BOGIE & BACALL Hollywood’s Greatest Love Story
Family members reveal the untold details of the screen legends’ against-all-odds romance, from their illicit first kiss to the tragedy that tore them apart
He embodied the Hollywood tough guy, but Humphrey Bogart turned to mush when he wed Lauren Bacall on May 21, 1945. “Bogie and I were ridiculous, holding hands like teenagers,” Lauren, just 20 at the time, recalled of that day, remembering the tears that sweetly fell down her 45-year-old groom’s cheeks. “Bogie said it was when he heard the beautiful words of the ceremony and realized what they meant — what they should mean — that he cried.”
It was a blissful moment for the couple, whose improbable romance ignited on the set of 1944’s To Have and Have Not. “You could see them fall in love on-screen. When they kissed, audiences went wild,” film critic Joe Neumaier tells Closer. Offscreen it was a different story, however, as it seemed everyone fought to keep them apart. Still, “my breath depended on his. I could not have believed such completion. Nor could he — if he’d been in love before, he was obsessed now,” Lauren once said of their willingness to risk everything to be together. Now, interviews with family members and experts shed new light on the stars’ larger-than-life romance.
OPPOSITES ATTRACT
At 19, Lauren was a Hollywood newcomer when she landed the role of a lifetime opposite Bogie in Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not. “This was post-Casablanca and Bogart was the biggest star in the world,” Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz explains to Closer. The pressure of the moment caused the ingenue to quiver uncontrollably during their first scenes together.
“I found out very quickly that day what a terrific man Bogart was,” Lauren said. “He did everything possible to put me at ease,” making her laugh and making her feel safe. Against all odds, they formed an intimate bond, and three weeks later Bogie surprised Lauren with a kiss, asking her to write her phone number on the back of an old book of matches. He called her that same night. “From that moment on, our relationship changed,” she said.
A huge problem loomed, however: Bogie was in a volatile marriage at the time to his third wife, actress Mayo Methot. “They were known as the Battling Bogarts,” Mankiewicz says of the tumultuous relationship. Mayo even stabbed him in the back with a knife on one occasion — “and he had the scar to prove it,” Lauren once said.
It wasn’t long before Bogie would succumb to his young co-star. “He was sucked into the vortex of this terrible, downward-spiraling marriage and he gets a lifeline with Bacall, a fresh, stylish total knockout who could wow a room,” says Eric Lax, co-author of Bogart. Grandson Jamie Bogart tells Closer, “She was so in love with him, I know it was a good relationship.”
But Bogie’s wife wasn’t their only roadblock. The jealous Hawks warned Lauren she meant nothing to Bogie and he’d forget all about her when the film wrapped. And due to Bogie’s age and marriage, Lauren’s overprotective mom was dead set against the romance, which forced Lauren to keep her late-night rendezvous with Bogie a secret — even though that proved thrilling for the young actress. “It was fun, it was exciting, it was all-encompassing,” Lauren said. “It was all so dramatic, too.”
In the months after filming ended, Bogie couldn’t get Lauren out of his mind. “Now I know what was meant by ‘To say goodbye is to die a little,’” he wrote her. “Because when I walked away from you that last time and saw you standing there so darling, I did die a little in my heart.” He filed for divorce in February 1945.
By then, it had became clear to everyone that the couple were destined to be together. “He told people he didn’t think he’d ever fall in love again and that Lauren was the last love of his life,” Mankiewicz says. “Her mother came to recognize he was there to stay and that eased her mind.”
Twelve days after his divorce from Mayo was finalized, Bogie and Lauren wed. “Never in my life had or has a man cared so much for me, wanted to protect me, surround me with life’s joys, share everything,” she recalled. “It made me want to return the care — to show him it was possible to be really happy with a woman, to give him children. I was determined to do that.”
Lauren would realize that dream
on Jan. 6, 1949, when Bogie raced her to the hospital to have their first child. Once again, though, the Hollywood tough guy proved to be a big softie, turning green as they waited for son Stephen to arrive. “He was so helpless, so scared, so sweet,” Lauren once shared of Bogie, joking that her delivery was easier for her than for him.
THEIR SECOND ACT
The actor, a first-time dad at the age of 49, wasn’t raised by affectionate parents, so he was awkward in Stephen’s early days. Still, he was smitten with his son. In his book Bogart: In Search of My Father, Stephen recounted how Lauren overheard Bogie sweetly chatting up his newborn after they’d returned from the hospital. “She heard him say, ‘Hello, son. You’re a little fellow, aren’t you? I’m Father. Welcome home,’” Stephen, now 68, wrote.
Three years later, the couple welcomed daughter Leslie, and though Bogie embraced his new life as a family man, his love for Lauren was always a priority. “He didn’t want his children to take anything away from his relationship with his wife,” Stephen has said.
Lauren’s devotion to Bogie never waned, either, and she put her career on the back burner to support his. She also stood faithfully by his side when the actor, always a heavy drinker and smoker, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1956. “It was a tough time on her,” Lax says, noting how she was just 31 at the time, with two young children, as she faced the fact that she could be losing the love of her life.
Despite his dramatically decreasing weight, Bogie fought to keep things as normal as possible for his family — and himself. “He was so weak they’d have to bring him downstairs in a dumbwaiter. He was completely weakened and in pain, but they’d prop him up for the afternoon” to greet friends such as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Lax explains. “He’d kind of hold court for an hour or two, talking,” trying to hide his suffering, Lax adds.
Lauren fought her own brave battle over the next year, stoically watching her husband suffer through surgeries and debilitating treatments of mustard gas. One morning, as she left to take the kids to Sunday school, Bogie said, “Goodbye, kid. Hurry back.” She’d return to find him in a coma.
“Somewhere around midnight I kissed Bogie good night — this time, for the first time in 11-and-a-half years of married life, with no response from him,” she recalled. She begged God to let him live, “over and over through my sobs until I slept.” Her prayers went unanswered, though, and he died in the early morning on Jan. 14, 1957, at the age of 57.
Lauren, then a widow at 32, was lost. “I was breathing, but there was no life in me,” she said, and she credited Stephen and Leslie with giving her a sense of purpose in the following years. She also found solace in her second marriage, in 1961, to Jason Robards, the father of her son Sam, who’s now 55.
After she and Jason divorced in 1969, though, she remained single until her death in 2014 at age 89. It’s no surprise that it was Bogie who always held her heart until the very end. “You could always get her going if you mentioned Bogie — she’d light up,” says grandson Jamie. “It was obviously an amazing connection those two had.”
To many, their love was — and still is — the stuff that movies are made of. Lauren agreed. As the actress once put it, “No one had ever written a romance better than we lived it.”
“I couldn’t get used to not seeing Bogie, not talking to him.” — Lauren