Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  The debilitating effects of the radiation lasted long after the treatments had ended, but by August my father was starting to feel better. He weighed himself daily, and the big excitement came one day when Daddy finally gained a single pound. Mother practically danced around the house. This was the sign that everybody had been waiting for, the proof that everything would be all right.

  My mother, whose career had come to a halt, began work on Designing Woman with Gregory Peck. My father told Aurelio to take the Thunderbird down and have it serviced. “I’m going to take Stephen to Newport for a cruise again,” he said.

  And he did. But now he was too weak to do much and Pete, the skipper, had to handle the boat. I don’t remember the cruise. But I remember standing on the deck with my dad, the feel of his hand on my shoulder. “Someday I’m going to teach you how to sail, Steve,” he said. “I think you have the makings of a fine yachtsman. And then we can go off, you and me and Pete, on trips. Just the men will go.” He laughed. “We’ll leave the women behind.”

  And he made other visits to the boat, not to sail, but just to be on it. For a while it seemed that the dark cloud had passed.

  But it hadn’t. My father began to feel pain in his left shoulder. The doctors told him it was nerve damage, common after surgery. But when they got him into the hospital they broke the terrible news to my mother: the cancer had returned.

  At the hospital they began something called nitrogen mustard treatments, which then was the last hope for cancer treatment. Bogie was not told that cancer had returned. They told him they were working on the nerve damage. In an odd way, my father was relieved to be back in the hospital for a few days because he despised the feeling of being a burden to everybody at home.

  When he returned from the hospital this time he was terribly weak. One night he collapsed in the living room. Mother was terrified. How could the indomitable Bogie have fallen?

  She got him a male nurse, someone who could carry him up and down stairs. But that didn’t work. Finally, as it became more and more difficult for Humphrey Bogart to walk, Aurelio got the wheelchair and rigged the dumbwaiter as my father’s elevator.

  Now all of Bogie’s friends, who had been treated to a period of hope, had to one by one give up the belief that Bogie “just needed to gain a little weight,” and face the fact. Bogie was dying.

  What was I feeling? I wonder now. Was I thinking, Daddy is dying? Was I afraid? I don’t know for sure. The emotions that moved through me then are mostly forgotten. But I don’t think that I believed my father was dying, because my father himself didn’t believe it. Or if he did, he protected us all from his fears.

  Bogie acted like a man who intended to go on living for a long time. For example, he continued to work on his career, making plans for films, even with the notorious Harry Cohn.

  Harry Cohn, the most feared and hated man in Hollywood, was the head of Columbia Pictures then. He was known for his vulgarity and his ruthlessness and such antics as spying on his employees with secret microphones and informers. He was a complex man who trumpeted his evil deeds and kept his acts of kindness secret.

  Despite his reputation as a heartless son of a bitch, Cohn seemed to have had a fondness for my father. Bogie had made films at Columbia on loan from Warner Brothers, and he had even sold his production company, Santana Productions, to Columbia for a million bucks. In fact, my father’s last picture, The Harder They Fall, was for Columbia.

  Now, with Bogie losing weight at a horrifying rate and spending most of his time in bed, Cohn frequently announced in the press that my father would star in The Good Shepherd, a movie to be based on C. S. Forester’s best-selling novel. Cohn used to call my father almost weekly telling him, “The part’s great, we want to get rolling, so get your ass over here.”

  Bogart told a friend, “I’ll tell you why I think I’m going to beat this rap. It’s Harry Cohn. He keeps calling me about going to work. Now you know that tough old bastard wouldn’t call if he thought I wasn’t going to make it. Perhaps he’s not such a bastard after all.”

  Even my mother was touched by what Cohn was doing.

  “Harry Cohn knew Bogie wasn’t going to make it,” she says. “But he kept the act going.”

  The friends continued to come for cocktail hour, though by now my mother was insisting on no more than two visitors at a time, and asking people to call ahead and schedule. Judy Garland came, and Truman Capote, and Adlai Stevenson, and Richard Burton, and David and Jennifer Selznick. Even Jack Warner, who had been my father’s nemesis through much of his career. And, of course, the inner circle of people who did not have to make appointments: Sinatra, Niven, Hepburn, Tracy, Lazar, and John Huston, who amused my father with stories about the filming of Moby-Dick, which he had just finished.

  And when they came, they did not sit weeping by Bogie’s bedside. Instead he came to them, down the dumbwaiter, into the wheelchair and into the study, where they all drank and laughed and said clever things. They did not ask my father how he felt. He hated to be asked. In fact, throughout his illness there was an air of denial. Bogie and his friends conspired to con each other into the belief that he would be fine.

  John Huston said, “One night Betty, Bogie’s doctor, Morgan Maree [my father’s business manager], and I were all sitting around in his living room when Bogie said, ‘Look, give me the lowdown. You aren’t kidding me, are you?’ I took a deep breath and held it. The doctor finally assured Bogie that it was the treatments he had undergone that were making him feel sick and lose weight. Now that he was off the treatments, he should improve rapidly. Then we all chimed in, compounding the falsehood. He seemed to accept it.”

  My mother says they did not talk about his illness as if it were a possibly deadly cancer, but rather as if it were a virus he would shake off. “When it’s somebody else’s illness you have to take your cue from them,” she told me recently. “If they choose to pretend it’s a cold, then you go along with that. You don’t force them to say it’s more than a cold. But deep down he knew.”

  And Father clung to the belief that if he could just make another film, everything would be okay. “If I could just work,” he would say to his friends. “If I could just work, I’d be okay.”

  For these cocktail hours Mom was the hostess, laughing, pouring drinks, joining in, but always keeping an eye on my father. Was he comfortable? Was he being included? Was he getting tired? She was fiercely protective of him and she sternly warned anyone who wanted to visit that if they were going to fall apart they should not come. She insisted that everybody be upbeat. This was not a death watch.

  When Clifton Webb came to visit he was shocked to see how emaciated my father had become, but Webb held together through the visit, probably out of fear of Bacall. When he left the room he broke down, sobbing.

  Spencer Tracy was another one who had to fight constantly against what he was feeling. “Spence was shattered before and after each visit,” Kate Hepburn told me.

  There were a few friends who did not come to visit, and my mother was extremely angry about that. The late director Richard Brooks was one she singled out. But she says there were others.

  When she complained about this to my father, he told her, “They’re afraid of death and they don’t want to be reminded of it. I don’t like to be around sick people myself. I’m not sure I would come and visit me.”

  It is poignant that these friendships were the center of my father’s life during his final weeks, because my father had never thought of himself as a well-liked man. These friends meant everything to my father during his illness. I remember that my mother had a small black notebook and in it she would write the names of everybody who came to visit him, or sent him flowers or cards.

  In time my father’s wiseguy protestation of “I’m just losing a little weight, that’s all,” gave way to a promise that he would win what he, reluctantly, acknowledged was a battle with death. “I’m going to beat it,” he told Swifty Lazar. “I feel in my heart I’m going to make
it.”

  Still, while he eventually admitted that the enemy was death, he never admitted that he was losing the battle. Everyone I talked to has said the same thing. Bogie never acknowledged that he was dying.

  In the movies my father had died many times, particularly in the early days. By 1942 he had made forty-five films. In them he was electrocuted or hanged eight times, and shot to death twelve times. He had also been sentenced to life in prison nine times. But in reality, Bogie had an incredible will to live and he was nowhere near ready to die.

  My mother says, “There were only two times when I heard Bogie even come close to saying it. Once was when we were on our way to the hospital for his surgery. He said to me, ‘I never had to go to doctors before. Now, I suppose, I’ll be seeing them for the rest of my life.’ The other time was very near the end when Dr. Brandsma came to see him. Bogie told Brandsma he was worried and he said, ‘So, Doc, are things going pretty much the way you expect?’ ‘Yes,’ Brandsma said. By this time it was clear that what Brandsma expected was that Bogie would die. Aside from those two moments Bogie never talked about dying of the cancer. And I never really thought: my husband’s going to die. You just get into a routine way of life. Doctors come. Nurses come. It becomes somewhat normal, and you think it is always going to be that way. He’ll be sick, but he won’t die.”

  Alistair Cooke told me, “Your father never said he was dying. And he was resolved to rouse himself for two hours a day to relax with friends until the end came. He managed to convince everyone that he was only sometimes uncomfortable, though in fact he was in terrible pain.”

  Other friends of my father say the same thing: he never acknowledged that he was in pain. He wouldn’t even admit it to his doctor.

  One afternoon Samuel Goldwyn and William Wyler came by to visit. My father was incredibly weak by this time, and said little. Still, Mother handed him his martini, and he did his best to be amusing. Even at his worst, he was able to brighten up for company.

  At one point a nurse walked into the room. It was time for Dad’s morphine shot.

  Bogie looked at her and then at his company. He had never taken an injection in front of company before. But now the pain was too much, even for him.

  He lifted his pajama leg. By now my father’s leg was only skin and bones. Goldwyn was shocked. He looked away while the nurse injected the needle. When it was over, my father, somewhat embarrassed that he had upset Goldwyn, smiled weakly. “For the pain,” he said, then, “sorry.” He never took another injection in front of company. He forced himself to have a high threshold of pain.

  One thing my father did not have a high threshold for was the press. At first, the newspapers were good to him. They didn’t hound him much. They didn’t say he had cancer.

  But as the weeks went by and he was no longer being seen at Romanoff’s, no longer making movies, the rumors became too much to ignore.

  Carolyn Morris says, “The reporters would call and your father would end up yelling at them. He threatened to sue them for saying he was in a coma. Then he would bang the phone down, coughing.”

  When one editor called to see if his reporter had really talked to Bogart, my father told him, “If you don’t trust your reporters then fire them.”

  My father exploded when Dorothy Kilgallen, whom he despised, printed a story that said Bogie was on the eighth floor of Los Angeles Memorial Hospital, and that he was near death.

  What was funny about the story was that the Los Angeles Memorial Hospital did not exist. But my father, a man who found almost everything amusing, was temporarily humorless. He called Kilgallen’s paper, screaming and yelling about “the stupid bitch.”

  When he was relatively calm he called Joe Hyams, and asked Joe to print a statement from him. Obviously, by the time he wrote it, Bogie’s sense of humor had returned.

  “I have been greatly disturbed lately at the many unchecked and baseless rumors being tossed among you regarding the state of my health,” he wrote. “Just to set the record straight, as they say in Washington (and I have as much right to say this as anybody in Washington has), a great deal of what has been printed has had nothing to do with the true facts. It may be even necessary for me to send out a truth team to follow you all around.

  “I have read that both lungs have been removed, that I couldn’t live for another half hour, that I was fighting for my life in some hospital which doesn’t exist out here, that my heart had been removed and replaced by an old gasoline pump salvaged from a defunct Standard Oil station. I have been on the way to practically every cemetery, you name ’em, from here to the Mississippi, including several where I’m certain they only accept dogs. All the above upsets my friends, not to mention the insurance companies…so, as they also say in Washington, let’s get the facts to the American people—and here they are.

  “I had a slight malignancy in the esophagus. So that some of you won’t have to go to the research department, it’s the pipe that runs from your throat to your stomach. The operation for the removal of the malignancy was successful, although it was touch and go for a while whether the malignancy or I would survive.

  “As they also say in Washington, I’m a better man than I ever was and all I need now is about thirty pounds in weight, which I’m sure some of you could spare. Possibly we could start something like a Weight Bank for Bogart, and, believe me, I’m not particular from which portion of your anatomies it comes from.

  “In closing, any time you want to run a little medical bulletin on me, just pick up the phone, and as they say in the old country, I’m in the book!”

  The reporters did call. But the distressing stories kept coming: BOGIE WAGES A BATTLE FOR LIFE, DOWN TO 80 LBS., BOGART FIGHTS FOR LIFE AGAINST THROAT CANCER.

  By December there was no denying the truth. Christmas came and went. Leslie and I got lots of presents. It was Dad’s fifty-seventh birthday. Then my birthday came two weeks later. My mother had a party for me, with lots of my friends.

  Everybody knew the end was coming. By this time Dad was having trouble breathing and they had brought in oxygen tanks for him. I remember them, two big green tanks, one for upstairs and one for downstairs.

  Soon friends were making final visits.

  One of the people I talked to about my father’s last days was Phil Stern. Stern is a top Hollywood photographer, who has taken shots of celebrities for Look, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post. At seventy-five, he is still very active in Hollywood.

  He remembers Mapleton Drive, the beautiful house, the patio, the pool. And he remembers his last visit with my father.

  “It really was a good-bye,” he says. “I was just one of many, hundreds who came…a ‘cast of thousands.’ I remember Bacall greeting me at the door and saying, ‘You’ve come to see the great man.’ I went in and Bogart was lying on the couch. He had wasted away. At this time I had just had a book of photos published. Bogie had the book. He looked up at me and smiled and said, ‘You did a great job, kid.’”

  Phil Gersh says, “Near the end I went upstairs, the last time I saw him. He must have been eighty-five pounds.

  “‘Hey, kid,’ he said, ‘where are the scripts?’

  “‘They’re in the car,’ I said. This was a running bit with us, dialogue we had many times at Romanoff’s.

  “‘Well, who are they for?’

  “I gave him some names. ‘Hal Wallis wants you,’ I said, or Joe Pasternak, or Stanley Kramer.

  “‘Are they holding the jobs open for me?’

  “I said, ‘Absolutely, Bogie.’ He was smoking. It didn’t make any difference by this point, I guess.”

  My father’s last visitors were Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. For these last weeks of his life, Tracy and Hepburn had gone to see him every night at 8:30. Tracy would sit in a chair by the bed, and Kate would sit on the floor beside him. Tracy would tell jokes.

  My father and Tracy had been friends for thirty years. There had been a time when they were the closest of friends, seeing each other eve
ry day and carousing together at night. Tracy, like my father, was a world-class drinker. Then there was a period of many years when they saw little of each other, and they seemed to find each other again after both became major movie stars. It was a good pairing then; Bogie was a talker and Tracy was a listener. Though they had separate social groups, they were always close. And more than that, there was enormous professional admiration. My father said that Spencer Tracy was our best screen actor. He said that with Tracy you didn’t see the mechanism at work. “He covers it up,” Bogie said, “never overacts, never gives the impression that he is acting at all. I try to do it, and I succeed, but not the way Spence does. He has direct contact with an audience he never sees.”

  This particular night, Tracy needed all of his acting skills, because he was a wreck.

  Kate Hepburn described the last visit to me this way. “I was with Spencer. We spent time with your father. Before we left I kissed him good night, the way I always did, and Spencer put a hand on Bogie’s shoulder. Bogie gave him one of those great Bogart smiles, you know, and he said, ‘Good-bye, Spence,’ but those words, Stephen, they were so filled with meaning. You knew Bogie meant it as a final good-bye, because your father had always said good night in the past, not good-bye. We got downstairs in that lovely house they had, and Spence looked at me. He was terribly sad and he said to me, ‘You know Bogie’s going to die.’ He meant that Bogie would die very soon.”

  Though my father almost never talked about dying during his illness, it seems that toward the end he knew. Even his doctor said that on his last visit Bogie said good-bye and thanked him for all that he had done. “I’m sure that night he knew he was going to die,” Brandsma says.

  After Tracy and Hepburn left that night, my mother and father watched Anchors Away, the film starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. Lately, my mother had been sleeping in another bed, so as not to disturb Bogie’s sleep. But on this particular night he asked her to stay with him. The night was a horror for both of them. Dad suffered through the night in a claustrophobic nightmare, constantly picking at his body, clutching his chest, struggling, it seemed, to leave his body. I can only imagine what my mother went through, lying there helplessly beside him. Later she learned that this was a common phenomenon just before death.