Lauren Bacall will always be defined by Humphrey Bogart, said Matt Tyrnauer in Vanity Fair. At 86, Bacall is rarely recognized anymore, but when she is, people always ask about Bogart. “Young people ask me, ‘Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?’ Well, yes, I think I was.” She recalls seeing him on-screen in Casablanca in 1942, when she was 18. “[My aunt] Rosalie thought he was sexy. I couldn’t understand her thinking at all.” A year later, she was cast with Bogart in To Have and Have Not. “I thought, Humphrey Bogart—yuck!”
Though he was married and 25 years older, he wooed her during the filming, and she fell, hard; they were married the following year. “I was happy being his wife,” she says. “Those were the best years of my life.’’ Bogie, she says, “taught me everything about life and movies and people. I knew everybody because I was married to Bogie. That 25-year difference was the most fantastic thing for me.’’ After Bogie’s death, she went on to marry again, but she knows how she’ll be remembered. “My obit is going to be full of Bogart, I’m sure,” she says. “If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.”
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