When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges “somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space,” she’s being candid and funny. It’s not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
Reprinted from the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times
BOOKS
Lauren Bacall, Still Salty at 80
February 27, 2005
By JAN HERMAN
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges “somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space,” she’s being candid and funny. It’s not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
But Bacall, who is one of a kind, always made the most of what she had, as this memoir proves for the second time. The first time was more than a quarter century ago, when By Myself was originally published to much praise, including a National Book Award.
That memoir ended with the early 1980s, half a dozen years after her return to New York from abroad and a decade after her divorce from her second husband, Jason Robards Jr. She had married Robards after the death of her first husband, Humphrey Bogart, and a post-Bogie love affair with Frank Sinatra, who’d asked her to marry him but suddenly “chickened out” (her term) when his proposal made the gossip columns. Not that we’re keeping score, but let’s face it — Bacall certainly has — her serial love life is one of the most fascinating aspects of her career.
Indeed, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that in the final pages of By Myself she bids a sad farewell to a long, post-Robards affair with her “Applause” co-star Len Cariou and to an intense, post-Cariou affair with an unnamed, married Englishman that left her feeling devastated when it ended. Nor should we omit to mention her serious crushes on Kirk Douglas and, much later, Adlai Stevenson, the two-time Democratic candidate for president. Both men returned her affection (but were not bedded).
BY MYSELF AND THEN SOME By Lauren BacallHarperEntertainment. $26.95. EXCERPT Lauren Bacall’s only Oscar nomination came in 1997, for best supporting actress in “The Mirror Has Two Faces.” Here she describes the awards ceremony in this excerpt from By Myself and Then Some: The evening began with Master of Ceremonies Billy Crystal. I did my best – trying to look relaxed as though I was enjoying myself. I doubt that I was very convincing. The truth is, I wanted to win. No matter how you rationalize it, to be nominated is fine – chosen by your peers, etc. – but it’s better to win. In any contest, that is the goal. The first award – wouldn’t you know – Best Supporting Actress. Kevin Spacey came out with the envelope in his hand, announced the nominees, looked at me and smiled, opened the envelope – “And the winner is …” He was so sure [I’d win] – my heart was pounding so loud, I thought I would faint, Steve [Bacall and Bogart’s son] was squeezing my hand – [Kevin’s] voice dropped. “The winner is Juliette Binoche, ‘The English Patient. ‘ … We got through the rest of the program and headed for the great dinner – chocolate Oscars at every place. I felt very alone. Kevin Spacey was there. He came over and invited me onto the dance floor, thank heaven. It’s not a good thing to be a shoo-in. |
“Upon reaching your seventieth year,” writes Bacall, who was born in 1924 and is now 80, “life begins to shift. First comes the shock of it — my God, am I really seventy? I don’t feel that different. But I sure as hell am.” Some sadness is inevitable, she admits, but there’s plenty of laughter, too, because “in my cockeyed way I think life is a joke.” You can take Lauren Bacall out of Hollywood, but you can’t take the Bronx-born, Brooklyn-bred Betty Joan Perske out of Lauren Bacall.
Hardly a page goes by in which Bacall does not marvel at her fate. In spite of her parents’ early divorce and an ever-absent father, her great good luck as a Jewish girl growing up during the Depression was to have a mother and a pair of uncles so devoted to her she never lacked for love or support. And when she ultimately slips into the jet stream of fame and fortune, she never forgets her origins.
“It’s hard to believe,” she writes, “I was a theater 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 a screen test by Howard Hawks that would send me to California and the opening chapters of my fairy tale life.”
Renowned for her early film-noir stardom — she was launched by Hawks in “To Have and Have Not,” her remarkable screen debut at 19, opposite Bogart, who was 44 — the Bacall of And Then Some says she usually does not dwell on the past. But time brings the death of many old friends — Roddy McDowall, John Gielgud, Gregory Peck, Katharine Hepburn, Adolph Green and Alec Guinness, to name a few — and many fond goodbyes in the form of anecdotal sketches and thumbnail portraits, all breezily written and wonderfully readable. So even as Bacall updates us about her more recent doings (film work with Barbra Streisand or Nicole Kidman, for example), she can’t help immersing us again in Hollywood’s Golden Age. For which this reader, at least, is grateful.
(It’s worth noting, since the 77th annual Academy Awards are being held tonight, that Bacall, who has made more than 50 feature films, has never won an Oscar. She was nominated only once, in 1997, for a satirical supporting role as Streisand’s self-absorbed, overbearing mother in “The Mirror Has Two Faces.”)
Although Bacall waxes sentimental about others, especially her children and her latest companion, a toy Papillon named Sophie, she’s a tough-minded realist about herself, her failures and her successes. More than that, she sums up the new pages in this volume with a political opinion guaranteed to make her enemies.
Given her history as a liberal Democrat, it’s no surprise the America she’s proud of is Franklin Roosevelt’s and John and Robert Kennedys’ and the America she’s ashamed of is George W. Bush’s. “I do not love the administration of now,” she writes, citing “Bush buddies,” “oil secrecy,” “anti-gun lobbying,” “anti-immigration corporations,” even Texas itself. But the greatest shame, she believes, is that the administration is “all wrapped up in the American flag, making this a pure Aryan (sound familiar?) country — a Christian country.”
Bacall sees a “corporate America” where “money, buying power, greed” are paramount. “It’s all so cold, so humorless, so dead.” Having just described her Manhattan apartment in the exclusive Dakota overlooking Central Park, Bacall adds, “Yes, money bought me my apartment, but it was money that came from years of work, hard work.” In other words, she wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth. “I like money as much as most people — more,” she concedes, “because … as long as I keep working [it] enables me to live here and go where I wish.”
Well, she can forget going to the White House for a while, even if she wished. No more invitations for her. It’s a good thing she’s already received Kennedy Center Honors.
Jan Herman, a former Sun-Times reporter, writes a daily blog for ArtsJournal.com and is the author of A Talent for Trouble, a biography of Hollywood director William Wyler.
