Bringing Up Bogie's Baby

By R.Z. Sheppard

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.

On and off the screen Bogart and Bacall caused a chemical reaction rivaled only by that of Tracy and Hepburn. The start was not promising: "He [Howard Hawks] said he thought he'd like to put me in a film with Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart. I thought, 'Cary Grant--terrific! Humphrey Bogart --yucch.'"

Yet when she describes the moment that their relationship became serious, one can almost hear a director shout "Cut and print": "It was about three weeks into the picture--the end of the day--I had one more shot, was sitting at the dressing table in the portable dressing room combing my hair. Bogie came in to bid me good night. He was standing behind me--when suddenly he leaned over, put his hand under my chin, and kissed me. It was impulsive--he was a bit shy--no lunging wolf tactics. He took a worn package of matches out of his pocket and asked me to put my phone number on the back. I did." His love letters too were everything a girl could want.

Their eleven-year marriage produced two children, a son Steve, named after the leading character in To Have and Have Not, and a daughter Leslie, after Leslie Howard, the British actor killed during the war.

Hollywood in the '40s was good duty.

Though actors worked hard for the national morale and propaganda effort, the Garden of Allah life does not appear to have been greatly curtailed. The West Coast version of Stage Door Canteen took place at Cole Porter's house, where "he always had a few soldiers who had no place to go." Bogart did his part in the Coast Guard. Once a week he cruised the coastline off Balboa, keeping an eye peeled for the Japanese. Never have so few...

Bacall is not overly reflective about her times. She has a few standard warnings about the danger of Communist witch hunts. But mainly she clicks off the events and people in her life with the diligent rhythms of the Twentieth Century Limited, which she had boarded in 1943 to start her film career. The exception is when she recounts Bogart's stoic struggle with terminal cancer. Here her prose becomes spare and piercing: "I sat with him, had coffee--he still couldn't forget the night before. I asked him if he felt better. 'It's always better in the daylight.' Sun day School was short, I had to collect my babies--I said I'd be right back and kissed him as I always did. Newspapers later printed that he said, 'Goodbye, Kid,' mak ing it seem overly dramatic and pointed.

It was not like that--it was just 'Good bye, Kid,' in a most ordinary way under most extraordinary circumstances." In such passages the props of career and success are suddenly swept away, and To Have and Have Not becomes much more than a movie title.

--R.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.