Bogart (27 page)

The fact is that a lot of Dad’s fears came to the surface
when he drank, and one of them, certainly at this time, was
that he would lose Bacall. From her viewpoint this was ridic
ulous. She was in love with him and if anyone was in danger
of heartbreak it was her. After all, he was a highly desirable,
witty, wealthy, intelligent, and famous man whom many
women found very sexy. In fact, she often saw, or thought she
saw, other women coming on to him. But from my father’s
point of view, he was a nearly fifty-year-old guy whose looks
were gone, and she was a beautiful young and talented ac
tress who could get any man she wanted. The result was the friction of two insecure people. My mother, fortunately, was
not a big drinker. But Bogie, of course, was, and when he
drank he would worry and often he would lash out at
my mother.

I’m relieved to say that I did not inherit my father’s addiction to alcohol. I’m not a drinker. I don’t like the taste of alcohol or the smell of it. In one year I might have only six
or seven drinks, and even those will be something innocuous,
in which the taste of the alcohol is well disguised.

I am, however, interested in my father’s drinking habits
because I had a substance addiction of my own. Drugs. I
think my father’s experience and mine were similar in some
ways. And they were different in some ways, the most obvious
being that his drug was legal and mine was not, and that I
gave up drugs, but he never really stopped drinking.

Certainly Bogie and I, both of us shy, used our drugs as
a social lubricant. There doesn’t seem to be a time in Bogie’s
adulthood when booze was not at the center of his social life.

In the twenties he was part of the jazz age. He ran
around with brazen women who smoked cigarettes, and he
drank bootleg whiskey distilled by the same machine gun
toting
ga
ngsters that he would later portray in the movies. After his first early successes on the stage, when he had some
money in his pockets, Dad used to spend a lot of time in
Times Square watering holes and Greenwich Village bars,
speakeasies, and places like the Harlem Cotton Club. Often
he stayed up drinking all night.

Later, when he got into movies, at six o’clock he would
go to his dressing room and shout “Scotch!” That’s when his
hairdresser would get drinks ready for Bogie and any guest
who happened to drop by. On his way home from work he
would stop for drinks with pals—writers mostly, like Mark
Hellinger, John O’Hara, Nathaniel Benchley, Nunnally John
son, and Quentin Reynolds. When he got home he would
drink again, and often go out later, looking for guys to go
drinking with.

His first three marriages, particularly his marriage to
Mayo Methot, were largely a drinking orgy. But when my fa
ther married my mother, it seemed he had found the missing
piece in his life, and his drinking habits improved. He
stopped drinking mixed drinks and he stopped mixing
his drinks.

“Mark Hellinger told me I was drinking like a boy and
he was right,” Bogie said. Hellinger had told him that he was
drinking like a kid because he mixed his drinks. Before
Hellinger, Bogie would have martinis before dinner, beer
with dinner, and Drambuie after dinner. But during the
Bacall part of his life he was strictly a scotch man. “Scotch,”
he said, “is a very valuable part of my life.”

Though my mother has often been given the credit for
reducing Bogie’s alcohol consumption, she doesn’t see it
quite that way.

“I didn’t persuade him to cut back,” she says. “That
would have been foolhardy. You couldn’t nag Bogie. That
would be counterproductive. I didn’t try to keep up with
him, and I didn’t bawl him out when he was hungover. I sim
ply ignored him. He would try to get me to pay attention
when he was drinking but I did not. The fact is that Bogie
drank because he was insecure. Once he realized that he had
emotional security, and professional security, too, he cut back
on his drinking.”

After he married Bacall, Bogie didn’t go out to drink as
often, but he still drank every day, usually with friends in the
butternut room. During this later part of his life Bogie said,
“This is my recreation. I like to sit around and gab, enjoy my
drinks and my family. That’s what a man wants when he’s
over fifty. Drink never caused me any harm.”

Quite simply, Bogie’s social life, throughout his life,
could fairly be described as “drinking with friends.” And I
know how that goes. A lot of my young adulthood could fairly
be described as “smoking dope with friends.”

My mother, of course, never knew about all this drugtaking until much later. But drugs—or, at least, the drug
culture—still got me in trouble with her during this period,
when I was living in her apartment.

One day in 1968, while my mother was in Europe mak
ing a movie, my friend Peter, from New Jersey, came up to
the Dakota.

“Bogart, let’s have a party,” he said.

“Great idea,” I said. “Who shall we invite?”

“Everybody.”

So we invited all our friends, and we told them they
could bring friends.

Before the party, Peter and I headed down to Greenwich
Village to buy a pound of grass. By the time we got back to
the Dakota, people were already showing up for the party. All
of them had one thing in common: Neither Pete nor I had
the vaguest idea of who they were.

I guess when we put out the word about the party, we
thought we’d end up with a few dozen people. But by ten o’clock that night there were three hundred to four hundred
people tromping in and out of Mother’s beautiful apartment,
including a few people that Pete and I actually knew. In those
days word of a party would spread like a virus. One person
would tell another where there was a party and soon stran
gers would show up, completely untroubled by the fact that
they didn’t know who was running the party or any of the
people there. So they came—long-haired guys and longer-
haired girls. Some brought cake, or a brick of cheese. Or a
bowl of cauliflower. All of them brought drugs. Joints were
passed from hand to hand, Mary Jane brownies were
munched, platters of acid made the rounds. Even some old-
fashioned types brought alcohol. Every five minutes the door
man would buzz the apartment and tell me somebody wanted
to come up.

“What’s their name?” I’d ask and I’d hear him asking
them, “What’s your name?”

“John and Cherry,” they’d say, or “Windsong and Har
mony.” And I’d say, “Send them up.” I didn’t know who the hell they were. It didn’t matter to me. I was stoned and I was
surrounded by peace and love and good-looking females.
They could have said their names were Huey, Dewey, and
Louie and I would have invited them up.

We all had a great time, and kind of a miracle occurred
that night. It wasn’t a miracle then, but it would be today.
Here were four hundred drug-addled hippie strangers roam
ing around the luxury apartment of a movie star, and not one thing was stolen or broken in that apartment. Times
were definitely different. Today everything would be stolen
or wrecked or used as evidence in a negligence suit.

So, since nothing was stolen or broken, my mother was
happy for me that I had four hundred friends drop by at her
place, right? Well, not exactly. After all, Pete had said there
was no possibility that she would find out, because she was
in Europe.

However, the doorman at the Dakota thought Bacall
might be interested in the fact that half the unwashed people
in New York were dancing on her carpets. So he called her in
Europe and told her.

She, not surprisingly, called me. We discussed it.

“Stephen,” she said, speaking in the coldest tones I have ever heard. “I have just received a very disturbing telephone
call from the doorman there.”

“Mom, it’s not so bad, there’s nothing broken—”

“Stephen,” she said, stopping me in midsentence, “what
you have done is so monumentally bad, so unforgivable, that
I am beyond even screaming.”

“Look, Mom, everybody’s gone. Nothing got stolen, nothing got—”

“Stephen! My hands are trembling on the phone. Trem
bling. I don’t know if I will ever again be able to trust you.”

She might as well have shoved an ice pick in my heart.

“Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t know so many people would
show up.”

“How many?” she said.

“I don’t know. Forty, maybe fifty.”

“I see,” she said, which either meant that fifty was a hor
rendous number, or that she knew the truth. “Now I will only
say this once, Stephen, I want that apartment spotless. Do
you understand?”

“I got you, Mom.”

“I don’t want to see a stain. Do you understand me? I
want to walk into my apartment and believe that this was all a nightmare, that what I have heard tonight never really
happened.”

I spent the next three days cleaning things that didn’t
need to be cleaned.

Despite one bad acid trip and the incident with my moth
er, over which I still feel guilty and embarrassed, I don’t
think smoking grass and tripping, on the whole, did me
much harm. That, however, cannot be said for cocaine, a
much more seductive drug and, I know now, a much more
dangerous one.

I first started snorting cocaine in my late twenties, when
I went to the University of Hartford. It was not a problem at
first. For the first couple of years I would do it maybe once
a month. It was around 1980, when I was working as an assis
tant producer at ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, that my co
caine use started to escalate. My marriage to my first wife,
Dale, had been lousy for a long time, but the impact of a bad
marriage had only just started to get to me. I was lonely, and
I guess cocaine took the edge off my loneliness.

At ESPN I’d be assistant-producing games and doing lines
of coke at the same time. We had a telex machine, where you
went to get the scores. Guys would put coke on the plastic
top and slice it up with a razor blade. Of course, all this
sounds reckless as hell today. But then cocaine was the “good
drug.” It was party time, Studio 54 and all that. Cocaine
was not the social evil that it is now. It wasn’t even all
that expensive.

At ESPN I still felt that I had things under con
trol. I’d buy some and I’d use it, and that would be it. I didn’t
go screaming through the streets for more. Sometimes I’d go
to people’s houses and do cocaine until four in the morning.
But the next day I would stay away from it. So I was cool,
I thought.

But cocaine is seductive. You don’t realize that you are
getting addicted. I started using it more and more. Soon I
was doing it on my day off, and twice a week I would make
a two-hundred-dollar coke buy. That’s four hundred bucks a
week to get drugged. Ten thousand bucks a year, and even
that was small change compared to the habits of some guys.
Trouble is, I was on track to become one of those guys.

I would do cocaine on a Friday night and I wouldn’t
sleep until Saturday night. I would space out. I would get
selfish and refuse to share my coke with anybody. Then the
paranoia started. The fear, the sweats, the jitters—all came
with the crash that followed the high. I stopped eating. I lost
weight. My strength was sapped and I couldn’t work out.

Still, I went to work in New York every day, which meant I had to commute eighty-five miles each way from Connecti
cut, and I would do coke. I didn’t miss much time at work,
but still I was getting worse.

With cocaine, as with alcohol, you reach a bottom. That
is, if you don’t kill yourself first. Everybody has a different
bottom. I think I know when I reached mine.