In the spring of 1951, Humphrey Bogart flew across the Atlantic to make The African Queen, John Huston’s classic Technicolor yarn about an odd couple on a boat. He took his wife, Lauren Bacall. He took his whisky and his cigarettes. But he left his two-year-old son in the care of the nanny, reasoning that the jungle was dangerous and that he’d only be gone for six months. Bogart and Bacall waved goodbye from the airport gangplank. The kid waved back from the employee’s arms. And it was at this moment, as the plane left the runway, that the nanny had a brain haemorrhage and dropped dead on the tarmac.
Stephen Bogart takes up the tale. His parents’ plane lands. Bacall hears the news. Mrs Hartley just died: her son’s effectively on his own. “So what does she do? She thinks, ‘Do I go to Africa with Bogie and Huston and [Katharine] Hepburn and have a lot of fun? Or do I go home and take care of the kid?’” After hasty consideration, she plumped for the first option, palming the boy off on his grandparents instead. He says: “Now I don’t blame my mother for doing what she did. But I’m not sure that I would have made the same choice.”
If Stephen was traumatised by that early separation, he has rolled with the punches like a true film-noir hero. Bogart and Bacall’s son is now a 75-year-old man, long since retired from his career as a TV news producer. He has a house in Florida, a second wife, Carla, and a white puppy called Wiley who keeps barking at nothing and leaping on to his lap. The past was a burden but he’s made his peace with it now. He says: “I’m not a student of my father. I needed to find out who I was. It took me years to feel comfortable with the whole Bogart thing.”
Stephen recently pitched in on a new documentary – Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes – which mines previously unseen material from the archive and is largely narrated in the actor’s own words. Kathryn Ferguson’s film ticks the required biographical boxes in covering Bogart’s stumbling creative apprenticeship (first as a foppish stage performer, then as a second-string heavy in Warner gangster flicks) and his belated ascent to superstardom.
But the documentary provides illuminating insights into his off-screen life, too. It analyses the three fiery marriages that preceded his union with Bacall, shows how his keen, caustic wit could sometimes tip into cruelty and tackles the cancer diagnosis that cut him down in his prime. In his final months, Bogart’s weight had dropped to around 80lbs. He was too weak to climb stairs and had to be ferried between floors inside a dumb waiter. Bacall says even then, he refused to believe he would die.
These days he’s part of our cultural fabric. He’s mimicked and quoted. The American Film Institute cites him as the all-time greatest screen actor. Stephen can’t think of another dead star who has lasted so well. “Maybe Cary Grant,” he suggests and this feels like a good call. Both men were complex, fascinating studies in friction. Critics like to point out that Grant’s low-born Bristol roots provided the crucial counterweight to his glamorous screen image. “Grant’s romantic elegance,” wrote film critic Pauline Kael, “is wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt.”
Bogart embodied the same duality, but he came at it from the opposite direction, from a rarefied New York background, via literature and chess and trips out on his yacht. His hard-boiled coating contained an air of refinement. His wary intelligence gave his tough guys depth and texture. He was American cinema’s fallen angel, its shop-soiled cynic; sometimes drawn to darkness (as the wild-eyed prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), mostly groping for the light (as the dogged, decent protagonists of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and Casablanca). Playing boozy Charlie Allnut in The African Queen, he steered a steamboat downriver en route to the best actor Oscar.
Possibly the film that best explores Bogart’s dual nature (refined, but a roughneck; compromised but self-directed) is In a Lonely Place. Nicholas Ray’s 50s noir cast him as a screenwriter who is accused of murdering a hat-check girl. He’s a man the audience wants to trust and yet never quite can. Stephen thinks that it might be Bogart’s most personal role, too. “Loneliness was always a part of his life,” he says. “He was always searching for something. His favourite thing was the sea. He was always kind of a loner guy.”
The truth, Stephen says, is that he and his younger sister Leslie never knew their father well. He was middle-aged when he had them. They were eight and four, respectively, when he died. Also, he was busy, constantly in demand. “My father would go to work, shoot in the studio all day and when he came home he’d want to have dinner with my mother. He’d say, ‘Hey kids, how are you?’ – and then we’re done, we’re out of there.” Which was just how it was: children were meant to be seen and not heard. “Different times,” he says. “Different people. I mean, there were kids around. There wasn’t much birth control back then. I was thinking about this the other day. My father was married to three other women and somehow he never had a kid until he met my mother. But kids were always on the periphery. They were secondary to the guys and girls getting together. The drinking, the smoking, the laughing, the parties.”
In the documentary Bogart explains his decision to start a family with Bacall. Conscious of his advancing years, the actor says: “I wanted a child to stay with her and remind her of me.” Bogart died in 1957. Bacall lived through to 2014. Did the plan pay off? Did Stephen remind her of his dad?
“Well, yeah,” he says. But the issue was complicated. “I was a reminder of him, but I was also a reminder that he’d died and left her with two young children. In her own book, she says, ‘I wanted Bogie to have my children.’ Which is kind of the same thing. They remind you of me and they remind me of you. That’s not the ideal reason to have kids. So yeah, I reminded her of him. That was a positive and a negative. She freaked out when he died. We moved to London for a while. Then she wanted to go to New York to be in the theatre. She was dragging us around. She married Jason [Robards], who was an absolutely brilliant stage actor but he kind of looked like my father – and so I’m sure she compared Jason to Bogie, too. There were always pictures of Bogie around the apartment.”
Bacall was only 32 when Bogart died. Much like her son, she had to set her own course and work out who she was. “I’m not convinced she wouldn’t rather have spread her wings instead of having to look after two kids,” he says. “She didn’t do badly by us, that’s not what I’m saying. But psychologically it was tough for her.”
Stephen never did go to the jungle with his father and mother, Bogart and Bacall. But he finally went on the African Queen. In 2012 the steamboat from the film was discovered rusting and forgotten at a marina in Key Largo. It was patched up, repainted and put back on the water. Stephen and Leslie were invited on board and handed commemorative souvenirs. “I have a piece of the tiller. My sister has a piece of the tiller.” He shrugs at the memory. “It was a fun ride, I guess, but it was a boat, that’s all. It didn’t really do anything for me.”
He’s happier, on balance, in the humdrum here and now, with his wife at his side and a yapping dog in his lap. Nostalgia’s a trap and the weight of the past drags you down. The best thing to do: shrug it off and sail on.
• Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes is out 9 December
