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LIFE Remembering Lauren Bacall, 1924–2014 PDF

104 Pages·2016·6.73 MB·English
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Preview LIFE Remembering Lauren Bacall, 1924–2014

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.)

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Celebrating the life and career of a Hollywood legend. From the moment she stepped onto the screen in To Have and Have Not, Lauren Bacall was a star. When she died in 2014, the Golden Age of Hollywood lost one of its last glittering icons. Now her fans can remember beautiful, bold Lauren Bacall in t
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