Bogart (23 page)

So I made an appointment, and one sunny morning I
drove from Connecticut to ABC in New York. I sat in the
receptionist’s office waiting for Cosell to show up. After about ten minutes the elevator door opened and I heard
someone doing this fairly good, but not great, Howard
Cosell impression.

“Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the great one has
arrived. Yes, it’s Howard Cosell, speaking to you from his
palatial offices at the American Broadcasting Corpora
tion Building.”

I looked up and discovered it
was
Cosell, making a grand
entrance, not as himself, but in a parody of his public per
sona. God, I thought, does he do this every day?

“And you must be the Bogart boy,” he said. “I remember
when I first met your mother, Betty. It was—” and he rattled
off the exact time and place where he had met Mom, some
fifteen years earlier. “Welcome to ABC,” he said. He shook my hand and led me into his office. It was still another min
ute or two before he could break out of the impression he
was doing of himself. After we talked for a while about Betty,
and my father, we got down to business. I told him that I
wanted to be in sports broadcasting. Cosell listened to me
very intently, and earnestly, and finally he leaned across his
desk and said, “You know, Steve, I could give you a job.”

“Really?”

“Oh sure, I could make a few calls and you’d be work
ing at nine o’clock tomorrow morning in some capacity
or other.”

“Anything would be great,” I said. “Just a start.”

“Steve,” he said, “it would be the beginning of your
sports broadcasting career.”

“Yes,” I said. Now my heart was pounding. This was it, my big break.

“But I have to tell you, Steve, it would also be the end
of it.”

“Huh?”

“The end, Stephen Bogart, the end. With no education,
you wouldn’t go anywhere in this business. Steve, I’ve been in
this business a long time and I’ll tell you one thing that I am
absolutely sure of. You have got to go back to school and get
your degree.”

At the time I was crestfallen. It seemed as if my sports
broadcasting dream was over and, after I shook hands with Cosell and thanked him for the advice, I left the building and
I must have walked forty blocks along Sixth Avenue with my
head down.

But at a deeper level I knew that Cosell was right and his
words only tempered a resolve I was about to make: once and
for all I would go to college and this time, for a novelty, I
would graduate. So I will always be grateful for Howard
Cosell’s advice.

As it happened, there was a small trust fund that my fa
ther had left me. It had kicked in as soon as I got married
and it came to about $600 a month, which was pretty good
money at a time when my rent was only about $185 a month.
But I had also from time to time petitioned for chunks of the
fund, to get a car or whatever. By the time I spoke to Cosell
I could see that this fund was only going to last about four
more years. I did go back to school, the University of Hart
ford, where I majored in Mass Communications. And yes,
I graduated.

So, like my father, I had turned to an older, established
man. And each older man had done the right thing for the
time. Brady gave a young man a job, Cosell did not. I lived
in a time when you had to have a degree to get anywhere.
My father lived in a time when success depended more on
how high you were willing to pull yourself up by your
own bootstraps.

My father was no sudden success. In his first appearance in
front of an audience, Bogie played a Japanese houseboy. He
had one line and he made the least of it. His friend Stuart
Rose, who was in the audience that night, said, “He said his
one line and he embarrassed me, it was so bad.”

Dad’s first significant role came as a juvenile in a play called
Swifty.
Almost all of Dad’s early roles were juveniles. His performance in
Swifty
was not memorable for the audi
ence, but Bogie would remember it for the rest of his life.

In fact, decades later he was sitting at 21 in New York
with sportscaster Mel Allen, along with Hank Greenberg, the
great Detroit Tigers slugger. Allen asked Greenberg about
some of the home runs he had hit. Greenberg said that his greatest recollections were not about home runs that he had
hit. They were about home runs he had wanted to hit, but
had not. “I remember one home run I didn’t hit with two
men on in the 1934 World Series,” he said. “And there was
another home run I didn’t hit when I wanted to in the 1940
World Series.”

The failures had stayed in Greenberg’s mind. When
Allen reminded him about all the homers he
had
hit,
Greenberg replied, “Some people only remember the un
happy things.”

“That’s a fact,” my father said. “Newspaper people have been awfully nice to me and they’ve written some swell re
views. I couldn’t quote you any of the good reviews. But I can
quote you word for word the panning Alexander Woollcott
administered to me twenty-six years ago when I was in
Swifty.
He said, ‘The young man who embodied the aforesaid Sprigg was what might mercifully be described as inadequate.’ That
was back in 1921. A lot has happened since then, but I can
still see those words.”

Swifty,
by the way, closed quickly, and my father carried
Woollcott’s review around with him for the rest of his life.

The first hit show Bogie appeared in was
Meet the Wife.
But even in a hit, he got into trouble. At one matinee he left
the theater after act two, forgetting that he had to make a
small appearance in act three. Later, when the stage man
ager asked him where the hell he had been, my father blew
his stack.

His reviews during this time were mixed. The bad ones
got to him, especially Woolcott’s, and also one that said that
Bogie and another actor “gave some rather trenchant exhibi
tions of bad acting.”

“The needling I got about my acting in those days made
me mad,” he said. “It made me want to keep on until I’d get
to the point where I didn’t stink anymore.”

Over the years my father never raised much fuss about critics. He said, “I always thought they were fair, except for
one, who wrote that so and so was bad in the part, but not
as bad as Humphrey Bogart would have been if he had
played it.”

Dad appeared in dozens of plays during the 1920s, and
in time his reviews got better, except perhaps from his
mother, Maud, who made it clear that actors were not socially
acceptable.

During this time my father drank lots of alcohol and
dated lots of girls. Though it later became common for peo
ple to talk about my father as a man who had sex appeal
without being handsome, the fact is that he was considered
quite handsome then, and was even compared to Valentino
in some reviews.

Though Bogie had not always had good reviews he had al
ways tried hard. He was, and remained for all of his life, a
student of acting.

One early story is that when Bogie was dating Mary Phil
ips, who later became his second wife, he met an actor by the
name of Holbrook Blinn, a stage star of the time.

“Hey, you’re no taller than me,” Bogie said to Blinn.

“So.”

“But I’ve seen you on the stage. You always look taller.”

“Watch,” Blinn said. He turned around and took several
steps away from Bogie. Then he paused for a few seconds and
slowly turned back. Bogie was astonished. It seemed to him
that Blinn had grown an inch or two right in front of him.

“How on earth?” Bogie said.

“Just think tall,” Blinn said. “Just think tall.”

From the beginning, it seems, he understood drama,
and often during his life he would articulate on the subject.

Though his early parts were as juveniles, he sometimes
called them “Tennis, anyone?” parts and that is why he is
given credit for bringing that phrase into the language. He
explained juveniles this way:

“The playwright gets five or six characters into a scene
and doesn’t know how to get them offstage. So what does he
do? He drags in the juvenile, who has been waiting in the wings for just such a chance. He comes in, tennis racquet
under his arm, and says, ‘Tennis, anyone?’ That, of course,
solves the playwright’s problem. The player whom the author
wants to get rid of for the time being accepts the suggestion.
The leading lady, who is due for a love scene with the leading
man, declines. So the others exit and all is ready for the love
scene between the leading lady and man. It doesn’t always
have to be tennis. Sometimes it’s golf or riding, but tennis is better because it gives the young man a chance to look attractive in spotless white flannels.”

My father had at least a couple of flirtations with the film
industry before he made it in Hollywood. In 1930 the studios
were looking for actors who could talk, so he went out to
Hollywood. But so did a lot of others. Nate Benchley says,
“Probably at no other time has so little talent been concen
trated in one place.”

He got into some pictures. They were boring and he was boring in them. So, fed up with Hollywood, he came back to
the New York stage.

In 1934 he was in
Invitation to a Murder,
a play that was
described by one critic as “high-voltage trash.” But producer-director Arthur Hopkins saw it and wanted Bogie for the role
in
The Petrified Forest.

Whatever magical quality my father had seems to have
shown up for the first time on January 7, 1935, in that play.
He was thirty-five years old. What he had was that elusive
something we call “star quality.”

What is star quality? Nobody is quite sure, but Bogie, apparently, recognized it in himself. Sam Jaffe told me, “I was
talking once to a director about this. He said there are some
good actors, who you don’t really notice when they come on the screen. But he said that when Bogie comes on the screen,
no matter who else is there, your eye is drawn to Bogart.
That’s what makes a star. And this is something that Bogie
knew about himself. He said to me, ‘You know, Sam, I’m not
the greatest actor in the world. Gary Cooper is not a great actor. But when he comes on the screen you watch him. And I
have that quality. It’s God given. That’s what they call a star.’”

While Bogie might have slighted his own acting ability in
that conversation, there were other times when Bogie told people that he was the second best actor in Hollywood, and Spencer Tracy was the first.

On this subject of star quality, John Huston said, “Bogie
was a medium-sized man, not particularly impressive off
screen, but something happened when he was playing the
right part. Those lights and shadows composed themselves
into another, nobler personality; heroic, as in
High Sierra.
I
swear the camera has a way of looking into a person and per
ceiving things that the naked eye doesn’t register.”

As Bogie developed his craft he became a teacher to others,
just as Blinn had been to him.

In 1944, for example, when he was making
Passage to
Marseilles,
there was a scene where the cabin boy, played by Billy Roy, had to throw an orange. Every time Billy threw the
piece of fruit he heard nothing but complaints.

“You’re throwing it like a girl,” the director said. “Throw
it like a boy.”

Billy kept trying, but he couldn’t seem to throw the or
ange the way he was supposed to. Soon everybody in the crew
was getting on him, and Billy was close to tears. It was my fa
ther who finally said, “Enough!”

He led Billy off to the side and took the time to teach
him how to throw the orange. When Billy had it perfect they
started shooting again.