Bogart (20 page)

By the time he got to North Africa, Bogie was known
around the world, mostly from his gangster films. A measure
of his growing international fame was that one day when he
and Mayo were touring the ancient Casbah, an Arab man
jumped out of a doorway at him. He lifted his arm as if he
were holding a submachine gun and shouted a stream of
foreign words at Dad, which turned out to be the Arabic
equivalent of
“Rat-tat-tat-tat,
you’re dead, you dirty rat!”

Though Bogie was a patriot who felt strongly about sup
porting the troops, he was his usual iconoclastic self when it
came to the brass. At one point on the tour he and Mayo had
a big fight. She locked him out of their bedroom. Bogie be
gan pounding on the door to get in. A colonel showed up
and, seeing Bogie in uniform (it was a USO uniform), told
him to stop it. Then he asked for my father’s name, rank, and serial number.

“I’ve got no name,” Bogie told him. “I’ve got no rank. I’ve got no serial number. And you can go to hell.”

Later, when Bogie was reprimanded for insulting the uniform of the United States Army, he apologized to the colonel, saying, “I didn’t mean to insult the uniform. I meant to insult you.”

In Naples, Italy, when Bogie threw a big party for a group of enlisted men, things got a bit rowdy. A general from across the hall complained about the noise, and Bogie shouted, “Go fuck yourself.” Soon after that he was moved out of Italy.

Back home Bogie continued his military service by joining the coast guard reserve. He went on duty once a week. In fact, it was often on his coast guard weekends in Balboa that my father had secret romantic meetings with a striking young actress known as Lauren Bacall, also known as my mother.

I’m sure my father would have entertained the troops, no matter which party was in power during the war. But, as it happened, he was a liberal Democrat most of the time and he was an ardent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. Bogie was not as politically active as Jane Fonda, or even Lauren Bacall, for that matter. But he did speak up for Democratic candidates, like Harry Truman, and he donated money to their campaigns.

The war, however, made Dwight Eisenhower very popular and both of my parents became early Ike supporters before anybody even knew if Ike would run for President. Bogie and Bacall hoped that Ike would run, and that he would run as a Democrat. But Ike went to the GOP. Though my folks still liked Ike, they began taking a second look at his Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson. Especially my mother.

The more Mom heard about Stevenson, the more in
trigued she became. She talked to friends about Adlai. She
read a book about Adlai. She went to a party for Adlai in Hol
lywood. This was at a time when Hollywood was very touchy
about politics, especially left-wing politics. In fact, at the party
one well-known producer told Mother, “If you’re smart you’ll
keep your mouth shut and take no sides.”

Before long my mother had switched her allegiance
from Eisenhower to Stevenson, and she was able to get my fa
ther to do the same thing. At one point Bogie was scheduled to fly to an Ike rally and, at the last minute, he changed his
mind and went with Bacall to a rally for Stevenson. This was the early 1950s, of course, and by this time Bogie was one of
the most famous movie stars in the world, so it was quite a coup for Adlai.

If my father was not quite as passionate for Stevenson as
my mother, it might have been that she was much younger
and more prone to political optimism. And also to the fact
that she was a woman.

My mother is quite candid about the fact that she was
smitten with Adlai Stevenson. After one trip to a Stevenson
event, where she got to know him personally, she says, “On the trip home I was far away from Bogie, my thoughts on the
man I had left behind. I tried to imagine his life. I had found
out as much as I could from his friends, anyone who had
known him in the last few years. In my usual way, I romanti
cized that he needed a wife—obviously his sister had taken
the official place of one, but he needed someone to share his
life with. I fantasized that I would be a long-distance partner,
a pen pal, a good friend whom he could feel free to talk to
about anything. A sympathetic, nonjudging ear. It took me a long time to dissect my feelings, but at that moment I felt a combination of hero worship and slight infatuation. This
campaign had disrupted my life completely. I was flattered to
have been included, flattered to have been singled out by
Stevenson as someone a bit special. I was, after all, just
twenty-eight years old. I’d just had a second baby and had
been preoccupied with domesticity for the last couple of
years. My career was at something of a standstill. I needed to
dream. I needed to reach out, to stretch myself, to put my
unused energies to use.”

Not surprisingly, there were times when my father got
sick of hearing “Adlai this,” and “Adlai that,” all the time, but
his occasional fits of jealousy never got in the way of his political convictions. Bogie supported Stevenson, and Stevenson
was grateful. (On the whole, my mother’s relationship with
Stevenson was a very positive force in her life, and I can re
member playing on his farm not long after my father died
because Stevenson was, for her, the kind of friend you turn to
at such a time.)

Alistair Cooke, who also favored Stevenson, was sure that
Eisenhower would win the election. He tells me that he made
a ten-dollar bet with my father that Adlai would lose. When
Ike won Bogie paid up, but not without a comment: “It’s a
hell of a guy who bets against his own principles,” Bogie said.
(Cooke, by the way, could vote in the election. He is an
American citizen. A lot of people think he is a British subject
because of all those
Masterpiece Theatres
he
hosted.)

Because my father was a famous actor, he caught a lot of
flack for taking public stands on political issues. In 1944,
when he spoke up for Roosevelt in a radio speech, Bogie was
assaulted with sacks of hate mail, mostly to the effect that ac
tors should have no political opinions and if they do have
them, they should keep them to themselves.

Dad didn’t care for the mail. He shot back at his detrac
tors in newspaper interviews and in a piece he wrote for the
Saturday Evening Post,
titled, “I Stuck My Neck Out.” By this
time his old friend Stuart Rose, now a
former
brother-in-law,
was editor of the
Post.

Bogie had little patience with the view that actors should
keep their political opinions secret simply because their personal glamor might swing a few votes one way or the other.
He said that idea was “idiotic.”

“I dislike politics and politicians, but I love my country,”
he said. “Why should a man lose the freedom to express him
self simply because he’s an actor? Nobody ever suggests that
a baseball star or a best-selling author should refrain from
public discussion of political issues. I don’t think anyone, and I mean anyone, should toss around a lot of political baloney,
but I feel I know as much about politics and government as
most guys on a soap box and if I disagree strongly with them
I’m going to say so.”

In 1950 when he was campaigning for Helen Douglas,
the subject came up again. “Movie stars pay a tremendous in
come tax,” Bogie said. “I don’t even look at my paycheck.
Just put my hand over it and sign it. It would buy an airplane,
I’ll tell you that. Anyone who pays $200,000 a year in income
taxes darned well has a right to take an active role in politics.
Of course, there are some Republicans who feel that a movie star should not have the right to engage in politics if he is a
Democrat.”

By this time my father was the highest-paid movie star at
Warner, and had, in some years, been the highest paid in the
world, though his paycheck was paltry by today’s Hollywood
standards. He had signed a fifteen-year contract with Warner
Brothers in 1945 that, Benchley says, gave Bogie a million
dollars a year.

Once when he was asked if he thought politicking would
hurt his career, he said, “I think there are a few diehards in
the backwoods of Pasadena or Santa Barbara who might not see my pictures because I’m a Democrat. But on the whole I
don’t think it makes much difference. People forget quickly,
as soon as the election is over, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. If you make a good picture and give a good
performance people will go to see it anyway.”

Perhaps. But there came a time when politics threatened
to hurt a lot of careers and did, in fact, destroy some.

In October of 1947, three years before crazy Joe McCarthy
got his witch hunt underway, a publicity-hungry congressman
by the name of J. Parnell Thomas chaired something called
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Thomas decided that it was extremely urgent that the com
mittee find Commies in the movie industry. Thomas, with the help of aides like Richard Nixon, came to Hollywood for
“interviews,” at which movie people were asked who they
thought might be a Communist. People who gave names
were considered “friendly.” In reaction to this, nineteen Hollywood writers, directors, and producers formed a group that
said it was none of Congress’s business what their politics
were or had been. Of those nineteen, eleven were asked to
testify before Congress. One of the eleven, Bertolt Brecht
(the guy who wrote
The Threepenny Opera),
skipped town. He
went back to his home in Germany. The rest became known as the “Unfriendly Ten.” A lot of people in the movie indus
try were outraged. They felt as if the ten were being accused
of something, without being given a trial. They also thought that Congress should be making laws, not trying to enforce
them. John Huston got a bunch of these movie people to
gether and they formed The Committee for the First Amend
ment. Their purpose was never specifically to defend the
Unfriendly Ten. It was to fight what they believed was an as
sault upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Huston, in fact, said some of these people really were
Communists. “But they were well-meaning people who had
no knowledge of the Gulag Archipelago or of Stalin’s mass
murders,” he said. Huston went to a few Communist
meetings and he found it all very childish. “I marveled at the
innocence of these good but simple people who actually be
lieved that this was a way of improving the social condition
of mankind.”

When an attorney for the Unfriendly Ten asked Huston
for support, he got together a planeload of movie stars and,
with Howard Hughes supplying the plane, they all went to
Washington. Among them: Danny Kaye, Sterling Hayden,
Richard Conte, Gene Kelly, Ira Gershwin. And my parents. “I
remember going to a meeting that John organized at William
Wyler’s house,” my mother recalls. “I told your father ‘we
have to go.’”

When it came time for testimony, the movie stars were
there for moral support. The ten, led by writer Dalton
Trumbo, told Thomas in so many words to shove his commit
tee where the sun don’t shine. They refused to answer ques
tions, citing their First Amendment right to freedom of
speech. But they did read statements. They wanted the Su
preme Court to rule on whether or not the committee had
the right to make a Communist identify himself as one.

Thomas banged his gavel and vowed to put them in jail for
contempt of Congress.

The press, which until then had been friendly, now turned against the ten and against the Committee for the
First Amendment. Soon the committee was being described
as a Communist front organization, and one columnist wrote,
“There is very good evidence that John Huston is the brains
of the Communist party in the west.”

After that Washington trip my father did some serious
backtracking. He felt as if he had gone out on a limb, and
had been assured that the Unfriendly Ten had been unjustly
maligned. Now, as it became clear that some of them were
Communists, Bogie was pissed because he felt as if he had
been used.