ANOTHER ICON GONE

 

 'I never went into this business thinking of winning anything' 

-- Lauren Bacall | 1924-2014

Another icon gone ...

     I have her in a starring role in my GHOST OF A CHANCE along with her husband, Humphrey Bogart.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-of-a-Chance/dp/B00LV7YBOM/

{For a free audiobook of it just comment below and ask.}

I admit to having a crush on Lauren Bacall when I a youngster watching classic black and white movies on the weekend marathons.

Lauren Bacall, the smoky-voiced movie legend who taught Humphrey Bogart how to whistle in "To Have and Have Not," has died at the age of 89, according to her family.

And my world has become even more poor.  

Just knowing the intelligent, forceful, and independent woman was living and cracking smart with bloated ego's made me smile.

Just like knowing Robin Williams was amusing upset babies in restaurants and helping friends down on their luck made me better about the human race.

Known for her husky voice and sizzling looks, Bacall started out as a model and then broke out as a leading lady opposite Humphrey Bogart in her first film, 1944's To Have and To Have Not. 

The two had a whirlwind romance and wed the following year, but it wasn't without scandal. 

When they met, she was 19 and he was 44 -- and an unhappily married man.

The couple went on to star together in more films: The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948). They had a son and daughter together and remained married until Bogart's death from throat cancer in 1957.

 She also experienced success on stage, starring on Broadway in Goodbye, Charlie (1959) and Cactus Flower (1965), and won Tony Awards for her performances in Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981).

 Maggie Smith:
 "Betty [Bacall is called Betty by everyone close to her; it is her real name - Lauren was Hawks's idea] is one of the most courageous people I know. 

She has lived a long time on her own. I don't think she always likes it, but she never complains." 

It was Bacall, Smith says, who helped her come to terms with living alone after her husband died. "She has always said living alone is not as bad as living with someone you can't stand."

Bacall on Bacall:
 "I would hate now to be married," she says, laughing - "it does occur to me on occasion that, if I fall and hit my head, there will be no one to make the phone call. But who wants to think about that disaster, I'd prefer not to."

 We like our legends dead, our elderly icons softly compliant. Bacall has never fitted this mold.

 There has always been something unsafe, unsure, unsettling about her, 

and she doesn't play Hollywood's nostalgia game - too crisp and casual and stylish for that. 

Also, by the time she came along, the mid-40s, Hollywood had abandoned its 30s pretense that the roaring 20s had never ended, 

that the golden pre-crash, pre-prohibition era would endure for ever, in favor of something more in keeping with America's dark, postwar mood.

 Film noir. All shadows and sombre angles.


Bacall's self-description:
"I was this flat-chested, big-footed, lanky thing" - not beautiful in a rounded, voluptuous way - suggested a new kind of male fantasy figure: neither angel nor demon beauty. 

She is smart as well as vulnerable. 

From the moment we first see her in the doorway of Steve/Bogart's Martinique hotel room in To Have And Have Not (it was Hawks's brilliant notion to have her slouching against the doorpost), 

we realize, as Steve realizes, that this is a woman who is all angles - angular beauty, sharp, angled suits; lippy, funny, sexy, provocative. 

We hear her, Steve hears her, before he/we see her. "Anybody got a match?" Bogart doesn't reply, goes to his desk and from a distance of 12ft or so tosses the matches to her. 

In reality, "I missed it many times ... trembling."

 In the film, seeming barely to move, she flicks up her hand like a paw to catch them mid-air. 

Equally memorable are her lines - offhand, low-key - after she has kissed him: 
"You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow." 

This scene was shot some time before their affair began, but the audience already senses that it has stumbled into a story. 

Hawks sensed it, too. 

In the original screenplay, Bogart was intended to have an affair with the wife of the fugitive he rescues, played by Dolores Moran. 

Having seen the dailies, Hawks decided the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall was too strong, that no audience would ever believe he'd fall for another woman.

All of life is an accident in a way, Bacall always used to say.