Bogart divorced his washed-up third wife in 1945 and married Lauren Bacall at Luis Bromfield's Malabar Farm, on 21st May 1945. His relationship and marriage with Bacall is the most splendorous phase in Bogart's life; John Huston asked an evening if somebody wanted to relive a part of their lives, only Bogart said: "When I was courting Betty [Bacall was born Betty Joan]".
The book by Sperber and Lax doesn't gloss over the more prosaic and obscure side of Bogart when they report his aggressions towards his wife Mayo, a long affair with his hairdresser Verita Thompson, and diverse remembrances: his lucky Oxford shoes at Grauman's Chinese, Spencer Tracy (the first who calls him Bogey) etc., that shed light and shadows on Bogie's brumous personality, a special chapter covering his trip to Washington to defend the blacklisted artists in Hollywood (accused by the House of Un-American Activities Committee of communism for their "New Deal" support), brusquely finished with a benign declaration by Bogart (afraid of a boycott on his films and pressed by Jack Warner) that some participants as Larry Adler found insufficient.
Huston, Bogart, William Wyler, will denounce the terror and hysteria provoked by HUAC. However, his previous press conference in Chicago (3rd December 1947) was the prevalent in Bogart's memory. Richard Brooks says Bogie was smart enough for anticipating this defeat; years later, Bogart confesses to Brooks how he had hoped to achieve more in his life, while they watched A Star is Born, a film whose ending moved Bogie to tears. He had always complained of his enslaved early years acting in clinkers: "I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history."
Another vivid anecdote that finds Bogie at Gotham Hotel (waiting for Lauren Bacall's arrival to Grand Central Station, New York), in company of a Warner agent exposes his self-consuming tension. Incapable of relaxing, Bogie forced his publicity agent to call a masseur three times in a row (who had to take the metro from Brooklyn).
"The combination of grandiosity, self-destructiveness, and panic with which Hollywood reacted to the audience's desertion is the subtext of Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950), which is set in the jittery Hollywood of 1949." (Bogart, playing a near-psychotic screenwriter says to restaurateur-conman Mike Romanoff, playing himself: 'How is business?', Romanoff: 'Like show business. There's no business'." Shades of Noir (1993) by Joan Copjec..jpg)
My favorite performance of Bogart is In a Lonely Place (1950) directed by Nicholas Ray, although his most renowned performances are "The African Queen" (awarded with an Oscar for his role Charlie Allnut), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Caine Mutiny, and Casablanca, all of them essential and unforgettable. Very touching was his lasting performance as a torn sportswriter in The Harder They Fall who chooses to make a last act of goodness.
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Article comments
1 - Alan Kurtz
On page 3, you write: "My favorite performance of Bogart is In Another Place (1950) directed by Nicholas Ray."
Yet in the preceding paragraph you refer to "Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950)."
May we assume one of these titles is correct? If so, it might be nice to use it consistently, especially since that's your favorite performance of Bogart.
2 - kendra
The correct title is "In a Lonely Place", sorry that was a typo!
3 - Alan Kurtz
I keep reminding my fellow Blogcritics writers, we can't rely on our editors to help wring mistakes out of our prose. BC's editors are for the most part nonprofessionals with neither the time, the skill, nor the inclination to read our stuff carefully. A recent example comes from BC's politics section, where in his very first sentence the author misidentifies George H.W. Bush "as 43rd President of the United States." (He was #41; his son was #43.) And this slipped by in, mind you, the politics section, where any editor worth his salt would've spotted and corrected that immediately.
As a writer, I strive to live up to the second adjective in the motto that BC founder Eric Olsen emblazoned on the masthead of each and every page on this site: "A sinister cabal of superior writers." The sinister part is a joke, of course; but I take superior very seriously.
And for those of us who subscribe to that ethos, we have to do it ourselves, since our editors are useless in that regard.
4 - kendra
I want to thank you, Aln, for having pointed this mistake out, and the Blogcritics editors team for having fixed it.
5 - nate
Good review of a timeless icon
6 - kendra
thanks, Nate! Bogart is a timeless figure, The London Times wrote his screen persona was the male equivalent to the hooker with a heart gold that Marilyn Monroe constructed.