Bogart by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

stone on her. He would avoid calling. He would act as if she did not exist. And when he finally did call again he’d act as if nothing had happened. This is an aspect of Sinatra’s personality which has exasperated people close to him for years. It was especially trying for my mother because, as she says, “I had been married to a grown-up.”
    Everybody who cared about my mother, including Frank’s friends, prayed that she would not marry him. The opinion seemed to be universal that any woman who mar ried Sinatra might as well take a knife and stab herself in the heart.
    After one of his cold and silent absences, Frank did ask Bacall to marry him. Mom accepted. She was in heaven. She would have a life again. Leslie and I would have Sinatra for a father. All the pain would be gone.
    The plans for the marriage were supposed to be kept se cret for a while. But when Swifty Lazar spilled the beans to Louella Parsons, the “Bacall-Sinatra marriage plans” hit the papers. Frank went ballistic. He went into his iceman routine and broke off the relationship, except he forgot to tell my mother that he was breaking it off. All he did was ignore her and humiliate her. There were times when he was actually in the same room with my mother and acted as if he didn’t know her. Though the passing of years has put my mother in a forgiving mood, she doesn’t discuss their relationship anymore.
    It was during Mother’s romance with Sinatra that we moved out of the Mapleton Drive house, and Sinatra was one of the main reasons.
    “I don’t think Frank was comfortable in that house,” my mother says. “The ghost of your father was always there, and I knew that Frank would feel better if I moved.”
    So Mother, believing that she would never have a future with Frank unless she moved, jettisoned her silver and much of her furniture and sold the house in which my father had died. We moved into a rented house on Bellagio Road in Bel Air. The house belonged to William Powell, the actor.
    By this time, then, I had lost my father, lost my school, and lost my house. And through it all I was losing my friends.
    Most of my friends had gone to Warner Avenue School, and when I was taken out of that school I was cut out of their lives. I felt it happening gradually, I guess, but it all seemed to come down on me one afternoon when I was at a birth day party for Steve Cahn, who had been my closest friend on Mapleton.
    Steve’s father, Sammy, was one of the most famous lyri cists of the time. Sammy had worked with composers like Jules Styne and Jimmy Van Heusen, doing film work. He had already won an Academy Award for the song “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and it was around this time that he won an other Academy Award for “All the Way,” which was from Sinatra’s film The Joker Is Wild. He would eventually win two more Academy Awards.
    Anyhow, at that birthday party I felt incredibly out of place. It was as if everybody else was a person and I was a goat or a donkey or something. This “outsider” feeling had been growing in me ever since my father’s death. It had started with the strange awareness that all my friends knew about my father. And it had gotten worse after I was pulled out of the Warner Avenue School. At the end of that birthday party I stood in the hallway with no one to talk to, like some unwanted vagrant who had wandered in. The kids were all saying good-bye to each other, and talking about what they would do tomorrow in school. Even though I was among all my friends, I felt a terrible pang of loneliness. Now I went to Curtis School and they still went to Warner and they lived to gether in a world that I was no longer part of.
    After we moved to Bellagio Road, of course, it got worse. If the death of my father had not already broken my heart, this surely did. I was devastated by the loss of my friends and the gradual realization that their lives went on as usual.
    This cycle of loss, which I’m sure was during the most