Bogart (9 page)

“Adolph, I want you to meet my friends,” Bogie said.
“Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.”

Green was thrilled, and it was a moment he never forgot.
For the rest of his stay in England, Bogie checked on Green
from time to time to make sure that he was getting along
okay, and was not lonely.

“Your father was thoughtful that way,” Green told me.
“And it wasn’t just me. Your father was very kind to a lot of people, like Judy Garland. Judy was always getting herself in
trouble, she was a sick girl and spoiled in a way, and he would
always be nice to her, though sometimes he would lose his
temper with her.”

Nat Benchley tells a story about the first time Benchley’s
wife, Marjorie, came to Hollywood. It was around Christmas
of 1955. She was going to meet Bogart for the first time,
and she was scared to death, because of Dad’s reputation as
a needler.

“What do I do if he starts picking on me?” she asked
her husband.

“If he picks on you, pick right back,” Benchley told his wife. “Tell him you don’t take any crap from bald men. Tell
him to put on his wig and then you’ll talk.”

When Mrs. Benchley did meet my father it was at a party,
after which they decided they would all go on to Mapleton
Drive. Benchley had to return home first to pick up some
thing and my father insisted on driving Mrs. Benchley to our
house in his black Thunderbird.

Marjorie was, of course, a wreck. Would this lunatic in
sult her, would he smash up the car? She had heard terrible
things. Dad, of course, was charming beyond words. He told
her how happy he was that she had come, he told her that if
she needed help or advice, to call him immediately. The next
day he took her on his boat. He told her his philosophy of
life and talked to her about bringing up kids. By the end of
her stay, Marjorie Benchley was, says her husband, “more
than a little in love with him.”

The next time Benchley saw Bogie, after Marjorie had
gone back east, Benchley said, “I think I should report that my wife has a thing for you.”

Bogie got embarrassed. “Tell her I’m really a shit,”
he mumbled. “Tell her I was nice only because she’s new
out here.”

Janet Leigh is another woman who was afraid to meet
Bogie, even though she was already well on her way to star
dom when she did.

“We were guests at one of Rocky and Gary Cooper’s din
ner parties, a star-studded evening,” she says. “I felt we were
in the company of royalty. Actually, we were—Hollywood roy
alty. In that context we met a king, Humphrey Bogart. Rumor
had it that Bogart took delight in verbally attacking a vulner
able victim with the zest of a witch doctor sticking pins in the
proverbial doll. I had no desire to be the recipient, so I kept
my distance.”

After supper, Leigh was standing in a group that had
gathered around the piano. Bogie walked in and stood next
to her. Feeling intimidated, but fascinated at the same time,
Leigh kept silent. When she was certain that Bogie was not
looking, she stole a glance at the legend. She saw that Bogie
wore, of all things, a little gold earring. I have no idea why
my father was wearing an earring, except maybe to create
controversy. An earring on a man was rare in those days, so Leigh tried to look at it, without actually staring. She was
mesmerized. Suddenly Bogie turned and caught her looking at him.

“Oh,” he said, “admiring my earring?”

“Well…yes, I guess.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Bogie said. “I’m all man, sweet
heart. Who are you?”

Leigh was too flabbergasted to reply. She stuttered.

“What’s the matter with you?” Bogie said. “You afraid of
me? I won’t bite you.”

Leigh says, “And he didn’t, perceptively realizing that I
was no opponent.”

The stories I like best about my father are those that
show me he was not on a star trip. My mother, I think, some
times takes her celebrity status seriously, and actually believes
that she deserves to be treated better than waiters and barbers. But my father, it seems, had no such pretensions. It’s
true, he did divide the world into phonies and non-phonies,
but never on the basis of how much money they made or
what they did for a living.

Dominick Dunne, for example, is now one of our lead
ing novelists and journalists, but he knew Bogie at a time
when Dunne was an unknown and Bogie was one of the big
gest movie stars in the world.

He says, “Bogie was extremely kind to me. It was 1955
when he and Lauren Bacall were doing
The Petrified Forest
on
television. This was part of a series called
Producers Showcase.
It was a big deal, an hour and a half of live TV. I was working
for NBC as a stage manager. The show was to be televised
from Burbank and I was sent out to California. We rehearsed
for three weeks, and performed it once. During this time
Bogart took a great interest in me and was incredibly nice to
me. I had a similar background to his, having gone to prep
school. I think he got a big kick out of that.

“I had lunch with him one day and I told him how much
I loved movie stars. So he invited me to a party at the
Mapleton Drive house one Saturday night. At that party Mr. Bogart introduced me to Judy Garland and Lana Turner, who
lived nearby, and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy
were there. Everybody was there. I can hardly convey what
heady stuff this was to a starstruck young man in his twenties,
as I was. I think Bogart really got off on how thrilled I was to
be there meeting these people.

“Perhaps I didn’t realize it at the time. But since then I
lived for twenty-five years in Hollywood and I understand
now that Hollywood has a pecking order and a caste system
as much as India, and I realize it was incredible for me, the
stage manager, to be at that party. For me to be invited was
really quite something. That was a great kindness your father
did me.

“I have always been a very shy person, but after I went
back to New York, I sometimes called Mr. Bogart up just
to say hello. And he was so gracious. This man was a
major fucking star and yet he was always so goddamn nice to me.”

* * *

My mother walks around the first floor of the house on Mapleton, telling me where pieces of furniture were. But I stare out a window at the trees in the yard and I remember something else:

It is a few days after my father’s funeral. I am alone in the yard looking at the tree where Diane Linkletter and I often play Swiss Family Robinson. I go up into the tree alone. I am a skinny boy, all arms and legs, but now my limbs feel as heavy as the limbs on the tree. I reach my favorite branch. And there, as lost as I have ever been, I scream at God. “Why did my father have to die?” I scream. “Why did you give him cancer? Why did you kill him? Why did you do this to me?” I am hysterical. My heart is broken.

I scream until my throat hurts. Then I sob.

“Stephen,” I hear.

It is May, the big black woman who is our cook, and part of our family.

“Stephen, what are you doing up there?” she asks. I stare down at her. I don’t answer.

“Stephen,” she says softly.

I understand that she is trying to make me feel better. I know that she is sad, too, because she knew my father for a long time. We stare at each other. She is crying, too.

Finally, she says, “You be careful coming down, Stephen.” She walks back to the house, shaking her head.

* * *

3

I’ve lived with celebrities and with stars, great people, great direc
tors, and I can tell you that the children always have to suffer. You
just cannot live up to the reputation of a parent who becomes
successful. To have to follow in those footsteps is a very
big handicap.

—SAM JAFFE

The heaviest thing I have ever had to carry is my fa
ther’s fame.

Bogie’s reputation has often made normal conversation difficult. It has brought me attention that I didn’t want. And often it has deprived me of attention that I did want. It has
made me sometimes distrustful of friendly people. It has, I
am the first to admit, placed that big chip on my shoulder. It
is a subject that, until now, I haven’t wanted to talk about.
I am not the sole owner of this problem. I have talked to
the sons and daughters of many celebrities, and always it is
the same. The fame of the celebrity exerts some strange grav
itational pull on the children, and makes it difficult for them
to simply break free.

Perhaps if I had been the son of some famous actor who
fell from fame when the lights went out, it might not have
been so bad. But I had the luck to be fathered by a man who became even more famous after he died. Humphrey Bogart,
whether I like it or not, is our most enduring Hollywood legend. In 1993,
Entertainment Weekly
crowned Bogie the
number-one movie legend of all time. (Number two, by the
way, was his friend Katharine Hepburn.)

So Bogie is very big stuff. And, as a consequence, I have
gone through life accompanied by what I call “The Bogie
Thing.” This is the big, red-lettered label that hangs from me.
It doesn’t say “Steve.” It says, HUMPHREY BOGART’S SON.

“Jack, I want you to meet my friend, Steve Bogart. He’s
Humphrey Bogart’s son.”

“No kidding? You’re really Bogie’s boy?”

“Yes.”

“God, I loved your father.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah, my first date with my wife was when we went to see
Sabrina.
Bogie! Now there was a man’s man. God, this
is so weird! Just the other night we rented
The Maltese Falcon.
That’s the one where he plays Sam Spade.”

“Right.”

“It’s really nice to meet you. Hey, this could be the start
of a beautiful friendship. Get it, huh, a beautiful friendship?”

“I get it.”

“
Casablanca
!
What a great movie.”

I have had this conversation, or some version of it, more
than a million times. At least it seems that way. This, of
course, pisses me off.

I deal with these encounters in many ways. Usually I
am polite and patient. I know that people don’t mean to
rob me of my identity. Besides, they are just meeting Bogart’s
son
once.
They’re excited to have some connection to the
screen legend. They’re not thinking about the fact that every
day I have to listen to strangers tell me what a great guy my
dad was.

There are other times when I amuse myself to keep
from getting angry. For example, one time a guy said to me,
“Are you Humphrey Bogart’s son? I heard he had a son
named Steve.”

“He did,” I said.

“And you’re him?”

“No,” I said. “My parents named me after Humphrey
Bogart’s son.”

And many times I simply deny it.

“Are you Humphrey Bogart’s son?”

“No, but a lot of people ask me that.”

Often, when I worked as a producer at ESPN and later
at NBC and Court TV, I would see one of my coworkers giv
ing some people a tour of the studio. At some point the tour
guide would point to me. Then I would see the visitors smile
and they would gaze at me for a little too long.
He told them,
I would think. It always made me angry and uncomfortable.

But let’s get real for a minute. There are crack-addicted babies being born every day, while I was born in the afflu
ence and safety of Beverly Hills. There are children being
beaten, while I spent my early childhood with two parents who loved me. And there are cancer wards filled with kids
who will never get to be teenagers, while my greatest health
problems as a kid were a hernia operation at age three, and
a gashed chin from a bicycling mishap. So, yes, I gripe about my problems like everybody else, but I try to keep some per
spective. Carrying the burden of being Humphrey Bogart’s
son is not actually the worst thing that can happen to a person, and the only reason we are talking about it at all is that
the public remains fascinated by anything to do with
Humphrey Bogart.