Bogart (29 page)

—LAUREN BACALL

For decades it has been whispered that my father had the
biggest schlong in Hollywood. I like to think the rumor is
true, but I don’t know who to ask. Who keeps track of these things? I do know that it’s not the sort of thing I can discuss
over tea with Mother.

Whether it’s true or not, the fact is that my father was
not a major-league cocksman.

People who knew Dad say he almost never looked at
other women. Film critics have said that Bogart was at his
least convincing on the screen when he was supposed to be leering at dames. And Bacall says, “Not once in our years of
marriage did Bogie ever suffer from the roving eye.”

The party line on my father and women is that he was
not a skirt chaser, not a ladies’ man, and only occasionally a
flirt. In fact, much of his movie appeal to women seems to
come from the fact that he doesn’t need them. Bette Davis
said, “What women liked about Bogie, I think, was that when
he did love scenes, he held back, like many men do, and they
understood that.”

On the other hand, my father was married four times,
and in at least two cases, he was wriggling under the sheets
with the future wife before the present wife became a past
wife. Which kind of knocks the shit out of my Peter Lorre
quote: “Bogie is no ladies’ man. Maybe it is deep-down de
cency. He has very set ideas about behavior and morals in
that respect.”

Still, it is clear that my father would rather have sailed to
Catalina with an all-male crew than dance until dawn at the El Morocco with a beautiful blonde. He liked a good horse
race and a round of golf more than a great set of gams. Bogie did not squire hundreds of girls around town, and when
he did get attached to a female he tended to marry her.

I am very different from my father in that respect. I have
always found the female form a hell of a lot more compelling
than a birdie on the fifteenth hole, even though I am a
golfer. This can be a problem. Like any man, including Bo
gie, I have from time to time been controlled by anatomical
parts much lower than the brain. After I got kicked out of
Boston University, for example, and was staying at Dale’s par
ents’ home in Torrington, I got the boot when Dale’s mother came home from the hardware store one day and caught us
screwing in the living room. I did manage to get back in after
I wrote a long, apologetic letter.

Howard Stern once asked me on the radio if I had ever
used my role as Bogie’s son to get laid, and I told him I
hadn’t, at least not consciously. In fact, I said, sometimes
when women asked me if I was related to Humphrey Bogart
I told them I wasn’t, because I didn’t want to be Bogie’s son,
always being compared to him. And I especially did not want
a girl to be interested in me because of who my father was.
Sometimes I even lied about my name. But, now that I think
about it, I suppose there were those other times when I was
with a woman who was keenly aware of my bloodline, perhaps
impressed by it, and I did what I could to make the most
of it.

Anyhow, having made sex and romance—not necessarily
in that order—priorities in my life, I took a special interest in
finding out about my dad and women.

I learned that his first known girlfriend was named Pick
les, though my guess is that that was not her given name. Bo
gie was a teenager when he fell in love with Pickles at Fire
Island, where his family was staying one summer, a change of
pace for them since they usually spent their summer vaca
tions upstate at Camp Canandaigua, the place where Bogie learned to sail. Pickles was, he once said, “a girl with laughing eyes and freckles on her nose.” At summer’s end Pickles
returned to her home in Flatbush and, as much as he was in
love with her, it apparently was not enough to make worthwhile the long train ride to Brooklyn. So, after one postsum
mer visit, young Humphrey scratched Pickles off his dance
card and took up with a girl from New Jersey.

Bogie did a fair amount of oat-sowing with a succession
of young women, and when he finally did get serious, it was
with an actress by the name of Helen Menken. He met Helen when he was working as a stage manager for a touring com
pany of a play called
Drifting.
One day some of Bogie’s sets
fell on poor Helen’s head and the two of them got into a
peppery battle over it. Later he said, “I guess I shouldn’t
have done it, but I booted her. She, in turn, belted me and
ran to her dressing room to cry.”

We’ll never know whether these two literally smacked
each other, or if Dad was just trying to be colorful when he
talked about this, but the fight between man and woman led,
as it often does in the movies, to romance. It was only a mat
ter of weeks before Humphrey and Helen had a license to
get married. And a matter of hours after that before Bogie
had second thoughts.

Menken was a well-known and well-connected actress
who could help Bogie in his acting career. But he was con
cerned about marrying a woman who was more successful
than himself. He had grown up in a home where the wife was
dominant and he didn’t care for it. So Bogie backed out.

He told his friend Bill Brady, “God, I don’t want to
marry that girl.”

Brady replied, “If you don’t, Humphrey, you’ll never get
another part on Broadway.”

Maybe Dad was worried about what Helen could do to
his career. Or maybe it was just that Helen was persistent. Ei
ther way, the result was that Bogie reconsidered, and he and
Helen did get married in the spring of 1926.

The wedding was a horror. Helen’s parents were deaf
mutes and the minister, also deaf, performed the ceremony
in sign language. That would have been fine, but the deaf
minister tried to speak the words, too, and the sound that
came from him was unlike any known language of the time,
dragging the whole affair down to the level of tragicom
edy. By the end of the ceremony Helen was crying hysteri
cally, and she ran from the reporters who were covering
the wedding.

Helen recovered, but the marriage, clearly, was doomed,
and indeed it went straight to hell. Bogart and Menken
fought over everything, including the fact that Helen wanted
to feed the dog caviar, and my father, despite being a dog
lover, thought hamburger was good enough for a pooch.
“This would lead to that,” my father said, and “one or the
other of us would walk out in a fine rage.”

The unhappy lovers separated once or twice and their
reunions were short-lived. Eighteen months after the wed
ding they were permanently split. Dad worried about the gos
sip but he told one friend, “When the whole thing is over
Helen and I will be good friends. She’s a wonderful girl.”

Though Helen blamed Bogie for the failed marriage at
the time, years later she told my mother that it was her own
fault, that she had put too much emphasis on her career and
not enough on her marriage.

Bogie, who was twenty-seven when things went sour with
Helen Menken, later said, “I’d had enough women by the
time I was twenty-seven to know what I was looking for in a
wife. I wanted a girl I could come home to.”

Perhaps, but after Helen he dated other actresses.

One of them was Mary Philips. She would become wife
number two, and his romance with her also began with a
fight scene.

Bogie had a small part in a play, and during his one
good scene, this actress, Mary Philips, was supposed to be
walking away from him, drifting out of sight and mind as he
went into his speech. One night during his big moment Dad
observed that Philips was putting too much of what he called
“that” into her walk. It was a bit of feminine swaying that was
sufficient to draw the audience’s attention away from his
speech and on to her derriere. Later he confronted her.

“You can’t do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“That thing you do. That walk.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yes, really,” he said.

“And why, pray tell, not?”

“That’s my scene,” Bogie said. “You can’t just steal a
scene from me like that.”

Mary was amused. “Well,” she said, “suppose you try to
stop me.”

If Bogie were telling the story today he might say some
thing like, “Well Stevie, I smacked her a good one and she
smartened up.” But the truth is he did nothing. He ex
plained once, “I didn’t try to stop her, because while I was
talking I suddenly became aware that here was a girl with whom I could very easily fall in love.”

Bogie did fall in love with Mary Philips. But not just
then. A few years after the derriere incident he ran into her
after a showing of
The Jazz Singer,
the first talking movie. They
started dating, going mostly to plays when they were not
performing in them. Mary, like Helen, was more successful
than Bogie and, like Helen, she encouraged Bogie to pursue
his craft.

After he proposed and Mary accepted, Bogie told a re
porter, “Marrying her is probably the most wonderful thing
that could happen to me.”

As it turned out, something more wonderful happened
to Bogie. He was invited to Hollywood. He tested for a role
in
The Man Who Came Back
and was offered a contract at $750
a week. Dad had it in his head that he would take his bride out to California, that he would make it big in Hollywood,
and they could live in great style. But Mary, it turns out, was
not interested in being “a girl you can come home to,” and
something large came between them: the United States. Mary
had her own career and it was firmly rooted in the stages of
the east coast, not in front of Hollywood cameras.

The result of all the bickering over careers and coasts
was that my father and Mary agreed that while he was out in California becoming a movie star, he could see other women
and she would be back in New York with the freedom to date
other guys.

When this was told to me I found it interesting because in my first marriage I did somewhat the same thing, though
by that time it had a name: open marriage. I was very young
when I married Dale and became a father. It wasn’t long be
fore our marriage became little more than a device for keep
ing both of Jamie’s parents under the same roof. It seemed
to me that I was changing and my wife wasn’t, though of
course, Dale saw it differently. Anyhow, with a toddler to care
for, Dale and I didn’t want to break up, so we went the open marriage route, popular in those days. It’s not as though I
would come home and say, “Oh, by the way, I screwed Lulu
last night,” but we had an understanding that if either of us
wanted to see someone, we could. Truth is, it didn’t work all
that well. For the last seven years of my first marriage, Dale
never got to know the people I hung out with, and I didn’t
really know the people she was close to. We were emotionally
separated. We didn’t fight much, but that was probably be
cause she worked days then, and I worked nights.

Dad’s open marriage experiment didn’t fare much bet
ter. Mary Philips, apparently, was a woman of her word. She
said she would see other men, and that’s what she did. She
fell in love with the actor Roland Young, while Bogie was in
Hollywood. But when Bogie got back to New York, he and Mary hashed things out. They brought the marriage in for re
pairs and vowed never to be separated again, which was fine
with Bogie since he was now disillusioned with Hollywood for
the second time. For his $750 a week he had not been hired to star in
The Man Who Came Back.
He had been hired to
work as a voice coach for the star, Charles Farrell, who you
might remember as Gale Storm’s father on
My Little Margie.