With Bogart, this wonderful enigma is brought under the light as never before. Although authors Ann M. Sperber and Eric Lax never met, Bogart is a unique collaboration, combining the strengths of two prize-winning biographers. Sperber, the author of the New York Times best-selling Pulitzer-Prize finalist Murrow: His Life and Times (1986), spent seven years before her death in 1994 amassing a vast archive of original research on the life and times of Humphrey Bogart, including more than 200 interviews she conducted with people who had known and worked with him, including Katharine Hepburn and John Huston. Eric Lax, whose Woody Allen was a national bestseller in 1991, took over the project after Sperber's death and spent two years completing it. The result is the definitive portrait of the actor who merged his screen anti-heroism with his own staunch personal integrity in a manner new to Hollywood, fashioning a persona as timely today, forty years after his death, as it was during his own life.
Several things are left out of the book, and I wonder why. One is the fact that Mr. Lax states that Bogart's sister was a great financial responsibility for him as she was in a private sanitarium for mental illness. In 1955 Frances Bogart Rose was a patient in the Metropolitan State Hospital (for the mentally ill) at Norwalk, California. She was allowed occasional visits to the Bogart home, but her return was always a concern because of the heavy drinking at Bogart's home and its effects on her. Perhaps it was at an earlier time that she was in a private sanitarium, but Mr. Lax gives the reader the impression it was for life. Since Bogart, who died in 1957, left her no bequest in his will (in spite of leaving small bequests to the household cook and his secretary), one can assume he knew she in some way would be cared for during her lifetime
Another issue not covered is Bogart's involvement with women during his mariage to Bacall, which even Bacall speaks of in her autobiography, stating she did not find out about some of the women until after Bogart's death (perhaps the best documented claim is about the young lady who cut his children's hair, a total opposite from Ms. Bacall). Yet the author points out Ms. Bacall's attractions (and in the case of Adlai Stevenson, she obviously had fallen in love). As Bacall states in her book, she did not have an actual affair because she knew that Bogart would leave her if she did. This is not to say they did not love each other deeply. Perhaps if she had not rejected another great love of his life, his yaught and sailing, and snooted the crew, preferring instead to attend Hollywood parties, the time and experiences they could have shared there would have resulted in a more close-knit bond. On the other hand, she was only twenty when she married him, and the fact that she lived with such a complex and difficult man until his death says something for her.
This book packs you with a wallop because it is so well written, very well researched and documented, the photos are great. Remember, he was an extremely heavy drinker and all his activities were lived under a cloud of alcohol or the affects of alcohol, even his greatest preformances. A gentleman and a boor. crude and erudite. kind and cruel. But talented, talented, talented!
