Lauren Beall left behind one of the most iconic legacies in Hollywood history. The voice, the look, the films with Bogart, the decades of stage and screen work that stretched well into the 21st century. When she died in August 2014 at the age of 89, the tributes poured in from every corner of the world.
But very few of those tributes said much about her children. Three of them from two different marriages, each carrying the weight of being born into one of the most scrutinized families in American entertainment history. Each shaped in very different ways by the losses and instabilities that ran beneath the surface of all that glamour.
This is their story and the story of what it actually cost to grow up as the child of Lauren Beall, the woman they were born to. To understand what Lauren Beall’s children inherited and what they spent their lives contending with, you have to understand who she was before any of them arrived. She was born Betty Joan Persk on September 16th, 1924 in the Bronx, New York City into a family that was far from stable.
Her father, William Perski, was an alcoholic who left the family when Betty was 6 years old. It was an early and formative abandonment, and she and her mother responded to it by reinventing themselves, changing their last name to Bal, a form of her mother’s maiden name, and then adding a second L for good measure. The name became a fresh start.
Her mother, Natalie, worked to keep them afloat, and young Betty grew up with the particular toughness that New York and a difficult childhood can produce in a person. She was obsessed with the theater from early on, working as an usher at Broadway shows as a teenager, performing whenever she could, developing that quiet ferocity of ambition that would carry her all the way to Hollywood.
She got there at 19, landing the lead in To Have and Have Not in 1944, opposite a 44year-old actor named Humphrey Bogart. The chemistry between them was immediate and entirely real. He was still married to his third wife, Mayo Method, at the time, but Beall and Bogart fell in love on set with the kind of intensity that neither of them seemed entirely able to control.
He got his divorce. She got the role. And on May 21st, 1945, they married at the country estate of the author Lewis Bramfield in Malibar Farm, Ohio. The marriage became the most famous in Hollywood. They were brilliant together on screen and by almost all accounts genuinely happy together off it. Though Bogart was a complicated man, a serious drinker, a needler who liked to provoke, and someone who had strong opinions about what a wife and family should look like.
When he suggested that Belell put her career on hold to focus on their home and children, she largely agreed. It was not simple for her. Her ambitions had always been enormous, but she loved him and for a while the arrangement held. Their home hills home in Los Angeles was a gathering place for some of the most famous people in the world. Frank Sinatra was a neighbor.
Judy Garland was a close friend. The dinner parties Bogart and Bol hosted were legendary, loud, opinionated, full of people who were at the very top of the most glamorous industry in the world. The children who grew up in that house were surrounded by fame on a scale that most people never brush against in an entire lifetime.
They took it for granted the way children take for granted whatever they are born into, which meant they had no frame of reference for how extraordinary and how pressured their circumstances actually were. And then in 1956, everything began to come apart. Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1956 and what followed would define the lives of every person in that house especially the children who were too young to fully understand what was happening.
The first loss Steven Humphrey Bogart was born on January 6th 1949 in Los Angeles. He was named after his father’s character in To Have and Have Not, the tough, capable Harry Steve Morgan, which tells you something about how much Humphrey Bogart wanted his son to carry a piece of that screen legend forward, even before he was old enough to understand it.
Steven grew up in the Holy Hills house, surrounded by famous faces that meant nothing to him, because they were simply the people his parents knew. Judy Garland’s daughter, Lorna Luft, was his sister Leslie’s childhood friend. Frank Sinatra lived nearby. These were not exceptional facts to Steven. They were just the texture of his daily life.
What was less comfortable was his father’s absence. Humphrey Bogart worked constantly, and when he wasn’t working, he was often on his boat, the Santana, which was the place he felt most alive. Steven later described his father as somewhat distant in those early years. Someone who was physically present on the weekends, but emotionally contained, a man of his era who did not particularly demonstrate affection in the way that later generations would come to expect.
But then Steven got older and started to want to know his father better and started to realize that there was a real person behind the legend that everyone else seemed to already know everything about. And then his father got sick. Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1956. The illness moved quickly.
He had been a lifelong smoker and drinker and by the time the diagnosis came the cancer was advanced. Lauren Beall remained by his bedside almost constantly through the illness giving up whatever remained of her professional momentum to care for him. She was 31 years old. Steven was seven. His sister Leslie was four. On January 14th, 1957, Humphrey Bogart died at home in Holby Hills at the age of 57.
Steven was 8 years old. More than 3,000 people he had never met came to the funeral. And that was the moment Steven later said when he understood for the first time that his family was different. What followed was a childhood shaped by that loss in ways that took decades to fully surface. Belell moved the family to England for a period, then relocated them to New York City, where she had bought an apartment at the Dakota on the Upper West Side, the same building where John Lennon would later be killed.
She threw herself back into work, into the theater that had always been her first love, into the life of a suddenly single woman with two young children and an enormous grief to process. Steven largely raised himself through those years, or so it felt to him. He spent time with nannies and at schools, while his mother rebuilt her life and career.
He did not resent her for it exactly. He understood in retrospect that she had no other choice, but the loneliness was real and it marked him. He later wrote about feeling invisible in those years, about the chip that formed on his shoulder, about the particular awkwardness of being the son of Humphrey Bogart in a world that seemed to think they already owned a piece of his father.
He enrolled at the Milton Academy in Massachusetts for high school, then went to the University of Pennsylvania where he studied English, then transferred to Boston University where he met his first wife, Dale Jlly, in 1969. They married young, had a son named Jamie, and eventually divorced in 1984, a pattern of relationships begun too early and strained by things Steven was still working through.
He became a drug user during his years working in television production at NBC, at ESPN, at Court TV. He was functioning, productive, employed, professionally competent, but he was also numbing things that he had not yet found another way to deal with. He later drew a direct line between his father’s alcoholism and his own drug use, noting that both of them had used their substance of choice as social lubrication as a way of managing anxiety and the discomfort of being in rooms where they felt exposed.
The difference, as he pointed out with dry awareness, was that his father’s drug was legal and his wasn’t, and that he eventually stopped, while his father never really did. He never hid this. In fact, he wrote about it directly in his 1995 book, Bogart: In Search of My Father, a memoir and biography that was, by his own account, the most cathartic thing he had ever done.
The book was partly about his father, but mostly about himself, about the decades he had spent resenting and avoiding the enormous shadow the Bogart name cast, and about his eventual hard one peace with it. He described having carried his father’s fame as the heaviest thing he had ever lifted. He described using his drug habit to get through rooms that his last name made difficult to navigate.
He described the loneliness of the years after his father’s death, the nannies, the boarding schools, the sense of being managed rather than raised. The book which Beall encouraged and wrote the forward for was warmly received. It did not resolve everything. No book ever does.
But it opened a door that Steven had kept shut for most of his adult life. He described writing it in seven months with the help of the author Gary Provost and finding in the process of research and reflection things about his father he had never known and things about himself he had been avoiding for decades. He eventually married for a second time to Barbara Brookman in 1985.
That marriage lasted 25 years. He married a third time shortly after his mother’s death in 2014. He has three children and lives in Naples, Florida, where he oversees the management of the Humphrey Bogart estate, controlling his father’s name, image, and likeness, running an annual Humphrey Bogart film festival in Karago, and serving as the guardian of a legacy he spent most of his life trying to escape.
Steven’s sister Leslie was four years old when their father died. Young enough that she barely remembers him and old enough that his absence became the defining fact of her early years. The quiet one. Leslie. Leslie Howard Bogart was born on August 23rd, 1952 in Los Angeles. Her name was a gift of gratitude. Humphrey Bogart named her after the British actor Leslie Howard, who had been a close friend and who had done something Bogart never forgot.
When Warner Brothers was planning the Petrified Forest in 1936, Howard had refused to appear in the film unless the studio agreed to cast Bogart in the key role of Duke Manty. That act of professional friendship changed Bogart’s career. Naming his daughter Leslie was the way he repaid a debt he felt he owed for life.
Leslie grew up in the same Holy Hills house as Steven in the same cloud of celebrity and abundance. Her childhood friends included Lorna Lu, Judy Garland’s daughter. The house was filled with famous people who felt comfortable there, with dinner parties that lasted deep into the night, with the kind of easy, well-funded Hollywood life that looked charmed from the outside.
She was four years old when her father died. She has almost no direct memories of Humphrey Bogart, just fragments, impressions, things filtered through photographs and the stories her mother told. In that sense, she lost him before she ever fully had him, which is its own particular kind of grief. Not the sharp break that Steven experienced, but a slow awareness growing through childhood that the man whose name and legend surrounded her on every side was someone she would never actually know.
What she had instead was a mother who was still very much present and very much alive in the world. Beall moved the family to New York, remarried in 1961, and tried to build something new. The second marriage was to Jason Robards. And for a while, it produced another child, a half-brother, Sam, born in December 1961, and something resembling a reconstituted family.
But Roards was an alcoholic, and the alcoholism made the marriage impossible to sustain. BL divorced him in 1969 when Leslie was 16 years old and the family returned to its familiar configuration of mother and children navigating the world without a father in it. Leslie chose a different path from both her brother and her famous parents.
She did not go into the entertainment industry. She trained as a registered nurse and worked in that capacity through the 1970s in hospital settings with patients dealing with physical and emotional ailments. The work was demanding and unglamorous and it was as far from a Hollywood premiere as a person can get. It was also by every account something she genuinely wanted to do and was genuinely good at.
She moved to California in the 1980s and began to study yoga, receiving her first certification as an instructor in 1985. She deepened her practice through work with several teachers specializing in therapeutic yoga for people with cardiac conditions, chronic disease, and the physical challenges of aging. Her work became focused on healing, on helping people find some physical and emotional balance in circumstances that had stripped it away, which given the childhood she had lived through has a logic to it that feels deeply personal, even if she never explicitly connected
the two. In 1990, she married Eric Schiffman, a yoga instructor and teacher who had studied with Yangar and Jessica Cha and who was considered one of the more serious and thoughtful figures in American yoga. They built a practice together and have maintained a long, stable, and largely private life in California.
She became her husband’s sister-in-law of sorts when he and Steven’s sister-in-law connection became formalized. a small quiet connection binding two family lines that had not had an easy relationship with stability. Leslie has spoken occasionally about her mother and father in interviews, always warmly, always with a kind of considered care that suggests someone who has thought carefully about how much to say and to whom.
She wrote a brief piece in Harper’s Bazaar after Beall’s death in 2015, focusing on her mother’s love of jewelry and the specific memories attached to the pieces she had kept. It was a gentle, private act of mourning and entirely characteristic. She is, of the three children, the one who most successfully built a life at a clean distance from the weight of the family name. She did not erase it.
She could not and she did not try. But she chose work that was entirely hers, a partner who came from a different world and a level of privacy that the other two never quite managed to sustain. But there was a third child, one born into a very different kind of trouble from a very different kind of marriage who grew up with a different set of complications all his own.
Jason Robarts and the marriage that couldn’t hold. After Humphrey Bogart died in January 1957, Lauren Beall was 32 years old, widowed, and suddenly alone with two young children, and a career that had been deliberately placed on hold for the sake of a marriage she had believed would last forever.
The grief she carried was genuine and enormous. She had loved Bogart with a completeness that she never fully replicated. and the years immediately after his death were by her own account some of the darkest of her life. She had a brief and painful relationship with Frank Sinatra, brief enough that she was later somewhat embarrassed by how seriously she had taken it.
Sinatra had expressed an interest in marriage. But when the news was leaked to the press through no fault of Beall’s own, he reacted by ending the relationship entirely, blaming her for the publicity, even though she had not been responsible for it. It was a humiliating experience and left her wary of the particular kind of celebrity relationship where public image mattered more than private feeling.
She moved east. She returned to the theater, which had always been the place she felt most completely herself. She appeared on Broadway in Goodbye Charlie in 1959 and began to rebuild both her career and her sense of who she was outside of the Bogart marriage. And then she met Jason Roards. Robarts was in the 1950s and early 1960s considered one of the finest theatrical actors in America.
He had made his name playing Eugene O’Neal, the Iceman Cometh in 1956, Long Day’s Journey into Night that same year. And he had a reputation for an intensity on stage that was genuinely extraordinary. He was handsome, brilliant, celebrated, and deeply troubled. The trouble took the form of alcoholism so severe that it would eventually require a near fatal car accident to bring it under any kind of control.
They married on July 4th, 1961 in Ensenada, Mexico. The original plan to marry in Vienna had fallen apart because of paperwork problems and a Las Vegas wedding had also failed due to documentation issues which gives you some sense of the chaotic energy surrounding their relationship from the beginning.
They settled in New York and then in California and Robards became a stepfather to Steven who was 12 at the time and Leslie who was nine. The family they tried to build was not without its genuine warmth. Robards, when he was sober, could be brilliant and generous and funny. He brought a different kind of theatrical seriousness into the household, a deep engagement with American drama that Beall found genuinely interesting and that gave the children a different window into what serious artistic work could look like.
There were periods of real happiness, trips, family evenings, the particular energy that two genuinely talented and engaged people generate when they are functioning well together. But the alcoholism ran underneath everything like a current that could not be switched off. Beall later wrote in her autobiography that she had left Roards primarily because of his drinking, that she could not sustain a family life inside the constant uncertainty of a marriage to someone who was at his most difficult moments entirely unreachable.
It was a pattern she recognized in a different register from her own childhood, a man whose addiction took him away from the people who needed him present. The divorce was finalized in 1969. Steven and Leslie, who were 20 and 16 respectively, when the divorce happened, had now lived through two family ruptures in 12 years, their father’s death in 1957, and now the dissolution of their mother’s second marriage.
Sam, at 7, was living through his first. Sam arrived in December 1961 into a household that contained a famous mother, an alcoholic father, two older half siblings still processing their own grief, and the accumulated weight of one of Hollywood’s most storied families. What that meant for who he became is something he has spent his entire adult life figuring out.
The third child, Sam. Sam Predo Robarts was born on December 16th, 1961 in New York City. He was the only child of Lauren Beall and Jason Robarts and by the time he was old enough to form clear memories of his family, the family was already in the process of coming apart. He was 7 years old when his parents divorced in 1969, the same age almost exactly, at which Steven had lost his father to death 12 years earlier.
different circumstances, different loss, but a similar experience of growing up without the complete version of the family he had been born into. He later described his childhood as something close to being raised alone, meaning not that he was truly abandoned, but that the emotional availability of his parents was intermittent in ways that left significant gaps.
His father’s alcoholism was the central fact of Sam’s early relationship with Jason Robarts. Robarts was a man who became in the grip of his addiction, someone genuinely difficult to know or rely on. Sam watched his parents’ marriage dissolve through that lens and then watched his father continue to struggle in the years that followed.
In 1972, Robards was nearly killed when his car left a winding California road and slammed into the side of a mountain. The crash required extensive surgery and significant reconstruction of his face. It is widely understood to have been connected to his drinking. What happened after was remarkable.
Roards got sober genuinely and permanently. He did not do it quietly or privately. He became an advocate speaking publicly about alcoholism and working with organizations focused on recovery and awareness including the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependency and the Hazelden Foundation. He performed with Sam in Eugene O’Neal’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play that is itself a portrait of a family destroyed by addiction written by a man who had lived through one and used the performance to illustrate to medical
audiences the impact of drugs and alcohol on family life. There was something extraordinary and painful about a father and son performing that particular material together. a play about addiction and family damage with the knowledge of what their own history contained. It was not lost on either of them. Robards also appeared in Bright Lights Big City in 1988 alongside Sam, the only time they shared a screen in a film that itself dealt with substance abuse and the dissolution of a promising young man. Whether that casting was
coincidence or something more deliberate is difficult to say. What is clear is that Jason Roards, in his long sobriety, made real efforts to be present for his son in the ways his addiction had made impossible when Sam was young. Sam inherited his parents’ talent and their drive, but he moved toward the work carefully without illusions.
He later described his parents making clear to him from an early age that acting was simply a job, not a glamorous calling or a birthright, just work that required discipline and commitment like any other. He attended the American school in London during a period when his mother was working in Europe, then returned to New York and attended the collegiate school.
He briefly enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College but was expelled after his first year. He then enrolled at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neal Theater Center in Connecticut in 1980, which gave him the formal training his talents required. His early career was genuinely good, not simply because of his parents’ names, but because he had real ability.
He made his feature film debut in Paul Mazerk’s Tempest in 1982. He appeared alongside Kevin Cosner and his future first wife Susie Amos in Fandango in 1985. He acted opposite his father in Bright Lights Big City in 1988, the only time the two of them appeared together on screen and a film about addiction that carried its own quiet ironies.
He appeared with his mother in Robert Ultman’s ensemble film Preta in 1994. Catherine Hepburn, who had been a close friend of both his parents, became his godmother, a connection that links him back to the heart of old Hollywood and to the specific world his mother had inhabited at the height of her fame.
His most widely seen film work came in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He appeared in American Beauty in 1999, the film that won Kevin Spacy the Academy Award for best actor and in which Sam played a suburban neighbor with a quiet observational quality that suited him well. He appeared in Steven Spielberg’s AI artificial intelligence in 2001 as Henry Swinton, the father who brings home the android boy at the center of the film’s story.
Both performances demonstrated a range that his television work, recurring roles in Gossip Girl as the troubled Captain Archable, appearances in The West Wing, Law and Order: Sex and the City, also confirmed. His stage work earned perhaps the most significant recognition. In 2002, he received a Tony Award nomination for best featured actor in a play for his performance in a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck.
The Clarence Derwent Award for most promising male on Broadway that came alongside the nomination was a formal acknowledgement from the theatrical world that he had made it on his own terms, not simply by inheritance. He married twice. His first marriage to actress Susie Amos produced a son named Jasper before ending in divorce in 1994. In 1997, he married Danish model and actress Sidzel Jensen, with whom he has two sons, Calvin and Sebastian.
By all accounts, his family life has been the stable and sustaining thing that neither of his parents’ marriages provided him with as a child. His father, Jason Robarts, died on December 26th, 2000 at the age of 78. Having spent the last decades of his life sober and working and making what amends he could, Sam was 39 years old.
He has spoken carefully about that relationship in the years since, not bitterly and not with easy forgiveness, but with the kind of considered complexity that comes from having thought about it for a very long time. All three of them shared one more loss, the one that closed the chapter for good.
What they shared, the death of Beall. Lauren Beall did not slow down gracefully. She kept working deep into her 70s and 80s, stage, film, television, refusing to become the kind of relic that Hollywood tries to make of its most iconic figures. She won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award in 1997 for The Mirror Has Two Faces and received an honorary academy award in 2009 in recognition of her contribution to the golden age of cinema.
She was among the last surviving major stars of that era and she seemed to take a particular satisfaction in that fact in having outlasted so much and so many. She remained throughout her later years deeply identified with Humphrey Bogart with the love story that had made both of them in different ways more than they might have been separately.
She talked about him constantly, kept his memory alive in interviews and in conversation, and was cleareyed about the fact that no relationship in her life had quite equaled that one. Her two subsequent marriages, to Robards, and the brief relationship with Sinatra that never reached marriage, were chapters in a life that continued, but they were not the central chapter.
Her children observed this from a considered distance. Steven, in particular, was sometimes struck by the gap between the idealized Bogart his mother described and the somewhat more remote father he himself remembered from childhood. In his memoir, he was careful about this, respectful of his mother’s experience while honest about his own, understanding that two people can remember the same man in genuinely different ways without either of them being wrong.
Belell spent her final years in the apartment at the Dakota that had been her New York home for decades. She had lived there since moving from Los Angeles after Bogart’s death in 1957, and it had become inseparable from who she was. A New York woman, deeply identified with the city’s particular rhythms and attitudes. She walked to restaurants.
She attended the theater. She remained opinionated and direct and fully herself in a way that people who loved her found enormously reassuring. and people who didn’t know her sometimes found startling. She had grandchildren by then, Steven’s children, Sam’s children, and had made the kind of peace with her own history that comes from having lived long enough to see the long arc of things.
The grief over Bogart never fully resolved because that kind of love doesn’t resolve. It simply becomes part of the permanent landscape of who you are. But she had built a life of genuine substance and lasting work alongside it. On August 12th, 2014, Lauren Beall died at the age of 89 of a stroke. She died at home in the Dakota, which was exactly where a woman like her should have died, in her own space, in her own city, having outlasted almost everyone who had known her at her beginning.
Steven, Leslie, and Sam were all present in her final days. The tributes that followed were enormous. American cinema paused to acknowledge the loss of one of its last genuine legends. The photographs from her life circulated everywhere. The young beall with Bogart, the look magazine covers, the stills from the big sleep and kego and to have and have not.
Celebrities and directors and critics lined up to describe what she had meant to the art form and to the culture. And the three children she left behind quietly absorbed the loss of the woman who had been the connective tissue of their family for as long as any of them could remember. She had been the constant through Bogart’s death, through the Roard’s marriage and divorce, through the decades of their own separate adult lives.
With her gone, they were what remained of something that had once been one of the most famous families in the world. The weight they all carried. What ties the three of them together is not exactly tragedy in the conventional sense. None of them died young. None of them collapsed entirely under the pressure of what they had been born into.
What ties them together is something more difficult to name. The particular experience of growing up in the absolute center of something enormous and having to find out who you are with that enormous thing always in the background, always casting its shadow always meaning something to strangers before it meant anything to you.
The Bogart name, the Beall voice, the stories everyone already knew or thought they knew about the most famous love affair in Hollywood history. The weight of being the children of people who had become in the public imagination almost mythological, not just famous actors, but symbols of a time and a feeling that the world had decided to preserve in amber.
Steven spent decades trying to outrun his father’s name, working in anonymity in television newsrooms, hiding the Bogart last name from colleagues until he was ready to own it. He became a drug user. He married three times and divorced twice. He eventually wrote his way through the thing he had been avoiding and found in the process of writing his book about his father something that looked like peace.
Today he tends his father’s legacy with a care and pride that feel genuine. The man who once hid the name now carries it forward intentionally, running the estate, the film festivals, the spirits brand that bears Bogart’s image. Leslie found her piece earlier and found it more quietly. She stepped entirely off the path her parents had traveled and built something different from the ground up.
Nursing, yoga, a stable marriage, a private life in California. The famous last name appears on official documents and in biographical entries and in occasional interviews, but it is not the organizing principle of her daily existence. She turned the capacity for care she must have developed, watching a family manage loss into an actual professional calling, helping people in physical and emotional distress find some form of balance.
Sam’s story is perhaps the most complex of the three, because he is the one who actually walked into the same profession his parents had worked in, and did so knowing exactly what that meant and what it cost, having watched both of them from close range. He was raised by a mother who was a global icon and a father who was both a brilliant artist and a man whose addiction made him unreliable and sometimes frightening.
He navigated that and he built something real. A serious stage career, a body of film and television work that stands on its own. A family that appears to have given him the stability his childhood did not. None of them chose their starting point. None of them had any say in the specific weight they were handed at birth.
The Bogart name, the Beall voice, the Roard’s talent and trouble, the shadow of old Hollywood falling across everything they tried to do and become. What they did with those things is its own kind of story, not a tragic one exactly, but not a simple one either. Lauren Beall left the world a remarkable body of work. Films that still hold up.
Performances that still command attention. A presence that was genuinely one of a kind. That legacy is real and it is lasting and it will be for a very long time. But she also left behind three people who had to live inside that legacy, who had to grow up as the children of one of the most famous couples in Hollywood history, who lost their fathers early and in different ways, who struggled and searched and eventually, each in their own way, found the version of themselves they could live with. Steven, now in his mid70s,
still tends the estate of the father he barely knew as a child and has come to understand as an adult. He carries the name forward with a deliberateness that looks very different from the years he spent hiding it. Leslie, now in her early 70s, still teaches yoga in California, still married to the same man she married in 1990, still largely out of the spotlight.
She is of the three the one who built the quietest life and perhaps in doing so the most complete one. Sam now in his early 60s still acts on stage on screen in the theater world his father dominated and is still by all accounts working out what it means to carry a name that contains so much history. He has done it on his own terms that matters.
Three lives. Three different answers to the same impossible question. How do you become yourself when the world already has a very strong idea of who you are? If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
