“It’s an awful thing to do to a woman my age, leave her alone with her thoughts.”
With rain streaming across the kitchen window, Lauren Bacall is presiding over a breakfast table conversation in A Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). She talks about what it is like when the spirit is young but life has no more chances to offer. Barbara Streisand sits opposite her, drinking a cup of coffee in quiet deference because when Ms Bacall talked, the world shut up and listened.
Even Humphrey Bogart had little to say in To Have and Have Not (1944), when Bacall husked some of the most memorable lines ever spoken by a female actor in a movie, including, “You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve?” Few female actors maybe with the exception of Greta Garbo had the kind of swagger Bacall had. She was linear, gliding perfection, with eyes that missed nothing and a face that you could not describe as just beautiful.
Beauty was for the likes of Marilyn Monroe. Bacall was every man’s equal. She was mystery and depth and scathing intelligence. She never cowered, she towered over the material and the actors she worked with. Legend has it that her screen test for To Have and Have Not was possibly the first and only time when she was asked not to be visibly nervous. She is supposed to have overcome the problem by giving the camera a “look” of such self-possession that it would become almost as famous as she was.
And of course, you can never really recall Bacall’s best work without remembering Bogart. The two shared a certain synergy on screen that cannot be articulated but only experienced in their films like The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948).
Bogart was 45, a man of the world, and she just 20 when they married. The year was 1945, and there is a newsreel still somewhere that shows them strolling hand in hand towards bliss that was just 12 years long because in 1957, Bogart died of cancer.
Their romance, be it on screen or off, had in-built magic that is hard to come by in cinema and in life. But even without him by her side, Bacall was a cinematic force to reckon with because till the end, she remained an uncompromised original. Today’s generation will remember her for her voice cameo in Family Guy, but to us she was more: more than just the face of film noir, or the woman who, in a way, changed the way women’s parts were written in Hollywood. She showed that beauty was intelligent repartee, standing tall and asking for and surviving trouble.
She will be remembered for being Lauren Bacall because there was no one quite like her. Or ever will be.
with The New Indian Express
Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be