A friend asked me in the comments (http://skepperson.com/) if there were any similarities between the chapters of the novel I was posting and the real story of Bogart and Bacall. She asking if a story element, “sympathy as an aphrodisiac”, came into play with Bacall’s feeling for Bogart. I thought I’d better post my response.
They were crazy about each other. She may have been sympathetic to the fact he was in a horrible and violent marriage (Mayo Methot came after him with a knife) – but he was a huge star at that point and he went out of his way to set her at ease and joke away her nerves on her first movie, “To Have and Have Not”. I think it was some months into shooting before the romance blossomed… Meta Carpenter Wilde (a script supervisor who wrote a memoir about her own relationship with the author, Faulkner) commented that no one saw it coming, but when they did fall for each they were very open about how they felt. Howard Hawks was terrible to them and lectured and berated Bacall until she broke down in tears. Bogart, when he found out what Hawks had done told the director in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t lay off he, Bogart, would walk and shut down production (at that point they were all working on “The Big Sleep”).
The newlyweds:
