Now
Lauren Bacall
Language: English
Pages: 214
ISBN: 0394574125
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"CANDID AND HONEST...A philosophical looking-backward and forward--an inquiry into the question 'Is that all there is?' "
--Liz Smith
New York Newsday
"FRANK AND AMUSING...[AND] BRIMMING WITH CONFESSIONS...Part career memoir and part meditation on what it's like to be a single woman of lingering glamour, enduring vitality and advancing age...The book has the Bacall voice behind it. Her writing echoes her deep, sardonic, no-nonsense timbre and jazzy tempo....Bacall is at her best when talking about friends she has loved and watched die. Bernstein, she says, was more than a little seductive; Huston, more than a little remote; Olivier, a survivor to the end."
--Chicago Sun-Times
"HER PROSE IS SPARE AND HONEST....A kaleidoscope of thoughts and ideas on loneliness, aging, and above all, surviving...There are also poignant reminiscences of the golden years of Hollywood and many of its leading creators."
--The Washington Post Book World
"SHE REMINDS US OF SOME FAMILIAR TRUTHS WORTH ATTENDING TO. . . .What she's writing about, Ms. Bacall explains, is 'life' and indeed her musings about getting older, about intimations of mortality, about living solo, about letting go of one's children will resonate with women who, like her, are of a certain age."
--The New York Times Book Review
"ENGROSSING. . .POIGNANT."
--People
From the Paperback edition.
there-art school lasted a year; after that there was college for another year-had the good sense to buy a small house. I was on Broadway with Applause for a year and a half, toured for another year, and played in London for yet another year. Boston turned out to be a good move for her. I was busy working. Sam was still small and at home and becoming more and more the center of my life. So Leslie's move away from home did not seem so traumatic at the time. Hell, I had wanted my independence at
of theater, or my mother's wedding day to Lee or mine to Bogie. As I cannot believe how many friends I have had-how different they have been-so I cannot believe that so many of them are no longer here. Memory is a precious commodity, not to be tampered with, not to be rejected. We have to be glad of its existence, for it keeps alive those special people-the moments, the places, the feelings. So, Memory, I drink to a long life-for both of us. Life enhancer Steve Smith, a man I will never forget,
living in the same building, two floors apart. When Lenny and Felicia bought their New York apartment, I was living in England. I offered them my place while they were renovating theirs, and they lived there for several months. So from 1974 to the end of their lives, we kind of shared the same space and I perhaps saw more of them than I might have otherwise. When Felicia became ill with cancer, she made Lenny promise to try to stop smoking. So he and I and Patrick O'Neal met once a week with the
boarded the plane, excited, nervous, very happy for Leslie, and with a head full of memories. Memories are insidious little things. I never thought I would devote much time to them, being, as I have always claimed, a champion of the present, a creature of now. I remember often resenting Bogie's sometime preoccupation with "the good old days." I suppose I saw little point in dwelling on what was over and never to come again, losing precious today time on yesterday, and also I was probably a little
the least bit carelessly he would let out a yell. I knew he wasn't right, so I took him to a veterinary hospital in Westwood. They had impressive facilities, but I didn't like the place. It was cold, the natives were not overly friendly, the doctor himself was remote. If you've ever had a sick dog, you know that friendliness and warmth are essential to dog and master. Blenheim had to stay for continued observation: his heart was definitely not good; he had arrhythmia plus high blood pressure.