Bogart (35 page)

Bogie, for example, put out a lot of phony stories when
he first got to Hollywood. One was that he owned a train sta
tion in France. Another was that he went to jail to prepare
for his role in
The Petrified Forest.
And nobody, as far as I can
see, has an unshakeable moral code. So did Bogie screw
around on Bacall? I doubt it. But if he did, it is not the smok
ing pistol that proves he was imperfect. He was, like the rest
of us, imperfect to begin with.

Horny or not, unfaithful or not, I do believe that my fa
ther was a romantic and a man deeply committed to the idea
of love.

“I believe in the institution of marriage,” he said. “The institution is right, it’s the human beings who are wrong. I be
lieve in love, but not the ‘one love of a lifetime’ as pretty a tale as that always makes. There couldn’t be just one love. Among
fifty million people that would be pretty hard to find.”

“Love is very warming, heartening, enjoyable,” he said, “a necessary exercise for the heart and soul and intelligence.
If you’re not in love, you dry up. After all, the best proof a
man can give of his belief in love and marriage is to marry
more than once. If you’re not married or in love you’re on
the loose and that’s not comfortable. Love is comforting, too.
It is the one emotion which can relieve, as much as is ever
possible, the awful, essential loneliness of us all.”

These are feelings I share with my father. He spoke these
words before he met Bacall, so maybe he did find that one
love of a lifetime. Everybody seems to agree that they adored each other. I know that I have my own love of a lifetime in
Barbara. And I know that, perhaps because of my childhood,
I have always put that first. And that is something I have
never regretted.

* * *

“Perhaps we should look at the bedroom,” my mother says. I am alarmed. I thought I would avoid it.

“I thought you did,” I said. “When we were upstairs.”

“No,” Mother says. She stares off into space. “I didn’t go in there.”

We move across the dining room. Toward the stairs. I am aware of an airplane somewhere off in the distance. I’ll be flying home to Barbara and the kids soon, I think.

The sound of the airplane brings another memory. It is not really a memory of an event. It is the memory of how I saw the event in my mind when I was old enough to know about it.

It is March 12, 1951. I am two years old. My father has been signed to star with Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen under the direction of his friend John Huston. My father is anxious to work with Huston again, because, he says, “John is my friend and he makes good movies.”

Both Bogie and my mother are going to Africa. They will be gone for four months, one sixth of my entire life at the time.

While my parents are on the dark continent I am to remain in the care of my nurse, Mrs. Hartley, a florid, full-bodied woman who holds me tightly in her arms on the tarmac as I watch my mother and father climb into some mysterious huge metal machine. It is, she says, a big silver bird. Coaxed by Mrs. Hartley, I wave my small hand at Mommy and Daddy one last time. The airplane rolls down the runway. God knows what anxiety I am feeling as I watch the big silver bird fly into the sky with my parents and zoom off away from me. I cling to Mrs. Hartley. I don’t understand why Mommy and Daddy are gone, but at least I have my nurse. And in that moment, while she is holding me, while my parents are disappearing beyond the horizon of the nighttime California sky, Mrs. Hartley is seized with a cerebral hemorrhage and falls dead.

* * *

10

You suddenly say to yourself, “Where the hell am I going—what
am I doing?” Then, of course, you know what you’re doing—
you’re going with your husband who believes in no separations in marriage, who is working. Your life with him cannot stop for your
son.

—LAUREN BACALL

Of course, I don’t consciously remember the airport death
of Mrs. Hartley. I was two years old. But I have the story from no less a source than Hollywood columnist Louella Par
sons, published in the next day’s
Los Angeles Examiner.

Little Stephen Bogart, two-year-old son of Lauren
Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, barely escaped injury
when his nurse, Mrs. Alyce Louise Hartley, who was
holding him in her arms, suffered a cerebral hemor
rhage and died almost instantly.

Fortunately, Carolyn Morris’s mother, who was
also at the airport, rushed to take the boy from the
stricken nurse’s arms, thus preventing Stephen from
being dropped.

That’s what happened, and while I don’t remember it, I
think it’s fair to say that I was terrified by the event. However,
Mrs. Hartley’s death is not the worst of it. What happened
next is something that I’ve thought about all of my life.

My mother did not come back.

My father, of course,
had
to go to Africa. He was an actor.
This was how he made his living. This was a chance to work
with Hepburn and Huston. But my mother was not in the
movie. She didn’t
have
to go.

In her book,
By Myself,
Mother writes with some candor
(though a noticeable retreat into the second person) about
leaving me. She writes, “I have a pain in my solar plexus
when I remember how it felt to leave Steve behind.…Your
life with [your husband] cannot stop for your son. And—
admit it—you want to see these unseen places. So the brain
whirs—the heart tugs—the gut aches. I must have turned
around a hundred times to look at Steve and wave and throw kisses and get teary-eyed.”

My parents were on a stopover in Chicago when they got
the news about Mrs. Hartley.

“I agonized about coming back,” Mother says, “I knew
you were being taken care of by my mother, but I wondered
if maybe I should have come back. I talked to your doctor,
Dr. Spivak, many times on the phone. He told me not to worry, that he would interview nurses and find one who was
acceptable. In the meantime my mother was there with you.
By the time the plane landed in New York, Dr. Spivak had
found a nurse. I interviewed her for a long time from a
phone booth in 21. I talked to the servants and they prom
ised to report to me. I tried to talk to you, Stephen, but you
refused to speak to me. I talked to the doctor again. He told
me you would be fine. There was never any issue of your
physical needs being taken care of.”

This is true. But it’s the emotional needs that I have al
ways wondered about. There are people who would say that
a two-year-old boy needs his mother when his father has gone
away and his nurse has just dropped dead while holding him.

On the other hand, a defense could be made of my
mother’s decision. I have made it many times. I did, after all, have a safe and beautiful house. I had servants to feed me. I
had the new nurse to dress me and take my temperature if I
got sick. I had my grandmother to look after me. I wasn’t ex
actly being left in a basket in the woods.

And frankly, my mother was under great pressure to stay with Bogie. She was incredibly devoted to him, and wanted to be with him. And Bogie was a man who believed that a wom
an’s place was with her husband. Because he was twenty-five
years older than Bacall, I can imagine that he must have felt
that each moment with her was particularly precious. Even if
they both lived to the same age, there would still be twenty-five years that he would never share with her. He certainly
didn’t want to be robbed of four months every time he had
to shoot on location. I can understand that; I hate to be separated from my wife even for four days.

So I know that I would have handled it differently if it
were me and my kids. I would have come back. But each of
us does what he or she feels is right, and that’s what my mother did in 1951.

What I did in 1951 and for most of my life was to feel an
gry and resentful about it. It has always been an issue be
tween Mother and me. I’m sure a good therapist would tell me it’s not so simple:

“Steve, you’ve got to understand that your feelings of be
ing abandoned are not just about your parents going to Af
rica. They are about your father dying, and your sense of
identity being stolen by people who think of you only as
‘Bogart’s son,’” and so on and so on and blah blah blah.

Probably true. But I do my own therapy. Half the time I
say, “Steve, your feelings are justified,” and the other half I
say, “Get past it, Steve, it was forty-three years ago.” I believe
that I am now past it.

But, because this episode has loomed so large in my life, I knew when I began asking about my father that I wanted to
learn what those four months were like for my father and my
mother. To find out, I talked to my mother and her friends
and people who knew my father. But, mostly I talked to
Katharine Hepburn.

I’ve known Kate Hepburn all of my life, because she has
been a good friend to my mother ever since those
African Queen
days. I remember being a boy of six and going to her
house for the first time. It was high on a hill in Beverly Hills,
California. In my mind, that house is like a castle, kind of
spooky and mysterious. Spencer Tracy was there, too, and I’ve always regretted that I never really got to know him.

It was during the filming of
The African Queen
that Kate
and my father developed their enormous affection and re
spect for one another.

“I loved him and he loved me,” Kate says. “He was a real
man, your father, there was nothing about him that wasn’t
manly. He was an aristocrat, and he was a gentleman. He was
very proud to be an actor and that is rare. Your father was an
angel, a true angel.”

My father admired Kate, too, but typical of him, he ex
pressed his affection in less direct ways. When he and Huston
first went to see her, Kate made some comment about plain
women knowing more about men than beautiful women.
Dad later remarked to Huston, “She’s a crow, so she should
know.” But after filming
The African Queen,
he told the press,
“I found no one is sexier than Kate, especially before a movie
camera, and she has legs like Dietrich. You learn to brand as
rank slander the crack that you can throw a hat at Katie and
it’ll hang wherever it hits.”

The African Queen,
a book by C. S. Forester, is the story of
Charlie Allnut, a gin-swilling Cockney ne’er-do-well riverboat
captain, and Rosie Sayer, a skinny, hymn-singing missionary.
An odd couple if ever there was one. There had once been
a plan to star Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester in a film
version of the story. Still later, it was to be John Mills and
Bette Davis. By 1951, producer Sam Spiegel wanted Bogart
and Hepburn.

It was a movie, my father says, “about a woman who
starts out to become a missionary but after spending some
time in a small boat with me winds up being a woman.”

Though my father had known Spencer Tracy well for
years, he had known Hepburn only casually. By the time he
and John Huston drove to that California house, to lobby
Kate for the part of Rosie, Bogie had heard terrible things
about her and he went, he said, “entertaining righteous skepticism.” Bogie had heard that Kate drove hard Yankee bar
gains with producers, that Hollywood was only a necessary
evil to her, that she didn’t sign autographs and, most shock
ing, that she didn’t drink.

“Your father was a bit nervous about me,” Kate says. “He
thought I was an ogre.”

Hepburn, likewise, was fearful of Bogie and Huston be
cause she had heard that they were reprobates. After she lectured them on the evils of drink, Bogie said to her, “You’re
absolutely right, Kate. Now pull up a chair and have a drink
with us.”

Kate, who was forty-two at the time and still quite glam
orous, was being asked by Huston to do something daring:
play a woman of fifty-five.

“Rosie was haggard,” Kate says. “She was worn out. She
was being dragged through the muck of Africa. This was not
a glamorous role. I loved it.”