Bogart (22 page)

(Apparently, my own irreverence started early in life. When I was christened in the Episcopal church and the priest
sprinkled water on my head, I said, “I don’t like the drops,”
loud enough for everybody to hear. Then, near the end of
the sermon, the priest said, “He shall enter the house of the
Lord,” and, again very loudly, I said, “If he wants to come in,
then let him come in.”)

“Bogie was not a religious man,” my mother says. “But he was a great believer in the Ten Commandments and the
Golden Rule.”

Nat Benchley says, “His moral code was strict, and was
based on, and almost indistinguishable from, the Ten Com
mandments. He didn’t always obey them, but he believed
in them.”

I don’t think learning about my father’s politics changed
my own politics in any way, though it does please me to know
that he had strong convictions. My own convictions are a lit
tle closer to home than his. I’m more directed toward my
personal world, my wife, my kids. It isn’t that I don’t care
about the larger world; it’s just that I don’t care that much,
and that I think I can do the most good at home. I find I
don’t tend to follow party lines, and, like my father, I am
suspicious of people who do. Dad once said, “Politically, I
am an anarchist. Just like John Huston.” I’m not sure that he
was kidding.

Bogie seems at every turn to be a man who is difficult to
sum up. But when I went to see Alistair Cooke, I wanted to
come away with some understanding of my father’s politics,
and I think I got it. Cooke often paused in our conversation
about my father to read something he had once written
about Bogie. And if the things he wrote don’t tell the whole
story, they at least tell a lot of it.

“Bogart,” says Cooke, “was a touchy man who found the
world more corrupt than he had hoped; a man with a tough shell hiding a fine core. He invented the Bogart character
and imposed it on a world impatient of men more obviously
good. And it fitted his deceptive purpose like a glove. From
all he was determined to keep his secret: the rather shameful
secret, in the realistic world we inhabit, of being a gallant man and an idealist.”

* * *

When I return to the top of the stairway at the Mapleton Drive house, my mother is halfway down the stairs. Has she already gone into the bedroom without me? I wonder. Did she need to be alone there? I am relieved. I don’t really want to go in there, though I haven’t quite formed that thought in my mind. As I descend the stairs I hear the sound of a car going by on Mapleton. I think for a moment that it is like the sound of Daddy pulling into the driveway after a day at the studio. But this idea melts into a different memory.

We go off in the Thunderbird, my father and I. I’m aware that it’s new and different. It’s not the Jaguar. He boasts about the new car. He says two of his friends bought Thunderbirds, but his is better. We are driving to the studio where Dad works.

We pull into the lot. It’s where they make the movies, he says. He says that going to the studio is like being allowed into the locker room of the Braves. He knows that the Braves are my favorite baseball team ever since Sammy Cahn took me to a Dodgers-Braves game.

At the studio everybody is friendly. We are on the set. Daddy says the movie is called
The Desperate Hours.
It seems very strange because my father is in a room, but it’s not really a room and there are people all around with lights and cameras and microphones. I am sitting in the director’s chair and people smile at me. They really say, “Quiet on the set,” just the way they do in movies I have seen about movies. I’m feeling like a big shot because my
father is the star and I am his son. It’s like being the son of the batting champ.

* * *

6

Bogie was the most professional actor I have ever worked with.
But his contract said he was off duty at six o’clock, and if it was
six o’clock and we were in the middle of the scene, he was gone.
He’d say, “It’s six o’clock, we’ll finish the scene tomorrow.” Then
he would go and have a drink.

—ROD STEIGER

When I began to write about my father I guess I believed
that every major aspect of his life would cast light on
my own, that I could easily find the ways in which I was, or
was not, my father’s son. His use of alcohol might say something about my use of drugs. His experience in private school
might somehow preview my own trouble in private school.
And I guess I thought that in looking at his career, in the way
he conducted it, and the way he felt about his work, I might
learn something about my feelings toward work.

Maybe. But the truth is there is little to be said about my
work life. It’s been like everybody else’s, some highs, some
lows. To go into my various jobs at length would be both bor
ing and pretentious, sins which neither I nor my father would
tolerate from someone else.

The most striking difference between my father and me
on the matter of work is that he really cared about his craft.
He was dedicated and, I think, he put work first. I, on the
other hand, have enjoyed my jobs in television, and I think I
have been good at them, but I have never really focused on work. I have always put family and friends above what I did
for a living. Maybe if I had grown up with a father, and had
not gone away to school, I would feel less strongly about the need for family life, and more strongly about career. Perhaps
that is the way in which my father has really influenced me.

My father had no big career plan when he got out of the
navy. He bounced around for a while. He worked at a biscuit
company, then he had a job inspecting tugboats. He worked
at other jobs, which didn’t last long. The young Bogie had no
idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He spent a lot of
time horseback riding with friends in Central Park.

Though Bogie’s parents were, supposedly, washing their
hands of him, it is probably not a coincidence that he was hired as a runner for the Wall Street brokerage firm that managed their money. And it was while he was at that job
that Bogie came under the wing of Bill Brady, Sr., the father of his long-time buddy Bill Brady. Brady senior was already
an established producer of stage plays. Specifically, Dad said,
“I got subway-sick one day in New York when I was running
messages for the brokerage house and staggered off the subway near William Brady’s theatrical offices—and, in a mo
ment of desperation, asked for a job.”

“How would you like to be an office boy?” Mr. Brady
asked Bogie.

“Office boy?”

“It’s not a big step up from being a runner,” Brady told
him, “but there are opportunities for advancement in a
new business.”

“What kind of business?” Dad asked.

“Movies, my boy, movies.”

So my father became an office boy for Brady’s company,
which was called World Films.

Advancement came fast. Brady stopped Bogie in the office one day and said, “How would you like to be a director?”

“A director?”

“Yes,” Brady said. He told Bogie that his picture,
Life,
was heading for the toilet, though he might have used a dif
ferent phrase.

“I guess,” Dad said.

Brady fired the director and handed the film over to
young Humphrey. “Finish directing it,” he said.

“How?”

“You figure it out,” Brady said.

Unfortunately, Dad did not figure it out and the movie
was a disaster.

The experience left my father with a belief, not that he
could direct, but that he could write much better than some
of the people who were getting paid for scripts. Soon he be
gan hanging around the 21 Club, a speakeasy in those days,
where he would sit at small tables and lean earnestly over his
notebook, penning story ideas. He smoked a pipe, which he
thought made him look more writerly. (“I like to smoke a
pipe,” he once said, “but it’s too damn much work.”)

When Bogie finally finished a story he sent it to Jesse
Lasky, who sent it to Walter Wanger, who announced that it
was dreadful, and threw it in the wastebasket. (Years later
Wanger’s daughter, Shelly, would become one of my play
mates, and Wanger would boast to people, “Bogie once wrote
for me.”)

When the writing thing went nowhere my father became
a stage manager in New York, working for Mr. Brady. Bogie
was responsible for baggage, props, and scenery. The stage
manager actually runs the show backstage.

Even then Dad was flouting authority. One night when
Brady brought the curtain up too soon after intermission,
Dad brought it back down. Brady, so the story goes, kicked
Dad in the stomach. My father got even by raising the curtain
while Brady was on stage, making last-minute preparations
for the next act. So Brady fired him. The next day Brady
rehired my father. This, apparently, was a pattern which they
repeated many times—an interesting precursor to Dad’s battles with, and many suspensions by, Jack Warner.

My father’s first acting job, if you want to call it that, occurred in rehearsals. The juvenile lead was sick, so Dad filled
in, with only the cast for an audience. (“Juvenile” was the
term for young, well-dressed men in minor parts.)

“It was awful,” he said. “I knew all the lines of all
the parts because I’d heard them from out front about a
thousand times. But I took one look at the emptiness where
the audience would be that night and I couldn’t remem
ber anything.”

Fortunately, he never had to actually perform in the play
because the show closed that night.

Awful or not, my father had the acting bug. He started
alternating his stage-managing duties with acting stints when
he could get them.

The acting bug is something that never bit me. Despite my
pedigree, or perhaps because of it, I have never seriously con
sidered being an actor. I did some acting in the eighth grade.
I played Bianca in
The Taming of the Shrew.
Yes, I know, Bianca
is a woman, but it was an all-boys school. I also acted a little bit at Milton. But, frankly, I’m a lousy actor. I’m comfortable
being myself in front of people. But I’m not comfortable be
ing someone else, and that’s what acting is. If you’re not comfortable being someone else, you’d better forget about
acting. My mother keeps telling me I look great in front of
the camera, but then, she
is
my mother.

Besides, early in life I decided that I wanted my work to
have something to do with sports.

When Jady Robards and I used to go to Mets games
we often sat in the bleachers, talking to each other as if
one of us was the play-by-play man and the other was the
color commentator.

“Yes, Jady, I think if the Mets can score more runs than
the other team today they have a pretty good chance of steal
ing this ball game.”

“Right, Steve, many of these players have fast speed and
strong strength. And quickness, lots of very rapid quickness.”

“Yes, and every one of them is one of the finest gentle
men in the game.”

Even though we only had fun pretending to be sports
casters, I, at least, often dreamed of being one. And if I
couldn’t be a sportscaster, I still wanted some connection
to sports.

“Well, go talk to Howard,” my mother said. This was
when I was in my early twenties. I’d been starting to think
that maybe a person should have some focus in life, so I had
talked to my mother about my sports dreams. The Howard of
whom she spoke was Howard Cosell. She called him and I got
an interview.

It’s nice, I guess, to have a famous mother, because she,
in turn, has a lot of celebrity friends. But, generally, I have a
horror of taking advantage of that. Whenever I’m planning a
trip to Disney World with my kids, for example, Mom says,
“Call Michael, he’ll help you out.” She means Michael Eisner,
chairman of Disney. But I never call Michael. Special treat
ment makes me uncomfortable; I don’t want to feel as if I’m
being pushed to the head of the line. So usually I don’t take
advantage of my mother’s celebrity status. But hell, I was a
sports nut, and this was Howard Cosell.