Bogart (8 page)

I think that Bogie might have been telling Sinatra that
if his life stinks he should fix it. I think that if Bogie felt Sinatra had really been doing his best, Bogie would have been gentle.

Though Bogie had some close actor friends, like Niven, Tracy, Burton, Sinatra, Peter Lorre, and Raymond Massey,
most of Bogie’s friends were writers: Nunnally Johnson, Louis
Bromfield, Nathaniel Benchley, and even Huston, who
started out as a screenwriter. He surrounded himself with
writers because he admired them and he understood that
without them, he would have no words to speak as an ac
tor. Another reason he hung around with few actors was
that he didn’t have much respect for what he called “Holly
wood types.”

The trouble with many of them was that they had small
vocabularies, he said. “They get my goat,” he said. Of course,
Dad’s goat was easily gotten. “They get up there like stoops
and say, ‘Gosh, it’s wonderful to be here. It’s a wonderful
night and I hear this is a wonderful picture. I know Willie
Wyler did a wonderful job and I’m looking forward to a won
derful evening.’ The word
wonderful
should be outlawed.”

From the viewpoint of the Hollywood establishment, my
father was widely regarded as a social misfit, and I think he
liked it that way. He didn’t go to premieres. In fact, he didn’t
go to see his own pictures.

“I am not socially acceptable,” he said. “People are
afraid to invite me to their homes. They’re afraid that I will
say something to Darryl Zanuck or Louis B. Mayer, which, of
course, I will. I don’t really fit in with the Hollywood crowd.
Why can’t you be yourself, do your job, be your role at the
studio and yourself at home, and not have to belong to the
glitter-and-glamor group? Actors are always publicized as hav
ing a beautiful courtesy. I haven’t. I’m the most impolite per
son in the world. It’s thoughtlessness. If I start to be polite
you can hear it for forty miles. I never think to light a lady’s
cigarette. Sometimes I rise when a lady leaves the room. If I
open a door for a lady, my arm always gets in the way so
that she either has to duck under or get hit in the nose.
It’s an effort for me to do things people believe should
be done. I don’t see why I should conform to Mrs. Emily
Post, not because I’m an actor and believe that being
an actor gives me special dispensations to be different, but
because I’m a human being with a pattern of my own and
the right to work out my pattern in my own way. I’m not a
respecter of tradition, of the kind that makes people kowtow
to some young pipsqueak because he is the descendant of a long line.”

Comments like these spewed forth from Bogie almost ev
ery day. He loved to argue. When he and Mom lived
in the farmhouse in Benedict Canyon she put up a sign
that said:

DANGER: BOGART AT WORK. DO NOT DISCUSS POLITICS, RELIGION,
WOMEN, MEN, PICTURES, THEATRE, OR ANYTHING ELSE.

Bogie seemed to bask in his role as troublemaker.
Benchley says, “There was apparently some streak within
him, some imp that was loosed by a variety of factors.”

There really was an odd sort of puritanism about my
father. He once bawled out Ingrid Bergman for throw
ing away her career in the scandal of having a baby out
of wedlock.

“You were a great star,” he said. “What are you now?”

Bergman replied, “A happy woman.”

Dad was capable of obscenities but they were not common. While many people say that my father abhorred vulgarity, there are also people who recall him being vulgar. Conrad
Nagel, for example, remembers Bogie saying of Bette Davis,
“That dame is too uptight. What she needs is a good screw
from a man who knows how to do it.” Others recall that when
my father had a dark room he used to make double expo
sures with his friend the writer Eric Hatch. They called them
“trick photos,” and one of them was of a skier skiing down a
woman’s bare breast.

I think Bogie’s idea of vulgarity depended on who was
present to hear it. Ruth Gordon said that one time Bogie told
her that he was reading a script by “some college type.”

“What’s a college type?” she asked him.

“People who say ‘fuck’ in front of the children,” Bo
gie replied.

Though my father poked fun at people he also poked fun at
himself. He joked about the lifts he sometimes wore in his shoes to make him taller. And he made fun of the toupee he
had to wear later in life, after a disease, called alopecia
areata, caused much of his hair to fall out. He was extremely
well-read in American history and Greek mythology, and
could quote from Emerson, Pope, Plato, and over a thousand
lines of Shakespeare, but he liked to play the dullard. “Henry
the Fourth, part two, what’s that?” he would ask. When some
one gave him a compliment on his intellect or anything else,
he would combat it with a wisecrack.

He wasn’t any more comfortable giving compliments
than he was with getting them. When he was very impressed
by an actor’s performance, for example, he would send a
note instead of praising the actor to his face. He approached
gift giving the same way. He hated birthdays and Christmas
because on those days you were supposed to give a present.
Typically, he would wait until the day had passed, then he
would give a gift. Even then he would sabotage any possibility
of sentiment with a zinger, such as giving someone a new
watch and saying, “I’m sick of looking at the piece of junk
you’ve been wearing on your wrist.”

Another seeming contradiction for my father is that he was a
guy who supposedly wanted nothing to do with Hollywood
“in” groups and yet he was the leader of the most in group
of all, the Holmby Hills Rat Pack. People my age and youn
ger probably think of the Rat Pack as being Frank Sinatra,
Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, Angie Dickinson,
and others. But, except for Sinatra, those are not the origi
nal members.

My mother is the person who gave the pack its name.
The story is that Frank Sinatra had flown Bogie and Bacall
and a bunch of other friends over to Las Vegas for Noel Cow
ard’s opening there. (Now that I think of it, maybe this ex
plains why I banged Coward over the head with a tray. I must
have known that my parents and all their friends were going to see him in Vegas and not taking me with them.) In Vegas
the group debauched for about four days straight, drinking,
dancing, partying, and gambling. Apparently they didn’t get
much sleep, and after a while they all looked like hell. On
the fourth day my mother said, “You look like a goddamn rat
pack.” The name stuck.

“We had a dinner later at Romanoff’s,” my mother says,
“and we elected officers.”

The first official notice of the Rat Pack appeared the
next day in Joe Hyams’s column in the
New York Herald Tribune.

The Holmby Hills Rat Pack held its first annual
meeting last night at Romanoff’s restaurant in
Beverly Hills and elected officers for the coming
year. Named to executive positions were: Frank Si
natra, pack master; Judy Garland, first vice presi
dent; Lauren Bacall, den mother; Sid Luft, cage
master; Humphrey Bogart, rat in charge of public
relations; Irving Lazar, recording secretary and trea
surer; Nathaniel Benchley, historian.

The only members of the organization not
voted into office are David Niven, Michael Ro
manoff, and James Van Heusen. Mr. Niven, an
Englishman, Mr. Romanoff, a Russian, and Mr. Van
Heusen, an American, protested that they were
discriminated against because of their national
origins. Mr. Sinatra, who was acting chairman of
the meeting, refused to enter their protests on
the minutes.

A coat of arms designed by Mr. Benchley was
unanimously approved as the official insignia of the
Holmby Hills Rat Pack for use on letterheads and
membership pins. The escutcheon features a rat
gnawing on a human hand with a legend, “Never Rat on a Rat.”

Mr. Bogart, who was spokesman, said the orga
nization has no specific function other than “the
relief of boredom and the perpetuation of indepen
dence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for
anyone else.”

He said that membership is open to free-
minded, successful individuals who don’t care what
anyone thinks about them.

A motion concerning the admittance of Clau
dette Colbert was tabled at the insistence of Miss
Bacall, who said that Miss Colbert “is a nice person
but not a rat.”

My mother says that Spencer Tracy was only an honorary
member because this was not really his scene. Tracy led a qui
eter life.

“You had to be a nonconformist,” she says, “and you had
to stay up late and drink and laugh a lot and not care what
anybody said about you or thought about you.”

Bogie came up with the motto,
Never Rat on a Rat.
They
made rules, such as they were. One was that no new member
could come in without the unanimous vote of the char
ter members.

Though my father was elected as director of public rela
tions, people I talk to seem to feel that he was the spiritual leader of the group. Of course when Bogie died, the real
leadership of the Rat Pack went to Frank Sinatra and its center moved from Hollywood to Las Vegas.

The press made a big deal of the Rat Pack, of course,
and even today when a group of celebrities hang out to
gether they often get labeled with some version of the title,
such as the Brat Pack of a few years ago.

You wouldn’t think that forming a group of friends to
have fun would be controversial, but it sometimes was. William Holden, who had already had a few run-ins with my fa
ther, didn’t care for the Rat Pack. Holden said, “It’s terribly
important for people to realize that their conduct reflects the
way a nation is represented in the eyes of the world. That’s
why the rat-pack idea makes our job so tough. If you were to
go to Japan or India or France and represent an entire indus
try, which has made an artistic contribution to the entire
world, and were faced then with the problem of someone asking, ‘Do they really have a Rat Pack in Holmby Hills?’
what would you say? It makes your job doubly tough.

“In every barrel there’s bound to be a rotten apple. Not
all actors are bad. It may sound stuffy and dull, but it is quite possible for people to have social intercourse without resort
ing to a Rat Pack.”

I never met William Holden, but I can understand why he wasn’t a favorite of my father’s.

There are many stories that make my father sound like a
wiseguy and a show-off. But there are also stories that portray
him as a generous man. For example, he once got three
friends together to pitch in $10,000 for his writer friend
Eric Hatch, who was down on his luck. And there are stories
that show that Bogie treated people kindly, regardless of
where they stood in the Hollywood pecking order. He was
never a snob.

Adolph Green remembers running into Bogie in a hotel
in England one time. This was just after Bogie had finished
filming
The African Queen.

Green was alone and lonely at the time, and he didn’t
know Bogie very well. Bogie sat and talked with him in the
lobby of the hotel, and after awhile Dad seemed to catch on
that Green had no one to talk to.

“Look,” Bogie said, “I’m having a few friends over later.
Why don’t you come by and join us?”

Green, delighted to have some company, accepted. He
was excited and flattered. Here he was, being invited over to
Bogie’s suite. When he got there, he realized he’d been in
vited to a very small gathering. There were only two other
people there.