Academy Award-winning actor Humphrey Bogart’s life might have turned out a whole lot different had he taken to heart criticism his parents showered on him through his entire early life, calling him an “inadequate” actor and scholar, and an outright “failure.” But a distinctive, raspy voice, the character in his face that he once said had “taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there,” and that unparalleled talent for playing an emotionally complex tough guy — all fueled by an incredible drive — made him a Hollywood legend. And, as told in the new documentary streaming today, “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes,” five women in his life defined the trajectory of his career.
“Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” is chock full of never-before-seen photos and is told using Bogart’s own words from letters, diaries and historical interviews as the narrative backbone. But what makes the doc different than any other about Hollywood royalty is that it is framed around his mother and four wives, including his final marriage to screen icon Lauren Bacall.
“As we began developing the film, we quickly decided that the idea of telling Bogart’s story by interweaving the stories of the women in his life felt like a different angle, and one that really excited us,” director Kathryn Ferguson (“Nothing Compares”) says. “These were women who had been instrumental in his success and who all, bar his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, had been left as footnotes in history. We wanted to show the complexities of these relationships and were careful not to omit some of the more challenging details.”
Bogie’s mother, Maud Humphrey, was a suffragette and quite a famous — and well paid — illustrator from the turn of the 20th century into the 1920s, earning upwards of $50,000 a year during the Great Depression. Both she and Bogart’s father, a cardiopulmonary surgeon named Belmont DeForest Bogart, were anything but loving parents and showed no affection for their children, frequently belittling their son and his two sisters. “I was brought up very unsentimentally but very straightforwardly. A kiss, in our family, was an event,” Bogie once said.
“He had a lot of drive. He overcame all that, his mother and all that stuff. I mean, they kicked him out, and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll join the Navy,’” Bogart and Bacall’s son Stephen Bogart tells Variety. “Then he knew what he wanted to do, and he did it. He was a carefree kind of guy. Brooding, but carefree.”
Ferguson weaves together that consequential disassociation from his mother with his four marriages, all four of whom were actresses: Helen Menken, Mary Philips (who refused to abandon her Broadway career to move to Hollywood for Bogart), Mayo Methot (an alcoholic diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, together with whom they were known as “the Battling Bogarts”) and film great Lauren Bacall.
“Mayo had a lot to do with pushing him into doing film like ‘Casablanca,’” Stephen says, pointing out that up to that point, his father primarily played gangsters mainly because those were the kind of movies the studios were making at the time and, if under contract to one of them, actors didn’t have the luxury of saying “no.”
While Bogart’s marriage to Methot grew increasingly tumultuous, he began filming “To Have and Have Not,” where he met Bacall. She was 20 at the time; he was 45. It was her first film, but she had “it.” Director Howard Hawks told Bogart, “Every scene, she’s going to leave egg on your face.” Bogie was careful about starting anything romantic with her, saying, “If you want a real career, I will do everything I can for you… but I won’t marry you.” He had married three actresses before Bacall, and they all put their careers first. Bacall, on the other hand, promised him she’d put their marriage first. They tied the knot in 1945, and she made good on that promise. Always.
Evidenced in exquisite photos shared in “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes,” one of the most telling things about the couple is the way they looked at each other throughout their 12-year marriage, which ended only when Bogart died of esophageal cancer in 1957.
“She was a tough woman. She did not suffer fools,” Stephen says. “She loved us, but I think she was forever tortured by the fact that he died and left her with two young kids. You know? That was not the plan for her. … She lived like three lives, four lives. She won a couple of Tony Awards, and she wrote a bestselling book. She was impressive and imposing. But I think that she was still always … like in the doc, she said, ‘Well, I wanted Bogie to have children.’ And, she didn’t say, ‘I want to have children. I want to have him to be the father.’ And my father said, ‘I want you to have children, so you look at them and they’ll remind you of me.’ And I’m like, ‘Really?’”
In 2012, Stephen, who was only 8 years old when his father died, wrote a memoir titled “Bogart: In Search of My Father,” which he says, “looks back on my life, it’s not looking back on his.” He adds, “People wanna know, ‘Is there some big, huge thing that happened inside you that caused you to change your outlook on your father?’ No, it was just kind of neat finding out more about him. … I don’t really have any memories of him. I mean, you know, he died 67 years ago, and he was not around most of the time. He was working or he was on the boat. So about the time that we were gonna start to be parent and son it was the time he got sick and died. I mean, I remember snippets of being on the boat with him. And I remember he wouldn’t allow women on the boat because if women were on the boat, he couldn’t pee over the side. But he was a ‘very straight guy,’ as Kate Hepburn said. He was a very puritanical guy.”
When Universal Pictures Content Group started considering making a Bogart documentary, they approached Humphrey Bogart Estate CEO Robbert de Klerk, who picked up the phone and called Stephen, who “didn’t really see the added value of another talking heads documentary discussing my father’s movies,” he says. But what sold him was Ferguson’s idea where Bogie is the narrator and her choice “to tell Bogie’s life story from the perspective of the five key women in his life: his mother and his four wives. The end result is a truly insightful look at the personal life of the human being behind the icon.
Stephen adds, “Whether you are a big Bogart fan or whether you are only vaguely aware of the guy in the trench coat and the fedora, this film will educate you, entertain you, and change your perspective. The Bogart Estate is very proud of ‘Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes.’”
English (US) ·