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.
Lauren
Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not.”Critic’s Notebook: Lauren
Bacall’s Debut in ‘To Have and Have Not’AUG. 13, 2014
Lauren
Bacall in 1950 with her husband, Humphrey Bogart, at the Stork Club in New
York. Ms. Bacall died Tuesday at age 89.With Gruffness and Glamour, Bacall Was
a True New Yorker AUG. 13, 2014
Lauren
Bacall in 1979.Remembering Bacall in The TimesAUG. 13, 2014
“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.”
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.”
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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?”
An
Impulsive Kiss
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.
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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.
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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.
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 the Bronx 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.”
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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.”
Correction:
August 14, 2014
An
earlier version of this obituary misstated Ms. Bacall’s birthplace. She was
born in the Bronx, not Brooklyn.
Emma
G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.
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