We were in New York because Mother had been offered
a leading role in
Good-bye Charlie,
a Broadway play about
a gangster who dies and comes back to earth as a woman.
Mom was determined to have a career and not spend the rest
of her life being described in newspaper articles as “Bo
gie’s widow.”
Good-bye Charlie
was written and directed by my parents’
friend George Axelrod. The actors, including my mother, got
great reviews, but the play was panned by the critics. After
only three months on Broadway it was good-bye to
Good-bye Charlie.
The story did, however, resurface in 1964 as a pretty
pathetic excuse for a movie, starring Tony Curtis and Debbie
Reynolds. Still,
Good-bye Charlie
was a shot of adrenaline for
my mother’s career, and she continued to get work on Broad
way and in Hollywood.
On our first New Year’s Eve in New York, Mother met Jason
Robards, Jr. Jason was then, and still is, one of our best stage
and screen actors. He is an enormous talent, regarded by a
lot of people as the finest interpreter of the works of Eugene
O’Neill. Now, we know, Jason has appeared in something like
a million movies. But at the time his star was just rising. He
had recently won the New York Drama Critics Award for
Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
If there’s one thing that turns my
mother on it is excellence, and Jason was a brilliant actor.
She fell for him quickly, and he fell for her. Unfortunately, he
was an alcoholic.
My mother says that when Jason was sober, he was
charming, thoughtful, kind, and gentle. When Jason was
slightly drunk, he was still charming, though less thoughtful
and kind, which he made up for by being eloquent, often reciting poetry or soliloquies in Greenwich Village bars. But
when Jason was very drunk he was not charming, thoughtful,
kind, or gentle. And Jason drank a lot.
So Mother married him.
Like a zillion women before her, Mother deluded herself
that she could change a man by marrying him. This heavy drinking thing, she thought, was just a stage Jason was going
through because of his recent divorce. This was a problem
that would vanish after they were married. Yes, yes, the love
of a good woman would cure him. Right. What Mother
should have done was listen to Spencer Tracy, who said to
her, “Betty, get it through your head. No alcoholic ever
changes because somebody asks him to.” Or her good friend,
Adlai Stevenson, who told her, “It’s not going to get better af
ter you are married, it’s going to get worse.”
There are those who say that Jason Robards looks a lot
like my father. By those I mean just about everybody who has
eyes, except Lauren Bacall. Mom has never seen the resem
blance, but I think it is quite striking. What it all means, if anything, is something a psychologist would have to figure
out. But whether he looked like Bogie or not, Jason had to wrestle with the ghost of Humphrey Bogart. When word got
to the press that Jason and Mother were a serious item, there
were dozens of stories to the effect:
can he fill Bogie’s shoes?
It’s
unfortunate for anyone to have to suffer those comparisons,
but particularly unjust for Jason, who is such a towering tal
ent in his own right.
By the time they got married in July, 1961, we had moved
out of the rented apartment and into a fourteen-room apart
ment at the Dakota. The Dakota is a famous old building
on Central Park West. You might remember it as the set
ting of
Rosemary’s Baby,
where Mia Farrow’s husband gets in
volved with a witch’s coven right there in the building. The Dakota is also the place where, in real life, John Lennon was
shot dead by Mark David Chapman. Of course, when we moved into the building the Beatles were just unknown
teenagers in Liverpool, but years later on visits to my moth
er, I would see John Lennon walking in and out of the build
ing,
often standing on the very spot where he would be murdered.
The huge apartment at the Dakota allowed for a large
family, which we suddenly had. That was the best thing about
Mother’s marriage to Jason. Jason had three kids by a previ
ous marriage: Sarah, Jady, and David. Jady was my age. Sarah
was around Leslie’s age. And David became the baby of this
extended family. Though the three Robards kids lived with
their mother, we spent a lot of time together, and there was
a period of about a year when Jady and Sarah lived with us at
the Dakota. So we had our own Brady Bunch. Or maybe I
should say
Eight Is Enough,
because within a year of the wed
ding my half-brother, Sam Robards, was born. Sam is now a
successful movie actor. (If Sam seems a small part of this
book it is only because there is a fourteen-year difference in
our ages, and I was away from home through most of Sam’s
childhood. Sam, like me, had to live through the experience
of having two famous parents. It took a lot of guts for him to
become an actor, considering who his parents are, and the in
evitable comparisons that would be made with his father. But
he turned into quite a good actor. Sam and I remain very
close. I love him, and I love his son, Jasper, my first nephew.)
On the whole, though, the Bacall-Robards marriage was
lousy. My mother had fallen in love with an alcoholic, and
after she married him, Jason continued to drink heavily,
just as everybody in the universe, except my mother, knew
he would.
Leslie and I, in the innocence of youth, didn’t realize at
the time how bad it really was. Sure, Jason sometimes came in
late and slept all day, but Mother explained that that was be
cause he worked late nights on Broadway. Sure, he seemed to
be away a lot, but then, so was Mother when she was making a movie. Actually I liked Jason a lot, and he liked me. Jason
and I got along great. I think that was because Jason was re
ally a kid at heart. He didn’t try to be a replacement father.
He was more of a big brother who liked to goof off, not un
like the character he played in
A Thousand Clowns,
where he
was kind of a social dropout who lived with his nephew.
Jason had been a top athlete at Hollywood High School,
a swimmer and track man. He loved sports. After he married
my mother, that was something he shared with me. He used
to take me to the Sheeps Meadow in Central Park and pitch
baseballs to me, and he would hit high flies so that I could
practice my fielding. When we spent a summer in California,
Jason taught me to bodysurf. I will always treasure these times
with Jason because they were such traditional father-son
things, and I never had a chance to do them with my father.
Many of the things Jason did with me were things I later did
with my sons.
Jason sometimes took Jady and me to New York Mets
games during their first season, when the Mets were known as the team that couldn’t throw straight. Their most famous
player then was Marvelous Marv Throneberry known for his
ineptitude at third base.
Like my father, Jason was more of a man’s man than a la
dies’ man, and he liked to stay up all night, hanging out with
the guys.
I remember one particular night at the Dakota, Jason
coming into my room and shaking me.
“Stevie, you awake?”
I hadn’t been, but I was now, with a slightly tipsy Jason
Robards poking at me.
“What? What’s up?”
“Nothing, pal,” he said. “Just me and the guys having a
few drinks and shooting the shit in the living room.”
“So?”
“So, why don’t you come in and join us.”
I didn’t really want to. I was half asleep. But Jason was in
sistent. So I got up and went into the living room where Ja
son was entertaining Peter O’Toole and a few other guys. We
stayed up most of the night, the guys telling off-color jokes and getting loaded while I drank Cokes. It was a great, rau
cous night and I’ll always remember that Jason made me feel
like one of the boys.
So, now that I think about it, it seems that it was my
mother’s fate to be surrounded by bad boys. First there was
Bogart. Then Jason. Then me.
Though I never participated in drive-by shootings or dealt
crack in alleys, I did get into mischief often during the next
ten years, and I think a lot of it had to do with anger over my
father’s death, and the continuing issue of his fame. Perhaps
I inherited a mischief gene from my father, because it turns
out he also was a handful at a young age.
When Bogie was thirteen he went to a private school in
New York. It was the Trinity School, an old Episcopalian insti
tute for young gentlemen. It was on 91st Street near Amster
dam Avenue in Manhattan.
Trinity was like a European school, with a lot of emphasis on Latin and other languages that never come
up in real life unless you’re a priest, and I think my father
knew he would never need them. Trinity also made a big
deal about memorization, which my father despised,
though perhaps it was a discipline that he would later apply to movie scripts. He said, “At Trinity I wasn’t taught right. They made you learn dates and that was all. They
would tell you a war was fought in 1812. So what? They
never told you why people decided to kill each other at just
that moment.”
The young Bogart boy at Trinity wore a blue serge suit,
white vest, white shirts, and maybe a brass buttoned Chester
field for good measure. My father was the properly dressed
boy, all right, but he also wore a hat to school every day, ap
parently just to get attention. He did not fit in well, mostly because immediately after school every day he had to rush
home to work as a model for his mother, the artist.
At Trinity he was called into the headmaster’s office to
be reprimanded on a regular basis. He describes one of his conversations with the headmaster this way:
“Herr Luther has reported you again,” the
headmaster said.
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“He complains that you started a riot in class
this morning, and he’s given you a failure in
German.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like German,” I said.
“Nor Herr Luther?”
“No, sir.”
“Since you don’t like German and you don’t
like English or history or economics, will you tell me
if there is anything that you do like, Master Bogart.”
“I like math, sir. Algebra.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s nothing theoretical about it.
It’s simply fact. You can do a problem and get your
answer and then you prove the answer’s right.”
“But these riots. This endless flouting of au
thority. Why do you do these things?”
I don’t know what my father told the headmaster that day.
But this flouting of authority was a Bogart trademark
throughout his life.
“I always liked stirring things up, needling authority,” he
said. “Even in my childhood it gave me pleasure. I guess I in
herited it from my parents. They needled everyone including
each other.”
He inherited it from his parents, and maybe I inherited
it from him. Like my father, I went to a private school in New
York. I went to Buckley, a very exclusive school, where I was
probably the only child of movie stars, but I was also probably from the poorest family. It seemed as if most of the kids were
the sons of multimillionaire industrialists and bankers.
I got into a lot of mischief at Buckley, but somehow I got
through it and went on to prep school in Massachusetts, which is the same thing my father had done.
Bogie had to repeat his third year at Trinity because
of a bout with scarlet fever, but after that he went to Phil
lips Academy in Andover, where his father had gone to
prep school.