New Baby

The womanly baritone laughs a line home. Waves of appreciation break across the stage. The timing matches Bankhead's; the zany movements beat Bea Lillie's. It is just as nobody predicted: Lauren Bacall can pack them in the theater the way she packed them in the movies back in the '40s when she was Mrs. Humphrey Bogart. "Looks like I'm one hell of a Broadway draw," she drawls.

The surprise is understandable. Success may be nothing new to Lauren Bacall, but it is nothing recent either. At 41 she is appearing in her first stage hit, Abe Burrows' Cactus Flower. It has been 23 years since she rose to star status with her first picture, To Have and Have Not.

Most Imitated. Success was no surprise to her then. She had been planning on it from the age of twelve. As Betty Perske, she announced to a classmate in New York, "I am going to Hollywood." Her high school yearbook lyrically cited her ambitions: "Popular ways that win/ May your dreams of becoming an actress/ Overflow the brim."

The brim overflowed three years later when critics called the 18-year-old fashion model turned actress "an adolescent cougar." "If you want anything, just whistle," she said to Bogie in To Have, and there is hardly a man alive over 40 who didn't wish she'd answer his whistle. Bogie married her (she was his fourth and final wife), and for thousands of nostalgic fans she has been Bogie's babe ever since.

In the late '40s, Bogie and Baby became Hollywood's most imitated couple. Men held their cigarettes with all four fingers, Bogie-style; women made their voices husky. In 1956, Bogart's persistent illness was diagnosed as cancer, but Bacall resolutely kept on entertaining all their old friends, rarely left the house. "She's my wife, and nurse," Bogie said shortly before his death. "So she stays home. Maybe that's the way you tell the ladies from the broads in this town."

Up on Central Park. Today, relocated in New York and remarried--to Actor Jason Robards Jr.--Bacall prefers to look forward. But, says a friend, "the past has a way of hounding Betty. She tries to look out the windshield, but there are always things there in the rearview mirror." Among the things are TV's endless Bogie-Bacall festivals. "Those movies," she says ruefully, "always come back to haunt me on that damn box." And there are the Bogie biographies, five released within the last year. "The paperback ones are written by hungry guys trying to get in on the madness and make a buck," she complains. "And the hard-covers aren't a hell of a lot better." The one she has hopes for was written by Old Bogart Buddy Joe Hyams. Due for publication in mid-'66, it will sport an introduction by Bacall herself.

Now that the celluloid years have finally given way to the greasepaint ones, she is plunging into the new life with relish. Home is no longer Hollywood but an airy ten-room apartment in the Dakota on Manhattan's Central Park West. There she maintains a houseful of children (Stephen Bogart, 16, second year at Milton Academy; his sister Leslie, 13, an honors student at the Lycee Franc,ais; plus Sam Robards, 4) and tries to recover from a six-week stint on the tryout trail, where Cactus underwent drastic pruning. A month after the Cactus opening, she insists: "My mind is still in Philadelphia. Out-of-town is designed to kill actors."

Two Zombies. Since the first rehearsal, Bacall has had twice the problems of other working actresses; while she was learning new jokes, Robards was trying out his grueling tragedy, The Devils. When she was in New York, he was in Boston; when she was in Washington, he was on Broadway. To this day, neither has quite adjusted to each other's stage schedule; neither has been able to see the other onstage. "Acting is all we have the time or energy to do," she says. "After work, two zombies meet. But at least I'm not trembling at home, wondering what my husband is doing at night. And he's not wondering what his wife's doing. She's working her head off. For other people, it could be hell. For us, it's ideal."

Then standing back a little from her life and looking at her new role, she delivers a sentiment that would have won a nod from Bogie himself. "There are very few good times to be had in this age of space or whatever the hell it is," she says. "So if there are any to be had, we better damn well have them now."

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