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At the tribute to Barbara Cook at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater on Monday night, a memorial for the Broadway and cabaret star who died in August at 89, friends and former colleagues recalled the high and sometimes low points of working with the gifted singer over her roller-coaster career, which lasted more than six decades.

The lyricist Sheldon Harnick told of out-of-town tryouts for the 1963 Broadway musical “She Loves Me,” when he and the show’s composer, Jerry Bock, showed up one afternoon with a new song they had just written for their female lead. Ms. Cook read the lyrics, hummed a few bars and then said, as they looked at her incredulously, “‘Let’s do it tonight.’” That song was “Vanilla Ice Cream,” which Ms. Cook stopped the show with that night — “and then every night afterward,” Mr. Harnick recalled — and went on to make the signature song of her career.

Renée Fleming sang, “Hello, Young Lovers,” from “The King and I,” a show Ms. Cook performed in at City Center with the dashing Farley Granger in 1960, and repeated the advice Ms. Cook gave young singers, particularly those in the master classes she often taught: “You are enough. We are all enough. We are all always enough.”

Audra McDonald remembered working as an usher at a Juilliard event so she could watch one of those master classes, sobbing as she sat on the stairs in the back of the theater. She then sang an ethereal version of “Go Back Home” from the Kander and Ebb musical “The Scottsboro Boys.” Several friends, as well as Ms. Cook’s son, Adam LeGrant, noted her late-night scouring of YouTube, looking for new material to sing; of her haunting Tower Records on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, eager to add to her opera collection; and, perhaps most surprisingly, her obsession with Hugh Jackman, particularly his performance in “The Boy From Oz,” which she saw 15 times.

But the star of the evening was Frank Langella, the actor and recipient of four Tonys: a close friend of Ms. Cook’s over the last 20 years of her life, and who, in his 10-minute speech, shared both the most poignant and the funniest stories of the night, moving the rapt audience of several hundred from muffled sobs to hysterical laughter.

He recalled meeting Ms. Cook in 1982, when he was taking voice lessons from her longtime collaborator Wally Harper, in preparation for his planned Broadway debut as “a musical-comedy performer” (a career step that audiences were eventually spared, he assured us), and Ms. Cook stopped by the apartment.

The meeting was not a fortuitous one.

“Barbara was quite remote,” Mr. Langella told the audience, adding that she struck him as a “very sad, very lonely” woman, one who had “lost an exquisite young career to alcoholism and neuroses.”

He added, “What an old lady she was to my eyes: 55. ‘Finished and done,’ I thought, as I left Wally’s apartment.”

But Ms. Cook was not done. She was not finished.

As Mr. Langella recalled, just a few years later Ms. Cook was performing in a concert version of “Follies” at Lincoln Center, singing the role of Sally Durant, a performance that rebooted her career and began a decades-long association with Stephen Sondheim, including a return to Broadway in 2010 in her Tony-nominated role in “Sondheim on Sondheim.”

Mr. Langella was preceded by a video message in which Mr. Sondheim talked about that Lincoln Center production of “Follies,” and introduced a film clip of Ms. Cook in the rehearsal studio, singing a transformative rendition of “In Buddy’s Eyes.” Most of the other performers, including Lee Remick and a very young Mandy Patinkin, watched in rapt admiration. But the mood was broken — as Mr. Sondheim warned the memorial’s audience it would be — hilariously, by a scene-stealing, chain-smoking Elaine Stritch.

Ms. Cook and Mr. Langella later became close friends, sharing gossip in phone calls that might begin at 2 or 3 a.m. (“She was the only friend from whom I would get a cheery ‘hello’ when I called at that hour,” he said.)

That friendship was tested only once, Mr. Langella said: when he invited Ms. Cook to accompany him to a dinner party that Barbara Walters was holding at her apartment. Ms. Cook “nervously accepted,” he recalled, “but said, ‘Stay close to me. They’re not my crowd.’”

After dinner, Ms. Walters asked Ms. Cook to sing. She “politely refused,” said Mr. Langella. “But Barbara Walters is not an easy person to resist.” Eventually, Ms. Cook agreed to perform, huddling with the pianist for about 15 minutes, and then, with her eyes tightly closed and her hands balled into a fist, quietly sang, “You’ll Never Know.”

When she finished, Ms. Cook refused a request to do an encore, walked over to Mr. Langella, sat down next to him on the couch, her hands shaking, and whispered into his ear, “I’ll never forgive you for this,” adding a expletive for effect.

“Luckily,” Mr. Langella said, “she eventually did.”