Imagine this: you're an ordinary 18-year-old living in the suburbs. You get a phone call from Hollywood. They want you. Bewildered, you go there. They cast you in a movie opposite the most famous movie star in the world. The movie is a huge hit and its daring sexuality makes you an erotic icon across the globe. You are still a virgin. You fall in love with that movie star and get married. It's the biggest tabloid story of its time.
And then you make a terrible film and the critics want to send you back home. And your movie star husband dies of cancer. And life becomes something else. You know Hemingway and TS Eliot, the Oliviers and Judy Garland, Katherine Hepburn and Orson Welles, but you never again find a partner like that movie star. And for the rest of your life, you live the insolent, ironic way you and he evolved.
It's quite a story, and it's a true one. It all happened to Lauren Bacall, who married Humphrey Bogart (after appearing in "To Have or Have Not"). I wanted to hear her tell it and talk about the films which often get lost in the drama of her life. After two years of phone calls and faxes, go-betweens and mutual friends, I spent an afternoon with Lauren Bacall, talking through her roller-coaster story.
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