Daughter Writes Last Chapters of Late Father’s Memoir

By JACQUELINE PRIMO | Assistant Managing Editor

Many adults who suffer the loss of an older parent rifle through photo albums, scan through home videos or sort through knick-knacks when they feel like reminiscing about their parent’s life.

Not Palisadian Tracy Metzger. When her father Bob Palmer passed away in September 2014 at his home in Marquez Knolls, she wrapped herself up in completing the memoir he had been working on for nearly six years.

“It was very, very emotional for me,” Metzger said of the two-month process of finishing his memoir “Bogie’s Bike: Life in the Background” 10 months after he died peacefully at the age of 85.

Metzger worked with an editor and publisher to assemble the life story her father had written near the end of his life and the photos to go along with it, despite the fact that there were things Palmer still wanted to add before he died.

“He was working on it in the hospital,” Metzger told the Palisadian-Post, noting her father’s short stint in the hospital and brief illness preceding his death. “It was just his dream to finish this thing, to finally publish it.”

And with the help of his only daughter, Palmer was able to posthumously make his dream come true.

Palmer’s memoir, written with the whimsy and sense of humor that he carried with him in his life, details his life as a lover of movies, a film extra and Hollywood publicist.

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1930s and following a two-year stint in the Navy, Palmer worked as a TV publicist for ABC, Screen Gems and MGM among others, working on shows including “Maverick,” “Bewitched,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Monkees,” “The Love Boat” and “Charlie’s Angels.”

The namesake of “Bogie’s Bike” stems from an anecdote highlighted in the memoir in which Palmer got a three-week contract on the 1947 Warner Brothers film “That Hagen Girl” starring Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan.

Palmer had “two visible moments” in the film: “jogging to baseball practice past Shirley, and accepting the role of Montague in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as Shirley smiles before being cast as Juliet,” he wrote in his memoir.

One day on set, Palmer ran off to get more cigarettes—specifically Pall Malls, which were Shirley’s favorite—before he would be missed when he came across a bicycle at a nearby soundstage.

The bicycle turned out to belong to Humphrey Bogart, who was shooting “Treasure of Sierra Madre” at the time. Bogart caught Palmer trying to hop on the seat.

“I’m not stealing, Mister Bogart,” Palmer told him. “I need to get cigarettes for Shirley Temple.”

The encounter, which left Bogart laughing as Palmer sheepishly went back to his own soundstage, was one of Palmer’s favorite anecdotes, Metzger told the Post.

“He was super funny, very charming and really connected with people,” Metzger said of her late father. “He was full of mischief.”

Bob Palmer Public Relations (formed in 1979) represented such names as Dick Van Dyke, Faye Dunaway, Sada Thompson, David Soul, Peter Strauss, Michele Lee and Anthony Hopkins.

Palmer was close friends with Hopkins for much of his life. A former Honorary Mayor of Pacific Palisades, Hopkins wrote the prelude to “Bogie’s Bike” and was godfather of Metzger’s son Dylan.

It was Palmer who was responsible for the 1992 Academy Award campaign for Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Palmer moved to the Palisades in 1958 with wife Nancy, son Chris and Tracy (who was 2 at the time) and lived in his house on Las Pulgas Rd. from 1971 until he passed away.

Tracy and her husband Jim Metzger have lived in the home since January 2015.

“He really stopped to listen to people,” she said of her father, adding that she remembers walking to the Village with him as a child and noting how much he loved taking his dogs to the Bluffs, where he would stop and talk to people along the way.

“He knew a lot of people in so many different ways. He loved the Palisades,” Metzger said, remembering how her father loved to run in the Palisades Fourth of July 10K and “never missed a parade.”

“Not many kids get to have this journey with their parents,” Metzger said of finishing her father’s memoir, which is available on Amazon. “We did it. It was a labor of love.”