LIFE Remembering Lauren Bacall, 1924–2014

104 Pages·2016·6.73 MB·English

by  The Editors of LIFE

Remembering
LAUREN BACALL
1924–2014
Photograph from Photo12/Polaris.
Contents
Cover
Title
Introduction: Back to the Golden Age
The Chosen One
The Look: A Life in Pictures
Copyright
Photograph from Photo12/Polaris.
Back to The Golden Age
WHEN LAUREN BACALL DIED IN AUGUST just shy of her 90th birthday, there
was sympathy for her family, of course, and also lamentation that we, the film audience,
had, what with the earlier losses this year of Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, seen
the last of the Golden Age greats. That’s not true. Olivia de Havilland is still with us,
living today in Paris at 98 years old. Kirk Douglas, whom Bacall dated when she was a
17-year-old in acting school in New York City, is alive at age 97. Doris Day is 90 and
Dame Angela Lansbury 88. Relative whippersnappers such as Sean Connery and
certainly Sophia Loren touched the Golden Age.
But Douglas seemed to speak for many of us when he said, “With the loss of Lauren
Bacall, whom we all called Betty, a meaningful part of my history has been
extinguished.”
She was glamorous from the get-go—at least from the get-go of her public persona.
As we will learn from the narrative beginning on the pages immediately following, as a
child she was just, in her words, “a nice Jewish girl” from New York City, Betty Perske,
growing taller and dreaming the usual little girl dreams. Yes, she, like the older Douglas,
took acting classes, but nothing was assured. Success and fame came in a tremendous
rush, and overnight Lauren Bacall was an exemplar of the Golden Age.
rush, and overnight Lauren Bacall was an exemplar of the Golden Age.
LIFE’s batting average on these things isn’t necessarily Ruthian or even Jeteresque.
When staff photographer Ed Clark sent us pretty pictures of a young ingenue taken by
him in an L.A. park, a curvy woman taking the stage name Marilyn Monroe, we didn’t
run them. When Terence Spencer called from London to put us on to this
phenomenon sweeping Britain in 1963, Beatlemania, we demurred.
But almost as soon as director Howard Hawks (and particularly Mrs. Hawks, as you
will read) found Betty Bacall for his new film To Have and Have Not, we found her too
—and in fact, as you see, that was our cover copy: a “new movie find.” With our
October 16, 1944, cover story the American public got a week off from the war and an
early look at the Look.
“Midway through the first reel of To Have and Have Not, a new movie, the sulky-
looking girl . . . saunters with catlike grace into camera range and in an insolent, sultry
voice says, ‘Anybody got a match?’” ran the first paragraph of the LIFE piece. “That
moment marks the impressive screen debut of 20-year-old Lauren (Betty) Bacall.” (It
was Hawks who changed Betty to Lauren.)
It certainly was an impressive debut, and one she would struggle to top. But she did
have several other film successes, and in the Golden Age mode, she led an off-screen
life as fascinating as anything she was putting on the big screen. Most famously, she
married her To Have and Have Not costar, the much older Humphrey Bogart, and the
two of them were congenial hosts to a platoon of Hollywood wild folk that became the
original Rat Pack. After Bogart’s death there was the affair with Frank Sinatra, the
marriage to Jason Robards, the Broadway triumphs . . . the elegant segue into the life of
a Golden Age Grande Dame. LIFE stayed with the story: Bacall in a fashion spread,
Bacall’s new movie in color, the Widow Bogart and her son at the funeral, Bacall in her
seniority. Many of the pictures we ran in days gone by are in the portraits adorning our
biographical sketch, and then in A Life in Pictures to follow.
Lauren Bacall was quoted in LIFE in 1945 as having confided in one of her best
friends when she was still a girl, “I am going to Hollywood.” She did that, and she
conquered, and she became a regal figure in Hollywood’s Golden Age. She entertained
us with her work, captivated us with her persona. She will be missed. She is missed
already.
The Chosen One
KOBAL COLLECTION AT ART RESOURCE, NY
SHE WAS, almost as much as anyone in movie history, plucked from the pack of
aspirants—the wife of a high-powered film director spotted her in a magazine photo,
and suddenly she was a star. This photograph was made in 1944 when she was right on
the cusp. She had paid few dues—acting classes, a couple of unnoticeable turns on the
New York stage, some modeling gigs—and now she was costarring opposite the great
Bogart in a high-profile Hollywood movie. The good news: Lauren Bacall would listen
to the graces, and her sensational beginning would lead to a long lifetime of success, as
an actress and mother, that today renders her a legend.
WHEN SHE DIED, LAUREN BACALL WAS, even in the most detailed obituaries,
often broken down into elements, and accounts varied. The eyes were emerald green
or they were grey or they were grey-green or they were simply dark and smoldering.
The Look was her own, caused by her slowly raising her head on camera out of anxiety,
or it was coached by her director. In her off-screen persona, she was imperious or
insecure, demanding or kind. All agreed she was brassy, and she was loyal. She had a
sharp sense of humor and often a sharp tongue. As for the Voice, its origin, as with that
of the Look, was debated: It was either an inherent trait or it was foisted upon her; it
was always said to be husky.
Bacall herself admitted about this last one that it was coaxed. Apparently—and this
should be in the Believe It or Not category—her tenor was high when she arrived in
Hollywood in her late teens, having been plucked by fate (and we’ll get to all that very
shortly) from the modeling world to star opposite a film legend in a big-budget
production, the now famous (if very loose) adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have
and Have Not. The director who had cast her after a miraculous screen test, Howard
Hawks, hated her voice, and told her to lower it—greatly—and add some insinuation,
which is to say: sex. “I was 19 and wasn’t exactly swimming in self-confidence,” Bacall
remembered to People magazine in 1979, but she did as she was told. “You can’t
acquire a voice. Either you have it or you don’t. But Howard wanted me to be insolent
with men on the screen, and that meant training my voice so it would remain low. I
would park on Mulholland Drive—so as not to disturb the neighbors—and read The
Robe aloud in a low, low voice.”
We bring up the Voice and these other things at the top of our narrative to make a
point: You came away from a lot of the posthumous appreciations of Lauren Bacall
feeling she had been constructed, much in the way Marilyn Monroe had been created
out of Norma Jeane Baker. In reality, this was nothing like that. Sure, there were
Hollywood touches and PR department enhancements through the many years, but at
the end of the day, Lauren Bacall, despite a name change, was just about as consistent,
honest and candid a superstar as can be imagined. She was as close to transparent as
these folks get. It’s not that she didn’t care what people felt—she cared deeply about
her friends, and what constituted their friendships—but, although she willingly played
roles on the camera, roles that often had little to do with herself, she was, like her dear
friend Katharine Hepburn, an actress who did not act once the film was wrapped. She
was, by all accounts, a tall and true Hollywood queen. This was in her nature. She was
also a live wire, and a lot of fun.
She was this from the first to the last.
BETTY JOAN PERSKE WAS BORN ON September 16, 1924, in the Bronx, New
York City, and would be raised there and in Brooklyn and Manhattan, almost
exclusively by her mother. Her father, William Perske, a medical devices salesman, was
also a drinker (the first of a few in Betty’s life) and he was gone when the girl was
young, separated from her mother when she was six. Her mom, the former Natalie
Weinstein-Bacal, a Romanian Jew who had immigrated through Ellis Island, was an
executive secretary and raised her only child in middle class circumstances. William
Perske was Jewish as well, and an interesting footnote is that Betty Perske was related,
however near or distantly, to Israel’s ninth president, Shimon Peres, through her
father’s lineage.
She was extremely close to her mother; never sought out her father (her mother
would come live with her in California after she became a Hollywood star). Like many
a beauty before her and many since, from Adam’s Eve to Gisele Bündchen, she claimed
to have been a “gawky,” “lanky” girl who drew no attention. Under the auspices of rich
relatives, she was able to attend, first, a private school up the Hudson River in
Tarrytown, the Highland Manor Boarding School for Girls, and then the Julia Richman
High School in Manhattan. In her National Book Award–winning autobiography By
Myself, she said that as a teen she spent lots of time “inflicting my Katharine Hepburn
and Bette Davis imitations on anyone who would sit still for them.” She hadn’t yet
decided that she wanted to be an actress, but had ambitions that ranged from modeling
to, God is our witness, journalism: “a momentary dream of becoming a reporter.” She
would chew up many a journalist years later; at what point she forsook the Fifth Estate
cannot be historically pinpointed.
She never did file a story professionally, though she was a teen model. She was fired at
one point, and took a job as an usher on Broadway, where she not only was able to
observe the life of actors, which looked exciting indeed, but was named the prettiest
usher in town by theater critic George Jean Nathan in his annual rankings of such
things. (Her legacy as a stage actress, built largely in the second half of her career when
she garnered two Tony Awards, is as strong as her reputation as a film star.) She took
acting lessons in this period at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where another
student was Kirk Douglas, whom she would briefly date and who would remain a
lifelong friend. In 1942 she appeared in a Broadway show called Johnny 2 X 4, which
closed in under two months. That same year she was named Miss Greenwich Village,
so this award at age 17, on top of the pretty-usher thing, tends to put the lie to her
protestations about being lanky, gawky, awkward, flat-chested. Those stages must have
been earlier.
To say that things sped up at this point in time is the grossest of understatements;
among Hollywood teen supernova stories, Betty Bacall’s remains legend. Back in
modeling as she grew ever lovelier—“catlike grace, tawny blond hair and blue-green
eyes” (a fifth choice on the eye color; you be the judge)—she was brought to the
attention of Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland (legendary characters
permeate the Bacall story) and landed on the cover of the March 1943 issue of the
magazine. It was a beyond-chaste picture, a sad-eyed Betty posing outside a Red Cross
blood donations center to aid in the war effort. But when it hit the coffee table in the
Howard Hawks household, Mrs. Hawks, the former Nancy “Slim” Gross, saw
something special. Howard was planning To Have and Have Not at that time, with
Humphrey Bogart already signed for the lead, and Slim urged her husband to screen-
test this young woman from New York. Hawks asked his secretary to locate the model,
and, misunderstanding her instructions, the secretary sent the model a ticket to
Hollywood. Hawks was blown away at the audition by Bacall’s magnetism, and she was
signed to a seven-year contract—initial pay, $100 per week. “Betty Bacall” just
wouldn’t do. (Betty had adopted half her mother’s maiden name in New York, adding
an l, from the European version, and also so folks wouldn’t rhyme “Bacal” with
“crackle.” Hawks is credited with “Lauren,” and thus: Lauren Bacall, a name ready for
the marquee, and a girl headed there. Last note: Friends would call her Betty
throughout her life.)