She was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, but after her husband and co-star Humphrey Bogart died in 1957, Lauren Bacall wasted no time rushing back to New York City.
“I had no life here,” Bacall said of Los Angeles.
“To be a woman alone in this town is not a happy situation. It was an unnurturing atmosphere out here. My career was not thriving. I was just dismissed. I had my mother and relatives in New York, and I needed them.”
So back she came in 1958 to the city of her birth to renew her affair with her second-greatest love.
Three years later, Bacall married actor Jason Robards and settled into a spacious apartment in The Dakota, on Central Park West, where she continued to live until her death Tuesday.
Bacall bought the apartment for $48,000, according to Vanity Fair.
“I called my business manager in California and said, ‘Sell all of my stock’ — what little of it I had,” Bacall told the magazine. “And it’s the only smart financial move I ever made.”
The two-bedroom apartment — configured as a bedroom and a library — was recently appraised at $9 million, a source told The Post.
Over time, Bacall became as much of a fixture as the building’s high gables or the Dakota Indian figure that keeps watch over the W. 72nd Street entrance. But not everybody paid proper homage.
An infamous undated story features a newbie doorman, on his first day, supposedly stopping Bacall to ask where she was going.
After the star berated the man, he asked: “How was I supposed to know it was you?”
Her response: “The voice.”
Years later, after breaking her hip in a 2011 fall, Bacall talked about leaving The Dakota one day to walk to physical therapy without being recognized.
“People don’t pay any attention to me or the walker,” she told Vanity Fair.
“The other night I was going into a doctor’s office, and some son of a bitch came out of the building, almost knocked me over. I said, ‘You’re a fu–ing ape!’ — screaming at him. He never even turned around. Couldn’t care less, this big horse of a man.”
Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in The Bronx, on Sept. 16, 1924 to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland and Romania.
After her parents divorced when she was 6, Bacall’s mother moved to Manhattan and adopted the second half of her maiden name, Weinstein-Bacal. The actress said she added the second ‘l’ to make the name easier to pronounce.
A film director renamed her Lauren, and the rest was movie history.
Bacall’s mother worked multiple jobs to support her only child. The young girl’s dream was to be an actress; her idol was Bette Davis.
So enamored with Bette Davis was the 15-year-old Bacall that that she and a friend actually stalked the “Jezebel” star when she was staying at Fifth Avenue’s Gotham Hotel. “She always stayed at the Gotham Hotel,” Bacall wrote in her memoir “By Myself.”
“One afternoon when we were sulking in the lobby, Bette Davis came in — walked directly to the elevator,” Bacall wrote. “We rushed in after her and tremblingly rode to the tenth floor with her.”
Four years later, Bacall was on her way to Hollywood after a director’s wife spotted her on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.
A string of movies with Bogart followed, including “To Have and Have Not,” “Dark Passage” and “Key Largo.”
After Bogart died, Bacall had success back in New York on Broadway, earning Tony Awards for “Applause” in 1970 and “Woman of the Year” in 1981.
She was never able to recapture the movie magic that she made with her leading man. But she knew better than to complain.
“If they don’t know me by now, or don’t want to use me, I mean, forget it,” she said in 1996. “You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with.I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses,” she said in 1996. “And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”