Sunday Times 2
Vamp with a volcanic temper
‘Bogie!’ drawled Lauren Bacall in her rasping trombone voice as she sat curled up in her cavernous, art-filled apartment in New York.
‘And by the way, honey, he spelled it with an “ie” and not an “ey”, like his goddam biographers do.’
Settling that limpid gaze directly on me, she continued: ‘It’s all anyone ever asks me about. My life with Humphrey Bogart.
‘I feel like losing my mind when complete strangers come up to me while I’m having dinner in a restaurant and ask me what it was like being married to him. I tell them that being a widow is not a profession and they look crushed.’
Once she started, she was unstoppable. ‘Sure, we had 12 great years together, Bogie and me, but hell, it wasn’t the way people think it was, or like we did it in the movies. What marriage ever is?
A signed photograph of Lauren Bacall at Bonhams and Butterfields in Los Angeles, California (AFP)
‘A famous love story is hard to maintain when you both live in the spotlight. What we had together wasn’t perfection, but it was real, and I’ve never been able to replace it.’
The magnificent, gutsy, outspoken and occasionally terrifying Miss Bacall – Betty to me and her friends – who died on Tuesday at the age of 89 following a stroke, won two Tony awards, an Academy Award nomination, and an Honorary Oscar during her glittering 70-year career.
But despite being a vivid, charismatic and hugely talented performer, she never quite succeeded, to her fury, in throwing off the mantle of being ‘Humphrey Bogart’s widow’.
She was born Betty Joan Perske in the Bronx district of New York on September 16, 1924, the only child of Jewish parents from immigrant families. Her Polish-born first cousin is Shimon Peres, the former President of Israel.
Her mother was a secretary and her father was a salesman, though they divorced when she was five.
Once out of school, and already 5ft 8½in tall, she started modelling, but was deeply self-conscious about the size of her feet. ‘I was a lousy model,’ she said. ‘I was this flat-chested, big-footed, lanky thing.’
However, she had cat-like green eyes and she was quite exceptionally photogenic. The turning point came at 18 when she landed the front cover of the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Her cover photograph was spotted by the wife of A-list movie director Howard Hawks, who brought her to Hollywood for a screen test.
Visually, she certainly passed muster, but Hawks was put off by her high-pitched nasal New York twang. Showing the steely determination that characterised her entire approach to life, she went away, worked on her voice, and came back with a smokey, sultry growl.
Hawks gave her the screen name Lauren Bacall, which she hated, and told her he wanted to put her in a movie with either Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart.
‘Cary Grant, terrific!’ she replied. ‘Humphrey Bogart, yuk!’
But Bogart it was, and she made an unforgettable screen debut opposite him in 1944 in To Have And Have Not.
Though she was outwardly cool and assured, working with the great movie legend, 25 years her senior, caused her to shake so badly with nerves that the only way she found she could control her shakes was to lower her chin to her chest, keeping her body rigid, and look up at him through her eyelashes.
The effect was so astonishingly seductive that it instantly became known in Hollywood as ‘The Look’, and columnists hailed her as the great new sex symbol, calling her ‘Slinky! Sultry! Sensational!’
One scene was to etch itself into the memories of moviegoers for ever. It was when Bacall said to Bogart: ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and . . . blow.’
Bogart was still married to his alcoholic third wife, Mayo Methot, but it rapidly became obvious that he and Bacall were falling in love off-screen as well as on.
Within three weeks of meeting, they were having an affair, and seven months after the movie premiered, Bogart divorced his wife and married Bacall. She was 20; he was 45.
US actors Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) during a cocktail party of American actors and spouses. They met starring for the movier "To have and have not" (1944) and later appeared together in "The big Sleep" (1946), "Dark Passage" (1947) and "Key Largo" (1948) (AFP)
They would star in three more movies together – The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo – and went on to have two children: Stephen, in 1949, and daughter, Leslie, born in 1952.
In the minds of the public and the fan magazines, Bacall was ‘Bogie’s Baby’ and theirs was one of Hollywood’s great love stories.
He was a heavy smoker, an even heavier drinker, and a lifelong womaniser. And although Bacall knew how to manage him, matched him drink for drink, cuss word for cuss word, and stood up to him in every slanging match, behind the scenes the marriage was not quite as idyllic as people wanted to imagine.
Bogart had a mistress, Verita Bouvaire Thompson, with whom he had begun an affair two years before he met Bacall. His relationship with Verita continued throughout his marriage to Bacall.
Verita travelled with Bogart, ostensibly as his personal secretary, bartender and hairdresser. She was later to reveal – in her 1982 memoir, Bogie And Me: A Love Story – that she slept with Bogart’s toupée under her pillow.
The star, who was almost bald, hated wearing a toupée, but she used to tell him: ‘You look like hell without it, like an old man.’
One friend of Bogart, the writer Dean Shapiro, said: ‘The Bogie and Bacall myth wasn’t really what it seemed. They were supposed to be this great Hollywood couple, but Bogie was carrying on with Verita on the side.’
Other friends revealed that Verita shared Bogart’s passion for sailing and drinking, and that their relationship often left Bacall ‘stranded’. Verita claimed that Bogie called her from his deathbed.
In the late Eighties, Verita opened a piano bar in New Orleans called Bogie and Me. When Hurricane Katrina hit the city, Verita refused to leave her home.
‘Lauren Bacall failed to chase me out of Hollywood,” she said defiantly. ‘Katrina won’t force me out of New Orleans.’
If Bacall knew about the affair, she ignored it. She had a temper that was the equal to Bogart’s own.
Noel Coward never got over his astonishment at seeing Bacall, in an outburst of fury, kick the all-powerful Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper ‘up the bottie under my very eyes’ while calling her ‘a lousy bitch’.
Both she and Bogart were formidably strong characters.
In 1947, they travelled to Washington to take part in major political protests in favour of the Hollywood Ten – film industry employees who were being branded as Communist sympathisers.
Their outspoken stance horrified the major studios, and Bogart was prevailed upon to distance himself from the furore by writing an article in the March 1948 issue of Photoplay magazine under the title: ‘I’m no Communist.’
Bacall, however, remained implacably silent, refusing to be told whom she could or couldn’t support politically. A lifelong Democrat, she hated Richard Nixon.
Bacall reached the peak of her popularity in 1953, when she co-starred with Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe in the hugely successful screen comedy, How To Marry A Millionaire.
She got on well with Grable, but Monroe exasperated her almost beyond endurance. She regarded her as selfish, ill-mannered and unprofessional, and found it hard to say anything polite about her even after her untimely death at the age of 36.
‘If it hadn’t been for the patience of Grable, that film would never have been finished,’ she once told me.
In her autobiography, By Myself, Bacall was searchingly, almost painfully honest about the death of Humphrey Bogart at the age of 57 in 1957 from cancer of the throat and oesophagus – and about how difficult and irritable he was towards her during that final illness.
She describes in graphic detail her shock and horror on watching Bogie’s crumpled corpse being carried from the house in a body bag by the funeral directors. At his funeral, she placed a small gold whistle on his coffin in memory of the most famous line in their first movie together.
She remained loyal to him for the rest of her days.
Asked whether Bogart was really as tough as he seemed, she replied: ‘In a word, no. Bogie was truly a gentle soul.’
For a long time after his death, Bacall suffered an identity crisis, both personal and professional.
The only way she could find of filling that vacuum was to gravitate towards a relationship with another superstar, Frank Sinatra.
But when she made the mistake of informing the gossip columnist Louella Parsons that they were engaged, Sinatra was furious. He took back his marriage proposal and cut off all contact with her.
Sinatra’s ex-wife, Ava Gardner, who loathed Bacall, called him up. ‘Don’t tell me you were really going to marry her?’ she asked.
‘Hell, no,’ he replied. ‘I was never going to marry that pushy broad.’
Bacall’s own take on this public humiliation was characteristically spirited. ‘Frank did me a great favour. He saved me from the disaster our marriage would have been. But the truth is that he behaved like a complete s***.’
In July 1961, she married the great, but alcoholic, actor Jason Robards – perhaps best known for his role in All The President’s Men – when she was four months pregnant. Their son, Sam, was born in the following December.
Their marriage was stormy and disastrous.
‘I invited a few friends over to celebrate Jason’s 40th birthday,’ Bacall remembered. ‘Jason showed up at 2am – loaded. I grabbed a bottle of vodka, smashed it into the cake and yelled: “Here’s your goddam cake!” The marriage ended when I came across a letter written to him by his girlfriend.’ They were divorced in 1969.
Huge Broadway hits in the comedy Cactus Flower in 1965, and in the musical Applause in 1970, established her as a star independent of Bogart.
She was fierce behind the scenes and would display a dragon-like ferocity if she felt anyone else in the cast was encroaching on her territory.
During the London run of Applause, she took a holiday and in her absence, the British musical star Sheila Mathews played the lead.
But when Mathews committed the heresy of being photographed by a national newspaper in the star dressing room, Bacall stormed back early from her break and sat in the darkened theatre watching her replacement.
Afterwards she marched backstage, summoned Mathews to her presence and barked: ‘Honey, you just played your last show.’
The Hollywood actress Kathleen Turner, who was often compared with Bacall, reportedly introduced herself to Bacall with the words: ‘Hi, I’m the young you.’ She found herself looking at a frozen, unsmiling and imperious mask.
In 1996, appearing with Barbra Streisand in the film The Mirror Has Two Faces, Bacall was nominated for an Oscar. Everyone in Hollywood was convinced she would win. When she didn’t, and the camera zoomed in on her face, her expression spoke volumes – all of them unprintable.
After appearing with Nicole Kidman in the 2003 movie, Dogville, Bacall developed a fierce antagonism towards Kidman’s ex-husband, Tom Cruise, calling him ‘a maniac’, and adding: ‘I can’t understand the way he conducts his life.’
In 2009, Bacall was at last awarded an Honorary Oscar ‘in recognition of her central place in the golden age of motion pictures’.
‘Bogie’s Baby’ still had an infallible way with one-liners. Gazing at the gold statuette, she turned to the audience and growled: ‘A man at last!’
In her increasingly reclusive last years, she said: ‘A woman isn’t complete without a man. But where do you find a man – a real man – these days?’
Tempestuous, explosive and eternally uncompromising, she was one of the last great movie icons of our age.
There could never be another Bogie – and there will certainly never be another Lauren Bacall.
© Daily Mail, London