Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  “The great movie star, Humphrey Bogart, thinks Roosevelt’s a grand guy, does he? Tell it to your whores,” Mayo shouted.

  “Cut the crap, Sluggy,” he shouted back.

  But when Mayo caught him she jabbed the knife into his back. Bogie, feeling faint, went to the phone. Instead of calling a doctor, he called Sam Jaffe.

  “Sam, we have a problem,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” Sam said.

  “I think you’d better come over here,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Mayo stabbed me.”

  “Jesus!”

  Sam sent Mary Baker to Bogie’s house. When Baker got there Mayo was hysterical.

  “I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything,” she was shrieking. But Bogie was on the floor, just regaining consciousness after passing out for a few minutes, and his jacket was red with blood. He explained to Baker that he and Mayo had gotten into an argument over Roosevelt, and that Mayo had stabbed him. Baker told Mayo not to pull the knife out of Bogie. Baker called the doctor. The doctor was bribed not to tell the story. Bogie was patched up and Mayo, as always, was stricken with guilt and was full of affection and kisses for her husband.

  One morning after the stabbing, Dad invited Sam Jaffe over to the house.

  They sat in the living room, Dad still slightly shaken by the incident. “Sam,” he said, “look at the seltzer bottle there.” He pointed to a glass bottle in the corner.

  “What about it?” Sam asked.

  “Well, she threw it at my head the other day. She missed.”

  “So?”

  “So someday she might not miss.”

  “And?”

  “And it might not be a bottle,” Bogie said. “I think you ought to have insurance.”

  “Not necessary,” Sam said.

  “Look,” Bogie said. “You’ve invested a lot of time and money in my career. If Mayo’s aim ever improves you could lose it all. Get some insurance.”

  So Jaffe & Baker took out a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on my father. Fortunately, Mayo’s aim never did improve.

  Long before this, Mayo had been diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a paranoid schizophrenic. She had even made at least one legitimate suicide attempt, slashing her wrists. After the knife incident the psychiatrist recommended that Mayo be institutionalized. Bogie refused. He said at the time, “My wife is an actress. It just so happens that she is not working right now. But even when an actress isn’t working she’s got to have scenes to play. And in this case I’ve got to give her the cues.”

  There was also a night when Mayo pulled a gun on Bogie. He casually mentioned that he wanted to go off on a trip alone, and Mayo freaked out. She came after him with a gun. Dad retreated to the bathroom where he called a studio publicist for help. While the publicist drove over to the house, others in the studio gathered around the phone and listened to the drama. They heard Bogie shouting through the door, trying to calm Mayo down, but all she did was get more hysterical. At one point Mayo got so frustrated that she started shooting Dad’s suitcase. This was so absurd that Bogie started laughing, and so did the studio people who listened on the other end. Though I’m sure at first my father must have been afraid that this time Mayo really would kill him, he apparently came to the conclusion that she couldn’t really do it. When the publicist arrived at the house, he found Bogie relaxing in the bathtub. This incident, like many others, was covered up by the studio and never made the papers.

  Growing up, I heard many of the Bogie and Mayo stories. I’ve heard a lot more since I began asking about my father. But something has always bothered me about all these stories. They seem almost unbelievable. There is a show business quality to them. They sound like something out of a screwball romance of the thirties—two people throwing things at each other, then laughing about it minutes later.

  I can’t deny that the fights actually occurred. Certainly, some of the stories have been embellished over the years, but basically they are true. Many reliable people remember these physical battles between my father and Mayo Methot. The skirmishes represent one of the more bizarre episodes in Hollywood lore. To me, what is most bizarre about the battles is not that they happened, but the spirit in which they occurred, with so much good humor. Why would two people who fought like cats and dogs stay together?

  “These fights,” one friend says, “were a kind of mating dance. They liked to fight because it made sex better. Their marriage was kept together because of the fighting, their fantastic physical attraction for each other, and their love of sailing.”

  In fact, quite a few people state with remarkable certainty that the fights made their sex hotter, though I assume this is secondhand knowledge, at best.

  For me the key to understanding my father’s relationship with Mayo, and, indeed, much of my father’s life, is in something he said in an interview before he married her.

  “We have some first-rate battles,” he said. “Both of us are actors, so fights are easy to start. Actors always see the dramatic quality of a situation more easily than other people and can’t resist dramatizing it for them. We both understand that one of the important things to master in marriage is the technique of a quarrel.”

  Later, when he was married to Mother, Dad wrote, “Each of my wives has been an actress. Betty’s a good one as well as a good-looking one. I guess it would be plain hell to marry a bad actress. I never could have stood that. Of course, when an actor marries an actress, their differences usually develop into something more intense than they started out to be. You find you are playing a dramatic scene. And some of the arguments I’ve had in my time in married life have gone on long after either of us remembered what the tiff was about. I guess we were each thoroughly enjoying a leading role.”

  Certainly Mayo’s jealousy and paranoia were real. Certainly the alcohol problem was real; she eventually died of alcoholism. But I think in some way the fights were also staged; Bogie and Mayo were, in part, acting out their anger and frustration. Bogie loved a good joke and he loved to dramatize. You can imagine what would happen if he married a woman who felt the same way, and when he married Mayo he did marry a woman who felt the same way. She once said of Bogie, “I married a man who conducts himself like a man. A man who doesn’t only offer me security, but a certain excitement.” To some extent Bogie and Mayo were putting on an elaborate show for the public. And, I think, to some extent, Bogie did that with his whole life.

  One thing that always troubled me about these stories was the hitting. Did my father actually hit his wife? Did he hit women?

  “No,” Gloria Stuart told me, “your father did not hit people. He did not hit women. But he did hit Mayo and she hit him. She always hit him first. It was part of the relationship. In fact, I only saw your father hit her back one time.”

  So Bogie did not hit women. But still, it is difficult to talk today about my father and women without it seeming that he was as politically incorrect as you can get. He lived in a different world from the one I live in. He called women “girls,” and it was perfectly acceptable. He said, “I have an aversion to any group of women with a purpose or a mission.” He made jokes about a woman’s role and that was fine.

  “This was a different time with men and women,” Gloria Stuart says. “This was a time when people still joked about rape. Men and women just talked differently then and nobody thought anything about it.”

  For example, when Dad came back from filming The African Queen he took a ribbing in the newspapers because a photo had been taken of my mother hanging laundry supposedly while he was snoozing on his hammock. DID BOGIE BRING BACALL TO AFRICA TO DO HIS LAUNDRY? the newspaper headline asked. Bogie denied that he had. “You think Baby would do this for me back home?” he said. “Not on your life. I take her half way around the world and suddenly she becomes the perfect housewife. In Hollywood she never once washed a handkerchief. No kidding!”

  The story now seems quaint, but today it would take on an entire
ly different spin, and Bogie would be made out to be some sort of sexist monster.

  His public interviews are peppered with comments about women that would be regarded as outrageous today, but were kind of endearing in their time. He once said, “Women have got us. We should never have set them free. They should still be in chains, and fettered to the home where they belong.” And after he made his statement about not being a Communist, and being “ill-advised” about his trip to Washington, one reporter asked him if the statement also represented his wife.

  “I am making the statement,” he said, “but it includes her. I still believe the man wears the pants in the family and what I say goes for the whole family.”

  Much of how Bogie thought about women can be inferred from what he said about actresses. In 1953 he did an interview for the London Daily Mirror and he talked about “four real hot babes that stand way out in my twenty-five years of movie making.” If he talked about hot babes today he would have to duck fast. The four were Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and, of course, Lauren Bacall.

  “I’m not saying anything against the sweet and shapely glamor girls in the business,” Bogie says. “They’re okay. But for me, you act with them, then forget them. Whatever they’ve got is laid right out on a platter for you. Now that doesn’t appeal to Bogart. For me an actress has to have unassailability. This, in plain language says, here it is, now come and fight for it. Which I reckon is a good thing for all women to have.

  “Hepburn has unassailability. She is a dyed in the wool eccentric. There is nothing phony about her. She is not beautiful, more like a nylon-covered skeleton. She’s no chicken any more either, but she’s really fascinating with a tremendous offbeat kind of sex appeal which throws out a challenge that not any hunk of man can take up. She’s shy, though. At interviews she shakes like a leaf, although she has the guts not to show it. She’s got maybe half a dozen friends in Hollywood and she just circulates among them. You never see her at the nightclubs. When you spend six weeks on a boat in the jungle with a woman and all around you are down with malaria you kind of get to know her. I got to know Katie like a favorite book.

  “Bette Davis is different. She’s not as well-organized as Katie, mentally. She’s got very definite opinions and it’s sure hard to shake them. I made Dark Victory with Bette and although I haven’t any scars from it, I’m not forgetting it either.

  “I’ve never had any trouble with her, but it may be true some guys find her hard to get on with. The fact is she’s a talented, tough, temperamental filly with a strong mind of her own. Unless you’re very big she can knock you down. She’s getting along a bit, so if people treat her rough she can get kind of crotchety. But she’s a hell of a gal.

  “When she was younger she used to be a real dish—not my type, though. I like a good figure and Bette’s a wee bit too well-stacked and a shade heavy in the legs. But I’m sure fond of her. She’s got a highly developed intellect and she can act the pants off most of the other ladies in the business. When you take Bette Davis you’ve got to take everything else that goes with it. And I guess I like all the things that go with Bette Davis.

  “Barbara Stanwyck has unassailability by the truckload. She’s got a wonderful figure and talent that bursts out in every scene.

  “I can’t stand bad actresses. When I act with them they throw me so hard I can’t speak a line. But Stanwyck, that girl acts like she really means it. We made a louse of a film together called Conflict. It bored the pants off both of us. But Stanwyck was good. If she had an emotional scene to play, we’d all have to wait while she’d go for a little walk to work up steam. Then she’d come back all ready to emote. God help the technician who interrupted at the wrong moment. She’s a fine type is Stanwyck, solid material. Her hair is going gray. She’s putting on the years, but she still makes movies with a kick in them.

  “As for Lauren Bacall, well sure, she’s Mrs. Bogart. But she doesn’t figure in my favorite foursome just because of that. She’s a big beautiful baby who’s going to make a big name for herself in the business. She’s bright, brainy and popular with women as well as men. Look at that face of hers. There you’ve got the map of Middle Europe slung across those high cheekbones and wide green eyes. As an actress she hasn’t got a lot of experience. It’s going to take a long time to get it. But Baby is going to get there. She’s not the type that hangs around being stalled by the boss’s secretary. As a woman she holds all the cards. She’s beautiful, a good mother, a good wife, and knows how to run a home.

  “She’s a honey blonde and in her high heels she comes up to the top wrinkle in my forehead. She’s got a model’s figure, square shoulders, and a kid’s waist. Met her in the film To Have and Have Not then afterward we made The Big Sleep. After that film I said, ‘That’s my baby,’ and I’ve called her Baby ever since.”

  *

  I focus more and more on my mother’s voice now. She is talking about him. “Your father loved the dogs,” she says. Then something else. “He always wore that terry robe when he was out by the lanai.” She is talking to me, but not checking to see if I am listening. She knows that when she has talked about Dad in the past I have not always listened. She moves about, reciting her memories like lines from a movie. And the words she speaks resonate with a headful of images that have been passed to me over the years from things she has said and things I have heard from friends. Mother has told me many times about her love affair with Humphrey Bogart. I vow that from now on I will listen carefully.

  *

  9

  When the picture’s over Bogart will forget all about you. That’s the last you’ll ever see of him.

  —HOWARD HAWKS TO LAUREN BACALL

  During the last week of 1943, director Howard Hawks took my mother, then nineteen, to the sound stage where Humphrey Bogart was shooting Passage to Marseilles.

  At the time my mother was under personal contract to Hawks, and while he was certainly interested in finding a role for her, he made no mention of it that day. He did tell her, however, that he owned the film rights to To Have and Have Not written by his friend Ernest Hemingway, and that he was hoping to get Bogie for the lead.

  During a break in shooting, Hawks brought Bogie over to meet Mom. “There was,” she says, “no fireworks, no thunder, just a pleasant hello and how do you do.” Mostly, Mom remembers being struck by the fact that Bogart was much smaller than she had expected him to be.

  A few weeks later there was some Bogart excitement in my mother’s life, but it was not of the romantic variety. It was career excitement. Hawks told her that she would get a screen test for a role in To Have and Have Not.

  “And by the way,” he said, “I’ve got Bogart.”

  The scene was the famous “You know how to whistle” scene, and Mother rehearsed it over and over with a well-established actor, though she was always embarrassed by the requirement that she kiss him every time she did the scene. Bogie, meanwhile, had gone off to Casablanca to entertain the troops. In any case, it would have been unusual for an actor of his stature to play in a screen test for an unknown actress like my mother, who at that time was still Betty, not yet Lauren. A few days after the screen test was shot, Bogie was back and Mom ran into him at the studio.

  “I saw your test,” he told her. “We’ll have a lot of fun together.”

  Mom had the role. She was ecstatic. She was also a nervous wreck and would remain that way for the next several weeks.

  “On the first day of shooting I was ready for a straitjacket,” she says. She remembers doing the “Anybody got a match?” line again and again, being all knotted up inside, trembling, perspiring. “Your father tried to joke me out of my nervousness,” she said. “He was wonderful about that, trying to put other actors at ease.”

  Though Bogie was kind to Bacall right from the beginning, and sensitive to her youth and inexperience, he did not flirt with her. Mom was a flirt, but Bogie had a reputation as a man who never flirted with actresses in his films. So th
e relationship that began during the filming of To Have and Have Not began as a friendship, which perhaps is why it lasted. From the beginning they called each other Slim and Steve, which is what the characters in the film called each other, even though the characters’ names were really Marie and Harry.

  Bogie and Bacall talked nonstop, and probably it was obvious to others before it was obvious to them that something was happening between them. Mom talked about her childhood and her dreams of success in Hollywood. She adored Bette Davis, she said, and Leslie Howard, and she was thrilled to learn that Bogie actually knew them both. It must have been pretty heady stuff. Bogie gave her acting tips and he talked about his early days on the stage. He told her the twenties were “the good old days.” And he talked about his marriage to Mayo. He joked about the fighting with “madame,” as he called her, but Mom could see that he was lonely.

  The relationship progressed in this platonic fashion until one day about three weeks into the shooting of the picture, Bogie came by Mom’s dressing room to say goodnight.

  “He was standing behind me,” she says. “We were joking, the way we always did. Then suddenly he leaned over and he placed his hand under my chin. He lifted my face toward his and he kissed me. It was very romantic, very sweet really, and your father was quite shy about the whole thing. Then he took an old matchbook out of his pocket and asked me to write my phone number on it.”

  That night Bogie called Mom. He just wanted to see how she was doing, he said. They talked for hours.

  After that, Mother says, things were different. They lit up when they saw each other. During breaks they gravitated toward each other, as if there were no other place to be. When Bogie played chess on the set, Mom would stand behind him and watch. Where they used to eat lunch separately—Mom from a brown bag at the studio and Dad at the Lakeside Golf Club—now they both went to Lakeside. One day gossip columnist Hedda Hopper called Mom and said, “You’d better be careful or you might have a lamp dropped on your head,” a reference to Mayo’s well-known penchant for throwing things. Another columnist wrote, “You can get your B&B lunch any day at Lakeside,” an item which must have been of special interest to Mayo Methot.