Men, Booze, and Cigarettes: The Autobiography of Lauren Bacall

One of the great memoirs, about the loves and wisdom of a dramatic life.

You wouldn't expect an outstanding memoir from a Hollywood starlet who took the nation by storm (giving it "the look"), snatched Humphrey Bogart from his third wife, and went on to an outstanding, if patchy, career in film and theater. But there it is. Bacall (originally Betty Bacal) was raised in very modest circumstances, in a solid New York (Bronx) Jewish familiy, but with the significant void of a father who left (was thrown out, really) very early in her life, between five and eight years old. Just old enough to remember him, but not old enough to understand why. She spent much of her life looking for father figures, with mixed success.

Bacall writes with incredible immediacy. Her heart is right there on the page, as she is smitten with movie stars in her childhood, has a gushing personal encounter with the surprisingly kind Betty White, and pursues acting relentlessly in her teens. But money is very tight, and she has to do modelling on the side. The big break comes with a cover in Harper's Bazaar, under the genius Diana Vreeland.

This cover led to several offers from far-off Hollywood, and just like that, Bacall was on the train and in the expert hands of Howard Hawkes. He was understandably pleased with what he saw, and cast Bacall in her first film, To Have and Have Not. Not only did Bacall turn out to have the looks, she also had the voice, the humor, and the acting skill to rise to the occasion (singing would always be a problem, though). While Bacall was in quite a different place when she wrote all this in the mid-seventies, she is obviously reliving this special time with acute memory and a unique dramatic sense, as she was smitten by co-star Humphrey Bogart who was, yes, old enough to be her father.

It turns out to be one of the love affairs of the century. Bogart was not just a character, but truly had character. They treated each other with great respect, and she describes a largely idylic life. He was a bit of a drinker when they met, having been beaten down by several bad marriages, especially his third, but drinks less as time goes on, now having children and his all-important sailboat to live for. Bacall's highest praise, in retrospect after future failures in love, was that she was married to a mature man. Unlike all the others.

But like all biography, the story of Humphrey Bogart ends tragically in his mid-fifties, from cancer clearly brought on by drinking and smoking. Within a year he wastes away to practically nothing, and Bacall writes so movingly of his illness and death that it is heartbreaking to read. All else, certainly her career, took a back seat to her personal life, and her Hollywood career never fully recovered. She was anxious to get back to work after Bogie's death, but the industry, the town, seemed uninterested, perhaps pigeonholing her as the wife, rather than the actor she was also. While it was frustrating for her to be out of work for long stretches, (eventually she made a new life on Broadway), it is a great loss to the rest of us to not see more of her on film.

Bacall did a good deal of falling apart and rebounding after Bogie died. She ran around with Frank Sinatra for a while, until he pathetically backed out of a marriage proposal- truly one of the "rat pack". Then, esconced on Broadway, Bacall met and fell in love with Jason Robards. This time, she succeeded in dragging him to the altar, but lived to regret it as his drinking kept right on going. She remarks that the only thing she could count on was that he would be at the theater he was appearing at a half hour before show time. Bacall, who prided herself on her motivation, character, and life sense, found herself treated shabbily, utterly unmoored, with up to six children to take care of at times.

It took six years, but she finally threw him out and embraced a single life, with occasional film roles, but mostly working on Broadway. Katherine Hepburn was a great friend, and indeed a mentor in how to live singly, and how to brush off the constant stream of negativity from critics, missed roles, the press. Bacall worked extremely hard on Broadway, even in musicals, and won a Tony eventually. But the time lost to bad men, and the adoption of a single life, clearly caused rankling regret, after her idyl with the king, which is to say her time of having it all- a great marriage, children, stardom, and a great social life, with Humphrey Bogart.

The theme of father figures is one of the more interesting in this story. Bacall denies seeing any physical (vocal, name ... ) resemblance between Bogart and Robards(!) At least Robards was her age. Anyway, she pays explicit homage at one point to the most influential & positive male figures in her life- her uncle Charlie Weinstein, Bogart, and Adelai Stevenson, whom she campaigned for, flirted with, and who all but offered himself as a partner after Bogie's death. She clearly valued, even hungered for, this influence, which puts her in contrast to the current trend of gender neutrality and anti-patriarchial agitation.

But the father figure is among the deepest archetypes, one we have worshipped forever, name: "God". I think it is fair to say that we all seek father figures through life- as mentors, leaders, power-brokers and status confer-ers, stabilizers. While the patriarchial complex has amplified this archetype out of all proportion, it is biologically programmed and not to be denied. But who can possibly fulfill the role? Very few. And the first ingredient is ... training with another father figure. So the cultural round keeps going, generally in very flawed and even destructive and tragic ways, but so very valuable when it does go right. Many of the ancient epics and fairy tales put a strong black / white frame around this- the good king, ruling a happy land, contrasted with the bad king, beset with bad luck, misery, defeat. Not only the lives of great women, but of whole cultures, hang on the quality of this training, acting, and being.

• To Have and Have Not: We can offer a job guarantee, and much more.
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• Dark Passage: Why is the new TTP trade deal being kept so secret?
• Key Largo: Tax holiday for corporations practicing extortion?
• How to Marry a Millionaire: Conservatives and social mobility: peddling an illusion.
• Woman's World: Health insurance helps women particularly.
• The Cobweb: Net neutrality is on the way.
• Written on the Wind: The future is solar (+wind).
• North West Frontier: Why is the Taliban so resilient?
• Shock Treatment: Germany tells Greece to get lost. Exit is really the only solution.
• The Shootist, Appointment with Death: Is manhood about killing?
• Misery: The Fed has been wrong continuously, and could be poised for more policy errors.
• Prêt-à-Porter: The psychology of being middle class.

With Shifafa on the Side

Poetry in America is OK.

The state of formal poetry is rather grim these days. Poet laureates are named, nationally and at other levels, and are then mostly ignored. Books of poetry are indigestable, and progressive forms are militantly unreadable. The New Yorker and other magazines gamely continue to publish poems, but to me, it seems a vain pursuit. It is a sad tale of a vibrant form in the humanities being academi-sized, perhaps like philosophy and economics, to irrelevance. But perhaps there is more going on.

Some fields do extremely well in academia, particularly the hard sciences. But the softer the field, the less it can be transmitted by formal methods, and perhaps the more it is killed rather than nurtured by the conformity, the drive to explicit formulations, the competitiveness, the prosody of the logos.

Poetry, however, is doing fine outside of formal institutions. It lives as always most happily with its musical muse. And that great American art form, jazz, is one of its finer incarnations, with word play aplenty. An example is "The Frim Fram Sauce", a standard from the Nat King Cole era.

I don't want french fried potatoes,
Red ripe tomatoes,
I'm never satisfied.
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay
With shafafa on the side. 

I don't want pork chops and bacon,
That won't awaken
My appetite inside.
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay
With chafafa on the side. 

A fella really got to eat
And a fella should eat right.
Five will get you ten
I'm gonna feed myself right tonight. 

I don't want fish cakes and rye bread,
You heard what I said.
Waiter, please serve mine fried
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay
With shafafa on the side. 

~interlude~ 

A fella really got to eat
And a fella should eat right.
Five will get you ten
I'm gonna feed myself right tonight. 

I don't want fish cakes and rye bread,
You heard what I said.
Waiter, please serve mine fried
I want the frim fram sauce with the ausen fay
With shafafa on the side. 

(now if you don't have it, just bring me a check for the water!)

- Redd Evans

Some singers (Diana Krall, I'm looking at you!) leave out the concluding line, i.e. the punchline, leaving the audience mystified. And then she has the audacity to intimate that it is all sexual inuendo! Anyhow, the song is a great example of poetry that looks pretty dry on the page coming alive with music, since as sung, it is smart, melifluous wordplay.

Perhaps poetry is not meant to be dry, to be subject to "readings", with apologies to Shakespeare. Country artists are another class of homegrown poets who know how to make a line sing.

No, we're not the jet set
We're the old Chevrolet set
Our steak and martinis
Is draft beer with wieners. 

-George Jones

• Ten commandments, modernized version.
• "However, Pakistan has a history of releasing jihadists who seek to destroy the Pakistani state if the government feels it will further its goals of destabilizing Afghanistan or India."
• Obamacare is doing just fine.
• Minimum wage increases are paid by customers, not through unemployment.

Myth & music

The languages we love.

Claude Levi Strauss wrote an exceedingly brief book, "Myth and Meaning", one chapter of which is titled "Myth and Music". He offers the hypothesis that, compared to the basic core of human spoken language, music and myth each lack an element, forming a sort of coding triangle:

"Now you can compare mythology both to music and to language, but there is this difference: in mythology there are no phonemes; the lowest elements are words. So if we take language as a paradigm, the paradigm is constituted by, first, phonemes; second, words; third, sentences. In music you have the equivalent to phonemes and the equivalent to sentences, but you don't have the equivalent to words. In myth you have an equivalent to words, an equivalent to sentences, but you have no equivalent to phonemes. So there is, in both cases, one level missing. 

If we try to understand the relationship between language, myth, and music, we can only do so by using language as the point of departure, and then it can be shown that music on the one hand and mythology on the other both stem from languages but grow apart in different directions, that music emphasizes the sound aspect already embedded in language, while mythology emphasizes the sense aspect, the meaning aspect, which is also embedded in language."

I can't say I think much of this setup, (indeed his book is but a weak rendition of Jungian concepts), but it does get one thinking about the relations between these languages. I would offer that music is absolutely primary. Its evolutionary roots are extremely deep, expressing and sharing emotions among birds and insects, not to mention all mammals.

The next level up from music is practical language, used for parenting, household organization, hunting parties, and the like. The musical aspects of our phonemes and sentences are weakened in the interests of more finely coded communication, as words take the place of purely musical expressions. Still, poetry (and various onomatopoeias) harkens back to a time when all sentences were more or less musical, more emotionally meaningful, less coded.

From there, languages develop increasing coding capacity, which can be used for many things. Here is where myths come in, as one of perhaps two thematic branches of language use. One branch is the didactic, analytic language, which eventually develops toward Witgenstein and mathematics, where, if the content is not poetic, nothing else about the language betrays any musicality whatsoever.

The language of myth goes in quite a different direction and expresses quite different things- our dreams and emotions. One telltale is that myth is happy to be embedded in a culturally integrated way with strong connections to music, image, and other arts, as a unity of performance. Myths are no more logical than our dreams are; they express an emotional and human logic that is essential to our being, nurturing a sense of self, community, history, hope, and imagination. Why do all our movies & novels have happy endings? Why are the cop show criminals always caught? These myths carry out the elementary function of keeping our spiritual sense of order and hope alive.

This is all to say that one shouldn't confuse the nature or purposes of didactic versus mythical languages. They are fundamentally different, and the weird necessity that modern religions often have of insisting that their myths cover both bases, are perfectly correct, contain all knowledge, and must never be doubted is another case of emotional language being used- some relatively ugly emotions, to be truthful.

• Economic quote of the week:

Alas, in their self-appointed role as purchasing agents in health care, American employers have arguably become the sloppiest purchasers of health care anywhere in the world. The chaotic price system for health care is one manifestation of that sloppiness.
...
Another result has been that ... a decade of health care cost growth under employment-based health insurance has wiped out the real income gains for an average family with employment-based health insurance.

Lucid dreaming

Of dreams, fairy tales, and religion.

Our brains are always going. Awake or asleep, something is always bubbling, until death do us in. Emptying the mind is a hopeless task, as meditators learn to their chagrin, though one can focus on smaller and smaller objects, and increase one's discipline of focus.

Most activity is fully unconscious, wheels turning to support our breathing, blood pressure, vision, etc. But the conscious parts are likewise going virtually all the time, apart from the deepest levels of sleep, and send up a constant stream of drama in the form of dreams, images, plans, regrets, and desires- waking and sleeping.

When we are not making up our own, we like nothing more than to experience in those of others- watching movies, gossipping, reading books. Why is that? Computers do some of the computation we do, (more or less!), but without all this drama. They are not motivated agents. That is the divide between our world and the one where robots take over- as of now, they don't have any motivation ... a drama motor running all the time, putting out dream images, desires, and ambition.

I've been reading fairy tales, and watching the illustrated dreaming of Henry Darger. Tales like Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella are by turns cautionary morality plays and hopeful live-happily-ever-after dreamscapes. Pared down and packed with every archetype, kings come riding over every hill, stepmothers thwart every princess, and big things happen in threes. Fairy tales seem like lucid dreams, with no preamble, context. or excuses- just pure drama dredged right up from our emotional core.

While we all dream, some people are far more gifted (or cursed!) with the ability to experience and express dreams in the waking state. Of the brother Grimm's sources, none was as prolific or precise as Dorothea Viehmann, who contributed many of their stories. But her stories came from other folk sources. She had an extraordinary memory to collect and transmit them.

Henry Darger, on the other hand, was a reclusive product of early 20th century Illinois orphages and asylums who generated an enormous fantasy world, which he spent a lifetime recording in ream after ream of typescript and hundreds of paintings and collage. Probably, we all experience easily this much imagery and drama, in dreams. But very few experience it so clearly in waking, or are so compelled to tell the story, listener or no. Carl Jung was another example.

Art for art's sake, by Henry Darger.

Our cultural life, however, depends on people so gifted, who bind us together in shared fantasies, of movies, novels, ceremonies, and the like. Our humanity is expressed in intense desire and the drama of fulfilling it in world where it often runs directly athwart the desires of others. Thus the epic Glandelinian war of Darger's opus, with its heroes the Vivian girls. Or the latest Superman, Spiderman, Hobbit, Potter, etc.

Which brings, us, as usual, to the topic of religion, which falls squarely into this category of art: enacted fantasy with a head-spinning brew of every conceivable archetype, cosmic-level drama, and the can't-top-this promise of living-happily-ever-after. It is a story. One that has come so naturally to us through the ages in countless guises, rising from the same basic psychological truth and origin. One that has been refined into the crack-i-est of narrative crack cocaine. One that tops it all by not saying "once upon a time", but by claiming truth and demanding belief from its mystified and yearning votaries.

Is it really so hard to tell story from reality? Reality is, to our awareness, just another story, and sometimes a mightily depressing one that pierces our narcissim. One of the great accomplishments of the enlightenment was to begin a definitive separation between nonfiction and fiction across the culture, using immense intellectual discipline, in combination with intellectual accelerants such as printing. The development of science was only one facet of a deeper process. It is a long, long road- indeed never ending, since human nature itself remains unmoved.

• Get the lead out of all ammunition. Not just for birds, but for hunters as well, of course.
• Citigroup now writing our banking laws.
• The Fed starts to realize that it isn't tracking the right numbers; money isn't all it's cracked up to be.
• Krugman comments on rent: "Since profits are high while borrowing costs are low, why aren’t we seeing a boom in business investment? ... Well, there’s no puzzle here if rising profits reflect rents, not returns on investment."
• Solar viability still in question- needs carbon tax to stabilize.
• Shale oil and gas supplies look essentially unlimited. So we can't wait for supply constraints to save the climate.
• How can some workers in the US be paid ¢22 an hour?
• Dennett on closeted clergy.
• A tempest in the atheist teapot- only for the intrepid!
• Green tip: telecommute!
• Economics quotes of the week (NYT editorial): "If a business really needed workers, it would pay up. That is not happening, which calls into question the existence of a skills gap as well as the urgency on the part of employers to fill their openings."
• And, Simon Johnson on too big to fail: "Hank Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury and former head of Goldman, felt strongly that the continued existence of his firm was essential to the well-functioning of the world economy."
• And, market fundamentalists still at work (Bill Mitchell): "Mankiw’s example assumes at the outset that 'people earn the value of their marginal product'."
• And, at the nexus of government, economics, and Afghanistan: 

More than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment have been shredded, cut, and crushed into scrap metal as the U.S. military prepares to withdraw all combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 (Post).  Because complicated rules govern equipment donations to other countries, and few would even be able to retrieve it from Afghanistan, military planners have destroyed equipment worth more than $7 billion, turning it into scrap metal the Afghans use in construction projects or as spare parts.