In the spring of 1951, Humphrey Bogart flew across the Atlantic to make The African Queen, John Huston’s classic Technicolor yarn about an odd couple on a boat. He took his wife, Lauren Bacall. He took his whisky and his cigarettes. But he left his two-year-old son in the care of the nanny, reasoning that the jungle was dangerous and that he’d only be gone for six months. Bogart and Bacall waved goodbye from the airport gangplank. The kid waved back from the employee’s arms. And it was at this moment, as the plane left the runway, that the nanny had a brain haemorrhage and dropped dead on the tarmac.
Stephen Bogart takes up the tale. His parents’ plane lands. Bacall hears the news. Mrs Hartley just died: her son’s effectively on his own. “So what does she do? She thinks, ‘Do I go to Africa with Bogie and Huston and [Katharine] Hepburn and have a lot of fun? Or do I go home and take care of the kid?’” After hasty consideration, she plumped for the first option, palming the boy off on his grandparents instead. He says: “Now I don’t blame my mother for doing what she did. But I’m not sure that I would have made the same choice.”
