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Bogart: A Life in Hollywood By Jeffrey Meyers 369 pages |
From Booklist Veteran literary biographer Meyers (Frost and Hemingway are among his previous subjects) moves to the popular arts with this entertaining account of the life and work of Humphrey Bogart. The facts of Bogart's life are familiar to most movie fans--upper-class childhood, Broadway career as a pretty boy ("Tennis anyone?"), gangster roles in Hollywood, breakthrough in Casablanca, marriage to Lauren Bacall, death from cancer in his fifties--and while Meyers competently takes us through these events, he recognizes that a new life of Bogart must offer something more. |
As in his previous work, that something more comes not
so much from new revelations as from Meyers' ability to synthesize great masses of divergent material into a unified
whole that provides new perspective. This is especially true in terms of Bogart's life as an actor. Juxtaposing
Bogart the stage-trained, consummate craftsman against the popular image of Bogey the hard-boiled cult hero
("The world is two drinks behind"), Meyers carefully sorts image from reality and, most convincingly, shows how
the two merge to make the man. This is a Hollywood bio, though, so there's bound to be a little dishing: the
revelation, backed up by sources both named and unnamed, that Bacall was having an affair with Frank Sinatra
before her husband's death will provide grist for the talk-show mill. Though Meyers spends a bit too much
time in summarizing the plots of Bogart's films, his critical opinions are insightful, and he offers some
tantalizing insider nuggets, especially concerning Bogey's career-long battles with Jack Warner. All in all,
this is a fine reassessment of a "remarkably sane and honest" actor whose "built-in shit detector" remained
finely tuned throughout 25 years in Hollywood. Bill Ott. |