Bogart (39 page)

There was one frightening setback while my father was
still in the hospital. One night he began coughing violently,
and the spasms ripped open the stitches in his belly. Blood
began pouring out of his abdomen. Fortunately, my mother
was with him at the time and she was able to get help.

The morning of my father’s return from Good Samari
tan, Mother fussed around in their bedroom, fixing the bed, getting it in just the right place, making sure that his books
and glasses and his chess set would all be within reach. She
was nervous and excited. Leslie and I played indoors. In
fected by Mother’s mood, we were excited, too. It felt like
Christmas. Finally, Mother heard the slam of a car door in
the driveway.

“Kids, your father’s home,” she called. We gathered on the upstairs landing to wait for him, me on one side of my mother, little Leslie on the other. Dad was carried in on a stretcher by male attendants. He gazed up at us and smiled.
“You see,” he said to the attendants, “this is why mar
riage is worth it.” Then to Mother, “I’ve been trying to get it
through these guys’ thick skulls that it’s a great thing to be
married, that you can’t beat having a wife and kids there to
greet you when you get home from a nice relaxing vacation
at the Good Samaritan.”

The attendants took the ribbing and helped Bogie to his
bed. Later that day Mother told Leslie and me the rules for the fiftieth time.

“No jumping on your father.” “If you’re going to be noisy play outside.”
“Don’t let the dogs jump on your father.”
A few weeks later my father began radiation treatments. Five days a week for eight weeks he had to drive to Los An
geles and get zapped by X-rays. No one was saying that he still
had cancer, just that they were targeting the places where it
was most likely to recur. More and more I got the feeling that
there were things going on that I didn’t know about.

During the weeks of the radiation treatments Bogie ate
little, though my mother would always set a tray of food in
front of him by the fireplace. He felt nauseous from the
X-rays. Now and then he would take a few bites, or even ask for a particular food, and Mother would be filled with opti
mism. But later he would be weak and tired and nauseous,
and she would be deflated. Sometimes at night when Leslie
and I sat with him watching television, he would make sounds
as if he was in pain, and then he would close his eyes and pretend to be sleeping, so that we would think he was just
having a bad dream.

My father’s first setback was emotional. Early in the radi
ation treatments he lost his friend Louis Bromfield the nov
elist. Bromfield, the man who had hosted the Bogart and Bacall wedding on his Ohio farm, died suddenly at the age
of sixty.

But Dad was buoyed up by other friends. David Niven
visited. And Nunnally Johnson, and Tracy and Hepburn, and
Mike Romanoff, and so many others. Frank Sinatra came by
almost every night. And Swifty Lazar, fighting a constantly ter
rible phobia about germs and sickness, came by often. Dur
ing this time Bogie’s friends thought they were visiting a man
who was recovering from surgery, not a man who was sick.

My father took great delight in telling his friends the de
tails of his surgery. He was fascinated by the medical proce
dures and, apparently, was able to look at his illness as if it
belonged to someone else.

Raymond Massey, who was an acclaimed movie actor
long before most of us got to know him as Dr. Gillespie on
Dr. Kildare,
said, “I didn’t know what to expect when I was
ushered into the sick room, but there was Bogart, sitting in a
chair, looking as good as ever, sipping scotch and soda, wait
ing for me. I was just beginning on the small talk when he
cut in. ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me down there,’ he
said. ‘It was awful!’ And he told me. And the sicker I got from
the story, the healthier he became. Then we spent a marvel
ous afternoon reminiscing about our adventures together.”

Throughout the ordeal my father joked as always,
quipped, needled, and expressed his appreciation for the vis
its in that flippant way of his. “Jesus,” he told one set of
friends, “how am I supposed to get any rest with the likes of you coming every day?”

Though my father tended to hide many of his feelings
behind joking, as I often do, there were those serious intro
spective moments, too. One day Bogie told Alistair Cooke that having money, the Jaguar, the great house, the boat, no
longer was any comfort to him now that he was sick.

But Dad remained optimistic. He cheerfully told people
that he was getting better, and he believed it was true. “Just losing a little weight, that’s all,” he said. “If I could put on a
few pounds I would be fine.”

Certainly he took what pleasure he could from life dur
ing this period. He continued to drink, though his drinking
had been reduced considerably since he’d married my
mother. And he continued to smoke, switching now to fil
tered cigarettes. This was somewhat reckless, I suppose, since
drinking and smoking were almost certainly responsible for
his cancer. But Bogie was, after all, Bogie. He had eating
problems, of course, but eating had never been one of his
great pleasures anyhow. Bogie ate for sustenance, not for en
tertainment. Another similarity between father and son.

So he had his books and his booze, and he had letters to
write. I remember that the phone rang often, and sometimes
that scared me because I had a constant sense that something
bad could happen, though I didn’t know exactly what. But
the phone calls were his friends mostly. They were always con
cerned, and always offering to help in any way they could.
And many of those calls were from the press, checking in
to rumors that Bogie was dying. My father would get on
the phone.

“It appears to me that I am not dead,” he would say.
“And I’m not dying. I’m fine. Just a little underweight.”

The debilitating effects of the radiation lasted long after
the treatments had ended, but by August my father was start
ing to feel better. He weighed himself daily, and the big ex
citement came one day when Daddy finally gained a single
pound. Mother practically danced around the house. This
was the sign that everybody had been waiting for, the proof
that everything would be all right.

My mother, whose career had come to a halt, began
work on
Designing Woman
with Gregory Peck. My father told
Aurelio to take the Thunderbird down and have it serviced.
“I’m going to take Stephen to Newport for a cruise again,”
he said.

And he did. But now he was too weak to do much and
Pete, the skipper, had to handle the boat. I don’t remember
the cruise. But I remember standing on the deck with my
dad, the feel of his hand on my shoulder. “Someday I’m go
ing to teach you how to sail, Steve,” he said. “I think you have
the makings of a fine yachtsman. And then we can go off,
you and me and Pete, on trips. Just the men will go.” He
laughed. “We’ll leave the women behind.”

And he made other visits to the boat, not to sail, but just
to be on it. For a while it seemed that the dark cloud
had passed.

But it hadn’t. My father began to feel pain in his left
shoulder. The doctors told him it was nerve damage, common after surgery. But when they got him into the hospital
they broke the terrible news to my mother: the cancer
had returned.

At the hospital they began something called nitrogen mustard treatments, which then was the last hope for cancer treatment. Bogie was not told that cancer had returned. They told him they were working on the nerve damage. In an odd
way, my father was relieved to be back in the hospital for a
few days because he despised the feeling of being a burden to everybody at home.

When he returned from the hospital this time he was ter
ribly weak. One night he collapsed in the living room.
Mother was terrified. How could the indomitable Bogie
have fallen?

She got him a male nurse, someone who could carry
him up and down stairs. But that didn’t work. Finally, as it be
came more and more difficult for Humphrey Bogart to walk, Aurelio got the wheelchair and rigged the dumbwaiter as my father’s elevator.

Now all of Bogie’s friends, who had been treated to a pe
riod of hope, had to one by one give up the belief that Bogie
“just needed to gain a little weight,” and face the fact. Bogie
was dying.

What was I feeling? I wonder now. Was I thinking, Daddy
is dying? Was I afraid? I don’t know for sure. The emotions
that moved through me then are mostly forgotten. But I
don’t think that I believed my father was dying, because my
father himself didn’t believe it. Or if he did, he protected us all from his fears.

Bogie acted like a man who intended to go on living for
a long time. For example, he continued to work on his ca
reer, making plans for films, even with the notorious
Harry Cohn.

Harry Cohn, the most feared and hated man in Holly
wood, was the head of Columbia Pictures then. He was
known for his vulgarity and his ruthlessness and such antics
as spying on his employees with secret microphones and in
formers. He was a complex man who trumpeted his evil
deeds and kept his acts of kindness secret.

Despite his reputation as a heartless son of a bitch, Cohn
seemed to have had a fondness for my father. Bogie had
made films at Columbia on loan from Warner Brothers, and he had even sold his production company, Santana Produc
tions, to Columbia for a million bucks. In fact, my father’s
last picture,
The Harder They Fall,
was for Columbia.

Now, with Bogie losing weight at a horrifying rate and
spending most of his time in bed, Cohn frequently an
nounced in the press that my father would star in
The Good Shepherd,
a movie to be based on C. S. Forester’s best-selling
novel. Cohn used to call my father almost weekly telling
him, “The part’s great, we want to get rolling, so get your ass
over here.”

Bogart told a friend, “I’ll tell you why I think I’m going to beat this rap. It’s Harry Cohn. He keeps calling me about
going to work. Now you know that tough old bastard
wouldn’t call if he thought I wasn’t going to make it. Perhaps
he’s not such a bastard after all.”

Even my mother was touched by what Cohn was doing.

“Harry Cohn knew Bogie wasn’t going to make it,” she says.
“But he kept the act going.”

The friends continued to come for cocktail hour, though
by now my mother was insisting on no more than two visitors
at a time, and asking people to call ahead and schedule. Judy
Garland came, and Truman Capote, and Adlai Stevenson,
and Richard Burton, and David and Jennifer Selznick. Even
Jack Warner, who had been my father’s nemesis through
much of his career. And, of course, the inner circle of people
who did not have to make appointments: Sinatra, Niven,
Hepburn, Tracy, Lazar, and John Huston, who amused my fa
ther with stories about the filming of
Moby-Dick,
which he had
just finished.

And when they came, they did not sit weeping by Bogie’s
bedside. Instead he came to them, down the dumbwaiter,
into the wheelchair and into the study, where they all drank
and laughed and said clever things. They did not ask my fa
ther how he felt. He hated to be asked. In fact, throughout
his illness there was an air of denial. Bogie and his friends
conspired to con each other into the belief that he would
be fine.

John Huston said, “One night Betty, Bogie’s doctor, Mor
gan Maree [my father’s business manager], and I were all sit
ting around in his living room when Bogie said, ‘Look, give me the lowdown. You aren’t kidding me, are you?’ I took a
deep breath and held it. The doctor finally assured Bogie
that it was the treatments he had undergone that were mak
ing him feel sick and lose weight. Now that he was off the
treatments, he should improve rapidly. Then we all chimed
in, compounding the falsehood. He seemed to accept it.”