Patrick O’Moore, one of my father’s actor friends, said that when he drank with Bogart, he realized there was something wrong with his own drinking.
“I thought we drank the same,” he says, “but I noticed that Bogart was still cold sober at the end of the evening and I wasn’t.”
One day on the Santana, O’Moore said to Bogie, “There’s something wrong with my drinking, Bogie. I don’t know what it is, but you can be all right when you want to and I can’t.”
Bogie replied, “Well, kid, you don’t handle it right. You’ve crossed the line.”
My father rarely crossed the line. He took great pride in that.
Yet, this is a guy who, when he wasn’t working, started drinking by noon. He drank when he went to Romanoff’s. He stopped for drinks on the way home. He drank when he got home. He drank on his boat. He hung out with people who drank. Drinking was one thing my father did a lot of. The fact is that my father liked to drink and smoke, and that’s what eventually killed him. It seems to me at least that this is a description of a drinking problem.
John Huston said, “Bogie loved to drink and play the roughneck. Actually I don’t think I ever saw Bogie drunk. It was always half acting, but he loved the whole scene.”
Maybe Huston never saw Bogie drunk, but a lot of other people, including my mother, did. The results were not always attractive. Just like Jason Robards, Bogie could be charming when he was sober, but often unpleasant when he was drunk. Bogie was not always drinking for fun.
Mom says that when Bogie drank too much with her, he felt remorseful. And when he drank too much he often had a temper. She tells me there were times when Bogart was so loaded he didn’t even know where he was or who she was.
One night—I think it was her first night on the boat, and they were still dating secretly—he got frighteningly drunk and she watched as his personality turned from adorable to ugly. It was Jekyll-and-Hyde time. There had been no arguments, no cutting remarks, nothing to predict an outburst. But, suddenly Bogie began pounding on the table.
“Actresses!” he shouted.
“Bogie, what’s the matter?” Mother asked. She was only nineteen at the time and this was the first time she was seeing Bogie’s temper.
“All you damn actresses are what’s the matter,” Bogie shouted. “You’re all alike.”
“Well you ought to know,” Mother said, trying to make light of things. “You married three of them.”
“I said that ninety-five percent of them were morons,” Bogie shouted. “And the papers got all over me for that. Well, I’m revising the figures, goddamn it! I’m saying that ninety-eight percent of them are morons.”
Though these same comments had been amusing when the sober Bogart said them to reporters, he now sounded furious.
“Actresses! Who needs them, damn it,” he shouted. Again, he pounded the table.
My mother felt a mixture of emotions. She didn’t understand what had set him off like this. “Actresses,” she figured was code for women like her, and his three wives, and perhaps even his mother. Mom had never seen him so upset. She was afraid that people would hear him shouting. She was afraid she would lose him. And she was terrified that if she managed to hold on to this volatile personality, she would never learn how to deal with all the drinking that he and his friends did. My mother had never been around so much drinking before.
Finally staggering, and railing against the world in general and actresses in particular, Dad stormed off the boat and disappeared into the night. Mother cried for hours. In the morning Bogie was back, filled with remorse for his behavior. It was only much later that Mother came to the conclusion that Bogie had been fighting and drinking for so long with Mayo Methot, to whom he was still married at the time, that he had established a terrible pattern, and in his drunkenness he must have thought Bacall was Mayo.
The fact is that a lot of Dad’s fears came to the surface when he drank, and one of them, certainly at this time, was that he would lose Bacall. From her viewpoint this was ridiculous. She was in love with him and if anyone was in danger of heartbreak it was her. After all, he was a highly desirable, witty, wealthy, intelligent, and famous man whom many women found very sexy. In fact, she often saw, or thought she saw, other women coming on to him. But from my father’s point of view, he was a nearly fifty-year-old guy whose looks were gone, and she was a beautiful young and talented actress who could get any man she wanted. The result was the friction of two insecure people. My mother, fortunately, was not a big drinker. But Bogie, of course, was, and when he drank he would worry and often he would lash out at my mother.
I’m relieved to say that I did not inherit my father’s addiction to alcohol. I’m not a drinker. I don’t like the taste of alcohol or the smell of it. In one year I might have only six or seven drinks, and even those will be something innocuous, in which the taste of the alcohol is well disguised.
I am, however, interested in my father’s drinking habits because I had a substance addiction of my own. Drugs. I think my father’s experience and mine were similar in some ways. And they were different in some ways, the most obvious being that his drug was legal and mine was not, and that I gave up drugs, but he never really stopped drinking.
Certainly Bogie and I, both of us shy, used our drugs as a social lubricant. There doesn’t seem to be a time in Bogie’s adulthood when booze was not at the center of his social life.
In the twenties he was part of the jazz age. He ran around with brazen women who smoked cigarettes, and he drank bootleg whiskey distilled by the same machine gun toting gangsters that he would later portray in the movies. After his first early successes on the stage, when he had some money in his pockets, Dad used to spend a lot of time in Times Square watering holes and Greenwich Village bars, speakeasies, and places like the Harlem Cotton Club. Often he stayed up drinking all night.
Later, when he got into movies, at six o’clock he would go to his dressing room and shout “Scotch!” That’s when his hairdresser would get drinks ready for Bogie and any guest who happened to drop by. On his way home from work he would stop for drinks with pals—writers mostly, like Mark Hellinger, John O’Hara, Nathaniel Benchley, Nunnally Johnson, and Quentin Reynolds. When he got home he would drink again, and often go out later, looking for guys to go drinking with.
His first three marriages, particularly his marriage to Mayo Methot, were largely a drinking orgy. But when my father married my mother, it seemed he had found the missing piece in his life, and his drinking habits improved. He stopped drinking mixed drinks and he stopped mixing his drinks.
“Mark Hellinger told me I was drinking like a boy and he was right,” Bogie said. Hellinger had told him that he was drinking like a kid because he mixed his drinks. Before Hellinger, Bogie would have martinis before dinner, beer with dinner, and Drambuie after dinner. But during the Bacall part of his life he was strictly a scotch man. “Scotch,” he said, “is a very valuable part of my life.”
Though my mother has often been given the credit for reducing Bogie’s alcohol consumption, she doesn’t see it quite that way.
“I didn’t persuade him to cut back,” she says. “That would have been foolhardy. You couldn’t nag Bogie. That would be counterproductive. I didn’t try to keep up with him, and I didn’t bawl him out when he was hungover. I simply ignored him. He would try to get me to pay attention when he was drinking but I did not. The fact is that Bogie drank because he was insecure. Once he realized that he had emotional security, and professional security, too, he cut back on his drinking.”
After he married Bacall, Bogie didn’t go out to drink as often, but he still drank every day, usually with friends in the butternut room. During this later part of his life Bogie said, “This is my recreation. I like to sit around and gab, enjoy my drinks and my family. That’s what a man wants when he’s over fifty. Drink never caused me any harm.”
Quite simply, Bogie’s social life, throughout his life, could fairly be described as “drinking
with friends.” And I know how that goes. A lot of my young adulthood could fairly be described as “smoking dope with friends.”
My mother, of course, never knew about all this drugtaking until much later. But drugs—or, at least, the drug culture—still got me in trouble with her during this period, when I was living in her apartment.
One day in 1968, while my mother was in Europe making a movie, my friend Peter, from New Jersey, came up to the Dakota.
“Bogart, let’s have a party,” he said.
“Great idea,” I said. “Who shall we invite?”
“Everybody.”
So we invited all our friends, and we told them they could bring friends.
Before the party, Peter and I headed down to Greenwich Village to buy a pound of grass. By the time we got back to the Dakota, people were already showing up for the party. All of them had one thing in common: Neither Pete nor I had the vaguest idea of who they were.
I guess when we put out the word about the party, we thought we’d end up with a few dozen people. But by ten o’clock that night there were three hundred to four hundred people tromping in and out of Mother’s beautiful apartment, including a few people that Pete and I actually knew. In those days word of a party would spread like a virus. One person would tell another where there was a party and soon strangers would show up, completely untroubled by the fact that they didn’t know who was running the party or any of the people there. So they came—long-haired guys and longer-haired girls. Some brought cake, or a brick of cheese. Or a bowl of cauliflower. All of them brought drugs. Joints were passed from hand to hand, Mary Jane brownies were munched, platters of acid made the rounds. Even some old-fashioned types brought alcohol. Every five minutes the doorman would buzz the apartment and tell me somebody wanted to come up.
“What’s their name?” I’d ask and I’d hear him asking them, “What’s your name?”
“John and Cherry,” they’d say, or “Windsong and Harmony.” And I’d say, “Send them up.” I didn’t know who the hell they were. It didn’t matter to me. I was stoned and I was surrounded by peace and love and good-looking females. They could have said their names were Huey, Dewey, and Louie and I would have invited them up.
We all had a great time, and kind of a miracle occurred that night. It wasn’t a miracle then, but it would be today. Here were four hundred drug-addled hippie strangers roaming around the luxury apartment of a movie star, and not one thing was stolen or broken in that apartment. Times were definitely different. Today everything would be stolen or wrecked or used as evidence in a negligence suit.
So, since nothing was stolen or broken, my mother was happy for me that I had four hundred friends drop by at her place, right? Well, not exactly. After all, Pete had said there was no possibility that she would find out, because she was in Europe.
However, the doorman at the Dakota thought Bacall might be interested in the fact that half the unwashed people in New York were dancing on her carpets. So he called her in Europe and told her.
She, not surprisingly, called me. We discussed it.
“Stephen,” she said, speaking in the coldest tones I have ever heard. “I have just received a very disturbing telephone call from the doorman there.”
“Mom, it’s not so bad, there’s nothing broken—”
“Stephen,” she said, stopping me in midsentence, “what you have done is so monumentally bad, so unforgivable, that I am beyond even screaming.”
“Look, Mom, everybody’s gone. Nothing got stolen, nothing got—”
“Stephen! My hands are trembling on the phone. Trembling. I don’t know if I will ever again be able to trust you.”
She might as well have shoved an ice pick in my heart.
“Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t know so many people would show up.”
“How many?” she said.
“I don’t know. Forty, maybe fifty.”
“I see,” she said, which either meant that fifty was a horrendous number, or that she knew the truth. “Now I will only say this once, Stephen, I want that apartment spotless. Do you understand?”
“I got you, Mom.”
“I don’t want to see a stain. Do you understand me? I want to walk into my apartment and believe that this was all a nightmare, that what I have heard tonight never really happened.”
I spent the next three days cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned.
Despite one bad acid trip and the incident with my mother, over which I still feel guilty and embarrassed, I don’t think smoking grass and tripping, on the whole, did me much harm. That, however, cannot be said for cocaine, a much more seductive drug and, I know now, a much more dangerous one.
I first started snorting cocaine in my late twenties, when I went to the University of Hartford. It was not a problem at first. For the first couple of years I would do it maybe once a month. It was around 1980, when I was working as an assistant producer at ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, that my cocaine use started to escalate. My marriage to my first wife, Dale, had been lousy for a long time, but the impact of a bad marriage had only just started to get to me. I was lonely, and I guess cocaine took the edge off my loneliness.
At ESPN I’d be assistant-producing games and doing lines of coke at the same time. We had a telex machine, where you went to get the scores. Guys would put coke on the plastic top and slice it up with a razor blade. Of course, all this sounds reckless as hell today. But then cocaine was the “good drug.” It was party time, Studio 54 and all that. Cocaine was not the social evil that it is now. It wasn’t even all that expensive.
At ESPN I still felt that I had things under control. I’d buy some and I’d use it, and that would be it. I didn’t go screaming through the streets for more. Sometimes I’d go to people’s houses and do cocaine until four in the morning. But the next day I would stay away from it. So I was cool, I thought.
But cocaine is seductive. You don’t realize that you are getting addicted. I started using it more and more. Soon I was doing it on my day off, and twice a week I would make a two-hundred-dollar coke buy. That’s four hundred bucks a week to get drugged. Ten thousand bucks a year, and even that was small change compared to the habits of some guys. Trouble is, I was on track to become one of those guys.
I would do cocaine on a Friday night and I wouldn’t sleep until Saturday night. I would space out. I would get selfish and refuse to share my coke with anybody. Then the paranoia started. The fear, the sweats, the jitters—all came with the crash that followed the high. I stopped eating. I lost weight. My strength was sapped and I couldn’t work out.
Still, I went to work in New York every day, which meant I had to commute eighty-five miles each way from Connecticut, and I would do coke. I didn’t miss much time at work, but still I was getting worse.
With cocaine, as with alcohol, you reach a bottom. That is, if you don’t kill yourself first. Everybody has a different bottom. I think I know when I reached mine.
It was in 1984 when I was working for NBC as a writer for the affiliate news. I had been doing cocaine all night. I needed to get ready for work. By this time I was divorced from Dale and I was living in New York again, at my mother’s place at the Dakota.
This particular morning, after the all-night session, I was a wreck. I knew I couldn’t go to work, but with the insane optimism of the coke fiend, I figured maybe later in the day I’d feel just great and I could go in to work. So I called NBC and told them that I was in Connecticut.
“My car stalled out,” I said. “I don’t know how long it will take to have it towed and fixed.”
I said I was calling from a pay phone. I felt guilty as hell, lying to them, but I figured I’d get in to the studio later and everything would be fine.
Of course, the way to take the edge off a cocaine high is to drink alcohol when you’re coming down. That was no pleasure for me, because I don’t like alcohol. But I drank it, anyhow. I’d done it before. I drank half a fifth of vodka. I’d pass out for a while,
wake up and think I was getting a grip on things, then pass out again and wake up later. I figured if I could last for an hour then I knew I’d be okay. Around midday I began to believe that I was pretty straight, so I got dressed and started walking to NBC. When I got close to Rockefeller Center I started to think, “Shit, they’ll smell the vodka I’ve been drinking.” So I called NBC from a pay phone right outside of the building. I told my supervisor that I was still in Connecticut having the car fixed. “I know you are,” he said, meaning, of course, that he knew I was what we affectionately called a lying sack of shit.
Before I hung up, he said, “Watch out or you’re going in the shitter,” or something like that.
I guess that’s when it hit me. I already was in the shitter, whatever a shitter was. It was the first time I actually missed work because of my habit. I was spending all kinds of money on cocaine, I was allowing it to interfere with my life, and now I was in danger of losing my job because I had turned into a lying, scheming cocaine addict. I sensed suddenly that I was not cool, that I was one of these guys who had a problem and that everybody in the world could see it.
Shortly after that I went into therapy. I went to therapy alone. And I went to therapy with my mother. And I went to couples therapy with Barbara, who was then my new girlfriend.
I give most of the credit for my sobriety to Barbara. It was she, more than anybody else, who helped me to give up drugs. Barbara had been two years sober after a serious substance abuse problem of her own. Alcohol and drugs. She had gone through a long and difficult time, and as I fell more deeply in love with her I came to admire her greatly for overcoming her addiction. She took me to her AA meetings. She loved me and supported me and told me I could kick the habit.
Bogart Page 17
