Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  I found out that my father was feisty. And he was combative. But his battles were not all fought to show off his wit, or to win an argument. He had, everybody says, an unmoving set of principles and he would rather raise hell than be silent when the events around him came in conflict with what he believed was right. This did not surprise me, but it pleased me to hear it from people who knew him. Did I, too, have an unmoving set of principles? Yes, I decided. Could some of my behavior be excused because I was fighting for what I believed in? No. But I heard stories about my father standing up for people, and I like to think that if Bogie could somehow be plucked from those stories and I could take his place, I would behave similarly.

  “I didn’t go on the set much,” Sam Jaffe says, “but I remember one time I was on the set, visiting your father, and he was being directed in a film at Columbia. I don’t remember who the director was, but at one point the producer was there and he was interfering, telling the director what to do. Finally, Bogie just stopped working and he said to the producer, ‘Look, I can’t be directed by you and him. He is the director. If you want to tell him something, do it at some other time. If you want to be a director I’ll help you find a story and you can direct your own picture. But don’t try to direct this man.’ That’s an example of what Bogie represented as a person.”

  And Phil Gersh remembers that my father was very affected by World War II, and that he put in a lot of time visiting wounded soldiers. Gersh remembers being with Bogie in 1942 during the Second World War when Bogie went overseas to do a show for the troops with Mayo Methot. Bogie stayed at a hotel that was there for generals and colonels. Phil stayed with the grunts. When Bogie realized that Phil was not at the hotel he went looking for him.

  “Where are you sleeping?” Bogie asked.

  “On the ground,” Phil said.

  “No,” Bogie said, “I want you to stay in my room.”

  “But that’s for officers,” Phil said.

  “I don’t care,” Bogie told him. “We’ll get you a bed and you can stay in my room.”

  So Bogie went to some commanding general and told him he wanted an extra bed for his friend. When the brass turned him down, he said, “Fine. If you won’t let me have a bed in my room for my friend, then you won’t have a show.”

  So, of course, he got the bed, and Phil got a good night’s sleep.

  Gersh was one of many people who had stories to tell about Bogie ruffling feathers, needling people, even speaking unkindly and hurting feelings. But I also heard stories like this one, stories about Bogie speaking out for the little guy. I liked to hear those stories. Because the truth is my own mischief was not always cute at the time that it was happening. I had often behaved badly, and I often hurt the feelings of people who had been kind to me. A lot of my mischief made me feel crummy about myself. So it was reassuring to learn that my imperfect father must have felt crummy about himself from time to time, must have had his own regrets about shallow moments and thoughtless remarks.

  And as I roamed from one Bogie friend to the next and listened to the stories about my father’s more admirable traits, I found that they, too, were deeply satisfying because I still had some growing up to do and my father, though dead these many years, was teaching me ways to do it.

  *

  I am in my room at the Mapleton Drive House. But it is not my room. It has not been my room for thirty-six years. It is someone else’s room, and there is no evidence that I have ever been here before. I find that this room does not sweep me back to my childhood as easily as I’d thought it would. In fact, I remember little. What I do remember, oddly, is something that hung on the wall. A wooden frame, a square of glass, and in the middle is a check from the President of the United States.

  In my memory I am a kid again, and one day I take the frame down from the wall and examine it. I expect the check to be somehow bigger than other checks, but it is ordinary looking. It is from Harry S Truman and it is made out to “Baby Bogart.” I ask my father about it.

  “Well,” he says, “before you were born I made a bet with the president that you would be a girl. He said you would be a boy. He was right.”

  “So how come you didn’t send him a check?”

  “I did,” my father says. “He wrote me a note. He said, ‘It is a rare instance when I find a man who remembers his commitments and meets them on the dot.’ Then he sent the money back, only he sent it to you.”

  These memories are just slivers, so frustratingly fleeting, and now I am awakened from this one. I look one last time around the room that once was mine. I try to remember exactly where the framed check hung on the wall. But I can’t. I smile. I still have that check at home. It’s like winning a bet from my father.

  *

  5

  It was not a good time to be a Democrat in the movie business, especially one partisan to me. But Bogie never seemed to give a damn for what people said or thought.

  —ADLAI STEVENSON

  My father and I both reached the age of military service during a war. The big difference was that his was a “good war,” World War I, and mine was an unpopular war in Vietnam. Another difference: he enlisted, I was drafted.

  That is, I got my draft notice. It came four weeks after I got thrown out of Boston University, which is where I went to school for a short time after I got thrown out of the University of Pennsylvania.

  I tried heroically to get out of being drafted, but it seemed as if all the legal dodges were being snatched away from me faster than I could scheme up ways of using them.

  First they dropped the student deferment. Then they dropped the deferment for being married. Then they dropped the deferment for being a father. It looked for a while there as if I was about to be dropped into South Vietnam, or at least to some godforsaken military base in South Carolina.

  So I did the only rational thing. I applied for status as a conscientious objector. This conscientious objector thing was big in the 1960s. People who couldn’t even spell conscientious were suddenly having pangs of conscience. Lots of guys like me had gotten the crazy idea that they didn’t want to be shot to death in an Asian jungle, but you couldn’t say that. What you could say was that you didn’t want to shoot somebody else to death in an Asian jungle.

  So I filled out this conscientious objector application and it was sent to some kind of three-man board that would decide whether or not I qualified. Amazingly, one guy on the board actually voted in my favor, which meant that my plea was sent on to Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick turned me down. Maybe that was because Nixon just didn’t like conscientious objectors. Or maybe it was because he remembered that my father stumped for Helen Gahagan Douglas, when she ran against Nixon for the Senate in 1950. Anyhow, the president said, “You’re next, Steve.”

  I went to some federal building in Hartford, Connecticut, and I took all the mental and physical tests. Unfortunately, I was healthy, hetero, and relatively sane. I was qualified to get shot in the jungle. So I figured I’d better check out the navy. After all, my father had been in the navy and he had lived.

  At the navy recruiting office, I remember being in this harshly lit, bare-walled room and there was this big dog-faced navy guy behind a long table, and he looked very officious.

  “Bogart?” he said. “Any relation to Humphrey?”

  “I’m his son.”

  “No shit?” he said. “I didn’t know he had kids.”

  So he went through the drill. He told me all his favorite Bogie movies, and then did his Bogie impression. We seemed to be getting along okay, so I said to him, “Hey, look, I’ll sign up if you can take me after January 6, my birthday.”

  “Jesus, I’d love to do it,” he said. “You know, for your father and all.” He shuffled around a few papers and said, “The latest we can take you is December 24th.”

  I didn’t want that, so I said, “Look, if I get drafted, can I come down here and sign up?”

  He said yes.

  So I resigned myself to the fact that I
would get drafted and I’d go into the navy and probably drown in the South China Sea.

  But, you know, every once in a while life acts like a movie, and gives you a last minute reprieve, like the scene in The African Queen, when the homemade torpedo exploded right on cue just as the Germans were about to hang my father and Katharine Hepburn. My lucky torpedo was that the draft lottery came in, and I got number 224, a high number. That first year the lottery picks went up to 218 so I was spared. The next year they started all over again, beginning with the new kids who had turned eighteen, so I was spared again. In this way, I never did have to go into the military.

  But the thing was—and it’s always kind of bothered me—I didn’t have a strong political conscience. I just wanted to stay alive.

  So naturally when I started exploring my father’s life, I wondered just how politically involved my father was. Was he like me, a bit on the apathetic side? Or was he the kind of person who would carry banners and say that people like me were part of the problem?

  When I started talking to his friends, I found out that Bogie certainly was less concerned about getting shot at than I was. He did not try to avoid combat, the way I did, but, of course, the wars were more noble in his day.

  Bogie’s pal Stuart Rose, who would later marry Bogie’s sister Frances, known as Pat, had joined the army and had some colorful stories to tell. So joining the military seemed like a good idea to my father. He’d get to wear a uniform and meet beautiful French girls, and, as a bonus, he’d get the hell away from Maud, who was driving him nuts.

  Consent came with some difficulty from his parents. But they must have sensed that he desperately needed to put a few thousand miles of saltwater between himself and them. I’m sure he didn’t come right out and say, “Mother, I’ve got to get away from your constant harping about what a failure and troublemaker I am,” but that’s what it amounted to.

  While the idea of dying in Vietnam was very real to me in the late 1960s—after all, I had seen it on television—the possibility of death in combat was not real to my father when he was eighteen. “Death was a big joke,” he said. “Death? What does death mean to a kid of eighteen? The idea of death starts getting to you only when you’re older, when you read obituaries of famous people whose accomplishments have touched you, and when people of your own generation die. At eighteen war was great stuff. Paris. French girls. Hot damn!”

  There are two well-known but conflicting stories about his navy days. Only one of them, at most, is true.

  The first story is that his boat, the Leviathan, was shelled by a German U-boat and one explosion caused a splinter of wood to pierce my father’s upper lip. The injury damaged a nerve and left the lip partially paralyzed. The resulting tight-set lip would forever be associated with Humphrey Bogart and it would be the physical feature that three generations of impressionists would focus on when they tried to create their own Humphrey Bogart. The paralysis also affected my father’s speech, leaving him with a slight lisp that doesn’t seem to have hurt his movie career.

  However, there is another story about how he got the stiff lip. In this one, Dad was not yet onboard. He was on shore duty and he was assigned to take a navy prisoner up to the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire. The prisoner was handcuffed. When they changed trains in Boston the prisoner asked my father for a cigarette. Bogie (who, by the way, was not yet known as Bogie—that would come later in Hollywood) gave the guy a Lucky Strike and, while he was fishing around in his pea jacket for a match, the guy raised his manacled hands, smashed Dad across the mouth, and split. My father, with his lip damn near ripped from his face, whipped out his .45 and put the prisoner down with a couple of shots. The results were the same: my father was scarred for life.

  Nathaniel Benchley says this second story is the true one. He says the shrapnel story is ridiculous because it is alleged to have happened sixteen days after the war was over and that even if there was delayed-action shrapnel, it could not have traveled in any direction which would have produced the scar.

  Maybe. But the thing that bothers me about Benchley’s conclusion is that he says the shrapnel story was made up by a studio publicity department. I don’t get it. Why would a studio PR flack make up a story about Humphrey Bogart catching shrapnel in the lip if there was already a true story about how he plugged an escaping prisoner with his .45? If anything sounds like studio fiction it’s the prisoner story. Anyhow, Dad got stitched up by a navy doctor in both stories, and the lip became part of the legend.

  In talking to Bogie’s friends I heard different versions of many stories and there is, at this point, no way to get the precise truth. That’s what happens when you’re a legend. Of course, it bothers me to hear stories about my father, never knowing for sure if they are true. And it bothers me to tell them, too. We all crave certainty in these things; we’d all like to say, “My father did this, he didn’t do that.” But the truth is that not only the sons of legends have to deal with it. We all do from time to time. We all have a colorful Uncle Jack or a Cousin Mertie whose exploits have been distorted over the years, and whose stories have been filtered down through different family lines in different ways. When I began to write about my father, people said to me, “You can’t tell two different stories about the same event. You’ll lose credibility.” They seemed to think that Bogie’s son should be the one who always knows the truth, though they certainly didn’t know the whole truth about their own fathers or mothers. I disagree. I think credibility comes from owning up to uncertainty, from simply saying from time to time, “I don’t know.”

  I do know that when his navy tour was over Bogie went back to his mother, who belittled him constantly about his lack of education.

  The military, it seems, had not been a particularly formative experience.

  “I’m sorry that the war had not touched me mentally,” my father said. “When it was over I was still no nearer to an understanding of what I wanted to be or what I was.”

  *

  Bogie, of course, was not done with the military after serving in World War I. Gloria Stuart, an actress who used to play card games with Bogie and Mayo Methot, remembers that when World War II came along, my father began a series of chess matches which he would play by mail with troops overseas.

  My father wanted to do what he could for the troops, so during the Christmas season of 1943 he and Mayo went to North Africa for a twelve-week tour of army rest camps. It’s a humorous image, Humphrey Bogart doing a soft shoe, twirling a cane, and singing “Thanks for the Memories” with Bob Hope. He did have a fair singing voice, but the fact is that his act consisted of reciting speeches from The Petrified Forest and other films. And Mayo sang “More Than You Know,” a song she was known for, and other tunes, accompanied on the accordion by Don Cummings.

  By the time he got to North Africa, Bogie was known around the world, mostly from his gangster films. A measure of his growing international fame was that one day when he and Mayo were touring the ancient Casbah, an Arab man jumped out of a doorway at him. He lifted his arm as if he were holding a submachine gun and shouted a stream of foreign words at Dad, which turned out to be the Arabic equivalent of “Rat-tat-tat-tat, you’re dead, you dirty rat!”

  Though Bogie was a patriot who felt strongly about supporting the troops, he was his usual iconoclastic self when it came to the brass. At one point on the tour he and Mayo had a big fight. She locked him out of their bedroom. Bogie began pounding on the door to get in. A colonel showed up and, seeing Bogie in uniform (it was a USO uniform), told him to stop it. Then he asked for my father’s name, rank, and serial number.

  “I’ve got no name,” Bogie told him. “I’ve got no rank. I’ve got no serial number. And you can go to hell.”

  Later, when Bogie was reprimanded for insulting the uniform of the United States Army, he apologized to the colonel, saying, “I didn’t mean to insult the uniform. I meant to insult you.”

  In Naples, Italy, when Bogie threw a big party for a group of e
nlisted men, things got a bit rowdy. A general from across the hall complained about the noise, and Bogie shouted, “Go fuck yourself.” Soon after that he was moved out of Italy.

  Back home Bogie continued his military service by joining the coast guard reserve. He went on duty once a week. In fact, it was often on his coast guard weekends in Balboa that my father had secret romantic meetings with a striking young actress known as Lauren Bacall, also known as my mother.

  I’m sure my father would have entertained the troops, no matter which party was in power during the war. But, as it happened, he was a liberal Democrat most of the time and he was an ardent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. Bogie was not as politically active as Jane Fonda, or even Lauren Bacall, for that matter. But he did speak up for Democratic candidates, like Harry Truman, and he donated money to their campaigns.

  The war, however, made Dwight Eisenhower very popular and both of my parents became early Ike supporters before anybody even knew if Ike would run for President. Bogie and Bacall hoped that Ike would run, and that he would run as a Democrat. But Ike went to the GOP. Though my folks still liked Ike, they began taking a second look at his Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson. Especially my mother.

  The more Mom heard about Stevenson, the more intrigued she became. She talked to friends about Adlai. She read a book about Adlai. She went to a party for Adlai in Hollywood. This was at a time when Hollywood was very touchy about politics, especially left-wing politics. In fact, at the party one well-known producer told Mother, “If you’re smart you’ll keep your mouth shut and take no sides.”

  Before long my mother had switched her allegiance from Eisenhower to Stevenson, and she was able to get my father to do the same thing. At one point Bogie was scheduled to fly to an Ike rally and, at the last minute, he changed his mind and went with Bacall to a rally for Stevenson. This was the early 1950s, of course, and by this time Bogie was one of the most famous movie stars in the world, so it was quite a coup for Adlai.