The ground-state energy of the charged Bose gas is calculated by the pair-correlation variational method of Girardeau and Arnowitt. The method is exact in the high-density limit (${r}_{s}\ensuremath{\ll}1$) and provides a variational extrapolation to intermediate densities. The leading terms of the high-density expansion, obtained by iteration of the variational integral equation, are ${u}_{0}=\ensuremath{-}0.804{{r}_{s}}^{\ensuremath{-}\frac{3}{4}}\ensuremath{-}(\frac{1}{8})\mathrm{ln}{r}_{s}+O(1)$, where ${u}_{0}$ is the ground-state energy per particle in Rydbergs and ${r}_{s}$ is the ratio of the mean interparticle spacing to the Bohr radius. The first term was obtained previously by Foldy, but the logarithmic term is new; it is related to screening of the long-range correlations at a distance ${r}_{0}\ensuremath{\sim}{{r}_{s}}^{\ensuremath{-}\frac{1}{2}}{\ensuremath{\rho}}^{\ensuremath{-}\frac{1}{3}}$, in analogy with the logarithmic term in the correlation energy of the electron gas. Results of numerical solutions for the intermediate-density region are presented, ranging up to ${r}_{s}=10$. On the basis of a comparison with the energy calculated from the known low-density expansion, it is estimated that the transition into Wigner's electron crystal (here a boson crystal) should occur at ${r}_{s}\ensuremath{\sim}5$.