The Sheila Variations

Lauren Bacall and Harper's Bazaar

For background, please read this. If you don't feel like reading it, I will re-cap:

Lauren Bacall was 17 years old, and modeling clothes at various department stores in New York City. This is the early 1940s, understand, so here's the deal:

The body type in style at that time was pretty bodacious. The bullet bras, the miniscule waists, the curving hips ... This was what was "in". (I shoulda been born then, I tell ya.) Lauren Bacall, a lanky teenager, with a long lean body, was not at all in style. She said it herself, when she came to my school to do a seminar, "The clothes didn't hang right on my body. They didn't look good on me."

Diana Vreeland, fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar, thought differently. At the time, she was the only one. But that's what makes a visionary, and Vreeland was, indeed, a visionary.

She saw Betty Bacall, and decided to put her on the cover of Harper's Bazaar.

Now, I will be COMPLETELY obnoxious and quote myself, from the post above:

I believe the photo was taken in 1941 or 1942 - and she was standing in front of a huge Red Cross. It is an arresting image. She has a flat blank face, she stares straight at the camera - there is nothing coy about her. Her skin is pale, her lips are bright red. Again: she doesn't quite look like what models looked like in that time period. She looks like what models look like now. There is a very clear identity on her face - you can see her personality - which models didn't quite have at that time. Think of the runway models now - how they stalk right at you - with this flat blank "Yeah, this is who I am" stare. That was what Bacall looked like on that cover.

The Harper's Bazaar cover was, as Bacall described it to us, "the twist of fate that changed my life forever".

What did Bacall mean by that? Slim Hawks, Howard Hawks' wife, saw the cover and showed it to her husband, saying: "What about this girl?" Howard Hawks, incredible film director (my personal favorite) had been looking for a project. He was a Svengali, he wanted to create a certain type of woman for movies (ahem, let me point to myself again. Here's my post on the Howard Hawks woman.) As a result of Lauren Bacall's Harper's Bazaar cover, Howard Hawks called this skinny teenager out to Hollywood to put her under his own personal contract, to develop projects for her - the first being To Have and Have Not - starring (of course) Humphrey Bogart. Her performance in that film has got to go down in history as one of the greatest and most startling film debuts of all time. Also, you know, there was the little thing of that romance that began on that film!!

Anyway, there's the background.

And here's what just happened. In the original post, I mentioned that I had been Googling up a storm, looking for the exact image of Lauren Bacall's first cover for Harper's Bazaar. I knew the image, because it's in her first autobiography - but I had a HELL of a time finding it online. I found other images from the shoot (which showed up in the pages of that issue) - but not the cover.

So just now, I got an email from a woman named Anna. She must have tripped over that post, through a Google search of her own, and she very very kindly sent me the image of that first Harper's Bazaar cover.

I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to have the image, and I'm thrilled to now be able to share it with you all. It's enormous - so I put it in the extended entry.

Enjoy. LOOK at that face!!! Isn't it so OBVIOUS why she would attract attention?? Isn't it so apparent that she was MEANT to be a star??

Posted by sheila