Bogart (37 page)

Seeing there was no way to hurry the natives, Huston
and Bogie decided to scout for locations in the jungle.

“Katie could have remained behind,” he wrote, “but she
preferred to march through the jungle with us, as John and
I knew she would.”

Bogie was sitting in a small jungle clearing with Kate and
John Huston, when a huge wild boar showed up with his family. “It was a gruesome creature,” Bogie said, “big as a large
sheep dog with vicious tusks springing from both sides of
its mouth.

“Fortunately, we had a downwind, or the creature would
have smelled us and charged. I froze. So did Huston. But not
Katie. Before we could stop her she had stepped into the
clearing, with her sixteen-millimeter camera to her eyes.
Huston and I dared not yell to Katie to come back for fear
the boar would charge, nor could we move for fear of panick
ing him and we could not shoot since Katie was between us
and the boar.

“As she walked slowly toward the thing, with the camera
finder to her eye, it stared straight at her. I was frozen but fas
cinated, and in those horrendous moments of waiting that
seemed like hours I learned something rare and wonderful
about Katie.

“I thought, there’s a fearless woman. I also sensed that
Katie, who is a remarkable woman, could not believe that an
animal would hurt her. She is not stupid but I suddenly knew
that she felt if she wanted the boar’s photograph, he could
not possibly object. Approaching him fearlessly, as she did,
she communicated no fear to him. Huston and I were the
ones who were afraid, but in a desperate situation, I’ll take
Katie before Huston—or myself—any time.”

Maybe. But in one desperate situation it was Bogie who had a moment of bravery. My parents and Peter Viertel were
going for a ride down the river in a small gasoline-driven
boat. Their boatman, however, had trouble getting the en
gine started, and he flooded it. When he went down to look at it with a lighted match, the whole damn thing blew up. When the boatman came running up to the deck he was on
fire and he quickly put himself in the water. Meanwhile, the boat was in danger of burning. It was Bogie who threw a line
to another boat that was tied up and somehow he got buckets of sand, then went below deck and put out the fire. It could
have been a real disaster.

The filming in Africa came to an appropriately dramatic close. When the schedule called for two more days of shoot
ing, Huston announced that he needed three days, which
raised havoc with airline schedules and inland transportation.
Bogie was mad as hell and he thought Huston and Hepburn
were in cahoots to keep him in Africa forever. Huston, how
ever, got his way. Equipment was moved out gradually so that
on the last day nothing was left but Bogie, Hepburn, Huston,
and the camera. My mother and my father went to London
together, where they were to meet me at the airport.

“Your plane arrived around noon and I was a nervous
wreck,” my mother says. “The door opened and there you
were. Immediately you made this face that you always made and you came running down the gangway, smiling, and I was
so happy to hold you again. I missed you terribly in Africa.
Your father was very emotional, too, at seeing you again. You
just kept talking and talking, chattering a mile a minute. We
had never heard you talk so much before. I was really happy that the Africa adventure was over and we were all back to
gether as a family.”

The Africa adventure, of course, was not over for me. For decades I would carry around the belief that I had been aban
doned by my mother. Sometimes when I watch my home mov
ies of Mom and Dad and Kate working and playing in Africa,
I can’t help thinking that most parents of a two-year-old, es
pecially their first, don’t want to miss a day with the child
because he is learning to talk better each day and he is con
stantly making new discoveries. I know that’s how I felt about
my kids. It makes it harder to understand.

The months that my parents were in Africa were, un
doubtedly, a formative time for me. It was also a time of pas
sages for others. It was in Africa that Kate found out that her good friend Fanny Brice had died. It was there that my father
learned that Mayo Methot had died. And it was in Africa that
John Huston learned that his wife had given birth to a baby
girl. They named her Anjelica and today, of course, she is
one of our top screen actresses. (I finally met Anjelica
Huston a few years ago. Her first words to me were, “It’s about time we met.”)

Some wonderful things came out of that African adven
ture. One was my parents’ friendship with Kate Hepburn. An
other was that the work those people did in the jungle
produced a great film. And a third was that later that year my
father was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor.

My father certainly did not expect to win the Oscar. He
thought it would go to Marlon Brando, who was up for
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Bogie admired Brando immensely, even
if Brando was a method actor. He considered him to be the
best of the new actors. Bogie also thought that Montgomery
Clift had a decent shot for
A Place In the Sun.

Also, my father was embarrassed by the whole thing. He
had, after all, derided the Oscars, saying that the only way a
Best Actor award would make sense would be if each actor
donned black tights and recited Hamlet. Years earlier he had
ridiculed the Oscars by concocting the idea of giving Academy Awards to animals. The first year he gave the award to Skippy, the dog in
The Awful Truth.
The following year he gave the Os
car to a water buffalo in
The Good Earth.
Though he intended
all this as a joke, the animal award later became real in the
form of the Patsy, awarded annually by the ASPCA.

But the big night came and Bogie was there. My mother sat beside him, tensely holding his hand. The award for Best
Supporting Actress went to Kim Hunter for
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Then the award for Best Supporting Actor went to Karl
Malden, from the same movie. Then Bogie and Bacall sat
through the disappointment of having Kate lose out on the
Best Actress award. The award went to Vivien Leigh. Three
straight acting awards to
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Brando, for
Best Actor, would make it a sweep. And then came the an
nouncement for Best Actor. Greer Garson announced, “The
award goes to Humphrey Bogart for
The African Queen
.”
The
cheers were deafening.

My father, always so quick with a quip, stumbled over his
planned ad-lib. Clearly, he was touched by the award.

“It’s a long way from the Belgian Congo to the stage of this theater,” he finally said. “It’s nice to be here. Thank you
very much.” He thanked Kate, and Huston and Spiegel and
the crew. “No one does it alone,” he said. “As in tennis, you
need a good opponent or partner to bring out the best in
you. John and Katie helped me to be where I am now.”

What stunned my father, though, more than the award
itself was the fact that his was such a popular victory. He
never believed that people in Hollywood liked him as much
as they did, and he was very moved by it all. Long before
there was a Sally Field crying, “You like me, you really like
me,” my father felt the same way.

Back in the press tent after the awards, Bogie reverted to
form and wheeled out his old jokes about actors donning
tights and reciting Hamlet. But he didn’t fool anybody. They
knew he was pleased and touched to have been chosen.

Later, among his friends at Romanoff’s he admitted as
much. Now my father was at the height of his career. He had
an Oscar, a beautiful young wife, an adorable son, and a
daughter on the way.

I don’t know if a three-year-old boy has the sophistica
tion to turn a small metal statue into a symbol of his anger and resentment. But I seem to recall that when my father
brought home the Oscar, visible symbol of all that he had
accomplished in Africa, I wanted to pick it up and hurl it
at him.

That Oscar, by the way, is now on a shelf in my home.

* * *

When we get to the room that was my parents’ bedroom I feel pain. I have been expecting it. Now the room holds the possessions of another Hollywood family, but I look through them and I see the room as it was. I remember the position of the bed, the table with the chess set, those nights watching TV with my father, the good-night kisses, the smell of medicine.

“God,” I say to my mother, “this is so strange. I remember coming in as a kid. The bed was against the wall. I remember standing by the bed, seeing him a lot, lying down in that bed.”

“Well, he was only lying down toward the end,” she says.

“I have a picture of him in my mind,” I say, “and Leslie and me coming up. I can really see him,” I say. I am talking more to myself than to Mom.

“He would be sitting up,” my mother says. “He would be sitting up when you saw him.”

Despite my pain and the memories, I smile. It suddenly seems funny that Mom would be uncomfortable simply agreeing with something I say.

“Yes, Stephen, you are absolutely right,” I say out loud, but she doesn’t get it.

A sensation of sadness sweeps through me.

“God, thirty-six years ago,” I say. I can still feel the pain, but I don’t think my mother is aware of it.

I know what I am feeling. The pain is not about memories of being in the bedroom. It is about the times when I was not allowed into the bedroom. I try to push the pain from my mind.

* * *

11

When a man is sick you get to know him. You find out whether he is made of soft or hard wood. I began to get fonder of Bogie with
each visit. He was made of very hard wood, indeed.

—DR. MAYNARD BRANDSMA

I
remember the wheelchair that my father needed during
the final weeks of his illness. It was a fascinating metallic
contraption with hinges and shiny spokes, and a leather seat
that made a snapping sound when it was opened. Dad would roll across the floor in it, grabbing at the wheels with his
withering, bony hands. The wheelchair was visual, it was ex
otic, it was something that I understood because it was some
thing that I could have built with an Erector set. So it is the wheelchair that is the most vivid image I retain from those
mostly faded memories of my father’s illness.

Our gardener then was Aurelio Salazar. Now he is old,
brown as a coffee bean from decades in the sun, and always
bent slightly toward the earth he has tended so long. But
back then, Aurelio was young and sturdy, and I can remem
ber that every day at around five o’clock Aurelio would go
up to my father’s bedroom. He and my mother would help
Bogie get dressed in his trousers, casual shirt, and smok
ing jacket. Bogie would make jokes about having to gain
weight and he would fret about his boat, asking if they had
finished the work on the hull. And then Aurelio would slip his strong arms under my father’s shoulders, lifting Bogie
from the bed and into the wheelchair. My father, fussing
and mumbling and still insisting on doing whatever he could
for himself, would roll the chair himself across the bedroom
to the dumbwaiter shaft which was built into the corner of the bedroom.

Then Aurelio would lift Bogie again, and carefully place
him in the dumbwaiter, which had been altered to serve as an elevator for my father. My father would sit on a small
stool. The top of the dumbwaiter had been removed to ac
commodate him, but, sadly, nothing else had to be done. My father’s weight loss had been gradual, and as a kid I didn’t re
alize what I know now, that my father, thin to begin with, had
become skeletal. Toward the end he weighed as little as
eighty pounds.

Aurelio would go down to the kitchen and pull the ropes
that would slowly lower my father through the dumbwaiter
shaft. The shaft was dark, and though the entire ride took
only about twenty seconds, it must have been a painful, even
humiliating, ride for my father, alone in that dark shaft,
reduced to the size of a child, and face-to-face with his
own helplessness.