Bogart is not just a movie star biography. Perhaps no other book has ever provided a more graphic rendering of what life was like for a contract player when the big studios ruled Hollywood or has so dramatically captured what happened in the late 1940's as some of the biggest names in the industry pitted themselves against the excesses of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early days of the Cold War. Based on more than two hundred interviews with everyone from such famous co-workers as Katharine Hepburn and John Huston to behind-the-scenes publicists and makeup artists (even a bellman who served Bogart on one memorable night at the Beverly Hills Hotel), on a year and a half spent in the Warner Brothers archives at the University of Southern California poring over memos, letters, script reports, and contracts, and on Bogart's two-inch-thick FBI folder obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Bogart finally tells the full story of a Hollywood legend while re-creating the history of both a Hollywood and a political era.