The Books: “Now” (Lauren Bacall)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Now, by Lauren Bacall

Published in 1994, Now is the second of Lauren Bacall’s three autobiographies. By Myself (excerpt here) was published in 1978, and Now came out in 1994. For the most part, it fills in the gap – of what happened in those years, in her career (Woman of the Year, Applause, her love of the theatre), as a mother, as a widow. But a lot of it is long ruminations on people she knows. There are sections on Olivier, Slim Hawks, and of course her years with Bogart. She loved him. I remember her saying to our class, when she came and spoke at our school, “You know, we had a lot of fun together.” Bogart taught her about being a celebrity. He taught her what you do and what you don’t do. The tabloids will not tell you who you are. Bogart created a wall of privacy around their very public relationship, and for the most part, they were homebodies. They had crazy parties (and the group of folks who congregated at the Bogart house for hours on end were the original “Rat Pack”), but they put up a united front against the world. Bacall learned a lot from him, and she kept those lessons going in the years after his death. She obviously had a good upbringing, with standards and morals ingrained in her from her mother, but Bogart reinforced those lessons.

I wanted to choose an excerpt today that is a “profile” of one of her friends. In the same manner as By Myself, Now is written in a chatty yet confident prose. It doesn’t go all over the place, there is a nice structure to it. You can feel Bacall’s personality breathing and living behind it, which is one of the reasons why the books are so good. Bacall insists that she wrote “every word” and I believe her. She would procrastinate writing the book, due to fears and insecurity, it’s hard sometimes to sit down and write (don’t I know it!). So her editor at Random House, aware of the approaching deadline, said to her, “Look. You’ve got to finish this. Why don’t we set you up here at Random House with an office, a place you can come to every day, like a job, and write?” So that’s what she did. She went to the Random House offices every day, closed the door of her office, and wrote.

Today’s excerpt is Lauren Bacall’s memories of John Huston, one of Bogart’s greatest friends (he did the eulogy at Bogart’s funeral), and a great friend of Bacall’s too. Their friendship and working relationship spanned decades.

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The Maltese Falcon was Huston’s first directing job. He directed both Bogart and Bacall in Key Largo. The experience of filming African Queen was one-for-the-books, and Bacall sat on the sidelines, battling the scary bugs in her bungalow, and trying to be a good sport. Huston and Bogart were crotchety old old friends. Both of them wild. But good men. Bacall paints a touching portrait. To me, Huston leaps off the pages here, alive, unpredictable, quirky, real. It’s a marvelous picture, too, of the lifelong friendship between Humphrey Bogart and Huston.

EXCERPT FROM Now, by Lauren Bacall

And I thought then and after, and reflect now, on what a major part John played in my life: through all my married years with Bogie; through Bogie’s illness and the eulogy he delivered at Bogie’s memorial; through providing two of our greatest out-of-the-country adventures, in Mexico and Africa, and taking part in some of our funniest, most outrageous times in various world capitals; as one of the leaders of our trip to Washington during the horrible Hollywood investigation years. He never stopped being fascinating, brilliant, funny, mad, and infuriating.

I have never met and I’m sure there has never been anyone remotely like him. He gave me an awareness of writers I had never heard of, such as B. Traven, Stephen Crane, W.R. Burnett. He had the gift of words and ideas; he was always searching, and I’m not sure he was ever happy. Generally, I don’t think he liked women – when he was humiliating a wife, it was deeply unnerving – but he was able to like me because I was Bogie’s wife.

All he did, he did in his own Huston way. He loved his father, Walter; he loved Bogie; he loved Anjelica, Danny, Tony, and Allegra; and that was about it I would say. And all through his devastating, painful illness, he, like Bogie, never complained. He left an unfillable space in work and life. He contributed knowledge, adventure, and excitement that was original and unique to him and that cannot be duplicated.

His relationship with Bogie began long before I came on the scene. Both of them were at Warner’s – John a writer, Bogie an actor – until The Maltese Falcon and Bogie’s willingness to take a chance on this writer’s first directorial effort. They were not personally alike, really: Bogie wanting a more stable life, a saner one; John more driven, being quite incapable of staying in any one place too long. They made each other laugh. They challenged each other’s work – each reaching higher because of the other – and finally they respected each other.

They both were professionals, perfectionists, and they both were devils – drank well together, enjoyed the working of each other’s minds, disagreed, fought mildly – and very occasionally they were slightly cuckoo, both of them always fun to be around, though unpredictable and prankish. Like John bringing home a monkey as a pet, playing touch football at his house at three in the morning, tweaking and twisting Bogie’s nose one drunken evening in Africa – the result of one of those wild disagreements. But they loved each other.

This was no ordinary friendship. They were together socially a great deal, but in actual fact, spent such an enormous amount of time together because in addition they worked together so often and so well. Their personalities each had an edge, so in that way they were very alike. That was part of the mutual attraction. Bogie may not have gone along with all of John’s life choices, but he did understand his personal problems. And he empathized with them. And John was able to talk to Bogie, whom he knew he could trust and who he knew would be honest with him. Not only did they enjoy each other, but each of them recognized the uniqueness of the other – how they stood out and rose about the ordinariness of so many around them. When John would cast a picture, Bogie was almost always the first choice; and when Bogie was asked by John to join him in moviemaking, there was no question about Bogie’s saying yes. He always felt that as high as you might go with another director, with John you could always go higher. At the same time, John’s attention span was fairly short and his boredom level easily reached. Bogie, ever aware of this failing, always kept a weather eye and pulled him back into the proper finishing of the movie. John was dazzling. He drew people to him like a magnet. You had to be careful not to be too drawn – at least not to the exclusion of everything else, for John was a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy. He would see you, and you would be convinced you were the one persona in the world he wanted to see. The hugs, the enthusiasm, the Hello, honeys! But when you left or he did, you had to know you were forgotten: you were only in that moment of John’s life. But he did mean it – at the time. I still always felt lucky to have had that moment. After all, John was not like anyone else.

Having been with him in Mexico for two months and in Africa and London for four or more, I was able to observe him in his directing mode quite often. With Bogie he had unspoken communication. I never knew what the shorthand was specifically, but I knew that when they talked about a scene they figured it out, and then in the shooting of that same scene, if the result was not quite what John wanted, eye contact and a word or two seemed to be enough. That kind of connection is so rare as to be almost nonexistent. Is it any wonder they worked together every chance they could? The locations were always difficult, not easily accessible – part of the attraction for John. Bogie beefed, but he would always go; partly, I think, because he was incredulous and because he wanted to see for himself how far John would go.

On The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John was very much the same with his father, Walter, except that it was the first time they had worked together and the joy and personal pride they had in each other was palpable. Walter impressed with John’s ability, and John thrilled to be giving Walter the role of a lifetime. As John was a man who did not openly or, I daresay, easily deal with his emotions, watching him soften, open up a little more with Walter, becoming somewhat vulnerable, therefore more human, more connected, made the hours spent with him there all the more moving.

I experienced his creative gifts firsthand in Key Largo. He was articulate with actors: he knew what he wanted and told you. But he told you privately. An arm around your shoulder, a walk away from the set to explain. Never to embarrass; never to make you feel uncomfortable. It is difficult to isolate specifics in John the director. Friend or not, he was the figure of authority on the set. He had a gift for listening to anyone working on the picture. Working with John was an exchange of ideas – it was a cooperative effort. John instilled trust; I certainly trusted him in Key Largo, wanted his help and got it. As in my last scene in Key Largo: after a tense exchange between the Bogart and Edward G. Robinson characters, there I was with my father, Lionel Barrymore, worried that I would never see Bogart again. The phone rang, with the Bogie character telling me he was on his way back to me. It could have been a soapy moment – instead of which, it was quite real. Me telling Lionel he was returning to us; filled with emotion. I had to cross the room to Lionel, go to the window, open the shutters to let the sunlight in, signaling the start of a new day and hope. It was John’s idea to open the shutters. Another visual that said more than words ever could.

He was a friend to me. Not the kind of friend I would call in the middle of the night for help – though, come to think of it, he’d probably have rushed right over. So I guess I would say he was not a day-to-day friend. His interests were elsewhere, and they were many and far-flung. He had been a boxer in his youth, had always loved horses, riding to hounds, as he did in Ireland. He was a writer, a lover of the written and spoken word. And a lover of art – paintings, sculpture. I had never heard of pre-Columbian art until John, who had an extraordinary collection of it. For no apparent reason, I hadn’t expected him to live in great style. I was totally wrong. His house in Tarzana, California, which he designed and built, was in keeping with his size: large, expansive, comfortable, modern – mixed with antique furniture – different kinds of wood, a perfect background for his pre-Columbian art display. You can see in his movies how uniquely visual he was. He saw people and places in a way nobody else did.

I didn’t see much of him for a few years after Bogie’s death. He lived in Ireland; invited me numerous times. Stupidly, I never went. He was never happy about my second marriage, though he never said so. But I knew. He wanted me with Bogie or no one. That’s who I was to him.

Though John had talked to me a couple of times about appearing in something he was developing, those projects unhappily were never done. To him I was first and foremost Bogie’s wife. I never thought of John as being a true lover and enjoyer of women, except as possible conquests. Wives should be at home with their husbands. Wives should bear children and, almost always, or preferably, speak only when spoken to. I think he was genuinely fond of me but that a lot of it was because he associated me with good and happy times when all of us were working together. On the locations, I was the nonworking tagalong wife looking after her husband, and we had great times together. Then during Bogie’s illness and after, in John’s eyes I behaved as a wife should behave. Because of the closeness we had all shared, and because Bogie and I were such a complete pair, any man who might come into my life was looked upon as an interloper. How dare he! John was a macho man, and perhaps it was my insecurity with him that made me feel as I’ve described. It certainly did not hamper our relationship. In fact, it probably made it a stronger one than most women had with him. Anyway, it lasted a hell of a long time and saw us through the best: the birth of children, the rewards of work well done, and the shared laughter of friendship and the worst of life, sickness, and death.

In the most unforgettable and probably my favorite memory of John, it is early morning in Africa – he is in safari pants and jacket, brown slouch hat, brown boots, brown cigarillo in hand. In kingly fashion John is waving, smiling, and bowing to the natives who lined the route daily as we headed for the Ruiki River for the day’s shooting. Pure, beautiful Huston.

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1 Response to The Books: “Now” (Lauren Bacall)

  1. The Books: “By Myself and Then Some” (Lauren Bacall)

    Next book on my “entertainment biography” shelf: By Myself and Then Some, by Lauren Bacall This is an expanded and updated version of Lauren Bacall’s first autobiography By Myself (excerpt here). We’ve got more photos (some really great ones), more…

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