After Bogie hung up he mulled it over for a long time. He couldn’t stand the thought of his friends helping a man who had criticized his dogs. Finally, he called back.
“Sammy,” he said. “That petition for the dog-hater. Did anybody actually see you sign it?”
“Well, no,” Cahn told him.
“Then it’s not legal,” Dad said, and he hung up.
The same year that Bogie bought the house in Benedict Canyon for his true love, he also bought his other true love, the Santana.
“The boat was owned by Dick Powell and June Allyson,” Mom says, “but Dick was having sinus trouble and he had to stay in dry climates. So he had to sell the boat, which was agony for him, because he was in love with the sea as much as your father was. So we went sailing with Dick and June. Bogie, of course, fell madly in love with the Santana. After he bought that boat Bogie had everything he had ever wanted.”
So it seems that from the moment he met Bacall my father’s life was just one headlong rush to pure happiness, with no bumps along the way, save for splitting from Mayo. And maybe that’s how it was.
But, as with so much of my father’s life, there is another version of the story.
Vera Thompson, a hairdresser and toupee expert, says that she had an affair with my father that began when he was still married to Mayo Methot, and continued long after he married my mother.
Vera says she met Bogie at a wrap party and later that night they went out dancing and drinking. Bogie, she says, called her the next day for lunch.
“Then,” she says, “he surprised me. He said, ‘I’ll go back over to the set and see if they’re going to need me. I’ll play sick or something and meet you at your place in about an hour. Is that okay with you?’”
Vera was surprised, not just because Bogie was married to Mayo at the time, but because Vera, herself, also was married. She said yes.
She says that the affair ended when Bogie got involved with my mother, but that three months after his marriage to Bacall, they resumed their affair. She signed on as his hairstylist she says, and they began meeting secretly at her house, on his boat, and at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She says that she thought my parents would get divorced, at least up until the time I was born, and then she gave up hope of that. In 1982 she put all of this stuff in a book called Bogie and Me.
Is any of this true? Is all of it true? I don’t know, and I really don’t spend much time worrying about it. However, it seems to me that my father was probably a lot hornier than he is generally given credit for. I don’t think that my father fooled with other women after he married my mother. It’s not, of course, that Dad was a saint. But it seems to me that he liked too many other things for him to take the time and energy to be sneaking around with another woman. He was, as I’ve said, a man’s man—a drinker and sailor and poker player—not a lover. Also, he was one of the greatest stars of his day and I don’t think Thompson would be his first choice out of all the ladies who would have been available to him if he had been interested in a dalliance. But, unfortunately, we live in a time when a lot of people are “remembering” that they had an affair with some celebrity who is dead and can’t deny it.
On the other hand, I can’t say for certain that it never happened.
I have learned that there was an impenetrable part of my father, that he did not reveal every part of himself to anybody, including Bacall. We tend to paint legends in absolutes: “Bogie always told the truth.” “Bogie had an unshakeable moral code.” And so forth. But legends start out as human beings, and human beings are never consistent. Nobody always tells the truth.
Bogie, for example, put out a lot of phony stories when he first got to Hollywood. One was that he owned a train station in France. Another was that he went to jail to prepare for his role in The Petrified Forest. And nobody, as far as I can see, has an unshakeable moral code. So did Bogie screw around on Bacall? I doubt it. But if he did, it is not the smoking pistol that proves he was imperfect. He was, like the rest of us, imperfect to begin with.
Horny or not, unfaithful or not, I do believe that my father was a romantic and a man deeply committed to the idea of love.
“I believe in the institution of marriage,” he said. “The institution is right, it’s the human beings who are wrong. I believe in love, but not the ‘one love of a lifetime’ as pretty a tale as that always makes. There couldn’t be just one love. Among fifty million people that would be pretty hard to find.”
“Love is very warming, heartening, enjoyable,” he said, “a necessary exercise for the heart and soul and intelligence. If you’re not in love, you dry up. After all, the best proof a man can give of his belief in love and marriage is to marry more than once. If you’re not married or in love you’re on the loose and that’s not comfortable. Love is comforting, too. It is the one emotion which can relieve, as much as is ever possible, the awful, essential loneliness of us all.”
These are feelings I share with my father. He spoke these words before he met Bacall, so maybe he did find that one love of a lifetime. Everybody seems to agree that they adored each other. I know that I have my own love of a lifetime in Barbara. And I know that, perhaps because of my childhood, I have always put that first. And that is something I have never regretted.
*
“Perhaps we should look at the bedroom,” my mother says. I am alarmed. I thought I would avoid it.
“I thought you did,” I said. “When we were upstairs.”
“No,” Mother says. She stares off into space. “I didn’t go in there.”
We move across the dining room. Toward the stairs. I am aware of an airplane somewhere off in the distance. I’ll be flying home to Barbara and the kids soon, I think.
The sound of the airplane brings another memory. It is not really a memory of an event. It is the memory of how I saw the event in my mind when I was old enough to know about it.
It is March 12, 1951. I am two years old. My father has been signed to star with Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen under the direction of his friend John Huston. My father is anxious to work with Huston again, because, he says, “John is my friend and he makes good movies.”
Both Bogie and my mother are going to Africa. They will be gone for four months, one sixth of my entire life at the time.
While my parents are on the dark continent I am to remain in the care of my nurse, Mrs. Hartley, a florid, full-bodied woman who holds me tightly in her arms on the tarmac as I watch my mother and father climb into some mysterious huge metal machine. It is, she says, a big silver bird. Coaxed by Mrs. Hartley, I wave my small hand at Mommy and Daddy one last time. The airplane rolls down the runway. God knows what anxiety I am feeling as I watch the big silver bird fly into the sky with my parents and zoom off away from me. I cling to Mrs. Hartley. I don’t understand why Mommy and Daddy are gone, but at least I have my nurse. And in that moment, while she is holding me, while my parents are disappearing beyond the horizon of the nighttime California sky, Mrs. Hartley is seized with a cerebral hemorrhage and falls dead.
*
10
You suddenly say to yourself, “Where the hell am I going—what am I doing?” Then, of course, you know what you’re doing—you’re going with your husband who believes in no separations in marriage, who is working. Your life with him cannot stop for your son.
—LAUREN BACALL
Of course, I don’t consciously remember the airport death of Mrs. Hartley. I was two years old. But I have the story from no less a source than Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons, published in the next day’s Los Angeles Examiner.
Little Stephen Bogart, two-year-old son of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, barely escaped injury when his nurse, Mrs. Alyce Louise Hartley, who was holding him in her arms, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died almost instantly.
Fortunately, Carolyn Morris’s mother, who was also at the airport, rushed to take the boy from the stricken nurse’s arms, thus preventing Stephen from being dropped.
My mother did not come back.
My father, of course, had to go to Africa. He was an actor. This was how he made his living. This was a chance to work with Hepburn and Huston. But my mother was not in the movie. She didn’t have to go.
In her book, By Myself, Mother writes with some candor (though a noticeable retreat into the second person) about leaving me. She writes, “I have a pain in my solar plexus when I remember how it felt to leave Steve behind.…Your life with [your husband] cannot stop for your son. And—admit it—you want to see these unseen places. So the brain whirs—the heart tugs—the gut aches. I must have turned around a hundred times to look at Steve and wave and throw kisses and get teary-eyed.”
My parents were on a stopover in Chicago when they got the news about Mrs. Hartley.
“I agonized about coming back,” Mother says, “I knew you were being taken care of by my mother, but I wondered if maybe I should have come back. I talked to your doctor, Dr. Spivak, many times on the phone. He told me not to worry, that he would interview nurses and find one who was acceptable. In the meantime my mother was there with you. By the time the plane landed in New York, Dr. Spivak had found a nurse. I interviewed her for a long time from a phone booth in 21. I talked to the servants and they promised to report to me. I tried to talk to you, Stephen, but you refused to speak to me. I talked to the doctor again. He told me you would be fine. There was never any issue of your physical needs being taken care of.”
This is true. But it’s the emotional needs that I have always wondered about. There are people who would say that a two-year-old boy needs his mother when his father has gone away and his nurse has just dropped dead while holding him.
On the other hand, a defense could be made of my mother’s decision. I have made it many times. I did, after all, have a safe and beautiful house. I had servants to feed me. I had the new nurse to dress me and take my temperature if I got sick. I had my grandmother to look after me. I wasn’t exactly being left in a basket in the woods.
And frankly, my mother was under great pressure to stay with Bogie. She was incredibly devoted to him, and wanted to be with him. And Bogie was a man who believed that a woman’s place was with her husband. Because he was twenty-five years older than Bacall, I can imagine that he must have felt that each moment with her was particularly precious. Even if they both lived to the same age, there would still be twenty-five years that he would never share with her. He certainly didn’t want to be robbed of four months every time he had to shoot on location. I can understand that; I hate to be separated from my wife even for four days.
So I know that I would have handled it differently if it were me and my kids. I would have come back. But each of us does what he or she feels is right, and that’s what my mother did in 1951.
What I did in 1951 and for most of my life was to feel angry and resentful about it. It has always been an issue between Mother and me. I’m sure a good therapist would tell me it’s not so simple:
“Steve, you’ve got to understand that your feelings of being abandoned are not just about your parents going to Africa. They are about your father dying, and your sense of identity being stolen by people who think of you only as ‘Bogart’s son,’” and so on and so on and blah blah blah.
Probably true. But I do my own therapy. Half the time I say, “Steve, your feelings are justified,” and the other half I say, “Get past it, Steve, it was forty-three years ago.” I believe that I am now past it.
But, because this episode has loomed so large in my life, I knew when I began asking about my father that I wanted to learn what those four months were like for my father and my mother. To find out, I talked to my mother and her friends and people who knew my father. But, mostly I talked to Katharine Hepburn.
I’ve known Kate Hepburn all of my life, because she has been a good friend to my mother ever since those African Queen days. I remember being a boy of six and going to her house for the first time. It was high on a hill in Beverly Hills, California. In my mind, that house is like a castle, kind of spooky and mysterious. Spencer Tracy was there, too, and I’ve always regretted that I never really got to know him.
It was during the filming of The African Queen that Kate and my father developed their enormous affection and respect for one another.
“I loved him and he loved me,” Kate says. “He was a real man, your father, there was nothing about him that wasn’t manly. He was an aristocrat, and he was a gentleman. He was very proud to be an actor and that is rare. Your father was an angel, a true angel.”
My father admired Kate, too, but typical of him, he expressed his affection in less direct ways. When he and Huston first went to see her, Kate made some comment about plain women knowing more about men than beautiful women. Dad later remarked to Huston, “She’s a crow, so she should know.” But after filming The African Queen, he told the press, “I found no one is sexier than Kate, especially before a movie camera, and she has legs like Dietrich. You learn to brand as rank slander the crack that you can throw a hat at Katie and it’ll hang wherever it hits.”
The African Queen, a book by C. S. Forester, is the story of Charlie Allnut, a gin-swilling Cockney ne’er-do-well riverboat captain, and Rosie Sayer, a skinny, hymn-singing missionary. An odd couple if ever there was one. There had once been a plan to star Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester in a film version of the story. Still later, it was to be John Mills and Bette Davis. By 1951, producer Sam Spiegel wanted Bogart and Hepburn.
It was a movie, my father says, “about a woman who starts out to become a missionary but after spending some time in a small boat with me winds up being a woman.”
Though my father had known Spencer Tracy well for years, he had known Hepburn only casually. By the time he and John Huston drove to that California house, to lobby Kate for the part of Rosie, Bogie had heard terrible things about her and he went, he said, “entertaining righteous skepticism.” Bogie had heard that Kate drove hard Yankee bargains with producers, that Hollywood was only a necessary evil to her, that she didn’t sign autographs and, most shocking, that she didn’t drink.
“Your father was a bit nervous about me,” Kate says. “He thought I was an ogre.”
Hepburn, likewise, was fearful of Bogie and Huston because she had heard that they were reprobates. After she lectured them on the evils of drink, Bogie said to her, “You’re absolutely right, Kate. Now pull up a chair and have a drink with us.”
Kate, who was forty-two at the time and still quite glamorous, was being asked by Huston to do something daring: play a woman of fifty-five.
“Rosie was haggard,” Kate says. “She was worn out. She was being dragged through the muck of Africa. This was not a glamorous role. I loved it.”
My father loved Forester’s story, too, and he saw it as a change. “We all believed in the honesty and charm of the story,” he said. “And I wanted to get out of the trench coat I wear in the movies whether I’m devil or a saint.” Bogie, who usually avoided sentiment, was sentimental about The African Queen. “We loved those two silly people on that boat,” he says.
Actually, according to John Huston, my father was not crazy about Charlie Allnut to begin with.
“Bogie did not like the role at first,” Huston said. “But all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd, brave little man and would say to me, ‘John, don’t let me lose it. Watch me. Don’t let me lose it.’”
After they all met, it was agreed that Kate would play Rosie and that my father would play Charlie Allnut, except that Allnut was changed to a Canadian to accommodate Bogie’s accent. So all the adults were off to Africa.
Well, not exactly. After my parents left me and the late Mrs. Hartley at the airport they did not go straight to Africa.
In New York they boarded the cruise ship Liberté and sailed to England. When they got to London they learned that some of Spiegel’s backers had jumped overboard and the money to make The African Queen wasn’t there. Financial decisions were made hurriedly. One was that my father would put up some of his own money to make the film. Another was that Bogie, Hepburn, and Huston would defer their salaries until there was money coming in.
“I did insist on having my hotel room in London paid for,” Kate says. “I didn’t mind doing the film for nothing, but I certainly wasn’t going to pay for the privilege.”
In Europe they drove through the French countryside, having a fine time while I was sulking in Holmby Hills. They stopped at roadside cafés. In Paris they visited the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and they ate dinner on the Seine with Art Buchwald and Frank Capra. They stayed at the Ritz, and they ate, my mother says, “incredible French breads.” My mother fell in love with Paris for life. But it was Italy that my father loved most, and he would later make two movies there.
My father liked to pick up a pen from time to time, and of his European adventure, he later wrote, “Like most Americans I have my greatest linguistic difficulties in France. My theory is that Parisians understand my Phillips Andover French and pretend not to. On the other hand, Italians pretend, out of natural politeness, to understand my experiments with their language when actually they don’t. Either way I am in trouble.”
Perhaps it was best that my parents had these idyllic days on the Continent. Because typical of Huston, whom my father referred to as “The Monster,” The African Queen was to be shot in the most remote jungles of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) and Uganda. Generally, my father didn’t care for location shooting. He preferred the comfort of a studio. But he knew that when you made a film with Huston you had to be prepared to relocate in jungles and on mountains.
Bogie had already gone on tough locations with Huston. They had gone to a remote village in Mexico to make The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. “John wanted everything perfect,” Bogie said of that excursion. “If he saw a nearby mountain that could serve for photographic purposes, that mountain was no good. Too easy to reach. If we could get to a location site without fording a couple of streams and walking through snake-infested areas in the scorching sun, then it wasn’t quite right.”
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