the stricken nurse’s arms, thus preventing Stephen from being dropped.
That’s what happened, and while I don’t remember it, I think it’s fair to say that I was terrified by the event. However, Mrs. Hartley’s death is not the worst of it. What happened next is something that I’ve thought about all of my life.
My mother did not come back.
My father, of course, had to go to Africa. He was an actor. This was how he made his living. This was a chance to work with Hepburn and Huston. But my mother was not in the movie. She didn’t have to go.
In her book, By Myself, Mother writes with some candor (though a noticeable retreat into the second person) about leaving me. She writes, “I have a pain in my solar plexus when I remember how it felt to leave Steve behind.…Your life with [your husband] cannot stop for your son. And—admit it—you want to see these unseen places. So the brain whirs—the heart tugs—the gut aches. I must have turned around a hundred times to look at Steve and wave and throw kisses and get teary-eyed.”
My parents were on a stopover in Chicago when they got the news about Mrs. Hartley.
“I agonized about coming back,” Mother says, “I knew you were being taken care of by my mother, but I wondered if maybe I should have come back. I talked to your doctor, Dr. Spivak, many times on the phone. He told me not to worry, that he would interview nurses and find one who was acceptable. In the meantime my mother was there with you. By the time the plane landed in New York, Dr. Spivak had found a nurse. I interviewed her for a long time from a phone booth in 21. I talked to the servants and they promised to report to me. I tried to talk to you, Stephen, but you refused to speak to me. I talked to the doctor again. He told me you would be fine. There was never any issue of your physical needs being taken care of.”
This is true. But it’s the emotional needs that I have always wondered about. There are people who would say that a two-year-old boy needs his mother when his father has gone away and his nurse has just dropped dead while holding him.
On the other hand, a defense could be made of my mother’s decision. I have made it many times. I did, after all, have a safe and beautiful house. I had servants to feed me. I had the new nurse to dress me and take my temperature if I got sick. I had my grandmother to look after me. I wasn’t exactly being left in a basket in the woods.
And frankly, my mother was under great pressure to stay with Bogie. She was incredibly devoted to him, and wanted to be with him. And Bogie was a man who believed that a woman’s place was with her husband. Because he was twenty-five years older than Bacall, I can imagine that he must have felt that each moment with her was particularly precious. Even if they both lived to the same age, there would still be twenty-five years that he would never share with her. He certainly didn’t want to be robbed of four months every time he had to shoot on location. I can understand that; I hate to be separated from my wife even for four days.
So I know that I would have handled it differently if it were me and my kids. I would have come back. But each of us does what he or she feels is right, and that’s what my mother did in 1951.
What I did in 1951 and for most of my life was to feel angry and resentful about it. It has always been an issue between Mother and me. I’m sure a good therapist would tell me it’s not so simple:
“Steve, you’ve got to understand that your feelings of being abandoned are not just about your parents going to Africa. They are about your father dying, and your sense of identity being stolen by people who think of you only as ‘Bogart’s son,’” and so on and so on and blah blah blah.
Probably true. But I do my own therapy. Half the time I say, “Steve, your feelings are justified,” and the other half I say, “Get past it, Steve, it was forty-three years ago.” I believe that I am now past it.
But, because this episode has loomed so large in my life, I knew when I began asking about my father that I wanted to learn what those four months were like for my father and my mother. To find out, I talked to my mother and her friends and people who knew my father. But, mostly I talked to Katharine Hepburn.
I’ve known Kate Hepburn all of my life, because she has been a good friend to my mother ever since those African Queen days. I remember being a boy of six and going to her house for the first time. It was high on a hill in Beverly Hills, California. In my mind, that house is like a castle, kind of spooky and mysterious. Spencer Tracy was there, too, and I’ve always regretted that I never really got to know him.
It was during the filming of The African Queen that Kate and my father developed their enormous affection and respect for one another.
“I loved him and he loved me,” Kate says. “He was a real man, your father, there was nothing about him that wasn’t manly. He was an aristocrat, and he was a gentleman. He was very proud to be an actor and that is rare. Your father was an angel, a true angel.”
My father admired Kate, too, but typical of him, he expressed his affection in less direct ways. When he and Huston first went to see her, Kate made some comment about plain women knowing more about men than beautiful women. Dad later remarked to Huston, “She’s a crow, so she should know.” But after filming The African Queen, he told the press, “I found no one is sexier than Kate, especially before a movie camera, and she has legs like Dietrich. You learn to brand as rank slander the crack that you can throw a hat at Katie and it’ll hang wherever it hits.”
The African Queen, a book by C. S. Forester, is the story of Charlie Allnut, a gin-swilling Cockney ne’er-do-well riverboat captain, and Rosie Sayer, a skinny, hymn-singing missionary. An odd couple if ever there was one. There had once been a plan to star Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester in a film version of the story. Still later, it was to be John Mills and Bette Davis. By 1951, producer Sam Spiegel wanted Bogart and Hepburn.
It was a movie, my father says, “about a woman who starts out to become a missionary but after spending some time in a small boat with me winds up being a woman.”
Though my father had known Spencer Tracy well for years, he had known Hepburn only casually. By the time he and John Huston drove to that California house, to lobby Kate for the part of Rosie, Bogie had heard terrible things about her and he went, he said, “entertaining righteous skepticism.” Bogie had heard that Kate drove hard Yankee bargains with producers, that Hollywood was only a necessary evil to her, that she didn’t sign autographs and, most shocking, that she didn’t drink.
“Your father was a bit nervous about me,” Kate says. “He thought I was an ogre.”
Hepburn, likewise, was fearful of Bogie and Huston because she had heard that they were reprobates. After she lectured them on the evils of drink, Bogie said to her, “You’re absolutely right, Kate. Now pull up a chair and have a drink with us.”
Kate, who was forty-two at the time and still quite glamorous, was being asked by Huston to do something daring: play a woman of fifty-five.
“Rosie was haggard,” Kate says. “She was worn out. She was being dragged through the muck of Africa. This was not a glamorous role. I loved it.”
My father loved Forester’s story, too, and he saw it as a change. “We all believed in the honesty and charm of the story,” he said. “And I wanted to get out of the trench coat I wear in the movies whether I’m devil or a saint.” Bogie, who usually avoided sentiment, was sentimental about The African Queen. “We loved those two silly people on that boat,” he says.
Actually, according to John Huston, my father was not crazy about Charlie Allnut to begin with.
“Bogie did not like the role at first,” Huston said. “But all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd, brave little man and would say to me, ‘John, don’t let me lose it. Watch me. Don’t let me lose it.’”
After they all met, it was agreed that Kate would play Rosie and that my father would play Charlie Allnut, except that Allnut was changed to a Canadian to accommodate Bogie’s accent. So all the adults were off to Africa.
Well, not exactly. After my parents left me and the late Mrs. Hartley at the airport they did not go straight to Africa. In New York they boarded the cruise ship Liberté and sailed to England. When they got to London they learned that some of Spiegel’s backers had jumped overboard and the money to make The African Queen wasn’t there. Financial decisions were made hurriedly. One was that my father would put up some of his own money to make the film. Another was that Bogie, Hepburn, and Huston would defer their salaries until there was money coming in.
“I did insist on having my hotel room in London paid for,” Kate says. “I didn’t mind doing the film for nothing, but I certainly wasn’t going to pay for the privilege.”
In Europe they drove through the French countryside, having a fine time while I was sulking in Holmby Hills. They stopped at roadside cafés. In Paris they visited the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and they ate dinner on the Seine with Art Buchwald and Frank Capra. They stayed at the Ritz, and they ate, my mother says, “incredible French breads.” My mother fell in love with Paris for life. But it was Italy that my father loved most, and he would later make two movies there.
My father liked to pick up a pen from time to time, and of his European adventure, he later wrote, “Like most Americans I have my greatest linguistic difficulties in France. My theory is that Parisians understand my Phillips Andover French and pretend not to. On the other hand, Italians pretend, out of natural politeness, to understand my experiments with their language when actually they don’t. Either way I am in trouble.”
Perhaps it was best that my parents had these idyllic days on the Continent. Because typical of Huston, whom my father referred to as “The Monster,” The African Queen was to be shot in the most remote jungles of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) and Uganda. Generally, my father didn’t care for location shooting. He preferred the comfort of a studio. But he knew that when you made a film with Huston you had to be prepared to relocate in jungles and on mountains.
Bogie had already gone on tough locations with Huston. They had gone to a remote village in Mexico to make The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. “John wanted everything perfect,” Bogie said of that excursion. “If he saw a nearby mountain that could serve for photographic purposes, that mountain was no good. Too easy to reach. If we could get to a location site without fording a couple of streams and walking through snake-infested areas in the scorching sun, then it wasn’t quite right.”
The filming in Africa was, by all accounts, a nightmare.
“We lived in bamboo bungalows,” Kate says. “Half the time we didn’t know what we were eating, and we didn’t want to know. I found a snake in my toilet.”
Personality conflicts among the major players were relatively minor. My mother and Kate got along nicely. However, early in the adventure Kate did seem a bit too haughty for Dad. “There we are a million miles from nowhere sleeping in bamboo huts and she wants a dressing room with ankle deep rugs and a star on the door,” he said later, with affection. But at the time what he said to Kate was, “Kate, you ugly, skinny old bag of bones, why don’t you come down to Earth?”
Kate’s reply was, “Down where you’re crawling? All right!” Perhaps that was the beginning of their beautiful friendship.
Bogie and Huston, of course, were already friends. And Kate got along well enough with Huston, even though she did see in him a sadistic streak, an unfortunate Huston quality that others have also noted. I remember John Huston best for his kindness to me when I was a child. He was a fascinating and complex man and you can get one very compelling view of him in the novel White Hunter, Dark Heart, written by Peter Viertel. Viertel was the screenwriter on The African Queen and his novel, about Huston in Africa, was later turned into a movie with Clint Eastwood in the Huston role.
Though I had always imagined that my parents were off in some exotic world enjoying a glamorous vacation, I have since learned that the cast and the English crew of The African Queen were visited by plagues of biblical proportions. The first of these was bad drinking water. Everyone except Bogie and Bacall got dysentery. My mother, apparently, was just lucky. My father was saved because he drank no water, only scotch.
“His strength was scotch,” Huston says. “I think all of us were ill in some way or another, but not Bogie.”
“I was sick with dysentery,” Kate says, “because I drank water all the time, hoping to shame Huston and your father out of drinking liquor. Well, the water was full of germs. I got the trots so bad I thought I would die.”
Dysentery, however, was mild compared to some of the other diseases that threatened the crew. For example, much of the filming was to be done on or near the Lualaba River in Pontheirville in the Belgian Congo. Huston loved the river because it appeared to be black, due to the tannic acid from the surrounding vegetation. However, human waste had infested the Lualaba with parasitic bacteria that could cause incurable blood disease. There was one affliction, apparently common in the area, that caused worms to grow under the skin. When my father learned about this, and the fact that the river was well populated with crocodiles, he thought it might be best if the scenes of him and Kate submerged in the Lualaba were shot not on location, but later at the studio in England.
Also, it rained often, shutting down the shooting. When that happened, Huston, who fancied himself a great white hunter, went off to stalk elephants. My father, who did not like the idea of killing animals, stayed at the camp. There he drank scotch, told stories, slept in a hammock on a river raft, and read the many books he had brought with him.
The rain, unfortunately, did bring on some of those minor personality conflicts. Kate, for example, thought Huston was a murderer for going hunting, though she took comfort in her belief that Huston “could not hit an elephant with a bean shooter.”
My father also was annoyed when Huston went hunting. Dad thought the director ought to pay more attention to the movie even if rain had shut down the actual filming. It wasn’t just that Bogart wanted to get back to his comfortable air-conditioned house in California. It was also that in the movie industry, more than most, time is money and in this case a lot of the money being lost was his. Huston, on the other hand, was never anxious to leave exotic locations. He seemed to thrive in swamps and deserts.
In addition to rain and disease, there were bugs. “Bugs were everywhere, especially on the personnel,” Bogie said. After the first two-day rainstorm, which occurred almost as soon as they arrived, mosquitoes hatched by the millions and they seemed to have no trouble working their way through the netting around the beds. Kate says everyone was soon itching and scratching and covered with red welts.
Except for my father, of course. He claimed that when the mosquitoes bit him they either died or got drunk. “I built a solid wall of scotch between me and the bugs,” he said. Later, an army of man-eating red ants invaded, driving the filmmakers out of their campsite, to another site outside of Entebbe in Uganda. There it rained more and several members of the crew got malaria. Oh yes, they were having a grand time.
There’s more. There were also problems with the Ugandans. When it came time to burn an entire village, which the crew had built for the scene, Huston worked a deal with a local chief to populate the film village with natives. On the day of the scheduled shooting, the hired natives didn’t show up. It turned out that cannibalism was still common in the area, and the natives were afraid that Huston was setting a trap to capture them and eat them. (If this sounds crazy to us, you can imagine how crazy they thought Huston and these other white people were, building an entire village and then burning it to the ground.) There were natives working with the film crew, too, and at one point they went on strike for higher wages.
The centerpiece of the filming was a bizarre caravan of four rafts, all tied together. The first was a replica of The African Queen, Charlie Allnut’s boat. Most of the shooting was done there. The second raft carried the lights and props. The third raft carried the generator to power it all. And the fourth raft carried Kate’s dressing room, including a privy and full-length mirror. After a few days Kate’s raft had to be cut loose; the boat was towing too much. At one point The African Queen sprung a leak and sank. It took five days to raise it by hand. “The natives were supposed to be watching it,” Bogie said. “They did. They watched it sink.”
Even though my father didn’t get sick in Africa, he nevertheless griped constantly about the heat, the dampness, the stink, and all the crawling things. So, while I was at home alone, he and Bacall were not having such a great time. Kate, however, didn’t gripe, and Bogie marveled at how Kate, who was ill and exhausted almost all of the time, handled herself through the ordeal. Often he was heard to shout, “Damn Hepburn, damn her, she is so goddamned cheerful.”
“Huston and I drank,” he said. “But what is good for me and John Huston has got to be bad for the rest of society. Katharine Hepburn didn’t drink, and breezed through her stay as if it were a weekend in Connecticut. She pounces on flora and fauna with a home movie camera like a kid going to his first Christmas party. About every other minute she wrings her hands in ecstasy and says, ‘What divine natives, what divine morning glories.’ Brother, your brow goes up.”
A few years after the filming of The African Queen, my father wrote slightly more seriously in The American Weekly about one incident with Hepburn. He described going into the jungle with John Huston to find the caravan of trucks that was carrying cameras, lights, and sound equipment. When they found the trucks, which were being driven by local natives, some of the vehicles were stalled on the road. Others were overturned, and the drivers had taken the calamity as an opportunity to chat with people in a nearby village.
“The block and tackle is as mysterious to a native as the workings of the atom bomb is to me,” Bogie said.
Seeing there was no way to hurry the natives, Huston and Bogie decided to scout for locations in the jungle.
“Katie could have remained behind,” he wrote, “but she preferred to march through the jungle with us, as John and I knew she would.”
Bogie was sitting in a small jungle clearing with Kate and John Huston, when a huge wild boar showed up with his family. “It was a gruesome creature,” Bogie said, “big as a large sheep dog with vicious tusks springing from both sides of its mouth.
“Fortunately, we had a downwind, or the creature would have smelled us and charged. I froze. So did Huston. But not Katie. Before we could stop her she had stepped into the clearing, with her sixteen-millimeter camera to her eyes. Huston and I dared not yell to Katie to come back for fear the boar would charge, nor could we move for fear of panicking him and we could not shoot since Katie was between us and the boar.
“As she walked slowly toward the thing, with the camera finder to her eye, it stared straight at her. I was frozen but fascinated, and in those horrendous moments of waiting that seemed like hours I learned something rare and wonderful about Katie.
“I thought, there’s a fearless woman. I also sensed that Katie, who is a remarkable woman, could not believe that an animal would hurt her. She is not stupid but I suddenly knew that she felt if she wanted the boar’s photograph, he could not possibly object. Approaching him fearlessly, as she did, she communicated no fear to him. Huston and I were the ones who were afraid, but in a desperate situation, I’ll take Katie before Huston—or myself—any time.”
Maybe. But in one desperate situation it was Bogie who had a moment of bravery. My parents and Peter Viertel were going for a ride down the river in a small gasoline-driven boat. Their boatman, however, had trouble getting the engine started, and he flooded it. When he went down to look at it with a lighted match, the whole damn thing blew up. When the boatman came running up to the deck he was on fire and he quickly put himself in the water. Meanwhile, the boat was in danger of burning. It was Bogie who threw a line to another boat that was tied up and somehow he got buckets of sand, then went below deck and put out the fire. It could have been a real disaster.
The filming in Africa came to an appropriately dramatic close. When the schedule called for two more days of shooting, Huston announced that he needed three days, which raised havoc with airline schedules and inland transportation. Bogie was mad as hell and he thought Huston and Hepburn were in cahoots to keep him in Africa forever. Huston, however, got his way. Equipment was moved out gradually so that on the last day nothing was left but Bogie, Hepburn, Huston, and the camera. My mother and my father went to London together, where they were to meet me at the airport.
“Your plane arrived around noon and I was a nervous wreck,” my mother says. “The door opened and there you were. Immediately you made this face that you always made and you came running down the gangway, smiling, and I was so happy to hold you again. I missed you terribly in Africa. Your father was very emotional, too, at seeing you again. You just kept talking and talking, chattering a mile a minute. We had never heard you talk so much before. I was really happy that the Africa adventure was over and we were all back together as a family.”
The Africa adventure, of course, was not over for me. For decades I would carry around the belief that I had been abandoned by my mother. Sometimes when I watch my home movies of Mom and Dad and Kate working and playing in Africa, I can’t help thinking that most parents of a two-year-old, especially their first, don’t want to miss a day with the child because he is learning to talk better each day and he is constantly making new discoveries. I know that’s how I felt about my kids. It makes it harder to understand.
The months that my parents were in Africa were, undoubtedly, a formative time for me. It was also a time of passages for others. It was in Africa that Kate found out that her good friend Fanny Brice had died. It was there that my father learned that Mayo Methot had died. And it was in Africa that John Huston learned that his wife had given birth to a baby girl. They named her Anjelica and today, of course, she is one of our top screen actresses. (I finally met Anjelica Huston a few years ago. Her first words to me were, “It’s about time we met.”)
Some wonderful things came out of that African adventure. One was my parents’ friendship with Kate Hepburn. Another was that the work those people did in the jungle produced a great film. And a third was that later that year my father was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor.
My father certainly did not expect to win the Oscar. He thought it would go to Marlon Brando, who was up for A Streetcar Named Desire. Bogie admired Brando immensely, even if Brando was a method actor. He considered him to be the best of the new actors. Bogie also thought that Montgomery Clift had a decent shot for A Place In the Sun.
Also, my father was embarrassed by the whole thing. He had, after all, derided the Oscars, saying that the only way a Best Actor award would make sense would be if each actor donned black tights and recited Hamlet. Years earlier he had ridiculed the Oscars by concocting the idea of giving Academy Awards to animals. The first year he gave the award to Skippy, the dog in The Awful Truth. The following year he gave the Oscar to a water buffalo in The Good Earth. Though he intended all this as a joke, the animal award later became real in the form of the Patsy, awarded annually by the ASPCA.
But the big night came and Bogie was there. My mother sat beside him, tensely holding his hand. The award for Best Supporting Actress went to Kim Hunter for A Streetcar Named Desire. Then the award for Best Supporting Actor went to Karl Malden, from the same movie. Then Bogie and Bacall sat through the disappointment of having Kate lose out on the Best Actress award. The award went to Vivien Leigh. Three straight acting awards to A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando, for Best Actor, would make it a sweep. And then came the announcement for Best Actor. Greer Garson announced, “The award goes to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen.” The cheers were deafening.
My father, always so quick with a quip, stumbled over his planned ad-lib. Clearly, he was touched by the award.
“It’s a long way from the Belgian Congo to the stage of this theater,” he finally said. “It’s nice to be here. Thank you very much.” He thanked Kate, and Huston and Spiegel and the crew. “No one does it alone,” he said. “As in tennis, you need a good opponent or partner to bring out the best in you. John and Katie helped me to be where I am now.”
What stunned my father, though, more than the award itself was the fact that his was such a popular victory. He never believed that people in Hollywood liked him as much as they did, and he was very moved by it all. Long before there was a Sally Field crying, “You like me, you really like me,” my father felt the same way.
Back in the press tent after the awards, Bogie reverted to form and wheeled out his old jokes about actors donning tights and reciting Hamlet. But he didn’t fool anybody. They knew he was pleased and touched to have been chosen.
Later, among his friends at Romanoff’s he admitted as much. Now my father was at the height of his career. He had an Oscar, a beautiful young wife, an adorable son, and a daughter on the way.
I don’t know if a three-year-old boy has the sophistication to turn a small metal statue into a symbol of his anger and resentment. But I seem to recall that when my father brought home the Oscar, visible symbol of all that he had accomplished in Africa, I wanted to pick it up and hurl it at him.
That Oscar, by the way, is now on a shelf in my home.
* * *
When we get to the room that was my parents’ bedroom I feel pain. I have been expecting it. Now the room holds the possessions of another Hollywood family, but I look through them and I see the room as it was. I remember the position of the bed, the table with the chess set, those nights watching TV with my father, the good-night kisses, the smell of medicine.
“God,” I say to my mother, “this is so strange. I remember coming in as a kid. The bed was against the wall. I remember standing by the bed, seeing him a lot, lying down in that bed.”
“Well, he was only lying down toward the end,” she says.
“I have a picture of him in my mind,” I say, “and Leslie and me coming up. I can really see him,” I say. I am talking more to myself than to Mom.
“He would be sitting up,” my mother says. “He would be sitting up when you saw him.”
Despite my pain and the memories, I smile. It suddenly seems funny that Mom would be uncomfortable simply agreeing with something I say.
“Yes, Stephen, you are absolutely right,” I say out loud, but she doesn’t get it.
A sensation of sadness sweeps through me.
“God, thirty-six years ago,” I say. I can still feel the pain, but I don’t think my mother is aware of it.
I know what I am feeling. The pain is not about memories of being in the bedroom. It is about the times when I was not allowed into the bedroom. I try to push the pain from my mind.
* * *