I think, when he married me, Bogie thought I would be, like his other wives, a companion for his semibachelor existence.
—LAUREN BACALL
For decades it has been whispered that my father had the biggest schlong in Hollywood. I like to think the rumor is true, but I don’t know who to ask. Who keeps track of these things? I do know that it’s not the sort of thing I can discuss over tea with Mother.
Whether it’s true or not, the fact is that my father was not a major-league cocksman.
People who knew Dad say he almost never looked at other women. Film critics have said that Bogart was at his least convincing on the screen when he was supposed to be leering at dames. And Bacall says, “Not once in our years of marriage did Bogie ever suffer from the roving eye.”
The party line on my father and women is that he was not a skirt chaser, not a ladies’ man, and only occasionally a flirt. In fact, much of his movie appeal to women seems to come from the fact that he doesn’t need them. Bette Davis said, “What women liked about Bogie, I think, was that when he did love scenes, he held back, like many men do, and they understood that.”
On the other hand, my father was married four times, and in at least two cases, he was wriggling under the sheets with the future wife before the present wife became a past wife. Which kind of knocks the shit out of my Peter Lorre quote: “Bogie is no ladies’ man. Maybe it is deep-down decency. He has very set ideas about behavior and morals in that respect.”
Still, it is clear that my father would rather have sailed to Catalina with an all-male crew than dance until dawn at the El Morocco with a beautiful blonde. He liked a good horse race and a round of golf more than a great set of gams. Bogie did not squire hundreds of girls around town, and when he did get attached to a female he tended to marry her.
I am very different from my father in that respect. I have always found the female form a hell of a lot more compelling than a birdie on the fifteenth hole, even though I am a golfer. This can be a problem. Like any man, including Bogie, I have from time to time been controlled by anatomical parts much lower than the brain. After I got kicked out of Boston University, for example, and was staying at Dale’s parents’ home in Torrington, I got the boot when Dale’s mother came home from the hardware store one day and caught us screwing in the living room. I did manage to get back in after I wrote a long, apologetic letter.
Howard Stern once asked me on the radio if I had ever used my role as Bogie’s son to get laid, and I told him I hadn’t, at least not consciously. In fact, I said, sometimes when women asked me if I was related to Humphrey Bogart I told them I wasn’t, because I didn’t want to be Bogie’s son, always being compared to him. And I especially did not want a girl to be interested in me because of who my father was. Sometimes I even lied about my name. But, now that I think about it, I suppose there were those other times when I was with a woman who was keenly aware of my bloodline, perhaps impressed by it, and I did what I could to make the most of it.
Anyhow, having made sex and romance—not necessarily in that order—priorities in my life, I took a special interest in finding out about my dad and women.
I learned that his first known girlfriend was named Pickles, though my guess is that that was not her given name. Bogie was a teenager when he fell in love with Pickles at Fire Island, where his family was staying one summer, a change of pace for them since they usually spent their summer vacations upstate at Camp Canandaigua, the place where Bogie learned to sail. Pickles was, he once said, “a girl with laughing eyes and freckles on her nose.” At summer’s end Pickles returned to her home in Flatbush and, as much as he was in love with her, it apparently was not enough to make worthwhile the long train ride to Brooklyn. So, after one postsummer visit, young Humphrey scratched Pickles off his dance card and took up with a girl from New Jersey.
Bogie did a fair amount of oat-sowing with a succession of young women, and when he finally did get serious, it was with an actress by the name of Helen Menken. He met Helen when he was working as a stage manager for a touring company of a play called Drifting. One day some of Bogie’s sets fell on poor Helen’s head and the two of them got into a peppery battle over it. Later he said, “I guess I shouldn’t have done it, but I booted her. She, in turn, belted me and ran to her dressing room to cry.”
We’ll never know whether these two literally smacked each other, or if Dad was just trying to be colorful when he talked about this, but the fight between man and woman led, as it often does in the movies, to romance. It was only a matter of weeks before Humphrey and Helen had a license to get married. And a matter of hours after that before Bogie had second thoughts.
Menken was a well-known and well-connected actress who could help Bogie in his acting career. But he was concerned about marrying a woman who was more successful than himself. He had grown up in a home where the wife was dominant and he didn’t care for it. So Bogie backed out.
He told his friend Bill Brady, “God, I don’t want to marry that girl.”
Brady replied, “If you don’t, Humphrey, you’ll never get another part on Broadway.”
Maybe Dad was worried about what Helen could do to his career. Or maybe it was just that Helen was persistent. Either way, the result was that Bogie reconsidered, and he and Helen did get married in the spring of 1926.
The wedding was a horror. Helen’s parents were deaf mutes and the minister, also deaf, performed the ceremony in sign language. That would have been fine, but the deaf minister tried to speak the words, too, and the sound that came from him was unlike any known language of the time, dragging the whole affair down to the level of tragicomedy. By the end of the ceremony Helen was crying hysterically, and she ran from the reporters who were covering the wedding.
Helen recovered, but the marriage, clearly, was doomed, and indeed it went straight to hell. Bogart and Menken fought over everything, including the fact that Helen wanted to feed the dog caviar, and my father, despite being a dog lover, thought hamburger was good enough for a pooch. “This would lead to that,” my father said, and “one or the other of us would walk out in a fine rage.”
The unhappy lovers separated once or twice and their reunions were short-lived. Eighteen months after the wedding they were permanently split. Dad worried about the gossip but he told one friend, “When the whole thing is over Helen and I will be good friends. She’s a wonderful girl.”
Though Helen blamed Bogie for the failed marriage at the time, years later she told my mother that it was her own fault, that she had put too much emphasis on her career and not enough on her marriage.
Bogie, who was twenty-seven when things went sour with Helen Menken, later said, “I’d had enough women by the time I was twenty-seven to know what I was looking for in a wife. I wanted a girl I could come home to.”
Perhaps, but after Helen he dated other actresses.
One of them was Mary Philips. She would become wife number two, and his romance with her also began with a fight scene.
Bogie had a small part in a play, and during his one good scene, this actress, Mary Philips, was supposed to be walking away from him, drifting out of sight and mind as he went into his speech. One night during his big moment Dad observed that Philips was putting too much of what he called “that” into her walk. It was a bit of feminine swaying that was sufficient to draw the audience’s attention away from his speech and on to her derriere. Later he confronted her.
“You can’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“That thing you do. That walk.”
“Really?” she said.
“Yes, really,” he said.
“And why, pray tell, not?”
“That’s my scene,” Bogie said. “You can’t just steal a scene from me like that.”
Mary was amused. “Well,” she said, “suppose you try to stop me.”
If Bogie were telling the story today he might say something like, “Well Stevie, I smacked her a good one and she smartened up.” But the truth is he did nothing. He explained once, “I didn’t try to stop her, because while I was talking I suddenly became aware that here was a girl with whom I could very easily fall in love.”
Bogie did fall in love with Mary Philips. But not just then. A few years after the derriere incident he ran into her after a showing of The Jazz Singer, the first talking movie. They started dating, going mostly to plays when they were not performing in them. Mary, like Helen, was more successful than Bogie and, like Helen, she encouraged Bogie to pursue his craft.
After he proposed and Mary accepted, Bogie told a reporter, “Marrying her is probably the most wonderful thing that could happen to me.”
As it turned out, something more wonderful happened to Bogie. He was invited to Hollywood. He tested for a role in The Man Who Came Back and was offered a contract at $750 a week. Dad had it in his head that he would take his bride out to California, that he would make it big in Hollywood, and they could live in great style. But Mary, it turns out, was not interested in being “a girl you can come home to,” and something large came between them: the United States. Mary had her own career and it was firmly rooted in the stages of the east coast, not in front of Hollywood cameras.
The result of all the bickering over careers and coasts was that my father and Mary agreed that while he was out in California becoming a movie star, he could see other women and she would be back in New York with the freedom to date other guys.
When this was told to me I found it interesting because in my first marriage I did somewhat the same thing, though by that time it had a name: open marriage. I was very young when I married Dale and became a father. It wasn’t long before our marriage became little more than a device for keeping both of Jamie’s parents under the same roof. It seemed to me that I was changing and my wife wasn’t, though of course, Dale saw it differently. Anyhow, with a toddler to care for, Dale and I didn’t want to break up, so we went the open marriage route, popular in those days. It’s not as though I would come home and say, “Oh, by the way, I screwed Lulu last night,” but we had an understanding that if either of us wanted to see someone, we could. Truth is, it didn’t work all that well. For the last seven years of my first marriage, Dale never got to know the people I hung out with, and I didn’t really know the people she was close to. We were emotionally separated. We didn’t fight much, but that was probably because she worked days then, and I worked nights.
Dad’s open marriage experiment didn’t fare much better. Mary Philips, apparently, was a woman of her word. She said she would see other men, and that’s what she did. She fell in love with the actor Roland Young, while Bogie was in Hollywood. But when Bogie got back to New York, he and Mary hashed things out. They brought the marriage in for repairs and vowed never to be separated again, which was fine with Bogie since he was now disillusioned with Hollywood for the second time. For his $750 a week he had not been hired to star in The Man Who Came Back. He had been hired to work as a voice coach for the star, Charles Farrell, who you might remember as Gale Storm’s father on My Little Margie.
Bogie’s marriage to Mary Philips lasted for a decade, though not without its occasional plot twists. These were the depression years and the young acting couple struggled financially. Mary had some luck, performing in summer stock in New England, but through much of the thirties many lights were dim on Broadway. What money the couple did have was mainly brought in by Mary. Bogie couldn’t even borrow money from his parents, because by this time Belmont had made a number of bad business deals and the Bogarts were not as affluent as they had been. (Eventually, Belmont would give up his practice and run away to become a ship’s doctor aboard freighters. He returned to New York a morphine addict, and died ten thousand dollars in debt. My father would eventually pay off the debt.)
So Bogie and Mary pooled money with friends and wore a lot of sweaters.
Though Mary would prove to be a little lamb compared to wife number three, the Bogart-Philips marriage was in some ways a preliminary bout for the Bogart-Methot marriage that would come next. Mary, for example, almost bit off a cop’s finger one night when he arrested her for being drunk, along with Bogie and their friend Broderick Crawford, who had a career as a movie actor before my generation got to know him as Captain Dan Matthews on Highway Patrol.
On Bogie’s next visit to Hollywood Mary went with him. They lived in the Garden of Allah, a legendary cluster of bungalows on Sunset Boulevard, where celebrities and wannabes drank, laughed, and occasionally bedded down together.
But Mary was homesick for the smell of greasepaint. Broadway was where she belonged, she felt, and when she got a chance to perform there in The Postman Always Rings Twice, she told Bogie she wanted to return to Manhattan. Bogie was deeply hurt that she wanted to leave.
“The postman always rings twice?” he said. “What the hell does that mean, anyhow?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Bogie said. “I read the book. There’s no postman in it and nobody rings anything once, never mind twice. Guy just made up the title. You want to be in a play where the guy just made up the title?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all wrong for you,” Bogie said.
“I want to go,” Mary cried.
“For God’s sake, Mary,” Bogie said. “This is my first chance to really prove that I can support a wife, maybe have kids, and here you are getting ready to hop on the first train back to New York.”
“I have to go,” Mary said.
“Then go, goddamn it, but I’m telling you the play is not right for you,” Bogie said.
Mary left, and it was during her absence that Bogie met Mayo Methot.
* * *
Some say Bogie met Mayo at the home of his friend Eric Hatch. Others say he met her at a Screen Actors’ Guild dinner. He spotted her eyeing him from a balcony and found her so fetching that he broke off a decoration of a nude woman from a column of some sort and presented it to her.
“Your Academy Award, madame,” he said. “For being the most exciting actress present.”
Mayo, a native of Portland, Oregon, had been a child actress. She was still an actress, and in many ways she was still a child. Like Bogie, she had been married twice. A year earlier she had divorced her second husband for mental cruelty, claiming that he wouldn’t allow her to rearrange the furniture.
Bogie took Mayo on his powerboat at Newport Beach. This was before the Santana. Mayo, whose father was a ship’s captain, loved the sea and that was a big point in her favor. Mayo loved to drink, another point. Bogie had fun with Mayo. Unfortunately, Mayo Methot was a raging alcoholic, and her fits of temper and violence made Bogie’s occasional outbursts look kittenish by comparison. With Mayo, who has been described as a combination of Mae West and Edward G. Robinson, Bogie began a relationship that was as famous for its fury as his later relationship with my mother was for its romance.
When Mary came back from New York and found Bogie and Mayo staying at the Garden of Allah, she felt that a divorce was in order. After the divorce, Bogie was not really in a marrying mood, but, once again, he had gotten himself into a position where he felt he had an obligation. Sam Jaffe’s partner, Mary Baker, said, “Bogie was trapped in a situation and didn’t know how to get out of it.”
It is interesting that my father, who is famous for doing exactly what he wanted and compromising on nothing, seems to have entered with some reluctance into each of his first three marriages. With Helen he had tried to back out at first. With Mary he had had major doubts, but had been financially dependent on her. And now, with Mayo, again, he told people he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to marry her. In some ways all three of these women were the dominant person in the relationship, and even in his fourth marriage—well, it is no secret that my mother is a strong, controlling sort of woman. So Bogie, the very symbol of male independence, married women who could, at least in part, control him. A Freudian might say that he was trying to replace his domineering mother. Others would say he married women who could help his career. Nat Benchley, who gave this matter a good deal of thought, came to the conclusion that none of the handy theories fit. Not all of Bogie’s wives were financially helpful. Not all of them were older than him. (My mother was twenty-five years younger.) And not all of them could help his career. (He was already a big star by the time he married Mayo and my mom.) Benchley concludes that the answer is much simpler than that. My father, Benchley says, “was a gentleman, like his father, and he felt that once he had gone a certain distance with a woman, he was obliged to marry her.”
I know that that self-imposed feeling of obligation weighed heavily on my father, because I have gone through the experience, though in a slightly different way. A generation ago, Dale and I had planned to go to the great Woodstock lovefest. We couldn’t make it, so we stayed home and had a lovefest of our own. The sex was, shall we say, impetuous. A few months later Dale had some interesting news to tell me.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
I was still a kid, really, and getting married was not on my list of things to do. But I knew I had an obligation, and it was one I had created long ago when I swore that no kid of mine would ever go through life without a father.
Though abortion was out of the question, Dale did not insist on wedding bells. She was not interested in acquiring a husband who didn’t want to be acquired.
“I’m keeping the baby,” she said. “You do whatever you really want to do.”
Of course, there was never any doubt about what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a father to my kid. I asked Dale to marry me.
And in 1938, Bogie did the same thing. He asked Mayo Methot to marry him.
Shortly before their wedding Bogie said of Mayo, “One reason why we get on so well together is that we don’t have illusions about each other. We know just what we’re getting, so there can’t be any complaints on that score after we’re married. Illusions are no good in marriage. And I love a good fight. So does Mayo.”
It’s a good thing that Dad loved a good fight because Mayo gave him a lot more action than he ever saw when he was in the navy. He was thirty-eight when he married her and there were some who wondered if he would make it to thirty-nine.
They got married on August 21, 1938, at the home of Mary and Mel Baker in Bel Air. Bogie cried at the wedding.
“He cried at every one of his weddings,” my mother says, “and with good reason.”
On their wedding night Bogie and Mayo had a fight, so he went off to spend the night with Mel Baker while she spent the night with Mary. There is even a report that Bogie went off to Mexico for some male bonding.
Soon he and Mayo moved into a house on Horn Avenue near the Sunset Strip. They filled it with pets, and they fought constantly. Bogie nicknamed Mayo “Sluggy.” In front of their house they had a sign that said SLUGGY HOLLOW. They also had a dog named Sluggy. And Bogie named the thirty-eight-foot cruiser that he kept in Newport Sluggy.
Mayo was a devoted and adoring wife when she was sober, but, like her husband, she was a prodigious drinker of scotch, and when she was drunk she could be hell on wheels. The neighbors remember the nightly shouting and the sounds of breaking glassware. The battles were strangely, or perhaps fittingly, theatrical. For example, one night the couple came out of the house drunk and Mayo had tied a rope around Bogie’s neck. But it was Bogie who was shouting, “Sluggy, you miserable shrew, I’m going to hang you.”
“The Bogart-Methot marriage was the sequel to the Civil War,” Julius Epstein says.
An interesting turn of events for the man who once complained that he had to hide under the blankets and cover his ears to block out the sound of his parents fighting.
“The marriage was very stormy,” says Gloria Stuart. “Their relationship was mutual; they hit each other. But it was really Mayo who did most of the hitting. I remember once when Mel Baker and my husband and I were at their house and Mayo threatened to shoot all of us. When she was drunk she was very combative. Sober she was fine. But I think the fighting excited them, it got them all worked up.”
While friends agree that Bogart liked to needle Mayo, all agree that she was the violent one. And Mayo was also every inch the needler that Bogie was. She often referred to him as “Mr. Bogart, the great big Warner Brothers star,” and after he made the smallest remark she would say, “Quick, call the newspapers. Mr. Bogart, the great big Warner Brothers star, has spoken.”
“Mayo resented Bogart’s growing popularity,” one friend says, “and the fact that she gave up her career to be just Mrs. Bogart. The resentment always showed.”
Mayo was insanely jealous, too. Maybe drink made her jealous, or maybe jealousy made her drink. Either way, Mayo often had her claws out for Bogie’s leading ladies. Being married to a top male actor would be difficult for any woman, but for Mayo it was war. So when Bogie had to take a beautiful actress in his arms you could hear Mayo’s roar all the way to Fresno. Mayo was especially jealous of Ingrid Bergman when Bogie made Casablanca. After the film came out a reporter asked Bogie what he thought of it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t allowed to see it.”
Dad’s early movie career, of course, was not as a romantic lead or a sex symbol. A condemned murderer or gun-toting racketeer was not the kind of guy most women were looking to fall in love with. But in 1940, during this marriage to Mayo, Bogie was making a personal appearance at a New York movie house when something happened to change all that.
The show that evening opened with dozens of Bogie’s movie death scenes flashing across the screen. Then, when the lights were turned up, there was Bogie lying on the stage, face down as if he had been rubbed out by gangsters. He got up slowly, grinned at his audience and said, “Boy, this is a hell of a way to make a living.”
It was a magical moment. Suddenly, movie fans who had known Bogie only as a thug, saw a guy with a sense of humor, a guy who could laugh at himself, which it seems to me is a definite aphrodisiac for women. After the show there was a mob of women outside of Bogie’s dressing room. Mary Baker called Warner Brothers to tell them about all the female adoration. Jack Warner was skeptical, but in time Bogie did become a rather unlikely heartthrob.
Bogie actually claimed to enjoy Mayo’s jealousy.
“I like a jealous wife,” he said. “I can be a jealous husband, too. Mayo’s a grand girl. She knows how to handle me. When I go to a party and the party spirit gets at me I’m apt to flirt with any amusing girl I see. But I don’t mean it. My wife’s job, and Mayo has promised to take it on, is to yank me out of the fire before I get burned.”
If Bogie looked at another woman, Mayo would hit him, punch him, or throw something at him. Once she threw him into a harbor because she thought she caught him eyeing a girl getting off a boat. One night at Peter Lorre’s house she hit him over the head with a large wooden spoon for the same offense. Not all of Mayo’s rages, however, were about other women.
Mayo didn’t always need a reason to fight. Like so many alcoholics, she simply turned into a violent, insecure, and dangerous person when the booze kicked in. One night, for example, she actually set the house on fire. Naturally, the incident was handled discreetly by the local fire department.
And then there was the time that Bogie was sitting at home with a friend when Mayo went into a rage about something. She picked up a bottle and threw it at him. Bogie just sat still and let the bottle pass by.
He turned to his friend. “Mayo’s a lousy shot,” he said. “Besides, she’s crazy about me. She knows I’m braver than George Raft or Edward G. Robinson.”
I found out about another time when they were having Thanksgiving dinner with Raymond Massey and his wife. Bogie made some remark and Mayo hurled the turkey platter at his head. As the story is told, Bogie smiled, picked up the food, put it all back on the platter, and they all enjoyed their meal. Bogie, it seems, had a tremendous ability to remain calm during tense moments.
Mayo often became paranoid when drunk. One night she came into the living room where Bogie and some guests were talking.
“You bastards are talking about me,” she said.
“No, we’re not,” Bogie said.
“Of course you are,” she said. “Do you think I’m stupid, that I don’t know when I’m being talked about?”
“Sluggy, will you sit down,” Bogie said. “Nobody is talking about you.”
“You are talking about me,” she cried. “I know it.”
Then she ran out of the room and dashed up the stairs to their bedroom.
A few minutes later, when the group was about to sit down to dinner, they heard a gunshot from upstairs.
“Forget it,” Bogie said to his friends. “It’s just Mayo shooting her gun.”
Then there was another shot.
“I guess we’d better go upstairs,” Bogie said. He went up. Mayo was locked in the bedroom.
“Open up, Sluggy,” Bogie said.
“No,” Mayo screamed.
Bogie started pounding on the door. “Sluggy, open the door or I’m going to break it down.”
“Get away or I’ll plug you,” Mayo said.
Finally, Bogie managed to break the door and get in. He found Mayo lying on the bed, crying.
In the press they became known as “The Battling Bogarts.” They were notorious for breaking crockery and glassware at a number of fine business establishments.
One typical fight occurred when they were in New York and they got an early morning phone call. Mayo answered the phone then turned to my father. “It’s for you,” she said, then she dropped the phone on his face.
Bogie, annoyed, smacked her.
Then both of them leaped out of bed naked and started throwing things at each other. This went on for a while, then Mayo picked up a potted plant to hurl at Bogie, but she lost her balance with it and fell on the floor. The two of them had a good laugh and went on with their lives.
Sam Jaffe says, “I remember one time they were in New York, at the Algonquin. I went to see them. Right then and there they got into an argument over Roosevelt. She threw a lamp at your father. Bogie rushed out. Later Mayo kept calling me and saying Bogie had probably been killed in traffic. When your father called me the following morning he told me he had spent the night with one of his previous wives, Helen Menken.”
The battling Bogarts got into battles in nightclubs with each other, and sometimes, with the two of them on the same side, against some heckler. At one point Bogie and Mayo were barred from 21 as a couple. They could come in separately, but not together. 21, by the way, was not the only place to bar them as a couple. When they went overseas to entertain the troops they were so rowdy and fought so often that the USO made a rule forbidding husband and wife teams to tour the army camps.
Dad told the Mayo stories with great relish. But one incident Bogie did not boast about was the night Mayo stabbed him.
Bogie came home that night from the Finlandia Baths on Sunset Boulevard. He had gone there to get away from Mayo, but she was convinced he had gone to a whorehouse. When he came into the house Mayo was humming “Embraceable You,” which was always the signal that she had crossed the line from a sober Jekyll to a drunken Hyde. He could see that she had been drinking and that she had been crying. He said nothing.
But a few minutes later they had gotten themselves into a violent argument, when suddenly Mayo lunged at Bogie with a kitchen knife. Bogie ducked. He ran for the door. Mayo came after him.
“The great movie star, Humphrey Bogart, thinks Roosevelt’s a grand guy, does he? Tell it to your whores,” Mayo shouted.
“Cut the crap, Sluggy,” he shouted back.
But when Mayo caught him she jabbed the knife into his back. Bogie, feeling faint, went to the phone. Instead of calling a doctor, he called Sam Jaffe.
“Sam, we have a problem,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” Sam said.
“I think you’d better come over here,” he said.
“Why?”
“Mayo stabbed me.”
“Jesus!”
Sam sent Mary Baker to Bogie’s house. When Baker got there Mayo was hysterical.
“I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything,” she was shrieking. But Bogie was on the floor, just regaining consciousness after passing out for a few minutes, and his jacket was red with blood. He explained to Baker that he and Mayo had gotten into an argument over Roosevelt, and that Mayo had stabbed him. Baker told Mayo not to pull the knife out of Bogie. Baker called the doctor. The doctor was bribed not to tell the story. Bogie was patched up and Mayo, as always, was stricken with guilt and was full of affection and kisses for her husband.
One morning after the stabbing, Dad invited Sam Jaffe over to the house.
They sat in the living room, Dad still slightly shaken by the incident. “Sam,” he said, “look at the seltzer bottle there.” He pointed to a glass bottle in the corner.
“What about it?” Sam asked.
“Well, she threw it at my head the other day. She missed.”
“So?”
“So someday she might not miss.”
“And?”
“And it might not be a bottle,” Bogie said. “I think you ought to have insurance.”
“Not necessary,” Sam said.
“Look,” Bogie said. “You’ve invested a lot of time and money in my career. If Mayo’s aim ever improves you could lose it all. Get some insurance.”
So Jaffe & Baker took out a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on my father. Fortunately, Mayo’s aim never did improve.
Long before this, Mayo had been diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a paranoid schizophrenic. She had even made at least one legitimate suicide attempt, slashing her wrists. After the knife incident the psychiatrist recommended that Mayo be institutionalized. Bogie refused. He said at the time, “My wife is an actress. It just so happens that she is not working right now. But even when an actress isn’t working she’s got to have scenes to play. And in this case I’ve got to give her the cues.”
There was also a night when Mayo pulled a gun on Bogie. He casually mentioned that he wanted to go off on a trip alone, and Mayo freaked out. She came after him with a gun. Dad retreated to the bathroom where he called a studio publicist for help. While the publicist drove over to the house, others in the studio gathered around the phone and listened to the drama. They heard Bogie shouting through the door, trying to calm Mayo down, but all she did was get more hysterical. At one point Mayo got so frustrated that she started shooting Dad’s suitcase. This was so absurd that Bogie started laughing, and so did the studio people who listened on the other end. Though I’m sure at first my father must have been afraid that this time Mayo really would kill him, he apparently came to the conclusion that she couldn’t really do it. When the publicist arrived at the house, he found Bogie relaxing in the bathtub. This incident, like many others, was covered up by the studio and never made the papers.
Growing up, I heard many of the Bogie and Mayo stories. I’ve heard a lot more since I began asking about my father. But something has always bothered me about all these stories. They seem almost unbelievable. There is a show business quality to them. They sound like something out of a screwball romance of the thirties—two people throwing things at each other, then laughing about it minutes later.
I can’t deny that the fights actually occurred. Certainly, some of the stories have been embellished over the years, but basically they are true. Many reliable people remember these physical battles between my father and Mayo Methot. The skirmishes represent one of the more bizarre episodes in Hollywood lore. To me, what is most bizarre about the battles is not that they happened, but the spirit in which they occurred, with so much good humor. Why would two people who fought like cats and dogs stay together?
“These fights,” one friend says, “were a kind of mating dance. They liked to fight because it made sex better. Their marriage was kept together because of the fighting, their fantastic physical attraction for each other, and their love of sailing.”
In fact, quite a few people state with remarkable certainty that the fights made their sex hotter, though I assume this is secondhand knowledge, at best.
For me the key to understanding my father’s relationship with Mayo, and, indeed, much of my father’s life, is in something he said in an interview before he married her.
“We have some first-rate battles,” he said. “Both of us are actors, so fights are easy to start. Actors always see the dramatic quality of a situation more easily than other people and can’t resist dramatizing it for them. We both understand that one of the important things to master in marriage is the technique of a quarrel.”
Later, when he was married to Mother, Dad wrote, “Each of my wives has been an actress. Betty’s a good one as well as a good-looking one. I guess it would be plain hell to marry a bad actress. I never could have stood that. Of course, when an actor marries an actress, their differences usually develop into something more intense than they started out to be. You find you are playing a dramatic scene. And some of the arguments I’ve had in my time in married life have gone on long after either of us remembered what the tiff was about. I guess we were each thoroughly enjoying a leading role.”
Certainly Mayo’s jealousy and paranoia were real. Certainly the alcohol problem was real; she eventually died of alcoholism. But I think in some way the fights were also staged; Bogie and Mayo were, in part, acting out their anger and frustration. Bogie loved a good joke and he loved to dramatize. You can imagine what would happen if he married a woman who felt the same way, and when he married Mayo he did marry a woman who felt the same way. She once said of Bogie, “I married a man who conducts himself like a man. A man who doesn’t only offer me security, but a certain excitement.” To some extent Bogie and Mayo were putting on an elaborate show for the public. And, I think, to some extent, Bogie did that with his whole life.
One thing that always troubled me about these stories was the hitting. Did my father actually hit his wife? Did he hit women?
“No,” Gloria Stuart told me, “your father did not hit people. He did not hit women. But he did hit Mayo and she hit him. She always hit him first. It was part of the relationship. In fact, I only saw your father hit her back one time.”
So Bogie did not hit women. But still, it is difficult to talk today about my father and women without it seeming that he was as politically incorrect as you can get. He lived in a different world from the one I live in. He called women “girls,” and it was perfectly acceptable. He said, “I have an aversion to any group of women with a purpose or a mission.” He made jokes about a woman’s role and that was fine.
“This was a different time with men and women,” Gloria Stuart says. “This was a time when people still joked about rape. Men and women just talked differently then and nobody thought anything about it.”
For example, when Dad came back from filming The African Queen he took a ribbing in the newspapers because a photo had been taken of my mother hanging laundry supposedly while he was snoozing on his hammock. DID BOGIE BRING BACALL TO AFRICA TO DO HIS LAUNDRY? the newspaper headline asked. Bogie denied that he had. “You think Baby would do this for me back home?” he said. “Not on your life. I take her half way around the world and suddenly she becomes the perfect housewife. In Hollywood she never once washed a handkerchief. No kidding!”
The story now seems quaint, but today it would take on an entirely different spin, and Bogie would be made out to be some sort of sexist monster.
His public interviews are peppered with comments about women that would be regarded as outrageous today, but were kind of endearing in their time. He once said, “Women have got us. We should never have set them free. They should still be in chains, and fettered to the home where they belong.” And after he made his statement about not being a Communist, and being “ill-advised” about his trip to Washington, one reporter asked him if the statement also represented his wife.
“I am making the statement,” he said, “but it includes her. I still believe the man wears the pants in the family and what I say goes for the whole family.”
Much of how Bogie thought about women can be inferred from what he said about actresses. In 1953 he did an interview for the London Daily Mirror and he talked about “four real hot babes that stand way out in my twenty-five years of movie making.” If he talked about hot babes today he would have to duck fast. The four were Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and, of course, Lauren Bacall.
“I’m not saying anything against the sweet and shapely glamor girls in the business,” Bogie says. “They’re okay. But for me, you act with them, then forget them. Whatever they’ve got is laid right out on a platter for you. Now that doesn’t appeal to Bogart. For me an actress has to have unassailability. This, in plain language says, here it is, now come and fight for it. Which I reckon is a good thing for all women to have.
“Hepburn has unassailability. She is a dyed in the wool eccentric. There is nothing phony about her. She is not beautiful, more like a nylon-covered skeleton. She’s no chicken any more either, but she’s really fascinating with a tremendous off-beat kind of sex appeal which throws out a challenge that not any hunk of man can take up. She’s shy, though. At interviews she shakes like a leaf, although she has the guts not to show it. She’s got maybe half a dozen friends in Hollywood and she just circulates among them. You never see her at the nightclubs. When you spend six weeks on a boat in the jungle with a woman and all around you are down with malaria you kind of get to know her. I got to know Katie like a favorite book.
“Bette Davis is different. She’s not as well-organized as Katie, mentally. She’s got very definite opinions and it’s sure hard to shake them. I made Dark Victory with Bette and although I haven’t any scars from it, I’m not forgetting it either.
“I’ve never had any trouble with her, but it may be true some guys find her hard to get on with. The fact is she’s a talented, tough, temperamental filly with a strong mind of her own. Unless you’re very big she can knock you down. She’s getting along a bit, so if people treat her rough she can get kind of crotchety. But she’s a hell of a gal.
“When she was younger she used to be a real dish—not my type, though. I like a good figure and Bette’s a wee bit too well-stacked and a shade heavy in the legs. But I’m sure fond of her. She’s got a highly developed intellect and she can act the pants off most of the other ladies in the business. When you take Bette Davis you’ve got to take everything else that goes with it. And I guess I like all the things that go with Bette Davis.
“Barbara Stanwyck has unassailability by the truckload. She’s got a wonderful figure and talent that bursts out in every scene.
“I can’t stand bad actresses. When I act with them they throw me so hard I can’t speak a line. But Stanwyck, that girl acts like she really means it. We made a louse of a film together called Conflict. It bored the pants off both of us. But Stanwyck was good. If she had an emotional scene to play, we’d all have to wait while she’d go for a little walk to work up steam. Then she’d come back all ready to emote. God help the technician who interrupted at the wrong moment. She’s a fine type is Stanwyck, solid material. Her hair is going gray. She’s putting on the years, but she still makes movies with a kick in them.
“As for Lauren Bacall, well sure, she’s Mrs. Bogart. But she doesn’t figure in my favorite foursome just because of that. She’s a big beautiful baby who’s going to make a big name for herself in the business. She’s bright, brainy and popular with women as well as men. Look at that face of hers. There you’ve got the map of Middle Europe slung across those high cheekbones and wide green eyes. As an actress she hasn’t got a lot of experience. It’s going to take a long time to get it. But Baby is going to get there. She’s not the type that hangs around being stalled by the boss’s secretary. As a woman she holds all the cards. She’s beautiful, a good mother, a good wife, and knows how to run a home.
“She’s a honey blonde and in her high heels she comes up to the top wrinkle in my forehead. She’s got a model’s figure, square shoulders, and a kid’s waist. Met her in the film To Have and Have Not then afterward we made The Big Sleep. After that film I said, ‘That’s my baby,’ and I’ve called her Baby ever since.”
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I focus more and more on my mother’s voice now. She is talking about him. “Your father loved the dogs,” she says. Then something else. “He always wore that terry robe when he was out by the lanai.” She is talking to me, but not checking to see if I am listening. She knows that when she has talked about Dad in the past I have not always listened. She moves about, reciting her memories like lines from a movie. And the words she speaks resonate with a headful of images that have been passed to me over the years from things she has said and things I have heard from friends. Mother has told me many times about her love affair with Humphrey Bogart. I vow that from now on I will listen carefully.
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