Bogie

Tuesday night

I was one of many domestic servants working for Humphrey Bogart in his house. Among other duties, I was responsible for cleaning cat shit off of his bed. That may have been why he liked me. This evening there was a party going on downstairs, but Bogie was upstairs, hanging out with me, instead, and he was wearing a silk bathrobe, or smoking jacket. At one point one of the guests got a little carried away, and Bogie had to go downstairs and slap him around a bit. I didn't see that part, but he came back a little while later to hang out with me. He knew me, so he could let down his guard and be himself. I said, "So, what's your favorite among all of your films?" I was expecting him to choose one of his classics from the 1940s, but he surprised me; he picked an obscure horror film. He said he made it in 1939.

*****

It's not every night that you meet your favorite actor.

This past weekend, after my wife and I toured a plantation in Franklin, TN with my father-in-law, we stopped in at an antique shop and browsed around for awhile. There I found a book that Katharine Hepburn wrote in the 1980s about the making of "The African Queen," her 1951 film with Bogart. It featured many photographs taken on and off of the set, including a few of Bogie and "Betty" Bacall having breakfast in their bathrobes. I clean a cat box (nearly) every night, so that's a part of daily life around here; that would probably explain why I mixed Bogart in smoking jacket and cleaning up after a cat. Then again, I might have been thinking about the cat that belongs to my sister-in-law, Dawn; his name is Humphries...

For me, the most fascinating part of this dream is the fact that I got the year right for Bogart's only horror film. It was made in 1939, and was called "The Return of Dr. X." I've never seen it, but have seen some stills from it. This information may have been floating around in my head because I read an article in "Entertainment Weekly" some time in the past 6 months in which Tim Burton said that he modeled Johnny Depp's look as "Sweeny Todd" in part after Bogart's "Dr. X." Both characters wore white pancake makeup and sported black hair with a groovy white streak.

By the way, I got a kick out of the back flap of Hepburn's book. It read, "Katharine Hepburn is an actress. She lives in Connecticut. This is her first book."