At 75, Actress Lauren Bacall Merely Speaks to Conquer

The voice--deep, sultry, dripping with its intriguing combination of classiness and moxie, allure and independence--has been triggering things in our psyche for more than half of this century.

At the heart of it, when Hollywood still ruled our dreams, the voice was entwined in the “Bogie and Baby” legend. “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” Lauren Bacall, Baby, asked Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not.” In that film, her first, they met and fell in love--on and off screen.

That was almost 55 years ago but, refreshed by dozens of stage and screen roles (the latest being “Diamonds” with Kirk Douglas, in which she’s a madam), television talk-show appearances and lectures, who’s forgotten?

Even reading her two memoirs--”By Myself,” which won a National Book Award in 1980, and 1994’s “Now”--one imagines the growls and purrs in that voice. And in recent years, that sound, throaty and seductive as ever and readily identifiable, has been the voice-over lauding cat food (a brand for discriminating felines, of course) and luxury cruises. “And PBS. The snob in me is proud of that,” Bacall says, the baritone laugh rolling on the air.

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As it turns out, the voice, so admired and imitated, so associated with decorum and unflappable control, has sometimes been a trial for Bacall. Someone asked her about it a couple of years ago when she attended a special screening of the 1956 television version of “Blithe Spirit” (in which she, Claudette Colbert and Sir Noel Coward starred) at the Museum of Television & Radio.

“You’ve had that voice for 50 years; how’d you get it?” The question was not quite as goofily tactless as it seems on the surface, because there has always been the rumor that Howard Hawks, the Hollywood director who discovered a 19-year-old Bacall on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and teamed her with Bogart, had been responsible for the voice, which took on a slight edge as she responded:

“My mother had a low voice. My daughter has a low voice and I’ve always had a low voice.” (She also isn’t delighted that people still wonder if a teenage Andy Williams dubbed in the singing voice when she introduced Hoagy Carmichael’s “How Little We Know” in that first movie. “I’ve won a Tony for a musical,” she points out: “Applause” in 1970.)

Recently in Boston, the actress was being more expansive about her voice. Theatergoers had the opportunity to hear it at work: “Waiting in the Wings,” in which Bacall is part of an ensemble of theater legends, was having its out-of-town tryout at the Colonial Theatre.

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The play, set in a home for aging actresses, has moved to Broadway and coincides with the 100th birthday of its playwright, the late Sir Noel Coward, an old pal of Bacall’s and Bogart’s. It is Bacall’s first time playing her hometown since she won a Tony for “Woman of the Year” in 1981.

“Howard Hawks had a fantasy about me, which I never lived up to,” she was saying backstage in her Boston dressing room, after a telephone conversation “with my ex-husband, Jason [Robards], who told me all about the Walter Kerr,” the theater in New York where the play is running and where she has since transported all the snapshots she had up of her three children (Steve and Leslie with Bogart; Sam with Robards, whom she divorced in 1969) and five grandchildren.

It was Hawks’ advice “to keep my voice low even when I was excited. So I practiced by reading ‘The Robe’ aloud sitting in my car. There were all these silly stories that I was screaming in the hills for days to get my voice down. I didn’t just suddenly get a low voice.”

The voice may be behind the reputation for being haughty and often difficult that Bacall has been saddled with--unjustly, she feels. “It gives people the impression that I’m formidable, when I’m really quite vulnerable. I say things as a joke and they come out sounding like I don’t know what.”

There’s been plenty of speculation that “Waiting in the Wings,” its cast packed with well-known actresses of a certain age (Rosemary Harris, Elizabeth Wilson, Dana Ivey just for starters), would be rife with monumental ego clashes, but the participants swear that things have been quite civilized. “A very congenial experience,” says director Michael Langham.

“I do like ensemble work,” says Bacall, downplaying the star treatment she has received from the media and theater audiences. “The last few shows I’ve had to carry the load, and it’s just not as rewarding.”

Alexander Cohen, one of the play’s producers, has worked with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Jerry Lewis, and he says, “I know all about egos.” He insists that Betty (Bacall’s friends have never called her by her stage name) is “a real pro and quite a caring person.”

“I like to work; I’ve worked all my life,” says Bacall, and perhaps one of the ironies of that life is that people still identify her with Bogart, who died of cancer in 1957, when Bacall was 32.

“I’ll never get away from him,” the actress has said of their symbiotic relationship. “I accept that. He was the emotional love of my life, but I think I’ve accomplished quite a bit on my own.”

Coward isn’t the only one coming up on a centennial this year. “Bogie would have been a hundred on Christmas Day,” Bacall says. But the faraway doesn’t linger in the voice. “A hundred is just a number,” she says, “I remember him as he was. He was not an old man.”

As for, at the age of 75, being in a play about an old-folks home for actresses, it’s nothing personal. “I know chronologically about the years, but I really don’t feel them that much,” she says with a toss of still-blond hair. Forget about that word “legend”: “That sounds like it’s over. I am far from finished.”