“I was in terrible shape then, and I was in no shape to cope with Sinatra and his incredible behavior,” Bacall tells me. Yet she could not ignore the “insane electric currents running between them all the time.” In 1958, Sinatra proposed. “I questioned nothing. That was my trouble—one of my troubles,” she says. The night of their engagement, they went to the Imperial Gardens restaurant on the Sunset Strip. “A young girl came over for autographs,” writes Bacall in By Myself. “Frank handed me the paper napkin and pen. As I started to write, he said, ‘Put down your new name.’ So ‘Lauren Bacall’ was followed by ‘Betty Sinatra.’ It looked funny, but he asked for it and he got it. I often wondered what became of that paper napkin.”

Within days the engagement was off. Swifty Lazar, perhaps Bogart’s closest friend, had leaked the news to Louella Parsons. The Los Angeles Herald ran it on the front page: SINATRA TO MARRY BACALL. “I gasped—oh my God, what a disaster—how the hell did that happen?,” Bacall later recounted. “How could Louella have printed that? ‘My God, Swifty. You told her—are you crazy? Frank will be furious!’ Swifty just laughed: ‘Of course I told her—I didn’t know she’d do this. I just said I happened to know that Frank had asked Betty to marry him. So what? He did! What’s wrong with saying it?’ I said, ‘It wasn’t up to you. You’re coming home with me right now and calling Frank—I don’t want him to think I did it.’ I was so insecure it was pathetic.”

Sinatra dropped her over the phone. At a dinner party only months later, he was one seat away from her. “He did not speak one word to me—if he looked in my direction, he did not see me, he looked right past me, as though my chair were empty,” Bacall wrote. He ignored her for the next 20 years.

‘I think there are certain things you have to face about yourself,” she says. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. Sometimes you think: I’m the Queen of the May—I can do anything. The great thing about life is—the terrible thing about life is—that everything is mixed up. All the things that you thought were one way suddenly turn out to be another way. You might say that my honorary Oscar was a high point in my life, but it actually represents to me the worst thing I’ve ever done. So it’s very weird. But nobody’s perfect, as Joe E. Brown [the actor who has the last word in Some Like It Hot] said. Right?”

Bacall continues, “I don’t think anybody that has a brain can really be happy. What is there really to be happy about? You tell me. If you’re a thinking human being, there’s no way to divorce yourself from the world. Yes, I probably was happy when I was married to Bogie, but I was very young then. I had a good growing-up life, I would say, but I wasn’t really happy, because I was an only child, and I wasn’t part of a whole family—what we in America consider the proper family, a father and a mother and child, which, of course, is a big crock we know—and yet I had the greatest family anyone could wish for in everyone on my mother’s side. So what you think is happy? Happy shmappy. I think you have to be unconscious to be happy. Are you unconscious?” she asks me.

When our final interview is over, I help Bacall up from her chair, and she walks with me to the door. “You haven’t told me a thing about you!” she says as I stand there with one foot over the threshold. She gives me a hug and a kiss and then issues one last lament: “I can never get a voice-over job. People say, ‘With your voice?’ I say, ‘Yes, with my voice.’ It’s all Bogie’s fault.” She leans forward and pokes a finger in my chest. “Remember what Bogie and my mother both used to say: ‘Character is the most important thing. All that matters is character!’ ”

With that she shuts the door.