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Her lines have been neatly tailored to her talents. They include such easy lines of cryptic folk poetry as "Was ya ever bit by a dead bee?" An even easier line, sure to bring down any decently vulgar house, is her comment on Bogart's second, emboldened kiss: "It's even better when you help." Besides good lines, there are good situations and songs for Newcomer Bacall. 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 in She Done Him Wrong (1933)-
Idol and Model. Lauren (real name, Betty) Bacall was born on 103rd Street in New York City in September 1924. According to her employers, "she is the daughter of parents who trace their American ancestry back several generations." According to herself, she is part Rumanian, part French, part Russian (she thinks). Her father sold medical instruments. She is an only child. By the time she got out of Julia Richman High, Bette Davis was her idol, and she had seen enough Davis pictures to realize that it takes training to be an actress.
She got a certain amount of training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, more as a walk-on, more as an ingenue (directed by George Kaufman). She also worked as an usherette, and got a job modeling for Harper's Bazaar.
In April 1943 Mrs. Howard Hawks, leafing through the Bazaar, caught on her face the way a skirt catches on barbed wire. She showed it to her husband ; Producer Howard Hawks was caught too.
He wired the magazine, asking whether she was available. The answer came fast, on the Hawks's doorstep, in person. In May 1943 Miss Bacall signed a contract with Hawks; this was shared by Jack Warner as soon as he saw her screen test, a bit of Claudia. The test alone is proof of her abilities; for Lauren Bacall (as I seen in To Have and Have Not) to make even a mediocre stab at such a role is like Tom Dewey's successfully impersonating Lincoln.
Instructions and Decisions. For the better part of a year Hawks worked her out mainly in a vacant lot, bellowing anything from Shakespeare to odd copies of shopping news. In the fullness of time Hawks had achieved his purpose: he had developed her voice from "a high nasal pipe to a low guttural wheeze." He instructed her now to speak softly and naturally, paying no attention to the traditional voice-culture style which he surrealistically compares with "digging post-holes."
Hawks carried his shrewdly contrived campaign of artificialized naturalness still further. Time & again he left it up to Lauren to decide for herself about how to play a scene, basing her decision on how she would handle the situation in real life. One of the most successful scenes in the picture is her own invention. After a highly charged few minutes with Bogart, late at night in a cheap hotel room, Marie reluctantly retires to her own quarters. At this point in the shooting, Miss Bacall complained: "God, I'm dumb." "Why?" asked Hawks. "Well, if I had any sense, I'd go back in after that guy." She did.
Lauren Bacall may or may not become a star. Yet only last fortnight, Hawks turned down a rival producer's $75,000 bid for her services. He understands her pretty well, and he has plans.