In the spring of 1945, Humphrey Bogart left Sluggy Hollow – his chaotic home on Shoreham Drive with Mayo Methot – and returned to the Garden of Allah. It had been a decade since he last lived there. Then, he was a journeyman actor with Broadway credentials and a string of gangster roles. Now, at 44, he was a Hollywood titan, fresh off Casablanca, and deeply in love with his 20-year-old co-star from To Have and To Have Not, Lauren Bacall.
His marriage to Mayo had long since curdled into tabloid spectacle. Their home earned its nickname from Bogart’s mocking epithet for his wife – “Sluggy” – a nod to her combative drunkenness. The dog was named Sluggy. His boat was Sluggy. Their neighbors were serenaded nightly by the sound of breaking glass, shouted curses, and occasional gunfire. Dorothy Parker, a frequent guest, once quipped, “Their neighbors were lulled to sleep by the sounds of breaking china and crashing glass.” One night, gunshots rang out upstairs. Bogart, unfazed, told his guests, “Forget it. It’s just Mayo playing with her gun.”
She once fired a .45 into his suitcase while he hid in the bathroom. Another time, she stabbed him in the back with a kitchen knife, convinced he was having an affair with Ingrid Bergman. The studio dispatched a doctor. As he stitched Bogart up, the actor shrugged, “Ain’t she a pistol?”
Despite the violence, Bogart often treated their battles with gallows humor. “I love a good fight,” he said. “So does Mayo. We have some first-rate battles.” Howard Hawks, his director and confidant, once asked if Bogart could get an erection without first fighting with Mayo.
But the cycle of abuse and reconciliation wore thin. Bogart’s career, once stalled in B-pictures, had surged. They Drive by Night and High Sierra gave him depth. The Maltese Falcon made him iconic. Casablanca made him immortal. And then came Bacall.
Introduced by Hawks in April 1944, Bacall was 19, poised, and electric. Their off-screen romance ignited quickly. The chemistry was undeniable. Hollywood noticed. So did Mayo. She spiraled. Her drinking worsened. Her paranoia sharpened. She called Bacall a “Jewish bitch” in a drunken phone call and demanded to know who would wash Bogart’s socks.
Warners saw gold in Bogart and Bacall’s pairing and cast them again in The Big Sleep. Mayo saw doom. Bogart moved out, then back in, then out again. On Christmas Day 1944 – his 45th birthday – he took Bacall to a party at Mark Hellinger’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Bugsy Siegel and Allen Smiley were there, soft-spoken and polite. Bacall was stunned to learn they were underworld figures.
After one final attempt to salvage his marriage, Bogart left Sluggy Hollow for good. In March 1945, he returned to the Garden of Allah. He and Bacall made plans to marry. She met his circle – Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, the Algonquin transplants. “They laughed a lot, and their hands never held an empty glass,” Bacall recalled. “It did cross my mind that the reason they laughed so much was that they drank.”
They married on May 21 at a farm in Ohio owned by Louis Bromfield, an early Garden resident. Back in Los Angeles, Parker and Benchley threw them a party with champagne and cake. They moved into a honeymoon house on North Kings Road, then to Benedict Canyon, and finally to Holmby Hills. They made four films together and had two children. Bogart died of cancer in 1957 at age 57. Mayo Methot died alone in 1951, still wealthy but forgotten. Bacall lived into her nineties, working steadily and writing two memoirs.