'Bogie & Bacall' Biography Hints at Infidelity in the Famous Hollywood Marriage

What’s that you say? It wasn’t all champagne and roses between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall?

Hollywood historian William J. Mann’s latest venture is Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair. In a passage from the book given to Entertainment Weekly before it was officially published, Mann uses Bacall’s own words from her memoir to investigate “Bacall’s fascination with United States politician and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson,” and it becomes “clear the two had, at the least, an emotional affair, if not also a physical one. An affair that Bogart was somewhat wary of.”

Bacall and Bogart joined Stevenson on his campaign in 1952. She wrote in her memoir that he would “catch my eye and wave and smile at me,” and that he “needed a wife, someone to share his life with.”

“I fantasized that I would be a long-distance partner … a good friend he could feel free to talk with about anything.” She goes on to describe their friendship in more detail, and her feelings about it. Basically, she wanted him and struggled with that wanting because, duh, she was married.

Is anyone really surprised? Bacall was a 20-year-old starlet when she married Bogart. He was 45. They met on the set of To Have and Have Not and thus began a legendary love affair while Bogart was still technically someone else’s husband. They stayed married until Bogie died in 1957, not long after that campaign, and he had been aging not-so-gracefully for years before that. You can’t tell me that Humphrey Bogart stayed faithful to his blushing child bride for all that time. Their relationship started as an infidelity!

What this really reveals is how much relationships have changed since Bogie and Bacall. These days, we see more headlines about celebrities divorces than much else. But here were two classic movie stars with lives just as messy as anyone, who proved that “Absolute fidelity need not be a requirement for true love.”

And, I guess, that democratic campaigns are just as sexy as we think they are.