Bogart (36 page)

My father loved Forester’s story, too, and he saw it as a
change. “We all believed in the honesty and charm of the
story,” he said. “And I wanted to get out of the trench coat
I wear in the movies whether I’m devil or a saint.” Bogie, who
usually avoided sentiment, was sentimental about
The African Queen.
“We loved those two silly people on that boat,”
he says.

Actually, according to John Huston, my father was not
crazy about Charlie Allnut to begin with.

“Bogie did not like the role at first,” Huston said. “But
all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, ab
surd, brave little man and would say to me, ‘John, don’t let
me lose it. Watch me. Don’t let me lose it.’”

After they all met, it was agreed that Kate would play Rosie and that my father would play Charlie Allnut, except
that Allnut was changed to a Canadian to accommodate Bo
gie’s accent. So all the adults were off to Africa.

Well, not exactly. After my parents left me and the late
Mrs. Hartley at the airport they did not go straight to Africa.
In New York they boarded the cruise ship
Liberté
and sailed to
England. When they got to London they learned that some
of Spiegel’s backers had jumped overboard and the money to
make
The African Queen
wasn’t there. Financial decisions were
made hurriedly. One was that my father would put up some
of his own money to make the film. Another was that Bogie,
Hepburn, and Huston would defer their salaries until there
was money coming in.

“I did insist on having my hotel room in London paid
for,” Kate says. “I didn’t mind doing the film for nothing, but
I certainly wasn’t going to pay for the privilege.”

In Europe they drove through the French countryside,
having a fine time while I was sulking in Holmby Hills. They
stopped at roadside cafés. In Paris they visited the Eiffel
Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and they ate dinner on the
Seine with Art Buchwald and Frank Capra. They stayed at the
Ritz, and they ate, my mother says, “incredible French
breads.” My mother fell in love with Paris for life. But it was
Italy that my father loved most, and he would later make two
movies there.

My father liked to pick up a pen from time to time, and
of his European adventure, he later wrote, “Like most Amer
icans I have my greatest linguistic difficulties in France. My
theory is that Parisians understand my Phillips Andover
French and pretend not to. On the other hand, Italians pre
tend, out of natural politeness, to understand my experi
ments with their language when actually they don’t. Either way I am in trouble.”

Perhaps it was best that my parents had these idyllic days
on the Continent. Because typical of Huston, whom my fa
ther referred to as “The Monster,”
The African Queen
was to
be shot in the most remote jungles of the Belgian Congo
(now Zaire) and Uganda. Generally, my father didn’t care for
location shooting. He preferred the comfort of a studio. But he knew that when you made a film with Huston you had to
be prepared to relocate in jungles and on mountains.

Bogie had already gone on tough locations with Huston.
They had gone to a remote village in Mexico to make
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
“John wanted everything perfect,”
Bogie said of that excursion. “If he saw a nearby mountain
that could serve for photographic purposes, that mountain
was no good. Too easy to reach. If we could get to a location
site without fording a couple of streams and walking through
snake-infested areas in the scorching sun, then it wasn’t
quite right.”

The filming in Africa was, by all accounts, a nightmare.

“We lived in bamboo bungalows,” Kate says. “Half the
time we didn’t know what we were eating, and we didn’t want
to know. I found a snake in my toilet.”

Personality conflicts among the major players were rela
tively minor. My mother and Kate got along nicely. However,
early in the adventure Kate did seem a bit too haughty for
Dad. “There we are a million miles from nowhere sleeping in
bamboo huts and she wants a dressing room with ankle deep rugs and a star on the door,” he said later, with affection. But
at the time what he said to Kate was, “Kate, you ugly, skinny
old bag of bones, why don’t you come down to Earth?”

Kate’s reply was, “Down where you’re crawling? All
right!” Perhaps that was the beginning of their beau
tiful friendship.

Bogie and Huston, of course, were already friends. And
Kate got along well enough with Huston, even though she
did see in him a sadistic streak, an unfortunate Huston qual
ity that others have also noted. I remember John Huston best
for his kindness to me when I was a child. He was a fascinat
ing and complex man and you can get one very compelling
view of him in the novel
White Hunter, Dark Heart,
written by
Peter Viertel. Viertel was the screenwriter on
The African Queen
and his novel, about Huston in Africa, was later turned
into a movie with Clint Eastwood in the Huston role.

Though I had always imagined that my parents were off
in some exotic world enjoying a glamorous vacation, I have
since learned that the cast and the English crew of
The African Queen
were visited by plagues of biblical proportions.
The first of these was bad drinking water. Everyone except
Bogie and Bacall got dysentery. My mother, apparently, was
just lucky. My father was saved because he drank no water,
only scotch.

“His strength was scotch,” Huston says. “I think all of us
were ill in some way or another, but not Bogie.”

“I was sick with dysentery,” Kate says, “because I drank
water all the time, hoping to shame Huston and your father
out of drinking liquor. Well, the water was full of germs. I got
the trots so bad I thought I would die.”

Dysentery, however, was mild compared to some of the
other diseases that threatened the crew. For example, much
of the filming was to be done on or near the Lualaba River
in Pontheirville in the Belgian Congo. Huston loved the river
because it appeared to be black, due to the tannic acid from
the surrounding vegetation. However, human waste had in
fested the Lualaba with parasitic bacteria that could cause in
curable blood disease. There was one affliction, apparently
common in the area, that caused worms to grow under the
skin. When my father learned about this, and the fact that
the river was well populated with crocodiles, he thought it
might be best if the scenes of him and Kate submerged in the
Lualaba were shot not on location, but later at the studio
in England.

Also, it rained often, shutting down the shooting. When that happened, Huston, who fancied himself a great white
hunter, went off to stalk elephants. My father, who did not
like the idea of killing animals, stayed at the camp. There he
drank scotch, told stories, slept in a hammock on a river raft,
and read the many books he had brought with him.

The rain, unfortunately, did bring on some of those mi
nor personality conflicts. Kate, for example, thought Huston
was a murderer for going hunting, though she took comfort
in her belief that Huston “could not hit an elephant with a
bean shooter.”

My father also was annoyed when Huston went hunting.
Dad thought the director ought to pay more attention to the
movie even if rain had shut down the actual filming. It wasn’t just that Bogart wanted to get back to his comfortable air-conditioned house in California. It was also that in the movie industry, more than most, time is money and in this case a lot
of the money being lost was his. Huston, on the other hand,
was never anxious to leave exotic locations. He seemed to thrive in swamps and deserts.

In addition to rain and disease, there were bugs. “Bugs
were everywhere, especially on the personnel,” Bogie said. Af
ter the first two-day rainstorm, which occurred almost as soon
as they arrived, mosquitoes hatched by the millions and they
seemed to have no trouble working their way through the
netting around the beds. Kate says everyone was soon itching
and scratching and covered with red welts.

Except for my father, of course. He claimed that when
the mosquitoes bit him they either died or got drunk. “I built
a solid wall of scotch between me and the bugs,” he said.
Later, an army of man-eating red ants invaded, driving the
filmmakers out of their campsite, to another site outside of
Entebbe in Uganda. There it rained more and several mem
bers of the crew got malaria. Oh yes, they were having a
grand time.

There’s more. There were also problems with the Ugandans. When it came time to burn an entire village, which the
crew had built for the scene, Huston worked a deal with a lo
cal chief to populate the film village with natives. On the day
of the scheduled shooting, the hired natives didn’t show up.
It turned out that cannibalism was still common in the area,
and the natives were afraid that Huston was setting a trap to
capture them and eat them. (If this sounds crazy to us, you
can imagine how crazy they thought Huston and these other white people were, building an entire village and then burn
ing it to the ground.) There were natives working with the
film crew, too, and at one point they went on strike for
higher wages.

The centerpiece of the filming was a bizarre caravan of
four rafts, all tied together. The first was a replica of
The African Queen,
Charlie Allnut’s boat. Most of the shooting was
done there. The second raft carried the lights and props.
The third raft carried the generator to power it all. And the
fourth raft carried Kate’s dressing room, including a privy
and full-length mirror. After a few days Kate’s raft had to be
cut loose; the boat was towing too much. At one point
The African Queen
sprung a leak and sank. It took five days to raise
it by hand. “The natives were supposed to be watching it,”
Bogie said. “They did. They watched it sink.”

Even though my father didn’t get sick in Africa, he nev
ertheless griped constantly about the heat, the dampness, the
stink, and all the crawling things. So, while I was at home
alone, he and Bacall were not having such a great time. Kate, however, didn’t gripe, and Bogie marveled at how Kate, who
was ill and exhausted almost all of the time, handled herself
through the ordeal. Often he was heard to shout, “Damn
Hepburn, damn her, she is so goddamned cheerful.”

“Huston and I drank,” he said. “But what is good for me
and John Huston has got to be bad for the rest of society.
Katharine Hepburn didn’t drink, and breezed through her
stay as if it were a weekend in Connecticut. She pounces on
flora and fauna with a home movie camera like a kid going
to his first Christmas party. About every other minute she
wrings her hands in ecstasy and says, ‘What divine natives,
what divine morning glories.’ Brother, your brow goes up.”

A few years after the filming of
The African Queen,
my fa
ther wrote slightly more seriously in
The American Weekly
about one incident with Hepburn. He described going into
the jungle with John Huston to find the caravan of trucks that was carrying cameras, lights, and sound equipment.
When they found the trucks, which were being driven by lo
cal natives, some of the vehicles were stalled on the road.
Others were overturned, and the drivers had taken the
calamity as an opportunity to chat with people in a
nearby village.

“The block and tackle is as mysterious to a native as the
workings of the atom bomb is to me,” Bogie said.