Lauren Bacall's Famous Romances
Hollywood icon Lauren Bacall enjoyed a career that easily eclipsed her love life — but she still picked up a few tales to tell. So who are the names on her list of romantic conquests?
Transcript
00:00Hollywood icon Lauren Bacall enjoyed a career that easily eclipsed her love life, but she
00:06still picked up a few tales to tell. So who are the names on her list of romantic conquests?
00:13Some Hollywood power couples end up branded with a portmanteau, you know, like Brangelina.
00:19For Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, however, their alliterative surnames were enough. Bogart
00:25and Bacall were among the most iconic couples of the immediate post-war period, not only
00:30for their romance, but for their on-screen chemistry in several stylish film noirs. And
00:35their life away from the cameras was happy, if complicated.
00:39Bacall recalled in her memoir that she and Bogart first met on the set of Passage to
00:44Marseilles in 1943. Soon after, they were cast together in To Have and Have Not. Bogart
00:50was 43 and an established star. Bacall was 19, with almost no acting experience.
01:01Despite the age difference, the two fell in love during filming. Their early romance encountered
01:06bumps along the way. Bogart was still in a disastrous marriage to Mayo Metho, and director
01:12Howard Hawks, who was Bacall's mentor, disapproved of the relationship. But the stars remained
01:18smitten with one another, and on May 21, 1945, after Bogart's divorce from Metho went
01:24through, they wed.
01:26Bogart and Bacall stayed together until his death. They had two children, and when Bogart
01:31fell ill with cancer, Bacall pulled back from acting to look after him. They may not have
01:36been an entirely faithful couple. Bogart's hairdresser claimed to have had an affair
01:41with the star, but the two remained deeply in love until Bogart's death.
01:46Legend has it that it was Lauren Bacall who first coined the phrase rat pack, referring
01:51to Humphrey Bogart's Circle of Friends. It wasn't meant as a compliment, though. According
01:56to A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax's Bogart, Bacall saw the aftermath of a wild Las Vegas bender
02:02and told the man responsible,
02:04"...you look like a goddamn rat pack."
02:07The guilty parties included Bogart, David Niven, Charlie Feldman, Mike Romanoff, and
02:13Frank Sinatra, who had come up with the idea for the expedition. Sinatra and the Bogarts
02:18were good friends. Bacall later recounted for The Guardian how her husband had teased
02:22her that Sinatra had a crush on her. Indeed, Sinatra was a frequent caller while Bogart
02:27was dying of cancer. For Bacall, tasked with nursing her older and ailing husband, the
02:33visits were welcome. In By Myself and Then Some, she wrote,
02:38"...he represented physical health, vitality. I needed that. Part of me needed a man to
02:44talk to and Frank turned out to be that man. It wasn't planned. It simply was."
02:50Some have insinuated that an affair began before Bogart had passed. Sperber and Lax
02:55quote William Campbell's suspicions that Bacall was the more interested of the two, and that
03:00Bogart and Sinatra's friendship actually soured over it. But Bacall maintained that their
03:05relationship began after her husband's death. In any event, it was intense but brief. Sinatra
03:11abruptly broke things off after their engagement leaked to the press.
03:16In an interview with Jeremy Isaacs in 1995, Lauren Bacall said,
03:21"...I had one great marriage."
03:23She didn't name which one, but her consistent expressions of affection for her years with
03:28Humphrey Bogart didn't leave it much of a question. Her marriage to Jason Robarts, by
03:33contrast, was rarely brought up in the press. Bacall occasionally seemed upset about that,
03:38but she also never waxed romantic about her second marriage the way she did about the
03:43first. Robarts, the son of silent film actor Jason Robarts Sr., followed his father into
03:49show business and eventually caught a break through his work in The Iceman Cometh.
03:54Given his profession and an assumed physical resemblance to Bogart by some journalists,
03:59the story presented in some quarters was that Bacall had fallen for a substitute. It
04:04was a charge Bacall deeply resented. She later told Vanity Fair,
04:08"...my time with Jason bore no resemblance to my life with Bogie. None. He didn't look
04:14anything like Bogie, and he didn't behave anything like Bogie. He didn't think anything
04:18like Bogie."
04:20They were married for eight years. They had one child together before Bacall ended things,
04:25in part, over one trait Robarts had in common with Bogart — alcoholism. By choice, Bacall
04:31kept a cordial distance afterward.