Bogie & Bacall
The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair
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From the noted Hollywood biographer and author of The Contender comes this celebration of the great American love story—the romance between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—capturing its complexity, contradictions, and challenges as never before.
In Bogie & Bacall, William Mann offers a deep and comprehensive look at Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and the unlikely love they shared. Mann details their early years—Bogart’s effete upbringing in New York City; Bacall’s rise as a model and actress. He paints a vivid portrait of their courtship and twelve-year marriage: the fights, the reconciliations, the children, the affairs, Bogie’s illness and Bacall’s steadfastness until his death. He offers a sympathetic yet clear-eyed portrait of Bacall’s life after Bogie, exploring her relationships with Frank Sinatra and Jason Robards, who would become her second husband, and the identity crisis she faced.
Surpassing previous biographies, Mann digs deep into the celebrities’ personal lives and considers their relationship from surprising angles. Bacall was just nineteen when she started dating the thrice-married forty-five-year-old Bogart. How might that age gap have influenced their relationship? In addition to what she gained, what might Bacall have lost by marrying a Hollywood superstar more than twice her age? How did Bogart, a man of average looks, become one of the greatest movie stars of all time? Throughout, Mann explains the unparalleled successes of their individual careers as well as the extraordinary love between them and the legend that has endured.
Filled with entertaining details and thoughtful insights based on newly available records and correspondence, and illustrated with 30-40 photographs, Bogie & Bacall offers a fresh look at this famous couple, their remarkable relationship, and their legacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Mann (The Contender) spotlights screen legends Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) and Lauren Bacall (1924–2014) in this engrossing examination of the couple's intertwined careers and mythologized romance. Emotionally deprived rich boy Bogart found his niche on Broadway in the 1935 play The Petrified Forest (the first in which Bogart "glimpsed his own potential," according to Mann). Later roles in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca cemented his status as a cinematic icon. Meanwhile, alluring magazine photos of New York–born model Bacall helped get her cast in director Howard Hawks's 1944 film To Have and Have Not. Her chemistry with costar Bogart, then 25 years her senior, caught fire while shooting the famous scene in which her character teaches his to whistle, sparking a passion that led to their marriage a year later. Mann traces the development of the "Bogart-Bacall brand," a screen team whose electric appeal drew audiences to such box office hits as The Big Sleep, and details the couple's trials, including fights, rumored affairs, and Bogart's alcoholism. Scrupulously attending to the distinct personalities, cultural conditions, and media environment that joined forces to create "arguably Hollywood's greatest love story," Mann delivers a spirited narrative that's hard to put down despite its heft. Film buffs will eat this up.
