THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 29, 1995 TAG: 9511290031
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY SANDRA M. LOUDEN
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
HUMPHREY BOGART. Does the name ring any bells? Even in a culture where anything older than 30 days is ancient history, Humphrey Bogart remains solid and timely 38 years after his death. No matter how much you may know about his life, you undoubtedly recognize that his name exists comfortably alongside others who have managed to break into the rarefied - if somewhat quirky - designation of icon.
``Bogart: In Search of My Father'' (Dutton, 325 pp., $24.95) is a little boy's account of life with - and mostly without - Humphrey Bogart. The ``little boy'' is now a man of 46, but Stephen Humphrey Bogart has forced himself to become a child again. He ``(roams) from one Bogie friend to the next'' trying to flesh out the man that Bogart was, combining their anecdotes and observations with his own frustratingly small cache of memories about the father who died when Stephen was 8.
Is this an honest account or a hatchet job by the son of Bogie and Lauren ``Baby'' Bacall? Well, Bogie is no Daddy Dearest, and although Stephen presents him as a complex man with both good and not-so-good traits, his is a portrait done from a position of love and respect.
``In Search of My Father'' recounts distinct phases in Humphrey Bogart's life. Each chapter carries a theme - Bogie's early life with his parents, his military service, his politics, his love of acting . . . his love of drinking, and his 11-month fight with the cancer that eventually took his life. Throughout, Stephen, a writer, intersperses his own experiences, trying to discover a correlation between his father's life and his own.
He sometimes finds contradictions in his father's behavior. Usually skeptical of organized causes, Bogie nevertheless traveled to Washington in 1947 with other actors during the ``Red Scare'' to fight for what they thought was an assault on the Constitution - a trip Bogie later called ``ill-advised, foolish and impetuous.''
According to Stephen, Bogie was an elitist about drinking, often implying that people who drank were of a higher caliber than those who didn't. The whole world is three drinks behind, he once said. Today, though, Stephen understands that his father had a drinking problem. He compares his father's drinking with his own previous cocaine addiction and finds solace in the fact that while his father was the quintessential pragmatist on the screen, playing loners like Sam Spade (``The Maltese Falcon'') and Rick Blaine (``Casablanca''), in reality he was like any other human being - strong sometimes, shy and insecure at others.
Stephen writes, ``hell, nobody can be like Rick Blaine all the time, not even Humphrey Bogart.'' This observation makes Bogie all the more endearing. And coming from his son, makes this story all the more poignant. MEMO: Sandra Louden is a greeting-card writer and book reviewer who lives in
Pittsburgh.
by CNB