Free Bogart by Stephen Humphrey Bogart Page A

and Court TV, I would see one of my coworkers giv ing some people a tour of the studio. At some point the tour guide would point to me. Then I would see the visitors smile and they would gaze at me for a little too long. He told them, I would think. It always made me angry and uncomfortable.
    But let’s get real for a minute. There are crack-addicted babies being born every day, while I was born in the afflu ence and safety of Beverly Hills. There are children being beaten, while I spent my early childhood with two parents who loved me. And there are cancer wards filled with kids who will never get to be teenagers, while my greatest health problems as a kid were a hernia operation at age three, and a gashed chin from a bicycling mishap. So, yes, I gripe about my problems like everybody else, but I try to keep some per spective. Carrying the burden of being Humphrey Bogart’s son is not actually the worst thing that can happen to a person, and the only reason we are talking about it at all is that the public remains fascinated by anything to do with Humphrey Bogart.
    For me, the Bogie thing began at my father’s funeral at All Saints Episcopal Church.
    The days just before the funeral are not clear to me. I re member little. But there are others who have memories of how I reacted in those unreal days following my father’s death from cancer at age fifty-seven. My mother remem bers that on the day after Dad died I stood at the top of the stairs, clutching a small notebook in my hand, and asked her, “What day is yesterday?”
    “January fourteenth,” she said.
    Then I sat on the top stair and wrote in my notebook, “January 14, Daddy died.”
    And Sam Jaffe remembers talking to me on the same day.
    I said to him, “I’m glad I sat on my father’s bed with him.”
    “Why are you glad?” Sam asked me.
    “Because of what he did yesterday,” I said, meaning in my own eight-year-old way that I was glad I said good-bye to my father before he died.
    It is the funeral that begins the time when my father’s fame was a weight upon me.
    I went to my father’s funeral in a limousine. We were the first car in a long row, and my mother sat between me and Leslie, holding us in her arms. John Huston was also with us. I remember that he said little, and that was unusual.
    When the driver pulled up to the church I peered through the window of the limousine. A huge crowd had gathered. Hundreds of people lined the sidewalks outside the church. Though none of the women were crying, many of them carried handkerchiefs, as if they knew they soon would be. The people were very quiet, respectful, some had flowers. But still, I was scared.
    “Who are all those people?” I asked my mother.
    “They’re fans, Stephen,” my mother said. “They are peo ple who went to see your father’s movies, and they are sad that he is dead.”
    “What do they want?”
    “They are going to hear the service for your father.”
    “They’re coming to our church?”
    “No,” she said. “They will hear it outside. Over the loudspeaker.”
    “I hate them,” I said.
    “No, you don’t, Stephen. You don’t hate them.”
    “He’s my father, not theirs. They don’t even know him.”
    I was sad, I was hurt, I was angry. What right did these people have to invade my life that way and gawk at my fa ther’s death? I was there to say good-bye to Daddy—that’s what I’d been told—and I didn’t want to share it with thou sands of strangers.
    Six years later, when John Kennedy died, I would be fourteen years old, and I would understand the sense of personal loss that people feel when a public figure passes. But then I was not at all understanding. I was enraged. Somehow it felt to me that if thousands of people could cry at my fa ther’s funeral, then I had no special relationship with him. At some level I think I have always felt that way, and still do.
    She took one of my hands, and one of Leslie’s. Holding us tightly, she led us out of the