Bogart (19 page)

And as I roamed from one Bogie friend to the next and
listened to the stories about my father’s more admirable
traits, I found that they, too, were deeply satisfying because I
still had some growing up to do and my father, though dead
these many years, was teaching me ways to do it.

* * *

I am in my room at the Mapleton Drive House. But it is not my room. It has not been my room for thirty-six years. It is someone else’s room, and there is no evidence that I have ever been here before. I find that this room does not sweep me back to my childhood as easily as I’d thought it would. In fact, I remember little. What I do remember, oddly, is something that hung on the wall. A wooden frame, a square of glass, and in the middle is a check from the President of the United States.

In my memory I am a kid again, and one day I take the frame down from the wall and examine it. I expect the check to be somehow bigger than other checks, but it is ordinary looking. It is from Harry S Truman and it is made out to “Baby Bogart.” I ask my father about it.

“Well,” he says, “before you were born I made a bet with the president that you would be a girl. He said you would be a boy. He was right.”

“So how come you didn’t send him a check?”

“I did,” my father says. “He wrote me a note. He said, ‘It is a rare instance when I find a man who remembers his commitments and meets them on the dot.’ Then he sent the money back, only he sent it to you.”

These memories are just slivers, so frustratingly fleeting, and now I am awakened from this one. I look one last time around the room that once was mine. I try to remember exactly where the framed check hung on the wall. But I can’t. I smile. I still have that check at home. It’s like winning a bet from my father.

* * *

5

It was not a good time to be a Democrat in the movie business, especially one partisan to me. But Bogie never seemed to give a
damn for what people said or thought.

—ADLAI STEVENSON

My father and I both reached the age of military service
during a war. The big difference was that his was a
“good war,” World War I, and mine was an unpopular war in
Vietnam. Another difference: he enlisted, I was drafted.

That is, I got my draft notice. It came four weeks after I
got thrown out of Boston University, which is where I went to
school for a short time after I got thrown out of the Univer
sity of Pennsylvania.

I tried heroically to get out of being drafted, but it
seemed as if all the legal dodges were being snatched away
from me faster than I could scheme up ways of using them.

First they dropped the student deferment. Then they dropped
the deferment for being married. Then they dropped the deferment for being a father. It looked for a while there as if I was about to be dropped into South Vietnam, or at least to
some godforsaken military base in South Carolina.

So I did the only rational thing. I applied for status as a
conscientious objector. This conscientious objector thing was
big in the 1960s. People who couldn’t even spell
conscientious
were suddenly having pangs of conscience. Lots of guys like
me had gotten the crazy idea that they didn’t want to be shot
to death in an Asian jungle, but you couldn’t say that. What
you could say was that you didn’t want to shoot somebody
else
to death in an Asian jungle.

So I filled out this conscientious objector application
and it was sent to some kind of three-man board that would
decide whether or not I qualified. Amazingly, one guy on the
board actually voted in my favor, which meant that my plea
was sent on to Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick turned me down.
Maybe that was because Nixon just didn’t like conscientious objectors. Or maybe it was because he remembered that my
father stumped for Helen Gahagan Douglas, when she ran
against Nixon for the Senate in 1950. Anyhow, the president
said, “You’re next, Steve.”

I went to some federal building in Hartford, Connecticut, and I took all the mental and physical tests. Unfortu
nately, I was healthy, hetero, and relatively sane. I was
qualified to get shot in the jungle. So I figured I’d better
check out the navy. After all, my father had been in the navy
and he had lived.

At the navy recruiting office, I remember being in this
harshly lit, bare-walled room and there was this big dog-faced
navy guy behind a long table, and he looked very officious.

“Bogart?” he said. “Any relation to Humphrey?”

“I’m his son.”

“No shit?” he said. “I didn’t know he had kids.”

So he went through the drill. He told me all his favorite
Bogie movies, and then did his Bogie impression. We seemed
to be getting along okay, so I said to him, “Hey, look, I’ll sign
up if you can take me after January 6, my birthday.”

“Jesus, I’d love to do it,” he said. “You know, for your fa
ther and all.” He shuffled around a few papers and said,
“The latest we can take you is December 24th.”

I didn’t want that, so I said, “Look, if I get drafted, can
I come down here and sign up?”

He said yes.

So I resigned myself to the fact that I would get drafted
and I’d go into the navy and probably drown in the South
China Sea.

But, you know, every once in a while life acts like a
movie, and gives you a last minute reprieve, like the scene in
The African Queen,
when the homemade torpedo exploded
right on cue just as the Germans were about to hang my fa
ther and Katharine Hepburn. My lucky torpedo was that the
draft lottery came in, and I got number 224, a high number.
That first year the lottery picks went up to 218 so I was
spared. The next year they started all over again, beginning
with the new kids who had turned eighteen, so I was spared
again. In this way, I never did have to go into the military.

But the thing was—and it’s always kind of bothered
me—I didn’t have a strong political conscience. I just wanted
to stay alive.

So naturally when I started exploring my father’s life, I
wondered just how politically involved my father was. Was he
like me, a bit on the apathetic side? Or was he the kind of
person who would carry banners and say that people like me
were part of the problem?

When I started talking to his friends, I found out that
Bogie certainly was less concerned about getting shot at than
I was. He did not try to avoid combat, the way I did, but, of
course, the wars were more noble in his day.

Bogie’s pal Stuart Rose, who would later marry Bogie’s
sister Frances, known as Pat, had joined the army and had
some colorful stories to tell. So joining the military seemed like a good idea to my father. He’d get to wear a uniform and meet beautiful French girls, and, as a bonus, he’d get the hell away from Maud, who was driving him nuts.

Consent came with some difficulty from his parents. But
they must have sensed that he desperately needed to put a
few thousand miles of saltwater between himself and them.
I’m sure he didn’t come right out and say, “Mother, I’ve got
to get away from your constant harping about what a failure
and troublemaker I am,” but that’s what it amounted to.

While the idea of dying in Vietnam was very real to me
in the late 1960s—after all, I had seen it on television—the
possibility of death in combat was not real to my father when
he was eighteen. “Death was a big joke,” he said. “Death?
What does death mean to a kid of eighteen? The idea of
death starts getting to you only when you’re older, when you
read obituaries of famous people whose accomplishments
have touched you, and when people of your own genera
tion die. At eighteen war was great stuff. Paris. French girls.
Hot damn!”

There are two well-known but conflicting stories about
his navy days. Only one of them, at most, is true.

The first story is that his boat, the
Leviathan,
was shelled
by a German U-boat and one explosion caused a splinter of
wood to pierce my father’s upper lip. The injury damaged a
nerve and left the lip partially paralyzed. The resulting tight-
set lip would forever be associated with Humphrey Bogart
and it would be the physical feature that three generations of impressionists would focus on when they tried to create their
own Humphrey Bogart. The paralysis also affected my fa
ther’s speech, leaving him with a slight lisp that doesn’t seem
to have hurt his movie career.

However, there is another story about how he got the
stiff lip. In this one, Dad was not yet onboard. He was on
shore duty and he was assigned to take a navy prisoner up to
the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire. The pris
oner was handcuffed. When they changed trains in Boston
the prisoner asked my father for a cigarette. Bogie (who, by
the way, was not yet known as Bogie—that would come later
in Hollywood) gave the guy a Lucky Strike and, while he was
fishing around in his pea jacket for a match, the guy raised
his manacled hands, smashed Dad across the mouth, and
split. My father, with his lip damn near ripped from his face,
whipped out his .45 and put the prisoner down with a couple
of shots. The results were the same: my father was scarred
for life.

Nathaniel Benchley says this second story is the true
one. He says the shrapnel story is ridiculous because it is al
leged to have happened sixteen days after the war was over
and that even if there was delayed-action shrapnel, it could
not have traveled in any direction which would have produced the scar.

Maybe. But the thing that bothers me about Benchley’s
conclusion is that he says the shrapnel story was made up by
a studio publicity department. I don’t get it. Why would a stu
dio PR flack make up a story about Humphrey Bogart catch
ing shrapnel in the lip if there was already a true story about how he plugged an escaping prisoner with his .45? If any
thing sounds like studio fiction it’s the prisoner story. Any
how, Dad got stitched up by a navy doctor in both stories,
and the lip became part of the legend.

In talking to Bogie’s friends I heard different versions of many stories and there is, at this point, no way to get the pre
cise truth. That’s what happens when you’re a legend. Of
course, it bothers me to hear stories about my father, never
knowing for sure if they are true. And it bothers me to tell
them, too. We all crave certainty in these things; we’d all like
to say, “My father did this, he didn’t do that.” But the truth
is that not only the sons of legends have to deal with it. We
all do from time to time. We all have a colorful Uncle Jack or a Cousin Mertie whose exploits have been distorted over the years, and whose stories have been filtered down through different family lines in different ways. When I began to write
about my father, people said to me, “You can’t tell two differ
ent stories about the same event. You’ll lose credibility.” They
seemed to think that Bogie’s son should be the one who al
ways knows the truth, though they certainly didn’t know the
whole truth about their own fathers or mothers. I disagree. I
think credibility comes from owning up to uncertainty, from
simply saying from time to time, “I don’t know.”

I do know that when his navy tour was over Bogie went
back to his mother, who belittled him constantly about his lack of education.

The military, it seems, had not been a particularly formative experience.

“I’m sorry that the war had not touched me mentally,”
my father said. “When it was over I was still no nearer to an
understanding of what I wanted to be or what I was.”

* * *

Bogie, of course, was not done with the military after serving
in World War I. Gloria Stuart, an actress who used to play
card games with Bogie and Mayo Methot, remembers that
when World War II came along, my father began a series of
chess matches which he would play by mail with troops
overseas.

My father wanted to do what he could for the troops, so during the Christmas season of 1943 he and Mayo went to
North Africa for a twelve-week tour of army rest camps. It’s a
humorous image, Humphrey Bogart doing a soft shoe, twirling a cane, and singing “Thanks for the Memories” with Bob Hope. He did have a fair singing voice, but the fact is that his
act consisted of reciting speeches from
The Petrified Forest
and
other films. And Mayo sang “More Than You Know,” a song
she was known for, and other tunes, accompanied on the ac
cordion by Don Cummings.