Lauren Bacall - By Myself and Then Some

The problem with a hit show, of course, is that the longer it runs, the harder it is to perform. Outsiders don’t understand that. To keep it fresh – to have each new audience feel you’re doing it for the first time – that is the discipline of the theatre, that’s what’s tough. No matter how you feel – sick, unhappy – you have to forget all that and just go out on the stage and do it. That’s the greatest lesson one learns, the important one.

I had decided early in Applause that I would not plan my social life. If someone invited me to supper a week, even days, in advance, and had to know definitely, I would reply, ‘Then don’t count on me.’ I had never lived my night life loosely, but I knew it was time for a change. How did I know if I’d feel like going out that night? Or, indeed, if I wouldn’t get a better offer? Not socially better – emotionally better. It created problems with some friends, but I decided, ‘The hell with it – I’m going to be selfish and only do what I really want to do.’ It was time in my life for that. I’d lived so many years on other people’s demands – husbands, children. It was time for me to live on my own.

My whole day was geared to that day’s performance. Not too much time on the telephone – bad for the voice. Plenty of rest – nap from four to five. Eat something on a tray – red meat preferably, but not too much – at five. Voice lesson at six. To theatre by seven for body warm-up and work with the weights. Ready to make up at eight for an eight-thirty curtain. When we were on the experimental seven-thirty curtain, everything moved up an hour. My only time to play was after the show – that was for me and I was going to keep it that way. I put out so much onstage, I had to do my own thing when that curtain came down. I’ve never regretted that choice and have continued it since. That is the extent of my self-indulgence.

I paid a price for my choices – more times than I care to mention I spent evenings alone. Funny how people you know sometimes come to see a show and don’t come round afterward, thinking your dressing room is full, that you’re busy. On those nights I often was sitting in my room praying that someone would knock on my door.

One night the Duke and Duchess of Windsor came round full of compliments, sent flowers the next day. I couldn’t tell him how I’d cried as a little girl when I heard his abdication speech on that ancient Atwater Kent radio. I was still impressed by people – a onetime King of England in my dressing room, complimenting me! Proof positive that being an actress enables you to meet more people from more parts of the world – fascinating people, accomplished people – than any other profession on earth. It made Adlai Stevenson possible in my life. John Kennedy. Robert Kennedy. I still can’t get over how lucky I have been to know men like that.

T oward the end of the first summer’s run, I had to face the fact of Leslie’s leaving the nest. She’d spent her whole life in a French school, and she wanted an American college. I had thought she would choose to go to the Sorbonne or to Italy – what I would have chosen had I been Leslie. But she was her own person – as willful as I – and that was that. She would spend a year in a Boston Art School and feeling that was not her calling would go to Boston University as Steve had done, and see if she could deal with the American way of learning after ten years at the Lycée. She was in search of her identity – logically had to find it away from me. I remembered watching her head for Boston – all eighteen years of her – and knowing she was more than figuratively walking away from me and toward her own life. Our relationship had gotten better and better, closer and closer. I found myself able to confide in her some of my personal frustrations; she listened well, her thinking was true and straight – no nonsense. She was developing into quite a somebody and on her way to being my best friend.

And Jason and I were still not on the best terms. He was unable to deal with Sam as I felt he should – he didn’t see him enough, call him enough. He was still struggling with his own life. I wanted him to make it absolutely clear to Sam that we were not going to be one happy family again. That remained Sam’s fantasy, and he was having great difficulty separating fantasy from reality. I was worried about him, and his excellent pediatrician suggested that he should see that child psychiatrist. But Sam was too smart to be shoved in any direction, so I had to explain to him that this man was a doctor, and that he could tell the doctor anything he wanted to about anything that bothered him, about anyone, and it would never be repeated. I had to say casually, ‘It might help you to feel better. Worth a try.’ He agreed to meet the doctor, and after the first meeting agreed to see him once a week, on the basis that if he wanted to stop, he would stop. I accepted his conditions. The sessions helped Sam a great deal – so much so that as summer approached, he said he wanted to stop for a while and go to camp; he’d start again in the fall if he felt the need. The doctor and I agreed – let’s see what happens, maybe he can handle his emotions better. Time would be the teller of that tale.

We celebrated our first year of Applause with a cake-cutting ceremony in front of cameras on Broadway. A year already, and what a year. I was an emotional wreck, my inability to be casual about my personal relationship with Len had taken its toll. I was very thin – in good physical shape, really, but emotions were taking over more and more often and I was getting a drawn look on my face. There were still high spots, though. One night at intermission there was a knock on my dressing-room door. Elizabeth, my dresser, opened the door and there was Ethel Merman. As I gasped, she charged into the room, saying, ‘Where’s the can?’ Merman the definitive musical-comedy star – in my opinion, the best that ever was. She lifted you right out of your seat, she was that exciting. Out she came, saying, ‘You’ve got to stop doing this,’ as she hit her chest with her fist. In ‘Welcome to the Theatre,’ the first-act curtain number, I hit my chest several times and she said that each time my body mike would send a resounding roar through the theatre. No one had mentioned it before. But at the end of the show she did tell me she liked me. I hope she meant it.

The night Joe Mankiewicz came to the show I went to supper with him and his wife. All About Eve was his brainchild – he had written and directed the film – and he was totally possessive about it. He was happy to see how much of his work had been kept in our show and liked it better than he had anticipated. A great relief to me. He is a man of no small talent and no small accomplishment, and I wanted his approval.

About a month after the show’s anniversary, Len asked me out for supper. It was a Saturday night – well chosen so I would have Sunday to recover. Out we went, happy as could be. When he took me home we had a nightcap and then he dropped his bomb. As gently as he could – as sweetly – he told me he was leaving the show in three weeks. He was going to play in repertory at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. He felt it was time for him to do something else, and he’d wanted me to hear it from him. I was stunned – it was totally unexpected and I burst into a flood of tears. I had become more emotionally dependent on him than I had realized. I had thought I was handling the situation, but clearly I was not. Another ending. I felt the bottom of my world dropping out – the world of Applause , which had become more my world than anything else in my life. There I was on this ferris wheel, dangling in mid-air, with no support beneath me – frightened and beginning to feel sick. We sat in my library until dawn, talking, talking about the year, the work, our involvement with each other. His feelings about me were not to be taken lightly either. Of course I understood the logic of his decision, and, from his point of view as a young actor, the necessity for it. But understanding didn’t make me like it. And I would have to stay with the show for another few months. By then I had agreed to go to St Louis to play Applause at the Municipal Opera, an outdoor theatre seating twelve thousand people, the week of July 4. How could I play it with another actor? Bill Sampson was Len – there would never be another Bill Sampson for me. That’s what separates me from the real lady stars – I don’t want to be supported by an actor while I take all the bows and enjoy my vehicle. I don’t believe in vehicles. I want to share the stage. That’s what theatre is to me – sharing. I love my solo curtain calls – don’t misunderstand – but I don’t want to be out there all alone, and I never will.