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.”
Lauren Bacall had a long
career in film and theater, but she remains best known for the roles she played
opposite Humphrey Bogart.
Video Credit By Adam Freelander on Publish Date August 13, 2014. Image
CreditGabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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?”
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 500 Hollywood personalities to sign a petition
protesting what they called the committee’s attempt “to smear the motion
picture industry.” 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.
Loved her, Bogie, Agnes
Moorehead and San Francisco in "Dark Passage." I'll have to dig out
my copy and watch it again. Ms. Bacall was a...
"The world doesn’t owe
you a damn thing."More true words were never spoken. Yet today we have
groomed a culture of entitlement without any...
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 Brooklyn 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.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/movies/lauren-bacall-sultry-movie-star-dies-at-89.html?_r=0
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