Bogart (34 page)

Mom writes, “My knees shook so, I was sure I’d fall down
the stairs. Bogie standing there looking so vulnerable and so
handsome—like a juvenile. Mother as nervous as I, trying to
keep her eyes from spilling over, a smile on that sweet face.
My knees were knocking together, my cheek was twitching—
would any sound come out when I had to say ‘I do’? We
turned the corner. When I reached Bogie he took my hand—
the enormous beautiful white orchids I was holding were
shaking themselves to pieces; as I stood there, there wasn’t a
particle of me that wasn’t moving visibly. The judge was
speaking—addressing me—and I heard a voice I’d never
heard before say those two simple words of total commit
ment. Bogie slipped the ring on my finger—it jammed before
it reached the knuckle, the trembling didn’t help, and then
it finally reached its destination. As I glanced at Bogie, I saw
tears streaming down his face—his ‘I do’ was strong and
clear, though. As Judge Shettler said, ‘I now pronounce you
man and wife,’ Bogie and I turned toward each other—he
leaned to kiss me—I shyly turned my cheek—all those eyes watching made me very self-conscious. He said, ‘Hello, Baby.’
I hugged him and was reported to have said, ‘Oh, goody.’
Hard to believe, but maybe I did.”

The days that followed were no less romantic than the
days that preceded. Mother, who was no cook, vowed to learn
all the requisite skills of a housewife in those days, even
though Bogie, set in his ways, planned to keep his cook, May,
and his gardener, Aurelio.

They lived first at the Garden of Allah, the friendly cluster of bungalows where Bogie had many friends and drinking
companions. “It was a great place to be a bachelor,” my mother says. But Bogie was not a bachelor, and already
Mother was looking forward to the day when they would live in a house suitable for raising children. Still, the social life at the Garden of Allah was exciting. Bogie’s friends there were
fascinating people with keen minds and sharp tongues, most
of them writers, all of them drinkers.

Bogie wasted no time getting Mom into the sailing fra
ternity, or tried to. He introduced her to his Newport Beach
boat friends, all of whom were in businesses other than show
business, and most of whom thought actors were strange,
save for their friend Bogie.

“Your father took me to Catalina on his boat when we
were first married,” Mother says. “This was before he bought
Santana
from Dick Powell. He was so excited. It was impor
tant to him that I love the sea as much as he did. He showed
me how to steer the boat and I made lunch in the galley.
When the boat started to sway I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to be sick. I felt nauseous. I wanted to hide this from your
father more than anything because I knew what sailing meant
to him. After a while I felt better and we ate lunch, which was
a mistake. Again I felt nauseous. Finally, your father caught
on and he told me to stare at the horizon, that would settle
me down. It seemed to work. We went to Catalina many times
after that and I loved the island, but I never really cared for
the getting to it.”

The relationship that developed during the early days of
my parents’ marriage has often been compared to that of
Nick and Nora Charles in the
Thin Man
movies. It was lively,
it was romantic, it was witty and loving. It was a verbal tennis
match in which Bogie usually won the point but Bacall some
how ended up winning the set.

He said things like: “I should have remained a bachelor.
I never learn. You think it’s going to be all right, that you’ve
learned all the tricks. You’ve learned that you must put away
that bath towel and not leave bristles in the basin after you’ve
shaved. And then the next time it’s something different. You
have a cupboard for drinks and you want the glasses ar
ranged so you can get at them, and you find your wife likes
them fixed in neat pyramids, and you’re wrong again.”

She said things like: “Bogie does nothing around the
house, but nothing. He is not a house man. He wants every
thing to be just so, but he doesn’t build barbecues or stone
walls and he has no recipes for spaghetti.” During the four
years of their marriage before I was born, Mom was certainly free to pursue her career. Dad had decided that he
would not interfere, but he also would make no heroic ef
forts to help. That is, he would not insist that Bacall be
used in any of his films. To Mother, however, it seemed that
people forgot she was an actress. They saw her now as Mrs.
Humphrey Bogart.

Critically, she went through the wringer. After
To Have
and Have Not
came out, my mother was the hottest thing going. The critics compared her favorably to every big name ac
tress of the day. They predicted great things for her. Next she
appeared in
Confidential Agent
ridiculously miscast in the role
of an Englishwoman, and the critics savaged her. They had been wrong, they said. Bacall, they said, had no future. But when
The Big Sleep
came out they announced that they had
been right all along, that Bacall was a great emerging talent
with a huge future. She must have had her own big sleep
through
Confidential Agent
they said, cleverly, when in fact
Mom had actually made
The Big Sleep
with Dad first.

It was after Bogie and Bacall made their third movie to
gether,
Dark Passage,
that Mother talked Dad into buying the
house in Benedict Canyon, where I would be conceived. Benedict Canyon was not developed yet, and this was a real farm
house which was owned by the actress Hedy Lamarr. It had
eight rooms all on one floor, a pool, and a yard for ducks
and chickens.

Along with the feathered pets at Benedict Canyon, my
parents had a few four-legged ones. Louis Bromfield had
given them a boxer as a wedding present. Bogie named the
dog Harvey, after the invisible rabbit in the James Stewart
movie of the same name because, Bogie said, “Harvey’s the
invisible hound. He’s never around when you want him.”
Later my parents got a mate for Harvey and called her Baby.
(In fact, Harvey had been one of Dad’s pet names for my
mother when they first started seeing each other and she was
supposed to be “invisible.”) When Harvey and Baby had
pups, they kept one and named him George.

Oscar Levant said that whenever he visited my parents at
the Benedict Canyon house the biggest hazard, aside from
my father, was the two large boxer dogs. He says the dogs
would snooze all through the evening in the middle of the
living room and everybody had to talk loud because the dogs
would snore. However, the dogs apparently had another
habit more troubling than snoring, because Levant recalls ev
eryone lighting wooden matches to get rid of the smell.

My father was devoted to the dogs. Benedict Canyon was
still very rural then, and one night he found that Baby had
been bitten by a rattlesnake. He stomped the snake to death,
then took Baby to the hospital. When he came back he found that Harvey was being harassed by a wildcat, which Bogie
chased off with a rifle. The paper heard about the incidents
and portrayed Dad as a hero, standing up for his pets.

I was just a baby at Benedict Canyon, so my memories of
the dogs don’t show up until after we moved to Mapleton
Drive. One incident gives you an idea of what a dog lover
Bogie was.

The dogs often barked late at night and after a while a
few neighbors, including Art Linkletter, signed a petition to
have the dogs muzzled.

When my father was told about one of the men who complained about the dogs barking, he said, “The son of a
bitch doesn’t like dogs? What kind of monster is he? He
ought to be glad he can hear the wonderful sound of
dogs barking.”

Some time later, after this dog thing had blown over, the
same man was circulating a harmless petition concerning
changes he wanted to make on his property. Dad was talking
on the phone with Sammy Cahn, who just happened to men
tion that he had signed the man’s petition.

“What?” Bogie said. “You signed it?”

“Sure,” Sammy said. “What do I care?”

“How could you sign anything for that goddamned dog-hater?” Bogie asked.

After Bogie hung up he mulled it over for a long time.
He couldn’t stand the thought of his friends helping a man
who had criticized his dogs. Finally, he called back.

“Sammy,” he said. “That petition for the dog-hater. Did
anybody actually see you sign it?”

“Well, no,” Cahn told him.

“Then it’s not legal,” Dad said, and he hung up.

The same year that Bogie bought the house in Benedict Canyon for his true love, he also bought his other true love,
the
Santana.

“The boat was owned by Dick Powell and June Allyson,”
Mom says, “but Dick was having sinus trouble and he had to
stay in dry climates. So he had to sell the boat, which was ag
ony for him, because he was in love with the sea as much as your father was. So we went sailing with Dick and June. Bo
gie, of course, fell madly in love with the
Santana.
After he
bought that boat Bogie had everything he had ever wanted.”

So it seems that from the moment he met Bacall my fa
ther’s life was just one headlong rush to pure happiness, with no bumps along the way, save for splitting from Mayo. And
maybe that’s how it was.

But, as with so much of my father’s life, there is another
version of the story.

Vera Thompson, a hairdresser and toupee expert, says
that she had an affair with my father that began when he was
still married to Mayo Methot, and continued long after he
married my mother.

Vera says she met Bogie at a wrap party and later that
night they went out dancing and drinking. Bogie, she says,
called her the next day for lunch.

“Then,” she says, “he surprised me. He said, ‘I’ll go back
over to the set and see if they’re going to need me. I’ll play
sick or something and meet you at your place in about an
hour. Is that okay with you?’”

Vera was surprised, not just because Bogie was married
to Mayo at the time, but because Vera, herself, also was mar
ried. She said yes.

She says that the affair ended when Bogie got involved
with my mother, but that three months after his marriage
to Bacall, they resumed their affair. She signed on as his hairstylist she says, and they began meeting secretly at her house, on his boat, and at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She says that she thought my parents would get divorced, at least up until the time I was born, and then she gave up hope of that.
In 1982 she put all of this stuff in a book called
Bogie and Me.

Is any of this true? Is all of it true? I don’t know, and I really don’t spend much time worrying about it. However, it
seems to me that my father was probably a lot hornier than
he is generally given credit for. I don’t think that my father
fooled with other women after he married my mother. It’s
not, of course, that Dad was a saint. But it seems to me that
he liked too many other things for him to take the time and energy to be sneaking around with another woman. He was,
as I’ve said, a man’s man—a drinker and sailor and poker
player—not a lover. Also, he was one of the greatest stars of
his day and I don’t think Thompson would be his first choice
out of all the ladies who would have been available to him if
he had been interested in a dalliance. But, unfortunately, we
live in a time when a lot of people are “remembering” that
they had an affair with some celebrity who is dead and can’t deny it.

On the other hand, I can’t say for certain that it nev
er happened.

I have learned that there was an impenetrable part of my
father, that he did not reveal every part of himself to any
body, including Bacall. We tend to paint legends in absolutes:
“Bogie always told the truth.” “Bogie had an unshakeable moral code.” And so forth. But legends start out as human
beings, and human beings are never consistent.
Nobody
always
tells the truth.