Bogart (31 page)

Bogie actually claimed to enjoy Mayo’s jealousy.

“I like a jealous wife,” he said. “I can be a jealous hus
band, too. Mayo’s a grand girl. She knows how to handle me.
When I go to a party and the party spirit gets at me I’m apt
to flirt with any amusing girl I see. But I don’t mean it. My
wife’s job, and Mayo has promised to take it on, is to yank me
out of the fire before I get burned.”

If Bogie looked at another woman, Mayo would hit him,
punch him, or throw something at him. Once she threw him
into a harbor because she thought she caught him eyeing a girl getting off a boat. One night at Peter Lorre’s house she
hit him over the head with a large wooden spoon for the
same offense. Not all of Mayo’s rages, however, were about
other women.

Mayo didn’t always need a reason to fight. Like so many
alcoholics, she simply turned into a violent, insecure, and
dangerous person when the booze kicked in. One night, for
example, she actually set the house on fire. Naturally, the in
cident was handled discreetly by the local fire department.

And then there was the time that Bogie was sitting at
home with a friend when Mayo went into a rage about some
thing. She picked up a bottle and threw it at him. Bogie just
sat still and let the bottle pass by.

He turned to his friend. “Mayo’s a lousy shot,” he said.
“Besides, she’s crazy about me. She knows I’m braver than
George Raft or Edward G. Robinson.”

I found out about another time when they were having
Thanksgiving dinner with Raymond Massey and his wife. Bo
gie made some remark and Mayo hurled the turkey platter at
his head. As the story is told, Bogie smiled, picked up the
food, put it all back on the platter, and they all enjoyed their
meal. Bogie, it seems, had a tremendous ability to remain calm during tense moments.

Mayo often became paranoid when drunk. One night
she came into the living room where Bogie and some guests
were talking.

“You bastards are talking about me,” she said.

“No, we’re not,” Bogie said.

“Of course you are,” she said. “Do you think I’m stupid,
that I don’t know when I’m being talked about?”

“Sluggy, will you sit down,” Bogie said. “Nobody is talk
ing about you.”

“You
are
talking about me,” she cried. “I know it.”

Then she ran out of the room and dashed up the stairs to their bedroom.

A few minutes later, when the group was about to sit
down to dinner, they heard a gunshot from upstairs.

“Forget it,” Bogie said to his friends. “It’s just Mayo
shooting her gun.”

Then there was another shot.

“I guess we’d better go upstairs,” Bogie said. He went up.
Mayo was locked in the bedroom.

“Open up, Sluggy,” Bogie said.

“No,” Mayo screamed.

Bogie started pounding on the door. “Sluggy, open the
door or I’m going to break it down.”

“Get away or I’ll plug you,” Mayo said.

Finally, Bogie managed to break the door and get in. He
found Mayo lying on the bed, crying.

In the press they became known as “The Battling
Bogarts.” They were notorious for breaking crockery and
glassware at a number of fine business establishments.

One typical fight occurred when they were in New York
and they got an early morning phone call. Mayo answered
the phone then turned to my father. “It’s for you,” she said,
then she dropped the phone on his face.

Bogie, annoyed, smacked her.

Then both of them leaped out of bed naked and started
throwing things at each other. This went on for a while, then
Mayo picked up a potted plant to hurl at Bogie, but she lost
her balance with it and fell on the floor. The two of them had a good laugh and went on with their lives.

Sam Jaffe says, “I remember one time they were in New
York, at the Algonquin. I went to see them. Right then and
there they got into an argument over Roosevelt. She threw a lamp at your father. Bogie rushed out. Later Mayo kept call
ing me and saying Bogie had probably been killed in traffic.
When your father called me the following morning he told
me he had spent the night with one of his previous wives,
Helen Menken.”

The battling Bogarts got into battles in nightclubs with
each other, and sometimes, with the two of them on the same
side, against some heckler. At one point Bogie and Mayo
were barred from 21 as a couple. They could come in sepa
rately, but not together. 21, by the way, was not the only place
to bar them as a couple. When they went overseas to enter
tain the troops they were so rowdy and fought so often that
the USO made a rule forbidding husband and wife teams to
tour the army camps.

Dad told the Mayo stories with great relish. But one
incident Bogie did not boast about was the night Mayo
stabbed him.

Bogie came home that night from the Finlandia Baths
on Sunset Boulevard. He had gone there to get away from
Mayo, but she was convinced he had gone to a whorehouse. When he came into the house Mayo was humming “Embraceable You,” which was always the signal that she had
crossed the line from a sober Jekyll to a drunken Hyde. He
could see that she had been drinking and that she had been crying. He said nothing.

But a few minutes later they had gotten themselves into
a violent argument, when suddenly Mayo lunged at Bogie
with a kitchen knife. Bogie ducked. He ran for the door.
Mayo came after him.

“The great movie star, Humphrey Bogart, thinks Roose
velt’s a grand guy, does he? Tell it to your whores,”
Mayo shouted.

“Cut the crap, Sluggy,” he shouted back.

But when Mayo caught him she jabbed the knife into his
back. Bogie, feeling faint, went to the phone. Instead of call
ing a doctor, he called Sam Jaffe.

“Sam, we have a problem,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” Sam said.

“I think you’d better come over here,” he said.

“Why?”

“Mayo stabbed me.”

“Jesus!”

Sam sent Mary Baker to Bogie’s house. When Baker got there Mayo was hysterical.

“I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything,” she was
shrieking. But Bogie was on the floor, just regaining con
sciousness after passing out for a few minutes, and his jacket
was red with blood. He explained to Baker that he and Mayo
had gotten into an argument over Roosevelt, and that Mayo
had stabbed him. Baker told Mayo not to pull the knife out
of Bogie. Baker called the doctor. The doctor was bribed not
to tell the story. Bogie was patched up and Mayo, as always,
was stricken with guilt and was full of affection and kisses for
her husband.

One morning after the stabbing, Dad invited Sam Jaffe
over to the house.

They sat in the living room, Dad still slightly shaken by
the incident. “Sam,” he said, “look at the seltzer bottle
there.” He pointed to a glass bottle in the corner.

“What about it?” Sam asked.

“Well, she threw it at my head the other day.
She missed.”

“So?”

“So someday she might not miss.”

“And?”

“And it might not be a bottle,” Bogie said. “I think you
ought to have insurance.”

“Not necessary,” Sam said.

“Look,” Bogie said. “You’ve invested a lot of time and
money in my career. If Mayo’s aim ever improves you could
lose it all. Get some insurance.”

So Jaffe & Baker took out a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on my father. Fortunately, Mayo’s aim never
did improve.

Long before this, Mayo had been diagnosed by a psychi
atrist as a paranoid schizophrenic. She had even made at
least one legitimate suicide attempt, slashing her wrists. After
the knife incident the psychiatrist recommended that Mayo
be institutionalized. Bogie refused. He said at the time, “My
wife is an actress. It just so happens that she is not working
right now. But even when an actress isn’t working she’s got to have scenes to play. And in this case I’ve got to give her
the cues.”

There was also a night when Mayo pulled a gun on Bogie. He casually mentioned that he wanted to go off on a trip alone, and Mayo freaked out. She came after him with a gun.
Dad retreated to the bathroom where he called a studio pub
licist for help. While the publicist drove over to the house,
others in the studio gathered around the phone and listened
to the drama. They heard Bogie shouting through the door,
trying to calm Mayo down, but all she did was get more hys
terical. At one point Mayo got so frustrated that she started
shooting Dad’s suitcase. This was so absurd that Bogie started
laughing, and so did the studio people who listened on the
other end. Though I’m sure at first my father must have been
afraid that this time Mayo really would kill him, he apparently came to the conclusion that she couldn’t really do it. When the publicist arrived at the house, he found Bogie re
laxing in the bathtub. This incident, like many others, was
covered up by the studio and never made the papers.

Growing up, I heard many of the Bogie and Mayo sto
ries. I’ve heard a lot more since I began asking about my father. But something has always bothered me about all these
stories. They seem almost unbelievable. There is a show busi
ness quality to them. They sound like something out of a
screwball romance of the thirties—two people throwing things
at each other, then laughing about it minutes later.

I can’t deny that the fights actually occurred. Certainly,
some of the stories have been embellished over the years, but basically they are true. Many reliable people remember these
physical battles between my father and Mayo Methot. The
skirmishes represent one of the more bizarre episodes in
Hollywood lore. To me, what is most bizarre about the battles
is not that they happened, but the spirit in which they oc
curred, with so much good humor. Why would two people
who fought like cats and dogs stay together?

“These fights,” one friend says, “were a kind of mating
dance. They liked to fight because it made sex better. Their
marriage was kept together because of the fighting, their
fantastic physical attraction for each other, and their love
of sailing.”

In fact, quite a few people state with remarkable cer
tainty that the fights made their sex hotter, though I assume
this is secondhand knowledge, at best.

For me the key to understanding my father’s relation
ship with Mayo, and, indeed, much of my father’s life, is in
something he said in an interview before he married her.

“We have some first-rate battles,” he said. “Both of us are
actors, so fights are easy to start. Actors always see the dra
matic quality of a situation more easily than other people and
can’t resist dramatizing it for them. We both understand that one of the important things to master in marriage is the tech
nique of a quarrel.”

Later, when he was married to Mother, Dad wrote, “Each
of my wives has been an actress. Betty’s a good one as well as
a good-looking one. I guess it would be plain hell to marry a
bad actress. I never could have stood that. Of course, when
an actor marries an actress, their differences usually develop
into something more intense than they started out to be. You
find you are playing a dramatic scene. And some of the argu
ments I’ve had in my time in married life have gone on long
after either of us remembered what the tiff was about. I guess
we were each thoroughly enjoying a leading role.”

Certainly Mayo’s jealousy and paranoia were real. Certainly the alcohol problem was real; she eventually died of al
coholism. But I think in some way the fights were also staged;
Bogie and Mayo were, in part, acting out their anger and frustration. Bogie loved a good joke and he loved to drama
tize. You can imagine what would happen if he married a
woman who felt the same way, and when he married Mayo he
did marry a woman who felt the same way. She once said of
Bogie, “I married a man who conducts himself like a man. A man who doesn’t only offer me security, but a certain excite
ment.” To some extent Bogie and Mayo were putting on an elaborate show for the public. And, I think, to some extent,
Bogie did that with his whole life.