When Slick Met Slim

“James Garner, whose wisecracks can’t hide integrity at the core, may be Hollywood’s last leading man.”

-        Jane Hall, People Magazine, April 22, 1985

“Lauren Bacall…In a Bygone Hollywood, She Purred Every Word”

-        The New York Times headline, August 12, 2014

Less than a month after James Garner died at age 86 on July 19, 2014, Lauren Bacall passed away at age 89, August 12.  As a teenager, James Garner earned the nickname “Slick.” At 19, Lauren Bacall made an auspicious screen debut as a sassy lounge singer nicknamed “Slim” in “To Have and Have Not,” starring Humphrey Bogart. In the early 1980s, these two distinctively different icons – Lauren Bacall and James Garner - linked by a kindred spirit, hooked up to play off each other in a pair of motion pictures and a two-part episode of a TV series, while tabloids cooked up a romantic tango between the duo.

 

Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall in "To Have and Have Not" (1944)

But first things first. Once upon a time – in 1944 - Howard Hawks, a storied, old-school Hollywood director whose venerable career encompassed a number of classic genres, among them gangster melodramas, screwball comedies, film noir, and westerns, bet the immortal Ernest Hemingway that he could make a good movie out of the author’s worst novel. Hawks chose To Have and Have Not, which he told Hemingway was a “bunch of junk.” The filmmaker jettisoned most of the book, and The Sound and the Fury author William Faulkner (Hemingway’s main rival) contributed to the screenplay, which retained the title and characters’ names but little else, transforming the story into a World War II intrigue strikingly similar to Bogart’s popular 1942 film “Casablanca.”

Lauren Bacall had graced the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in March 1943 (above) when she was discovered by Howard Hawks’ socialite wife, Nancy Keith, whose nickname “Slim” was given to Bacall’s character in “To Have and Have Not,” while Nancy’s nickname for her husband, “Steve,” became Bogart’s nickname in the film.

In a May 1997 interview for Parade magazine, Lauren Bacall recalled the production as “a learning process…I was very nervous and very frightened, totally inexperienced, and I needed help. Howard Hawks was great with me. He was gentle, and he told Bogie to look after me…I was new and very green.” Bogart, 25 years her senior, started romancing Bacall, to the consternation of Hawks, a reputed womanizer who initially had his own designs on the starlet. “Howard did not expect Bogie to fall in love with me. We used to have fun and kid around on the set, and I think it was Bogie’s way of loosening me up. I was so young. I was a pure virgin. I wasn’t a girl around town, and to meet a man like Bogie at that age? At least I was not dumb.”

To paraphrase the closing line from Bogart’s earlier hit picture “The Maltese Falcon,” Bogart and Bacall’s love story became the stuff that dreams are made of. The couple, who married in 1945, appeared together in three more taut film noir thrillers: “The Big Sleep” (1946), “Dark Passage” (1947), and “Key Largo” (1948). Bogart called her “Baby.” She was also known by the nicknames “Betty” and “The Look.”

 

Even Looney Tunes took notice of the love affair between Bogie and Baby.

In the spring of 1955, in the wake of a monumental party held by Bogart, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, David Niven, and, among others, Angie Dickinson, Lauren Bacall purportedly surveyed the damage, declared, “You look like a goddamn rat pack,” and a legend was born. Bacall became the rat pack’s “den mother,” Sinatra was named “pack leader,” and Bogart remained “director of public relations” until his death on January 14, 1957.

Known as a heavy smoker and drinker, Bogart had developed cancer of the esophagus but refused to see a doctor until it was too late to stem the spread of the disease. Bacall stood by her husband during his final days. In a 2012 interview, their son, Stephen Bogart, recalled, “She was tough. She did take care of him. It was too bad it ended the way it did. It almost ruined her.”

 

(Left) Frank Sinatra and Lauren Bacall; (right) Lauren Bacall and Jason Robards

Shortly after Bogart’s death, Lauren Bacall had a brief romance with Frank Sinatra. According to Bacall in her autobiography, Sinatra angrily ended the relationship when he found out a gossip columnist had leaked news of his marriage proposal to the press. From 1961 to 1969, Bacall was married to Jason Robards, an actor with more than a passing physical resemblance to Bogart. The union was turbulent, exacerbated by Robards’ alcoholism and infidelity. “It didn’t work,” Bacall recalled succinctly. “We were a mismatch. That’s all. Simple.”

 

Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall in "The Big Sleep" (1946)

As alluded to earlier, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were reteamed by “To Have and Have Not” director Howard Hawks for the 1946 film noir classic “The Big Sleep,” featuring Bogart as hardboiled private eye Philip Marlowe. Created by detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler, the hard-drinking, wisecracking (and chess aficionado) Marlowe had previously been portrayed by Dick Powell in “Murder, My Sweet” (based on Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely) and would be played the following year by Robert Montgomery (who also directed) in “The Lady in the Lake.” In 1969, James Garner carried on Bogie’s legacy in “Marlowe.”

 

Winslow Wong (Bruce Lee) redecorates Philip Marlowe's office in "Marlowe."

Scripted by Stirling Silliphant (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “In the Heat of the Night”), the Sixties reboot of Raymond Chandler’s book The Little Sister featured colorful supporting performances by Gayle Hunnicutt, Carroll O’Connor, William Daniels, Jackie Coogan, Kenneth Tobey, and, in his big-screen debut, Bruce Lee as a mob henchman who trashes Marlowe’s office.

Rita Moreno, especially memorable as Marlowe’s stripper girlfriend (above), would guest-star on three episodes of “The Rockford Files” and one of the later “Rockford” reunion TV movies.

Garner later recalled, “I was in good company playing Raymond Chandler’s legendary private eye, following in the footsteps of Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, and Robert Montgomery. Plus, I got to beat up Bruce Lee. (Only in the movies!).”

In the 1970s, Robert Mitchum portrayed Philip Marlowe in remakes of “Farewell, My Lovely” and “The Big Sleep,” while in the 1980s, Powers Boothe starred in the HBO series “Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.” Iconoclastic filmmaker Robert Altman updated Marlowe to 1970s Los Angeles in the revisionist film noir “The Long Goodbye,” starring Elliott Gould. But we digress…

Lauren Bacall's sons Stephen Bogart and Sam Robards 

…Speaking of Robert Altman…Lauren and Jason Robard’s son, actor Sam Robards (who had recurring roles in the TV series “Spin City,” “The West Wing,” “Gossip Girl,” “Treme,” and “Twisted”), shared the screen with his father (in an uncredited cameo) in 1988’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” starring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland, and Phoebe Cates, and with his mother in the 1994 satirical fashionista comedy “Ready to Wear,” which was directed by Robert Altman.

It was Robert Altman, the late cinematic orchestrator of sizable casts in mold-breaking motion pictures – from “MASH” to “Nashville,” “A Wedding,” “The Player,” “Gosford Park,” and “A Prairie Home Companion” – who cast Lauren Bacall and James Garner in 1980’s “Health,” an ensemble comedy poking fun at wellness fads and the political climate of the time.

A luxury hotel in St. Pete Beach, Florida, hosts a convention for delegates of “Happiness, Energy And Longevity Through Health” (H.E.A.L.T.H.) as they elect a new president. Lauren Bacall portrays the front-runner, “the first lady of health,” a remarkably well-preserved 83-year-old who attributes her looks to her virginity and warns that every orgasm takes 28 days off a woman’s life; unfortunately, she is prone to spells of suspended animation. Her humorless, holier-than-thou rival is played by Glenda Jackson (a two-time Best Actress Oscar winner, for 1969’s “Women in Love” and 1973’s “A Touch of Class”).

 

Carol Burnett, Lauren Bacall, Glenda Jackson,
and director Robert Altman of "Health" (1980)

Actor Paul Dooley, who also co-wrote the screenplay, portrays the independent, third-party candidate, a self-styled “little guy” who claims to have discovered a way to use radical nutrition to breathe underwater. Director Altman gleefully pointed out, “He conducts his campaign from the bottom of the pool.” Dooley, who appeared in six films directed by Altman, including “Popeye,” starring Robin Williams (Dooley played Wimpy), is fondly remembered as Molly Ringwald’s well-meaning but harried father in writer-director John Hughes’ “Sixteen Candles.”

The supporting cast features Carol Burnett (as the former “U.S. Protein Advisor to the United Nations), Henry Gibson (who had roles in Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” “Nashville,” and “A Perfect Couple”), Alfre Woodard, Donald Moffat, and Dick Cavett and Dinah Shore as themselves.

 

James Garner, Lauren Bacall in "Health"

James Garner portrays Lauren Bacall’s world-weary campaign manager who also happens to be Carol Burnett’s ex-husband. “I enjoyed every minute of it,” Garner noted in his 2011 memoir, The Garner Files. ‘I loved Bob Altman…He gave actors tremendous freedom. Though we had completely different approaches – he hated scripts, I loved them…Bob was a true maverick and he had guts: he’d think nothing of starting a movie before he had all the financing, and he thumbed his nose at studio. My kind of guy.” Altman would recall, “I have long thought that Jim Garner was one of the best actors around. He is often overlooked because he makes it look so easy, and that is not easy to do.”

The New York Times critic Vincent Canby called “Health” “Robert Altman’s buoyant carnival of a movie…composed of throwaway jests and rude japes, big comic set pieces and other bits of business that pass so quickly they seem to be subliminal.” Admitting he “enjoyed every minute of it,” Canby wrote, ”It seems almost to be a series of improvisations conceived in the midst of lunatic confusion that is the movie’s ambience,” adding, “It’s less a movie than a wicked Mardi Gras parade…”

In 1982, President Reagan screened “Health” at Camp David, and, in his diary, called it “the world’s worst movie.”

Canby summed up, “’Health’ gives one the feeling of being on a nonstop party with the people who made it.” Garner recalled, “We had a lot of fun making it, especially playing practical jokes on Dick Cavett, who took everything we could throw at him with grace and good humor. (Dick and I became instant pals.) It was a privilege and a pleasure to play opposite Carol and to work with Betty Bacall.”

 

Lauren Bacall, James Garner in "The Rockford Files" (1980)

As a matter of fact, Garner enjoyed working with Bacall so much that he invited her to appear as a guest star on “The Rockford Files” during the series’ sixth and final season in 1980. Titled “Lions, Tigers, Monkeys and Dogs,” the two-part episode featured Dana Wynter (best known for her role in the original 1956 science-fiction classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” directed by Don Siegel) as a princess and dubious friend of Bacall’s.

Bacall and Garner appeared to be having so much fun working together that tabloids stirred rumors of an affair between the two. Garner and his wife of over 22 years separated at the beginning of 1979, as the actor’s interest in “The Rockford Files” was waning. However, in a 1985 interview for People magazine, Garner insisted he has never succumbed to temptation. “I’ve worked with a lot of great-looking actresses, and I make it my business not to dislike any of them. I also make it my business not to fall in love with them either.”

The separation lasted 18 months. “Lois and I were never in serious trouble,” Garner told People, “and everything is fine with us now – 99 percent of the problem was pressure of ‘Rockford.’ It wasn’t us. It was me needing to get away to get my head together.” In his autobiography, he maintained, “We weren’t angry at each other, and the marriage was never in real danger…Lois was smart enough to know that I just needed some time alone because I was physically and mentally exhausted from the demands doing ‘Rockford.’“ Lois and James Garner remained married until his death.

James Garner, Lauren Bacall in "The Fan" (1981)

In 1981, James Garner and Lauren Bacall reunited onscreen in the lurid suspense thriller “The Fan.” Looking back at the film 30 years later, Garner mused, “Can there be more than one ‘worst-picture-I-ever-made’?”

Michael Biehn, an actor best known for his roles in the James Cameron films “The Terminator,” “Aliens,” and “The Abyss,” as well as costarring with Charlie Sheen in “Navy SEALS,” plays a baby-faced, psychotic stalker obsessed with a once glamorous Hollywood star (Bacall) rehearsing for her first Broadway musical.

 

Michael Biehn composes his next fan letter in "The Fan."

Bacall herself, who had won a Tony Award as the star of the 1970 Broadway musical “Applause” (based on the 1950 movie “All About Eve”), had coincidentally returned to Broadway earlier in 1981 in the musical “Woman of the Year” (based on the 1942 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy film), which would garner her another Tony Award.

Unfortunately, “The Fan” was released a couple of months after John Hinckley Jr.’s infatuation with Jodie Foster led him to try to assassinate President Reagan in an attempt to “impress” the actress, and five months after John Lennon was shot to death outside his residence at The Dakota apartments in Manhattan. The Dakota was also the longtime home of Lauren Bacall until she passed away. Not surprisingly, “The Fan” was a critical and commercial failure.

There was, however, one reviewer who sang the picture’s praises - the previously mentioned Vincent Canby of The New York Times - who, despite the “rather unfortunate timeliness” of the story, asserted it “has several things going for it, and they’re all named Lauren Bacall.” He deemed her role “the most fully drawn, the most engaging, and the sexiest character that Miss Bacall has played on the screen since her early great days with Humphrey Bogart and Howard Hawks…” Canby shamelessly gushed, “She’s a head-to-toe performer, one that demands to be seen…Miss Bacall is not a product. She’s a total personality…”

Playing Bacall’s ex-husband, “Mr. Garner isn’t on the screen very much,” Canby wrote, “but he’s very effective as a high-powered Hollywood director who has decided he can’t run his own career and that of an emotionally desperate wife.”

First-time director Edward Bianchi, who had been an award-winning director of TV commercials for Dr. Pepper and Eastern Airlines, would not make another feature film for ten years, but he has since matured into an Emmy-nominated director of such acclaimed series as “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “Boardwalk Empire,” and “The Killing.”

Vincent Canby concluded, “’The Fan’ is a far from perfect movie, but it’s an entertaining one. It’s also the next best thing to seeing its dynamic star live on stage, kicking up her heels and raising the roof as only she can.”

Garner wrote in his memoir, “The only saving grace was working with Betty Bacall again…She’s a wonderful actress and a beautiful woman. And so feisty. I just love her.”

 

Hail to the Chiefs...James Garner: "Screw you!" and Jack Lemmon: "Blow me!"
in "My Fellow Americans" (1996)

James Garner and Lauren Bacall reteamed a final time – sort of – in 1996 in “My Fellow Americans,” a far-fetched but good-hearted road comedy about two former U.S. Presidents – bitter political rivals – running for their lives to uncover the truth behind a White House scandal. The under-the-breath grumbling and salty bickering between Jack Lemmon, as the penny-pinching Republican, and James Garner, as the womanizing Democrat, undoubtedly brings to mind earlier comedic pairings of Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Indeed, Roger Ebert dreaded that “every other reviewer in the country” would use the phrase “Grumpy Old Presidents,” and, sure enough, he was right. Reportedly, Matthau was originally cast but dropped out due to illness. Thankfully, Garner’s personal brand of wry cynicism and crusty curmudgeonry, underscored by his inimitable Oklahoma-bred drawl, provide a refreshing alternative to the over-familiar Lemmon-Matthau school of comedy.

Lauren Bacall is regrettably ill-used in a toss-off role as Lemmon’s wife, onscreen all too briefly with perhaps a dozen lines of dialogue, albeit delivered with the same sultry brass she was famed for decades ago (Slim to Steve in “To Have and Have Not”: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and...blow”).

 

Jack Lemmon: "It's a kick in the balls. Sorry, sweetheart."
Lauren Bacall: "I'm a politician's wife. I have a set of my own."

“A lot of the movie is, shall we say, not convincing,” Ebert conceded, with scenes “familiar from many another film.” However, he pointed out, “What’s entertaining…is the way the movie skewers the human weaknesses of the two old Presidents.” Such moments are particularly touching. According to the critic, “Both actors have enormous charm, work easily together, and have enough parallels with real-life counterparts that we can amuse ourselves playing Spot-the-Chief-Executive.”

The A.V. Club review pointed out, “Garner and Jack Lemmon have enough charisma, and there are enough solid laughs, to mostly overcome ‘My Fellow Americans’ ‘ embarrassing moments…” Ebert concluded, “’My Fellows Americans’ is a series of cheap shots and missed opportunities, but a lot of the cheap shots are funny…This is not a great comedy and will soon be forgotten, but it has nice moments.”

In his autobiography, James Garner praised Lemmon, “Such a sweet man. He was a joy to work with: thoughtful, generous, always prepared.”  Garner was not impressed with director Peter Segal. “I wish the director were so professional,” Garner wrote. “He was a self-appointed genius who didn’t know his ass from second base, and Jack and I both knew it. He had no idea where to put the camera, he didn’t know what he wanted, and he was a whiner. The movie could have been a lot better."

Peter Segal came to the film after directing Leslie Nielsen in “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” and Chris Farley in “Tommy Boy.” Segal started in show business working with comedian Tom Arnold on a series of acclaimed TV specials and the series “The Jackie Thomas Show.” He eventually developed a relationship with Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions and directed the comic actor in “Anger Management,” “50 First Dates,” and “The Longest Yard.” Segal went on to make “Get Smart,” with Steve Carell, and “Grudge Match,” starring Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone.

Although Bacall is on-camera with Garner in a few shots in “My Fellow Americans,” the two never really share a scene, leaving one wondering how much of her performance ended up on the cutting-room floor. What a shame it was that on this, their last dance together, Lauren and James were given nothing to share. “As an actor,” Bacall contributed to Garner’s memoir, “he knows exactly how to behave in every scene. He can make you feel what he’s feeling. That’s a great gift.”

Lauren Bacall observed, “Jim is one of the most worthwhile people I’ve ever met. Everybody who ever worked with Jim is crazy about him. You can’t not be. He’s a most appealing creature: an adorable man and a funny and terrific actor. I don’t think people realize that. Those of us who worked with him did, but I don’t think he got the attention his talent deserved, and he was kind of passed over as a leading man. But his legacy will not be forgotten because his talent is very big.”