'Slinky! Sultry! Sensational!' was how Lauren Bacall came to the screen, along with press releases as to how her husky voice had been developed by making her shout across a canyon for six months. But she was not a joke at all. James Agee described her:
'She has cinema personality to burn, and she burns both ends against an unusually little middle. Her personality is compounded partly of percolated Davis, Garbo, West, Dietrich, Harlow and Glenda Farrell, but more than enough of it is completely new to the screen. She has a javelinlike vitality, a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With these faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long while...She does a wickedly good job of sizing up male prospects in a low bar, growls a louche song more suggestively than anyone in cinema has dared since Mae West.'
She was born (Betty Pepske - she hates the name Hollywood gave her) in New York City in 1924 and was brought up by a divorced mother, who had her study dancing and
cting and enrolled her at the AADA - which she quit after one term. She was an usherette briefly, then got a couple of minor stage jobs and - she was strikingly handsome - several modelling assignments. One Harper's Bazaar cover was seen by Howard Hawks, who tested her and signed her to a seven-year contract, 32 weeks a year. (Columbia asked her to be the Harper's Bazaar girl in Cover Girl, but she knew his was likely to provide a better future.)
Hawks showed the test to Warners - who promptly bought half her contract - and trained her for a year. While coaching her, Hawks began to see her potential more clearly, and when he and Warners cast her opposite Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944) he moulded her into a younger, a female Bogart - though he let her often make her own decisions. She was even more cynical than Bogie and more coolly independant: to his second kiss she responds 'It's even better when you help.'
The sexual antagonism between them worked sufficiently to carry this mangled version of Hemingway to success; and they married the following year. Warners were so pleased with her that they bought the other half of her contract from Hawks and raised her weekly pay from $550 to $1,000, the start of a new seven-year contract, to go to $1,250 in the second year and thence to $1,500 with $500 weekly annual increases to a ceiling of $3,500. She was to be paid 52 weeks a year instead of the usual 42, but they believed she was a strong actress who should not be overexposed; the sales force was calling for a reteaming with Bogart and indeed one was in the can, but release was delayed till after the next one, since it was more topical and Jack Warner thought her better in it.
Confidential Agent (1945) was in fact set in pre-war Britain, with Bacall as a local girl who aids Spanish Republican Charles Boyer. The New York Times thought her performance:
'close to becoming an unmitigated bore...Miss Bacall starts out brusque and surly, obtuse and emotionally cold - and she ends up that way, with neither a flicker of responsiveness or "give" in between.'
It is curious that Warners should have preferred that to Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), the one with Bogart; the magic between them worked again, he as a private eye and she as a wealthy, insolent divorcee. She did two more with
om Hawks and raised her weekly pay from $550 to $1,000, the start of a new seven-year contract, to go to $1,250 in the second year and thence to $1,500 with $500 weekly annual increases to a ceiling of $3,500. She was to be paid 52 weeks a year instead of the usual 42, but they believed she was a strong actress who should not be overexposed; the sales force was calling for a reteaming with Bogart and indeed one was in the can, but release was delayed till after the next one, since it was more topical and Jack Warner thought her better in it.
Confidential Agent (1945) was in fact set in pre-war Britain, with Bacall as a local girl who aids Spanish Republican Charles Boyer. The New York Times thought her performance:
'close to becoming an unmitigated bore...Miss Bacall starts out brusque and surly, obtuse and emotionally cold - and she ends up that way, with neither a flicker of responsiveness or "give" in between.'
It is curious that Warners should have preferred that to Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), the one with Bogart; the magic between them worked again, he as a private eye and she as a wealthy, insolent divorcee. She did two more with him, Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948), but these were roles which any competent actress might have played. She was a strongly individual heroine, but clearly less effective than before. Meanwhile, Hollywood had proliferated with imitators, from the variable Lizabeth Scott downwards.
Encouraged by Bogart - who wanted her to be as independant of Warners as he now was - she quarrelled frequently with the studio over roles; but not, alas, over those in Young Man with a Horn (1950) and Bright Leaf, both old favourites. In the former, she was the wealthy socialite who seduces Kirk Douglas from his music and Doris Day; in the second, the madam who comforts Gary Cooper on excursions from wife Patricia Neal.
The sixth suspension in six years was over the co-starring role with Errol Fynn in Rocky Mountain (Patrice Wymore - his wife - played it); then she bought herself out of her contract, just a few months before Warners dropped many players in a panic at the threat from TV.
She signed a long-term contract with 20th, but made only two films for them over a two-year period; after a long absence, How To Marry a Millionaire (1953). as a gold-digger, and A Woman's World (1954), as the bored wife of executive Fred MacMurray. Not surprisingly, she proved to be a stylish light comedienne, incisive and elegant, a shrewd woman-about-town who knows the answers before the questions are asked. In the former she stole scenes from Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable; in the latter there was little competition from June Allyson or Arlene Dahl.
Changing mood again, she embarked on a quiet romance with Richard Widmark in The Cobweb (55) at MGM, the only good 'serious' film she made - but not a success. It would be more difficult to divine her motives in taking on conventional parts in either Blood Alley, a mediocre John Wayne vehicle, or Written on the Wind (56), a lurid melodrama with Rock Hudson, especially as the Wayne film was a silly anti-Red drama, and Bogart and Bacall were considered to be on Hollywood's Left. Still, Wayne admired her and made one of his rare comments on a co-star:
