In the spring of 1951, Humphrey Bogart flew throughout the Atlantic to make The African Queen, John Huston’s traditional Technicolor yarn about an odd couple on a ship. He took his spouse, Lauren Bacall. He took his whisky and his cigarettes. However he left his two-year-old son within the care of the nanny, reasoning that the jungle was harmful and that he’d solely be gone for six months. Bogart and Bacall waved goodbye from the airport gangplank. The child waved again from the worker’s arms. And it was at this second, because the airplane left the runway, that the nanny had a mind haemorrhage and dropped useless on the tarmac.
Stephen Bogart takes up the story. His dad and mom’ airplane lands. Bacall hears the information. Mrs Hartley simply died: her son’s successfully on his personal. “So what does she do? She thinks, ‘Do I’m going to Africa with Bogie and Huston and [Katharine] Hepburn and have loads of enjoyable? Or do I’m going house and care for the child?’” After hasty consideration, she plumped for the primary possibility, palming the boy off on his grandparents as a substitute. He says: “Now I don’t blame my mom for doing what she did. However I’m unsure that I’d have made the identical selection.”
If Stephen was traumatised by that early separation, he has rolled with the punches like a real film-noir hero. Bogart and Bacall’s son is now a 75-year-old man, lengthy since retired from his profession as a TV information producer. He has a home in Florida, a second spouse, Carla, and a white pet known as Wiley who retains barking at nothing and leaping on to his lap. The previous was a burden however he’s made his peace with it now. He says: “I’m not a scholar of my father. I wanted to search out out who I used to be. It took me years to really feel comfy with the entire Bogart factor.”
Stephen lately pitched in on a brand new documentary – Bogart: Life Is available in Flashes – which mines beforehand unseen materials from the archive and is basically narrated within the actor’s personal phrases. Kathryn Ferguson’s movie ticks the required biographical containers in overlaying Bogart’s stumbling artistic apprenticeship (first as a foppish stage performer, then as a second-string heavy in Warner gangster flicks) and his belated ascent to superstardom.
However the documentary gives illuminating insights into his off-screen life, too. It analyses the three fiery marriages that preceded his union with Bacall, exhibits how his eager, caustic wit may generally tip into cruelty and tackles the most cancers prognosis that reduce him down in his prime. In his ultimate months, Bogart’s weight had dropped to round 80lbs. He was too weak to climb stairs and needed to be ferried between flooring inside a dumb waiter. Bacall says even then, he refused to consider he would die.
Nowadays he’s a part of our cultural material. He’s mimicked and quoted. The American Movie Institute cites him because the all-time best display screen actor. Stephen can’t consider one other useless star who has lasted so properly. “Possibly Cary Grant,” he suggests and this seems like a superb name. Each males have been complicated, fascinating research in friction. Critics prefer to level out that Grant’s low-born Bristol roots offered the essential counterweight to his glamorous display screen picture. “Grant’s romantic magnificence,” wrote movie critic Pauline Kael, “is wrapped across the resilient, robust core of a mutt.”
Bogart embodied the identical duality, however he got here at it from the other way, from a rarefied New York background, through literature and chess and journeys out on his yacht. His hard-boiled coating contained an air of refinement. His cautious intelligence gave his robust guys depth and texture. He was American cinema’s fallen angel, its shop-soiled cynic; generally drawn to darkness (because the wild-eyed prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), largely groping for the sunshine (because the dogged, respectable protagonists of The Maltese Falcon, The Huge Sleep and Casablanca). Taking part in boozy Charlie Allnut in The African Queen, he steered a steamboat downriver en path to the most effective actor Oscar.
Presumably the movie that finest explores Bogart’s twin nature (refined, however a roughneck; compromised however self-directed) is In a Lonely Place. Nicholas Ray’s 50s noir forged him as a screenwriter who’s accused of murdering a hat-check lady. He’s a person the viewers desires to belief and but by no means fairly can. Stephen thinks that it is perhaps Bogart’s most private function, too. “Loneliness was at all times part of his life,” he says. “He was at all times looking for one thing. His favorite factor was the ocean. He was at all times sort of a loner man.”
The reality, Stephen says, is that he and his youthful sister Leslie by no means knew their father properly. He was middle-aged when he had them. They have been eight and 4, respectively, when he died. Additionally, he was busy, continuously in demand. “My father would go to work, shoot within the studio all day and when he got here house he’d need to have dinner with my mom. He’d say, ‘Hey children, how are you?’ – after which we’re performed, we’re out of there.” Which was simply the way it was: youngsters have been meant to be seen and never heard. “Totally different occasions,” he says. “Totally different folks. I imply, there have been children round. There wasn’t a lot contraception again then. I used to be excited about this the opposite day. My father was married to 3 different girls and someway he by no means had a child till he met my mom. However children have been at all times on the periphery. They have been secondary to the fellows and women getting collectively. The ingesting, the smoking, the laughing, the events.”
Within the documentary Bogart explains his resolution to begin a household with Bacall. Acutely aware of his advancing years, the actor says: “I needed a baby to stick with her and remind her of me.” Bogart died in 1957. Bacall lived by way of to 2014. Did the plan repay? Did Stephen remind her of his dad?
“Properly, yeah,” he says. However the difficulty was difficult. “I used to be a reminder of him, however I used to be additionally a reminder that he’d died and left her with two younger youngsters. In her personal e book, she says, ‘I needed Bogie to have my youngsters.’ Which is sort of the identical factor. They remind you of me they usually remind me of you. That’s not the best motive to have children. So yeah, I reminded her of him. That was a optimistic and a destructive. She freaked out when he died. We moved to London for some time. Then she needed to go to New York to be within the theatre. She was dragging us round. She married Jason [Robards], who was a fully sensible stage actor however he sort of appeared like my father – and so I’m certain she in contrast Jason to Bogie, too. There have been at all times photos of Bogie across the residence.”
Bacall was solely 32 when Bogart died. Very like her son, she needed to set her personal course and work out who she was. “I’m not satisfied she wouldn’t relatively have unfold her wings as a substitute of getting to take care of two children,” he says. “She didn’t do badly by us, that’s not what I’m saying. However psychologically it was robust for her.”
Stephen by no means did go to the jungle along with his father and mom, Bogart and Bacall. However he lastly went on the African Queen. In 2012 the steamboat from the movie was found rusting and forgotten at a marina in Key Largo. It was patched up, repainted and put again on the water. Stephen and Leslie have been invited on board and handed commemorative souvenirs. “I’ve a chunk of the tiller. My sister has a chunk of the tiller.” He shrugs on the reminiscence. “It was a enjoyable experience, I suppose, however it was a ship, that’s all. It didn’t actually do something for me.”
He’s happier, on steadiness, within the humdrum right here and now, along with his spouse at his facet and a yapping canine in his lap. Nostalgia’s a lure and the load of the previous drags you down. The most effective factor to do: shrug it off and sail on.
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