Lauren Bacall in "The Mirror Has Two Faces" (1996). Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York, the only child of Natalie ("née" Weinstein; 1901–1977), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacal, and William Perske (1889–1982), who worked in sales. Both her parents were Jewish. According to Bacall, her mother emigrated from Iași, the Kingdom of Romania, through Ellis Island, and her father was born in New Jersey to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a significant center of Jewish life, in present-day Belarus, then in the Russian Empire. Soon after her
To Have and Have Not (film) were close friends and on a fishing trip, reluctant to go into screenwriting, Hemingway was told by Hawks that he could make a great movie from his worst book which Hawks admitted was "To Have and Have Not". Jules Furthman wrote the first screenplay, set in Cuba like the novel, but the screenplay was extensively altered to be set in Martinique instead of Cuba because the portrayal of Cuba's government was believed to be in violation of the United State's Good Neighbor policy with Latin American countries. Hawks's other good friend William Faulkner was the main contributor to the screenplay