Lauren Bacall - By Myself and Then Some

Charlie was seeing a girl named Rosalie. She was Italian, Catholic, and my grandmother couldn’t bear it. Clearly they were very much in love – but they couldn’t get married: she was not Jewish. It couldn’t happen, it had never happened in our family before. There is prejudice of all kinds, everywhere. Rosalie’s mother was not crazy about the match either. But they were sure – they had to get married. Charlie had lived with his mother, sister, and niece long enough, he was entitled to his own life. Theirs was the first wedding I attended. She was beautiful, brilliant, and I adored her. I was given a prize seat at the civil ceremony. My grandmother sat on one side of the aisle, Rosalie’s mother on the other – neither of them looking to one side or the other – and Charlie and Rosalie were wed. Love conquered all. After the honeymoon Rosalie moved in with us until they found a place. We would have to move as well. Mother couldn’t afford an apartment like that. Anyway, the neighborhood was not that safe.

We had moved to 84th Street because the apartment we’d lived in before was not that safe either. Not for little girls. I used to climb fences with boys – tomboyish. Also, the superintendent was very friendly. One afternoon he invited me down to the basement. How exciting, I thought, I’d never been there before. He smoked a cigarette – sat me on his lap – asked me if I wanted to try a puff of the cigarette. Adventure – of course I did. I thought nothing of sitting on his lap – but he put his arm around me and when a hand landed on my leg I was frightened. I couldn’t have been more than eight, but I knew that wasn’t right. I finally got out of there and told my mother and Charlie. Their fury cannot be imagined. That precipitated the first move. As I always traveled to high school by bus and subway, I was subjected to the same experiences everyone is who travels that way – men exposing themselves behind newspapers, asking if you didn’t want an ice-cream cone. The usual. I was well trained on that score, but always terrified. When I took the subway home, I had to walk from Broadway to West End Avenue. When it was dark, you really had to watch out. There were men popping from basement doors, coming out of alleys. One night as I was walking that endless block a man started following me in a car – he crept along next to me, calling softly and suggestively out of his window. I never thought I’d get through my apartment-house door safely. A few experiences like that and there was no question we’d have to move. Mother was worried to death.

She found an apartment on 86th Street, just under the Sixth Avenue El. It was small – one living room, two small bedrooms (one for Mother and me, one for Grandma), a kitchen. But it was friendly, although the noise from the El was indescribable. My mother had a great gift for making the drabbest place cheery. There was no fancy furniture ever, but she would throw pillows on a sofa, put decorative ashtrays and cigarette boxes on the tables, personal photographs, anything she could add that cost little – anything to make things less dreary. I spent my last two years of high school in that apartment.

I had two very close friends in high school. One was Sylvia Berne, whose Russian grandmother served hot tea in a glass, Russian style, every time I was there. Sylvia and I spent all our spare time together, like sisters. Once we went shopping together – to Macy’s. Mother said I could buy one skirt and one sweater if the price was right. I felt very grown-up. Sylvia and I took the subway, talking all the way as sophisticatedly as we could. We wanted to be sure that when we got to Macy’s we would sound like experienced women of the world. Not easy to do when you’re fourteen. However, all went well – into the shopping crush we charged and found just what we wanted. As we wished to be sisters, and pretended that we were, we would dress alike. We bought the same pleated skirt – hers in plum, mine in olive green – and the same Shetland crew-necked sweater – hers in pale blue, mine in yellow. Those outfits were a smashing success, worn until they could be worn no more, and mostly at the same time, so that we almost believed our own invention.

Then there was Betty Kalb, who had a big family including two older brothers. They had more money than we did – their apartment was bigger, her clothes were better – but we shared the same dream: to become actresses. She wanted to be in films, I wanted to be on the stage. We were both mad about Bette Davis – we’d see her films, imitate her, play scenes word for word, look for look, step for step.

I didn’t ever have a true boyfriend. There wasn’t much opportunity to meet boys going to a school of five thousand girls, then home to do homework. If I met anyone ever, it was always through a friend. There were one or two blind dates – they never ended well. I never seemed to know what to say, nor did the young men. In addition, I was younger than my friends by two years or more – too young for the boys.

I spent my last year in school filled with restlessness and frustration. If the sun was shining, I wanted to be outside. If it rained, I wanted to be watching a Bette Davis film. I was a good student – not summa cum laude , mind you, but able to get through well without too much effort. What mattered was that Saturday mornings I took classes at the New York School of the Theatre. Mother agreed that I could go and that was what I got through the week for. There I had my first taste of improvisation, of memorizing scenes, playing parts of all ages. Oh, it was fun – but it was so short, only a few hours each week.

And I was continuing my dancing lessons. My last year at school I studied ballet with a great old Russian dancer, Mikhail Mordkin, who had been Pavlova’s partner on many of her tours. We would all get into our leotards and stand at the barre in our toe shoes opposite a mirror, and he would conduct class. He was somewhat eccentric. During class one day when we were doing our steps he picked up a wooden chair with a loose leg, pulled out the leg, sat down in the three-legged chair, and proceeded to play an invisible violin, using the leg as the bow, humming – completely overwhelmed by his music. Yet he was very strict. I used to stuff as much lamb’s wool in my toe shoes as would fit – my toes were so long that every time I was on point I found myself standing on the first joint of my second toe instead of the ends of all five. It was agony. And I could never spot-turn, with the result that I was always dizzy at the end of a series of pirouettes. It sounds like a disaster – and must have looked like one! One day toward the end of the year’s study Mother came to pick me up at class, and to see what Mr Mordkin felt about my ability. He told her, ‘Mrs Bacal, Betty’s feet always hurt – they are built wrong for ballet. She will never be exceptional. Forget it.’ I had known for some time that I was put together wrong for ballet, but it’s terrible to hear someone say it out loud. So that was that. I couldn’t do everything – that dream was not to be dreamed again. Henceforth I would have to content myself with almost nightly dreams of dancing in marble palaces with Fred Astaire. I was always in flowing chiffon, there were great pillared halls, and Fred Astaire was doing the most intricate, romantic dance with me, throwing me in the air – a never ending whirl to the best Gershwin music ever written.

I continued venting my energy on acting. At the end of the year, students of the New York School of the Theatre performed for parents. I had learned the potion scene from Romeo and Juliet . For weeks I studied it – during class, in school, on the street (why I wasn’t hit by a truck I’ll never know), at home. The day came and my moment with it. And the shaking started. I got through it, with Mother, Grandma, Charlie and Rosalie, Vera and Jack in attendance. It must have been awful – but what mattered was that I had done it, and that meant I would continue. No stopping me now.