She Was Nineteen, He Was Forty-Four and Married — and It Lasted Until He Died

What the record shows

Betty Joan Perske was a nineteen-year-old model and stage hopeful when her photograph ran on the cover of Harper's Bazaar in March 1943. Slim Hawks, the wife of director Howard Hawks, saw it and told her husband to test the girl. Hawks put her under personal contract, renamed her Lauren Bacall, coached the register of her voice down, and cast her opposite the biggest male star at Warner Bros in an adaptation of a Hemingway novel he had bet the author he could make from his worst book.

Bogart was forty-four, on his third marriage, and had been in films for fifteen years. What happened during production is documented by everyone who was on it, including both participants, and by the film itself: the chemistry that is on screen was not manufactured, and the studio knew it before the picture was released.

The sequence, as documented

1. March 1943

   Bacall appears on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. Howard Hawks signs her to a personal contract.

2. Early 1944

   Production begins on To Have and Have Not. Bacall is 19; Bogart is 44 and married to the actress Mayo Methot.

3. 11 October 1944

   To Have and Have Not opens. Bacall's line readings — including one that becomes among the most quoted in American film — make her a star on a first picture.

4. 10 May 1945

   Bogart's divorce from Mayo Methot is granted.

5. 21 May 1945

   Bogart and Bacall marry at Malabar Farm in Ohio, the home of the novelist Louis Bromfield. He is 45; she is 20.

6. 1946–1948

   They make three more films together: The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo.

7. 6 January 1949

   Their son Stephen is born.

8. 1951–1952

   Bogart wins the Academy Award for Best Actor for The African Queen. Their daughter Leslie is born in 1952.

9. February 1956

   Bogart is diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and undergoes surgery.

10. 14 January 1957

    Humphrey Bogart dies at home in Los Angeles, aged 57.

11. 1961–1969

    Bacall is married to the actor Jason Robards; their son Sam Robards is born in 1961.

12. 12 August 2014

    Lauren Bacall dies in New York, aged 89, having won a National Book Award for her memoir and an honorary Academy Award.

What the sources support

• PUBLIC RECORD: the marriage took place on 21 May 1945 at Malabar Farm, Ohio, eleven days after Bogart's divorce was granted.
• PUBLIC RECORD: they made four films together between 1944 and 1948 and had two children.
• PUBLIC RECORD: Bogart died of oesophageal cancer on 14 January 1957; the marriage lasted eleven years and eight months.
• CONFIRMED: Bacall was discovered from a Harper's Bazaar cover and signed to a personal contract by Howard Hawks, an account she gave consistently for seventy years.
• CONFIRMED: Bacall wrote about the marriage in her own memoir, By Myself, which won a National Book Award in 1980.

The age gap, without the euphemism

Twenty-five years separated them, and she was nineteen when filming began. Forgotten Frame does not launder that with the word 'timeless'. What the record also shows is that Bacall described the relationship in the same terms for the rest of her life, in a memoir she wrote herself and in interviews given decades after his death, and never revised the account. She was also, by every contemporaneous account including the studio's own correspondence, the more assertive negotiator of the two: she went on suspension at Warner Bros repeatedly rather than take parts she did not want.

The couple's political conduct is documented too. In 1947 they flew to Washington with the Committee for the First Amendment to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearings into Hollywood. Bogart later distanced himself from the trip under studio pressure; Bacall's account of the episode in her memoir is markedly less repentant.

Statements on the record

“You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow.”

Continue reading · What happened next?She Died Three Days After a War Bond Rally. He Enlisted Within Months.Carole Lombard raised over two million dollars in a single evening in Indianapolis, boarded a plane home, and was killed with her mother and twenty other people on a Nevada mountainside.

Bogart's public statements about the marriage were characteristically short. Bacall's were not: she wrote two volumes of memoir, gave hundreds of interviews, and was still being asked about him fifty years after his death. She addressed that too, more than once, with visible impatience and without ever disowning it.

What followed

Bacall worked for another fifty-seven years — on Broadway, where she won two Tony Awards, and in films from Written on the Wind to The Mirror Has Two Faces, which brought her an Academy Award nomination in 1997. She received an honorary Oscar in 2009. She was briefly engaged to Frank Sinatra after Bogart's death, an episode she wrote about herself; the engagement ended when it reached the press.

Three of the four films the couple made together are held in American archive collections and remain in circulation. The Big Sleep is in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Whatever else the studio manufactured about its stars in the 1940s, this particular pairing is one where the on-screen version and the documented one match.

How the studio built 'The Look'

Bacall's screen manner — chin down, eyes up — has a documented and unglamorous origin. She was nineteen, terrified, and shaking so badly during her first scenes that pressing her chin to her chest was the only way to steady her head. Hawks kept it. The lowered voice was deliberate work: on Hawks's instruction she spent weeks reading aloud in the Hollywood hills to force her register down, and the result is audible if you compare her screen test to the finished film.

Warner Bros then marketed her as a fully formed sensation, which she was not. She was under personal contract to Hawks, who sold her contract on to the studio, and her second and third films were assigned rather than chosen. Confidential Agent (1945) was a critical failure severe enough that her career was widely written off within eighteen months of her debut; The Big Sleep, shot earlier, was re-edited and partly reshot to add more of her scenes with Bogart before its 1946 release, and it was that decision that saved her.

The marriage as a working partnership

They worked. Four films in five years, a weekly radio series, and a shared professional stubbornness: Bogart had spent the 1930s on suspension repeatedly for refusing parts, and Bacall did the same at Warner Bros throughout the late 1940s, at real cost to her income. The 1947 trip to Washington with the Committee for the First Amendment was a joint decision, undertaken against the explicit advice of both their studios, and it was expensive for both of them.

Their home in Holmby Hills became the centre of what Bacall herself christened the Rat Pack — the original one, built around Bogart rather than Sinatra. When Bogart was dying in 1956 and 1957, that same group came to the house nightly; he was carried downstairs in the dumbwaiter to receive visitors because he could no longer manage the stairs. Bacall recorded all of it, in detail, in a memoir she wrote without a ghost.