Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 1

h.e.l.lo, gorgeous: becoming Barbra Streisand.

by William J. Mann.

Why Streisand Now

Just five years after arriving in Manhattan as a seventeen-year-old kid without money or connections, Barbra Streisand was the top-selling female recording artist in America and the star of one of Broadway's biggest hits. Twenty-two years old, her face graced the covers of Time and Life. That was only the beginning of a career that has marched its band and beat its drum now for half a century, but everything Streisand has accomplished in that time can be traced right back to this first half decade of her professional life.

The young Barbra was like nothing the world of entertainment had ever seen. So fresh, so fearless, so unself-conscious-so bursting with desire-that today, even the lady herself seems to cower when confronted with the memory of that young upstart. If Streisand has ever been afraid of anything, I suspect that it's been the burden of living up to that s.e.xy, vulnerable, sensational younger self who gate-crashed her way to fame during the turbulent 1960s, defying old definitions of talent, beauty, and success by harnessing an extraordinary confluence of talent, hard work, and shrewd salesmanship. In these all-important formative years, Streisand first learned how to dazzle, how to connect, and how to get what she wanted.

It was also during these years that she learned-in that less comfortable and far less controllable world offstage-how to love, be loved, and lose love. These were the years that the budding Brooklyn teenager born Barbara Streisand would become both a personality and a person, a time when she got her first inkling of how much the artistic affirmation she craved-and the fame that came with it-would cost.

This book charts Barbra's climb from her earliest days in Manhattan to her first major triumph, the Broadway musical Funny Girl. After that, her chronicle becomes a very different kind of story: a Cinderella tale after she's secured prince and palace. (Or at least the palace; princes, for Barbra, weren't so easy to come by.) My goal has been to understand this early, groundbreaking Streisand, the artist and the woman who, out of need and lack of nurture, transformed herself into a superstar the world loved or loathed, an ambivalence that seemed to mirror the feelings in her own head and heart. I've attempted to zoom in as closely as possible on this complicated young woman-not the constructed myth or icon-in order to doc.u.ment how this unlikely kid from Brooklyn turned herself, in just five years' time, into the biggest star on the planet.

Much of it, of course, was due to her astonishing talent, and to a voice that pianist Glenn Gould called "one of the natural wonders of the age." Streisand came out of a time when talent still mattered, when the pursuit of greatness, not infamy, was rewarded-a world very different from ours, where Snooki and the Kardashians and drunken "real housewives" grab the lion's share of media attention. Still, for all her gifts, Streisand wasn't above merchandizing her fame, and during these first five years, she learned to do so expertly. She would cultivate an eccentric personality to go along with the mellifluous voice, knowing it would be the combination of the two that would keep audiences and interviewers coming back for more.

Yet Streisand's vaunted ambition remains very different from the l.u.s.t for notoriety that drives so many of today's celebrities. Barbra's determination to reach the big time was never simply an engine to acc.u.mulate fans or headlines or even dollars. From the start, she made it clear that she did not wish "to be a star having to sign autographs or being recognized and all that." Instead, there were much more human reasons. Barbra wanted to make it big so she could demonstrate she had talent and appeal to a father who had never known her, a mother who hadn't seemed to care, and a world that had thought she was too different to succeed. No surprise, then, that being acknowledged as good would never be enough; Barbra had to be great. And as for paying her dues, she showed little patience: "It was right to the top," she declared early on, "or nowhere at all."

Of course, Streisand's rise has been told before. To say something new and valuable, to put her career into fresh perspective, I have tried to re-create the vanished world of her beginnings. Given my subject's refusal to speak with biographers, I knew I would need to uncover new, authoritative source materials on my own. Happily, I discovered that there were, in fact, several never-before-used collections that provided exactly the kind of detailed inside information I needed-material that, as I discovered, did not always jibe with the established canon of Streisand's early years.

I can't say that I was surprised by this-the written historical record often serves as an important corrective to the faulty human memory-but I was nonetheless struck by how many oft-told tales and a.s.sumptions about Streisand's career turned out to be false. The personal papers of Jerome Robbins, for example, revealed that, contrary to what has always been written, Ray Stark wasn't opposed to Barbra's casting in Funny Girl; rather, he was her most ardent champion right from the start. Claims made by Garson Kanin that he'd had to persuade Stark to hire Streisand were latter-day self-embellishments (something Kanin was very good at). The Robbins papers clearly show that Barbra was on the project months before Kanin came on board. Likewise, the papers of Bob Fosse finally flesh out that director's rather shadowy involvement with the show. Streisand buffs might want to read my notes thoroughly, as I present evidence that debunks many of the famous myths about her career, such as the story of her being fired from a nightclub in Winnipeg.

Also doc.u.mented here for the first time is the prodigious amount of backstage maneuvering and public-relations chicanery that propelled Streisand forward. Her ticket to the top was indisputably her voice, but her great good fortune was to choose a crackerjack team of managers, agents, and publicists who made sure that her voice got heard. This able corps of lieutenants, operating largely unseen and unsung, was led, almost from the start, by Marty Erlichman, second only to the lady herself in engineering her brilliant career. Erlichman understood that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Streisand's very difference-her unusual looks, her Jewishness, her offbeat manner-could a.s.sist her rise, not hinder it. He was able to argue that she was so uniquely talented that her huge fame was simply fated; all they had needed to do to make Barbra a star was wait "for her talent to speak for itself." As such, her celebrity wasn't "artificially created," Erlichman insisted, but something that simply "had to happen." Such a plat.i.tude, of course, obscures all the press releases, publicity gimmicks, and backstage deals that Erlichman and his efficient band of foot soldiers waged on their client's behalf, especially during these crucial first five years.

Yet to acknowledge such clandestine efforts would have been to undercut the image of a singularly talented star to whom the world had flocked instinctively and unbidden. Now, thanks to publicists and advocates finally sharing their accounts, another story emerges, and it is every bit as fascinating and compelling as the myths that have long been spun. Here is the chronicle of a girl-so green, so raw, such a diamond in the rough-carried along on a wave of masterful salesmanship to the attention of such influential figures in the world of theater and music as Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne, Harold Arlen, and Sammy Cahn, who then adopted her, anointed her, and presented her to the world. With such an entrance, Streisand's acclaim was instant and overwhelming.

None of that diminishes Barbra's talent or star quality. If she hadn't been as sensational as her handlers said she was, she would have crashed and burned like so many before her had done. Nor, significantly, should it minimize Streisand's own role in making it all happen. Styne said she "carried her own spotlight." Certainly no one knew better than Barbra what worked best for her, and she had little time for false modesty. In fact, Streisand's very narcissism-a trait that has created a vocal minority of detractors-proved a key ingredient of her success, perhaps as essential as her ample talent and capable a.s.sistants. Greatness cannot be achieved, after all, without a corresponding belief in one's own greatness. That single-minded egoism left some people resentful, however, and others simply perplexed. Rosie O'Donnell, a fervent Streisand devotee, once pressed Barbra on whether she, too, had had idols in her youth. There was a long pause, in which Streisand seemed to struggle with the very concept. "I don't think so," she said at last. Of course not: It had always been just her.

For all of Streisand's self-confidence, there was also the corresponding self-doubt. "That goes so deep," she admitted-right back to those days in Brooklyn when her mother withheld praise and the girls at Erasmus Hall High School turned up their considerably smaller noses at her. As much as she'd been determined to make it, when success came, it still seemed strange to her. Seeing her name in lights was hard to accept. "Barbra Streisand doesn't sound like a star," she told a reporter in 1963.

Since that time, she has made "Barbra Streisand" synonymous with stardom, becoming the bar by which others measure their success. But fifty years earlier, she'd had her own hurdles. There had been Jewish stars before her-Lauren Bacall, Joan Collins, Piper Laurie, Judy Holliday-but none who seemed to announce it quite as forcefully as Streisand did when she walked into a room or onto a stage. There had been stars who had looked different, stars who hadn't fit conventional expectations of beauty or glamour, but none who had insisted they were beautiful-leading-lady material-as Streisand did. She was fortunate to emerge at a time when the old order was breaking down: Diahann Carroll and Chita Rivera were challenging the white-bread glamour handbook of Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day, and people such as Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, d.i.c.k Gregory, and Joan Rivers were introducing new voices into the American conversation.

Streisand's times were, therefore, right for her-but she was also right for her times. Though the critics started out calling her ugly and strange, within five years she had transformed not only their opinion of her, but also their very concepts of beauty and talent.

That was a lot to accomplish for a young woman barely out of her teens, especially one who had to be great and not merely good. Early on, Streisand learned she could only achieve her goals by taking charge herself; her first alb.u.m, engineered and orchestrated by others, wasn't nearly as masterful as her second, on which she exerted more control. That word "control," however, had "negative implications," she argued; Streisand preferred to say that she took "artistic responsibility." Yet sometimes in her quest for the best, she seemed to overshoot and expect perfection, especially from herself. Part of the reason she didn't have pierced ears, she explained to Oprah Winfrey, was because "each ear is a different length, so how could you possibly put a hole in exactly the same place on different ears?"

But she has always worn this insistence on precision as a badge of pride. "I really don't like being called a 'perfectionist' as if it's a crime," she has said. Certainly Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins, her earliest examples of auteurship, had been no shrinking violets when it came to taking control over their work. "What is so offensive about a woman doing the same thing?" Streisand has asked. Even her detractors concede she has a point on that score.

Perhaps this accounts for Streisand's recent prominence on the scene. Suddenly she's everywhere: giving concerts, celebrated on Glee, collecting awards, invoked in pop-rap songs, top-lining a movie for the first time in sixteen years. I suspect that our renewed fondness, even adoration, of Streisand is evidence of a nostalgia for a time when striving for excellence was at least as important as making a buck, and when originality was prized over focus-grouped packaging. In the early 1960s, Streisand reset the cultural parameters when she walked onstage in Funny Girl and said "h.e.l.lo, gorgeous" to herself in the mirror-a slender, unusual girl who wouldn't compromise on appearance, performance, or integrity. Fifty years later, she still matters, and for all the same reasons.

All scenes and events described herein are based on primary sources: interviews, letters, production records, journals, and contemporary news and weather reports. Nothing has been created simply for dramatic sake. Anything within quotation marks comes from interviews or other sources; dialogue is used only when it originates directly from these sources. Att.i.tudes, motivations, and feelings attributed to Streisand or others always come from descriptions given in interviews. Full citations are found in the notes.

CHAPTER ONE

Winter 1960

1.

For sixty-five cents you could get a piece of fish, a heaping helping of French fries, a tub of coleslaw, and some tartar sauce at the smoky little diner on Broadway just south of Times Square. But since they only had ninety-three cents and some pocket lint between them, they decided to order one meal and split it, throwing in an additional dime apiece for a couple of gla.s.ses of birch beer.

It hadn't escaped Barbara's attention-few things ever did-that today, February 5, was her father's birthday. He would have been fifty-two if he hadn't died when she was fifteen months old, and quite possibly, instead of eating greasy fried fish with her friend Carl, she'd have spent this unseasonably warm winter day wandering through the city discussing Chekhov with the man she had come to idolize, a devotee of the Russian playwright, as well as of Shaw and Shakespeare. It was, after all, Chekhov's centennial, and as serious students of the theater, both Barbara and Emanuel Streisand would have been well aware of that fact. She and her father might even have taken in Three Sisters that night at the Fourth Street Theater in the East Village-a production Barbara had been dying to see, but for which she'd been unable to afford a ticket.

Looking up at Carl over their French fries with a sudden, surprising pa.s.sion, Barbara insisted that everything would have been very different if her father had lived. Certainly she wouldn't have had to spend her nights at the Lunt-Fontanne, ushering giddy housewives from New Jersey to their seats to see Mary Martin warble her way through The Sound of Music, hiding her face "so n.o.body would remember" her after she became famous.

Barbara Joan Streisand was seventeen years old. She had been living in Manhattan now for almost exactly a year, and she was getting impatient with the pace of her acting career. So far her resume consisted of summer stock and one play in somebody's attic. But she wasn't anywhere near to giving up. Her grandmother had called her "farbrent" -Yiddish for "on fire"-because even as a child Barbara had never been able to accept "no" for an answer. Growing up in Brooklyn in near poverty, she'd existed in a world of her own imagination of "what life should be like." She was driven by "a need to be great," she said, a need that burned in her like the pa.s.sion of a "preacher" and necessitated getting out of Brooklyn as soon as she could. And so it was that, in January 1959, just weeks after graduating (six months early) from Erasmus Hall High School, Barbara had hopped on the subway and, several stops later, emerged into her new life amid the lights of Times Square. Manhattan, she believed, was "where people really lived."

With the childlike enthusiasm that could, in an instant, melt her usual steely resolve, Barbara looked over at Carl with her wide blue eyes, telling him about her father, the intellectual, the man of culture. Her hands in frenetic motion, her outrageously long fingernails drawing considerable attention, she insisted that her father would have understood her. She missed him "in her bones." All her life, she'd felt she was "missing something," and she had to fill up the empty place he had left.

But, asked about her mother, Barbara fell silent. Crumpling her napkin and tossing it onto her plate, she slid out of the booth, plopped her share of coins onto the table, and trudged out of the restaurant. Carl had to gulp down the last of his birch beer before hurrying after her. Barbara was already out the door and striding down the sidewalk, the fringe of her antique lace shawl swinging as she walked.

Carl Esser knew very little about this strange urchin he'd met just a few weeks before in a Theatre Studio workshop, except that she fascinated him. s.e.x and romance had nothing to do with the attraction, at least not for him. At twenty-four, Carl was seven years Barbara's senior, and besides, the small girl who was already half a block ahead of him wasn't exactly what most people would call pretty. A layer of heavy pancake makeup covered an angry blush of teenage acne. Her eyes, no matter how cornflower blue, had a tendency to look crossed. Most of all, she had a nose that was likened by some in their acting cla.s.s to an anteater's snout-behind Barbara's back, of course. But her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were full, her waist was small, and her hips were nicely rounded, making for an odd and rather contradictory package.

Carl knew-everyone in their acting cla.s.s knew-how intensely Barbara wanted to be great. She wanted to be Duse, she said, though she'd never seen Duse act, only read about her in books on theater in her acting teacher's library. That didn't matter. Duse had been a great artist, perhaps the greatest, and that's what Barbara wanted. There were others in the cla.s.s who claimed they wanted to be great, but what they really wanted was fame and applause. That wasn't what fired Barbara up. She didn't sit around idolizing movie stars or the latest Broadway sensation du jour. She wanted to be remembered for being great, for making art.

Taxicabs bleated their horns as Barbara and Carl crossed Times Square. Policemen blew high-pitched whistles as tiny brand-new Ford Falcons scooted past sleek Chevrolet Impalas with their sweeping tail fins. Steam from the Seventh Avenue subway rose through the grates like fog from an underground river. On every block hung the fragrance of roasting chestnuts, while tourists in fur coats gaped up at the news ticker on the New York Times Building, its 14,800 bulbs spelling out the latest in the U.S.-Soviet s.p.a.ce race.

Barbara and Carl headed west on Forty-eighth Street. At Barbara's apartment, number 339, the friends bid each other good-bye, and if Barbara was hoping there might be a kiss, she didn't wait for it. It was clear that Carl, like all the others, wasn't interested in her that way. If anyone had asked, she would've insisted it didn't matter. With all her big dreams, she would've said that she didn't have time for romance.

That day, or one very much like it, Barbara walked up the stairs to her apartment to the smell of boiled chicken. On the stove bubbled a pot of her mother's chicken soup. Barbara's roommate, Marilyn, told her that her mother had just walked in, dropped off the soup, and left. No message, no note. But the chicken soup, as always, was welcome because that fried fish and coleslaw would last only so long.

2.

Striding into her acting cla.s.s, Barbara was boiling with all the ferocity of her mother's soup. Who did this Susskind guy think he was?

Word around the Theatre Studio had been that the producer David Susskind was always looking for new talent. It might be only for television, not the stage, but Susskind's production of Lullaby for Channel 13's Play of the Week had recently won approving notices for Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, and next up was The Devil and Daniel Webster for NBC Sunday Showcase. The guy was making something worthwhile out of the b.o.o.b tube. And since Susskind had been an agent, Barbara no doubt figured stopping by his office on Columbus Circle couldn't hurt, to drop off some headshots if nothing else.

But rarely had she encountered such rudeness. Carl, who'd gotten an earful on the way to cla.s.s, was trying to calm her down, but Barbara was on a roll. Susskind had agreed to see her, but then Barbara had sat in his office for hours to no avail. Finally she'd stormed out, and the storm had yet to subside. People such as Susskind, she raged, were refusing to let new talent emerge, almost as if they had a "duty to squelch" it. That was the problem with this business, Barbara carped. Whenever she tried to sign up with agents, she was told they only represented people who were working. But you couldn't get work without an agent! Talk about double binds! Barbara took it all very personally.

The others in her cla.s.s looked on with a mixture of amus.e.m.e.nt and weariness. To them, Barbara was that nutty kid who was always stumbling in late eating yogurt and wearing "a coat of some immense plaid," as one of them described. When she spoke, Barbara reminded some people of a Jules Feiffer cartoon from the Village Voice-cynical, ironic, sometimes angry, and always quintessentially New York. When asked why she talked so much, often to the point where other students closed their eyes in exhaustion, she was apt to blame it on her tinnitus, a condition that had plagued her since she was eight. "I never hear the silence," she said. Neither, her cla.s.smates might have replied, did they.

The Theatre Studio was located at 353 West Forty-eighth Street, just a few doors from Barbara's apartment, precisely the reason she'd chosen to live there. The school was one of about a hundred such inst.i.tutions in a twenty-block radius of Times Square. In the previous decade acting schools had proliferated in New York. With the elite "big three"-the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the American Theatre Wing, and the Neighborhood Playhouse-only being able to accommodate about six hundred aspiring actors, newer schools quickly formed to fill the need. Celebrated coaches like Herbert Berghof and Stella Adler established their own ateliers. The Theatre Studio was part of this same tradition, having been founded in 1952 by Curt Conway, a member of the groundbreaking Group Theatre and a major proponent of Method acting. In addition to the cla.s.srooms on Forty-eighth Street, Conway had acquired the Cecilwood Playhouse in Fishkill, New York, for summer productions, and a weekly radio program on station WEVD where his students interpreted new and cla.s.sical work. The school offered three levels of courses, from fundamental to advanced acting, and special workshops conducted by some of the greats Conway had worked with, including Joseph Anthony, Howard Da Silva, Paddy Chayefsky, and Harold Clurman.

Not that Barbara, a neophyte, had gotten to study with any of them. Her primary teacher was Allan Miller, a young up-and-comer who'd studied under Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen and who was best known for playing the second lead (behind Warren Beatty) in a summer tour of A Hatful of Rain. Under Miller's tutelage, Barbara was beginning to blossom. Finally she was in an environment where people believed in her potential as much as she did. Any student with enough "appet.i.te," Miller believed, could be trained to act. With such a philosophy, it was no surprise that Barbara responded well to Miller's instruction. "We all have deep, secret feelings," he told his students-and that was certainly true enough of Barbara. With enough craft and discipline, Miller said, she could use those feelings to hone and express her acting talent.

Barbara had enrolled at the Theatre Studio when she was not quite sixteen, younger than most people who were admitted. Her only real acting experience came from a summer internship with the Malden Bridge Playhouse in upstate New York between her soph.o.m.ore and junior years, where she'd gotten to act in Picnic and won a nice review in the local newspaper. Her acceptance into the Theatre Studio had come about only through the intercession of Miller's wife, Anita, whom Barbara had met at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where she'd secured herself yet another internship. As soon as Barbara had realized that her new friend's husband taught at the Theatre Studio, she'd bombarded her with questions, coming across to Anita "like someone who had been starved." Impressed by her pa.s.sion, Anita had prevailed upon her husband to accept Barbara into his cla.s.s. Instead of paying tuition ($180 for a fifteen-week course ), Barbara babysat the Millers' two young sons. It wasn't unheard of for students to barter their tuition in this way; another young hopeful, an enterprising kid from California named Dustin Hoffman, swept the floors and emptied the trash at night. Barbara told her mother she'd received a "scholarship."

Although she took cla.s.ses with other teachers, it was Allan Miller who became Barbara's mentor. Handsome, intelligent, pa.s.sionate, Miller offered Barbara a glimpse of what her life might have been like if her father had still been around. In the days before she got her apartment, Barbara would sometimes sleep on the Millers' couch instead of schlepping back to Brooklyn. She'd fall asleep with books about theater, art, or literature resting on her chest. These were the kind of treatises she believed her father would have kept around the house: Socrates, Euripides, French farces, and Russian literature. Anna Karenina "changed her life," she said. During this same period Barbara also heard her first cla.s.sical music: Respighi's Pines of Rome and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. "Can you imagine what that's like?" she asked, looking back. "To hear that music for the first time?"