When Bogie met Bacall: The red-hot romance that killed a screen siren’s career
The life of Lauren Bacall was dominated by one man in particular: “My obit is going to be full of Bogart, I’m sure.” He was her perfect co-star, her beloved husband – and the man who ruined her career.
In her performances opposite Humphrey Bogart in the 1940s, Bacall – who was born a century ago this week – transformed how women could appear on film. She made the “femme fatale” newly intellectual and sympathetic – engineered to destabilise Bogart’s craggy machismo, with thrilling results. Together the pair were transfixing, and their on-screen fireworks came from their off-screen chemistry.
But when they married, Bacall paid a heavy price. Bogart didn’t want to be hitched to a movie star – he was after a housewife. His career was a continued success after they tied the knot; hers faltered catastrophically.
Betty Joan Perske was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1924. Her father disappeared when she was five and she was raised by her mother, whose surname she later adopted. After aborted attempts at dancing and acting, the young Bacall became a model. She was spotted in Harper’s Bazaar by the wife of Howard Hawks, the revered director, who pointed out Bacall to her talent-hungry husband.
An instantly besotted Hawks summoned Bacall to Hollywood, where he gave her a seven-year contract and remodelled her as a movie star. The name Betty was quickly dispensed with; the public would know her as Lauren. And her New York accent and faltering diction couldn’t stay either; Hawks demanded that she lower her voice and spend hours shouting lines of Shakespeare. The final step to stardom was partnership with an established leading man. Hawks considered Cary Grant as well as Bogart, much to Bacall’s delight (“I thought ‘Cary Grant – terrific! Humphrey Bogart – yuck’”) – but ultimately chose the star of Casablanca.
Bogart was 25 years older than Bacall; he’d been born in a previous century, on Christmas Day 1899. Almost every aspect of their lives had been different before they met. His family was higher class than hers – but also unhappier and suffused with debt and addiction. Bacall was an instant success in Hollywood whereas Bogart had spent a decade trying to become famous. She was mercurial, he was phlegmatic. She was sparky, he was tired.
So Bacall did not fall in love with Bogart the first time she met him – “there was no clap of thunder, no lightning bolt” – and she was anyway preoccupied with trying not to embarrass herself on her first film set.
It doesn’t show on-screen but Bacall was terrified while filming To Have and Have Not, the romantic adventure film in which Hawks brought her and Bogart together. Her first appearance is one of the most striking in Hollywood history – slouching in a doorway she effortlessly catches a pack of matches tossed her way by an entranced Bogart, before lighting up her cigarette and slinking out of the room.
But in real life, the jittery Bacall missed or fumbled the box of matches umpteen times before she successfully caught it. (To prevent her petrified shaking she would push her chin down to stabilise her head, and then stare sharply upwards – forming the famous Look with which she was always associated.)
The pressure to match Bogart’s charisma and sang-froid forced Bacall to develop her own remarkable screen personality. And over time Bogart fell for his young co-star’s mix of private vulnerability and public steeliness. Three weeks into the shoot, they kissed in Bacall’s dressing room, and from then on he would phone her while she was at home with her mother, sometimes in the middle of the night.
In To Have and Have Not’s original screenplay, Bogart does not end up with Bacall’s character. But after watching the pair perform together, Hawks realised that audiences would find any other conclusion unbelievable and changed the story. The film was shot in sequence and to watch it is to see its stars fall explosively in love.
A complication: Bogart had a wife. His third marriage, to the actress Mayo Methot, was well-known in Hollywood as a quarrelsome nightmare, with the booze-fuelled and smash-happy fights of the “Battling Bogarts” requiring the couple to keep a carpenter on call to deal with ravaged furniture. During one argument things became so heated that Methot actually stabbed Bogart.
But he survived and so did his marriage, for a while, meaning that Bogart had to keep his affair with Bacall quiet. Moments of sudden reconciliation with Methot required that Bogart habitually break things off with his new girlfriend, leaving Bacall devastated. She was so prone to long spells of crying on set that her swollen and tear-glazed face often had to be daubed with ice before she could appear on camera.
To Have and Have Not was a huge success when it was released in 1944, and Bacall and Bogart were reconvened for The Big Sleep, the famously complicated adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel. Bogart’s tortured relationship with Methot was by now leading him to drink heavily and miss days on set, where Bacall provided the perfect distraction from life at home.
The couple’s chemistry was as vibrant as ever – at one point studio head Jack Warner sent them a note saying “Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop” – and by the end of 1944 Bogart’s marriage with Methot was over.
A few months later he married Bacall. But there was a catch: she was now to be first and foremost Mrs Bogart. “She’s my wife, so she stays home and takes care of me,” Bogart shrugged. “He told me that he wouldn’t marry me if I wanted a career,” Bacall later recalled.
Bogart didn’t ban Bacall from making films, but he did expect her career to be fitted around his, and he made some strict demands of his wife. She was not allowed to film on location, for example – a severe restriction as directors began to drift away from shooting mostly in studios.
“Bogie was an old-fashioned man,” Bacall said long after his death. “He kidded that a woman’s place was in the home, but he was only half kidding. He had divorced three actresses and was convinced that a career and marriage don’t mix.”
Bacall was expected to raise the couple’s two children – Stephen and Leslie – pretty much by herself. Bogart was to be given sufficient time with his friends and beloved boat. A representative early incident: when Bacall first arrived home from hospital after giving birth to Stephen, Bogart was nowhere to be seen – inevitably, he was out drinking. Bogart’s children would grow up trying to understand their absent father.
Sometimes, looking after Bogart took precedence even over caring for the rest of the family. When he went to Uganda and the Congo to film The African Queen, Bacall was expected to join him. Bogart won an Oscar for his performance, but the remote and arduous shoot had required Bacall to leave behind her young child for months.
Bacall had been warned by Howard Hawks, her greatest industry advocate and original admirer, that a married Bogart would expect his wife to subordinate her ambitions to his own. He’d disapproved of their romance from the moment he first noticed it on the set of To Have and Have Not, and when the couple finally married he was overwhelmed with professional resentment and (perhaps) sexual jealousy.
Hawks terminated his personal contract with Bacall and sold her to Warner Bros. Their era of perfect collaboration, which had produced Bacall’s greatest and most successful performances, was over. Bacall would now be a contract player, without the security of guaranteed good roles.
She tried to retain some control of her career by dismissing most of the dross that she was offered. But this meant that she was considered difficult by the studio, who ultimately suspended her twelve times for rejecting scripts. Good parts rarely came her way.
Meanwhile a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking was catching up with Bogart, whose health collapsed in the 1950s. Bacall was increasingly referred to as his carer – rather than as an actress in her own right – and then, when he died aged 57, as his tragically young widow. She was still only 32, but her time in the first rank of movie stars was over.
Bacall would still have the odd good part on film, from Douglas Sirks’s Written in the Wind to Lars Von Trier’s Dogville – and something of a career revival on Broadway in the 1960s and `970s. But her marriage to Bogart had killed her crucial early momentum. For the rest of her life, interviewers and fans overwhelmingly wanted to discuss To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and ‘Bogie’.
Bacall said that she was “hurt more than anything” by the disappointments of her film career, but she nevertheless retained her affection for Bogart, long after his death and despite acknowledging the damaging effects of his conservatism. “If I’d had just my career, I would have missed out on Bogie, on children – on the very substance of my life.”
