By Myself and Then Some

by Lauren Bacall

  The first time the disco went back in the show I was very nervous. Had to think of that knee constantly, figure out where to put my weight, how to favor the right leg, without the audience being aware. I worked with weights before my daily body warm-up and I go on doing it to this very day.

  One night at the interval I was told that Bette Davis was in the audience. That she had said she would come on two conditions: (1) that she did not sit up front, and (2) that there would be no pictures. I almost died. God – the creator of Margo Channing in All About Eve, the definitive performance. My childhood idol was in the audience watching me play her part.

  I had never known her well at Warner Bros. – had only seen her a few times there. I was apprehensive about meeting her afterward – about how she would feel, what she would think of the show, of me. I opened my dressing-room door in answer to her knock and there she was – my dream, my fantasy actress. Every part she had ever played – and I loved her in all of them – flashed before me.

  I offered her a drink, which she declined – she had to get back to her daughter in Connecticut. She sat on a chair, not on the love seat, which might have indicated she would stay awhile. I stammered something about how ridiculous it was for me to be playing her part. She said, ‘Funny – I’d never thought of this as a musical.’ She was reserved, polite – rather closed. And I was uncomfortable. My admiration couldn’t be lessened – I was just personally uncomfortable with her. After a few more exchanges she rose to leave. Her last words were, ‘No one but you could have played this part – and you know I mean that.’ I thanked her and she left. There was so much more I had wanted to say to her, but I was too self-conscious, and her reserve kept her in check. If we’d had fifteen minutes, it might have been warmer, I might have made her realize how much her being there had meant. That woman who was the biggest woman star in motion pictures in the Thirties and Forties, Garbo notwithstanding, actually took an ad in the Hollywood trade papers saying she was looking for a job – was ready, willing, and able. That that should happen is the horror of this business.

  And now she is being appreciated as she should be – saluted by her peers, her contribution to film recognized as unique. That’s part of the glory of this business.

  So the months went by, the Palace Theatre filled to capacity at every performance, well-known people from all walks of life coming backstage unexpectedly. It was always rewarding, always gave me a lift. One of the most unforgettable nights that I still think about, and will always, was about six weeks after opening night. Noel Coward brought the Lunts. They stayed in the dressing room – I wouldn’t let them out. Len sitting at Lynn Fontanne’s feet – me hanging on to Alfred Lunt’s every syllable – Noel enjoying it all. Three people whose contributions had been immeasurable and everlasting. One night Paul Lukas came aged, white-haired, still good to look at. My mentor of thirty years earlier. He was proud of me, he said. ‘So you finally have done what you set out to do.’ Sitting in my dressing room, I could picture vividly the reverse scene at the Martin Beck Theatre – all our conversations. I had forgotten nothing. And it was a good feeling, to remember.

  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.

  Toward 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.

  It was traumatic for me – that night, that shock. Applause had given Len his first lead in a Broadway show, and we’d grown together in it. Nothing would be quite the same for me. It wasn’t just a show, it was a crucial portion of my life. And he had been such a strength to me, on and off the stage. He knew me so well, was aware of my weaknesses. Even after the success of Applause, I still had to fight my past life. Whatever people have made me in their heads – both from my movie career and my marriage to Bogie – is an obstacle to now. They want their memories and fantasies kept intact – they’re not interested in the person I am. Every man needs his own identity. His ego will not allow him to be thought of as an appendage to an actress. And though I have never lived my private life like that, I have not found a man secure enough in himself – grown up enough, if you will – to take his chances with me because he knows and values me as I am.

  Well, there’s not a damn thing I can do about my past life. It has been lived – it is past – it has contributed largely to what I am, what might attract a man to me or interest a man in me. But it is not now – not today. I am still fighting for the right to be thought of as I am, the way it is, not as anyone else’s image or idea of what I am because of parts I played when I was nineteen. It’s been a losing battle so far, it may always be, but I won’t give up. Not then – not now – not tomorrow.

  I finished my Broadway run in Applause sixteen months after it opened. Len had left – there was another Bill Sampson and I dealt with it professionally. Then a month in Europe trying unsuccessfully to reorient my head and lighten my spirits. But how can two years of unrelenting, totally demanding work, plus my mother’s death, plus my divorce – how can all that be wiped away in one month? I returned to re-rehearse for a national tour of Applause, the emotional highlight of which was playing in Los Angeles. ‘At last,’ I thought, ‘I’ll show them – ten years later – that I have talent, that I am good, that they were wrong to sluff me off.’ Opening night there was my most nervous night in all those months of playing Margo. It revealed to me once again how much importance I had placed on proving my worth – leaving my mark on that community. What did I expect – that all those who had rejected me would appear as one to beg forgiveness? They couldn’t have cared less. My friends – the real ones – came. The others didn’t, couldn’t be bothered. The theatre was too far away and their minds don’t think beyond grosses. What’s in the trade papers? Whose footprints in cement? But mine – remember? – aren’t there!

  I took the show to London for a year, returning for the second time to a city I had slowly learned to love, filled with people I had loved for a long time. But this time I would be on the London stage – not only allowed to breathe the same rarefied air as Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, Scofield, and so many more, but welcomed by them, by all. They wanted me to love their island. So I embarked on another new beginning in a small, cozy, perfect house – perfect for Sam, Nanny, and me – with a reason to be there.

  So I flourished in the land of royalty, gentility, creativity, and friendship. Applause opened. Not all the critics loved the show, but they did me, and there’s no one who would not respond to that. I felt loved – whether it was the woman they thought I was, who had evolved over twenty years into my Margo Channing, I am not sure. I only knew that the praise for my work was unequivocal and I was not about to ask questions. People came – audiences responded – they let me know they were glad I’d traveled those three thousand miles. I reveled in it. And then I fell in love with a married Englishman. Unexpectedly, but definitely. And after six completely happy months the relationship was brought to a devastating end through circumstance – bad timing – bad luck. For a while I hated England, felt betrayed, blamed the country, not the individuals. Felt trapped. I’d been working nonstop for five years – too hard – too long. Being Margo Channing had been my greatest theatrical gift, and being Margo Channing had taken its toll. Then along came Sidney Lumet with an offer for Murder on the Orient Express with a blinding cast of star actors. So one English year was to stretch into two. With that film experience came not only new friendships but the happiest work experience I’d had in my movie life since the beginning. And the raw hurt – the pain of another emotional ending – became somewhat dulled.

  Steve and Dale came over for a two-week visit – I bought a beautiful dog, Blenheim, for Sam – and I loved my life in that, for me, enchanted city. The city is clean – the parks are green – everything about the less-pressured English life I loved. Best of all, I had Sidney and Sandra Bernstein and their children for Sam’s and my English family, with whom we always felt wanted, needed, and loved.

  But in America, Watergate was in full flower. My only news came from limited
TV coverage and newspapers. I wanted to know more – every detail. Having always been violently anti-Nixon, I wanted – felt the need – to be in America. I wanted to be certain Nixon would be removed. I wanted to be there to see it. Yet whenever I heard a loose English remark about the languid pace with which Watergate was being dealt, I found myself defending my country. So it was time to go. And there were Steve and Leslie – plus a Bogart grandson I hadn’t seen in two years. And Sam’s father was in America – Sam should not be deprived of him.

  Finally, there was no real reason to stay. My work was over. And I had avoided the competitive world of my birthplace as long as I dared. I had one place to live that was my own, and that place was the frantic city of New York. So back I came, with endless luggage – crates of possessions to be shipped – Sam – and Blenheim. I didn’t know what would greet me on arrival, it was almost like exploring new territory. But there was really no choice. It was time to fight the battle of work in my own country, and to face my own reality, which was not England.

  But even after months in New York I was miserable. The culture shock on re-entry was enormous. The soot, the noise, the filth in Central Park, the pushing and shoving. I was happy to see my children and my friends – they were happy to see me – but I could only think of England and wish I’d never left it. And re-entry was hard on Sam as well. His two years away from Collegiate School had left him in a terrible academic hole. The work was harder – he couldn’t handle it – he asked to go back to seeing the doctor. I asked him why. He said, ‘I think I need help.’ So we floundered – disjointed, disoriented, misplaced. No good work was in the offing. I rode on the joy of the Orient Express for some time – happily, for it brought England closer to me.