Bogie was the most professional actor I have ever worked with. But his contract said he was off duty at six o’clock, and if it was six o’clock and we were in the middle of the scene, he was gone. He’d say, “It’s six o’clock, we’ll finish the scene tomorrow.” Then he would go and have a drink.
—ROD STEIGER
When I began to write about my father I guess I believed that every major aspect of his life would cast light on my own, that I could easily find the ways in which I was, or was not, my father’s son. His use of alcohol might say something about my use of drugs. His experience in private school might somehow preview my own trouble in private school. And I guess I thought that in looking at his career, in the way he conducted it, and the way he felt about his work, I might learn something about my feelings toward work.
Maybe. But the truth is there is little to be said about my work life. It’s been like everybody else’s, some highs, some lows. To go into my various jobs at length would be both boring and pretentious, sins which neither I nor my father would tolerate from someone else.
The most striking difference between my father and me on the matter of work is that he really cared about his craft. He was dedicated and, I think, he put work first. I, on the other hand, have enjoyed my jobs in television, and I think I have been good at them, but I have never really focused on work. I have always put family and friends above what I did for a living. Maybe if I had grown up with a father, and had not gone away to school, I would feel less strongly about the need for family life, and more strongly about career. Perhaps that is the way in which my father has really influenced me.
My father had no big career plan when he got out of the navy. He bounced around for a while. He worked at a biscuit company, then he had a job inspecting tugboats. He worked at other jobs, which didn’t last long. The young Bogie had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He spent a lot of time horseback riding with friends in Central Park.
Though Bogie’s parents were, supposedly, washing their hands of him, it is probably not a coincidence that he was hired as a runner for the Wall Street brokerage firm that managed their money. And it was while he was at that job that Bogie came under the wing of Bill Brady, Sr., the father of his long-time buddy Bill Brady. Brady senior was already an established producer of stage plays. Specifically, Dad said, “I got subway-sick one day in New York when I was running messages for the brokerage house and staggered off the subway near William Brady’s theatrical offices—and, in a moment of desperation, asked for a job.”
“How would you like to be an office boy?” Mr. Brady asked Bogie.
“Office boy?”
“It’s not a big step up from being a runner,” Brady told him, “but there are opportunities for advancement in a new business.”
“What kind of business?” Dad asked.
“Movies, my boy, movies.”
So my father became an office boy for Brady’s company, which was called World Films.
Advancement came fast. Brady stopped Bogie in the office one day and said, “How would you like to be a director?”
“A director?”
“Yes,” Brady said. He told Bogie that his picture, Life, was heading for the toilet, though he might have used a different phrase.
“I guess,” Dad said.
Brady fired the director and handed the film over to young Humphrey. “Finish directing it,” he said.
“How?”
“You figure it out,” Brady said.
Unfortunately, Dad did not figure it out and the movie was a disaster.
The experience left my father with a belief, not that he could direct, but that he could write much better than some of the people who were getting paid for scripts. Soon he began hanging around the 21 Club, a speakeasy in those days, where he would sit at small tables and lean earnestly over his notebook, penning story ideas. He smoked a pipe, which he thought made him look more writerly. (“I like to smoke a pipe,” he once said, “but it’s too damn much work.”)
When Bogie finally finished a story he sent it to Jesse Lasky, who sent it to Walter Wanger, who announced that it was dreadful, and threw it in the wastebasket. (Years later Wanger’s daughter, Shelly, would become one of my playmates, and Wanger would boast to people, “Bogie once wrote for me.”)
When the writing thing went nowhere my father became a stage manager in New York, working for Mr. Brady. Bogie was responsible for baggage, props, and scenery. The stage manager actually runs the show backstage.
Even then Dad was flouting authority. One night when Brady brought the curtain up too soon after intermission, Dad brought it back down. Brady, so the story goes, kicked Dad in the stomach. My father got even by raising the curtain while Brady was on stage, making last-minute preparations for the next act. So Brady fired him. The next day Brady rehired my father. This, apparently, was a pattern which they repeated many times—an interesting precursor to Dad’s battles with, and many suspensions by, Jack Warner.
My father’s first acting job, if you want to call it that, occurred in rehearsals. The juvenile lead was sick, so Dad filled in, with only the cast for an audience. (“Juvenile” was the term for young, well-dressed men in minor parts.)
“It was awful,” he said. “I knew all the lines of all the parts because I’d heard them from out front about a thousand times. But I took one look at the emptiness where the audience would be that night and I couldn’t remember anything.”
Fortunately, he never had to actually perform in the play because the show closed that night.
Awful or not, my father had the acting bug. He started alternating his stage-managing duties with acting stints when he could get them.
The acting bug is something that never bit me. Despite my pedigree, or perhaps because of it, I have never seriously considered being an actor. I did some acting in the eighth grade. I played Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew. Yes, I know, Bianca is a woman, but it was an all-boys school. I also acted a little bit at Milton. But, frankly, I’m a lousy actor. I’m comfortable being myself in front of people. But I’m not comfortable being someone else, and that’s what acting is. If you’re not comfortable being someone else, you’d better forget about acting. My mother keeps telling me I look great in front of the camera, but then, she is my mother.
Besides, early in life I decided that I wanted my work to have something to do with sports.
When Jady Robards and I used to go to Mets games we often sat in the bleachers, talking to each other as if one of us was the play-by-play man and the other was the color commentator.
“Yes, Jady, I think if the Mets can score more runs than the other team today they have a pretty good chance of stealing this ball game.”
“Right, Steve, many of these players have fast speed and strong strength. And quickness, lots of very rapid quickness.”
“Yes, and every one of them is one of the finest gentlemen in the game.”
Even though we only had fun pretending to be sportscasters, I, at least, often dreamed of being one. And if I couldn’t be a sportscaster, I still wanted some connection to sports.
“Well, go talk to Howard,” my mother said. This was when I was in my early twenties. I’d been starting to think that maybe a person should have some focus in life, so I had talked to my mother about my sports dreams. The Howard of whom she spoke was Howard Cosell. She called him and I got an interview.
It’s nice, I guess, to have a famous mother, because she, in turn, has a lot of celebrity friends. But, generally, I have a horror of taking advantage of that. Whenever I’m planning a trip to Disney World with my kids, for example, Mom says, “Call Michael, he’ll help you out.” She means Michael Eisner, chairman of Disney. But I never call Michael. Special treatment makes me uncomfortable; I don’t want to feel as if I’m being pushed to the head of the line. So usually I don’t take advantage of my mother’s celebrity status. But hell, I was a sports nut, and this was Howard Cosell.
So I made an appointment, and one sunny morning I drove from Connecticut to ABC in New York. I sat in the receptionist’s office waiting for Cosell to show up. After about ten minutes the elevator door opened and I heard someone doing this fairly good, but not great, Howard Cosell impression.
“Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the great one has arrived. Yes, it’s Howard Cosell, speaking to you from his palatial offices at the American Broadcasting Corporation Building.”
I looked up and discovered it was Cosell, making a grand entrance, not as himself, but in a parody of his public persona. God, I thought, does he do this every day?
“And you must be the Bogart boy,” he said. “I remember when I first met your mother, Betty. It was—” and he rattled off the exact time and place where he had met Mom, some fifteen years earlier. “Welcome to ABC,” he said. He shook my hand and led me into his office. It was still another minute or two before he could break out of the impression he was doing of himself. After we talked for a while about Betty, and my father, we got down to business. I told him that I wanted to be in sports broadcasting. Cosell listened to me very intently, and earnestly, and finally he leaned across his desk and said, “You know, Steve, I could give you a job.”
“Really?”
“Oh sure, I could make a few calls and you’d be working at nine o’clock tomorrow morning in some capacity or other.”
“Anything would be great,” I said. “Just a start.”
“Steve,” he said, “it would be the beginning of your sports broadcasting career.”
“Yes,” I said. Now my heart was pounding. This was it, my big break.
“But I have to tell you, Steve, it would also be the end of it.”
“Huh?”
“The end, Stephen Bogart, the end. With no education, you wouldn’t go anywhere in this business. Steve, I’ve been in this business a long time and I’ll tell you one thing that I am absolutely sure of. You have got to go back to school and get your degree.”
At the time I was crestfallen. It seemed as if my sports broadcasting dream was over and, after I shook hands with Cosell and thanked him for the advice, I left the building and I must have walked forty blocks along Sixth Avenue with my head down.
But at a deeper level I knew that Cosell was right and his words only tempered a resolve I was about to make: once and for all I would go to college and this time, for a novelty, I would graduate. So I will always be grateful for Howard Cosell’s advice.
As it happened, there was a small trust fund that my father had left me. It had kicked in as soon as I got married and it came to about $600 a month, which was pretty good money at a time when my rent was only about $185 a month. But I had also from time to time petitioned for chunks of the fund, to get a car or whatever. By the time I spoke to Cosell I could see that this fund was only going to last about four more years. I did go back to school, the University of Hartford, where I majored in Mass Communications. And yes, I graduated.
So, like my father, I had turned to an older, established man. And each older man had done the right thing for the time. Brady gave a young man a job, Cosell did not. I lived in a time when you had to have a degree to get anywhere. My father lived in a time when success depended more on how high you were willing to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
My father was no sudden success. In his first appearance in front of an audience, Bogie played a Japanese houseboy. He had one line and he made the least of it. His friend Stuart Rose, who was in the audience that night, said, “He said his one line and he embarrassed me, it was so bad.”
Dad’s first significant role came as a juvenile in a play called Swifty. Almost all of Dad’s early roles were juveniles. His performance in Swifty was not memorable for the audience, but Bogie would remember it for the rest of his life.
In fact, decades later he was sitting at 21 in New York with sportscaster Mel Allen, along with Hank Greenberg, the great Detroit Tigers slugger. Allen asked Greenberg about some of the home runs he had hit. Greenberg said that his greatest recollections were not about home runs that he had hit. They were about home runs he had wanted to hit, but had not. “I remember one home run I didn’t hit with two men on in the 1934 World Series,” he said. “And there was another home run I didn’t hit when I wanted to in the 1940 World Series.”
The failures had stayed in Greenberg’s mind. When Allen reminded him about all the homers he had hit, Greenberg replied, “Some people only remember the unhappy things.”
“That’s a fact,” my father said. “Newspaper people have been awfully nice to me and they’ve written some swell reviews. I couldn’t quote you any of the good reviews. But I can quote you word for word the panning Alexander Woollcott administered to me twenty-six years ago when I was in Swifty. He said, ‘The young man who embodied the aforesaid Sprigg was what might mercifully be described as inadequate.’ That was back in 1921. A lot has happened since then, but I can still see those words.”
Swifty, by the way, closed quickly, and my father carried Woollcott’s review around with him for the rest of his life.
The first hit show Bogie appeared in was Meet the Wife. But even in a hit, he got into trouble. At one matinee he left the theater after act two, forgetting that he had to make a small appearance in act three. Later, when the stage manager asked him where the hell he had been, my father blew his stack.
His reviews during this time were mixed. The bad ones got to him, especially Woolcott’s, and also one that said that Bogie and another actor “gave some rather trenchant exhibitions of bad acting.”
“The needling I got about my acting in those days made me mad,” he said. “It made me want to keep on until I’d get to the point where I didn’t stink anymore.”
Over the years my father never raised much fuss about critics. He said, “I always thought they were fair, except for one, who wrote that so and so was bad in the part, but not as bad as Humphrey Bogart would have been if he had played it.”
Dad appeared in dozens of plays during the 1920s, and in time his reviews got better, except perhaps from his mother, Maud, who made it clear that actors were not socially acceptable.
During this time my father drank lots of alcohol and dated lots of girls. Though it later became common for people to talk about my father as a man who had sex appeal without being handsome, the fact is that he was considered quite handsome then, and was even compared to Valentino in some reviews.
Though Bogie had not always had good reviews he had always tried hard. He was, and remained for all of his life, a student of acting.
One early story is that when Bogie was dating Mary Philips, who later became his second wife, he met an actor by the name of Holbrook Blinn, a stage star of the time.
“Hey, you’re no taller than me,” Bogie said to Blinn.
“So.”
“But I’ve seen you on the stage. You always look taller.”
“Watch,” Blinn said. He turned around and took several steps away from Bogie. Then he paused for a few seconds and slowly turned back. Bogie was astonished. It seemed to him that Blinn had grown an inch or two right in front of him.
“How on earth?” Bogie said.
“Just think tall,” Blinn said. “Just think tall.”
From the beginning, it seems, he understood drama, and often during his life he would articulate on the subject.
Though his early parts were as juveniles, he sometimes called them “Tennis, anyone?” parts and that is why he is given credit for bringing that phrase into the language. He explained juveniles this way:
“The playwright gets five or six characters into a scene and doesn’t know how to get them offstage. So what does he do? He drags in the juvenile, who has been waiting in the wings for just such a chance. He comes in, tennis racquet under his arm, and says, ‘Tennis, anyone?’ That, of course, solves the playwright’s problem. The player whom the author wants to get rid of for the time being accepts the suggestion. The leading lady, who is due for a love scene with the leading man, declines. So the others exit and all is ready for the love scene between the leading lady and man. It doesn’t always have to be tennis. Sometimes it’s golf or riding, but tennis is better because it gives the young man a chance to look attractive in spotless white flannels.”
My father had at least a couple of flirtations with the film industry before he made it in Hollywood. In 1930 the studios were looking for actors who could talk, so he went out to Hollywood. But so did a lot of others. Nate Benchley says, “Probably at no other time has so little talent been concentrated in one place.”
He got into some pictures. They were boring and he was boring in them. So, fed up with Hollywood, he came back to the New York stage.
In 1934 he was in Invitation to a Murder, a play that was described by one critic as “high-voltage trash.” But producer-director Arthur Hopkins saw it and wanted Bogie for the role in The Petrified Forest.
Whatever magical quality my father had seems to have shown up for the first time on January 7, 1935, in that play. He was thirty-five years old. What he had was that elusive something we call “star quality.”
What is star quality? Nobody is quite sure, but Bogie, apparently, recognized it in himself. Sam Jaffe told me, “I was talking once to a director about this. He said there are some good actors, who you don’t really notice when they come on the screen. But he said that when Bogie comes on the screen, no matter who else is there, your eye is drawn to Bogart. That’s what makes a star. And this is something that Bogie knew about himself. He said to me, ‘You know, Sam, I’m not the greatest actor in the world. Gary Cooper is not a great actor. But when he comes on the screen you watch him. And I have that quality. It’s God given. That’s what they call a star.’”
While Bogie might have slighted his own acting ability in that conversation, there were other times when Bogie told people that he was the second best actor in Hollywood, and Spencer Tracy was the first.
On this subject of star quality, John Huston said, “Bogie was a medium-sized man, not particularly impressive offscreen, but something happened when he was playing the right part. Those lights and shadows composed themselves into another, nobler personality; heroic, as in High Sierra. I swear the camera has a way of looking into a person and perceiving things that the naked eye doesn’t register.”
As Bogie developed his craft he became a teacher to others, just as Blinn had been to him.
In 1944, for example, when he was making Passage to Marseilles, there was a scene where the cabin boy, played by Billy Roy, had to throw an orange. Every time Billy threw the piece of fruit he heard nothing but complaints.
“You’re throwing it like a girl,” the director said. “Throw it like a boy.”
Billy kept trying, but he couldn’t seem to throw the orange the way he was supposed to. Soon everybody in the crew was getting on him, and Billy was close to tears. It was my father who finally said, “Enough!”
He led Billy off to the side and took the time to teach him how to throw the orange. When Billy had it perfect they started shooting again.
Once when I was a kid my father brought six young actors over to the house to talk about acting. Frank Sinatra was there, too. All of the young actors were unknown at the time, but two of them made the cut, so to speak. One of them was Tom Laughlin, who later starred in the Billy Jack films. Another was Dennis Hopper.
Bogie sat on the floor, and the young actors, sitting cross-legged on the floor, gathered around him. “Keep working. Never be ‘available,’” he told them. This was advice he had been given long ago, and he quoted it often. “Keep playing in theater or TV, anywhere, as often as you can. Eventually, if you’re any good, somebody will see you. Of course the best way to get into the picture business is to go on the stage first.”
“Why do you keep working, now that you’re such a big star?” one of the young actresses asked.
“I don’t know,” Bogie said. “I have a charming wife, two beautiful kids, a gorgeous home, and a yacht. But I’ll be damned if I know why I work so hard. Sinatra and I were talking about it the other day. Working is therapy, I guess. It keeps us on the wagon. This is a very bad town to be out of work in. After a week or so of not working you’re so bored you don’t know what the hell to do.”
Bogart also told the young people, “If you want to be an actor be honest with yourself. Don’t let them push you around. When you believe in something, you fight for it even though you may suffer for it. We actors are better judges than any studio as to what is good for us. As soon as your name gets known and you feel you can say, ‘I won’t do this,’ if you think the part isn’t right, go ahead, say it. In the long run it will pay off. Just remember to put some dough aside for the times you’re suspended.”
Dad asked Dennis Hopper why he wanted to be an actor.
“It’s a lot of things,” Hopper said. “To do something in life, to be somebody.”
“But why acting?” my father asked. “Why not farming? Or something else?”
“I’m just best suited for acting,” Hopper said. “I want, I don’t know, I just have the urge to be better than—”
“Yes, all right, go on,” my father said.
“To be better than the other guy,” Hopper said.
“To get out of the millions?”
“Yes,” Hopper said, “that’s it.”
My father smiled. “You’re okay, kid,” he said. He said “kid” a lot.
“Enjoy the applause,” he told the actors. “It’s wonderful. It has nothing to do with vanity. It’s the satisfaction, like telling a joke and having everybody laugh.”
And he told them, “Don’t go to parties to meet people.”
On the subject of publicity he said, “A star has to accept a certain invasion of privacy. If you get loaded in a bar, then you can’t get mad if it’s printed.”
“What do you think a star is?” one of the women asked.
“Good stories make stars,” Bogie said. “But if you want to be an actress, don’t say, ‘I want to be a star.’ Just concentrate on acting, learn your trade. You’ve got to develop confidence if you’re to play a scene right, and confidence comes from knowing the ropes. Personally, I think you’re all in a hell of a mess, wanting to be actors, because they don’t know what acting is in Hollywood. They think it’s easy to act. They think actors are a necessary evil.”
My father had some very definite ideas about acting and actors. He was skeptical about actors with a message. “If an actor has got a message he should call Western Union,” Bogie said. “An actor’s job is to act, nothing more. He owes the public nothing but a good performance.”
Sam Jaffe told me, “Your father was not impressed with method actors. I remember being on the set with Bogart in one film and he was working with a young, so-called method actor. Bogie said to me, ‘Sam, watch this guy. He thinks he’s going to steal the scene from me.’ So they started a new take and the other actor made a lot of noise and moved his body and his hands a lot. But when the rushes were shown it was Bogart who caught the eye. There was no way you could steal a scene from Bogie. He said he had two rules for playing with method actors. One was to let them improvise as much as they wanted, and the other was never to play an eating scene with them because they spit all over you.”
My father once asked a young actor about the Stanislavski method.
“Well, Stanislavski claimed that the real interpretation comes from the subconscious,” the young actor explained. “We can’t touch it or control it, but if we release it, it will flow from the subconscious.”
Bogie probably thought this was so much horse manure, but he replied politely. “If you’ll pardon the expression,” he said, “you’ve got me completely screwed up. But I know this, the audience is always a little ahead of you. If a guy points a gun at you the audience knows you’re afraid. You don’t have to make faces. You just have to believe you are the person.”
Bogie said that the key to good acting was concentration. You might recall that first shot of Rick in Casablanca shows him playing chess alone. This was my father’s idea, because playing chess alone was something he did often, and he associated it with his acting. He believed that his concentration at chess was what he needed in his acting.
While Bogie believed in talent and concentration, I suspect he would agree with Woody Allen, who once said that eighty percent of life is just showing up. Bogie was a guy who always showed up for work.
“Bogie was a man who was very disciplined,” Sam Jaffe says. “People come to me and they often bring up the fact that he drank while he worked in a picture, and I say, you got the wrong man. Bogie came to work with a lunch pail. In it he had one bottle of cold beer. At lunch time he would go to his bungalow or his trailer and he would eat his lunch and have his beer. And he timed it. One half hour. Then he would lie down and go right to sleep for the other half hour. Bogie was anything but a drinker when he worked in pictures. He was completely sober because he was a man who came out of the theater and his acting and his art was something he revered and respected. He came to work like any disciplined worker and he knew his lines. He really liked what he was doing. But people used to say he was a drunkard. It’s true he got in fights and drank when he was not working, but not on the set.”
This is something that everybody says about my father. He was never late, always knew his lines, and would rehearse for as long as necessary for the other actors so that they didn’t have to talk to a wall. In fact, one beef my father had with Sinatra, even though they were close friends, was that he felt Frank was not a professional as an actor, though he certainly was as a singer. Bogie felt that Sinatra treated acting too lightly. During the later years of his life, Bogie would be in bed by ten o’clock when he had to work the next day, and he often chided Sinatra for being such a carouser during the making of a film.
Actually, there is one recorded time of my father letting booze interfere with his work at Warner Brothers. He got drunk one night and the next morning refused to work. Instead, he zoomed around the Warner Brothers lot on his bicycle, shouting, “Look, no hands, no hands,” like a ten-year-old who had learned a new trick.
Finally, Jack Warner came out to talk to him.
“Bogie, what the hell are you doing?”
“Riding my bicycle,” Bogie said.
“It’s time to go to work,” Warner said.
“I don’t feel like working.”
“You don’t, huh?”
“That’s right, I don’t.”
“Well,” Warner said, “there’s a lot of people in there who do feel like working and they get paychecks that are less than what you spend on scotch.”
“So,” Bogie said. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that these people are depending on you. If you don’t work, they don’t work.”
That pretty much ended that conversation. Bogie put his bike away and went to work, and never showed up drunk again.
Though Bogie was disciplined about acting, he claimed not to be sentimental about it.
“I take my work seriously,” he said, “but none of this art for art’s sake. Any art or any job of work that’s any good at all sells. If it’s worth selling, it’s worth buying. I have no sentimentality about such matters. If someone offers me five dollars a year more than I’m getting I take it.”
Sounds nice, but it simply is not true. Bogie also said, “The only reason to make a million dollars is so you can tell some fat producer to go to hell.” And the fact is that Bogie, who was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood in the late 1940s, often gave up a great deal of money in order to play the roles he really wanted.
“Your father was an intellectual, for an actor,” Phil Gersh says. “Generally, actors aren’t very smart. But he was very well read. One time he came to my office and he said, ‘Phillip, have you read this book, The Caine Mutiny?
“I said yes.
“‘And do you know Stanley Kramer?’ he said. Stanley was going to direct The Caine Mutiny.
“I said, ‘Yes, I know Stanley very well.’
“And your father said, ‘Well, I’d like to play Captain Queeg.’
“So I called Stanley and he said he thought Bogie would be great as Queeg, and I called Harry Cohn, who was head of Columbia. Now, at that time the top salary for a big star was about $200,000 per picture. So I told Cohn that’s what we’re looking for and Cohn says, ‘No, no, he wants to play this part, we’ll pay him $75,000.’ And Bogie ended up doing the movie for a lot less money than he could have gotten for another film. Every studio in town knew they could get Bogart for cheap if he really wanted a part.”
Bogie must have had good instincts about Queeg, because the role earned him his fourth Oscar nomination. Marlon Brando beat him out that year, for On the Waterfront.
But Bogie’s instincts were not always so good about films. He made some bad ones, and he knew it. When he was in Italy with Huston making Beat the Devil, for example, he sensed that the film was in trouble. He thought the first script was a dog and that maybe he and Huston should drop the whole thing. Instead, Huston brought Truman Capote over to rewrite. Capote turned what had been a complicated adventure into a parody, but not all of the actors knew that. The result was a dopey, oddball movie that was supposed to be a spoof of caper movies, but just did not meet with everybody’s taste. When the movie came out it was a financial failure. In fact, one theater placed an ad apologizing for showing the film, but, noting that they were obliged to run it a few more days, offered to give the admission price back to anybody who thought it was as lousy as they, apparently, did.
Critically, the film was given good marks and bad. One reviewer said that no matter where you came in during the movie you felt as if you had missed half of it. Dad, it seems, agreed that Beat the Devil was a disaster, and he said that the people who thought it was funny were phony intellectuals.
Beat the Devil would later have a cult following, but that doesn’t make it a good film. Many Bogie films have cult followings and many of them are bad. The Big Sleep, for example, has many devoted fans, and the movie is great fun, but is also a confused mess. Bosley Crowther says, “So many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused.” And when my father was asked what happened to the chauffeur in the movie, he replied, “I’m damned if I know.”
Though my father made a lot of money as an actor, and did not spend it foolishly, he was not a man who accumulated great wealth from investments. At one time he owned a few Safeway supermarkets, but they went to Mayo Methot when he divorced her, as did a large chunk of cash. His only other significant investments were in movies, and he tended to make these investments more with his heart than his head. He had put some of his own money into Beat the Devil, probably as an act of faith in his friend John Huston.
But that was not his last movie investment. Throughout his career, my father was often concerned about the quality of movies he appeared in. In 1947, he decided to put his money where his mouth was, and he formed his own production company, Santana Pictures Corporation, with the help of Sam Jaffe and Sam’s partner, Mary Baker. Bogie said that some day all big stars would have their own production companies, so they could acquire properties and control what films they appeared in. This was a bizarre idea at the time. Jack Warner, of course, was pissed off. He called Sam Jaffe.
“Sam,” he said, “you are the most destructive force in the movie industry today.”
“Why is that, Jack?” Sam asked.
“You have made an actor into an independent company,” Warner said. “That sets a terrible, terrible precedent.”
Sam asked, “How does that hurt the industry? Bogie is a name above the title and he wants his own company.”
“It will destroy the industry,” Warner said. “These actors will want everything. Maybe you can talk Bogie out of this terrible thing he is about to do.”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “Seeing as how, it was my idea that he could have his own company.”
Sam Jaffe told me that Warner never forgave him. In fact, because Jack Warner saw Santana as a great danger to the business, he refused to use Jaffe & Baker clients in films. As a result the agents lost many stars. But they held their ground.
Santana, unfortunately, never made a great film. There were four Santana films made between 1949 and 1951: Knock On Any Door, Tokyo Joe, In a Lonely Place, and Sirocco. None were very popular, which was embarrassing to Bogie, because he had quit Warner Brothers in order to make better films. But my father had struck a blow for artistic freedom, and he was proved right. Today many, if not most, big stars have their own production companies, and choose their own movie projects. So there, my daddy was right!
Whether he was working for others or for himself, Bogie, I have learned, was usually not difficult to work with. But he expected other people to be as professional at their jobs as he was at his, and from time to time this would put him in conflict with a director.
Sam Jaffe says, “One day I was on the set of The Desperate Hours with your father and Fredric March. Willie Wyler was directing. Wyler was the type of man who could not articulate what he wanted. He was like a lot of directors who can put together a fine picture in the cutting room but really don’t know how to tell an actor what they want. All they can do is say, ‘Do it again.’ So he kept doing this to Bogie and Bogie said, ‘Look, what is the point of me doing it again if you can’t tell me what it is you want different, or what it is you want me to do.’ That was characteristic of Bogie. He was analytical. But, he had embarrassed Wyler and the two men got together and talked quietly and made peace with each other, then they shot the scene again, and I guess Wyler communicated what he wanted from your father.”
Oddly, Phil Gersh also told me a story about Bogie and Wyler failing to communicate on this same film.
Bogie had it written into his contracts that he was done for the day at six o’clock, and one day during the filming of The Desperate Hours he called Gersh up from the set at ten minutes to six.
“Phil,” Bogie said, “Wyler’s driving me nuts.”
“What’s the problem?” Phil asked.
“I’ve got to walk upstairs to the second floor in this scene.”
“So?”
“So, I do it, and Willy says I’m too slow. Then I do it again and Willy says I’m going too fast. No matter what I do, it’s not right. I’ve run up and down those stairs about twelve times now and it’s almost six o’clock.”
“Make him show you,” Phil said.
“Huh?”
“Just tell him, ‘Willy, you go up the stairs. Show me how you want it done.’”
So Bogie went over to Wyler. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you just go up the stairs the way you want me to.”
Wyler looked at him for a moment, then looked at the stairs. “It’s a wrap,” he said, and Bogie was out by six o’clock.
Most directors found Bogie easy to work with. As did most actors. Rod Steiger says, “Bogie was the ultimate professional. Even when he was not in a scene with me he would stand off camera and feed me the lines, so I had someone to talk to. And Bogie was very generous. We’d be shooting a scene and he’d say, ‘Jesus, this kid is blowing me off the screen,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, Mr. Bogart, we can switch parts,’ and he would just smile. He could have gotten me out of the picture if he wanted to, or he could have had my close-ups cut out, the way a lot of stars did in those days, but he never did any of those things.”
There were, however, a few actors who found working with Bogie not quite so joyous. One was William Holden.
Holden did not care for Dad. He called Bogie “an actor of consummate skill, with an ego to match.”
When Holden was twenty-one and appearing in Invisible Stripes, in 1939, he was to be in a scene where he drove a motorcycle, with my father in the sidecar. He overheard Dad say, “Get my double to do it. I won’t ride with that son of a bitch. He’ll crack it up.” Years later Holden allowed for the fact that “son of a bitch” could be an endearment coming from Bogie, but at the time he was steamed, and he was so anxious to prove Bogart wrong that he cracked up the motorcycle with Bogie’s double in it.
Fourteen years later my father and Bill Holden were making Sabrina for Paramount. The making of Sabrina was by all accounts a lousy experience for my father. And, by all accounts, Bogie was at least partially to blame for that.
“It didn’t even start off good,” Phil Gersh says. “I called Billy Wilder. I said, ‘Billy, you’ve already got Audrey Hepburn and Bill Holden. I think Bogie would be marvelous as Linus Larrabee.’ Billy said, ‘Meet me at the tennis club on Saturday, we’ll talk.’ So we talked. Then two weeks went by and he called and said, ‘I’ve been thinking it over, can I meet with Bogie?’ So we met at five o’clock and we all schmoozed and it got to be seven o’clock and we still hadn’t even discussed the movie. Everybody had appointments. Finally, Bogie said to Billy, ‘Look, let’s just shake hands on it, and you take care of me.’ They shook hands and that was it, there was nothing to worry about. They hadn’t even talked about the script. Bogie was just trusting Billy to treat him right.
“So the picture starts shooting thirty days later and Bogie calls me all upset. He says, ‘Look, this guy is shooting the back of my head, I don’t even have to put my hairpiece on; I’m not in this picture.’ So I went to Billy Wilder and told him, ‘Look, Bogie is very unhappy, he’s going to walk.’ There was a lot of yelling and screaming, he’s not being taken care of. So Bogie put his hairpiece on and came off great in the movie.”
Bogie might have come off great, but the movie, I learned, was troubled from day one. Wilder started shooting without a complete script, reminiscent of Bogie’s Casablanca experience. Pages were being delivered every day. One day they were delivered to Holden and Hepburn, but not to my father, who already felt like an outsider among these “Paramount bastards,” as he called them. He walked out, forcing a shutdown in the production.
One reason that Dad felt like an outsider was that William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and Billy Wilder, who was directing, would get together for drinks every evening after shooting, but they never invited Bogie to join them, and it hurt his feelings. More than once he was heard to say, “Those Paramount bastards didn’t invite me. Well, fuck them,” which is the way I talk when my feelings are hurt.
Billy Wilder says the reason Bogie was not invited to join everybody for drinks at the end of the day was, “We just didn’t think he was fun to be with. Since he was excluded he reacted with anger and became worse than ever. This caused extreme tension on the picture.”
More than one movie journalist has said that Bogie was not at his best during the filming of Sabrina. Some say he was still identifying with the character of Captain Queeg from his previous movie, The Caine Mutiny—paranoid and unhappy. He was, some say, irritable, on edge, apathetic about the film. He is said to have complained about his costumes, told reporters the movie was “a crock of you know what,” and often referred to Billy Wilder as a “Kraut bastard Nazi son of a bitch,” even though Wilder is, in fact, Jewish.
Dad also did not care for Audrey Hepburn. Though he said gracious things about her in interviews, he privately thought that she was unprofessional.
Even on this movie, which he was unhappy about, Dad knew his lines cold and he often got impatient with Holden and Hepburn, both of whom had a tendency to blow lines. Supposedly, Bogie had a whole laundry list of complaints besides this. Hepburn couldn’t do a scene in less than twelve takes, he said, and she had rings under her eyes because she was up late seeing Holden. Holden, who was married at the time, also blew cigarette smoke in my father’s face. In one scene Dad was on camera and Bill Holden, because he was out of the shot, read his lines from the script. Holden was smoking and when my father got frustrated because he was blowing his lines—something he had never done—he told Billy Wilder, “It’s that fucking Holden with his script and his cigarettes in the air.”
Holden and my father exchanged words, but apparently they made up later while drinking alcohol, a love they shared.
Another actress who was less than enamored of my father was Bette Davis. Conrad Nagel, the actor who helped to start the Academy of Motion Pictures, says that Bette Davis did not like my father, and it was because of something that happened when she was making her first movie, Bad Sister, with him.
According to Nagel, there was a scene in the movie where Bette Davis had to diaper a baby. Davis, Nagel says, was sexually inexperienced and easily embarrassed, and she had assumed the baby would be a girl. She was twenty-three and supposedly had never seen male genitals, but when she unwrapped the baby, there they were. Davis got terribly embarrassed and blushed. Nagel doesn’t say that my father arranged for a male baby, just that Bette Davis always believed that Bogie had gathered the cast and crew to watch her reaction. As she saw it, he got a big laugh at her expense. Bogie, she has said, was “uncouth.”
Though Davis and Bogie were never close, they did have a drink together now and then to bitch about Jack Warner, and she says they came to have a “grudging admiration for each other.”
I suppose a grudging admiration is what I came to have for my father’s work as I learned more about it. I learned that he took his work seriously, that he stood up for other actors, that he studied his craft. All these things are admirable. But his job, like his boat, had deprived me of time with him, so I suppose I have always resented it. I’ve come to see it differently—to do another take, as it were. He did, after all, have to make a living. And, perhaps more to the point, Bogie didn’t know that he was going to die when I was only eight years old. Maybe if he did know, he would have slowed down and not made so many pictures. I’ve learned, too, that passion for work can be an acquired trait, particularly as your kids grow older and less in need of your time. And maybe a lot depends on what the work is. I never cared enough about my jobs to put them first, but that doesn’t make me right and him wrong. The fact is that lately I’ve been writing a series of mystery novels, and I find that I think about them even when I don’t have to, just as I imagine Bogie must have thought about his roles, even when he was sailing off the coast of California. So maybe one of these days I will take my notebooks and pens and find a Greenwich Village drinking establishment, where I can sit at a small table, penning story ideas. And maybe I’ll smoke a pipe while I work. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe, like my father, I’ll think it’s too damn much work.
* * *
Mother and I enter the kitchen just long enough to say how different it is. But in that fragment of time I remember my first taste of alcohol.
I am eight years old. My father has been sick for a long time now and he comes down from his bedroom only in the afternoons to be with his friends in the butternut room. The grown-ups still laugh, which makes me think things will be all right. And they still drink liquor, which is the word I know for everything that they pour into glasses. It is late afternoon, unusually cool outside and not a day to play. I have been trying to do my homework, but I am bored. I come downstairs to the kitchen, and there is nobody there. I can hear them all talking in the butternut room. On the sink there is a tray of empty glasses. But May is not there. No one is there. A few of the glasses still have liquor in them, and I am suddenly excited, thinking this is my chance to taste liquor. For some time I have thought about these drinks that grown-ups have. Which glass is Dad’s? I wonder. Is his one of the ones that still has something in it? My heart is pounding, as if I am about to do something wicked. I hear the voices in the butternut room. I move close to the sink, where the tray of glasses is. I count the glasses. There are four of them. Which one is my father’s? I wonder again. I move closer, thinking I want to taste liquor and tell the kids about it. I sniff the glasses, thinking I can tell which one is my father’s. Two are the same, one is different. The smell is not really pleasant. It feels warm to my nostrils, like breathing hot air. But I am sure the taste will be good. Even if it’s not, I think, I will have tasted liquor. Finally, thinking I know which glass is my father’s I pick it up. There is only a small amount of liquor in the bottom of the glass. I wait for the sound of laughter, so I will know they are all still in the butternut room. I lift the glass to my mouth and let the liquor pour over my tongue. It feels hot and disgusting. I quickly put the glass back on the tray and I start spitting into the sink, trying to get the taste off my tongue. I turn on the faucet and pour water into my cupped hands and drink it. These people must be nuts to like this stuff, I think.
* * *