There’s no better evidence for the idea that watching a great actor means watching a great director at work than the career of Lauren Bacall, who, at the time that she was discovered by the director Howard Hawks, was hardly even an actress. She was a model whom Hawks’s wife, Slim Hawks, had spotted on a magazine cover. Howard Hawks claimed that Bacall, rather than her résumé, ended up in his office as a result of a misunderstanding. When he met her, he hated her high voice and told her to alter it to a throaty purr.
She was nineteen; he instructed her (so he said) to sass men, and, when she sassed Clark Gable, Hawks told his screenwriter Jules Furthman, “Do you suppose we could make a girl who is insolent, as insolent as Bogart, who insults people, who grins when she does it, and people like it?” They started writing, and, Hawks said, “I would try out the scenes on Bacall,” and here’s the thing—he added, “She was working all the time.” He got her to work even more, with a series of demanding lessons in accents. He maintained her natural, somewhat feline look—as Bacall wrote in her autobiography, “By Myself,” “Howard had chosen me for my thick eyebrows and crooked teeth and that’s the way they would stay.” He also cast her opposite Humphrey Bogart in an adaptation—an unrecognizably loose adaptation—of Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not,” the movie that made her a star, that launched her career and her relationship with Bogart, whom she married in 1945. (Hawks delivers his version of the story in Joseph McBride’s “Hawks on Hawks.”)
In “To Have and Have Not,” Bacall gave Bogart as good as she got; the famous line in the famous scene, of course, is “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” Bacall, at nineteen, was already fast and knowing. When her character calls out Bogart’s lines a step ahead of him, it doesn’t seem scripted. Hawks hadn’t invented the strong woman onscreen. (Marlene Dietrich, with whom Hawks never worked, reproached him for lending Bacall her shtick.) Hawks filmed tough women because he filmed tough men; he invented female characters to knock his leading men down in a way that other men couldn’t. That’s where some of the sly gender symbols of Hawks’s films come from, but that’s also what his tough women often remain: symbols, legends, mysteries.
Hawks wanted Bacall for what he could make of her. But when I think of Bacall, the movie that first comes to mind is Vincente Minnelli’s “Designing Woman.” It was a role meant for Grace Kelly, who was unavailable, the role of a New York fashion designer who has a whirlwind marriage with a slovenly, man’s-man sports writer (Gregory Peck). The drama of the comedy is their effort to reconcile their drastically different ways of life with their emotional unity. It’s a sort of erotic “Odd Couple,” with duelling voice-overs, and Bacall was never more radiant or more poised. It features the scene that makes Bacall present for me more than any: her first moments alone in her husband’s rumpled apartment, which she’s packing up, humming the song “Everything I Have Is Yours”—a throwaway moment in which, doing ordinary things with practical determination and an unfailing sense of command, she moves, unobserved, joyful, and confident, with an eye on the future.
It was Bacall’s second film with Minnelli; their first was “The Cobweb,” from 1955, and there, too, she’s glorious in a roiling ensemble cast. For Minnelli, Bacall wasn’t merely a strong or tough woman. Rather, she was an independent woman who made her way in the world with power of mind, force of character, and determined ideas. In “The Cobweb,” she’s an artist; in “Designing Woman,” she’s a commanding presence in the New York fashion world, and the movie feels like going home. It’s also a movie of romantic happiness that’s shadowed by death—Bacall filmed it in late 1956, while Bogart was dying of cancer, and she wrote, “That movie was one of my happiest film experiences.” She called it a “godsend,” adding, “It was a romantic movie and I seemed to be constantly running toward Greg or away from him, so I had emotional and physical release to compensate for keeping everything inside at home.” Bacall was only thirty-two at the time, and, strange to say, her career reached its apogee at that moment. What was the problem?
Simply: that strength, that independence. To this day, Hollywood has trouble with strong and independent female characters, to the extent that the notion has become a stereotype and a constraint. Bacall beside Bogart was in a tussle; for all the mighty figures who populated the Hollywood studios, almost nobody else could stand up to her. She was meant to play Presidents and C.E.O.s, editors-in-chief and visionary directors. How many such roles existed for actresses—for women in real life—in her heyday? Bacall was bigger than her career. She started young and stayed ahead of her time, and her greatness—her mighty personal presence and her diverse body of work—carries a shadow of unfulfillment, and even tragedy.
P.S.: It seems apt to remember her with a personal moment of comedy. My father, nearly five years her senior, was a counselor at the summer camp that she attended in the late thirties (her name then was Betty Bacal); he remembered catching her and a friend skinny-dipping in the lake. He never forgot.
