Bogart (12 page)

The message I got from all this moving, each time far
ther away from where we’d lived with Bogie, was clear: your
father is no longer a part of your life, forget about him. And
that’s what I tried to do for most of my life.

Of course, all this has created conflict over the years be
tween me and Mom. I didn’t want to think of myself as “the
son of Humphrey Bogart.” I have always wanted to be just
plain Steve. I didn’t want any kind of spotlight on me for be
ing Bogie’s son, and I didn’t want the responsibility of
meeting some expectation that people might have for the
child of Bogie.

You might think that I would want to stay in the world of
celebrities who are so much a part of my mother’s life. After
all, celebrities aren’t going to be impressed by my being the
son of a celebrity. But by the time I was a teenager I had met
a few celebrities and, believe it or not, it was exactly the same.

“Oh, I knew your father. I loved him. He was great.”

It was always your father this, and your father that. No
body ever said to me, “Tell me Steve, how do you make a gas
ket, exactly?” which is something I did once.

There was never anything specific that my mother
wanted me to
do
about my father’s fame. It was just that she wanted me to somehow dedicate my life to keeping his spirit
alive, something that Bogie has managed to do just fine with
out me.

At a minimum my mother would have liked me to talk a
lot about Bogie. To her, Bogie was, and remains, perfect. She
always wanted me to ask her what he was like. I seldom did
that because she was always telling me anyhow, and to hear
her tell it, he
was
perfect. It was bad enough that I was con
stantly besieged by strangers telling me what a great guy my dad was. I wanted somebody to say to me, “Bogie was great,
but sometimes he was a prick, you know…” and maybe show
that the guy had some shortcomings so that I wouldn’t have
to live up to a legend. But my mother could never bring her
self to say anything that might reflect negatively on him.

“Stephen,” she would say, “why do you always want to
know the bad stuff?”

“Because that’s what would make him real to me,” I
would say.

I realize now that perfect is Mom’s perception of my fa
ther, and that she was just trying to make him perfect for me.
But the effect of all this, for years, was that I simply did not
learn much about my father. So when I began to take more
interest in my father’s life, I was especially curious about the
nature of his fame. After all, his fame has caused me so much
trouble that I wanted to understand it. Where did it come
from? Why is it so durable when the fame of others has
faded? The truth is if you had asked me to recite a
filmography of Humphrey Bogart a few years ago, I would
not have done any better than the average movie fan. But
now I’m much more familiar with this shadow in my life
known as Humphrey Bogart and I know a little more, though
I suspect no one will ever completely understand the lasting
impression of Bogie.

My father was not the most famous movie star of his time. Certainly Clark Gable surpassed him, and you could make a
case for James Cagney and others. But today, for reasons
which have been discussed many times, my father is the one
that the older generation remembers and the younger gener
ation idolizes. He is generally conceded to be the number-
one movie star of all time. Stories about my father almost
invariably describe him as a “legend,” a man who has a “mys
tique,” and the center of the “Bogart cult.” There are many
reasons why my father is more famous today than when he
died thirty-eight years ago. One of them is simply the fact
that he was the first of his generation of movie greats to die
prematurely. Clark Gable and Gary Cooper also died in their
fifties, but they died after Bogie. Dying young is no guarantee of immortality, but it helps. Do you think the names Marilyn
Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley would mean quite
what they do today if they had died in their eighties? Like
wise, Bogie.

If there is a year marking the beginning of my father’s
fame it is 1935, fourteen years before I was born. By that time
he had been in dozens of Broadway plays and even a few re
ally awful movies. In one of them,
Up the River,
he made his
only screen appearance with Spencer Tracy. For years, Bogie
had shuttled back and forth between Hollywood and Broad
way with a notable lack of film success. “I wasn’t Gable and
I flopped,” he said.

But in 1935, Bogie got the role of a psychopathic gangster by the name of Duke Mantee, in Robert Sherwood’s
Broadway play
The Petrified Forest.
Over the years a lot of peo
ple have told me that when my father walked on stage as
Duke Mantee you could hear a gasp from the audience, and that happened every single night. Somehow Dad created the
shuffling gait of a convict who might have had his legs man
acled, and his hands dangled as if they might have been re
cently handcuffed together. His voice was cold, his eyes
heartless. At the time of the play, John Dillinger was king of the tabloids, and Bogie, they say, looked a lot like Dillinger.
For years people talked about that nightly gasp in the audience and how it always seemed that John Dillinger had just
walked onto the stage.

The play, with Leslie Howard as the star, was a big hit.
Bogie got the best reviews of his stage career. He was hopeful
that repeating the role on film would finally make him a Hol
lywood star. But when Warner Brothers bought the rights to
film the play they announced that Mantee would be played
by Edward G. Robinson. Robinson was already a major movie star, mostly playing gangsters. Bogie was pissed off. He sent a
cable to Leslie Howard, because Howard (who, incidentally,
was my mother’s screen idol, though she never got to meet
him) had promised to help Bogie get the Mantee movie role.
Howard, true to his word, told Warner Brothers that they
could shove their movie if they didn’t cast Dad as Mantee,
though I suppose Howard used more genteel language. The studio caved in. Bogie got the part and he was a sensation.
And that is why my sister is named Leslie; she was named af
ter Leslie Howard.

The Petrified Forest,
however, did not make Bogie a movie
star. Warner Brothers signed him to one of their so-called
slave contracts, and they plugged him into a whole series of roles that they thought suited his “type.” During the next five
years my father appeared in twenty-eight films, playing so
many gangsters you would have thought he was born with a
.38 in his hand. The titles say it all:
Racket Busters, San Quentin, You Can’t Get Away With Murder,
and so on. But Bogie
never even got to be the top gangster in these flicks, because
Warner Brothers already had big gangster-role stars like Rob
inson, James Cagney, and George Raft. Bogie did get to play
a cowboy on occasion, and he had top billing from time to
time, such as in
Dead End,
notable because it was the first film
featuring the Dead End Kids.

Bogie was not great in these films—but then, the films weren’t great either. In some he was good, in others lousy. He
did, however, get good at dramatic death scenes because he
had lots of practice. In these gangster films, he was always
getting knocked off at the end by Robinson or Cagney. He joked about how absurd it was that he, brought up in wealth
and culture, was known to the public as a tough street guy.
But he was not happy playing these parts. He really cared
about acting, and he wanted to make something of himself as
an actor.

Still, if these films do not represent Bogie at his best,
they do show that he was sometimes able to make the most
of roles that were as common as lice. Raymond Chandler
said, “Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also, he has a
sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of con
tempt. Alan Ladd is hard, bitter, and occasionally charming,
but he is after all a small boy’s idea of a tough guy. Bogart is
the genuine article.”

It wasn’t until 1941 and
High Sierra
that Bogie began to
emerge as someone who would make his mark on film his
tory. He got the role because he fought for it after George
Raft turned it down. Raft did not want to die at the end.
This would not be the last time that Bogie benefited from
Raft’s fussiness.

In that movie, Bogie played Roy Earle, another Dillinger-
like character. Earle was ruthless and cold-blooded. But
somehow Bogie created sympathy for the guy, developing the
Earle character as a last-of-a-dying-breed type. Audiences re
sponded. When Earle was killed at the end of the movie, as
bad guys always were in those days, the moviegoers felt
sympathy instead of glee. It was probably my father’s best per
formance to date. The movie was a hit.

The screenwriter on
High Sierra,
along with W. R. Bur
nett, was John Huston. Later that year, Huston got his first
directing assignment. The movie was
The Maltese Falcon,
and
it was to star George Raft. Raft said no. This time he was
afraid of jeopardizing his career by working with a new direc
tor. Right. Anybody could see that Huston had no future as
a director. So, Bogie got the role, and Huston was happy to
have him.

In
The Maltese Falcon,
Bogie was on the right side of the
law, more or less, as Dashiell Hammett’s private eye Sam
Spade, another self-sufficient loner type. Bogie was still ruth
less, but now it was ruthlessness in the name of principles.

The Maltese Falcon
had been made twice before, but this
time they did it right and the movie was a big success. My mother thinks it is the movie against which all other private-
eye films are judged.

In one of his most famous scenes, Bogie tells Mary Astor
that he is “sending her over,” for killing his partner. They
supposedly love each other, but Bogie says, “I don’t care who
loves you. I won’t play the sap for you. You killed Miles and
you’re going over for it.” He tells her, “I hope they don’t
hang you by your sweet neck. If you’re a good girl you’ll be
out in twenty years and you’ll come back to me. If they hang
you, I’ll always remember you.”

This, I guess, is the beginning of Bogie as Mr. Cool. Rich
ard Brooks, the director, says, “Finally, the film was done the
way it was written. The whole purpose of the story was that
his partner was killed and a woman who got him killed was
trying to make love to Bogie on the couch. And she wanted to go free. And when he finally says to her, ‘I have to send
you over, somebody has to take the fall,’ they loved him for
it because he could do it and maybe we couldn’t do it.”

Alistair Cooke knew my father and he says that
The Maltese Falcon
was the film that finally isolated my father’s charac
ter. “That was the quintessential Bogart,” he says. “All that matters is what is going on in your father’s mind. You could see everything in his face. The camera loved Bogie. He was
born to be in films.”

Richard Schickel, the movie critic for
Time,
says that
The Maltese Falcon
was the movie that put Bogie over the top as a
star. “The public now had what it required of all movie stars
in those days,” Schickel says, “a firm sense of his character, a
feeling that they knew what they were bargaining for when
they paid their money to see a Bogart picture. And from this
point onward, with his name fixed firmly above the title, in
the first billing position he would never again be forced to re
linquish, that is what he appeared in: Bogart pictures. He
had become what a star had to be, a genre unto himself.”