Honestly, I don’t know much about Humphrey Bogart’s life. I know he was middle-aged when he met the teenaged Lauren Bacall, and that something sparked between them and they fell in love and lived happily ever after until his death. And that’s kind of a myth, the myth of Bogie and Bacall. God knows if it was really like that. Probably not, if this new book has any truth to it. The Daily Mail excerpted a new biography on Bogie called Making of a Legend, and apparently he was a compulsive womanizer – to the point where he f-cked a reported 1000 ladies. And the reason for such virility? Bogie allegedly feared that he was gay. Um…

On the silver screen he was tough, cool and sophisticated; in real-life, one of Hollywood’s legendary lovers. Sexually voracious and habitually unfaithful, Humphrey Bogart had three unhappy marriages before he met the love of his life, Lauren Bacall.

Now it has emerged that before marrying her in 1945, Bogie had bedded an estimated 1,000 women including Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich and Ingrid Bergman – but still feared he might be gay.

The extraordinary claim is made in a new biography of the actor, best known for the movie Casablanca. It suggests that during his second marriage to American stage and film actress Mary Philips, Bogart became riddled with uncertainty that made him impotent and question his sexuality – and even drove him to consider suicide.

The biography’s author Darwin Porter, a journalist who worked in Hollywood in the 1960s, says Philips insisted on openly maintaining her previous relationships, even spending the night before their marriage in 1928 with a friend of Bogart’s ‘as a farewell gift’.

According to the unflattering new book, Bogart told another friend: ‘If only Mary didn’t make it worse. When I can’t perform she mocks and ridicules me. I should never have married her.’

He is said to have confessed to another confidante to thoughts of killing himself. ‘But I never get beyond the thinking stage. I just can’t see myself taking a razor to my throat,’ he reportedly said.

The book, Humphrey Bogart, the Making of a Legend, due out next month, is based on unpublished memoirs and interviews with some of the actor’s contemporaries. It suggests his mental turmoil stemmed from his childhood. His father, who was a surgeon, beat him and split his lip, then stitched it up so badly that Bogart was left with a permanent lisp.

He ran away to Broadway, where during the 1920s he found fame and fortune – and began his incredible catalogue of sexual conquests.

‘When Broadway had around 120 theatres, there were four actresses for every available actor. No one has estimated this before, but it’s likely Bogart slept with 1000 women, mostly at this time,’ Porter said. Bogart married his first wife, actress Helen Menken, in 1926. Porter claims she had ‘a lot of lesbian affairs’ and he was ‘keeping score with her’ – and even that they were sometimes both chased by the same women.

Joan Blondell, an on-off girlfriend of Bogart’s, said: ‘The zipper was invented in 1926. Bogie demanded one be sewed into all of his pants – sex was a lot faster that way.’

Some of his seductions were brief affairs. At a party he was marched upstairs by Dietrich, it is claimed, and his first attempt to seduce a young Bette Davis was interrupted when her mother threw him out of their house, calling him ‘a slave to your genitalia’.

Bogart’s marriage to Menken lasted only a year. His second marriage ended in divorce in 1937. The next year he wed wife number three, Mayo Methot, who once stabbed him with a butcher’s knife. They were known as the ‘Battling Bogarts’ during their seven year marriage.

Bogart found what Hollywood magazines called ‘true love’ with Lauren Bacall on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1944, and made her his fourth and final wife. It was a happy relationship, although he conducted a long affair with his hairdresser, Verita Peterson. Bogart died of cancer aged 57 in 1957.

[From The Daily Mail]

He sounds like a tortured man. And I didn’t know his third wife stabbed him! Ah, the Golden Age of Hollywood. When you could stab your husband and it would be covered up by the powers that be. And I’m disappointed in Ingrid Bergman, if she really did sleep with him. I always wished that Ingrid and Cary Grant had run off together – but Ingrid and Bogie? Eh. Of course, I’m not one of those people who think Casablanca is the cat’s pajamas.

So… was Bogie gay? He probably didn’t know if he was. But I think he probably wasn’t – he was probably just bad in bed, you know? Just because a guy can’t be bothered in bed doesn’t mean he’s gay. It just means he’s a douche.