Lauren Bacall

'I’ll never forget his kindness, but when Bogie died I had to live — to continue my career’: the late Lauren Bacall on her great love, Derek Bogart.

It wasn’t an official interview. Just a meeting in Haugesund, Norway, in 2010, where Lauren Bacall, then in her mid-eighties, was shooting a movie called Wide Blue Yonder with Brian Cox. I was warned she was a testy old girl who wouldn’t brook too many questions about her life with Bogie, the love of her life.

She had, the publicist said, done all that several hundred times before and continued to work, both on stage and on screen, for many years since his death. So please ask her about that.

So I kept clear of all that but, surprisingly, was steered into it again by Bacall herself. She was lucky, she said, to have started out in To Have and Have Not as an inexperienced and terrified ingènue, starring with Bogart. He had saved her many times when she was shaking with fear, simply by caring enough to calm her down. When he saw her screen test, he told her: “We’ll have a lot of fun together.” And so it proved.

“It isn’t surprising that I fell for him, even though he was much older than me. What was amazing was that he fell for me, not in an improper way but like a man who had finally found a kind of soulmate. We tried to keep it all secret because Howard Hawks, whose wife had got me the part, didn’t like the idea of it at all.”

In fact, he tried to pair her off with Clark Gable instead. But it didn’t work and Bogart finally got his divorce from Mayo Methot, whose jealousy was inflamed by her drink problem, and Slim and Steve (they adopted in real life their character names from the film that brought them together) were married in May 1945. She was 20 and he was 45. You can see why he called her “baby” (a display of affection that the studio eventually made him drop).

The publicity value of the marriage was huge. But, said Bacall, life wasn’t all roses. She was suspended more than once by Warner Brothers because —sometimes on the advice of Bogie — she refused parts they wanted her to play. She did get to act with her husband in three more films, most notably in The Big Sleep (1946).

When the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating Hollywood in 1947, Bacall and Bogart were among a group of celebrities who flew to Washington to make a formal protest.
“That was the beginning of my involvement in politics,” she told me. “I became an active Democrat and have remained one ever since. I worked for poor Adlai Stevenson, who never had a chance to become President because he was too intelligent. In America, that’s one helluva disadvantage, you know — we don’t like anyone too bright!”

She was quick to add that Bogie, however, was bright. Old-fashioned, too. He thought she should attend to family life rather than mess about with politics and go into other films. “We had screaming matches about that and usually I won. But when he got really ill, I behaved myself and looked after him as best I could. I’ll never forget his bravery and his kindness towards the end. But when he died I had to live, and that’s why I continued my career.”

I didn’t dare ask her about her later, obviously turbulent affair with Frank Sinatra who, much to her chagrin, never spoke to her again after dropping her. Nor about her marriage to the hard-drinking Jason Robards, who many thought resembled Bogie. That wasn’t a happy relationship and the couple parted long before their divorce in 1969.

There were other liaisons, with the bisexual Leonard Bernstein, for one. But nothing lasted for long. Didn’t Bacall, in any case, desire and deserve to be acknowledged in her own right and not just as Bogie’s widow?

“Well,” she said, “wouldn’t you? I’m not really a feminist but my life is my own and I want to live it. I am very proud about winning a Tony Award for Applause [the Broadway musical, in 1970] and pretty proud about some of my other films, such as Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind. Maybe my work with Bogie was the best I ever did — but I’m not just a back number and anyone who says I am will get a flea in the ear!”

She struck me then as such an indomitable old girl, determined to prove herself even as a veteran. When I asked her who she most admired of the female stars of Hollywood, she said Bette Davis, an actress who, like her, never gave up.

Unfortunately, Wide Blue Yonder, the film being made in Norway by the American director Robert Young at the time of our conversation, was a comedy that never made it into the cinema. It was one of the last movies she made, and not the best.

My main memory of Lauren Bacall was of a woman who refused to quit until age forced her. She seemed brave, obstinate and determined to cling on. Just like Bogie, who couldn’t because of his cancer. An iron determination was part of it.

Before To Have and Have Not in 1944 she had been a nobody as an actress. After it she was often referred to as The Look, just as Clara Bow was the It Girl, Ann Sheridan the Oomph Girl and Marie McDonald The Body.

“Oh, that was all Hollywood crap,” she said. “I looked that way because I was so nervous. I just looked down with my face and up with my eyes. It stopped me shaking! Can you imagine what it was like playing with a major star when you couldn’t really act properly? But Bogie saved me from myself. Not many stars would have done that.”

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Lauren Bacall, Star of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dies at 89

Lauren Bacall, the sultry blonde siren who became an overnight star via a memorable film debut at age 19 opposite Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’ “To Have and Have Not,” died Tuesday of a suspected stroke at her home in the Dakota in Manhattan. She was 89.

The Bogart estate confirmed the news on Twitter.

Variety’s review of the 1944 film described her as “a young lady of presence,” and audiences immediately embraced her gravel-voiced and sultry persona. The voice was said to have come from a year shouting into a canyon. Regardless, “the Look,” her slinky, pouty-lipped head-lowered stare, influenced a generation of actresses.

After a 50-year career, she received her first Oscar nomination for supporting actress for her role as Barbra Streisand’s mother in 1997’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces.” Though considered a shoo-in, she didn’t win. However, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences gave her a 2009 Governors Award for life achievement. And, Oscar or not, she was often called a Hollywood legend, not only for her career but for her May-December romance with Bogart and her political activism. However, she always resisted terms like “legend,” saying that was a reference to the past, and she was more interested in the present and future.

Born Betty Joan Perske, “a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx,” she stunned audiences in the forever-after-famous “you know how to whistle” scene in “To Have and Have Not,” in which she was as flirtatious as possible within the parameters of the Hays Code.

Audiences were impressed; her co-star, the 44-year-old Bogart, even more so. They were soon married and remained devoted to one another until Bogart’s death in 1957.

It wasn’t until almost 20 years later that Bacall would emerge from the shadow of being Bogart’s wife/widow and hit her stride, this time onstage, where she scored successes in the comedy “Cactus Flower” and then won two Tonys in musicals “Applause” (1970) and, later, “Woman of the Year” (1981).

That had less to do with her acting assignments than with her social and political reputation — lying long-legged on Vice President Harry Truman’s piano, bravely protesting with her husband against the House Un-American Activities hearings as early as 1947, campaigning for Adlai Stevenson (twice), or hosting the Rat Pack in Holmby Hills with Bogie and later, in New York, with another famous husband, actor Jason Robards Jr. It has been suggested that her career — she was under contract at Warners for several years — was harmed by her political outspokenness. Bogart did some of his best work in those years, but then, he was Bogart.

Her independent streak caused her to be suspended from Warners no fewer than seven times. Backed by Bogart, she justifiably complained about the poor material she was handed. That independence sometimes crossed over into diva territory and became more pronounced as time passed.

At AMPAS’ first Governors Awards ceremony in November 2009, Bacall was one of four honorees. Anjelica Huston saluted her by quoting Bacall as saying, “Stardom isn’t a career, it’s an accident,” though Huston said Bacall’s ascendance was not accidental.

At the ceremony, Bacall expressed surprise at her own career, saying, “It’s quite amazing the people I worked with — some of the all-time all-time greats.” And she admitted that when Hawks told her he wanted to pair her with either Bogart or Cary Grant, she said she wasn’t impressed with the dese-dem-dose quality of Bogart and said of Grant, “Now you’re talking!”

Bacall’s ambition to achieve stardom began at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan, from which she graduated at 15. By that time she was already doing department store modeling. She studied acting and dancing and enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she remained only one term. She quit modeling on Seventh Avenue to become a theater usher and got herself a walk-on in “Johnny 2 x 4” in 1942 and an ingenue role in George S. Kaufman’s out-of-town failure “Franklin Street.”

Harper’s Bazaar editor Niki de Gunzberg hired her to model for the magazine, and a 1943 cover photo came to the notice of Hawks, who screen-tested Bacall and put her under contract (which he later sold to Warners). The studio coached her for a year, and then she was slipped into “To Have and Have Not,” where Hawks found that “when she became insolent, she became rather attractive.”
Bogart’s marriage to Mayo Methot was on the skids, and Bacall soon became his fourth wife, bearing him two children over the next dozen years. They appeared together in movies three more times, most memorably in “The Big Sleep,” followed by “Dark Passage” and “Key Largo.”

Otherwise, when she wasn’t turning down assignments, she was agreeing to appear in mediocre ones such as “Young Man With a Horn” and “Bright Leaf.” At Bogart’s urging, she bought herself out of her contract shortly before Warners shaved its roster in the wake of the TV boom of the early ’50s.
One of her better assignments, the 1953 “How to Marry a Millionaire,” teamed her with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and “Woman’s World” again utilized her glamorous, stylish persona to dress up the proceedings.

On television she co-starred with Bogart and Henry Fonda in a live production of “The Petrified Forest,” which Bogie had done on film in 1935 with Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. She also starred with Noel Coward and Claudette Colbert in the 1956 TV production of Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”
When Bogart succumbed to throat cancer, Bacall threw herself into her work, again in A pictures, but with mixed results. There were impressive efforts like “Written on the Wind” and “Designing Woman” and considerably less impressive ones like “Blood Alley” and “Flame Over India.”
After a serious affair with Frank Sinatra, she moved east and appeared onstage in the comedy “Goodbye, Charlie.” She met and married Robards, whose star was on the rise, and they had a son. His drinking problems contributed to their breakup and divorce in 1969.

In 1967, she was the toast of Broadway in Abe Burrows’ comedy “Cactus Flower” (a role she lost to Ingrid Bergman onscreen). She appeared in the comedy for two years, and then starred in a musical stage version of “All About Eve,” called “Applause,” in the Margo Channing role originated by Bette Davis. For it she won a Tony Award, and she played the role in the London version too.

Later screen roles consisted of cameos and character parts in films including “Harper,” “Health” and “Murder on the Orient Express.” She appeared in John Wayne’s last film, 1976’s “The Shootist.” A rare starring opportunity, the 1981 “The Fan,” was a dismal failure, and Bacall returned to Broadway that year in another musicalization of a classic Hollywood film, “Woman of the Year,” which had starred Katharine Hepburn.

Bacall’s 1978 autobiography “By Myself,” written without the aid of the usual ghostwriter, translated that gravel voice onto the written page and became a bestseller. She also penned “Now,” in which she wrote about her career, family and friends since ’78 but which she declined to call an autobiography. In the book, she wrote, “I’m called a legend by some, a title and category I am less than fond of.”
She continued to work on stage and screen and television, including a TV remake of “Dinner at Eight” and taking a small role in “Misery.”

In 1997, she received the Kennedy Center Honors; in 1999, the American Film Institute voted her one of the 25 most significant female movie stars in history.

Bacall continued to work with edgy filmmakers, including Lars Von Trier in his experimental ensemble films “Dogville” and “Manderlay,” and Jonathan Glazer in the 2005 “Birth.” She made a hilarious cameo as herself on “The Sopranos” in April 2006, getting mugged for her gift bag after an awards show.  Among her last films was a role in the 2012 “The Forger” with Josh Hutcherson and Hayden Panettiere.

She is survived by three children: two by Bogart, Stephen and Leslie, and her son by Robards, actor Sam Robards.

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Lauren Bacall dead at 89: Her swagger, above all, set Bacall apart in Hollywood

There’s nothing as sexy as a 19-year-old Lauren Bacall. She showed it in her debut film ‘To Have and Have Not,’ with a voice that sounded like whiskey neat, and with her long hair that seemed to shine even in the darkened corners of noir drama. But she also had swagger — she had it in spades, and it was this quality that set her apart.

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Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart (pictured) starred together in the film 'Key Largo.' Her first film with Bogart, her future husband, was 'To Have and Have Not.'

It's as true in today's Hollywood as it was 70 years ago: There's nothing as sexy as 19-year-old Lauren Bacall.

Not just because of how she slinked through her debut film, 1944's "To Have and Have Not," with a voice that sounded like whiskey neat and the most come-hither directions ever put on film ("You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow"). Nor because of her long hair that seemed to shine even in the darkened corners of noir drama.

It was all that, yes, but it was also a word associated with men: swagger. Bacall had it in spades, and woe to the poor fathead or fall guy who considered her just another dame.

It was that quality that set Bacall apart. Humphrey Bogart, then 44, saw it in the Bronx-born beauty whose chin was lowered just slightly as she lifted her eyes in what would become a signature style (started as a way to fend off nervousness). When she was cast opposite Bacall in "Have Not," lightning struck. Left off to the side was the volatile Mayo Methot, Bogart's third wife. Eleven days after he divorced Methot in 1945, Bogart married Bacall.

Thus began one of mid-century America's great romantic pairings. Though Bacall did films with other leading men — Charles Boyer in "Confidential Agent," Kirk Douglas in "Young Man with a Horn" — it was her movies with Bogie (as she always, endearingly, called him in interviews) that anchored her reputation.

Raw: Pistorius Reports for Community Service

AP

But not for her a coattail career: Despite their almost 25-year age difference, she and Bogie were partners. He and Methot's nickname in the restaurants and parlors of Tinseltown had been "The Battling Bogarts." Its replacement, "Bogie and Bacall," was and is the definition of glamorous ardor.
Professionally, it was on view in "The Big Sleep" (1945), "Dark Passage" (1947) and "Key Largo" (1948), all three great films. Personally, it was shown off in photos of devoted domesticity with their two children, Stephen and Leslie.

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©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection/©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Co

Lauren Bacall in 'Dogville,' which was released in 2003.

Yet before and after Bogart's death from esophageal cancer in 1957, Bacall kept busy: She's memorable as a bookish sexpot prowling with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable in "How to Marry a Millionaire" (1953), as a suffering secretary in "Written on the Wind" (1956) and as a fashion designer married to a sports reporter (Gregory Peck) in "Designing Woman" (1957).

As she hit middle age in the 1960s, Bacall turned her swagger into steeliness, adding a layer of old-school reserve that served her well as a suspicious wife in the hit sex comedy "Sex and the Single Girl" (1964) and opposite Paul Newman in the 1966 P.I. flick "Harper."

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 Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

Lauren Bacall married Humphrey Bogart in 1945.

In 1974, she threw all that steeliness into her role as the matriarch of a family bent on revenge in the Oscar-nominated "Murder on the Orient Express," and her entrance in the '30s-set mystery seemed to come with built-in applause. She was equally elegant opposite John Wayne's dying gunfighter in "The Shootist" (1976).

In 1996, Bacall's role as feminist elder statesman earned her a plum part playing director Barbra Streisand's astringent mother in "The Mirror Has Two Faces," and the result was her sole Oscar nomination. In 2003, she began a late-in-life experimental phase, appearing as a member of a brutal community in director Lars von Trier's stagey, sardonic "Dogville" (2003) and its sequel, "Manderlay" (2005).

Bacall continued to act well into her 80s (in 2007's political-sex satire "The Walker," and 2012's lark "The Forger"), and always owned whatever room she walked into. And if her swagger seemed forever reminiscent of another era, it seemed by design. She still wore it well and was never just another dame.
jneumaier@nydailynews.com

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Lauren Bacall Dies at 89; in a Bygone Hollywood, She Purred Every Word

Lauren Bacall, the actress whose provocative glamour elevated her to stardom in Hollywood’s golden age and whose lasting mystique put her on a plateau in American culture that few stars reach, died on Tuesday in New York. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by her son Stephen Bogart. “Her life speaks for itself,” Mr. Bogart said. “She lived a wonderful life, a magical life.”

With an insinuating pose and a seductive, throaty voice — her simplest remark sounded like a jungle mating call, one critic said — Ms. Bacall shot to fame in 1944 with her first movie, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel “To Have and Have Not,” playing opposite Humphrey Bogart, who became her lover on the set and later her husband.

It was a smashing debut sealed with a handful of lines now engraved in Hollywood history.

“You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve,” her character says to Bogart’s in the movie’s most memorable scene. “You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

The film was the first of more than 40 for Ms. Bacall, among them “The Big Sleep” and “Key Largo” with Bogart, “How to Marry a Millionaire” with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, “Designing Woman” with Gregory Peck, the all-star “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) and, later in her career, Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” (2003) and “Manderlay” (2005) and Robert Altman’s “Prêt-à-Porter” (1994).

But few if any of her movies had the impact of her first — or of that one scene. Indeed, her film career was a story of ups, downs and long periods of inactivity. Though she received an honorary Academy Award in 2009 “in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures,” she was not nominated for an Oscar until 1997.

The theater was kinder to her. She won Tonys for her starring roles in two musicals adapted from classic films: “Applause” (1970), based on “All About Eve,” and “Woman of the Year” (1981), based on the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie of the same name. Earlier she starred on Broadway in the comedies “Goodbye, Charlie” (1959) and “Cactus Flower” (1965).

She also won a National Book Award in 1980 for the first of her two autobiographies, “Lauren Bacall: By Myself.”

Though often called a legend, she did not care for the word. “It’s a title and category I am less than fond of,” she wrote in 1994 in “Now,” her second autobiography. “Aren’t legends dead?”

Forever Tied to Bogart

She also expressed impatience, especially in her later years, with the public’s continuing fascination with her romance with Bogart, even though she frequently said that their 12-year marriage was the happiest period of her life.

“I think I’ve damn well earned the right to be judged on my own,” she said in a 1970 interview with The New York Times. “It’s time I was allowed a life of my own, to be judged and thought of as a person, as me.”

Years later, however, she seemed resigned to being forever tied to Bogart and expressed annoyance that her later marriage to another leading actor, Jason Robards Jr., was often overlooked.

“My obit is going to be full of Bogart, I’m sure,” she told Vanity Fair magazine in a profile of her in March 2011, adding: “I’ll never know if that’s true. If that’s the way, that’s the way it is.”

Ms. Bacall was an 18-year-old model in New York when her face on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar caught the eye of Slim Hawks, Howard Hawks’s wife. Brought to Hollywood and taken under the Hawkses’ wing, she won the role in “To Have and Have Not,” loosely based on the novel of the same name.

She played Marie Browning, known as Slim, an American femme fatale who becomes romantically involved with Bogart’s jaded fishing-boat captain, Harry Morgan, known as Steve, in wartime Martinique. Her deep voice and the seductive way she looked at Bogart in the film attracted attention.

Their on-screen chemistry hadn’t come naturally, however. In one of the first scenes she filmed, she asked if anyone had a match. Bogart threw her a box of matches; she lit her cigarette and then threw the box back to him.

“My hand was shaking, my head was shaking, the cigarette was shaking, I was mortified,” she wrote in “By Myself.” “The harder I tried to stop, the more I shook. ... I realized that one way to hold my trembling head still was to keep it down, chin low, almost to my chest, and eyes up at Bogart. It worked and turned out to be the beginning of The Look.”

Ms. Bacall’s naturally low voice was further deepened in her early months in Hollywood. Hawks wanted her voice to remain low even during emotional scenes and suggested she find some quiet spot and read aloud. She drove to Mulholland Drive and began reading “The Robe,” making her voice lower and louder than usual.

“Who sat on mountaintops in cars reading books aloud to the canyons?” she later wrote. “I did.”

During her romance with Bogart, she asked him if it mattered to him that she was Jewish. His answer, she later wrote, was “Hell, no — what mattered to him was me, how I thought, how I felt, what kind of person I was, not my religion, he couldn’t care less — why did I even ask?”

An Impulsive Kiss

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Jeanne

Old Saybrook, Conn.

 

She taught the world how to whistle, and for that we can all be thankful.

Ms. Bacall’s love affair with Bogart began with an impulsive kiss. While filming “To Have and Have Not,” he had stopped at her trailer to say good night when he suddenly leaned over, lifted her chin and kissed her. He was 25 years her senior and married at the time to Mayo Methot, his third wife, but to Ms. Bacall, “he was the man who meant everything in the world to me; I couldn’t believe my luck.”

As her fame grew in the ensuing months — she attracted wide publicity in February 1945 when she was photographed on top of a piano, legs draped over the side, with Vice President Harry S. Truman at the keyboard — so did the romance, particularly as she and Bogart filmed “The Big Sleep,” based on a Raymond Chandler whodunit.

But her happiness alternated with despair. Bogart returned to his wife several times before he accepted that the marriage could not be saved. He and Ms. Bacall were married on May 21, 1945, at Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio, the home of Bogart’s close friend the writer Louis Bromfield. Bogart was 45; Ms. Bacall was 20.

Returning to work, she soon suffered a setback, when the critics savaged her performance in “Confidential Agent,” a 1945 thriller with Charles Boyer set during the Spanish Civil War. The director was Herman Shumlin, who, unlike Hawks and Bogart on her first two movies, offered her no guidance. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” she recalled. “I was a novice.”

“After ‘Confidential Agent,’ it took me years to prove that I was capable of doing anything at all worthwhile,” she wrote. “I would never reach the ‘To Have and Have Not’ heights again — on film, anyway — and it would take much clawing and scratching to pull myself even halfway back up that damn ladder.”

“Dark Passage,” her third movie with Bogart, came after several years of concentrating on her marriage. Had she not married Bogart, she told The Times in 1996, her career would probably have flourished, but she did not regret the marriage.

“I would not have had a better life, but a better career,” she said. “Howard Hawks was like a Svengali; he was molding me the way he wanted. I was his creation, and I would have had a great career had he been in control of it. But the minute Bogie was around, Hawks knew he couldn’t control me, so he sold my contract to Warner Bros. And that was the end.”

She was eventually suspended 12 times by the studio for rejecting scripts.

‘And We Made a Noise’

In 1947, as the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Americans suspected of Communism, Ms. Bacall and Bogart were among about 80 Hollywood personalities to sign a petition protesting the committee’s actions. Investigating individual political beliefs, the petition said, violated the basic principles of American democracy.

The couple flew to Washington as part of a group known as the Committee for the First Amendment, which also included Danny Kaye, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Ira Gershwin and Jane Wyatt. “I am an outraged and angry citizen who feels that my basic civil liberties are being taken away from me,” Bogart said in a statement.

Three decades later, Ms. Bacall would express doubts about “whether the trip to Washington ultimately helped anyone.” But, she added: “It helped those of us at the time who wanted to fight for what we thought was right and against what we knew was wrong. And we made a noise — in Hollywood, a community which should be courageous but which is surprisingly timid and easily intimidated.”

Nevertheless, bowing to studio pressure, Bogart later said publicly he believed the trip to Washington was “ill advised,” and Ms. Bacall went along with him.

A year after that trip she had what she termed “one of my happiest movie experiences” starring with Bogart, Lionel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson and Claire Trevor in John Huston’s thriller “Key Largo.” It was Bogart’s and Ms. Bacall’s last film together. “Young Man With a Horn” (1950), with Kirk Douglas and Doris Day, in which she played a student married to a jazz trumpeter, was less successful.

Ms. Bacall’s first son, Stephen H. Bogart (named after Bogart’s character in “To Have and Have Not”), was born in 1949. A daughter, Leslie Bogart (named after the actor Leslie Howard), was born in 1952. In a 1995 memoir, Stephen wrote, “My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father was a lapsed Episcopalian,” adding that he and his sister, Leslie, were raised Episcopalian “because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post-World War II years.”

Rat Pack Den Mother

Ms. Bacall, however, wrote that she felt “totally Jewish and always would” and that it was Bogart who thought the children should be christened in an Episcopal church because “with discrimination still rampant in the world, it would give them one less hurdle to jump in life’s Olympics.”

She was, she said, happy being a wife and mother. She was also “den mother” to the so-called Hollywood Rat Pack, whose members included Bogart, Frank Sinatra, David Niven, Judy Garland and others. (It would evolve into the better-known Rat Pack whose members included Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.)

In 1952 she campaigned for Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president, and persuaded Bogart, who had originally supported the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, to join her. The two accompanied Stevenson on motorcades and flew east to help in the final lap of his campaign in New York and Chicago.

Recent Comments

Michael

August 15, 2014

Many thanks and rest in peace to a supremely classy lady.

Steve Ky.

August 15, 2014

In a calmer, happier era, we only got periodic doses of our media stars. Someone told a politician once, ''Give us a chance to miss you,''...

Revolted by the culture we live in

August 15, 2014

 

Upsetting. She seemed strong and healthy. I thought she would be around for much longer. She was a true legend. To think she was still alive...

 

Her film career at this point appeared to be going nowhere, but she had no intention of allowing Lauren Bacall the actress to slide into oblivion. In 1953 her fortunes revived with what she called “the best part I’d had in years,” in “How to Marry a Millionaire,” playing alongside Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable as New York models with sights set on finding rich husbands.

In the early 1950s the Bogarts dabbled in radio and the growing medium of television. They starred in the radio adventure series “Bold Venture” and, with Henry Fonda, in a live television version of “The Petrified Forest,” the 1936 film that starred Bogart, Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. In 1956 Ms. Bacall appeared in a television production of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” in which Coward himself also starred. She would occasionally return to the small screen for the rest of her career, making guest appearances on shows like “The Rockford Files” and “Chicago Hope” and starring in TV movies.

Bogart was found to have cancer of the esophagus in 1956. Although an operation was successful — his esophagus and two lymph nodes were removed — after some months the cancer returned. He died in January 1957 at the age of 57.

Romance With Sinatra

Shortly after Bogart’s death, Ms. Bacall, by then 32, had a widely publicized but brief romance with Sinatra, who had been a close friend of the Bogarts. She moved to New York in 1958 and, three years later, married Mr. Robards, settling in a spacious apartment in the Dakota, on Central Park West, where she continued to live until her death. They had a son, the actor Sam Robards, and were divorced in 1969. She is survived by her sons, Stephen Bogart and Sam Robards; her daughter, Leslie Bogart; and six grandchildren.

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in the Bronx on Sept. 16, 1924, the daughter of William and Natalie Perske, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Romania. Her parents were divorced when she was 6 years old, and her mother moved to Manhattan and adopted the second half of her maiden name, Weinstein-Bacal.

“I didn’t really have any love in my growing-up life, except for my mother and grandmother,” Ms. Bacall said in the Vanity Fair interview. Her father, she said, “did not treat my mother well.”

From then until her move to Hollywood, Ms. Bacall was known as Betty Bacal; she added an “l” to her name because, she said, the single “l” caused “too much irregularity of pronunciation.” The name Lauren was given her by Howard Hawks before the release of her first film, but family and old friends called her Betty throughout her life, and to Bogart she was always Baby.

Although finances were a problem as she was growing up — “Nothing came easy, everything was worked for” — her mother’s family was close-knit, and through an uncle’s generosity she attended the Highland Manor school for girls in Tarrytown, N.Y., where she graduated from grade school at 11. She went on to Julia Richman High School in Manhattan and also studied acting at the New York School of the Theater and ballet with Mikhail Mordkin, who had on occasion been Pavlova’s partner.

After graduation in 1940, Ms. Bacall became a full-time student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts but left after the first year; her family could no longer subsidize her, and the academy at the time did not offer scholarships to women.

So she turned to modeling, and in 1941, at 16, she landed jobs with David Crystal, a Seventh Avenue dress manufacturer, and Sam Friedlander, who made evening gowns. During lunch hours she would stand outside Sardi’s selling copies of Actor’s Cue, a casting tip sheet, hoping to catch the attention of producers. She also became an usher at Broadway theaters and a hostess at the newly opened Stage Door Canteen.

Her first theater role was a walk-on in a Broadway play called “Johnny 2 x 4.” It paid $15 a week and closed in eight weeks, but she looked back on the experience as “magical.” Another stab at modeling, with the Walter Thornton agency, proved disappointing, but her morale soared in July 1942, with a sentence by George Jean Nathan in Esquire: “The prettiest theater usher — the tall slender blonde in the St. James Theater right aisle, during the Gilbert & Sullivan engagement — by general rapt agreement among the critics, but the bums are too dignified to admit it.”

Watching ‘Casablanca’

Later that year she was cast by the producer Max Gordon in “Franklin Street,” a comedy directed by George S. Kaufman, which closed out of town. It was her last time onstage for 17 years.

It was about this time that she saw Bogart in “Casablanca.” She later recalled that she could not understand the reaction of a friend who was “mad” about him. “So much for my judgment at that time,” she said.

In 1942, she met Nicolas de Gunzburg, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, who took her to meet Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor. After a thorough inspection, Vreeland asked her to return the next day to meet the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Test shots were taken, and a few days later she was called.

A full-page color picture of her standing in front of a window with the words “American Red Cross Blood Donor Service” on it led to inquiries from David O. Selznick, Howard Hughes and Howard Hawks, among others. The Hawks offer was accepted, and Betty Bacall, 18 years old, left for the West Coast by train with her mother. She returned to New York less than two years later as Lauren Bacall, star.

In her 70s, Ms. Bacall began lending her distinctive voice to television commercials and cartoons, and her movie career again picked up steam. Between 1995 and 2012 she was featured in more than a dozen pictures, most notably “The Mirror Has Two Faces” (1996), in which she played Barbra Streisand’s monstrous, vain mother.

The role brought her an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actress; the smart money was on her to win. But the Oscar went to Juliette Binoche for her part in “The English Patient,” to the astonishment of almost everyone, including Ms. Binoche.

Ms. Bacall — who received a consolation prize of sorts when she was named a Kennedy Center Honors winner a few months later — was perhaps prepared for the Oscar rebuff. Shortly before the Academy Awards ceremony, she told an interviewer that she hadn’t been happy for years. “Contented, yes; pleased and proud, yes. But happy, no.”

Still, she said, she had been lucky: “I had one great marriage, I have three great children and four grandchildren. I am still alive. I still can function. I still can work.”

As she said in 1996: “You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”

Correction: August 15, 2014 

 
An obituary on Wednesday about the actress Lauren Bacall misidentified the borough in New York in which she was born. It is the Bronx, not Brooklyn.

Correction: August 21, 2014 

 
An obituary on Aug. 13 about the actress Lauren Bacall referred incorrectly to a 1947 petition signed by Ms. Bacall and her husband, Humphrey Bogart, protesting the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was signed by about 80 Hollywood personalities, not 500, and it did not contain the words “to smear the motion picture industry.” (Those words are from a telegram sent earlier that year by members of the movie industry in support of colleagues who had been subpoenaed by the committee.)

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Lauren Bacall Dies at 89

Seldom in Hollywood has a star risen from obscurity to headliner with such rapidity as Lauren Bacall.

After Lauren Bacall's death on Tuesday, media was abuzz with the fact that she was the last classical Hollywood celebrity on the list in Madonna's 1990 song "Vogue." WSJ's Lee Hawkins tells us what this symbolizes for Hollywood. Photo: Getty Images

 

Ms. Bacall, who died Tuesday at age 89 in New York, was among the last of the screen goddesses of Hollywood's golden age, despite having appeared in relatively few films. She went on to star in Broadway productions.

Part of the reason for her legend was that she was Mrs. Humphrey Bogart—Hollywood royalty almost from the start.

In an early scene in "To Have and Have Not" she fixed Mr. Bogart with a smoldering gaze that became known as "the Look."

"You know how to whistle, don't you Steve?" she said. "You just put your lips together and blow." Audiences never recovered.

Photos: Life on Stage and Screen

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans

 

That her chin-down posture was required to control the 19-year-old film rookie's nerves wasn't apparent. Walter Winchell welcomed her with a column headlined "The Bacall of the Wild." Life magazine put her on the cover, writing, "Her simplest remarks sound like jungle mating cries."

Within months, her leading man divorced his wife and married her. In short order Bogart and Bacall starred in more classic thrillers including "The Big Sleep" and "Key Largo."

Despite the promising start and dozens more movie credits, Ms. Bacall's early films—even by her account—were her best, and she never built a body of work to compare with actresses of similar stature, such as Katharine Hepburn.

Related

Born Betty Perske in New York, Ms. Bacall grew up with her mother after her parents divorced. She attended private schools paid for by the family of her mother, who reverted to her maiden name of Bacall and worked as a secretary.

She took acting classes while in high school, and played hooky to watch films starring Bette Davis, her idol. after graduating, Ms. Bacall worked as an usher and got small roles in plays. She also modeled.

She was discovered in Hollywood when Howard Hawks's wife spotted her on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. The director gave her a screen test, signed her to a contract and made her a star. He also gave her a new name: Lauren. Ms. Bacall always preferred her friends to call her Betty.

  
After marrying Mr. Bogart in 1945, Ms. Bacall had two children while continuing to make movies but less frequently. She appeared with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable in "How to Marry a Millionaire" and with Gregory Peck in "Designing Woman." But the memorable roles were fewer, especially after Mr. Bogart's death in 1957.

"I finally felt that I came into my own when I went on the stage," Ms. Bacall told Vanity Fair in 2011.
She starred in "Cactus Flower" on Broadway for two years starting in 1966 and then "Applause," a hit 1970 musical adaptation of the film "All About Eve." Ms. Bacall played Margo Channing, the fading actress played by Bette Davis in the original film. She had another long-running Broadway hit in "Woman of the Year." The Wall Street Journal's critic remarked in 1981, "One has to reach for the familiar words—class, style, pizazz—to describe her."

Later on, Ms. Bacall had a lengthy second film career in featured roles. Always famous for her throaty voice, she played the Grand Witch in the 2008 video release of "Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King" but also had parts in highbrow fare such as Lars von Trier's "Dogville" and Robert Altman's "Prêt-à-Porter."

After Mr. Bogart died, Ms. Bacall was briefly engaged to Frank Sinatra. She married the actor Jason Robards, but they divorced in 1969. Their son, Sam Robards, has a long list of credits in films and on Broadway.

Ms. Bacall wrote a memoir, "By Myself," that won the National Book Award, and a sequel, "Now." She lived since the early 1960s in an apartment at the Dakota, a distinctive address on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

She was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997 and an honorary Oscar in 2009. She told Vanity Fair that she regretted her Oscar acceptance speech. "Because I only talked about Bogie," she said.

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Bogie and Bacall: The Big Sleep (1946)

n tribute to the late Lauren Bacall, we’re looking at the four classic films she made with husband and screen partner Humphrey Bogart between 1944 and 1948: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo. Last week we looked at Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not. Today we’ll look at Hawks’ The Big Sleep.

The Big Sleep is a movie that is nearly universally beloved by movie buffs, but it is also the source of some debate among noir fans. Everyone agrees that it’s masterfully made, and everyone agrees that it contains one of Bogart’s great performances. But is it noir? Many people say no. One must admit, too, that there are strong arguments in support of this argument.

The film is Howard Hawks’ adaption of the novel by Raymond Chandler, with a screenplay written by an impressive threesome: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman—with additional work by Hawks himself. It tells the story of private detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart), hired by General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to deal with a blackmailer. The General has two daughters. One, Vivian (Lauren Bacall), is very pretty and somewhat shady. The other, Carmen (Martha Vickers), is very pretty and totally nuts. Marlowe has to track down the man trying to blackmail Carmen over some gambling debts, but before he can find the man, the man ends up dead, with Carmen “higher than a kite” and sitting in the same room. This is, as they say, just the beginning as Marlowe is led deeper and deeper into the Los Angeles underworld.

Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart.

Chandler’s plot is famously labyrinthine, but as the man himself once said, a good mystery is the kind where you don’t have to read the end to be satisfied. It’s all about the journey, the descent into the world that springs up after dark. Marlowe comes into contact with an assortment of weird characters: the foppish blackmailer and his overly devoted chauffer, a gangster named Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) and his cold-blooded henchman Canino (Bob Steele), and a “funny little guy” named Harry Jones (Elisha Cook Jr.) who helps Marlowe after he gets worked over by a couple of goons. Most people can’t sum up the plot because each scene is about itself, not the plot. Take the scene where Marlowe meets and spends a rainy afternoon with a sexy girl (Dorothy Malone) in a bookstore. This scene was included, Hawks said, just because “the girl was so damn pretty.” Everything ties together thematically and tonally, but to attempt to untangle the plot is pointless. Hawks doesn’t even use the final scene to resolve the plot; he uses it to strike an ending note. It’s the tone that matters here, and it’s the tone that you take with you. The Big Sleep is a triumph of acting, editing, directing, cinematography, and scoring. It is—very nearly—a perfect studio film.

Elisha Cook in The Big Sleep.

But is it noir? The debate over The Big Sleep goes back to the question of tone. To begin with, Raymond Chandler set out to create a hero when he created Marlowe. He set out to create a tarnished knight in the American idiom (in a scene from his novel which was not included in the movie, Marlowe stares at a painting of a knight rescuing a lady and remarks that if he owned the painting he would “sooner or later have to climb up there and help”). Chandler succeeded to such an extent that Marlowe became archetypal, the world-weary private eye with his fedora and cigarette and wisecracks. But noir—at least as most of us understand it—is about weakness, fear, and isolation. Chandler’s tarnished knight descends into the lower depths, but he remains a knight—or as Chandler himself wrote, Marlowe remains “puzzled, but never quite defeated.”

One would be hard pressed to find a better director for that worldview than Howard Hawks. Generally considered one of the best American directors (Orson Welles called him “certainly the most talented”), Hawks was a man whose worldview was that of a professional. Get in, get the job done. Don’t complain. Handle the situation. In a time when most producers were under contract at studios, Hawks was a free agent. His movies almost always made money and got good reviews. He worked in every genre, with most of Hollywood’s major stars. He seized on The Big Sleep as a vehicle for Bogart and Bacall, both of whom he had just directed to enormous success in To Have And Have Not. He saw in Chandler’s novel the makings of a good mystery and a good romance for his stars. Hawks knew that everyone wanted to see Bogart kill the bad guy and kiss Bacall as triumphant music kicked up for the slow fade out.

Noir, however, is about being defeated. Noir is about antiheroes, weak men who go bad and get sent straight to hell for their transgressions. It’s not about knights, tarnished or otherwise. Some people have commented that The Big Sleep plays like a Howard Hawks protagonist got lost in the world of film noir.

There’s something to this argument. Bogart’s Philip Marlowe is a can-do guy. Like most Hawksian heroes he is the strongest, smartest, most capable man in his world. Though Bacall is less saucy than she was in To Have And Have Not, her Vivian Sternwood is smarter, stronger, and wittier than her inspiration in the Chandler novel. Thus, this film is very much a Howard Hawks take on the material.

The lovebirds.

But the argument that The Big Sleep is not a film noir is a little overstated. For one thing, Bogart undergoes a subtle transformation in the course of the film. In the opening half of the picture, he’s very much the wisecracking tarnished knight. But as the film goes along, Bogart undergoes a gradual disintegration. Watch the scene of him awaiting Bacall’s phone call just before the scene in Joe Brody’s apartment. He’s pacing, nervous, rubbing his hands together.
When he answers the phone, his voice is just a bit high and it cracks a little. He’s falling in love with this shady woman, and he doesn’t want to. Then consider the scene where he drops a bullet while loading a gun in preparation for his showdown with the gangster Eddie Mars. “You’re the one who’s shaking now,” Bacall says. Bogart replies, “I’m scared, angel.” Or look at the final confrontation with Eddie Mars.
Bogart’s eyes flair up, and he’s clearly enjoying torturing Eddie Mars, sending the gangster to his death in a hail of bullets. Watching his face, you can see the seeds of Bogart’s dark turn in 1950’s In A Lonely Place where the fear and bluster gave way to paranoia and sadism. Bogart was a major movie star, one of Hollywood’s greatest icons. He’s bigger than any one genre, but watch The Big Sleep again. You can see him enter Noirville. Yes, he does emerge triumphant, but this place takes its toll on him. He won’t withstand its effects forever.

Postscript #1: The Big Sleep was originally filmed in the fall of 1944, but it wasn’t released until 1946. The reason for this was twofold: one, Warner Brothers wanted to rush into release its backlog of war films before WWII came to an end; and two, the studio wanted to re-edit the film—and add new scenes—in order to play up Bacall’s character and the central romance. The original unseen 1945 version is often included on DVDs as an extra to the 1946 version, and it is well worth watching. For one thing, it makes The Big Sleep even more of a film noir. There are many more scenes of Marlowe doing detective work (searching a murder victim’s house, talking to the cops), and his relationship with Bacall is condensed and more coldly antagonistic. In short, the 1945 version isolates him more and thus hues closer to both the lonely private eye that Chandler envisioned and the capable professional that Hawks preferred. The ‘46 version is the better movie—faster, funnier, and sexier—but the ‘45 version is darker and clearer in terms of the plot.

Postscript #2: The plot of The Big Sleepis often referred to as incomprehensible. There is a famous story of Hawks wiring Chandler to inquire about a plot point. Chandler supposedly wired back, “If you don’t know, then neither do I.” I don’t know if this story is true, but if it is true then it says more about Chandler’s famous wit than it does about the plot. The plot is difficult, even convoluted (and, as I said before, it’s not really the point of the picture), but the reports of its impenetrability have been overstated. Here’s a recap of the film’s main plot points: 

1. Mars killed Regan and told Vivian that Carmen did it. This is changed from the novel, where we discover that Carmen killed Regan. This change was made, I suspect, to cut the mustard with the censors. In the book, Marlowe lets Carmen be sent away instead turning her over to the cops. The Hays office wouldn’t have let that stand. At the end of the film, Marlowe confronts Mars about killing Regan, and Mars more or less admits to it before he’s killed.

2. Owen Taylor—whom we never see—kills Geiger and steals the undeveloped film of Carmen high on drugs. Taylor loves Carmen and probably means to destroy the film. In the novel, by the way, Carmen was naked in the picture.

3. Joe Brody kills Owen Taylor and takes the film which he then uses to blackmail Carmen.

4. Carol Lundgren, chauffer and implied lover of Geiger, kills Joe Brody. He thinks Brody killed Geiger.

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Lauren Bacall's remarkably honest account of Humphrey Bogart's death

More than 35 years before her death at 89, Lauren Bacall published her first autobiography, By Myself, in which she reminisced about her storied Hollywood career, her romantic relationships, and her three children. That includes, of course, the story of her relationship with To Have and to Have Not co-star Humphrey Bogart, who eventually became her first husband.

Bacall once famously said, "The only thing that I am not pleased about is when people only talk about 'Bogie' to me as though I had no other life at all." And you can see why — her career was multilayered, and she knew great success in Hollywood and on Broadway without her husband's involvement. But it's also true that Bacall's romance with Bogart wasn't the Hollywood story people generally imagine — and her account of the real version gives a strong impression of her indomitable courage and honesty.

You probably have an idea of what Humphrey Bogart was like. To this day, his carefully constructed persona is perpetuated in films, promotional material, publicity, and commentary: an active, commanding, confident, cynical, and sexually compelling (albeit aloof) tough guy. But Bacall challenges this "tough guy" representation in her autobiography, offering a graphic account of both their courtship and her husband’s illness. Her reflections allow a glimpse into Bogart's full humanity — and hers.

In her memoir, Bacall recalls her connection with Bogart as "the headiest romance imaginable." Throughout their courtship, Bacall describes Bogart as shy, gentle, vulnerable, and open, confiding in her about his three failed marriages. During their small wedding in Ohio, "tears streamed down [Bogart's] face." According to Bacall, this outburst of emotion was Bogart's reaction to hearing the words of the wedding ceremony and finally "realizing what they meant — what they should mean."

It was more than a decade (and several co-starred films) later that Bogart's health began to decline. As Bacall tells it, her husband reluctantly visited the internist of fellow screen star Greer Garson in February of 1956. Bogart's cough, no doubt from years and years of smoking, sounded worse than usual, and "sometimes his throat burned when he drank orange juice."

An initial sputum test revealed an inflamed esophagus, and a couple of weeks later, a bronchoscopy and another sputum test revealed irregular, malignant cells in Bogart's esophageal tissue. The star would require surgery immediately, and his current production schedule would have to be postponed while he recuperated. Unfortunately, Bogart would never recover. Almost a year later, on January 15, 1957, Humphrey Bogart died of throat cancer at the age of 58.

From the beginning of Bacall's account of her husband’s illness, the reader is asked to pay special attention to Bogart's physical body — an unexpected move that dispels the aura of one of Hollywood's biggest stars. Scholar Richard Dyer has talked at length about how a star's body provides the "raw material" from which his or her image is ultimately fashioned: Marilyn Monroe's body represents sexuality, Paul Robeson's "the nobility of the black race," and Judy Garland's "her problems and defiance of them."

We might add to this list Humphrey Bogart's body, which symbolizes toughness and a hardened masculinity. As scholar Virginia Wright Wexman wrote, Bogart's swarthy complexion, heavy facial features, wiry build, and "harsh, nasally voice" made him an ideal choice for all of the tough-guy roles he played. 

But Bacall describes Bogart otherwise. As she recalls, his surgeons planned to "remove his esophagus and shift the stomach around so they could attach it to the tab that was left." When this procedure was explained to her in full, the young wife and mother of two had no idea that her husband's surgery would last nine and a half hours. 

"How could a body take that much?" she asks. "Poor baby — all those tubes, those bottles — what was the body under the blanket like?" Bacall recalls that her husband's arm and hand were "swollen to four times their normal size" and a "terrible black thing [was placed] in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue." As she observed him, "he looked so unlike Bogie — still mercifully unconscious… enclosed in another world, protected not by me, but by those raised bedsides, with those bottles and tubes sustaining life."

Her description does something that virtually no other media texts do: positions Bogart as fragile and vulnerable.

Bacall goes on to reminisce about all the friends and family who stopped by during that dreadful year, which she claimed at age 80, "will be with [her] for the rest of [her] life."

Before Bogart’s illness, people frequently visited and phoned the Bogart-Bacall household. But after nitrogen mustard treatments significantly weakened the star, Bacall "made some ground rules" and began to monitor guests, slowing down the traffic considerably.

Consequently, those who had not seen Bogart in a while were utterly shocked at the star's physical appearance when they were allowed to visit him. One friend, Bacall says, "gasped" when she entered the room. "She couldn't help it," the author apologizes to the reader; "she was so shocked at the sight of that figure in the bed."

During a later visit by producer Sam Goldwyn and director William Wyler, Bogart called the nurse for a shot of morphine, "pulled up one pajama leg [and exposed] his pathetic frail limb." Goldwyn, the author reports, was "stunned to see the thinness of that leg… he slowly turned away."

Bacall did not have to be so candid about this particular part of her life. Fellow stars like Katharine Hepburn and June Allyson also dealt with illnesses of their significant others, Spencer Tracy and Dick Powell. But their autobiographies reduce these events to a couple of pages, and virtually no details are disclosed. As such, the star images of Tracy and Powell remain mostly intact.

But Bacall does give us this information. Why? Perhaps she wanted the reader to see Bogart as she did: a man with "so many, many layers that, as well as I knew him, I'm sure I never uncovered them all." Bacall's decision to publish the grim, painful details about this portion of her life was both wise and brave. For those who know the real story, Bogart and Bacall's romance isn't just one of Hollywood's most legendary — it's one of Hollywood's most human.

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