The Making of Lauren Bacall
The teenage Betty Bacal was 5'8" tall and entranced by the theater. Her family lived in a small apartment at 84th Street and West End Avenue, in Manhattan. Betty had always wanted to be on stage, though no one else in her family did. Hungry for a career, she did everything she could to learn the acting craft and to get noticed. Though shy and uncertain about her performances, she had an iron will and didn’t hesitate to ask strangers for help with her acting career. One afternoon, she learned that the great star Bette Davis was in a certain hotel, Betty introduced herself and the two had a warm chat.
In 1939, the family splurged and took Betty to see “Hamlet” on Broadway. John Gielgud played Hamlet masterfully and for the rest of her life Bacall would recall dozens of details from that evening: the boxes and balconies of the theater; the lush, upholstered seats; the house lights dimming as the chatter of hundreds of people suddenly fell into a hush. The play was so powerful that when it was over and Betty left the theater, she was jostled and bumped on the street, not quite sure where she was…
By the fall of 1940, Betty Bacal was completely finished with school, and felt ready to begin serious training in the theater world. Her beloved Rumanian-Jewish mother Natalie told Betty the family could afford to send her for one year to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. It was a two-year program, but for Betty it would have to be just one year. Anyway, you had to be asked back for the second year, and few students were asked.
Betty plunged in, taking fencing lessons, voice lessons, dance lessons, pantomime lessons. Students at the American Academy learned how to fall on stage without being injured, how to use theatrical makeup; how to analyze a play and its characters; and how to choose a costume.
Betty was given scenes to play and her acting critiqued. The faculty were very serious about teaching. One day in dance class she learned the rhumba from a Mr. Riley who insisted, “You can’t do the rhumba until you’ve lived!” Bacall got a lesson in posture by having to put a book on her head and walk all over the stage without the book falling off.
She’d always been told she was a natural performer, but the American Academy treated its students as if they knew nothing about performance and had to learn it all from the ground up. Betty was taught how to speak dramatically, how to breathe, how to project her voice, and how to use her body to project emotion.
She was told to write and perform a comic monologue and a dramatic monologue. Bacal’s comic monologue was about a young woman with a harelip who tries to be a speech therapist. She played it with mockery and was devastated when her teacher said, “Miss Bacal, there is no humor in making fun of the physical defects of others.”
Whenever there was time, Betty saw a play. Friday nights, the more senior American Academy of Dramatic Arts students staged a play on a ground-floor theater of the Carnegie Lyceum. One of the star students was Kirk Douglas and Betty marveled at his acting gifts and versatility. She was eating and drinking theater, thinking about it all day and dreaming about it at night.
She acted in some plays at the Carnegie Lyceum, looking out at an audience full of fellow students but also the occasional professional actor, playwright or theatrical agent. Always the school’s instructors were in the audience, armed with pad and paper, taking detailed notes on the performances. Betty played a maid in the Sidney Howard play “The Silver Cord” and had to have an emotional breakdown on stage just as Act One ended, then smoothly pour tea as the curtain rose for Act Two.
At the end of the year, it was time to meet with the head of the theater program, Mr. Diestel, for his evaluation. Mr. Diestel received Betty in his office, a husky man behind a large, imposing desk. He read Betty the comments and observations her various teachers had turned in. Most were complimentary; all expressed the fact that Betty had improved a good deal over the course of the year. Some described deficits in her work, but the verdict was that she should return for the second year.
Betty’s eyes filled with tears as she explained that her family had no money for the second year. She had heard there were scholarships… ? Mr. Diestel said yes, there were scholarships, but only for men. Betty asked could he possibly make an exception in her case? No, he could not.
She went to a drugstore, had a cup of coffee and cried.
Then she picked herself up and went to the modeling agency of Harry Conover, the biggest modeling agent in New York. He told her she was too flat-chested to model for him. Finally, she found a job on 37th Street and Seventh Avenue, modeling for a man named Phil Crystal, which she did all through the summer of 1941.
Men would come in, interested in a dress and wanting to see a lovely woman wearing it. She’d walk up and down for them. They had a right to feel the fabric but sometimes they tried to feel more than the fabric. She learned that cutting humor scalded them better than anger.
She’d go to Walgreen’s drugstore on 44th and Broadway because many actors did. Phil Crystal fired her and she collected herself again. She found work modeling evening gowns for Sam Friedlander.
She changed her name — from “Bacal” to “Bacall.” She auditioned for plays, worked as a theater usher for the Shubert Theater chain, for eight dollars a week. One night, ushering at the Morosco Theatre on 45th Street she was overwhelmed by the tenderness and wit of Noel Coward’s play “Blithe Spirit.” She knew very powerfully that this was her world. But how could she get up on that professional stage?
She worked as a vendor of show business guides at Sardi’s, where theater people went and gawkers went to see the theater people. She was a hostess at the Stage Door Canteen entertaining soldiers and sailors. She auditioned and auditioned, but never got the part.
One week, the critic George Jean Nathan remarked in his Esquire column that the prettiest theater usher in New York was “the tall, slender blonde in the St. James Theatre, right aisle, during the Gilbert & Sullivan engagement” and Betty knew he was talking about her.
Why was it taking so long to become a professional actress?
She got her first speaking part in a George S. Kaufman play — which closed before it reached Broadway. She began to become known in the theater world as a raw newcomer, tall and gawky, but with a lovely face and a voice you remembered.
One day in 1942, Bacall, her mother Natalie and her aunt Rosalie went to the Capitol Theater to see a new movie called “Casablanca.” All three women liked Humphrey Bogart in the movie, but Rosalie also thought he was handsome. Betty was surprised — she didn’t find him handsome at all.
Her big break finally came when a friend introduced Betty to Diana Vreeland of Harper’s Bazaar. Vreeland was bold, demanding, a visionary who carried herself like a queen. She liked the way Betty photographed and put her on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. Slim Hawks, the wife of Hollywood director Howard Hawks, saw the Harper’s Bazaar cover, and suggested her husband try to sign this cover girl to a movie deal.
In 1944, Howard Hawks cast Betty in his film “To Have and Have Not,” changed her professional name to Lauren, paired her with Humphrey Bogart and advised her to speak in a lower register, and to act cool and hard to get. She mastered a sultry, upward-sweeping glance quickly dubbed “The Look.” When the movie came out, she was finally, finally, a star. She was 19 years old.