“You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve?”
They wed when Bacall was only 20 and Bogart was 25 years her senior.
An affair that Bogart was somewhat wary of.
Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart (circa 1955).Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Read on for more below on this potential infidelity between indelible on and offscreen duo Bogie and Bacall.
Bogie shared his wife’s partiality for the erudite governor of Illinois and Democratic nominee.
The Bogarts accompanied Stevenson on California campaign stops.
Harper
For Bacall, the experience was thrilling.
“Crowds waving and screamingit made me feel I was running for office myself.”
On the campaign train to Pennsylvania, while Bogart dozed, Bacall and Stevenson huddled in close conversation.
“To my fantasizing mind he seemed so vulnerable.”
Such intimacy was bound to cause talk.
Stevenson was the first major-party nominee to be divorced.
“For glamour, the Democrats have beautiful Lauren Bacall,” one newspaper observed.
But for Ives, glamour led to gossip.
Even the merest hint that Stevenson was flirting with Bacall would confirm many voters' suspicions of divorced men.
She did her best to keep Bacall away from photographers.
But she couldn’t keep her away from the candidate.
By the end of the campaign, Bacall was thoroughly smitten.
In her memoir, she was remarkably candid about her feelings.
“I fantasized that I would be a long-distance partner .
a good friend he could feel free to talk with about anything.”
What she wanted was to be “connected with a great man capable of .
bettering the world"something her own husband, apparently, wasn’t apparently capable of.
Meeting Stevenson had fundamentally changed her life.
“Something happened” inside her, she said, and she was never the same again.
Bacall was 28 when she met Stevenson.
She was just 20 when she’d married Bogie, who was 25 years her senior.
Their legend would play down the personal cost of their age difference.
He was increasingly frail, years of heavy drinking and smoking taking their toll.
Bacall had never been able to sow her oats the way Bogie had done in his own youth.
She’d never had time to explore love or understand her own sexual and emotional power.
On election night, Bogie had a virus and stayed back at the hotel.
Bacall did not stick around to care for him.
“Having come this far,” she wrote, “I was not about to miss anything.”
At the governor’s mansion, the expectant jubilation quickly turned into despair as Eisenhower won in a landslide.
Bacall was overcome as she listened to Stevenson make his concession speech.
But Stevenson, she wrote, “shook me up completely.”
She was determined “not to have [Stevenson] vanish completely” from her life.
Her husband was starting to object.
Stephen would ask, “Daddy, where’s Mommy?”
and Bogie would reply forlornly, “With Adlai.”
Still, when Bogie was in Italy shootingBeat the Devil, Bacall flew to New York.
After the soiree, the governor took Bacall on his arm and escorted her back to her hotel.
In her telling of it, Bacall seems to have been hoping he would come upstairs with her.
“I wanted to talk to him alone, to talk personally,” she wrote.
If she made the offer, Stevenson declined.
Had she been prepared to begin an extramarital affair with Stevenson that night?
A close read of her memoir gives the impression she was.
At the designated time and place, Bacall was right up front.
“Stevenson caught my eyeor I caught hisor we caught each other’s,” she wrote.
They planned a rendezvous in Palm Springs, where the governor was heading for some rest.
“I was included in all his activities which only fed my fantasy,” she wrote.
She accompanied Stevenson to dinners with friends.
Her husband’s jealousy, Bacall wrote, “had come out before and would again.
She defied him and flew to Illinois, which was surely a sharp slap to Bogart’s ego.
Still, things didn’t turn out the way Bacall wanted, either.
Any hope for the sort of intimacy she had enjoyed with Stevenson in Palm Springs was dashed.
Other people were always around.
“All very proper,” Bacall wrote.
Buffie Ives was more hostile than ever, asking her “very pointedly” about her husband and children.
“I was flattered that she might consider me a threat,” Bacall wrote.
But the threat had likely been overestimated.
Although they exchanged warm farewells, the Bacall-Stevenson romance of the heart had come to an end.
He had many women, and perhaps she had realized that.
Bacall got onto the plane and returned to her husband and children.
Yet none of this should undercut the love story of Bogie and Bacall.
Absolute fidelity need not be a requirement for true love.
They believed in and boosted each other.
In the beginning, Bogie had nurtured a young woman inexperienced with fame and public life.
Excerpt fromBogie & Bacallby William J. Mann courtesy of Harper Collins.
