Bringing Up Bogie's
LAUREN BACALL: BY MYSELF Knopf; 377 pages; $10.95
George S. Kaufman of Broadway saw it. Diana Vreeland of Harper's Bazaar saw it. Director Howard Hawks not only saw it but developed and packaged it for millions of entertainment-starved Americans emerging from the empty frying pans of the Depression into the fires of World War II.
This nascent "it," a combination of glamour and whatever it is that makes cookies tough, belonged to a teen-age girl from New York City, born Betty Perske and metamorphosed by Hawks and Warner Bros., publicity department into Lauren Bacall. She was the kind of sex symbol a fella could swap wisecracks with and then bring home to Mother. She became an instant addition to the fantasy lives of American males when she huskily told Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not, "If you want anything, just whistle."
Bacall's autobiographical voice is not so sultry, seductive or worldly. "I am in love with the Arch of Triumph—aside from the Lincoln Memorial, it is the most moving monument my heart has beat to ... We returned to Rome to prepare for our audience with the Pope. With my Jewish background, I was ill prepared ... Bogie, Ted Moore, the camera operator, the Captain and I went fishing on Lake Albert. I caught a five-pound Nile perch and threw it back, just loved catching it."
She brings the same sort of breathless enthusiasm to her girlhood experiences in acting school, modeling, ushering, and selling Actor's Cue in front of Sardi's so her face would become familiar to producers. A big break came when Critic George Jean Nathan wrote that Lauren was "the prettiest theater usher" of the 1942 season. Off Broadway the spotlight was on Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Bacall danced with servicemen at the Stage Door Canteen, but her mind seems to have been exclusively on star wars.
She generously praises her friends, is discreet about most of her enemies and as demure as a schoolgirl about herself. One is never sure if her virginity was lost or simply faded slowly like the Cheshire cat. Still, the lady knows how to settle a score. On being romanced and jilted by Frank Sinatra after Bogart's death in 1957: "Actually, Frank did me a great favor—he saved me from the disaster our marriage would have been. The truth is he was probably smarter than I: he knew it couldn't work. But the truth also is that he behaved like a complete shit." When she writes about the end of her marriage to Jason Robards, she is as cool and businesslike as a woman returning a defective toaster.
The reader is constantly aware—as the men in her later life must have been—that Bacall was, and to some extent always will be, Bogie's Baby. When they met in 1944 while co-starring in To Have and Have Not, she was 19 and he was 44. Bogart was unhappily married to a woman noted for her drinking and violent temper, so the courtship was stealthily conducted in trailers and friends' boats.