“You will go on to Yale,” his mother Maud told him.
It was a hope that my mother would later have for me.
Both mothers were to be disappointed.
It was 1917 when Dad went into Phillips.
“Studying will be encouraged and hijinx will not be tol
erated,” he was told on his first day. So right away he didn’t
care for it. One classmate says, “The thing I remembered was
his sullenness. I got the impression that he was a very spoiled
boy. When things didn’t go his way he didn’t like it a bit.”
“People in authority are so damn smug,” Bogie said. “I
can’t show reverence when I don’t feel it. So I was always test
ing my instructors to see if they were as bright or godlike as
they seemed to be.”
By Christmas of that year my father was flunking most of
his courses, and he was thinking of burning his report card or maybe burying it under the campus green. But no, he
brought it home, and when he did show it to Maud and
Belmont, his folks told him to bring his marks up or he
would be yanked out of school and put to work. His marks
did not improve, however, and Humphrey’s father, in a last
ditch effort to keep the boy enrolled wrote to the headmas
ter, saying that Humphrey was basically a good kid who had
just “lost the way.”
Doctor Bogart wrote, “The whole problem seems to be that the boy has given up his mind to sports and continuous
correspondence with his girl friends.” This, I can relate to
with ease. When I was that age I was also obsessed with sports
and girls.
Bogie’s father went on to say that, “the harder the screws
are put on, the better it will be for my son.”
This, I guess, was tough love for the times, but the fact
is that tighter screws did not do the trick. On May 15, 1918,
Dad was, in the politest possible language, thrown out of
Phillips with a promise from the headmaster that he would
probably “profit from this unfortunate occurrence.”
Years later my father put his own spin on the dismissal.
He attributed it to “high spirits” and “infractions of the
rules.” My father, apparently, would rather be thought of as a
discipline case than an academic failure, and he bragged
about a couple of pranks which probably never occurred. No
discipline problems showed up on his report card, but fail
ures in Chemistry, English, French, Geometry, the Bible, and
even Algebra did.
Discipline problems did, however, show up on my report
cards years later when I also went to a Massachusetts prep
school. My school was Milton Academy in the town of Milton.
I remember when I got suspended from Milton. They put me
on a train back to New York. As the train rumbled through
Connecticut and into New York, I rehearsed in my mind what I would say to my mother, how I would explain the terrible
mistake that had been made by Milton. When I got home to
the Dakota I went up to the door leading to the kitchen, as
I always did. We have always been a kitchen family. Mother
was in another part of the apartment, so for a long time I
stood alone outside the apartment like a wounded pup, brac
ing myself for the terrible tongue-lashing I would get from
my mother. I tried to work myself into a state of hysteria
that would bring on a good crying jag so that I would get
some sympathy.
Now, a digression about my famous mother, Betty Bacall.
Don’t call her Lauren and don’t call her Baby. She’s Betty to
her friends, and Ms. Bacall to everybody else.
My mother is a woman who has dedicated her life to ex
cellence. She adores excellence in art, in music, in every
thing. Unfortunately, Mom is a perfectionist. Which means
she not only adores excellence, she expects it. And she expects it in people. So if you are one of my mother’s children and you do something great, get A’s on your report card, win
a trophy, marry well, whatever, don’t plan on getting congrat
ulated or patted on the back. It is merely expected of you.
Having said this, I’m now going to tell you that I caught
holy hell when my mother opened the back door and I had
to tell her I had been suspended from Milton Academy,
right? Wrong. I understand my mother better now than I did
then, and I should have known she would not bawl me out.
When I told her what happened, she just held me in her
arms. “It’s all right, Stephen, it’s all right.”
My mother has always been a good mother, always loved
us and worried about us. She has always put her children
first. Though she might not have always shown the love,
Leslie and I always knew it was there. This time she certain
ly showed it. It is when the chips are down that my mother
is at her best. When the chips are down she is always there.
Unfortunately, it takes the chips being down for her to get
to that point. She is not a fair-weather friend; she is a foul-
weather friend.
So when things were bad for me, my mother was a hell
of a lot more supportive than Bogie’s mother was of him, and
maybe that’s why I eventually graduated from Milton, while
he flunked out of Phillips. Bogie’s mother tended to harass
him for being a failure, which is why, after he was thrown out
of Phillips, my father joined the navy.
The First World War was on, and Dad was assigned as the
helmsman on the
Leviathan,
a troop transport ship which had
once been a German passenger liner. My father’s irreverence
for authority figures continued, and it wasn’t long before his
low opinion of people in high places got him in hot water. An
officer gave Bogie an order and he told the officer, “That’s
not my detail.” As the story goes, the officer slugged my fa
ther, and Bogie never made that particular mistake again.
However, there were other incidents.
“One time he took an unauthorized leave,” says Phil
Gersh, who worked with Sam Jaffe, “so they posted him as a
deserter. He got ten days in the brig. Bogie didn’t care for the sentence so he gave his captain some lip about it, and
they made it twenty days. He gave them more lip and they
made it thirty days.”
Dad also liked to shoot craps on the ship and on at least
one occasion he lost his entire month’s pay before reaching
Paris and the French girls that he had so eagerly looked
forward to.
Shortly after the armistice was signed my father pulled
his final navy prank. His captain ordered him to make out
the discharge papers for two hundred of the most deserving
men. Dr. James Mitchell, who served with my father, and was later a physician for MGM, says, “Humphrey went below and
made out his own discharge first. He was about to go over
the side with seabag and hammock in hand when the captain
spied him and asked where he was going. Humphrey an
swered that he had orders to discharge the most deserving
men first, and he thought he was the most deserving man
aboard ship. The captain insisted he go below and finish out
his service time.”
While my father was not exactly a model of navy excel
lence, he did look great in uniform. In photos from those
days he looks handsome and dashing, a regular navy poster
boy. And he finally did get his honorable discharge.
I often wonder about my father’s life in the military. On the one hand, he was a patriot and I am sure he would have died
for his country if it came to that. But he was an iconoclast, too, forever thumbing his nose at institutions like the mili
tary. He was perhaps amused by the very idea of himself in
uniform. And I wonder, too, about the difference between
two men, one who serves in the military and one who
doesn’t. Did the navy instill my father with a discipline that I never had? Did the navy “make a man out of him,” as we are
so often told that service does? If he had not served, would
he still have had the work ethic that later characterized
his career?
The questions I ask about my father are often disguised
versions of questions I am asking about myself, and often I
wonder how my life might be different if I had served in
the military, if I had gone to war instead of getting a
draft deferment.
After I left Milton in 1967, when I was about the age that
Dad entered the navy, I went to the University of Pennsylva
nia in Philadelphia for a year and got into more mischief.
That year in Philadelphia was my year as a lowlife. My mother
was paying for college, so my normal living expenses were
taken care of. But I had a steady girlfriend by this time, and
the $100 a month that my mother sent didn’t seem to go far enough. So I got a job at a record store, and did something
that bothers me to this day. Something I’m not proud of. I
gave away hundreds of record albums so that people would
like me. My new friends would come in and say, “Hey Steve,
can I take some records?” and I’d say, “Sure, help yourself.”
It got ridiculous. One time a guy I hardly even knew came in,
and he must have walked off with twenty record albums. This
was my way of making friends. My class at Milton had sixty-
three boys, and when I got to this big school in Philly it was
like being dropped off in the center of a huge city where I
knew no one. I didn’t really know how to make friends, ex
cept by giving them stuff. All I had to do was give them re
cords that weren’t mine. I think in some weird way it was
part of the Bogie thing, a way of being popular for who I
was. In Philadelphia, people didn’t like me because I was Humphrey Bogart’s son—they liked me because I would let
them steal albums out of the record shop. At the time, crazy
as it seems now, anything was better than being liked because
of my father.
During this whole period I lost contact with my mother.
It was the breakaway scenario, a time of rebellion, of trying to
be anonymous. I never called home. Most of the time my
mother didn’t really know where I was. During that year I did
a lot of things I’m ashamed of. For example, I stole money
from my friend Jon Avnet, who was one of the people I
moved in with after I got kicked out of my dormitory. When
Avnet found I had robbed him of sixty bucks he came to me and said, “Why didn’t you just ask?” I didn’t have an answer.
That’s when
he stopped being my friend. Today Jon is a very successful
Hollywood producer and director, with films like
Fried Green Tomatoes
and
Risky Business
to his credit. Maybe by now he has
forgotten what I did, but I never have. Sorry, Jon.
For a while I was deep into fraternity life. I was in a fra
ternity of real jocks, guys like Chuck Mercene who would
later play for the New York Giants, and Timmy Cutter, a bril
liant hockey player. This was the period of time when I
started smoking grass. I didn’t really drink.
I’ve never really been much of a drinker.
When I got back from Christmas break that year, I returned to the record store and the woman who was the assis
tant manager said, “Steve, we did inventory.”
“And?”
“Ronnie’s looking for you,” she said. Ronnie was
the boss.
When Ronnie found me he said, “Steve, there are a few
albums missing.”
I hadn’t stolen them for money. I had given them to friends because I wanted so much to have friends and I felt I had to kind of buy them. That they wouldn’t like me for me.
I said, “I think I’m fired.”
He said, “Right.”
I don’t know when I really stopped getting into trouble.
I guess it was in the early 1980s when I met Barbara, and she
helped me get over my cocaine dependence.
It was around that time that I started to think about my
father and I began to ask questions whenever I met
someone who had known my him. Naturally, because of my
own history, I asked a lot about his misbehavior. It seemed as
if everybody had a story to tell about Bogie being a bad boy.
His defiance of authority, for example, is always there, all
through his life.