Bogey’s Baby: From the Big Sleep to the Sopranos and More

Bogey and Baby
It wasn’t easy picking the first person to talk about for the “Legs” part of the Cigars and Legs updates. But someone who was married to Bogey has a distinct advantage in the running for that. This week I’m going to talk about Lauren Bacall, a successful actress, mother, and the last wife of Humphrey Bogart.

A few vitals:


Bacall, who will be eigthy in a few years, has had over seventy roles. During the 40s and 50s, she was in a few film noir movies or movies where she played a femme fatale — the Big Sleep, Dark Passage, Young Man with a Horn, and others. She even starred in a radio show with Bogart called Bold Venture. Her roles ranged, though, from the serious tear-jerkers, to film noir, to those 1950s comedy movies that are sometimes just downright weird when viewed now, and playing herself on the Sopranos.

She was married twice: first to Bogey, who called her Baby, for the last twelve years of his life, and then to Jason Robards from 1961-1969. Looking at the two men, I think we can guess at her type. From those marriages, she had three children: Stephen and Leslie Bogart and Sam Robards.

Throughout her career she’s been open about her relationships, marriages, and her politics, but at no point has she been obnoxious about it. She has her beliefs, she sticks to them: She’s campaigned for presidential candidates and she’s made stands about important issues. She and Bogey were very vocal about censorship during McCarthyism. That’s downright heroic given the hysteria of the times.

She’s the kind of woman Ron Cavanaugh would definitely have a poster of in his room — if Audrey would let him and he were a teenager in the ’50s, anyway.

And as a piano player, well, I’ll let this image speak for itself:
Bacall and some old politician

Images, though public domain, are from Wikipedia, as are a significant number of the random facts in my head (related and unrelated to this article).