Bacall raised the temperature in Hollywood: Bogie used to tell her, “Keep it quiet. If in doubt, don’t answer”
❚ THE ONLY TIME I MET LAUREN BACALL was at London’s Hayward Gallery in autumn 1985 at the show Hockney Paints the Stage. I was minding my own business admiring one huge and brashly colourful stage setting, when that unmistakably smoky voice boomed into my ear: “Aw, that is a perfect match for the curtains in the ocean room back home!” I just about suppressed laughing out loud and we became instant pals for the duration. She did actually like the Hockney, without revealing which colour would match her curtains, and certainly gave the impression of knowing her way round the art world.
My diary notes that she was with her incredibly young-looking daughter Leslie Bogart while mum, aged only 61, sadly looked “much the worse for wear though youthfully kitted in black one-piece romper suit”. Did I even ask one personal question? In the orbit of so dazzling a supernova? You’re kidding. And everyone in that gallery was silently begging me to.
Betty’s star today on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame
“ She was so nervous in her first film role, at all of 19 years old, that her head shook; so she tilted her chin down to steady herself, and had to look up from under at the camera. She stood at the bedroom door of ‘a hotel in Martinique in the French West Indies’ – the Warner Bros lot in Hollywood – looked up, and asked Humphrey Bogart for a match. And defined her life… ” / Continued at Guardian online
The inimitable Lauren Bacall with Sophie, her papillon, in her apartment at the Dakota, in New York City. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz
➢ At 86 Lauren Bacall looked back on a lucky, if often difficult, life as she gave it straight to Vanity Fair:
“ You are going to cut me to ribbons, I can tell. What’s the argument for this story? That I am still breathing? I don’t talk about the past,” she proclaims, taking a piece of Bissinger’s and pushing the rest in my direction. Nevertheless, the past is present everywhere in this room and all over the apartment. It is, in fact, never far from her thoughts. She has lived in great comfort in this place since 1961, when she bought it for $48,000. “I called my business manager in California and said, ‘Sell all of my stock’ — what little of it I had — and it’s the only smart financial move I ever made,” she says… ” / Continued at Vanity Fair online
“Go to work, Slim”
❏ Above, we see 19-year-old Betty at her sexiest in To Have and Have Not, her first movie with Bogie when they fell for each other and married for life, making it rather superior to Casablanca for romance. Watch her minx up this quirky number, How Little We Know, with Hoagy Carmichael tickling the ivories.
1945: Bogie and Bacall married within a year of meeting. She said the 25-year age gap was was the most fantastic thing in her life
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 