William J. Mann: Bogie & Bacall review - beyond the screen

What is it about Humphrey Bogart? Why does he still spark interest, still feel relevant, so many decades after his death? It’s a complex question and may be impossible to satisfactorily answer, but there’s no doubt that Bogart being one half of Hollywood’s most famous love story has had something to do with it.

There have been numerous Bogart biographies, and even the idea of telling the story through the lens of the Bogie and Bacall romance has been done at least twice previously. Well, there is nothing new under the Klieg lights; what’s important is not the tale but how it’s told. William J Mann, in this carefully structured dual biography, sets out his stall in the book’s preface:

“Ten years on [from Bacall’s death], it’s time to turn a fresh eye on their story—not to tear their legend down, as people always fear about reassessments of their favorites’ lives, but to understand how Bogie and Bacall happened, what their story meant, and in how many ways it’s still relevant and reflective for today.”

How it happened is well known: after a stuttering start in 1930s Hollywood, Bogart finally broke through as a star. At the height of his fame post-’Casablanca’, he and Lauren Bacall came together on the set of Howard Hawks’s ‘To Have and Have Not’. Meets have seldom been cuter. Bacall asked “Anybody got a match?” and Bogie said hold my Scotch and soda. The rest is Hollywood history.

Before we get to the golden couple, though, Mann gives us their respective backstories. First, Bogart: upper class New York childhood; freewheeling early years in the theatre; the struggle to transcend one-dimensional B-movie typecasting at Warner Brothers in the 30s; the first three wives. Bacall skips nimbly from teenage model, to aspiring actress, to an exclusive “personal contract” with Howard Hawks, making the most of her extraordinary looks and charisma: she  “was a very pretty, very passionate, fawning young woman who was drawn to older men and had already proven her ability to charm them.” It’s a risky narratorial gambit: by the time Bacall is demurring at suggestions she should “be nice to” Hawks, instead focusing on teaching Bogie how to whistle – “just put your lips together and blow” – we’re nearly 300 pages in.

What Mann’s titular ‘surprise’ is, he never says. Unless the reader is liable, à la Claude Rains in ‘Casablanca’, to find themselves shocked - shocked! - to discover that Bogie and Bacall did not enjoy a perfect, idyllic marriage? The age gap was gigantic, and they didn’t always share the same interests: he liked drinking, smoking, playing chess, and sailing his yacht; she enjoyed shopping, jewellery, acquiring famous friends, and brow-beating Bogart into buying a series of ever more extravagant houses.

What they did have in common was a disinterest in, and lack of facility for, parenthood. Mann makes much of the fact that they left their two-year-old son, Stephen, with his nanny while they went to Africa with John Huston for ‘The African Queen’. But Bogie didn’t want to spend months apart from his wife; and for Bacall, who had never left the US before, a deluxe, celebrity-studded trip to London, Paris, Rome, and then on to Kenya and the Congo must have seemed an irresistibly exciting prospect.

Bacall had talked a reluctant Bogart into having children - he had to have hormone injections to raise his sperm count, which accelerated his hair loss, in turn further cementing his relationship with his makeup artist and toupee wrangler, Verita Peterson, with whom he had an on-off affair both before and during his marriage to Bacall. Meanwhile, Bacall was guilty of infidelity of feeling if not (we still don’t know) physical relationships with Leonard Bernstein, the liberal politician Adlai Stevenson, and Bogart’s friend and original Rat Pack member, Frank Sinatra. Oddly enough, Mann omits the dalliance with Bernstein, only mentioning him in passing; perhaps he felt two extramarital affairs of the heart was enough to puncture the myth without deflating it entirely?

After Bogart’s death from esophageal cancer in 1957, Bacall set about burnishing their joint legend. She’d learned well from the Warners publicity machine, plus her friendship with Katharine Hepburn (who had spun a tenuous, troubled relationship with Spencer Tracy into another radiant Hollywood myth of true love). The downside, as Mann says, was that she polished a little too hard:

“But in so carefully controlling the way her life was chronicled, Bacall narrowed Bogart’s story as much as she did her own. One of the few reviews of By Myself and Then Some, in the Guardian, commented that Bacall’s version of Bogie tended to ‘blur the man himself’.”

Bacall’s post-Bogart life makes for a dispiriting read. She became an egregious diva, tormented by a toxic mix of entitled narcissism and embittered self-doubt. “Nothing,” she told a New York Times writer, “is ever as good as it is in the beginning.” The comet-like incandescence of her debut depended on a smouldering, insolently sexy persona that could not sustain a career. Although she went on to prove herself as an actress, winning two TONY awards (and an honorary Oscar), Bacall’s insecurities persisted: “Today, psychologists call the complex ‘imposter syndrome’.”

If Bacall could never match her own beginning, Bogart – a living reproof to Fitzgerald’s “no second acts” dictum – had to take three runs at Hollywood before finding a foothold. By the time he made ‘High Sierra’ and ‘The Maltese Falcon’ he had, as David Thomson put it, “the advantage of having failed.” He grew enormously as an actor, and “brought to the screen”, in Andrew Sarris’s words, “his own very special gravity”. Bogart was at his peak when he died.

People say “Bogart just played Bogart”, but the truth is more nuanced: there was a complex exchange of facets between actor and role. He imbued a character with some classic Bogart qualities, but also absorbed some of a character’s aspects into the rich, impasto-like palimpsest of the Bogart persona. As Mary Astor commented: “His personality dominated the character he was playing - but the character gained from it.” Mann acknowledges Bogart’s importance as an actor, not just a star, calling him “easily the equal” of the actors Bogart once cited as his “top three”: Spencer Tracy, Clifton Webb, and James Stewart.

Hollywood historian Jeanne Bassinger, in her review of Sperber & Lax’s definitive 1997 biography, summed up the enigma of Bogart’s appeal: “In the end, Bogart somehow eludes all his biographers and maintains his mystery, possibly because mystery is what movie stardom is all about”. And maybe that’s the answer: the explanation for Bogart’s enduring appeal is that it cannot be explained. That and the fact that there’s something about Bogart which triggers our elective affinity. His “special gravity” pulls us in. As Thomson had it, Bogart is “complex and central to the issue of identification” in cinema: “He was one of us. So we became a little like him.” We feel he is our star, shining away on our subconscious screen, hat brim always at a jaunty angle, an eye forever on the cusp of a sardonic twinkle.

Mann’s book succeeds on its own terms. He can be a little bloodless and genteel at times: over 556 pages on the famously profane Bogart, I counted only five “fucks”. And I always wish Bogart books would say more about his films. But Mann’s thoroughly researched, scrupulously fair biography offers a welcome reminder of why we love Bogart, and Bacall, and their complicated but still iridescently glamorous love affair.

• Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair by William J. Mann (Harper Collins, £35)
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