Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  “It will destroy the industry,” Warner said. “These actors will want everything. Maybe you can talk Bogie out of this terrible thing he is about to do.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sam said. “Seeing as how, it was my idea that he could have his own company.”

  Sam Jaffe told me that Warner never forgave him. In fact, because Jack Warner saw Santana as a great danger to the business, he refused to use Jaffe & Baker clients in films. As a result the agents lost many stars. But they held their ground.

  Santana, unfortunately, never made a great film. There were four Santana films made between 1949 and 1951: Knock On Any Door, Tokyo Joe, In a Lonely Place, and Sirocco. None were very popular, which was embarrassing to Bogie, because he had quit Warner Brothers in order to make better films. But my father had struck a blow for artistic freedom, and he was proved right. Today many, if not most, big stars have their own production companies, and choose their own movie projects. So there, my daddy was right!

  Whether he was working for others or for himself, Bogie, I have learned, was usually not difficult to work with. But he expected other people to be as professional at their jobs as he was at his, and from time to time this would put him in conflict with a director.

  Sam Jaffe says, “One day I was on the set of The Desperate Hours with your father and Fredric March. Willie Wyler was directing. Wyler was the type of man who could not articulate what he wanted. He was like a lot of directors who can put together a fine picture in the cutting room but really don’t know how to tell an actor what they want. All they can do is say, ‘Do it again.’ So he kept doing this to Bogie and Bogie said, ‘Look, what is the point of me doing it again if you can’t tell me what it is you want different, or what it is you want me to do.’ That was characteristic of Bogie. He was analytical. But, he had embarrassed Wyler and the two men got together and talked quietly and made peace with each other, then they shot the scene again, and I guess Wyler communicated what he wanted from your father.”

  Oddly, Phil Gersh also told me a story about Bogie and Wyler failing to communicate on this same film.

  Bogie had it written into his contracts that he was done for the day at six o’clock, and one day during the filming of The Desperate Hours he called Gersh up from the set at ten minutes to six.

  “Phil,” Bogie said, “Wyler’s driving me nuts.”

  “What’s the problem?” Phil asked.

  “I’ve got to walk upstairs to the second floor in this scene.”

  “So?”

  “So, I do it, and Willy says I’m too slow. Then I do it again and Willy says I’m going too fast. No matter what I do, it’s not right. I’ve run up and down those stairs about twelve times now and it’s almost six o’clock.”

  “Make him show you,” Phil said.

  “Huh?”

  “Just tell him, ‘Willy, you go up the stairs. Show me how you want it done.’”

  So Bogie went over to Wyler. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you just go up the stairs the way you want me to.”

  Wyler looked at him for a moment, then looked at the stairs. “It’s a wrap,” he said, and Bogie was out by six o’clock.

  Most directors found Bogie easy to work with. As did most actors. Rod Steiger says, “Bogie was the ultimate professional. Even when he was not in a scene with me he would stand off camera and feed me the lines, so I had someone to talk to. And Bogie was very generous. We’d be shooting a scene and he’d say, ‘Jesus, this kid is blowing me off the screen,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, Mr. Bogart, we can switch parts,’ and he would just smile. He could have gotten me out of the picture if he wanted to, or he could have had my close-ups cut out, the way a lot of stars did in those days, but he never did any of those things.”

  There were, however, a few actors who found working with Bogie not quite so joyous. One was William Holden.

  Holden did not care for Dad. He called Bogie “an actor of consummate skill, with an ego to match.”

  When Holden was twenty-one and appearing in Invisible Stripes, in 1939, he was to be in a scene where he drove a motorcycle, with my father in the sidecar. He overheard Dad say, “Get my double to do it. I won’t ride with that son of a bitch. He’ll crack it up.” Years later Holden allowed for the fact that “son of a bitch” could be an endearment coming from Bogie, but at the time he was steamed, and he was so anxious to prove Bogart wrong that he cracked up the motorcycle with Bogie’s double in it.

  Fourteen years later my father and Bill Holden were making Sabrina for Paramount. The making of Sabrina was by all accounts a lousy experience for my father. And, by all accounts, Bogie was at least partially to blame for that.

  “It didn’t even start off good,” Phil Gersh says. “I called Billy Wilder. I said, ‘Billy, you’ve already got Audrey Hepburn and Bill Holden. I think Bogie would be marvelous as Linus Larrabee.’ Billy said, ‘Meet me at the tennis club on Saturday, we’ll talk.’ So we talked. Then two weeks went by and he called and said, ‘I’ve been thinking it over, can I meet with Bogie?’ So we met at five o’clock and we all schmoozed and it got to be seven o’clock and we still hadn’t even discussed the movie. Everybody had appointments. Finally, Bogie said to Billy, ‘Look, let’s just shake hands on it, and you take care of me.’ They shook hands and that was it, there was nothing to worry about. They hadn’t even talked about the script. Bogie was just trusting Billy to treat him right.

  “So the picture starts shooting thirty days later and Bogie calls me all upset. He says, ‘Look, this guy is shooting the back of my head, I don’t even have to put my hairpiece on; I’m not in this picture.’ So I went to Billy Wilder and told him, ‘Look, Bogie is very unhappy, he’s going to walk.’ There was a lot of yelling and screaming, he’s not being taken care of. So Bogie put his hairpiece on and came off great in the movie.”

  Bogie might have come off great, but the movie, I learned, was troubled from day one. Wilder started shooting without a complete script, reminiscent of Bogie’s Casablanca experience. Pages were being delivered every day. One day they were delivered to Holden and Hepburn, but not to my father, who already felt like an outsider among these “Paramount bastards,” as he called them. He walked out, forcing a shutdown in the production.

  One reason that Dad felt like an outsider was that William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and Billy Wilder, who was directing, would get together for drinks every evening after shooting, but they never invited Bogie to join them, and it hurt his feelings. More than once he was heard to say, “Those Paramount bastards didn’t invite me. Well, fuck them,” which is the way I talk when my feelings are hurt.

  Billy Wilder says the reason Bogie was not invited to join everybody for drinks at the end of the day was, “We just didn’t think he was fun to be with. Since he was excluded he reacted with anger and became worse than ever. This caused extreme tension on the picture.”

  More than one movie journalist has said that Bogie was not at his best during the filming of Sabrina. Some say he was still identifying with the character of Captain Queeg from his previous movie, The Caine Mutiny—paranoid and unhappy. He was, some say, irritable, on edge, apathetic about the film. He is said to have complained about his costumes, told reporters the movie was “a crock of you know what,” and often referred to Billy Wilder as a “Kraut bastard Nazi son of a bitch,” even though Wilder is, in fact, Jewish.

  Dad also did not care for Audrey Hepburn. Though he said gracious things about her in interviews, he privately thought that she was unprofessional.

  Even on this movie, which he was unhappy about, Dad knew his lines cold and he often got impatient with Holden and Hepburn, both of whom had a tendency to blow lines. Supposedly, Bogie had a whole laundry list of complaints besides this. Hepburn couldn’t do a scene in less than twelve takes, he said, and she had rings under her eyes because she was up late seeing Holden. Holden, who was married at the time, also blew cigarette smoke in my father’s face. In one scene Dad was on camera and Bill Holden, because he was out
of the shot, read his lines from the script. Holden was smoking and when my father got frustrated because he was blowing his lines—something he had never done—he told Billy Wilder, “It’s that fucking Holden with his script and his cigarettes in the air.”

  Holden and my father exchanged words, but apparently they made up later while drinking alcohol, a love they shared.

  Another actress who was less than enamored of my father was Bette Davis. Conrad Nagel, the actor who helped to start the Academy of Motion Pictures, says that Bette Davis did not like my father, and it was because of something that happened when she was making her first movie, Bad Sister, with him.

  According to Nagel, there was a scene in the movie where Bette Davis had to diaper a baby. Davis, Nagel says, was sexually inexperienced and easily embarrassed, and she had assumed the baby would be a girl. She was twenty-three and supposedly had never seen male genitals, but when she unwrapped the baby, there they were. Davis got terribly embarrassed and blushed. Nagel doesn’t say that my father arranged for a male baby, just that Bette Davis always believed that Bogie had gathered the cast and crew to watch her reaction. As she saw it, he got a big laugh at her expense. Bogie, she has said, was “uncouth.”

  Though Davis and Bogie were never close, they did have a drink together now and then to bitch about Jack Warner, and she says they came to have a “grudging admiration for each other.”

  I suppose a grudging admiration is what I came to have for my father’s work as I learned more about it. I learned that he took his work seriously, that he stood up for other actors, that he studied his craft. All these things are admirable. But his job, like his boat, had deprived me of time with him, so I suppose I have always resented it. I’ve come to see it differently—to do another take, as it were. He did, after all, have to make a living. And, perhaps more to the point, Bogie didn’t know that he was going to die when I was only eight years old. Maybe if he did know, he would have slowed down and not made so many pictures. I’ve learned, too, that passion for work can be an acquired trait, particularly as your kids grow older and less in need of your time. And maybe a lot depends on what the work is. I never cared enough about my jobs to put them first, but that doesn’t make me right and him wrong. The fact is that lately I’ve been writing a series of mystery novels, and I find that I think about them even when I don’t have to, just as I imagine Bogie must have thought about his roles, even when he was sailing off the coast of California. So maybe one of these days I will take my notebooks and pens and find a Greenwich Village drinking establishment, where I can sit at a small table, penning story ideas. And maybe I’ll smoke a pipe while I work. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe, like my father, I’ll think it’s too damn much work.

  *

  Mother and I enter the kitchen just long enough to say how different it is. But in that fragment of time I remember my first taste of alcohol.

  I am eight years old. My father has been sick for a long time now and he comes down from his bedroom only in the afternoons to be with his friends in the butternut room. The grown-ups still laugh, which makes me think things will be all right. And they still drink liquor, which is the word I know for everything that they pour into glasses. It is late afternoon, unusually cool outside and not a day to play. I have been trying to do my homework, but I am bored. I come downstairs to the kitchen, and there is nobody there. I can hear them all talking in the butternut room. On the sink there is a tray of empty glasses. But May is not there. No one is there. A few of the glasses still have liquor in them, and I am suddenly excited, thinking this is my chance to taste liquor. For some time I have thought about these drinks that grown-ups have. Which glass is Dad’s? I wonder. Is his one of the ones that still has something in it? My heart is pounding, as if I am about to do something wicked. I hear the voices in the butternut room. I move close to the sink, where the tray of glasses is. I count the glasses. There are four of them. Which one is my father’s? I wonder again. I move closer, thinking I want to taste liquor and tell the kids about it. I sniff the glasses, thinking I can tell which one is my father’s. Two are the same, one is different. The smell is not really pleasant. It feels warm to my nostrils, like breathing hot air. But I am sure the taste will be good. Even if it’s not, I think, I will have tasted liquor. Finally, thinking I know which glass is my father’s I pick it up. There is only a small amount of liquor in the bottom of the glass. I wait for the sound of laughter, so I will know they are all still in the butternut room. I lift the glass to my mouth and let the liquor pour over my tongue. It feels hot and disgusting. I quickly put the glass back on the tray and I start spitting into the sink, trying to get the taste off my tongue. I turn on the faucet and pour water into my cupped hands and drink it. These people must be nuts to like this stuff, I think.

  *

  7

  Bogie had an alcoholic thermostat. He just set his thermostat at noon, pumped in some scotch, and stayed at a nice even glow all day, automatically redosing as necessary.

  —NUNNALLY JOHNSON

  One time, a few years before I was born, my father was out all night drinking. When dawn came he was staggering around on unfamiliar Hollywood streets. He was hungover, unshaven, and disheveled, looking more like a gutter rat than a movie star. As he walked along one side street in the early morning, he noticed a light glowing in the window of a small house. He slipped between two hedges, crept across the lawn, and peered in the window. There he saw a woman in her kitchen, cooking breakfast for her family. By this time Bogie was getting hungry, apparently, and he stood by the window for a long time, sniffing the smell of bacon. Finally, the woman turned toward the window and she saw him peering in at her. At first she was startled at the sight of this scruffy-looking guy. But as she stared longer at him she realized that she was looking at one of the most famous men in the world.

  “My God!” she called to her husband, “it’s Humphrey Bogart.”

  “What about him?” the husband asked.

  “He’s in our front yard,” she said.

  “Well, let’s invite him in.”

  So the husband invited Bogie in. The kids came down for breakfast, and everybody gathered around the kitchen table. There, the not-quite-sober movie star wolfed down bacon and eggs, and regaled these ordinary folk with tales of Hollywood moviemaking and what it was like to kiss Bette Davis and get shot dead by James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. After he said good-bye that morning, Bogie never saw the people again, but for the rest of their lives they had a story to tell.

  There are any number of anecdotes concerning my father and alcohol. Dad lived, after all, in a time when there were no Mothers Against Drunk Driving, when getting loaded was still amusing. So he made no efforts to hide his drinking, and many of his drinking stories found their way into print.

  My father, in fact, was somewhat chauvinistic about booze, often hinting that people who drank were of a higher order than those who abstained.

  “The whole world is three drinks behind,” he said in 1950. “If everybody in the world would take three drinks, we would have no trouble. Of course, it should be handled in moderation. You should be able to handle it. I don’t think it should handle you. But that’s what the world needs, three more drinks. If Stalin, Truman, and everybody else in the world had three drinks right now, we’d all loosen up, and we wouldn’t need the UN.”

  Bogie once announced, “I’m starting, maybe I should say uncorking, a campaign for more civilized, more decorous drinking.” He named his favorite “gentlemen guzzlers.” On his list were Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Errol Flynn, John Steinbeck, Don Ameche, Ed Gardner, Toots Shor, Pat O’Brien, Paul Douglas, and John Nance Garner. And on his all-star drinking team he put Mark Hellinger, Robert Benchley, and W. C. Fields.

  He wouldn’t allow women on the team. He said that you could not have peaceful drinking when there were women around. “You don’t have fights in men’s bars,” he said. “The fights are in nightclubs, when women come flirting around. Women should be
allowed one cocktail as an appetizer, and they should be made to drink that at a table. Women don’t drink attractively. They look a little crooked when they drink. They fix their hats till they get them tilted and crooked.”

  Whenever Bogie talked at length, which was often, some reference to drink was almost inevitable, and he has become highly quotable on the subject. “I think there should be some space between drinks,” he said. “But not much.” When he came back from Italy he said, “I didn’t like the pasta so I lived on scotch and soup.” When asked if he had ever been on the wagon, he replied, “Just once. It was the most miserable afternoon of my life.”

  Bogie also said, “Something happens to people who drink. They live longer.” But he knew better. When his sister Catherine, whom he called Kay, died of peritonitis after a ruptured appendix, the doctors said she had been weakened by too much alcohol. “She was,” said Bogie, “a victim of the speakeasy era.”

  Kay, who had been a Bergdorf-Goodman model, died in her thirties. She had been as prodigious a drinker as my father. George Oppenheimer, cofounder of Viking Press, was once her steady date, but he couldn’t keep up with her drinking. Bogie once said, “The trouble with George is that he gives out just as Kay is ready to give in.”

  So yes, there are some cute stories about Bogie’s drinking and there are lots of funny lines. But the simple truth is that my father had a drinking problem, and that can never be a good thing.

  “My father was a functional alcoholic,” I said to a woman one time. I have said that a lot.

  “Watch what you say,” she said. She was very upset with me.

  “Huh?”

  “There’s no such term as ‘functional alcoholic,’” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Alcoholism is a disease and we should be very careful about how we use our terms.”

  Well, maybe.

  I do know that Bogie functioned. He was never drunk on the job (except, of course, for the time that Jack Warner had to coax him off his bicycle), never hauled into jail or hospitalized for drinking, and never ravaged by booze, though certainly it was a factor in his cancer. Bogie did not usually get drunk, at least so that you could tell. He was what he called a good drinker. “A good drinker,” he said, “doesn’t let drinking interfere with his job. He can get absolutely stiff and the fellow next to him doesn’t know it.”