“I tried working here at home but nothing came,” Bacall once told a reporter, of writing “By Myself.” “So I said, ‘O.K., Bacall, you’ve horsed around enough,’ and moved myself down to Knopf.” She camped out in her publisher’s office for three years, in the nineteen-seventies, writing in longhand on yellow legal pads. What poured out of her on those pages was a love story, albeit one that had its share of rocky patches. Released in 1978, “By Myself” (as well as its short sequel, “And Then Some,” which Bacall tacked on in 2005) does detail her career, from teen-age modelling days through Hollywood dominance in films such as “The Big Sleep” and “How to Marry a Millionaire.” But her Big Subject, occupying roughly half of the book, is Humphrey Bogart, whom she married in 1945, when she was only twenty. (He was forty-five.) The two stayed together until Bogart died of cancer, in 1957, though their relationship was always tempestuous. “By Myself” is a fascinating story of romance and codependence, of how navigating the Hollywood machinery as a high-profile duo can be even more treacherous than going solo. “He was too old for me, he’d had three wives, he drank, he was an actor and he was goyim,” Bacall writes. But she loved Bogie in spite of it all. She writes with brutal honesty about Bogart’s drunken temper and with great tenderness about his years of worsening illness. There are many Bogie biographies out there, but Bacall’s staunch account is more powerful—and hard-earned—than any third-party perspective. In the end, their story was hers alone to tell.
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The Art of the Hollywood Memoir - The New Yorker
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