When a man is sick you get to know him. You find out whether he is made of soft or hard wood. I began to get fonder of Bogie with each visit. He was made of very hard wood, indeed.
—DR. MAYNARD BRANDSMA
I remember the wheelchair that my father needed during the final weeks of his illness. It was a fascinating metallic contraption with hinges and shiny spokes, and a leather seat that made a snapping sound when it was opened. Dad would roll across the floor in it, grabbing at the wheels with his withering, bony hands. The wheelchair was visual, it was exotic, it was something that I understood because it was something that I could have built with an Erector set. So it is the wheelchair that is the most vivid image I retain from those mostly faded memories of my father’s illness.
Our gardener then was Aurelio Salazar. Now he is old, brown as a coffee bean from decades in the sun, and always bent slightly toward the earth he has tended so long. But back then, Aurelio was young and sturdy, and I can remember that every day at around five o’clock Aurelio would go up to my father’s bedroom. He and my mother would help Bogie get dressed in his trousers, casual shirt, and smoking jacket. Bogie would make jokes about having to gain weight and he would fret about his boat, asking if they had finished the work on the hull. And then Aurelio would slip his strong arms under my father’s shoulders, lifting Bogie from the bed and into the wheelchair. My father, fussing and mumbling and still insisting on doing whatever he could for himself, would roll the chair himself across the bedroom to the dumbwaiter shaft which was built into the corner of the bedroom.
Then Aurelio would lift Bogie again, and carefully place him in the dumbwaiter, which had been altered to serve as an elevator for my father. My father would sit on a small stool. The top of the dumbwaiter had been removed to accommodate him, but, sadly, nothing else had to be done. My father’s weight loss had been gradual, and as a kid I didn’t realize what I know now, that my father, thin to begin with, had become skeletal. Toward the end he weighed as little as eighty pounds.
Aurelio would go down to the kitchen and pull the ropes that would slowly lower my father through the dumbwaiter shaft. The shaft was dark, and though the entire ride took only about twenty seconds, it must have been a painful, even humiliating, ride for my father, alone in that dark shaft, reduced to the size of a child, and face-to-face with his own helplessness.
But once Aurelio had pulled my father out of the shaft and put him back in the wheelchair, my father would begin what, for him, was the best part of the day: cocktails with friends. He would roll into the study, swing into a more comfortable chair, smooth down his trousers, and light a cigarette. Mother would hand him a glass of scotch.
“Haven’t you people got anything better to do than come over here and bother me?” he would say to whoever had come to visit on that particular day. Then the banter with pals would begin and for an hour or so, despite the pain, despite the moments of despair, my dad would again be Bogie.
This is one of the precious few memories I have of the period from February 1956 to January 1957, the time of my father’s illness.
I was seven years old then, and I would certainly not have understood talk about malignant cells, biopsies, radiation treatments, drugs for pain. But those were the realities of my father’s cancer. So to a large extent, my father’s illness was a mystery to me, a nameless thing that invaded our home one day and forever changed our lives. Certainly, I understood that Daddy was sick. But I had gotten sick, too, and I’d always gotten better.
I do remember sitting with Leslie and my mother in my father’s bedroom some nights, the four of us watching television. And I remember going up to his room every night with Leslie to kiss him good night. I remember being in my pajamas, and the feel of my terry cloth bathrobe, and the smell of medicine in the room. I remember a couple of trips on the Santana, when he was no longer able to scramble around the deck and sing and be as cheerful as he usually was on the boat.
But, sadly, it is not the moments with my father during his illness that I remember most strongly. It is the moments without him. I remember a feeling of not being allowed to see him when I needed to. I remember that I was not supposed to jump on him, that I was not to let the dogs get too lively with him. I remember that he no longer picked me up and swung me around.
Until recently I was not especially troubled about my lack of memories. I took it on faith that my father’s illness and death must have been traumatic and that I had simply blocked much of it out.
When I talked to my sister about it, she, of course, remembered less. She was only three years old when he got sick, four when he died.
“I remember Daddy in a bathrobe and sitting in a chair,” she said. “I do remember that from the time he became ill, Mother felt you were old enough to understand and I was not, so all she could deal with was you, and her, and Father, not me, and I guess I felt angry and jealous about that. I don’t remember a lot of family stuff from that time, either. I don’t remember him being around. But whether he was around or not and whether we remember it or not, he was our father and he must have had a huge effect on us. He was a big presence whether we realized it or not.”
Leslie was right. My father’s dying must have had a great effect on me, whether I remember it or not. So as I began my search for my father I knew that I wanted to ask his friends about the last months of his life, months that may very well have shaped me in ways I don’t even understand. I wanted to know about the spaces between my memories, the world that Humphrey Bogart lived in during those painful months. And I hoped that in the asking, and in the telling, I would remember much of what I had forgotten.
One of the first people I talked to was Julius Epstein, the cowriter of Casablanca. Epstein is a small bald man, now eighty-five years old. I went to see Julius in Boston where he was visiting his son, the fine novelist Leslie Epstein.
Julius Epstein was not one of my father’s intimates. They knew each other mostly in connection with Casablanca. But all of Hollywood was in the grip of my father’s illness and Epstein remembered those final months, not so much as a man who saw my father, but as a man who was part of the world my father lived in.
“As I recall, it was right around Christmastime,” he said. “That would be 1955. This was after your father had filmed The Harder They Fall. Bogie was drinking orange juice at Romanoff’s. That, of course, was his hangout. And he found that it hurt his throat to drink the orange juice. And there was a lot of coughing. So he went to see the doctor.”
In fact, it was Greer Garson, the actress who had announced Dad’s Oscar, who dragged Bogie to her doctor one afternoon because she didn’t like the sound of his cough.
Garson’s doctor, Maynard Brandsma, told my father that his throat was inflamed. My father took it casually, even though he’d been having lengthy coughing spells long before the orange juice incident. The doctor put him on a better diet and told him to cut back on the scotch and cigarettes.
“Sure, Doc,” Bogie said.
“And come back in three weeks.”
“Sure, Doc.”
When Bogie got home and told my mother he’d been to the doctor, she was not alarmed. However, the mere fact that Bogie had even gone to a doctor was disconcerting. He had been coughing for years, but her suggestions that he see a doctor had always been met with stony silence or a scornful reply.
Three weeks later Bogart was back in Brandsma’s office. It still hurt to swallow.
“Did you do what I told you?” the doctor asked.
“No.”
“Well, I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah, well it will clear up,” Bogie assured the doctor.
Somewhat nonchalant about his coughing and the fact that it hurt him to swallow, Bogie continued to prepare for his next film. He and my mother, who had already starred together in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo, were planning to make their first film together since Key Largo, eight years earlier. This one was to be called Melville Goodwin, USA, with my father as a military officer, and my mother as a character based on Claire Booth Luce.
But the coughing got worse and, finally, Bogie began to worry. He called the doctor.
“Bring in a mucus sample,” he was told.
The mucus sample that my father brought in made Brandsma suspicious. He asked Bogie to come back in for a bronchoscopy, a procedure for scraping a tissue sample from the esophagus. Though Bogie was still having trouble eating and had lost weight, he and Mother still thought they were dealing with nothing worse than a viral infection of some sort. So, after the bronchoscopy they went off to Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, so that Bogie could rest for a week.
By the time my parents came back from Sinatra’s, the doctor was sure. Bogie had cancer. “The malignancy is small and we’re finding it early,” Brandsma told him. “I think we can get it out of you.”
“Great,” Bogie said. “Let’s do what has to be done. As soon as I finish this movie we’ll get to it.”
“They tell me you’re not a man to be lied to,” Brandsma said.
“That’s right,” Bogie said.
“Well, I’m telling you, you’d better get to it now. If you delay surgery to make a movie, it will be your last movie.”
“I can’t put off this film,” Bogie said. “It will cost the studio too much money.”
“Do the movie,” Brandsma said, “and all the cast and crew can come to your funeral.”
So surgery was scheduled and the film was put on hold. The press was told nothing about the cancer, just that Bogie was going into the hospital with a swollen esophagus.
I remember the day that my father left for the Good Samaritan Hospital, February 29, 1956. My mother brought me and Leslie into the living room. She sat us down somewhat formally, then crouched to speak to us at eye level.
“Daddy is going away for a while,” she said. “He has to have something taken out of his throat by a doctor. It’s nothing to worry about, but he will be gone for a few weeks.” We didn’t really understand, but I guess we nodded our heads and figured everything would be all right. A few minutes later a big white limousine pulled up in front of the house. Dad kissed Leslie and me good-bye, and off he went in the limo. Perhaps if I had been the son of an auto mechanic who came home every night, this would have been upsetting. But during my short life my father had often gone away for weeks, even months at a time. Leslie and I were not alarmed.
The next morning when my father went into surgery, the doctors found that things were not all right. Dr. John Jones, the surgeon, saw that the cancer had spread to Bogie’s lymph glands. Jones took out the lymph glands, along with the esophagus. There was more. The surgical team had to move my father’s stomach around so they could hook it up to the tab that was left. To do that they had to open his chest as well as his abdomen, so they could take out a rib to get at a few things. When they explained the procedure to my mother they also told her that from now on Bogie would feel food go directly to his stomach and that it would probably nauseate him until he got used to it. For my mother it must have been a nightmare to hear all this. Neither of my parents had had much experience with doctors and hospitals.
Dad went through nine and a half hours of surgery. Mother, of course, stayed at the hospital, calling home every few hours to tell us that everything was fine, not to worry.
When Bogie first came out of surgery my mother was horrified to see that his left hand and arm had swollen to four times their normal size, a consequence of being in one position during the hours of surgery.
For the next three weeks Leslie and I saw little of our mother. She called often, but came home usually just long enough to change clothes and rush back to the hospital. Though I was often petulant at the time, I know now that those weeks were an incredible ordeal for my mother. She had to watch helplessly as the man she loved was injected with needles, surrounded by tubes and bottles, and hooked up to cold, robotic medical machines. She had to listen while kind but often incomprehensible doctors explained the carpentry they had done inside her husband’s body. She had to obey when competent but sometimes officious nurses told her when she could and could not see her husband.
“He hated the suction machine most of all,” she tells me. “They needed it to clear his lungs so that he wouldn’t get pneumonia. But it was awful. Once when they were getting ready to put him on it, I heard him cry, ‘Please, no more.’ Your father had to be in great, great pain, for him to say something like that. Through the entire ordeal of his illness, that was the only time he complained.”
As my father improved he saw more and more visitors. Not only his close Hollywood friends came to see him in the hospital, but other Hollywood luminaries whom he knew less well, people like John Wayne and Fred Astaire. At some point my mother decided that he was well enough for a prank. John Huston flew in from England, and hid outside my father’s hospital room. When Bogie went to the bathroom, Huston climbed into his bed and hid under the covers. Bogie came out and eyed the mysterious lump under his sheets. Then Huston leaped up, surprising Bogie, and the two men had a fine laugh.
They talked about the movies they had made together, and the ones they would make in the future. Huston, of course, had already directed my father in five great movies. Now he was looking forward to Bogie’s recovery, he said, because he wanted to pair him up with Clark Gable in Rudyard Kipling’s tale, The Man Who Would Be King. (The movie, of course, was not made then. In 1960, Huston was planning again to make it, still with Clark Gable, and while he was agonizing over who to cast in the Bogie part, Clark Gable died. But Huston finally did make The Man Who Would Be King in 1975, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine, a big Bogart fan, incidentally, who took his name from a marquee for my father’s film The Caine Mutiny.)
There was one frightening setback while my father was still in the hospital. One night he began coughing violently, and the spasms ripped open the stitches in his belly. Blood began pouring out of his abdomen. Fortunately, my mother was with him at the time and she was able to get help.
The morning of my father’s return from Good Samaritan, Mother fussed around in their bedroom, fixing the bed, getting it in just the right place, making sure that his books and glasses and his chess set would all be within reach. She was nervous and excited. Leslie and I played indoors. Infected by Mother’s mood, we were excited, too. It felt like Christmas. Finally, Mother heard the slam of a car door in the driveway.
“Kids, your father’s home,” she called. We gathered on the upstairs landing to wait for him, me on one side of my mother, little Leslie on the other. Dad was carried in on a stretcher by male attendants. He gazed up at us and smiled. “You see,” he said to the attendants, “this is why marriage is worth it.” Then to Mother, “I’ve been trying to get it through these guys’ thick skulls that it’s a great thing to be married, that you can’t beat having a wife and kids there to greet you when you get home from a nice relaxing vacation at the Good Samaritan.”
The attendants took the ribbing and helped Bogie to his bed. Later that day Mother told Leslie and me the rules for the fiftieth time.
“No jumping on your father.” “If you’re going to be noisy play outside.” “Don’t let the dogs jump on your father.” A few weeks later my father began radiation treatments. Five days a week for eight weeks he had to drive to Los Angeles and get zapped by X-rays. No one was saying that he still had cancer, just that they were targeting the places where it was most likely to recur. More and more I got the feeling that there were things going on that I didn’t know about.
During the weeks of the radiation treatments Bogie ate little, though my mother would always set a tray of food in front of him by the fireplace. He felt nauseous from the X-rays. Now and then he would take a few bites, or even ask for a particular food, and Mother would be filled with optimism. But later he would be weak and tired and nauseous, and she would be deflated. Sometimes at night when Leslie and I sat with him watching television, he would make sounds as if he was in pain, and then he would close his eyes and pretend to be sleeping, so that we would think he was just having a bad dream.
My father’s first setback was emotional. Early in the radiation treatments he lost his friend Louis Bromfield the novelist. Bromfield, the man who had hosted the Bogart and Bacall wedding on his Ohio farm, died suddenly at the age of sixty.
But Dad was buoyed up by other friends. David Niven visited. And Nunnally Johnson, and Tracy and Hepburn, and Mike Romanoff, and so many others. Frank Sinatra came by almost every night. And Swifty Lazar, fighting a constantly terrible phobia about germs and sickness, came by often. During this time Bogie’s friends thought they were visiting a man who was recovering from surgery, not a man who was sick.
My father took great delight in telling his friends the details of his surgery. He was fascinated by the medical procedures and, apparently, was able to look at his illness as if it belonged to someone else.
Raymond Massey, who was an acclaimed movie actor long before most of us got to know him as Dr. Gillespie on Dr. Kildare, said, “I didn’t know what to expect when I was ushered into the sick room, but there was Bogart, sitting in a chair, looking as good as ever, sipping scotch and soda, waiting for me. I was just beginning on the small talk when he cut in. ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me down there,’ he said. ‘It was awful!’ And he told me. And the sicker I got from the story, the healthier he became. Then we spent a marvelous afternoon reminiscing about our adventures together.”
Throughout the ordeal my father joked as always, quipped, needled, and expressed his appreciation for the visits in that flippant way of his. “Jesus,” he told one set of friends, “how am I supposed to get any rest with the likes of you coming every day?”
Though my father tended to hide many of his feelings behind joking, as I often do, there were those serious introspective moments, too. One day Bogie told Alistair Cooke that having money, the Jaguar, the great house, the boat, no longer was any comfort to him now that he was sick.
But Dad remained optimistic. He cheerfully told people that he was getting better, and he believed it was true. “Just losing a little weight, that’s all,” he said. “If I could put on a few pounds I would be fine.”
Certainly he took what pleasure he could from life during this period. He continued to drink, though his drinking had been reduced considerably since he’d married my mother. And he continued to smoke, switching now to filtered cigarettes. This was somewhat reckless, I suppose, since drinking and smoking were almost certainly responsible for his cancer. But Bogie was, after all, Bogie. He had eating problems, of course, but eating had never been one of his great pleasures anyhow. Bogie ate for sustenance, not for entertainment. Another similarity between father and son.
So he had his books and his booze, and he had letters to write. I remember that the phone rang often, and sometimes that scared me because I had a constant sense that something bad could happen, though I didn’t know exactly what. But the phone calls were his friends mostly. They were always concerned, and always offering to help in any way they could. And many of those calls were from the press, checking into rumors that Bogie was dying. My father would get on the phone.
“It appears to me that I am not dead,” he would say. “And I’m not dying. I’m fine. Just a little underweight.”
The debilitating effects of the radiation lasted long after the treatments had ended, but by August my father was starting to feel better. He weighed himself daily, and the big excitement came one day when Daddy finally gained a single pound. Mother practically danced around the house. This was the sign that everybody had been waiting for, the proof that everything would be all right.
My mother, whose career had come to a halt, began work on Designing Woman with Gregory Peck. My father told Aurelio to take the Thunderbird down and have it serviced. “I’m going to take Stephen to Newport for a cruise again,” he said.
And he did. But now he was too weak to do much and Pete, the skipper, had to handle the boat. I don’t remember the cruise. But I remember standing on the deck with my dad, the feel of his hand on my shoulder. “Someday I’m going to teach you how to sail, Steve,” he said. “I think you have the makings of a fine yachtsman. And then we can go off, you and me and Pete, on trips. Just the men will go.” He laughed. “We’ll leave the women behind.”
And he made other visits to the boat, not to sail, but just to be on it. For a while it seemed that the dark cloud had passed.
But it hadn’t. My father began to feel pain in his left shoulder. The doctors told him it was nerve damage, common after surgery. But when they got him into the hospital they broke the terrible news to my mother: the cancer had returned.
At the hospital they began something called nitrogen mustard treatments, which then was the last hope for cancer treatment. Bogie was not told that cancer had returned. They told him they were working on the nerve damage. In an odd way, my father was relieved to be back in the hospital for a few days because he despised the feeling of being a burden to everybody at home.
When he returned from the hospital this time he was terribly weak. One night he collapsed in the living room. Mother was terrified. How could the indomitable Bogie have fallen?
She got him a male nurse, someone who could carry him up and down stairs. But that didn’t work. Finally, as it became more and more difficult for Humphrey Bogart to walk, Aurelio got the wheelchair and rigged the dumbwaiter as my father’s elevator.
Now all of Bogie’s friends, who had been treated to a period of hope, had to one by one give up the belief that Bogie “just needed to gain a little weight,” and face the fact. Bogie was dying.
What was I feeling? I wonder now. Was I thinking, Daddy is dying? Was I afraid? I don’t know for sure. The emotions that moved through me then are mostly forgotten. But I don’t think that I believed my father was dying, because my father himself didn’t believe it. Or if he did, he protected us all from his fears.
Bogie acted like a man who intended to go on living for a long time. For example, he continued to work on his career, making plans for films, even with the notorious Harry Cohn.
Harry Cohn, the most feared and hated man in Hollywood, was the head of Columbia Pictures then. He was known for his vulgarity and his ruthlessness and such antics as spying on his employees with secret microphones and informers. He was a complex man who trumpeted his evil deeds and kept his acts of kindness secret.
Despite his reputation as a heartless son of a bitch, Cohn seemed to have had a fondness for my father. Bogie had made films at Columbia on loan from Warner Brothers, and he had even sold his production company, Santana Productions, to Columbia for a million bucks. In fact, my father’s last picture, The Harder They Fall, was for Columbia.
Now, with Bogie losing weight at a horrifying rate and spending most of his time in bed, Cohn frequently announced in the press that my father would star in The Good Shepherd, a movie to be based on C. S. Forester’s best-selling novel. Cohn used to call my father almost weekly telling him, “The part’s great, we want to get rolling, so get your ass over here.”
Bogart told a friend, “I’ll tell you why I think I’m going to beat this rap. It’s Harry Cohn. He keeps calling me about going to work. Now you know that tough old bastard wouldn’t call if he thought I wasn’t going to make it. Perhaps he’s not such a bastard after all.”
Even my mother was touched by what Cohn was doing.
“Harry Cohn knew Bogie wasn’t going to make it,” she says. “But he kept the act going.”
The friends continued to come for cocktail hour, though by now my mother was insisting on no more than two visitors at a time, and asking people to call ahead and schedule. Judy Garland came, and Truman Capote, and Adlai Stevenson, and Richard Burton, and David and Jennifer Selznick. Even Jack Warner, who had been my father’s nemesis through much of his career. And, of course, the inner circle of people who did not have to make appointments: Sinatra, Niven, Hepburn, Tracy, Lazar, and John Huston, who amused my father with stories about the filming of Moby-Dick, which he had just finished.
And when they came, they did not sit weeping by Bogie’s bedside. Instead he came to them, down the dumbwaiter, into the wheelchair and into the study, where they all drank and laughed and said clever things. They did not ask my father how he felt. He hated to be asked. In fact, throughout his illness there was an air of denial. Bogie and his friends conspired to con each other into the belief that he would be fine.
John Huston said, “One night Betty, Bogie’s doctor, Morgan Maree [my father’s business manager], and I were all sitting around in his living room when Bogie said, ‘Look, give me the lowdown. You aren’t kidding me, are you?’ I took a deep breath and held it. The doctor finally assured Bogie that it was the treatments he had undergone that were making him feel sick and lose weight. Now that he was off the treatments, he should improve rapidly. Then we all chimed in, compounding the falsehood. He seemed to accept it.”
My mother says they did not talk about his illness as if it were a possibly deadly cancer, but rather as if it were a virus he would shake off. “When it’s somebody else’s illness you have to take your cue from them,” she told me recently. “If they choose to pretend it’s a cold, then you go along with that. You don’t force them to say it’s more than a cold. But deep down he knew.”
And Father clung to the belief that if he could just make another film, everything would be okay. “If I could just work,” he would say to his friends. “If I could just work, I’d be okay.”
For these cocktail hours Mom was the hostess, laughing, pouring drinks, joining in, but always keeping an eye on my father. Was he comfortable? Was he being included? Was he getting tired? She was fiercely protective of him and she sternly warned anyone who wanted to visit that if they were going to fall apart they should not come. She insisted that everybody be upbeat. This was not a death watch.
When Clifton Webb came to visit he was shocked to see how emaciated my father had become, but Webb held together through the visit, probably out of fear of Bacall. When he left the room he broke down, sobbing.
Spencer Tracy was another one who had to fight constantly against what he was feeling. “Spence was shattered before and after each visit,” Kate Hepburn told me.
There were a few friends who did not come to visit, and my mother was extremely angry about that. The late director Richard Brooks was one she singled out. But she says there were others.
When she complained about this to my father, he told her, “They’re afraid of death and they don’t want to be reminded of it. I don’t like to be around sick people myself. I’m not sure I would come and visit me.”
It is poignant that these friendships were the center of my father’s life during his final weeks, because my father had never thought of himself as a well-liked man. These friends meant everything to my father during his illness. I remember that my mother had a small black notebook and in it she would write the names of everybody who came to visit him, or sent him flowers or cards.
In time my father’s wise-guy protestation of “I’m just losing a little weight, that’s all,” gave way to a promise that he would win what he, reluctantly, acknowledged was a battle with death. “I’m going to beat it,” he told Swifty Lazar. “I feel in my heart I’m going to make it.”
Still, while he eventually admitted that the enemy was death, he never admitted that he was losing the battle. Everyone I talked to has said the same thing. Bogie never acknowledged that he was dying.
In the movies my father had died many times, particularly in the early days. By 1942 he had made forty-five films. In them he was electrocuted or hanged eight times, and shot to death twelve times. He had also been sentenced to life in prison nine times. But in reality, Bogie had an incredible will to live and he was nowhere near ready to die.
My mother says, “There were only two times when I heard Bogie even come close to saying it. Once was when we were on our way to the hospital for his surgery. He said to me, ‘I never had to go to doctors before. Now, I suppose, I’ll be seeing them for the rest of my life.’ The other time was very near the end when Dr. Brandsma came to see him. Bogie told Brandsma he was worried and he said, ‘So, Doc, are things going pretty much the way you expect?’ ‘Yes,’ Brandsma said. By this time it was clear that what Brandsma expected was that Bogie would die. Aside from those two moments Bogie never talked about dying of the cancer. And I never really thought: my husband’s going to die. You just get into a routine way of life. Doctors come. Nurses come. It becomes somewhat normal, and you think it is always going to be that way. He’ll be sick, but he won’t die.”
Alistair Cooke told me, “Your father never said he was dying. And he was resolved to rouse himself for two hours a day to relax with friends until the end came. He managed to convince everyone that he was only sometimes uncomfortable, though in fact he was in terrible pain.”
Other friends of my father say the same thing: he never acknowledged that he was in pain. He wouldn’t even admit it to his doctor.
One afternoon Samuel Goldwyn and William Wyler came by to visit. My father was incredibly weak by this time, and said little. Still, Mother handed him his martini, and he did his best to be amusing. Even at his worst, he was able to brighten up for company.
At one point a nurse walked into the room. It was time for Dad’s morphine shot.
Bogie looked at her and then at his company. He had never taken an injection in front of company before. But now the pain was too much, even for him.
He lifted his pajama leg. By now my father’s leg was only skin and bones. Goldwyn was shocked. He looked away while the nurse injected the needle. When it was over, my father, somewhat embarrassed that he had upset Goldwyn, smiled weakly. “For the pain,” he said, then, “sorry.” He never took another injection in front of company. He forced himself to have a high threshold of pain.
One thing my father did not have a high threshold for was the press. At first, the newspapers were good to him. They didn’t hound him much. They didn’t say he had cancer.
But as the weeks went by and he was no longer being seen at Romanoff’s, no longer making movies, the rumors became too much to ignore.
Carolyn Morris says, “The reporters would call and your father would end up yelling at them. He threatened to sue them for saying he was in a coma. Then he would bang the phone down, coughing.”
When one editor called to see if his reporter had really talked to Bogart, my father told him, “If you don’t trust your reporters then fire them.”
My father exploded when Dorothy Kilgallen, whom he despised, printed a story that said Bogie was on the eighth floor of Los Angeles Memorial Hospital, and that he was near death.
What was funny about the story was that the Los Angeles Memorial Hospital did not exist. But my father, a man who found almost everything amusing, was temporarily humorless. He called Kilgallen’s paper, screaming and yelling about “the stupid bitch.”
When he was relatively calm he called Joe Hyams, and asked Joe to print a statement from him. Obviously, by the time he wrote it, Bogie’s sense of humor had returned.
“I have been greatly disturbed lately at the many unchecked and baseless rumors being tossed among you regarding the state of my health,” he wrote. “Just to set the record straight, as they say in Washington (and I have as much right to say this as anybody in Washington has), a great deal of what has been printed has had nothing to do with the true facts. It may be even necessary for me to send out a truth team to follow you all around.
“I have read that both lungs have been removed, that I couldn’t live for another half hour, that I was fighting for my life in some hospital which doesn’t exist out here, that my heart had been removed and replaced by an old gasoline pump salvaged from a defunct Standard Oil station. I have been on the way to practically every cemetery, you name ’em, from here to the Mississippi, including several where I’m certain they only accept dogs. All the above upsets my friends, not to mention the insurance companies…so, as they also say in Washington, let’s get the facts to the American people—and here they are.
“I had a slight malignancy in the esophagus. So that some of you won’t have to go to the research department, it’s the pipe that runs from your throat to your stomach. The operation for the removal of the malignancy was successful, although it was touch and go for a while whether the malignancy or I would survive.
“As they also say in Washington, I’m a better man than I ever was and all I need now is about thirty pounds in weight, which I’m sure some of you could spare. Possibly we could start something like a Weight Bank for Bogart, and, believe me, I’m not particular from which portion of your anatomies it comes from.
“In closing, any time you want to run a little medical bulletin on me, just pick up the phone, and as they say in the old country, I’m in the book!”
The reporters did call. But the distressing stories kept coming: BOGIE WAGES A BATTLE FOR LIFE, DOWN TO 80 LBS., BOGART FIGHTS FOR LIFE AGAINST THROAT CANCER.
By December there was no denying the truth. Christmas came and went. Leslie and I got lots of presents. It was Dad’s fifty-seventh birthday. Then my birthday came two weeks later. My mother had a party for me, with lots of my friends.
Everybody knew the end was coming. By this time Dad was having trouble breathing and they had brought in oxygen tanks for him. I remember them, two big green tanks, one for upstairs and one for downstairs.
Soon friends were making final visits.
One of the people I talked to about my father’s last days was Phil Stern. Stern is a top Hollywood photographer, who has taken shots of celebrities for Look, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post. At seventy-five, he is still very active in Hollywood.
He remembers Mapleton Drive, the beautiful house, the patio, the pool. And he remembers his last visit with my father.
“It really was a good-bye,” he says. “I was just one of many, hundreds who came…a ‘cast of thousands.’ I remember Bacall greeting me at the door and saying, ‘You’ve come to see the great man.’ I went in and Bogart was lying on the couch. He had wasted away. At this time I had just had a book of photos published. Bogie had the book. He looked up at me and smiled and said, ‘You did a great job, kid.’”
Phil Gersh says, “Near the end I went upstairs, the last time I saw him. He must have been eighty-five pounds.
“‘Hey, kid,’ he said, ‘where are the scripts?’
“‘They’re in the car,’ I said. This was a running bit with us, dialogue we had many times at Romanoff’s.
“‘Well, who are they for?’
“I gave him some names. ‘Hal Wallis wants you,’ I said, or Joe Pasternak, or Stanley Kramer.
“‘Are they holding the jobs open for me?’
“I said, ‘Absolutely, Bogie.’ He was smoking. It didn’t make any difference by this point, I guess.”
My father’s last visitors were Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. For these last weeks of his life, Tracy and Hepburn had gone to see him every night at 8:30. Tracy would sit in a chair by the bed, and Kate would sit on the floor beside him. Tracy would tell jokes.
My father and Tracy had been friends for thirty years. There had been a time when they were the closest of friends, seeing each other every day and carousing together at night. Tracy, like my father, was a world-class drinker. Then there was a period of many years when they saw little of each other, and they seemed to find each other again after both became major movie stars. It was a good pairing then; Bogie was a talker and Tracy was a listener. Though they had separate social groups, they were always close. And more than that, there was enormous professional admiration. My father said that Spencer Tracy was our best screen actor. He said that with Tracy you didn’t see the mechanism at work. “He covers it up,” Bogie said, “never overacts, never gives the impression that he is acting at all. I try to do it, and I succeed, but not the way Spence does. He has direct contact with an audience he never sees.”
This particular night, Tracy needed all of his acting skills, because he was a wreck.
Kate Hepburn described the last visit to me this way. “I was with Spencer. We spent time with your father. Before we left I kissed him good night, the way I always did, and Spencer put a hand on Bogie’s shoulder. Bogie gave him one of those great Bogart smiles, you know, and he said, ‘Good-bye, Spence,’ but those words, Stephen, they were so filled with meaning. You knew Bogie meant it as a final good-bye, because your father had always said good night in the past, not good-bye. We got downstairs in that lovely house they had, and Spence looked at me. He was terribly sad and he said to me, ‘You know Bogie’s going to die.’ He meant that Bogie would die very soon.”
Though my father almost never talked about dying during his illness, it seems that toward the end he knew. Even his doctor said that on his last visit Bogie said good-bye and thanked him for all that he had done. “I’m sure that night he knew he was going to die,” Brandsma says.
After Tracy and Hepburn left that night, my mother and father watched Anchors Away, the film starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. Lately, my mother had been sleeping in another bed, so as not to disturb Bogie’s sleep. But on this particular night he asked her to stay with him. The night was a horror for both of them. Dad suffered through the night in a claustrophobic nightmare, constantly picking at his body, clutching his chest, struggling, it seemed, to leave his body. I can only imagine what my mother went through, lying there helplessly beside him. Later she learned that this was a common phenomenon just before death.
In the morning Dad seemed a little better, as he usually did when day arrived. It was a Sunday, and Mother took Leslie and me to Sunday school at the All Saints Episcopal Church. When she came back she and Dad talked for a while and when she left to pick us up at Sunday school he said to her, “Good-bye, kid.” These were his last words to her, and later the press would make something of it, filling the words with meaning, as if Bogie knew they were the last words. But my mother says no, he said, “Good-bye, kid,” just the way he always said it.
When Mother brought us home from Sunday school my father was in a coma.
Dr. Brandsma came over. He told my mother that Bogie could come out of the coma, but that, more likely, this was the end. “He has fought harder than anyone,” Brandsma told her. “He lived longer than we had a right to expect. He should have died four months ago, but he didn’t because his will was so strong.”
My mother was shaking. “What about Steve?” she said. “How do you tell an eight-year-old boy that his father is dying?” She asked Brandsma if he would talk to me.
Then she called me into the butternut room. “Steve, Dr. Brandsma wants to talk to you.”
Mother asked me to sit. I must have known that something bad was going to happen because I remember sitting on the edge of the chair. Brandsma sat across from me.
“Stephen,” he said, “you know your daddy has been very sick.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ve been trying everything I could to make him better,” the doctor said. “But that’s not enough.”
I nodded.
“Stephen, your dad is sleeping now. He may go into a deeper sleep. And he might not wake up. Do you know what I’m trying to say to you?”
I nodded. My mother had her arm around me. “Stephen, do you understand what the doctor is saying?”
I ran out of the room.
Later my mother found me. “Daddy is in a deep sleep,” she said. “Come and see him.” We walked into that room, with its awful smell of sickness and decay. We sat on the bed. Mother was more frightened than me. I moved closer. We both took Bogie’s hand, and sat there not talking to each other, just thinking our own thoughts, feeling our own feelings. After a moment I leaned over and kissed my father’s cheek. Mother did the same.
Later that day she found me again in the bedroom, standing by my sleeping father. She asked me why I had come back. “Because I wanted to,” I said.
That’s what happened. I know from talking to my mother and from my own small fragments of memories. But for most of my life I could only guess at what I felt: fear, anger, loss. I could recall only some of the scene, as if I had glimpsed it quickly from a safe hiding place. And I recalled none of the feelings. Lately, they have been returning—glimpses, whispers, sensations of regret so poignantly felt that I have no words to describe them.
That night the nurse came to my mother. “Mrs. Bogart,” she said, “Mr. Bogart has died.” My mother sobbed all through the night. Because of their game, their pretense that it was all a passing virus, their insistence that Bogie was always on the road back to good health, Mom had had to hold so much in. And now, with him gone, all those trapped emotions came pouring out for her. She could let herself feel what she had been trying not to feel for months. I sometimes wonder if these memories I am having in bits and pieces are enough, or if I also need to have such a moment.
At dawn she came into my room.
“Darling, I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father died early this morning.”
She says I lay there, rubbing my eyes with my fists. My eyes were wet and red, she says, but I did not cry.
“Is he in heaven?” I asked.
“Yes, he’s in heaven,” she said. “And he is watching over us, so you must be brave and strong. He was so proud of you. And he loved you very much.”
Then she got Leslie and brought her in and told her. I do remember that Leslie kept playing while Mother told her, and because I was feeling sad while Leslie was still playing, I somehow thought that made me better than Leslie. Of course, Leslie kept playing. She was only four years old.
So I lost my father when I was eight, and within a year I would lose my home, my school, and my friends. All of those losses that I remember would be troubling, of course. But something happened during those final weeks that has troubled me even more all of my life. I was in my father’s room one day. I don’t know if I was talking to him or just playing there. And I don’t know whether it was days before he died, or weeks before he died. But after I was gone, my father told my mother not to let me or Leslie in there anymore.
I’m forty-five now and I can perhaps gather some of what my father must have felt, the emotions that would make him say such a thing. The pain of having his children see him so impotent, so small and pathetic, must have been unbearable. He must have cried to think he would never see us grow up. It must have been more excruciating than the cancer for Bogie to look at his little boy and his little girl playing in the sunlight that streamed through his bedroom window, knowing that the light would go out much too soon.
But that’s big Steve Bogart sizing things up with his adult brain. I was eight years old. And what I have held on to most of my life is that feeling of not being allowed to see him, of being somehow left out, of being rejected by my father during his final days. The memory of that feeling has stayed with me always. Perhaps it explains, in part, why until now I have been unwilling to talk about my father’s life.
* * *
Mother and I stand outside of the house. We stare into the swimming pool.
“It wasn’t here when we moved in,” she explains. “I had it installed for you kids.”
She points to the spot where Leslie and I left our small footprints in the cement four decades ago. Both somewhat stunned by our memories, we stand by the edge of the glistening water, as if our own feet are anchored in the cement. Our visit to the Mapleton Drive house is over, but we are not quite ready to leave. There is a slight breeze and I hear the soft play of the water as it slaps against the edges of the swimming pool. I replay a memory that I have replayed many times.
I am with my father on the boat, sailing to Catalina. Then I am on the shore. My father is offshore, on the boat. He is sending Pete in the skiff to pick me up. But I don’t want to be picked up. I want to swim out to Dad, show him I can swim well. I wave to him. “I’ll swim to you, “I shout. He shouts something to Pete, telling Pete to let me swim but to keep an eye on me. I begin to swim.
The water is cold around me and the surface bobs at me, now and then splashing my face. I keep my mouth closed, afraid of swallowing water. I kick my feet the way I’ve been taught. My arms swing forward wildly, pulling me along through the water. I can swim good, I think.
My father is standing on the foredeck watching me. He holds his hands to the brim of his fisherman’s cap, to keep the sun out of his eyes. He is rooting me on as if it is a race and I am his favorite. “Come on, Steve, my boy!” I keep swimming. I want to get there. I don’t want to fail. I swim onward, but the boat seems farther away than it did when I began. I begin to feel a burning in my chest. I am tired, but I am determined, and I flail my arms forward, wildly scooping the water behind me. Dad is cheering me on. The Santana is bobbing in the water. “Good going, Steve,” my father is shouting. Pete stays near me in the skiff. I keep swimming. Finally, the boat is getting closer. I’m going to make it, I think. I swim harder, I breathe faster. I’m going to make it. I’m feeling so good. Almost there, I find one last burst of energy, and rip through the remaining water. I did it, I think, I swam to the boat. I begin to climb the ladder. My father, excited, dashes over to help me aboard. I get to the top rung. He lifts me in his arms and swings me around. He is smiling. “Great going, kid,” he says. “I’m so proud of you. “
The memories are coming rapidly now, and as the Santana of my memory sails away, and Mother and I begin, at last, to leave the house I am suddenly aware of another memory, an incident that happened just a few weeks before this trip to California.
I am at home, looking at videos of old home movies. There is my father swinging me upside down in the yard. There is Leslie and me, splashing in the pool. There is my dog Harvey loping across the lawn. There is the young Bacall with her Bogie. Suddenly a picture of me as an adult has flashed on the screen. I am confused.
“How did a picture of me get on this tape?” I say to Barbara.
She looks at me strangely. “Steve,” she says, “that’s not you. That’s your father.”
I look again. Barbara is right. For the first time I am seeing myself completely in my father’s face. More and more lately I have been seeing pieces of my father in me. I have become preoccupied with questions that have never before bothered me. Am I my father’s son? How are we alike? How are we different?
Now, when my mother and I walk around to the front of the Mapleton Drive house the morning seems very bright, like the mornings of my childhood. The smell of the grass and the trees rush into me as if for the first time. I feel as if I have come to the end of two journeys that all men must take, one way or the other. One journey, I began a decade ago when my wife told me, “Find out about your father.” The other, a journey of self-knowledge, which can last a lifetime, or a year, or even just the time it takes to walk through a house you once lived in.
Your search is over, I think. The words just come to me suddenly, as if carried on the breeze. Though I have spent most of my life running away from the shadow of my father, I have come now to see what Barbara has told me, that just because I don’t want to live life as “Bogie’s son,” I don’t have to ignore him. “Bogie or not, he was still your father,” she has told me.
If I didn’t know it before, I know it now, standing in the yard of my childhood home, that this search is all about looking at my own life and at my father’s and trying to figure out what, if anything, they have to do with each other. I feel as if I have, in a very real sense, come home. I want to embrace my father, not run from him. I know now that the words will come easier. Not just the words I write about my father, but also the words I speak to my children when they ask about their grandfather, the words I speak to strangers when they say, “So you’re Bogie’s boy, huh?” My mother and I are quiet with each other as we drive away from the Mapleton Drive house that morning. I love her. She is still my mother, and even when she is driving my sister and me nuts, she is loving us. We are on our way to visit some more old friends of Humphrey Bogart. I am anxious to see these people, to ask more questions. But I am anxious, too, to be done with this trip, and to get on a plane back to my home in New Jersey. I miss my kids.
* * *