Nat Benchley tells a story about the first time Benchley’s wife, Marjorie, came to Hollywood. It was around Christmas of 1955. She was going to meet Bogart for the first time, and she was scared to death, because of Dad’s reputation as a needler.
“What do I do if he starts picking on me?” she asked her husband.
“If he picks on you, pick right back,” Benchley told his wife. “Tell him you don’t take any crap from bald men. Tell him to put on his wig and then you’ll talk.”
When Mrs. Benchley did meet my father it was at a party, after which they decided they would all go on to Mapleton Drive. Benchley had to return home first to pick up something and my father insisted on driving Mrs. Benchley to our house in his black Thunderbird.
Marjorie was, of course, a wreck. Would this lunatic insult her, would he smash up the car? She had heard terrible things. Dad, of course, was charming beyond words. He told her how happy he was that she had come, he told her that if she needed help or advice, to call him immediately. The next day he took her on his boat. He told her his philosophy of life and talked to her about bringing up kids. By the end of her stay, Marjorie Benchley was, says her husband, “more than a little in love with him.”
The next time Benchley saw Bogie, after Marjorie had gone back east, Benchley said, “I think I should report that my wife has a thing for you.”
Bogie got embarrassed. “Tell her I’m really a shit,” he mumbled. “Tell her I was nice only because she’s new out here.”
Janet Leigh is another woman who was afraid to meet Bogie, even though she was already well on her way to stardom when she did.
“We were guests at one of Rocky and Gary Cooper’s dinner parties, a star-studded evening,” she says. “I felt we were in the company of royalty. Actually, we were—Hollywood royalty. In that context we met a king, Humphrey Bogart. Rumor had it that Bogart took delight in verbally attacking a vulnerable victim with the zest of a witch doctor sticking pins in the proverbial doll. I had no desire to be the recipient, so I kept my distance.”
After supper, Leigh was standing in a group that had gathered around the piano. Bogie walked in and stood next to her. Feeling intimidated, but fascinated at the same time, Leigh kept silent. When she was certain that Bogie was not looking, she stole a glance at the legend. She saw that Bogie wore, of all things, a little gold earring. I have no idea why my father was wearing an earring, except maybe to create controversy. An earring on a man was rare in those days, so Leigh tried to look at it, without actually staring. She was mesmerized. Suddenly Bogie turned and caught her looking at him.
“Oh,” he said, “admiring my earring?”
“Well…yes, I guess.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Bogie said. “I’m all man, sweetheart. Who are you?”
Leigh was too flabbergasted to reply. She stuttered.
“What’s the matter with you?” Bogie said. “You afraid of me? I won’t bite you.”
Leigh says, “And he didn’t, perceptively realizing that I was no opponent.”
The stories I like best about my father are those that show me he was not on a star trip. My mother, I think, sometimes takes her celebrity status seriously, and actually believes that she deserves to be treated better than waiters and barbers. But my father, it seems, had no such pretensions. It’s true, he did divide the world into phonies and non-phonies, but never on the basis of how much money they made or what they did for a living.
Dominick Dunne, for example, is now one of our leading novelists and journalists, but he knew Bogie at a time when Dunne was an unknown and Bogie was one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
He says, “Bogie was extremely kind to me. It was 1955 when he and Lauren Bacall were doing The Petrified Forest on television. This was part of a series called Producers Showcase. It was a big deal, an hour and a half of live TV. I was working for NBC as a stage manager. The show was to be televised from Burbank and I was sent out to California. We rehearsed for three weeks, and performed it once. During this time Bogart took a great interest in me and was incredibly nice to me. I had a similar background to his, having gone to prep school. I think he got a big kick out of that.
“I had lunch with him one day and I told him how much I loved movie stars. So he invited me to a party at the Mapleton Drive house one Saturday night. At that party Mr. Bogart introduced me to Judy Garland and Lana Turner, who lived nearby, and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were there. Everybody was there. I can hardly convey what heady stuff this was to a starstruck young man in his twenties, as I was. I think Bogart really got off on how thrilled I was to be there meeting these people.
“Perhaps I didn’t realize it at the time. But since then I lived for twenty-five years in Hollywood and I understand now that Hollywood has a pecking order and a caste system as much as India, and I realize it was incredible for me, the stage manager, to be at that party. For me to be invited was really quite something. That was a great kindness your father did me.
“I have always been a very shy person, but after I went back to New York, I sometimes called Mr. Bogart up just to say hello. And he was so gracious. This man was a major fucking star and yet he was always so goddamn nice to me.”
*
My mother walks around the first floor of the house on Mapleton, telling me where pieces of furniture were. But I stare out a window at the trees in the yard and I remember something else:
It is a few days after my father’s funeral. I am alone in the yard looking at the tree where Diane Linkletter and I often play Swiss Family Robinson. I go up into the tree alone. I am a skinny boy, all arms and legs, but now my limbs feel as heavy as the limbs on the tree. I reach my favorite branch. And there, as lost as I have ever been, I scream at God. “Why did my father have to die?” I scream. “Why did you give him cancer? Why did you kill him? Why did you do this to me?” I am hysterical. My heart is broken.
I scream until my throat hurts. Then I sob.
“Stephen,” I hear.
It is May, the big black woman who is our cook, and part of our family.
“Stephen, what are you doing up there?” she asks. I stare down at her. I don’t answer.
“Stephen,” she says softly.
I understand that she is trying to make me feel better. I know that she is sad, too, because she knew my father for a long time. We stare at each other. She is crying, too.
Finally, she says, “You be careful coming down, Stephen.” She walks back to the house, shaking her head.
*
3
I’ve lived with celebrities and with stars, great people, great directors, and I can tell you that the children always have to suffer. You just cannot live up to the reputation of a parent who becomes successful. To have to follow in those footsteps is a very big handicap.
—SAM JAFFE
The heaviest thing I have ever had to carry is my father’s fame.
Bogie’s reputation has often made normal conversation difficult. It has brought me attention that I didn’t want. And often it has deprived me of attention that I did want. It has made me sometimes distrustful of friendly people. It has, I am the first to admit, placed that big chip on my shoulder. It is a subject that, until now, I haven’t wanted to talk about. I am not the sole owner of this problem. I have talked to the sons and daughters of many celebrities, and always it is the same. The fame of the celebrity exerts some strange gravitational pull on the children, and makes it difficult for them to simply break free.
Perhaps if I had been the son of some famous actor who fell from fame when the lights went out, it might not have been so bad. But I had the luck to be fathered by a man who became even more famous after he died. Humphrey Bogart, whether I like it or not, is our most enduring Hollywood legend. In 1993, Entertainment Weekly crowned Bogie the number-one movie legend of all time. (Number two, by the way, was his friend Katharine Hepburn.)
So Bogie is very big stuff. And, as a consequence, I have gone through life accompanied b
y what I call “The Bogie Thing.” This is the big, red-lettered label that hangs from me. It doesn’t say “Steve.” It says, HUMPHREY BOGART’S SON.
“Jack, I want you to meet my friend, Steve Bogart. He’s Humphrey Bogart’s son.”
“No kidding? You’re really Bogie’s boy?”
“Yes.”
“God, I loved your father.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah, my first date with my wife was when we went to see Sabrina. Bogie! Now there was a man’s man. God, this is so weird! Just the other night we rented The Maltese Falcon. That’s the one where he plays Sam Spade.”
“Right.”
“It’s really nice to meet you. Hey, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Get it, huh, a beautiful friendship?”
“I get it.”
“Casablanca! What a great movie.”
I have had this conversation, or some version of it, more than a million times. At least it seems that way. This, of course, pisses me off.
I deal with these encounters in many ways. Usually I am polite and patient. I know that people don’t mean to rob me of my identity. Besides, they are just meeting Bogart’s son once. They’re excited to have some connection to the screen legend. They’re not thinking about the fact that every day I have to listen to strangers tell me what a great guy my dad was.
There are other times when I amuse myself to keep from getting angry. For example, one time a guy said to me, “Are you Humphrey Bogart’s son? I heard he had a son named Steve.”
“He did,” I said.
“And you’re him?”
“No,” I said. “My parents named me after Humphrey Bogart’s son.”
And many times I simply deny it.
“Are you Humphrey Bogart’s son?”
“No, but a lot of people ask me that.”
Often, when I worked as a producer at ESPN and later at NBC and Court TV, I would see one of my coworkers giving some people a tour of the studio. At some point the tour guide would point to me. Then I would see the visitors smile and they would gaze at me for a little too long. He told them, I would think. It always made me angry and uncomfortable.
But let’s get real for a minute. There are crack-addicted babies being born every day, while I was born in the affluence and safety of Beverly Hills. There are children being beaten, while I spent my early childhood with two parents who loved me. And there are cancer wards filled with kids who will never get to be teenagers, while my greatest health problems as a kid were a hernia operation at age three, and a gashed chin from a bicycling mishap. So, yes, I gripe about my problems like everybody else, but I try to keep some perspective. Carrying the burden of being Humphrey Bogart’s son is not actually the worst thing that can happen to a person, and the only reason we are talking about it at all is that the public remains fascinated by anything to do with Humphrey Bogart.
For me, the Bogie thing began at my father’s funeral at All Saints Episcopal Church.
The days just before the funeral are not clear to me. I remember little. But there are others who have memories of how I reacted in those unreal days following my father’s death from cancer at age fifty-seven. My mother remembers that on the day after Dad died I stood at the top of the stairs, clutching a small notebook in my hand, and asked her, “What day is yesterday?”
“January fourteenth,” she said.
Then I sat on the top stair and wrote in my notebook, “January 14, Daddy died.”
And Sam Jaffe remembers talking to me on the same day.
I said to him, “I’m glad I sat on my father’s bed with him.”
“Why are you glad?” Sam asked me.
“Because of what he did yesterday,” I said, meaning in my own eight-year-old way that I was glad I said good-bye to my father before he died.
It is the funeral that begins the time when my father’s fame was a weight upon me.
I went to my father’s funeral in a limousine. We were the first car in a long row, and my mother sat between me and Leslie, holding us in her arms. John Huston was also with us. I remember that he said little, and that was unusual.
When the driver pulled up to the church I peered through the window of the limousine. A huge crowd had gathered. Hundreds of people lined the sidewalks outside the church. Though none of the women were crying, many of them carried handkerchiefs, as if they knew they soon would be. The people were very quiet, respectful, some had flowers. But still, I was scared.
“Who are all those people?” I asked my mother.
“They’re fans, Stephen,” my mother said. “They are people who went to see your father’s movies, and they are sad that he is dead.”
“What do they want?”
“They are going to hear the service for your father.”
“They’re coming to our church?”
“No,” she said. “They will hear it outside. Over the loudspeaker.”
“I hate them,” I said.
“No, you don’t, Stephen. You don’t hate them.”
“He’s my father, not theirs. They don’t even know him.”
I was sad, I was hurt, I was angry. What right did these people have to invade my life that way and gawk at my father’s death? I was there to say good-bye to Daddy—that’s what I’d been told—and I didn’t want to share it with thousands of strangers.
Six years later, when John Kennedy died, I would be fourteen years old, and I would understand the sense of personal loss that people feel when a public figure passes. But then I was not at all understanding. I was enraged. Somehow it felt to me that if thousands of people could cry at my father’s funeral, then I had no special relationship with him. At some level I think I have always felt that way, and still do.
She took one of my hands, and one of Leslie’s. Holding us tightly, she led us out of the limo. As I climbed from the car I heard a woman say, “That’s his son.” I wanted to punch her. I felt as if I was being forced to perform. I was being thrust into the spotlight, which is not where an eight-year-old who has just lost his father wants to be.
Mother led us into the church. Huston stayed close, as if he could somehow protect us from the fans.
In addition to the bereaved fans on the street, eight hundred of Bogie’s Hollywood friends and associates had come to attend the service. The fans had come, of course, not just to say good-bye to Bogie, but to gawk at the movie stars who would be there. Gary Cooper came, and so did Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, Tony Martin, Gregory Peck, Marlene Dietrich, Ida Lupino, Howard Duff, Danny Kaye, and of course Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. (Frank Sinatra wanted to come to Dad’s funeral, of course, but if he had, it would have created great hardship for the club where he was performing in New York. My mother told him it was okay to stay in New York.)
We moved slowly down to the front of the church and took a pew. All eyes were on us, probably my mother mostly, but I felt as if they were all watching me. I remember that the priest, a man named Kermit Castellanos, who everyone called K.C., talked for a while about my father.
Then John Huston spoke. He was such a big, impressive-looking man and he had an incredible voice. He gave the eulogy, though I didn’t yet know that word. I’ve since learned that Huston was actually my mother’s second choice. She had first asked Spencer Tracy, but Tracy was so devastated by Bogie’s death that he told my mother he was afraid he could not speak about his friend without falling apart.
There was no body at my father’s funeral service. Bogie had expressed his wishes to my mother long before, at the funeral of his friend Mark Hellinger.
“Once you’re gone, you’re gone,” he said. “I hate funerals. They aren’t for the one who’s dead, but for the ones who are left and enjoy mourning. When I die I want no funeral. Cremation, which is clean and final, and my ashes strewn over the Pacific. My friends can raise a glass and exchange stories about me if they like. No mourning, I don’t believe in it. The Irish have the right idea, a wake.”
Unfortunately, when
Jess Morgan, who was then the young associate of my father’s business manager, Morgan Maree, went to make arrangements for the cremation he was told that such a scattering was illegal. My mother was very upset. She had wanted Bogie to go back to the sea, which he loved. So Dad was cremated. Mother had arranged for the cremation to take place at the same time as the service, and after the service the ashes were placed in an urn in the Gardens of Memory at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Included with the ashes was the gold whistle my mother had used in their first film together, To Have and Have Not. On the whistle were inscribed the initials B & B—Bogie and Baby. And at 12:30 that day, a moment of silence was observed at both Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century-Fox.
Most of that day I’ve forgotten. They played music. I know now that it was from the works of Bach and Debussy, Bogie’s favorite composers. Leslie and I kneeled when we were supposed to. I remember the crowds. I remember the familiar smell of magnolias, cut from our front yard, and the white roses that surrounded the altar. And on the altar there was Bogie’s treasured glass-encased model of the Santana. I remember thinking my father should be there to see it. But mostly I remember just being stunned by it all, being in a kind of daze.
When it was over, people rose from the pews, began to mill around, shaking hands with old friends, clapping each other sympathetically on the back. I felt lost for a moment and then John Huston leaned down to me. He put his big hands gently on my shoulders and he whispered, “You know, Stephen, there are going to be many photographers out there trying to take your picture.”
I guess if Huston was warning me, he must have understood how angry and scared the photographers had already made me feel.
Between the day my father died and the day of the funeral there had been two school days. My mother, thinking that it was best to keep things as close to normal for us as she could, had sent Leslie and me to school on those mornings. But normalcy was not to be had. Incredibly, when I was dropped off at school that first day there was a group of photographers waiting for me. They just came at me, like a gang of big kids, taking my picture without even asking. I hated it. I didn’t want my picture taken anymore. But now at the church after the funeral, I knew how to stop them, I thought. I would simply put my hand over my face so they couldn’t see me and they would not take my picture. That’s what I believed. So as we filed out of the church, I stood next to my mother and John Huston and I held my hand up over my face. We moved through the crowd of people who were being kept behind ropes. Suddenly it seemed as if everybody in the world had a camera. They were taking my picture. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t matter that I had my hand over my face.
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