Bacall and Bogart

The Look … Lauren Bacall in the 1950s

TO MAKE SOME kind of sense of the following, rather fraught, interview, we append some brief data on Ms. Lauren Bacall and Mr Humphrey Bogart.

Born 4 September 1924, and brought up by her mother from the age of six, Miss Bacall was by the age of 18 ‘vulnerable, romantic and idealistic’, a model, and a would-be actress.

Enormous chutzpah masked some insecurity. In the chain that finds Miss Bacall in Australia in 1986, November 1942, is the crucial moment. She met an English writer, Timothy Brooke; he introduced her to Nicholas de Gunzburg, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar; Gunzburg introduced her to Diana Vreeland, a fashion editor; and Vreeland had Louise Dahl-Wolfe take some pictures of her, at $10 an hour …

Meanwhile, Bogart, born 23 January 1899, had been acting on the boards since 1920 and in Hollywood since 1930. He eventually made seventy-five films, of which David Thomson, who is perhaps as underboard on Bogart as he may be overboard on Howard Hawks, allows him only four as’ wholly satisfactory’: High Sierra, the two Hawks’ films with Miss Bacall and In Lonely Place.

Bogart`s technical limitations, and his relatively narrow range, impeded his progress until 1941, when High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon were major turning points for him. When Casablanca, although marred by a Bogart scene of maudlin self-pity, was released early in 1943, Bogart was at last a made man…

In January 1943, Dahl-Wolfe photographed Miss Bacall in a blue suit, an off-the-face hat and a challenging mood. Vreeland put this haunting picture on the cover of the March Harper’s Bazaar; in short order Miss Bacall got inquiries from Columbia Pictures, producers David SeIznick and Howard Hughes and director Howard Winchester Hawks.

Hawks (1896-1977) was alleged, at any rate by Thomson, to have made every one of ten best films of all time. Thomson asserts that he ‘is the supreme figure of classical cinema… his work has still not been surpassed’. In the one year, 1944, Hawks put Miss Bacall and Bogart into Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Chandler’s The Big Sleep. They turned out to be among Hawks’ masterpieces and the high points in the film careers of both Miss Bacall and Bogart.

But Hawks had a problem: an insanely hyperactive Svengali complex. So, when Bogart got a crush on Miss Bacall, and she responded, Hawks went into a tizzy: Trilby should respond only to Svengali; if she wanted to horse around with an actor, Hawks would have nothing more to do with her. The Bogarts never worked for Hawks again, and we are all the losers.

They were married on 21 May 1945, when Miss Bacall was twenty; and he died on January 14,1957, when she was thirty-two. It may have been the love story of the century, and appears to have been a wonderful marriage, but after the Lord Mayor’s procession, in the pain of her loss, came… Francis Albert Sinatra (b. 1915).

Sinatra asked her to marry him; she accepted; Sinatra told literary agent Irving (Swifty) Lazar; Lazar told Louella Parsons; Parsons noted in the Los Angeles Examiner on March 12, 1958: SINATRA TO MARRY BACALL; Sinatra, in a funk, pretended to believe she had made the disclosure and welshed. Miss Bacall says Sinatra did her ‘a great favour – he saved me from the disaster the marriage would have been… but the truth also is that he behaved like a complete shit. He was too cowardly to tell the truth’.

Seeking to pick up the shreds of a career, Miss Bacall appeared in a Broadway play in 1959, but it ran only three months. In 1961 she married stage actor Jason Robards Jnr (b. 1922), but it didn’t work and they were divorced.

The Bogart cult dates on the continent from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 film, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), and in the States from early 1964, when Harvard University’s Brattle Theatre began running his films. Six books about him were published in 1965.

Miss Bacall, again reduced to the status of Mrs Bogart, had two years from 1965 in Cactus Flower (but, to her disgust, was passed over for the film role); five years, from 1970, in the musical, Applause, for which she was declared best Broadway actress; wrote her best-selling and admirably candid memoirs; was again best Broadway actress, for Woman of the Year, in 1981; and had a London success in Sweet Bird of Youth in 1985.

From Amazing Scenes: Adventures of a Reptile of the Press Fairfax Press, 1987)

Next: Miss Bacall is not amused