Bogart by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

your picture.”
    I guess if Huston was warning me, he must have under stood how angry and scared the photographers had already made me feel.
    Between the day my father died and the day of the fu neral there had been two school days. My mother, thinking that it was best to keep things as close to normal for us as she could, had sent Leslie and me to school on those mornings. But normalcy was not to be had. Incredibly, when I was dropped off at school that first day there was a group of photographers waiting for me. They just came at me, like a gang of big kids, taking my picture without even asking. I hated it. I didn’t want my picture taken anymore. But now at the church after the funeral, I knew how to stop them, I thought. I would simply put my hand over my face so they couldn’t see me and they would not take my picture. That’s what I be lieved. So as we filed out of the church, I stood next to my mother and John Huston and I held my hand up over my face. We moved through the crowd of people who were being kept behind ropes. Suddenly it seemed as if everybody in the world had a camera. They were taking my picture. I couldn’t be lieve it. It didn’t matter that I had my hand over my face.
    They still took pictures, one after the other. I was scared. I felt as if I was being jumped on or called names. By the time we got into the car I was bawling.
    The next morning the front page of the newspaper featured a big picture of me coming out of my father’s funeral with my hand over my face. I was mortified. I felt as if some how everybody had lied to me.
    After the funeral dozens of people gathered at the house on Mapleton. There were many celebrities there. But there were neighbors, too, and studio executives, makeup men, sailing people, hairdressers, all people who loved Bogart. As long as there were people around, and things to do, Mother was able to hold herself together. Even before the funeral she had been able to keep busy constantly by answering some of the thousands of telegrams that came in from sympathetic friends and strangers.
    It was a telegram that made for one light moment on the afternoon of Dad’s funeral. My mother had asked that no flowers be sent for my father, that instead, donations be made to the American Cancer Society. Then she got a telegram from the American Floral Association, which she read to the gathering. It said, “Do we say don’t go to see Lauren Bacall movies?”
    So it was not a totally somber afternoon. People chatted and gossiped and exchanged Bogie stories. Mother was happy to have the house filled with people. But the friends had to leave sometime, and when they did we were alone again, Mother, me, and Leslie, in a home with no father. That’s when the problems began.
    If I was uncommonly quiet in the weeks that followed, my little sister was the opposite. Leslie was full of questions.
    “Why did Daddy go to heaven?” she asked my grand mother, Mom’s mother, Natalie, who had been living with us through much of my father’s illness. Our other grandmother, Maud, had died of cancer more than a decade earlier.
    “Because God needed him,” my grandmother answered.
    “But we needed him, too,” Leslie said. “Did God think he needed him more than his kids?”
    She was four years old and an expert at asking the unan swerable questions.
    Leslie was going through her own awful time. She had been Daddy’s little girl and Bogie had doted on her. Now he wasn’t there to scoop her into his lap, or ride on the seesaw with her. Now was the time when Leslie needed her mother the most, but Mom couldn’t give her enough. I was the rea son. Because I was so troubled, my mother gave me a lot of attention and in the process, they both agree, neglected some of Leslie’s emotional needs. It has been, as you can imagine, a sore spot between mother and daughter over the years.
    However, I was the one who was most obviously in need of special attention.
    Not so long ago I told my wife