Bogart Read Free

isn’t it,’ she said. ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do much sailing, you know.’ I said, ‘Oh.’”
    He doesn’t mention the fight, but the next morning, he apologized to my mother. He told her that he was shocked at his own behavior. He had been scared, more than anything else. He said he didn’t want to lose all the happiness he had found in being married to her. He was afraid of being a lousy father, he said, and he didn’t know how he would han dle a kid.
    I’m sure Bogie had all the birth defect fears that I had when I was an expectant father. Would his kid have all the fingers, toes, and ears that a kid is supposed to have? These fears probably loom even larger when you are almost fifty and expecting your first baby. Dad was full of anxiety about it all, but he also said that he did want a baby, more than any thing in the world.
    After his initial panic, Bogie started to get into this baby thing. His male pals gave him a baby shower, if you can imag ine that. Frank Sinatra, Paul Douglas, Mike Romanoff, and others brought diapers and rattles and even little baby dresses, because in those days you didn’t know if you would have a boy or a girl. “His shower was bigger than the one I had,” Mother says.
    Mother spent much of her pregnancy making home im provements in the middle of the night, and reading books about gadgets. Already she was lobbying for a bigger house because she wanted more children. Bogie told his friend Mike Romanoff, “When other wives are pregnant they’re sup posed to demand pickles, ice cream, or strawberries out of season. Mine just wants houses.”
    I became known in the papers as “The most discussed baby-to-be in Hollywood.” Hollywood columnists Hedda Hop per and Sheilah Graham called often. Did the baby move? Had they decided on a name?
    Throughout the pregnancy Bogie was edgy. He paced. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. At times he must have looked like one of those death row prisoners he had portrayed, waiting for a phone call from the governor. Bogie had no experience with kids so he started trying to get to know the children of his friends. But he tried too hard, it seems, and was often rebuffed, which made him all the more insecure about what sort of father he would be.
    “I can’t say that I truly ever wanted a child before I mar ried Betty,” he later said. (Betty is my mother. She was born Betty Perske. She took her mother’s name of Bacall when she was a kid and her father ran away. Producer Howard Hawks made her Lauren, a name she has never felt comfortable with.) “For one thing, in the past, my life never seemed set tled enough to wish it on a minor. I was in the theater in New York, or going on tour around the countryside. And in Hol lywood, I was either trying to consolidate my foothold in pic tures or was preoccupied by something else. But Betty wanted a child very much, and as she talked about it, I did, too. For one reason, which may seem a little grisly, but true, nonethe less. I wanted to leave a part of me with her when I died. There is quite a difference in our ages, you know, and I am realistic enough to be aware that I shall probably leave this sphere before she does. I wanted a child, therefore, to stay with her, to remind her of me.”
    * * *
    On the day of my birth Bogie was a wreck. This was in the days when guys stayed out of the delivery room and felt pretty helpless. I know how Bogie felt, because I was not al lowed in the delivery room when my first son, Jamie, was born. But I know what my father missed, too, because a de cade later I watched Richard and Brooke being born and those births were easily the most deeply felt moments of my life.
    In the labor room Bogie did not do well. He turned white and felt sick. My father had a great tolerance for pain, but he had almost no tolerance for the pain of people he cared about. (Several people recall that a few years later Bo gie got sick when a doctor came to the house to stick