Great Romances of the 20th Century (1997) s01e05 Episode Script
Part 5
They met on a movie set and turned a thriller into a love story lt was one of the greatest real-life romances in the history of Hollywood.
Humphrey Bogart was 43 and Lauren Bacall was just 19.
The love which blossomed on the soundstage of To Have and Have Not lasted long after the final wrap.
lt lasted for the rest of Bogart's life As a married couple they were grown-up and sexy.
Katharine Hepburn observed that when Bogart and Bacall fought, ''it was with utter confidence of two cats locked deliciously in the same cage'' Humphrey Bogart was born in this house in a fashionable part of New York in 1889 He was the son of a society doctor, whose wife Maud was a successful freelance illustrator.
The young Bogart was educated at Trinity School and then the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachussets.
He was not a success at Phillips Academy, from which he was expelled in May 1918.
He immediately joined the US Navy but saw no action.
Bogart eventually drifted into acting.
The first and briefest of his four marriages was to the actress Helen Menken.
1924 found him playing in the melodrama Nerves alongside Paul Kelly and Mary Phillips, who was to become Bogart's second wife Quick-tempered and hard-drinking, Bogart pursued an erratic career on Broadway.
But at least one critic was moved to write of him that he was ''as young and handsome as Valentino and as graceful as any of our actors.
'' ln New York Bogart made a few two-real movies.
They were fitted around his stagework, but it was not long before he went to Hollywood.
The talkies had taken over and the studios wanted actors with stage experience.
''And then you killed him, you poisoned him'' ''Your trying to force me into saying something that isn't true and this is not true'' ''And in your haste to get away you forgot something''.
Bogart was signed by Fox studios, but his movie career failed to catch fire.
On Broadway he had been a romantic leading man, but the image didn't gel in Hollywood.
Back on Broadway he co-starred with Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest.
And scored a big hit as the doomed mobster Duke Mantee When the play was filmed by Warners, Bogart repeated the role ''What's the matter with you Duke do something'' ''Shut up, shut up, give me time to think''.
Bogart's performance persuaded Warners to typecast him as a snarling heavy and occasional tough guy hero, always in the shadow of the studio's gangster A-team of James Cagney, Edward G.
Robinson and George Raft.
''Everybody stay quiet and keep where they are, they'll shoot the first thing that moves.
'' ''Put that gun away'' ''When l'm good and ready, that friendship stuff don't mean a thing to me, this guys got enough on us to - ''He won't talk'' - ''He'd better not''.
''You've been horsing us around for long enough, we ought to break your crummy neck for leaving us stuck out on the road with a busted wheel and lifting our load''.
''Please don't ask me to talk he'll kill me'' ''Now you help me to prove that he was responsible for this and l'll put him where he won't kill anybody'' ''You don't know what he's like he stops at nothing, people just disappear and are never heard of again l don't want that to happen to me''.
lt was while filming Marked Woman with Bette Davis in 1938 that Bogart met a busty but none too beautiful actress called Mayo Methot.
She became his third wife.
She was a poor choice.
Mayo was, if anything, an even bigger drinker than Bogart.
Not only was she a boozer, she was also a brawler.
Bogart's pet name for Methot was ''Sluggy''.
The legend of the Battling Bogarts began on their wedding night, which they spent apart after a furious row.
Their roller-coaster marriage ride was keenly tracked by the gossip columnists, but the truth was rather sad.
lt was the tale of two alcoholics locked in a punishing mutual dependency.
By now Bogart was a familiar fourth-billed face in Warner movies.
ln the Western Virginia City, Bogart played a gunslinger gloriously named Whip McCord.
The movie's star Errol Flynn led the premiere parade in Reno Bogart and Methot trundled behind in a wagon.
Bogart's breakthough came in High Sierra as the soft-hearted hoodlum Roy Mad Dog Earle.
What's the matter? Yellow? Come and get me, buddy.
Come and get me.
Top billing arrived as the private eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the directing debut of John Huston.
lt transformed a slightly wooden supporting actor into the cynical but soft-centred ''Bogie'' of movie myth.
''What have you ever given me beside money, you haven't given me any of your confidence any of the truth, haven't you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else'' ''What else is their l can buy you with''.
Sam Spade was the first in a long line of Bogart heroes, iconic, seemingly self-sufficient men in tightly belted trenchcoats.
The war now took a hand.
ln November 1942 the Allies landed in North Africa.
ln January Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca.
Warners had just the movie to coincide with the conference.
ln Casablanca opposite lngrid Bergman, Bogart played the wounded, world-weary expatriate American Rick.
They turned production-line dross into movie gold.
''l don't buy and sell human beings'' ''That's too bad that's Casablanca's leading commodity''.
''l know a good deal about you than you suspect, l know for instance that you are in love with a woman, perhaps a strange circumstance that we both should love the same woman''.
''lf you know how much l loved you, how much l still love you''.
l was willing to shoot Captain Renault and l'm willing to shoot you.
All right, Major, you asked for it.
ln Casablanca, Bogart cemented his screen personally - the loner whose tough exterior hides tenderness and vulnerability.
A man like himself or, at least, Bogart's own image of himself.
For some time director Howard Hawks had been looking for a leading lady to match Bogart with a strong female presence.
He found her on the cover of Harper's Bazaar magazine Hawks' wife had drawn his attention to a tawny-haired, almond-eyed young model in New York, Betty Joan Perske.
She had an extraordinary beauty, smouldering with a kind of go-to-hell insolence that made her seem older and wiser than her 19 years.
Hawks brought her to Hollywood, put her under contract and changed her name to Lauren Bacall.
The former Betty Joan Perske loathed Lauren and has always been known as Betty to her friends.
After changing her name, Hawks changed her voice, deepening it by hours of reading aloud out of doors After four months Lauren Bacall was ready for the cameras She was to co-star with Bogart in To Have and Have Not Their first meeting was a low-key affair which failed to quicken any pulses.
''Well, when l first met Bogie he just said hello to me and said l saw your test and he said we'll have a lot of fun together, ha, l don't think he realized at the time quite how things would turn out, but he was right we did have a lot of fun together''.
To Have and Have Not was very loosely based on a Hemingway novel.
Hawks had bought the rights simply because Hemingway bet him that he couldn't make a film out of it.
At first it was something of an ordeal for Lauren Bacall.
Bogart stepped in to help.
''He was tremendously helpful to me, because l really knew nothing, l hadn't a clue what l was doing, 19 years old ga ga, you know in California working with this big star, and Howard Hawks, scared to death.
And l just never um, l mean their was so much l didn't think about''.
This is not evident in the finished product.
Bacall's cool, teasing delivery of her lines - notably when she tells Bogart how to whistle, ''You just put your lips together and blow'' - suggested that she had been up all night writing the script.
Three weeks into shooting, it was obvious that Bogart had fallen in love with Bacall.
Hawks recalled, ''The funny thing is that Bogie fell in love with the character she played, so that she had to keep playing it for the rest of his life.
'' ''l'm hard to get, Steve, all you have to do is ask me'' ''You know what your getting into, it's gonna be rough''.
''What did you do that for'' ''l was wondering whether l'd like it'' ''What's your decision?'' ''l don't know yet lt's even better when you help.
'' By now Bogart's marriage to Mayo Methot was in free fall.
Their public rowing cut short a morale-boosting tour of North Africa and ltaly.
''On our trip overseas my wife and l saw thousands of American boys and African, ltalian you could be awfully proud of them''.
For 12 months after To Have and Have Not, Bogart and Bacall met secretly wherever they could, holding hands in Bogie's car in the quiet palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills To Betty Bacall, Bogart seemed gentle, ''diametrically opposed to the parts he played.
'' ''Bogie's theory was always when your dead, that's it, you know you've got to press on, this life is for the living and it wasn't that he was unemotional or tough because he wasn't he was tough in his beliefs, but he wasn't tough emotionally at all'' But they could meet openly on the movie lot.
Their next film together was Howard Hawks' screen version of the Raymond Chandler thriller The Big Sleep, with Bogie cast as private eye Philip Marlowe.
Sometimes l wonder what strange fate brought me out of the storm To that house that stood alone in the shadows.
As l probed into its mysteries, every clue told me a different story.
But each had the same ending.
Murder.
Every instinct warned me to beware that something more dangerous, More deadly than l'd ever known before, was in that room.
And suddenly l liked that.
l'd like more.
ln retrospect it's amazing that Bogie's marriage to Mayo Methot lasted so long.
Mayo was paranoid with jealousy and Bogie was back on the bottle.
Howard Hawks and his wife tried to defuse the situation by fixing Bacall up with Clark Gable, who had lost his wife Carole Lombard in a plane crash in 1942.
But Bacall wouldn't play.
Bogart and Bacall were married quietly at a friend's farm in Ohio in May 1945.
Mayo Methot had spent six weeks in Reno so that Bogie could get a quickie divorce.
During the ceremony bride and groom wept buckets of tears.
Later, Bacall was to write, ''He cried at every one of his weddings And with good reason''.
Fourth time around Bogart was full of apprehension.
He told producer Mark Hellinger that Bacall was a ''tigress'' and that he had the feeling of a mouse about to be torn apart by a cat.
After the wedding Bogie gave Bacall a small silver whistle on a chain as a memento of To Have and Have Not.
Whatever his fears, Bogart was entering a period of great stability and happiness.
There were few more contented Hollywood couples than the Bogarts.
Marriage to Bacall removed Bogart's dependence on drink, although he never gave it up.
ln 1948 they had a son, named Steve after the character Bogie played in ''To Have and Have Not''.
Bogie was to prove a devoted father.
Four years later, they had a daughter, Leslie.
Bacall kept house for Bogie at their home in Los Angeles.
She cooked, gardened and entertained their friends in the movie business.
They did everything together.
Bacall was equal to coping with her husband's sudden flashes of temper, usually fuelled by drink she remained unfazed by his legendary pastime of needling his drinking companions to the edge of physical violence.
ln 1947 the husband and wife team were paired for a third time in an overwrought melodrama, Dark Passage This lacked the magic of The Big Sleep.
''You won't tell me because you think l'll come their you think l'd follow you'' You'd be insane to follow me l'd ''Do you think l'm insane to pick you up on the road, was l crazy to let you stay here? There were times during the making of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre when the Bogarts must have thought they were crazy.
Bacall joined her husband for the location shooting in Mexico.
The going was rugged, the creature comforts non-existent and the catering primitive in the extreme.
When it collapsed Bacall found herself cooking for the actors and crew.
The conditions did not prevent Bogart turning in a remarkable performance as the paranoid gold prospector and three-time loser Fred C.
Dobbs.
''l know exactly what you mean, you want to take it all for yourself and cut me out, l know you for what you are, a long time l've had my suspicions about you and now l know l've been right'' ''So that's your stinking game is it informing, l knew you were an informer l knew it all the time'' ''Take a look down that mountains this means all our funerals, if l'm right in what l'm thinking may the lord be with us, they're not soldiers they're bandits'' ln 1947 there were bandits of another kind abroad in Washington.
A congressional committee, chaired by J.
Parnell Thomas, was investigating the infiltration of the Hollywood studios by Communists Twenty-nine writers and directors were summoned to appear before the committee.
One of them was the writer John Howard Lawson.
Chief interrogator was J.
Parnell Thomas, assisted by a young Richard M.
Nixon.
Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? l am framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame - Then you deny it? - his answer to a question which invades his Absolutely invades Then you deny You refuse to answer that question, is that correct? l have told you, and l will offer my beliefs, my affiliations and everything else Excuse the witness.
to the American public and they will know where l stand, as they do from what l have written.
Stand away from the stand.
l have written for Americanism for many years.
Stand away from the stand! And will fight for the Bill of Rights which you are seeking to destroy.
Officer, take this man away from the stand.
Bogart and Bacall joined a deputation of Hollywood liberals which flew to Washington to protest at the treatment of the witnesses who had declined to testify.
The mission to Washington fizzled out in near-farce and, under heavy pressure from the studios, Bogart and Bacall distanced themselves from the protest Their friend John Huston later recalled the fear which infected Hollywood at the time.
''Um, in the light of ensuing events why l regard it as a mistake that Bogey did this, he should have stuck to his guns, but l quite understand why he didn't, particularly as time went on, um any opinion contrary, by the way J Parnell Thomas was a thief who went tojail but the man who followed Thomas, Senate McCarthy made a nightmare out of his decade Back home, the Bogarts and Huston tried to salvage some pride with Key Largo, a movie version of the allegorical play by Maxwell Anderson about the threat of fascism in America The Bogarts' co-star was Edward G.
Robinson, whose mild socialism had made him virtually unemployable.
Try to stop me from wiping you all out.
What'll that do, boss? Forget it.
Her kind's a dime a dozen.
l say smack her and let it go at that.
Smacking her isn't enough for such an insult.
He'd have to kill her.
Then he'd have to kill the rest of us, because we witnessed it.
lt's kill us all, or nothing.
After Key Largo, Bogart and Bacall's screen careers took different directions.
ln films like How to Marry a Millionaire, with Marilyn Monroe, and Betty Grable, Bacall revealed a flair for stylish comedy.
Marilyn revealed other qualities.
But, without Bogart, Bacall seemed unable to rekindle her youthful fire.
These mild shenanigans were light years away from the static which had crackled between Bogie and Bacall in the Big Sleep.
But Bogie, Howard Hawks and Bacall's intoxicating combination of youth and sexual candour were no longer there.
ln 1951, Bacall joined her husband on location in central Africa, where he was filming The African Queen, co-starring Katharine Hepburn and directed by John Huston.
Hepburn was struck by the air of intense privacy radiated by Bogart and Bacall.
ln the African Queen Hepburn played a prim spinster missionary and Bogart the gin-soaked captain of the rusting river-tub of the title.
They battle the elements, a German gunboat and each other.
Bogart's grizzled Charlie Alnutt was a benign version of the twitching Fred C.
Dobbs Hepburn's missionary had a touching primness.
''Well l ain't sorry no more you crazy psalm singing skinny old maid''.
Bogart's performance won him a belated Oscar, a sentimental gesture, perhaps, for an off beat role.
At the ceremony a friend advised him just to growl, ''lt's about time'', but Bogie showed a sentimental streak by thanking everyone under the sun.
His son Steve shared in the triumph.
But at this stage in this career, Bogart reserved his best performances for complicated men like the malevolent, washed-up screenwriter Dixon Steele of ln a Lonely Place.
Or the manic Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
Did they reflect aspects of his own character? As Raymond Chandler once remarked, ''Bogart is very good at playing Bogart''.
And he was very good as Queeg and Dixon Steele.
By the early 1950s Bogart's style was increasingly becoming a thing of the past.
He was a symbol of the old Hollywood, whose horizons were shrinking and nerve failing.
The studio system which had made Bogie a star was now crumbling.
Bogie's hair was also falling out in handfuls but, typically, he didn't give a damn about appearing in public without his rug.
A new breed of actor had also invaded Hollywood.
ln 1954 Marlon Brando won the Best Actor Oscar as the broken-down pug Terry Molloy in On the Waterfront.
Bogie's last film, The Harder They Fall, had a boxing theme.
He played a disillusioned sports writer.
He also sparred with Method actor Rod Steiger, a fascinating contrast in styles which Bogie shaded on points.
ln 1956 Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed with throat cancer.
An operation and a punishing regime of treatments failed to arrest the disease Bogie had always been an enthusiastic and skilful sailor, but now his sailing days were drawing to a close.
Growing steadily weaker, Bogie toughed it out, with Lauren Bacall in constant attendance.
He lost his appetite and stones in weight, but not his black sense of humour and love of drink and conservation.
''l remember his last days, um, when he was very, very ill indeed, he was too weak to come down the stairs.
Their was one hour a day when they received guests and this was observed right up to the finish.
He was too weak even to be lifted down the stairs.
Their was a dumb waiter and he used to crowd himself into this dumb waiter and come down to the first floor where he was then put into a chair and wheeled into the drawing room and have drinks and talk and that's the last picture l have of Bogey and quite in keeping with the image l have of him altogether, his whole life''.
Bacall was with him to the end.
Bogart told a friend, ''She's my wife and my nurse.
So she stays home.
Maybe that's the way you tell the ladies from the boards in this town.
'' Humphrey Bogart died in a coma in the early hours of the 14th of January 1957.
At his funeral three days later, John Huston, who had established Bogart's screen persona in the Maltese Falcon, pointed out that his life, although rich and full, was not a long one measured in years after twenty years of struggle - false starts, failed marriages and alcoholism - he had enjoyed 15 years of success and 12 years of happiness with Betty Bacall.
Humphrey Bogart was 43 and Lauren Bacall was just 19.
The love which blossomed on the soundstage of To Have and Have Not lasted long after the final wrap.
lt lasted for the rest of Bogart's life As a married couple they were grown-up and sexy.
Katharine Hepburn observed that when Bogart and Bacall fought, ''it was with utter confidence of two cats locked deliciously in the same cage'' Humphrey Bogart was born in this house in a fashionable part of New York in 1889 He was the son of a society doctor, whose wife Maud was a successful freelance illustrator.
The young Bogart was educated at Trinity School and then the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachussets.
He was not a success at Phillips Academy, from which he was expelled in May 1918.
He immediately joined the US Navy but saw no action.
Bogart eventually drifted into acting.
The first and briefest of his four marriages was to the actress Helen Menken.
1924 found him playing in the melodrama Nerves alongside Paul Kelly and Mary Phillips, who was to become Bogart's second wife Quick-tempered and hard-drinking, Bogart pursued an erratic career on Broadway.
But at least one critic was moved to write of him that he was ''as young and handsome as Valentino and as graceful as any of our actors.
'' ln New York Bogart made a few two-real movies.
They were fitted around his stagework, but it was not long before he went to Hollywood.
The talkies had taken over and the studios wanted actors with stage experience.
''And then you killed him, you poisoned him'' ''Your trying to force me into saying something that isn't true and this is not true'' ''And in your haste to get away you forgot something''.
Bogart was signed by Fox studios, but his movie career failed to catch fire.
On Broadway he had been a romantic leading man, but the image didn't gel in Hollywood.
Back on Broadway he co-starred with Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest.
And scored a big hit as the doomed mobster Duke Mantee When the play was filmed by Warners, Bogart repeated the role ''What's the matter with you Duke do something'' ''Shut up, shut up, give me time to think''.
Bogart's performance persuaded Warners to typecast him as a snarling heavy and occasional tough guy hero, always in the shadow of the studio's gangster A-team of James Cagney, Edward G.
Robinson and George Raft.
''Everybody stay quiet and keep where they are, they'll shoot the first thing that moves.
'' ''Put that gun away'' ''When l'm good and ready, that friendship stuff don't mean a thing to me, this guys got enough on us to - ''He won't talk'' - ''He'd better not''.
''You've been horsing us around for long enough, we ought to break your crummy neck for leaving us stuck out on the road with a busted wheel and lifting our load''.
''Please don't ask me to talk he'll kill me'' ''Now you help me to prove that he was responsible for this and l'll put him where he won't kill anybody'' ''You don't know what he's like he stops at nothing, people just disappear and are never heard of again l don't want that to happen to me''.
lt was while filming Marked Woman with Bette Davis in 1938 that Bogart met a busty but none too beautiful actress called Mayo Methot.
She became his third wife.
She was a poor choice.
Mayo was, if anything, an even bigger drinker than Bogart.
Not only was she a boozer, she was also a brawler.
Bogart's pet name for Methot was ''Sluggy''.
The legend of the Battling Bogarts began on their wedding night, which they spent apart after a furious row.
Their roller-coaster marriage ride was keenly tracked by the gossip columnists, but the truth was rather sad.
lt was the tale of two alcoholics locked in a punishing mutual dependency.
By now Bogart was a familiar fourth-billed face in Warner movies.
ln the Western Virginia City, Bogart played a gunslinger gloriously named Whip McCord.
The movie's star Errol Flynn led the premiere parade in Reno Bogart and Methot trundled behind in a wagon.
Bogart's breakthough came in High Sierra as the soft-hearted hoodlum Roy Mad Dog Earle.
What's the matter? Yellow? Come and get me, buddy.
Come and get me.
Top billing arrived as the private eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the directing debut of John Huston.
lt transformed a slightly wooden supporting actor into the cynical but soft-centred ''Bogie'' of movie myth.
''What have you ever given me beside money, you haven't given me any of your confidence any of the truth, haven't you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else'' ''What else is their l can buy you with''.
Sam Spade was the first in a long line of Bogart heroes, iconic, seemingly self-sufficient men in tightly belted trenchcoats.
The war now took a hand.
ln November 1942 the Allies landed in North Africa.
ln January Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca.
Warners had just the movie to coincide with the conference.
ln Casablanca opposite lngrid Bergman, Bogart played the wounded, world-weary expatriate American Rick.
They turned production-line dross into movie gold.
''l don't buy and sell human beings'' ''That's too bad that's Casablanca's leading commodity''.
''l know a good deal about you than you suspect, l know for instance that you are in love with a woman, perhaps a strange circumstance that we both should love the same woman''.
''lf you know how much l loved you, how much l still love you''.
l was willing to shoot Captain Renault and l'm willing to shoot you.
All right, Major, you asked for it.
ln Casablanca, Bogart cemented his screen personally - the loner whose tough exterior hides tenderness and vulnerability.
A man like himself or, at least, Bogart's own image of himself.
For some time director Howard Hawks had been looking for a leading lady to match Bogart with a strong female presence.
He found her on the cover of Harper's Bazaar magazine Hawks' wife had drawn his attention to a tawny-haired, almond-eyed young model in New York, Betty Joan Perske.
She had an extraordinary beauty, smouldering with a kind of go-to-hell insolence that made her seem older and wiser than her 19 years.
Hawks brought her to Hollywood, put her under contract and changed her name to Lauren Bacall.
The former Betty Joan Perske loathed Lauren and has always been known as Betty to her friends.
After changing her name, Hawks changed her voice, deepening it by hours of reading aloud out of doors After four months Lauren Bacall was ready for the cameras She was to co-star with Bogart in To Have and Have Not Their first meeting was a low-key affair which failed to quicken any pulses.
''Well, when l first met Bogie he just said hello to me and said l saw your test and he said we'll have a lot of fun together, ha, l don't think he realized at the time quite how things would turn out, but he was right we did have a lot of fun together''.
To Have and Have Not was very loosely based on a Hemingway novel.
Hawks had bought the rights simply because Hemingway bet him that he couldn't make a film out of it.
At first it was something of an ordeal for Lauren Bacall.
Bogart stepped in to help.
''He was tremendously helpful to me, because l really knew nothing, l hadn't a clue what l was doing, 19 years old ga ga, you know in California working with this big star, and Howard Hawks, scared to death.
And l just never um, l mean their was so much l didn't think about''.
This is not evident in the finished product.
Bacall's cool, teasing delivery of her lines - notably when she tells Bogart how to whistle, ''You just put your lips together and blow'' - suggested that she had been up all night writing the script.
Three weeks into shooting, it was obvious that Bogart had fallen in love with Bacall.
Hawks recalled, ''The funny thing is that Bogie fell in love with the character she played, so that she had to keep playing it for the rest of his life.
'' ''l'm hard to get, Steve, all you have to do is ask me'' ''You know what your getting into, it's gonna be rough''.
''What did you do that for'' ''l was wondering whether l'd like it'' ''What's your decision?'' ''l don't know yet lt's even better when you help.
'' By now Bogart's marriage to Mayo Methot was in free fall.
Their public rowing cut short a morale-boosting tour of North Africa and ltaly.
''On our trip overseas my wife and l saw thousands of American boys and African, ltalian you could be awfully proud of them''.
For 12 months after To Have and Have Not, Bogart and Bacall met secretly wherever they could, holding hands in Bogie's car in the quiet palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills To Betty Bacall, Bogart seemed gentle, ''diametrically opposed to the parts he played.
'' ''Bogie's theory was always when your dead, that's it, you know you've got to press on, this life is for the living and it wasn't that he was unemotional or tough because he wasn't he was tough in his beliefs, but he wasn't tough emotionally at all'' But they could meet openly on the movie lot.
Their next film together was Howard Hawks' screen version of the Raymond Chandler thriller The Big Sleep, with Bogie cast as private eye Philip Marlowe.
Sometimes l wonder what strange fate brought me out of the storm To that house that stood alone in the shadows.
As l probed into its mysteries, every clue told me a different story.
But each had the same ending.
Murder.
Every instinct warned me to beware that something more dangerous, More deadly than l'd ever known before, was in that room.
And suddenly l liked that.
l'd like more.
ln retrospect it's amazing that Bogie's marriage to Mayo Methot lasted so long.
Mayo was paranoid with jealousy and Bogie was back on the bottle.
Howard Hawks and his wife tried to defuse the situation by fixing Bacall up with Clark Gable, who had lost his wife Carole Lombard in a plane crash in 1942.
But Bacall wouldn't play.
Bogart and Bacall were married quietly at a friend's farm in Ohio in May 1945.
Mayo Methot had spent six weeks in Reno so that Bogie could get a quickie divorce.
During the ceremony bride and groom wept buckets of tears.
Later, Bacall was to write, ''He cried at every one of his weddings And with good reason''.
Fourth time around Bogart was full of apprehension.
He told producer Mark Hellinger that Bacall was a ''tigress'' and that he had the feeling of a mouse about to be torn apart by a cat.
After the wedding Bogie gave Bacall a small silver whistle on a chain as a memento of To Have and Have Not.
Whatever his fears, Bogart was entering a period of great stability and happiness.
There were few more contented Hollywood couples than the Bogarts.
Marriage to Bacall removed Bogart's dependence on drink, although he never gave it up.
ln 1948 they had a son, named Steve after the character Bogie played in ''To Have and Have Not''.
Bogie was to prove a devoted father.
Four years later, they had a daughter, Leslie.
Bacall kept house for Bogie at their home in Los Angeles.
She cooked, gardened and entertained their friends in the movie business.
They did everything together.
Bacall was equal to coping with her husband's sudden flashes of temper, usually fuelled by drink she remained unfazed by his legendary pastime of needling his drinking companions to the edge of physical violence.
ln 1947 the husband and wife team were paired for a third time in an overwrought melodrama, Dark Passage This lacked the magic of The Big Sleep.
''You won't tell me because you think l'll come their you think l'd follow you'' You'd be insane to follow me l'd ''Do you think l'm insane to pick you up on the road, was l crazy to let you stay here? There were times during the making of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre when the Bogarts must have thought they were crazy.
Bacall joined her husband for the location shooting in Mexico.
The going was rugged, the creature comforts non-existent and the catering primitive in the extreme.
When it collapsed Bacall found herself cooking for the actors and crew.
The conditions did not prevent Bogart turning in a remarkable performance as the paranoid gold prospector and three-time loser Fred C.
Dobbs.
''l know exactly what you mean, you want to take it all for yourself and cut me out, l know you for what you are, a long time l've had my suspicions about you and now l know l've been right'' ''So that's your stinking game is it informing, l knew you were an informer l knew it all the time'' ''Take a look down that mountains this means all our funerals, if l'm right in what l'm thinking may the lord be with us, they're not soldiers they're bandits'' ln 1947 there were bandits of another kind abroad in Washington.
A congressional committee, chaired by J.
Parnell Thomas, was investigating the infiltration of the Hollywood studios by Communists Twenty-nine writers and directors were summoned to appear before the committee.
One of them was the writer John Howard Lawson.
Chief interrogator was J.
Parnell Thomas, assisted by a young Richard M.
Nixon.
Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? l am framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame - Then you deny it? - his answer to a question which invades his Absolutely invades Then you deny You refuse to answer that question, is that correct? l have told you, and l will offer my beliefs, my affiliations and everything else Excuse the witness.
to the American public and they will know where l stand, as they do from what l have written.
Stand away from the stand.
l have written for Americanism for many years.
Stand away from the stand! And will fight for the Bill of Rights which you are seeking to destroy.
Officer, take this man away from the stand.
Bogart and Bacall joined a deputation of Hollywood liberals which flew to Washington to protest at the treatment of the witnesses who had declined to testify.
The mission to Washington fizzled out in near-farce and, under heavy pressure from the studios, Bogart and Bacall distanced themselves from the protest Their friend John Huston later recalled the fear which infected Hollywood at the time.
''Um, in the light of ensuing events why l regard it as a mistake that Bogey did this, he should have stuck to his guns, but l quite understand why he didn't, particularly as time went on, um any opinion contrary, by the way J Parnell Thomas was a thief who went tojail but the man who followed Thomas, Senate McCarthy made a nightmare out of his decade Back home, the Bogarts and Huston tried to salvage some pride with Key Largo, a movie version of the allegorical play by Maxwell Anderson about the threat of fascism in America The Bogarts' co-star was Edward G.
Robinson, whose mild socialism had made him virtually unemployable.
Try to stop me from wiping you all out.
What'll that do, boss? Forget it.
Her kind's a dime a dozen.
l say smack her and let it go at that.
Smacking her isn't enough for such an insult.
He'd have to kill her.
Then he'd have to kill the rest of us, because we witnessed it.
lt's kill us all, or nothing.
After Key Largo, Bogart and Bacall's screen careers took different directions.
ln films like How to Marry a Millionaire, with Marilyn Monroe, and Betty Grable, Bacall revealed a flair for stylish comedy.
Marilyn revealed other qualities.
But, without Bogart, Bacall seemed unable to rekindle her youthful fire.
These mild shenanigans were light years away from the static which had crackled between Bogie and Bacall in the Big Sleep.
But Bogie, Howard Hawks and Bacall's intoxicating combination of youth and sexual candour were no longer there.
ln 1951, Bacall joined her husband on location in central Africa, where he was filming The African Queen, co-starring Katharine Hepburn and directed by John Huston.
Hepburn was struck by the air of intense privacy radiated by Bogart and Bacall.
ln the African Queen Hepburn played a prim spinster missionary and Bogart the gin-soaked captain of the rusting river-tub of the title.
They battle the elements, a German gunboat and each other.
Bogart's grizzled Charlie Alnutt was a benign version of the twitching Fred C.
Dobbs Hepburn's missionary had a touching primness.
''Well l ain't sorry no more you crazy psalm singing skinny old maid''.
Bogart's performance won him a belated Oscar, a sentimental gesture, perhaps, for an off beat role.
At the ceremony a friend advised him just to growl, ''lt's about time'', but Bogie showed a sentimental streak by thanking everyone under the sun.
His son Steve shared in the triumph.
But at this stage in this career, Bogart reserved his best performances for complicated men like the malevolent, washed-up screenwriter Dixon Steele of ln a Lonely Place.
Or the manic Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
Did they reflect aspects of his own character? As Raymond Chandler once remarked, ''Bogart is very good at playing Bogart''.
And he was very good as Queeg and Dixon Steele.
By the early 1950s Bogart's style was increasingly becoming a thing of the past.
He was a symbol of the old Hollywood, whose horizons were shrinking and nerve failing.
The studio system which had made Bogie a star was now crumbling.
Bogie's hair was also falling out in handfuls but, typically, he didn't give a damn about appearing in public without his rug.
A new breed of actor had also invaded Hollywood.
ln 1954 Marlon Brando won the Best Actor Oscar as the broken-down pug Terry Molloy in On the Waterfront.
Bogie's last film, The Harder They Fall, had a boxing theme.
He played a disillusioned sports writer.
He also sparred with Method actor Rod Steiger, a fascinating contrast in styles which Bogie shaded on points.
ln 1956 Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed with throat cancer.
An operation and a punishing regime of treatments failed to arrest the disease Bogie had always been an enthusiastic and skilful sailor, but now his sailing days were drawing to a close.
Growing steadily weaker, Bogie toughed it out, with Lauren Bacall in constant attendance.
He lost his appetite and stones in weight, but not his black sense of humour and love of drink and conservation.
''l remember his last days, um, when he was very, very ill indeed, he was too weak to come down the stairs.
Their was one hour a day when they received guests and this was observed right up to the finish.
He was too weak even to be lifted down the stairs.
Their was a dumb waiter and he used to crowd himself into this dumb waiter and come down to the first floor where he was then put into a chair and wheeled into the drawing room and have drinks and talk and that's the last picture l have of Bogey and quite in keeping with the image l have of him altogether, his whole life''.
Bacall was with him to the end.
Bogart told a friend, ''She's my wife and my nurse.
So she stays home.
Maybe that's the way you tell the ladies from the boards in this town.
'' Humphrey Bogart died in a coma in the early hours of the 14th of January 1957.
At his funeral three days later, John Huston, who had established Bogart's screen persona in the Maltese Falcon, pointed out that his life, although rich and full, was not a long one measured in years after twenty years of struggle - false starts, failed marriages and alcoholism - he had enjoyed 15 years of success and 12 years of happiness with Betty Bacall.