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regrets have less to do with how I felt about him, and more with how he felt about me. I regret that he didn’t spend as much time with me as I would have liked, and that he died when it seemed that he was just starting to get the hang of this fatherhood thing. I wasn’t always sure of it, but I am sure now that if my father had lived a full life we would have had the kind of relation ship that fathers and sons dream of.
    But, as it is, I still have a few memories. One of them concerns Romanoff’s restaurant. Though my father had gone to Africa to make The African Queen, and Italy to make Beat the Devil, he generally stayed around Hollywood. And when he wasn’t working he was often schmoozing at Roman off’s restaurant.
    Phil Gersh, who was a partner of Sam Jaffe, remembers my father’s Romanoff’s days well.
    “I’d meet your father at Romanoff’s,” Gersh says. “Bogie always had the same lunch. Two scotch and sodas, French toast, and a brandy. He never looked at a menu. And he never carried money. He’d say ‘Phil, have you got a dollar for the valet kid?’”
    Actually, my father stuck people with more than just the valet’s tip money. It was a running gag for him to see how of ten he could con somebody else into paying the bill.
    Mike Romanoff, who owned the restaurant, was a close friend of my father. He was known as Prince Michael. As far as anybody knows, no drop of royal blood ever flowed through Mike Romanoff’s veins, but for years he insisted he was Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitri Obolensky Ro manoff, a nephew of Russian Czar Nicholas Romanoff. Phony p rince or not, Mike was much loved by the Hollywood crowd. He was a guy Hollywood turned to for advice, a regu lar Ann Landers, and his restaurant was a famous watering hole for movers and shakers. Mike was also one of the few people who could beat my father at chess. It was Mike Romanoff who summed up my father about as well as any body could in one sentence. He said, “Bogart is a first-class person with an obsessive compulsion to behave like a second-class person.”
    My father had his own reserved table at Romanoff’s. I re member it well. It was the second booth to the left from the entry way. There Bogie would eat his lunch, drink his scotch, and shoot the breeze with some of the best-known people in the world.
    One day, when I was seven, Bogie decided that I should join the world of men. That is, I should be taken to Romanoff’s restaurant and shown off. On this day he wanted to be Daddy. That morning my mother dressed me up in new long trousers and a spiffy new shirt, then she brought me up to the bedroom to be inspected by the man himself.
    My father, wearing gray flannels, a black cashmere jacket, and a checked bow tie, looked long and hard at me. “You look good, kid,” he said. Then off we went, me and Bo gie, in the Jaguar.
    Romanoff’s was in Beverly Hills. Dad and I arrived in the Jag at 12:30, my father’s usual time. When we pulled in, the valet took the car and we were led immediately to Bogie’s regular booth. Dad waved to a few of the many Hollywood notables who were already dining, and I’m sure most of them thought it adorable that he had his little Stevie with him. We sat in the booth and Mike Romanoff came over to greet us.
    “Good afternoon, your royal highness,” my father said. His usual greeting to Mike.
    “Good afternoon, Mr. Bogart,” Mike said, in his carefully cultivated Oxford accent. “Are you going to be paying your bill today? I thought that might be a pleasant change.”
    “Are you going to be putting any alcohol in your overpriced drinks?” Bogie asked. “That also would be a nice change.”
    “You won’t be needing a necktie today?” Romanoff said.
    “No.”
    Romanoff, you see, had a jacket and tie policy at the res taurant, and he always made Dad wear a tie. One time my father had baited Mike by showing up with a bow tie that was one inch wide and sat on a pin.
    “I see you’ve