Bogart (26 page)

* * *

Mother and I enter the kitchen just long enough to say how different it is. But in that fragment of time I remember my first taste of alcohol.

I am eight years old. My father has been sick for a long time now and he comes down from his bedroom only in the afternoons to be with his friends in the butternut room. The grown-ups still laugh, which makes me think things will be all right. And they still drink liquor, which is the word I know for everything that they pour into glasses. It is late afternoon, unusually cool outside and not a day to play. I have been trying to do my homework, but I am bored. I come downstairs to the kitchen, and there is nobody there. I can hear them all talking in the butternut room. On the sink there is a tray of empty glasses. But May is not there. No one is there. A few of the glasses still have liquor in them, and I am suddenly excited, thinking this is my chance to taste liquor. For some time I have thought about these drinks that grown-ups have. Which glass is Dad’s? I wonder. Is his one of the ones that still has something in it? My heart is pounding, as if I am about to do something wicked. I hear the voices in the butternut room. I move close to the sink, where the tray of glasses is. I count the glasses. There are four of them. Which one is my father’s? I wonder again. I move closer, thinking I want to taste liquor and tell the kids about it. I sniff the glasses, thinking I can tell which one is my father’s. Two are the same, one is different. The smell is not really pleasant. It feels warm to my nostrils, like breathing hot air. But I am sure the taste will be good. Even if it’s not, I think, I will have tasted liquor. Finally, thinking I know which glass is my father’s I pick it up. There is only a small amount of liquor in the bottom of the glass. I wait for the sound of laughter, so I will know they are all still in the butternut room. I lift the glass to my mouth and let the liquor pour over my tongue. It feels hot and disgusting. I quickly put the glass back on the tray and I start spitting into the sink, trying to get the taste off my tongue. I turn on the faucet and pour water into my cupped hands and drink it. These people must be nuts to like this stuff, I think.

* * *

7

Bogie had an alcoholic thermostat. He just set his thermostat at
noon, pumped in some scotch, and stayed at a nice even glow all
day, automatically redosing as necessary.

—NUNNALLY JOHNSON

One time, a few years before I was born, my father was out
all night drinking. When dawn came he was staggering around on unfamiliar Hollywood streets. He was hungover,
unshaven, and disheveled, looking more like a gutter rat
than a movie star. As he walked along one side street in the early morning, he noticed a light glowing in the window of a
small house. He slipped between two hedges, crept across the
lawn, and peered in the window. There he saw a woman in
her kitchen, cooking breakfast for her family. By this time Bo
gie was getting hungry, apparently, and he stood by the win
dow for a long time, sniffing the smell of bacon. Finally, the
woman turned toward the window and she saw him peering
in at her. At first she was startled at the sight of this scruffy-
looking guy. But as she stared longer at him she realized that
she was looking at one of the most famous men in the world.

“My God!” she called to her husband, “it’s Humphrey
Bogart.”

“What about him?” the husband asked.

“He’s in our front yard,” she said.

“Well, let’s invite him in.”

So the husband invited Bogie in. The kids came down
for breakfast, and everybody gathered around the kitchen ta
ble. There, the not-quite-sober movie star wolfed down bacon
and eggs, and regaled these ordinary folk with tales of Holly
wood moviemaking and what it was like to kiss Bette Davis
and get shot dead by James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.
After he said good-bye that morning, Bogie never saw the
people again, but for the rest of their lives they had a story
to tell.

There are any number of anecdotes concerning my father and alcohol. Dad lived, after all, in a time when there
were no Mothers Against Drunk Driving, when getting
loaded was still amusing. So he made no efforts to hide his
drinking, and many of his drinking stories found their way
into print.

My father, in fact, was somewhat chauvinistic about
booze, often hinting that people who drank were of a higher
order than those who abstained.

“The whole world is three drinks behind,” he said in
1950. “If everybody in the world would take three drinks, we
would have no trouble. Of course, it should be handled in
moderation. You should be able to handle it. I don’t think it
should handle you. But that’s what the world needs, three
more drinks. If Stalin, Truman, and everybody else in the
world had three drinks right now, we’d all loosen up, and we
wouldn’t need the UN.”

Bogie once announced, “I’m starting, maybe I should
say uncorking, a campaign for more civilized, more decorous
drinking.” He named his favorite “gentlemen guzzlers.” On
his list were Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Errol
Flynn, John Steinbeck, Don Ameche, Ed Gardner, Toots
Shor, Pat O’Brien, Paul Douglas, and John Nance Garner.
And on his all-star drinking team he put Mark Hellinger,
Robert Benchley, and W. C. Fields.

He wouldn’t allow women on the team. He said that you
could not have peaceful drinking when there were women
around. “You don’t have fights in men’s bars,” he said. “The
fights are in nightclubs, when women come flirting around.
Women should be allowed one cocktail as an appetizer, and
they should be made to drink that at a table. Women don’t
drink attractively. They look a little crooked when they drink.
They fix their hats till they get them tilted and crooked.”

Whenever Bogie talked at length, which was often, some
reference to drink was almost inevitable, and he has become
highly quotable on the subject. “I think there should be
some space between drinks,” he said. “But not much.” When
he came back from Italy he said, “I didn’t like the pasta so I
lived on scotch
a
nd soup.” When asked if he had ever been
on the wagon, he replied, “Just once. It was the most miser
able afternoon of my life.”

Bogie also said, “Something happens to people who
drink. They live longer.” But he knew better. When his sister
Catherine, whom he called Kay, died of peritonitis after a
ruptured appendix, the doctors said she had been weakened
by too much alcohol. “She was,” said Bogie, “a victim of the speakeasy era.”

Kay, who had been a Bergdorf-Goodman model, died in
her thirties. She had been as prodigious a drinker as my fa
ther. George Oppenheimer, cofounder of Viking Press, was
once her steady date, but he couldn’t keep up with her drink
ing. Bogie once said, “The trouble with George is that he
gives out just as Kay is ready to give in.”

So yes, there are some cute stories about Bogie’s drink
ing and there are lots of funny lines. But the simple truth
is that my father had a drinking problem, and that can never
be a good thing.

“My father was a functional alcoholic,” I said to a woman one
time. I have said that a lot.

“Watch what you say,” she said. She was very upset
with me.

“Huh?”

“There’s no such term as ‘functional alcoholic,’” she
said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Alcoholism is a disease and
we should be very careful about how we use our terms.”

Well, maybe.

I do know that Bogie functioned. He was never drunk
on the job (except, of course, for the time that Jack Warner
had to coax him off his bicycle), never hauled into jail or
hospitalized for drinking, and never ravaged by booze,
though certainly it was a factor in his cancer. Bogie did not
usually get drunk, at least so that you could tell. He was what
he called a good drinker. “A good drinker,” he said, “doesn’t
let drinking interfere with his job. He can get absolutely stiff
and the fellow next to him doesn’t know it.”

Patrick O’Moore, one of my father’s actor friends, said
that when he drank with Bogart, he realized there was some
thing wrong with his own drinking.

“I thought we drank the same,” he says, “but I noticed
that Bogart was still cold sober at the end of the evening and
I wasn’t.”

One day on the
Santana,
O’Moore said to Bogie, “There’s
something wrong with my drinking, Bogie. I don’t know
what it is, but you can be all right when you want to and
I can’t.”

Bogie replied, “Well, kid, you don’t handle it right.
You’ve crossed the line.”

My father rarely crossed the line. He took great pride
in that.

Yet, this is a guy who, when he wasn’t working, started
drinking by noon. He drank when he went to Romanoff’s.
He stopped for drinks on the way home. He drank when he
got home. He drank on his boat. He hung out with people who drank. Drinking was one thing my father did a lot of.
The fact is that my father liked to drink and smoke, and
that’s what eventually killed him. It seems to me at least that
this is a description of a drinking problem.

John Huston said, “Bogie loved to drink and play the roughneck. Actually I don’t think I ever saw Bogie drunk. It
was always half acting, but he loved the whole scene.”

Maybe Huston never saw Bogie drunk, but a lot of other
people, including my mother, did. The results were not al
ways attractive. Just like Jason Robards, Bogie could be charming when he was sober, but often unpleasant when he was drunk. Bogie was not always drinking for fun.

Mom says that when Bogie drank too much with her, he
felt remorseful. And when he drank too much he often had
a temper. She tells me there were times when Bogart was so
loaded he didn’t even know where he was or who she was.

One night—I think it was her first night on the boat,
and they were still dating secretly—he got frighteningly
drunk and she watched as his personality turned from ador
able to ugly. It was Jekyll-and-Hyde time. There had been no
arguments, no cutting remarks, nothing to predict an out
burst. But, suddenly Bogie began pounding on the table.

“Actresses!” he shouted.

“Bogie, what’s the matter?” Mother asked. She was only
nineteen at the time and this was the first time she was seeing Bogie’s temper.

“All you damn actresses are what’s the matter,” Bogie
shouted. “You’re all alike.”

“Well you ought to know,” Mother said, trying to make
light of things. “You married three of them.”

“I said that ninety-five percent of them were morons,”
Bogie shouted. “And the papers got all over me for that.
Well, I’m revising the figures, goddamn it! I’m saying that
ninety-eight percent of them are morons.”

Though these same comments had been amusing
when the sober Bogart said them to reporters, he now
sounded furious.

“Actresses! Who needs them, damn it,” he shouted.
Again, he pounded the table.

My mother felt a mixture of emotions. She didn’t understand what had set him off like this. “Actresses,” she figured
was code for women like her, and his three wives, and per
haps even his mother. Mom had never seen him so upset.
She was afraid that people would hear him shouting. She was afraid she would lose him. And she was terrified that if she
managed to hold on to this volatile personality, she would
never learn how to deal with all the drinking that he and his
friends did. My mother had never been around so much
drinking before.

Finally staggering, and railing against the world in gen
eral and actresses in particular, Dad stormed off the boat and
disappeared into the night. Mother cried for hours. In the
morning Bogie was back, filled with remorse for his behavior.
It was only much later that Mother came to the conclusion
that Bogie had been fighting and drinking for so long with
Mayo Methot, to whom he was still married at the time, that
he had established a terrible pattern, and in his drunkenness
he must have thought Bacall was Mayo.