Bogart Read Free Page B

kids. He was in awe of them.
    What his agent, Sam Jaffe, said to me is typical. Sam said, “I am the father of three, the grandfather of four, and the great-grandfather of three, so I notice children and I have al ways noticed how other people deal with them. When I was in the house with Bogie and you kids for the first time, I paid attention. And I will never forget that when you and your sis ter came down the stairs his look was so…quizzical. He was looking at you children as objects of curiosity, as if he had never seen children. It was as if to say ‘Who are these people? What are you?’ I’ll never forget that. Fatherhood was an unknown thing to him. He came to it late in life. He didn’t caress children, didn’t do any of the things that I did as a fa ther, because it was strange to him. He was not the sentimen tal type that gushed, though he did cry easily. I’m not saying he was not a good father, just that he had this look of curios ity around children. He was not ready to be a father. I don’t think, until he married Betty, that he ever thought he would have children.”
    (This Sam, by the way, is not Sam Jaffe the actor, who played in the movie Gunga Din and later in the TV show Ben Casey.)
    Because Dad was uncomfortable with kids, there are not many stories about Bogie and children before I came along. But one of them is that when Bogie was married to Mary Phil ips, he was godfather to the son of his friends John and Elea nor Halliday. Bogie once offered to take the boy to lunch. When the day came, he said to Eleanor Halliday, “For God’s sake, what do you talk to a thirteen-year-old boy about?”
    “Well,” she said, “you’re his godfather. That means you’re supposed to be in charge of his religious instruction.”
    Later, when the boy returned from lunch his mother asked him, “What did you and Mr. Bogart talk about?”
    “Not much,” the boy told her. “Mr. Bogart said, ‘Listen, kid, there are twelve commandments,’ and then he ordered a drink.”
    Adolph Green, who got to know my father when Green and Betty Comden were in Hollywood writing the screenplays for Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon, remembers an incident at Mapleton Drive one day when the pool was be ing filled.
    “They had been fixing the pool, and now they were pouring new water into it,” he says. “You and me and Bogie were there. You were four or five years old. You were watch ing them fill the pool. There was a hose pouring water into it, and suddenly you got hysterical. You were shrieking. You thought the pool was going to overflow and you were going to drown. I said, ‘Don’t be silly, Steve, it’s okay.’ But you kept getting more and more upset. What I remember most, though, is your father. He didn’t know what to do. He had no idea how to handle it. He was just shaking his head. I asked him about you, and he said that something else had over flowed recently, a tub or something, so your hysteria had some valid reason behind it. I think your mother must have come out and taken care of you, I don’t really remember. But I do remember Bogie shaking his head, helplessly. He had no idea how to handle a hysterical child.”
    When my sister, Leslie, came along a few years after me Dad fared only slightly better. Because she was a girl he was probably even more afraid of her. But he was also much more affectionate with her. He bounced her on his knee of ten, though he had done that rarely with me. He played on the seesaw with her. She was Daddy’s little girl, the baby as well as the female, and he gave to her a quality of love that he never gave to me. He didn’t know any better, of course, didn’t understand that a boy needs to be hugged by his fa ther, too. But sometimes when I am lonely, when I feel that life has cheated me out of something important, I wish for the memory of one of those hugs that went to my sister.
    My father liked the idea of having kids. He was proud to have Leslie and me, and