Bogart (10 page)

For me, the Bogie thing began at my father’s funeral at All Saints Episcopal Church.

The days just before the funeral are not clear to me. I re
member little. But there are others who have memories of
how I reacted in those unreal days following my father’s
death from cancer at age fifty-seven. My mother remem
bers that on the day after Dad died I stood at the top of the
stairs, clutching a small notebook in my hand, and asked her,
“What day is yesterday?”

“January fourteenth,” she said.

Then I sat on the top stair and wrote in my notebook, “January 14, Daddy died.”

And Sam Jaffe remembers talking to me on the
same day.

I said to him, “I’m glad I sat on my father’s bed
with him.”

“Why are you glad?” Sam asked me.

“Because of what he did yesterday,” I said, meaning in
my own eight-year-old way that I was glad I said good-bye to
my father before he died.

It is the funeral that begins the time when my father’s
fame was a weight upon me.

I went to my father’s funeral in a limousine. We were the
first car in a long row, and my mother sat between me and
Leslie, holding us in her arms. John Huston was also with us.
I remember that he said little, and that was unusual.

When the driver pulled up to the church I peered
through the window of the limousine. A huge crowd had gathered. Hundreds of people lined the sidewalks outside the
church. Though none of the women were crying, many of
them carried handkerchiefs, as if they knew they soon would
be. The people were very quiet, respectful, some had flowers.
But still, I was scared.

“Who are all those people?” I asked my mother.

“They’re fans, Stephen,” my mother said. “They are peo
ple who went to see your father’s movies, and they are sad
that he is dead.”

“What do they want?”

“They are going to hear the service for your father.”

“They’re coming to our church?”

“No,” she said. “They will hear it outside. Over the
loudspeaker.”

“I hate them,” I said.

“No, you don’t, Stephen. You don’t hate them.”

“He’s my father, not theirs. They don’t even know him.”

I was sad, I was hurt, I was angry. What right did these
people have to invade my life that way and gawk at my fa
ther’s death? I was there to say good-bye to Daddy—that’s what I’d been told—and I didn’t want to share it with thou
sands of strangers.

Six years later, when John Kennedy died, I would be
fourteen years old, and I would understand the sense of personal loss that people feel when a public figure passes. But then I was not at all understanding. I was enraged. Somehow
it felt to me that if thousands of people could cry at my fa
ther’s funeral, then I had no special relationship with him. At
some level I think I have always felt that way, and still do.

She took one of my hands, and one of Leslie’s. Holding us tightly, she led us out of the limo. As I climbed from the
car I heard a woman say, “That’s his son.” I wanted to punch
her. I felt as if I was being forced to perform. I was being
thrust into the spotlight, which is not where an eight-year-old
who has just lost his father wants to be.

Mother led us into the church. Huston stayed close, as if
he could somehow protect us from the fans.

In addition to the bereaved fans on the street, eight hundred of Bogie’s Hollywood friends and associates had come
to attend the service. The fans had come, of course, not just
to say good-bye to Bogie, but to gawk at the movie stars who
would be there. Gary Cooper came, and so did Charles
Boyer, Dick Powell, Tony Martin, Gregory Peck, Marlene
Dietrich, Ida Lupino, Howard Duff, Danny Kaye, and of
course Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. (Frank Sinatra
wanted to come to Dad’s funeral, of course, but if he had, it
would have created great hardship for the club where he
was performing in New York. My mother told him it was okay
to stay in New York.)

We moved slowly down to the front of the church and
took a pew. All eyes were on us, probably my mother mostly,
but I felt as if they were all watching me. I remember that the
priest, a man named Kermit Castellanos, who everyone called
K.C., talked for a while about my father.

Then John Huston spoke. He was such a big, impressive-
looking man and he had an incredible voice. He gave the eu
logy, though I didn’t yet know that word. I’ve since learned
that Huston was actually my mother’s second choice. She had
first asked Spencer Tracy, but Tracy was so devastated by Bo
gie’s death that he told my mother he was afraid he could
not speak about his friend without falling apart.

There was no body at my father’s funeral service. Bogie
had expressed his wishes to my mother long before, at the fu
neral of his friend Mark Hellinger.

“Once you’re gone, you’re gone,” he said. “I hate funerals. They aren’t for the one who’s dead, but for the ones who are left and enjoy mourning. When I die I want no funeral.
Cremation, which is clean and final, and my ashes strewn
over the Pacific. My friends can raise a glass and exchange
stories about me if they like. No mourning, I don’t believe in
it. The Irish have the right idea, a wake.”

Unfortunately, when Jess Morgan, who was then the
young associate of my father’s business manager, Morgan
Maree, went to make arrangements for the cremation he was
told that such a scattering was illegal. My mother was very up
set. She had wanted Bogie to go back to the sea, which he
loved. So Dad was cremated. Mother had arranged for the cremation to take place at the same time as the service, and after the service the ashes were placed in an urn in the Gar
dens of Memory at Forest Lawn Cemetery. Included with the
ashes was the gold whistle my mother had used in their first
film together,
To Have and Have Not.
On the whistle were in
scribed the initials
B & B
—Bogie and Baby. And at 12:30 that
day, a moment of silence was observed at both Warner Broth
ers and Twentieth Century-Fox.

Most of that day I’ve forgotten. They played music. I
know now that it was from the works of Bach and Debussy,
Bogie’s favorite composers. Leslie and I kneeled when we
were supposed to. I remember the crowds. I remember the
familiar smell of magnolias, cut from our front yard, and the
white roses that surrounded the altar. And on the altar there
was Bogie’s treasured glass-encased model of the
Santana.
I
remember thinking my father should be there to see it. But
mostly I remember just being stunned by it all, being in a
kind of daze.

When it was over, people rose from the pews, began to mill around, shaking hands with old friends, clapping each
other sympathetically on the back. I felt lost for a moment
and then John Huston leaned down to me. He put his big
hands gently on my shoulders and he whispered, “You know,
Stephen, there are going to be many photographers out
there trying to take your picture.”

I guess if Huston was warning me, he must have under
stood how angry and scared the photographers had already
made me feel.

Between the day my father died and the day of the fu
neral there had been two school days. My mother, thinking
that it was best to keep things as close to normal for us as she
could, had sent Leslie and me to school on those mornings.
But normalcy was not to be had. Incredibly, when I was
dropped off at school that first day there was a group of photographers waiting for me. They just came at me, like a gang of big kids, taking my picture without even asking. I hated it.
I didn’t want my picture taken anymore. But now at the
church after the funeral, I knew how to stop them, I thought.
I would simply put my hand over my face so they couldn’t see
me and they would not take my picture. That’s what I be
lieved. So as we filed out of the church, I stood next to my
mother and John Huston and I held my hand up over my
face. We moved through the crowd of people who were being
kept behind ropes. Suddenly it seemed as if everybody in the
world had a camera.
They were taking my picture.
I couldn’t be
lieve it. It didn’t matter that I had my hand over my face.

They still took pictures, one after the other. I was scared. I
felt as if I was being jumped on or called names. By the time
we got into the car I was bawling.

The next morning the front page of the newspaper featured a big picture of me coming out of my father’s funeral
with my hand over my face. I was mortified. I felt as if some
how everybody had lied to me.

After the funeral dozens of people gathered at the house
on Mapleton. There were many celebrities there. But there
were neighbors, too, and studio executives, makeup men,
sailing people, hairdressers, all people who loved Bogart. As
long as there were people around, and things to do, Mother
was able to hold herself together. Even before the funeral she
had been able to keep busy constantly by answering some of
the thousands of telegrams that came in from sympathetic
friends and strangers.

It was a telegram that made for one light moment on the
afternoon of Dad’s funeral. My mother had asked that no
flowers be sent for my father, that instead, donations be
made to the American Cancer Society. Then she got a telegram from the American Floral Association, which she read to the gathering. It said, “Do we say don’t go to see Lauren
Bacall movies?”

So it was not a totally somber afternoon. People chatted
and gossiped and exchanged Bogie stories. Mother was
happy to have the house filled with people. But the friends
had to leave sometime, and when they did we were alone
again, Mother, me, and Leslie, in a home with no father.
That’s when the problems began.

If I was uncommonly quiet in the weeks that followed,
my little sister was the opposite. Leslie was full of questions.

“Why did Daddy go to heaven?” she asked my grand
mother, Mom’s mother, Natalie, who had been living with us
through much of my father’s illness. Our other grandmother,
Maud, had died of cancer more than a decade earlier.

“Because God needed him,” my grandmother answered.

“But we needed him, too,” Leslie said. “Did God think
he needed him more than his kids?”

She was four years old and an expert at asking the unan
swerable questions.

Leslie was going through her own awful time. She had been Daddy’s little girl and Bogie had doted on her. Now he
wasn’t there to scoop her into his lap, or ride on the seesaw
with her. Now was the time when Leslie needed her mother the most, but Mom couldn’t give her enough. I was the rea
son. Because I was so troubled, my mother gave me a lot of
attention and in the process, they both agree, neglected
some of Leslie’s emotional needs. It has been, as you can
imagine, a sore spot between mother and daughter over the
years.

However, I was the one who was most obviously in need
of special attention.

Not so long ago I told my wife about a bicycle accident
that I’d had about a year after my father died. I had cut open
my jaw and been taken to the hospital for stitches. There was
no lasting injury from that accident, but all my life I had
been unaccountably angry about the fact that my mother was
at work when it occurred.

Barbara said, “Well, perhaps you were angry because you
felt there was no one to protect you.” And it struck home.
Yes, that was it, exactly. That’s how I felt, that nobody was
there to protect me. My mother was gone, and my father was
gone, too.

In a strange way, this idea that I was unprotected was a
comforting thought. Because for so many years I had felt that
I didn’t think enough about my father, that I didn’t feel
enough about him. I had always believed that, while
Humphrey Bogart’s fame has tainted every single minute of
my life, he, personally, never really had much impact on my
life. But now I realize that if his absence made me feel so
damn vulnerable and unprotected, then his presence, his be
ing alive, must have made me feel safe. When he died my
world was shattered. And it took me many years to put it all
back together.