May 20, 1945: Humphrey Bogart marries Lauren Bacall. It might have been the greatest Hollywood marriage of them all.
Bogart had been married 3 times before, each time to a fellow actor: Helen Menken, briefly in 1926-27; Mary Philips, from 1928 to 1937; and Mayo Methot from 1938 onward. But Bogie (sometimes, it was spelled "Bogey") and Mayo fought like crazy. Literally: Each of them reported that the other had hit them over the head with liquor bottles, Bogie once ripped Mayo's dress off, Mayo once stabbed Bogie in the shoulder, and actress Gloria Stuart (old Rose from Titanic) remembered a party where a drunk Mayo pulled out a pistol and threatened to shoot Bogie. (She didn't do it.)
Bogart grew up a pampered mama's boy, but eventually, partly through his U.S. Navy service in World War I, became believable as a tough guy. He had starred in gangster movies like The Petrified Forest in 1936, and Angels with Dirty Faces opposite James Cagney in 1938. In 1941, he starred in High Sierra, opposite Ida Lupino, proving he could carry a film; and The Maltese Falcon, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett, as San Francisco private detective Sam Spade, opposite Mary Astor.
Among his co-stars in The Maltese Falcon were Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. They would also be in Casablanca with Bogart, perhaps the greatest film ever made. The World War II adventure -- made at a time when the war's outcome was still very much in doubt, and even Bogart's cafe-casino owner Rick Blaine admits, when asked who he thinks will win, says, "I haven't the slightest idea" -- also featured Ingrid Bergman, Paul Heinreid, Claude Rains and Conrad Veidt.
In March 1944, filming began on To Have and Have Not, loosely based on Ernest Hemingway's story. Hemingway worked on the story with Howard Hawks, who directed the film. Bogart was 44. His co-star, Lauren Bacall, was 19, and had recently appeared on the cover of Vogue.
The film is set in the Summer of 1940, shortly after the Nazis had taken over France, including the French Caribbean colony on the island of Martinique. Bogart played Steve Morgan, who operated a fishing boat in the West Indies. Bacall played Marie "Slim" Browning, a young but shady lady.
Midway through the movie, this "kid" shows the middle-aged man that she may be more mature than he is. She leaves a room by saying, "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and 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." And then she walks through the door, and closes it, and just the right pace. Bogart is sitting down, fingers his cigarette, and whistles. It's the classic "wolf whistle": "Tweet-whoo!"
(It's not clear how far back the whistle goes, but the term "wolf whistle" dates back to the year before, to the Tex Avery cartoon Red Hot Riding Hood.)
He was born Humphrey DeForest Bogart on Christmas Day, December 25, 1899, in Manhattan, and also grew up in Manhattan. Sidney Zion, a columnist for the New York Daily News, listed him as one of "The Century Seven," 7 people born in 1899, the last year of the 19th Century, whose work guided American popular culture through much of the 20th Century. They were: Duke Ellington, born on April 29; Fred Astaire, May 10; James Cagney, July 17; Alfred Hitchcock, August 13; Hoagy Carmichael, November 22; Noël Coward, December 16; and Humphrey Bogart, December 25.
Everybody, including Bacall, called him "Bogie." She was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, and grew up in Brooklyn. "Bacal" was a name from her mother's side of the family. Even after changing her name, everyone called her "Betty," except Bogie, who called her "Baby."
Bogie's divorce from Methot secured, he and Baby married on May 21, 1945, at Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio, the country home of a friend of Bogie's, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield. They spent their honeymoon there was well, as it was far from prying eyes, about halfway between Cleveland and Columbus.
They settled down at 2707 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills. They made 3 more films together, all in the "film noir" genre: The Big Sleep, 1946, with Bogie playing Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles-based "hard-boiled private eye" Philip Marlowe; Dark Passage, 1947; and Key Largo, 1948. This last film would inspire a hit song with the same title in 1982, by Bertie Higgins:
We had it all
just like Bogie and Bacall
starring in our own late-late show
sailing away to Key Largo.
Here's looking at you, kid
missing all the things we did.
We can find it once again, I know
sailing away to Key Largo.
Of course, the line, "Here's looking at you, kid" was from Bogie's Rick Blaine to Ingrid Berman's Ilsa Lund in Casablanca, in 1942, 2 years before he met Bacall.
Most of their best work, however, was separate. Bogart made The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948, and The African Queen in 1953. Playing a riverboat captain in the latter film, alongside Katharine Hepburn's missionary, he finally got the Academy Award for Best Actor. In 1954 alone, he starred in The Caine Mutiny, The Barefoot Contessa alongside Ava Gardner, and Sabrina alongside Audrey Hepburn. Despite plenty of opportunities, by all accounts, he appears to have stayed faithful to Bacall.
"There was something that made him able to be a man of his own," Bacall wrote in her memoir, "and it showed through his work. There was also a purity, which is amazing considering the parts he played. Something solid too. I think as time goes by we all believe less and less. Here was someone who believed in something."
Bacall starred alongside Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire in 1953, and starred in Written on the Wind in 1956. Sadly, it could be argued that her best work was yet to come, at a time when Bogie was no longer available as a co-star.
Their son, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, was born on January 6, 1949, and was named after Steve, the character Bogie was playing when he and Bacall met. He grew up to look just like his father, and has written several books, including a biography of him. A daughter, Leslie Howard Bogart, was born on August 23, 1952. She was named after a friend and former co-star of Bogie's, British actor Leslie Howard, who was killed in action in World War II.
In the Spring of 1955, Bacall walked into her husband's hotel suite in Las Vegas, and saw the remains of a party with him, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and her husband Sidney Luft, David Niven, Angie Dickinson, and a few others, and said, "You look like a goddamn rat pack."
The name "Rat Pack" stuck. At a party at Romanoff's restaurant in Beverly Hills -- owner Michael Romanoff had also been at that Vegas party -- they actually formed a club. Sinatra was named president, Bogart "director of public relations," and Bacall "den mother." The nationally-syndicated gossip columnist Earl Wilson asked Bacall what the group's purpose was. She said, "To drink a lot of bourbon, and stay up late."
By 1960, and the filming of the movie Ocean's 11 in Las Vegas, the Rat Pack had... I'm not sure "evolved" is the right term, more like "settled," on 5 men: Sinatra, actor-singer-dancer Sammy Davis Jr., singer-actor Dean Martin, actor Peter Lawford, and comedian Joey Bishop. (Because he was the least talented and the least good-looking member of the group, Bishop has been called "the Ringo of the Rat Pack.") Dickinson was an auxiliary member. So was Garland, and when her daughter, Liza Minnelli, became old enough, she became one, too. Comedian Don Rickles, a Sinatra hanger-on, could also be counted as a member.
But even if Bogart no longer screwed like a rabbit, he still ate like a horse, drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney. And it caught up with him. In 1955, he developed esophageal cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy were unsuccessful.
On January 13, 1957, he was visited by Sinatra, Hepburn, and actor Spencer Tracy. (Hepburn and Tracy had already been co-stars and lovers, but Tracy's Catholic wife wouldn't give him a divorce, even though she knew, and everybody knew.) Hepburn recalled that when they got ready to leave:
Spence patted him on the shoulder and said, "Goodnight, Bogie." Bogie turned his eyes to Spence very quietly and with a sweet smile covered Spence's hand with his own and said, "Goodbye, Spence." Spence's heart stood still. He understood.
Bogie died the next day. Everybody came to his funeral -- everybody who was anybody in Hollywood. Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack, including Garland. Tracy. Both Hepburns (not related). Marilyn. Bergman. Niven. Lupino. Astor. John Huston, who had directed him a few times. Bob Hope. Bing Crosby. Danny Kaye. John Wayne. Jimmy Stewart. Henry Fonda. Jack Benny. Laurence Olivier. Lana Turner. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (feuding, so they didn't sit together). Joan Fontaine and her sister Olivia de Havilland (also feuding, so they didn't sit together). Gregory Peck. Gary Cooper. Marlene Dietrich. Gene Tierney. Ronald Reagan. (Noticeably absent from a list of guests that I saw were Cagney, and Princess Grace Kelly, both former co-stars of his.)
Bogart had asked Tracy to give his eulogy. Tracy was too overcome with grief to do so. Huston gave it:
Himself, he never took his work too seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with an amused cynicism; Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect...
He is quite irreplaceable. There will never be another like him.
Bacall went on. She even dated Sinatra for a time. After their breakup, she married actor Jason Robards in 1961, divorcing him in 1969, mainly due to his alcoholism: Having become famous starring in the works of Eugene O'Neill, both on stage and in film, he took to the roles too much. Their son, Sam Robards, was born on December 16, 1961 -- 5 months after the wedding, but it didn't hurt either of their careers -- and went into the family business, having been nominated for a Tony Award.
In 1966, she starred along with Paul Newman in Harper. In 1976, despite their intense political differences -- The Duke was as conservative as they come, while both Bogie and Bacall were bleeding-heart liberals -- John Wayne asked her to be his co-star in the Western The Shootist, which he knew, due to his own cancer, would be his last film.
She turned to Broadway, and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical (yes, she could sing) for Applause in 1970, and Woman of the Year in 1981 (based on the 1942 Tracy & Hepburn film). She played James Caan's literary agent in the 1990 Stephen King adaptation Misery, and Barbra Streisand's mother in the 1996 film The Mirror Has Two Faces. This film got Bacall her one and only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress, at age 72. She didn't win it, but did win the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award.
Interviewed at that time by ABC News' Barbara Walters, she said, "I had one great marriage, I have three great children and four grandchildren. I am still alive. I still can function. I still can work... You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with."
Her last film was Ernest & Celestine, in 2012. She lived in The Dakota, home to many other show-business legends, including John Lennon and Leonard Bernstein. There, she passed away on August 12, 2014, just short of turning 90.
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May 21, 1945 was a Monday. The only major sporting events that day were 2 major-league baseball games. Bogart's favorite team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-0 at Ebbets Field. Sylvester "Blix" Donnelly pitched a 7-hit shutout. And the New York Giants lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 5-2 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.
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