I was pregnant - and Bogie was just livid

I was pregnant - and Bogie was just livid, by LAUREN BACALL: The late actress tells of her tempestuous and passionate marriage to screen star Humphrey Bogart

The only cause my husband Humphrey Bogart ever gave me to be jealous was not of a woman but of a boat — a racing yacht called the Santana. He was in love with her sleek lines, and the way she moved in the water. Sailing was his greatest joy. But I got seasick. I didn’t want to sail, I wanted children. We were trying for a baby, but it didn’t happen straight away.

After three years, my doctor told me the problem was that I needed to relax. Think of the good time we’re having, Bogie used to say — making love is the most fun you can have without laughing. We were blissfully happy, though like any married couple we had occasional rows. One erupted on our second Christmas together, surrounded by friends.

Bogie gave me a large box and I gasped when I tore it open — it was a mink coat, from upmarket store Bergdorf Goodman, and embroidered with my initials on the lining. That coat was a beauty.

We had all been drinking, of course. When I first arrived in California at 18, I was such an innocent that I ordered ginger ale and thought myself sophisticated. Now at 22, I had discovered aquavit on ice.

Bogie said it was too strong, but I liked the taste.

So I put it on this gorgeous coat, and one of our friends said: ‘Have you ever walked barefoot on a mink?’ We threw it on the floor, took off our shoes, and walked on it. Bogie was livid.

He grabbed it from the floor, so hurt and angry that after all his planning I simply dumped his gift on the floor and stomped on it. I threw my arms around him and swore I loved the coat, but he was having none of it. It was touch and go for a while there.

The day I told him I was pregnant, we had the biggest shouting match of our lives. It hadn’t occurred to me that, 48 years old and childless, he wasn’t ready to be a father. He kept yelling that he hadn’t married me just to lose me to a baby.

The next day, he wrote me a long, contrite letter. He was afraid, he said, of being a bad father. But he knew how much I wanted a child, and he promised he would get used to the idea of being called Dad.

When our son was born, on January 6, 1949, we called him Steve — after Bogie’s character in To Have And Have Not, the movie that brought us together.

When Bogie flew to the Congo three years later, to film The African Queen, I went with him, even though I was terrified of bugs and nearly went into hysterics on the first night when I found a scorpion in my bathroom.

The movie won him an Academy Award, and that night we were so happy. Bogie had his yacht, me, success, our son...?and now our second child was on the way.

We called her Leslie, spelled that way after the actor who was Bogie’s great mentor, Leslie Howard.

The Oscar meant more major film roles for Bogie and we flew to Rome where he shot The Barefoot Contessa with Ava Gardner.

When we got back to California, we were deluged with phone calls from friends welcoming us back, and we started seeing everyone.

I loved parties, and sometimes Bogie would complain that he felt like my escort, not my husband.

The lyricist Ira Gershwin invited us to meet Leonard Bernstein, the composer of West Side Story and a genuine genius. He was ravishing to look at, with enormous vitality, energy, and a great sense of fun.

From that night on, we saw a lot of Lenny. He’d come to the house for tennis, drinks, dinner and to play music until three in the morning. When Lenny sat down at the piano, I sat at his feet.

Bogie could see I was becoming infatuated. He knew I was an innocent, never having had the chance to spread my sexual wings, so he allowed me my intermittent crushes.

That’s where the 25-year difference in our ages showed. He warned me against ever thinking I could run off with Lenny: ‘You’d probably have a great time for a weekend, but not for a lifetime.’

I would never have dared. Not only did my nice-Jewish-girl syndrome get in the way, but I knew that, though Bogie might put up with flirtation, if I was ever really unfaithful he would leave me. He valued character more than anything, and he trusted mine.

We hadn’t made a film together in eight years, since Key Largo, but in 1956, now that both the children were a little older, we started making plans: there was a book we liked, called Melville Goodwin, USA, a love story between a military man and a female politician.

Life seemed very good indeed. But Bogie came home one day and told me that he’d run into an old co-star, Greer Garson.

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Over lunch, she’d announced that she didn’t like the sound of his cough, and dragged him to see her doctor, Maynard Brandsma, at the Beverly Hills Clinic.

+7I was so used to Bogie’s cough that I never paid too much attention. He’d been off his food a little, but that wasn’t unusual. I should have realised at once that the mere fact that he’d consented to go with Greer to a doctor was indicative of something serious. Any time I’d ever mentioned a doctor to him, Bogie bristled.

The doctors called him back for a bronchoscopy, taking a sample of tissue from deep in the throat, and then suggested he ought to take a week to rest.

We stayed in Palm Springs, at Frank Sinatra’s house, and I was disturbed that Bogie seemed unable to swallow much solid food.

When the tests came back, Dr Brandsma called us in to his office. The movie would have to be postponed, he said, because Bogie needed surgery. The biopsy had revealed malignant cells, a cancer in the oesophagus.

We were due to start shooting in a week, and we had already filmed the wardrobe tests, to help get the costumes right.

That had been great fun, as though we were back making our first movie together, playing those classic characters Slim and Steve.

Bogie asked if the operation could be postponed until after shooting.

• Not unless you want a lot of flowers at Forest Lawn cemetery,’ said Dr Brandsma. He hadn’t known us long, but he had already learned that he must never lie to Bogie.

He was booked into the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles for the following Wednesday. As we drove there, Bogie very shyly took my hand and said: ‘Funny, I’ve never spent much time with doctors. Now I’ll probably spend the rest of my life with them.’

I smiled back at him and said: ‘No, you won’t — they wouldn’t dare.’

The doctors kept telling us how lucky we were to have caught the cancer so early. What they did not tell me until much later is that this was one of the worst possible places to have cancer, because it moves so quickly to the nearby lymph nodes.

I have no idea how I got through the day of the operation — hundreds of cups of coffee, hundreds of cigarettes. Bogie was on the operating table for nine-and-a-half hours.

I didn’t understand how any body, even his, could survive that much punishment.

Until I saw my husband safely back in his hospital room, I couldn’t sleep or even eat.

I sat in the dark suite, with just one light on, and waited. Suddenly there was the sound of wheels, and the door opened. I saw nurses, and bottles hanging from everywhere, tubes, and Bogie with a terrible black contraption in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue.

He was lying on his side, his left arm and hand hanging through the raised side of the bed. They were swollen to four times their normal size. My God, I was so frightened.

For the next two days and nights I barely slept. I wanted to be ready when he came round. When he did wake, he was rolled to a sitting position, and a suction machine was brought in, to clear the lungs of mucus so that pneumonia wouldn’t set in. Bogie hated that machine. The second time he used it, I heard him pleading: ‘Please — no more.’ For him to say those words, it must have been horribly painful.

After a few weeks, he had recovered enough to go home, though the treatment was not over. He would need X-ray therapy, and he had lost about 30lb.

He had been thin to begin with, about 11st ‘soaking wet’, as he used to say. There was no question of him being allowed to film while he was so weak. When he came home we were waiting for him — I was standing at the top of the stairs, with our children either side of me.

With that chewing gesture of his, the one that signalled some strong emotion, he said: ‘This is what it’s all about — this is why marriage is worth it.’ I smiled down at him, on the verge of tears, suddenly realising that he was, too.

Over the next few weeks Bogie grew stronger every day. He was coughing less, and smoking filtered cigarettes for the first time — ‘These are pretty good, aren’t they?’ he’d say.

Next came the X-ray therapy. It would be an eight-week programme on the million-volt machine, the only one in the city. We were warned that the side-effects were cumulative, and that Bogie would feel nauseous, but after it was over he’d be fine. We believed what they told us.

I was not allowed in the room with the machine, only to look through a square of glass in the wall. The room was bare, and suspended from the ceiling was a large round metal object that looked like something from outer space.

The machine aimed its beam at the tiniest point in Bogie’s chest while he lay on a metal slab, and for a brief moment one million volts of X-ray were concentrated into that area. It was a debilitating procedure. Every day he came home, and he was determined to come downstairs to dinner every night even though he didn’t eat.

He still had a drink before dinner, or an occasional beer. I could only guess how he felt — Bogie wasn’t one to dwell on such things. A man’s illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.

One afternoon Bogie flew into a rage. Dorothy Kilgallen, a truly vicious gossip columnist, had printed a complete lie — that Bogie had been moved to ‘the eighth floor of Memorial Hospital’, where he was ‘fighting for his life’. Now the phone was ringing like crazy, and he was horribly upset.

He’d been struggling for so many months to gain weight, to feel better. ‘The fact that there isn’t any Memorial Hospital doesn’t bother me so much,’ he said, ‘but that detail about me being on the eighth floor has got me sore. That’s pretty damn ominous.’

Around this time Bogie started complaining about a pain in his left shoulder. He never mentioned anything unless it really hurt.

Pills didn’t help. The cancer had returned. In those days, there was only one other treatment, called nitrogen mustard. That was as bad as it sounds.

The nitrogen mustard knocked him flat. He could hardly walk — we had to hire a male nurse to carry him. Bogie hated that, and hated the thought of friends seeing him this way even more.

For the first time, even our closest friends, such as Sinatra or David Niven and his wife Hjordis, had to call before they dropped by.

When they did call round, Bogie refused to be carried down the stairs. So we put a chair in the ‘dumb waiter’, the lift that used to carry food between floors, and he came downstairs in that instead.

Though he could still barely eat, cocktail hour became his happiest time of the day, drinking Martinis with dry sherry.

Spencer Tracy and Kate Hepburn were there almost every night. We would wheel him from the dumb waiter to his favourite orange chair, and through those last weeks, by a superhuman effort, talk and laughter kept him going.

Around Christmas 1956, Dr Brandsma told me there was no hope. Bogie had already fought this cancer for longer than seemed humanly possible.

He was so frail that we could no longer lift him into his armchair — he just stayed in the wheelchair.

On a weekend morning in January, after the worst night imaginable when Bogie lay restlessly plucking at his chest and moaning, I dressed to take the children to Sunday school.

I kissed him, as I always did, and said I’d be right back.

• Goodbye, kid,’ he said. When I came back an hour later, he had slipped into a coma.

I started to shake, and I would have gone to pieces but for the children. I told Steve that daddy had been very ill, and that now he was asleep and might never wake up. I brought Leslie into the bedroom to see him too, though she was too young to understand.

We sat with him, and after about 15 minutes Steve leaned over and kissed his father’s cheek. It seemed a perfectly natural thing to do.

Around midnight, I went to lie down in the adjoining room. For the first time in almost a year I sobbed and sobbed, saying: ‘Please don’t let him die.’

At around five, I was awakened by someone gently shaking me. A yellow light shone from the bedroom. I heard the nurse say: ‘Mrs Bogart, it’s all over.’

At his funeral, the director John Huston read the eulogy. He said: ‘Bogie was lucky at love and he was lucky at dice.

• He got all that he asked for from life, and more. We have no reason to feel any sorrow for him — only for ourselves, for having lost him.’

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