It was a few days after the funeral that I climbed that tree in
the backyard and started screaming at God. When May, the
cook, came out and heard me, she must have sensed that I
was about to become a major headache for my mother. For
several days in a row I sat in that tree and screamed for my
father and cried for hours on end.
The hours I spent in that tree, feeling the pain and frus
tration of losing my father, mark the end of my belief in a
personal God. My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father a lapsed Episcopalian. Neither of my parents had any strong be
lief in God, but, like many parents, they sent their children to
Sunday school, out of a vague sense that religion was a good thing for a kid. We were being raised Episcopalian rather than Jewish because my mother felt that would make life easier for
Leslie and me during those post–World War II years.
In any case, when I was eight years old I still believed in
the God that adults told me about. But I have always been a
very logical person, even then, and during the days when I
sat in that tree bawling my eyes out, the equation became very simple for me:
My father is dead. God wouldn’t let that happen. Therefore, there is no God.
In that tree I gave up a belief in
God, and nothing I have seen in the last thirty-seven years
has changed my mind on that point.
Though my mother didn’t know at the time about the
tree screaming, she had plenty of evidence that things were
not right with me.
One night just before Valentine’s Day, Mother, Leslie,
and I were eating supper in the dining room.
“I know how we can surprise Daddy,” I said.
“How is that?” my mother asked.
“We can all shoot ourselves, and then we can be with
him for Valentine’s Day.”
This comment, understandably, made my mother worry.
She began talking to doctors about me. They assured her
that my behavior was normal. They said it was natural for me
to be full of resentment because my father had died. They
said I was probably feeling that I had done something wrong
to make him leave.
Apparently, it was common for me to make announce
ments about my father at the dinner table. Adolph Green says, “I remember one night having dinner on Mapleton
Drive, shortly after your father died, and you looked up and
said, ‘There’s Daddy flying over the dining room table.’ You
were not hysterical, you just said it very calmly.”
At the Warner Avenue School, where all of my friends went, I was not so calm. I had been getting good grades. But
now, with the onset of the Bogie thing, I began working on
a one-way ticket out the door.
Looking back I realize that the main thing was that it in
furiated me that all my friends knew that my father was dead.
I hated the fact that they all had fathers and I didn’t, and
they all knew that I didn’t. They knew I was fatherless be
cause they had seen it on television, or their parents had read
it in the newspaper. People were not pointing at me in the corridors and laughing, but that’s how it felt. It was as if
everybody was in on some joke except me. I felt no sense
of privacy.
One day a kid said to me, “Too bad about your father,”
and I slugged him.
A few days later it happened again. “Sorry about your
dad.” Pow, right in the face.
For a while I was getting in fights every day with kids
who hadn’t done anything except mention my father.
In school it wasn’t only the fighting that got me into
trouble. I also had a habit of standing on my desk and
screaming. When the mood possessed me, I would suddenly
climb on top of my small wooden desk, wave my hands in the
air, and shriek hysterically. The kids just stared at me and the
teachers wrung their hands. Nobody knew quite what to
make of it except that, obviously, I was trying to get attention.
I don’t think I was screaming for my father as I had in the
tree, I was just screaming so that somebody would notice that
I was in pain.
The principal called my mother into his office. He was a
tall, carrot-haired man.
“There’s a problem with Stephen,” he said.
“A problem?”
“He seems very withdrawn most of the time.”
“That’s understandable,” my mother said.
“But he’s also getting in fights.”
“Fights?”
“He gave one boy a bloody nose. And he stands on his
desk, shrieking. Are there difficulties at home?”
“Well, of course there are difficulties at home,” my
mother said. “He’s lost his father.”
“Yes, and we are all very sympathetic,” Carrot Head said.
“But he’s become a disruption in class. If this continues, we’ll
have to ask you to take your son out of the school.”
A few days later I climbed onto my desk again and
screamed. They couldn’t handle me. Warner Avenue be
came the first school I was “asked to leave.” It would not be
the last.
So, still reeling from the blow of losing my father, I was
yanked out of Warner Avenue School, where all my friends
were. I had no idea what was going on. My marks were good,
so why was I being put into another school? I felt as if I were
being punished. I knew that all of this was, in some mysteri
ous way, linked up with my father’s death. Beginning in Sep
tember, 1958, I went to the Carl Curtis School. I remember
that they had a swimming pool.
Adding to my sense of loss during this period, we also moved
out of the Mapleton Drive house and away from everything I
had grown up with. It was partly thanks to Frank Sinatra. Sev
eral months after my father died my mother entered into a
rather volatile romance with Frank Sinatra, which I guess is
the only kind of romance Sinatra had. During my father’s illness, Frank, as devoted as a son to my father, had come over
to see Dad often, so it’s not as though Leslie and I were
suddenly being confronted with a new man in the house
when he and Mother started dating. We already knew Frank
as a guy who would come to the house a lot, and sometimes
play with us for a few minutes before going off to talk with
the grown-ups.
Back in 1957, if anyone had told my mother that her ro
mance with Sinatra was an attempt to forget Bogie, she would
have said that was absurd. But that is how she sees it now.
Frank was an anesthetic to the pain of losing Bogie.
Frank was good for my mother in many ways. She had al
ways been close to him as a friend, and after the long ordeal
of Bogie’s declining health in the last year, she needed to get
out and dance a bit. But Frank was a bit screwed up, and the romance brought with it a quantity of pain, as a number of
women have discovered over the years. My mother says
Sinatra was incredibly charming and handsome and talented, but also incredibly juvenile and insecure. One week Frank would be courting her like a prince, taking her to parties and premieres and concerts. And then suddenly he would go as
cold as stone on her. He would avoid calling. He would act as
if she did not exist. And when he finally did call again he’d
act as if nothing had happened. This is an aspect of Sinatra’s
personality which has exasperated people close to him for
years. It was especially trying for my mother because, as she
says, “I had been married to a grown-up.”
Everybody who cared about my mother, including
Frank’s friends, prayed that she would not marry him. The
opinion seemed to be universal that any woman who mar
ried Sinatra might as well take a knife and stab herself in
the heart.
After one of his cold and silent absences, Frank did ask
Bacall to marry him. Mom accepted. She was in heaven. She
would have a life again. Leslie and I would have Sinatra for
a father. All the pain would be gone.
The plans for the marriage were supposed to be kept se
cret for a while. But when Swifty Lazar spilled the beans to
Louella Parsons, the “Bacall-Sinatra marriage plans” hit the
papers. Frank went ballistic. He went into his iceman routine
and broke off the relationship, except he forgot to tell my
mother that he was breaking it off. All he did was ignore her
and humiliate her. There were times when he was actually in
the same room with my mother and acted as if he didn’t
know her. Though the passing of years has put my mother
in a forgiving mood, she doesn’t discuss their relationship
anymore.
It was during Mother’s romance with Sinatra that we
moved out of the Mapleton Drive house, and Sinatra was one
of the main reasons.
“I don’t think Frank was comfortable in that house,” my
mother says. “The ghost of your father was always there, and
I knew that Frank would feel better if I moved.”
So Mother, believing that she would never have a future
with Frank unless she moved, jettisoned her silver and much
of her furniture and sold the house in which my father had
died. We moved into a rented house on Bellagio Road in Bel
Air. The house belonged to William Powell, the actor.
By this time, then, I had lost my father, lost my school, and
lost my house. And through it all I was losing my friends.
Most of my friends had gone to Warner Avenue School, and when I was taken out of that school I was cut out of their
lives. I felt it happening gradually, I guess, but it all seemed
to come down on me one afternoon when I was at a birth
day party for Steve Cahn, who had been my closest friend
on Mapleton.
Steve’s father, Sammy, was one of the most famous lyri
cists of the time. Sammy had worked with composers like
Jules Styne and Jimmy Van Heusen, doing film work. He had
already won an Academy Award for the song “Three Coins in
the Fountain,” and it was around this time that he won an
other Academy Award for “All the Way,” which was from
Sinatra’s film
The Joker Is Wild.
He would eventually win two
more Academy Awards.
Anyhow, at that birthday party I felt incredibly out of
place. It was as if everybody else was a person and I was a goat or a donkey or something. This “outsider” feeling had
been growing in me ever since my father’s death. It had
started with the strange awareness that all my friends knew
about my father. And it had gotten worse after I was pulled
out of the Warner Avenue School. At the end of that birthday
party I stood in the hallway with no one to talk to, like some
unwanted vagrant who had wandered in. The kids were all
saying good-bye to each other, and talking about what they
would do tomorrow in school. Even though I was among all
my friends, I felt a terrible pang of loneliness. Now I went to
Curtis School and they still went to Warner and they lived to
gether in a world that I was no longer part of.
After we moved to Bellagio Road, of course, it got worse.
If the death of my father had not already broken my heart,
this surely did. I was devastated by the loss of my friends and
the gradual realization that their lives went on as usual.
This cycle of loss, which I’m sure was during the most
important formative time of my life, was completed in Janu
ary of 1959, just short of two years after Bogie’s death. My
mother had gone on a trip to London looking for a job, leaving Leslie and me in our nurse’s care. There she had wined
and dined with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and Rich
ard and Sybil Burton. She had also been offered work in a
film, which was to be shot throughout Europe. She had ac
cepted the job. As a result, we moved to London for six
months and, as it turned out, away from California forever.
Now I was down one father, one school, one house, dozens of
friends, and an entire state and country.
In London there were more photographers, first at the air
port and later at the school. By now I had developed an al
most pathological hatred of cameras and I would turn my
head any time I saw one, even if it was just hanging over the
neck of a tourist. I was enrolled in the American School in
London, one of the few schools, by the way, that I have not
been thrown out of. Apparently, I pretty much kept to myself.
But everywhere I went somebody knew me because of who
my father had been. I never perceived any jealousy from
other kids, but that’s what I was always afraid of. More than
anything, I just wanted to blend into the woodwork. I remem
ber at school that there was a girl who kept passing me a
piece of paper. She wanted my autograph because I was
Humphrey Bogart’s son. I didn’t want that kind of notice.
And there was a guy there, Jeff Eaton. I remember that he in
tercepted the paper every time, and signed his name to it
and sent it back to her. I remember Jeff fondly because he
knew how self-conscious I felt about being the Bogie boy, and
he deflected the attention away from me and on to him. And
he made me laugh, too.