Lauren Bacall and the Art of Writing the Grand Amour

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badass ladies, Bogey, bromance, cinema, Classic Cinema, grand amour, Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart, IMDB, Lauren Bacall, love affair, memoirs, movies, Old Hollywood, writing

Betty, Lauren, Slim, Baby. Icon.

Miss Bacall would have hated that last epithet, yet it’s by far the most apropos when discussing her. More will be written, and better, by people who have analyzed her life and times to a far more exacting degree, and yet…how many of those writers are true fans?

I read Lauren Bacall’s memoirs, By Myself and Then Some, about three years ago. Humphrey Bogart has long been my favorite actor, and of course his romance with Lauren Bacall was legendary, but it always made me wonder what kind of woman could so enthrall a man like Bogey. It’s the same with someone like Warren Beatty, who was so very popular with just about every woman in Hollywood finally settling down (and staying with) Annette Bening. What is it about her that so entrances him? Hm, that may need to be a later post.

Back to Bacall.

She called Bogey the most electrifying love of her life, and she had the endurance to live 57 years without him. She made quite a life for herself in those years, with another marriage and a third child, to say nothing of the career she blazed on Broadway, TV, and films.

And yet…

The book is 512 pages long, and she spends more than 200 of those pages on her years with Bogey. For perspective, let’s remind ourselves that she was 19 when she met Bogey, and 33 when he died. Thirteen years of the 89 she spent on this earth consumed 40% of her book because of the person she spent those years with.

As a writer, I try to capture that kind of connection between my characters, and I know the finished product is never as perfect as it is in my head, and certainly never as good as the real thing. I try because even a pale imitation of that connection is still intoxicating. The tension, the verbal sparring, the intense attraction, it all feels real as I imagine it and then try to make it as real as words on a page can get. I wonder if Miss Bacall wrote those 200 pages as a way of reliving those years with Bogey, and not just remembering them. I wonder how often she revisited those years in her own mind before she put them to paper.

If it was me, that would have been a daily habit, part torture, part pleasure, but essential.