Tag: Hollywood

Lauren Bacall, Actress and Liberal Icon, 1924-2014

Jon Ponder
March on Washington: Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart lead a contingent of actors, writers and directors from Hollywood to a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947

Lauren Bacall, who died yesterday just a month shy of her 90th birthday, will rightly be remembered for her A-list acting career and her marriage to movie legend Humphrey Bogart. But Bacall also had a record as a stalwart liberal. As she put it, “I’m a total Democrat. I’m anti-Republican.”

“Being a liberal is the best thing on earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you’re a liberal. You do not have a small mind.”
– Lauren Bacall

Her performance with Bogart in “To Have and Have Not” catapulted her to stardom overnight in 1944. A few months after the film came out, she made her political debut at an event for World War II service members in Washington, D.C., when she was boosted atop an upright piano and photographed lounging there as then-Vice Pres. Harry Truman played for the crowd.

After the war, Bacall, Bogart, director John Huston and others formed the Committee for the First Amendment in opposition to the Republican Party’s anti-communist witch hunts, which were championed by Hollywood figures like Ronald Reagan, Walt Disney and Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson. In 1947, Bacall and Bogart led a contingent of the organization’s members to Washington in protest of the right-wing pogrom and in support of Hollywood witnesses called by the committee who had refused to testify.

That was just the beginning of Lauren Bacall’s decades-long political activity and support for the Democratic Party. Michael Tomasky pays tribute to Bacall as “deeply liberal and deeply anti-communist” in a eulogy at the Daily Beast:

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Republican National Committee Meets in the Heart of Hollywood But Can’t Drum up GOP Stars to Lend Youth-Oriented Buzz to the Event

Jon Ponder
The RNC could not find a movie or TV star to attend its 2013 spring meeting in Hollywood as part of its outreach to young people, so Dick Cheney, the GOP’s favorite living war criminal, was flown in to deliver a lunchtime speech

The Republican National Committee is holding its spring meeting this week in a hotel in the heart of Hollywood. As these sorts of events go, this one has generated more speculation about the GOP’s rationale for choosing to meet in a place that is home to an industry Republicans revile, and vice versa, than it has actual news coverage on local outlets.

So what was RNC Chairman Reince Priebus thinking when he decided to hold his spring meeting behind enemy lines?

The answer comes from Beltway insider Politico.com, which notes that a key criticism in the Republican National Committee’s aptly nicknamed 2012 election “autopsy” report released last month was that the “party is seen as old and detached from pop culture.” To counter this, the autopsy committee recommended that the GOP “establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry to host events for the RNC and allow donors to participate in entertainment events as a way to attract younger voters.”

Preibus’ decision to hold the meeting in Hollywood appears to have been the first step in the party’s celebrity outreach — and, if so, this first step has clearly been an abysmal, even laughable failure, so much so that Priebus is now denying that reaching out to celebrities had anything to do with his choice of Hollywood as the meeting site.

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