Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall both had 'emotional affairs', but remained 'devoted to each other', author William J. Mann asserts in his new book Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair. Humphrey Bogart “was already a serious drinker by the age of 22,” and his drunkenness often resulted in public brawls. Married and divorced twice, his third marriage was foundering when he was cast opposite newcomer Bacall—producer Howard Hawks had just changed her name from Betty—in To Have and Have Not. Bacall, 18 at the time, recalled thinking that “he was a good actor, but I never palpitated over him like many a lady did… He was not the prince on the white horse that I had imagined.” Nevertheless, by the end of filming, they had become lovers, and in 1945, they married. The ambitious Bacall also craved her absent father’s love; despite undeniable success, she felt like an imposter, “unworthy of what she’d been given, while at the same time convinced that she deserved more.” Bacall and Bogart's marriage was never as simple as a silver screen idyll. A passage unpacks Bacall's fascination with the presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, reading between the lines of her memoir to understand their relationship. In Bacall's own words, it's clear the two had, at the least, 'an emotional affair,' if not also a physical one. Another affair that Bogart was somewhat wary of was with Frank Sinatra.
On the campaign train to Pennsylvania, while Bogart dozed, Bacall and Adlai Stevenson huddled in close conversation. "At every speech from the beginning—every platform, breakfast, lunch—Stevenson would catch my eye and wave and smile at me," Bacall wrote. "To my fantasizing mind he seemed so vulnerable." Such intimacy was bound to cause talk. Stevenson was the first major-party nominee to be divorced. "For glamour, the Democrats have beautiful Lauren Bacall," one newspaper observed. By the end of the campaign, Bacall was thoroughly smitten. Stevenson, she believed, "needed a wife, someone to share his life with." In her memoir, she was remarkably candid about her feelings. "I fantasized that I would be a long-distance partner, a good friend he could feel free to talk with about anything." What she wanted was to be "connected with a great man capable of bettering the world"—something her own husband wasn't apparently capable of. "It takes one person," Bacall wrote, "who has real passion to unleash one's own comparable passions." Having met Adlai Stevenson had changed Bacall's life. "I was never the same again," she said.
Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart are arguably Hollywood's greatest love story, but their relationship was nuanced and complicated. Bacall was 28 when she met Stevenson. She was just 20 when she'd married Bogie, who was 25 years her senior. Their legend would play down the personal cost of their age difference. When Bacall met Stevenson, she was in the prime of her life; Bogie had long since passed his. He was increasingly frail, years of heavy drinking and smoking taking their toll. Bacall had never been able to sow her oats the way Bogie had done in his own youth. So, she was doing that now, making her own decisions and establishing her own relationships, discovering that she liked being Miss Bacall at least as much as being Mrs. Bogart. On election night, Bogie had a virus and stayed back at the hotel. Bacall did not stick around to care for him. "Having come this far," she wrote, "I was not about to miss anything." At the governor's mansion, the expectant jubilation quickly turned into despair as Eisenhower won in a landslide. Bacall was overcome as she listened to Stevenson make his concession speech. "I sobbed my way back to our room," Bacall wrote, where she found Bogie more upset about running out of quarters for the pay TV set than he was about the election.
"Until Adlai Stevenson, I was a perfectly happy woman with a husband whom I loved—a beautiful son and daughter—some success in my work—a beautiful home—money—not a care in the world." But Stevenson, she wrote, "shook me up completely." On the flight back to L.A., "I was far away from Bogie," Bacall admitted, "my thoughts on the man I had left behind." She was determined "not to have Stevenson vanish completely" from her life. Her husband was starting to object. "Miss Bacall supports wholeheartedly Governor Stevenson, up to the vomiting point," Bogie noted dryly to his friend and director John Huston. During the campaign, Bogie had shared an idea with his wife for a cartoon: Bogie and their two kids would be at their front door. Stephen would ask, "Daddy, where's Mommy?" and Bogie would reply forlornly, "With Adlai." Still, when Bogie was in Italy shooting Beat the Devil, Bacall flew to New York. At a party being given for Stevenson, she was "not at all sad to be the only Bogart present." After the soiree, the governor took Bacall on his arm and escorted her back to her hotel. In her telling of it, Bacall seems to have been hoping he would come upstairs with her. "I wanted to talk to him alone, to talk personally," she wrote. "Though I wasn't sure he would get that personal with me, the implication was that he would." If she made the offer, Stevenson declined. Had she been prepared to begin an extramarital affair with Stevenson that night? A close read of her memoir gives the impression she was. "He did like to flirt," she wrote about Stevenson, "and he did know I had a solid crush on him."
She made all the obligatory qualifications: "It wasn't that I was dissatisfied with Bogie or loved him any less, but Stevenson could help a different, obviously dormant part of me to grow." In her fantasy, she could have it both ways: "Short of leaving husband and home—which I had no desire or intention of doing—I would see Stevenson when I could and keep the thread of my presence alive in his consciousness." While in New York, the pair arranged to meet again in California, where Stevenson was giving a speech. At the designated time and place, Bacall was right up front. "Stevenson caught my eye—or I caught his—or we caught each other's," she wrote. They planned a rendezvous in Palm Springs, where the governor was heading for some rest. With her "imagination going at full tilt," Bacall headed out to the desert, her children left with nursemaids. "I was included in all his activities which only fed my fantasy," she wrote. She accompanied Stevenson to dinners with friends. If a sexual relationship developed between the two, it was likely there, in the shadow of the San Jacinto Mountains and far away from watchful eyes. Bacall was eager to see Stevenson again, but Bogie, now home from Italy, declared, "Absolutely not!"
Her husband's jealousy, Bacall wrote, "had come out before and would again. He held himself in check most of the time, but when it got to be too much, he let loose." She defied him and flew to Illinois, which was surely a sharp slap to Bogart's ego. Still, things didn't turn out the way Bacall wanted, either. Any hope for the sort of intimacy she had enjoyed with Stevenson in Palm Springs was dashed. Other people were always around. "All very proper," Bacall wrote. Buffie Ives was more hostile than ever, asking her "very pointedly" about her husband and children. "I was flattered that she might consider me a threat," Bacall wrote. But the threat had likely been overestimated. The next day, on her way to the airport, Bacall stopped by Stevenson's farm in Libertyville to say goodbye. She found Adlai entertaining one of his "devoted followers," whose name she claimed not to remember. Although they exchanged warm farewells, the Bacall-Stevenson romance had come to an end. Although she would continue to speak highly of Stevenson and would support him for president again, the intensity of their interactions was now in the past. Bacall got onto the plane and returned to her husband and children.
When Bogie got sick a few years later, Bacall was steadfast; she really did love him, even if she wasn't always emotionally faithful to him. There would be a similar infatuation with Frank Sinatra a couple of years after Stevenson, one that would linger past Bogie's death. But Bogart, too, had his own emotional infidelity, turning to his old flame Verita "Pete" Thompson, closer in age and temperament to him, as Bacall began pursuing independent amours. Yet none of this should undercut the love story of Bogie and Bacall. Absolute fidelity need not be a requirement for true love. They believed in and boosted each other. In the beginning, Bogie had nurtured a young woman inexperienced with fame and public life. At the end, Bacall slept beside her eighty-pound husband in his hospital bed. Hollywood tells stories that give us legends; the truth gives us human beings who have their own stories beyond the eyes of the world. After receiving his prognosis, Bogie’s stress and resentment made him self-destructive, drinking until dawn. At one point during this period, drunk as a skunk, he attempted to eat glass, going “too far with his peculiar humor,” the agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar said, and cutting his mouth severely. Bacall did her best to subdue him; she was still the only one who could.
Bogie saw what was happening. His wife’s career was at a standstill. Their social life was nonexistent, except for when friends came to visit. He knew that Betty needed a break and that she missed the carefree antics of the Rat Pack. “Bogie would make me go to dinner,” she recalled. “Because he wasn’t up to it, he said, was no reason why I should stay home all the time.” Although he had come to depend on her for most everything, “realistically he felt I had to get out once in a while,” she wrote. Yet the fact remains that her return to society meant a return to Sinatra’s society, and that only deepened her attachment to the famous singer. Bogie had to know that would happen, but he encouraged his wife’s respite. Sinatra became Betty’s sounding board about Bogie’s care, his doctors’ advice, and whether she should return to work. “There’s no question that she became more fixated on Sinatra during Bogie’s illness,” said her publicist. “Sinatra was young and healthy and vibrant, such a change from oxygen machines.”
For the most part, Betty and Frank avoided being seen in public, tending to socialize with others from the Rat Pack in their homes. They were, however, spotted together at the Art Aragon–Cisco Andrade prizefight. As with Stevenson, Betty developed an increasingly proprietary attitude regarding Sinatra. And also, as with the earlier relationship, it has never been fully clear how Frank returned Betty’s feelings. When Bacall ran into Sinatra at Romanoff’s not long after, Betty made a point of sitting in Sinatra’s lap, even as Bogie, on one of his rare outings, sat beside them. It’s very possible that Bogie’s distancing himself from Sinatra had as much to do with his mob connections as it did with his wife’s infatuation. Even if Sinatra’s relationship with the mob was more “mutual admiration than affiliation,” just the perception of impropriety would have been enough to keep Bogie away. But not Betty. A few nights later, she was back in the audience for Frank’s show, knowing that once he sang his last number, the floor would be hers. Natalie Schafer, with whom Bogie appeared in the TV adaptation of
The Petrified Forest, remembered visiting him toward the end. “He turned to me one day when we were talking alone,” she told an interviewer, “and he said, ‘Keep your eye on Betty. Don’t let her get mixed up with those jerks out there.’”
Just who he considered “those jerks” to be is unknown. He clearly didn’t mean his friends, Niven, Romanoff, or people such as the Durochers and Goetzes. But there were those out there whom he worried about. The Sands was full of them. Despite his serenade of Betty, Sinatra’s date for the week was reported to be Kim Novak, and Earl Wilson reported that he was on the phone regularly with “his beautiful protégé” Peggy Connelly. Wilson revealed that Frank had phoned all his friends back east to go see Connelly’s debut at the Blue Angel nightclub. “Results: biggest opening there ever,” Wilson wrote. Connelly was seven years younger than Bacall; Novak was nine years younger. The doctors suggested that injections of nitrogen mustard might help with the pain, but they clearly saw it as a palliative, or possibly as an attempt to keep Bogie’s hopes up. But the nitrogen only made him dizzier and more nauseous. At least once, he fainted when he stood up from bed. To get around the house, he now had to literally lean on Betty. He apologized for being a burden on her. She wouldn’t hear of it. “I love you to lean on me,” she told him. Bogie said nothing about dying. So Betty kept up the game. After all, he had told her. “If you’re okay, then I am. If you’re upset, then I am.” She choked back her emotions and put on a cheerful face. friend. It’s to be hoped that at the end of his life, some of the old demons were at last chased away and Bogie finally understood what it felt like to be loved.
After Bogie's death, Betty seemed to find her proximity to the dangerous elements of Sinatra’s life exciting. She’d been current as Bogart’s wife for twelve years, but now she was adrift, looking for a way to stay on top. And no one was more current than Frank Sinatra. It’s also true that he was very solicitous toward her at a time when Betty needed some tender loving care. Frank took her for drives down to Palm Springs, showed up at Bellagio Road with flowers in hand, invited her to join him at the Villa Capri. He was sexy, dynamic, vital. He made Betty feel alive after the long ordeal of Bogie’s illness and death. Betty admitted that she found Frank “wildly attractive, electrifying” and indulged herself with a belief that “behind that swinging façade” lay “a lonely, restless man, one who wants a wife and a home.” “A favorite subject of speculation in romance-conscious Hollywood today is whether Frank Sinatra will marry Lauren Bacall, widow of his good friend, Humphrey Bogart,” reported the Associated Press. Both parties denied that there were wedding bells in their future, but that didn’t stop the talk. But then, all at once, he asked her to marry him. According to Betty, Frank said he was finally facing up to his feelings for her. Betty had imagined such a moment many times, and now that it was happening, all her doubts retreated from her mind and she immediately said yes. They called Swifty Lazar to join them in a celebration at the Imperial Gardens, a Japanese restaurant on the Sunset Strip. “I was giddy with joy,” Betty remembered, “felt like laughing every time I opened my mouth. My life would go on. The children would have a father. I would have a husband. We’d have a home again.” At first, Lazar was convinced that they were putting him on, but he finally raised a glass to toast them.
According to Betty’s account, they brainstormed about where they would hold the ceremony. When a fan came up to their table and asked for their autographs, Sinatra told Betty to put down her new name. She wrote, “Betty Sinatra.” Still, they agreed to wait awhile before making the announcement. Not long after that, while Frank was performing in Miami, Betty accompanied Lazar to the theater, where they ran into Louella Parsons. At least, this was the story as Betty would tell it. When she spotted Betty, the columnist pounced, asking the usual question about when she and Sinatra would tie the knot. Betty suggested, a bit brazenly, that Parsons ask Frank. Before she could spill any more beans, she wrote in her memoir, she made a beeline for the ladies’ room. When she emerged, she saw Lazar and Parsons deep in hushed conversation but thought nothing of it. That was, until the next morning, when she spotted a headline in the Los Angeles Examiner: LAUREN ANSWERS YES TO SINATRA’S PROPOSAL. It wasn’t just an item in Parsons’s column; it was a full-fledged news story, syndicated across the country. Betty recalled, but he didn’t seem overly upset. Bacall had many reasons for insisting, first to Sinatra during that phone call and later in her memoir, that she had not divulged the secret to Parsons. But Parsons told a different version of the story. According to the columnist, she didn’t run into Bacall at the theater but rather at an after-party thrown by Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose sister Eva was starring with Noël Coward in a production of his play Present Laughter at the Huntington Hartford Theatre. In her memoir, Betty wrote that the show had been Emlyn Williams’s tribute to Charles Dickens. However, newspapers confirm that it was the Coward show, playing at the Huntington Hartford the night before Parsons published her scoop.
That seems to lend more credence to the columnist’s version. According to Parsons, there was no encounter at the theater, no mad dash to the ladies’ room. Instead, she said, she had posed the question at Zsa Zsa’s party, to which Betty had responded, “Why don’t you telephone Frank in Florida?” That much, at least, conforms with Bacall’s account, but Parsons went on to assert that the actress “finally admitted that Sinatra had asked her to marry him.” The columnist quickly followed up, “And you’ll say yes?” To which Betty answered, “Of course.” For all her reputation for skullduggery, Parsons was usually scrupulous about confirming stories, at least the ones she presented as fact and not just as rumors. She was clearly confident about this story, which was why the Examiner ran it as news. Parsons backed up her scoop with other sources: she’d gotten a tip from someone who’d overheard the talk of marriage at the Imperial Gardens, possibly the fan for whom Betty had signed her “new name.” Parsons also got Lazar to confirm the story. “It’s true. They’ll marry,” he said. Betty would claim that Lazar had made the statement on his own. But Parsons was clear that it was only after Bacall had already confirmed it. In the days after Parsons’s report, the story took off like wildfire, with most headlines along the lines of BACALL ADMITS SHE WILL MARRY SINATRA. It’s likely that the accretion of reports caused Sinatra to lose his cool and blame Betty. After a few days of silence, he called and asked, “Why did you do it?” She pleaded innocence, insisting that it had all been Lazar’s fault. Rightly or wrongly, Frank didn’t believe her. The roller coaster finally came to a complete stop.
—"Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair" (2023) by William J. Mann
