70 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • JANUARY 2020
REAR VIEW
BOGIE AND BACALL
A LOVELY LIFE TOGETHER
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
They met on a film set in 1944 and wed
a year later. She was 19. He was 46. He
was in his third unhappy marriage.
But unlike the Brangelinas and Bennifers
who come and go, Lauren Bacall
and Humphrey Bogart endured,
keeping their love alive. After he
died, she found consolation in her
Amagansett home on Long Island’s
East End, when not garnering awards
for her performances onstage and
onscreen.
Looking back on their paths to true
romance, the outcome does not seem
that far-fetched. The unlikely union
succeeded, despite the age gap and
earlier upsets.
“THE BOY’S GOOD, ISN’T HE?”
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born
in New York City in 1899 and raised
by a well-positioned but dysfunctional
family in Manhattan. They spent
idyllic summers at Willow Brook,
their Canandaigua Lake estate. When
not sailing, he directed other wealthy
boys in improvised performances
based on film melodramas. In 1916,
to his bitter disappointment, they
relocated, summering in a Fire Island
cottage.
Bogart was raised by a morphine-addicted
father and an undemonstrative,
career-obsessed mother who
fought constantly. He was a poor
student, albeit one who quoted
Plato; he excelled at chess, was well
read, and admired writers and intellectuals.
But weak grades got him
expelled from several prestigious
private schools; he joined the Navy,
then found work managing a touring
theatrical production. The next
year, 1921, he landed a small part. His
father, seated in the audience, said to a
companion, “The boy’s good, isn’t he?”
He learned from such talents as Spencer
Tracy, who coined the nickname
“Bogie” in 1930 when they were filming
Up the River. Bogie gave legendary
performances in The Petrified
L. to R.: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Forest and other movies, and by the
early 1940s was making classics
such as The Maltese Falcon and
Casablanca, perfecting his persona
as the cynical gangster with soul who
eventually shows his noble side.
His offscreen life, though, cried out
for a major rewrite as he negotiated a
tumultuous divorce. Enter Betty Joan
Perske.
“THERE IS NO WAY BOGIE
AND I COULD BE IN THE
SAME ROOM WITHOUT
REACHING FOR ONE ANOTHER,
AND IT JUST WASN’T
PHYSICAL.”
Bronx-born in 1924 to Jewish immigrants
from Poland and Romania who
divorced when she was 6, Perske later
said she had little or no love while
growing up and remembered her
father treating her mother badly.
She was fascinated by the theatre,
working as a Broadway usher in
high school while Bogart became a
star. But finances were tight and she
dropped out of the American Academy
of Dramatic Arts, which did not
offer scholarships to women.
After some small Broadway and
off-Broadway parts, her career was
going nowhere, so she began modeling.
Her 1943 Harper’s Bazaar cover
was noticed by Slim Hawks, who
challenged her husband, famed director
Howard Hawks, to work with
the starlet.
Hawks coached her in To Have and
Have Not, advising her to speak in a
lower register. She was so nervous
that before the cameras rolled she
had to lower her chin and look up
into Bogart’s eyes, to still the shaking;
thus was born “The Look.” The New
York Times praised her “insinuating
pose and a seductive, throaty voice.”
She became Lauren Bacall, remaining
“Betty” to family and friends; to
Bogie, she was “Baby.” They became
lovers — “a real Joe,” he called her —
and he divorced his wife.
They married in 1945, made four
more films together, then she stopped
acting to raise their children. He won
an Academy Award for The African
Queen in 1951 and died of cancer in
1957, leaving her a widow at 32.
When asked about their 12-year marriage,
Bacall said, “It was much too
short. We had a lovely life together.”
“SHE’S A REAL JOE. YOU’LL
FALL IN LOVE WITH HER
LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE.”
By the early 1960s, when not at her
Manhattan apartment full of homages
to Bogie, she had become a Hamptons
regular, shopping at Iacono Fam
and supporting fundraisers for Sag
Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre and the
Hamptons Film Festival, lending
that throaty voice to Hampton Jitney
advertisements.
“I talk to my birds, my trees. I love my
house. It’s my haven,” she told People
magazine in 1981.
The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn
called Bacall “the personification of
glamour.” Still, the star was normal,
Quinn wrote: Her show business
friends always felt she was one of
them.
Bacall returned to starring in films
and Broadway plays, winning Golden
Globes, Tonys, and an Oscar. Even
after selling her Hamptons home in
1995, she continued to support area
arts organizations.
She was 89 when she died in 2014.
“We had a lovely life together,”
Lauren Bacall said.
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
