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 relatively 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 beautiful 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 quality that others have also noted. I remember John Huston best for his kindness to me when I was a child. He was a fascinating 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 infested the Lualaba with parasitic bacteria that could cause incurable 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 minor 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. After 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 members 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 local 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 burning 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 nevertheless 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 father 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 local 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.
Seeing there was no way to hurry the natives, Huston and Bogie decided to scout for locations in the jungle.
“Katie could have remained behind,” he wrote, “but she preferred to march through the jungle with us, as John and I knew she would.”
Bogie was sitting in a small jungle clearing with Kate and John Huston, when a huge wild boar showed up with his family. “It was a gruesome creature,” Bogie said, “big as a large sheep dog with vicious tusks springing from both sides of its mouth.
“Fortunately, we had a downwind, or the creature would have smelled us and charged. I froze. So did Huston. But not Katie. Before we could stop he
r she had stepped into the clearing, with her sixteen-millimeter camera to her eyes. Huston and I dared not yell to Katie to come back for fear the boar would charge, nor could we move for fear of panicking him and we could not shoot since Katie was between us and the boar.
“As she walked slowly toward the thing, with the camera finder to her eye, it stared straight at her. I was frozen but fascinated, and in those horrendous moments of waiting that seemed like hours I learned something rare and wonderful about Katie.
“I thought, there’s a fearless woman. I also sensed that Katie, who is a remarkable woman, could not believe that an animal would hurt her. She is not stupid but I suddenly knew that she felt if she wanted the boar’s photograph, he could not possibly object. Approaching him fearlessly, as she did, she communicated no fear to him. Huston and I were the ones who were afraid, but in a desperate situation, I’ll take Katie before Huston—or myself—any time.”
Maybe. But in one desperate situation it was Bogie who had a moment of bravery. My parents and Peter Viertel were going for a ride down the river in a small gasoline-driven boat. Their boatman, however, had trouble getting the engine started, and he flooded it. When he went down to look at it with a lighted match, the whole damn thing blew up. When the boatman came running up to the deck he was on fire and he quickly put himself in the water. Meanwhile, the boat was in danger of burning. It was Bogie who threw a line to another boat that was tied up and somehow he got buckets of sand, then went below deck and put out the fire. It could have been a real disaster.
The filming in Africa came to an appropriately dramatic close. When the schedule called for two more days of shooting, Huston announced that he needed three days, which raised havoc with airline schedules and inland transportation. Bogie was mad as hell and he thought Huston and Hepburn were in cahoots to keep him in Africa forever. Huston, however, got his way. Equipment was moved out gradually so that on the last day nothing was left but Bogie, Hepburn, Huston, and the camera. My mother and my father went to London together, where they were to meet me at the airport.
“Your plane arrived around noon and I was a nervous wreck,” my mother says. “The door opened and there you were. Immediately you made this face that you always made and you came running down the gangway, smiling, and I was so happy to hold you again. I missed you terribly in Africa. Your father was very emotional, too, at seeing you again. You just kept talking and talking, chattering a mile a minute. We had never heard you talk so much before. I was really happy that the Africa adventure was over and we were all back together as a family.”
The Africa adventure, of course, was not over for me. For decades I would carry around the belief that I had been abandoned by my mother. Sometimes when I watch my home movies of Mom and Dad and Kate working and playing in Africa, I can’t help thinking that most parents of a two-year-old, especially their first, don’t want to miss a day with the child because he is learning to talk better each day and he is constantly making new discoveries. I know that’s how I felt about my kids. It makes it harder to understand.
The months that my parents were in Africa were, undoubtedly, a formative time for me. It was also a time of passages for others. It was in Africa that Kate found out that her good friend Fanny Brice had died. It was there that my father learned that Mayo Methot had died. And it was in Africa that John Huston learned that his wife had given birth to a baby girl. They named her Anjelica and today, of course, she is one of our top screen actresses. (I finally met Anjelica Huston a few years ago. Her first words to me were, “It’s about time we met.”)
Some wonderful things came out of that African adventure. One was my parents’ friendship with Kate Hepburn. Another was that the work those people did in the jungle produced a great film. And a third was that later that year my father was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor.
My father certainly did not expect to win the Oscar. He thought it would go to Marlon Brando, who was up for A Streetcar Named Desire. Bogie admired Brando immensely, even if Brando was a method actor. He considered him to be the best of the new actors. Bogie also thought that Montgomery Clift had a decent shot for A Place In the Sun.
Also, my father was embarrassed by the whole thing. He had, after all, derided the Oscars, saying that the only way a Best Actor award would make sense would be if each actor donned black tights and recited Hamlet. Years earlier he had ridiculed the Oscars by concocting the idea of giving Academy Awards to animals. The first year he gave the award to Skippy, the dog in The Awful Truth. The following year he gave the Oscar to a water buffalo in The Good Earth. Though he intended all this as a joke, the animal award later became real in the form of the Patsy, awarded annually by the ASPCA.
But the big night came and Bogie was there. My mother sat beside him, tensely holding his hand. The award for Best Supporting Actress went to Kim Hunter for A Streetcar Named Desire. Then the award for Best Supporting Actor went to Karl Malden, from the same movie. Then Bogie and Bacall sat through the disappointment of having Kate lose out on the Best Actress award. The award went to Vivien Leigh. Three straight acting awards to A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando, for Best Actor, would make it a sweep. And then came the announcement for Best Actor. Greer Garson announced, “The award goes to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen.” The cheers were deafening.
My father, always so quick with a quip, stumbled over his planned ad-lib. Clearly, he was touched by the award.
“It’s a long way from the Belgian Congo to the stage of this theater,” he finally said. “It’s nice to be here. Thank you very much.” He thanked Kate, and Huston and Spiegel and the crew. “No one does it alone,” he said. “As in tennis, you need a good opponent or partner to bring out the best in you. John and Katie helped me to be where I am now.”
What stunned my father, though, more than the award itself was the fact that his was such a popular victory. He never believed that people in Hollywood liked him as much as they did, and he was very moved by it all. Long before there was a Sally Field crying, “You like me, you really like me,” my father felt the same way.
Back in the press tent after the awards, Bogie reverted to form and wheeled out his old jokes about actors donning tights and reciting Hamlet. But he didn’t fool anybody. They knew he was pleased and touched to have been chosen.
Later, among his friends at Romanoff’s he admitted as much. Now my father was at the height of his career. He had an Oscar, a beautiful young wife, an adorable son, and a daughter on the way.
I don’t know if a three-year-old boy has the sophistication to turn a small metal statue into a symbol of his anger and resentment. But I seem to recall that when my father brought home the Oscar, visible symbol of all that he had accomplished in Africa, I wanted to pick it up and hurl it at him.
That Oscar, by the way, is now on a shelf in my home.
*
When we get to the room that was my parents’ bedroom I feel pain. I have been expecting it. Now the room holds the possessions of another Hollywood family, but I look through them and I see the room as it was. I remember the position of the bed, the table with the chess set, those nights watching TV with my father, the goodnight kisses, the smell of medicine.
“God,” I say to my mother, “this is so strange. I remember coming in as a kid. The bed was against the wall. I remember standing by the bed, seeing him a lot, lying down in that bed.”
“Well, he was only lying down toward the end,” she says.
“I have a picture of him in my mind,” I say, “and Leslie and me coming up. I can really see him,” I say. I am talking more to myself than to Mom.
“He would be sitting up,” my mother says. “He would be sitting up when you saw him.”
Despite my pain and the memories, I smile. It suddenly seems funny that Mom would be uncomfortable simply agreeing with something I say.
“Yes, Stephen, you are absolutely right,” I say out loud, but she doesn’t get it.
A sensation of sadness sweeps through
me.
“God, thirty-six years ago,” I say. I can still feel the pain, but I don’t think my mother is aware of it.
I know what I am feeling. The pain is not about memories of being in the bedroom. It is about the times when I was not allowed into the bedroom. I try to push the pain from my mind.
*
11
When a man is sick you get to know him. You find out whether he is made of soft or hard wood. I began to get fonder of Bogie with each visit. He was made of very hard wood, indeed.
—DR. MAYNARD BRANDSMA
I remember the wheelchair that my father needed during the final weeks of his illness. It was a fascinating metallic contraption with hinges and shiny spokes, and a leather seat that made a snapping sound when it was opened. Dad would roll across the floor in it, grabbing at the wheels with his withering, bony hands. The wheelchair was visual, it was exotic, it was something that I understood because it was something that I could have built with an Erector set. So it is the wheelchair that is the most vivid image I retain from those mostly faded memories of my father’s illness.
Our gardener then was Aurelio Salazar. Now he is old, brown as a coffee bean from decades in the sun, and always bent slightly toward the earth he has tended so long. But back then, Aurelio was young and sturdy, and I can remember that every day at around five o’clock Aurelio would go up to my father’s bedroom. He and my mother would help Bogie get dressed in his trousers, casual shirt, and smoking jacket. Bogie would make jokes about having to gain weight and he would fret about his boat, asking if they had finished the work on the hull. And then Aurelio would slip his strong arms under my father’s shoulders, lifting Bogie from the bed and into the wheelchair. My father, fussing and mumbling and still insisting on doing whatever he could for himself, would roll the chair himself across the bedroom to the dumbwaiter shaft which was built into the corner of the bedroom.
Bogart Page 23