BACALL, OR NOTHING AT ALL

DENVER — At first, from the rumpled bed at stage left in Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth,” comes the sound of a deep throaty moan. Then, a husky voice asks the strange young man in the room with her to bring oxygen, her jewelry and a pill.

It is Lauren Bacall playing the venerable, hung-over and drugged-out screen star Alexandra Del Lago, passing herself off as the Princess Kosmonopolis, waking up in an unfamiliar bed in a Gulf Coast hotel. As she waves an arm at Chance Wayne (Mark Soper), ordering him to get off the phone, while stretching those syllables to “HA-AA-ANG UP!,” one can hear shades of Margo Channing from the 1970 musical “Applause”--the “All About Eve” adaptation that won Bacall her first Tony as best actress in a musical.

Having drawn full houses for two weeks at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the play formally opens tonight at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre for an eight-week run.

Los Angeles is the fourth stop for this production that began in London, moved to Australia, and will eventually wind up, after San Francisco and some other places, on Broadway next spring. “I’m going to cities I like, “ says Bacall, “and I’m not going anywhere (else), except if we go to Dallas, I guess it’ll be for two weeks. . . .”

In a performance two nights before Thanksgiving, the audience loved her, following her every move, though afterward as she nibbled raw yellow zucchini and cherry tomatoes backstage at midnight, wearing the form-hugging black sequined gown that carries her through Act II, Bacall dismissed the house as “one of the worst so far.”

From the 13th row at the 2,200-seat Auditorium Theatre, her features are distinct. At 62, The Look--imprinted on the American consciousness back in 1942 when she made her first movie, starring opposite Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not”--has matured. Her shoulder-length honey-colored hair has a slight wave to it now; the jawline, with those two bumps on either side squaring the face that she is proud has never been lifted, is still strong.

“Sexy woman,” mutters a Bacall contemporary to her husband as the actress emerges from bed in a long white satin man-tailored shirt-gown, slit to the thighs. “Isn’t she wonderful?” he responds.

And when the actress taunts the young man--”I am Alexandra Del Lago, artist and star. Take a look in this mirror. What do you see?”--it’s hard to separate Del Lago from the legend that is Bacall.

“My nose seems to be constantly running, and I can hardly breathe the air here,” Bacall says, after introductions. In outsized tan-tinted glasses, brown corduroy pants, a floppy blue pullover, a bucket green shoulder-bag and barely a speck of makeup, she strides purposefully into the wood-paneled restaurant at the grand old Brown-Palace Hotel here for a medium hamburger--no salt--with French fries and Perrier lunch, and an interview.

“I can’t make decisions anymore,” she offers at table. “I’m getting caught in making so many decisions. I’ve been making decisions so many years, and having been alone for a good part of my life, I’ve made them for my children and for myself, even when to have the room painted. Everything. . . . Obviously, when I was married to Bogie (Bogart), I didn’t make many, he made a lot of decisions. I made my own decisions on certain things, and with Jason (Robards) I did as well.”

In retrospect, in this post women’s-lib era, does it concern her that Bogart, who was 25 years her senior, made most of the decisions? Their 11 1/2-year marriage ended in 1957 when he died of cancer. “Not at all,” she answers easily. “I never had a problem about women’s rights because I worked all my life, and I was the product of a working mother. I always thought I had some freedom because I made my own living.”

Although Bacall notes that in 1966, Williams told her backstage after a performance of “Cactus Flower” that he would “love to see me in one of his plays,” until now she didn’t have the chance. “I have never appeared in a play written by a major playwright,” says Bacall who won her second Tony as best actress/musical for “Woman of the Year” (1981). “The man is a poet, he wrote wonderful words, and they support you all through the play. Del Lago is a wonderful role,” she added. “He wrote great women’s parts, always.”

Asked whether the role also appealed to her because it dealt with an actress growing older, Bacall shrugs: “Well, that’s something you have to learn to live with. I’ve been dealing with it a lot. . . . I’m certainly getting there, and I don’t know, the alternative to getting old is what? Not getting there?” And she emits deep throaty laughter. “I feel the play really has to do with loss. Loss of self, of some strength of dignity, and mostly about loss of love, of feeling, of emotions--the things that happen to people who become desperate and frightened.

“I’m not a druggie, and I don’t pay young men, but I do understand what it’s like to feel the lack of success. . . . I’ve seen enough people in my life who have overdone many things in their lives. Actors learn; you don’t have to experience it.”

When it was suggested that she saw the effects of alcoholism during her eight-year marriage to Robards that ended in 1969, she stops: “But you’re not going to get any of that !”

“I have had sadness in my life, who hasn’t?” says Bacall who wrote about it, including the joy, in her best-selling 1978 autobiography “By Myself.” “Who lives and has known no sadness? Is it possible? How can you take part in the world and not have something lousy happen to you?”

“Sweet Bird” has been beset by changes. Harold Pinter, the first director, left after the London run to do a screenplay adaptation; in Australia, Bacall was the only non-Australian. British director Michael Blakemore (“Noises Off,” “Benefactors”) took over for the American run. Keith Carradine was supposed to play Chance Wayne, Joseph Bottoms had it for two days during rehearsal in New York, and Soper, whose credits evolve mostly from off-Broadway and regional theater, moved up to the off-lead role.

Bacall saw the original 1959 production starring Geraldine Page--”I remember Gerry; obviously you couldn’t forget her. She had an electric blue sequined dress, and a long cigarette holder; she visually jumped out at you.” Paul Newman, “I really didn’t remember. It is only fitting that I make the announcement that I am not Geraldine Page. I know I’m not. I never intended to be or wanted to be, so that that comparison must not be made. . . . Gerry, after all, was much too young for the part when she played it. Tennessee Williams and (director Elia) Kazan, I’m sure they agreed on the interpretation, but it’s not mine.”

She is a bear on the matter of critics. Although she received mostly raves in London--”Bacall’s star quality glows with a hard steely incandescence that could shatter a diamond” touted the Sunday Express--there was the critique by the New York Times’ Mel Gussow that while giving “a stylish, even a glamorous performance, assiduously scoring comic points,” Bacall is not playing Williams’ “tormented former movie queen grasping for life support”; she doesn’t appear “ravaged.”

“Obviously, he wouldn’t like me in it,” says Bacall. “He’s a third-string critic and he shouldn’t have written the review anyway, because it was playing in London, not to be reviewed by the New York Times. . . . There are always negative comments. You probably will write a few yourself. Listen, I learned a long time ago that there are always people who’ll like you and some that don’t, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. . . .”

Some negatives also appear in Kitty Kelley’s “His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra,” in which Bacall has kind of a walk-on role as one of the women in the singer’s life. In her own book, Bacall wrote candidly about their seesaw romance following Bogart’s death. Kelley goes a step further, suggesting, through one quote, that it began a few months beforehand.

Bacall says she has not read the Kelley book. “A house of garbage really,” she says, scrunching her face. Asked about the allusion to a romance before (Bogart’s death), Bacall interrupts: “Really? But I am not interested in the quote. Nobody knows anything about what anybody does. It’s nobody’s business, and I don’t have to discuss it. . . . I will always have affection for Frank. We were great, great friends, and I had some great times with him. God, when I heard he was sick, I don’t want him to be sick,” she laughs, “I want him to be healthy.”

Asked whether she contacted Sinatra, the laughter became almost a roar of delight. “No, no, no, no. . . . Come on!”

In “By Myself,” Bacall also wrote of her life with Bogie: “Whenever I hear the word happy now, I think of then. Then I lived the full meaning of the word. Since then it has been elusive.” Is happiness still elusive?

“Happy? I really don’t know what it is,” Bacall responds. “I figure that if I have my health, can pay the rent and I have my friends, I call it content. I’m quite content now.”

“I’m not getting married again,” she asserts. “If I knew anyone that I wanted to go out with more than twice, I would be so far ahead. Listen, I know some terrific men,” she pauses for effect, “but they all have wives. If there’s somebody great on the loose, there must be something wrong with them. They’re either picked up by some young girl, or they’ve been married a long time. But I’m not looking for that, you see.”

She would like to do another movie, “but there are no good parts for women over 18.” She’s taking notes for another book--about playing “Sweet Bird of Youth” on three continents, interspersed with comments on acting. She has stopped smoking “for the ninth time, eight months ago, but that’s all right, I’ve stopped two times before for 8 1/2 months each time. I take it one day at a time. But I have put on weight. Twelve, 14 pounds that I must get rid of, because nothing disgusts me more than flab. . . . At least my face is mine.”

She talks about her children. Stephen Bogart, 37, is a producer at NBC News in New York. Leslie Bogart, 34, is in Los Angeles working with the Hollywood Archives on the preservation of movie stills. And Sam Robards, 25, is an actor in New York, “a very talented actor, I think, with a great future.” There are also two grandsons: Jamie, 16, from Steve’s first marriage, and from his second marriage, she smiles broadly, “a new year-old adorable little boy, Richard Humphrey. Humphrey,” she repeats.

The child’s full name, of course, is Richard Humphrey Bogart.