Lauren Bacall’s trouble with men

She was a Hollywood legend who kept company with Presidents and could freeze a man with that deep voice and that famous no-nonsense “Look.”

But she dismissed the legend stuff, and came across as one of the more grounded people you could ever meet.
In 1994 she told Charlie Rose it was frustrating that she seemed to intimidate men off-screen as well as on:

“I find so many men so immature, so preoccupied with their manliness that they can’t have a relationship. They need constant reassurance. They need younger women to tell them how wonderful they are.”

She was that younger woman when she married Humphrey Bogart. She was 20, Bogart who had been married three times before, was 45.

She said he worried about that, “because he felt I was too young and that he was too old and that I would run off with somebody else after five years. He told this Peter Lorre who was a good friend of his. And Peter Lorre said, ‘Five years is better than nothing.'”

They would stay together until he died of cancer eleven years later, and she would have other relationships – but none like Bogart.

And she refused to be arm candy. “He’s got to be interesting. And he’s got to have humor. And many men don’t have any humor.”

Well, one man did.