Lauren Bacall - By Myself and Then Some

I spent the next week going through my scant wardrobe to make certain I had enough to wear to work. Then a trip to Loehmann’s in Brooklyn. Loehmann’s was a large store that stocked clothes from all the Seventh Avenue houses – lower-priced clothes of unknown designers as well as the most expensive from Traina-Norell to Hattie Carnegie. Mother had been shopping there for years and had been taking me from the age of fourteen. There were no dressing rooms in the store. Women learned when new dresses would be coming in – Thursday nights were always good, I remember. Women ran around in their slips, girdles, and bras – all shapes and sizes – grabbing things from saleswomen as they brought them down. A madhouse. Downstairs were the least expensive items, upstairs the better things – and a small room in the rear reserved for special designer clothes. Everything on racks in the open. On the landing between the two floors any poor husband who had been bulldozed into accompanying his wife was made to wait. It was insanity, but it was bargain heaven!

I started my professional modeling career on Seventh Avenue in May of 1941. I was still sixteen years old and very immature. But I was full of bravado, and although I really had nothing in common with the other models, I liked them and I made them laugh. I soon learned the routine. On arrival at Crystal’s you undressed and either sat in a slip or put on a cotton smock. There was a long make-up table with a chair for each of us. The two girls I remember were a luscious blonde named Cynthia and the beautiful, tall brunette named Audrey whom I had seen on my first interview. I watched them as they applied their makeup – a base, then full eye make-up. It didn’t look heavy, but it was there. I did the best I could do with the face confronting me in the mirror. I used no base – only a little mascara, eyebrow pencil, and lipstick. I had never felt that make-up enhanced my looks very much. Not that there was no room for enhancing – there was plenty – but make-up made me look unreal to myself.

That summer moved along fairly pleasantly. I got along fine with the girls. I was the baby of the group, looking up to the older girls who knew all about life – perhaps I would garner some knowledge from them. Each model was assigned the ten or twelve outfits made on her, and they made a few outfits on me, but not many – I was too thin, too underdeveloped. When I showed a dress and a buyer would ask to see it close to, I’d be motioned forward. The buyer, male or female, would then feel the fabric, discuss it – I’d stand there until I was dismissed. An occasional male buyer would feel the goods a bit more than was necessary and I never knew what to do. I was petrified, though no one ever was really fresh, just suggestive – just enough to make me aware that I’d better keep on my toes, protect myself. I suppose my experience in the garment center helped me to build a small wall around myself, taught me to take care of myself, defend myself. It also started me on the road to saying something funny, acting funny, to promote a laugh instead of a feel. It was all I could think of to do – I wasn’t sophisticated enough to sluff things off or make some telling remark. I felt safer with the distraction of laughter. Their reaction, I hoped, would be ‘funny kid’ as opposed to ‘possible bed material.’

The summer was suffocating – in the garment center you’re always modeling heavy winter clothes in 100-degree heat and flimsy summer wear in the dead of winter. At the end of the summer Audrey took her two-week holiday – she went to California, which seemed as far away to me as Outer Mongolia. She returned singing its praises, looking great – told of sleeping well, awakening to a large glass of fresh orange juice every morning, swimming, sunshine, and meeting Errol Flynn! I hung on her every word. Flynn had a reputation as a great ladies’ man and he was beautiful. I never imagined that California life for me – it all sounded a fairyland, which I guess it was in 1941. I still identified only with Broadway – New York. I used to meet Betty Kalb for lunch when I had a full hour to eat. We’d go to Walgreen’s Drug Store at 44th Street and Broadway, a well-known hangout for out-of-work actors, and although we didn’t know anyone there, the atmosphere was so pungent it carried me through those hours just seven blocks south that seemed to be lived in another country. Enemy territory, for it took me away from the theatre; anything that took me away from the theatre was against me. So I stumbled through those months enjoying my paycheck and little else. Soon it was time to prepare for cruise wear – the designs had been made, the clothes were to be ready for showing in October. They started to make a couple of things on me, but there was something in the air.

As I felt the firm beginning to lose interest in fitting me for cruise wear, the ax was indeed about to fall. Shortly before its descent came the day we all were casually talking about our lives. The other girls seemed fairly uncomplicated to me – they would keep on modeling until Mr Right came along and then they’d get married and be all set. No dreams of names in lights to get in their way. Audrey and I ended up in the ladies’ room talking about our families – she talked more than I did, and that’s when she said from her stall to me in mine, ‘What are you?’ That’s when – not knowing she meant ancestry, not religion – I said, ‘I’m Jewish.’ And that’s when she said, ‘Oh – but you don’t look it at all.’ I’d like to meet the man who decided that people do or don’t look Jewish. What the hell does that mean anyway? Is it the American penchant for pinning things down, categorizing, for pigeonholing people? Whatever it is, it’s wrong. Audrey’s idea, I suppose, was that I didn’t have a large nose and I wasn’t ugly, the standard Gentile concept of Jewish looks at the time. She wasn’t nasty, unpleasant, or even bigoted – just very surprised.

We returned to our dressing room and the conversation went on, bringing in one of the other girls. ‘Can you believe Betty is Jewish?’ ‘My God, you sure don’t look it.’ I didn’t know what to say. I resented the discussion – and I resented being Jewish, being singled out because I was, and being some sort of freak because I didn’t look it. Who cares? What is the difference between Jewish and Christian? But the difference is there – I’ve never really understood it and I spent the first half of my life worrying about it. More.

A few days later Phil Crystal called me into his office and said something like, ‘Betty, you’re a good model and I hate to have to do this, but we won’t be needing you anymore. It was only a trial, you’re a bit too thin for our clothes’ – underdeveloped, you mean – flat-chested ‘– we’ve enjoyed having you with us and wish you luck.’ Oh God, I thought, let me not cry now. Of course I knew modeling wasn’t my life’s work and I’d never felt really comfortable there – but being fired is not pleasant. And it did not feed my frail ego. I was very stiff-upper-lip – went back to the dressing room, didn’t talk much, went to the girls’ room, cried it out in the loo, then back to the dressing room. The girls must have known it was coming. I braved it through, making jokes about how now the theatre could have me full time, how had it managed this long without me?… I finished out my week at David Crystal and took my leave, praying I wouldn’t trip as I exited the room for the last time. I didn’t.

I had heard models were needed at a place called Sam Friedlander at 495 Seventh. Friedlander made evening gowns. I went to see him and, miracle of miracles, was hired. He was a friendly, nice man who enjoyed my dreams of becoming an actress. Of course I thought he was nice – he liked me.