Lauren Bacall - By Myself and Then Some

So much in life seems to be compromise. Why can’t we have the best? Why can’t we be better than we are? Why can’t we enrich our lives with appreciation of the arts, with books? Why can’t that all be at least as important as making money, having a bigger house, a newer car? Why do we have to be submerged in commercialism? Why is tearing down a sign of progress instead of preserving? And there are many more whys. The big why to me in America is why don’t we take the time to see what is around us – the earth, the sea, the sky? Are people so busy chasing the hours, hurrying them along so they can get to that first martini? I myself have been guilty of losing time – wasting it. However, the last few years I have become too aware of the passing of time – the losing of it.

A s I sit here writing about the most vivid and affecting events and happenings of the last twenty-five years, I think of the lives I have led. The remarkable number of remarkable people I have known. The varied locations when memorable and lasting friendships have been formed – where work opportunities have allowed me to spread my wings in new directions. I can hardly believe that from the age of eighteen – riding on the Super Chief, alone, heading for the unknown in California – that from that moment on my life would change forever. New sights and sounds, new faces and experiences that even in my fantasy I never envisioned would happen at once and so quickly. Leaving the protective arms of my mother, my grandmother, my Uncle Charlie and the rest of my New York family, I was then on my own.

From my first meeting with Howard Hawks, who would own me, and Charlie Feldman, who would represent and also own me, the new world began to unfold. From the first movie came my first and most electrifying love. The wheels of publicity from Warner Bros. and Hawks turned me from an unknown to a completely new identity and spun me around so quickly I hardly had time to know what was happening… then to be married, to live in a house for the first time – with a swimming pool, a cook, a butler – to drive a car – to own a car – to have dogs and flowers and trees – to meet Robert Benchley, Nunnally Johnson, John Huston, Richard Brooks, Ira Gershwin, Dorothy Parker, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, John O’Hara, Cole Porter, David Niven, Clifton Webb, Cary Grant, Oscar Levant and more and more. To absorb it all is dizzy-making to me now. And to have a child – at twenty-four. All this in less than five years! Mind-boggling. I do not really understand how I was able to accept it all so readily. It’s hard to believe I was a theatre usher living in Greenwich Village and sharing a bed with my mother in the entry hall of our small apartment at the time I was offered the screen test by Howard Hawks that would send me to California and the opening chapter of my fairy tale life.

The pictures I have in my head from those early years are very clear to me: running down Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, arms held wide, green three-quarters coat flying, toward Bogie waiting for me on the corner with James Gleason at four in the morning; Bogie walking up Highway 101 in espadrilles, huge sunflower in jacket lapel at six in the morning as I found him in my 1940 Plymouth – the headiest romance imaginable. The varied photos taken on the set of To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep on the Warner Bros. lot – I know it’s me – so young – but I can hardly believe it. The twenty-five-year difference between us is never visible. We just looked right together – always. Maybe I looked older and he looked younger. Whatever it was, it was most definitely the match made in heaven.

The chapters in my life unfolded with the birth of Steve first and, two and a half years later, Leslie – moving into new houses with each child. High times on a first trip to Europe and Africa – Academy Awards – the great friends – the beginning of my relationship with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy – the sailing life so foreign to me, so necessary for Bogie – my mother’s wedding to the loveliest of men, Lee Goldberg, who was her prince on the white horse from the day she laid eyes on him a few years before – a bachelor until then, whisking her away to the life she always wanted.

I think of the steadiness of friendships that grew stronger with each year, even as the studio life changed and television became a serious factor in all our lives, and some friends had to move to Europe for work and this forced distance between us. My movie career had a few highs – quite a few lows – all saved by a happy house, the children, dogs and travel to Bogie’s locations. Noel Coward, an old friend of Bogie’s, entered our lives when he came to California and cast me in Blithe Spirit for live TV. Of course, Noel had invited Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and every star in town to sit on the sound stage in full view of us, the nerve-racked actors. That experience was a great high for me and Noel continued to be a factor in my life until his death. A most extraordinary man of extraordinary talents – those of a Renaissance man. And there appeared, whenever we were in the same city or country, the likes of Robert Sherwood – a brilliant, funny, marvelous man and writer who had been major in Bogie’s theatre days with Petrified Forest – a turning point for Bogie’s career. And there was the arrival in Los Angeles of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who immediately became our best friends while there and after. Because we spent time in London before and after The African Queen location, our British friends became very important to us – and to me later on when those in the theatre world of England made my life richer and might I say happier at a time that I needed it. Once those special people were friends, they were friends for life. So it was that David Niven, Larry and Vivien, Noel, John Gielgud, Richard and Sybil Burton, Jack and Doreen Hawkins remained a permanent part of our, and finally my, life.

The days and nights at Ira Gershwin’s home – the music, the assortment of composers, actors, writers jump out at me often – our musical years. Frank Sinatra, Jimmy van Heusen, Roger Eden, Judy Garland were constants – often daily visitors in Mapleton Drive, the location of our final home together. Those memories, the figure of our fantastic cook, and even more a fantastic woman, May Smith, carrying breakfast trays upstairs with her special style – a red rose over her right ear and an open, loving smile on her lovely face – did I actually live that way – did I actually know and hug all of those people – did I become part of their lives and they part of mine? It is so hard to believe.

All this was interspersed with the highlights of our trips to New York where our theatre friends became our focus. The theatre itself became a nightly event and Moss and Kitty Hart, George Kaufman, Leland and Slim Hayward, George and Joan Axelrod, Comden and Green and Leonard and Felicia Bernstein filled each visit with laughter and song. I can never forget how I loved sitting next to Lenny as he played his early, middle and latest songs – always aware that I should have lived in the speakeasy days when I could have sat on the piano and sung show tunes. I knew every lyric of most of Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Hart, Jule Styne, Van Heusen, Kern. Little did I ever even dream then that this was preparing me – paving my way – to star in a musical on Broadway.

This may all be nostalgia to you. I do not usually dwell on the past, but every now and then these moments – and more than moments – that have had an impact on me pop up. They resonate with me clearly and loudly. All of the events big and small – all of the people close or not so – have shaped me. Every time I attended a play in New York it had a lasting effect on me – Streetcar Named Desire , my first sight of Marlon Brando – The Glass Menagerie starring the great Laurette Taylor – Long Day’s Journey Into Night where Jason Robards showed how great an actor he was – so great it gave you chills. Yet who, on our first meeting backstage – a handshake, a how-do-you-do – ever thought for a second that I might meet him again, much less marry him. Each of those performances became a permanent part of my being: Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth , Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach in Rose Tattoo , Margot Fonteyn in Ondine, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle – everything. I never missed a performance of hers, starting in London where we met often at Larry and Vivien’s, John Gielgud’s and others, before Nureyev. Every experience – Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof , Ethel Merman in Gypsy and every other show she was in during my time in the Big Apple, South Pacific with Pinza, My Fair Lady – Rex Harrison’s perfect performance – Richard Burton and Julie Andrews in Camelot . Every one thrilled me, taught me something, and confirmed again and again why I wanted to be an actress from childhood on. But would I ever be as good as any of them – could I be?