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
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
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