It was not a good time to be a Democrat in the movie business, especially one partisan to me. But Bogie never seemed to give a damn for what people said or thought.
—ADLAI STEVENSON
My father and I both reached the age of military service during a war. The big difference was that his was a “good war,” World War I, and mine was an unpopular war in Vietnam. Another difference: he enlisted, I was drafted.
That is, I got my draft notice. It came four weeks after I got thrown out of Boston University, which is where I went to school for a short time after I got thrown out of the University of Pennsylvania.
I tried heroically to get out of being drafted, but it seemed as if all the legal dodges were being snatched away from me faster than I could scheme up ways of using them.
First they dropped the student deferment. Then they dropped the deferment for being married. Then they dropped the deferment for being a father. It looked for a while there as if I was about to be dropped into South Vietnam, or at least to some godforsaken military base in South Carolina.
So I did the only rational thing. I applied for status as a conscientious objector. This conscientious objector thing was big in the 1960s. People who couldn’t even spell conscientious were suddenly having pangs of conscience. Lots of guys like me had gotten the crazy idea that they didn’t want to be shot to death in an Asian jungle, but you couldn’t say that. What you could say was that you didn’t want to shoot somebody else to death in an Asian jungle.
So I filled out this conscientious objector application and it was sent to some kind of three-man board that would decide whether or not I qualified. Amazingly, one guy on the board actually voted in my favor, which meant that my plea was sent on to Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick turned me down. Maybe that was because Nixon just didn’t like conscientious objectors. Or maybe it was because he remembered that my father stumped for Helen Gahagan Douglas, when she ran against Nixon for the Senate in 1950. Anyhow, the president said, “You’re next, Steve.”
I went to some federal building in Hartford, Connecticut, and I took all the mental and physical tests. Unfortunately, I was healthy, hetero, and relatively sane. I was qualified to get shot in the jungle. So I figured I’d better check out the navy. After all, my father had been in the navy and he had lived.
At the navy recruiting office, I remember being in this harshly lit, bare-walled room and there was this big dog-faced navy guy behind a long table, and he looked very officious.
“Bogart?” he said. “Any relation to Humphrey?”
“I’m his son.”
“No shit?” he said. “I didn’t know he had kids.”
So he went through the drill. He told me all his favorite Bogie movies, and then did his Bogie impression. We seemed to be getting along okay, so I said to him, “Hey, look, I’ll sign up if you can take me after January 6, my birthday.”
“Jesus, I’d love to do it,” he said. “You know, for your father and all.” He shuffled around a few papers and said, “The latest we can take you is December 24th.”
I didn’t want that, so I said, “Look, if I get drafted, can I come down here and sign up?”
He said yes.
So I resigned myself to the fact that I would get drafted and I’d go into the navy and probably drown in the South China Sea.
But, you know, every once in a while life acts like a movie, and gives you a last minute reprieve, like the scene in The African Queen, when the homemade torpedo exploded right on cue just as the Germans were about to hang my father and Katharine Hepburn. My lucky torpedo was that the draft lottery came in, and I got number 224, a high number. That first year the lottery picks went up to 218 so I was spared. The next year they started all over again, beginning with the new kids who had turned eighteen, so I was spared again. In this way, I never did have to go into the military.
But the thing was—and it’s always kind of bothered me—I didn’t have a strong political conscience. I just wanted to stay alive.
So naturally when I started exploring my father’s life, I wondered just how politically involved my father was. Was he like me, a bit on the apathetic side? Or was he the kind of person who would carry banners and say that people like me were part of the problem?
When I started talking to his friends, I found out that Bogie certainly was less concerned about getting shot at than I was. He did not try to avoid combat, the way I did, but, of course, the wars were more noble in his day.
Bogie’s pal Stuart Rose, who would later marry Bogie’s sister Frances, known as Pat, had joined the army and had some colorful stories to tell. So joining the military seemed like a good idea to my father. He’d get to wear a uniform and meet beautiful French girls, and, as a bonus, he’d get the hell away from Maud, who was driving him nuts.
Consent came with some difficulty from his parents. But they must have sensed that he desperately needed to put a few thousand miles of saltwater between himself and them. I’m sure he didn’t come right out and say, “Mother, I’ve got to get away from your constant harping about what a failure and troublemaker I am,” but that’s what it amounted to.
While the idea of dying in Vietnam was very real to me in the late 1960s—after all, I had seen it on television—the possibility of death in combat was not real to my father when he was eighteen. “Death was a big joke,” he said. “Death? What does death mean to a kid of eighteen? The idea of death starts getting to you only when you’re older, when you read obituaries of famous people whose accomplishments have touched you, and when people of your own generation die. At eighteen war was great stuff. Paris. French girls. Hot damn!”
There are two well-known but conflicting stories about his navy days. Only one of them, at most, is true.
The first story is that his boat, the Leviathan, was shelled by a German U-boat and one explosion caused a splinter of wood to pierce my father’s upper lip. The injury damaged a nerve and left the lip partially paralyzed. The resulting tight-set lip would forever be associated with Humphrey Bogart and it would be the physical feature that three generations of impressionists would focus on when they tried to create their own Humphrey Bogart. The paralysis also affected my father’s speech, leaving him with a slight lisp that doesn’t seem to have hurt his movie career.
However, there is another story about how he got the stiff lip. In this one, Dad was not yet onboard. He was on shore duty and he was assigned to take a navy prisoner up to the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire. The prisoner was handcuffed. When they changed trains in Boston the prisoner asked my father for a cigarette. Bogie (who, by the way, was not yet known as Bogie—that would come later in Hollywood) gave the guy a Lucky Strike and, while he was fishing around in his pea jacket for a match, the guy raised his manacled hands, smashed Dad across the mouth, and split. My father, with his lip damn near ripped from his face, whipped out his .45 and put the prisoner down with a couple of shots. The results were the same: my father was scarred for life.
Nathaniel Benchley says this second story is the true one. He says the shrapnel story is ridiculous because it is alleged to have happened sixteen days after the war was over and that even if there was delayed-action shrapnel, it could not have traveled in any direction which would have produced the scar.
Maybe. But the thing that bothers me about Benchley’s conclusion is that he says the shrapnel story was made up by a studio publicity department. I don’t get it. Why would a studio PR flack make up a story about Humphrey Bogart catching shrapnel in the lip if there was already a true story about how he plugged an escaping prisoner with his .45? If anything sounds like studio fiction it’s the prisoner story. Anyhow, Dad got stitched up by a navy doctor in both stories, and the lip became part of the legend.
In talking to Bogie’s friends I heard different versions of many stories and there is, at this point, no way to get the precise truth. That’s what happens when you’re a legend. Of course, it bothers me to hear stories about my father, never knowing for sure if they are true. And it bothers me to tell them, too. We all crave certainty in these things; we’d all like to say, “My father did this, he didn’t do that.” But the truth is that not only the sons of legends have to deal with it. We all do from time to time. We all have a colorful Uncle Jack or a Cousin Mertie whose exploits have been distorted over the years, and whose stories have been filtered down through different family lines in different ways. When I began to write about my father, people said to me, “You can’t tell two different stories about the same event. You’ll lose credibility.” They seemed to think that Bogie’s son should be the one who always knows the truth, though they certainly didn’t know the whole truth about their own fathers or mothers. I disagree. I think credibility comes from owning up to uncertainty, from simply saying from time to time, “I don’t know.”
I do know that when his navy tour was over Bogie went back to his mother, who belittled him constantly about his lack of education.
The military, it seems, had not been a particularly formative experience.
“I’m sorry that the war had not touched me mentally,” my father said. “When it was over I was still no nearer to an understanding of what I wanted to be or what I was.”
* * *
Bogie, of course, was not done with the military after serving in World War I. Gloria Stuart, an actress who used to play card games with Bogie and Mayo Methot, remembers that when World War II came along, my father began a series of chess matches which he would play by mail with troops overseas.
My father wanted to do what he could for the troops, so during the Christmas season of 1943 he and Mayo went to North Africa for a twelve-week tour of army rest camps. It’s a humorous image, Humphrey Bogart doing a soft shoe, twirling a cane, and singing “Thanks for the Memories” with Bob Hope. He did have a fair singing voice, but the fact is that his act consisted of reciting speeches from The Petrified Forest and other films. And Mayo sang “More Than You Know,” a song she was known for, and other tunes, accompanied on the accordion by Don Cummings.
By the time he got to North Africa, Bogie was known around the world, mostly from his gangster films. A measure of his growing international fame was that one day when he and Mayo were touring the ancient Casbah, an Arab man jumped out of a doorway at him. He lifted his arm as if he were holding a submachine gun and shouted a stream of foreign words at Dad, which turned out to be the Arabic equivalent of “Rat-tat-tat-tat, you’re dead, you dirty rat!”
Though Bogie was a patriot who felt strongly about supporting the troops, he was his usual iconoclastic self when it came to the brass. At one point on the tour he and Mayo had a big fight. She locked him out of their bedroom. Bogie began pounding on the door to get in. A colonel showed up and, seeing Bogie in uniform (it was a USO uniform), told him to stop it. Then he asked for my father’s name, rank, and serial number.
“I’ve got no name,” Bogie told him. “I’ve got no rank. I’ve got no serial number. And you can go to hell.”
Later, when Bogie was reprimanded for insulting the uniform of the United States Army, he apologized to the colonel, saying, “I didn’t mean to insult the uniform. I meant to insult you.”
In Naples, Italy, when Bogie threw a big party for a group of enlisted men, things got a bit rowdy. A general from across the hall complained about the noise, and Bogie shouted, “Go fuck yourself.” Soon after that he was moved out of Italy.
Back home Bogie continued his military service by joining the coast guard reserve. He went on duty once a week. In fact, it was often on his coast guard weekends in Balboa that my father had secret romantic meetings with a striking young actress known as Lauren Bacall, also known as my mother.
I’m sure my father would have entertained the troops, no matter which party was in power during the war. But, as it happened, he was a liberal Democrat most of the time and he was an ardent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. Bogie was not as politically active as Jane Fonda, or even Lauren Bacall, for that matter. But he did speak up for Democratic candidates, like Harry Truman, and he donated money to their campaigns.
The war, however, made Dwight Eisenhower very popular and both of my parents became early Ike supporters before anybody even knew if Ike would run for President. Bogie and Bacall hoped that Ike would run, and that he would run as a Democrat. But Ike went to the GOP. Though my folks still liked Ike, they began taking a second look at his Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson. Especially my mother.
The more Mom heard about Stevenson, the more intrigued she became. She talked to friends about Adlai. She read a book about Adlai. She went to a party for Adlai in Hollywood. This was at a time when Hollywood was very touchy about politics, especially left-wing politics. In fact, at the party one well-known producer told Mother, “If you’re smart you’ll keep your mouth shut and take no sides.”
Before long my mother had switched her allegiance from Eisenhower to Stevenson, and she was able to get my father to do the same thing. At one point Bogie was scheduled to fly to an Ike rally and, at the last minute, he changed his mind and went with Bacall to a rally for Stevenson. This was the early 1950s, of course, and by this time Bogie was one of the most famous movie stars in the world, so it was quite a coup for Adlai.
If my father was not quite as passionate for Stevenson as my mother, it might have been that she was much younger and more prone to political optimism. And also to the fact that she was a woman.
My mother is quite candid about the fact that she was smitten with Adlai Stevenson. After one trip to a Stevenson event, where she got to know him personally, she says, “On the trip home I was far away from Bogie, my thoughts on the man I had left behind. I tried to imagine his life. I had found out as much as I could from his friends, anyone who had known him in the last few years. In my usual way, I romanticized that he needed a wife—obviously his sister had taken the official place of one, but he needed someone to share his life with. I fantasized that I would be a long-distance partner, a pen pal, a good friend whom he could feel free to talk to about anything. A sympathetic, nonjudging ear. It took me a long time to dissect my feelings, but at that moment I felt a combination of hero worship and slight infatuation. This campaign had disrupted my life completely. I was flattered to have been included, flattered to have been singled out by Stevenson as someone a bit special. I was, after all, just twenty-eight years old. I’d just had a second baby and had been preoccupied with domesticity for the last couple of years. My career was at something of a standstill. I needed to dream. I needed to reach out, to stretch myself, to put my unused energies to use.”
Not surprisingly, there were times when my father got sick of hearing “Adlai this,” and “Adlai that,” all the time, but his occasional fits of jealousy never got in the way of his political convictions. Bogie supported Stevenson, and Stevenson was grateful. (On the whole, my mother’s relationship with Stevenson was a very positive force in her life, and I can remember playing on his farm not long after my father died because Stevenson was, for her, the kind of friend you turn to at such a time.)
Alistair Cooke, who also favored Stevenson, was sure that Eisenhower would win the election. He tells me that he made a ten-dollar bet with my father that Adlai would lose. When Ike won Bogie paid up, but not without a comment: “It’s a hell of a guy who bets against his own principles,” Bogie said. (Cooke, by the way, could vote in the election. He is an American citizen. A lot of people think he is a British subject because of all those Masterpiece Theatres he hosted.)
Because my father was a famous actor, he caught a lot of flack for taking public stands on political issues. In 1944, when he spoke up for Roosevelt in a radio speech, Bogie was assaulted with sacks of hate mail, mostly to the effect that actors should have no political opinions and if they do have them, they should keep them to themselves.
Dad didn’t care for the mail. He shot back at his detractors in newspaper interviews and in a piece he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, titled, “I Stuck My Neck Out.” By this time his old friend Stuart Rose, now a former brother-in-law, was editor of the Post.
Bogie had little patience with the view that actors should keep their political opinions secret simply because their personal glamor might swing a few votes one way or the other. He said that idea was “idiotic.”
“I dislike politics and politicians, but I love my country,” he said. “Why should a man lose the freedom to express himself simply because he’s an actor? Nobody ever suggests that a baseball star or a best-selling author should refrain from public discussion of political issues. I don’t think anyone, and I mean anyone, should toss around a lot of political baloney, but I feel I know as much about politics and government as most guys on a soap box and if I disagree strongly with them I’m going to say so.”
In 1950 when he was campaigning for Helen Douglas, the subject came up again. “Movie stars pay a tremendous income tax,” Bogie said. “I don’t even look at my paycheck. Just put my hand over it and sign it. It would buy an airplane, I’ll tell you that. Anyone who pays $200,000 a year in income taxes darned well has a right to take an active role in politics. Of course, there are some Republicans who feel that a movie star should not have the right to engage in politics if he is a Democrat.”
By this time my father was the highest-paid movie star at Warner, and had, in some years, been the highest paid in the world, though his paycheck was paltry by today’s Hollywood standards. He had signed a fifteen-year contract with Warner Brothers in 1945 that, Benchley says, gave Bogie a million dollars a year.
Once when he was asked if he thought politicking would hurt his career, he said, “I think there are a few diehards in the backwoods of Pasadena or Santa Barbara who might not see my pictures because I’m a Democrat. But on the whole I don’t think it makes much difference. People forget quickly, as soon as the election is over, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. If you make a good picture and give a good performance people will go to see it anyway.”
Perhaps. But there came a time when politics threatened to hurt a lot of careers and did, in fact, destroy some.
In October of 1947, three years before crazy Joe McCarthy got his witch hunt underway, a publicity-hungry congressman by the name of J. Parnell Thomas chaired something called The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Thomas decided that it was extremely urgent that the committee find Commies in the movie industry. Thomas, with the help of aides like Richard Nixon, came to Hollywood for “interviews,” at which movie people were asked who they thought might be a Communist. People who gave names were considered “friendly.” In reaction to this, nineteen Hollywood writers, directors, and producers formed a group that said it was none of Congress’s business what their politics were or had been. Of those nineteen, eleven were asked to testify before Congress. One of the eleven, Bertolt Brecht (the guy who wrote The Threepenny Opera), skipped town. He went back to his home in Germany. The rest became known as the “Unfriendly Ten.” A lot of people in the movie industry were outraged. They felt as if the ten were being accused of something, without being given a trial. They also thought that Congress should be making laws, not trying to enforce them. John Huston got a bunch of these movie people together and they formed The Committee for the First Amendment. Their purpose was never specifically to defend the Unfriendly Ten. It was to fight what they believed was an assault upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Huston, in fact, said some of these people really were Communists. “But they were well-meaning people who had no knowledge of the Gulag Archipelago or of Stalin’s mass murders,” he said. Huston went to a few Communist meetings and he found it all very childish. “I marveled at the innocence of these good but simple people who actually believed that this was a way of improving the social condition of mankind.”
When an attorney for the Unfriendly Ten asked Huston for support, he got together a planeload of movie stars and, with Howard Hughes supplying the plane, they all went to Washington. Among them: Danny Kaye, Sterling Hayden, Richard Conte, Gene Kelly, Ira Gershwin. And my parents. “I remember going to a meeting that John organized at William Wyler’s house,” my mother recalls. “I told your father ‘we have to go.’”
When it came time for testimony, the movie stars were there for moral support. The ten, led by writer Dalton Trumbo, told Thomas in so many words to shove his committee where the sun don’t shine. They refused to answer questions, citing their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. But they did read statements. They wanted the Supreme Court to rule on whether or not the committee had the right to make a Communist identify himself as one.
Thomas banged his gavel and vowed to put them in jail for contempt of Congress.
The press, which until then had been friendly, now turned against the ten and against the Committee for the First Amendment. Soon the committee was being described as a Communist front organization, and one columnist wrote, “There is very good evidence that John Huston is the brains of the Communist party in the west.”
After that Washington trip my father did some serious backtracking. He felt as if he had gone out on a limb, and had been assured that the Unfriendly Ten had been unjustly maligned. Now, as it became clear that some of them were Communists, Bogie was pissed because he felt as if he had been used.
“I am not a Communist,” he said. “I detest communism as any other decent American does. I have never in my life been identified with any Communistic front organization. I went to Washington because I thought fellow Americans were being deprived of their Constitutional rights and for that reason alone.
“I see now that my trip was ill-advised, foolish, and impetuous, but at the time it seemed the thing to do. I acted impetuously and foolishly on the spur of the moment, like I am sure many other American citizens do at many times.”
He told Ed Sullivan, “I’m about as much in favor of communism as J. Edgar Hoover. I despise communism and I believe in our American brand of democracy. Our planeload of movie people who flew to Washington came east to fight against censorship being clamped on the movies. The ten men cited for contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee are certainly not typical of Hollywood. On every occasion at Washington we stressed our opposition to Lawson and his crew, so there could be no doubt as to where we stood. In fact, before we left Hollywood we carefully screened every performer so that no red or pink could infiltrate and sabotage our purpose.”
My father’s reaction had many interpretations. Some people felt that he was copping out, just trying to protect his career. Others say that he just didn’t want to be part of something that he couldn’t control. My mother, always looking for the best in Bogie, says that he realized that he was misled and he was angry about it.
I’ve given this some thought. I’m not sure that my mother’s view makes sense. It seems to me that if Bogie and the others went to Washington to defend a principle, not the ten accused, then that principle didn’t change just because some of the ten really were Communists. If he went to defend constitutional rights, then how was he misled or ill-advised? I happen to think that Bogie was wrong here, just as I have been wrong about hundreds of things. Maybe he was just trying to save his career. Maybe he was a human being and was expressing the simple human desire for self-preservation. Dad, apparently, came to feel the same way about his change of heart. Mother says, “He felt coerced into it, and he was never proud of it.”
The ten were eventually convicted of contempt of Congress and sent to jail, some for as much as a year. One ironic twist, which I found satisfying: Some of them were sent to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, and one of their fellow inmates was none other than J. Parnell Thomas, the great, self-righteous, Commie-hunter. Turns out he was a scummy little crook who was bagged for padding a payroll and taking kickbacks.
My father’s role in the Unfriendly Ten, of getting involved politically and then dropping out, would not make for good cinema. Much more effective is the reverse, which is what Bogie often played in films: the man who does not want to get involved, wants to be left alone, but is eventually drawn in and compelled to take a side because a principle is at stake. Remember Charlie Allnut in The African Queen? When Hepburn’s character suggests that they cruise on down the river and blow up a German ship he tells her she is nuts and he wants no part of it. Of course, he ends up designing his own torpedo and going after the Germans with Hepburn.
Casablanca is, of course, the classic example. Rick Blaine was this tough American who ran a cafe in Morocco. Even though he was flanked on every side by someone’s political passion, he was the kind of guy who didn’t take sides. He was cynical about all causes and he wanted to be left out of them. He was not into patriotism or nationalism or any other ism. But in the end he did the decent thing and he didn’t expect to be praised for it. Rick was the guy that a lot of people want to be.
Was my father like Rick Blaine? Yes, in many ways. I don’t think Dad was big on isms, either. He had ideals, but he was skeptical when other people talked about their ideals. He was big on compassion and loyalty, but his eyes tended to glaze over when other people went on too much about how compassionate and loyal they were. Maybe Rick Blaine would have handled the Unfriendly Ten controversy differently, but hell, nobody can be like Rick Blaine all the time, not even Humphrey Bogart.
Whether my father was a Rick Blaine or not, there is no question that Casablanca was the movie that gave the public its most memorable political image of Humphrey Bogart.
Alistair Cooke told me, “Your father is a legend, and a lot of it is tied up in that film, Casablanca. It was a stroke of colossal luck, that film appearing at a time when Hitler had demonstrated something we were loathe to admit: the success of violence. Casablanca first came to theaters just eighteen days after the Allied landing in Casablanca. This was one of the first great blows against Hitler. Then later, when they put the film in wider release, what was going on? Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were holding a summit conference. And where were they holding it? Casablanca. Was it any wonder that the public got your father’s character all mixed up with reality?”
Cooke is right when he says there was a lot of luck involved. But Warner Brothers gave luck a little help. The movie was scheduled to be released later in 1943, but they rushed it to theaters after the Allied invasion of Casablanca in November of 1942.
Cooke, I found, was particularly interested not in Bogie’s politics, so much as the effect that world politics had on my father’s career. He says, “The gangster film fell out of favor when World War Two came along. How could you get excited about gangsters shooting a few people, when Hitler was doing things that Warner Brothers could never dream up? And out of the top gangster stars, like Robinson, and Cagney, and Raft, it was your father who seemed best suited to go up against Nazis in the movies.”
Cooke once wrote of Bogie, “He probably had no notion, in his endless strolls across the stages and drawing rooms of the twenties, that he was being saved and soured by time to become the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s new order.”
* * *
Like most people, my father was more likely to jump into a political issue that directly affected him. One of them was censorship.
In the late 1940s, with Hitler vanquished, gangsters were popular in films again and there was a lot of whining and hand wringing about the rising number of crime movies. For a short time crime movies were even banned by the Johnston office, which was the Hollywood censorship office at the time. The ban, like most censorship attempts, was effective only for a brief time. Soon more crime movies were reaching the screen and many people were upset.
Though my father had little patience with the complainers, he did concede a few points for their side. Discussing one recent prison movie he said, “It was a story of a bunch of bad eggs who broke out of stir and finally were put back where they belonged. I can see no reason for the picture.” (This was a sentiment he had expressed before. Once, when his friend Mark Hellinger called to see what Bogie thought of the prison movie Brute Force, Bogie replied, “Why did you make it? A picture should have either entertainment or a moral. This one had neither.”)
“But it’s stupid to think that movies can foster crime,” Bogie said. “When I was young we were reading about Billy the Kid. But that didn’t make criminals out of us. If you want to find out what turns kids to crime look at their environment and particularly their family life. Parents who let ten-year-old kids stay out at night are the ones responsible for making criminals.”
Dad deplored censorship and he said it would backfire. “The Johnston office made a ruling that a criminal can’t use a sawed-off shotgun or a tommy gun in pictures,” he said. “And movie cops have to be big and there has to be lots of them. So when you show a capture it appeals to a child’s favor of the underdog. Like when I got caught in High Sierra. I was up on that mountain with the whole state against me.”
Writing in the New York Times in November of 1948, Bogie came up with a “cure” for the gangster film.
Noting that he was a filmmaker and a man who was about to become a father, he said that he had a special interest in the problem. The “problem” which seemed to be emerging from all these antigangster film discussions was that the public was fascinated by the gangsters, not the police. “The reason for the gangster’s popularity,” Bogie said, “is that we don’t hunt him singly or on equal terms. We call out a horde of squad cars, the National Guard, or the entire FBI and, after hunting him down like a rabbit, fill him so full of lead even his own mother wouldn’t recognize him. Or, if we don’t, for the average American the rest of the story stops moving until the gangster has by some good fortune or some charming device on the writer’s part, got away and who in the audience at this point is going to say to himself, ‘I like those policemen’?
“The young gangster, running out into the street, or up some alley, spraying the world he hates with bullets, may not be as morally acceptable as the young Crazy Horse outwitting an American army on the march, but as a dramatic device he will catch the same amount of sympathy, killer though he is.
“The cure for the gangster film, then, seems eminently simple to me. In The Maltese Falcon we sent a single individual out against a lot of gangsters, and the result was a whole series of pictures with the lone hero against gangsters instead of vice-versa. We called him Sam Spade, but you could call him Calvin Coolidge and still get the same effect if you held to the rule. Of course, I don’t claim we’re changing basic values. You have the cavalry for you winning money instead of the Indians, but you are going to get some killings in any event.”
What I find admirable in my father on this censorship issue was not that he was against censorship, as I am, but that he was able to understand the other side, and not just paint one side of the question all black and the other all white. This, to me, is the mark of an intelligent person.
I suspect that, politically, I am much more like my father than my mother. I think of my mother as a kind of knee-jerk liberal, though it drives her crazy when I say that. I tend to be liberal on some issues, like abortion and civil rights. But I’m also conservative on others. For example, I believe in the death penalty, which horrifies my mother.
You might think that all this would make for lively arguments between myself and Bacall. Not exactly. It is true that, like my father, I love to argue. I’ll be glad to take any side of an argument just for the fun of it. My mother enjoys a spirited discussion, also. But not with me.
My father, I think, was the more patient one of the two. I think that if he were around today he would listen to me. Politically, we are alike. It’s not that he would agree with my views on each thing, but I think he would weigh each thing separately and not get caught up in the ism, whether it be liberalism or conservatism.
My father was also a “personal-religionist,” which is a phrase I’d never heard until I read it in a press release about him. Basically, it means he didn’t practice his religion. I’m not religious at all.
(Apparently, my own irreverence started early in life. When I was christened in the Episcopal church and the priest sprinkled water on my head, I said, “I don’t like the drops,” loud enough for everybody to hear. Then, near the end of the sermon, the priest said, “He shall enter the house of the Lord,” and, again very loudly, I said, “If he wants to come in, then let him come in.”)
“Bogie was not a religious man,” my mother says. “But he was a great believer in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.”
Nat Benchley says, “His moral code was strict, and was based on, and almost indistinguishable from, the Ten Commandments. He didn’t always obey them, but he believed in them.”
I don’t think learning about my father’s politics changed my own politics in any way, though it does please me to know that he had strong convictions. My own convictions are a little closer to home than his. I’m more directed toward my personal world, my wife, my kids. It isn’t that I don’t care about the larger world; it’s just that I don’t care that much, and that I think I can do the most good at home. I find I don’t tend to follow party lines, and, like my father, I am suspicious of people who do. Dad once said, “Politically, I am an anarchist. Just like John Huston.” I’m not sure that he was kidding.
Bogie seems at every turn to be a man who is difficult to sum up. But when I went to see Alistair Cooke, I wanted to come away with some understanding of my father’s politics, and I think I got it. Cooke often paused in our conversation about my father to read something he had once written about Bogie. And if the things he wrote don’t tell the whole story, they at least tell a lot of it.
“Bogart,” says Cooke, “was a touchy man who found the world more corrupt than he had hoped; a man with a tough shell hiding a fine core. He invented the Bogart character and imposed it on a world impatient of men more obviously good. And it fitted his deceptive purpose like a glove. From all he was determined to keep his secret: the rather shameful secret, in the realistic world we inhabit, of being a gallant man and an idealist.”
* * *
When I return to the top of the stairway at the Mapleton Drive house, my mother is halfway down the stairs. Has she already gone into the bedroom without me? I wonder. Did she need to be alone there? I am relieved. I don’t really want to go in there, though I haven’t quite formed that thought in my mind. As I descend the stairs I hear the sound of a car going by on Mapleton. I think for a moment that it is like the sound of Daddy pulling into the driveway after a day at the studio. But this idea melts into a different memory.
We go off in the Thunderbird, my father and I. I’m aware that it’s new and different. It’s not the Jaguar. He boasts about the new car. He says two of his friends bought Thunderbirds, but his is better. We are driving to the studio where Dad works.
We pull into the lot. It’s where they make the movies, he says. He says that going to the studio is like being allowed into the locker room of the Braves. He knows that the Braves are my favorite baseball team ever since Sammy Cahn took me to a Dodgers-Braves game.
At the studio everybody is friendly. We are on the set. Daddy says the movie is called The Desperate Hours. It seems very strange because my father is in a room, but it’s not really a room and there are people all around with lights and cameras and microphones. I am sitting in the director’s chair and people smile at me. They really say, “Quiet on the set,” just the way they do in movies I have seen about movies. I’m feeling like a big shot because my father is the star and I am his son. It’s like being the son of the batting champ.
* * *