Lauren Bacall and High Point Coffee

“Coffee’ll stunt your growth!” croaks Lauren Bacall to a chorus boy admirer in The Fan (1981), a slasher exploitation film released the same year she had a success on Broadway in the musical Woman of the Year. 1981 was also supposedly the year when she made the first of a series of commercials for High Point Coffee, an instant decaffeinated brand that she purred over with her plummiest mid-Atlantic accent.

Perhaps these Bacall commercials for High Point were clucked over in their time, but they became a way of life or code among the camp cognoscenti when they started showing up on YouTube in the late 2000s. Even Emma Stone did a brief parody of the first Bacall commercial for High Point in Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011): “I love curling up with a rich cup of coffee!” Stone cries to Ryan Gosling as they tease each other in bed. “What? You think coffee and sleep don’t mix? Well, they do if it’s High Point! It’s de-CAFF-einated and the flav-ah is marvelous.”

Bacall started selling coffee early. She roped her second husband Jason Robards Jr. into appearing in a commercial for Maxwell House instant coffee and attempted to create a Bogie-Bacall chemistry with him, but he clearly would rather be anywhere but here; she claims that he needs Maxwell House brew backstage and that she makes it for him “by the pot.”

It was years later during one of her many comebacks that she started singing the praises of High Point decaffeinated coffee and memorably claimed, “My favorite time of day is night!” Bacall was noted at this point for her hilariously grand insincerity, which often had an edge of menace, but maybe this particular line was true, for she was a nighttime creature, from her days in The Big Sleep (1946) to her time as a Broadway star.

There’s a lot going on here in these 30 seconds, so let’s take a moment to bask in them. First there’s that whoosh of the curtain as she shows us the Manhattan skyline and proclaims that her favorite time of day is night, and presumably we are meant to think that Bacall is speaking to us directly from her glamorous apartment at the Dakota in Manhattan. When she sits and starts talking up this abysmal-looking instant decaffeinated coffee, Bacall shifts into a tone of intimidation, as if to say, “So you think this looks bad? Well, you’re wrong, and I need this money, and fuck you!”

The camp comes in with Bacall here because she is saying something that she 100% does not believe with 100% fervor and a theatrical sort of accent that is never heard anymore. (She does not sound like this in the early films that made her famous, To Have and Have Not {1944} and The Big Sleep. My theory is that it started to creep in when she worked on a live TV production of Blithe Spirit with Noël Coward in 1956 and took extensive direction from him. This is a very British play that neither Bacall nor co-star Claudette Colbert needed to do British accents for because their own delivery was so highfalutin already.) “Umm,” she groans at the end of the first High Point commercial. “It’s a coffee lover’s dream!” Clearly it isn’t. Clearly it is a weak and pointless beverage. But Bacall’s growling contempt for it is turned inside out, so that she seems to be signaling, “You want to be like me? You want my fabulous life? Then drink this stuff like I tell you to, hoi polloi!”

The second Bacall commercial for High Point takes place as she catches a limousine to be driven to the theater, apparently to play Woman of the Year to her adoring fans. (This famous story must be told here, and I’m going to try to get it right. Lee Roy Reams, who had appeared with Bacall in her first musical hit Applause in 1969, took Ethel Merman to the opening night of Woman of the Year. They were late, and the overture was starting as they took their seats. The curtain rose, there was singing from the chorus, and then Bacall came out and hit her first big boomed off-key-ish notes, and not long afterward the audience heard the unmistakable voice of Ethel Merman crying, “Jesus!” When Reams tells this story to Rick McKay for the documentary Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age {2021}, he also has Merman cover her ears.)

So Bacall is racing to the theater in this second High Point commercial, and she thanks her doorman (which is a hoot for anyone who knows how badly she too often treated anyone in a service position, anyone she considered an underling). “Rushing for an 8 o’clock curtain every night means giving up a lot of things…but coffee isn’t one of ‘em!” she cries. The phoniness of this line reading is very layered, particularly that last word in place of “them,” as if she is signaling, “I’m just like you underneath, working stiffs, but of course we know I’m not!”

Her limo has a cunning little lamp on a small table and what look like petit fours underneath (I can imagine her insisting on these, for anything French to Bacall meant class). “I don’t want extra caffeine…I’m active enough, thank you!” she insists, and now Bacall has shifted to her intimidation tactic, since we all now know how bad this instant decaffeinated coffee is, even if served in a fancy limo as you are being driven to a theater to wow audiences in a musical star vehicle. Bacall takes a long whiff of the High Point jar and crows over the delicious aroma before widening her eyes to cry, “And look at this deep, rich cullah!”

A different take of this particular commercial has survived, and it feels like a first take where Bacall doesn’t quite have her exaggerated verve yet, as if she hadn’t activated the deepest level of her haughty insincerity.

The next High Point commercial sees Bacall rehearsing at the theater and entering her star dressing room as she claims, “I’m enjoying life today more than I ever have!” The phoniness of this is a little sad because she seems to be trying to fool herself as much as her audience here, but if we might be tempted to offer some sympathy, this is soon jettisoned by all her boasting about the aroma of High Point and the camp moment when she insists, “This is good…it’s more than good…it’s lively!”

Then Bacall takes us into her queenly confidence: “I’ll tell you a secret…caffeine sometimes makes me tense…and tension can show on your face! In my profession you have to look your best.” And then she gets defensive: “Look…I set high standards for myself…I set high standards for my coffee!” To be fair, she rarely missed performances on stage. Her standards for what she was willing to sell, however, were clearly nil.

Bacall had recently published a best-selling memoir called By Myself (1978), and so the next High Point commercial showcases Bacall the Author croaking, “Writing is a coffee lover’s dream…that page took four cups!” She sits and counsels, “I can do without caffeine…so can you,” and what contempt there is in that “you”! And she ends by saying, “I think you’ll really go for it,” a brief callback to some 1940s lingo, and then, “You’re gonna love it!” which comes with a sassy-ish head shake and a clearly unspoken, “Or else!”

The next one has her recording that memoir and shilling for the “cute” free packets of High Point decaffeinated coffee; she reiterates that “personally” she likes that High Point is decaffeinated and that she’s “active enough,” but this sounds less insistent than before. There is a plea to write in for the free packets to an address in Iowa, and then Bacall comes back to say, “Come on, write us!” Write “us”?! As if Bacall is going to be out in Iowa and sending the High Point sample packets out personally.

The last one, which seems to date from 1984, finds Bacall in a restaurant talking about how she gave up caffeine but is so happy with decaf the second time around, but caffeine equals Bogie, and no caffeine equals the rest of her long career, I’m afraid. She’s wearing classy pearls here, a woman of the world, ready to fall in love “all over again” with the pleasure of…High Point decaffeinated instant coffee. It’s been discontinued, so I’ve never tasted it. Any thoughts from those who took the High Point plunge?

Bacall did commercials for all kinds of déclassée products in later years, and it was notable that they were always for things that she would not have been caught dead using herself. She urged us to eat beef in 1988, got into a reflective Terrence Malick-ish mood to sell Spray ‘n Wash to get out stains in 1992, but was most at home as a voice purring over interstitials for the Turner Classic Movies channel.

In 1998 Bacall cried, “To be a great actress, you must call on your own experiences!” before claiming that if she wants to feel “sorrow” she thinks of Burger King hamburgers, but “if I want to feel intense joy” she thinks of Arby’s Roast Chicken Santa Fe sandwich. She no longer cared to appear on camera, but her deep, tobacco-stained voice would sell practically anything.

In 2000, that unmistakable voice urged us to try Arby’s Tulip Tumblers for our Christmas parties: “As an entertainer, I’m a perfectionist! And that goes double when I entertain for the holidays.” That they were just 99 cents could be “our little secret,” she counseled. I like to think that Bacall saved some free packets of High Point decaffeinated and drank cups of them sometimes from her free Arby’s Tulip Tumblers at the Dakota in the 2000s. But that’s probably just the dream of a coffee lover.