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Lauren Bacall: The souring of a Hollywood legend (FROM THE INDEPENDENT, 2004) CONTINUED
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Betty Joan Perske was born in the Bronx in 1924. She was Jewish. Her father, William Perske, was Polish, with some French. Her mother, Natalie Weinstein-Bacal, was German and Romanian. The Bacal was dropped by the immigration authorities, but Natalie reinstated it when she and William divorced, and when she and Betty moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
It was a strict, modest upbringing. "You had it drummed into your head from childhood by your mother, grandmother, uncles, that nice Jewish girls didn't smoke - weren't fast - nice Jewish girls had character. 'Don't chase a boy, ever - if he wants to see you, he'll call; if not, forget him.' But what were you to do if your head was filled with dreams of beauty, glamour, romance, accomplishment, and if you were stuck with being tall, ungainly (I didn't know I was 'colt-like' until a critic said I was), with big feet, flat-chested - too young to have finished high school at 15."
I don't think Betty Bacal ever quite qualified as beautiful. But she had the kind of looks that men notice and remember. Her mother paid for her to go to the Julia Richman High School, and then the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. That's where she met and dated the young Kirk Douglas (eight years her senior), and it's how she got some modelling offers. In 1943, thanks to the decision of editor Diana Vreeland, she made it on to the cover of Harper's Bazaar.
There is an extraordinary photograph in which Bacall is leaning against the outside door of a Red Cross blood donor room. She wears a chic suit, gloves, a cloche hat with long waves of hair falling from it. I suppose it's a picture that says: even society women are giving blood for our boys. But there's a fascinating subtext, coming from the film noir style and the look on Betty's very hard, hardly 19 face, which says: "Watch out at the Blood Donor office - They have sultry vampires waiting there." One suck and our boys are men.
Cut to Hollywood where Nancy "Slim" Hawks, herself a famous fashion plate, the wife of Howard Hawks, is looking through the new magazines. She sees the cover, hands it to Howard, and with more generosity than common sense, perhaps, says, "Take a look at her." Howard got the point straightaway. Within a matter of days he had Betty under personal service contract. He thought of the new name "Lauren" and he asked her to test for To Have and Have Not.
Was it as simple as that? Hardly. Hawks and his wife schooled the kid in what clothes to wear, and Hawks even asked Betty to study the way Slim talked, and try copying it. The girl is actually called "Slim" in To Have and Have Not - and the Bogart character, Harry Morgan to others, is called "Steve" by "Slim" (the names Howard and Nancy kept for each other).
So it was the portrait of a fond marriage? Not quite, because Howard was undoubtedly determined to lay Betty, and while Betty may never have encouraged that thought, she did not discourage it either. This was her big break. Hawks got her to deepen her voice (he sent her up to Mulholland Drive at night to recite poetry until she became hoarse), and he did everything a director can do to make her act like his dream: very young, yet very worldly, utterly free but sweetly obedient.
I spell it out like that because I'm not sure that Lauren Bacall ever liked or even understood the Svengali act. The years have suggested that she was never as loose, cool, hip or natural as Slim in that film or as Vivian Rutledge in The Big Sleep. But in those two pictures, she has Hawks guiding her and Bogart teasing her along (plus a genius named Jules Furthman doing a lot of the dialogue).
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