10 Things You Might Not Know About Bogie & Bacall’s Romance

(She added an extra l to Bacal to make it easier to pronounce correctly; people kept rhyming her name with “cackle.”)  

3. Bogart had a chilly childhood.  

Born in 1899, he grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, son of an upper-middle-class family with prized social connections. His father was a doctor to the toffs, his mother a successful commercial artist, but Mann documents how they were cold and disapproving parents who withheld affection, not picking their son up to comfort him when he cried as an infant, for example. It affected his relationships with his own children and contributed to his lifelong problems with insecurity and self-doubt, Mann argues. After flunking out of two posh schools, Bogart stumbled into theater acting as a youth and took to it, having decided it was the only thing he was good at besides sailing and drinking.   

4. He drank – a lot.

One of his friendly biographers described Bogart’s life as “an extended hangover.” He began drinking and smoking as a youth and didn’t stop until he died, long before the health dangers were fully known. But the effects on Bogart’s body and face were obvious, to say nothing of his relationships with his wives, children, friends and colleagues. He looked older than he was, lost his hair early and had to wear wigs, and suffered from what would later be called erectile dysfunction. “At one point, his alcoholism threatened everything he was on the verge of achieving” in terms of megastardom, Mann writes.  

5. But Bogart wasn’t always the “cynical tough guy” he often portrayed. 

The “real Bogart was gentler, more romantic, more yearning than the legend admits,” Mann writes. In fact, he was kind of a softy. As an example, Mann cites how Bogart’s “gentle side” came out the day he and Bacall got married, in May 1945. “Bogie shed tears all through the ceremony,” Bacall once told an interviewer, according to the author. “He cries at weddings. He’s very cute about it.”  

6. The couple was among the first celebrities to become political activists. 

They stood up for democracy under threat in the late 1940s when the House Committee on Un-American Activities imagined Reds under every Hollywood bed. They went to Washington to publicly protest and to support their friends in the Hollywood Ten who had been targeted in this surge of anti-Communist paranoia. Their authentic outrage at the committee’s mischief bonded Bogart and Bacall early in their marriage with a shared view about the First Amendment and freedom of expression. “They had revealed themselves as persons of conscience. That, too, has served their legend,” Mann argues.   

But they eventually backed down in the face of public criticism, studio fears and threats. They called a press conference to say they despised Communists “just as any other decent American does.”    

7. Bogie had a love affair with his wigmaker.  

Bogart was mostly faithful to his wives, but before his third divorce and his marriage to Bacall he was in a three-year secret affair with Arizona-born Verita “Pete” Peterson. Bogie later got the studio to hire her as a wigmaker, assigned to make and fit his increasingly necessary toupees on his movie sets. Smart and independent, she could match him drink for drink, but she never saw his marriage to Bacall coming — and he never said goodbye. She read about it in the newspaper.   

8. Bacall fell for Frank Sinatra.  

The Bogarts were close friends with Sinatra, and Bacall leaned on the younger star during her husband’s illness. After Bogart's death, they began a volatile relationship, but it was never clear that Sinatra returned her feelings. At some point, they became engaged, but when the news leaked to gossip columnist Louella Parsons, Sinatra was furious, blamed Bacall and dropped her, Mann reports. Sinatra’s handlers whispered that Bacall was a schemer trying to trap Sinatra, reflecting the misogyny of the era (and of Sinatra himself). Still grieving Bogie, she had left Hollywood by the end of 1958, moving to Europe and then back to New York, heartbroken and traumatized.  

9. She spent decades crafting the legend of their love story.  

Bacall lived for nearly 60 years after Bogart died, so she had plenty of time to shape their story as she liked. She did so more through omission — she didn’t focus on her father’s absence from her life or Bogart’s alcoholism, for instance — than invention, Mann writes. Her memoirs (she updated her first book, which was a National Book Award winner, twice) failed to deal fully with the Sinatra and Peterson episodes, for instance. By the time she died, she had ensured that her more romantic version of Bogie and his Baby was enshrined in public memory.  

10. She was tough — a “survivor.” 

When Bogie died, Bacall was just 32. In 1961 she married actor Jason Robards — another heavy drinker, whom she divorced in 1969 — and had a third child, Sam Robards (Stephen and Leslie Bogart were her first two). 

Her subsequent long career was packed with dozens of film and theater roles, winning her Tonys for her star turns in the musicals Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981). She worked into her 80s, including in 2010’s All at Sea with Brian Cox, spending her last 10 years living in her apartment in the Dakota in Manhattan with her dog. “For all her mythologizing, Bacall truly did smash through barriers to become one of the great Hollywood survivors,” Mann writes.