The Editors of LIFE - LIFE Remembering Lauren Bacall, 1924–2014

Remembering

LAUREN BACALL

19242014

Photograph from Photo12/Polaris.

LIFE Books

Managing Editor Robert Sullivan

Director of Photography Christina Lieberman

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Copy Editor Joel Van Liew

Picture Editor Sarah Cates

Writer-Reporters Marilyn Fu, Amy Lennard Goehner, Daniel S. Levy

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Photo Assistant Caitlin Powers

Director of Photography Emerita Barbara Baker Burrows

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eISBN: 978-1-68330-570-5

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Vol. 14, No. 17 September 5, 2014

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Front Cover Photograph by Bert Six/MPTVImages.

Below On Broadway, New York City, before, and just after the lights have been dimmed in tribute to Lauren Bacall on August 15, 2014. Photograph by Peter Foley/EPA/Landov.

Back to The Golden Age

WHEN LAUREN BACALL DIED IN AUGUST just shy of her 90th birthday, there was sympathy for her family, of course, and also lamentation that we, the film audience, had, what with the earlier losses this year of Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, seen the last of the Golden Age greats. Thats not true. Olivia de Havilland is still with us, living today in Paris at 98 years old. Kirk Douglas, whom Bacall dated when she was a 17-year-old in acting school in New York City, is alive at age 97. Doris Day is 90 and Dame Angela Lansbury 88. Relative whippersnappers such as Sean Connery and certainly Sophia Loren touched the Golden Age.

But Douglas seemed to speak for many of us when he said, With the loss of Lauren Bacall, whom we all called Betty, a meaningful part of my history has been extinguished.

She was glamorous from the get-goat least from the get-go of her public persona. As we will learn from the narrative beginning on the pages immediately following, as a child she was just, in her words, a nice Jewish girl from New York City, Betty Perske, growing taller and dreaming the usual little girl dreams. Yes, she, like the older Douglas, took acting classes, but nothing was assured. Success and fame came in a tremendous rush, and overnight Lauren Bacall was an exemplar of the Golden Age.

LIFEs batting average on these things isnt necessarily Ruthian or even Jeteresque. When staff photographer Ed Clark sent us pretty pictures of a young ingenue taken by him in an L.A. park, a curvy woman taking the stage name Marilyn Monroe, we didnt run them. When Terence Spencer called from London to put us on to this phenomenon sweeping Britain in 1963, Beatlemania, we demurred.

But almost as soon as director Howard Hawks (and particularly Mrs. Hawks, as you will read) found Betty Bacall for his new film To Have and Have Not, we found her tooand in fact, as you see, that was our cover copy: a new movie find. With our October 16, 1944, cover story the American public got a week off from the war and an early look at the Look.

Midway through the first reel of To Have and Have Not, a new movie, the sulky-looking girl... saunters with catlike grace into camera range and in an insolent, sultry voice says, Anybody got a match? ran the first paragraph of the LIFE piece. That moment marks the impressive screen debut of 20-year-old Lauren (Betty) Bacall. (It was Hawks who changed Betty to Lauren.)

It certainly was an impressive debut, and one she would struggle to top. But she did have several other film successes, and in the Golden Age mode, she led an off-screen life as fascinating as anything she was putting on the big screen. Most famously, she married her To Have and Have Not costar, the much older Humphrey Bogart, and the two of them were congenial hosts to a platoon of Hollywood wild folk that became the original Rat Pack. After Bogarts death there was the affair with Frank Sinatra, the marriage to Jason Robards, the Broadway triumphs... the elegant segue into the life of a Golden Age Grande Dame. LIFE stayed with the story: Bacall in a fashion spread, Bacalls new movie in color, the Widow Bogart and her son at the funeral, Bacall in her seniority. Many of the pictures we ran in days gone by are in the portraits adorning our biographical sketch, and then in A Life in Pictures to follow.

Lauren Bacall was quoted in LIFE in 1945 as having confided in one of her best friends when she was still a girl, I am going to Hollywood. She did that, and she conquered, and she became a regal figure in Hollywoods Golden Age. She entertained us with her work, captivated us with her persona. She will be missed. She is missed already.