Bogart (25 page)

Though my father made a lot of money as an actor, and did
not spend it foolishly, he was not a man who accumulated
great wealth from investments. At one time he owned a few
Safeway supermarkets, but they went to Mayo Methot when he divorced her, as did a large chunk of cash. His only other
significant investments were in movies, and he tended to
make these investments more with his heart than his head.
He had put some of his own money into
Beat the Devil,
prob
ably as an act of faith in his friend John Huston.

But that was not his last movie investment. Throughout
his career, my father was often concerned about the quality
of movies he appeared in. In 1947, he decided to put his
money where his mouth was, and he formed his own production company, Santana Pictures Corporation, with the help of
Sam Jaffe and Sam’s partner, Mary Baker. Bogie said that
some day all big stars would have their own production com
panies, so they could acquire properties and control what
films they appeared in. This was a bizarre idea at the time.
Jack Warner, of course, was pissed off. He called Sam Jaffe.

“Sam,” he said, “you are the most destructive force in
the movie industry today.”

“Why is that, Jack?” Sam asked.

“You have made an actor into an independent com
pany,” Warner said. “That sets a terrible, terrible precedent.”

Sam asked, “How does that hurt the industry? Bogie is a
name above the title and he wants his own company.”

“It will destroy the industry,” Warner said. “These actors
will want everything. Maybe you can talk Bogie out of this ter
rible thing he is about to do.”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “Seeing as how, it was my
idea that he could have his own company.”

Sam Jaffe told me that Warner never forgave him. In
fact, because Jack Warner saw Santana as a great danger to
the business, he refused to use Jaffe & Baker clients in
films. As a result the agents lost many stars. But they held
their ground.

Santana, unfortunately, never made a
great
film. There
were four Santana films made between 1949 and 1951:
Knock On Any Door, Tokyo Joe, In a Lonely Place,
and
Sirocco.
None
were very popular, which was embarrassing to Bogie, because
he had quit Warner Brothers in order to make better films.
But my father had struck a blow for artistic freedom, and he
was proved right. Today many, if not most, big stars have
their own production companies, and choose their own
movie projects. So there, my daddy was right!

Whether he was working for others or for himself, Bogie,
I have learned, was usually not difficult to work with. But he
expected other people to be as professional at their jobs as
he was at his, and from time to time this would put him in conflict with a director.

Sam Jaffe says, “One day I was on the set of
The Desperate Hours
with your father and Fredric March. Willie Wyler was
directing. Wyler was the type of man who could not articulate
what he wanted. He was like a lot of directors who can put to
gether a fine picture in the cutting room but really don’t
know how to tell an actor what they want. All they can do is
say, ‘Do it again.’ So he kept doing this to Bogie and Bogie
said, ‘Look, what is the point of me doing it again if you can’t
tell me what it is you want different, or what it is you want me
to do.’ That was characteristic of Bogie. He was analytical.
But, he had embarrassed Wyler and the two men got to
gether and talked quietly and made peace with each other,
then they shot the scene again, and I guess Wyler communi
cated what he wanted from your father.”

Oddly, Phil Gersh also told me a story about Bogie and
Wyler failing to communicate on this same film.

Bogie had it written into his contracts that he was done
for the day at six o’clock, and one day during the filming of
The Desperate Hours
he called Gersh up from the set at ten
minutes to six.

“Phil,” Bogie said, “Wyler’s driving me nuts.”

“What’s the problem?” Phil asked.

“I’ve got to walk upstairs to the second floor in
this scene.”

“So?”

“So, I do it, and Willy says I’m too slow. Then I do it
again and Willy says I’m going too fast. No matter what I do,
it’s not right. I’ve run up and down those stairs about twelve
times now and it’s almost six o’clock.”

“Make him show you,” Phil said.

“Huh?”

“Just tell him, ‘Willy, you go up the stairs. Show me how
you want it done.’”

So Bogie went over to Wyler. “Look,” he said, “why don’t
you just go up the stairs the way you want me to.”

Wyler looked at him for a moment, then looked at the
stairs. “It’s a wrap,” he said, and Bogie was out by six o’clock.

Most directors found Bogie easy to work with. As did
most actors. Rod Steiger says, “Bogie was the ultimate profes
sional. Even when he was not in a scene with me he would stand off camera and feed me the lines, so I had someone to
talk to. And Bogie was very generous. We’d be shooting a
scene and he’d say, ‘Jesus, this kid is blowing me off the
screen,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, Mr. Bogart, we can switch parts,’
and he would just smile. He could have gotten me out of the
picture if he wanted to, or he could have had my close-ups
cut out, the way a lot of stars did in those days, but he never
did any of those things.”

There were, however, a few actors who found working
with Bogie not quite so joyous. One was William Holden.

Holden did not care for Dad. He called Bogie “an actor
of consummate skill, with an ego to match.”

When Holden was twenty-one and appearing in
Invisible Stripes,
in 1939, he was to be in a scene where he drove a motorcycle, with my father in the sidecar. He overheard Dad say,
“Get my double to do it. I won’t ride with that son of a bitch. He’ll crack it up.” Years later Holden allowed for the fact that
“son of a bitch” could be an endearment coming from Bogie,
but at the time he was steamed, and he was so anxious to
prove Bogart wrong that he cracked up the motorcycle with
Bogie’s double in it.

Fourteen years later my father and Bill Holden were making
Sabrina
for Paramount. The making of
Sabrina
was by all ac
counts a lousy experience for my father. And, by all accounts,
Bogie was at least partially to blame for that.

“It didn’t even start off good,” Phil Gersh says. “I called
Billy Wilder. I said, ‘Billy, you’ve already got Audrey Hepburn
and Bill Holden. I think Bogie would be marvelous as Linus Larrabee.’ Billy said, ‘Meet me at the tennis club on Saturday,
we’ll talk.’ So we talked. Then two weeks went by and he
called and said, ‘I’ve been thinking it over, can I meet with
Bogie?’ So we met at five o’clock and we all schmoozed and
it got to be seven o’clock and we still hadn’t even discussed
the movie. Everybody had appointments. Finally, Bogie said
to Billy, ‘Look, let’s just shake hands on it, and you take care
of me.’ They shook hands and that was it, there was nothing
to worry about. They hadn’t even talked about the script. Bo
gie was just trusting Billy to treat him right.

“So the picture starts shooting thirty days later and Bo
gie calls me all upset. He says, ‘Look, this guy is shooting the
back of my head, I don’t even have to put my hairpiece on;
I’m not in this picture.’ So I went to Billy Wilder and told
him, ‘Look, Bogie is very unhappy, he’s going to walk.’ There
was a lot of yelling and screaming, he’s not being taken care
of. So Bogie put his hairpiece on and came off great in
the movie.”

Bogie might have come off great, but the movie, I
learned, was troubled from day one. Wilder started shooting
without a complete script, reminiscent of Bogie’s
Casablanca
experience. Pages were being delivered every day. One day
they were delivered to Holden and Hepburn, but not to my
father, who already felt like an outsider among these “Para
mount bastards,” as he called them. He walked out, forcing a
shutdown in the production.

One reason that Dad felt like an outsider was that Wil
liam Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and Billy Wilder, who was
directing, would get together for drinks every evening after
shooting, but they never invited Bogie to join them, and it
hurt his feelings. More than once he was heard to say,
“Those Paramount bastards didn’t invite me. Well, fuck
them,” which is the way I talk when my feelings are hurt.

Billy Wilder says the reason Bogie was not invited to join
everybody for drinks at the end of the day was, “We just
didn’t think he was fun to be with. Since he was excluded he reacted with anger and became worse than ever. This caused
extreme tension on the picture.”

More than one movie journalist has said that Bogie was
not at his best during the filming of
Sabrina.
Some say he was
still identifying with the character of Captain Queeg from his previous movie,
The Caine Mutiny
—paranoid and unhappy.
He was, some say, irritable, on edge, apathetic about the film.
He is said to have complained about his costumes, told re
porters the movie was “a crock of you know what,” and often
referred to Billy Wilder as a “Kraut bastard Nazi son of a
bitch,” even though Wilder is, in fact, Jewish.

Dad also did not care for Audrey Hepburn. Though he
said gracious things about her in interviews, he privately
thought that she was unprofessional.

Even on this movie, which he was unhappy about, Dad
knew his lines cold and he often got impatient with Holden and Hepburn, both of whom had a tendency to blow lines.
Supposedly, Bogie had a whole laundry list of complaints be
sides this. Hepburn couldn’t do a scene in less than twelve
takes, he said, and she had rings under her eyes because she was up late seeing Holden. Holden, who was married at the
time, also blew cigarette smoke in my father’s face. In one scene Dad was on camera and Bill Holden, because he was
out of the shot, read his lines from the script. Holden
was smoking and when my father got frustrated because he
was blowing his lines—something he had never done—he
told Billy Wilder, “It’s that fucking Holden with his script and
his cigarettes in the air.”

Holden and my father exchanged words, but appar
ently they made up later while drinking alcohol, a love
they shared.

Another actress who was less than enamored of my father was
Bette Davis. Conrad Nagel, the actor who helped to start the
Academy of Motion Pictures, says that Bette Davis did not like my father, and it was because of something that hap
pened when she was making her first movie,
Bad Sister,
with him.

According to Nagel, there was a scene in the movie
where Bette Davis had to diaper a baby. Davis, Nagel says, was
sexually inexperienced and easily embarrassed, and she had
assumed the baby would be a girl. She was twenty-three and
supposedly had never seen male genitals, but when she un
wrapped the baby, there they were. Davis got terribly embar
rassed and blushed. Nagel doesn’t say that my father
arranged for a male baby, just that Bette Davis always believed
that Bogie had gathered the cast and crew to watch her reac
tion. As she saw it, he got a big laugh at her expense. Bogie,
she has said, was “uncouth.”

Though Davis and Bogie were never close, they did have
a drink together now and then to bitch about Jack Warner,
and she says they came to have a “grudging admiration for each other.”

I suppose a grudging admiration is what I came to have
for my father’s work as I learned more about it. I learned
that he took his work seriously, that he stood up for other actors, that he studied his craft. All these things are admirable. But his job, like his boat, had deprived me of time with him,
so I suppose I have always resented it. I’ve come to see it
differently—to do another take, as it were. He did, after all,
have to make a living. And, perhaps more to the point, Bogie
didn’t know that he was going to die when I was only eight
years old. Maybe if he did know, he would have slowed down
and not made so many pictures. I’ve learned, too, that passion for work can be an acquired trait, particularly as your kids grow older and less in need of your time. And maybe a
lot depends on what the work is. I never cared enough about
my jobs to put them first, but that doesn’t make me right and
him wrong. The fact is that lately I’ve been writing a series of
mystery novels, and I find that I think about them even when
I don’t have to, just as I imagine Bogie must have thought
about his roles, even when he was sailing off the coast of California. So maybe one of these days I will take my notebooks
and pens and find a Greenwich Village drinking establish
ment, where I can sit at a small table, penning story ideas.
And maybe I’ll smoke a pipe while I work. Or maybe I won’t.
Maybe, like my father, I’ll think it’s too damn much work.