Bogart (18 page)

“Mr. Seeman and myself were sitting perfectly quietly
around a table for four at about three forty-five A.M. when
some Jane I never saw before tried to steal one of the pan
das on a bet or something. I couldn’t let that happen,
could I?

“So I wrestled the panda away from the girl. I guess she
did fall down. I’d never hit a lady. They’re too dangerous.
But those pandas were huge, almost as big as she was, and
she must have gotten a little top heavy. Anyway, she looked as
if she’d been drinking too many Coca-Colas.”

Bogie denied that the other woman’s date had assaulted
him with plates. “Nobody threatened me,” he says. “I would
have pasted him. There was no slugging and nobody got
hurt.” In telling his story to the papers, he even managed to
quote Shakespeare. “It was just a lot of sound and fury, signi
fying nothing,” he said. “You know how it is at that hour of
the morning when everybody’s had quite a few drinks. Any
way, Mr. Seeman and myself and our two pandas left the club
under our own steam.”

A few days later my father was served with a summons in
his suite at the St. Regis. The model was accusing him of assault, and claiming back and neck injuries. My uncle, Charlie
Weinstein, was Bogie’s lawyer.

“I thought this was a tempest in a teapot,” Bogie said, “but it has grown into a full-size hurricane. Sure, I’ll appear
in court tomorrow. They tell me I’d better or else. They send policemen after you, put you in jail, and do other bad things.
I think the girls are both very pretty. Too pretty to have to do
anything like this for publicity. So I don’t know what the
score is. I’ll tag along and see.”

The model was also suing my father for twenty-five
thousand bucks, but he didn’t take it too seriously. In court he was asked, “Were you drunk at the time?” He replied,
“Isn’t everybody at three in the morning?” The case was dropped.

My mother tells me, “The funny thing about the pandas
is that when Bogie took them home you wouldn’t play with
them and you didn’t even look at them for three years. When
you were four you used to ride them when you watched cow
boy films on television.”

It was the panda incident more than others that ce
mented my father’s reputation as a carouser. A couple of
months later he was quoted in a newspaper column as saying
that New York was a fun town, implying that the city’s clubs
and restaurants closed their eyes to drunkenness and disor
derly conduct. My father thought such carousing was becom
ing a lost art, at least among movie stars. “Errol Flynn and I are the only ones left who do any good old hell-raising,”
he said.

The head of New York’s Society of Restaurateurs re
sponded by saying that Bogart and Errol Flynn would get the “bum’s rush” the next time they tried to “get stiff and
raise hell.”

“New York restaurant owners don’t condone misbehav
ior by big movie stars, millionaires, or anyone else,” he said.
“This is a clean town. There isn’t a public place here that
wouldn’t give Bogart, Flynn, or anyone else the boot if they
carried on in a disturbing manner.”

One prominent theatrical publicist at the time was sure
that this outrageous night life would ruin my father’s career.
“If that guy doesn’t get wise to himself pretty soon and stop
trying to make like he’s in the movies all the time, he’ll be
finished,” he said.

Of course, by the time of the panda incident my father
was married to Bacall, and he was also fifty years old. Both of
these things inhibited wild nightlife, and he was really not
the party animal he once had been.

Still, he was concerned about the image of him that was
being created. Just before he left to film
The African Queen
he
said, “Some people think the only thing I’ve done is get in
volved in barroom bouts. Why, I’ve been in over forty plays.
I’ve done some lasting things, too. What they are I can’t think of at the moment, but there must have been some.”

My father was a guy who had a lot to say about a lot of
things, including celebrity reporting.

“People who live in glass houses need ear plugs and a
sense of humor,” he said. “If they hear everything that’s said
about them and are disturbed by everything they hear, they’ll
go through life in a constant state of hypertension and high
blood pressure. By the nature of my profession I live in a
glass house. When I chose to be an actor I knew I’d be work
ing in the spotlight. I also knew that the higher a monkey climbs the more you can see of his tail. So I keep my sense
of humor and go right along leading my life and enjoying it. I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.

“Like many another honest burgher, my vices are rea
sonably modest and unspectacular. But some of the stories
you should hear. I have an interesting, never dull, but hardly scandalous life. I am not going about slugging people in sa
loons, chasing starlets, smoking marijuana, or otherwise mak
ing headlines. Of course, I express an opinion now and then, but it’s all in fun. So if people want to create a legend of a
hell-raising Bogie, in keeping with some of my film roles, it is
necessary that they invent little stories and pass them along
as authentic.”

Though my father eventually ran out of energy for late-night drinking, he never tired of pranks. There are many sto
ries about my father’s mischief and there is no reason to
doubt most of them. However, I’ve learned that my father’s
impishness was so legendary that it has spawned a good many
stories which are suspect.

One story that is true, though, concerns the time when
my father made
Action in the North Atlantic
with Raymond
Massey. There was a scene where he and Massey were sup
posed to jump from a burning tanker ship into a burning oil
slick on the ocean. Of course, stunt doubles would be doing
the jumping for the high-priced talent.

“My double is braver than your double,” Bogie said
to Massey.

“Like hell, he is,” Massey said. “My double is twice as
brave as your double.”

Somehow this disagreement became a discussion of
which actor was the braver and before long the men had ma
choed their way into doing the stunt themselves. Both of
them got burned slightly, but not seriously, leaping into the
water. The director, of course, was horrified that millions of
Warner Brothers dollars had been put in jeopardy by the prank, which made it all the more enjoyable for my father.

On that same film, Bogie told Dane Clark, who then was
waiting to be built up as “the new Bogart,” that Warner’s was
going to change Clark’s name to Jose O’Toole and make him
into a new Irish-South American sensation. Clark apparently
fell for it, and had a big blow-up with Jack Warner, until the
two of them figured out that Bogie had tricked them.

Richard Brooks, the director, tells a Bogie story concern
ing chess. My father was a great chess player, but Mike
Romanoff was better. Brooks says that one time Bogie
and Romanoff were playing a series of games and Romanoff
had to pay a hundred bucks to charity if my father won a cer
tain number of them. During this series of games the prince
had to go into the hospital for some minor surgery and they
decided they would keep playing the chess match, by phone.
But Bogie set it up so that he played in his booth at
Romanoff’s and he had two phones handy. Romanoff would call in with his move and Bogie would stall for time before
making a counter move. Then he’d get on the other phone
and call some big US chess champion who would tell him
what moves to make.

Swifty Lazar told me about the time my father pushed
him in the pool at Sinatra’s house. When Swifty got even by
pushing Bogie into the pool my father was really pissed off
because he was wearing a very expensive watch that my
mother had just bought him. “What the hell are you going to
do about this?” he asked, handing Swifty the soaked watch. “I’m going to dry it off,” Swifty said and he tossed the watch
in the fireplace. The next day he bought my father a Mickey
Mouse watch to replace it, but eventually he replaced the ex
pensive one.

Inevitably, Dad became the target of pranksters, as well.
Sybil Christopher, who used to be Sybil Burton, told me, “I remember one time Richard and Betty playing a trick. Bogie
was working on a film and when he got home Richard was ly
ing on the couch, wearing Bogie’s pajamas. But Bogie out
smarted them; he just said hello, and pretended nothing was
odd. Bogie would not admit that Richard was wearing his pajamas—he didn’t react at all. The joke fell flat because Bo
gie outsmarted them.”

I found out that my father was feisty. And he was combative.
But his battles were not all fought to show off his wit, or to win an argument. He had, everybody says, an unmoving set
of principles and he would rather raise hell than be silent
when the events around him came in conflict with what he
believed was right. This did not surprise me, but it pleased
me to hear it from people who knew him. Did I, too, have an
unmoving set of principles? Yes, I decided. Could some of my
behavior be excused because I was fighting for what I be
lieved in? No. But I heard stories about my father standing
up for people, and I like to think that if Bogie could some
how be plucked from those stories and I could take his place,
I would behave similarly.

“I didn’t go on the set much,” Sam Jaffe says, “but I re
member one time I was on the set, visiting your father, and
he was being directed in a film at Columbia. I don’t remember who the director was, but at one point the producer was there and he was interfering, telling the director what to do.
Finally, Bogie just stopped working and he said to the pro
ducer, ‘Look, I can’t be directed by you and him. He is the
director. If you want to tell him something, do it at some
other time. If you want to be a director I’ll help you find a
story and you can direct your own picture. But don’t try to
direct this man.’ That’s an example of what Bogie repre
sented as a person.”

And Phil Gersh remembers that my father was very
affected by World War II, and that he put in a lot of time vis
iting wounded soldiers. Gersh remembers being with Bogie
in 1942 during the Second World War when Bogie went over
seas to do a show for the troops with Mayo Methot. Bogie
stayed at a hotel that was there for generals and colonels.
Phil stayed with the grunts. When Bogie realized that Phil
was not at the hotel he went looking for him.

“Where are you sleeping?” Bogie asked.

“On the ground,” Phil said.

“No,” Bogie said, “I want you to stay in my room.”

“But that’s for officers,” Phil said.

“I don’t care,” Bogie told him. “We’ll get you a bed and
you can stay in my room.”

So Bogie went to some commanding general and told
him he wanted an extra bed for his friend. When the brass turned him down, he said, “Fine. If you won’t let me have a bed in my room for my friend, then you won’t have a show.”

So, of course, he got the bed, and Phil got a good
night’s sleep.

Gersh was one of many people who had stories to tell about Bogie ruffling feathers, needling people, even speak
ing unkindly and hurting feelings. But I also heard stories
like this one, stories about Bogie speaking out for the little
guy. I liked to hear those stories. Because the truth is my own
mischief was not always cute at the time that it was happen
ing. I had often behaved badly, and I often hurt the feelings
of people who had been kind to me. A lot of my mischief
made me feel crummy about myself. So it was reassuring to
learn that my imperfect father must have felt crummy about
himself from time to time, must have had his own regrets about shallow moments and thoughtless remarks.