I’ve lived with celebrities and with stars, great people, great directors, and I can tell you that the children always have to suffer. You just cannot live up to the reputation of a parent who becomes successful. To have to follow in those footsteps is a very big handicap.
—SAM JAFFE
The heaviest thing I have ever had to carry is my father’s fame.
Bogie’s reputation has often made normal conversation difficult. It has brought me attention that I didn’t want. And often it has deprived me of attention that I did want. It has made me sometimes distrustful of friendly people. It has, I am the first to admit, placed that big chip on my shoulder. It is a subject that, until now, I haven’t wanted to talk about. I am not the sole owner of this problem. I have talked to the sons and daughters of many celebrities, and always it is the same. The fame of the celebrity exerts some strange gravitational pull on the children, and makes it difficult for them to simply break free.
Perhaps if I had been the son of some famous actor who fell from fame when the lights went out, it might not have been so bad. But I had the luck to be fathered by a man who became even more famous after he died. Humphrey Bogart, whether I like it or not, is our most enduring Hollywood legend. In 1993, Entertainment Weekly crowned Bogie the number-one movie legend of all time. (Number two, by the way, was his friend Katharine Hepburn.)
So Bogie is very big stuff. And, as a consequence, I have gone through life accompanied by what I call “The Bogie Thing.” This is the big, red-lettered label that hangs from me. It doesn’t say “Steve.” It says, HUMPHREY BOGART’S SON.
“Jack, I want you to meet my friend, Steve Bogart. He’s Humphrey Bogart’s son.”
“No kidding? You’re really Bogie’s boy?”
“Yes.”
“God, I loved your father.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah, my first date with my wife was when we went to see Sabrina. Bogie! Now there was a man’s man. God, this is so weird! Just the other night we rented The Maltese Falcon. That’s the one where he plays Sam Spade.”
“Right.”
“It’s really nice to meet you. Hey, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Get it, huh, a beautiful friendship?”
“I get it.”
“Casablanca! What a great movie.”
I have had this conversation, or some version of it, more than a million times. At least it seems that way. This, of course, pisses me off.
I deal with these encounters in many ways. Usually I am polite and patient. I know that people don’t mean to rob me of my identity. Besides, they are just meeting Bogart’s son once. They’re excited to have some connection to the screen legend. They’re not thinking about the fact that every day I have to listen to strangers tell me what a great guy my dad was.
There are other times when I amuse myself to keep from getting angry. For example, one time a guy said to me, “Are you Humphrey Bogart’s son? I heard he had a son named Steve.”
“He did,” I said.
“And you’re him?”
“No,” I said. “My parents named me after Humphrey Bogart’s son.”
And many times I simply deny it.
“Are you Humphrey Bogart’s son?”
“No, but a lot of people ask me that.”
Often, when I worked as a producer at ESPN and later at NBC and Court TV, I would see one of my coworkers giving some people a tour of the studio. At some point the tour guide would point to me. Then I would see the visitors smile and they would gaze at me for a little too long. He told them, I would think. It always made me angry and uncomfortable.
But let’s get real for a minute. There are crack-addicted babies being born every day, while I was born in the affluence and safety of Beverly Hills. There are children being beaten, while I spent my early childhood with two parents who loved me. And there are cancer wards filled with kids who will never get to be teenagers, while my greatest health problems as a kid were a hernia operation at age three, and a gashed chin from a bicycling mishap. So, yes, I gripe about my problems like everybody else, but I try to keep some perspective. Carrying the burden of being Humphrey Bogart’s son is not actually the worst thing that can happen to a person, and the only reason we are talking about it at all is that the public remains fascinated by anything to do with Humphrey Bogart.
For me, the Bogie thing began at my father’s funeral at All Saints Episcopal Church.
The days just before the funeral are not clear to me. I remember little. But there are others who have memories of how I reacted in those unreal days following my father’s death from cancer at age fifty-seven. My mother remembers that on the day after Dad died I stood at the top of the stairs, clutching a small notebook in my hand, and asked her, “What day is yesterday?”
“January fourteenth,” she said.
Then I sat on the top stair and wrote in my notebook, “January 14, Daddy died.”
And Sam Jaffe remembers talking to me on the same day.
I said to him, “I’m glad I sat on my father’s bed with him.”
“Why are you glad?” Sam asked me.
“Because of what he did yesterday,” I said, meaning in my own eight-year-old way that I was glad I said good-bye to my father before he died.
It is the funeral that begins the time when my father’s fame was a weight upon me.
I went to my father’s funeral in a limousine. We were the first car in a long row, and my mother sat between me and Leslie, holding us in her arms. John Huston was also with us. I remember that he said little, and that was unusual.
When the driver pulled up to the church I peered through the window of the limousine. A huge crowd had gathered. Hundreds of people lined the sidewalks outside the church. Though none of the women were crying, many of them carried handkerchiefs, as if they knew they soon would be. The people were very quiet, respectful, some had flowers. But still, I was scared.
“Who are all those people?” I asked my mother.
“They’re fans, Stephen,” my mother said. “They are people who went to see your father’s movies, and they are sad that he is dead.”
“What do they want?”
“They are going to hear the service for your father.”
“They’re coming to our church?”
“No,” she said. “They will hear it outside. Over the loudspeaker.”
“I hate them,” I said.
“No, you don’t, Stephen. You don’t hate them.”
“He’s my father, not theirs. They don’t even know him.”
I was sad, I was hurt, I was angry. What right did these people have to invade my life that way and gawk at my father’s death? I was there to say good-bye to Daddy—that’s what I’d been told—and I didn’t want to share it with thousands of strangers.
Six years later, when John Kennedy died, I would be fourteen years old, and I would understand the sense of personal loss that people feel when a public figure passes. But then I was not at all understanding. I was enraged. Somehow it felt to me that if thousands of people could cry at my father’s funeral, then I had no special relationship with him. At some level I think I have always felt that way, and still do.
She took one of my hands, and one of Leslie’s. Holding us tightly, she led us out of the limo. As I climbed from the car I heard a woman say, “That’s his son.” I wanted to punch her. I felt as if I was being forced to perform. I was being thrust into the spotlight, which is not where an eight-year-old who has just lost his father wants to be.
Mother led us into the church. Huston stayed close, as if he could somehow protect us from the fans.
In addition to the bereaved fans on the street, eight hundred of Bogie’s Hollywood friends and associates had come to attend the service. The fans had come, of course, not just to say good-bye to Bogie, but to gawk at the movie stars who would be there. Gary Cooper came, and so did Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, Tony Martin, Gregory Peck, Marlene Dietrich, Ida Lupino, Howard Duff, Danny Kaye, and of course Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. (Frank Sinatra wanted to come to Dad’s funeral, of course, but if he had, it would have created great hardship for the club where he was performing in New York. My mother told him it was okay to stay in New York.)
We moved slowly down to the front of the church and took a pew. All eyes were on us, probably my mother mostly, but I felt as if they were all watching me. I remember that the priest, a man named Kermit Castellanos, who everyone called K.C., talked for a while about my father.
Then John Huston spoke. He was such a big, impressive-looking man and he had an incredible voice. He gave the eulogy, though I didn’t yet know that word. I’ve since learned that Huston was actually my mother’s second choice. She had first asked Spencer Tracy, but Tracy was so devastated by Bogie’s death that he told my mother he was afraid he could not speak about his friend without falling apart.
There was no body at my father’s funeral service. Bogie had expressed his wishes to my mother long before, at the funeral of his friend Mark Hellinger.
“Once you’re gone, you’re gone,” he said. “I hate funerals. They aren’t for the one who’s dead, but for the ones who are left and enjoy mourning. When I die I want no funeral. Cremation, which is clean and final, and my ashes strewn over the Pacific. My friends can raise a glass and exchange stories about me if they like. No mourning, I don’t believe in it. The Irish have the right idea, a wake.”
Unfortunately, when Jess Morgan, who was then the young associate of my father’s business manager, Morgan Maree, went to make arrangements for the cremation he was told that such a scattering was illegal. My mother was very upset. She had wanted Bogie to go back to the sea, which he loved. So Dad was cremated. Mother had arranged for the cremation to take place at the same time as the service, and after the service the ashes were placed in an urn in the Gardens of Memory at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Included with the ashes was the gold whistle my mother had used in their first film together, To Have and Have Not. On the whistle were inscribed the initials B & B—Bogie and Baby. And at 12:30 that day, a moment of silence was observed at both Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century-Fox.
Most of that day I’ve forgotten. They played music. I know now that it was from the works of Bach and Debussy, Bogie’s favorite composers. Leslie and I kneeled when we were supposed to. I remember the crowds. I remember the familiar smell of magnolias, cut from our front yard, and the white roses that surrounded the altar. And on the altar there was Bogie’s treasured glass-encased model of the Santana. I remember thinking my father should be there to see it. But mostly I remember just being stunned by it all, being in a kind of daze.
When it was over, people rose from the pews, began to mill around, shaking hands with old friends, clapping each other sympathetically on the back. I felt lost for a moment and then John Huston leaned down to me. He put his big hands gently on my shoulders and he whispered, “You know, Stephen, there are going to be many photographers out there trying to take your picture.”
I guess if Huston was warning me, he must have understood how angry and scared the photographers had already made me feel.
Between the day my father died and the day of the funeral there had been two school days. My mother, thinking that it was best to keep things as close to normal for us as she could, had sent Leslie and me to school on those mornings. But normalcy was not to be had. Incredibly, when I was dropped off at school that first day there was a group of photographers waiting for me. They just came at me, like a gang of big kids, taking my picture without even asking. I hated it. I didn’t want my picture taken anymore. But now at the church after the funeral, I knew how to stop them, I thought. I would simply put my hand over my face so they couldn’t see me and they would not take my picture. That’s what I believed. So as we filed out of the church, I stood next to my mother and John Huston and I held my hand up over my face. We moved through the crowd of people who were being kept behind ropes. Suddenly it seemed as if everybody in the world had a camera. They were taking my picture. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t matter that I had my hand over my face.
They still took pictures, one after the other. I was scared. I felt as if I was being jumped on or called names. By the time we got into the car I was bawling.
The next morning the front page of the newspaper featured a big picture of me coming out of my father’s funeral with my hand over my face. I was mortified. I felt as if somehow everybody had lied to me.
After the funeral dozens of people gathered at the house on Mapleton. There were many celebrities there. But there were neighbors, too, and studio executives, makeup men, sailing people, hairdressers, all people who loved Bogart. As long as there were people around, and things to do, Mother was able to hold herself together. Even before the funeral she had been able to keep busy constantly by answering some of the thousands of telegrams that came in from sympathetic friends and strangers.
It was a telegram that made for one light moment on the afternoon of Dad’s funeral. My mother had asked that no flowers be sent for my father, that instead, donations be made to the American Cancer Society. Then she got a telegram from the American Floral Association, which she read to the gathering. It said, “Do we say don’t go to see Lauren Bacall movies?”
So it was not a totally somber afternoon. People chatted and gossiped and exchanged Bogie stories. Mother was happy to have the house filled with people. But the friends had to leave sometime, and when they did we were alone again, Mother, me, and Leslie, in a home with no father. That’s when the problems began.
If I was uncommonly quiet in the weeks that followed, my little sister was the opposite. Leslie was full of questions.
“Why did Daddy go to heaven?” she asked my grandmother, Mom’s mother, Natalie, who had been living with us through much of my father’s illness. Our other grandmother, Maud, had died of cancer more than a decade earlier.
“Because God needed him,” my grandmother answered.
“But we needed him, too,” Leslie said. “Did God think he needed him more than his kids?”
She was four years old and an expert at asking the unanswerable questions.
Leslie was going through her own awful time. She had been Daddy’s little girl and Bogie had doted on her. Now he wasn’t there to scoop her into his lap, or ride on the seesaw with her. Now was the time when Leslie needed her mother the most, but Mom couldn’t give her enough. I was the reason. Because I was so troubled, my mother gave me a lot of attention and in the process, they both agree, neglected some of Leslie’s emotional needs. It has been, as you can imagine, a sore spot between mother and daughter over the years.
However, I was the one who was most obviously in need of special attention.
Not so long ago I told my wife about a bicycle accident that I’d had about a year after my father died. I had cut open my jaw and been taken to the hospital for stitches. There was no lasting injury from that accident, but all my life I had been unaccountably angry about the fact that my mother was at work when it occurred.
Barbara said, “Well, perhaps you were angry because you felt there was no one to protect you.” And it struck home. Yes, that was it, exactly. That’s how I felt, that nobody was there to protect me. My mother was gone, and my father was gone, too.
In a strange way, this idea that I was unprotected was a comforting thought. Because for so many years I had felt that I didn’t think enough about my father, that I didn’t feel enough about him. I had always believed that, while Humphrey Bogart’s fame has tainted every single minute of my life, he, personally, never really had much impact on my life. But now I realize that if his absence made me feel so damn vulnerable and unprotected, then his presence, his being alive, must have made me feel safe. When he died my world was shattered. And it took me many years to put it all back together.
It was a few days after the funeral that I climbed that tree in the backyard and started screaming at God. When May, the cook, came out and heard me, she must have sensed that I was about to become a major headache for my mother. For several days in a row I sat in that tree and screamed for my father and cried for hours on end.
The hours I spent in that tree, feeling the pain and frustration of losing my father, mark the end of my belief in a personal God. My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father a lapsed Episcopalian. Neither of my parents had any strong belief in God, but, like many parents, they sent their children to Sunday school, out of a vague sense that religion was a good thing for a kid. We were being raised Episcopalian rather than Jewish because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post–World War II years.
In any case, when I was eight years old I still believed in the God that adults told me about. But I have always been a very logical person, even then, and during the days when I sat in that tree bawling my eyes out, the equation became very simple for me: My father is dead. God wouldn’t let that happen. Therefore, there is no God. In that tree I gave up a belief in God, and nothing I have seen in the last thirty-seven years has changed my mind on that point.
Though my mother didn’t know at the time about the tree screaming, she had plenty of evidence that things were not right with me.
One night just before Valentine’s Day, Mother, Leslie, and I were eating supper in the dining room.
“I know how we can surprise Daddy,” I said.
“How is that?” my mother asked.
“We can all shoot ourselves, and then we can be with him for Valentine’s Day.”
This comment, understandably, made my mother worry. She began talking to doctors about me. They assured her that my behavior was normal. They said it was natural for me to be full of resentment because my father had died. They said I was probably feeling that I had done something wrong to make him leave.
Apparently, it was common for me to make announcements about my father at the dinner table. Adolph Green says, “I remember one night having dinner on Mapleton Drive, shortly after your father died, and you looked up and said, ‘There’s Daddy flying over the dining room table.’ You were not hysterical, you just said it very calmly.”
At the Warner Avenue School, where all of my friends went, I was not so calm. I had been getting good grades. But now, with the onset of the Bogie thing, I began working on a one-way ticket out the door.
Looking back I realize that the main thing was that it infuriated me that all my friends knew that my father was dead. I hated the fact that they all had fathers and I didn’t, and they all knew that I didn’t. They knew I was fatherless because they had seen it on television, or their parents had read it in the newspaper. People were not pointing at me in the corridors and laughing, but that’s how it felt. It was as if everybody was in on some joke except me. I felt no sense of privacy.
One day a kid said to me, “Too bad about your father,” and I slugged him.
A few days later it happened again. “Sorry about your dad.” Pow, right in the face.
For a while I was getting in fights every day with kids who hadn’t done anything except mention my father.
In school it wasn’t only the fighting that got me into trouble. I also had a habit of standing on my desk and screaming. When the mood possessed me, I would suddenly climb on top of my small wooden desk, wave my hands in the air, and shriek hysterically. The kids just stared at me and the teachers wrung their hands. Nobody knew quite what to make of it except that, obviously, I was trying to get attention. I don’t think I was screaming for my father as I had in the tree, I was just screaming so that somebody would notice that I was in pain.
The principal called my mother into his office. He was a tall, carrot-haired man.
“There’s a problem with Stephen,” he said.
“A problem?”
“He seems very withdrawn most of the time.”
“That’s understandable,” my mother said.
“But he’s also getting in fights.”
“Fights?”
“He gave one boy a bloody nose. And he stands on his desk, shrieking. Are there difficulties at home?”
“Well, of course there are difficulties at home,” my mother said. “He’s lost his father.”
“Yes, and we are all very sympathetic,” Carrot Head said. “But he’s become a disruption in class. If this continues, we’ll have to ask you to take your son out of the school.”
A few days later I climbed onto my desk again and screamed. They couldn’t handle me. Warner Avenue became the first school I was “asked to leave.” It would not be the last.
So, still reeling from the blow of losing my father, I was yanked out of Warner Avenue School, where all my friends were. I had no idea what was going on. My marks were good, so why was I being put into another school? I felt as if I were being punished. I knew that all of this was, in some mysterious way, linked up with my father’s death. Beginning in September, 1958, I went to the Carl Curtis School. I remember that they had a swimming pool.
Adding to my sense of loss during this period, we also moved out of the Mapleton Drive house and away from everything I had grown up with. It was partly thanks to Frank Sinatra. Several months after my father died my mother entered into a rather volatile romance with Frank Sinatra, which I guess is the only kind of romance Sinatra had. During my father’s illness, Frank, as devoted as a son to my father, had come over to see Dad often, so it’s not as though Leslie and I were suddenly being confronted with a new man in the house when he and Mother started dating. We already knew Frank as a guy who would come to the house a lot, and sometimes play with us for a few minutes before going off to talk with the grown-ups.
Back in 1957, if anyone had told my mother that her romance with Sinatra was an attempt to forget Bogie, she would have said that was absurd. But that is how she sees it now. Frank was an anesthetic to the pain of losing Bogie.
Frank was good for my mother in many ways. She had always been close to him as a friend, and after the long ordeal of Bogie’s declining health in the last year, she needed to get out and dance a bit. But Frank was a bit screwed up, and the romance brought with it a quantity of pain, as a number of women have discovered over the years. My mother says Sinatra was incredibly charming and handsome and talented, but also incredibly juvenile and insecure. One week Frank would be courting her like a prince, taking her to parties and premieres and concerts. And then suddenly he would go as cold as stone on her. He would avoid calling. He would act as if she did not exist. And when he finally did call again he’d act as if nothing had happened. This is an aspect of Sinatra’s personality which has exasperated people close to him for years. It was especially trying for my mother because, as she says, “I had been married to a grown-up.”
Everybody who cared about my mother, including Frank’s friends, prayed that she would not marry him. The opinion seemed to be universal that any woman who married Sinatra might as well take a knife and stab herself in the heart.
After one of his cold and silent absences, Frank did ask Bacall to marry him. Mom accepted. She was in heaven. She would have a life again. Leslie and I would have Sinatra for a father. All the pain would be gone.
The plans for the marriage were supposed to be kept secret for a while. But when Swifty Lazar spilled the beans to Louella Parsons, the “Bacall-Sinatra marriage plans” hit the papers. Frank went ballistic. He went into his iceman routine and broke off the relationship, except he forgot to tell my mother that he was breaking it off. All he did was ignore her and humiliate her. There were times when he was actually in the same room with my mother and acted as if he didn’t know her. Though the passing of years has put my mother in a forgiving mood, she doesn’t discuss their relationship anymore.
It was during Mother’s romance with Sinatra that we moved out of the Mapleton Drive house, and Sinatra was one of the main reasons.
“I don’t think Frank was comfortable in that house,” my mother says. “The ghost of your father was always there, and I knew that Frank would feel better if I moved.”
So Mother, believing that she would never have a future with Frank unless she moved, jettisoned her silver and much of her furniture and sold the house in which my father had died. We moved into a rented house on Bellagio Road in Bel Air. The house belonged to William Powell, the actor.
By this time, then, I had lost my father, lost my school, and lost my house. And through it all I was losing my friends.
Most of my friends had gone to Warner Avenue School, and when I was taken out of that school I was cut out of their lives. I felt it happening gradually, I guess, but it all seemed to come down on me one afternoon when I was at a birthday party for Steve Cahn, who had been my closest friend on Mapleton.
Steve’s father, Sammy, was one of the most famous lyricists of the time. Sammy had worked with composers like Jules Styne and Jimmy Van Heusen, doing film work. He had already won an Academy Award for the song “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and it was around this time that he won another Academy Award for “All the Way,” which was from Sinatra’s film The Joker Is Wild. He would eventually win two more Academy Awards.
Anyhow, at that birthday party I felt incredibly out of place. It was as if everybody else was a person and I was a goat or a donkey or something. This “outsider” feeling had been growing in me ever since my father’s death. It had started with the strange awareness that all my friends knew about my father. And it had gotten worse after I was pulled out of the Warner Avenue School. At the end of that birthday party I stood in the hallway with no one to talk to, like some unwanted vagrant who had wandered in. The kids were all saying good-bye to each other, and talking about what they would do tomorrow in school. Even though I was among all my friends, I felt a terrible pang of loneliness. Now I went to Curtis School and they still went to Warner and they lived together in a world that I was no longer part of.
After we moved to Bellagio Road, of course, it got worse. If the death of my father had not already broken my heart, this surely did. I was devastated by the loss of my friends and the gradual realization that their lives went on as usual.
This cycle of loss, which I’m sure was during the most important formative time of my life, was completed in January of 1959, just short of two years after Bogie’s death. My mother had gone on a trip to London looking for a job, leaving Leslie and me in our nurse’s care. There she had wined and dined with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and Richard and Sybil Burton. She had also been offered work in a film, which was to be shot throughout Europe. She had accepted the job. As a result, we moved to London for six months and, as it turned out, away from California forever.
Now I was down one father, one school, one house, dozens of friends, and an entire state and country.
In London there were more photographers, first at the airport and later at the school. By now I had developed an almost pathological hatred of cameras and I would turn my head any time I saw one, even if it was just hanging over the neck of a tourist. I was enrolled in the American School in London, one of the few schools, by the way, that I have not been thrown out of. Apparently, I pretty much kept to myself. But everywhere I went somebody knew me because of who my father had been. I never perceived any jealousy from other kids, but that’s what I was always afraid of. More than anything, I just wanted to blend into the woodwork. I remember at school that there was a girl who kept passing me a piece of paper. She wanted my autograph because I was Humphrey Bogart’s son. I didn’t want that kind of notice. And there was a guy there, Jeff Eaton. I remember that he intercepted the paper every time, and signed his name to it and sent it back to her. I remember Jeff fondly because he knew how self-conscious I felt about being the Bogie boy, and he deflected the attention away from me and on to him. And he made me laugh, too.
The message I got from all this moving, each time farther away from where we’d lived with Bogie, was clear: your father is no longer a part of your life, forget about him. And that’s what I tried to do for most of my life.
Of course, all this has created conflict over the years between me and Mom. I didn’t want to think of myself as “the son of Humphrey Bogart.” I have always wanted to be just plain Steve. I didn’t want any kind of spotlight on me for being Bogie’s son, and I didn’t want the responsibility of meeting some expectation that people might have for the child of Bogie.
You might think that I would want to stay in the world of celebrities who are so much a part of my mother’s life. After all, celebrities aren’t going to be impressed by my being the son of a celebrity. But by the time I was a teenager I had met a few celebrities and, believe it or not, it was exactly the same.
“Oh, I knew your father. I loved him. He was great.”
It was always your father this, and your father that. Nobody ever said to me, “Tell me Steve, how do you make a gasket, exactly?” which is something I did once.
There was never anything specific that my mother wanted me to do about my father’s fame. It was just that she wanted me to somehow dedicate my life to keeping his spirit alive, something that Bogie has managed to do just fine without me.
At a minimum my mother would have liked me to talk a lot about Bogie. To her, Bogie was, and remains, perfect. She always wanted me to ask her what he was like. I seldom did that because she was always telling me anyhow, and to hear her tell it, he wasperfect. It was bad enough that I was constantly besieged by strangers telling me what a great guy my dad was. I wanted somebody to say to me, “Bogie was great, but sometimes he was a prick, you know…” and maybe show that the guy had some shortcomings so that I wouldn’t have to live up to a legend. But my mother could never bring herself to say anything that might reflect negatively on him.
“Stephen,” she would say, “why do you always want to know the bad stuff?”
“Because that’s what would make him real to me,” I would say.
I realize now that perfect is Mom’s perception of my father, and that she was just trying to make him perfect for me. But the effect of all this, for years, was that I simply did not learn much about my father. So when I began to take more interest in my father’s life, I was especially curious about the nature of his fame. After all, his fame has caused me so much trouble that I wanted to understand it. Where did it come from? Why is it so durable when the fame of others has faded? The truth is if you had asked me to recite a filmography of Humphrey Bogart a few years ago, I would not have done any better than the average movie fan. But now I’m much more familiar with this shadow in my life known as Humphrey Bogart and I know a little more, though I suspect no one will ever completely understand the lasting impression of Bogie.
My father was not the most famous movie star of his time. Certainly Clark Gable surpassed him, and you could make a case for James Cagney and others. But today, for reasons which have been discussed many times, my father is the one that the older generation remembers and the younger generation idolizes. He is generally conceded to be the number-one movie star of all time. Stories about my father almost invariably describe him as a “legend,” a man who has a “mystique,” and the center of the “Bogart cult.” There are many reasons why my father is more famous today than when he died thirty-eight years ago. One of them is simply the fact that he was the first of his generation of movie greats to die prematurely. Clark Gable and Gary Cooper also died in their fifties, but they died after Bogie. Dying young is no guarantee of immortality, but it helps. Do you think the names Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley would mean quite what they do today if they had died in their eighties? Likewise, Bogie.
If there is a year marking the beginning of my father’s fame it is 1935, fourteen years before I was born. By that time he had been in dozens of Broadway plays and even a few really awful movies. In one of them, Up the River, he made his only screen appearance with Spencer Tracy. For years, Bogie had shuttled back and forth between Hollywood and Broadway with a notable lack of film success. “I wasn’t Gable and I flopped,” he said.
But in 1935, Bogie got the role of a psychopathic gangster by the name of Duke Mantee, in Robert Sherwood’s Broadway play The Petrified Forest. Over the years a lot of people have told me that when my father walked on stage as Duke Mantee you could hear a gasp from the audience, and that happened every single night. Somehow Dad created the shuffling gait of a convict who might have had his legs manacled, and his hands dangled as if they might have been recently handcuffed together. His voice was cold, his eyes heartless. At the time of the play, John Dillinger was king of the tabloids, and Bogie, they say, looked a lot like Dillinger. For years people talked about that nightly gasp in the audience and how it always seemed that John Dillinger had just walked onto the stage.
The play, with Leslie Howard as the star, was a big hit. Bogie got the best reviews of his stage career. He was hopeful that repeating the role on film would finally make him a Hollywood star. But when Warner Brothers bought the rights to film the play they announced that Mantee would be played by Edward G. Robinson. Robinson was already a major movie star, mostly playing gangsters. Bogie was pissed off. He sent a cable to Leslie Howard, because Howard (who, incidentally, was my mother’s screen idol, though she never got to meet him) had promised to help Bogie get the Mantee movie role. Howard, true to his word, told Warner Brothers that they could shove their movie if they didn’t cast Dad as Mantee, though I suppose Howard used more genteel language. The studio caved in. Bogie got the part and he was a sensation. And that is why my sister is named Leslie; she was named after Leslie Howard.
The Petrified Forest, however, did not make Bogie a movie star. Warner Brothers signed him to one of their so-called slave contracts, and they plugged him into a whole series of roles that they thought suited his “type.” During the next five years my father appeared in twenty-eight films, playing so many gangsters you would have thought he was born with a .38 in his hand. The titles say it all: Racket Busters, San Quentin, You Can’t Get Away With Murder, and so on. But Bogie never even got to be the top gangster in these flicks, because Warner Brothers already had big gangster-role stars like Robinson, James Cagney, and George Raft. Bogie did get to play a cowboy on occasion, and he had top billing from time to time, such as in Dead End, notable because it was the first film featuring the Dead End Kids.
Bogie was not great in these films—but then, the films weren’t great either. In some he was good, in others lousy. He did, however, get good at dramatic death scenes because he had lots of practice. In these gangster films, he was always getting knocked off at the end by Robinson or Cagney. He joked about how absurd it was that he, brought up in wealth and culture, was known to the public as a tough street guy. But he was not happy playing these parts. He really cared about acting, and he wanted to make something of himself as an actor.
Still, if these films do not represent Bogie at his best, they do show that he was sometimes able to make the most of roles that were as common as lice. Raymond Chandler said, “Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also, he has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt. Alan Ladd is hard, bitter, and occasionally charming, but he is after all a small boy’s idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the genuine article.”
It wasn’t until 1941 and High Sierra that Bogie began to emerge as someone who would make his mark on film history. He got the role because he fought for it after George Raft turned it down. Raft did not want to die at the end. This would not be the last time that Bogie benefited from Raft’s fussiness.
In that movie, Bogie played Roy Earle, another Dillinger-like character. Earle was ruthless and cold-blooded. But somehow Bogie created sympathy for the guy, developing the Earle character as a last-of-a-dying-breed type. Audiences responded. When Earle was killed at the end of the movie, as bad guys always were in those days, the moviegoers felt sympathy instead of glee. It was probably my father’s best performance to date. The movie was a hit.
The screenwriter on High Sierra, along with W. R. Burnett, was John Huston. Later that year, Huston got his first directing assignment. The movie was The Maltese Falcon, and it was to star George Raft. Raft said no. This time he was afraid of jeopardizing his career by working with a new director. Right. Anybody could see that Huston had no future as a director. So, Bogie got the role, and Huston was happy to have him.
In The Maltese Falcon, Bogie was on the right side of the law, more or less, as Dashiell Hammett’s private eye Sam Spade, another self-sufficient loner type. Bogie was still ruthless, but now it was ruthlessness in the name of principles.
The Maltese Falcon had been made twice before, but this time they did it right and the movie was a big success. My mother thinks it is the movie against which all other private-eye films are judged.
In one of his most famous scenes, Bogie tells Mary Astor that he is “sending her over,” for killing his partner. They supposedly love each other, but Bogie says, “I don’t care who loves you. I won’t play the sap for you. You killed Miles and you’re going over for it.” He tells her, “I hope they don’t hang you by your sweet neck. If you’re a good girl you’ll be out in twenty years and you’ll come back to me. If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.”
This, I guess, is the beginning of Bogie as Mr. Cool. Richard Brooks, the director, says, “Finally, the film was done the way it was written. The whole purpose of the story was that his partner was killed and a woman who got him killed was trying to make love to Bogie on the couch. And she wanted to go free. And when he finally says to her, ‘I have to send you over, somebody has to take the fall,’ they loved him for it because he could do it and maybe we couldn’t do it.”
Alistair Cooke knew my father and he says that The Maltese Falcon was the film that finally isolated my father’s character. “That was the quintessential Bogart,” he says. “All that matters is what is going on in your father’s mind. You could see everything in his face. The camera loved Bogie. He was born to be in films.”
Richard Schickel, the movie critic for Time, says that The Maltese Falcon was the movie that put Bogie over the top as a star. “The public now had what it required of all movie stars in those days,” Schickel says, “a firm sense of his character, a feeling that they knew what they were bargaining for when they paid their money to see a Bogart picture. And from this point onward, with his name fixed firmly above the title, in the first billing position he would never again be forced to relinquish, that is what he appeared in: Bogart pictures. He had become what a star had to be, a genre unto himself.”
In 1943 came the next big magnification of the Bogart star. It was my father’s forty-fifth movie, Casablanca, which, even though it won the Oscar for best picture, has been called “the best bad movie ever made.” It is also, of my father’s five most important films, the only one that was not written or directed by John Huston. Alistair Cooke says, “Bogie’s continuing fame is a mystery but a lot of it is tied up in that film, Casablanca.”
“Casablanca was never supposed to be anything special,” Julius Epstein told me. Epstein, along with his twin brother, Philip, and Howard Koch, wrote the screenplay. “In those days the studios owned the theaters and each studio made a picture a week. Casablanca was just one more picture. It was corny and it was sentimental, and your father made a lot of better films that don’t get as much attention. But somehow magic happened and it became a classic.”
Epstein went on to say, “The first preview was not a howling success. The movie did not become the cult film it is now until after your father died.”
Though Casablanca went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director, and my father got his first Best Actor nomination, the road to being a classic was not a smooth ride. “We were making changes in the script every day during shooting,” Epstein says. “Your father didn’t like that. He was a professional, always prepared, and he didn’t like sloppiness. But that’s what it was. We were handing in dialogue hours, even minutes, before it was to be shot.”
No one really knew where the picture was going or how it was going to end. All of this, of course, raised havoc with characterizations. Ingrid Bergman recalls in her book, My Story, “Every morning we said, ‘Well, who are we, what are we doing here?’ And Michael Curtiz, the director, would say, ‘We’re not quite sure, but let’s get through this scene today and we’ll let you know tomorrow.’”
In fact, the famous ending of the movie where my father says to Claude Rains, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” was not the only ending planned. Curtiz also planned to shoot an ending in which Bergman stays with Bogart. It was only after the “beautiful friendship” line was shot that Curtiz knew he had something perfect and decided to go with it.
It was a difficult movie for my father. He spent most of his time in his trailer. He was not happy with the part at first. He wanted to get the girl, but so did Paul Henreid, because that, to some extent, was the definition of stardom: the guy who got the girl was the star. But Bogie also worried that the public would not believe that a woman as beautiful as Ingrid Bergman could fall for a guy who looked like him. He was, after all, a five-foot-ten, 155-pound, forty-four-year-old, balding man who had spent most of his film life playing snarling triggermen.
Dad was also troubled by the fact that, in the original script, Rick Blaine was a bit of a whiner, and that Rick didn’t actually do much of anything. So the role was beefed up.
The role became more challenging. Dad had to convince his audience that Rick was a man’s man, a tough guy, but that he also could be brought close to tears by the sound of “As Time Goes By” played on the piano by Dooley Wilson as Sam. (By the way, Bogie never said, “Play it again, Sam.”)
My father, I have learned, was not a ladies’ man, in real life, or on film. In fact, his aloofness with women on screen, the ease with which he could turn a dame into the cops if she was bad, is one of the things that makes him attractive both to men and women. Casablanca was probably his most romantic role, and even then most of the romance is in the back story.
Bogie, with not a lot of experience in romantic parts, took advice on how to play it. His friend Mel Baker told him, “This is the first time you’ve ever played the romantic lead against a major star. You stand still, and always make her come to you. Mike [Curtiz, the director] probably won’t notice it, and if she complains you can tell her it’s tacit in the script. You’ve got something she wants, so she has to come to you.”
Whatever my father did worked. Casablanca turned Bogie into a sex symbol. As Rick Blaine he represented one of what Ingrid Bergman called “the two poles of male attractiveness.” Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo was the other. Laszlo was honest, responsible, conservative, and fatherly. Bogie, as Rick, was sexy, romantic, irresponsible, and funny. In other words: dangerous. Women love rascals.
“I didn’t do anything I’ve never done before,” Bogie said, “but when the camera moves in on that Bergman face, and she’s saying she loves you, it would make anybody look romantic.”
In fact, the chemistry between my father and Bergman was so palpable that many people thought they must have had something going on off the screen. But the truth is they were practically strangers.
“I kissed him,” Bergman says, “but I never knew him.”
Bob Williams, who was the studio’s publicist on the film, has said that he thinks my father was in love with Ingrid Bergman, and that a romance might have developed if he were not married to the fanatically jealous Mayo Methot at the time. “Bogie was kind of jealous if I would bring another man onto the set to see her,” Williams says. “He would sulk. I think he was kind of smitten with her.”
Perhaps. But my father was not the kind to flirt with his costars. He was more inclined to retire to his trailer and study his script or play chess, in this case with Howard Koch.
Nobody can say for sure why Casablanca has become the beloved film that it is, or why so many lines from it have become installed in our language. All I know is that I would be a very rich man if I got a quarter every time somebody said to me, “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,” or “We’ll always have Paris,” or “Here’s looking at you, kid,” or “Of all the gin joints in all the world,” and on and on. Barely a day goes by that I don’t see or hear some reference to Bogie on the news, and most commonly it is one of the Casablanca lines. Even Secretary of State Warren Christopher summed up his comments on the GATT Treaty: “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
Casablanca was truly a serendipitous combination of things. But if the soul of my father’s fame is the merging of his real self with his screen image, as film historians have suggested, then Casablanca probably is the best example of that merging.
Perhaps this is the phenomenon that Bergman is talking about when she writes that she came to Hollywood troubled by the fact that in Hollywood you were expected to play some version of yourself in every film. She was from Sweden where actors played different ages, different ethnic groups, people very different from who they really were. She says that Michael Curtiz told her, “American audiences pay their money to see Gary Cooper being Gary Cooper, not the Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Rick Blaine was not a clone of Humphrey Bogart, but he was a hell of a lot closer to being my father than any of those gun-toting gangsters ever had been.
Richard Schickel puts it this way: “What Bogart found in Rick Blaine was something more interesting than Tough Guy, no less complex than Existential Hero, but much more appealing—to some of us, at least—than both. For Rick was but a minor variation on the role Bogart had himself been playing most of his adult life. A role he had taken up with particular relish when he made his permanent residence in Hollywood. It was the role of Declassed Gentleman. A man of breeding and privilege who found himself far from his native haunts, among people of rather less quality, rather fewer standards morally, socially, intellectually, than he had been raised to expect to find among his acquaintances. Rick Blaine should not have ended up running a gin joint in Casablanca, and Humphrey Bogart should not have ended up being an actor in Hollywood.”
I think Curtiz and Schickel are, at least partially, right. The movie stars who endure, including my father, often play a big part of themselves. Nonetheless, the next three important films in the Bogie cult were movies in which Dad played parts much further from himself than Rick Blaine or Sam Spade were.
In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which is my favorite, Dad was no confident, highly principled Sam Spade. He played a paranoid gold prospector. Huston directed and had a cameo part. Walter Huston, John’s father, was in the film and he won the 1948 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor while John was winning the Oscar for Best Director. My father got his second Oscar nomination for that film.
While this was one of my father’s favorite roles, Sam Jaffe says that Bogie had some reservations at first.
“Your father came to me one day and said, ‘Have you read the script for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?’ I said yes. He made a face. I said, ‘Bogie, I can see that something’s bothering you.’ It seemed to me that he was concerned about the size of the part, since he had already done The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca by this point. I said to him, ‘I don’t know if you are considering not doing this, but you’re a great friend of John Huston and you have great respect for Walter Huston. There is nothing wrong with being second in a movie that stars Walter Huston and is directed by John Huston. You may have some doubts, but let me say that if you don’t do this picture, it won’t get made because they won’t make a picture with Walter and another actor. And what will happen to your relationship with John Huston? You will crush John. I want to relieve your mind that you will not be hurt by playing in this movie. You’ll be good in the picture and people will not say, Oh, Bogie’s not important anymore because he is being second to Walter Huston.’”
John Huston, of course, was a major force in my father’s career. Perhaps the major force. It would be Huston, of course, who would later direct Bogie in The African Queen, the last of the five films which I think are mainly responsible for my father’s fame.
Of course, these five films only make up one-fifteenth of my father’s film work. Everybody I meet has a favorite. A lot of people like The Big Sleep, which I can’t make heads or tails of. Some people favor the other Bogie and Bacall movies, like To Have and Have Not and Key Largo, the latter of which was also directed by Huston. And there are people who just love those old gangster movies, especially The Roaring Twenties and They Drive By Night. Still I think it was those five: High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, which are most responsible for making my father the most famous movie star in the world.
Tracing the arc of my father’s fame is a lot easier than understanding it. I see him kind of moving along from film to film like an airplane gaining speed, then finally lifting off into stardom. But then there is a moment when he seems to go into the stratosphere, breaking away from the pull of gravity which holds the rest of us on earth. We can, more or less, figure out when it happened, but nobody can say for sure why it happened.
Some film critics say that the first sign of Bogie’s film immortality was in France in 1960. It was in the famous French movie Breathless that Jean-Paul Belmondo stood in front of a poster of my father smoking a cigarette and simply said, “Bogie.” Critics disagree about just what Belmondo was trying to say, but the fact that they discuss it at all is the telling thing.
But other film historians will tell you that the Bogie cult was born in America, specifically in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. In 1956, a year before he died, the Brattle booked Beat the Devil, which had come out in 1954. Beat the Devil was an offbeat comedy which starred, along with my father, Robert Morley and Gina Lollobrigida and Dad’s friend Peter Lorre. Huston directed. It was another one of those movies where nobody was quite sure of what the movie was, even by the time they started shooting. It had not been a commercial success.
But in Cambridge in 1956 the students from Harvard and MIT loved the offbeat humor and they loved Bogie.
The following year, the Brattle booked Casablanca and the response was even greater. It turned into a Bogart film festival and the Bogie cult was born. In fact, in Harvard Square there is still a Bogie-themed restaurant.
Then the Bogart cult spread to the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City’s Greenwich Village and the Lyric in Lexington, Virginia, and all across the country, first in college towns and then art houses, and then everywhere. Posters went up on walls. Woody Allen wrote Play It Again, Sam. Eventually there was a hit record, “Key Largo”. Howard Koch, one of the cowriters on Casablanca, and one of Dad’s chess partners, says that when he appeared at college showings of Casablanca, the kids would recite the dialogue along with the actors just as they did for the Rocky Horror Picture Show. He says he has met students who have seen the film dozens of times.
So over the years there has been a lot written about the appeal of Bogie. And there is little diversity in the opinions. Almost everybody who has written about the Bogart myth says that we love Bogart because he was his own man. He told the truth. He saw right through phonies. He was cynical, yet he could be idealistic when the time came.
The last family friend I talked to about this phenomenon was George Axelrod. Axelrod is the writer-producer-director who is probably best known for writing Broadway comedies like The Seven Year Itch. He was a friend of my father’s and when I asked him why he thought Bogie has endured, he said, “Your father understood that the world was absurd. That’s something that nobody understood. He didn’t really take life seriously. He knew it was all bullshit. Steve, it’s good to go through life knowing it is all bullshit. Bogie would have loved all this politically correct stuff today. Oh, what he would have done with this. When you understand that there’s no purpose, that it’s all an accident and there’s no value and you still make a life for yourself, that’s the trick of the thing. Once you understand that, you realize everything is delusion and illusion, then life is kind of existential, and Bogie understood that this existential quality is the kind of subtext that comes out in his performance and that is why he is an immortal figure. Bogie made that quality somehow come across on the screen, and he had it in real life, too. He was an existentialist. I don’t know if he would use that word, because that would be too pretentious for him, but that’s what he was.”
Rod Steiger, who starred with my father in his last movie, The Harder They Fall, also had an interesting take on Bogart’s lasting fame. He said, “I think Mr. Bogart—that’s what I always called him—has endured because in our society the family unit has softened and gone to pieces. And here you had a guy about whom there was no doubt. There is no doubt that he is the leader. There is no doubt that he is the strong one. There is no doubt with this man that he can handle himself, that he can protect the family. This is all unconscious, of course, but with Bogart you are secure, you never doubt that he will take care of things.”
I guess the real question is not, why do we like Bogart? It’s which Bogie are we talking about—the Bogart movie image projected on film screens around the world through seventy-five films? Or my father, the wry, but somewhat insecure man, who I think was kind of lonely and did not tell everybody what was on his mind all the time? I think George Axelrod was telling me that the answer is both, and I think he’s right.
One of the first things all Bogie historians like to point out is that Bogart was educated, well spoken, genteel, not at all like the gangsters he portrayed in most of his early films. This, they say, is the starting point for separating Bogie from his roles. But I think it might also be the ending point, because my father really was a somewhat cynical wisecracker who hated phonies. Aside from the fact that he had no background with real gangsters, and that he had the insecurities that come with being human, there is no big surprise in the real Bogart. Sure, he played chess and golf, and maybe you didn’t know that. And maybe you didn’t know he was an avid reader, or that he coined the phrase “Tennis, anyone?” But that’s the end of the surprises. My father was not a child abuser, like Joan Crawford, and he did not have bad breath, like Clark Gable. He was not gay and he was not a Nazi spy, and if he had a secret life I think it was mostly a secret life of the mind. These days it seems like once a month we are shocked and disappointed by the gap between a star’s real nature and his public image. So maybe my father has endured because there is no significant gap. Bogie, to a great extent, really was Bogie. He was the man John Huston described in his eulogy when he said:
Humphrey Bogart died early Monday morning. His wife was at his bedside, and his children were nearby. He had been unconscious for a day. He was not in any pain. It was a peaceful death. At no time during the months of his illness did he believe he was going to die, not that he refused to consider the thought—it simply never occurred to him. He loved life. Life meant his family, his friends, his work, his boat. He could not imagine leaving any of them, and so until the very last he planned what he would do when he got well. His boat was being repainted. Stephen, his son, was getting of an age when he could be taught to sail, and to learn his father’s love of the seas. A few weeks sailing and Bogie would be all ready to go to work again. He was going to make fine pictures—only fine pictures—from here on in.
With the years he had become increasingly aware of the dignity of his profession…actor, not star. Actor. Himself, he never took too seriously—his work most seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with an amused cynicism; Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect. Those who did not know him well, who never worked with him, who were not of the small circle of his close friends, had another completely different idea of the man than the few who were so privileged. I suppose the ones who knew him but slightly were at the greatest disadvantage, particularly if they were the least bit solemn about their own importance. Bigwigs have been known to stay away from the brilliant Hollywood occasions rather than expose their swelling neck muscles to Bogart’s banderillas.
In each of the fountains at Versailles there is a pike which keeps all the carp active, otherwise they would grow overfat and die. Bogie took rare delight in performing a similar duty in the fountains of Hollywood. Yet his victims seldom bore him any malice, and when they did, not for long. His shafts were fashioned only to stick into the outer layer of complacency, and not to penetrate through to the regions of the spirit where real injuries are done.
The great houses of Beverly Hills, and for that matter of the world, were so many shooting galleries so far as Bogie was concerned. His own house was a sanctuary. Within those walls anyone, no matter how elevated his position, could breathe easy. Bogie’s hospitality went far beyond food and drink. He fed a guest’s spirit as well as his body, plied him with good will until he became drunk in the heart as well as in the legs.
Bogie was lucky at love and he was lucky at dice. To begin with he was endowed with the greatest gift a man can have: talent. The whole world came to recognize it. Through it all he was able to live in comfort and to provide well for his wife and children.
His life, though not a long one measured in years, was a rich, full life. Over all the other blessings were the two children, Stephen and Leslie, who gave a final lasting meaning to his life. Yes, Bogie wanted for nothing. He got all that he asked for out of life and more. We have no reason to feel any sorrow for him—only for ourselves for having lost him. He is quite irreplaceable. There will never be another like him.
* * *
I am on the floor watching television. I am straddled across Pandy, my giant stuffed panda, pretending that Pandy is a horse. My father comes in. “What you watching, Steve?” he asks.
“The Alone Ranger,” I tell him.
“Good,” he says. “Good.”
“Wanna see me ride?” I say.
“Sure, pal. Go ahead, Steve, ride ’em cowboy.”
I lift myself higher in my make-believe saddle. I make galloping noises with my mouth. I fire my cap pistol at the outlaws on the black-and-white television. I spank Pandy with my other hand to make him ride faster. I sway back and forth as if I might fall from my horse, and I start giggling.
“Go get ’em, cowboy,” my father says. “Go get ’em. “ He watches me for a while longer, then he laughs and leaves the room. I think to call him back. I want to ask him if he wants to watch the Alone Ranger with me. But I don’t. I stare at the door. He is gone. I hear him downstairs talking to my mother. I turn back to the TV screen and watch the rest of the Alone Ranger alone, riding my stuffed panda.
* * *