Bogart (32 page)

One thing that always troubled me about these stories
was the hitting. Did my father actually hit his wife? Did he
hit women?

“No,” Gloria Stuart told me, “your father did not hit
people. He did not hit women. But he did hit Mayo and she
hit him. She always hit him first. It was part of the relation
ship. In fact, I only saw your father hit her back one time.”

So Bogie did not hit women. But still, it is difficult to talk
today about my father and women without it seeming that he
was as politically incorrect as you can get. He lived in a dif
ferent world from the one I live in. He called women
“girls,” and it was perfectly acceptable. He said, “I have
an aversion to any group of women with a purpose or
a mission.” He made jokes about a woman’s role and that
was fine.

“This was a different time with men and women,” Gloria
Stuart says. “This was a time when people still joked about
rape. Men and women just talked differently then and no
body thought anything about it.”

For example, when Dad came back from filming
The African Queen
he took a ribbing in the newspapers because a
photo had been taken of my mother hanging laundry sup
posedly while he was snoozing on his hammock.
DID BOGIE BRING BACALL TO AFRICA TO DO HIS LAUNDRY?
the newspaper
headline asked. Bogie denied that he had. “You think Baby would do this for me back home?” he said. “Not on your life. I take her half way around the world and suddenly she be
comes the perfect housewife. In Hollywood she never once
washed a handkerchief. No kidding!”

The story now seems quaint, but today it would take on
an entirely different spin, and Bogie would be made out to
be some sort of sexist monster.

His public interviews are peppered with comments about
women that would be regarded as outrageous today, but were
kind of endearing in their time. He once said, “Women have
got us. We should never have set them free. They should still
be in chains, and fettered to the home where they belong.”
And after he made his statement about not being a Commu
nist, and being “ill-advised” about his trip to Washington, one
reporter asked him if the statement also represented his wife.

“I am making the statement,” he said, “but it includes
her. I still believe the man wears the pants in the family and
what I say goes for the whole family.”

Much of how Bogie thought about women can be inferred from what he said about actresses. In 1953 he did an inter
view for the
London Daily Mirror
and he talked about “four
real hot babes that stand way out in my twenty-five years of
movie making.” If he talked about hot babes today he would
have to duck fast. The four were Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and, of course, Lauren Bacall.

“I’m not saying anything against the sweet and shapely
glamor girls in the business,” Bogie says. “They’re okay. But
for me, you act with them, then forget them. Whatever
they’ve got is laid right out on a platter for you. Now that
doesn’t appeal to Bogart. For me an actress has to have unassailability. This, in plain language says, here it is, now
come and fight for it. Which I reckon is a good thing for all women to have.

“Hepburn has unassailability. She is a dyed in the wool eccentric. There is nothing phony about her. She is not beau
tiful, more like a nylon-covered skeleton. She’s no chicken
any more either, but she’s really fascinating with a tremen
dous off-beat kind of sex appeal which throws out a chal
lenge that not any hunk of man can take up. She’s shy,
though. At interviews she shakes like a leaf, although she has
the guts not to show it. She’s got maybe half a dozen friends
in Hollywood and she just circulates among them. You never
see her at the nightclubs. When you spend six weeks on a
boat in the jungle with a woman and all around you are
down with malaria you kind of get to know her. I got to know
Katie like a favorite book.

“Bette Davis is different. She’s not as well-organized as
Katie, mentally. She’s got very definite opinions and it’s sure
hard to shake them. I made
Dark Victory
with Bette and
although I haven’t any scars from it, I’m not forgetting
it either.

“I’ve never had any trouble with her, but it may be true
some guys find her hard to get on with. The fact is she’s a tal
ented, tough, temperamental filly with a strong mind of her
own. Unless you’re very big she can knock you down. She’s
getting along a bit, so if people treat her rough she can get
kind of crotchety. But she’s a hell of a gal.

“When she was younger she used to be a real dish—not
my type, though. I like a good figure and Bette’s a wee bit
too well-stacked and a shade heavy in the legs. But I’m sure
fond of her. She’s got a highly developed intellect and she
can act the pants off most of the other ladies in the business.
When you take Bette Davis you’ve got to take everything else
that goes with it. And I guess I like all the things that go with
Bette Davis.

“Barbara Stanwyck has unassailability by the truckload.
She’s got a wonderful figure and talent that bursts out in
every scene.

“I can’t stand bad actresses. When I act with them they
throw me so hard I can’t speak a line. But Stanwyck, that girl acts like she really means it. We made a louse of a film to
gether called
Conflict.
It bored the pants off both of us. But
Stanwyck was good. If she had an emotional scene to play,
we’d all have to wait while she’d go for a little walk to work
up steam. Then she’d come back all ready to emote. God
help the technician who interrupted at the wrong moment.
She’s a fine type is Stanwyck, solid material. Her hair is going
gray. She’s putting on the years, but she still makes movies
with a kick in them.

“As for Lauren Bacall, well sure, she’s Mrs. Bogart. But
she doesn’t figure in my favorite foursome just because of
that. She’s a big beautiful baby who’s going to make a big
name for herself in the business. She’s bright, brainy and
popular with women as well as men. Look at that face of hers.
There you’ve got the map of Middle Europe slung across
those high cheekbones and wide green eyes. As an actress she
hasn’t got a lot of experience. It’s going to take a long time
to get it. But Baby is going to get there. She’s not the type
that hangs around being stalled by the boss’s secretary. As a
woman she holds all the cards. She’s beautiful, a good
mother, a good wife, and knows how to run a home.

“She’s a honey blonde and in her high heels she comes
up to the top wrinkle in my forehead. She’s got a model’s fig
ure, square shoulders, and a kid’s waist. Met her in the film
To Have and Have Not
then afterward we made
The Big Sleep.
After that film I said, ‘That’s my baby,’ and I’ve called her
Baby ever since.”

* * *

I focus more and more on my mother’s voice now. She is talking about him. “Your father loved the dogs,” she says. Then something else. “He always wore that terry robe when he was out by the lanai.
”
She is talking to me, but not checking to see if I am listening. She knows that when she has talked about Dad in the past I have not always listened. She moves about, reciting her memories like lines from a movie. And the words she speaks resonate with a headful of images that have been passed to me over the years from things she has said and things I have heard from friends. Mother has told me many times about her love affair with Humphrey Bogart. I vow that from now on I will listen carefully.

* * *

9

When the picture’s over Bogart will forget all about you. That’s the
last you’ll ever see of him.

—HOWARD HAWKS TO LAUREN BACALL

During the last week of 1943, director Howard Hawks took
my mother, then nineteen, to the sound stage where
Humphrey Bogart was shooting
Passage to Marseilles.

At the time my mother was under personal contract to
Hawks, and while he was certainly interested in finding a role
for her, he made no mention of it that day. He did tell her,
however, that he owned the film rights to
To Have and Have Not
written by his friend Ernest Hemingway, and that he was
hoping to get Bogie for the lead.

During a break in shooting, Hawks brought Bogie over
to meet Mom. “There was,” she says, “no fireworks, no thun
der, just a pleasant hello and how do you do.” Mostly, Mom
remembers being struck by the fact that Bogart was much
smaller than she had expected him to be.

A few weeks later there was some Bogart excitement in
my mother’s life, but it was not of the romantic variety. It was
career excitement. Hawks told her that she would get a
screen test for a role in
To Have and Have Not.

“And by the way,” he said, “I’ve got Bogart.”

The scene was the famous “You know how to whistle”
scene, and Mother rehearsed it over and over with a well-
established actor, though she was always embarrassed by the
requirement that she kiss him every time she did the scene.
Bogie, meanwhile, had gone off to Casablanca to entertain
the troops. In any case, it would have been unusual for an ac
tor of his stature to play in a screen test for an unknown ac
tress like my mother, who at that time was still Betty, not yet Lauren. A few days after the screen test was shot, Bogie was
back and Mom ran into him at the studio.

“I saw your test,” he told her. “We’ll have a lot of
fun together.”

Mom had the role. She was ecstatic. She was also a
nervous wreck and would remain that way for the next
several weeks.

“On the first day of shooting I was ready for a strait
jacket,” she says. She remembers doing the “Anybody got a
match?” line again and again, being all knotted up inside,
trembling, perspiring. “Your father tried to joke me out of
my nervousness,” she said. “He was wonderful about that, try
ing to put other actors at ease.”

Though Bogie was kind to Bacall right from the begin
ning, and sensitive to her youth and inexperience, he did not flirt with her. Mom was a flirt, but Bogie had a reputation as
a man who never flirted with actresses in his films. So the re
lationship that began during the filming of
To Have and Have Not
began as a friendship, which perhaps is why it lasted.
From the beginning they called each other Slim and Steve,
which is what the characters in the film called each oth
er, even though the characters’ names were really Marie
and Harry.

Bogie and Bacall talked nonstop, and probably it was
obvious to others before it was obvious to them that something was happening between them. Mom talked about her
childhood and her dreams of success in Hollywood. She
adored Bette Davis, she said, and Leslie Howard, and she
was thrilled to learn that Bogie actually knew them both. It
must have been pretty heady stuff. Bogie gave her acting
tips and he talked about his early days on the stage. He told
her the twenties were “the good old days.” And he talked
about his marriage to Mayo. He joked about the fighting
with “madame,” as he called her, but Mom could see that he
was lonely.

The relationship progressed in this platonic fashion until
one day about three weeks into the shooting of the picture,
Bogie came by Mom’s dressing room to say goodnight.

“He was standing behind me,” she says. “We were joking,
the way we always did. Then suddenly he leaned over and he
placed his hand under my chin. He lifted my face toward his
and he kissed me. It was very romantic, very sweet really, and
your father was quite shy about the whole thing. Then he
took an old matchbook out of his pocket and asked me to
write my phone number on it.”