Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 16

That early summer day, trooping up to the WNEW television studios in the former DuMont Tele-Centre on East Sixty-seventh Street, Barbra looked like a G.o.ddess, just as Bob had intended.

She was a young woman transformed. Her eyes appeared Egyptian-making her look like Isis, perhaps, or at least like the photos of Elizabeth Taylor coming off the set of Cleopatra. Her hair was styled in a long, fashionable inverted bob; no more ponytails, Bob had decreed. On her forefinger she wore a silver ring-all the rage at the time, not to mention a symbol of Jewish marriage-and for a blouse she'd chosen a ruffled middy, the kind Jackie Kennedy had popularized when she was pregnant. Some people thought Barbra looked a little pregnant herself with all those ruffles at her waist. But those were people who simply didn't understand style.

It was the eyes, however, that really got her noticed, that caused the studio technicians to stop what they were doing and look twice at her. Bob had always emphasized Barbra's eyes when doing her makeup, but now he'd come up with something entirely new. With a tiny watercolor brush, he had extended the shape of her eyes outward with a long stripe of black eyeliner. Then, before applying her false eyelashes, he drew a thin, almost imperceptible white highlight along the rim of her eyelid to lighten the heaviness of the dark lashes. To teach her how to do it herself, Bob made up one side of Barbra's face and then had her do the other. But without Bob's help, she could never seem to glue the eyelashes on herself. Too often her fingers got stuck to the lid of one eye, leaving Barbra screaming, "I'm going blind!"

So when she didn't have Bob to help her, she would forego the false eyelashes and go out with only the white lines above her eyelids and the long black lines extending around to the sides of her face. In so doing, Bob thought, Barbra had inadvertently created "a stylistic signature" for herself. Had she been able to apply the eyelashes on her own, the result would have seemed more natural; but without the lashes, the lines around her eyes became more apparent-and, by default, a statement. If Barbra and Bob had been going for the exotic-the "white G.o.ddess" look-they had succeeded in ways they hadn't even imagined.

As it turned out, their timing was perfect. The television show Barbra was taping, PM East, was a new talkfest produced by WBC Productions, a subsidiary of Westinghouse, and syndicated to various stations throughout the country. Paired with a second half, PM West, taped in San Francisco, the show was intended to give Jack Paar a run for his money. The New York hosts were Mike Wallace, the hard-driving interviewer from the old Night Beat series, and Joyce Davidson, formerly of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and the theme for the segment Barbra was taping today was "glamour." Among the other guests were model Suzy Parker, Life magazine photographer Milton Greene, and agent Candy Jones, herself frequently on the annual best-dressed lists. Barbra might have been hired to sing a couple of songs, but if the conversation was going to be about glamour, there was no way she was going to be left out. She made sure she showed up ready to take on the best of them.

Yet just how she had nailed this particular job, she wasn't telling. When Ted Rozar found out she'd been booked on the show, he was mystified. He hadn't had anything to do with it. Apparently, a PM East staffer had heard Barbra sing at the Bon Soir and had arranged for an audition. But, Rozar wondered, who had arranged her contract? It wasn't Irvin Arthur; a.s.sociated Booking only handled club dates. So who was it? Rozar had his suspicions. A week or so before Barbra turned up at the station, Marty Erlichman's clients, the Clancy Brothers, had also taped an appearance on PM East. Had Erlichman, already working with the show's staff, made a call, talked to some people, helped Barbra out? Was this a way of wooing her? Barbra didn't say.

But no doubt she was happy to take the job. Since its debut on June 12, PM East had lured a diverse roster of guests up to Sixty-seventh Street. Retired Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, war correspondent William Shirer, film director Otto Preminger, and comedian Jonathan Winters had all appeared during the show's kickoff week. An episode focusing on rock and roll with Paul Anka was in the can. Another show looked at the issue of violence, featuring pacifist Jim Peck and psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.

Parading into the studio Barbra wore her ambition like a debutante might flaunt a mink stole. And for the first time in her career, she ran headfirst into another personality with an ego as big as her own. Mike Wallace was aggressive, grouchy, suspicious by nature, and eager to prove himself with PM East after a series of ratings disappointments. Paul Dooley, who'd been a guest on the show, thought the host "didn't know anything about variety or singing," so he came across as tough when, in fact, he was just defensive. Wallace was determined, against all odds, to vanquish Jack Paar and claim late-night supremacy.

Dooley thought Wallace had "a certain kind of ego that b.u.mps into other performers' egos"-a perfect description for what happened with Barbra. When the young singer with the extravagant eye makeup walked in, Wallace took one look at her and decided he didn't like her. True, during her audition, the host had thought her voice was "magnificent," and he'd agreed with his producers that the kid could be a real a.s.set to the show. But Wallace had also homed right in on what he called Barbra's "self-absorption." Of course he did. Narcissists tend to recognize each other. Wallace thought Barbra had "the demeanor of a diva," and expected the "world [to] revolve around her"-even though, in his opinion, she'd yet to prove she deserved such treatment.

It's not surprising, then, that he tried to pull Barbra down a peg. When the cameras began to roll, Wallace began his introduction. "New York is just full of unusual and interesting girls who are starting out in show business, but few of them have the style as early as this young lady." He was reading a prepared script, of course; Barbra's "style" was not something Wallace admired. Unimpressed with Bob's "white G.o.ddess" attempts, the newsman thought Barbra looked "more like the studio mail girl than a singer." Suddenly going off script, he asked for a close-up of Barbra's hand. It was a show about glamour, after all, and Barbra seemed to be trying to make a statement. "Isn't this really an affectation?" Wallace asked. "Come on now, this ring on the forefinger? And these nails that are a little bit short of two inches long each? What's that all about?"

Barbra, probably prepped by the producers, didn't let Wallace knock her off stride. "Well, see, I was very poor," she said, "so I wanted to grow them really long so I could get ten dollars a nail from Revlon." She laughed, barely concealing her annoyance at Wallace's question. "I happen to like long nails!"

"And the ring on the forefinger?" Wallace pressed.

"Well, I could tell you the ring ... would be too big, which it is for this finger," Barbra said, indicating the traditional ring finger. "But I like it on this finger! So did King Louis XIV!"

According to the show's publicist, Don Softness, Barbra had displayed a similar sa.s.siness during her audition, and the producers, delighted, had told her to "play up the kookiness" on the air. Barbra didn't disappoint. When Wallace asked what she was going to sing first, she replied, "The Kinsey Report," which got a big laugh from the technicians in the studio. (She actually sang "A Sleepin' Bee.") When he asked what she wanted to be "when she grew up," Barbra quipped, "A fireman," before adding, grandly, that what she really wanted to do was "direct opera."

"Do you know anything about directing operas?" Wallace asked.

"I don't know anything about opera really," Barbra replied, "except that it's a magnificent medium to express things theatrically and vocally, if you have the vocal equipment. It could be a very exciting theatrical experience. The kind of plots you could-"

"They're telling us from the control room-" Wallace interrupted.

"That's awful," Barbra said, peeved at being cut off.

"-that they understand the answer and they'd like another song."

As Barbra headed over to the stage to sing, Wallace asked his viewers to decide whether she looked more like the regal actress Judith Anderson, best known for playing Medea on Broadway and Mrs. Danvers in Hitchc.o.c.k's Rebecca, or f.a.n.n.y Brice, the Ziegfeld Follies comic best known for playing Baby Snooks on the radio.

The orchestra began playing and Barbra sang "Lover, Come Back to Me" with all the power she'd given it at the Bon Soir. In the control booth, the contrast between Barbra's two personae-the quirky kid and the soulful woman-was received with great appreciation by the show's producers. Even before Barbra had finished singing, they had decided to have her back whenever her schedule permitted.

2.

In the late afternoon of the first Sunday in July, Barbra arrived at the Village Vanguard, one of the oldest clubs in the Village, located in a cellar at 178 Seventh Avenue South. Here Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, Blossom Dearie, and Sonny Rollins had all made names for themselves, but the biggest star currently a.s.sociated with the club was trumpeter Miles Davis. Davis's band was setting up the day Barbra walked in. The Shirley Horn Trio was also on the bill.

Barbra had come to the Vanguard at the behest of an old friend from acting school, Rick Edelstein, who worked as a waiter at the club. In the past, Edelstein had sometimes sneaked Barbra into the club so she could catch the last show. Primarily a jazz club, the Vanguard had recently headlined Gerry Mulligan, Ahmad Jamal, Nina Simone, and the edgy comedian Lenny Bruce. Any of these shows Barbra might have seen. Edelstein served her ginger ale, because he understood that Barbra "didn't drink"; perhaps the memory of that one bottle of wine too many with Bob had lingered. After the show, Barbra and Rick would head over to the Pam Pam, split a baked potato, and talk until three AM.

This afternoon, however, Barbra had come for more than just the show. During the Sunday matinees, which began at four thirty, the Vanguard occasionally allowed a few surprise acts, who hoped a warm reception from the afternoon audience might get them invited back as an official part of the bill some evening. In the extremely compet.i.tive nightclub business, such opportunities were rare, but the Vanguard's easygoing owner, Max Gordon, was known to have "an eye for promising newcomers and the ability to help them blossom." When Edelstein suggested that Barbra perform a few numbers that afternoon, Gordon agreed; he'd heard her sing before, probably at the Bon Soir, and thought she was "great." He even asked Miles Davis to play backup for her, but the jazz great refused, saying he didn't play "behind no girl singer."

Yet, if singing in a club made her feel like a floozy, why was Barbra even there? Why had she curled her hair, drawn those elaborate lines around her eyes, picked out a fashionable dress, slipped into some antique shoes, and trooped over that afternoon to the Village Vanguard? She didn't even really need the money, at least not at that particular moment. She'd just been paid for PM East, and there was a looming gig in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Irvin Arthur would surely get her more nightclub jobs if she needed them. So why put herself through all of this?

The answer, perhaps, came from the most recent man in her life.

His name was Stanley Beck, and he had told Barbra that her problem was simple: She didn't like herself very much. Stanley had known Barbra long enough to speak with some degree of authority. He'd first met her at the Malden Bridge Playhouse when Barbra was fifteen and he was twenty-one. Though he'd found her attractive, Stanley had kept a respectable distance from the underage girl. It was not until one night in the late spring of 1961 that they'd reconnected. Barbra and her roommate, Elaine, had gone to see The Balcony, the Jean Genet play being directed by Jose Quintero at the Circle in the Square Theatre. Stanley had recently taken over the part of the executioner, and Barbra had recognized him. After the show, they met up, and during the past few weeks had been seeing quite a bit of each other.

Barbra, according to friends, had initially been smitten. Shortly before meeting Stanley, she'd lamented to Elaine, "Will I ever get a guy? Do you think anyone could ever love this face?" The affair with Tommy Smothers may have given Barbra a boost, but for someone with self-doubts that ran as deep as hers, it was going to take much more than that to convince her of her own allure. So when Stanley returned her interest, she was elated.

Stanley had picked up on her insecurities. He'd told Barbra plainly that the reason "she was attracted to guys who paid no attention to her" was because it confirmed her own deep-seated belief that "she was nothing." That might explain, some friends thought, why she kept trudging into nightclubs, craving the approval of the managers and the applause of their patrons.

Standing in the Vanguard now, waiting for Rick Edelstein to corral a musician to play backup for her, Barbra was as alone as she'd ever been in her life. Nearly seven months after the breakup with Barre, her renditions of "Cry Me a River" had lost none of their intensity. Even Stanley's muscular frame couldn't compete with the memory of Barre. At first, Barbra had been attracted enough to Stanley to buy a diaphragm in case she ever gave in and had s.e.x with him. But as time went on, she told Elaine that she "could take him or leave him." Stanley wasn't the devoted, nurturing mentor Barre had been. He was also perhaps just a bit too honest. He spoke with a directness that Barbra wasn't used to, and he articulated a truth that went to the core of her being. To no one's great surprise, shortly before her audition at the Vanguard, Barbra had stopped seeing Stanley Beck.

Up on the stage, Edelstein was motioning to Barbra that the musician was ready. Barbra stepped up and sang three numbers. The audience, as expected, cheered and whistled. Watching from the back of the room, Max Gordon's wife, Lorraine, felt as if there was nothing Barbra "couldn't do with her voice-she had such control, top to bottom." But her husband didn't offer Barbra a job that day. The Vanguard was a jazz club, and Barbra was no Nina Simone. This day, the affirmation she sought so desperately would not be forthcoming.

At least not from the club managers. As Barbra was leaving, an older woman from the audience stopped her. "You are fantastic," she said. "Don't ever change."

Barbra looked at her matter-of-factly. "Of course I'll change," she said. "Life changes people."

Indeed, she was counting on change. She didn't want to stay the same, singing in clubs, b.a.s.t.a.r.dizing her art, begging for jobs. That lady was crazy. Barbra was impatient for change. Bring it on, she might well have said. The sooner the better.

3.

Homesickness can get pretty acute seventeen hundred miles away.

Everything seemed so different in Canada. At the nightclub, men wore short-sleeved shirts with no ties. No matter that the temperatures had reached ninety degrees Fahrenheit that week, Barbra found the practice peculiar, especially since the Town 'n' Country, the three-story theater-restaurant where she was playing, seemed more like a palace than a club. "Beautiful," she proclaimed. "Very posh." Yet the club's management wasn't even springing for her accommodations. For her two-week stint in Winnipeg, from July 3 to 15, Barbra had to pay her own way at the local YWCA. True, she was being paid better than she had ever been before-$350 Canadian a week, about the same in American dollars-but that was quickly whittled down when she figured in travel, food, and lodging. She'd made a few friends, who had taken her out horseback riding, which she'd enjoyed. But mostly she spent her days alone in her room, talking with Elaine on the phone or writing letters to Bob.

Worst of all, however, were the audiences, to whom she played three shows nightly, finding them both dull and noisy. On this night, it was the latter. People kept on talking as she tried to sing. It was like being in the Catskills all over again. With her tinnitus probably clanging in her ears, as it usually did in loud, stressful situations, Barbra stopped singing and abruptly walked off the stage.

The club's manager, Auby Galpern, wasn't pleased. He liked Barbra, even if he'd been distinctly unimpressed with her sartorial choices. He'd also been befuddled by her singing style. For a rendition of "Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking," one of Cole Porter's less well-known and more outlandish compositions, Barbra pounded on a bongo drum, flung her hair around, and swayed her torso. Reviewers took note. "Miss Streisand is the type of singer you'd expect to find in the Blue Angel or San Francisco's hungry i," Gene Telpner wrote in the Winnipeg Free Press. "That's why Winnipeggers may find her rather strange." Telpner repeated the fiction, still part of Barbra's official publicity, that she'd been born in Turkey. He thought it gave her a "semi-Oriental look."

Still, in the end, the review had been positive. Barbra's act, Telpner concluded, "was really worth hearing." That was what had saved her in Galpern's view, at least so far. Barbra might be different from the acts he usually headlined at the Towers, the Town 'n' Country's performing s.p.a.ce, but she was good. Very good. The boys in the band had declared she was "terrific," and Galpern knew his musicians were his best judges of talent.

But walking off the stage as Barbra had done-that was unacceptable. Galpern and his young singer exchanged some heated words over the incident. No doubt, there were some tears. Phoning Elaine, Barbra said she might have just been fired.

But she wasn't. Galpern forgave her, and she went on the next night. The gig would turn out just fine. In the beginning, she may have had Winnipeggers asking, "What's she doing?" But "after they knew who I was," she said, "they listened to me."