Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  Then Aurelio would lift Bogie again, and carefully place him in the dumbwaiter, which had been altered to serve as an elevator for my father. My father would sit on a small stool. The top of the dumbwaiter had been removed to accommodate him, but, sadly, nothing else had to be done. My father’s weight loss had been gradual, and as a kid I didn’t realize what I know now, that my father, thin to begin with, had become skeletal. Toward the end he weighed as little as eighty pounds.

  Aurelio would go down to the kitchen and pull the ropes that would slowly lower my father through the dumbwaiter shaft. The shaft was dark, and though the entire ride took only about twenty seconds, it must have been a painful, even humiliating, ride for my father, alone in that dark shaft, reduced to the size of a child, and face-to-face with his own helplessness.

  But once Aurelio had pulled my father out of the shaft and put him back in the wheelchair, my father would begin what, for him, was the best part of the day: cocktails with friends. He would roll into the study, swing into a more comfortable chair, smooth down his trousers, and light a cigarette. Mother would hand him a glass of scotch.

  “Haven’t you people got anything better to do than come over here and bother me?” he would say to whoever had come to visit on that particular day. Then the banter with pals would begin and for an hour or so, despite the pain, despite the moments of despair, my dad would again be Bogie.

  This is one of the precious few memories I have of the period from February 1956 to January 1957, the time of my father’s illness.

  I was seven years old then, and I would certainly not have understood talk about malignant cells, biopsies, radiation treatments, drugs for pain. But those were the realities of my father’s cancer. So to a large extent, my father’s illness was a mystery to me, a nameless thing that invaded our home one day and forever changed our lives. Certainly, I understood that Daddy was sick. But I had gotten sick, too, and I’d always gotten better.

  I do remember sitting with Leslie and my mother in my father’s bedroom some nights, the four of us watching television. And I remember going up to his room every night with Leslie to kiss him good night. I remember being in my pajamas, and the feel of my terry cloth bathrobe, and the smell of medicine in the room. I remember a couple of trips on the Santana, when he was no longer able to scramble around the deck and sing and be as cheerful as he usually was on the boat.

  But, sadly, it is not the moments with my father during his illness that I remember most strongly. It is the moments without him. I remember a feeling of not being allowed to see him when I needed to. I remember that I was not supposed to jump on him, that I was not to let the dogs get too lively with him. I remember that he no longer picked me up and swung me around.

  Until recently I was not especially troubled about my lack of memories. I took it on faith that my father’s illness and death must have been traumatic and that I had simply blocked much of it out.

  When I talked to my sister about it, she, of course, remembered less. She was only three years old when he got sick, four when he died.

  “I remember Daddy in a bathrobe and sitting in a chair,” she said. “I do remember that from the time he became ill, Mother felt you were old enough to understand and I was not, so all she could deal with was you, and her, and Father, not me, and I guess I felt angry and jealous about that. I don’t remember a lot of family stuff from that time, either. I don’t remember him being around. But whether he was around or not and whether we remember it or not, he was our father and he must have had a huge effect on us. He was a big presence whether we realized it or not.”

  Leslie was right. My father’s dying must have had a great effect on me, whether I remember it or not. So as I began my search for my father I knew that I wanted to ask his friends about the last months of his life, months that may very well have shaped me in ways I don’t even understand. I wanted to know about the spaces between my memories, the world that Humphrey Bogart lived in during those painful months. And I hoped that in the asking, and in the telling, I would remember much of what I had forgotten.

  One of the first people I talked to was Julius Epstein, the cowriter of Casablanca. Epstein is a small bald man, now eighty-five years old. I went to see Julius in Boston where he was visiting his son, the fine novelist Leslie Epstein.

  Julius Epstein was not one of my father’s intimates. They knew each other mostly in connection with Casablanca. But all of Hollywood was in the grip of my father’s illness and Epstein remembered those final months, not so much as a man who saw my father, but as a man who was part of the world my father lived in.

  “As I recall, it was right around Christmastime,” he said. “That would be 1955. This was after your father had filmed The Harder They Fall. Bogie was drinking orange juice at Romanoff’s. That, of course, was his hangout. And he found that it hurt his throat to drink the orange juice. And there was a lot of coughing. So he went to see the doctor.”

  In fact, it was Greer Garson, the actress who had announced Dad’s Oscar, who dragged Bogie to her doctor one afternoon because she didn’t like the sound of his cough.

  Garson’s doctor, Maynard Brandsma, told my father that his throat was inflamed. My father took it casually, even though he’d been having lengthy coughing spells long before the orange juice incident. The doctor put him on a better diet and told him to cut back on the scotch and cigarettes.

  “Sure, Doc,” Bogie said.

  “And come back in three weeks.”

  “Sure, Doc.”

  When Bogie got home and told my mother he’d been to the doctor, she was not alarmed. However, the mere fact that Bogie had even gone to a doctor was disconcerting. He had been coughing for years, but her suggestions that he see a doctor had always been met with stony silence or a scornful reply.

  Three weeks later Bogart was back in Brandsma’s office. It still hurt to swallow.

  “Did you do what I told you?” the doctor asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.”

  “Yeah, yeah, well it will clear up,” Bogie assured the doctor.

  Somewhat nonchalant about his coughing and the fact that it hurt him to swallow, Bogie continued to prepare for his next film. He and my mother, who had already starred together in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo, were planning to make their first film together since Key Largo, eight years earlier. This one was to be called Melville Goodwin, USA, with my father as a military officer, and my mother as a character based on Claire Booth Luce.

  But the coughing got worse and, finally, Bogie began to worry. He called the doctor.

  “Bring in a mucus sample,” he was told.

  The mucus sample that my father brought in made Brandsma suspicious. He asked Bogie to come back in for a bronchoscopy, a procedure for scraping a tissue sample from the esophagus. Though Bogie was still having trouble eating and had lost weight, he and Mother still thought they were dealing with nothing worse than a viral infection of some sort. So, after the bronchoscopy they went off to Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, so that Bogie could rest for a week.

  By the time my parents came back from Sinatra’s, the doctor was sure. Bogie had cancer. “The malignancy is small and we’re finding it early,” Brandsma told him. “I think we can get it out of you.”

  “Great,” Bogie said. “Let’s do what has to be done. As soon as I finish this movie we’ll get to it.”

  “They tell me you’re not a man to be lied to,” Brandsma said.

  “That’s right,” Bogie said.

  “Well, I’m telling you, you’d better get to it now. If you delay surgery to make a movie, it will be your last movie.”

  “I can’t put off this film,” Bogie said. “It will cost the studio too much money.”

  “Do the movie,” Brandsma said, “and all the cast and crew can come to your funeral.”

  So surgery was scheduled and the film was put on hold. The press was told not
hing about the cancer, just that Bogie was going into the hospital with a swollen esophagus.

  I remember the day that my father left for the Good Samaritan Hospital, February 29, 1956. My mother brought me and Leslie into the living room. She sat us down somewhat formally, then crouched to speak to us at eye level.

  “Daddy is going away for a while,” she said. “He has to have something taken out of his throat by a doctor. It’s nothing to worry about, but he will be gone for a few weeks.” We didn’t really understand, but I guess we nodded our heads and figured everything would be all right. A few minutes later a big white limousine pulled up in front of the house. Dad kissed Leslie and me good-bye, and off he went in the limo. Perhaps if I had been the son of an auto mechanic who came home every night, this would have been upsetting. But during my short life my father had often gone away for weeks, even months at a time. Leslie and I were not alarmed.

  The next morning when my father went into surgery, the doctors found that things were not all right. Dr. John Jones, the surgeon, saw that the cancer had spread to Bogie’s lymph glands. Jones took out the lymph glands, along with the esophagus. There was more. The surgical team had to move my father’s stomach around so they could hook it up to the tab that was left. To do that they had to open his chest as well as his abdomen, so they could take out a rib to get at a few things. When they explained the procedure to my mother they also told her that from now on Bogie would feel food go directly to his stomach and that it would probably nauseate him until he got used to it. For my mother it must have been a nightmare to hear all this. Neither of my parents had had much experience with doctors and hospitals.

  Dad went through nine and a half hours of surgery. Mother, of course, stayed at the hospital, calling home every few hours to tell us that everything was fine, not to worry.

  When Bogie first came out of surgery my mother was horrified to see that his left hand and arm had swollen to four times their normal size, a consequence of being in one position during the hours of surgery.

  For the next three weeks Leslie and I saw little of our mother. She called often, but came home usually just long enough to change clothes and rush back to the hospital. Though I was often petulant at the time, I know now that those weeks were an incredible ordeal for my mother. She had to watch helplessly as the man she loved was injected with needles, surrounded by tubes and bottles, and hooked up to cold, robotic medical machines. She had to listen while kind but often incomprehensible doctors explained the carpentry they had done inside her husband’s body. She had to obey when competent but sometimes officious nurses told her when she could and could not see her husband.

  “He hated the suction machine most of all,” she tells me. “They needed it to clear his lungs so that he wouldn’t get pneumonia. But it was awful. Once when they were getting ready to put him on it, I heard him cry, ‘Please, no more.’ Your father had to be in great, great pain, for him to say something like that. Through the entire ordeal of his illness, that was the only time he complained.”

  As my father improved he saw more and more visitors. Not only his close Hollywood friends came to see him in the hospital, but other Hollywood luminaries whom he knew less well, people like John Wayne and Fred Astaire. At some point my mother decided that he was well enough for a prank. John Huston flew in from England, and hid outside my father’s hospital room. When Bogie went to the bathroom, Huston climbed into his bed and hid under the covers. Bogie came out and eyed the mysterious lump under his sheets. Then Huston leaped up, surprising Bogie, and the two men had a fine laugh.

  They talked about the movies they had made together, and the ones they would make in the future. Huston, of course, had already directed my father in five great movies. Now he was looking forward to Bogie’s recovery, he said, because he wanted to pair him up with Clark Gable in Rudyard Kipling’s tale, The Man Who Would Be King. (The movie, of course, was not made then. In 1960, Huston was planning again to make it, still with Clark Gable, and while he was agonizing over who to cast in the Bogie part, Clark Gable died. But Huston finally did make The Man Who Would Be King in 1975, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine, a big Bogart fan, incidentally, who took his name from a marquee for my father’s film The Caine Mutiny.)

  There was one frightening setback while my father was still in the hospital. One night he began coughing violently, and the spasms ripped open the stitches in his belly. Blood began pouring out of his abdomen. Fortunately, my mother was with him at the time and she was able to get help.

  The morning of my father’s return from Good Samaritan, Mother fussed around in their bedroom, fixing the bed, getting it in just the right place, making sure that his books and glasses and his chess set would all be within reach. She was nervous and excited. Leslie and I played indoors. Infected by Mother’s mood, we were excited, too. It felt like Christmas. Finally, Mother heard the slam of a car door in the driveway.

  “Kids, your father’s home,” she called. We gathered on the upstairs landing to wait for him, me on one side of my mother, little Leslie on the other. Dad was carried in on a stretcher by male attendants. He gazed up at us and smiled. “You see,” he said to the attendants, “this is why marriage is worth it.” Then to Mother, “I’ve been trying to get it through these guys’ thick skulls that it’s a great thing to be married, that you can’t beat having a wife and kids there to greet you when you get home from a nice relaxing vacation at the Good Samaritan.”

  The attendants took the ribbing and helped Bogie to his bed. Later that day Mother told Leslie and me the rules for the fiftieth time.

  “No jumping on your father.” “If you’re going to be noisy play outside.” “Don’t let the dogs jump on your father.” A few weeks later my father began radiation treatments. Five days a week for eight weeks he had to drive to Los Angeles and get zapped by X-rays. No one was saying that he still had cancer, just that they were targeting the places where it was most likely to recur. More and more I got the feeling that there were things going on that I didn’t know about.

  During the weeks of the radiation treatments Bogie ate little, though my mother would always set a tray of food in front of him by the fireplace. He felt nauseous from the X-rays. Now and then he would take a few bites, or even ask for a particular food, and Mother would be filled with optimism. But later he would be weak and tired and nauseous, and she would be deflated. Sometimes at night when Leslie and I sat with him watching television, he would make sounds as if he was in pain, and then he would close his eyes and pretend to be sleeping, so that we would think he was just having a bad dream.

  My father’s first setback was emotional. Early in the radiation treatments he lost his friend Louis Bromfield the novelist. Bromfield, the man who had hosted the Bogart and Bacall wedding on his Ohio farm, died suddenly at the age of sixty.

  But Dad was buoyed up by other friends. David Niven visited. And Nunnally Johnson, and Tracy and Hepburn, and Mike Romanoff, and so many others. Frank Sinatra came by almost every night. And Swifty Lazar, fighting a constantly terrible phobia about germs and sickness, came by often. During this time Bogie’s friends thought they were visiting a man who was recovering from surgery, not a man who was sick.

  My father took great delight in telling his friends the details of his surgery. He was fascinated by the medical procedures and, apparently, was able to look at his illness as if it belonged to someone else.

  Raymond Massey, who was an acclaimed movie actor long before most of us got to know him as Dr. Gillespie on Dr. Kildare, said, “I didn’t know what to expect when I was ushered into the sick room, but there was Bogart, sitting in a chair, looking as good as ever, sipping scotch and soda, waiting for me. I was just beginning on the small talk when he cut in. ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me down there,’ he said. ‘It was awful!’ And he told me. And the sicker I got from the story, the healthier he became. Then we spent a marvelous afternoon reminiscing about our adventures together.”

  Throughout the ordeal m
y father joked as always, quipped, needled, and expressed his appreciation for the visits in that flippant way of his. “Jesus,” he told one set of friends, “how am I supposed to get any rest with the likes of you coming every day?”

  Though my father tended to hide many of his feelings behind joking, as I often do, there were those serious introspective moments, too. One day Bogie told Alistair Cooke that having money, the Jaguar, the great house, the boat, no longer was any comfort to him now that he was sick.

  But Dad remained optimistic. He cheerfully told people that he was getting better, and he believed it was true. “Just losing a little weight, that’s all,” he said. “If I could put on a few pounds I would be fine.”

  Certainly he took what pleasure he could from life during this period. He continued to drink, though his drinking had been reduced considerably since he’d married my mother. And he continued to smoke, switching now to filtered cigarettes. This was somewhat reckless, I suppose, since drinking and smoking were almost certainly responsible for his cancer. But Bogie was, after all, Bogie. He had eating problems, of course, but eating had never been one of his great pleasures anyhow. Bogie ate for sustenance, not for entertainment. Another similarity between father and son.

  So he had his books and his booze, and he had letters to write. I remember that the phone rang often, and sometimes that scared me because I had a constant sense that something bad could happen, though I didn’t know exactly what. But the phone calls were his friends mostly. They were always concerned, and always offering to help in any way they could. And many of those calls were from the press, checking into rumors that Bogie was dying. My father would get on the phone.

  “It appears to me that I am not dead,” he would say. “And I’m not dying. I’m fine. Just a little underweight.”