Lauren Bacall’s Secret Relationship With British Writer ‘They Were Soulmates’ | movies | entertainment

Little did I know what discoveries lay ahead when I met again my first husband, Colin Hayden Evans, 30 years later. Imagine my utter surprise when he casually hinted at a secret affair he had with Hollywood screen icon Lauren Bacall in 1979. I couldn’t imagine my reclusive ex-husband in the world of Hollywood. But it turned out to be true.

By the time I reconnected with Colin in 2005, he had been an established and successful BBC playwright for 25 years, with a string of powerful psychological and supernatural dramas to his name.

But early in his writing career in the late 1970s, when he was 39, his agent sent him to Los Angeles to help set up a radio drama reference company with Hollywood stars. During this period he was introduced to Lauren Bacall at a dinner party. They had an instant relationship and started a relationship right away.

During my visit to Colin, he asked if I would be willing to edit the couple’s letters, memos, and interviews. “What happened to us wasn’t what you call ordinary falling in love,” he told me. But there was one caveat: For now, their identities must be strictly concealed.

Over the next few months I received documents describing the strange and sometimes semi-paranormal experiences that occurred between him and Bacall, who was then 55 years old. “You’ll meet her one day,” Colin told me.

Then Coleen died and after several attempts to communicate with Bacall, she also died in 2014. After failing to get a response from her family, who seemed determined to hide this episode of Bacall’s life, I decided to publish their extraordinary story. It’s significant, I think, because it reveals Lauren Bacall’s deepest thoughts and presents a deeply personal, hitherto unknown side of her.

It was always seen as a kind of mystery, a little different from other stars, somehow removed from Hollywood. Here we have an insight into this difference.

She was deep in the esoteric and the spiritual, which was finally fully expressed through her relationship with my ex-husband.

What is remarkable in the writings, as well as in the writings of the people who have moved into Bacall’s circle, is the extraordinary influence which their meeting had, not only on the two, but on others present at the time.

Guests at the dinner party describe meeting Bacall and Colin as shaking them out of their normal state. “You changed my life forever,” one guest wrote.

Despite the 16-year age difference, their relationship was much more than an ordinary romance.

In her memoirs, Bacall writes about how meeting Colin changed and gave meaning to her glamorous, but fragile Hollywood lifestyle. “We weren’t in love,” she wrote. “We were much closer than that.”

She went on to write of their first meeting, “At once, something was–though I knew it was waiting. It was a great astonishment.”

As we shook hands with each other, everything stopped. I know this sounds strange – but that’s how it was.

There was suddenly – in such a way that there was nothing else; As if the air was full of it. It was the only thing that mattered. We were cast aside, and we never recovered.”

Meanwhile, Colin described what happened from his point of view: “One night in the hallway of a house, for no apparent reason and without any understanding whatsoever, we stopped each other. It happened on the spot. immediately.”

For the next five intense months, Colin stayed with Bacall in Los Angeles and barely left each other’s side. Eventually visas and work obligations forced them to separate, but they remained in constant contact until Colin’s death in Wales in 2009.

Excerpts from their diaries are rich with intimate revelations describing their thoughts and feelings during their time together.

In another entry, Bacall wrote: “If someone asked me: Do you fall in love with this guy, I’d probably say, No. Attract next? Not quite that either. But if they said in that case it would be fine if he just left, I know That I would have willingly died instead of letting that happen. I felt as if I could only breathe again if he was there.”

Along the same lines, Evans wrote, “Looking back at the past, it always seemed strange to me that I never left the house that first night—or later. It was never discussed: I just stayed. Days later, when I asked the question, I seemed surprised because I I didn’t see it myself. “Where could you go?” she said.

The experiences of my first husband and Bacal influenced me in turn. The fact that life can be so strange, and that there is no such thing as normal, is, to me, something to be celebrated. Life is not quite what it seems

The privilege of accessing these extraordinary documents has given me an exclusive glimpse into one of Hollywood’s greats. I thought it was right that everyone should have a chance to read, too. The result is “things in heaven and earth”.

• ‘Things in Heaven and Earth: The Mysterious Relationship of a Hollywood Legend and a British Writer’ by Jane Metcalf, £10.99 (ISBN: 9781527265813) Available at Amazon and all bookstores.