Bogart by Stephen Humphrey Bogart Page A

important formative time of my life, was completed in Janu ary of 1959, just short of two years after Bogie’s death. My mother had gone on a trip to London looking for a job, leaving Leslie and me in our nurse’s care. There she had wined and dined with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and Rich ard and Sybil Burton. She had also been offered work in a film, which was to be shot throughout Europe. She had ac cepted the job. As a result, we moved to London for six months and, as it turned out, away from California forever.
    Now I was down one father, one school, one house, dozens of friends, and an entire state and country.
    In London there were more photographers, first at the air port and later at the school. By now I had developed an al most pathological hatred of cameras and I would turn my head any time I saw one, even if it was just hanging over the neck of a tourist. I was enrolled in the American School in London, one of the few schools, by the way, that I have not been thrown out of. Apparently, I pretty much kept to myself. But everywhere I went somebody knew me because of who my father had been. I never perceived any jealousy from other kids, but that’s what I was always afraid of. More than anything, I just wanted to blend into the woodwork. I remem ber at school that there was a girl who kept passing me a piece of paper. She wanted my autograph because I was Humphrey Bogart’s son. I didn’t want that kind of notice. And there was a guy there, Jeff Eaton. I remember that he in tercepted the paper every time, and signed his name to it and sent it back to her. I remember Jeff fondly because he knew how self-conscious I felt about being the Bogie boy, and he deflected the attention away from me and on to him. And he made me laugh, too.
    The message I got from all this moving, each time far ther away from where we’d lived with Bogie, was clear: your father is no longer a part of your life, forget about him. And that’s what I tried to do for most of my life.
    Of course, all this has created conflict over the years be tween me and Mom. I didn’t want to think of myself as “the son of Humphrey Bogart.” I have always wanted to be just plain Steve. I didn’t want any kind of spotlight on me for be ing Bogie’s son, and I didn’t want the responsibility of meeting some expectation that people might have for the child of Bogie.
    You might think that I would want to stay in the world of celebrities who are so much a part of my mother’s life. After all, celebrities aren’t going to be impressed by my being the son of a celebrity. But by the time I was a teenager I had met a few celebrities and, believe it or not, it was exactly the same.
    “Oh, I knew your father. I loved him. He was great.”
    It was always your father this, and your father that. No body ever said to me, “Tell me Steve, how do you make a gas ket, exactly?” which is something I did once.
    There was never anything specific that my mother wanted me to do about my father’s fame. It was just that she wanted me to somehow dedicate my life to keeping his spirit alive, something that Bogie has managed to do just fine with out me.
    At a minimum my mother would have liked me to talk a lot about Bogie. To her, Bogie was, and remains, perfect. She always wanted me to ask her what he was like. I seldom did that because she was always telling me anyhow, and to hear her tell it, he was perfect. It was bad enough that I was con stantly besieged by strangers telling me what a great guy my dad was. I wanted somebody to say to me, “Bogie was great, but sometimes he was a prick, you know…” and maybe show that the guy had some shortcomings so that I wouldn’t have to live up to a legend. But my mother could never bring her self to say anything that might reflect negatively on him.
    “Stephen,” she would say, “why do you always want to know the bad stuff?”
    “Because that’s what would make him real to me,” I would say.
    I realize now