Melvyn Bragg met Lauren Bacall, then 60, for the Observer Magazine while she was on tour in Sweet Bird of Youth, which had just started its London run (‘Bacall comes to Britain’, 14 July 1985). Bragg, like everyone else, is struck by her beauty. Christine, ‘the cautious Scottish makeup girl’, says ‘I’ve never seen bone structure like it, and the face, the skin, all that – all natural, no scissors-and-paste job anywhere’. His prose style rejects ‘She looks sensational’, in favour of: ‘Sensational. That’s the answer: that’s how she looks.’
After her debut in the Howard Hawks film To Have and Have Not, where she was ‘tough, poised, worldly, sexually insolent: 19, irresistible’, director Moss Hart told her: ‘You have nowhere to go but down.’ Bragg sadly concurs: ‘In her career, she did. Not in her life.’ Bacall was frustrated by such unrealistic expectation: ‘After that one movie they said I was Garbo and Dietrich and Bette Davis rolled into one. It was ridiculous. It was impossible.’
She spoke about how Hawks had moulded her in his fantasy image, controlling her clothes and hairstyle and telling her ‘not to talk to newspapers, to be mysterious’, and even changed her name (she used to be Betty Perske). Humphrey Bogart, whom she married when he was 45 and she was 20, was ‘maybe the dad I didn’t have’.
‘She was always tough,’ wrote Bragg. ‘She rowed with Jack Warner so much he forced her to buy out her own contract. Everyone else left free.’ Bacall then flashed her trademark hauteur: ‘He wasn’t only a monster, he was a moron.’
Meeting her backstage in Plymouth, Bragg noted that Bacall ‘was much more Broadway than Hemingway’ and all of the rough treatment she had endured had pushed her back to the theatre. ‘That’s what I’d started out wanting to be,’ she said. ‘I wanted my name in lights on Broadway. I wanted everything.’
