Plum library program focuses on Bogart, Bacall

Among the true-life love stories that emerged from Hollywood was the unlikely pairing of a married actor in his mid-40s with a teenager making her first movie.

Yet Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall worked as a couple.

“Even though their ages were so different and their time together was really so short, it was so influential to both of them,” Plum resident Melanie Novak said. “And they both considered it the best part of their life, when they were together.”

Novak, a blog writer and film historian, will present “Bogart and Bacall … the Lives and Films of Hollywood’s Greatest Romances” during an Author’s Arena program at 6:30 p.m. July 26 at Plum Borough Community Library. Registration is required.

Her previous talk at the library, in April, focused on movies that were made prior to the adoption of Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines in the mid-1930s.

In 1943, Bogart began work on “To Have and Have Not” with a 19-year-old female lead whose face director Howard Hawks had seen on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. He subsequently signed Lauren Bacall, born Betty Joan Perske, to a personal contract.

“He had her hair made over the way he wanted. He had her clothes made over. He taught her how he wanted her to talk and how he wanted her to act. And of course, he assumed that they would have an affair,” Novak said.

“Then they start filming, and it’s apparent that she and Bogart are falling in love. And it just drove Howard nuts. This was his perfect creation, and it turned out she had this kind of stubborn mind of her own. And what she wanted was Humphrey Bogart.”

The generation-older object of her affection was in the midst of his third marriage, none of them at all successful, according to Novak.

“He was kind of old school. He wanted a wife who was going to put him first. He wanted his career to be first, and he wanted to be her provider,” she said. “He married these two theater actresses who were very successful, and they wanted to put their careers first.”

Bogart’s third wife — Mayo Methot, yet another actress — at various times reportedly stabbed Bogart in the shoulder and threatened to shoot him. He divorced her and then wed Bacall on May 21, 1945.

Their marriage lasted, happily by all indications, until his Jan. 14, 1957, death from esophageal cancer.

“She really surprised him by putting him first,” Novak said. “If you go back through her filmography, there’s not a lot there. She was always traveling with him and taking care of the kids. They had a truly good marriage, to the detriment of her career, really. But she never regretted it.”

Beyond Bogart and Bacall, Novak continues to delve into films from the roughly three-decade period for which her blog is named: the Golden Age of Hollywood.

“Ever since I was a kid, I just sort of fell in love with them,” she said. “Watching the movies is one thing. Then as I got older, I just got obsessed with reading the biographies, reading about the lives of all these stars. And that was another thing I wanted to kind of incorporate with the posts on the blog, not just straight movie reviews, but movie reviews plus some history.”

She started concentrating more extensively on her blog at the onset of the covid-19 pandemic

“I thought, I’ve got time on my hands. We’re not going anywhere. It sort of revived that love of old movies,” she said. “The news was so depressing and so scary in the beginning. I would turn it off, and I’d be watching ‘Tarzan’ or something just totally out of the real world.”

When someone asks her for Golden Age-type recommendations, she usually gives three titles: “The Lady Eve” (1941), directed by Preston Sturges and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda; Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954), featuring James Stewart and Grace Kelly; and Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca” (1942), directed by Michael Curtiz.

“If you don’t like any of those films,” Novak said, “then this is not for you.”

To read her blog, visit melanienovak.com/golden-age-of-hollywood. To register for the Author’s Arena program, visit plumlibrary.org and click Online Program Registration.