Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  They still took pictures, one after the other. I was scared. I felt as if I was being jumped on or called names. By the time we got into the car I was bawling.

  The next morning the front page of the newspaper featured a big picture of me coming out of my father’s funeral with my hand over my face. I was mortified. I felt as if somehow everybody had lied to me.

  After the funeral dozens of people gathered at the house on Mapleton. There were many celebrities there. But there were neighbors, too, and studio executives, makeup men, sailing people, hairdressers, all people who loved Bogart. As long as there were people around, and things to do, Mother was able to hold herself together. Even before the funeral she had been able to keep busy constantly by answering some of the thousands of telegrams that came in from sympathetic friends and strangers.

  It was a telegram that made for one light moment on the afternoon of Dad’s funeral. My mother had asked that no flowers be sent for my father, that instead, donations be made to the American Cancer Society. Then she got a telegram from the American Floral Association, which she read to the gathering. It said, “Do we say don’t go to see Lauren Bacall movies?”

  So it was not a totally somber afternoon. People chatted and gossiped and exchanged Bogie stories. Mother was happy to have the house filled with people. But the friends had to leave sometime, and when they did we were alone again, Mother, me, and Leslie, in a home with no father. That’s when the problems began.

  If I was uncommonly quiet in the weeks that followed, my little sister was the opposite. Leslie was full of questions.

  “Why did Daddy go to heaven?” she asked my grandmother, Mom’s mother, Natalie, who had been living with us through much of my father’s illness. Our other grandmother, Maud, had died of cancer more than a decade earlier.

  “Because God needed him,” my grandmother answered.

  “But we needed him, too,” Leslie said. “Did God think he needed him more than his kids?”

  She was four years old and an expert at asking the unanswerable questions.

  Leslie was going through her own awful time. She had been Daddy’s little girl and Bogie had doted on her. Now he wasn’t there to scoop her into his lap, or ride on the seesaw with her. Now was the time when Leslie needed her mother the most, but Mom couldn’t give her enough. I was the reason. Because I was so troubled, my mother gave me a lot of attention and in the process, they both agree, neglected some of Leslie’s emotional needs. It has been, as you can imagine, a sore spot between mother and daughter over the years.

  However, I was the one who was most obviously in need of special attention.

  Not so long ago I told my wife about a bicycle accident that I’d had about a year after my father died. I had cut open my jaw and been taken to the hospital for stitches. There was no lasting injury from that accident, but all my life I had been unaccountably angry about the fact that my mother was at work when it occurred.

  Barbara said, “Well, perhaps you were angry because you felt there was no one to protect you.” And it struck home. Yes, that was it, exactly. That’s how I felt, that nobody was there to protect me. My mother was gone, and my father was gone, too.

  In a strange way, this idea that I was unprotected was a comforting thought. Because for so many years I had felt that I didn’t think enough about my father, that I didn’t feel enough about him. I had always believed that, while Humphrey Bogart’s fame has tainted every single minute of my life, he, personally, never really had much impact on my life. But now I realize that if his absence made me feel so damn vulnerable and unprotected, then his presence, his being alive, must have made me feel safe. When he died my world was shattered. And it took me many years to put it all back together.

  It was a few days after the funeral that I climbed that tree in the backyard and started screaming at God. When May, the cook, came out and heard me, she must have sensed that I was about to become a major headache for my mother. For several days in a row I sat in that tree and screamed for my father and cried for hours on end.

  The hours I spent in that tree, feeling the pain and frustration of losing my father, mark the end of my belief in a personal God. My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father a lapsed Episcopalian. Neither of my parents had any strong belief in God, but, like many parents, they sent their children to Sunday school, out of a vague sense that religion was a good thing for a kid. We were being raised Episcopalian rather than Jewish because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post–World War II years.

  In any case, when I was eight years old I still believed in the God that adults told me about. But I have always been a very logical person, even then, and during the days when I sat in that tree bawling my eyes out, the equation became very simple for me: My father is dead. God wouldn’t let that happen. Therefore, there is no God. In that tree I gave up a belief in God, and nothing I have seen in the last thirty-seven years has changed my mind on that point.

  Though my mother didn’t know at the time about the tree screaming, she had plenty of evidence that things were not right with me.

  One night just before Valentine’s Day, Mother, Leslie, and I were eating supper in the dining room.

  “I know how we can surprise Daddy,” I said.

  “How is that?” my mother asked.

  “We can all shoot ourselves, and then we can be with him for Valentine’s Day.”

  This comment, understandably, made my mother worry. She began talking to doctors about me. They assured her that my behavior was normal. They said it was natural for me to be full of resentment because my father had died. They said I was probably feeling that I had done something wrong to make him leave.

  Apparently, it was common for me to make announcements about my father at the dinner table. Adolph Green says, “I remember one night having dinner on Mapleton Drive, shortly after your father died, and you looked up and said, ‘There’s Daddy flying over the dining room table.’ You were not hysterical, you just said it very calmly.”

  At the Warner Avenue School, where all of my friends went, I was not so calm. I had been getting good grades. But now, with the onset of the Bogie thing, I began working on a one-way ticket out the door.

  Looking back I realize that the main thing was that it infuriated me that all my friends knew that my father was dead. I hated the fact that they all had fathers and I didn’t, and they all knew that I didn’t. They knew I was fatherless because they had seen it on television, or their parents had read it in the newspaper. People were not pointing at me in the corridors and laughing, but that’s how it felt. It was as if everybody was in on some joke except me. I felt no sense of privacy.

  One day a kid said to me, “Too bad about your father,” and I slugged him.

  A few days later it happened again. “Sorry about your dad.” Pow, right in the face.

  For a while I was getting in fights every day with kids who hadn’t done anything except mention my father.

  In school it wasn’t only the fighting that got me into trouble. I also had a habit of standing on my desk and screaming. When the mood possessed me, I would suddenly climb on top of my small wooden desk, wave my hands in the air, and shriek hysterically. The kids just stared at me and the teachers wrung their hands. Nobody knew quite what to make of it except that, obviously, I was trying to get attention. I don’t think I was screaming for my father as I had in the tree, I was just screaming so that somebody would notice that I was in pain.

  The principal called my mother into his office. He was a tall, carrot-haired man.

  “There’s a problem with Stephen,” he said.

  “A problem?”

  “He seems very withdrawn most of the time.”

  “That’s understandable,” my mother said.

  “But he’s also getting in fights.”

  “Fights?”

  “He gave one boy a bloody nose. And he stands on his desk, shrieking. Are there difficulties at home?”

  “We
ll, of course there are difficulties at home,” my mother said. “He’s lost his father.”

  “Yes, and we are all very sympathetic,” Carrot Head said. “But he’s become a disruption in class. If this continues, we’ll have to ask you to take your son out of the school.”

  A few days later I climbed onto my desk again and screamed. They couldn’t handle me. Warner Avenue became the first school I was “asked to leave.” It would not be the last.

  So, still reeling from the blow of losing my father, I was yanked out of Warner Avenue School, where all my friends were. I had no idea what was going on. My marks were good, so why was I being put into another school? I felt as if I were being punished. I knew that all of this was, in some mysterious way, linked up with my father’s death. Beginning in September, 1958, I went to the Carl Curtis School. I remember that they had a swimming pool.

  Adding to my sense of loss during this period, we also moved out of the Mapleton Drive house and away from everything I had grown up with. It was partly thanks to Frank Sinatra. Several months after my father died my mother entered into a rather volatile romance with Frank Sinatra, which I guess is the only kind of romance Sinatra had. During my father’s illness, Frank, as devoted as a son to my father, had come over to see Dad often, so it’s not as though Leslie and I were suddenly being confronted with a new man in the house when he and Mother started dating. We already knew Frank as a guy who would come to the house a lot, and sometimes play with us for a few minutes before going off to talk with the grown-ups.

  Back in 1957, if anyone had told my mother that her romance with Sinatra was an attempt to forget Bogie, she would have said that was absurd. But that is how she sees it now. Frank was an anesthetic to the pain of losing Bogie.

  Frank was good for my mother in many ways. She had always been close to him as a friend, and after the long ordeal of Bogie’s declining health in the last year, she needed to get out and dance a bit. But Frank was a bit screwed up, and the romance brought with it a quantity of pain, as a number of women have discovered over the years. My mother says Sinatra was incredibly charming and handsome and talented, but also incredibly juvenile and insecure. One week Frank would be courting her like a prince, taking her to parties and premieres and concerts. And then suddenly he would go as cold as stone on her. He would avoid calling. He would act as if she did not exist. And when he finally did call again he’d act as if nothing had happened. This is an aspect of Sinatra’s personality which has exasperated people close to him for years. It was especially trying for my mother because, as she says, “I had been married to a grown-up.”

  Everybody who cared about my mother, including Frank’s friends, prayed that she would not marry him. The opinion seemed to be universal that any woman who married Sinatra might as well take a knife and stab herself in the heart.

  After one of his cold and silent absences, Frank did ask Bacall to marry him. Mom accepted. She was in heaven. She would have a life again. Leslie and I would have Sinatra for a father. All the pain would be gone.

  The plans for the marriage were supposed to be kept secret for a while. But when Swifty Lazar spilled the beans to Louella Parsons, the “Bacall-Sinatra marriage plans” hit the papers. Frank went ballistic. He went into his iceman routine and broke off the relationship, except he forgot to tell my mother that he was breaking it off. All he did was ignore her and humiliate her. There were times when he was actually in the same room with my mother and acted as if he didn’t know her. Though the passing of years has put my mother in a forgiving mood, she doesn’t discuss their relationship anymore.

  It was during Mother’s romance with Sinatra that we moved out of the Mapleton Drive house, and Sinatra was one of the main reasons.

  “I don’t think Frank was comfortable in that house,” my mother says. “The ghost of your father was always there, and I knew that Frank would feel better if I moved.”

  So Mother, believing that she would never have a future with Frank unless she moved, jettisoned her silver and much of her furniture and sold the house in which my father had died. We moved into a rented house on Bellagio Road in Bel Air. The house belonged to William Powell, the actor.

  By this time, then, I had lost my father, lost my school, and lost my house. And through it all I was losing my friends.

  Most of my friends had gone to Warner Avenue School, and when I was taken out of that school I was cut out of their lives. I felt it happening gradually, I guess, but it all seemed to come down on me one afternoon when I was at a birthday party for Steve Cahn, who had been my closest friend on Mapleton.

  Steve’s father, Sammy, was one of the most famous lyricists of the time. Sammy had worked with composers like Jules Styne and Jimmy Van Heusen, doing film work. He had already won an Academy Award for the song “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and it was around this time that he won another Academy Award for “All the Way,” which was from Sinatra’s film The Joker Is Wild. He would eventually win two more Academy Awards.

  Anyhow, at that birthday party I felt incredibly out of place. It was as if everybody else was a person and I was a goat or a donkey or something. This “outsider” feeling had been growing in me ever since my father’s death. It had started with the strange awareness that all my friends knew about my father. And it had gotten worse after I was pulled out of the Warner Avenue School. At the end of that birthday party I stood in the hallway with no one to talk to, like some unwanted vagrant who had wandered in. The kids were all saying good-bye to each other, and talking about what they would do tomorrow in school. Even though I was among all my friends, I felt a terrible pang of loneliness. Now I went to Curtis School and they still went to Warner and they lived together in a world that I was no longer part of.

  After we moved to Bellagio Road, of course, it got worse. If the death of my father had not already broken my heart, this surely did. I was devastated by the loss of my friends and the gradual realization that their lives went on as usual.

  This cycle of loss, which I’m sure was during the most important formative time of my life, was completed in January of 1959, just short of two years after Bogie’s death. My mother had gone on a trip to London looking for a job, leaving Leslie and me in our nurse’s care. There she had wined and dined with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and Richard and Sybil Burton. She had also been offered work in a film, which was to be shot throughout Europe. She had accepted the job. As a result, we moved to London for six months and, as it turned out, away from California forever.

  Now I was down one father, one school, one house, dozens of friends, and an entire state and country.

  In London there were more photographers, first at the airport and later at the school. By now I had developed an almost pathological hatred of cameras and I would turn my head any time I saw one, even if it was just hanging over the neck of a tourist. I was enrolled in the American School in London, one of the few schools, by the way, that I have not been thrown out of. Apparently, I pretty much kept to myself. But everywhere I went somebody knew me because of who my father had been. I never perceived any jealousy from other kids, but that’s what I was always afraid of. More than anything, I just wanted to blend into the woodwork. I remember at school that there was a girl who kept passing me a piece of paper. She wanted my autograph because I was Humphrey Bogart’s son. I didn’t want that kind of notice. And there was a guy there, Jeff Eaton. I remember that he intercepted the paper every time, and signed his name to it and sent it back to her. I remember Jeff fondly because he knew how self-conscious I felt about being the Bogie boy, and he deflected the attention away from me and on to him. And he made me laugh, too.

  The message I got from all this moving, each time farther away from where we’d lived with Bogie, was clear: your father is no longer a part of your life, forget about him. And that’s what I tried to do for most of my life.

  Of course, all this has created conflict over the years between me and Mom. I didn’t want to think of myself as “the son of Humphr
ey Bogart.” I have always wanted to be just plain Steve. I didn’t want any kind of spotlight on me for being Bogie’s son, and I didn’t want the responsibility of meeting some expectation that people might have for the child of Bogie.

  You might think that I would want to stay in the world of celebrities who are so much a part of my mother’s life. After all, celebrities aren’t going to be impressed by my being the son of a celebrity. But by the time I was a teenager I had met a few celebrities and, believe it or not, it was exactly the same.

  “Oh, I knew your father. I loved him. He was great.”

  It was always your father this, and your father that. Nobody ever said to me, “Tell me Steve, how do you make a gasket, exactly?” which is something I did once.

  There was never anything specific that my mother wanted me to do about my father’s fame. It was just that she wanted me to somehow dedicate my life to keeping his spirit alive, something that Bogie has managed to do just fine without me.

  At a minimum my mother would have liked me to talk a lot about Bogie. To her, Bogie was, and remains, perfect. She always wanted me to ask her what he was like. I seldom did that because she was always telling me anyhow, and to hear her tell it, he was perfect. It was bad enough that I was constantly besieged by strangers telling me what a great guy my dad was. I wanted somebody to say to me, “Bogie was great, but sometimes he was a prick, you know…” and maybe show that the guy had some shortcomings so that I wouldn’t have to live up to a legend. But my mother could never bring herself to say anything that might reflect negatively on him.