Bogie was never wrong about people. If he thought a person was all right, the person was all right. And if he thought a person was a phony, the person was a phony.
—SAM JAFFE
Looking back, I can see that Mapleton Drive was an extraordinary street. It was a celebrity enclave, the kind of well-heeled and neatly manicured neighborhood that my father swore he would never inhabit, right up to the day that Bacall talked him into it. On Mapleton, I played with the children of famous people. I took piano lessons with Tina Sinatra at Frank Sinatra’s house. And my closest friend was Scott Johnson, whose father, Nunnally Johnson, was a Bogie pal. Nunnally wrote dozens of screenplays including The Grapes of Wrath, The Dirty Dozen, and The Three Faces of Eve, which he also produced and directed.
Living across the street from me was Art Linkletter, who was one of TV’s top daytime personalities in the 1950s, with Art Linkletter’s House Party. His daughter, Diane, and I were like Tarzan and Jane, constantly climbing trees together. And next to Linkletter lived Sammy Cahn, the famous composer. His son, Steve, and I liked to hike back into the woods behind my house, where we had a little camp. Sometimes we’d make a fire and roast marshmallows on a stick. Down the street was Judy Garland. Her daughter, Liza Minnelli, was my other close female friend. Liza, of course, is now a superstar in her own right, but then she was, like me, the child of famous people. Her father was Vincente Minnelli, who directed An American In Paris, Gigi, and Lust for Life. By this time, though, Judy Garland was married to Sid Luft, the producer, and their daughter, Lorna, was my sister’s pal. Judy Garland visited my mother often. Judy, as everybody in the world knows, was troubled, and she often came to my parents for comfort.
Bing Crosby lived down the street with his four sons, who used to cruise up and down Mapleton in their Corvettes. Gloria Grahame lived there, too. And Lana Turner. Liza used to hang out with Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, who, you might remember, got into one of the 1950s’ biggest showbiz scandals when she stabbed to death her mother’s mobster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. The incident was more than a scandal to Cheryl, of course. It was a tragedy that propelled her onto the front pages of newspapers all over America.
I had many good friends on Mapleton, but after my father died, when I was eight, I gradually lost them. And for years afterward I did not make friends easily. One reason was that I always heard the fearful whisper in my ear: he only likes you because you’re Bogie’s boy. Not surprisingly, my closest friends today are the people who didn’t know or didn’t care that I was Humphrey Bogart’s son.
It wasn’t until after I got thrown out of Boston University and moved to Torrington, Connecticut, with Dale that I got reconnected, that I began to develop the kind of friendships I had always wanted.
I had been to Dale’s home in Torrington before, and from the moment I saw it, I knew it was home. For me this small Connecticut town was as magical as Brigadoon. The people there couldn’t have cared less that I was Humphrey Bogart’s son. As I saw it, I could hide there and be what I wanted. In Torrington, my friends were not the sons of movie stars or bank presidents. They were guys who drove trucks or worked in factories, or ran auto repair shops. They didn’t have any film projects in development; they didn’t have private swimming pools. These were guys I played poker with, and pickup basketball at the school yard. It was there that I was first able to shed the skin of being the Bogart kid. What I learned then was that friendship is what I really needed and it was what mattered. I learned, too, that if you want to know the truth about a person you should look at his friendships. With his family, a man often acts out of guilt and a sense of responsibility. With women he might be trying too hard to impress, or he’s conniving so he can get laid. And with coworkers, if he wants to get ahead, he’s got to pretend to care about a lot of things that he doesn’t really care about. But with friends, well there’s nothing there but the friendship, and I think it is with his friends that a man ends up revealing who he really is.
So I knew, when I started asking about my father, that if this was true of ordinary men, it was even more true for Bogie. Though he had many good friends over the years, Bogie did not see it that way. “I have a few good, close friends, that’s all,” my father once said.
On Christmas Eve, the night before his forty-sixth birthday, my mother threw him a surprise birthday party. She gathered about twenty of their friends, and ordered them to stand in the Roman tub at the Bogart house in Hollywood. When my father came home, Mother handed him a drink, but told him not to get too comfortable.
“There’s something wrong with the tub,” she said. “Can you take a look at it?”
When my father went in to check on the tub, there were all the friends, Robert Benchley and Raymond Massey among them, absurdly crowded together in the Roman tub. “Surprise!” they shouted, and “Happy Birthday!” not “Merry Christmas.”
A party followed, and my father, who had never had a surprise party in his life, was deeply touched, even more than my mother expected.
“I think he was genuinely surprised,” she says. “Not just by the party, but by the fact that all these people cared enough about him to come on Christmas Eve. Despite all the success he’d had, he didn’t really feel popular. I don’t think he ever really knew how much he was loved.”
The first of my father’s good friends was Bill Brady, Jr. Brady’s father, William Brady, Sr., was a fight promoter and theatrical producer who would eventually give Dad his first break in show business. It was as a teenager with Bill Brady that my father first saw Broadway shows and moving pictures. Sadly, young Brady died in a fire right around the time that my father was becoming famous in The Petrified Forest. Dad, who rarely displayed his emotions, wept openly over the death of his friend. Years later, he was hit hard again when his pal, Mark Hellinger, died of a heart attack at age forty-four when Hellinger and Dad were trying to get a production company going.
From early adulthood on, the main thing that Bogie did with his friends was drink. When he was in his twenties he drank with friends in New York’s Greenwich Village. When he was on Broadway he drank with friends in Times Square. When he was a movie star he drank with friends at 21 in Manhattan, and drank with other friends at Romanoff’s when he was home. Of course, heavy drinking was not the politically incorrect activity that it is today. There were no Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and such heavy drinking was considered manly, even a bit amusing. And he also played games. He was a chess expert and very good at card games. He played poker, too. In these games, friends remember that he was always very meticulous, carefully counting out his moves on a Parcheesi board, for example.
Though Bogie had more friends than he ever realized, he was, by no means, universally loved. “Everybody doesn’t like me, and I don’t like everybody,” he once said.
One reason that some people did not like him was that he was a world-class needler. It was one more game with him. He liked to test people as soon as he met them, perhaps see if they were worthy opponents. When he first met Frank Sinatra, for example, he said, “They tell me you have a voice that makes girls faint. Make me faint.” And when he met John Steinbeck he said, “Hemingway tells me you’re not all that good a writer.”
Bogie needled everybody, including Mother. He needled her often about leaving Leslie and me so that she could work. “Look,” he’d say, “if you’re not going to be another Sarah Bernhardt, don’t give up everything just to be an actress.” Or he would find a hole in a sock and say, “You’ve got time to be an actress but no time to darn my socks.” My father, you can see, would have had to make a few adjustments if he lived in this postfeminist era.
Though my father never used foul language around women and never told off-color stories in their presence, he did not exempt them from his needling. My mother’s friend Carolyn Morris remembers an incident that occurred the first time she met Bogie. It was when she went with my mother to see him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When my mother was first seeing Bogie, it was all very secret because even though he was separated from Mayo Methot at the time, they were still married. So Bacall had asked Carolyn to go with her, to make it more innocent.
When Carolyn got into the hotel room she could see right away that Bogie had been drinking and was not pleased to see her with Bacall. He’d expected to have Mom alone.
At the time Carolyn’s future husband, Buddy, was in Florida, so she decided to give him a call from Bogie’s suite.
“What’s the deal?” Bogie said to Bacall. “You bring your girlfriends up here so they can make long-distance calls on my phone?”
Carolyn, who was for the first time meeting the man that her friend Betty had been swooning over, didn’t know what to think. He seemed pretty obnoxious to her.
“Maybe I should put up a sign,” Bogie said. “Public telephone for friends of Bacall.”
He kept it up all through Carolyn’s call to Buddy. By the time she hung up, Carolyn was steaming. She slammed down the phone and pulled a five-dollar bill out of her pocketbook.
“Here,” she said. “For the phone call.”
“I don’t want it,” he said.
“Take it,” she said. “I don’t want you saying that I’m running up your precious phone bills.”
“I don’t want it,” he said.
“I insist.”
Finally, Bogie took the five-dollar bill and tore it up. It was only later that he and Carolyn became good friends.
Another Bogie friend, George Axelrod, said to me, “Your father was full of life. He was a demon. When I first met him he liked to get me drunk. He had a great sense of humor, very dry, and he would never laugh at his own jokes. He would mutter, always with a cigarette and always with a drink. I think he was born with a scotch in his hand.
“But this guy Bogart was always making trouble for people and wouldn’t let them off easy. He liked to shake up the world. He was trying for his own private revolution. He often said to Rock Hudson, ‘What kind of a name is that, what the hell is Rock Hudson?’ Here we had a man named Humphrey making fun of someone else’s name. Actually, Rock and your father were friends. Rock’s real name was Roy and he hated to be called Rock. So your father teased him by calling him Rock all the time. Bogie thought ‘Rock Hudson’ was a pretension, so he kept on it, wouldn’t let up on him.”
This, I’ve learned, was not the only time my father made fun of names. It was a regular thing with him. One time he met a young writer at a party named Ben Ray Redman. He said to Redman, “You know what’s wrong with you? You’re just another goddamned three-named writer.” Then, I guess Dad was feeling very clever, because he started reeling off a list of three-named writers. “Stephen Vincent Benet,” he said. “Mary Roberts Rinehart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,” and on he went.
Dad wanted to see if people would stand up to him, and sometimes that was a mistake. For example, he met Judy Garland’s third husband, Sid Luft, for the first time at a Swifty Lazar party. Bogie was drinking and started getting on Luft right from the beginning. But Luft, a former test pilot, who was a pretty powerful guy, was having none of it. He picked Bogie off the floor and pinned him to a wall.
“Put me down, you son of a bitch,” Bogie said.
Instead of putting him down, Luft kissed him on both cheeks.
“We’re going to be good friends, you and I,” Luft said.
“Oh yeah, and why’s that?”
“Because we’re not going to needle each other.”
“Oh, we’re not, huh?”
“That’s right,” Luft said. “And the reason we are not going to needle each other is because I’d have to split your head open.” Then he put my father down. “Right, Bogie?”
There was a moment of tension, followed by a burst of laughter from my father. Then everything was fine. I think my father liked this sort of thing because he was an actor. This was dramatic. This was bigger than life.
My father liked to show off. And needling people like Luft was a way to do it. Nat Benchley said, “There are some people who will argue that Bogart was simply an exhibitionist who caused severe rectal pains to all around him, but this argument neglects the fact that he could, when he chose, be as quiet and thoughtful as a Talmudic scholar. If he acted up, there was usually a reason for it, and the reason could often be found in the company.”
Dad’s tendency to take on people before he knew who he was dealing with got him in trouble one time early in his career when he was working for Twentieth Century-Fox, and still trying to get a foothold in Hollywood. He was a serious golfer, at least then. He was playing with a friend, behind a very slow foursome. When Bogie asked if he could play through, one of the guys in the foursome turned and glared at him.
“Certainly not,” the guy said. “Who the hell do you think you are, asking such a thing?”
“My name is Humphrey Bogart,” my father said. “I work at Fox. And what the hell are you doing, playing a gentleman’s game at a gentleman’s club?”
Unfortunately, the man that my father shouted at was a vice president at Fox. Maybe that’s why Dad ended up making most of his movies at Warner Brothers.
Dad didn’t fight just with strangers, though. He often got into it with friends. One night he was needling his agent, Sam Jaffe, at Romanoff’s and Jaffe got fed up.
“Listen,” Sam said, “I don’t take that guff from you or anyone else. If you need to be that way, get a new agent, I’ll give your contract back. I’m not taking that stuff.”
Bogart thought it over, and decided to quit the needling, at least for the night. There was another incident concerning Jaffe, this one at the Jaffe house. For some reason, Bogie was annoyed at the modern paintings that hung on the Jaffes’ walls. Dad probably thought there was something pretentious about the work.
“Goddamn phony artists,” he said.
“What did you say?” Sam asked him.
“The paintings on your walls,” Bogie said. “They’re a bunch of phony crap.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You know what I ought to do?”
“What’s that?”
“I ought to throw them all out.”
It was then that Mrs. Jaffe entered the conversation.
“Get out,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Get out, Mr. Bogart. Leave my house. You are not behaving properly.”
Bogie left and never criticized the Jaffes’ taste in paintings again.
John Huston is another close friend whom Bogie fought with. Kate Hepburn told me that Bogie and Huston exchanged words while making The African Queen. And Jess Morgan, who was a friend to both men, says that Bogie and Huston were two strongminded men who fought often. But Huston, apparently, didn’t think of their disagreements as fights because he said that it was during the filming of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that he and Bogie had “our one and only quarrel.”
As Huston told the story, Bogie was getting impatient for shooting on Sierra to end because he wanted to get the Santana into a race to Honolulu. Bogie was afraid that the picture would run over schedule and he would miss out. Huston said my father “sulked and became progressively less cooperative.”
One day they were shooting a scene between Bogie and Tim Holt.
“Okay,” Huston said after they cut. “Let’s do one more.”
“Why?” Bogie asked.
“Why what?” Huston asked.
“Why another take?”
“Because I need another,” Huston said.
“I thought I was good,” Bogie said.
“You were,” the director said. “It has nothing to do with you, Bogie. I’d just like to shoot it again.”
“Well, I don’t see why you have to shoot it again. I thought it was pretty good,” my father said.
“Please,” Huston asked. Now he was getting annoyed. “Just do it.”
Bogie did the new take, but he wasn’t happy about it. Later that evening, when Bogie and Huston and my mother sat down to supper, Dad started grumbling again.
“Too goddamn many takes,” he said. “Don’t need them all.”
“What’s that, Bogie?”
“You’re taking too goddamn long to shoot this movie,” Bogie said. He leaned across the table, poking an accusing finger at his friend. “The way we’re going, I’ll miss my race.”
That’s when Huston reached out and grabbed Dad’s nose between two fingers and started squeezing.
“John, you’re hurting him,” my mother said.
“Yes, I know,” Huston said. “I mean to.” He gave Dad’s nose one more solid twist and let it go.
Later my father felt bad, because he had fought with his friend. He came to Huston. “What the hell are we doing?” Bogie said. “Let’s have things be the way they have always been with us.” They made up and sealed it with a drink. Bogie, by the way, did miss the race.
Richard Burton also remembers that Bogie could be rough on his friends. Burton recalls one Catalina night out on the boat with Bogie, David Niven, and Frank Sinatra, who crooned all night long for dozens of other sailing people who floated around the Santana in their dinghies.
Burton says, “Frankie did sing all through the night, it’s true, and a lot of people sat around in boats and got drunk. Bogie and I went out lobster potting and Frankie got really pissed off with Bogie. David Niv was trying to set fire to the Santana at one point, because nobody could stop Francis from going on and on and on. I was drinking boilermakers with Bogie—rye whiskey with canned beer chasers—so the night is pretty vague, but I seem to remember a girl having a fight with her husband or boyfriend in a rowing dinghy and being thrown in the water by her irate mate. I don’t know why, but I would guess that she wanted to stay and listen to Frankie, and he wanted to go. And Bogie and Frankie nearly came to blows the next day about the singing the night before and I drove Betty home because she was so angry with Bogie’s cracks about Frankie’s singing. At that time Frankie was out of work and was peculiarly vulnerable and Bogie was unnecessarily cruel.”
Several people have mentioned the fact that Bogie sometimes went too far with his needling, and sometimes hurt people with his cutting remarks. But it was not out of meanness. Sometimes he just got carried away with his own cuteness and misjudged his target. Not everybody has thick skin, and even those who do sometimes shed it in moments of weakness. But I think if Dad pushed Frank Sinatra too hard at this particular time, it was probably because he felt that Sinatra was not being the person he could be, either personally or professionally. Bogie and Sinatra had a kind of father-son relationship, and Dad had often gotten on Sinatra for not taking his acting seriously enough. I think Dad saw Sinatra as a great talent that sometimes was wasted. My father had a philosophy about this, and it came from a valuable lesson he had learned years earlier in a producer’s office.
Bogie had come into the producer’s office while the producer was talking to a writer about his script. The producer told the writer that his script had some merit, that there were many good things in it, despite its shortcomings. After the writer left, the producer told Bogie that the script was lousy. Bogie asked him why he hadn’t just said so. The producer told Bogie, “When you see that a person has done his best and it’s no good, you cannot be cruel. If you know he can do better, then you say it stinks and he should fix it. But when you know this is his best, then be gentle.”
I think that Bogie might have been telling Sinatra that if his life stinks he should fix it. I think that if Bogie felt Sinatra had really been doing his best, Bogie would have been gentle.
Though Bogie had some close actor friends, like Niven, Tracy, Burton, Sinatra, Peter Lorre, and Raymond Massey, most of Bogie’s friends were writers: Nunnally Johnson, Louis Bromfield, Nathaniel Benchley, and even Huston, who started out as a screenwriter. He surrounded himself with writers because he admired them and he understood that without them, he would have no words to speak as an actor. Another reason he hung around with few actors was that he didn’t have much respect for what he called “Hollywood types.”
The trouble with many of them was that they had small vocabularies, he said. “They get my goat,” he said. Of course, Dad’s goat was easily gotten. “They get up there like stoops and say, ‘Gosh, it’s wonderful to be here. It’s a wonderful night and I hear this is a wonderful picture. I know Willie Wyler did a wonderful job and I’m looking forward to a wonderful evening.’ The word wonderful should be outlawed.”
From the viewpoint of the Hollywood establishment, my father was widely regarded as a social misfit, and I think he liked it that way. He didn’t go to premieres. In fact, he didn’t go to see his own pictures.
“I am not socially acceptable,” he said. “People are afraid to invite me to their homes. They’re afraid that I will say something to Darryl Zanuck or Louis B. Mayer, which, of course, I will. I don’t really fit in with the Hollywood crowd. Why can’t you be yourself, do your job, be your role at the studio and yourself at home, and not have to belong to the glitter-and-glamor group? Actors are always publicized as having a beautiful courtesy. I haven’t. I’m the most impolite person in the world. It’s thoughtlessness. If I start to be polite you can hear it for forty miles. I never think to light a lady’s cigarette. Sometimes I rise when a lady leaves the room. If I open a door for a lady, my arm always gets in the way so that she either has to duck under or get hit in the nose. It’s an effort for me to do things people believe should be done. I don’t see why I should conform to Mrs. Emily Post, not because I’m an actor and believe that being an actor gives me special dispensations to be different, but because I’m a human being with a pattern of my own and the right to work out my pattern in my own way. I’m not a respecter of tradition, of the kind that makes people kowtow to some young pipsqueak because he is the descendant of a long line.”
Comments like these spewed forth from Bogie almost every day. He loved to argue. When he and Mom lived in the farmhouse in Benedict Canyon she put up a sign that said:
DANGER: BOGART AT WORK. DO NOT DISCUSS POLITICS, RELIGION, WOMEN, MEN, PICTURES, THEATRE, OR ANYTHING ELSE.
Bogie seemed to bask in his role as troublemaker. Benchley says, “There was apparently some streak within him, some imp that was loosed by a variety of factors.”
There really was an odd sort of puritanism about my father. He once bawled out Ingrid Bergman for throwing away her career in the scandal of having a baby out of wedlock.
“You were a great star,” he said. “What are you now?”
Bergman replied, “A happy woman.”
Dad was capable of obscenities but they were not common. While many people say that my father abhorred vulgarity, there are also people who recall him being vulgar. Conrad Nagel, for example, remembers Bogie saying of Bette Davis, “That dame is too uptight. What she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to do it.” Others recall that when my father had a dark room he used to make double exposures with his friend the writer Eric Hatch. They called them “trick photos,” and one of them was of a skier skiing down a woman’s bare breast.
I think Bogie’s idea of vulgarity depended on who was present to hear it. Ruth Gordon said that one time Bogie told her that he was reading a script by “some college type.”
“What’s a college type?” she asked him.
“People who say ‘fuck’ in front of the children,” Bogie replied.
Though my father poked fun at people he also poked fun at himself. He joked about the lifts he sometimes wore in his shoes to make him taller. And he made fun of the toupee he had to wear later in life, after a disease, called alopecia areata, caused much of his hair to fall out. He was extremely well-read in American history and Greek mythology, and could quote from Emerson, Pope, Plato, and over a thousand lines of Shakespeare, but he liked to play the dullard. “Henry the Fourth, part two, what’s that?” he would ask. When someone gave him a compliment on his intellect or anything else, he would combat it with a wisecrack.
He wasn’t any more comfortable giving compliments than he was with getting them. When he was very impressed by an actor’s performance, for example, he would send a note instead of praising the actor to his face. He approached gift giving the same way. He hated birthdays and Christmas because on those days you were supposed to give a present. Typically, he would wait until the day had passed, then he would give a gift. Even then he would sabotage any possibility of sentiment with a zinger, such as giving someone a new watch and saying, “I’m sick of looking at the piece of junk you’ve been wearing on your wrist.”
Another seeming contradiction for my father is that he was a guy who supposedly wanted nothing to do with Hollywood “in” groups and yet he was the leader of the most in group of all, the Holmby Hills Rat Pack. People my age and younger probably think of the Rat Pack as being Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, Angie Dickinson, and others. But, except for Sinatra, those are not the original members.
My mother is the person who gave the pack its name. The story is that Frank Sinatra had flown Bogie and Bacall and a bunch of other friends over to Las Vegas for Noel Coward’s opening there. (Now that I think of it, maybe this explains why I banged Coward over the head with a tray. I must have known that my parents and all their friends were going to see him in Vegas and not taking me with them.) In Vegas the group debauched for about four days straight, drinking, dancing, partying, and gambling. Apparently they didn’t get much sleep, and after a while they all looked like hell. On the fourth day my mother said, “You look like a goddamn rat pack.” The name stuck.
“We had a dinner later at Romanoff’s,” my mother says, “and we elected officers.”
The first official notice of the Rat Pack appeared the next day in Joe Hyams’s column in the New York Herald Tribune.
The Holmby Hills Rat Pack held its first annual meeting last night at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills and elected officers for the coming year. Named to executive positions were: Frank Sinatra, pack master; Judy Garland, first vice president; Lauren Bacall, den mother; Sid Luft, cage master; Humphrey Bogart, rat in charge of public relations; Irving Lazar, recording secretary and treasurer; Nathaniel Benchley, historian.
The only members of the organization not voted into office are David Niven, Michael Romanoff, and James Van Heusen. Mr. Niven, an Englishman, Mr. Romanoff, a Russian, and Mr. Van Heusen, an American, protested that they were discriminated against because of their national origins. Mr. Sinatra, who was acting chairman of the meeting, refused to enter their protests on the minutes.
A coat of arms designed by Mr. Benchley was unanimously approved as the official insignia of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack for use on letterheads and membership pins. The escutcheon features a rat gnawing on a human hand with a legend, “Never Rat on a Rat.”
Mr. Bogart, who was spokesman, said the organization has no specific function other than “the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.”
He said that membership is open to free-minded, successful individuals who don’t care what anyone thinks about them.
A motion concerning the admittance of Claudette Colbert was tabled at the insistence of Miss Bacall, who said that Miss Colbert “is a nice person but not a rat.”
My mother says that Spencer Tracy was only an honorary member because this was not really his scene. Tracy led a quieter life.
“You had to be a nonconformist,” she says, “and you had to stay up late and drink and laugh a lot and not care what anybody said about you or thought about you.”
Bogie came up with the motto, Never Rat on a Rat. They made rules, such as they were. One was that no new member could come in without the unanimous vote of the charter members.
Though my father was elected as director of public relations, people I talk to seem to feel that he was the spiritual leader of the group. Of course when Bogie died, the real leadership of the Rat Pack went to Frank Sinatra and its center moved from Hollywood to Las Vegas.
The press made a big deal of the Rat Pack, of course, and even today when a group of celebrities hang out together they often get labeled with some version of the title, such as the Brat Pack of a few years ago.
You wouldn’t think that forming a group of friends to have fun would be controversial, but it sometimes was. William Holden, who had already had a few run-ins with my father, didn’t care for the Rat Pack. Holden said, “It’s terribly important for people to realize that their conduct reflects the way a nation is represented in the eyes of the world. That’s why the rat-pack idea makes our job so tough. If you were to go to Japan or India or France and represent an entire industry, which has made an artistic contribution to the entire world, and were faced then with the problem of someone asking, ‘Do they really have a Rat Pack in Holmby Hills?’ what would you say? It makes your job doubly tough.
“In every barrel there’s bound to be a rotten apple. Not all actors are bad. It may sound stuffy and dull, but it is quite possible for people to have social intercourse without resorting to a Rat Pack.”
I never met William Holden, but I can understand why he wasn’t a favorite of my father’s.
There are many stories that make my father sound like a wiseguy and a show-off. But there are also stories that portray him as a generous man. For example, he once got three friends together to pitch in $10,000 for his writer friend Eric Hatch, who was down on his luck. And there are stories that show that Bogie treated people kindly, regardless of where they stood in the Hollywood pecking order. He was never a snob.
Adolph Green remembers running into Bogie in a hotel in England one time. This was just after Bogie had finished filming The African Queen.
Green was alone and lonely at the time, and he didn’t know Bogie very well. Bogie sat and talked with him in the lobby of the hotel, and after awhile Dad seemed to catch on that Green had no one to talk to.
“Look,” Bogie said, “I’m having a few friends over later. Why don’t you come by and join us?”
Green, delighted to have some company, accepted. He was excited and flattered. Here he was, being invited over to Bogie’s suite. When he got there, he realized he’d been invited to a very small gathering. There were only two other people there.
“Adolph, I want you to meet my friends,” Bogie said. “Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.”
Green was thrilled, and it was a moment he never forgot. For the rest of his stay in England, Bogie checked on Green from time to time to make sure that he was getting along okay, and was not lonely.
“Your father was thoughtful that way,” Green told me. “And it wasn’t just me. Your father was very kind to a lot of people, like Judy Garland. Judy was always getting herself in trouble, she was a sick girl and spoiled in a way, and he would always be nice to her, though sometimes he would lose his temper with her.”
Nat Benchley tells a story about the first time Benchley’s wife, Marjorie, came to Hollywood. It was around Christmas of 1955. She was going to meet Bogart for the first time, and she was scared to death, because of Dad’s reputation as a needler.
“What do I do if he starts picking on me?” she asked her husband.
“If he picks on you, pick right back,” Benchley told his wife. “Tell him you don’t take any crap from bald men. Tell him to put on his wig and then you’ll talk.”
When Mrs. Benchley did meet my father it was at a party, after which they decided they would all go on to Mapleton Drive. Benchley had to return home first to pick up something and my father insisted on driving Mrs. Benchley to our house in his black Thunderbird.
Marjorie was, of course, a wreck. Would this lunatic insult her, would he smash up the car? She had heard terrible things. Dad, of course, was charming beyond words. He told her how happy he was that she had come, he told her that if she needed help or advice, to call him immediately. The next day he took her on his boat. He told her his philosophy of life and talked to her about bringing up kids. By the end of her stay, Marjorie Benchley was, says her husband, “more than a little in love with him.”
The next time Benchley saw Bogie, after Marjorie had gone back east, Benchley said, “I think I should report that my wife has a thing for you.”
Bogie got embarrassed. “Tell her I’m really a shit,” he mumbled. “Tell her I was nice only because she’s new out here.”
Janet Leigh is another woman who was afraid to meet Bogie, even though she was already well on her way to stardom when she did.
“We were guests at one of Rocky and Gary Cooper’s dinner parties, a star-studded evening,” she says. “I felt we were in the company of royalty. Actually, we were—Hollywood royalty. In that context we met a king, Humphrey Bogart. Rumor had it that Bogart took delight in verbally attacking a vulnerable victim with the zest of a witch doctor sticking pins in the proverbial doll. I had no desire to be the recipient, so I kept my distance.”
After supper, Leigh was standing in a group that had gathered around the piano. Bogie walked in and stood next to her. Feeling intimidated, but fascinated at the same time, Leigh kept silent. When she was certain that Bogie was not looking, she stole a glance at the legend. She saw that Bogie wore, of all things, a little gold earring. I have no idea why my father was wearing an earring, except maybe to create controversy. An earring on a man was rare in those days, so Leigh tried to look at it, without actually staring. She was mesmerized. Suddenly Bogie turned and caught her looking at him.
“Oh,” he said, “admiring my earring?”
“Well…yes, I guess.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Bogie said. “I’m all man, sweetheart. Who are you?”
Leigh was too flabbergasted to reply. She stuttered.
“What’s the matter with you?” Bogie said. “You afraid of me? I won’t bite you.”
Leigh says, “And he didn’t, perceptively realizing that I was no opponent.”
The stories I like best about my father are those that show me he was not on a star trip. My mother, I think, sometimes takes her celebrity status seriously, and actually believes that she deserves to be treated better than waiters and barbers. But my father, it seems, had no such pretensions. It’s true, he did divide the world into phonies and non-phonies, but never on the basis of how much money they made or what they did for a living.
Dominick Dunne, for example, is now one of our leading novelists and journalists, but he knew Bogie at a time when Dunne was an unknown and Bogie was one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
He says, “Bogie was extremely kind to me. It was 1955 when he and Lauren Bacall were doing The Petrified Forest on television. This was part of a series called Producers Showcase. It was a big deal, an hour and a half of live TV. I was working for NBC as a stage manager. The show was to be televised from Burbank and I was sent out to California. We rehearsed for three weeks, and performed it once. During this time Bogart took a great interest in me and was incredibly nice to me. I had a similar background to his, having gone to prep school. I think he got a big kick out of that.
“I had lunch with him one day and I told him how much I loved movie stars. So he invited me to a party at the Mapleton Drive house one Saturday night. At that party Mr. Bogart introduced me to Judy Garland and Lana Turner, who lived nearby, and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were there. Everybody was there. I can hardly convey what heady stuff this was to a starstruck young man in his twenties, as I was. I think Bogart really got off on how thrilled I was to be there meeting these people.
“Perhaps I didn’t realize it at the time. But since then I lived for twenty-five years in Hollywood and I understand now that Hollywood has a pecking order and a caste system as much as India, and I realize it was incredible for me, the stage manager, to be at that party. For me to be invited was really quite something. That was a great kindness your father did me.
“I have always been a very shy person, but after I went back to New York, I sometimes called Mr. Bogart up just to say hello. And he was so gracious. This man was a major fucking star and yet he was always so goddamn nice to me.”
* * *
My mother walks around the first floor of the house on Mapleton, telling me where pieces of furniture were. But I stare out a window at the trees in the yard and I remember something else:
It is a few days after my father’s funeral. I am alone in the yard looking at the tree where Diane Linkletter and I often play Swiss Family Robinson. I go up into the tree alone. I am a skinny boy, all arms and legs, but now my limbs feel as heavy as the limbs on the tree. I reach my favorite branch. And there, as lost as I have ever been, I scream at God. “Why did my father have to die?” I scream. “Why did you give him cancer? Why did you kill him? Why did you do this to me?” I am hysterical. My heart is broken.
I scream until my throat hurts. Then I sob.
“Stephen,” I hear.
It is May, the big black woman who is our cook, and part of our family.
“Stephen, what are you doing up there?” she asks. I stare down at her. I don’t answer.
“Stephen,” she says softly.
I understand that she is trying to make me feel better. I know that she is sad, too, because she knew my father for a long time. We stare at each other. She is crying, too.
Finally, she says, “You be careful coming down, Stephen.” She walks back to the house, shaking her head.
* * *