Lauren Bacall, glamorous actress and wife of Humphrey Bogart, dies at 89

NEW YORK — Lauren Bacall, the slinky, sultry-voiced actress who created on-screen magic with Humphrey Bogart in "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep" and off-screen magic in one of Hollywood's most storied marriages, died Tuesday at age 89.

Bacall, whose long career brought two Tonys and a special Oscar, died in New York. The managing partner of the Humphrey Bogart Estate, Robbert J.F. de Klerk, said that Bacall died at home, but declined to give further details. Bacall's son Stephen Bogart confirmed his mother's death to de Klerk.

She was among the last of the old-fashioned Hollywood stars and her legend, and the legend of "Bogie and Bacall" — the hard-boiled couple who could fight and make up with the best of them — started almost from the moment she appeared on screen. A fashion model and bit-part New York actress before moving to Hollywood at 19, Bacall achieved immediate fame in 1944 with one scene in her first film, "To Have and Have Not."

Leaving Bogart's hotel room, she murmured:

"You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."

She was less than half Bogart's age, yet as wise and as jaded as him. Her sly glance, with chin down and eyes raised, added to her fame; she was nicknamed "The Look." Bogart and Bacall married amid headlines in 1945, and they co-starred in three more films, "The Big Sleep" (1946), "Dark Passage" (1947) and "Key Largo" (1948). Their marriage lasted until his death from cancer in 1957.

She appeared in movies for more than a half-century, but not until 1996 did she receive an Academy Award nomination — as supporting actress for her role as Barbra Streisand's mother in "The Mirror Has Two Faces." Although a sentimental favorite, she lost to Juliette Binoche for her performance in "The English Patient."

She finally got a statuette in November 2009 when she was presented with a special Oscar at the movie academy's new Governors Awards gala.

"The thought when I get home that I'm going to have a two-legged man in my room is so exciting," she quipped.

Bacall was always a star. With her lanky figure and flowing blonde hair, she was seemingly born for checked suits and silk dresses. On television talk shows, she exhibited a persona that paralleled her screen appearances: She was frank, even blunt, with an undertone of sardonic humor, all of which she demonstrated in her best-selling 1979 autobiography, "By Myself," which beat out works by William Saroyan among others for the National Book Award. (She published an updated version in 2005, "By Myself and Then Some," noting that as she ages, "I don't feel that different. But I sure as hell am.")

When her movie career faded, she returned to the theater. She starred in the hit comedy "Cactus Flower" and stepped lively in "Applause," a musical version of the classic movie "All About Eve" that brought her first Tony in 1970.

She got the second Tony in 1981 for "Woman of the Year," based on a film that starred her idol, Katharine Hepburn. She enjoyed another triumph in London with "Sweet Bird of Youth" in 1985.

She was ever protective of the Bogart legacy, lashing out at those who tried to profit from his image. In 1997, she appeared at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood for ceremonies launching the U.S. Postal Service's Humphrey Bogart stamp.

When the American Film Institute compiled its list of screen legends in 1999, Bacall ranked No. 20 on the roster of 25 actresses. Bogart topped the list of actors.

Humphrey Bogart Biography

Actor Humphrey Bogart became a legend for his roles in 1940s-era films like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and To Have and Have Not.

Synopsis

Humphrey Bogart was born on December 25, 1899, in New York City. He began his career on Broadway in the 1920s. This led to B-movie parts in 1930s Hollywood. Bogart's turning point came in the 1940s, with his legendary roles in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. He married several times throughout his life, with his last wife being actress Lauren Bacall. He died in 1957 at the age of 57 to esophageal cancer.

Childhood

Hailed by many as the greatest male movie star of all time, Humphrey Bogart was born in New York on December 25, 1899. Bogart, whose surname comes from the Dutch for "keeper of an orchard," was born into a wealthy and prominent New York family, descended directly from New York's first Dutch colonial settlers. His father, Belmont DeForest Bogart, was a respected and socially prominent heart surgeon. His mother, Maud Humphrey, was an accomplished painter and artistic director of The Delineator, a woman's fashion magazine. One of her drawings of Humphrey Bogart as a baby was used in a national advertising campaign for Mellin's baby food and briefly turned the infant Bogart into a national sensation.

Bogart later recalled, "There was a period in American history when you couldn't pick up a goddamned magazine without seeing my kisser in it." Although she would paint young Humphrey many times throughout his childhood, Maud Bogart was by all accounts an intense, work-obsessed woman who was never especially close to or fond of her son. As Bogart himself put it, "If, when I was grown up, I [had] sent my mother one of those Mother's Day telegrams or said it with flowers, she would have returned the wire and flowers to me, collect."

The Bogarts owned a summer retreat on Canandaigua Lake, one of the most beautiful of the "finger lakes" in upstate New York, and it was there that Bogart passed his happiest days as a child. He spent his summers at Canandaigua playing chess and sailing, both lifelong hobbies that occasionally bordered on obsessions. Bogart attended the prestigious and socially elite Trinity School in New York City, where he was a disinterested and poor student.

His bad grades, his effeminate name, the overly ceremonial clothes his mother made him wear and his ineptitude for sports made Bogart the frequent butt of his classmates' jokes. One recalled, "Bogart never came out for anything. He wasn't a very good student ... He added up to nothing in our class."

Despite his poor performance in school, in 1917 Bogart's parents decided to send him to Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts—the rigorous and storied private boarding school where John Adams had once served as headmaster. Predictably, Bogart failed to meet the school's high academic standards and was expelled in May of the next year.

Enlisted Life

Young, restless and unsure what to make of his life, Bogart enlisted in the United States Navy, only weeks after his dismissal from school, to fight in World War I. He recalled his thinking at the time: "War was great stuff. Paris! French girls! Hot damn! ... The war was a big joke. Death? What does death mean to a kid of 17?" Perhaps the most notable occurrence of Humphrey's naval service was a scar he acquired above the right corner of his upper lip that would later become the defining feature of his tough guy appearance.

Although accounts vary, the most widely accepted story is that Bogart received the scar while escorting a handcuffed prisoner. The prisoner asked him for a cigarette, and when Humphrey reached into his pocket for a match, the prisoner smashed him in the face with his handcuffs and attempted, unsuccessfully, to flee.

Bogart was honorably discharged from the navy in 1919 and once again faced the question of what to make of his life. A year later, he met a stage actress named Alice Brady who landed him a job as the company manger of a touring production of The Ruined Lady.

A year later, in 1921, he made his stage debut as a Japanese waiter in a production of a play called Drifting. Bogart's one line, uttered in his best attempt at a Japanese accent, was "Drinks for my lady and for her most honored guests." Despite his son's miniscule role, upon seeing the show for the first time Bogart's father leaned over and whispered to the person next to him, "The boy's good, isn't he?"

Hollywood Career

That little taste of life on stage was enough for Bogart to resolve to become an actor, and for more than a decade he struggled to get his acting career off the ground, landing only minor roles in shows such as Nerves and The Skyrocket. Then, in 1934, Bogart finally delivered his breakthrough performance in Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest. He portrayed Duke Mantee, an escaped killer, and so fully embodied the role of the villain—stooped posture, dangling hands, dead stare—that the audience reportedly let out a gasp of horror the first time he walked on stage.

After delivering an equally riveting performance in the film adaptation of The Petrified Forest two years later, Bogart carved out a niche as one of Hollywood's go-to actors to play criminals. His early gangster and crime films included The Great O'Malley (1937), Dead End (1937), Crime School (1938) and King of the Underworld (1939).

Bogart felt limited playing such similar roles in film after film. He managed to break free from typecasting with his portrayal of the smooth, cunning and honorable private eye Sam Spade in the 1941 film noir masterpiece The Maltese Falcon. As it turned out, the film allowed Bogart to prove his versatility as an actor just in time to be cast in the leading role in the 1942 war romance Casablanca. Bogart played Rick Blaine, an American expatriate struggling to rekindle his relationship with his Norwegian lover (Ingrid Bergman) in the midst of World War II. Casablanca won three Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director) and is now ranked among the greatest films of all time. Also one of the most quotable films of all time, Casablanca ends with the unforgettable words, spoken by Bogart, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

One of Hollywood's most popular actors in the wake of Casablanca, Bogart continued on to a long and distinguished Hollywood career that included over 80 films. His most celebrated performance after Casablanca came in the 1951 film The African Queen, in which he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn and for which he won his first and only Academy Award for Best Actor. Bogart said after receiving the award, "The best way to survive an Oscar is to never try to win another one. You've seen what happens to some Oscar winners. They spend the rest of their lives turning down scripts while searching for the great role to win another one. Hell, I hope I'm never even nominated again. It's meat-and-potato roles for me from now on." His most notable later films included The Caine Mutiny (1954), Sabrina (1954) and The Harder They Fall(1956).

Final Years

In 1956, while still in the prime of his career, Bogart was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Surgery failed to remove the cancerous growth, and Bogart passed away on January 14, 1957. He was 57 years old.

While Humphrey Bogart was already one of the top movie stars in the country at the time of his death, his acclaim has grown enormously in the decades since his passing. Called "the Bogart Boom" in reference to the title of a series of Playboy articles chronicling the phenomenon, during the 1960s Bogart's films became the objects of superlative critical praise and his personality the object of cultish adulation. Both because of and despite his cavalierly anti-Hollywood persona, Bogart remains timelessly cool in a way few celebrities have ever been able to achieve.

In 1997, Entertainment Weekly named him "the number one movie legend of all time"; in 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the greatest male movie star of all time. Bogart's friend and biographer, Nathaniel Benchley, summed up the actor's life: "[Bogart] achieved class through his integrity and his devotion to what he thought was right. He believed in being direct, simple, and honest, all on his own terms, and this ruffled some people and endeared him to others."

Personal Life

Humphrey Bogart was married four times during his life. He married his first wife, Helen Menken, an actress 10 years his senior, in 1926. They divorced after less than a year of marriage, and in 1928 Bogart married another actress, Mary Philips. Their marriage also dissolved when Bogart made the move from New York to Hollywood, and in 1938 Bogart married his third wife, Mayo Methot.

Theirs was a tumultuous and fiery union—they were known in Hollywood as the "Battling Bogarts"—until they too divorced in 1945. Less than two weeks after his divorce from Methot, Bogart married Betty Perske, better known as Lauren Bacall, his young and extraordinarily beautiful costar in To Have and Have Not. They had two children together, a son Stephen and a daughter Leslie. Bogart and Bacall remained together until his death.

He’s finally comfortable being Bogart’s son

Stephen Bogart jokes that he looks like his father from the nose up. Strictly speaking, this is untrue — you could pick Humphrey Bogart’s kid out of a lineup.

But Stephen Humphrey Bogart is 64 years old, which means he’s seven years older than his father was when he died of cancer in 1957, which means he’s nobody’s kid anymore. The realization that he had exceeded his own father’s life span came accompanied by a slight jolt.

“He had a short sprint,” is the way Bogart refers to his father’s early demise. “He died 30 days after his 57th birthday.”

Stephen Bogart is the host of a new WXEL-Channel 42 show being filmed here entitled “Bogart at the Movies.” The title leads you to expect a series of shows devoted to Humphrey Bogart movies, but actually it’s a movie review show in the style of Siskel without Ebert, but with Steve Bogart, whose expertise about the movies has to be categorized as genetic — not only was his father Humphrey Bogart, his mother is Lauren Bacall.

At the time of his father’s death, Stephen Bogart was eight years old, his sister Leslie was five, and they were being raised in the more or less traditional Hollywood manner — by nannies. Speaking of nannies, Bogart’s dropped dead on the tarmac as his parents were taking off to make “The African Queen.” When they landed in London, his mother called the family doctor and got another nanny. “That’s the way things were done at that time,” says Bogart.

“My father was older, and he was set in his ways. He’d go to work, and then he wanted to be with his fourth wife, have a drink and dinner. By then, it was time for me to go to bed. On the weekends, he’d go on his boat. Babies were just not his thing. I believe we would have gotten closer as he grew older.”

It was on the boat, named “Santana,” that Bogart was most alive. “It was a beautiful yawl, and he sailed it himself. He was a real sailor; I’ve got cups that he won for racing. Women weren’t allowed; he said if women were around you couldn’t pee over the side.”

Over the years, Steve Bogart got the most accurate idea of his father not from his mother, but from old friends — Sam Jaffe, his father’s agent, Joe Hyams, a columnist and drinking buddy. “My mother absolutely idealized him. She was 25 years younger, and it’s hard to fall in love with someone that much older without idealizing them.”

Humphrey Bogart took a year to die of throat cancer — a time when he grew even more distant from his children. “He didn’t want us to see him like that. I think it was a mistake on his part, but who are you to tell someone who’s dying what they should do? Who knew from closure in 1957?”

After her husband’s death, Lauren Bacall headed for London, then New York. She starred on Broadway — “Goodbye Charlie,” “Cactus Flower,” “Applause” — and married Jason Robards Jr. All that meant that Steve “didn’t grow up in the movie business; I grew up in the theater business.” While a new nanny took care of Bogart’s half-brother Sam, “my sister and I were on our own.”

Life in Beverly Hills and Holmby Hills is completely insulated; life in New York is the complete reverse, even if you’re living at the Dakota — when Bogart was ten, he got held up on 73rd Street by a kid with a knife who wanted his baseball glove. “New York taught me how to get along. L.A. is great for certain things, but Beverly Hills is not the real world. I actively tried to get away from that.”

Bacall’s marriage to Robards didn’t last, as he was in his drinking years. When Robards was sober, he was a good guy; when he was drunk, Bogart says that he could be “caustic, although I wouldn’t say he was a mean drunk. But he was a great actor.”

Robards and Bacall divorced in 1969, but the kids stayed close; Bogart had Christmas dinner last year with Jason Robards III.

Bogart gave the family business a half-hearted try in high school, but he quickly realized the gift had not been passed on - he was stiff and self-conscious, an instinctively terrible actor.

“I wanted to stay out of the limelight. I had a kid when I was 21, but emotionally I was a lot younger than 21. Looking back, I ran away from who I was. I never gave anybody my last name unless I had to; I wanted people to like or dislike me for who I was. I never hung around with movie stars. All my friends are real people, not that movie people aren’t real, but you know what I mean. Did my mother like it? No.”

All that began to change in 1987, when Bacall gave her children the rights to their father’s name and likeness. At that point, Stephen Bogart began to gingerly edge into the Bogart business. He wrote a memoir about his father, while licensing and constant TV and cable re-runs have kept their father’s name and appeal alive and provided his children with income.

That was a good thing, because Humphrey Bogart was not a great businessman — he tended to work for straight salary instead of a percentage, which means no royalty stream for his estate. Even though there was some licensing money coming in, Stephen Bogart always kept working at his chosen profession — TV news producer.

He was a journeyman — ESPN, MSNBC, Court TV, WPIX in Tampa, the CBS Early Show. Some of it was fun, some of it wasn’t. “Producing a morning show is the hardest job in television. Especially with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Clayson.” Married twice, with three children — one in law school at the University of Miami, another at FAU — Bogart lives in Naples quite happily with a girlfriend he’s known for 30 years. His sister Leslie is a nurse and yoga instructor, and his mother is now the longest living resident of The Dakota.

He’s comfortable talking about himself and his family; he’s never been in therapy, so it’s probable that all the conversation, not to mention representing the family at various functions, have sanded off the rough edges of discontent. “Once I started to do it, I realized how grateful people are.”

Bill Scott is executive vice president at WXEL and has known Bogart for more than 30 years.“What strikes me is how little he’s changed from when we worked together in 1981,” says Scott. “If I see anything that might fall into the ‘changed’ category I guess it would be that he seems more introspective … more ‘I know who I am and I am comfortable with it.’ He still has a terrific sense of humor, the same calm approach to things.

“One might expect that the son of Hollywood legends, surrounded by great talents and powerful egos, would have a personality that might suggest an entitled life, with expectations of special treatment, or that he would just shut down, like a turtle pulling in his head. Neither one of these is Steve. The phrase ‘he wears well’ fits.”

WXEL and Bogart hope the movie review show will get nationally syndicated. It is bumptious fun, although like anybody without performing talent, Bogart doesn’t quite know what to do with his hands. He’s not afraid to throw a few elbows — “I don’t think there’s any movie that Peter Travers doesn’t like,” he says about the reflexively enthusiastic critic for “Rolling Stone.”

Bogart’s favorite movie from last year was “Django Unchained,” and he had problems with “Les Miserables”: “They needed singers who could act rather than actors who could sing.

“Reviewing movies isn’t heavy lifting. I have a pedigree, I have some insights. I think I can add something. I’m not James Lipton - I’m not learned in that way. Maybe it plays to my strength; I was a horrible actor because I couldn’t be anyone but myself. Now I can be myself.”

Bogart keeps busy; besides the TV show, he has his real estate license and has sold a few houses, and there’s a Humphrey Bogart Festival that will be starting in Key Largo in May. He’s perfectly content with what he has and who he is — “This is my lineage. I don’t need to be anonymous anymore.”

If the defensiveness about his parents has been eroded by the years, in some generalized way the reality of his father is still somehow mysterious to him, perhaps because there were so many conversations they never had. If he could ask his father one question, what would it be?

“Did I do OK? I haven’t been to jail yet. My kids are all upstanding citizens. Yeah, I’d ask him if I did OK.”

Lauren Bacall's remarkably honest account of Humphrey Bogart's death

More than 35 years before her death at 89, Lauren Bacall published her first autobiography,By Myself, in which she reminisced about her storied Hollywood career, her romantic relationships, and her three children. That includes, of course, the story of her relationship with To Have and to Have Not co-star Humphrey Bogart, who eventually became her first husband.

Bacall once famously said, "The only thing that I am not pleased about is when people only talk about 'Bogie' to me as though I had no other life at all." And you can see why — her career was multilayered, and she knew great success in Hollywood and on Broadway without her husband's involvement. But it's also true that Bacall's romance with Bogart wasn't the Hollywood story people generally imagine — and her account of the real version gives a strong impression of her indomitable courage and honesty.

You probably have an idea of what Humphrey Bogart was like. To this day, his carefully constructed persona is perpetuated in films, promotional material, publicity, and commentary: an active, commanding, confident, cynical, and sexually compelling (albeit aloof) tough guy. ButBacall challenges this "tough guy" representation in her autobiography, offering a graphic account of both their courtship and her husband’s illness. Her reflections allow a glimpse into Bogart's full humanity — and hers.

In her memoir, Bacall recalls her connection with Bogart as "the headiest romance imaginable."

Throughout their courtship, Bacall describes Bogart as shy, gentle, vulnerable, and open, confiding in her about his three failed marriages. During their small wedding in Ohio, "tears streamed down [Bogart's] face." According to Bacall, this outburst of emotion was Bogart's reaction to hearing the words of the wedding ceremony and finally "realizing what they meant — what they should mean."

It was more than a decade (and several co-starred films) later that Bogart's health began to decline. As Bacall tells it, her husband reluctantly visited the internist of fellow screen star Greer Garson in February of 1956. Bogart's cough, no doubt from years and years of smoking, sounded worse than usual, and "sometimes his throat burned when he drank orange juice."

An initial sputum test revealed an inflamed esophagus, and a couple of weeks later, a bronchoscopy and another sputum test revealed irregular, malignant cells in Bogart's esophageal tissue. The star would require surgery immediately, and his current production schedule would have to be postponed while he recuperated.
Unfortunately, Bogart would never recover. Almost a year later, on January 15, 1957, Humphrey Bogart died of throat cancer at the age of 58.

From the beginning of Bacall's account of her husband’s illness, the reader is asked to pay special attention to Bogart's physical body — an unexpected move that dispels the aura of one of Hollywood's biggest stars.
Scholar Richard Dyer has talked at length about how a star's body provides the "raw material" from which his or her image is ultimately fashioned: Marilyn Monroe's body represents sexuality, Paul Robeson's "the nobility of the black race," and Judy Garland's "her problems and defiance of them."

We might add to this list Humphrey Bogart's body, which symbolizes toughness and a hardened masculinity. As scholar Virginia Wright Wexman wrote, Bogart's swarthy complexion, heavy facial features, wiry build, and "harsh, nasally voice" made him an ideal choice for all of the tough-guy roles he played.

But Bacall describes Bogart otherwise.
As she recalls, his

surgeons planned to "remove his esophagus and shift the stomach around so they could attach it to the tab that was left." When this procedure was explained to her in full, the young wife and mother of two had no idea that her husband's surgery would last nine and a half hours.

"How could a body take that much?" she asks.
"Poor baby — all those tubes, those bottles — what was the body under the blanket like?" Bacall recalls that her husband's arm and hand were "swollen to four times their normal size" and a "terrible black thing [was placed] in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue."
As she observed him, "he looked so unlike Bogie — still mercifully unconscious… enclosed in another world, protected not by me, but by those raised bedsides, with those bottles and tubes sustaining life."

Her description does something that virtually no other media texts do: positions Bogart as fragile and vulnerable.

Bacall goes on to reminisce about all the friends and family who stopped by during that dreadful year, which she claimed at age 80, "will be with [her] for the rest of [her] life."

Before Bogart’s illness, people frequently visited and phoned the Bogart-Bacall household. But after nitrogen mustard treatments significantly weakened the star, Bacall "made some ground rules" and began to monitor guests, slowing down the traffic considerably.

Consequently, those who had not seen Bogart in a while were utterly shocked at the star's physical appearance when they were allowed to visit him. One friend, Bacall says, "gasped" when she entered the room. "She couldn't help it," the author apologizes to the reader; "she was so shocked at the sight of that figure in the bed."

During a later visit by producer Sam Goldwyn and director William Wyler, Bogart called the nurse for a shot of morphine, "pulled up one pajama leg [and exposed] his pathetic frail limb." Goldwyn, the author reports, was "stunned to see the thinness of that leg… he slowly turned away."

Bacall did not have to be so candid about this particular part of her life. Fellow stars like Katharine Hepburn and June Allyson also dealt with illnesses of their significant others, Spencer Tracy and Dick Powell. But their autobiographies reduce these events to a couple of pages, and virtually no details are disclosed. As such, the star images of Tracy and Powell remain mostly intact.

But Bacall does give us this information. Why? Perhaps she wanted the reader to see Bogart as she did: a man with "so many, many layers that, as well as I knew him, I'm sure I never uncovered them all." Bacall's decision to publish the grim, painful details about this portion of her life was both wise and brave. For those who know the real story, Bogart and Bacall's romance isn't just one of Hollywood's most legendary — it's one of Hollywood's most human.

Clandestine mistress of Bogart dies

The Casablanca star carried on a 17-year affair with the woman known as 'Bacall's worst nightmare'

Verita Bouvaire Thompson, the hard-drinking mistress and long-time companion of Humphrey Bogart who described herself as 'Bacall's worst nightmare', has died aged 89.

Thompson died of natural causes in New Orleans, the city she had made her home in the 1990s. Her 17-year affair with Bogart first came to light in 1982 in her book Bogie and Me: A Love Story, a memoir in which she described the close relationship the couple struck up two years before the star met his famous fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, on the set of the 1944 film To Have and Have Not

Between 1950 and 1956 Thompson travelled with Bogart, ostensibly as his personal secretary, bartender and hairdresser. A hopeful starlet who had spent most of her youth in Mexico, Thompson had trained in wig-making and then established herself in Hollywood as an expert in the preparation of toupees, working for stars such as George Raft, Ray Milland and Gary Cooper. When she travelled with Bogart, she always carried a suitcase packed with 10 hairpieces, including a 'cocktail wig' and a 'shaggy wig'. The actor, Thompson once recalled, was practically bald but hated wearing a toupee. 'I used to say: "You look like hell without it, like an old man". '

She first met Bogart at a party after shooting finished on his 1942 classic,Casablanca. 'Bogie didn't like to dance, but, honey, we danced the night away and from that day on we were lovers,' she told an interviewer in 1998.

Bogart made a habit of introducing her in company as his 'mistress', explaining to Thompson later that he believed the joke would ensure suspicious minds were thrown off the scent. The two shared a passion for sailing and drinking that repeatedly left his wife Bacall stranded, according to Jeffrey Meyers's biography Bogart: A Life in Hollywood.

This weekend the secret that lay behind one of the most iconic celebrity marriages of all time was confirmed once more by Thompson's boyfriend Dean Shapiro, 58, a New Orleans writer. 'It's hard for people to accept that the Bogie and Bacall myth wasn't really what it was,' he said. 'They were supposed to be this great Hollywood couple, but Bogie was carrying on with Verita on the side.' She could trade cuss word for cuss word and shot for shot with him. She liked to drink, he liked to drink. They did a lot of crazy things together.'

When the affair began, Bogart was still unhappily married to actress Mayo Methot and Thompson to her first husband, Robert Peterson.

In 1945 Bogart married Bacall, a 20-year-old former New York model, 12 days after his divorce from Methot had come through. The couple went on to have two children, Stephen and Leslie, a girl named after the British actor and friend of Bogart, Leslie Howard.

Nevertheless the clandestine affair with Thompson continued until her second marriage to cinematographer Walter Thompson in 1955. Bogart died in 1957 and Thompson has claimed that the actor called her from his deathbed.

'He asked me to spend the weekend on his boat to see everything was all right. When I got there, I discovered the boat had been painted. I think he knew he was going to die and the boat had to look her best in order to be sold. I called him and he said: "Don't drink all my scotch, I'll be down there soon." '

After the actor's death, Thompson opened Verita's La Cantina, a Mexican restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. She later moved to Natchez, Mississippi, in the late 1980s, before opening a piano bar in New Orleans called Bogie and Me.

Following Hurricane Katrina, Thompson was one of those who refused to leave her home. She commented: 'Lauren Bacall failed to chase me out of Hollywood; Katrina won't force me out of New Orleans.'

Born in 1918 in Arizona, she was raised by her grandparents and was prompted to head for Hollywood after being runner-up in the 1935 Miss Arizona Pageant. The one-time custodian of two of Bogie's big secrets, his baldness and his marital infidelity, Thompson is said to have slept with one of his toupees under her pillow.