Bogie’s marriage to Mary Philips lasted for a decade,
though not without its occasional plot twists. These were the
depression years and the young acting couple struggled
financially. Mary had some luck, performing in summer stock
in New England, but through much of the thirties many
lights were dim on Broadway. What money the couple did
have was mainly brought in by Mary. Bogie couldn’t even bor
row money from his parents, because by this time Belmont
had made a number of bad business deals and the Bogarts
were not as affluent as they had been. (Eventually, Belmont would give up his practice and run away to become a ship’s
doctor aboard freighters. He returned to New York a morphine addict, and died ten thousand dollars in debt. My fa
ther would eventually pay off the debt.)
So Bogie and Mary pooled money with friends and wore
a lot of sweaters.
Though Mary would prove to be a little lamb compared
to wife number three, the Bogart-Philips marriage was in
some ways a preliminary bout for the Bogart-Methot mar
riage that would come next. Mary, for example, almost bit off
a cop’s finger one night when he arrested her for being
drunk, along with Bogie and their friend Broderick Craw
ford, who had a career as a movie actor before my generation
got to know him as Captain Dan Matthews on
Highway Patrol.
On Bogie’s next visit to Hollywood Mary went with him.
They lived in the Garden of Allah, a legendary cluster of bun
galows on Sunset Boulevard, where celebrities and wannabes
drank, laughed, and occasionally bedded down together.
But Mary was homesick for the smell of greasepaint.
Broadway was where she belonged, she felt, and when she got
a chance to perform there in
The Postman Always Rings Twice,
she told Bogie she wanted to return to Manhattan. Bogie was
deeply hurt that she wanted to leave.
“The postman always rings twice?” he said. “What the
hell does that mean, anyhow?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Bogie said. “I read the
book. There’s no postman in it and nobody rings anything
once, never mind twice. Guy just made up the title. You want
to be in a play where the guy just made up the title?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all wrong for you,” Bogie said.
“I want to go,” Mary cried.
“For God’s sake, Mary,” Bogie said. “This is my first
chance to really prove that I can support a wife, maybe have
kids, and here you are getting ready to hop on the first train
back to New York.”
“I have to go,” Mary said.
“Then go, goddamn it, but I’m telling you the play is not
right for you,” Bogie said.
Mary left, and it was during her absence that Bogie met
Mayo Methot.
* * *
Some say Bogie met Mayo at the home of his friend Eric
Hatch. Others say he met her at a Screen Actors’ Guild din
ner. He spotted her eyeing him from a balcony and found
her so fetching that he broke off a decoration of a nude
woman from a column of some sort and presented it to her.
“Your Academy Award, madame,” he said. “For being the most exciting actress present.”
Mayo, a native of Portland, Oregon, had been a child ac
tress. She was still an actress, and in many ways she was still
a child. Like Bogie, she had been married twice. A year earlier she had divorced her second husband for mental
cruelty, claiming that he wouldn’t allow her to rearrange
the furniture.
Bogie took Mayo on his powerboat at Newport Beach.
This was before the
Santana.
Mayo, whose father was a ship’s
captain, loved the sea and that was a big point in her favor.
Mayo loved to drink, another point. Bogie had fun with
Mayo. Unfortunately, Mayo Methot was a raging alcoholic, and her fits of temper and violence made Bogie’s occasional
outbursts look kittenish by comparison. With Mayo, who has
been described as a combination of Mae West and Edward G.
Robinson, Bogie began a relationship that was as famous for
its fury as his later relationship with my mother was for
its romance.
When Mary came back from New York and found Bogie
and Mayo staying at the Garden of Allah, she felt that a divorce was in order. After the divorce, Bogie was not really in
a marrying mood, but, once again, he had gotten himself
into a position where he felt he had an obligation. Sam
Jaffe’s partner, Mary Baker, said, “Bogie was trapped in a sit
uation and didn’t know how to get out of it.”
It is interesting that my father, who is famous for doing
exactly what he wanted and compromising on nothing, seems
to have entered with some reluctance into each of his first
three marriages. With Helen he had tried to back out at first.
With Mary he had had major doubts, but had been finan
cially dependent on her. And now, with Mayo, again, he told
people he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to marry her. In
some ways all three of these women were the dominant per
son in the relationship, and even in his fourth marriage—
well, it is no secret that my mother is a strong, controlling
sort of woman. So Bogie, the very symbol of male indepen
dence, married women who could, at least in part, control
him. A Freudian might say that he was trying to replace his
domineering mother. Others would say he married women
who could help his career. Nat Benchley, who gave this mat
ter a good deal of thought, came to the conclusion that none
of the handy theories fit. Not all of Bogie’s wives were finan
cially helpful. Not all of them were older than him. (My
mother was twenty-five years younger.) And not all of them
could help his career. (He was already a big star by the time
he married Mayo and my mom.) Benchley concludes that the
answer is much simpler than that. My father, Benchley says,
“was a gentleman, like his father, and he felt that once he
had gone a certain distance with a woman, he was obliged to
marry her.”
I know that that self-imposed feeling of obligation
weighed heavily on my father, because I have gone through
the experience, though in a slightly different way. A genera
tion ago, Dale and I had planned to go to the great Wood
stock lovefest. We couldn’t make it, so we stayed home and
had a lovefest of our own. The sex was, shall we say, impetu
ous. A few months later Dale had some interesting news to
tell me.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
I was still a kid, really, and getting married was not on
my list of things to do. But I knew I had an obligation, and it was one I had created long ago when I swore that no kid
of mine would ever go through life without a father.
Though abortion was out of the question, Dale did not
insist on wedding bells. She was not interested in acquiring a
husband who didn’t want to be acquired.
“I’m keeping the baby,” she said. “You do whatever you really want to do.”
Of course, there was never any doubt about what I
wanted to do. I wanted to be a father to my kid. I asked Dale
to marry me.
And in 1938, Bogie did the same thing. He asked Mayo
Methot to marry him.
Shortly before their wedding Bogie said of Mayo, “One
reason why we get on so well together is that we don’t have illusions about each other. We know just what we’re getting,
so there can’t be any complaints on that score after we’re
married. Illusions are no good in marriage. And I love a
good fight. So does Mayo.”
It’s a good thing that Dad loved a good fight because
Mayo gave him a lot more action than he ever saw when he
was in the navy. He was thirty-eight when he married her and
there were some who wondered if he would make it to
thirty-nine.
They got married on August 21, 1938, at the home of
Mary and Mel Baker in Bel Air. Bogie cried at the wedding.
“He cried at every one of his weddings,” my mother says,
“and with good reason.”
On their wedding night Bogie and Mayo had a fight, so
he went off to spend the night with Mel Baker while she
spent the night with Mary. There is even a report that Bogie
went off to Mexico for some male bonding.
Soon he and Mayo moved into a house on Horn Avenue
near the Sunset Strip. They filled it with pets, and they
fought constantly. Bogie nicknamed Mayo “Sluggy.” In front
of their house they had a sign that said
SLUGGY HOLLOW.
They
also had a dog named Sluggy. And Bogie named the thirty-
eight-foot cruiser that he kept in Newport
Sluggy.
Mayo was a devoted and adoring wife when she was so
ber, but, like her husband, she was a prodigious drinker of
scotch, and when she was drunk she could be hell on wheels.
The neighbors remember the nightly shouting and the
sounds of breaking glassware. The battles were strangely, or
perhaps fittingly, theatrical. For example, one night the cou
ple came out of the house drunk and Mayo had tied a rope
around Bogie’s neck. But it was Bogie who was shouting,
“Sluggy, you miserable shrew, I’m going to hang you.”
“The Bogart-Methot marriage was the sequel to the
Civil War,” Julius Epstein says.
An interesting turn of events for the man who once com
plained that he had to hide under the blankets and cover his
ears to block out the sound of his parents fighting.
“The marriage was very stormy,” says Gloria Stuart.
“Their relationship was mutual; they hit each other. But it
was really Mayo who did most of the hitting. I remember
once when Mel Baker and my husband and I were at their
house and Mayo threatened to shoot all of us. When she was
drunk she was very combative. Sober she was fine. But I think
the fighting excited them, it got them all worked up.”
While friends agree that Bogart liked to needle Mayo, all agree that she was the violent one. And Mayo was also every
inch the needler that Bogie was. She often referred to him as
“Mr. Bogart, the great big Warner Brothers star,” and after he
made the smallest remark she would say, “Quick, call the
newspapers. Mr. Bogart, the great big Warner Brothers star,
has spoken.”
“Mayo resented Bogart’s growing popularity,” one friend
says, “and the fact that she gave up her career to be just Mrs.
Bogart. The resentment always showed.”
Mayo was insanely jealous, too. Maybe drink made her
jealous, or maybe jealousy made her drink. Either way, Mayo often had her claws out for Bogie’s leading ladies. Being mar
ried to a top male actor would be difficult for any woman,
but for Mayo it was war. So when Bogie had to take a beau
tiful actress in his arms you could hear Mayo’s roar all the
way to Fresno. Mayo was especially jealous of Ingrid Bergman
when Bogie made
Casablanca.
After the film came out a re
porter asked Bogie what he thought of it. “I don’t know,” he
said. “I wasn’t allowed to see it.”
Dad’s early movie career, of course, was not as a roman
tic lead or a sex symbol. A condemned murderer or gun-
toting racketeer was not the kind of guy most women were
looking to fall in love with. But in 1940, during this marriage
to Mayo, Bogie was making a personal appearance at a New
York movie house when something happened to change
all that.
The show that evening opened with dozens of Bogie’s
movie death scenes flashing across the screen. Then, when
the lights were turned up, there was Bogie lying on the stage,
face down as if he had been rubbed out by gangsters. He got
up slowly, grinned at his audience and said, “Boy, this is a hell of a way to make a living.”
It was a magical moment. Suddenly, movie fans who had
known Bogie only as a thug, saw a guy with a sense of humor,
a guy who could laugh at himself, which it seems to me is a
definite aphrodisiac for women. After the show there was a
mob of women outside of Bogie’s dressing room. Mary Baker
called Warner Brothers to tell them about all the female ad
oration. Jack Warner was skeptical, but in time Bogie did
become a rather unlikely heartthrob.