Yet there’s no doubt that [Bogart] was enchanted with Methot [Mayo]. “He found her at a time of lethargy and loneliness,” Louise Brooks remarked. Mayo was everything [his wife] Mary had once been: playful, hard drinking, quick to laugh, devoted to him. When he fell in love, Bogie went all in. He and Mayo met at the Hatches’ house or at other friends’ houses or in studio dressing rooms, laughing like kids playing hooky from school.
—William J. Mann, Bogie & Bacall
We tend to think of superstars as people beyond feelings, and that tendency has gotten even worse with social media because people have added the horribly-wrong idea that stars are only there for our entertainment and can be treated as toys. They’re people, too, just as Bogart was when he met the woman who would be his third wife, Methot Mayo.
The beauty of this passage is less in how it is written, although that is nice, too, with Mann’s image of kids playing hooky (throughout the book Bogie & Bacall Mann shows glimmers of being well above average in writing for a biographer). Rather, it’s in the range of this paragraph. We go in the span of only a couple dozen words from “lethargy and loneliness” to “laughing like kids.”
Next week: Amy Hempel and one of the most powerful opening sentences ever.
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