Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE The House at Seneca Point His earliest memories were of the estate where his family summered, and of a sailboat tied to the dock at the end of a stretch of manicured lawn. The elegant two-story Victorian house dominated a curve of land on the shoreline of Canandaigua Lake in western New York State. The spire on the tower room jutted above the treetops on the fifty-five acres of farmland, pasture, and woods, and large high windows stared out over the water. Broad awning-shaded steps led to the lawn that ended at a shale beach, where the long dock sliced into the lake. His father's champion-class yacht was moored there, and he would be a sailor all his life. A carriage road swept over a little stone bridge to the back entrance of the house, but, like the other homes nearby, Willow Brook was best reached by water. Visitors arrived at a leafy landing on the long, narrow Finger Lake--deep blue in morning, turquoise in the afternoon--gouged out of the hills aeons before by an advancing glacier. The boathouse flanked one side of the four-hundred-foot beachfront. On the other, sheltered by tall stands of ash, oak, and poplar, were the clear-running brook and weeping willows that gave the property its name. It was a showplace, built in 1871 by the owners of the local brewery as testimony to their wealth. In the last summer of the nineteenth century, Dr. Belmont DeForest Bogart bought the estate for his wife, Maud, then five months pregnant with their first child, a son. Two daughters would soon follow his birth. For the three offspring, Willow Brook was the summer home of their childhood, a place that would figure in both Humphrey Bogart's fondest recollections and his most nightmarish ones. The Bogarts seemed the model of the solid, successful Victorian family--upper-middle-class New York City people whose comings and goings in the village of Canandaigua were regularly recorded in the local paper: Dr. and Mrs. Belmont D. Bogart had arrived with their little son and were waiting to occupy their summer "cottage"; Dr. B. D. Bogart and children had moved in for the summer and would shortly be joined by Mrs. Bogart; Mrs. B. DeForest Bogart had improvised a studio from an old cabin on the property and was giving much time to her art. Like the other summer people, they had little to do with the daily life of the town. But as owners of property and householders of substance, they fit easily into Seneca Point, the exclusive lakeside enclave south of Canandaigua for leading locals and for professional families escaping the heat of Boston and New York--a mix of bankers and businessmen, old settlers, clergy, journalists, and academics. Show people were almost unheard of. The only Warner Brothers here were the local steamboat builders. The colony, usually referred to as the Point, was a little more than halfway down the sixteen-mile-long lake--a secluded Arcadia surrounded on three sides by the grapevine-covered hills that caused the region to be compared with northern Italy. The 142-foot-long sidewheeled steamer Onnalinda ferried people from place to place, stopping at any of the sixty-six landings around the lake whenever a white flag was raised, its two decks redolent with the aroma of fresh grapes, peaches, and other fruit headed for the rail spur at the Canandaigua pier, then on to markets in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The Point was self-contained, protected both by the cliffs and by the owners' corporation, which determined who could move in, and life there was paced to the easy elegance that prevailed for the privileged in those years before World War I. The residents visited, boated, and played tennis; in the evening they played bridge and attended uplifting lectures. On Sundays there were baseball games on the golf course--but only after church. For that, the families would travel by canoe or rowboat to the next point south, where the retired rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Canandaigua had his cottage. Many of the children would congregate on the stairs, beneath the walls lined with rattlesnake skins. The old priest would recite the service faster than anyone but his wife, who beat everyone through the Apostles' Creed. He was in a hurry to go fishing, and she was in a hurry to fix his lunch so he could. On all days, children went easily between the houses, whose doors were always unlocked. It was a secure, prosperous, homogeneous world, staunchly Republican, though once visited by young Franklin Roosevelt, who developed a cramp while swimming and was pulled ashore by a resident. In later years when New Deal rulings offended local sensibilities, FDR's Good Samaritan was often heard to declare, "I should have let the son of a bitch drown!" Even in that well-off community, the Bogarts were accorded a certain deference. Dr. Bogart ran a flourishing downstate practice and was known to have inherited wealth. His wife was the renowned illustrator and children's artist Maud Humphrey. It was said in hushed tones that they were DeForests--socially well connected and linked in some indefinable way with one of the oldest and most distinguished names in New York State. And they looked it. For years afterward people would remember the family, up from Grand Central Station on the overnight Pullman, getting off the train at Canandaigua and boarding the Onnalinda, headed for their landing: the doctor, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, immaculate in his heavy suit, boiled shirt, and stiff collar; his handsome wife, nearly as tall, thin, fashionable in starched cottons or flowing silks of gray or mauve, with lavender-ribboned high-heeled high-button shoes that accentuated the tininess of her size-2 1/2 feet, of which she was so proud; the small, dark-eyed boy and his two little sisters Frances and Catherine, all three under the close watch of a nurse in a starched uniform. They swept aboard the steamer, a splendid caravan, the rear brought up by a sourfaced servant couple straining under the weight of abundant trunks and packages. But there was an underside to the domestic portrait that was generally hidden, though not obscured from those who knew them well. Decades later, Humphrey Bogart would describe for his fans a meticulously proper view of his early life: a weak-willed but charming father; an undemonstrative yet wholly admirable mother; a home life lacking in affection but with plenty of character. "We were a career family," he told interviewers, "too busy to be intimate." Hardly the most comforting of descriptions, but perhaps the best available considering the recollections of his childhood friends. Theirs depict a far harsher reality. "Dr. Bogart had a violent temper," said Grace Lansing, later Mrs. Gerard Lambert of Palm Beach and Princeton, and a cousin of Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state. She lived nearby with her mother and the shadow of an absentee father, Harry Lansing, the alcoholic scion of a New York railroad dynasty who had long since disappeared into the wilds of the Adirondacks. Harry Lansing and Belmont Bogart had been hunting friends, and the doctor was attracted to the plump and pretty Mrs. Lansing. Grace Lambert pitied "those poor children. Humphrey was a month younger than I, very handsome. They were always sent up to the cottage for the summer, with the most awful servants. Common people, with loud voices, ignorant. Oh, they were tough! They used to beat them and shout at them, they were horrible. And the mother and father didn't seem to notice." Perhaps because the doctor and his wife were part of the problem. They fought continuously, loudly, and publicly. Both were heavy drinkers, with Belmont, as were many physicians of his time, quietly acknowledged to be addicted to morphine. Maud, for her part, seemed constantly preoccupied with her deadlines, always under pressure and loudly impatient with the needs of her children and household. "She had a short temper," Grace Lambert said. "And she'd flare up--against her children, against anybody. She was always painting, under a set time, so anything that came across this deadline was upsetting to her." When the work was finally done, Dr. and Mrs. Bogart would gather up Mrs. Lansing, and the three would go off by motorboat for dinner in Canandaigua. Next morning, Grace would hear from her mother of how poor, dear Mrs. Bogart had had too much to drink and taken to her bed; but it was all right, Dr. Bogart had given her some pills. Maud was a hostage to bad headaches, though no one really knew whether they or the drinking came first in a life replete with tension and anxiety. Her son, in his idealized recollections, would describe her as a near teetotaler, hardly venturing beyond a lady-like glass of champagne, a recollection considerably at odds with those of many others, including Grace Lambert: "She drank quite a lot." Maud also fought a painful skin condition known as erysipelas, a streptococcal inflammation named for the hot, red skin that results. "When the pain began," her son once said, "it lashed her so terribly that her left eye closed and the side of her face flamed.... Then my father shot a quarter of a grain of morphine into her to keep her from going insane." Eventually, erysipelas would be controllable by penicillin; at the time, however, the only relief was through narcotics, carrying with it the dangers of addiction. Belmont Bogart had been snared by drugs in the course of needed medication for a painful leg injury shortly before his marriage, and evidence suggests that Maud was caught as well. Frank Hamlin, a grandson of the town banker and later chairman of the board of the Canandaigua National Bank, was at the time the smallest of the local boys. He would never forget one day when, in his words, bare-legged and runny-nosed, he stopped off to see his friend Hump Bogart. Nobody ever bothered to knock on the open doors at the Point, least of all an eight-year-old in a hurry. What Hamlin saw in the hallway, however, made him stop and gape, his greeting locked in his throat. Dr. and Mrs. Bogart stood on the front stairs, dressed for dinner, oblivious to the boy or to anything besides themselves. The doctor had a syringe in one hand, Mrs. Bogart's extended arm in the other, the summer sleeve pushed back. With the expertise of his profession, he inserted the needle into his wife's forearm, after which she took the syringe and injected him. There was nothing furtive about it, the whole procedure completed with the practiced nonchalance of sophisticates enjoying a pre-supper aperitif. The scene confused and disturbed the boy. Dr. Bogart was a doctor, after all, and doctors used needles. But it also brought to mind bits and pieces of grownups' talk overheard before bedtime. As he stood there trying to make sense of what he'd seen, the couple swept out, unaware or perhaps simply not caring that they had an audience. Addiction among medical practitioners was to some extent accepted at the time; if doctors liked a taste of their own medicine, it was entirely their business. And early-twentieth-century attitudes to drugs aside, the Bogarts' wealth seemed always to give them a cushioned remove from contemporary mores; they lived by their own rules as surely as Maud Humphrey wore white boots in the rain when custom dictated that one wear only black, a color she deemed "plebeian." Not so easily overlooked, however, was the treatment of the three children behind the lace curtains and the massive front door of Willow Brook. To adults, Belmont Bogart, whom most everyone called Bogie, seemed a charming, civilized man with an easygoing nature, an outdoorsman who loved hunting and camping and always had time to talk with truck drivers and farmers. His son's contemporaries often saw someone else--a gruff, overbearing grownup who awed them with his physical presence and was quick to resort to corporal punishment for the least infraction. Mrs. Bogart was little better. Faced with a husband increasingly less inclined to work, which made her own deadlines more important, she released her short temper in shouts at her children when they annoyed her or got in her way. She was now in her forties and clinging to the remnants of her youthful good looks. One attempted augmentation, a newly introduced permanent wave, left her hair discolored, unruly, and the subject of unflattering conversation among the other ladies. To Humphrey's friends, she was an imperious, erratic presence, known as "Queen Maud" or "Lady Maud." Mercurial in mood, she was at times a pleasant grande dame paying youngsters the lavish rate of one dollar an hour to pose for her drawings, but at others a shrill, intimidating shrew whose scolding voice carried halfway across the lake. She was the determining factor in her son's early life. Maud Humphrey painted angelic children nestling up to Madonnalike mothers in a series of successful books that began in the 1890s with The Bride's Book. Her own children, however, seemed little more than biological evidence that she had done her duty as a wife. They knew their place; it was with the servants, to whom they were shunted off in the routine manner of the day, always secondary to her art. In a way, the closest she came to her children was when she had them sit for her. Humphrey was his mother's favorite model, although he was not the original Maud Humphrey baby, as so often later claimed. Her drawings depicted idealized children. And when her own child posed for her, he was removed from the realm of real person with real needs. It was as if in painting a picture of a perfect child, she made her own child, who was the subject, perfect, and therefore perfectly mothered. "She was essentially a woman who loved work, loved her work, to the exclusion of everything else," Bogart would recall. "I don't think she honestly cared about anything but her work and her family. Yet she was totally incapable of showing affection to us." To her children, she was always "Maud," never "Mother." It was easier, her son rationalized; it was unsentimental, as direct, business-like, and impersonal as Maud was. It also meant a childhood without a kiss or a hug. When she did show her approbation, it was conveyed in a masculine way; long after he was an adult, Bogart still did not know whether her manner was caused by shyness or a fear of seeming weak. "Her caress was a kind of blow," he said. "She clapped you on the shoulder, almost the way a man does." Humphrey Bogart would eventually come to terms with the mother of his childhood, would even admire her. After all, she was a woman who was famous in her own right, an acknowledged talent in a man's world, and a high-income earner in an age that consigned women to the kitchen. But admiration was as far as he could go: "I can't say truthfully that I loved her." The relationship engendered a streak of distrust that bedeviled his later intimacies with women. Once he was established as a tough guy in films, he gave interviews with super-macho titles such as "I Hate Dames," confessions with more of a basis in reality than the studio flacks who placed them realized. The classification of dysfunctional families was decades away, but the concept was no stranger to the Bogarts' neighbors on the Point, who were concerned for the welfare of the children. Humphrey's sisters, Frances and Catherine Elizabeth, known as Pat and Catty, were two and three years younger, respectively. (Frances was at first called "Fat" by Humphrey because she was, though she soon grew tall and slender and became Pat thereafter. As an adult, Catherine was called Kay.) Their gentle older brother with his sad dark eyes was protective of them but ill-equipped to cope with the rages of the servant couple who themselves were mistreated by Belmont and Maud, and who vented their resentment on their employers' helpless offspring. "They were abused," said Grace Lambert. "Everyone worried so about them, but they couldn't do much about it. Those servants were awful." The worst times were the extended periods, lasting anywhere from two weeks to a month, when the parents would return to the city, leaving the servants in total control. Even though sounds traveled on the Point, allowing others to hear the shouts and cries, Humphrey and his sisters never complained openly. "Wouldn't dare," Lambert said. "They were afraid." But Grace wasn't. If he wasn't going to talk about it, she told Humphrey one day, she would. Anyway, she added, the grownups already were. He grew anxious, his eyes troubled beneath the fringe of dark hair: "Don't--don't say that. Don't." She went ahead anyway--"And it got back to Mrs. Bogart that I was saying things about her servants." A walkway ran along the lakeshore, a favorite promenade for local families on summer evenings, when neighbor called on neighbor. Grace and her mother were out walking one night when a tall, imperious figure bore down on them out of the gloaming, shouting at the top of her voice. Maud Humphrey Bogart, made even more towering by her high-heeled shoes with the little purple bows, railed at the embarrassed little girl: Oh, she knew what Grace was up to, spreading stories about her servants being cruel. Well, she didn't believe it--not a word of it! The eleven-year-old winced, shaken at the dressing-down in front of the grownups. But to Grace's surprise, she saw them turn instead on Maud and berate her. While this comforted Grace, she also knew what would happen to Humphrey. On another summer's afternoon she had entered the cool, dark hallway of the Bogart house. She often came to pose for Maud, but that day she was just looking for her friend as she made her way up the stairway. The walls of the stairwell and landing were covered with murals, in which Mrs. Bogart, with a sardonic eye, had depicted the comings and goings of the colony. The house was quiet, except for an odd sound she couldn't quite place: a dull snap at regular intervals that echoed in the stillness. A door on the landing was ajar. Drawn by curiosity, she moved quietly until she saw, outlined against the light from the windows, Humphrey, hunched over, and his father, who held the boy's neck with one arm while the razor strop in the hand of the other came down repeatedly on his back. There was no shouting, no sign of anger, no murmur or struggle from Humphrey, who slightly flinched as the blows landed, his face expressionless. Only the recurring snap as the leather found its target. Grace quickly fled the house. As she hurried to the carriage road, she passed the little studio where Maud, a cool detached figure in mauve, sat painting one of her famous tableaux of angelic children. Humphrey Bogart would make his career in film, a medium based on illusion. He was perfectly trained for it, for a good deal about the Bogarts was illusion: the solid Victorian facade that masked alcoholism and drug and child abuse; the distinguished doctor with needle tracks under his boiled shirt; the revered children's artist with no understanding of her own son and daughters. Just as illusory were the Bogarts' pretensions of being Old New York society. The fact was, Dr. Bogart's father had begun as a Canandaigua innkeeper. Adam Watkins Bogart had always wanted more. With a single exception, his people had been farmers for generations, ever since Gisbert in den Bogart, "Gisbert in the Orchard," had arrived from Holland in the 1600s. They had lived first in Brooklyn--up to modern times there would be a Bogart Avenue there--then migrated in stages to the newly opened farmlands around the Finger Lakes in the lovely, hilly region of western New York known as the Southern Tier. Adam was ambitious and he was tough, and one way to be freed from slavery to the soil was to run a tavern, a two-fisted job in an area only a generation or two removed from frontier days. By the 1850s, he had saved enough for a lease on the Franklin House, Canandaigua's one hotel, which doubled as the county seat. The town jail was in the basement, a tap room out front was the social hub. Here were farmers gathered on their infrequent visits to town, travelers passing through, politicians arguing and dealing amid clouds of cigar smoke. Adam was in his element as proprietor and host; the appropriate occupation and place for the grandfather of Casablanca's Rick Blaine. He married a woman of property, like himself no longer young, and like himself eager for betterment. Julia Bogart had the money for the lease on the elegant three-story Jefferson House, the social center of what was then the village of Watkins on nearby Lake Seneca. The brick and stone hotel had been built by a distant cousin of Adam's, who had given his name to the town. Jefferson House had fourteen rooms, each with a fireplace, a two-story balustraded tower, and a spacious lobby with a floor of gleaming black and white Italian tile. Julia held the lease, and the money, too. Adam minded the business. The younger of their two children, both boys, was given the grandiose name of Belmont DeForest, joining the names of two leading New York high-society families of no relation to each other or the Bogarts, but a clear statement of the parents' aspirations. Only naming the child Vanderbilt Rockefeller would have been more pretentious. The older boy's name would be obliterated over the years, though not the story of his fate. He was six years old, sliding down the sleek, polished banister of the massive stairs that ascended two floors on one side of the high-ceilinged lobby. Perhaps the father had promised to keep an eye on him. Lost in the pleasure of descent, the boy failed to check his speed. Seconds later, he sailed off the railing and smashed against the bright, hard tiles, dying on impact. Julia never forgave her husband, although whether because marital rights were not to be denied or, more likely, because she simply wanted another child, Belmont was born a year later. He was two when his mother died in November 1868, after five months on a sickbed, treated by a doctor who had come by every day with useless medications. Her body was interred at Glenwood Cemetery, but not her fury. In the will she wrote just two months before, Julia A. Bogart left her worldly goods to her only child, with specific instructions that the boy's upbringing and financial affairs be in the care of a legally appointed guardian. Adam was left with nothing, not even his son. He contested the will, charging that his wife was not in her right mind. Local sympathies were with him, but hearings and conflicting family claims dragged on for two years, depleting the estate and embittering Adam. In March 1871, Adam traveled to Newark, New Jersey, to appeal directly to Julia's sisters. Whatever opposition they may formerly have had, they now petitioned the court on his behalf. Wrote one: "He has always thought I was opposed to his having his rights. Now I will say this to you in confidence--Brother Bogart has always been an honorable man with his family. I now think it the best way to let him have his own way and there is not a doubt [that he should be] with his own child." Another stated, "I know his whole mind is on the future welfare of the son" and asked that the money be released "in Brother Bogart's hands so he can go in business and make a living for self and boy.... I know [Adam] to be an affectionate father, ever watchful over the interest of the motherless son." Soon after, the court declared all accounts settled, leaving father and son free to go. Adam paid his debts and took his boy to New York City. He did not return to Watkins until he was shipped back in a casket twenty-one years later, to be buried near the wife who hated him. He had never remarried. Belmont DeForest Bogart grew up alone, a confused, disoriented child who was the object of a custody battle in which one of the litigants was his dead mother. Not that the boy lacked for material comforts. In the boomtown of 1870s New York, Adam Bogart invested Julia's remaining money well. He made a fortune as a pioneer manufacturer of lithographed tin advertising signs and was determined that Belmont would have not only the name of a rich man's son, but all the advantages as well. He would not have to endure the taproom of the Franklin House, the farmers with their muddy boots smelling of cow dung, and the country politicians with their tobacco plugs and cheap cigars; neither would he have to cater to the patrons of the Jefferson. Instead, he would go to Andover, like the sons of the landed gentry of Canandaigua and Rochester, and then to Yale. He would know the right people. He would be a gentleman. Belmont learned this lesson all too well. Tall and good-looking, with a thatch of thick, dark hair, he was popular with women and the sons of the best families, an avid huntsman and skilled sailor at the fashionable summer resorts. In a social world attuned to the "Gentleman's C," he made his way easily through Andover and Yale, then the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City; later he was on the staffs of Bellevue, St. Luke's, and Sloan hospitals. Following his graduation from Columbia in 1896 and eased by the right entrees, he launched a prosperous practice that never intruded on the pleasures of a gentleman. He had, on the surface anyway, an ideal life. And perhaps if it hadn't been for the ambulance accident, his son's life would have been very different. According to newspaper accounts, Dr. Bogart, just months out of medical school, was waiting alongside a city street when a horse-drawn ambulance, top-heavy and balanced precariously on large, spindly wheels, came by. Possibly the horse turned skittish, but without warning the ambulance tipped over and fell on the young doctor, leaving him with massive cuts and bruises, and a fractured leg. The bone, badly set, refused to heal and had to be rebroken and reset. Eventually he learned to walk again, but from then on his health would always be unstable. The use of drugs, prescribed at the outset to alleviate the excruciating pain, became a daily ritual; he would be addicted for the rest of his life. The accident had a secondary, equally fateful outcome. Two years earlier at an art studio party, Belmont Bogart had met the beautiful, spirited Maud Humphrey, two years younger than he and already famous. Their instantaneous attraction that led to a quick near-engagement was reinforced by the proper social attributes--he had money and position, she was tall and slender with fine features and an independent air that excited him, though not so bohemian as to preclude a good income. But she was also an outspoken conservative as well as a suffragist--her son would call her a laboring Tory--who worked hard for her earnings and for women's rights. Their differences soon led to a break in the relationship. Now, two years later, she walked into the hospital room and back into Belmont's life. Their reconciliation was as instantaneous as their initial attraction. From that point on, Maud took over. In view of "the impending sufferings" of her fiance, she told a reporter from upstate, she had decided that she would rather nurse her husband through his trial than visit a fiance with the chaperons required for a single lady. They were married within a week, a few Humphrey cousins on hand to stand for the bride. "The honeymoon," reported the Ontario County Times of Canandaigua, "will be spent in a hospital." They married in June 1898, the bridegroom thirty-two, old for those times, the bride thirty, an age considered well into spinsterhood. But labels seldom concerned Maud. In her case, moreover, the usual social pressures to marry had been inoperative. Her parents were dead, as were Belmont's; financially, she was independent. Even so, the doctor was a catch; he was rich, he was good-looking, and marriage was still the ultimate success, especially for a woman of thirty. She was the daughter of a comfortable middle-class family from Rochester's Third Ward, known locally as the Ruffled Shirt District. The Humphreys were proud of their English roots and their lateral connections to the Churchills, connections that make Maud and her children distant relations of Winston Churchill and of Princess Diana. One of Maud's uncles was a prominent lawyer, another the owner of Humphrey's Bookstore, for years a city landmark. Her father John had been a prosperous Rochester merchant. Maud's determination had sustained her through a bout of near blindness that inexplicably began when she was fourteen and just as inexplicably reversed itself two years later. Her parents died not long after, and she left Rochester at eighteen, going first to New York City to enroll at the Art Students League, and then to Paris, where one of her teachers was James McNeill Whistler. She returned a skilled painter, only to find that men of large affairs, who controlled the fat commissions, weren't about to have their portraits painted by a woman. Children, however, were another matter; the nursery was after all a woman's place. Her best work in any case was in watercolors and in the strong, sure charcoal drawings that would include some of the most insightful likenesses of her son. "The Maud Humphrey baby," he later said, was painted in "water color worked so dry the painting seemed to have been etched." Maud mined her niche. Her paintings appeared on the covers of such magazines as the Delineator and Buttrick's as well as in ads and sewing patterns. Soon her work caught the attention of such color printers as Louis Prang of Boston and Frederick A. Stokes of Rochester, who quickly bought exclusive rights to all her color work and kept her under contract until 1900, illustrating popular books of the publisher's invention. It was a lucrative arrangement for them both. Her artworks were printed on finer paper than the text, and were signed and copyrighted so that they could be resold as prints or reproduced as calendars and postcards by other publishers who had made agreements with Stokes. She also illustrated calendars for upstate New York newspapers, generally given to subscribers by their paper boys. A particularly beautiful one, done for the Buffalo Evening News, could be cut to form a jigsaw puzzle. Her books for Stokes brought her immense fame. By the early 1890s, Maud's name was a byword among parents throughout the United States. They called her the American Kate Greenaway, after the beloved English painter whose art graced children's books all over the English-speaking world. The Bride's Book did well, but its logical sequel, the Baby's Record, seems to have immortalized nearly every turn-of-the-century American infant's first haircut, tooth, word, and step. Among her other successes were Babes of the Year, Babes of the Nations, Tiny Toddlers, and Maud Humphrey's Mother Goose. Little Folk of 1776 and Children of the Revolution had tots in the guises of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, and other early American patriots. Little Heroes and Heroines and Little Soldiers and Sailors were children's guides to the Spanish-American War. In 1895, when she was twenty-seven, Maud Humphrey's annual income was reported to be $50,000. As her son later said, "Starving in a garret didn't appeal to her when she discovered she could make $50,000 a year drawing covers for magazines." Her private sketches were skillful, hard-edged, and uncompromising. The public taste demanded sentiment, and she gave it to them with a vengeance--angelic roly-polies with sausage curls and China-saucer eyes in saccharine poses; Maud Humphrey children would never "cry, drool, get dirty or throw their spinach about," as one critic later wrote, but "sweetly say their prayers for mother, gently toss rosebuds ... or at most shed a gentle tear." The public clamored for more, and Maud delivered with the skill and detail that earned her her prominence. But she knew what she could do if only allowed to, and beneath the success and brilliant marriage, there ran a deep current of anger. The Bogarts bought a town house on Manhattan's then-fashionable Upper West Side, a half block from the broad, tree-tented sweep of Riverside Drive along the Hudson. They filled it with horsehair furniture and maintained it with a legion of Irish maids. A year and a half later, Maud gave birth to their first child. They named him Humphrey after her family and DeForest after his father and the presumably rich relations whose connections were always hinted at but never proved. Adam Bogart had died seven years before, all traces of the taproom long vanished. Maud set out to reinvent the Bogarts and make certain that her son never heard anything about his father's forebears beyond occasional obliquely disparaging references. "I know nothing of her background," he said when he was in his fifties. "She never had time to tell me of it, but ... she was always a little supercilious about Father's family." For years, Humphrey Bogart's birth date would be a matter of dispute, the official date of December 25, 1899, dismissed as so much studio hype. (A favorite alternative was January 23, 1899, which would have made him a six-month baby.) This is one case where the legend turns out to be the truth; for, while his birth certificate appears to be lost, the Ontario County Times, which kept tabs on the region's notables, announced in its January 10, 1900, issue: "Born: at New York, Dec. 25, 1899, to Dr. and Mrs. Belmont DeForest Bogart, a son." Mrs. Bogart had been out to an exhibit the day before--over Dr. Bogart's objections, according to one biographer. She went into labor that night with a timing that couldn't have been more unfavorable. It was Christmas Eve; Sloan's Maternity Hospital was in midtown, at Fifty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue, more than two miles south; and it had begun to snow. A hansom cab carried the couple downtown. Maud, now feeling the contractions, was jostled from side to side as the carriage clattered along on its two wheels over the slippery cobblestones on Ninth Avenue while the trains of the Elevated thundered overhead. Humphrey DeForest Bogart arrived on Christmas Day, with the Black Dutch look of his forebears, the dark-eyed swarthiness that attested to a long-ago presence of the Spanish in the Netherlands. It was six days before the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. As an adult, he would often refer to himself as "a last century man." For Belmont and Maud, their New York City facade was the counterweight to their Canandaigua pretense. The family, like their four-story limestone-front townhouse, presented an impressive face to the world. They were listed yearly among the twenty thousand households in Dau's New York Blue Book--not quite the Social Register, but "a listing of fashionable addresses," as its publishers proudly put it, giving the names of "prominent residents" of the city. West 103rd Street, off Riverside Drive, was comfortably upper-middleclass--townhouses of brownstone and limestone arrayed wall to wall, ending in the leafy esplanade of Riverside Park with its broad views of the Hudson. On the semi-rural Drive, moviemakers filmed chase scenes for the nickelodeons, often ending at the domed 150-foot-high Grant's Tomb, which was modeled on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. At number 245, broad stone steps led up to the parlor floor and Dr. Bogart's office. He had his world; Maud had hers, in a fourth-floor studio under a skylight, where she usually worked late into the night. When they came together, they often fought. The children cowered in the nursery upstairs, their blankets pulled about their ears in an attempt to block the sounds of their parents screaming at each other and to escape the atmosphere of rage that suffused their growing up. At age six Humphrey set off on the expected prep school track, beginning at the small Delancey School and at nine transferring to Trinity School, founded in 1709, New York's oldest continuous private school. It was operated by Trinity Church, the wealthy Episcopal parish on Wall Street whose vestrymen controlled many of the levers of power in the city. The school, however, an imposing stone building on Ninety-first Street, just east of Broadway, was only twelve blocks away from the Bogart house. By this time Trinity was hardly the charity school that had been its founders' intent, but neither was it an easy ride for the very rich. Run on the austere pattern of the English public schools, it was a boys-only institution, with black-robed masters whose grading weeded out the slackers and sent the rest on to the Ivy League. Humphrey, a new boy among youngsters who had already spent four years together, did not do well. He was an outsider to his classmates and an erratic student, and his dismayed parents and teachers watched his marks yo-yo from near honor levels to barely average to abysmally failing and then up again; his attendance record was dotted with absences. His only consistently good grades were in religion, an inescapable presence at the school, where the day began at 9:00 A.M. with chapel, and where on Friday mornings the Very Reverend Dr. Lawrence T. "Bunny" Cole, headmaster of Trinity, recited the litany over the bowed heads of the kneeling boys. It might have been the drama that drew Humphrey to ecclesiastical excellence, or possibly a sense of caring that he could not find elsewhere. One of the few boys who bothered with him, a class officer, remembers liking him but feeling that he was lonely "and wasn't happy at home." During his years of stardom, Bogart reinvented his past and cast himself in the role of a young rebel who stood up to Dr. Cole. The sadder reality was of a boy who tried to make himself invisible. The very few who remembered him at all were to recall a delicate-featured, retiring lad, whose lush curls and immaculate Fauntleroy suits made him an easy mark; "a misfit," said the journalist Doug Storer, a member of the class of 1917, "in the rough-and-tumble world of growing boys. His good looks and his tidiness, plus the fact that he posed for his mother's `pretty' illustrations, helped earn him a sissy reputation. We always called him `Humphrey' because we considered that a sissy name. We must have made life miserable for Bogart." Other than that, he was a non-entity. Athletics were a trial, each gym class an ordeal for the pupil who carried the bruises of his encounters at home. A classmate sometimes paired with him in wrestling would recall his unmistakable fear of being hurt--"you could tell by the look on his face. He'd always lose quickly, just to get it over with." Dramatics, which were held after school, were also shunned. Until he was into his teens, a nursemaid in a starched uniform came to collect him at the final bell, as if he were a small child. Humphrey tried to avoid her, lagging behind as the others rushed for the front door. But she was always there to march him off, his hand imprisoned in her fist, as he cringed under the stares, real or imagined, of his schoolmates. It was only at the Point that he came into his own. Though Europe, in the summer of 1914, was about to plunge into World War I, at the lakeshore the elegant Edwardian world of Belmont and Maud Bogart went on placidly, with no thought yet of America's young men fighting and dying in far-off trenches. For fourteen-year-old Humphrey, however, there were changes only slightly less dramatic than those abroad. The victimized child had grown into a handsome teenager, at about five feet three inches a bit short for his age but attractive to girls. His studied cool and his occasional bouts of moodiness, when he would go off by himself in a silent sulk, only made him that much more interesting. There was also a new assertiveness that made him a leader of the self-styled Seneca Point Gang, a mob consisting not of gunsels but of future bankers and members of the Federal Reserve Board. His position was consolidated when he fished Arthur Hamlin, the youngest grandson of the local banker, out of the lake, after the three-year-old had fallen off the dock. "I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for him," Hamlin said when in his late eighties. Bogart would refer to those months as the happiest of his first forty years. As the head of the Gang, he would decide when the boys should go sliding down the waterfalls in the steep, narrow valleys that creased the hills above the Point, or when they should attend the butchering of a steer in a local farmer's barn. He was the first to jump onto the Onnalinda or one of the other ferries when it docked, shinnying barefoot up the steamer's side to its top for a plunge into the water, an act prohibited by local ordinance and therefore all the more adventurous. The others jumped, Frank Hamlin remembered; Hump Bogart always dove. For inspiration, they visited a retired sea captain who summered with his sister and who kept them spellbound with tales of past adventures and displays of how to splice a rope or carve. On rainy days, they would gather at the Hamlin house or next door at the Adamses, where the rug by the huge stone fireplace would be rolled back, an old toy box brought out, and, under the leadership of General Bogart, battles of the Crimean War reenacted with correctly uniformed lead soldiers from New York's F.A.O. Schwarz. In later life he would depict his career as an accident, a job he'd simply fallen into, a part of his self-mythologizing in keeping with a rugged code that saw acting as not quite fit for a real man. Yet those who knew him as a teenager remembered a boy who was slightly stage-struck. In New York, one of Dr. Bogart's patients and friends was the Broadway impresario William A. Brady, a steady source of free passes to plays, the major form of entertainment of the day. But even Seneca Point had its dramatist in residence: Frank and Arthur's mother was Mary Hamlin, an established writer of religious dramas and later author of the Broadway hit Alexander Hamilton, which was filmed by Warner Brothers in 1931 and was one of their earliest successful talkies. When Humphrey wasn't playing with his friends at the Hamlin house, he was there to listen to their mother's stories about the glamorous life and make-believe world of the theater. He staged his own productions, with the Seneca Point Gang as the cast and himself as producer-director. Two poles stood on the beach opposite his house, a line strung between them with a hanging blanket that served as the curtain. For a five-cent admission, parents were seated in chairs and benches set up by the troupe. The dialogue was improvised, but the costumes were real, sent from New York City by William Brady--old discards, stiff and smelly with dried sweat yet somehow touched with magic. The young players' favorites were the cowboy costumes from Girl of the Golden West, with leather chaps and outsized boots in which they swaggered. In pants hiked up and a ten-gallon hat down over his ears, Hump Bogart played the male lead, the bandit hero who is redeemed by the love of a good woman. That same sense of the dramatic had his friend Grace Lansing uncomfortably cast in a lakeside version of The Perils of Pauline, the popular new serial that had brought the actress Pearl White to instant stardom as the death-defying heroine whose horrific brushes with disaster thrilled audiences weekly at the movie houses blossoming from coast to coast. Grace, the only girl in a band of boys, was regularly stranded on a raft out in the lake, pushed out of windows, or tied to a stake a la Joan of Arc, a fire set in the underbrush near her feet. "But Humphrey would always rescue me," she said. "Always. Very handsome. He'd go out in a boat and get me off the raft, and he'd untie me from the stake. Well, I survived." He was acting out the first stirrings of sexual precocity and a new attitude toward women. Until now, he and Grace had an easygoing relationship of pre-adolescence: boating and baseball, playing Indians but not doctor. With the help of a local tutor, Humphrey had built a makeshift clubhouse in the woods where several friends spent the night, the only incident being the arrival of a stray cow through the door. But one day things suddenly changed. "It was," Grace Lambert remembered with a laugh, "sort of my first experience with sex, and it embarrassed me." They had been walking together, "up the hill, in the wood. And I think he was just feeling his sex; he couldn't have been more than thirteen or fourteen." A summer shower started. Humphrey proposed that they take off their clothes and walk in the rain. To her dismay, without waiting for her answer, he began to strip off his clothes, though Grace resolutely kept hers on. Stripped to the skin, there was no concealing that he had gotten "excited. And he wanted me to sit on his lap! Well, then I knew and I didn't like the idea at all. I didn't respond. And then he didn't like that." Sulking, bristling with anger, feeling rejected and embarrassed, he picked up his clothes and "just put them back on," Lambert said. "And then walked home. In silence." It was some weeks before he spoke to her again. Still, she said years later, "he was the most gentle person." Of all the rites of passage at Seneca Point, the one of overwhelming importance was his maturation as a sailor. Sailing was a birthright on the Finger Lakes, and for Humphrey it had a special significance as one of the few activities that he could share with his father. Belmont first came to Canandaigua for the summer in 1896, shortly after his graduation from medical school, and he immediately established himself as one of the best sailors in the area. The Comrade, his champion-class sailing yacht, finished either first or close to it every year in the local club's Commodore Cup. The Comrade, Humphrey Bogart would later say, "caught my fancy completely when I was two." Even though Belmont sold the boat in 1903, his son never forgot it. Nor did he forget the pleasure even at so early an age of being on the water with his father, in a boat with so ironic a name. Years later in California, his own fifty-five-foot yawl Santana would remind him of his father's marvelous craft. By the time Humphrey was fourteen, he was handling boats with a skill that delighted Belmont, good yachtsmanship being a suitable activity for every gentleman. Additionally, sailing gave Humphrey independence. Racing alone before the wind or just bobbing at anchor on the turquoise surface in mid-lake, he was for the moment free--free of scolding and of family demands to measure up to being Humphrey DeForest Bogart. He would come to treasure being alone on a boat on the open water where no one, friend, foe, or studio boss, could reach him. Then suddenly, his summer world vanished. Maud Humphrey took a high-paying staff job with the fashionable magazine the Delineator and needed a summer base nearer the city. Willow Brook was put up for sale, and a cottage was lined up for the next season on Fire Island, off the Long Island shore. Bogart would remember objecting bitterly to the move, with the futile anger of the young and powerless. He had always looked forward to the Ring of Fire, a Labor Day ritual around the lake, each community touching off a bonfire until a necklace of light rimmed the shoreline, marking the end of the season and the promise of next summer. But after the fires died out in September 1916, there would be only the return to the dark house on 103rd Street, and the ongoing parental warfare. He was to graduate from school the following June, but his marks would get him nowhere. Under Trinity's tough percent-based grading system, a 60 meant pass, 85 and over was honors, 70 was the minimum for college application. By the end of his sophomore year, Humphrey's average was 58 percent; even so, he was promoted. As a junior, he raised it to 69, still too low to meet the admission minimum The combination of low average and high absenteeism required him to repeat the year. By now the fearful nine-year-old had given way to a confident teenager with a detached manner toward his classmates and teachers. His sober blue serge suit--the uniform of the older students--was topped by a definitively non-regulation black derby, the symbol of a sporting man. Humphrey may have changed, but his grades hadn't. He raised his average the second turn through the junior year by exactly one point. In the hope that his son's future might be salvaged, Dr. Bogart contacted his prep school alma mater to see if they would take him. Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, was then, as it is today, one of the oldest and most distinguished prep schools in the country. Known informally as Andover, it was a school for gentlemen, and "Be a gentleman" was an injunction Bogart had heard since birth. Humphrey was the first of his father's family born to money and position, and the first with the freedom to repudiate them. He entered the world a gentleman, and so, regardless of his actions, his caste was set. Adam Watkins Bogart rose literally from the muck to make his fortune; Belmont DeForest Bogart assumed the dress and deportment of a patrician but, for all his airs, understood he was wearing a new suit. Humphrey DeForest Bogart was to both the manner and the manor born, but at some level he rejected both. No doubt the transparent strivings of his parents and the chasm between appearance and daily reality in the household helped shape his attitude. The result would be a lifelong tug-of-war between the polite cliches of his parents' world and a gut-level hatred of pretense. This may have played havoc with his life but it established a sensibility apparent on the screen, which the critic Richard Schickel has described as a "declassed gentleman, a man of breeding and privilege who found himself, as a result of circumstances not entirely of his making, far from his native haunts, among people of rather less quality, rather fewer standards morally, socially, intellectually than he had been raised to expect among his acquaintances. To put the matter more simply, Rick Blaine should not have ended up running a `gin joint' in Casablanca, and Humphrey Bogart should not have ended up being an actor in Hollywood." He would play tough guys who meet violent ends--in his first forty-five films, by one count, Bogart's characters were hanged or electrocuted eight times, sentenced to life in prison nine times, and riddled with bullets a dozen others--but more relevantly, he played people who have seen what the world has to offer and are not fooled by appearances. The men Bogart generally portrayed are on the surface hardened cases who chafe under the status quo and make a poor fit with society, yet their strength and allure is not so much their anti-establishment air as it is the more dangerous sense that they are familiar with the establishment and know where its rot lies. Raymond Chandler met Bogart early in his career as an actor and wrote, "Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also, he has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt." What cements Bogart's appeal is his willingness in spite of all he knows to fight through despair for love, for loyalty, for a sense of having lived up to his code. The photos of him in his latter teens show a young man with slicked-down hair, center-parted, looking out at the world with narrowed eyes set in a closed, unsmiling face. He had also adopted the slogan that was to keynote his relations with the older generation and with society in general, and which parodied the muscularly upbeat virtues of his class: "Chin down, loose lower lip, nuts to the family." Thanks largely to the man who would become his professional father, he had also found a congenial world away from 103rd Street where he could put that attitude to good use. William A. Brady entered show business as a prizefight manager and the developer of the Coney Island amusement park, but by the second decade of the new century he had become a noted Broadway impresario who would produce more than 250 plays. The daughter of his first marriage was the actress Alice Brady. His second wife, Grace George, was a star of many of his productions and also of films. The Bradys lived a block away on Riverside Drive, and Humphrey found a close friend in Bill Jr. Dr. Bogart himself was somewhat stage-struck and he encouraged his son's interest and involvement with the Bradys. Belmont was relatively free of the prejudices that drew strict social lines in New York, as elsewhere. Not only were the Bradys theater people, but William A. Brady was a Jew, and Jews were not considered "gentlemen." In a letter at the time, the columnist and wit Franklin P. Adams wrote to his friend Robert Benchley, who was a press agent for Brady during the fall of 1917, that "while some of my best friends are of the Semitic race, none of them is what you and I would call high-class, let alone Mr. Brady." Humphrey could not have cared less. His friendship with young Bill meant companionship and access to the best that Broadway had to offer at a time when stars had names like Barrymore and Bernhardt and popular culture meant live entertainment. For a nickel apiece, the two boys could ride the Broadway trolley to Forty-second Street and then catch a matinee in Times Square--the "Crossroads of the World"--and a bustling theater district where playhouses jammed the blocks and huge electric signs proclaimed the latest productions. A fashionable public thronged the streets at show times, and motorized taxis lined up at designated stands, awaiting patrons. Nearby were the nickelodeons and the first of the new movie palaces, and over on Sixth Avenue, the Hippodrome, with lavish spectacles for the larger public. Bogart would later tell of himself and Bill Brady popping out the lanterns at construction sites with a Daisy air rifle, a story which, in addition to being in keeping with his carefully drawn self-portrait as a part-time juvenile delinquent, might have had some truth to it. There were new summer relationships with girls on Fire Island, a place that turned out to be not so bad after all, and kisses exchanged over hot dogs and tasting of mustard. In early 1917, however, Dr. Bogart was maneuvering to get Humphrey off to Andover, where he might yet shape up academically. His eagerness seems reasonable enough: Andover put its boys on the fast track to college, the entrance exams for Harvard and Yale always noted on the school calendar. And Humphrey would turn eighteen that year; as far as higher education was concerned, it was now or never for him. Belmont called in every chit available, reminding Andover's headmaster Alfred Stearns that they had been teammates in football, class of '88. There was a father's genuine concern in his effort, the closest he had ever come to understanding someone who had now become a problem child. Humphrey was a good boy, the doctor assured the headmaster. He just needed to buckle down without distractions. The headmaster met with the candidate; Andover found a slot; Trinity was ready to smooth the transition, men of good will, pulling together in the spirit of the old school tie, to save the lad from himself. It was a mismatch from the start. For openers, he began late, a week after the start of classes in September 1917, because he had to take the make-up exams that Andover demanded in New York. He arrived tired and discouraged on a Sunday morning after a long ride in the dark aboard the 3:59 A.M., the only connection between New York and Andover. He'd come alone. Mrs. Bogart was ill, the doctor wrote Headmaster Stearns, and since he had to attend to her, it was quite impossible for him to accompany the boy. Besides, Humphrey really wanted to go up by himself. Years afterward, Bogart still remembered standing on the deserted platform, dulled by lack of sleep, a disoriented seventeen-year-old in a strange environment trying to find someone to help him with his trunk. Andover might be less than an hour from Boston, but to him it was the far side of the globe. At Andover, he faced 138 years of Puritan custom. The school day began at 7:45 with morning chapel, and all rules and regulations were spelled out in the pocket-sized Blue Book issued to every boy: Every absence of the student from recitation, daily chapel, Sunday service, or from his room during study hours, is to be accounted for.... A student absent from town without permission forfeits his connection to the school.... During study hours ... students are to occupy their own rooms, engaged in preparation of school exercises.... At ten o'clock each student is to be in his own room and to maintain such quiet as befits the usual retiring hour of the community. This was hardly the regimen for a young man whose playground, a week before, had been Times Square. He started well enough, with A's and B's, as though to show he could do it if he wanted. Then he tuned out, passing each evening in the room of Floyd Furlow, also from New York, and son of the president of the Otis Elevator Company. "Furlow was witty, very sophisticated, and had not a care in the world--and [had] a larder of good things to eat," a classmate remembered. Two other misfits joined them, one who had been to sea, another from the South African veldt. They talked not of school but of travel and adventure. "Bogart enjoyed listening at these sessions," the classmate added. "Didn't talk much. Idling away days and nights." Though Bogart and others later spun tales of high jinks and defiance, classmates remembered only a perennially bored student with few friends in the dorm; a boy who never cracked a book, spoke little, and seemed oddly naive and vulnerable. Although he was a fine sailor and tennis player at Seneca Point, no one at Andover would recall him showing any proficiency in sports. He was smart enough for the school, but bored by the education. "They made you learn dates," Bogart told an interviewer years later, "and that was all. They'd say, `a war was fought in 1812.' So what? They never told you why people decided to kill each other just at that moment." He posed for pictures with the other students. The open, receptive child of earlier years had given way to the turned-off teenager who showed a closed face to the camera, almost unrelated to the world around him. "He lived a life of his own, like no one else's; the mystery man, actually," classmate Arthur Sircom said, "and in the wrong pew at Andover." Back in New York for Christmas, he found his homecoming preceded by a bad report from Dr. Stearns, regretfully citing Humphrey's "indifference and lack of effort" and serving notice of the withdrawal of his off-campus privileges. His eighteenth birthday was passed in anger and recrimination. In February, the school placed him on probation. Dr. Bogart pleaded with the administration not to lose faith in Humphrey: he wasn't a bad boy, he had just "given up his mind to sports and a continuous correspondence with his girl friends." He and Mrs. Bogart, the doctor wrote the headmaster, appreciated the school's keeping up the pressure for their son's own good, and they would do everything possible to help him "find himself." Belmont sent a sterner letter to Humphrey with a faintly Dickensian warning: If he did not do better, they would request his dismissal from school and "put you to work"; David Copperfield, taken out of school and sent to the blacking factory. Dr. Stearns had a fatherly chat with Humphrey, after which Humphrey wrote his mother, vowing to do better. But after eighteen years, it was too late. The axe fell in May. With "great regret," the headmaster informed Dr. Bogart that Humphrey had failed to meet the terms of his probation and it had become necessary to require his withdrawal from the school. Although Dr. Stearns had not been at the faculty meeting where the decision was made, "it was the unanimous decision of those familiar with the situation that it would be unwise for Humphrey to remain here longer. I cannot tell you how deeply I regret our inability to make the boy realize the seriousness of the situation and put forth the effort required to avert this disaster." He hoped, in conclusion, that this would prove a turning point in the young man's life and if he could help in making work arrangements, to call on him. Maud Humphrey's reply by return mail that Monday--the doctor was "away on business"--was brisk and chilly. She was sending Humphrey $25, with instructions to pack his belongings, ship them to New York--"I believe that is what you ask"--and come home "at once." Humphrey's employment had already been settled, thank you very much, with Mr. Frank E. Kirby, "a very prominent Naval Architect, and now building ships for the Government," who had offered him a shipyard job. "Mr. Kirby," she wrote, "has both brains and influence," and she trusted exposure to so successful a man would help her son come to his senses. The school, in one last act of forbearance, kept the dismissal quiet. The following Thursday morning, Arthur Sircom was surprised to see Bogart come out of their dorm, a suitcase in each hand. Wasn't it a little early to be going off for the weekend? "No," he snapped. "I'm leaving this fucking place! For good! It's just a waste of time here." He turned and walked down the hill to the railroad station, his bags bumping his legs, a forlorn, lost figure. Sircom watched him with pity. "Poor guy," he thought, "you're ruining your life!" The train for New York wasn't due until 11:15 P.M. No matter. Humphrey DeForest Bogart wasn't staying where he wasn't wanted. "The bastards threw me out," was all that he would say for some time. Friday morning he arrived at Grand Central Station and went home to face his family. He never did go to work in the shipyard of the influential Mr. Kirby; instead he chose the sea. The sinking of the British liner Lusitania in 1915 by a German U-boat, and its loss of nearly 1,200 lives, a number of them Americans, had brought the United States into the Great War, and U-boats were still the scourge of the Atlantic. On May 28, after four unbearable days at home, he took the train to Brooklyn, presented himself aboard the USS Granite State, and enlisted in the Naval Reserve for four years with the provisional rating of seaman 2nd class. At age eighteen, he did not need parental consent, and in any case, he would have had it. The intervening three weeks until his call to active duty were less strident, not because his parents wanted to enjoy their son before he faced an uncertain future but because his enlistment was the face-saving solution to an increasingly embarrassing problem. Belmont proudly wrote to Andover to announce the good news, asking that the school fathers kindly credit the boy's "patriotic spirit." Humphrey had finally done the right thing. Copyright © 1997 the estate of Ann Sperber and Eric Lax. All rights reserved.