Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  John Huston, of course, was a major force in my father’s career. Perhaps the major force. It would be Huston, of course, who would later direct Bogie in The African Queen, the last of the five films which I think are mainly responsible for my father’s fame.

  Of course, these five films only make up one-fifteenth of my father’s film work. Everybody I meet has a favorite. A lot of people like The Big Sleep, which I can’t make heads or tails of. Some people favor the other Bogie and Bacall movies, like To Have and Have Not and Key Largo, the latter of which was also directed by Huston. And there are people who just love those old gangster movies, especially The Roaring Twenties and They Drive By Night. Still I think it was those five: High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, which are most responsible for making my father the most famous movie star in the world.

  Tracing the arc of my father’s fame is a lot easier than understanding it. I see him kind of moving along from film to film like an airplane gaining speed, then finally lifting off into stardom. But then there is a moment when he seems to go into the stratosphere, breaking away from the pull of gravity which holds the rest of us on earth. We can, more or less, figure out when it happened, but nobody can say for sure why it happened.

  Some film critics say that the first sign of Bogie’s film immortality was in France in 1960. It was in the famous French movie Breathless that Jean-Paul Belmondo stood in front of a poster of my father smoking a cigarette and simply said, “Bogie.” Critics disagree about just what Belmondo was trying to say, but the fact that they discuss it at all is the telling thing.

  But other film historians will tell you that the Bogie cult was born in America, specifically in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. In 1956, a year before he died, the Brattle booked Beat the Devil, which had come out in 1954. Beat the Devil was an offbeat comedy which starred, along with my father, Robert Morley and Gina Lollobrigida and Dad’s friend Peter Lorre. Huston directed. It was another one of those movies where nobody was quite sure of what the movie was, even by the time they started shooting. It had not been a commercial success.

  But in Cambridge in 1956 the students from Harvard and MIT loved the offbeat humor and they loved Bogie.

  The following year, the Brattle booked Casablanca and the response was even greater. It turned into a Bogart film festival and the Bogie cult was born. In fact, in Harvard Square there is still a Bogie-themed restaurant.

  Then the Bogart cult spread to the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City’s Greenwich Village and the Lyric in Lexington, Virginia, and all across the country, first in college towns and then art houses, and then everywhere. Posters went up on walls. Woody Allen wrote Play It Again, Sam. Eventually there was a hit record, “Key Largo”. Howard Koch, one of the cowriters on Casablanca, and one of Dad’s chess partners, says that when he appeared at college showings of Casablanca, the kids would recite the dialogue along with the actors just as they did for the Rocky Horror Picture Show. He says he has met students who have seen the film dozens of times.

  So over the years there has been a lot written about the appeal of Bogie. And there is little diversity in the opinions. Almost everybody who has written about the Bogart myth says that we love Bogart because he was his own man. He told the truth. He saw right through phonies. He was cynical, yet he could be idealistic when the time came.

  The last family friend I talked to about this phenomenon was George Axelrod. Axelrod is the writer-producer-director who is probably best known for writing Broadway comedies like The Seven Year Itch. He was a friend of my father’s and when I asked him why he thought Bogie has endured, he said, “Your father understood that the world was absurd. That’s something that nobody understood. He didn’t really take life seriously. He knew it was all bullshit. Steve, it’s good to go through life knowing it is all bullshit. Bogie would have loved all this politically correct stuff today. Oh, what he would have done with this. When you understand that there’s no purpose, that it’s all an accident and there’s no value and you still make a life for yourself, that’s the trick of the thing. Once you understand that, you realize everything is delusion and illusion, then life is kind of existential, and Bogie understood that this existential quality is the kind of subtext that comes out in his performance and that is why he is an immortal figure. Bogie made that quality somehow come across on the screen, and he had it in real life, too. He was an existentialist. I don’t know if he would use that word, because that would be too pretentious for him, but that’s what he was.”

  Rod Steiger, who starred with my father in his last movie, The Harder They Fall, also had an interesting take on Bogart’s lasting fame. He said, “I think Mr. Bogart—that’s what I always called him—has endured because in our society the family unit has softened and gone to pieces. And here you had a guy about whom there was no doubt. There is no doubt that he is the leader. There is no doubt that he is the strong one. There is no doubt with this man that he can handle himself, that he can protect the family. This is all unconscious, of course, but with Bogart you are secure, you never doubt that he will take care of things.”

  I guess the real question is not, why do we like Bogart? It’s which Bogie are we talking about—the Bogart movie image projected on film screens around the world through seventy-five films? Or my father, the wry, but somewhat insecure man, who I think was kind of lonely and did not tell everybody what was on his mind all the time? I think George Axelrod was telling me that the answer is both, and I think he’s right.

  One of the first things all Bogie historians like to point out is that Bogart was educated, well spoken, genteel, not at all like the gangsters he portrayed in most of his early films. This, they say, is the starting point for separating Bogie from his roles. But I think it might also be the ending point, because my father really was a somewhat cynical wisecracker who hated phonies. Aside from the fact that he had no background with real gangsters, and that he had the insecurities that come with being human, there is no big surprise in the real Bogart. Sure, he played chess and golf, and maybe you didn’t know that. And maybe you didn’t know he was an avid reader, or that he coined the phrase “Tennis, anyone?” But that’s the end of the surprises. My father was not a child abuser, like Joan Crawford, and he did not have bad breath, like Clark Gable. He was not gay and he was not a Nazi spy, and if he had a secret life I think it was mostly a secret life of the mind. These days it seems like once a month we are shocked and disappointed by the gap between a star’s real nature and his public image. So maybe my father has endured because there is no significant gap. Bogie, to a great extent, really was Bogie. He was the man John Huston described in his eulogy when he said:

  Humphrey Bogart died early Monday morning. His wife was at his bedside, and his children were nearby. He had been unconscious for a day. He was not in any pain. It was a peaceful death. At no time during the months of his illness did he believe he was going to die, not that he refused to consider the thought—it simply never occurred to him. He loved life. Life meant his family, his friends, his work, his boat. He could not imagine leaving any of them, and so until the very last he planned what he would do when he got well. His boat was being repainted. Stephen, his son, was getting of an age when he could be taught to sail, and to learn his father’s love of the seas. A few weeks sailing and Bogie would be all ready to go to work again. He was going to make fine pictures—only fine pictures—from here on in.

  With the years he had become increasingly aware of the dignity of his profession…actor, not star. Actor. Himself, he never took too seriously—his work most seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with an amused cynicism; Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect. Those who did not know him well, who never worked with him, who were not of the small circle of his close friends, had another completely different idea of the man than the few who were so privileged. I suppose the ones who knew him but slightly wer
e at the greatest disadvantage, particularly if they were the least bit solemn about their own importance. Bigwigs have been known to stay away from the brilliant Hollywood occasions rather than expose their swelling neck muscles to Bogart’s banderillas.

  In each of the fountains at Versailles there is a pike which keeps all the carp active, otherwise they would grow overfat and die. Bogie took rare delight in performing a similar duty in the fountains of Hollywood. Yet his victims seldom bore him any malice, and when they did, not for long. His shafts were fashioned only to stick into the outer layer of complacency, and not to penetrate through to the regions of the spirit where real injuries are done.

  The great houses of Beverly Hills, and for that matter of the world, were so many shooting galleries so far as Bogie was concerned. His own house was a sanctuary. Within those walls anyone, no matter how elevated his position, could breathe easy. Bogie’s hospitality went far beyond food and drink. He fed a guest’s spirit as well as his body, plied him with good will until he became drunk in the heart as well as in the legs.

  Bogie was lucky at love and he was lucky at dice. To begin with he was endowed with the greatest gift a man can have: talent. The whole world came to recognize it. Through it all he was able to live in comfort and to provide well for his wife and children.

  His life, though not a long one measured in years, was a rich, full life. Over all the other blessings were the two children, Stephen and Leslie, who gave a final lasting meaning to his life. Yes, Bogie wanted for nothing. He got all that he asked for out of life and more. We have no reason to feel any sorrow for him—only for ourselves for having lost him. He is quite irreplaceable. There will never be another like him.

  *

  I am on the floor watching television. I am straddled across Pandy, my giant stuffed panda, pretending that Pandy is a horse. My father comes in. “What you watching, Steve?” he asks.

  “The Alone Ranger,” I tell him.

  “Good,” he says. “Good.”

  “Wanna see me ride?” I say.

  “Sure, pal. Go ahead, Steve, ride ’em cowboy.”

  I lift myself higher in my make-believe saddle. I make galloping noises with my mouth. I fire my cap pistol at the outlaws on the black-and-white television. I spank Pandy with my other hand to make him ride faster. I sway back and forth as if I might fall from my horse, and I start giggling.

  “Go get ’em, cowboy,” my father says. “Go get ’em. “ He watches me for a while longer, then he laughs and leaves the room. I think to call him back. I want to ask him if he wants to watch the Alone Ranger with me. But I don’t. I stare at the door. He is gone. I hear him downstairs talking to my mother. I turn back to the TV screen and watch the rest of the Alone Ranger alone, riding my stuffed panda.

  *

  4

  Bogart thought of himself as Scaramouch, the mischievous scamp who sets off the fireworks, then nips out.

  —NUNNALLY JOHNSON

  We left England when my mother finished making Flame Over India, which was a fast-paced action film set on the northern frontier of India. She plays the governess of an Indian prince, and she’s trying to help British soldiers get the prince to safety from some bad guys. I thought Mom was excellent, and the movie did very well.

  With the film in the can, Mom moved us from London back to the US. But we did not return to California where I had spent my childhood. We flew, instead, to New York, where we moved into an apartment that was being rented jointly by us and Richard and Sybil Burton.

  My parents had met the Burtons in England in 1951. As a toddler I had spent a lot of time on Richard Burton’s knee. I think I might have vomited on his shoes once. (God, when I think of the voices I used to listen to as a kid: John Huston, Richard Burton, Humphrey Bogart, and of course, Lauren Bacall, who is known for her voice.) I know I used to confuse Burton with Richard Greene, who played Robin Hood on television, and I always pronounced Richard and Sybil, “Wretched and Simple.”

  When we moved to New York, May, the cook, was still with us, and a new nurse was hired to look after Leslie and me.

  We were in New York because Mother had been offered a leading role in Good-bye Charlie, a Broadway play about a gangster who dies and comes back to earth as a woman. Mom was determined to have a career and not spend the rest of her life being described in newspaper articles as “Bogie’s widow.”

  Good-bye Charlie was written and directed by my parents’ friend George Axelrod. The actors, including my mother, got great reviews, but the play was panned by the critics. After only three months on Broadway it was good-bye to Good-bye Charlie. The story did, however, resurface in 1964 as a pretty pathetic excuse for a movie, starring Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds. Still, Good-bye Charlie was a shot of adrenaline for my mother’s career, and she continued to get work on Broadway and in Hollywood.

  On our first New Year’s Eve in New York, Mother met Jason Robards, Jr. Jason was then, and still is, one of our best stage and screen actors. He is an enormous talent, regarded by a lot of people as the finest interpreter of the works of Eugene O’Neill. Now, we know, Jason has appeared in something like a million movies. But at the time his star was just rising. He had recently won the New York Drama Critics Award for Long Day’s Journey Into Night. If there’s one thing that turns my mother on it is excellence, and Jason was a brilliant actor. She fell for him quickly, and he fell for her. Unfortunately, he was an alcoholic.

  My mother says that when Jason was sober, he was charming, thoughtful, kind, and gentle. When Jason was slightly drunk, he was still charming, though less thoughtful and kind, which he made up for by being eloquent, often reciting poetry or soliloquies in Greenwich Village bars. But when Jason was very drunk he was not charming, thoughtful, kind, or gentle. And Jason drank a lot.

  So Mother married him.

  Like a zillion women before her, Mother deluded herself that she could change a man by marrying him. This heavy drinking thing, she thought, was just a stage Jason was going through because of his recent divorce. This was a problem that would vanish after they were married. Yes, yes, the love of a good woman would cure him. Right. What Mother should have done was listen to Spencer Tracy, who said to her, “Betty, get it through your head. No alcoholic ever changes because somebody asks him to.” Or her good friend, Adlai Stevenson, who told her, “It’s not going to get better after you are married, it’s going to get worse.”

  There are those who say that Jason Robards looks a lot like my father. By those I mean just about everybody who has eyes, except Lauren Bacall. Mom has never seen the resemblance, but I think it is quite striking. What it all means, if anything, is something a psychologist would have to figure out. But whether he looked like Bogie or not, Jason had to wrestle with the ghost of Humphrey Bogart. When word got to the press that Jason and Mother were a serious item, there were dozens of stories to the effect: can he fill Bogie’s shoes? It’s unfortunate for anyone to have to suffer those comparisons, but particularly unjust for Jason, who is such a towering talent in his own right.

  By the time they got married in July, 1961, we had moved out of the rented apartment and into a fourteen-room apartment at the Dakota. The Dakota is a famous old building on Central Park West. You might remember it as the setting of Rosemary’s Baby, where Mia Farrow’s husband gets involved with a witch’s coven right there in the building. The Dakota is also the place where, in real life, John Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman. Of course, when we moved into the building the Beatles were just unknown teenagers in Liverpool, but years later on visits to my mother, I would see John Lennon walking in and out of the building, often standing on the very spot where he would be murdered.

  The huge apartment at the Dakota allowed for a large family, which we suddenly had. That was the best thing about Mother’s marriage to Jason. Jason had three kids by a previous marriage: Sarah, Jady, and David. Jady was my age. Sarah was around Leslie’s age. And David became the baby of this extended family. Though the three Robards ki
ds lived with their mother, we spent a lot of time together, and there was a period of about a year when Jady and Sarah lived with us at the Dakota. So we had our own Brady Bunch. Or maybe I should say Eight Is Enough, because within a year of the wedding my half-brother, Sam Robards, was born. Sam is now a successful movie actor. (If Sam seems a small part of this book it is only because there is a fourteen-year difference in our ages, and I was away from home through most of Sam’s childhood. Sam, like me, had to live through the experience of having two famous parents. It took a lot of guts for him to become an actor, considering who his parents are, and the inevitable comparisons that would be made with his father. But he turned into quite a good actor. Sam and I remain very close. I love him, and I love his son, Jasper, my first nephew.)

  On the whole, though, the Bacall-Robards marriage was lousy. My mother had fallen in love with an alcoholic, and after she married him, Jason continued to drink heavily, just as everybody in the universe, except my mother, knew he would.

  Leslie and I, in the innocence of youth, didn’t realize at the time how bad it really was. Sure, Jason sometimes came in late and slept all day, but Mother explained that that was because he worked late nights on Broadway. Sure, he seemed to be away a lot, but then, so was Mother when she was making a movie. Actually I liked Jason a lot, and he liked me. Jason and I got along great. I think that was because Jason was really a kid at heart. He didn’t try to be a replacement father. He was more of a big brother who liked to goof off, not unlike the character he played in A Thousand Clowns, where he was kind of a social dropout who lived with his nephew.