Bogart (40 page)

My mother says they did not talk about his illness as if it
were a possibly deadly cancer, but rather as if it were a virus
he would shake off. “When it’s somebody else’s illness you have to take your cue from them,” she told me recently. “If
they choose to pretend it’s a cold, then you go along with
that. You don’t force them to say it’s more than a cold. But deep down he knew.”

And Father clung to the belief that if he could just make
another film, everything would be okay. “If I could just
work,” he would say to his friends. “If I could just work, I’d
be okay.”

For these cocktail hours Mom was the hostess, laughing,
pouring drinks, joining in, but always keeping an eye on my
father. Was he comfortable? Was he being included? Was he
getting tired? She was fiercely protective of him and she
sternly warned anyone who wanted to visit that if they were
going to fall apart they should not come. She insisted that ev
erybody be upbeat. This was not a death watch.

When Clifton Webb came to visit he was shocked to see
how emaciated my father had become, but Webb held to
gether through the visit, probably out of fear of Bacall. When
he left the room he broke down, sobbing.

Spencer Tracy was another one who had to fight con
stantly against what he was feeling. “Spence was shattered be
fore and after each visit,” Kate Hepburn told me.

There were a few friends who did not come to visit, and
my mother was extremely angry about that. The late director
Richard Brooks was one she singled out. But she says there
were others.

When she complained about this to my father, he told
her, “They’re afraid of death and they don’t want to be re
minded of it. I don’t like to be around sick people myself.
I’m not sure I would come and visit me.”

It is poignant that these friendships were the center of
my father’s life during his final weeks, because my father had never thought of himself as a well-liked man. These friends
meant everything to my father during his illness. I remember
that my mother had a small black notebook and in it she
would write the names of everybody who came to visit him,
or sent him flowers or cards.

In time my father’s wise-guy protestation of “I’m just los
ing a little weight, that’s all,” gave way to a promise that he
would win what he, reluctantly, acknowledged was a battle
with death. “I’m going to beat it,” he told Swifty Lazar. “I feel
in my heart I’m going to make it.”

Still, while he eventually admitted that the enemy was
death, he never admitted that he was losing the battle.
Everyone I talked to has said the same thing. Bogie never ac
knowledged that he was dying.

In the movies my father had died many times, particu
larly in the early days. By 1942 he had made forty-five films.
In them he was electrocuted or hanged eight times, and shot
to death twelve times. He had also been sentenced to life in
prison nine times. But in reality, Bogie had an incredible will
to live and he was nowhere near ready to die.

My mother says, “There were only two times when I
heard Bogie even come close to saying it. Once was when we
were on our way to the hospital for his surgery. He said to
me, ‘I never had to go to doctors before. Now, I suppose, I’ll
be seeing them for the rest of my life.’ The other time was
very near the end when Dr. Brandsma came to see him. Bo
gie told Brandsma he was worried and he said, ‘So, Doc,
are things going pretty much the way you expect?’ ‘Yes,’
Brandsma said. By this time it was clear that what Brandsma
expected was that Bogie would die. Aside from those two mo
ments Bogie never talked about dying of the cancer. And I
never really thought: my husband’s going to die. You just get into a routine way of life. Doctors come. Nurses come. It be
comes somewhat normal, and you think it is always going to
be that way. He’ll be sick, but he won’t die.”

Alistair Cooke told me, “Your father never said he was
dying. And he was resolved to rouse himself for two hours a
day to relax with friends until the end came. He managed to convince everyone that he was only sometimes uncomfort
able, though in fact he was in terrible pain.”

Other friends of my father say the same thing: he never
acknowledged that he was in pain. He wouldn’t even admit it
to his doctor.

One afternoon Samuel Goldwyn and William Wyler
came by to visit. My father was incredibly weak by this time,
and said little. Still, Mother handed him his martini, and he
did his best to be amusing. Even at his worst, he was able to
brighten up for company.

At one point a nurse walked into the room. It was time
for Dad’s morphine shot.

Bogie looked at her and then at his company. He had
never taken an injection in front of company before. But now
the pain was too much, even for him.

He lifted his pajama leg. By now my father’s leg was only skin and bones. Goldwyn was shocked. He looked away while
the nurse injected the needle. When it was over, my father,
somewhat embarrassed that he had upset Goldwyn, smiled weakly. “For the pain,” he said, then, “sorry.” He never took
another injection in front of company. He forced himself to
have a high threshold of pain.

One thing my father did not have a high threshold for was the press. At first, the newspapers were good to him.
They didn’t hound him much. They didn’t say he had cancer.

But as the weeks went by and he was no longer being seen at
Romanoff’s, no longer making movies, the rumors became
too much to ignore.

Carolyn Morris says, “The reporters would call and your
father would end up yelling at them. He threatened to sue
them for saying he was in a coma. Then he would bang the
phone down, coughing.”

When one editor called to see if his reporter had really talked to Bogart, my father told him, “If you don’t trust your
reporters then fire them.”

My father exploded when Dorothy Kilgallen, whom he
despised, printed a story that said Bogie was on the eighth
floor of Los Angeles Memorial Hospital, and that he was
near death.

What was funny about the story was that the Los Angeles
Memorial Hospital did not exist. But my father, a man who
found almost everything amusing, was temporarily humor
less. He called Kilgallen’s paper, screaming and yelling about
“the stupid bitch.”

When he was relatively calm he called Joe Hyams, and
asked Joe to print a statement from him. Obviously, by the
time he wrote it, Bogie’s sense of humor had returned.

“I have been greatly disturbed lately at the many un
checked and baseless rumors being tossed among you regard
ing the state of my health,” he wrote. “Just to set the record
straight, as they say in Washington (and I have as much right
to say this as anybody in Washington has), a great deal of what has been printed has had nothing to do with the true facts. It may be even necessary for me to send out a truth
team to follow you all around.

“I have read that both lungs have been removed, that I
couldn’t live for another half hour, that I was fighting for my
life in some hospital which doesn’t exist out here, that my
heart had been removed and replaced by an old gasoline
pump salvaged from a defunct Standard Oil station. I have
been on the way to practically every cemetery, you name ’em,
from here to the Mississippi, including several where I’m cer
tain they only accept dogs. All the above upsets my friends,
not to mention the insurance companies…so, as they also
say in Washington, let’s get the facts to the American
people—and here they are.

“I had a slight malignancy in the esophagus. So that
some of you won’t have to go to the research department, it’s
the pipe that runs from your throat to your stomach. The op
eration for the removal of the malignancy was successful,
although it was touch and go for a while whether the malig
nancy or I would survive.

“As they also say in Washington, I’m a better man than
I ever was and all I need now is about thirty pounds in
weight, which I’m sure some of you could spare. Possibly we
could start something like a Weight Bank for Bogart, and, be
lieve me, I’m not particular from which portion of your anat
omies it comes from.

“In closing, any time you want to run a little medical
bulletin on me, just pick up the phone, and as they say in the
old country, I’m in the book!”

The reporters did call. But the distressing stories kept
coming:
BOGIE WAGES A BATTLE FOR LIFE, DOWN TO 80 LBS., BOGART FIGHTS FOR LIFE AGAINST THROAT CANCER.

By December there was no denying the truth.
Christmas came and went. Leslie and I got lots of presents. It was Dad’s fifty-seventh birthday. Then my birthday
came two weeks later. My mother had a party for me, with
lots of my friends.

Everybody knew the end was coming. By this time Dad
was having trouble breathing and they had brought in oxy
gen tanks for him. I remember them, two big green tanks, one for upstairs and one for downstairs.

Soon friends were making final visits.

One of the people I talked to about my father’s last days
was Phil Stern. Stern is a top Hollywood photographer, who
has taken shots of celebrities for
Look, Life,
and
The Saturday Evening Post.
At seventy-five, he is still very active
in Hollywood.

He remembers Mapleton Drive, the beautiful house, the
patio, the pool. And he remembers his last visit with
my father.

“It really was a good-bye,” he says. “I was just one of
many, hundreds who came…a ‘cast of thousands.’ I remem
ber Bacall greeting me at the door and saying, ‘You’ve come
to see the great man.’ I went in and Bogart was lying on the
couch. He had wasted away. At this time I had just had a
book of photos published. Bogie had the book. He looked up
at me and smiled and said, ‘You did a great job, kid.’”

Phil Gersh says, “Near the end I went upstairs, the last
time I saw him. He must have been eighty-five pounds.

“‘Hey, kid,’ he said, ‘where are the scripts?’

“‘They’re in the car,’ I said. This was a running bit with
us, dialogue we had many times at Romanoff’s.

“‘Well, who are they for?’

“I gave him some names. ‘Hal Wallis wants you,’ I said,
or Joe Pasternak, or Stanley Kramer.

“‘Are they holding the jobs open for me?’

“I said, ‘Absolutely, Bogie.’ He was smoking. It didn’t
make any difference by this point, I guess.”

My father’s last visitors were Kate Hepburn and Spencer
Tracy. For these last weeks of his life, Tracy and Hepburn had
gone to see him every night at 8:30. Tracy would sit in a chair by the bed, and Kate would sit on the floor beside him. Tracy
would tell jokes.

My father and Tracy had been friends for thirty years.
There had been a time when they were the closest of friends,
seeing each other every day and carousing together at
night. Tracy, like my father, was a world-class drinker. Then
there was a period of many years when they saw little of each
other, and they seemed to find each other again after both
became major movie stars. It was a good pairing then; Bogie was a talker and Tracy was a listener. Though they had sepa
rate social groups, they were always close. And more than
that, there was enormous professional admiration. My father
said that Spencer Tracy was our best screen actor. He said
that with Tracy you didn’t see the mechanism at work. “He
covers it up,” Bogie said, “never overacts, never gives the im
pression that he is acting at all. I try to do it, and I succeed,
but not the way Spence does. He has direct contact with an
audience he never sees.”