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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