Bacall’s death true end of era
HOLLYWOOD CREATED the expectation that women should be beautiful, young and vulnerable – to the loss of youth and beauty, if nothing else.
Whatever special qualities Lauren Bacall had, you can’t help wishing that the world had more of them.
A high- flying teenage model before she moved into acting, Bacall was signed up by Howard Hawks at 19 and groomed for film stardom – which, of course, she achieved. That may be the stuff of dreams. But it is also a standard recipe for troubled living and dying.
Not for Bacall, though. She just appears to have handled it all, remaining both an iconic star and a well-adjusted person getting on with her life.
Miriam Krule, a contributor to the US website Slate, has noted that with the death of Bacall, ‘‘the 16 icons name- dropped in Madonna’s song Vogue are now all dead’’. Without pondering the list’s significance, there is a sense that Bacall’s death marks an end – that of orchestrated, ultra- glamorous, studio-system Hollywood.
If so, there’s something grand in the idea that the last survivor of that era was also the one who let it shape and define her the least.
But golden- age Hollywood shaped and defined so much else. Technology had exploded as a means of facilitating the massmarketing of culture. Hollywood aimed to dazzle passive audiences and control them, portraying an establishment fairytale world that the masses would quietly consume, in their seats.
It retains a strong influence to this day, most apparently in the grip it has over ideas of glamour.
The idea that glamour is a mask for vulnerability has potency to this day. So the most tragic among Hollywood’s icons – Marilyn Monroe and James Dean – are the ones who remain most alive, most present in contemporary culture.
Women didn’t dominate many things in the early part of the 20th century, but – pale- faced, meticulously dressed, draped and groomed – they did dominate glamour.
Even a star of Bacall’s stature faded as her glamour dimmed. She found herself touring the world in the 1980s, as Alexandra in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth –a fading actress playing a troubled, faded movie actress.
Which was another problem Bacall didn’t have. She was fond of declaring: ‘‘I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.’’