Bogart (33 page)

That night Bogie called Mom. He just wanted to see how
she was doing, he said. They talked for hours.

After that, Mother says, things were different. They lit up
when they saw each other. During breaks they gravitated to
ward each other, as if there were no other place to be. When
Bogie played chess on the set, Mom would stand behind him
and watch. Where they used to eat lunch separately—Mom
from a brown bag at the studio and Dad at the Lakeside Golf
Club—now they both went to Lakeside. One day gossip col
umnist Hedda Hopper called Mom and said, “You’d better
be careful or you might have a lamp dropped on your head,”
a reference to Mayo’s well-known penchant for throwing
things. Another columnist wrote, “You can get your B&B
lunch any day at Lakeside,” an item which must have been of
special interest to Mayo Methot.

Bogie and Bacall were suddenly giddy with romance.
They acted like kids, exchanging cornball jokes like, “What
did the ceiling say to the wall? Hold me up, I’m plastered.”

The attraction was real. In fact, the sexual tension be
tween my parents was so palpable that changes had to be
made in the script of the movie. Originally, Bogie was sup
posed to have a relationship with a different woman, but no
amount of acting could disguise the fact that Steve wanted
Slim and Slim wanted Steve.

Years later Bette Davis commented on this chemistry:
“Up until Betty Bacall I think Bogie really was embarrassed
doing love scenes, and that came over as a certain reticence.
With her he let go and it was great. She matched his inso
lence. Betty came along at exactly the right time for Bogie.
He was mature and she was a kid, and I think he had a ball
showing her what life was all about.”

After a day’s shooting they used to drive off in separate
cars and then they would pull onto a small residential side
street where there was no traffic. Bogie would get out of his car and climb into Mom’s, where they would squeeze an ex
tra twenty minutes out of the day, holding hands and talking
love talk. Then Bogie would go back into his car and head
for home and Mayo. Mom would follow in her car, and when
Bogie turned off for Horn Avenue, he would wave to her,
and she would wave back and continue home to Beverly
Hills, where she would spend another sleepless night.

Hawks, who had a financial interest in my mother, and
probably a romantic one as well, saw the romance developing. He stewed in silence over it for several weeks and then
one day he blew up at Mother.

“You damn fool! Bogart’s forty-five years old,” Hawks
said. “He’s a boozer. He’s married. This relationship is going
nowhere. It means nothing to him. This sort of thing hap
pens all the time, he’s not serious about you. You are throw
ing away a chance anyone would give their right arm for. And
I am not going to put up with it, I tell you.” Hawks threat
ened to send Mom to Monogram Pictures, which in the con
text of the time was like telling a young
New York Times
reporter that he was being sent to the
National Enquirer.

Mother was nearly hysterical with tears by the time
Hawks finished. It’s not true, she thought, it’s not true. Bogie
is not like that. But, still, there was a little part of her that was not so sure. Maybe she was just a Hollywood fling for him.
Later, after she cried in Bogie’s arms, she felt better. He as
sured her that he cared for her, that he would protect her,
and that she was too promising a talent for Hawks to let
her go.

As the days of shooting passed and Mother looked pain
fully forward to the day when they would no longer have this
movie to throw them together every day, she couldn’t eat, she
couldn’t sleep. All she could do was think about Bogie. At night she often spent time commiserating with her friend
Carolyn Morris, who also was in love with a married man.

When the dreaded last day of filming came, Bogie and
Bacall were parted. He went back to his wife, and she to a pil
low to cry on. A week later my father sent his first love letter
to my mother.

“I wish with all my heart that things were different,” he
wrote. “Someday soon they will be. And now I know what was
meant by ‘to say good-bye is to die a little’ because when I
walked away from you that last time and saw you standing there so darling, I did die a little in my heart.” He signed the
letter, “Steve.”

It was around this time that Mom started driving down
to Balboa with Carolyn Morris, to secretly visit Bogie on his coast guard weekends. Carolyn would go off somewhere, and
Bogie and Bacall would sit in the car and talk and smooch. Whenever they met this way they each brought a letter, to be
read after they were separated.

He wrote, “Baby, I do love you so dearly and I never,
never want to hurt you or bring any unhappiness to you. I
want you to have the loveliest life any mortal ever had. It’s been so long, darling, since I’ve cared so deeply for anyone,
that I just don’t know what to do or say. I can only say that I’ve searched my heart thoroughly these past two weeks and
I know that I deeply adore you and I know that I’ve got to
have you. We just must wait because at present nothing can
be done that would not bring disaster to you.

“It seems so strange that after forty-four years of knock
ing around I should meet you now and fall in love with you
when I thought that could never again happen to me. And
it’s tragic that everything couldn’t be all clean and just right
for us instead of the way it is because we’d have so much fun
together. Out of my love for you I want nothing but happi
ness to come to you and no hurt ever.”

Howard Hawks was not the only one who was unhappy about
the budding romance. My mother’s mother also warned her
that she was hurtling toward heartache because Bogart was
an actor, thrice-married, in his forties, and, perhaps worst of
all, he wasn’t Jewish.

I’m sure that my mother thought her mother was being
unreasonable at the time, objecting to the love of Betty’s life.
But the generations have an eerie way of repeating them
selves and Bacall eventually became the mother who disap
proved of her son’s mate. Flash forward to the time when
Dale was pregnant and we decided to get married. Bacall was
not happy.

“Stephen, you’re too young, it’s too soon, you’re making a terrible mistake.”

“How can it be a mistake for a kid to have a father?”

“But this girl, she’s not right for you.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Well, Stephen, let’s be serious. Torrington, Connecti
cut! Is this where you see your future?”

And so forth. Mother probably said to me the same
things her mother had said to her. But I was adamant. My kid
would have a father.

After I married Dale, she and Mom still did not get
along. I’m sure Mom resented Dale for getting pregnant and hauling her young son into a less than perfect marriage. But
there was another issue. It was that my mother didn’t think I
was doing enough to keep the memory of my father alive. At
the time Mother viewed all of what I was doing—the failing
grades, the blue-collar jobs, the move to Connecticut, the
marriage—as denying the existence of my father.

“Stephen, I want you to be proud of being Humphrey
Bogart’s son,” she would say, which I thought was code for,
“Move to a real city, get a career underway, and do some
thing with your life.”

My mother has never fully understood that I was neither
proud of, nor ashamed of, my father; I just didn’t want to be
smothered by him. All of my behavior, which she saw as de
structive, was simply my trying to outrun his shadow, trying
to get away so I could be myself. Mother thought my wife was
holding me back in the small Connecticut town, that Dale
was responsible for my not expanding, not growing. But
that’s how I wanted it.

Though nobody thought my marriage to Dale would last
very long, including me, it endured for thirteen years. Of
course, much of that was the open marriage phase, but still
the marriage lasted longer than any of my father’s.

I don’t know if marriage was on my mother’s mind when
she met Bogie, but certainly she was in love. Ever since her fa
ther had left her when she was a kid, she had keenly felt the
need to love a man, and in Bogart she had found that man.

Mother hated the sneaking around. Not only was she
consumed with guilt, but she had to worry about Mayo’s tem
per. One time Mother went to visit Bogie on
a
friend’s boat,
and she had to hide in the head when Mayo showed up.

While Hawks, my grandmother, and others were against a
Bogart-Bacall wedding, the public was all for it. Though word
of the romance got into the papers, Bacall never had to take
flack as “the other woman” or “home wrecker.” The public
loved her and they knew what a looney tunes Mayo was.

On May 10, 1945, Bogie and Mayo divorced. Though
Dad was anxious to marry Mom, he had put off the final
break with Mayo several times out of fear that she would
shoot him, Bacall, herself, or possibly all three. But there was
more to it than that. As anyone who has ever been divorced
knows, the years of shared experience exert a powerful influ
ence, and leaving is rarely easy. Bogie and Mayo had once
been deeply in love. They’d had many great times together
and, when she was not drinking, Mayo could be a sweet and
dear woman. Despite her jealousy, she was on the whole very
supportive of Bogie’s career. It was Mayo who got Morgan
Maree to be Bogie’s business manager. And when Bogie’s
mother, Maud, became ill with cancer, Mayo welcomed her
and treated her kindly until the end came. And when Maud
died, at seventy-five, Mayo made all the funeral arrange
ments. My father was grateful for these things, despite all the
savagery in the relationship.

There is, perhaps, one other reason why my father found
it so difficult to leave his mentally ill wife. There was another woman in his life who was mentally ill. His sister, Frances,
known as Pat, had been in and out of treatment for years. In
1930, Pat had gone through twenty-seven hours of torturous
labor before delivering a baby girl, Patricia. The ordeal left
her permanently unbalanced. She became manic depressive
and had to be hospitalized off and on. In 1935, Maud in
sisted Pat divorce Stuart Rose, to free him from the burden
of being married to her. Then she was transferred to a west
coast hospital and my father took over her care. Because of
her condition, she was rarely able to see her daughter, but
they did correspond. And from time to time, Pat was able to
visit her brother, the movie star.

“She was a tall, strongly built woman, easy to visualize on
a horse,” my mother recalls. “She looked a lot like your father.
She was shy and sweet and totally normal when I saw her. Your
father was very gentle with her and she adored him.”

If the problem of Mayo and Pat accounted for some of
the sadness my mother detected in Bogie’s eyes, it explained,
too, why he was so overjoyed to have a beautiful young
woman, sane and sober, who loved him so. Eleven days after
the divorce from Mayo, Bogie and Bacall were married on
Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm in Ohio. Bromfield, who
went back a few decades with my dad, was a well-respected
novelist who had fallen in love with the soil and become a
farmer. His politics were very different from Dad’s. He was a
Republican, but the two men had great respect for each
other’s intellect.

The wedding had the potential to become the media cir
cus of its time, with reporters and photographers from all
over the world surrounding the house. Despite police guards
a few managed to sneak into the house. Mother was a wreck
throughout, and she kept running to the bathroom.