Chapter 4

Bogart thought of himself as Scaramouch, the mischievous scamp who sets off the fireworks, then nips out.

—NUNNALLY JOHNSON

We left England when my mother finished making Flame Over India, which was a fast-paced action film set on the northern frontier of India. She plays the governess of an Indian prince, and she’s trying to help British soldiers get the prince to safety from some bad guys. I thought Mom was excellent, and the movie did very well.

With the film in the can, Mom moved us from London back to the US. But we did not return to California where I had spent my childhood. We flew, instead, to New York, where we moved into an apartment that was being rented jointly by us and Richard and Sybil Burton.

My parents had met the Burtons in England in 1951. As a toddler I had spent a lot of time on Richard Burton’s knee. I think I might have vomited on his shoes once. (God, when I think of the voices I used to listen to as a kid: John Huston, Richard Burton, Humphrey Bogart, and of course, Lauren Bacall, who is known for her voice.) I know I used to confuse Burton with Richard Greene, who played Robin Hood on television, and I always pronounced Richard and Sybil, “Wretched and Simple.”

When we moved to New York, May, the cook, was still with us, and a new nurse was hired to look after Leslie and me.

We were in New York because Mother had been offered a leading role in Good-bye Charlie, a Broadway play about a gangster who dies and comes back to earth as a woman. Mom was determined to have a career and not spend the rest of her life being described in newspaper articles as “Bogie’s widow.”

Good-bye Charlie was written and directed by my parents’ friend George Axelrod. The actors, including my mother, got great reviews, but the play was panned by the critics. After only three months on Broadway it was good-bye to Good-bye Charlie. The story did, however, resurface in 1964 as a pretty pathetic excuse for a movie, starring Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds. Still, Good-bye Charlie was a shot of adrenaline for my mother’s career, and she continued to get work on Broadway and in Hollywood.

On our first New Year’s Eve in New York, Mother met Jason Robards, Jr. Jason was then, and still is, one of our best stage and screen actors. He is an enormous talent, regarded by a lot of people as the finest interpreter of the works of Eugene O’Neill. Now, we know, Jason has appeared in something like a million movies. But at the time his star was just rising. He had recently won the New York Drama Critics Award for Long Day’s Journey Into Night. If there’s one thing that turns my mother on it is excellence, and Jason was a brilliant actor. She fell for him quickly, and he fell for her. Unfortunately, he was an alcoholic.

My mother says that when Jason was sober, he was charming, thoughtful, kind, and gentle. When Jason was slightly drunk, he was still charming, though less thoughtful and kind, which he made up for by being eloquent, often reciting poetry or soliloquies in Greenwich Village bars. But when Jason was very drunk he was not charming, thoughtful, kind, or gentle. And Jason drank a lot.

So Mother married him.

Like a zillion women before her, Mother deluded herself that she could change a man by marrying him. This heavy drinking thing, she thought, was just a stage Jason was going through because of his recent divorce. This was a problem that would vanish after they were married. Yes, yes, the love of a good woman would cure him. Right. What Mother should have done was listen to Spencer Tracy, who said to her, “Betty, get it through your head. No alcoholic ever changes because somebody asks him to.” Or her good friend, Adlai Stevenson, who told her, “It’s not going to get better after you are married, it’s going to get worse.”

There are those who say that Jason Robards looks a lot like my father. By those I mean just about everybody who has eyes, except Lauren Bacall. Mom has never seen the resemblance, but I think it is quite striking. What it all means, if anything, is something a psychologist would have to figure out. But whether he looked like Bogie or not, Jason had to wrestle with the ghost of Humphrey Bogart. When word got to the press that Jason and Mother were a serious item, there were dozens of stories to the effect: can he fill Bogie’s shoes? It’s unfortunate for anyone to have to suffer those comparisons, but particularly unjust for Jason, who is such a towering talent in his own right.

By the time they got married in July, 1961, we had moved out of the rented apartment and into a fourteen-room apartment at the Dakota. The Dakota is a famous old building on Central Park West. You might remember it as the setting of Rosemary’s Baby, where Mia Farrow’s husband gets involved with a witch’s coven right there in the building. The Dakota is also the place where, in real life, John Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman. Of course, when we moved into the building the Beatles were just unknown teenagers in Liverpool, but years later on visits to my mother, I would see John Lennon walking in and out of the building, often standing on the very spot where he would be murdered.

The huge apartment at the Dakota allowed for a large family, which we suddenly had. That was the best thing about Mother’s marriage to Jason. Jason had three kids by a previous marriage: Sarah, Jady, and David. Jady was my age. Sarah was around Leslie’s age. And David became the baby of this extended family. Though the three Robards kids lived with their mother, we spent a lot of time together, and there was a period of about a year when Jady and Sarah lived with us at the Dakota. So we had our own Brady Bunch. Or maybe I should say Eight Is Enough, because within a year of the wedding my half-brother, Sam Robards, was born. Sam is now a successful movie actor. (If Sam seems a small part of this book it is only because there is a fourteen-year difference in our ages, and I was away from home through most of Sam’s childhood. Sam, like me, had to live through the experience of having two famous parents. It took a lot of guts for him to become an actor, considering who his parents are, and the inevitable comparisons that would be made with his father. But he turned into quite a good actor. Sam and I remain very close. I love him, and I love his son, Jasper, my first nephew.)

On the whole, though, the Bacall-Robards marriage was lousy. My mother had fallen in love with an alcoholic, and after she married him, Jason continued to drink heavily, just as everybody in the universe, except my mother, knew he would.

Leslie and I, in the innocence of youth, didn’t realize at the time how bad it really was. Sure, Jason sometimes came in late and slept all day, but Mother explained that that was because he worked late nights on Broadway. Sure, he seemed to be away a lot, but then, so was Mother when she was making a movie. Actually I liked Jason a lot, and he liked me. Jason and I got along great. I think that was because Jason was really a kid at heart. He didn’t try to be a replacement father. He was more of a big brother who liked to goof off, not unlike the character he played in A Thousand Clowns, where he was kind of a social dropout who lived with his nephew.

Jason had been a top athlete at Hollywood High School, a swimmer and track man. He loved sports. After he married my mother, that was something he shared with me. He used to take me to the Sheeps Meadow in Central Park and pitch baseballs to me, and he would hit high flies so that I could practice my fielding. When we spent a summer in California, Jason taught me to bodysurf. I will always treasure these times with Jason because they were such traditional father-son things, and I never had a chance to do them with my father.

Many of the things Jason did with me were things I later did with my sons.

Jason sometimes took Jady and me to New York Mets games during their first season, when the Mets were known as the team that couldn’t throw straight. Their most famous player then was Marvelous Marv Throneberry known for his ineptitude at third base.

Like my father, Jason was more of a man’s man than a ladies’ man, and he liked to stay up all night, hanging out with the guys.

I remember one particular night at the Dakota, Jason coming into my room and shaking me.

“Stevie, you awake?”

I hadn’t been, but I was now, with a slightly tipsy Jason Robards poking at me.

“What? What’s up?”

“Nothing, pal,” he said. “Just me and the guys having a few drinks and shooting the shit in the living room.”

“So?”

“So, why don’t you come in and join us.”

I didn’t really want to. I was half asleep. But Jason was insistent. So I got up and went into the living room where Jason was entertaining Peter O’Toole and a few other guys. We stayed up most of the night, the guys telling off-color jokes and getting loaded while I drank Cokes. It was a great, raucous night and I’ll always remember that Jason made me feel like one of the boys.

So, now that I think about it, it seems that it was my mother’s fate to be surrounded by bad boys. First there was Bogart. Then Jason. Then me.

Though I never participated in drive-by shootings or dealt crack in alleys, I did get into mischief often during the next ten years, and I think a lot of it had to do with anger over my father’s death, and the continuing issue of his fame. Perhaps I inherited a mischief gene from my father, because it turns out he also was a handful at a young age.

When Bogie was thirteen he went to a private school in New York. It was the Trinity School, an old Episcopalian institute for young gentlemen. It was on 91st Street near Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.

Trinity was like a European school, with a lot of emphasis on Latin and other languages that never come up in real life unless you’re a priest, and I think my father knew he would never need them. Trinity also made a big deal about memorization, which my father despised, though perhaps it was a discipline that he would later apply to movie scripts. He said, “At Trinity I wasn’t taught right. They made you learn dates and that was all. They would tell you a war was fought in 1812. So what? They never told you why people decided to kill each other at just that moment.”

The young Bogart boy at Trinity wore a blue serge suit, white vest, white shirts, and maybe a brass buttoned Chesterfield for good measure. My father was the properly dressed boy, all right, but he also wore a hat to school every day, apparently just to get attention. He did not fit in well, mostly because immediately after school every day he had to rush home to work as a model for his mother, the artist.

At Trinity he was called into the headmaster’s office to be reprimanded on a regular basis. He describes one of his conversations with the headmaster this way:

“Herr Luther has reported you again,” the headmaster said.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“He complains that you started a riot in class this morning, and he’s given you a failure in German.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like German,” I said.

“Nor Herr Luther?”

“No, sir.”

“Since you don’t like German and you don’t like English or history or economics, will you tell me if there is anything that you do like, Master Bogart.”

“I like math, sir. Algebra.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s nothing theoretical about it. It’s simply fact. You can do a problem and get your answer and then you prove the answer’s right.”

“But these riots. This endless flouting of authority. Why do you do these things?”

I don’t know what my father told the headmaster that day. But this flouting of authority was a Bogart trademark throughout his life.

“I always liked stirring things up, needling authority,” he said. “Even in my childhood it gave me pleasure. I guess I inherited it from my parents. They needled everyone including each other.”

He inherited it from his parents, and maybe I inherited it from him. Like my father, I went to a private school in New York. I went to Buckley, a very exclusive school, where I was probably the only child of movie stars, but I was also probably from the poorest family. It seemed as if most of the kids were the sons of multimillionaire industrialists and bankers.

I got into a lot of mischief at Buckley, but somehow I got through it and went on to prep school in Massachusetts, which is the same thing my father had done.

Bogie had to repeat his third year at Trinity because of a bout with scarlet fever, but after that he went to Phillips Academy in Andover, where his father had gone to prep school.

“You will go on to Yale,” his mother Maud told him.

It was a hope that my mother would later have for me. Both mothers were to be disappointed.

It was 1917 when Dad went into Phillips.

“Studying will be encouraged and hijinx will not be tolerated,” he was told on his first day. So right away he didn’t care for it. One classmate says, “The thing I remembered was his sullenness. I got the impression that he was a very spoiled boy. When things didn’t go his way he didn’t like it a bit.”

“People in authority are so damn smug,” Bogie said. “I can’t show reverence when I don’t feel it. So I was always testing my instructors to see if they were as bright or godlike as they seemed to be.”

By Christmas of that year my father was flunking most of his courses, and he was thinking of burning his report card or maybe burying it under the campus green. But no, he brought it home, and when he did show it to Maud and Belmont, his folks told him to bring his marks up or he would be yanked out of school and put to work. His marks did not improve, however, and Humphrey’s father, in a last ditch effort to keep the boy enrolled wrote to the headmaster, saying that Humphrey was basically a good kid who had just “lost the way.”

Doctor Bogart wrote, “The whole problem seems to be that the boy has given up his mind to sports and continuous correspondence with his girl friends.” This, I can relate to with ease. When I was that age I was also obsessed with sports and girls.

Bogie’s father went on to say that, “the harder the screws are put on, the better it will be for my son.”

This, I guess, was tough love for the times, but the fact is that tighter screws did not do the trick. On May 15, 1918, Dad was, in the politest possible language, thrown out of Phillips with a promise from the headmaster that he would probably “profit from this unfortunate occurrence.”

Years later my father put his own spin on the dismissal. He attributed it to “high spirits” and “infractions of the rules.” My father, apparently, would rather be thought of as a discipline case than an academic failure, and he bragged about a couple of pranks which probably never occurred. No discipline problems showed up on his report card, but failures in Chemistry, English, French, Geometry, the Bible, and even Algebra did.

Discipline problems did, however, show up on my report cards years later when I also went to a Massachusetts prep school. My school was Milton Academy in the town of Milton. I remember when I got suspended from Milton. They put me on a train back to New York. As the train rumbled through Connecticut and into New York, I rehearsed in my mind what I would say to my mother, how I would explain the terrible mistake that had been made by Milton. When I got home to the Dakota I went up to the door leading to the kitchen, as I always did. We have always been a kitchen family. Mother was in another part of the apartment, so for a long time I stood alone outside the apartment like a wounded pup, bracing myself for the terrible tongue-lashing I would get from my mother. I tried to work myself into a state of hysteria that would bring on a good crying jag so that I would get some sympathy.

Now, a digression about my famous mother, Betty Bacall. Don’t call her Lauren and don’t call her Baby. She’s Betty to her friends, and Ms. Bacall to everybody else.

My mother is a woman who has dedicated her life to excellence. She adores excellence in art, in music, in everything. Unfortunately, Mom is a perfectionist. Which means she not only adores excellence, she expects it. And she expects it in people. So if you are one of my mother’s children and you do something great, get A’s on your report card, win a trophy, marry well, whatever, don’t plan on getting congratulated or patted on the back. It is merely expected of you.

Having said this, I’m now going to tell you that I caught holy hell when my mother opened the back door and I had to tell her I had been suspended from Milton Academy, right? Wrong. I understand my mother better now than I did then, and I should have known she would not bawl me out.

When I told her what happened, she just held me in her arms. “It’s all right, Stephen, it’s all right.”

My mother has always been a good mother, always loved us and worried about us. She has always put her children first. Though she might not have always shown the love, Leslie and I always knew it was there. This time she certainly showed it. It is when the chips are down that my mother is at her best. When the chips are down she is always there.

Unfortunately, it takes the chips being down for her to get to that point. She is not a fair-weather friend; she is a foul-weather friend.

So when things were bad for me, my mother was a hell of a lot more supportive than Bogie’s mother was of him, and maybe that’s why I eventually graduated from Milton, while he flunked out of Phillips. Bogie’s mother tended to harass him for being a failure, which is why, after he was thrown out of Phillips, my father joined the navy.

The First World War was on, and Dad was assigned as the helmsman on the Leviathan, a troop transport ship which had once been a German passenger liner. My father’s irreverence for authority figures continued, and it wasn’t long before his low opinion of people in high places got him in hot water. An officer gave Bogie an order and he told the officer, “That’s not my detail.” As the story goes, the officer slugged my father, and Bogie never made that particular mistake again.

However, there were other incidents.

“One time he took an unauthorized leave,” says Phil Gersh, who worked with Sam Jaffe, “so they posted him as a deserter. He got ten days in the brig. Bogie didn’t care for the sentence so he gave his captain some lip about it, and they made it twenty days. He gave them more lip and they made it thirty days.”

Dad also liked to shoot craps on the ship and on at least one occasion he lost his entire month’s pay before reaching Paris and the French girls that he had so eagerly looked forward to.

Shortly after the armistice was signed my father pulled his final navy prank. His captain ordered him to make out the discharge papers for two hundred of the most deserving men. Dr. James Mitchell, who served with my father, and was later a physician for MGM, says, “Humphrey went below and made out his own discharge first. He was about to go over the side with seabag and hammock in hand when the captain spied him and asked where he was going. Humphrey answered that he had orders to discharge the most deserving men first, and he thought he was the most deserving man aboard ship. The captain insisted he go below and finish out his service time.”

While my father was not exactly a model of navy excellence, he did look great in uniform. In photos from those days he looks handsome and dashing, a regular navy poster boy. And he finally did get his honorable discharge.

I often wonder about my father’s life in the military. On the one hand, he was a patriot and I am sure he would have died for his country if it came to that. But he was an iconoclast, too, forever thumbing his nose at institutions like the military. He was perhaps amused by the very idea of himself in uniform. And I wonder, too, about the difference between two men, one who serves in the military and one who doesn’t. Did the navy instill my father with a discipline that I never had? Did the navy “make a man out of him,” as we are so often told that service does? If he had not served, would he still have had the work ethic that later characterized his career?

The questions I ask about my father are often disguised versions of questions I am asking about myself, and often I wonder how my life might be different if I had served in the military, if I had gone to war instead of getting a draft deferment.

After I left Milton in 1967, when I was about the age that Dad entered the navy, I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for a year and got into more mischief. That year in Philadelphia was my year as a lowlife. My mother was paying for college, so my normal living expenses were taken care of. But I had a steady girlfriend by this time, and the $100 a month that my mother sent didn’t seem to go far enough. So I got a job at a record store, and did something that bothers me to this day. Something I’m not proud of. I gave away hundreds of record albums so that people would like me. My new friends would come in and say, “Hey Steve, can I take some records?” and I’d say, “Sure, help yourself.” It got ridiculous. One time a guy I hardly even knew came in, and he must have walked off with twenty record albums. This was my way of making friends. My class at Milton had sixty-three boys, and when I got to this big school in Philly it was like being dropped off in the center of a huge city where I knew no one. I didn’t really know how to make friends, except by giving them stuff. All I had to do was give them records that weren’t mine. I think in some weird way it was part of the Bogie thing, a way of being popular for who I was. In Philadelphia, people didn’t like me because I was Humphrey Bogart’s son—they liked me because I would let them steal albums out of the record shop. At the time, crazy as it seems now, anything was better than being liked because of my father.

During this whole period I lost contact with my mother. It was the breakaway scenario, a time of rebellion, of trying to be anonymous. I never called home. Most of the time my mother didn’t really know where I was. During that year I did a lot of things I’m ashamed of. For example, I stole money from my friend Jon Avnet, who was one of the people I moved in with after I got kicked out of my dormitory. When Avnet found I had robbed him of sixty bucks he came to me and said, “Why didn’t you just ask?” I didn’t have an answer. That’s when he stopped being my friend. Today Jon is a very successful Hollywood producer and director, with films like Fried Green Tomatoes and Risky Business to his credit. Maybe by now he has forgotten what I did, but I never have. Sorry, Jon.

For a while I was deep into fraternity life. I was in a fraternity of real jocks, guys like Chuck Mercene who would later play for the New York Giants, and Timmy Cutter, a brilliant hockey player. This was the period of time when I started smoking grass. I didn’t really drink. I’ve never really been much of a drinker.

When I got back from Christmas break that year, I returned to the record store and the woman who was the assistant manager said, “Steve, we did inventory.”

“And?”

“Ronnie’s looking for you,” she said. Ronnie was the boss.

When Ronnie found me he said, “Steve, there are a few albums missing.”

I hadn’t stolen them for money. I had given them to friends because I wanted so much to have friends and I felt I had to kind of buy them. That they wouldn’t like me for me.

I said, “I think I’m fired.”

He said, “Right.”

I don’t know when I really stopped getting into trouble. I guess it was in the early 1980s when I met Barbara, and she helped me get over my cocaine dependence.

It was around that time that I started to think about my father and I began to ask questions whenever I met someone who had known my him. Naturally, because of my own history, I asked a lot about his misbehavior. It seemed as if everybody had a story to tell about Bogie being a bad boy.

His defiance of authority, for example, is always there, all through his life.

If Dad wasn’t going to kowtow to authority in prep school and the military he certainly wasn’t going to do it years later in Hollywood. His irreverence for the icons of the movie world became one of his best-known characteristics.

In the 1930s when the studio public relations departments were trying to make every actor look like a model of gentility, Bogie refused to pose for the cornball photos they wanted of him patting dogs, smoking pipes, and riding horses. He thought that was phony. He hated phoniness. He just wanted to be himself. I understand how he felt. Sometimes when people ask me about being Bogart’s son I feel as if I am being asked to, somehow, pose for something that is not really me.

“If I feel like going to the Trocadero wearing a pair of moccasins, that is the way I go to the Troc,” Bogart said. “If I go to the Troc and want to make a jackass of myself in front of every producer in town, that’s my business.”

The biggest Hollywood authority figure for much of my father’s career was Jack Warner, and Bogie’s battles with Warner became a part of Hollywood lore.

Jack was one of the four Warner brothers. He was the production chief, the guy who ran the studio. He fought, not just with Bogie, but with Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, and James Cagney, among others. Warner was, my father once said in an interview, “a creep.”

Warner called him up after that remark. “How can you call me a thing like that?” Warner asked. “A creep is a loathsome, crawling thing in my dictionary.”

“But I spell it ‘kreep,’ with a k, not a c,” Bogie said.

“But how can you do this to me?”

“I did it for the publicity, for the studio and you,” Bogie told him.

I suspect that the Bogart-Warner battles were special because Jack Warner could be as tactless as Dad. Once when Warner was introduced to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, he allegedly muttered that he had forgotten to bring his laundry.

I asked Sam Jaffe what my father and Warner fought about.

“Scripts,” Sam said. “Jack Warner knew your father was a good actor, but he would never consider him for better roles. I remember one time Bogart wouldn’t do a certain picture. Warner said to me, ‘Sam, you have no control of your client.’ I said, ‘Jack, I can’t control Bogart’s mind. He reads scripts and he knows what he wants to do. I can’t tell him what to do.’ This was when they had what were called slave contracts, and the studio could lay Bogie off if he rejected a story. So he was always getting suspended. Warner would hand Bogie a script and Bogie would read it and say, ‘This is a piece of crap.’ The Warners never bought a really good book or play for him. They would get some lousy script and give it to your father just so they could comply with the contract requirement that they offer him a script. But Bogie always said it was crap. He used that word, crap, a lot.”

Talking about his conflicts with Warner, my father said, “I’d read a movie script and yell that it was not right for me. I’d be called for wardrobe and refuse to report. Jack Warner would phone and say, ‘Be a good sport.’ I’d say no. Then I’d get a letter from the Warner Brothers lawyers ordering me to report. I’d refuse. Then another wire from Warner saying that if I did not report he’d cut my throat. He’d always sign it, Love to Mayo.” (My father’s wife during much of this haggling.)

I was happy to hear that my father fought with Warner about scripts. We are always hearing that everybody in Hollywood these days cares only about the deal, not the movie. My father, admittedly, played in a lot of stinkers, but he was always fighting for better movies and better scripts, never for bigger paychecks.

Jack Warner certainly was not the only Hollywood figure to get the Bogart needle. Bogie often slammed Hollywood figures in print. And he was annoyed and amused when people found this outrageous.

He said, “All over Hollywood they are continually advising me, ‘Oh, you mustn’t say that. That will get you in a lot of trouble,’ when I remark that some picture or director or writer or producer is no good. I don’t get it. If he isn’t any good why can’t you say so? If more people would mention it, pretty soon it might have some effect. The local idea that anyone making a thousand dollars a week is sacred and is beyond the realm of criticism never strikes me as particularly sound.”

The press, of course, loved the fact that Bogie was outspoken and irreverent. They found him very quotable because he did not dish out the pablum they were used to.

“I believe in speaking my mind,” Bogie said. “I don’t believe in hiding anything. If you are ashamed of anything, correct it. There’s nothing I won’t talk about. I’ve never gone along with the social structure of this town and as a result I don’t have many close friends among the actors.”

My father was outspoken not just about Hollywood, but about everything. He loved to argue. This is certainly one area in which I am my father’s son. I love to argue just for the fun of it. I’ll take the opposite side on any issue just to watch the sparks fly. Dad was stimulated by the music of the words and the exchange of ideas. And he was amused by the positions people held on various topics. One of his favorite tricks was to say something outrageous in a group, get a debate going, and then sneak away while the others continued arguing.

Bogie said, “I can’t even get in a mild discussion without turning it into an argument. There must be something in my tone of voice, or this arrogant face. Something that antagonizes everybody. Nobody likes me on sight. I suppose that’s why I’m cast as the heavy.

“The thing is, I can’t understand why people get mad. You can’t live in a vacuum, and you can’t have a discussion without two sides. If you don’t agree with the other fellow, that’s what makes it a discussion. I’d feel like a sap, starting things by throwing in with my opponent and saying, ‘Well, of course, you may be right,’ or ‘You know more about it than I do,’ and all the other half-baked compromises the tact and diplomacy boys use. My idea of an honest discussion is to begin by declaring my opinion. Then, when the other fellow says, ‘Why you’re nothing but a goddamned fool, Bogart,’ things begin to move and we can get somewhere. Or, I’m the one that pulls that line on him. Anyway, it gets a lot of action.”

Because my father was burdened with the screen image of being a tough guy, he was often confronted by jerks who wanted to test him so they could boast in the office the next day about how they had drawn down on Bogie the tough guy.

It was always a difficult spot for Dad. Usually his wit could win over these dolts, who often as not were drunk. But Bogie couldn’t always wisecrack his way out of a sticky situation. Sometimes things got physical.

Because Dad was not well known during the time of his marriages to Mary Philips and Helen Menken, most of his physical fights occurred during his third marriage, to Mayo Methot, from 1938 to 1945. In fact, she was involved in many of them. One night, for example, he and Mayo were closing down a bar. Some guy came over to their table, leaned down real close to my father and said, “I hear you’re a tough guy. But they must have been talking about somebody else, because you don’t look so tough to me.”

“You’re probably right,” my father said. “Why don’t you sit down, pal, and have a drink on me.”

The man accepted my father’s offer. But soon he started getting belligerent again. “You know what I heard?” he said.

“No,” Bogie said, “what did you hear?”

“I heard you won’t sign autographs for kids. I heard you’re too tough for that, you just brush them off.”

Bogie could see that he wasn’t going to charm this guy into submission, so he turned to Mayo and suggested it was time to quit for the night.

“Just what I thought,” the stranger said. “You’re trying to run out. Tough, huh? That’s a laugh.”

Suddenly, the man took a swing at my father. My father ducked and caught only a slight glancing blow. Then they started grappling and finally ended up on the floor of this New York night spot. Mayo yanked off one of her shoes and began banging the man with it. Finally the manager had to step in and break up the brawl.

“Darling,” Mayo later said, “it must be wonderful to be a movie star and receive such recognition from your fans.”

If Dad’s being a movie star sometimes got him into trouble, there were other times when he used his screen persona to create trouble. One time at a restaurant a friend of his, knowing Bogie’s love for pranks, came up behind my father and tapped him on the shoulder.

“All right,” the friend said, “finish your drink and get out of here. We don’t want you in this place.”

Bogart turned slowly, looked carefully around the room, then took the cigarette out of his mouth and flipped it onto the floor, grinding it out. He narrowed his eyes, spat out the last of the cigarette smoke, and said, “Listen, pal, I’m staying here. If you don’t like it you can move along. This is my territory and you know it. Or do I have to prove it to you?”

The people in the restaurant were getting nervous now and some of them started putting distance between themselves and Bogart. Bogie let the tension hang in the room for a moment, then he started laughing.

This was something he did a lot, and sometimes he would get into fake fights, pulling his punches the way he had to in the movies.

Many of my father’s pranks would be big hits today on David Letterman. When Bogie was in Paris with Mother, Peter Viertel, and Joan Fontaine, he picked up a street wino and invited him to join them all for dinner. After dinner he gave the bum fifty bucks and a cigar. Also in Paris, he picked up a prostitute and introduced her around as his fiancee.

When I was eight months old, Bogie went back to New York and his visit to the El Morocco club led to one of the most infamous stories of his mischief.

The story, as it appeared in newspapers the next day, was that Bogie and Bacall were in New York on vacation. They went out nightclubbing with Bogie’s friend Bill Seeman and other friends. Around midnight my mother and the others went home, but Bogie and Seeman stayed out to continue carousing. They arrived at El Morocco after midnight, carrying two giant stuffed pandas, which my father had bought for me. They introduced the pandas all around as their “dates,” and asked to be seated at a table for four, so their pandas could have chairs. They propped the pandas, which were over three feet high, in the chairs and proceeded to drink.

At a nearby table two young women, one a socialite, the other a well-known fashion model, were having drinks with their dates. At one point one of the young women came over and picked up one of the pandas. Bogie, offended, pushed her and she fell to the floor. When the other young woman picked up the other panda, Bogie said something insulting to her. At that point the second woman’s boyfriend got into the act and started throwing dishes. This was followed by a melee, the details of which were not clear to anybody. My father, his friend, and their pandas were thrown out of El Morocco and banned from the club forever.

My father, admitting he was drunk at the time and that he was not completely clear on the sequence of events, tells a similar story but with important differences.

“My wife had some sense and went home to bed,” he says, “which I guess is where I should have been. But Mr. Seeman and myself went on to make it a stag party. It seemed like a good idea to us to buy a couple of those huge pandas as a present for my son and it seemed like a very good idea to take them to El Morocco for a nightcap.

“Mr. Seeman and myself were sitting perfectly quietly around a table for four at about three forty-five A.M. when some Jane I never saw before tried to steal one of the pandas on a bet or something. I couldn’t let that happen, could I?

“So I wrestled the panda away from the girl. I guess she did fall down. I’d never hit a lady. They’re too dangerous. But those pandas were huge, almost as big as she was, and she must have gotten a little top heavy. Anyway, she looked as if she’d been drinking too many Coca-Colas.”

Bogie denied that the other woman’s date had assaulted him with plates. “Nobody threatened me,” he says. “I would have pasted him. There was no slugging and nobody got hurt.” In telling his story to the papers, he even managed to quote Shakespeare. “It was just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he said. “You know how it is at that hour of the morning when everybody’s had quite a few drinks. Anyway, Mr. Seeman and myself and our two pandas left the club under our own steam.”

A few days later my father was served with a summons in his suite at the St. Regis. The model was accusing him of assault, and claiming back and neck injuries. My uncle, Charlie Weinstein, was Bogie’s lawyer.

“I thought this was a tempest in a teapot,” Bogie said, “but it has grown into a full-size hurricane. Sure, I’ll appear in court tomorrow. They tell me I’d better or else. They send policemen after you, put you in jail, and do other bad things. I think the girls are both very pretty. Too pretty to have to do anything like this for publicity. So I don’t know what the score is. I’ll tag along and see.”

The model was also suing my father for twenty-five thousand bucks, but he didn’t take it too seriously. In court he was asked, “Were you drunk at the time?” He replied, “Isn’t everybody at three in the morning?” The case was dropped.

My mother tells me, “The funny thing about the pandas is that when Bogie took them home you wouldn’t play with them and you didn’t even look at them for three years. When you were four you used to ride them when you watched cowboy films on television.”

It was the panda incident more than others that cemented my father’s reputation as a carouser. A couple of months later he was quoted in a newspaper column as saying that New York was a fun town, implying that the city’s clubs and restaurants closed their eyes to drunkenness and disorderly conduct. My father thought such carousing was becoming a lost art, at least among movie stars. “Errol Flynn and I are the only ones left who do any good old hell-raising,” he said.

The head of New York’s Society of Restaurateurs responded by saying that Bogart and Errol Flynn would get the “bum’s rush” the next time they tried to “get stiff and raise hell.”

“New York restaurant owners don’t condone misbehavior by big movie stars, millionaires, or anyone else,” he said. “This is a clean town. There isn’t a public place here that wouldn’t give Bogart, Flynn, or anyone else the boot if they carried on in a disturbing manner.”

One prominent theatrical publicist at the time was sure that this outrageous night life would ruin my father’s career. “If that guy doesn’t get wise to himself pretty soon and stop trying to make like he’s in the movies all the time, he’ll be finished,” he said.

Of course, by the time of the panda incident my father was married to Bacall, and he was also fifty years old. Both of these things inhibited wild nightlife, and he was really not the party animal he once had been.

Still, he was concerned about the image of him that was being created. Just before he left to film The African Queen he said, “Some people think the only thing I’ve done is get involved in barroom bouts. Why, I’ve been in over forty plays. I’ve done some lasting things, too. What they are I can’t think of at the moment, but there must have been some.”

My father was a guy who had a lot to say about a lot of things, including celebrity reporting.

“People who live in glass houses need ear plugs and a sense of humor,” he said. “If they hear everything that’s said about them and are disturbed by everything they hear, they’ll go through life in a constant state of hypertension and high blood pressure. By the nature of my profession I live in a glass house. When I chose to be an actor I knew I’d be working in the spotlight. I also knew that the higher a monkey climbs the more you can see of his tail. So I keep my sense of humor and go right along leading my life and enjoying it. I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.

“Like many another honest burgher, my vices are reasonably modest and unspectacular. But some of the stories you should hear. I have an interesting, never dull, but hardly scandalous life. I am not going about slugging people in saloons, chasing starlets, smoking marijuana, or otherwise making headlines. Of course, I express an opinion now and then, but it’s all in fun. So if people want to create a legend of a hell-raising Bogie, in keeping with some of my film roles, it is necessary that they invent little stories and pass them along as authentic.”

Though my father eventually ran out of energy for late-night drinking, he never tired of pranks. There are many stories about my father’s mischief and there is no reason to doubt most of them. However, I’ve learned that my father’s impishness was so legendary that it has spawned a good many stories which are suspect.

One story that is true, though, concerns the time when my father made Action in the North Atlantic with Raymond Massey. There was a scene where he and Massey were supposed to jump from a burning tanker ship into a burning oil slick on the ocean. Of course, stunt doubles would be doing the jumping for the high-priced talent.

“My double is braver than your double,” Bogie said to Massey.

“Like hell, he is,” Massey said. “My double is twice as brave as your double.”

Somehow this disagreement became a discussion of which actor was the braver and before long the men had machoed their way into doing the stunt themselves. Both of them got burned slightly, but not seriously, leaping into the water. The director, of course, was horrified that millions of Warner Brothers dollars had been put in jeopardy by the prank, which made it all the more enjoyable for my father.

On that same film, Bogie told Dane Clark, who then was waiting to be built up as “the new Bogart,” that Warner’s was going to change Clark’s name to Jose O’Toole and make him into a new Irish-South American sensation. Clark apparently fell for it, and had a big blow-up with Jack Warner, until the two of them figured out that Bogie had tricked them.

Richard Brooks, the director, tells a Bogie story concerning chess. My father was a great chess player, but Mike Romanoff was better. Brooks says that one time Bogie and Romanoff were playing a series of games and Romanoff had to pay a hundred bucks to charity if my father won a certain number of them. During this series of games the prince had to go into the hospital for some minor surgery and they decided they would keep playing the chess match, by phone. But Bogie set it up so that he played in his booth at Romanoff’s and he had two phones handy. Romanoff would call in with his move and Bogie would stall for time before making a counter move. Then he’d get on the other phone and call some big US chess champion who would tell him what moves to make.

Swifty Lazar told me about the time my father pushed him in the pool at Sinatra’s house. When Swifty got even by pushing Bogie into the pool my father was really pissed off because he was wearing a very expensive watch that my mother had just bought him. “What the hell are you going to do about this?” he asked, handing Swifty the soaked watch. “I’m going to dry it off,” Swifty said and he tossed the watch in the fireplace. The next day he bought my father a Mickey Mouse watch to replace it, but eventually he replaced the expensive one.

Inevitably, Dad became the target of pranksters, as well. Sybil Christopher, who used to be Sybil Burton, told me, “I remember one time Richard and Betty playing a trick. Bogie was working on a film and when he got home Richard was lying on the couch, wearing Bogie’s pajamas. But Bogie outsmarted them; he just said hello, and pretended nothing was odd. Bogie would not admit that Richard was wearing his pajamas—he didn’t react at all. The joke fell flat because Bogie outsmarted them.”

I found out that my father was feisty. And he was combative. But his battles were not all fought to show off his wit, or to win an argument. He had, everybody says, an unmoving set of principles and he would rather raise hell than be silent when the events around him came in conflict with what he believed was right. This did not surprise me, but it pleased me to hear it from people who knew him. Did I, too, have an unmoving set of principles? Yes, I decided. Could some of my behavior be excused because I was fighting for what I believed in? No. But I heard stories about my father standing up for people, and I like to think that if Bogie could somehow be plucked from those stories and I could take his place, I would behave similarly.

“I didn’t go on the set much,” Sam Jaffe says, “but I remember one time I was on the set, visiting your father, and he was being directed in a film at Columbia. I don’t remember who the director was, but at one point the producer was there and he was interfering, telling the director what to do. Finally, Bogie just stopped working and he said to the producer, ‘Look, I can’t be directed by you and him. He is the director. If you want to tell him something, do it at some other time. If you want to be a director I’ll help you find a story and you can direct your own picture. But don’t try to direct this man.’ That’s an example of what Bogie represented as a person.”

And Phil Gersh remembers that my father was very affected by World War II, and that he put in a lot of time visiting wounded soldiers. Gersh remembers being with Bogie in 1942 during the Second World War when Bogie went overseas to do a show for the troops with Mayo Methot. Bogie stayed at a hotel that was there for generals and colonels. Phil stayed with the grunts. When Bogie realized that Phil was not at the hotel he went looking for him.

“Where are you sleeping?” Bogie asked.

“On the ground,” Phil said.

“No,” Bogie said, “I want you to stay in my room.”

“But that’s for officers,” Phil said.

“I don’t care,” Bogie told him. “We’ll get you a bed and you can stay in my room.”

So Bogie went to some commanding general and told him he wanted an extra bed for his friend. When the brass turned him down, he said, “Fine. If you won’t let me have a bed in my room for my friend, then you won’t have a show.”

So, of course, he got the bed, and Phil got a good night’s sleep.

Gersh was one of many people who had stories to tell about Bogie ruffling feathers, needling people, even speaking unkindly and hurting feelings. But I also heard stories like this one, stories about Bogie speaking out for the little guy. I liked to hear those stories. Because the truth is my own mischief was not always cute at the time that it was happening. I had often behaved badly, and I often hurt the feelings of people who had been kind to me. A lot of my mischief made me feel crummy about myself. So it was reassuring to learn that my imperfect father must have felt crummy about himself from time to time, must have had his own regrets about shallow moments and thoughtless remarks.

And as I roamed from one Bogie friend to the next and listened to the stories about my father’s more admirable traits, I found that they, too, were deeply satisfying because I still had some growing up to do and my father, though dead these many years, was teaching me ways to do it.

* * *

I am in my room at the Mapleton Drive House. But it is not my room. It has not been my room for thirty-six years. It is someone else’s room, and there is no evidence that I have ever been here before. I find that this room does not sweep me back to my childhood as easily as I’d thought it would. In fact, I remember little. What I do remember, oddly, is something that hung on the wall. A wooden frame, a square of glass, and in the middle is a check from the President of the United States.

In my memory I am a kid again, and one day I take the frame down from the wall and examine it. I expect the check to be somehow bigger than other checks, but it is ordinary looking. It is from Harry S Truman and it is made out to “Baby Bogart.” I ask my father about it.

“Well,” he says, “before you were born I made a bet with the president that you would be a girl. He said you would be a boy. He was right.”

“So how come you didn’t send him a check?”

“I did,” my father says. “He wrote me a note. He said, ‘It is a rare instance when I find a man who remembers his commitments and meets them on the dot.’ Then he sent the money back, only he sent it to you.”

These memories are just slivers, so frustratingly fleeting, and now I am awakened from this one. I look one last time around the room that once was mine. I try to remember exactly where the framed check hung on the wall. But I can’t. I smile. I still have that check at home. It’s like winning a bet from my father.

* * *