Mr. Bogart said, “Listen, kid, there are twelve commandments,” and then he ordered a drink.
My mother is a woman who usually gets what she wants. And, in the late 1940s, she was resolved that her husband, Humphrey Bogart, would be a father. So Bogie and Bacall went to work on getting Bacall pregnant. They visited the doctor to see if all the plumbing was in good working order. The equipment was all functional, but the sperm count was a bit low. So Dad started taking vitamins, and his body had to be upgraded a bit because, though he had been a fine athlete at one time, he was now close to fifty and had made a mess of his body with cigarettes and alcohol. The doctor also told Bogie and Bacall to relax, everything would work out.
Though my father was not as oversexed as many well-known movie actors of his time, all indications are that he did enjoy sex. He once said that sex was the most fun you could have without laughing. And I don’t think he really wanted his sex life complicated by talk of ovulation and uteral linings, and all the other unromantic considerations that arise when couples are trying to have a baby. Still, except for a small amount of grumbling, he went along with the idea of being a daddy. This would be a first for him. Dad had been married three times before, to Helen Menken, Mary Philips, and Mayo Methot. All three of them had careers as actresses, and neither Dad nor his wives had ever insisted on procreation. So it is not surprising that when my mother told Bogie that she was pregnant, in the summer of 1948, he had second thoughts.
My parents lived in a farmhouse in Benedict Canyon at the time, away from the Hollywood scene and all the “phonies” that my father abhorred. My mother says that when Dad came home from the studio that day, she met him outside the house and told him the glorious news. Dad got very quiet. Then he put his arm around her gently and led her into the house. He remained quiet through dinner. After dinner they had a terrible fight.
Mother says, “It was the worst fight we ever had. Bogie was very upset. He was afraid that the baby would come between us, that our lives would not be the same. He said he didn’t marry me just so he could lose me to a child. It was horrid.”
Like many Bogie stories, this one has two versions. There is no reason to think he would tell the press the real story, of course, but here is what he did tell a reporter some months later: “The day came when my spouse walked in the door with the words, ‘Well, the doctor says you’ll never forgive me, but I’m going to have a baby.’ I made the proper sounds of elation. Frankly, I think I did them pretty well, considering it was my first take. Then I asked her, ‘Why am I never going to forgive you? To me a baby is a baby.’ ‘Summer is coming, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do much sailing, you know.’ I said, ‘Oh.’”
He doesn’t mention the fight, but the next morning, he apologized to my mother. He told her that he was shocked at his own behavior. He had been scared, more than anything else. He said he didn’t want to lose all the happiness he had found in being married to her. He was afraid of being a lousy father, he said, and he didn’t know how he would handle a kid.
I’m sure Bogie had all the birth defect fears that I had when I was an expectant father. Would his kid have all the fingers, toes, and ears that a kid is supposed to have? These fears probably loom even larger when you are almost fifty and expecting your first baby. Dad was full of anxiety about it all, but he also said that he did want a baby, more than anything in the world.
After his initial panic, Bogie started to get into this baby thing. His male pals gave him a baby shower, if you can imagine that. Frank Sinatra, Paul Douglas, Mike Romanoff, and others brought diapers and rattles and even little baby dresses, because in those days you didn’t know if you would have a boy or a girl. “His shower was bigger than the one I had,” Mother says.
Mother spent much of her pregnancy making home improvements in the middle of the night, and reading books about gadgets. Already she was lobbying for a bigger house because she wanted more children. Bogie told his friend Mike Romanoff, “When other wives are pregnant they’re supposed to demand pickles, ice cream, or strawberries out of season. Mine just wants houses.”
I became known in the papers as “The most discussed baby-to-be in Hollywood.” Hollywood columnists Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham called often. Did the baby move? Had they decided on a name?
Throughout the pregnancy Bogie was edgy. He paced. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. At times he must have looked like one of those death row prisoners he had portrayed, waiting for a phone call from the governor. Bogie had no experience with kids so he started trying to get to know the children of his friends. But he tried too hard, it seems, and was often rebuffed, which made him all the more insecure about what sort of father he would be.
“I can’t say that I truly ever wanted a child before I married Betty,” he later said. (Betty is my mother. She was born Betty Perske. She took her mother’s name of Bacall when she was a kid and her father ran away. Producer Howard Hawks made her Lauren, a name she has never felt comfortable with.) “For one thing, in the past, my life never seemed settled enough to wish it on a minor. I was in the theater in New York, or going on tour around the countryside. And in Hollywood, I was either trying to consolidate my foothold in pictures or was preoccupied by something else. But Betty wanted a child very much, and as she talked about it, I did, too. For one reason, which may seem a little grisly, but true, nonetheless. I wanted to leave a part of me with her when I died. There is quite a difference in our ages, you know, and I am realistic enough to be aware that I shall probably leave this sphere before she does. I wanted a child, therefore, to stay with her, to remind her of me.”
* * *
On the day of my birth Bogie was a wreck. This was in the days when guys stayed out of the delivery room and felt pretty helpless. I know how Bogie felt, because I was not allowed in the delivery room when my first son, Jamie, was born. But I know what my father missed, too, because a decade later I watched Richard and Brooke being born and those births were easily the most deeply felt moments of my life.
In the labor room Bogie did not do well. He turned white and felt sick. My father had a great tolerance for pain, but he had almost no tolerance for the pain of people he cared about. (Several people recall that a few years later Bogie got sick when a doctor came to the house to stick a needle in me. And a few years after that, when I had my hernia operation, Bogie got sick. Later he bragged to Nunnally Johnson that I had been braver than a soldier.) At 11:22 P.M. on January 6, 1949, I came along. I was named Stephen Humphrey Bogart. I was named Stephen after the character my father played in To Have and Have Not, the film that brought my mother and father together. I weighed six pounds, six ounces, and I was twenty inches long. After the birth, Dad was well enough to yank a flask full of scotch out of his coat pocket and pour drinks for all the other fathers-to-be.
The press was notified and soon presents for me arrived from Bogie fans all over the world. Among them were several toy submachine guns, which Dad sent back.
The first present I ever got from my father was a snowman. Incredibly, it had snowed in Beverly Hills on the day I was born. Three inches covered the ground, a rarity in southern California, and when my mother brought me home my father had built a snowman on the lawn to welcome us back. When Mom saw the snowman she felt a lot better about the whole idea of Bogie and fatherhood.
A few days later she felt even better. My parents had set up an intercom between the bedroom and the nursery, so they could hear me if I started crying. One morning, on his way to work, Dad stopped in and began cooing all sorts of baby talk to me, completely unaware that Mother was listening to him through the intercom. Then she heard him speaking to me, somewhat shyly and awkwardly because he didn’t know what you were supposed to say to babies. She heard him say, “Hello, son. You’re a little fellow, aren’t you? I’m Father. Welcome home.” He would have been embarrassed if he’d known he was overheard.
Bogie was a proud father, and in family photos you can see him doting over me. In one famous photo you can even see him changing my diapers. But the photo is a fraud. It is, says my mother, the only time in recorded history that Bogie changed a diaper.
Whether my father avoided baby doo because he wanted to, or because he felt left out, is debatable. It seems that Bogie did suffer the feeling of isolation and abandonment that afflicts many new fathers.
“Betty gave me a son when I had given up hope of having a son,” he said. “She is everything I wanted and now, Stephen, my son, completes the picture. I don’t know what constitutes being a good father. I think I’m a good one, but only time, of course, can tell. At this stage in a child’s life the father is packed away, put aside, and sat upon. The physical aspects—feeding, burping, changing, training—are matters before the Bogart committee, which is, as of now, a committee of one…Betty. So I won’t take over for a while yet. When I do I’ll handle the boy as I would any human being in my orbit. That is, I’ll let him be himself. I won’t push him into anything or try to influence him.”
In any case, Humphrey Bogart was by no means the diaper-changing, new-and-improved sensitive daddy of the 1990s, the one you see these days at the changing table in airport men’s rooms. And if he had been, it would not have been a matter of sharing chores to reduce the burden on his wife. We had servants for that.
When I was born, Bogie was already forty-nine years old. He was on his fourth marriage, this time to a beautiful actress who was twenty-five years younger than him. Bogie was a man set in his ways. He was a man with one rule: I’m going to live my life the way I want to. That’s the way he was, and he had been that way long before I came along. Even when he married my mother, Bogie kept his butler and cook, and his gardener, Aurelio. So Bogie was not about to make major changes in his life just for a baby.
Besides, he didn’t know how to change his life for a kid. I’ve talked to a lot of his friends about this, and they all say the same thing. Bogie was awkward with children. He didn’t know exactly what to do with kids. He was in awe of them.
What his agent, Sam Jaffe, said to me is typical. Sam said, “I am the father of three, the grandfather of four, and the great-grandfather of three, so I notice children and I have always noticed how other people deal with them. When I was in the house with Bogie and you kids for the first time, I paid attention. And I will never forget that when you and your sister came down the stairs his look was so…quizzical. He was looking at you children as objects of curiosity, as if he had never seen children. It was as if to say ‘Who are these people? What are you?’ I’ll never forget that. Fatherhood was an unknown thing to him. He came to it late in life. He didn’t caress children, didn’t do any of the things that I did as a father, because it was strange to him. He was not the sentimental type that gushed, though he did cry easily. I’m not saying he was not a good father, just that he had this look of curiosity around children. He was not ready to be a father. I don’t think, until he married Betty, that he ever thought he would have children.”
(This Sam, by the way, is not Sam Jaffe the actor, who played in the movie Gunga Din and later in the TV show Ben Casey.)
Because Dad was uncomfortable with kids, there are not many stories about Bogie and children before I came along. But one of them is that when Bogie was married to Mary Philips, he was godfather to the son of his friends John and Eleanor Halliday. Bogie once offered to take the boy to lunch. When the day came, he said to Eleanor Halliday, “For God’s sake, what do you talk to a thirteen-year-old boy about?”
“Well,” she said, “you’re his godfather. That means you’re supposed to be in charge of his religious instruction.”
Later, when the boy returned from lunch his mother asked him, “What did you and Mr. Bogart talk about?”
“Not much,” the boy told her. “Mr. Bogart said, ‘Listen, kid, there are twelve commandments,’ and then he ordered a drink.”
Adolph Green, who got to know my father when Green and Betty Comden were in Hollywood writing the screenplays for Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon, remembers an incident at Mapleton Drive one day when the pool was being filled.
“They had been fixing the pool, and now they were pouring new water into it,” he says. “You and me and Bogie were there. You were four or five years old. You were watching them fill the pool. There was a hose pouring water into it, and suddenly you got hysterical. You were shrieking. You thought the pool was going to overflow and you were going to drown. I said, ‘Don’t be silly, Steve, it’s okay.’ But you kept getting more and more upset. What I remember most, though, is your father. He didn’t know what to do. He had no idea how to handle it. He was just shaking his head. I asked him about you, and he said that something else had overflowed recently, a tub or something, so your hysteria had some valid reason behind it. I think your mother must have come out and taken care of you, I don’t really remember. But I do remember Bogie shaking his head, helplessly. He had no idea how to handle a hysterical child.”
When my sister, Leslie, came along a few years after me Dad fared only slightly better. Because she was a girl he was probably even more afraid of her. But he was also much more affectionate with her. He bounced her on his knee often, though he had done that rarely with me. He played on the seesaw with her. She was Daddy’s little girl, the baby as well as the female, and he gave to her a quality of love that he never gave to me. He didn’t know any better, of course, didn’t understand that a boy needs to be hugged by his father, too. But sometimes when I am lonely, when I feel that life has cheated me out of something important, I wish for the memory of one of those hugs that went to my sister.
My father liked the idea of having kids. He was proud to have Leslie and me, and he would never hurt us or neglect our basic needs. But he was not about to integrate us into his life. Kids had to fit into his life where it was comfortable for him. My father, for example, didn’t want to eat dinner with the kids. Which I can understand now, having often endured the torture of eating dinner with a two-year-old.
After I was born, my father’s schedule was pretty much the same as it had been before I was born. He worked every day at the studio, making, on average, two movies a year. He got home at five-thirty. Then he liked to be alone for a while, which is why he didn’t eat supper with us. On many weekends he went sailing. On days off he went to Romanoff’s for lunch. Sometimes he played with us, but not much. He said, “What do you do with a kid? They don’t drink.”
He would appear, be with us for a little while, and then vanish and do his thing. As a result, I idolized my father, which may come as a surprise to the people who have heard me grumble about him over the years.
In fairness to my father, the pain of losing him seems to have wiped out most of my memories of him, and he might have spent much more time with me than I think. I have learned about many moments with him that I don’t remember. When I was six, for example, he told a reporter, “The only thing I’m trying to impress on Steve right now is not to steal and not to squeal. When he comes home with some imaginary or real slight suffered at the hands of neighbor kids, I let him know right now that he’s on his own. The other day he started telling me about getting clobbered by a kid up the street. I told him to knock it off. ‘Hit him back,’ I said. ‘I did,’ Steve said, ‘I got him a beauty.’ And that, for the time being, was the end of that.”
I have no memory of this. I only know about it because I have the newspaper article. In that same interview, Dad said he looked forward to the day when I could take my place alongside him and help him tack the Santana down the Newport Channel. The reporter wrote, “That will be the day, no doubt, when Bogart figures his cup is filled.”
Though my father did not make great changes in his daily life, there is little doubt that he was affected by fatherhood. He bragged about the fact that I looked like him. He told one friend, “I’ve finally begun to understand why men carry pictures of their children with them. They’re proud of them.” Another friend, Nathaniel Benchley, says, “When Bogie remarried and settled down to raise a family, there came a drastic change. Gentle and sentimental, devoted to his wife and children, he was the antithesis of everything he’d been before and the reconciling of the two sides was like the clashing of gears.” And my mother remembers that Bogie cried the first time he saw me in a school room. She says, “I think the impact of fatherhood caught up with him.”
It’s understandable, I guess, that my father, who had never spent much time around children, would be uncomfortable with kids. But I wonder if it doesn’t go deeper than that. I wonder if Bogie might have been unprepared to bond with children because of his own parents. Certainly, I have learned that being the child of famous people, or even just highly successful people, can take its toll. My father was also the child of well-known and very successful people and that, it seems, took its toll on him.
Contrary to the image many have of my father, derived largely from his early films, Humphrey Bogart did not fight his way up from the streets with fists ablazing. He came from wealth and privilege. He was born on Christmas Day in 1899, a circumstance which did not please him as a kid. Once, on my birthday, he said, “Steve, I hope you enjoy it. I never had a birthday of my own to celebrate. I got cheated out of a birthday.”
He was the son of a prominent Manhattan surgeon, Belmont DeForest Bogart, and a nationally known magazine illustrator, Maud Humphrey, who had studied in Paris under Whistler.
Dr. Bogart and Maud were a fine-looking couple. He was tall and athletic, a good-looking guy whose tongue could be as sharp as a stiletto. Dr. Bogart could choose the right words and say them in just the right tone to sting people, tickle them, or just make them look ridiculous. This ability to needle was a trait that my father would adopt, and one for which he would be known his entire life. Though my grandfather was strong, handsome, and wealthy, he was less fortunate in other ways. When he was a young intern, a horse-drawn ambulance tumbled on him, and he was never in perfect health after that. In later life, he invested in many businesses that failed, and, because of the pain from the accident, he became addicted to morphine. Maud, my grandmother, was an elegant redhead who drew men to her like beagles to bones. She was a snob who had grown up in the Tory tradition in upper-class Rochester, New York. Bogie often referred to her as “a laboring Tory, if there is such a thing.” She was an Episcopalian who cared deeply about the women’s suffrage movement, and was a worthy adversary for her husband’s debating skills.
Mrs. Bogart was known by everybody, including her kids, as simply Maud.
Bogie once said of his mother, “It was always easier for my two sisters and me to call her ‘Maud’ than ‘Mother.’ ‘Mother’ was somehow sentimental. ‘Maud’ was direct and impersonal, businesslike. She loved work, to the exclusion of everything else. I doubt that she read very much. I know that she never played any games. She went to no parties, gave none. Actually I can’t remember that she even had a friend until she was a very old woman, and then she had only one. She had a few acquaintances who were mostly male artists, and she knew the people in her office well. But she never had a confidante, never was truly intimate with anyone and, I am certain, never wanted to be.”
In the early 1900s, Bogie’s parents were not super-rich, like the so-called robber barons of the time, but Dr. Bogart’s practice raked in twenty thousand dollars a year, which was added to an inheritance he’d gotten from my great-grandfather, who had invented a kind of lithographing process. And Maud, who was in charge of all artistic work for The Delineator magazine, was one of the highest-paid illustrators in the country. So there was no danger of the Bogarts running out of oats. The family, which included my dad’s two sisters, Frances and Catherine, lived comfortably in a four-story limestone house on 103rd Street and West End Avenue, near Riverside Drive in New York, which is where a lot of fat cats of the time lived.
Like me, my father grew up in a world of fine furniture, expensive rugs, polished silver, servants, celebrities, and modern conveniences, which in his case meant that the Bogarts had a gramophone and a telephone.
If Bogie had a childhood that was materially secure, I don’t think it was emotionally satisfying. For one thing, his mother and father did not get along well. “My parents fought,” Bogie once said. “We kids would pull the covers over our ears to keep out the sound of fighting. Our home was kept together for the sake of the children as well as for the sake of propriety.”
His mother, who was plagued by migraine headaches, used to work at her office all day, then at night she’d put in many more hours in her upstairs studio. Maud was not one to let motherhood interfere with her work. Bogie was, of course, well taken care of by his Irish nurse. But I was taken care of by nurses, too, so I think I know something of what he might have felt. I think he was probably a lonely kid much of the time.
When Bogie’s mother did take charge of him, she often took him to the park in his high-wheeled carriage. It was there one day that she sketched the first likeness of Humphrey Bogart. Maud’s sketch of her baby was bought by Mellins Baby Food Company, and, before he could even talk, my father became famous as the “Original Maud Humphrey Baby.” In fact, he was the most famous baby in the world. The watercolor drawings, with lines so fine that they looked like etchings, were published in magazines and books. They were even framed and sold as individual portraits. In these drawings my father has long curls and he’s ridiculously overdressed, which was the stylish thing to do with babies back then.
When Humphrey got pneumonia, Maud got it into her head that he was a sickly child. “He is manly,” she once wrote of the future tough guy, “but too delicate in health.” That’s about as weepy as Maud got over her son. The fact is that Maud Humphrey was not exactly a candidate for Mom of the Year.
“I was brought up very unsentimentally, but very straightforward,” my father once said. “A kiss in our family was an event. Our mother and father didn’t fawn over my two sisters and me. They had too many things to do, and so did we. Anyway, we were mainly the responsibility of the servants.”
He once told a Time reporter, “I can’t say that I loved my mother. I admired her and respected her. Ours was not the kind of affection that spills over or makes pretty pictures. If, when I was grown up, I sent my mother one of those Mother’s Day telegrams or said it with flowers, she would have returned the wire and flowers to me collect.”
Some of Bogie’s friends have told me that this “I never loved my mother” business is a polite understatement—that, in fact, he could not stand her. Nevertheless, he did take care of her in her declining years, and she was living with him and his third wife when she died of cancer at the age of seventy-five.
Maud, according to my father, was totally incapable of showing affection. “This might have stemmed from shyness,” he said, “from a fear of being considered weak.” Her caress, he said, was like a blow. “She clapped you on the shoulder, almost the way a man does. When she was proud of you there was no running down the stairs with arms outstretched, no ‘My darling son.’ Only, ‘Good job, Humphrey,’ or something like that.”
My father’s relationship with his father, while far from perfect, seems to have been less disappointing. Dr. Bogart liked to fish, hunt, and sail a hell of a lot more than he liked to poke around in people’s abdomens with surgical instruments. This sometimes led to friction between himself and Maud, but it was good for father and son. Dr. Bogart loved the open air and he often took young Humphrey with him. Though Bogie would grow up having no stomach for the killing of animals (“Went fishing for ten years,” he said in his pithy way. “Didn’t catch anything.”), his love of sailing was an abiding one and it was the love of his life. Except for Bacall, of course.
Still, despite what they shared, few words of affection passed between my father and his father before September of 1934. It was then that my father was playing chess for a dollar a game at a chess parlor on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, when he got word that his father was dying. He rushed home. Two days later Dr. Bogart passed away in Bogie’s arms.
“It was only in that moment that I realized how much I really loved him and needed him and that I had never told him,” Bogie said later. “Just before he died I said, ‘I love you, Father.’ He heard me, because he looked at me and smiled. Then he died. He was a real gentleman. I was always sorry he couldn’t have lived long enough to see me make some kind of success.”
My own regrets about my father’s death are somewhat different than that. I don’t think much about whether or not I said, “I love you, Father.” If I never used those words I certainly showed my love in the ways a small child does, by climbing on his lap, by coming to him for good-night hugs and kisses, and by calling him such charming pet names as “blubberhead,” and “slob.” No, my regrets have less to do with how I felt about him, and more with how he felt about me. I regret that he didn’t spend as much time with me as I would have liked, and that he died when it seemed that he was just starting to get the hang of this fatherhood thing. I wasn’t always sure of it, but I am sure now that if my father had lived a full life we would have had the kind of relationship that fathers and sons dream of.
But, as it is, I still have a few memories. One of them concerns Romanoff’s restaurant. Though my father had gone to Africa to make The African Queen, and Italy to make Beat the Devil, he generally stayed around Hollywood. And when he wasn’t working he was often schmoozing at Romanoff’s restaurant.
Phil Gersh, who was a partner of Sam Jaffe, remembers my father’s Romanoff’s days well.
“I’d meet your father at Romanoff’s,” Gersh says. “Bogie always had the same lunch. Two scotch and sodas, French toast, and a brandy. He never looked at a menu. And he never carried money. He’d say ‘Phil, have you got a dollar for the valet kid?’”
Actually, my father stuck people with more than just the valet’s tip money. It was a running gag for him to see how often he could con somebody else into paying the bill.
Mike Romanoff, who owned the restaurant, was a close friend of my father. He was known as Prince Michael. As far as anybody knows, no drop of royal blood ever flowed through Mike Romanoff’s veins, but for years he insisted he was Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitri Obolensky Romanoff, a nephew of Russian Czar Nicholas Romanoff. Phony prince or not, Mike was much loved by the Hollywood crowd. He was a guy Hollywood turned to for advice, a regular Ann Landers, and his restaurant was a famous watering hole for movers and shakers. Mike was also one of the few people who could beat my father at chess. It was Mike Romanoff who summed up my father about as well as anybody could in one sentence. He said, “Bogart is a first-class person with an obsessive compulsion to behave like a second-class person.”
My father had his own reserved table at Romanoff’s. I remember it well. It was the second booth to the left from the entry way. There Bogie would eat his lunch, drink his scotch, and shoot the breeze with some of the best-known people in the world.
One day, when I was seven, Bogie decided that I should join the world of men. That is, I should be taken to Romanoff’s restaurant and shown off. On this day he wanted to be Daddy. That morning my mother dressed me up in new long trousers and a spiffy new shirt, then she brought me up to the bedroom to be inspected by the man himself.
My father, wearing gray flannels, a black cashmere jacket, and a checked bow tie, looked long and hard at me. “You look good, kid,” he said. Then off we went, me and Bogie, in the Jaguar.
Romanoff’s was in Beverly Hills. Dad and I arrived in the Jag at 12:30, my father’s usual time. When we pulled in, the valet took the car and we were led immediately to Bogie’s regular booth. Dad waved to a few of the many Hollywood notables who were already dining, and I’m sure most of them thought it adorable that he had his little Stevie with him. We sat in the booth and Mike Romanoff came over to greet us.
“Good afternoon, your royal highness,” my father said. His usual greeting to Mike.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Bogart,” Mike said, in his carefully cultivated Oxford accent. “Are you going to be paying your bill today? I thought that might be a pleasant change.”
“Are you going to be putting any alcohol in your overpriced drinks?” Bogie asked. “That also would be a nice change.”
“You won’t be needing a necktie today?” Romanoff said.
“No.”
Romanoff, you see, had a jacket and tie policy at the restaurant, and he always made Dad wear a tie. One time my father had baited Mike by showing up with a bow tie that was one inch wide and sat on a pin.
“I see you’ve brought your grandson,” Mike said.
Mike liked to rib my father about his age. Bogie was a quarter of a century older than Bacall, so when my mother was with Bogie at the restaurant, Mike would say to her, “I see you are still dating the same aging actor.”
It went on like that for a while. I guess it always went on like that for a while. My strongest memories of that day are the feel of the green leather upholstery of the booth, the taste of creamed spinach, a specialty of the house which I loved, and the steady parade of grown-ups, which I wasn’t crazy about.
I don’t know everyone who came by to talk on that particular day. But this schmoozing at Romanoff’s was a ritual. It was common for David Niven to stop by at my father’s booth and visit, and for Judy Garland and Sid Luft, and Richard Brooks. And sometimes Spencer Tracy. I’m sure that Swifty Lazar came by on this particular day. Swifty, whose real name was Irving, got his nickname from my father after making three big deals in one day. He died only a few years ago. In fact, the 1987 Chrysler half-wagon which I drive today is one I bought from Swifty. He was known as the first Hollywood superagent, but he was not my father’s agent; he was his friend. Swifty was a small man, with a face like a cherub’s, but built as solidly as a fire hydrant. And he was one of the dandiest dressers in Hollywood history. He was once described by my godfather, writer Quentin Reynolds, as “a new kind of beach toy turned out by an expensive sporting goods store.”
So Swifty came by, and movie stars and singers, and studio heads, all of them smiling at the rare sight of Bogie with a child. They paid their dues to me: “How are you, Stephen?” and “My, don’t you look grown-up!” But then into shop talk they would go…Stanley Kramer had just bought rights to such and such a book, Gary Cooper was filming this, Harry Cohn was pissed off about that, and so on. A lot of celebrities, a lot of fascinating talk.
Fascinating, that is, to grown-ups, but not to a person whose idea of fun was sliding down banisters and climbing trees with Diane Linkletter. I was not impressed. I was the son of two movie stars, and, more to the point, I was only seven years old. So I was, in a word, bored.
By the time Bogie was into the brandy, my boredom had begun to take physical form. I was rapping my water glass with a fork.
“Don’t do that, kid,” my father said.
I was banging my feet under the table.
“Cut it out, kid,” my father said.
And, no doubt, I was making faces, tapping my fingers, fidgeting, and glancing around. Acting like a kid. But the behavior of children was a complete mystery to Humphrey Bogart and, though he was almost continually amused by life, he was now getting less and less amused.
By the time we left the restaurant that day, we were not speaking to each other. My father’s knuckles were white on the wheel of his Jaguar as he drove, perhaps a little too fast, through the streets of Beverly Hills, anxious to deliver the demon son back to the arms of Bacall.
I guess my father sometimes thought I was a handful. Once, discussing me with a friend, he said, “One word from me and he does as he pleases.” And my mother’s friend, Carolyn Morris, remembers, “You were challenging. Like your father. You did things your way and if anybody told you how to do them, you would do them more your way. Your dad was like that, very much.”
When we got home that day my mother was out by the pool reading. Dad led me directly to her, as if I might try to make a run for it.
“Baby,” he said. “Never again.”
My mother said nothing. She put her book down and looked at me, as if to ask, What is your side of the story?
“Never again,” I said, mimicking my father, and off I went to read my comic book.
In fact, Bogie did take me to Romanoff’s again, a few times. I don’t remember any conflict connected with those visits, so things must have gone better.
I only have one other memory of causing trouble for my father, and that is mostly because I was told the story years later by David Niven, one of my father’s closest Hollywood friends. He told me about a time when I almost knocked out one of the world’s most famous playwrights in our living room.
The playwright was Noel Coward. It seems that one night in 1955, Niven and Coward were sitting with Bogie. Noel Coward was visiting on his way to Las Vegas, where he was to make his first Vegas appearance, at the Sands Hotel. Coward wanted to discuss his material with Bogie and Niven. He was very worried about it. Would the Vegas nightclub crowd even understand the sophisticated humor of a British playwright? Bogie and Niven were in the two easy chairs, facing Coward, who sat on the sofa. I was behind the sofa. I don’t know whether I was being ignored or just in a pissy mood, or had something against British comedy or what, but Niven says I began moving ominously behind Coward, eyeing his head as if it were some sort of animal to be stalked. And I was armed with a large brass serving tray. When I got close behind Noel Coward, I lifted the tray and smashed it down on top of his head. It must have stung something awful, even if it was being wielded by a six-year-old. But the famous playwright never turned to look at me. He just looked at my father and, in that clipped British accent, said, “Bogart dear, do you know what I am going to give darling little Stephen for Christmas? A chocolate-covered hand grenade.”
It was unusual for us to use the living room. It was not fully furnished, but it did contain a few expensive antiques and paintings. When my mother and father brought guests into the house, which was often, my mother was inclined to steer them toward the wood-paneled study, the butternut room, where the furniture was less pricey and more comfortable. And where there was a bar. The butternut room was a cozy room with full bookcases, comfortable chairs, folding tables, and a pull-down screen for film viewing. These guests were famous people: Sinatra, Tracy, Garland, Benchley, Niven, Huston, on and on, and many were very wealthy. But most of them were drinkers. My father was not comfortable with people who didn’t drink. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t drink,” he once said. So my parents’ friends could be rowdy at times and I don’t think Mother wanted them bumping into her paintings and shattering vases.
Bacall certainly had good reason to worry. My father and his friends were capable of mischief. Once, after John Huston and his father, Walter, got Academy Awards for their work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Dad, who also got an Oscar nomination for the movie, went back to John Huston’s place where Bogie and the director, still wearing tuxedoes, played football in the mud against a movie executive and a screenwriter. They either didn’t have a football or were too drunk to look for one, so, instead, they ran pass patterns with a grapefruit.
* * *
There are many reasons why I did not see a lot of my father when I was a kid. One reason was his work. Another was his boat, the Santana.
While most people know that Bogie and Bacall had a great love affair, probably fewer know about my father’s other great love affair. It was with sailing. Specifically, it was with the Santana, a fifty-five-foot sailing yacht, which he had bought from Dick Powell and June Allyson. The sea was my father’s sanctuary.
My father was not simply some movie star throwing money into a hole in the water. He was very serious about the boat and he was an excellent helmsman who earned the respect of the sailing fraternity, despite some well-entrenched prejudices they had about actors with boats.
My father once answered a question about his devotion to sailing this way: “An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail down what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be.”
Phil Gersh says that at one point my father used to go out on the boat thirty-five weekends a year. I’d like to say that my father took me most of the time, but that’s not true. There was a long time when I wanted to go, but Dad would not let me on the boat until I could swim. Most of my life I’ve thought that was just his way of not having the kids on the boat, but Carolyn Morris, one of my mother’s best friends, says, “No, I think he was genuinely concerned about your safety. He had respect for the sea.”
Later, when I could swim, Dad took me on the boat now and then. Carolyn says, “I remember him taking just you on the boat, you and Pete. He didn’t like to show his emotions, but his eyes would give him away. He was really excited about having a boy. He loved you an awful lot and it was important to him that you love the sea.”
I do remember a trip with my father and Joe Hyams, and Joe’s son, who was about my age. And I remember Pete, the skipper, who was known as “Pete BS” when there were ladies aboard, or “Bullshit Pete” when there were only males. The name Bullshit Pete always made me giggle.
My mother was prone to seasickness, and by the time I was born her trips on the Santana were rare. That was okay with Dad. He liked his boating weekends to be all male anyhow. “The trouble with having dames on board,” he said, “is you can’t pee over the side.”
The Santana could sleep two in the master cabin. Four more could sleep in the main cabin. And there was sleeping space for two more ahead of the galley. On the boat my father was a regular Miss Manners. If you made a mess, you cleaned it up.
I can remember driving down to the harbor in Newport with him. There was a big iron shed there near the water, though I’m not sure what was in it. Pete would be waiting on the dock by the boat. His real name was Carl Petersen, but Dad always called him “Square Head.”
There would usually be a couple of young actors on the boat, who worked as crew. Dad would start the engine, and the crew would pull in the lines, and off to Catalina we would go. The trip took about four hours, depending on the wind. Catalina itself was no big deal. It was a fairly barren island with hills, and a lot of goats. The only town was Avalon. The thing about Catalina was getting there. From southern California it was the only place to go farther west. Once there, Bogie would anchor in White’s Landing, north of Avalon. The water was clear there, and there was a beach where I could play. This was a kind of gathering place for other sailing folk. My dad and his friends would set lobster traps, which was illegal. Instead of buoys they would tie liquor bottles to the lines. Sometimes they would get a few lobsters and Bogie and his pals would cook them on the boat.
On one trip when I was six or seven, I went along and brought an empty cricket cage, in which I usually kept a toy skunk. I’m not sure of just who else was on the trip, but I know that Nathaniel Benchley was, because he also remembered the incident. On this trip I was determined to catch a fish, which I can see now was silly, because a fish could swim through the spaces in the cage. So I propped open the cage with a stick, and for bait I put in some crabs I had found on shore. I hung the cage by a string over the stern of the boat, and every ten minutes I pulled it up to see if I had caught a fish. Even after dark I checked my cage with a flashlight until finally my flashlight fell into the water, and I went to bed, while the adults drank and played dominoes. I figured when I woke up there would be a fish in my cage. So the next morning I woke up early. I have a vivid memory of pulling up that cage, being so excited and filled with anticipation because it was very heavy. I finally yanked it aboard and I couldn’t believe what I saw. I had caught a lobster. Or more accurately, I had caught a lobster with no tail. I was overjoyed. I went crazy with excitement.
“I caught a lobster, I caught a lobster,” I shouted, waking everybody up. Soon all the guys were smiling and congratulating me on my big catch. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I was so proud of myself.
It wasn’t until I was twenty and had become a father myself that somebody told me that my father had placed the lobster in the cage for me to catch. Bogie, it seemed, was being my daddy even when I didn’t know it.
I’m sure that the way my father treated me, and the loss of my father at an early age, have influenced me in ways that I cannot totally understand. But the most lasting effect of being Bogie’s son is obvious to me; it is the way in which I raise my children.
Even though I was barely an adult myself when my first wife Dale and I had our son, Jamie, I was determined to put him first in my life. Nothing would be more important. I would be for Jamie the kind of father I wished Bogie had been for me. And I think I was. I hugged my son. I kissed him. I read to him. I played ball with him. I coached his baseball teams all the way through high school. In many ways, I guess, I was being a father to myself, and I’m sure I was a better father to my son because my own father died when I was eight. Jamie is an adult now, but I still have Richard and Brooke at home, and nothing has changed my mind about the importance of putting the kids first. When my kids are my age they will have many memories of times spent with their father.
That’s important to me, because even during all those years when I was angry about being Humphrey Bogart’s son, I wished that I had more complete memories of my dad. There were some. But far more common were those fragments of memory which became whole only when fitted in to the stories I was told. I remember, for example, taking a train trip with my father. But only in retrospect do I know that the trip was to northern California where we visited my mother on the set of Blood Alley.
Joe Hyams went on that trip and he remembers the details. He remembers Bogie calling and asking him to come along:
“We’ll go up on the evening train to see Betty,” Bogie said, “and then, maybe on Saturday, we can go to the zoo.”
“The zoo?” Hyams said.
“Sure,” Bogie said. “You and me and Betty and Steve.”
“Steve? You want me along as a baby-sitter?”
“Of course not,” Bogie said. “I want you for your company. But you’ve got kids.”
“So.”
“So, I figure you’ll know what to do when Steve acts up.”
Before the trip, Hyams stopped and bought some toys at the five-and-ten. When Bogie saw the toys he thought Hyams was a genius.
“Toys, yes,” he said. “Great idea! Kids like toys.” He told Hyams, “This is the first time I’ve been alone with the kid. I hope it works out all right.”
Hyams remembers that once we found our compartments and the train got going Bogie was all for “bedding down the kid” and getting a drink in the dining car. But I was six and I insisted on hearing a fairy tale.
“I don’t know any fairy tales,” Dad said. “Uncle Joe will tell you one.”
But I wanted a fairy tale from my father, not Uncle Joe. So Hyams sat on the lower bunk beneath me, making up a fairy tale and whispering the words to Bogie, who would then repeat them to me. According to Hyams I fell asleep, and so did my father.
Hyams also remembers that quizzical look that Dad often had with me and Leslie, a look that several people have told me about. And Hyams remembers being on that train trip the next day and seeing that look and Bogie saying to him, “I guess maybe I had the kid too late in life. I just don’t know what to do about him.” Then adding, “But I love him. I hope he knows that.”
* * *
It is two days after my first visit to the house. I am inside the house now. I am with my mother. Not quite seventy years old, Bacall is still the glamorous figure she was back then in her twenties, and as she sweeps through the house, narrating her own memories in that trademark husky voice of hers that so long ago said, “You know how to whistle, don’t you.” I try very hard to hear my father whistle. This, after all, was the place where Bogie and Bacall had it all.
But while the memories come full blown and in living color for my mother, they come for me in shards of black and white. It is as if I am looking at a series of photographs, some of friends, some of strangers. When my mother leads me into what had been the dining room, it is as if I am seeing it for the first time. It is the same with the living room. There is no shock of recognition. But at other moments, a turn in the hall, a glance at the baseboard, I am swept back again to the feeling of being seven years old. The nostalgia is most potent when we stand by the wide white stairway that leads up from the living room to the second floor. Now, almost forty years later, I can feel myself sliding down the banister, I can hear my father’s voice warning me to quiet down. For whatever reason, it is those stairs that most vividly transport me back to those days when I was a tumbling boy and my father was alive.
Lost in memories, I now see that my mother has led me to the butternut room where Bogie and Bacall entertained their friends. God, I think, the people who used to laugh in this room. Frank Sinatra, John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland…
* * *