Bogart and Bacall — Isn’t It Romantic!

by Susan King 

The fourth marriage was the charm for the beloved Oscar-winning actor Humphrey Bogart. The 45-year-old Bogie married his 20-year-old “To Have and Have Not” leading lady Lauren Bacall on May 21, 1945, at his BFF novelist Louis Bromfield’s cooperative farm Malabar near Mansfield, Ohio. Despite the age difference, the couple, nicknamed Bogie and Baby, would welcome two children and remain married until his death of cancer at 57 in 1957. 

When production began on the classic 1944 Howard Hawks romantic adventure loosely based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the same name, Bogart’s career was flourishing. He had spent over a decade making films often playing the bad guy in secondary roles in major movies or the starring role in such grade B turkeys as the 1939 horror flick, “The Return of Doctor X.” 

Then everything changed for Bogart in 1941 thanks to his turns as gangster Roy “Mad Dog” Earle in Raoul Walsh’s “High Sierra” and as San Francisco private eye Sam Spade in John Huston’s feature directorial debut, “The Maltese Falcon.” And he moved from star to superstar thanks to his flawless performance as the world-weary nightclub owner Rick Blaine who is reunited with his former love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in the cherished 1942 “Casablanca,” which would win three Oscars including best film and director for Michael Curtiz. Not only did Bogart score his first best actor Oscar nomination for the box office smash, his performance also turned him into a romantic sex symbol. 

And the role of jaded professional fisherman Harry Morgan in “To Have and Have Not,”  first him like a well-worn glove. Set in Martinque after the fall of France to the Germans in 1940, the hit also marked the debut of the 19-year-old former Betty Joan Perske as the sultry Marie. Bacall had been discovered by the wife of Hawks who saw her photo on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and suggested the filmmaker give her a film test. He thought she had the potential of being the next Marlene Dietrich — without the German accent.

Bogart’s personal life was exploding when he reported to work on the Warner Bros. lot for “To Have and Have Not.” His turbulent marriage to actress Mayo Methot, whom he met while making 1937’s “Marked Woman,” was unraveling. Not only did the two drink far too much, they also seemed to constantly fight, especially in public. So much so they were known as the Battling Bogarts; her nickname was Sluggo.

Lloyd Bridges was a young actor when he witnessed the Bogarts battling.  “He was so nice to me,” Bridges told the L.A. Times in 1990. “I was sort of getting started, and he invited me to dinner with him and Mayo. She would provoke him. She would go after him and after him until finally he would hit her.”  And she, in turn, would throw various objects at her husband, most notably record albums. She even told a reporter that albums “made such a satisfactory crash.”

Bogart soon started falling for his beautiful teenage costar. Though it wasn’t love at first sight for Bacall. “There was no clap of thunder, no lightning bolt,” Bacall would later say about their first meeting. But that all changed when three weeks into the shoot he gave her a kiss. The actress would write in her autobiography “By Myself”: “He was standing beside me — we were joking as usual — when suddenly he leaned over, put his hand under my chin, and kissed me.”

The affair became hot and heavy very quickly. “There was no way Bogie and I could be in the same room without reaching for one another,” Bacall would recall. “It wasn’t just physical. It was everything — heads, hearts, bodies, everything going at the same time.”

Methot wasn’t going down without a fight, so they met in private, and Bogart would often call Bacall drunk in the middle of the night. Hawks, whom Bacall said had a crush on her, got so angry when he heard of the affair he threatened to sell Bacall’s contract to a Poverty Row studio as punishment. Her mother, she said, “was furious” by their affair.

But their son Stephen Bogart would later say in People, “Everyone could see their love right there on celluloid. He was the greatest love of her life, and she his.”

When the film opened in October 1944, Bacall proved to be catnip to the press. Variety described Bacall as having an “arresting personality…she can slink, brother and no fooling!” And the couple had many memorable moments in the film most notably when the sultry Marie coos in her husky voice: “You don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve?” You just put your lips together and blow.” 

Bogart’s wedding gift to his young bride?

A 14-carat gold whistle charm bracelet with the name Betty — the name she preferred to use off-screen — Bacall engraved on one side and ‘The Whistler” on the other.

The press was in full force when they married on his friend’s farm just 11 days after his divorce from Methot. The two had already made their second film together, “The Big Sleep,” also directed by Hawks, before they were married. But it was held back from release as new scenes were added before it eventually came out in 1946. They would go on to do two more films together, 1947’s “Dark Passage” and 1948’s “Key Largo.” And in 1955 they starred with Henry Fonda in the “Producer’s Showcase” presentation of “The Petrified Forest” with Bogie reprising his role of the vicious gangster Duke Mantee, he originated on Broadway in 1935 and in the classic 1936 film.

She was devastated when he died, later writing “No one has ever written a romance better than we lived.”

Bacall, who had put her personal life ahead of her professional career when she married Bogie, became a Broadway baby after his death, winning two Tony Awards-for the 1970 musical “Applause” and the 1981 musical “Woman of the Year.” She earned her only Oscar nomination for supporting actress as Barbra Streisand’s mom in 1996’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces” and received an Honorary Oscar in 2009 “in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of Motion Pictures.”

“Oh, my heavens, I can't believe it. A man at last!" she proclaimed when Anjelica Huston gave her the honor.

She died in 2014, just a month before her 90th birthday. 

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Susan King was a film/TV/theater writer at the Los Angeles Times for 26 years specializing in Classic Hollywood.