In this 1995 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Stephen Bogart, the only son of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, sits down with Dini Petty to talk about the father he lost at eight and the book he wrote to find him, Bogart: In Search of My Father. On camera the resemblance is immediate. He is the son who looks just like his father, and he spends the conversation explaining what that has meant.
He grew up thinking Frank Sinatra, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn were just family friends. He was eight when the crowds outside the funeral told him his father was something else entirely. He describes the chip on his shoulder that followed, one he says was “the size of Idaho,” and what carrying the Bogart name did to him for the rest of his life. The most unexpected part is the habit it quietly left him chasing into adulthood. He talks frankly about drugs, about being eighteen in 1967, and about cocaine and the choice that ended it.
Between those confessions are gentler moments. He shares what his father believed about fame, that it never made anyone better than anyone else, and how he has tried to raise his own children the Bogart way. He speaks about his mother’s long loneliness since January 1957, and he does the Humphrey Bogart impression he performs for almost no one.
Humphrey Bogart died in 1957 and Lauren Bacall in 2014. Unseen since its original 1995 CTV broadcast, this conversation with their son has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
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