Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  “Steve,” she said, “it’s easier to stay straight than to keep up the addiction. And you have more fun.”

  Being with Barbara was important because she was a winner, a person who had become sober. If you are going to get rid of a substance abuse problem you must associate with winners. You can’t hang out with drug addicts.

  In therapy I came to see what need cocaine was filling in my life. I could see that I had become a very lonely person. I had gotten into cocaine at a time when I was lonely in my marriage because Dale and I had become practically strangers. After my divorce from Dale I had gotten even lonelier because I no longer had a daily relationship with my son, Jamie. And I was lonely because, even though I had some friends, I didn’t feel truly intimate with them. Cocaine had somehow taken the edge off that loneliness. Did I take cocaine because I am Humphrey Bogart’s son? No. But I think the loneliness that led to cocaine began when my father died and I began to build a wall around me.

  Not surprisingly, my father’s name came up from time to time during therapy. In those dark, introspective days, I felt a real bond with Dad. We both had a substance abuse problem. I talked a lot about him, or about his absence, I guess. I learned that I was full of regret for the fact that I never had a father in my life to teach me male things, to show me exactly what it meant to be a man. I began to think that he and I were similar. It seemed to me that he had been lonely, too.

  Now, having talked to many people about my father, I am more sure than ever that Humphrey Bogart was tightly wrapped around an inner core of loneliness.

  “There was something very sad about Mr. Bogart,” Rod Steiger told me. “You could see it in his eyes.”

  “He seemed to be a sad man,” Jess Morgan said.

  I heard similar comments from others.

  My father, I have learned, was a very guarded man. Though he was famous for speaking his mind, I don’t think he let his true feelings out to anybody, at least not often. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that his mother didn’t really give him the attention that he needed. Sometimes I think of him as a kid pulling pranks at Andover, and the image of him melts into the image of myself doing the same things at Milton. For me, all that mischief was a kind of mask. I bet it was for him, too.

  And at the other end of his life, when Bogie supposedly had close friends, maybe he didn’t feel truly intimate with them. We know that he did not feel close enough to any of them, including Mother, to really talk about the fact that he was dying. There was no last conversation with his wife or his kids. You would think he would want to talk about death. But he didn’t. He just wanted people to ignore his illness until he died, and then he wouldn’t have to deal with it. Maybe, despite the surprise birthday party and all the many get-togethers with pals, Bogie still never really believed that he was loved. After all, there were things to dislike about Bogie, and maybe in the privacy of his thoughts, those are the things that he focused on. Maybe there was a reason why he drank.

  I don’t know. But there are two things I am sure of. One is that my father was neither a saint nor a devil. He was human. And the other, learned from my own experience with drugs, is that nobody just happens to drink constantly, day in and day out. It is too goddamned punishing. There is always a reason.

  The reason can only be guessed at. But certainly my father was troubled and insecure, and the drinking was not unrelated to those things. Pat O’Moore said, “There came a time when the pressure built up inside him and he had to drink. I used to see him so frustrated with anger that he would sit and quiver all over.”

  And Phil Gersh says, “The insecurity of Humphrey Bogart was amazing. He was terribly insecure.”

  Gersh remembers one particular lunch at Romanoff’s. Usually, at lunch, Gersh would tell Bogie about possible jobs, or at least bring him a couple of scripts. This time the two men talked about other things.

  After Bogie had put away two scotches, he looked at Gersh and said, “No scripts, huh?”

  Gersh said, “No, I don’t have any today, Bogie, but I will have some.”

  Bogie looked depressed. “Well,” he said, “nobody wants me.”

  “Bogie, what are you talking about?”

  “I guess I’ll go down to the boat,” he said. “I’ll call Betty and tell her to bring the kids down.”

  “Listen,” Gersh said, “I’m getting a script from Hal Wallis tomorrow. It will probably be great for you.”

  “No,” Bogie said, “I’ll go down to the boat.”

  Gersh says, “He really thought, then, that nobody wanted him, that maybe his last movie was his last movie. Bogie had a great ego, but he had great insecurity, too. One time we walked out of Romanoff’s and the people were there. A bunch of kids ran over for autographs, and I said, ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ and he said, ‘No, it would bother me if they didn’t come.’”

  If I got a better understanding of Bogie in therapy, I also got a better understanding of my mother during this time. But the moment of insight didn’t come from a therapist. It came from my sister, Leslie, who lives in California, where she and her husband both teach Yoga.

  I was talking to Leslie on the phone one night, griping about Mom.

  “Why does she always have to be in control all the time?” I said. “Why can’t she ever be just pure emotion?” (Two weeks in therapy and I was starting to sound like Leo Buscaglia!)

  “Well,” Leslie said, “Mother never got the chance to express her emotions, and maybe she came to believe that expressing your emotions was not a necessary thing. Because of this silly game she and Dad played, never talking about the fact that he was dying, she never got to say to Father, ‘I can’t believe you’re dying. How could you do this to me? I gave up my career. You gave me two kids. And now you’re leaving, damn you!’ Instead she had to say, ‘I adore you,’ and so forth. I don’t know if this is something she would have said if she could have, but when you are allowed to have your grief you go through all these stages and one of them is anger. And I know that that’s what I would have said. But she never got a chance to say it. He didn’t leave her with that much.”

  God, I thought, Leslie’s right. And I knew that what was true for Mom was also true for Leslie and for me. If my father had died when I was an adult I might, like so many others, regret that I hadn’t told him I loved him. But he died when I was a kid. I had hugged him, I had told him I loved him. I was, as they say, okay with that. But I had never gotten a chance to say, “Damn you, Daddy, for dying on me when I need you.” And maybe all those years of denying him were my way of saying it.

  So here I was, having insights left and right and I breezed through therapy and never touched cocaine again, right? No, of course not. Life is never quite that simple.

  After Barbara and I were married there came a day when I slipped. She was away and I did some cocaine, even though I had been sober for a period of time. When I told Barbara about it, she didn’t scream and yell at me. She didn’t even preach. She made things very simple for me. She told me she would not be married to a cocaine addict. I could do cocaine or I could be married to her. Not both. No contest. I have been sober since.

  Like my mother with Bogie, Barbara does not take credit for getting me sober. And in a way she is right. Nobody can really get you off drugs. You have to get off them yourself. But in Barbara I think I found what my father found in Bacall, that one great love which, even if you have nothing else, is enough. Whatever hole I’d been trying to fill with drugs has now been filled.

  *

  As we move through the house on Mapleton I am aware of my mother’s voice. I hear it now not as the famous voice of an actress, but as the voice of my mom, echoing through the house so many years ago. It mixes musically with a variety of voices, all female. There is the voice of my sister, little Leslie, giggling at times, whining at other times. I hear the laughter that rose out of her when Dad would pick her up and swing her in the air, and the shriek of delight when he would trap her in the up position on t
he seesaw. There is the voice of May, the cook, deep and full of authority. It always seemed she knew things that the rest of us did not. And I hear the voice of Grandma Natalie, thick and maternal, sometimes lyrically reading stories to Leslie and me, sometimes stern and exasperated at our misbehavior. I notice that the voices are all female, that in this moment I am not hearing the voice of my father, the voice of any male, and I feel that something is missing and it makes me lonely.

  *

  8

  I think, when he married me, Bogie thought I would be, like his other wives, a companion for his semibachelor existence.

  —LAUREN BACALL

  For decades it has been whispered that my father had the biggest schlong in Hollywood. I like to think the rumor is true, but I don’t know who to ask. Who keeps track of these things? I do know that it’s not the sort of thing I can discuss over tea with Mother.

  Whether it’s true or not, the fact is that my father was not a major-league cocksman.

  People who knew Dad say he almost never looked at other women. Film critics have said that Bogart was at his least convincing on the screen when he was supposed to be leering at dames. And Bacall says, “Not once in our years of marriage did Bogie ever suffer from the roving eye.”

  The party line on my father and women is that he was not a skirt chaser, not a ladies’ man, and only occasionally a flirt. In fact, much of his movie appeal to women seems to come from the fact that he doesn’t need them. Bette Davis said, “What women liked about Bogie, I think, was that when he did love scenes, he held back, like many men do, and they understood that.”

  On the other hand, my father was married four times, and in at least two cases, he was wriggling under the sheets with the future wife before the present wife became a past wife. Which kind of knocks the shit out of my Peter Lorre quote: “Bogie is no ladies’ man. Maybe it is deep-down decency. He has very set ideas about behavior and morals in that respect.”

  Still, it is clear that my father would rather have sailed to Catalina with an all-male crew than dance until dawn at the El Morocco with a beautiful blonde. He liked a good horse race and a round of golf more than a great set of gams. Bogie did not squire hundreds of girls around town, and when he did get attached to a female he tended to marry her.

  I am very different from my father in that respect. I have always found the female form a hell of a lot more compelling than a birdie on the fifteenth hole, even though I am a golfer. This can be a problem. Like any man, including Bogie, I have from time to time been controlled by anatomical parts much lower than the brain. After I got kicked out of Boston University, for example, and was staying at Dale’s parents’ home in Torrington, I got the boot when Dale’s mother came home from the hardware store one day and caught us screwing in the living room. I did manage to get back in after I wrote a long, apologetic letter.

  Howard Stern once asked me on the radio if I had ever used my role as Bogie’s son to get laid, and I told him I hadn’t, at least not consciously. In fact, I said, sometimes when women asked me if I was related to Humphrey Bogart I told them I wasn’t, because I didn’t want to be Bogie’s son, always being compared to him. And I especially did not want a girl to be interested in me because of who my father was. Sometimes I even lied about my name. But, now that I think about it, I suppose there were those other times when I was with a woman who was keenly aware of my bloodline, perhaps impressed by it, and I did what I could to make the most of it.

  Anyhow, having made sex and romance—not necessarily in that order—priorities in my life, I took a special interest in finding out about my dad and women.

  I learned that his first known girlfriend was named Pickles, though my guess is that that was not her given name. Bogie was a teenager when he fell in love with Pickles at Fire Island, where his family was staying one summer, a change of pace for them since they usually spent their summer vacations upstate at Camp Canandaigua, the place where Bogie learned to sail. Pickles was, he once said, “a girl with laughing eyes and freckles on her nose.” At summer’s end Pickles returned to her home in Flatbush and, as much as he was in love with her, it apparently was not enough to make worthwhile the long train ride to Brooklyn. So, after one postsummer visit, young Humphrey scratched Pickles off his dance card and took up with a girl from New Jersey.

  Bogie did a fair amount of oat-sowing with a succession of young women, and when he finally did get serious, it was with an actress by the name of Helen Menken. He met Helen when he was working as a stage manager for a touring company of a play called Drifting. One day some of Bogie’s sets fell on poor Helen’s head and the two of them got into a peppery battle over it. Later he said, “I guess I shouldn’t have done it, but I booted her. She, in turn, belted me and ran to her dressing room to cry.”

  We’ll never know whether these two literally smacked each other, or if Dad was just trying to be colorful when he talked about this, but the fight between man and woman led, as it often does in the movies, to romance. It was only a matter of weeks before Humphrey and Helen had a license to get married. And a matter of hours after that before Bogie had second thoughts.

  Menken was a well-known and well-connected actress who could help Bogie in his acting career. But he was concerned about marrying a woman who was more successful than himself. He had grown up in a home where the wife was dominant and he didn’t care for it. So Bogie backed out.

  He told his friend Bill Brady, “God, I don’t want to marry that girl.”

  Brady replied, “If you don’t, Humphrey, you’ll never get another part on Broadway.”

  Maybe Dad was worried about what Helen could do to his career. Or maybe it was just that Helen was persistent. Either way, the result was that Bogie reconsidered, and he and Helen did get married in the spring of 1926.

  The wedding was a horror. Helen’s parents were deaf mutes and the minister, also deaf, performed the ceremony in sign language. That would have been fine, but the deaf minister tried to speak the words, too, and the sound that came from him was unlike any known language of the time, dragging the whole affair down to the level of tragicomedy. By the end of the ceremony Helen was crying hysterically, and she ran from the reporters who were covering the wedding.

  Helen recovered, but the marriage, clearly, was doomed, and indeed it went straight to hell. Bogart and Menken fought over everything, including the fact that Helen wanted to feed the dog caviar, and my father, despite being a dog lover, thought hamburger was good enough for a pooch. “This would lead to that,” my father said, and “one or the other of us would walk out in a fine rage.”

  The unhappy lovers separated once or twice and their reunions were short-lived. Eighteen months after the wedding they were permanently split. Dad worried about the gossip but he told one friend, “When the whole thing is over Helen and I will be good friends. She’s a wonderful girl.”

  Though Helen blamed Bogie for the failed marriage at the time, years later she told my mother that it was her own fault, that she had put too much emphasis on her career and not enough on her marriage.

  Bogie, who was twenty-seven when things went sour with Helen Menken, later said, “I’d had enough women by the time I was twenty-seven to know what I was looking for in a wife. I wanted a girl I could come home to.”

  Perhaps, but after Helen he dated other actresses.

  One of them was Mary Philips. She would become wife number two, and his romance with her also began with a fight scene.

  Bogie had a small part in a play, and during his one good scene, this actress, Mary Philips, was supposed to be walking away from him, drifting out of sight and mind as he went into his speech. One night during his big moment Dad observed that Philips was putting too much of what he called “that” into her walk. It was a bit of feminine swaying that was sufficient to draw the audience’s attention away from his speech and on to her derriere. Later he confronted her.

  “You can’t do that,” he said.

  “Do what?”

 
“That thing you do. That walk.”

  “Really?” she said.

  “Yes, really,” he said.

  “And why, pray tell, not?”

  “That’s my scene,” Bogie said. “You can’t just steal a scene from me like that.”

  Mary was amused. “Well,” she said, “suppose you try to stop me.”

  If Bogie were telling the story today he might say something like, “Well Stevie, I smacked her a good one and she smartened up.” But the truth is he did nothing. He explained once, “I didn’t try to stop her, because while I was talking I suddenly became aware that here was a girl with whom I could very easily fall in love.”

  Bogie did fall in love with Mary Philips. But not just then. A few years after the derriere incident he ran into her after a showing of The Jazz Singer, the first talking movie. They started dating, going mostly to plays when they were not performing in them. Mary, like Helen, was more successful than Bogie and, like Helen, she encouraged Bogie to pursue his craft.

  After he proposed and Mary accepted, Bogie told a reporter, “Marrying her is probably the most wonderful thing that could happen to me.”

  As it turned out, something more wonderful happened to Bogie. He was invited to Hollywood. He tested for a role in The Man Who Came Back and was offered a contract at $750 a week. Dad had it in his head that he would take his bride out to California, that he would make it big in Hollywood, and they could live in great style. But Mary, it turns out, was not interested in being “a girl you can come home to,” and something large came between them: the United States. Mary had her own career and it was firmly rooted in the stages of the east coast, not in front of Hollywood cameras.

  The result of all the bickering over careers and coasts was that my father and Mary agreed that while he was out in California becoming a movie star, he could see other women and she would be back in New York with the freedom to date other guys.