Bogart (38 page)

But once Aurelio had pulled my father out of the shaft
and put him back in the wheelchair, my father would begin what, for him, was the best part of the day: cocktails with
friends. He would roll into the study, swing into a more com
fortable chair, smooth down his trousers, and light a ciga
rette. Mother would hand him a glass of scotch.

“Haven’t you people got anything better to do than
come over here and bother me?” he would say to whoever
had come to visit on that particular day. Then the banter with
pals would begin and for an hour or so, despite the pain, despite the moments of despair, my dad would again be Bogie.

This is one of the precious few memories I have of the
period from February 1956 to January 1957, the time of my
father’s illness.

I was seven years old then, and I would certainly not
have understood talk about malignant cells, biopsies, radia
tion treatments, drugs for pain. But those were the realities
of my father’s cancer. So to a large extent, my father’s illness
was a mystery to me, a nameless thing that invaded our home
one day and forever changed our lives. Certainly, I under
stood that Daddy was sick. But I had gotten sick, too, and I’d
always gotten better.

I do remember sitting with Leslie and my mother in my father’s bedroom some nights, the four of us watching televi
sion. And I remember going up to his room every night with
Leslie to kiss him good night. I remember being in my
pajamas, and the feel of my terry cloth bathrobe, and the
smell of medicine in the room. I remember a couple of trips
on the
Santana,
when he was no longer able to scramble
around the deck and sing and be as cheerful as he usually was on the boat.

But, sadly, it is not the moments with my father during his illness that I remember most strongly. It is the moments
without him. I remember a feeling of not being allowed to
see him when I needed to. I remember that I was not sup
posed to jump on him, that I was not to let the dogs get too
lively with him. I remember that he no longer picked me up
and swung me around.

Until recently I was not especially troubled about my
lack of memories. I took it on faith that my father’s illness
and death must have been traumatic and that I had simply
blocked much of it out.

When I talked to my sister about it, she, of course, re
membered less. She was only three years old when he got sick, four when he died.

“I remember Daddy in a bathrobe and sitting in a chair,”
she said. “I do remember that from the time he became ill,
Mother felt you were old enough to understand and I was
not, so all she could deal with was you, and her, and Father,
not me, and I guess I felt angry and jealous about that. I
don’t remember a lot of family stuff from that time, either.
I don’t remember him being around. But whether he was
around or not and whether we remember it or not, he
was our father and he must have had a huge effect on us. He
was a big presence whether we realized it or not.”

Leslie was right. My father’s dying must have had a great
effect on me, whether I remember it or not. So as I began my search for my father I knew that I wanted to ask his friends about the last months of his life, months that may very well have shaped me in ways I don’t even understand. I wanted to
know about the spaces between my memories, the world that
Humphrey Bogart lived in during those painful months. And
I hoped that in the asking, and in the telling, I would remem
ber much of what I had forgotten.

One of the first people I talked to was Julius Epstein, the
cowriter of
Casablanca.
Epstein is a small bald man, now eighty-five years old. I went to see Julius in Boston where he
was visiting his son, the fine novelist Leslie Epstein.

Julius Epstein was not one of my father’s intimates. They
knew each other mostly in connection with
Casablanca.
But
all of Hollywood was in the grip of my father’s illness and
Epstein remembered those final months, not so much as a
man who saw my father, but as a man who was part of the world my father lived in.

“As I recall, it was right around Christmastime,” he said.
“That would be 1955. This was after your father had filmed
The Harder They Fall.
Bogie was drinking orange juice at
Romanoff’s. That, of course, was his hangout. And he found
that it hurt his throat to drink the orange juice. And there
was a lot of coughing. So he went to see the doctor.”

In fact, it was Greer Garson, the actress who had an
nounced Dad’s Oscar, who dragged Bogie to her doctor one
afternoon because she didn’t like the sound of his cough.

Garson’s doctor, Maynard Brandsma, told my father that
his throat was inflamed. My father took it casually, even
though he’d been having lengthy coughing spells long before
the orange juice incident. The doctor put him on a better
diet and told him to cut back on the scotch and cigarettes.

“Sure, Doc,” Bogie said.

“And come back in three weeks.”

“Sure, Doc.”

When Bogie got home and told my mother he’d been to
the doctor, she was not alarmed. However, the mere fact that
Bogie had even gone to a doctor was disconcerting. He
had been coughing for years, but her suggestions that he
see a doctor had always been met with stony silence or a
scornful reply.

Three weeks later Bogart was back in Brandsma’s office.
It still hurt to swallow.

“Did you do what I told you?” the doctor asked.

“No.”

“Well, I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah, well it will clear up,” Bogie assured
the doctor.

Somewhat nonchalant about his coughing and the fact
that it hurt him to swallow, Bogie continued to prepare for
his next film. He and my mother, who had already starred to
gether in
To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage,
and
Key Largo,
were planning to make their first film together
since
Key Largo,
eight years earlier. This one was to be called
Melville Goodwin, USA,
with my father as a military officer, and
my mother as a character based on Claire Booth Luce.

But the coughing got worse and, finally, Bogie began to
worry. He called the doctor.

“Bring in a mucus sample,” he was told.

The mucus sample that my father brought in made
Brandsma suspicious. He asked Bogie to come back in for a
bronchoscopy, a procedure for scraping a tissue sample from the esophagus. Though Bogie was still having trouble eating
and had lost weight, he and Mother still thought they were
dealing with nothing worse than a viral infection of some
sort. So, after the bronchoscopy they went off to Frank
Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, so that Bogie could rest for
a week.

By the time my parents came back from Sinatra’s, the
doctor was sure. Bogie had cancer. “The malignancy is small
and we’re finding it early,” Brandsma told him. “I think we
can get it out of you.”

“Great,” Bogie said. “Let’s do what has to be done. As
soon as I finish this movie we’ll get to it.”

“They tell me you’re not a man to be lied to,”
Brandsma said.

“That’s right,” Bogie said.

“Well, I’m telling you, you’d better get to it now. If you
delay surgery to make a movie, it will be your last movie.”

“I can’t put off this film,” Bogie said. “It will cost the stu
dio too much money.”

“Do the movie,” Brandsma said, “and all the cast and crew can come to your funeral.”

So surgery was scheduled and the film was put on hold.
The press was told nothing about the cancer, just that Bogie
was going into the hospital with a swollen esophagus.

I remember the day that my father left for the Good Samaritan Hospital, February 29, 1956. My mother brought me
and Leslie into the living room. She sat us down somewhat
formally, then crouched to speak to us at eye level.

“Daddy is going away for a while,” she said. “He has to
have something taken out of his throat by a doctor. It’s noth
ing to worry about, but he will be gone for a few weeks.” We
didn’t really understand, but I guess we nodded our heads and figured everything would be all right. A few minutes
later a big white limousine pulled up in front of the house.
Dad kissed Leslie and me good-bye, and off he went in the limo. Perhaps if I had been the son of an auto mechanic who
came home every night, this would have been upsetting. But
during my short life my father had often gone away for
weeks, even months at a time. Leslie and I were not alarmed.

The next morning when my father went into surgery,
the doctors found that things were not all right. Dr. John
Jones, the surgeon, saw that the cancer had spread to Bogie’s
lymph glands. Jones took out the lymph glands, along with
the esophagus. There was more. The surgical team had to
move my father’s stomach around so they could hook it up to the tab that was left. To do that they had to open his chest as
well as his abdomen, so they could take out a rib to get at a
few things. When they explained the procedure to my
mother they also told her that from now on Bogie would feel food go directly to his stomach and that it would probably
nauseate him until he got used to it. For my mother it must
have been a nightmare to hear all this. Neither of my parents
had had much experience with doctors and hospitals.

Dad went through nine and a half hours of surgery.
Mother, of course, stayed at the hospital, calling home every
few hours to tell us that everything was fine, not to worry.

When Bogie first came out of surgery my mother was
horrified to see that his left hand and arm had swollen to
four times their normal size, a consequence of being in one
position during the hours of surgery.

For the next three weeks Leslie and I saw little of our
mother. She called often, but came home usually just long
enough to change clothes and rush back to the hospital.
Though I was often petulant at the time, I know now that
those weeks were an incredible ordeal for my mother. She had to watch helplessly as the man she loved was injected
with needles, surrounded by tubes and bottles, and hooked
up to cold, robotic medical machines. She had to listen while
kind but often incomprehensible doctors explained the carpentry they had done inside her husband’s body. She had to
obey when competent but sometimes officious nurses told
her when she could and could not see her husband.

“He hated the suction machine most of all,” she tells
me. “They needed it to clear his lungs so that he wouldn’t
get pneumonia. But it was awful. Once when they were get
ting ready to put him on it, I heard him cry, ‘Please, no
more.’ Your father had to be in great, great pain, for him to
say something like that. Through the entire ordeal of his ill
ness, that was the only time he complained.”

As my father improved he saw more and more visitors.
Not only his close Hollywood friends came to see him in the
hospital, but other Hollywood luminaries whom he knew less
well, people like John Wayne and Fred Astaire. At some point
my mother decided that he was well enough for a prank.
John Huston flew in from England, and hid outside my fa
ther’s hospital room. When Bogie went to the bathroom,
Huston climbed into his bed and hid under the covers. Bogie
came out and eyed the mysterious lump under his sheets.
Then Huston leaped up, surprising Bogie, and the two men
had a fine laugh.

They talked about the movies they had made together,
and the ones they would make in the future. Huston, of
course, had already directed my father in five great movies.
Now he was looking forward to Bogie’s recovery, he said, be
cause he wanted to pair him up with Clark Gable in Rudyard
Kipling’s tale,
The Man Who Would Be King.
(The movie, of
course, was not made then. In 1960, Huston was planning
again to make it, still with Clark Gable, and while he was ag
onizing over who to cast in the Bogie part, Clark Gable died.
But Huston finally did make
The Man Who Would Be King
in
1975, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine, a big Bogart
fan, incidentally, who took his name from a marquee for my
father’s film
The Caine Mutiny.)