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INTERIOR A UNION SQUARE HOTEL, SAN FRANCISCO -- DAY.

A quiet, narrow hallway on the fifth floor. The elevator doors open, a man carrying a large black valise emerges, walks up to #535, knocks. The door opens slowly, revealing STEPHEN BOGART, who's just finished his third book, his second novel, As Time Goes By (Forge). But by every count, the toughest work was Bogart: In Search of My Father, about the legendary Humphrey Bogart. The resemblance between Stephen Bogart and his father is eerie.

STEPHEN CAPEN sets up the recorder and microphone in the dimly lit, cramped room and there they sit, knee to knee.




---


STEPHEN CAPEN: I'm a big fan of your father's work, and I've been watching his movies over and over, somewhat obsessively. The guy had no flies on him. He glided through the set.

STEPHEN BOGART: He did.

CAPEN: By no means was he a typical actor.

BOGART: No, he wasn't. He was a regular guy. A regular person. He would have liked to have gone out with you and me and have a few pops. He liked to be with people. He was not a star, but he was a star. He didn't think of himself as anything special.

CAPEN: He didn't go for the phoniness.

BOGART: No. He was not phony and I think that's part of what made him so popular besides the fact that he picked a lot of great films. George Raft turned down a lot of those great films.

CAPEN: So he would slide in when Raft declined?

BOGART: He'd just slide in. Casablanca, Maltese Falcon. Sam Jaffe, his agent, these guys worked together and were phenomenal and of course he became best of friends with arguably one of the greatest directors ever -- John Huston.

CAPEN: They had a personal relationship.

BOGART: Yeah, they did.

I met Angelica in '94. She was at my Mom's house and came up to me and said well, it's about time we met. I said yeah, it is about time. Yeah, Huston and my father had a personal relationship. They were great friends. There's a story in my book about a race that my father was supposed to make on the Santana to Hawaii and back. The Santana is now at the Saint Francis Yacht Club in Sausalito. I was signing books yesterday and this guy came up and said he was going to be the navigator on that race. He showed me a telegram from my father and pictures with him and Mayo. He was an old friend of my father's that I'd never spoken to.

Of course, Huston was a brilliant director but he kept doing more takes and more takes and my father finally got pissed off and said look, I've got to make this race, you can't keep doing more takes. Huston looks at him and says "I'm the director, you're the actor." They got into a big fight about that. Huston, who was a big guy, a boxer and a tough guy, won out. They missed the race.

CAPEN: So would they go off the set afterward and drink all night and stay up all night and talk film?

BOGART: That's what they would do.

There are people that you meet in your life, I have one or two of these, that are just you, that are just almost part of you. And they really were, and they loved working together but not only for that reason. They loved working together because my father was a student of the craft. He was a real actor. And John Huston, well -- absolutely the best. Him, Speilberg -- there are a few others. There's a story about my father where my mother was coming out of a bedroom in "To Have or Have Not" or "The Big Sleep" and she was supposed to come out of the bedroom and my father would be in the other room. She walks out of the bedroom and my father looks at her and says what did you just do?

She said, well, the scene says I'm supposed to walk out of the bedroom.

He said, and that's what you did, but what you forgot was, what were you doing in the bedroom before you walked out? What you did was just walk out and then here you are in the room, but you weren't just standing there waiting to walk out, you were maybe making the bed or putting some clothes on or whatever. You need to think about what you were doing beforehand in order to make it believable.

So that's a student of acting and that was what my father was.

CAPEN: And Huston was an instinctual character for finding people who took the craft seriously like your father. He went after Sterling Hayden when most people thought he was pretty much a ham -- until he got serious about it with Huston.

BOGART: It's true. Huston was that way. I think there are great directors who are that instinctual. Robert Shaw in Jaws -- a brillliant actor. Everybody in the business knew of him. Speilberg found him and brought him out and put him in Jaws and he was phenomenal. There aren't that many directors that can do that. Look at Huston casting his dad in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

How brilliant was Walter Huston in that movie? -- A favorite movie.

CAPEN: I recently made a top ten of my own favorite films and four or five were Huston's.

BOGART: It's phenomenal. "Caine Mutiny," "Treasure --," "African Queen," "To Have and Have Not," "The Big Sleep," "The Maltese Falcon" --

How many have I missed? "High Sierra." On and on.

The really fine films my father was in. There aren't any actors now that I can think of that have such a body of work. Of course, those were the days when they made three films a year. Jack Warner would send my father these scripts on contract. You could turn down two scripts and then the third you had to take. So Warner would slip him some real duds and then on the third he'd slip him the one that he really wanted him to do. It was kind of a game then. Also, my father was, I believe, the first to form his own production company as an actor, which was Santana Productions. So he was also very insightful as to the business.

CAPEN: They must have known this about him and he knew it about the people he worked with. To Have and Have Not, to take the author of the book, the screenwriters, and then your father and mother, and put that all together was just the most volatile of combinations. It was just incredible what happened on screen.

BOGART: It was. Obviously some of it was because they fell in love and you could actually see that. The famous "you know how to whistle, just put your lips together and blow" scene. Throughout the film you could see it happening. If I'm not mistaken, initially he wasn't supposed to get her. You could palpably see their love, that's why they changed things around a little bit.

CAPEN: Do you ever talk to your mother about these films?

BOGART: No, she's 72 now and she's doing fine, but we really don't do that because I ran away from all this for so long. I ran away from the scrutiny and the name and tried to find out who I was for myself for so long.

CAPEN: What a shadow to live in.

BOGART: It was kind of a shadow, but it wasn't really the fact that they were my parents, it was the fact that he died. The tremendous scrutiny simply by being his son drove me further away from wanting to find out about that.

CAPEN: Was there pressure on you to act?

BOGART: No, it wasn't that there was pressure on me to act, it was more that he was such a myth. And Bogey and Bacall, the love affair of the century. And when he died it seemed as though everything that the public loved about him came onto me.

"Oh, you're his son, we loved your father." Yet I never really got a chance to mourn at that funeral. I remember Huston was in the car with us going there, and around the corner there were hordes and hordes of people. He delivered the eulogy, part of which is in my book, and as we were going out he said, "There's a lot of photographers out there. Beware of that." And I'm walking out with my hand over my face.

CAPEN: You were eight years old?

BOGART: Eight years old. The photographers are flashing. The next day in the paper I see "Bogey's son walks out of funeral weeping." I wasn't weeping and I was very upset about that because it was just one more instance of my not having any privacy. Nobody said anything to me about such things, they just took it and added what they wanted to. It was very upsetting and it was the beginning of my retreat. Then we moved from the house on Mapleton to another house. I left my school. Then we moved to London where my mother did "Flame Over India." We went to India for a while, and then we moved to New York. So in a matter of a year and a half my life was gone. It was really traumatic.

CAPEN: Do you ever watch your father, watch the movies, perhaps many times?

BOGART: Some of them. I'm not as much a student as you are. Don't start asking me, because I'm really not a film buff.

CAPEN: Your personal favorite?

BOGART: "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." But I also love "The Caine Mutiny." He was so brilliant in that. "African Queen" was just a great film.

CAPEN: Do you ever watch these films and see your father and feel that this is the man speaking, not a character?

BOGART: I hadn't really thought of that. I was talking to my mother and she asked what I remember my father as looking like. I described him: coat, pants, what I pictured him dressed in. She said that's how he dressed in "x" movie, that's not what he wore around the house. My point being my only picture of my father was in the movies, I really didn't know him well enough to answer your question. But I do think that a lot of what he did on the screen was really him and he wasn't faking.

CAPEN: Some of it sure seems that way. One scene I'm thinking of is in "The Big Sleep." He gives this kid a kick that is sort of like a dance. It had to come right from Bogey himself. Not something he could have been coached to do.

BOGART: That's acting, though. Some people just have it. People tell me I look like my father, look like my mother. I was looking at home movies when I was doing research for my book and I see myself in the home movies, but this is from the early '50s. I kept re-racking it and looking at it and my wife said, "Did we edit this and put you in?" Well, it was him at my age.

CAPEN: He's been gone four decades now.

BOGART: Yes, 1957.

CAPEN: The world is a far different place, movies are far different. How do you think he would fit in now, what would be his take on the world?

BOGART: I think that one thing he would have done is decried the movie star thing, as he always did when he was a movie star. He thought of himself as a guy who had a good job that paid him good money. He was an ordinary guy. I think he would have really been upset.

He was well-read, a student, a chess player, educated. I think he would have been upset at graphic violence: "Rocky 9," "Child's Play 4." There's no thought behind any of this, there's no writing. Look at the lines from "Casablanca." My father said "Tennis, anyone?" on the stage in the '20s and that's still in the lexicon. Back in the days of black and white there was so much more focus on imagination and of course on shadow, and things like that. If he had seen "Casablanca" colorized . . . he would have refused. What's the point? I think he would have had a difficult time watching these types of films, you know, the Pam Anderson type of stuff.

Now there are some brilliant actors today: Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Newman. These are people who will go out of their way. The business is so different, so much less focused on content. Now you have to justify spending millions on a film by putting in nudity and violence. It's formula, and the art seems to be missing. Other than people like Speilberg, there's not much out there. I think a lot of the problem really does get down to the writing.

CAPEN: In another of Huston's films, a small masterpiece -- "Under the Volcano" -- Albert Finney was brilliant. The story is that Richard Burton wanted that role but he didn't get it. Finney did. If your dad were around for the past thirty years, can you think of anything he would have killed to get his hands on?

BOGART: "Cool Hand Luke?" "A Few Good Men?" I think the subtleties are no longer there. I think he would have gotten a great writer and he and Huston would have made one of the great films of all time. It hasn't been made yet because they don't do that anymore.

CAPEN: Coppola?

BOGART: Yes, Godfather roles. "On the Waterfront." He lost the Oscar for "The Caine Mutiny" to Marlon Brando in that, but he won for "African Queen" beating Brando in "Streetcar -- ".

CAPEN: Marlon Brando is a great example. Brando is struggling with a brave new world.

BOGART: A lot of the art is lost in twelve million dollars to play a stripper. How difficult is that? A lot of my father's films might not have been made today.

CAPEN: Let's talk about you for a bit. Your father dies at a very young age and then all of a sudden you're part of a new family. It seems like you started to get pretty damn uncomfortable. I think that people can end up turning to any sort of outlet, and they're legion now in the culture, to get the hell away from whatever their bete noire is -- their black beast --

BOGART: Well, I started out in the '60s. I went to the University of Pennsylvania out of Milton. I wasn't a drinker, I've never been a drinker, I never liked the taste of it, but I drank beer in high school before I ever got high on anything else.

I remember the first time I smoked pot. It was with a friend at the University of Pennsylvania. Remember the hookahs and things like that? To me it was great. I enjoyed it, it was fantastic for me. And then I took acid like everyone else, or most of us in the '60s. That only lasted for six months and finally I got scared of it and just didn't do that anymore. I kept smoking pot, but I think it was an escape. I think I was also trying to be part of a group.

That was the '60s: peace, love, and rock and roll, a special time for youth. This was my easy entrance into a small group, and the larger group of youth in this country. It wasn't until much later, maybe eight years later, that I ever tried cocaine. Initially, of course, cocaine was okay, people walked around with coke spoons, do a few lines, go to sleep, wake up, but everything was fine, it wasn't addictive, it's fine. Well, we know now that that's not true.

Thank goodness I was not out there when there was crack or any of that stuff. What happened to me was, it became a habit, and the reason it became a habit, I think, was loneliness. That was the end of my first marriage. I'm not a party person, not a chatter, not a small-talk person. I like to get together with a couple of people and talk and that's about it. I think it allowed me to withdraw into myself. I guess it treats everybody differently. Some people get very effervescent and outgoing and talkative. I like to be alone.

Finally it just got to be a habit replacing real life activities, so I went to a doctor in New York. He was a medical doctor as well as group therapist. He examined me and said I wasn't physically addicted but I had a habit. The way to break the habit is to break the cycle. I did that around ten or eleven years ago. Now put it in front of me and I don't need it. It was a difficult time and it's an evil drug. It really sneaks up on you. The phenomenon of getting high is an interesting one because humans have been doing it since the beginning.

CAPEN: Yes, and then recently there's Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary.

BOGART: Right. Near the end I had stayed up all night at my mother's house doing blow and had to go to work. I called in and said I can't get there because my car...you know, the whole story, but I drank to come down and called my boss again and he said "Watch out, Stephen, you're going to screw up your life, I'll see you tomorrow." I said uh-oh, he's right, it's time to do something about this.

CAPEN: Was your mother aware of what was going on?

BOGART: No. I was never really living there with her, she wasn't home when I was home. She knew I smoked pot and things like that but not really the full extent of it. It starts to interfere with your life and then you need to deal with it. It's really a bad drug.

CAPEN: You are a writer now. Are you a writer for life?

BOGART: It's so difficult to do it, but I would like to do it.

I wrote a novel, Play It Again, which I finished before I ever started Bogart: In Search of My Father. It got a review in the Times, a pretty good one. I was surprised.

When I think about all the great writers of our time I kind of throw my hands up and think maybe I'll do something else. I talked to Alistair Cooke about this and he said you don't have to be Herman Melville. You're not necessarily born to write. Someone like Somerset Maugham wrote every day from the time he was 15 until he died. You don't have to be Somerset Maugham and you don't have to be Melville. You just have to put your feelings and words on paper and hope that people enjoy it and that has to be enough. Everybody can't be a Bette Davis or a Humphrey Bogart. Writing is a very humbling experience but I enjoy it. In Search of My Father might allow me to write more because it's really tough to make a living. I have one child out of college, thank goodness, but two more. They'll be going to college and the reality is money.

Hmm, I'd like to try talk radio at some point, too.

CAPEN: Radio had a corner on the imagination for a time, live broadcasting and all. Now it's the Internet, CD-rom and all, and of course the larval state of TV viewing.

BOGART: It's too bad. Radio is such a great medium.

CAPEN: Crime writing. Is this your intended genre, mystery?

BOGART: It started out being that and I enjoy that, but now that I've done that I think I'd like to do something else. I don't really know what yet, but I want to write the great American novel as everyone else does. I'm in flux now. In Search of my Father has put a lot in the past for me and now I don't have to deal with those problems anymore. I can go on with the rest of my life and who knows what it's going to be? Who knows if I'll even be around next year, that's the way life is, right?

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