Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair

by William J. Mann

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063026391
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/11/2023
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	88,101
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

William J. Mann is the New York Times bestselling author of The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando; Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn; How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood; Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand; Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines; and Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award. He divides his time between Connecticut and Cape Cod.

Editorial Reviews

05/01/2023

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. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Well-researched . . . . Mann is perceptive, careful and experienced in writing about the film business." — David Thomson, London Review of Books

“Engrossing…. 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….Film buffs will eat this up.” — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2023-04-17
Drama in the lives of legendary actors.

Mining recently available archival material, Mann, who has chronicled the lives of Marlon Brando, Barbra Streisand, and Elizabeth Taylor, sifts through myths and gossip about Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and Lauren Bacall (1924-2014) to offer a cleareyed, sympathetic dual biography. Bogart, who grew up in a wealthy family devoid of outward displays of affection, harbored a profound sense of inadequacy throughout his life. Mann follows his acting career from stage to screen. He debuted on Broadway in 1922 and won his first movie lead in 1930. In 1936, he starred with movie icons Leslie Howard and Bette Davis in The Petrified Forest, a movie, Mann notes, that “changed everything” for an actor who was “as unlikely a star as they came.” But acting success belied personal turmoil. Bogart “was already a serious drinker by the age of twenty-two,” 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. She was still the little girl whose father didn’t love her.” After Bogart’s death from cancer, Bacall married hard-drinking Jason Robards Jr., a tumultuous liaison that soon ended; and, happily, she reignited her career on Broadway.

A star-studded, well-researched portrait of two superstars.

Kirkus Reviews

Structuring his biography like a film, Mann jumps from one key moment in Brando’s life to another—the dysfunctional family life, the great movie roles, the tempestuous and often callous relationships with lovers, the tragedies that befell his children—and, while the book brings something new and often revelatory to all of these familiar aspects of the Brando saga, Mann is at his best when he digs into Brando’s tortured relationship with acting itself…A compelling biography, rich in complexity and irony.”

Booklist (starred review) on The Contender