By Myself and Then Some by Lauren Bacall

 

It all started quite well, but it turned out not to be the book I had hoped for. In fact, the majority of the second half is all about how Lauren Bacall's husband Humphrey Bogart became ill and eventually died. Yes, I did skip most of that. Even after she meets Bogie as a teenager, the book is nearly all about their relationship and not her films.

Her early story is fine, about her Romanian background, about how her father up and left when she was only eight. We hear about her schools and moving in with her grandmother when she attended a high School of 5,000 girls. A year in New York at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Then "I started my professional Modelling career in May 1941. I was still sixteen". Working as an usher on Broadway and lots of auditions.

Her big break comes with a small part in the theatrical production of "Franklin Street". She is still only eighteen but the play didn't complete it's trial run. However, a modelling job for Harper's Bazaar takes her for two weeks into Florida, and was so successful that Lauren ends up as the cover photo for March 1943. She is still only eighteen. This turns out to be her big break as the big film studios became interested. The events that result in as screen test in Hollywood are, perhaps, the most interesting in the book.

It's big director Howard Hawks who signs her, "he always wanted to find a girl from nowhere, make her into his dream girl". She gets to know Hollywood, some of the stars, but no work. Until, out of the blue comes "The Have and Have Not", her first big role, playing opposite Humphrey Bogart! This is the start of their friendship and later affair, she's nineteen and he's in his early forties and married three times.

What follows is a story of their romance and later marriage at the expense of her work in movies. So it's Bogie, Bogie, Bogie. And all their friends. Even her next film "The Big Sleep" is hardly mentioned. Nor are her later films so I wont even bother to mention them. Except, perhaps "Designing Woman" that I have reviewed on my blog. But before then, Bogart has begun to be seriously ill and the book gives over to page after page of hospitals, part recovery and eventually death.

"By Myself" was originally published in 1978 and then some twenty seven years later came "And Then Some", an update from Lauren, now seventy, and of very little interest. And to cap it all, of the many biographical books I have read, this is the very first without an index. Cheap or what.