To celebrate the life and legacy of this inspiring woman I share today at The Wild Reed three things: an excerpt from Bacall’s Now, an interview Bacall did in London in 1985, and the 1999 Intimate Portrait documentary on Bacall directed by Lee Grant, narrated by Natasha Richardson, and featuring Gregory Peck, Phyllis Newman, Roddy McDowall, Peter Stone, Sybil Christopher, and Bacall herself.
It’s definitely a worthwhile documentary, marred only by its failure to highlight Bacall’s and her husband Humphrey Bogart’s defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings of the late-1940s, an extremely courageous stance to take at that time.
The following interview and excerpt from Now focus on Lauren Bacall’s mid-1980s apearance in Tennessee Williams’ play Sweet Bird of Youth. I chose this particular focus as I remember Bacall’s time in Australia when performing in this play in 1986. In fact, I almost travelled to Brisbane to see her in it, especially after seeing her being interviewed on the popular daytime variety show, The Mike Walsh Show. In retrospect, it must have been sheer luck that I managed to catch this interview, but I remember how impressed I was by Bacall as she talked about the deeper meaning of Williams’ play and her own thoughts about aging.
Over the years I’ve looked for this interview on YouTube, but to no avail. The closest I’ve come to it is the 1985 Channel 4 interview Bacall did in London when performing in Sweet Bird of Youth, which was before the play came to Australia. From my recollection, what she talked about on The Mike Walsh Show in Australia is similar to what she shared in the Channel 4 interview, especially her remarks about her role in the play (9:40) and our culture’s obsession with youth (10:33).
Following is an excerpt from Lauren Bacall’s 1994 memoir, Now.
It’s very odd, but it seems to me that my great successes onstage have always come at a turning point in my life. Never planned – just happened. In a way, the theater has saved me. Which was pure, unadulterated luck, plus my willingness to jump.
Cactus Flower, when I was sitting in California, getting no movie offers, was the beginning of almost twenty years of four positive experiences for me. And I wasn’t particularly looking for anything for anything onstage. It was fated.
Applause came during another struggling period in my career – and when my marriage [to Jason Robards] was failing and my mother’s health deteriorating. A completely depressing period.
Woman of the Year arrived when I was again treading water, trying to stay afloat. No movie offers – the theater once again renewed me. And not long after that, when I needed it, along came more than I ever dreamed of for me: Sweet Bird of Youth.
One day back in New York, late in the fall of ’84, my agent called to tell me that Duncan Weldon, an important London theatrical producer, wanted to know if I would be interested in coming to London to play in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth. First I was flattered, then I was thrilled, then, on reading the play, I became excited and then scared, and then I started thinking. Who would direct? After the playwright, the director was the key.
[The character of] Alexandra del Lago is an actress, a princess, a great star whose career is somewhat on the brink. It is all-important to her, and the fear of its ending leads her to fill her time with drink, drugs, and sex – anything to forget the possible nothingness that lies ahead. I had never been in a play that was written by a poet, and the prospect filled me with wonder. What would it be like? I could hardly wait to find out. The fear in Alexandra del Lago was not unlike the fear in Margo Channing [in the 1950 film All About Eve], though Alexandra had more grandeur and was more dramatic and crazed. Her first sounds in the opening scene were moans followed by screams. Screaming had never been my forte, so I was a little intimidated. My voice was/is not a screaming voice. But then I said to myself, “You have to forget all that, get into the skin of this woman, and the scream will be fine.” I had the greatest piece of luck any actress could have when Harold Pinter agreed with enthusiasm to direct.
I was stimulated by the words of Tennessee, by the torment of him and his people. Gradually I found myself inhabiting his world. With a playwright like Williams, there is no way to avoid it. Once again, the fear of a futureless future rose to the surface. Onstage I lived so many of the Princess’s fears, they were intertwined with my own. At times during rehearsal I thought, Oh God, here I go again, exposing myself, all my apprehensions, saying it all out loud. Now everyone will know. That’s what acting is. Parts like that can make you slightly schizophrenic. As over and over again I talked about the passage of time, it cut me; when I had to look in the mirror onstage, as I had to fairly often, I could see that enemy on my face. I could feel it in my body. If I faltered, I was her, I was me. Yet I was not her: I have never given in to drugs, liquor, or men in order to forget. It doesn’t work anyway; it didn’t for the Princess. That kind of forgetting does not last very long. The past is always there.
– Lauren Bacall
Excerpted from Now
Alfred A. Knoff, 1994
pp. 141-145
Excerpted from Now
Alfred A. Knoff, 1994
pp. 141-145
Related Off-site Links:
Lauren Bacall at 100: A Hollywood Casualty Who Fought Back – Lily Ruth Hardman (Indie Wire, September 16, 2024).
How Lauren Bacall Faced and Overcame Antisemitism – Benjamin Ivry (Forward, September 16, 2024).
Lauren Bacall Talks Favorite Hollywood Memories and Career in Unpublished Interview – Sandy Stert Benjamin (Remind Magazine, August 12, 2024).
The 10 Best Lauren Bacall Movies, Ranked – Daniela Gama (Collider, June 6, 2024).
The Day Lauren Bacall Let Rip at Australian Reporters – The Sydney Morning Herald (August 14, 2014).
See also the previous Wild Reed post:
• An Appropriate Homage
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