No doubt Lauren Bacall would have a certain amibivalence, were she to read this, that my mention of her death would include reference to Humphrey Bogart in the first paragraph. But her work with him and her love of and marriage to him is one of the three things I think of before anything else when I think of her, despite her having lived, and done many things, since his death 57 years ago, ironically the same passage of time as was the length of his life. But despite her perhaps even greater success as a stage actress (she did after all win awards for her stage work while "only" receiving one of those honorary lifetime Oscars), I remember her best for her four films with Bogart, who after all is my favorite all time actor. Of the four, Dark Passage is merely very good, while the other three are masterpieces of the golden age of Hollywood - To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Key Largo. Arguably those three are not Bogart's own top three. Even I would rank The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca higher. But the work they did together in those films was memorable and as good as anything on film. The chemistry between them has perhaps been met on the same level now and then, such as Gable and Crawford, or Flynn and De Havilland. But if you want to see an admittedly idealized portrayal of how men and women interact, you can't beat Bogart and Bacall. The connection between real life and the movies is often a tenuous one, if it exists at all, but that portrayal was based on real life. Bogart being my favorite actor but also one whose real life persona was not all that distant from his film portrayals, I wondered what was it about Lauren Bacall that led him to choose to spend his life with her, have his only children with her, and apparently had his only true happiness? What was it about her that he chose her when he probably could have had a range of choices that is unimaginable? That gets to the second thing about her - Lauren Bacall was what I would consider to be an ideal woman to be a man's true partner, which perhaps not coincidentally also made her a role model for women. Not a truly great actress, in my opinion, like Joan Fontaine or her lifetime idol Bette Davis. She nonetheless matched tremendous sexual allure, great presence, glamour, elegance, class, and beauty with obvious intelligence, wit and a kind of attitude that itself combined availability with a challenging attitude. That is the second thing I think about her. The third has to do something with this site. Some here clearly are not from New York. Others once were but now follow the Jets from some distance. Others here grew up here and still are here. Some like me are not from New York but now live and work in the area. I myself have an ambivalence about New York. But I do admire what I recognize in Lauren Bacall as being a quintessential New Yorker. Despite her time in Hollywood she was from New York and returned to it, having lived many years in the Dakota. Those here who remember my Beautiful Women thread may recall how many were born in New York. But right now I can't think of any of those who better represent the City than Lauren Bacall. She herself had this to say about how New York affected her and her attitude about life: “You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”
