Bogie was a sick man. Constantly exhausted, with a permanent hacking cough and severe stomach pains, the craggy-faced tough guy —legendary star of a string of classic Hollywood films from Casablanca to The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen (not to mention The Big Sleep, Treasures Of The Sierra Madre, Key Largo and The Caine Mutiny) —was feeling his age.
Although only 55, Humphrey Bogart had lived hard. He’d smoked and drunk heavily, brawled in nightclubs, never got much exercise. Now he was paying the price.
He’d always been irascible — he was noted for being quick to anger and even quicker to start a fight — but his mood swings were now greater than ever. And not just because of the pain and his creeping fear that his film star days were over, that he was obsolete. His wife’s attachments to another man added to his malaise.
He’d been married to actress Lauren Bacall, 25 years younger than him, for 12 years in an iconic relationship that, despite the age gap, had always been passionate and committed. Theirs had been lauded and celebrated as Hollywood’s greatest love affair. ‘No one has written a romance better than we lived it,’ was how she described it.
But now her eyes were straying to a newer kid on the block. She was spending more and more of her time with Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, the smooth and debonair singer and actor Frank Sinatra.
Sultry beauty: Lauren Bacall in about 1945 – who was married to Humphrey Bogart for 12 years despite the 25-year age gap
25-year age gap: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall on their wedding day May 21, 1945
The Bogarts still loved each other, and that love went deep. But the days of being ‘in love’ seemed to be over. Would it all end in tears?
Bogie and his ‘Baby’, as he called her, had met on the set of To Have And Have Not, the 1944 screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel. He was a movie veteran with nearly 50 films under his belt; she was a precocious teenage ingenue from New York, a small-time Broadway actress whose picture in a glossy magazine — plus her own (and her mother’s) pushiness — had tempted the director Howard Hawks to invite her to Hollywood for a screen test.
Though not yet 20, she had a history of batting her eyelids at men, particularly older ones who could further her career. She knew how to handle men and get them to do things for her. Hawkes hired her, though didn’t like her real name, Betty. It wasn’t sexy enough for the ‘little minx’ he envisaged her as. He changed it to Lauren, which she hated and never used with family and friends.
During the first weeks of shooting, Bogie and Betty were just pals, kidding each other, making dry asides about people who irritated them. ‘We rolled our eyes over the same sort of pretentious snobs,’ she said. Though he was married, she was getting hooked. She wrote to her mother: ‘We have the most wonderful times together. He is very, very fond of me, and I’m insane about him.’
Three weeks into filming, Betty was sitting in her dressing room combing her hair at the end of a long day when Bogie popped his head in to say good night. ‘Suddenly,’ she recalled, ‘he leaned over, put his hand under my chin and kissed me. He was a bit shy — no lunging wolf tactics.’
A week later, they were shooting a scene full of raw sexual power and double entendre. Slim, the woman played by Bacall, turns to Steve (Bogart’s part) and mouths huskily: ‘You don’t have to act with me. You don’t have to say or do anything. Maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.’
The chemistry between them combusted. They fell in love.
After that they couldn’t get enough of each other, and unashamedly cosied up in full view of everyone else on set. She’d chat to him for hours in her dressing room, with the door open. She’d stand as close to him as possible, relishing their physical proximity.
Frank Sinatra dancing with Lauren Bacall at a post-premiere party in 1954 – as she increasingly began to spend time with him
In one scene, on Bogie’s urging, she ran her hand over his unshaven face and gave him a playful slap. ‘It was suggestive and intimate, much more so than writhing around the floor would have been,’ she wrote. They were in effect conducting foreplay in plain sight.
Consummation was only a matter of time.
Eventually Bogie divorced his wife Mayo, bringing his turbulent third marriage to an end, and dumped his long-term mistress (though not totally — on the quiet, he still kept in touch). In May 1945, and despite words of caution from her family over the age difference, he and Betty married.
As they promised each other to love, comfort, honour, keep in sickness and in health and forsake all others, she looked over at her new husband to see tears sliding down his craggy cheeks.
Later that pledge would be put to the test, particularly the bit about in sickness and health. It was, though, generally a very good marriage. There were ups and downs, of course, but they seemed rock-solid as a couple, devoted and dependent on each other, so much so that their children, Steven and Leslie, got short shrift, brought up by nannies, forced to take a back seat.
They made films together, she was happy to learn acting skills from him and he was happy to teach her. She was a foil to his excessive boozing, giving him hell when he behaved badly.
A friend said: ‘Betty was the one person who could handle him, no matter how drunk he got.’ With her in his life, there were fewer benders out on the town. But it was perpetual party time at their mansion in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. ‘There was a light above the front door,’ Betty remembered fondly, ‘and when we switched it on, that meant we were up, drinking, and not averse to having friends join us. Maybe five nights a week, we’d have a crowd in.’
The likes of Judy Garland, David Niven and Noel Coward came to sit on the Bogarts’ magnificent patio overlooking the swimming pool and do their best to keep up with their hosts’ imbibing and merrymaking.
During the first weeks of shooting, Bogie and Betty were just pals, kidding each other, making dry asides about people who irritated them
They were leading lights in an emerging Hollywood ‘Rat Pack’ of boozers and troublemakers that gathered round entertainer extraordinaire Sammy Davis Jr and Frank Sinatra. The pack would rent a bus, complete with a bar, to take them to Long Beach to see Judy Garland perform and fly to Las Vegas to catch Noel Coward’s show. Betty was the ‘den mother’ and Bogart’s name always topped the list in press mentions of the pack.
But he was slowing down — ‘not getting any younger,’ as he told a newspaper columnist over a glass of milk — and with his declining health and his work commitments, he wasn’t always able to keep up with the Rat Pack’s mad ramblings. That, though, didn’t keep his wife away from the partying — or from Sinatra. In her husband’s absence she would be the singer’s date.
It was obvious to her friends that she had a crush on him. Her husband could see it, too, but he had no choice in the matter. He just had to put up with it.
Bogie had never been one for doctors, so Betty was stunned when at the beginning of 1956 he made an appointment to see a doctor about his persistent hacking cough. At the Beverly Hills Clinic, Dr Maynard Brandsma told him his oesophagus was inflamed and advised him to avoid acidic foods.
At first no one appeared to be seriously concerned. But then a sputum test revealed cancerous cells that would need surgery to remove. Brandsma assured his patient that they’d caught it early, but they needed to act quickly.
Bogie was reluctant. He and Betty were making their first picture together in eight years and were enjoying themselves, flirting and laughing on screen like they had in the old days. Couldn’t the surgery wait until it was finished?
But in the scenes that had already been shot the illness was apparent on his face. He was drawn and thin, his cheeks wasted, and he’d lost weight. The doctor told him he should postpone the film unless he wanted ‘a lot of flowers at Forest Lawn’, the local cemetery.
No one spoke much about cancer in 1956. When it was mentioned, people’s voices often dropped into whispers. The Bogarts knew nothing at all about the disease, which had the effect of keeping them relatively calm. ‘All I understood was that Bogie needed an operation,’ Betty wrote.
It was, though, generally a very good marriage. There were ups and downs, of course, but they seemed rock-solid as a couple
How serious it would be only became clear when he checked into the Good Samaritan Hospital to discover the doctors had decided his entire oesophagus needed to be removed. They would go in through the chest; a rib would have to be taken out. His stomach would be moved up into his chest and attached directly to the pharynx, meaning that the food he consumed would now drop directly into his stomach. He was expected to be in the hospital for three weeks.
Betty sensed that Bogie was frightened. ‘I told him I’d be with him, not to worry about anything.’ Whatever distance had grown between them evaporated. They sat together in silence, holding each other’s hands.
He was on the operating table for nine-and-a-half hours. But he made it through. A press statement afterwards said he was in comparatively good condition after undergoing major surgery for removal of ‘a small swelling’ that was of an inflammatory nature but not cancer.
That was the official line for the public, but even Betty wasn’t given the full story. While Brandsma told her he believed they’d got all the cancer, the doctor would later acknowledge that he had realised during the operation that ‘there was no hope’. He admitted that ‘he did not want the 56-year-old film veteran to know the worst’ and so had ‘withheld the truth’.
What would be malpractice today was common practice in 1956; patients and their families were routinely kept in the dark about prognoses. The fear was that the ‘shock’ would exacerbate their condition. Withholding was seen as a kindness, protecting a patient from anxiety and fear during his or her last weeks or months.
When he was wheeled back into his room following surgery, Bogie was pale and wasted, his body traumatised. He didn’t wake up for several days. Once he did, he coughed non-stop and so hard that his stitches came loose.
Betty saw blood seeping through the bandages on his abdomen and instinctively put her hands against them, trying to hold everything together. It was a far cry from the sultry Slim telling Steve to put his lips together and blow, but it’s a far more powerful, more intimate expression of love. She took to sleeping at the hospital to be at his side, exhausted but getting by on countless cups of coffee and cigarettes.
Well wishes came from all corners. The director John Huston came to visit him and afterwards told everyone how the patient roared at the nurses who brought him his food: ‘I’m sick of this pap you’re shoving down my throat! When am I gonna get something I can sink my teeth into?’
Lauren wasn’t kept away from the partying — or from Sinatra. In her husband’s absence she would be the singer’s date
The reality was that he could barely eat a thing and often got sick when he tried. But Bogie as his old self was the image his friends wanted out in public.
After he was discharged from hospital, though he no longer had an oesophagus he didn’t quit smoking, just moved on to filtered cigarettes. He also still drank, though usually only sherry. He began radiation therapy five days a week, which made him sicker.
A few months later there was more colour in his face and he’d put on a couple of pounds. He was confident he was going to get well and as his strength rose, he even managed a visit to his…
