In 1959, Lauren Bacall left Hollywood for New York and Broadway. Her husband, Humphrey Bogart, had died two years before, and an engagement to Frank Sinatra went off the rails when it appeared in the papers and he blamed her for the leak. As she would later tell her friend, press agent Susan L. Schulman, Hollywood had nothing for her anymore. The town she and Bogey reigned over from their Holmby Hills mansion suddenly “spurned her,” Schulman says. “Nobody wanted her without Bogey.”
And so it was back to NYC, her birthplace, and the theater, where, before becoming a movie star at 19, she once hoped to make her way. As a teenager, Bacall — Betty, to her friends — attended plays with Alexander H. Cohen, who’d go on to be one of Broadway’s leading impresarios. “We were so poor, we snuck in during the second act,” Cohen once told me.
Bacall earned her sea legs in a couple of plays — 1959’s “Goodbye, Charlie,” and “Cactus Flower” in 1965 — and married Jason Robards while waiting for a hit. It came, in 1970, in the form of “Applause,” a musical version of “All About Eve.”
Bacall, who died this week at 89, wasn’t a dancer or a singer, but songwriters Charles Strouse and Lee Adams and book writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green tailored the material to her. And it fit like a Bob Mackie gown.
“It was a star vehicle, created around her persona,” says Schulman, who worked on the show. “It was about a glamorous movie star in her 40s, which she was.”
Nearly everyone in the company was intimidated by the Hollywood legend with a reputation for cutting fools off at the knees. But Bacall quickly proved to be a trouper and “mother hen to the company,” says Sheilah Rae Gross, who was a chorus kid in the show. “It was fascinating to watch her work. She vocalized every day, and dancewise . . . she was up for anything. There was a disco scene and the guys [threw] her all over the place, and she just did it.”
During tryouts in Detroit, the company would often drink and sing at a piano bar near the theater. Bacall would join them, applauding their performances and matching leading man Len Cariou scotch for scotch. Bacall and Cariou wound up having a long affair, which she wrote about in her book “By Myself.” Once in New York, they covered it up by rarely going out in public without someone else from the show in tow, usually Lee Roy Reams.
“Applause” won four Tony Awards, including one for Bacall. It was, says Schulman, a happy time in her life — which is not to say the formidable Bacall softened. “If you asked her something stupid, she had a stare that could turn you to stone. People would come up to her at restaurants and say, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt . . .’ and she would say, ‘But you are.’ She would nail them to the floor.”
Bacall followed up “Applause” with the musical “Woman of the Year,” for which she won her second Tony. Again, she was the consummate professional — but also, this time around, more of a diva.
When producer Jimmy Nederlander gave another of his leading ladies, Lena Horne, a diamond bracelet, she called him and said, “Where’s mine?”
“It arrived the next day,” says Jon Wilner, who designed the show’s ad campaign.
When Raquel Welch was about to take over the part, Bacall insisted that Welch’s ads be no bigger than Bacall’s. The day of Bacall’s final performance, the papers carried only an ad announcing Welch’s dates. Bacall threatened not to go on. Wilner dashed to her dressing room and said, “You’ve been sold out for weeks. But Raquel isn’t selling any tickets.”
“Oh. Well, of course she can’t sell any tickets!” Bacall said. “That’s how we got her to go on,” Wilner says. Welch turned out to be even more of a diva than Bacall. Two weeks into her run, the entire cast showed up at the theater wearing T-shirts. They read: “Bring back Betty!”