Life's Still a Bazaar for Lauren Bacall : Celebrity: She might not be offered a lot of projects these days, but she's plenty busy at 70, appearing in the film 'Ready to Wear' and discussing her latest book.

By BLAKE GREEN

Dec. 26, 1994 12 AM PT

NEWSDAY

NEW YORK — If there’s a heaven and Diana Vreeland made the cut, she’s up there smiling.

The legendary fashion editor “gave me my first break,” says Lauren Bacall, herself alive and well with forearms dripping thin gold bracelets.

More than half a century after she modeled for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, thus launching a film career, Bacall is playing a character inspired by Vreeland in Robert Altman’s “Ready to Wear,” which opened Sunday.

This time the editor’s name is Slim Chrysler, but “the history is the same,” Bacall says about the editor. Even the name has a history of sorts: Slim was the name of Bacall’s character in that first movie, 1944’s “To Have and Have Not.”

Beyond their larger-than-life personas, Vreeland and Bacall don’t have much in common. The late editor bordered on the outlandish and was a bit of a screecher. The actress with the famous deep-throaty voice comes on cool and composed.

For anyone still searching for signs of typecasting, Bacall is happy to recall her other assignment for Altman: In his ill-fated “Health,” she played an 83-year-old virgin.

Her dry baritone laugh rumples the air of the hotel suite where, dressed in a mahogany silk trouser suit, sitting on a French salon chair and separating a tangerine from its rind, the actress is conducting interviews.

There was a time when young women practiced that voice, used those same immortal words, “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” that Bacall delivered to Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not.”

Her long legs dangling from the piano top, Bacall gave the pianist-President of the United States, Harry S. Truman--The Look and it titillated the nation and infuriated the President’s wife.

“You put your chin on your chest to hold your head steady and then look up” is Bacall’s clinical explanation of that look 50 years later. Not that you should try it: She says she thinks it would “look pretty silly” on today’s rialto.

While the public’s interest in Bacall has waned, her most enduring marketable asset remains her voice, currently heard in commercials for cat food and cruise ships.

“Movies and plays don’t start with me,” Bacall says, assessing her professional status. “I’m just not offered a lot of stuff.”

When the focus is on her, it’s often in the past tense. Lately, however, things have been buzzing.

“The last year I’ve been really working a lot. I’m certainly not complaining, but between this movie and the book, it’s been quite unreal,” she says.

“Now,” published in the fall by Knopf, is described by Bacall as “a book about feelings and survival and absolutely not a part two” to her 1979 autobiography, “By Myself.” That, she says, was all about “coming from nowhere to somewhere and what happens along the way”: Betty Perske, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn who went to Hollywood before she was 20, made lots of movies (she says she’s proudest of “The Fan” and “Designing Woman,” in which she plays a fashion plate) and married two famous husbands (Jason Robards after Bogart’s death).

She also had three children, was briefly engaged to Frank Sinatra, won two Tonys (“Applause” and “Woman of the Year”), a National Book Award (“By Myself”) and a reputation as one of the last of the old-fashioned glamour queens.

But that said: How many lives do you have to write about?

This time, she says, she confined herself to “some things I felt strongly about, I wanted my children and friends to know. They were better expressed on paper than vocally.”

Knopf printed 200,000 copies of “Now,” but recently advised book stores to slash the price in half. Bacall professes not to know about this--”it’s done incredibly well wherever I’ve gone”--and insists she has no regrets she didn’t write yet “another gossipy book.”

“I think that’s a pretty tacky way to live, and my life hasn’t been about that,” she says. “I love to make money the same as anyone else, but sure as hell not that way.”

At 70, the actress lives in a rambling, memento-filled co-op at the Dakota, and appears fit and trim, her long frame folded comfortably into the chair, her still-thick blonde mane brushing her collar. A question about facial surgery, put to her by a member of the audience when she appeared at the 92nd Street Y in October, received only a withering stare. Now the suggestion that her social schedule might be daunting for someone half her age isn’t treated as a compliment. “I am a social butterfly,” she bristles, the famous blue-green eyes suddenly ice hard.

Rather, she’s frazzled, she says, from just having spent 2 1/2 days moving herself out of the house she sold in the Hamptons. After the holidays, she’s off to France and Great Britain for her book’s publication abroad.

“I’m a basket case,” she says, her aura of supreme self-confidence a misconception she discussed in her book. “ Angst is a natural state for me,” she wrote, but after having presented quite another picture to the public for so long it has become necessary for her to explain the image. “I think it’s the voice,” she supposes. “It gives people the impression that I’m formidable when I’m really quite vulnerable.

“That idea that I’m always in control simply came out of my first movie. The minute people see you as something that clicks, you’re pigeonholed. I get a lot of mail from people who are very generous in complimenting me as a role model of a strong woman who always speaks her mind, who’s impervious to the frailties of life. But they couldn’t be more wrong.”