Bogart Read Free Page A

a nee dle in me. And a few years after that, when I had my hernia operation, Bogie got sick. Later he bragged to Nunnally Johnson that I had been braver than a soldier.) At 11:22 P.M. on January 6, 1949, I came along. I was named Stephen Humphrey Bogart. I was named Stephen after the character my father played in To Have and Have Not, the film that brought my mother and father together. I weighed six pounds, six ounces, and I was twenty inches long. After the birth, Dad was well enough to yank a flask full of scotch out of his coat pocket and pour drinks for all the other fathers- to-be.
    The press was notified and soon presents for me arrived from Bogie fans all over the world. Among them were several toy submachine guns, which Dad sent back.
    The first present I ever got from my father was a snow man. Incredibly, it had snowed in Beverly Hills on the day I was born. Three inches covered the ground, a rarity in south ern California, and when my mother brought me home my father had built a snowman on the lawn to welcome us back. When Mom saw the snowman she felt a lot better about the whole idea of Bogie and fatherhood.
    A few days later she felt even better. My parents had set up an intercom between the bedroom and the nursery, so they could hear me if I started crying. One morning, on his way to work, Dad stopped in and began cooing all sorts of baby talk to me, completely unaware that Mother was lis tening to him through the intercom. Then she heard him speaking to me, somewhat shyly and awkwardly because he didn’t know what you were supposed to say to babies. She heard him say, “Hello, son. You’re a little fellow, aren’t you? I’m Father. Welcome home.” He would have been embar rassed if he’d known he was overheard.
    Bogie was a proud father, and in family photos you can see him doting over me. In one famous photo you can even see him changing my diapers. But the photo is a fraud. It is, says my mother, the only time in recorded history that Bogie changed a diaper.
    Whether my father avoided baby doo because he wanted to, or because he felt left out, is debatable. It seems that Bo gie did suffer the feeling of isolation and abandonment that afflicts many new fathers.
    “Betty gave me a son when I had given up hope of hav ing a son,” he said. “She is everything I wanted and now, Stephen, my son, completes the picture. I don’t know what constitutes being a good father. I think I’m a good one, but only time, of course, can tell. At this stage in a child’s life the father is packed away, put aside, and sat upon. The physical aspects—feeding, burping, changing, training—are matters before the Bogart committee, which is, as of now, a commit tee of one…Betty. So I won’t take over for a while yet. When I do I’ll handle the boy as I would any human being in my orbit. That is, I’ll let him be himself. I won’t push him into anything or try to influence him.”
    In any case, Humphrey Bogart was by no means the diaper-changing, new-and-improved sensitive daddy of the 1990s, the one you see these days at the changing table in air port men’s rooms. And if he had been, it would not have been a matter of sharing chores to reduce the burden on his wife. We had servants for that.
    When I was born, Bogie was already forty-nine years old. He was on his fourth marriage, this time to a beautiful actress who was twenty-five years younger than him. Bogie was a man set in his ways. He was a man with one rule: I’m going to live my life the way I want to. That’s the way he was, and he had been that way long before I came along. Even when he mar ried my mother, Bogie kept his butler and cook, and his gar dener, Aurelio. So Bogie was not about to make major changes in his life just for a baby.
    Besides, he didn’t know how to change his life for a kid. I’ve talked to a lot of his friends about this, and they all say the same thing. Bogie was awkward with children. He didn’t know exactly what to do with