I’ve passed along this Lauren Bacall story previously, but it came from Howard Hawks. Hawks was interested in her for a film in the mid ’40s (probably To Have or Have Not) but told her she had to lower her voice, that she’d be more interesting if she sounded sultry and smoky. So Bacall went away and came back and her voice was just what Hawks was talking about. Then he told her to stop smiling all the time and to maybe insult a man every now and then. She later told him that she ran into Clark Gable at a party and said to him in that cool, low-down way of hers, “Where’d you get that tie?” Gable said “Oh, some haberdashery in Beverly Hills…what do you wanna know for?” And Bacall said, “So I can tell my friends not to go there.”
