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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
An earlier version of this obituary misstated Ms. Bacall’s birthplace. She was born in the Bronx, not Brooklyn.
