The Lauren Bacall Centennial

This has always been my favorite photo of Lauren Bacall (Betty Perske, 1924-2014). I like the fact that it appears uncharacteristically candid, with almost nothing observably artifical about it. I know that even that quality can be faked, hence my careful qualifiers (“appears”, “observably”) because you never know, and she was already a star by this time (1946). But the voyeuristic quality (illusory or not) without the fancy clothes and coif allow you to see how beautiful she actually was at the outset.

I also love it because it allows you to see that she was, in fact, beautiful, and I rarely see her that way. I am someone who has always felt that Bacall was like an orchid. She was gorgeous and beguiling at the start, but the window during which she was in bloom was brief. She was only two years older than Marilyn Monroe, for example, but by How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), she seems a generation older than that co-star; youth and beauty had long since fled, though class, grace, intelligence, and talent certainly hadn’t. When she was 30, she seemed 50. When she was 50, she seemed 80. At some point after this, she let her eyebrows grow in, starting that mannish trend that reached its apotheosis on the scary forehead of Joan Crawford. And smoking and drinking turned that sultry low voice into a harsh rasp not unlike Eugene Pallette’s. But the photo above captures her when she’s still a kid, in a seeming rush to reach a maturity that would arrive all too quickly. I’ve always pictured a script in front of her on that breakfast table. She took her work very seriously.

Bacall had only been in her late teens when she made her screen debut, already so worldly, sophisticated and self-assured, in To Have and Have Not (1944). This almost never happens, that one’s first film is a starring part, for the obvious reason that it requires experience to carry a picture. But her time as a model, her education at private schools and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and her brief early career on Broadway, combined to make her come off as polished, in spite of being quite a green kid. Credit goes to Howard Hawks’ wife Slim, herself a fashion icon, for bringing her to the west coast to audition. Bacall immediately hit it off with co-star Humphrey Bogart, who was over twice her age, married him, and went on to co-star with him in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), Key Largo (1948), and a TV remake of The Petrified Forest (1955). The pair were staunch and active liberals, but managed to avoid being tainted by the Red Scare of that era. She and Bogart were also at the center (and the founders) of what became known as the Rat Pack. After Bogart passed away, she began a serious relationship with Frank Sinatra, and the Rat Pack became primarily associated with him.

After the Bogart period, Bacall was famously choosy for a long while about what projects she would do; there were some long stretches when she appeared to be in semi-retirement. She seemed to value friendships and tended to work with the same people more than once. I find it interesting to track her relationships with colleagues, directors, and other stars. They include, in rough chronology:

Kirk Douglas, whom she had dated when both were students at AADA. She appeared opposte him in Young Man with a Horn (1950), and again much later in Diamonds (1999) and The Empire State Building Murders (2008). Young Man was directed by Michael Curtiz, as was her next picture the western Bright Leaf (1950) with Gary Cooper, a magical teaming that seems to foreshadow her later appearance in The Shootist (1976) with John Wayne.

John Huston, for whom she appeared in Key Largo (1948); later she appeared in his last project Mr. North (1988).

Jean Negulesco, who directed How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Woman’s World (1954), and The Gift of Love (1958).

Vincent Minnelli, who directed The Cobweb (1955) and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck, with whom she later appeared in a 1993 tv version of Painting Churches. (In between she did Written on the Wind with Douglas Sirk, co-starring Rock Hudson).

John Wayne, with whom she appeared in William Wellman’s Blood Alley (1955) and the aformentioned The Shootist (1976).

Bacall was married to Jason Robards through most of the 1960s (Sam Robards is their son). They appeared together in a 1964 episode of the tv show Mr. Broadway. Her biggest picture from this period was Harper (1966) with Paul Newman.

In 1964 she was in Shock Treatment, a film that reminds me of all of those black and white post-Pyscho thrillers by the likes of William Castle and Robert Aldrich. To be in this kind of picture was much more the style of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis at this time. Later she would play the Davis part in Applause, the 1970 Broadway musical based on All About Eve.

Two other cases of paralellism:

Bacall starred in the play Cactus Flower on Broadway in 1965, but that other great Bogart costar Ingrid Bergman played her role in the later screen version. Bacall would later take over a Bergman role in the 1995 remake of The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Th two great screen stars appeared together in Murder on the Orient Express (1974), the first of two Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot mysteries Bacall starred in (the other was 1988’s Appointment with Death).

Bacall had also been friends with Katharine Hepburn since Bogart was in The African Queen (1951) with her. Three decades later she would play the Hepburn role in the Broadway musical adaptation of Woman of the Year. Both women famously paired off with John Wayne in his last movies, Bacall in The Shootist, Hepburn in Rooster Cogburn (1975).

Some later associations: she worked with James Garner on The Rockford Files (1979), as well as Robert Altman’s HealtH (1980), and the horror anomaly The Fan (1981), the first first-run movie I ever saw her in at a cinema. She also appeared in Altman’s Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter)(1994). Late in life, she worked with Lars Von Trier twice, in Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005).

Starting in the 1990s, Bacall became much less discriminating about what projects she’d take. She spent her last couple of decades working a lot in film and television, including such things as cartoon voice-over work. Making up for lost time? Some of the more notable projects from this era we haven’t yet mentioned include Stephen King’sMisery (1990), Streisand’sThe Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), Day and Night (1997) opposite Alain Delon, and the tv mini-series Too Rich: The Secret Life of Doris Duke.

True fact: Lauren Bacall’s last screen credit was a 2014 episode of Family Guy! This from a woman who wouldn’t put her handprint in the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese because she didn’t want to be associated with other stars in an era when standards had gotten so low! Well…at least it wasn’t Scooby Doo and the Goblin King (2008)! She played a witch in that one. On the bright side, it may be the best use anyone ever put to that cackle!

Lest you judge my agist and lookist remarks above too harshly, I’d like to redeem myself by saying that when she was in her 80s…she was beautiful again. This is how she looked when she appeared on The Sopranos in 2006:

She’s only been gone ten years! A lengthy legacy for that long drink of water.

Fun fact: Bacall’s grandmother and the great-grandmother of our friend, author Eve Golden, were sisters!