Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  You might think that all this would make for lively arguments between myself and Bacall. Not exactly. It is true that, like my father, I love to argue. I’ll be glad to take any side of an argument just for the fun of it. My mother enjoys a spirited discussion, also. But not with me.

  My father, I think, was the more patient one of the two. I think that if he were around today he would listen to me. Politically, we are alike. It’s not that he would agree with my views on each thing, but I think he would weigh each thing separately and not get caught up in the ism, whether it be liberalism or conservatism.

  My father was also a “personal-religionist,” which is a phrase I’d never heard until I read it in a press release about him. Basically, it means he didn’t practice his religion. I’m not religious at all.

  (Apparently, my own irreverence started early in life. When I was christened in the Episcopal church and the priest sprinkled water on my head, I said, “I don’t like the drops,” loud enough for everybody to hear. Then, near the end of the sermon, the priest said, “He shall enter the house of the Lord,” and, again very loudly, I said, “If he wants to come in, then let him come in.”)

  “Bogie was not a religious man,” my mother says. “But he was a great believer in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.”

  Nat Benchley says, “His moral code was strict, and was based on, and almost indistinguishable from, the Ten Commandments. He didn’t always obey them, but he believed in them.”

  I don’t think learning about my father’s politics changed my own politics in any way, though it does please me to know that he had strong convictions. My own convictions are a little closer to home than his. I’m more directed toward my personal world, my wife, my kids. It isn’t that I don’t care about the larger world; it’s just that I don’t care that much, and that I think I can do the most good at home. I find I don’t tend to follow party lines, and, like my father, I am suspicious of people who do. Dad once said, “Politically, I am an anarchist. Just like John Huston.” I’m not sure that he was kidding.

  Bogie seems at every turn to be a man who is difficult to sum up. But when I went to see Alistair Cooke, I wanted to come away with some understanding of my father’s politics, and I think I got it. Cooke often paused in our conversation about my father to read something he had once written about Bogie. And if the things he wrote don’t tell the whole story, they at least tell a lot of it.

  “Bogart,” says Cooke, “was a touchy man who found the world more corrupt than he had hoped; a man with a tough shell hiding a fine core. He invented the Bogart character and imposed it on a world impatient of men more obviously good. And it fitted his deceptive purpose like a glove. From all he was determined to keep his secret: the rather shameful secret, in the realistic world we inhabit, of being a gallant man and an idealist.”

  *

  When I return to the top of the stairway at the Mapleton Drive house, my mother is halfway down the stairs. Has she already gone into the bedroom without me? I wonder. Did she need to be alone there? I am relieved. I don’t really want to go in there, though I haven’t quite formed that thought in my mind. As I descend the stairs I hear the sound of a car going by on Mapleton. I think for a moment that it is like the sound of Daddy pulling into the driveway after a day at the studio. But this idea melts into a different memory.

  We go off in the Thunderbird, my father and I. I’m aware that it’s new and different. It’s not the Jaguar. He boasts about the new car. He says two of his friends bought Thunderbirds, but his is better. We are driving to the studio where Dad works.

  We pull into the lot. It’s where they make the movies, he says. He says that going to the studio is like being allowed into the locker room of the Braves. He knows that the Braves are my favorite baseball team ever since Sammy Cahn took me to a Dodgers-Braves game.

  At the studio everybody is friendly. We are on the set. Daddy says the movie is called The Desperate Hours. It seems very strange because my father is in a room, but it’s not really a room and there are people all around with lights and cameras and microphones. I am sitting in the director’s chair and people smile at me. They really say, “Quiet on the set,” just the way they do in movies I have seen about movies. I’m feeling like a big shot because my father is the star and I am his son. It’s like being the son of the batting champ.

  *

  6

  Bogie was the most professional actor I have ever worked with. But his contract said he was off duty at six o’clock, and if it was six o’clock and we were in the middle of the scene, he was gone. He’d say, “It’s six o’clock, we’ll finish the scene tomorrow.” Then he would go and have a drink.

  —ROD STEIGER

  When I began to write about my father I guess I believed that every major aspect of his life would cast light on my own, that I could easily find the ways in which I was, or was not, my father’s son. His use of alcohol might say something about my use of drugs. His experience in private school might somehow preview my own trouble in private school. And I guess I thought that in looking at his career, in the way he conducted it, and the way he felt about his work, I might learn something about my feelings toward work.

  Maybe. But the truth is there is little to be said about my work life. It’s been like everybody else’s, some highs, some lows. To go into my various jobs at length would be both boring and pretentious, sins which neither I nor my father would tolerate from someone else.

  The most striking difference between my father and me on the matter of work is that he really cared about his craft. He was dedicated and, I think, he put work first. I, on the other hand, have enjoyed my jobs in television, and I think I have been good at them, but I have never really focused on work. I have always put family and friends above what I did for a living. Maybe if I had grown up with a father, and had not gone away to school, I would feel less strongly about the need for family life, and more strongly about career. Perhaps that is the way in which my father has really influenced me.

  My father had no big career plan when he got out of the navy. He bounced around for a while. He worked at a biscuit company, then he had a job inspecting tugboats. He worked at other jobs, which didn’t last long. The young Bogie had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He spent a lot of time horseback riding with friends in Central Park.

  Though Bogie’s parents were, supposedly, washing their hands of him, it is probably not a coincidence that he was hired as a runner for the Wall Street brokerage firm that managed their money. And it was while he was at that job that Bogie came under the wing of Bill Brady, Sr., the father of his long-time buddy Bill Brady. Brady senior was already an established producer of stage plays. Specifically, Dad said, “I got subway-sick one day in New York when I was running messages for the brokerage house and staggered off the subway near William Brady’s theatrical offices—and, in a moment of desperation, asked for a job.”

  “How would you like to be an office boy?” Mr. Brady asked Bogie.

  “Office boy?”

  “It’s not a big step up from being a runner,” Brady told him, “but there are opportunities for advancement in a new business.”

  “What kind of business?” Dad asked.

  “Movies, my boy, movies.”

  So my father became an office boy for Brady’s company, which was called World Films.

  Advancement came fast. Brady stopped Bogie in the office one day and said, “How would you like to be a director?”

  “A director?”

  “Yes,” Brady said. He told Bogie that his picture, Life, was heading for the toilet, though he might have used a different phrase.

  “I guess,” Dad said.

  Brady fired the director and handed the film over to young Humphrey. “Finish directing it,” he said.

  “How?”

  “You figure it out,” Brady said.

  Unfortunately, Dad did not figure it out and the movie was a disaster.

  The experience left my fathe
r with a belief, not that he could direct, but that he could write much better than some of the people who were getting paid for scripts. Soon he began hanging around the 21 Club, a speakeasy in those days, where he would sit at small tables and lean earnestly over his notebook, penning story ideas. He smoked a pipe, which he thought made him look more writerly. (“I like to smoke a pipe,” he once said, “but it’s too damn much work.”)

  When Bogie finally finished a story he sent it to Jesse Lasky, who sent it to Walter Wanger, who announced that it was dreadful, and threw it in the wastebasket. (Years later Wanger’s daughter, Shelly, would become one of my playmates, and Wanger would boast to people, “Bogie once wrote for me.”)

  When the writing thing went nowhere my father became a stage manager in New York, working for Mr. Brady. Bogie was responsible for baggage, props, and scenery. The stage manager actually runs the show backstage.

  Even then Dad was flouting authority. One night when Brady brought the curtain up too soon after intermission, Dad brought it back down. Brady, so the story goes, kicked Dad in the stomach. My father got even by raising the curtain while Brady was on stage, making last-minute preparations for the next act. So Brady fired him. The next day Brady rehired my father. This, apparently, was a pattern which they repeated many times—an interesting precursor to Dad’s battles with, and many suspensions by, Jack Warner.

  My father’s first acting job, if you want to call it that, occurred in rehearsals. The juvenile lead was sick, so Dad filled in, with only the cast for an audience. (“Juvenile” was the term for young, well-dressed men in minor parts.)

  “It was awful,” he said. “I knew all the lines of all the parts because I’d heard them from out front about a thousand times. But I took one look at the emptiness where the audience would be that night and I couldn’t remember anything.”

  Fortunately, he never had to actually perform in the play because the show closed that night.

  Awful or not, my father had the acting bug. He started alternating his stage-managing duties with acting stints when he could get them.

  The acting bug is something that never bit me. Despite my pedigree, or perhaps because of it, I have never seriously considered being an actor. I did some acting in the eighth grade. I played Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew. Yes, I know, Bianca is a woman, but it was an all-boys school. I also acted a little bit at Milton. But, frankly, I’m a lousy actor. I’m comfortable being myself in front of people. But I’m not comfortable being someone else, and that’s what acting is. If you’re not comfortable being someone else, you’d better forget about acting. My mother keeps telling me I look great in front of the camera, but then, she is my mother.

  Besides, early in life I decided that I wanted my work to have something to do with sports.

  When Jady Robards and I used to go to Mets games we often sat in the bleachers, talking to each other as if one of us was the play-by-play man and the other was the color commentator.

  “Yes, Jady, I think if the Mets can score more runs than the other team today they have a pretty good chance of stealing this ball game.”

  “Right, Steve, many of these players have fast speed and strong strength. And quickness, lots of very rapid quickness.”

  “Yes, and every one of them is one of the finest gentlemen in the game.”

  Even though we only had fun pretending to be sportscasters, I, at least, often dreamed of being one. And if I couldn’t be a sportscaster, I still wanted some connection to sports.

  “Well, go talk to Howard,” my mother said. This was when I was in my early twenties. I’d been starting to think that maybe a person should have some focus in life, so I had talked to my mother about my sports dreams. The Howard of whom she spoke was Howard Cosell. She called him and I got an interview.

  It’s nice, I guess, to have a famous mother, because she, in turn, has a lot of celebrity friends. But, generally, I have a horror of taking advantage of that. Whenever I’m planning a trip to Disney World with my kids, for example, Mom says, “Call Michael, he’ll help you out.” She means Michael Eisner, chairman of Disney. But I never call Michael. Special treatment makes me uncomfortable; I don’t want to feel as if I’m being pushed to the head of the line. So usually I don’t take advantage of my mother’s celebrity status. But hell, I was a sports nut, and this was Howard Cosell.

  So I made an appointment, and one sunny morning I drove from Connecticut to ABC in New York. I sat in the receptionist’s office waiting for Cosell to show up. After about ten minutes the elevator door opened and I heard someone doing this fairly good, but not great, Howard Cosell impression.

  “Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the great one has arrived. Yes, it’s Howard Cosell, speaking to you from his palatial offices at the American Broadcasting Corporation Building.”

  I looked up and discovered it was Cosell, making a grand entrance, not as himself, but in a parody of his public persona. God, I thought, does he do this every day?

  “And you must be the Bogart boy,” he said. “I remember when I first met your mother, Betty. It was—” and he rattled off the exact time and place where he had met Mom, some fifteen years earlier. “Welcome to ABC,” he said. He shook my hand and led me into his office. It was still another minute or two before he could break out of the impression he was doing of himself. After we talked for a while about Betty, and my father, we got down to business. I told him that I wanted to be in sports broadcasting. Cosell listened to me very intently, and earnestly, and finally he leaned across his desk and said, “You know, Steve, I could give you a job.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh sure, I could make a few calls and you’d be working at nine o’clock tomorrow morning in some capacity or other.”

  “Anything would be great,” I said. “Just a start.”

  “Steve,” he said, “it would be the beginning of your sports broadcasting career.”

  “Yes,” I said. Now my heart was pounding. This was it, my big break.

  “But I have to tell you, Steve, it would also be the end of it.”

  “Huh?”

  “The end, Stephen Bogart, the end. With no education, you wouldn’t go anywhere in this business. Steve, I’ve been in this business a long time and I’ll tell you one thing that I am absolutely sure of. You have got to go back to school and get your degree.”

  At the time I was crestfallen. It seemed as if my sports broadcasting dream was over and, after I shook hands with Cosell and thanked him for the advice, I left the building and I must have walked forty blocks along Sixth Avenue with my head down.

  But at a deeper level I knew that Cosell was right and his words only tempered a resolve I was about to make: once and for all I would go to college and this time, for a novelty, I would graduate. So I will always be grateful for Howard Cosell’s advice.

  As it happened, there was a small trust fund that my father had left me. It had kicked in as soon as I got married and it came to about $600 a month, which was pretty good money at a time when my rent was only about $185 a month. But I had also from time to time petitioned for chunks of the fund, to get a car or whatever. By the time I spoke to Cosell I could see that this fund was only going to last about four more years. I did go back to school, the University of Hartford, where I majored in Mass Communications. And yes, I graduated.

  So, like my father, I had turned to an older, established man. And each older man had done the right thing for the time. Brady gave a young man a job, Cosell did not. I lived in a time when you had to have a degree to get anywhere. My father lived in a time when success depended more on how high you were willing to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

  My father was no sudden success. In his first appearance in front of an audience, Bogie played a Japanese houseboy. He had one line and he made the least of it. His friend Stuart Rose, who was in the audience that night, said, “He said his one line and he embarrassed me, it was so bad.”

  Dad’s first significant role came as a juvenile in
a play called Swifty. Almost all of Dad’s early roles were juveniles. His performance in Swifty was not memorable for the audience, but Bogie would remember it for the rest of his life.

  In fact, decades later he was sitting at 21 in New York with sportscaster Mel Allen, along with Hank Greenberg, the great Detroit Tigers slugger. Allen asked Greenberg about some of the home runs he had hit. Greenberg said that his greatest recollections were not about home runs that he had hit. They were about home runs he had wanted to hit, but had not. “I remember one home run I didn’t hit with two men on in the 1934 World Series,” he said. “And there was another home run I didn’t hit when I wanted to in the 1940 World Series.”

  The failures had stayed in Greenberg’s mind. When Allen reminded him about all the homers he had hit, Greenberg replied, “Some people only remember the unhappy things.”

  “That’s a fact,” my father said. “Newspaper people have been awfully nice to me and they’ve written some swell reviews. I couldn’t quote you any of the good reviews. But I can quote you word for word the panning Alexander Woollcott administered to me twenty-six years ago when I was in Swifty. He said, ‘The young man who embodied the aforesaid Sprigg was what might mercifully be described as inadequate.’ That was back in 1921. A lot has happened since then, but I can still see those words.”

  Swifty, by the way, closed quickly, and my father carried Woollcott’s review around with him for the rest of his life.

  The first hit show Bogie appeared in was Meet the Wife. But even in a hit, he got into trouble. At one matinee he left the theater after act two, forgetting that he had to make a small appearance in act three. Later, when the stage manager asked him where the hell he had been, my father blew his stack.

  His reviews during this time were mixed. The bad ones got to him, especially Woolcott’s, and also one that said that Bogie and another actor “gave some rather trenchant exhibitions of bad acting.”

  “The needling I got about my acting in those days made me mad,” he said. “It made me want to keep on until I’d get to the point where I didn’t stink anymore.”