By Myself and Then Some

by Lauren Bacall

  I loved sports – played volleyball, basketball, baseball, and I loved to swim. There was a rule that in order to swim from the dock out to the raft one had to pass a test. I can see the test morning now. A group of small girls waiting their turns. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but after two years of swimming near the dock I was ready to move on. The girl before me was taking her test. She had a lovely stroke and there was no question that she would pass. I watched her very carefully to see when she breathed – how she turned her head – kicked her feet. I was next. I went down the ladder and proceeded to do exactly what she had done. Miraculously, it worked – I had won and it was the raft from then on. One step away from childhood. And there were weekly dramatic programs – sometimes plays, sometimes musical recitals, dances. I clearly remember doing a scarf dance my last year at Highland Nature. I felt as though I were really performing – I was so grown-up. Had the stage all to myself. I really felt good – the music was romantic, and I loved to dance. And I was in plays – in one I pulled my long hair back in a bun to look like Ann Harding. There were campfires – roasting marshmallows – overnight canoe trips – sleeping under the stars – skinny-dips before breakfast in the cold, clean lake. I suppose those years were as close to carefree as I had known or ever would again.

  It was decided after my graduation from Highland Manor that I would go to high school in New York. Mother and I would live with my grandmother and Uncle Charlie and share the rent. I would go to Julia Richman High School on 67th Street and Second Avenue. They found an apartment on 84th Street and West End Avenue. My uncle had a room, Mother and Grandma shared one, and next to them, separated by glass doors, was a tiny room for me. All to myself, the first time I would have a room to myself. Mother bought me a canary and I named him Petie. He was my first pet. I would talk to him – he would tweet to me. I’d close the windows and let him fly around the room. It was hell catching him, but I felt he was entitled to some freedom. One ghastly day when I suppose I thought he was well trained enough, and attached to me enough, I must have been a bit careless about a window, because he got out. He flew away – I never saw him again. I cried so. Mother tried replacing him with another canary, but it was never the same.

  I remember those years of living with my grandmother. She was a marvelous cook. I was her pet grandchild and she made the most delicious cookies I’ve ever tasted and stuffed cabbage and kreplach (pieces of dough, pinched at the corners, stuffed with cheese). I’ve never tasted those dishes anywhere in the world to match hers. When I was little she would bounce me on her leg, hobby-horse style, and sing an old German nursery rhyme:

  Bettelein ging allein Little Betty went alone

  In die weite Welt hinein Into the wide world

  Stock und Hut Walking stick and hat

  Steht ihr gut Suits her well

  1st ganz wohl gemut She’s well satisfied (well off)

  Aber Mutter weinet sehr But Mother cries a lot

  Hat ja nun kein Betty mehr She has no Betty anymore

  Wünsch’ ihr Glück Wish her luck

  Sagt ihr Blick Say her eyes

  Kehr nur bald zurück Come back soon

  Grandmother sang those words exactly as written above, except that sometimes she seemed to be singing, ‘But Betty cries a lot – she has no mother anymore.’ Was it real or did I imagine the change in those two lines?

  I remember watching her sit in a chair reading book after book, each in a different language. Her telling me how I must always help my mother – how hard my mother worked. Grandma was quite religious. A candle was lit every Friday night for my grandfather. She would comb her long hair, wind it round into a bun (never looking in a mirror), put on her coat and hat, and go to Temple. Dishes were changed for the proper holidays. She had a fierce temper – not lost too often, but when it was, she was wild. All those years of frustration, hard work, and worry had to come out some way. And we lived so closely with no room for privacy. The day that King Edward renounced his throne for Wallis Simpson I rushed home. There was Grandma sitting in front of an ancient Atwater Kent radio. I sat next to her – the King started to speak – through it all, this young girl and old woman sat and sobbed as so many throughout the world did. It was the most romantic story ever told, wasn’t it? To renounce a throne for love! I couldn’t get over it – it filled my head and heart for weeks.

  And then there was my Uncle Charlie, the man who surely had the most influence in my life through my growing-up years. He was Assistant Corporation Counsel for the city of New York under Mayor La Guardia – an attractive man, fair, blue twinkling eyes, medium height, highly intelligent, and very funny. Funny – witty and funny – silly. He always made me laugh. He told me I must read The New York Times every day, that as I was in high school now, I should learn what was going on in the world. How could I tell him that I only cared about my own world – the me that was going to be? I had so little room for other thoughts. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was my god – my father, my grandfather, my true hero. I grew up with him. One election year Roosevelt appeared in Madison Square Garden – it must have been 1940 – and Charlie got tickets. We were very far from the stage, but I was in the same building with Roosevelt, he was there and I was there! He walked with a cane and the aid of one of his sons, but he was there for me to see and hear, and I would never forget it, the emotion of that experience. Charlie gave me that too.

  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 moth
er 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.

  My restlessness with regular school was due to the fact that I wanted to get on with real life – or away from real and on to pretend. I cut classes three times one week – once to go to the zoo, the other times for Bette Davis – and wrote a note saying I’d been ill and signed my mother’s name. I always got to the morning mail first, but one morning I didn’t. There was a letter from the principal’s office saying I’d been out and they’d like to speak with Mother. What a scene! My tears – ‘Oh, Mother, forgive me, I’ll never do it again.’ Mother asking how I’d got away with it. My confession to signing her name to a note. She: ‘Don’t you know that’s against the law? That you can go to jail for that?’ What was it in me – why and how was I able to do such things? For a girl who was dedicated to truth, it was most strange. Was it just mischief? Or was it a streak of my father – perish the thought! It reminded me of a time when I was about eleven. My friends and I used to walk through the five-and-ten-cent store. That’s what it really was then, you could buy almost everything for five or ten cents. As I had no money, I used to look at all the appetizing items on the counters and imagine which I would buy. On one counter were pencil cases – cheap little pencil cases, but I’d never had one and I wanted one so badly. So badly that I took it. I suppose most kids have done something like that once in their lives – there’s so much to see, to buy. And when you don’t have the money, so much that is beyond your reach – even a silly pencil case. I went home as usual and Mother noticed the case. She took me by both arms, looked at me, and said, ‘When did you get this pencil case?’

  ‘I found it.’ Eyes slightly off center.

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘On the street, Mother.’

  ‘You’re lying, Betty. It’s brand new. Now tell me where you got it.’

  My chin trembled – I couldn’t help it – I was caught, and frightened of what I had done. ‘I took it from the five-and-ten,’ in the smallest voice – a voice only birds could hear

  ‘Well, you are going right back there and return it. And when you return it you are to give it to the woman behind the counter, tell her that you took it, and apologize.’

  ‘How can I ever do that? I’ll be punished! Can’t I just put it back on the counter and leave?’

  ‘No – you do as I say. Let this be a lesson to you. Taking what isn’t yours is stealing – it’s against the law. If you return it now, they will do nothing to you.’

  She walked with me to the store, went in with me, and quietly stood to one side while I made my confession. The woman took it back, and it was an experience I never forgot – nor was it ever followed by another like it. Facing a situation head on was the only way to deal with anything. I learned the lesson early. My mother gave me a solid foundation. Any little quirks along the way were my own. It was hard growing up. (It’s still hard.)

  I studied journalism at Julia Richman to fulfill a momentary dream of becoming a reporter. It must have been the result of a comic strip – that and seeing His Girl Friday. Years before when I saw a rerun of Loretta Young in The White Parade, saw how beautiful she was, how brave, how dedicated, I knew I would be a nurse. That is until my first sight of
blood and the wave of nausea that accompanied it. The nursing dream became a thing of the past.

  All this came from wanting so desperately to be someone – something; to have my own identity, my own place in life. The best thing about dreams is that youth holds on to them. I was always sure mine would come true – one of them, anyway. Clearly my fantasies resulted from my identification with movies and certain stars. Like the time I had seen Margaret Sullavan in a movie. She was a wonderful actress and I loved her looks. I wanted to look like that. My hair was long – it had been for years. Time for a change. But my mother and grandmother would be furious, so I pondered for days. Finally I decided I’d pondered enough. Time for action. I was to have my hair trimmed. Mother gave me the money. I took off for the shop. I was so excited – I’d leave 86th Street looking like me, I’d return looking like Margaret Sullavan. Thrilling. I sat in the barber chair and told the man what I wanted – I had a small photograph of Margaret Sullavan with me. He looked at me and said, ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ ‘I’m sure. Cut it all off.’ He picked up his scissors and began. One side went and I looked cockeyed. It was awful, but it would be lovely when both sides were done. They finally were. I looked in the mirror. The hair was Margaret Sullavan, all right – very short, just below the ears, bangs – but the face was still mine. The two definitely did not go together. But it was too late now, there was nothing for it but to go home and face the music. I walked in the door and when my grandmother saw me she gave a horrified scream, as did my mother. ‘Are you crazy – cutting that beautiful hair? Whatever got into you?’ ‘All I wanted to do was look like Margaret Sullavan. I love it – I’ve had my long hair long enough. I’m not a baby anymore.’ But it was awful – I looked hideous and I hated it. But it would grow back – I hoped. Fortunately, it did before I had finished high school. I was an awkward mess anyway, the hair just added to the picture.