Though my father never used foul language around
women and never told off-color stories in their presence, he
did not exempt them from his needling. My mother’s friend
Carolyn Morris remembers an incident that occurred the
first time she met Bogie. It was when she went with my
mother to see him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When my
mother was first seeing Bogie, it was all very secret because even though he was separated from Mayo Methot at the time,
they were still married. So Bacall had asked Carolyn to go
with her, to make it more innocent.
When Carolyn got into the hotel room she could see
right away that Bogie had been drinking and was not pleased
to see her with Bacall. He’d expected to have Mom alone.
At the time Carolyn’s future husband, Buddy, was in
Florida, so she decided to give him a call from Bogie’s suite.
“What’s the deal?” Bogie said to Bacall. “You bring your
girlfriends up here so they can make long-distance calls on
my phone?”
Carolyn, who was for the first time meeting the man that
her friend Betty had been swooning over, didn’t know what
to think. He seemed pretty obnoxious to her.
“Maybe I should put up a sign,” Bogie said. “Public tele
phone for friends of Bacall.”
He kept it up all through Carolyn’s call to Buddy. By
the time she hung up, Carolyn was steaming. She slammed
down the phone and pulled a five-dollar bill out of her
pocketbook.
“Here,” she said. “For the phone call.”
“I don’t want it,” he said.
“Take it,” she said. “I don’t want you saying that I’m run
ning up your precious phone bills.”
“I don’t want it,” he said.
“I insist.”
Finally, Bogie took the five-dollar bill and tore it up. It
was only later that he and Carolyn became good friends.
Another Bogie friend, George Axelrod, said to me,
“Your father was full of life. He was a demon. When I first met him he liked to get me drunk. He had a great sense of
humor, very dry, and he would never laugh at his own jokes.
He would mutter, always with a cigarette and always with a
drink. I think he was born with a scotch in his hand.
“But this guy Bogart was always making trouble for peo
ple and wouldn’t let them off easy. He liked to shake up the
world. He was trying for his own private revolution. He often
said to Rock Hudson, ‘What kind of a name is that, what the
hell is Rock Hudson?’ Here we had a man named Humphrey
making fun of someone else’s name. Actually, Rock and your
father were friends. Rock’s real name was Roy and he hated
to be called Rock. So your father teased him by calling him
Rock all the time. Bogie thought ‘Rock Hudson’ was a pre
tension, so he kept on it, wouldn’t let up on him.”
This, I’ve learned, was not the only time my father made
fun of names. It was a regular thing with him. One time he met a young writer at a party named Ben Ray Redman. He
said to Redman, “You know what’s wrong with you? You’re
just another goddamned three-named writer.” Then, I guess
Dad was feeling very clever, because he started reeling off a
list of three-named writers. “Stephen Vincent Benet,” he said. “Mary Roberts Rinehart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May
Alcott, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,” and on he went.
Dad wanted to see if people would stand up to him, and
sometimes that was a mistake. For example, he met Judy Gar
land’s third husband, Sid Luft, for the first time at a Swifty
Lazar party. Bogie was drinking and started getting on Luft
right from the beginning. But Luft, a former test pilot, who
was a pretty powerful guy, was having none of it. He picked
Bogie off the floor and pinned him to a wall.
“Put me down, you son of a bitch,” Bogie said.
Instead of putting him down, Luft kissed him on
both cheeks.
“We’re going to be good friends, you and I,” Luft said.
“Oh yeah, and why’s that?”
“Because we’re not going to needle each other.”
“Oh, we’re not, huh?”
“That’s right,” Luft said. “And the reason we are not go
ing to needle each other is because I’d have to split your
head open.” Then he put my father down. “Right, Bogie?”
There was a moment of tension, followed by a burst of
laughter from my father. Then everything was fine. I think my father liked this sort of thing because he was an actor.
This was dramatic. This was bigger than life.
My father liked to show off. And needling people like
Luft was a way to do it. Nat Benchley said, “There are some
people who will argue that Bogart was simply an exhibitionist
who caused severe rectal pains to all around him, but this argument neglects the fact that he could, when he chose, be as quiet and thoughtful as a Talmudic scholar. If he acted up,
there was usually a reason for it, and the reason could often
be found in the company.”
Dad’s tendency to take on people before he knew who
he was dealing with got him in trouble one time early in his
career when he was working for Twentieth Century-Fox, and still trying to get a foothold in Hollywood. He was a serious
golfer, at least then. He was playing with a friend, behind a
very slow foursome. When Bogie asked if he could play
through, one of the guys in the foursome turned and glared
at him.
“Certainly not,” the guy said. “Who the hell do you
think you are, asking such a thing?”
“My name is Humphrey Bogart,” my father said. “I work
at Fox. And what the hell are you doing, playing a gentle
man’s game at a gentleman’s club?”
Unfortunately, the man that my father shouted at was a vice president at Fox. Maybe that’s why Dad ended up mak
ing most of his movies at Warner Brothers.
Dad didn’t fight just with strangers, though. He often
got into it with friends. One night he was needling his agent,
Sam Jaffe, at Romanoff’s and Jaffe got fed up.
“Listen,” Sam said, “I don’t take that guff from you or
anyone else. If you need to be that way, get a new agent, I’ll
give your contract back. I’m not taking that stuff.”
Bogart thought it over, and decided to quit the needling,
at least for the night. There was another incident concerning
Jaffe, this one at the Jaffe house. For some reason, Bogie was
annoyed at the modern paintings that hung on the Jaffes’
walls. Dad probably thought there was something pretentious
about the work.
“Goddamn phony
a
rtists,” he said.
“What did you say?” Sam asked him.
“The paintings on your walls,” Bogie said. “They’re a
bunch of phony crap.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You know what I ought to do?”
“What’s that?”
“I ought to throw them all out.”
It was then that Mrs. Jaffe entered the conversation.
“Get out,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Get out, Mr. Bogart. Leave my house. You are not behaving properly.”
Bogie left and never criticized the Jaffes’ taste in paint
ings again.
John Huston is another close friend whom Bogie fought
with. Kate Hepburn told me that Bogie and Huston ex
changed words while making
The African Queen.
And Jess
Morgan, who was a friend to both men, says that Bogie
and Huston were two strongminded men who fought often.
But Huston, apparently, didn’t think of their disagreements
as fights because he said that it was during the filming of
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
that he and Bogie had “our one
and only quarrel.”
As Huston told the story, Bogie was getting impatient for
shooting on
Sierra
to end because he wanted to get the
Santana
into a race to Honolulu. Bogie was afraid that the
picture would run over schedule and he would miss out.
Huston said my father “sulked and became progressively
less cooperative.”
One day they were shooting a scene between Bogie and
Tim Holt.
“Okay,” Huston said after they cut. “Let’s do one more.”
“Why?” Bogie asked.
“Why what?” Huston asked.
“Why another take?”
“Because I need another,” Huston said.
“I thought I was good,” Bogie said.
“You were,” the director said. “It has nothing to do with
you, Bogie. I’d just like to shoot it again.”
“Well, I don’t see why you have to shoot it again. I
thought it was pretty good,” my father said.
“Please,” Huston asked. Now he was getting annoyed.
“Just do it.”
Bogie did the new take, but he wasn’t happy about it.
Later that evening, when Bogie and Huston and my mother
sat down to supper, Dad started grumbling again.
“Too goddamn many takes,” he said. “Don’t need
them all.”
“What’s that, Bogie?”
“You’re taking too goddamn long to shoot this movie,” Bogie said. He leaned across the table, poking an accusing
finger at his friend. “The way we’re going, I’ll miss my race.”
That’s when Huston reached out and grabbed Dad’s
nose between two fingers and started squeezing.
“John, you’re hurting him,” my mother said.
“Yes, I know,” Huston said. “I mean to.” He gave Dad’s
nose one more solid twist and let it go.
Later my father felt bad, because he had fought with his
friend. He came to Huston. “What the hell are we doing?”
Bogie said. “Let’s have things be the way they have always
been with us.” They made up and sealed it with a drink. Bo
gie, by the way, did miss the race.
Richard Burton also remembers that Bogie could be
rough on his friends. Burton recalls one Catalina night out
on the boat with Bogie, David Niven, and Frank Sinatra, who
crooned all night long for dozens of other sailing people who
floated around the
Santana
in their dinghies.
Burton says, “Frankie did sing all through the night, it’s
true, and a lot of people sat around in boats and got drunk.
Bogie and I went out lobster potting and Frankie got really
pissed off with Bogie. David Niv was trying to set fire to the
Santana
at one point, because nobody could stop Francis
from going on and on and on. I was drinking boilermakers
with Bogie—rye whiskey with canned beer chasers—so the
night is pretty vague, but I seem to remember a girl having
a fight with her husband or boyfriend in a rowing dinghy and
being thrown in the water by her irate mate. I don’t know
why, but I would guess that she wanted to stay and listen to
Frankie, and he wanted to go. And Bogie and Frankie nearly
came to blows the next day about the singing the night be
fore and I drove Betty home because she was so angry with
Bogie’s cracks about Frankie’s singing. At that time Frankie
was out of work and was peculiarly vulnerable and Bogie was
unnecessarily cruel.”
Several people have mentioned the fact that Bogie some
times went too far with his needling, and sometimes hurt
people with his cutting remarks. But it was not out of mean
ness. Sometimes he just got carried away with his own cuteness and misjudged his target. Not everybody has thick skin,
and even those who do sometimes shed it in moments of
weakness. But I think if Dad pushed Frank Sinatra too hard
at this particular time, it was probably because he felt that
Sinatra was not being the person he could be, either person
ally or professionally. Bogie and Sinatra had a kind of father-
son relationship, and Dad had often gotten on Sinatra for not taking his acting seriously enough. I think Dad saw Sinatra as a great talent that sometimes was wasted. My
father had a philosophy about this, and it came from a
valuable lesson he had learned years earlier in a pro
ducer’s office.
Bogie had come into the producer’s office while the pro
ducer was talking to a writer about his script. The producer
told the writer that his script had some merit, that there were
many good things in it, despite its shortcomings. After the
writer left, the producer told Bogie that the script was lousy.
Bogie asked him why he hadn’t just said so. The producer told Bogie, “When you see that a person has done his best
and it’s no good, you cannot be cruel. If you know he can do
better, then you say it stinks and he should fix it. But when
you know this is his best, then be gentle.”