Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  Jason had been a top athlete at Hollywood High School, a swimmer and track man. He loved sports. After he married my mother, that was something he shared with me. He used to take me to the Sheeps Meadow in Central Park and pitch baseballs to me, and he would hit high flies so that I could practice my fielding. When we spent a summer in California, Jason taught me to bodysurf. I will always treasure these times with Jason because they were such traditional father-son things, and I never had a chance to do them with my father.

  Many of the things Jason did with me were things I later did with my sons.

  Jason sometimes took Jady and me to New York Mets games during their first season, when the Mets were known as the team that couldn’t throw straight. Their most famous player then was Marvelous Marv Throneberry known for his ineptitude at third base.

  Like my father, Jason was more of a man’s man than a ladies’ man, and he liked to stay up all night, hanging out with the guys.

  I remember one particular night at the Dakota, Jason coming into my room and shaking me.

  “Stevie, you awake?”

  I hadn’t been, but I was now, with a slightly tipsy Jason Robards poking at me.

  “What? What’s up?”

  “Nothing, pal,” he said. “Just me and the guys having a few drinks and shooting the shit in the living room.”

  “So?”

  “So, why don’t you come in and join us.”

  I didn’t really want to. I was half asleep. But Jason was insistent. So I got up and went into the living room where Jason was entertaining Peter O’Toole and a few other guys. We stayed up most of the night, the guys telling off-color jokes and getting loaded while I drank Cokes. It was a great, raucous night and I’ll always remember that Jason made me feel like one of the boys.

  So, now that I think about it, it seems that it was my mother’s fate to be surrounded by bad boys. First there was Bogart. Then Jason. Then me.

  Though I never participated in drive-by shootings or dealt crack in alleys, I did get into mischief often during the next ten years, and I think a lot of it had to do with anger over my father’s death, and the continuing issue of his fame. Perhaps I inherited a mischief gene from my father, because it turns out he also was a handful at a young age.

  When Bogie was thirteen he went to a private school in New York. It was the Trinity School, an old Episcopalian institute for young gentlemen. It was on 91st Street near Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.

  Trinity was like a European school, with a lot of emphasis on Latin and other languages that never come up in real life unless you’re a priest, and I think my father knew he would never need them. Trinity also made a big deal about memorization, which my father despised, though perhaps it was a discipline that he would later apply to movie scripts. He said, “At Trinity I wasn’t taught right. They made you learn dates and that was all. They would tell you a war was fought in 1812. So what? They never told you why people decided to kill each other at just that moment.”

  The young Bogart boy at Trinity wore a blue serge suit, white vest, white shirts, and maybe a brass buttoned Chesterfield for good measure. My father was the properly dressed boy, all right, but he also wore a hat to school every day, apparently just to get attention. He did not fit in well, mostly because immediately after school every day he had to rush home to work as a model for his mother, the artist.

  At Trinity he was called into the headmaster’s office to be reprimanded on a regular basis. He describes one of his conversations with the headmaster this way:

  “Herr Luther has reported you again,” the headmaster said.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “He complains that you started a riot in class this morning, and he’s given you a failure in German.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like German,” I said.

  “Nor Herr Luther?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Since you don’t like German and you don’t like English or history or economics, will you tell me if there is anything that you do like, Master Bogart.”

  “I like math, sir. Algebra.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s nothing theoretical about it. It’s simply fact. You can do a problem and get your answer and then you prove the answer’s right.”

  “But these riots. This endless flouting of authority. Why do you do these things?”

  I don’t know what my father told the headmaster that day. But this flouting of authority was a Bogart trademark throughout his life.

  “I always liked stirring things up, needling authority,” he said. “Even in my childhood it gave me pleasure. I guess I inherited it from my parents. They needled everyone including each other.”

  He inherited it from his parents, and maybe I inherited it from him. Like my father, I went to a private school in New York. I went to Buckley, a very exclusive school, where I was probably the only child of movie stars, but I was also probably from the poorest family. It seemed as if most of the kids were the sons of multimillionaire industrialists and bankers.

  I got into a lot of mischief at Buckley, but somehow I got through it and went on to prep school in Massachusetts, which is the same thing my father had done.

  Bogie had to repeat his third year at Trinity because of a bout with scarlet fever, but after that he went to Phillips Academy in Andover, where his father had gone to prep school.

  “You will go on to Yale,” his mother Maud told him.

  It was a hope that my mother would later have for me. Both mothers were to be disappointed.

  It was 1917 when Dad went into Phillips.

  “Studying will be encouraged and hijinx will not be tolerated,” he was told on his first day. So right away he didn’t care for it. One classmate says, “The thing I remembered was his sullenness. I got the impression that he was a very spoiled boy. When things didn’t go his way he didn’t like it a bit.”

  “People in authority are so damn smug,” Bogie said. “I can’t show reverence when I don’t feel it. So I was always testing my instructors to see if they were as bright or godlike as they seemed to be.”

  By Christmas of that year my father was flunking most of his courses, and he was thinking of burning his report card or maybe burying it under the campus green. But no, he brought it home, and when he did show it to Maud and Belmont, his folks told him to bring his marks up or he would be yanked out of school and put to work. His marks did not improve, however, and Humphrey’s father, in a last ditch effort to keep the boy enrolled wrote to the headmaster, saying that Humphrey was basically a good kid who had just “lost the way.”

  Doctor Bogart wrote, “The whole problem seems to be that the boy has given up his mind to sports and continuous correspondence with his girl friends.” This, I can relate to with ease. When I was that age I was also obsessed with sports and girls.

  Bogie’s father went on to say that, “the harder the screws are put on, the better it will be for my son.”

  This, I guess, was tough love for the times, but the fact is that tighter screws did not do the trick. On May 15, 1918, Dad was, in the politest possible language, thrown out of Phillips with a promise from the headmaster that he would probably “profit from this unfortunate occurrence.”

  Years later my father put his own spin on the dismissal. He attributed it to “high spirits” and “infractions of the rules.” My father, apparently, would rather be thought of as a discipline case than an academic failure, and he bragged about a couple of pranks which probably never occurred. No discipline problems showed up on his report card, but failures in Chemistry, English, French, Geometry, the Bible, and even Algebra did.

  Discipline problems did, however, show up on my report cards years later when I also went to a Massachusetts prep school. My school was Milton Academy in the town of Milton. I remember when I got suspended from Milton. They put me on a train back to New York. As the train rumbled through Connecticut and into New York, I rehearsed
in my mind what I would say to my mother, how I would explain the terrible mistake that had been made by Milton. When I got home to the Dakota I went up to the door leading to the kitchen, as I always did. We have always been a kitchen family. Mother was in another part of the apartment, so for a long time I stood alone outside the apartment like a wounded pup, bracing myself for the terrible tongue-lashing I would get from my mother. I tried to work myself into a state of hysteria that would bring on a good crying jag so that I would get some sympathy.

  Now, a digression about my famous mother, Betty Bacall. Don’t call her Lauren and don’t call her Baby. She’s Betty to her friends, and Ms. Bacall to everybody else.

  My mother is a woman who has dedicated her life to excellence. She adores excellence in art, in music, in everything. Unfortunately, Mom is a perfectionist. Which means she not only adores excellence, she expects it. And she expects it in people. So if you are one of my mother’s children and you do something great, get A’s on your report card, win a trophy, marry well, whatever, don’t plan on getting congratulated or patted on the back. It is merely expected of you.

  Having said this, I’m now going to tell you that I caught holy hell when my mother opened the back door and I had to tell her I had been suspended from Milton Academy, right? Wrong. I understand my mother better now than I did then, and I should have known she would not bawl me out.

  When I told her what happened, she just held me in her arms. “It’s all right, Stephen, it’s all right.”

  My mother has always been a good mother, always loved us and worried about us. She has always put her children first. Though she might not have always shown the love, Leslie and I always knew it was there. This time she certainly showed it. It is when the chips are down that my mother is at her best. When the chips are down she is always there.

  Unfortunately, it takes the chips being down for her to get to that point. She is not a fair-weather friend; she is a foul-weather friend.

  So when things were bad for me, my mother was a hell of a lot more supportive than Bogie’s mother was of him, and maybe that’s why I eventually graduated from Milton, while he flunked out of Phillips. Bogie’s mother tended to harass him for being a failure, which is why, after he was thrown out of Phillips, my father joined the navy.

  The First World War was on, and Dad was assigned as the helmsman on the Leviathan, a troop transport ship which had once been a German passenger liner. My father’s irreverence for authority figures continued, and it wasn’t long before his low opinion of people in high places got him in hot water. An officer gave Bogie an order and he told the officer, “That’s not my detail.” As the story goes, the officer slugged my father, and Bogie never made that particular mistake again.

  However, there were other incidents.

  “One time he took an unauthorized leave,” says Phil Gersh, who worked with Sam Jaffe, “so they posted him as a deserter. He got ten days in the brig. Bogie didn’t care for the sentence so he gave his captain some lip about it, and they made it twenty days. He gave them more lip and they made it thirty days.”

  Dad also liked to shoot craps on the ship and on at least one occasion he lost his entire month’s pay before reaching Paris and the French girls that he had so eagerly looked forward to.

  Shortly after the armistice was signed my father pulled his final navy prank. His captain ordered him to make out the discharge papers for two hundred of the most deserving men. Dr. James Mitchell, who served with my father, and was later a physician for MGM, says, “Humphrey went below and made out his own discharge first. He was about to go over the side with seabag and hammock in hand when the captain spied him and asked where he was going. Humphrey answered that he had orders to discharge the most deserving men first, and he thought he was the most deserving man aboard ship. The captain insisted he go below and finish out his service time.”

  While my father was not exactly a model of navy excellence, he did look great in uniform. In photos from those days he looks handsome and dashing, a regular navy poster boy. And he finally did get his honorable discharge.

  I often wonder about my father’s life in the military. On the one hand, he was a patriot and I am sure he would have died for his country if it came to that. But he was an iconoclast, too, forever thumbing his nose at institutions like the military. He was perhaps amused by the very idea of himself in uniform. And I wonder, too, about the difference between two men, one who serves in the military and one who doesn’t. Did the navy instill my father with a discipline that I never had? Did the navy “make a man out of him,” as we are so often told that service does? If he had not served, would he still have had the work ethic that later characterized his career?

  The questions I ask about my father are often disguised versions of questions I am asking about myself, and often I wonder how my life might be different if I had served in the military, if I had gone to war instead of getting a draft deferment.

  After I left Milton in 1967, when I was about the age that Dad entered the navy, I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for a year and got into more mischief. That year in Philadelphia was my year as a lowlife. My mother was paying for college, so my normal living expenses were taken care of. But I had a steady girlfriend by this time, and the $100 a month that my mother sent didn’t seem to go far enough. So I got a job at a record store, and did something that bothers me to this day. Something I’m not proud of. I gave away hundreds of record albums so that people would like me. My new friends would come in and say, “Hey Steve, can I take some records?” and I’d say, “Sure, help yourself.” It got ridiculous. One time a guy I hardly even knew came in, and he must have walked off with twenty record albums. This was my way of making friends. My class at Milton had sixty-three boys, and when I got to this big school in Philly it was like being dropped off in the center of a huge city where I knew no one. I didn’t really know how to make friends, except by giving them stuff. All I had to do was give them records that weren’t mine. I think in some weird way it was part of the Bogie thing, a way of being popular for who I was. In Philadelphia, people didn’t like me because I was Humphrey Bogart’s son—they liked me because I would let them steal albums out of the record shop. At the time, crazy as it seems now, anything was better than being liked because of my father.

  During this whole period I lost contact with my mother. It was the breakaway scenario, a time of rebellion, of trying to be anonymous. I never called home. Most of the time my mother didn’t really know where I was. During that year I did a lot of things I’m ashamed of. For example, I stole money from my friend Jon Avnet, who was one of the people I moved in with after I got kicked out of my dormitory. When Avnet found I had robbed him of sixty bucks he came to me and said, “Why didn’t you just ask?” I didn’t have an answer. That’s when he stopped being my friend. Today Jon is a very successful Hollywood producer and director, with films like Fried Green Tomatoes and Risky Business to his credit. Maybe by now he has forgotten what I did, but I never have. Sorry, Jon.

  For a while I was deep into fraternity life. I was in a fraternity of real jocks, guys like Chuck Mercene who would later play for the New York Giants, and Timmy Cutter, a brilliant hockey player. This was the period of time when I started smoking grass. I didn’t really drink. I’ve never really been much of a drinker.

  When I got back from Christmas break that year, I returned to the record store and the woman who was the assistant manager said, “Steve, we did inventory.”

  “And?”

  “Ronnie’s looking for you,” she said. Ronnie was the boss.

  When Ronnie found me he said, “Steve, there are a few albums missing.”

  I hadn’t stolen them for money. I had given them to friends because I wanted so much to have friends and I felt I had to kind of buy them. That they wouldn’t like me for me.

  I said, “I think I’m fired.”

  He said, “Right.”

  I don’t know when I really stopped getting int
o trouble. I guess it was in the early 1980s when I met Barbara, and she helped me get over my cocaine dependence.

  It was around that time that I started to think about my father and I began to ask questions whenever I met someone who had known my him. Naturally, because of my own history, I asked a lot about his misbehavior. It seemed as if everybody had a story to tell about Bogie being a bad boy.

  His defiance of authority, for example, is always there, all through his life.

  If Dad wasn’t going to kowtow to authority in prep school and the military he certainly wasn’t going to do it years later in Hollywood. His irreverence for the icons of the movie world became one of his best-known characteristics.

  In the 1930s when the studio public relations departments were trying to make every actor look like a model of gentility, Bogie refused to pose for the cornball photos they wanted of him patting dogs, smoking pipes, and riding horses. He thought that was phony. He hated phoniness. He just wanted to be himself. I understand how he felt. Sometimes when people ask me about being Bogart’s son I feel as if I am being asked to, somehow, pose for something that is not really me.

  “If I feel like going to the Trocadero wearing a pair of moccasins, that is the way I go to the Troc,” Bogart said. “If I go to the Troc and want to make a jackass of myself in front of every producer in town, that’s my business.”

  The biggest Hollywood authority figure for much of my father’s career was Jack Warner, and Bogie’s battles with Warner became a part of Hollywood lore.

  Jack was one of the four Warner brothers. He was the production chief, the guy who ran the studio. He fought, not just with Bogie, but with Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, and James Cagney, among others. Warner was, my father once said in an interview, “a creep.”

  Warner called him up after that remark. “How can you call me a thing like that?” Warner asked. “A creep is a loathsome, crawling thing in my dictionary.”