Bogie & Bacall Beached Here

November 19, 2007 > MAUI TODAY, > Maui Yesterdays No Comments

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Everyone’s a Few Drinks Behind
November, 1954: Humphrey Bogart visits Maui with his wife, Lauren Bacall. The visit was sparked by Bogart’s location shooting earlier in the year for The Caine Mutiny, a movie that garnered seven Academy Award nominations, including Bogart’s third best-actor nomination (he won for The African Queen two years earlier.) Bogart has been called the greatest film star ever, according the American Film Institute’s “100 greatest stars.” He spent 27 years acting in films, from 1930 to his death from cancer, in 1957.

Outside acting, Bogart was a liberal, and was in the vanguard of Hollywood protesters, as he organized against the House Unamerican Activites Committee. In testimony before the McCarthy gang, he not only refused to answer questions, he excoriated the committee for its abhorrent display of abuse and power against powerless people. McCarthy told several people afterward he would never watch a Bogart film again, to which Bogart is reputed to have later said, “Was that a promise?”He met the love of his life, Lauren Bacall, on the film set of To Have and Have Not, in 1944. He was 44 and she was 19. He was worried about their age difference. She wasn’t. The meeting of the two characters on screen is quoted to this day. “You need me, whistle. You know how to whistle, Steve? You just put your lips together, and blow.”

Most people today think that Frank Sinatra started the “Rat Pack,” the group with Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, etc. In truth, it was Bogart who began a series of parties in the early 1950s, and which included Sinatra, along with Danny Kaye and John Houston. It was Bacall who named them; coming home from work one night she found them all drunk and laughing themselves silly on her living room floor. “If this isn’t the mangiest pack of rats I ever saw,” she said. To which Bogart is said to have replied, “Most of the world is a few drinks behind.”

They named their first boy Steve, after his character in the first movie they made together. At their wedding, he gave her a golden whistle, and when Bogart died, Bacall had it cremated with him.

Today, Lauren Bacall is 83.