Nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall met 44-year-old star Humphrey Bogart at the Warner Brothers studio in 1943 when the studio signed the young model to a contract. It was a brief meeting, with Bacall writing later that she found him "friendly." But when Howard Hawks told her that he wanted to cast her opposite either Bogart or Cary Grant in an upcoming movie, Bacall recalled thinking "Cary Grant -- terrific! Humphrey Bogart -- yuck!"
Hawks cast the pair in "To Have and Have Not" ... and, despite Bacall's initial misgivings, three weeks into filming they were an item. Bogart's marriage, already on the rocks, finished its collapse in the next year, and Bogart and Bacall were married on a friend's farm in Ohio. They honeymooned in charming Mystic, Connecticut.
Travelers to Mystic can stay in the very place Bogie and his new bride did. The Inn at Mystic, a Colonial revival home built in 1904 by Katherine Haley, widow of an owner of New York's famed Fulton Fish Market, offered the pair a picturesque retreat -- just as it does to many couples today.
The inn overlooks the Mystic Harbor and Long Island Sound on 15 acres of wooded hillside, and comes complete with a Victorian veranda, fireplaces and English gardens -- as perfect as a movie set for a love that was born on one.
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall | Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal | Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning | Ernest and Hadley Hemingway | Sam Baldwin and Annie Reed
© 1998 Cable News Network, Inc.
A Time Warner Company
All Rights Reserved.