Lore and Remembrance: Bogie and Bacall in O.C.

At the lovely seaside Hotel Laguna in Laguna Beach, the best suite in the house goes by a famous Hollywood name: Bogart. For $155 to $200 per night, you can stay there, in the very hotel where on- and off-screen sweethearts Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, among other celebrities, are said to have frolicked in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

But if you’re looking to have it all exactly like Bogie and Bacall, you might want to consider this: Bacall says she has never even heard of the Hotel Laguna, let alone frequented its bar or guest rooms, as popular local lore would have us believe.

The legendary bombshell dropped that bombshell during a recent conversation in her Four Seasons Hotel suite here, where she’d come to promote her star turn in Barbra Streisand’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” opening countywide today (review, F1).

Told that the Bogart Suite is still the most expensive at the Hotel Laguna, Bacall responded: “The what?”

The Hotel Laguna.

“I’ve got a hot flash for them,” she said emphatically. “We never stayed at the Hotel Laguna.

“I didn’t even know there was a Hotel Laguna. I went to Laguna once, before we were married.” Then she leaned low and whispered, as though in confidence, “Never stayed there. Listen, people make things up all the time.”

A flier on the “History of the Hotel Laguna,” made available to its guests, notes that the couple “are said to have visited” the hotel. That information, according to Pat Cunningham who is head of special projects at the hotel, was excerpted from a 1981 article in a local periodical called This Week in Laguna.

Cunningham said the hotel has no signature, guest register entry or other record of either Bogart or Bacall having visited the hotel, but “as I understand it, they used to sail up and down the coast all the time, and they used to stop in Laguna and stay at the hotel.”

Meanwhile, the author of the 1981 article, Bill Farnham of Tustin, said he “can’t recall exact annotations of where [the Bogart-Bacall] information came from,” but much of his article was researched through the archives of the Santa Ana Library.

Apparently fearful of Oliver Stone-esque conspiracy theories, Farnham added that “there’s no hard, historical, yellowing document that I have that would clear this up,” and he noted that “these are, of course, legends that spring up and are probably largely self serving.”

A search of the Santa Ana and Laguna Beach libraries yielded several books on the history of Laguna Beach, but no mention of Bacall or Bogart in any of them.

Bacall does remember Newport Beach, though she hasn’t visited in many years. Parts of it she even remembers fondly.

“I had a lot of wonderful times there and, of course, I was introduced to the yachting world there--as a little Jewish girl from New York, I knew nuhhhthing about yachts,” she recalled.

Less flattering are her recollections of the close-knit circles of privileged Newport Beach society.

“I think my problem with Newport was, first of all, anti-Semitism, and, second of all, the terrible prejudice they had about anyone who worked. And the terrible prejudices they had against actors,” she said. “But I think there were a lot of nice people there. There were also people who used to say to Bogie, ‘You know, you’re a great guy, for an actor.’ Well, thank you . . . for nothing.

“When they realized he was a serious sailor, they had respect for him. But I mean, why do you have to go through that?”

In “By Myself” (Ballantine, 1978), the first of her two autobiographies, Bacall wrote rather lovingly about Adlai Stevenson and her work in support of his presidential campaign. A lifelong Democrat, she had more than a few problems with the conservative politics she encountered in Orange County.

“Oh, they’re sooooo right wing,” she said of the movers and shakers to whom Bogart introduced her in Newport Beach. “When we used to listen to what they had to say about Roosevelt? Terrifying.

“It’s a community in which I did not have any place, really. I mean, I didn’t agree with them about anything. There were some nice people, and people I had fun with; but boy, there were so many subjects that were taboo, and if I heard anyone say anything it would just make me cringe.”

Her reason for spending any time in the area at all was simple: Bacall loved Bogart and Bogart loved Newport Beach. Back when they first met, on the set of “To Have and Have Not”--Bacall’s movie debut in 1944--he (still married at the time to his third wife) was in the Coast Guard and his patrol boat would come ashore at Balboa, where the couple often would steal time for a rendezvous. Bogart also owned pleasure boats moored in Newport Harbor.

She remembers one night, in particular, when Newport Beach proved irresistible.

“One of the most romantic things I ever did,” she said with a laugh, “was drive two hours in the pouring rain down Highway 101 [from L.A.] to pick up Bogie at 4 in the morning when he was walking from Newport Beach to meet me, with a big sunflower in his buttonhole. . . . He just decided to walk. He wanted me to pick him up.”

The anecdote, mentioned in her autobiography, was retold here with clear delight and a deep, resonant, smoker’s laugh. That same look of delight reappeared when she recalled another Newport-based memory, involving boats of a slightly lesser class than Bogie might have raced.

“What was the most fun was the Flight of the Snowbirds, when all the little kids once a year would sail these little boats, these little snowbirds, with one little sail. That was fabulous,” she said. “I thought: ‘God, a child can grow up doing things like that?’

“It’s another world there.”

Contributing to the research for this report was Times correspondent Benjamin Epstein.