When this was told to me I found it interesting because in my first marriage I did somewhat the same thing, though by that time it had a name: open marriage. I was very young when I married Dale and became a father. It wasn’t long before our marriage became little more than a device for keeping both of Jamie’s parents under the same roof. It seemed to me that I was changing and my wife wasn’t, though of course, Dale saw it differently. Anyhow, with a toddler to care for, Dale and I didn’t want to break up, so we went the open marriage route, popular in those days. It’s not as though I would come home and say, “Oh, by the way, I screwed Lulu last night,” but we had an understanding that if either of us wanted to see someone, we could. Truth is, it didn’t work all that well. For the last seven years of my first marriage, Dale never got to know the people I hung out with, and I didn’t really know the people she was close to. We were emotionally separated. We didn’t fight much, but that was probably because she worked days then, and I worked nights.
Dad’s open marriage experiment didn’t fare much better. Mary Philips, apparently, was a woman of her word. She said she would see other men, and that’s what she did. She fell in love with the actor Roland Young, while Bogie was in Hollywood. But when Bogie got back to New York, he and Mary hashed things out. They brought the marriage in for repairs and vowed never to be separated again, which was fine with Bogie since he was now disillusioned with Hollywood for the second time. For his $750 a week he had not been hired to star in The Man Who Came Back. He had been hired to work as a voice coach for the star, Charles Farrell, who you might remember as Gale Storm’s father on My Little Margie.
Bogie’s marriage to Mary Philips lasted for a decade, though not without its occasional plot twists. These were the depression years and the young acting couple struggled financially. Mary had some luck, performing in summer stock in New England, but through much of the thirties many lights were dim on Broadway. What money the couple did have was mainly brought in by Mary. Bogie couldn’t even borrow money from his parents, because by this time Belmont had made a number of bad business deals and the Bogarts were not as affluent as they had been. (Eventually, Belmont would give up his practice and run away to become a ship’s doctor aboard freighters. He returned to New York a morphine addict, and died ten thousand dollars in debt. My father would eventually pay off the debt.)
So Bogie and Mary pooled money with friends and wore a lot of sweaters.
Though Mary would prove to be a little lamb compared to wife number three, the Bogart-Philips marriage was in some ways a preliminary bout for the Bogart-Methot marriage that would come next. Mary, for example, almost bit off a cop’s finger one night when he arrested her for being drunk, along with Bogie and their friend Broderick Crawford, who had a career as a movie actor before my generation got to know him as Captain Dan Matthews on Highway Patrol.
On Bogie’s next visit to Hollywood Mary went with him. They lived in the Garden of Allah, a legendary cluster of bungalows on Sunset Boulevard, where celebrities and wannabes drank, laughed, and occasionally bedded down together.
But Mary was homesick for the smell of greasepaint. Broadway was where she belonged, she felt, and when she got a chance to perform there in The Postman Always Rings Twice, she told Bogie she wanted to return to Manhattan. Bogie was deeply hurt that she wanted to leave.
“The postman always rings twice?” he said. “What the hell does that mean, anyhow?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Bogie said. “I read the book. There’s no postman in it and nobody rings anything once, never mind twice. Guy just made up the title. You want to be in a play where the guy just made up the title?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all wrong for you,” Bogie said.
“I want to go,” Mary cried.
“For God’s sake, Mary,” Bogie said. “This is my first chance to really prove that I can support a wife, maybe have kids, and here you are getting ready to hop on the first train back to New York.”
“I have to go,” Mary said.
“Then go, goddamn it, but I’m telling you the play is not right for you,” Bogie said.
Mary left, and it was during her absence that Bogie met Mayo Methot.
*
Some say Bogie met Mayo at the home of his friend Eric Hatch. Others say he met her at a Screen Actors’ Guild dinner. He spotted her eyeing him from a balcony and found her so fetching that he broke off a decoration of a nude woman from a column of some sort and presented it to her.
“Your Academy Award, madame,” he said. “For being the most exciting actress present.”
Mayo, a native of Portland, Oregon, had been a child actress. She was still an actress, and in many ways she was still a child. Like Bogie, she had been married twice. A year earlier she had divorced her second husband for mental cruelty, claiming that he wouldn’t allow her to rearrange the furniture.
Bogie took Mayo on his powerboat at Newport Beach. This was before the Santana. Mayo, whose father was a ship’s captain, loved the sea and that was a big point in her favor. Mayo loved to drink, another point. Bogie had fun with Mayo. Unfortunately, Mayo Methot was a raging alcoholic, and her fits of temper and violence made Bogie’s occasional outbursts look kittenish by comparison. With Mayo, who has been described as a combination of Mae West and Edward G. Robinson, Bogie began a relationship that was as famous for its fury as his later relationship with my mother was for its romance.
When Mary came back from New York and found Bogie and Mayo staying at the Garden of Allah, she felt that a divorce was in order. After the divorce, Bogie was not really in a marrying mood, but, once again, he had gotten himself into a position where he felt he had an obligation. Sam Jaffe’s partner, Mary Baker, said, “Bogie was trapped in a situation and didn’t know how to get out of it.”
It is interesting that my father, who is famous for doing exactly what he wanted and compromising on nothing, seems to have entered with some reluctance into each of his first three marriages. With Helen he had tried to back out at first. With Mary he had had major doubts, but had been financially dependent on her. And now, with Mayo, again, he told people he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to marry her. In some ways all three of these women were the dominant person in the relationship, and even in his fourth marriage—well, it is no secret that my mother is a strong, controlling sort of woman. So Bogie, the very symbol of male independence, married women who could, at least in part, control him. A Freudian might say that he was trying to replace his domineering mother. Others would say he married women who could help his career. Nat Benchley, who gave this matter a good deal of thought, came to the conclusion that none of the handy theories fit. Not all of Bogie’s wives were financially helpful. Not all of them were older than him. (My mother was twenty-five years younger.) And not all of them could help his career. (He was already a big star by the time he married Mayo and my mom.) Benchley concludes that the answer is much simpler than that. My father, Benchley says, “was a gentleman, like his father, and he felt that once he had gone a certain distance with a woman, he was obliged to marry her.”
I know that that self-imposed feeling of obligation weighed heavily on my father, because I have gone through the experience, though in a slightly different way. A generation ago, Dale and I had planned to go to the great Woodstock lovefest. We couldn’t make it, so we stayed home and had a lovefest of our own. The sex was, shall we say, impetuous. A few months later Dale had some interesting news to tell me.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
I was still a kid, really, and getting married was not on my list of things to do. But I knew I had an obligation, and it was one I had created long ago when I swore that no kid of mine would ever go through life without a father.
Though abortion was out of the question, Dale did not insist on wedding bells. She was not interested in acquiring a husband who didn’t want to be acquired.
“I’m keeping the baby,” she said. �
�You do whatever you really want to do.”
Of course, there was never any doubt about what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a father to my kid. I asked Dale to marry me.
And in 1938, Bogie did the same thing. He asked Mayo Methot to marry him.
Shortly before their wedding Bogie said of Mayo, “One reason why we get on so well together is that we don’t have illusions about each other. We know just what we’re getting, so there can’t be any complaints on that score after we’re married. Illusions are no good in marriage. And I love a good fight. So does Mayo.”
It’s a good thing that Dad loved a good fight because Mayo gave him a lot more action than he ever saw when he was in the navy. He was thirty-eight when he married her and there were some who wondered if he would make it to thirty-nine.
They got married on August 21, 1938, at the home of Mary and Mel Baker in Bel Air. Bogie cried at the wedding.
“He cried at every one of his weddings,” my mother says, “and with good reason.”
On their wedding night Bogie and Mayo had a fight, so he went off to spend the night with Mel Baker while she spent the night with Mary. There is even a report that Bogie went off to Mexico for some male bonding.
Soon he and Mayo moved into a house on Horn Avenue near the Sunset Strip. They filled it with pets, and they fought constantly. Bogie nicknamed Mayo “Sluggy.” In front of their house they had a sign that said SLUGGY HOLLOW. They also had a dog named Sluggy. And Bogie named the thirty-eight-foot cruiser that he kept in Newport Sluggy.
Mayo was a devoted and adoring wife when she was sober, but, like her husband, she was a prodigious drinker of scotch, and when she was drunk she could be hell on wheels. The neighbors remember the nightly shouting and the sounds of breaking glassware. The battles were strangely, or perhaps fittingly, theatrical. For example, one night the couple came out of the house drunk and Mayo had tied a rope around Bogie’s neck. But it was Bogie who was shouting, “Sluggy, you miserable shrew, I’m going to hang you.”
“The Bogart-Methot marriage was the sequel to the Civil War,” Julius Epstein says.
An interesting turn of events for the man who once complained that he had to hide under the blankets and cover his ears to block out the sound of his parents fighting.
“The marriage was very stormy,” says Gloria Stuart. “Their relationship was mutual; they hit each other. But it was really Mayo who did most of the hitting. I remember once when Mel Baker and my husband and I were at their house and Mayo threatened to shoot all of us. When she was drunk she was very combative. Sober she was fine. But I think the fighting excited them, it got them all worked up.”
While friends agree that Bogart liked to needle Mayo, all agree that she was the violent one. And Mayo was also every inch the needler that Bogie was. She often referred to him as “Mr. Bogart, the great big Warner Brothers star,” and after he made the smallest remark she would say, “Quick, call the newspapers. Mr. Bogart, the great big Warner Brothers star, has spoken.”
“Mayo resented Bogart’s growing popularity,” one friend says, “and the fact that she gave up her career to be just Mrs. Bogart. The resentment always showed.”
Mayo was insanely jealous, too. Maybe drink made her jealous, or maybe jealousy made her drink. Either way, Mayo often had her claws out for Bogie’s leading ladies. Being married to a top male actor would be difficult for any woman, but for Mayo it was war. So when Bogie had to take a beautiful actress in his arms you could hear Mayo’s roar all the way to Fresno. Mayo was especially jealous of Ingrid Bergman when Bogie made Casablanca. After the film came out a reporter asked Bogie what he thought of it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t allowed to see it.”
Dad’s early movie career, of course, was not as a romantic lead or a sex symbol. A condemned murderer or gun-toting racketeer was not the kind of guy most women were looking to fall in love with. But in 1940, during this marriage to Mayo, Bogie was making a personal appearance at a New York movie house when something happened to change all that.
The show that evening opened with dozens of Bogie’s movie death scenes flashing across the screen. Then, when the lights were turned up, there was Bogie lying on the stage, face down as if he had been rubbed out by gangsters. He got up slowly, grinned at his audience and said, “Boy, this is a hell of a way to make a living.”
It was a magical moment. Suddenly, movie fans who had known Bogie only as a thug, saw a guy with a sense of humor, a guy who could laugh at himself, which it seems to me is a definite aphrodisiac for women. After the show there was a mob of women outside of Bogie’s dressing room. Mary Baker called Warner Brothers to tell them about all the female adoration. Jack Warner was skeptical, but in time Bogie did become a rather unlikely heartthrob.
Bogie actually claimed to enjoy Mayo’s jealousy.
“I like a jealous wife,” he said. “I can be a jealous husband, too. Mayo’s a grand girl. She knows how to handle me. When I go to a party and the party spirit gets at me I’m apt to flirt with any amusing girl I see. But I don’t mean it. My wife’s job, and Mayo has promised to take it on, is to yank me out of the fire before I get burned.”
If Bogie looked at another woman, Mayo would hit him, punch him, or throw something at him. Once she threw him into a harbor because she thought she caught him eyeing a girl getting off a boat. One night at Peter Lorre’s house she hit him over the head with a large wooden spoon for the same offense. Not all of Mayo’s rages, however, were about other women.
Mayo didn’t always need a reason to fight. Like so many alcoholics, she simply turned into a violent, insecure, and dangerous person when the booze kicked in. One night, for example, she actually set the house on fire. Naturally, the incident was handled discreetly by the local fire department.
And then there was the time that Bogie was sitting at home with a friend when Mayo went into a rage about something. She picked up a bottle and threw it at him. Bogie just sat still and let the bottle pass by.
He turned to his friend. “Mayo’s a lousy shot,” he said. “Besides, she’s crazy about me. She knows I’m braver than George Raft or Edward G. Robinson.”
I found out about another time when they were having Thanksgiving dinner with Raymond Massey and his wife. Bogie made some remark and Mayo hurled the turkey platter at his head. As the story is told, Bogie smiled, picked up the food, put it all back on the platter, and they all enjoyed their meal. Bogie, it seems, had a tremendous ability to remain calm during tense moments.
Mayo often became paranoid when drunk. One night she came into the living room where Bogie and some guests were talking.
“You bastards are talking about me,” she said.
“No, we’re not,” Bogie said.
“Of course you are,” she said. “Do you think I’m stupid, that I don’t know when I’m being talked about?”
“Sluggy, will you sit down,” Bogie said. “Nobody is talking about you.”
“You are talking about me,” she cried. “I know it.”
Then she ran out of the room and dashed up the stairs to their bedroom.
A few minutes later, when the group was about to sit down to dinner, they heard a gunshot from upstairs.
“Forget it,” Bogie said to his friends. “It’s just Mayo shooting her gun.”
Then there was another shot.
“I guess we’d better go upstairs,” Bogie said. He went up. Mayo was locked in the bedroom.
“Open up, Sluggy,” Bogie said.
“No,” Mayo screamed.
Bogie started pounding on the door. “Sluggy, open the door or I’m going to break it down.”
“Get away or I’ll plug you,” Mayo said.
Finally, Bogie managed to break the door and get in. He found Mayo lying on the bed, crying.
In the press they became known as “The Battling Bogarts.” They were notorious for breaking crockery and glassware at a number of fine business establishments.
One typical fight occurred when they wer
e in New York and they got an early morning phone call. Mayo answered the phone then turned to my father. “It’s for you,” she said, then she dropped the phone on his face.
Bogie, annoyed, smacked her.
Then both of them leaped out of bed naked and started throwing things at each other. This went on for a while, then Mayo picked up a potted plant to hurl at Bogie, but she lost her balance with it and fell on the floor. The two of them had a good laugh and went on with their lives.
Sam Jaffe says, “I remember one time they were in New York, at the Algonquin. I went to see them. Right then and there they got into an argument over Roosevelt. She threw a lamp at your father. Bogie rushed out. Later Mayo kept calling me and saying Bogie had probably been killed in traffic. When your father called me the following morning he told me he had spent the night with one of his previous wives, Helen Menken.”
The battling Bogarts got into battles in nightclubs with each other, and sometimes, with the two of them on the same side, against some heckler. At one point Bogie and Mayo were barred from 21 as a couple. They could come in separately, but not together. 21, by the way, was not the only place to bar them as a couple. When they went overseas to entertain the troops they were so rowdy and fought so often that the USO made a rule forbidding husband and wife teams to tour the army camps.
Dad told the Mayo stories with great relish. But one incident Bogie did not boast about was the night Mayo stabbed him.
Bogie came home that night from the Finlandia Baths on Sunset Boulevard. He had gone there to get away from Mayo, but she was convinced he had gone to a whorehouse. When he came into the house Mayo was humming “Embraceable You,” which was always the signal that she had crossed the line from a sober Jekyll to a drunken Hyde. He could see that she had been drinking and that she had been crying. He said nothing.
But a few minutes later they had gotten themselves into a violent argument, when suddenly Mayo lunged at Bogie with a kitchen knife. Bogie ducked. He ran for the door. Mayo came after him.
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