Lauren Bacall — The Look and Everything Behind It

Biography

From the Bronx to Slim's Whistle

Born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York — to Jewish Romanian and Polish immigrant parents, raised primarily by her mother after her parents' divorce. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and worked as a theatre usher and model before her photograph on the cover of Harper's Bazaar in 1943 caught the attention of Howard Hawks's wife, who showed it to her husband, who showed it to Humphrey Bogart, who was fifty-six films into a twenty-year career and about to make his most important one.

Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not (1944) — Bacall's film debut, at nineteen — gave her Slim, the adventuress who matches Bogart's Steve Morgan line for line and look for look. She tilted her chin down to stop her nervousness from showing and kept her eyes on Bogart, and the camera found something that no director had planned and no coaching had produced. She and Bogart married in 1945. They made three more films together; the marriage lasted until his death in 1957 from esophageal cancer.

The post-Bogart career is the career that Hollywood underestimated and she refused to. She returned to Broadway repeatedly — winning Tony Awards for Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981) — and made selective, distinguished film appearances across five decades: John Huston's Key Largo (1948), Vincent Minelli's Designing Woman (1957), Robert Altman's Ready to Wear (1994), Barbra Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) earning her the Oscar nomination at seventy-two that she received — with characteristic grace and minimal fuss — in lieu of any earlier ones the Academy had neglected to give her.

She died on August 12, 2014, in New York City, of a stroke, having maintained for seventy years the quality she had invented at nineteen: the irony that was also warmth, the coolness that was also feeling, the Look that had always been the least interesting thing about her.

1924

Born Betty Perske in the Bronx; Jewish immigrant family; theatre ushering

1943

Harper's Bazaar cover; Howard Hawks's wife notices; the chain begins

1944

To Have and Have Not — Slim; Bogart; The Look; age nineteen

1945

Marries Bogart; The Big Sleep; the partnership in full

1957

Bogart dies; forty-five; Broadway calls; she answers

1970 / 1981

Tony Awards — Applause and Woman of the Year; the stage career

1997

Oscar nomination at seventy-two — Mirror Has Two Faces; received with grace

2014

Dies in New York; age 89; the Look intact to the end

Filmography

From Slim's Debut to Seventy-Two's Nomination

1944Adventure Noir · Howard Hawks · Hemingway

To Have and Have Not

Howard Hawks's wartime adventure — Bacall's film debut at nineteen, as Slim, the adventuress who matches Bogart's charter boat captain word for word and glance for glance in Martinique. The film that invented The Look, launched one of cinema's great partnerships, and established in a single debut the quality — ironic warmth, cool feeling — that sixty years of career would never exhaust.

She tilted her chin down to stop her trembling, kept her eyes on Bogart, and the camera found what Hawks had not designed. The "whistle" scene — "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow" — is the most relaxed piece of seduction in 1940s Hollywood, delivered by a nineteen-year-old on her first film day with a composure she has said she was entirely faking.

1946Noir · Howard Hawks · Chandler

The Big Sleep

Howard Hawks's Chandler adaptation — Bacall as Vivian Rutledge, the elder Sternwood daughter, matching Bogart's Philip Marlowe through a plot so labyrinthine that Hawks famously could not explain who killed whom. What matters is not the plot but the voltage between the two leads, which had been theatrical on location in To Have and Have Not and was now completely natural.

The racetrack dialogue — in which Vivian and Marlowe conduct an entire conversation about something other than what they are talking about — is the most elegant double-entendre scene in the genre and the clearest demonstration that the Bacall-Bogart chemistry had become something neither Hawks nor the screenplay could have engineered. They were by this point married and it showed, which was the best possible outcome for a noir whose plot required viewers to trust the leads more than the story.

1948Drama · John Huston · Bogart · Edward G. Robinson

Key Largo

John Huston's trapped-in-a-hotel thriller — Bacall as Nora Temple, the widow of a war hero whose father-in-law's hotel has been occupied by a gangster (Edward G. Robinson) and his associates. The film that gave her the most dramatically demanding role of the Bogart years and the clearest evidence that the warmth beneath the cool was not a trick but a resource.

Nora's quality — the woman whose composure in the face of threat comes from having already lost the thing she most valued, making every subsequent risk smaller — is played by Bacall with a specificity that goes beyond the supporting role the script had intended. Her scenes with Lionel Barrymore as her father-in-law are the film's emotional anchor; Robinson's gangster is the film's threat; Bacall is the film's moral centre, which is a different and more interesting function.

1953Comedy · Jean Negulesco · Monroe · Grable

How to Marry a Millionaire

Jean Negulesco's comedy — Bacall as Schatze Page, the drily intelligent one of three model-roommates scheming to marry wealthy men, the one who marries a man she thinks is poor and discovers he is rich. Her comedy is the best in the film — the ironic voice deployed in a different register, the cool still there but used for laughs rather than atmosphere.

She is often overlooked in discussions of this film in favour of Monroe's Pola, which is understandable — Monroe's nearsighted fumbling is the film's comic set piece — but Bacall's Schatze is the film's structural intelligence, the woman who understands the scheme clearly and whose abandonment of it is the most convincing character arc. Her facility for comedy was consistently underused by a studio system that had decided she was noir.

Honors

Two Tonys — One Oscar Nomination — Sixty Years of The Look

Oscar Nomination — Best Supporting Actress

1997

The Mirror Has Two Faces

Nominated at seventy-two for Barbra Streisand's mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces — the Academy's long-delayed acknowledgment of a career it had contrived not to notice for five decades. She received the nomination with characteristic grace and without pretending that it was less overdue than it was.

Oscar Nominated

Tony Award — Best Actress, Musical

1970 · 1981

Applause · Woman of the Year

Two Tony Awards across eleven years — for Applause (the musical adaptation of All About Eve) and Woman of the Year (the Hepburn-Tracy film retooled as a stage vehicle). The Broadway career that the film industry's failure to cast her adequately had produced, and that turned out to be the most distinguished theatrical career any film actress of her generation built.

2 Tony Awards

AFI Lifetime Achievement Award

2009

The Body of Work

The American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award — belated, as were all the institutional honours she received, and accepted with the same quality that had characterised everything from To Have and Have Not onward: the warmth that did not require the institution to validate it, and the cool that made the warmth more rather than less convincing.

AFI Lifetime

The Bogart Partnership

1944 – 1957

Four Films · Thirteen Years · One Marriage

To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, Key Largo — four films across four years, followed by nine years of marriage until Bogart's death at fifty-seven. She was thirty-two when she was widowed. She did not define herself by the marriage, which would have been the easier choice and the less interesting one.

Four Films · One Marriage

Identity

The Look — The Warmth — The Refusal to Be Diminished

The Look

She invented it to stop trembling on her first film day — tilting her chin to steady herself, keeping her eyes up to maintain contact. The camera found something in it that no one had designed. It became her signature, was endlessly imitated, and was always the least interesting thing about her, which she knew perfectly well.

The Broadway Years

The Hollywood career that the studio system could not adequately sustain sent her to Broadway, where she spent twenty-five years being exactly what the stage required and winning the Tonys the films had not produced Oscar equivalents of. The theatrical career was not a consolation; it was the main event of her middle years, and she was formidable in it.

The Ironic Intelligence

Her specific quality was the irony that was also warmth — the cool surface over the feeling, the knowing delivery that never tipped into cynicism because the warmth was always available just behind it. It worked in noir, in comedy, in drama, and on stage. It never ran out and it never stopped being hers.

After Bogart

She was thirty-two when Bogart died. The industry expected her to be defined by the loss and the films they had made together. She declined the expectation, went to Broadway, raised three children, married Jason Robards (briefly), and spent the remaining fifty-seven years of her life being herself rather than the widow of anyone famous.

Legacy

The Whistle — And Sixty Years of Everything After It

Lauren Bacall's legacy is the whistle scene and its aftermath — the nineteen-year-old who invented a look to stop trembling and spent sixty years proving it was incidental to what she actually was. Two Tony Awards, one Oscar nomination at seventy-two, four Bogart films, twenty-five years on Broadway, and the most sustained refusal to be defined by a single quality that any actress of her generation managed.

The industry never awarded her during the years when the performances were at their peak, and gave her the Oscar nomination when she was old enough to receive it without requiring validation. She received it with grace and without pretending it was timely, which was itself the most complete statement of the quality she had always had: the warmth that did not need to be confirmed to be real.

Oscar Nomination

The Mirror Has Two Faces, 1997

Tony Awards Won

Applause · Woman of the Year

Films with Humphrey Bogart

1944 to 1948

Age at Oscar Nomination

The delayed acknowledgment