“Certainly not,” the guy said. “Who the hell do you think you are, asking such a thing?”
“My name is Humphrey Bogart,” my father said. “I work at Fox. And what the hell are you doing, playing a gentleman’s game at a gentleman’s club?”
Unfortunately, the man that my father shouted at was a vice president at Fox. Maybe that’s why Dad ended up making most of his movies at Warner Brothers.
Dad didn’t fight just with strangers, though. He often got into it with friends. One night he was needling his agent, Sam Jaffe, at Romanoff’s and Jaffe got fed up.
“Listen,” Sam said, “I don’t take that guff from you or anyone else. If you need to be that way, get a new agent, I’ll give your contract back. I’m not taking that stuff.”
Bogart thought it over, and decided to quit the needling, at least for the night. There was another incident concerning Jaffe, this one at the Jaffe house. For some reason, Bogie was annoyed at the modern paintings that hung on the Jaffes’ walls. Dad probably thought there was something pretentious about the work.
“Goddamn phony artists,” he said.
“What did you say?” Sam asked him.
“The paintings on your walls,” Bogie said. “They’re a bunch of phony crap.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You know what I ought to do?”
“What’s that?”
“I ought to throw them all out.”
It was then that Mrs. Jaffe entered the conversation.
“Get out,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Get out, Mr. Bogart. Leave my house. You are not behaving properly.”
Bogie left and never criticized the Jaffes’ taste in paintings again.
John Huston is another close friend whom Bogie fought with. Kate Hepburn told me that Bogie and Huston exchanged words while making The African Queen. And Jess Morgan, who was a friend to both men, says that Bogie and Huston were two strongminded men who fought often. But Huston, apparently, didn’t think of their disagreements as fights because he said that it was during the filming of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that he and Bogie had “our one and only quarrel.”
As Huston told the story, Bogie was getting impatient for shooting on Sierra to end because he wanted to get the Santana into a race to Honolulu. Bogie was afraid that the picture would run over schedule and he would miss out. Huston said my father “sulked and became progressively less cooperative.”
One day they were shooting a scene between Bogie and Tim Holt.
“Okay,” Huston said after they cut. “Let’s do one more.”
“Why?” Bogie asked.
“Why what?” Huston asked.
“Why another take?”
“Because I need another,” Huston said.
“I thought I was good,” Bogie said.
“You were,” the director said. “It has nothing to do with you, Bogie. I’d just like to shoot it again.”
“Well, I don’t see why you have to shoot it again. I thought it was pretty good,” my father said.
“Please,” Huston asked. Now he was getting annoyed. “Just do it.”
Bogie did the new take, but he wasn’t happy about it. Later that evening, when Bogie and Huston and my mother sat down to supper, Dad started grumbling again.
“Too goddamn many takes,” he said. “Don’t need them all.”
“What’s that, Bogie?”
“You’re taking too goddamn long to shoot this movie,” Bogie said. He leaned across the table, poking an accusing finger at his friend. “The way we’re going, I’ll miss my race.”
That’s when Huston reached out and grabbed Dad’s nose between two fingers and started squeezing.
“John, you’re hurting him,” my mother said.
“Yes, I know,” Huston said. “I mean to.” He gave Dad’s nose one more solid twist and let it go.
Later my father felt bad, because he had fought with his friend. He came to Huston. “What the hell are we doing?” Bogie said. “Let’s have things be the way they have always been with us.” They made up and sealed it with a drink. Bogie, by the way, did miss the race.
Richard Burton also remembers that Bogie could be rough on his friends. Burton recalls one Catalina night out on the boat with Bogie, David Niven, and Frank Sinatra, who crooned all night long for dozens of other sailing people who floated around the Santana in their dinghies.
Burton says, “Frankie did sing all through the night, it’s true, and a lot of people sat around in boats and got drunk. Bogie and I went out lobster potting and Frankie got really pissed off with Bogie. David Niv was trying to set fire to the Santana at one point, because nobody could stop Francis from going on and on and on. I was drinking boilermakers with Bogie—rye whiskey with canned beer chasers—so the night is pretty vague, but I seem to remember a girl having a fight with her husband or boyfriend in a rowing dinghy and being thrown in the water by her irate mate. I don’t know why, but I would guess that she wanted to stay and listen to Frankie, and he wanted to go. And Bogie and Frankie nearly came to blows the next day about the singing the night before and I drove Betty home because she was so angry with Bogie’s cracks about Frankie’s singing. At that time Frankie was out of work and was peculiarly vulnerable and Bogie was unnecessarily cruel.”
Several people have mentioned the fact that Bogie sometimes went too far with his needling, and sometimes hurt people with his cutting remarks. But it was not out of meanness. Sometimes he just got carried away with his own cuteness and misjudged his target. Not everybody has thick skin, and even those who do sometimes shed it in moments of weakness. But I think if Dad pushed Frank Sinatra too hard at this particular time, it was probably because he felt that Sinatra was not being the person he could be, either personally or professionally. Bogie and Sinatra had a kind of father-son relationship, and Dad had often gotten on Sinatra for not taking his acting seriously enough. I think Dad saw Sinatra as a great talent that sometimes was wasted. My father had a philosophy about this, and it came from a valuable lesson he had learned years earlier in a producer’s office.
Bogie had come into the producer’s office while the producer was talking to a writer about his script. The producer told the writer that his script had some merit, that there were many good things in it, despite its shortcomings. After the writer left, the producer told Bogie that the script was lousy. Bogie asked him why he hadn’t just said so. The producer told Bogie, “When you see that a person has done his best and it’s no good, you cannot be cruel. If you know he can do better, then you say it stinks and he should fix it. But when you know this is his best, then be gentle.”
I think that Bogie might have been telling Sinatra that if his life stinks he should fix it. I think that if Bogie felt Sinatra had really been doing his best, Bogie would have been gentle.
Though Bogie had some close actor friends, like Niven, Tracy, Burton, Sinatra, Peter Lorre, and Raymond Massey, most of Bogie’s friends were writers: Nunnally Johnson, Louis Bromfield, Nathaniel Benchley, and even Huston, who started out as a screenwriter. He surrounded himself with writers because he admired them and he understood that without them, he would have no words to speak as an actor. Another reason he hung around with few actors was that he didn’t have much respect for what he called “Hollywood types.”
The trouble with many of them was that they had small vocabularies, he said. “They get my goat,” he said. Of course, Dad’s goat was easily gotten. “They get up there like stoops and say, ‘Gosh, it’s wonderful to be here. It’s a wonderful night and I hear this is a wonderful picture. I know Willie Wyler did a wonderful job and I’m looking forward to a wonderful evening.’ The word wonderful should be outlawed.”
From the viewpoint of the Hollywood establishment, my father was widely regarded as a social misfit, and I think he liked it that way. He didn’t go to premieres. In fact, he didn’t go to see his own pictures.
“I am not socially acceptable,” he said. “Peop
le are afraid to invite me to their homes. They’re afraid that I will say something to Darryl Zanuck or Louis B. Mayer, which, of course, I will. I don’t really fit in with the Hollywood crowd. Why can’t you be yourself, do your job, be your role at the studio and yourself at home, and not have to belong to the glitter-and-glamor group? Actors are always publicized as having a beautiful courtesy. I haven’t. I’m the most impolite person in the world. It’s thoughtlessness. If I start to be polite you can hear it for forty miles. I never think to light a lady’s cigarette. Sometimes I rise when a lady leaves the room. If I open a door for a lady, my arm always gets in the way so that she either has to duck under or get hit in the nose. It’s an effort for me to do things people believe should be done. I don’t see why I should conform to Mrs. Emily Post, not because I’m an actor and believe that being an actor gives me special dispensations to be different, but because I’m a human being with a pattern of my own and the right to work out my pattern in my own way. I’m not a respecter of tradition, of the kind that makes people kowtow to some young pipsqueak because he is the descendant of a long line.”
Comments like these spewed forth from Bogie almost every day. He loved to argue. When he and Mom lived in the farmhouse in Benedict Canyon she put up a sign that said:
DANGER: BOGART AT WORK. DO NOT DISCUSS POLITICS, RELIGION, WOMEN, MEN, PICTURES, THEATRE, OR ANYTHING ELSE.
Bogie seemed to bask in his role as troublemaker. Benchley says, “There was apparently some streak within him, some imp that was loosed by a variety of factors.”
There really was an odd sort of puritanism about my father. He once bawled out Ingrid Bergman for throwing away her career in the scandal of having a baby out of wedlock.
“You were a great star,” he said. “What are you now?”
Bergman replied, “A happy woman.”
Dad was capable of obscenities but they were not common. While many people say that my father abhorred vulgarity, there are also people who recall him being vulgar. Conrad Nagel, for example, remembers Bogie saying of Bette Davis, “That dame is too uptight. What she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to do it.” Others recall that when my father had a dark room he used to make double exposures with his friend the writer Eric Hatch. They called them “trick photos,” and one of them was of a skier skiing down a woman’s bare breast.
I think Bogie’s idea of vulgarity depended on who was present to hear it. Ruth Gordon said that one time Bogie told her that he was reading a script by “some college type.”
“What’s a college type?” she asked him.
“People who say ‘fuck’ in front of the children,” Bogie replied.
Though my father poked fun at people he also poked fun at himself. He joked about the lifts he sometimes wore in his shoes to make him taller. And he made fun of the toupee he had to wear later in life, after a disease, called alopecia areata, caused much of his hair to fall out. He was extremely well-read in American history and Greek mythology, and could quote from Emerson, Pope, Plato, and over a thousand lines of Shakespeare, but he liked to play the dullard. “Henry the Fourth, part two, what’s that?” he would ask. When someone gave him a compliment on his intellect or anything else, he would combat it with a wisecrack.
He wasn’t any more comfortable giving compliments than he was with getting them. When he was very impressed by an actor’s performance, for example, he would send a note instead of praising the actor to his face. He approached gift giving the same way. He hated birthdays and Christmas because on those days you were supposed to give a present. Typically, he would wait until the day had passed, then he would give a gift. Even then he would sabotage any possibility of sentiment with a zinger, such as giving someone a new watch and saying, “I’m sick of looking at the piece of junk you’ve been wearing on your wrist.”
Another seeming contradiction for my father is that he was a guy who supposedly wanted nothing to do with Hollywood “in” groups and yet he was the leader of the most in group of all, the Holmby Hills Rat Pack. People my age and younger probably think of the Rat Pack as being Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, Angie Dickinson, and others. But, except for Sinatra, those are not the original members.
My mother is the person who gave the pack its name. The story is that Frank Sinatra had flown Bogie and Bacall and a bunch of other friends over to Las Vegas for Noel Coward’s opening there. (Now that I think of it, maybe this explains why I banged Coward over the head with a tray. I must have known that my parents and all their friends were going to see him in Vegas and not taking me with them.) In Vegas the group debauched for about four days straight, drinking, dancing, partying, and gambling. Apparently they didn’t get much sleep, and after a while they all looked like hell. On the fourth day my mother said, “You look like a goddamn rat pack.” The name stuck.
“We had a dinner later at Romanoff’s,” my mother says, “and we elected officers.”
The first official notice of the Rat Pack appeared the next day in Joe Hyams’s column in the New York Herald Tribune.
The Holmby Hills Rat Pack held its first annual meeting last night at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills and elected officers for the coming year. Named to executive positions were: Frank Sinatra, pack master; Judy Garland, first vice president; Lauren Bacall, den mother; Sid Luft, cage master; Humphrey Bogart, rat in charge of public relations; Irving Lazar, recording secretary and treasurer; Nathaniel Benchley, historian.
The only members of the organization not voted into office are David Niven, Michael Romanoff, and James Van Heusen. Mr. Niven, an Englishman, Mr. Romanoff, a Russian, and Mr. Van Heusen, an American, protested that they were discriminated against because of their national origins. Mr. Sinatra, who was acting chairman of the meeting, refused to enter their protests on the minutes.
A coat of arms designed by Mr. Benchley was unanimously approved as the official insignia of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack for use on letterheads and membership pins. The escutcheon features a rat gnawing on a human hand with a legend, “Never Rat on a Rat.”
Mr. Bogart, who was spokesman, said the organization has no specific function other than “the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.”
He said that membership is open to free-minded, successful individuals who don’t care what anyone thinks about them.
A motion concerning the admittance of Claudette Colbert was tabled at the insistence of Miss Bacall, who said that Miss Colbert “is a nice person but not a rat.”
My mother says that Spencer Tracy was only an honorary member because this was not really his scene. Tracy led a quieter life.
“You had to be a nonconformist,” she says, “and you had to stay up late and drink and laugh a lot and not care what anybody said about you or thought about you.”
Bogie came up with the motto, Never Rat on a Rat. They made rules, such as they were. One was that no new member could come in without the unanimous vote of the charter members.
Though my father was elected as director of public relations, people I talk to seem to feel that he was the spiritual leader of the group. Of course when Bogie died, the real leadership of the Rat Pack went to Frank Sinatra and its center moved from Hollywood to Las Vegas.
The press made a big deal of the Rat Pack, of course, and even today when a group of celebrities hang out together they often get labeled with some version of the title, such as the Brat Pack of a few years ago.
You wouldn’t think that forming a group of friends to have fun would be controversial, but it sometimes was. William Holden, who had already had a few run-ins with my father, didn’t care for the Rat Pack. Holden said, “It’s terribly important for people to realize that their conduct reflects the way a nation is represented in the eyes of the world. That’s why the rat-pack idea makes our job so tough. If you were to go to Japan or India or France and represent an entire industry, which has made an artistic contribution to the
entire world, and were faced then with the problem of someone asking, ‘Do they really have a Rat Pack in Holmby Hills?’ what would you say? It makes your job doubly tough.
“In every barrel there’s bound to be a rotten apple. Not all actors are bad. It may sound stuffy and dull, but it is quite possible for people to have social intercourse without resorting to a Rat Pack.”
I never met William Holden, but I can understand why he wasn’t a favorite of my father’s.
There are many stories that make my father sound like a wiseguy and a show-off. But there are also stories that portray him as a generous man. For example, he once got three friends together to pitch in $10,000 for his writer friend Eric Hatch, who was down on his luck. And there are stories that show that Bogie treated people kindly, regardless of where they stood in the Hollywood pecking order. He was never a snob.
Adolph Green remembers running into Bogie in a hotel in England one time. This was just after Bogie had finished filming The African Queen.
Green was alone and lonely at the time, and he didn’t know Bogie very well. Bogie sat and talked with him in the lobby of the hotel, and after awhile Dad seemed to catch on that Green had no one to talk to.
“Look,” Bogie said, “I’m having a few friends over later. Why don’t you come by and join us?”
Green, delighted to have some company, accepted. He was excited and flattered. Here he was, being invited over to Bogie’s suite. When he got there, he realized he’d been invited to a very small gathering. There were only two other people there.
“Adolph, I want you to meet my friends,” Bogie said. “Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.”
Green was thrilled, and it was a moment he never forgot. For the rest of his stay in England, Bogie checked on Green from time to time to make sure that he was getting along okay, and was not lonely.
“Your father was thoughtful that way,” Green told me. “And it wasn’t just me. Your father was very kind to a lot of people, like Judy Garland. Judy was always getting herself in trouble, she was a sick girl and spoiled in a way, and he would always be nice to her, though sometimes he would lose his temper with her.”
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