Whenever an actor and an actress begin an affair on the soundstage they like to believe they are the new Burton and Taylor. Actually they’ll be lucky to resemble Christopher Timothy and Carol Drinkwater, who had a fling on that vet programme – and now here are Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall to live up to as well. Of their love story, William J. Mann avers: ‘It was wonderful; it was passionate; it was complicated.’
Also, it was creepy. Bacall was 19, Bogart 45. There was a ‘significant power differential between them’ when they met in 1944 during the filming of To Have and Have Not. Mann is probably pointing the finger at Bogart, the established Hollywood star. Yet it is surely Bacall, the ingénue, who had potency and was the one in control, telling Bogart, with maximum suggestiveness, how to whistle: ‘You just put your lips together – and blow.’
Bogart would drink until he collapsed, and enjoyed ‘provoking fights just for the fun of it’
Bogart, we are told (several times) was always ‘wounded, vulnerable and filled with self-doubt’; he was ‘wounded and guarded’; he was ‘belligerent, wounded, lonely’.
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