Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 20

8.

The Variety review still bugged her. But Barbra found a way to defuse it.

On the November 27 PM East, she sat alongside fellow guest Mickey Rooney, the legendary child star of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer now grown into a puckish character actor. "I can't get in the movies," she lamented.

"Why not?" Rooney asked.

"My nose."

Rather than shrink from the insult or pretend it had never happened, Barbra had decided to put it right out there on national television, ensuring that her nose would become even more discussed. The only way to make the criticism go away, she seemed to believe, was to confront it head on, bring it up to bring it down.

"What's wrong with your nose?" Rooney asked.

"It's different."

"It's a lovely nose."

Barbra giggled. That was what she was hoping he'd say. And the gallant Rooney kept the compliments coming.

"It's an adorable nose," he insisted.

"Most people don't like it," Barbra said. "It's a different commercial market."

"That's all in your mind," Rooney told her.

Barbra looked over at him. "How did you ever work-?" She indicated Rooney's own nose, a little bulbous and splotchy from years of heavy drinking.

To his credit, Rooney didn't take offense and instead seemed to agree with her. "Look at mine!" he said. "Mine is ... is ... is ..."

"It fits," Barbra said. "W. C. Fields." And then she laughed.

It was a strange little interaction. Rooney had complimented her, but in response, Barbra had insulted him. No doubt she didn't mean to be cruel, even if it had come across that way. She appeared to just want to point out that people with oversized noses could be successful.

Of course, she'd also been warned by Don Softness that Rooney was a notorious scenery chewer, so she was making sure to take control. She wasn't going to let anyone, movie legend or not, hog her spotlight.

Even when Rooney tried to change the subject away from schnozzolas, asking his costar if she'd dedicate a song to him, Barbra kept the imperious att.i.tude going. "No," she replied, and laughed again. Her feistiness may actually have been a prelude to the duet she then sang with Rooney, "I Wish I Were in Love Again," a humorous riff on lovers' quarrels. After all, Barbra often got into character for a song. "The sleepless nights, the daily fights," she and Rooney harmonized, "the quick toboggan when you reach the heights, I miss the kisses and I miss the bites, I wish I were in love again!"

Whatever Barbra's motivation, the duet was successful, Softness thought. Rooney had sung the number with Judy Garland in the 1948 film Words and Music, and Barbra filled Garland's shoes surprisingly well, bringing exactly the right kind of winking combativeness to her rendition. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing and where she was going. She seemed on top of the world.

9.

Not long afterward, Don Softness took Barbra out to dinner. The publicist knew that his client "didn't sing unless she was paid for it," so he fully expected her to decline when Mimi, the gregarious, florid proprietor of their favorite Italian eatery on East Fifty-third Street, asked if she'd step up to the piano and give them a number. But to Softness's great surprise, Barbra agreed, accepting the scattering of applause from their fellow diners. From her bag she produced some sheet music and handed it over to the pianist. That was when Softness understood why Barbra had said yes. The song she'd sing for them was "Moon River," which she was scheduled to perform on an upcoming PM East. This impromptu rendition at Mimi's would give her a chance to practice.

To Softness's great delight, Barbra was proving to be a natural television performer-galvanized, she said, by the knowledge that thousands of people were viewing her. "You can't see them," she said, "but you know they're there and watching you." Such exposure inspired and emboldened her. And in the process Softness witnessed one of the most interesting public personas he'd ever seen take shape.

On the December 8 show, for example, appearing alongside Paul Dooley, singer Lillian Briggs, pianist Lee Evans, and a rising young comedian named Woody Allen, Barbra had gone off on a riff about smoked foods. There was no stopping her-not that anyone wanted to. Smoked foods caused cancer, Barbra insisted, in a voice that got more nasal every time she appeared on the show. People in Iceland got cancer at much higher rates than anyone else, she pontificated, because all they ate in Iceland were smoked foods. "Streisand's a little sick, folks," Mike Wallace deadpanned. Barbra's absurd claims needed no facts to support them, because it wasn't what she said, but how she said it. Even the phrase "smoked foods" was funny the way it rolled off her tongue.

Softness had clued into her act very quickly. Barbra was deliberately building an eccentric reputation because she knew it got her attention, and she did so "carefully and a.s.siduously," he observed. She understood that she had to be "somewhat-but not too-outrageous." Softness thought Barbra walked that line very well because the PM East producers kept rebooking her for more appearances. But the publicist also knew that they could capitalize on the gimmick even further. Together they could build her into a real character, stringing together the many little quirks that already defined her.

Over the last few weeks, given all the time they spent together on publicity, they'd grown quite close. When Barbra was evicted from her apartment on Eighteenth Street-the tenant of record had returned and, appalled at how she'd redecorated the place, insisted that she leave immediately-it had been Softness to whom she'd turned for help. Loading up his car with all of Barbra's shoes and boas and cloche hats, the publicist told her he'd take her to her mother's in Brooklyn. "Anywhere but there," Barbra said. So Softness allowed her to live in his office, just down the block from Mimi's. Barbra was grateful, but also depressed to find herself a nomad again. Quite the predicament for a young woman who, in a matter of weeks, would begin rehearsals for a Broadway show-now ret.i.tled I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the name of the original novel.

Being thrown out of her apartment so soon after winning her first big role simply affirmed Barbra's old belief that whenever anything good happened to her, G.o.d threw down a thunderbolt of bad luck. But if anyone had the resilience to get through this, Softness believed, it was his young, determined client. He was determined to make Barbra's stay at his office as comfortable as possible. She could sleep on the couch in the main room and use the office's kitchen and full bathroom, but she had to be out by nine every morning unless it was one of those days when they were working on press releases together, which were more and more frequent of late.

As he watched her warble "Moon River" beside Mimi's piano, wearing old dungarees and no makeup, Softness realized the noisy room had fallen silent. The girl sure had something. Softness was enjoying the process of building her up. Barbra's thrift-shop habit was a great angle that her publicist knew could be used for maximum advantage. A shawl that served "double duty as a bed cover," he said, was a terrific detail. So was a hunter's bullet bag that could be publicized as "one of the most marvelous purses" Barbra owned. There was plenty of raw material like this that the publicist could fashion into a compelling public persona-if Barbra was willing.

She was. She was glad to do anything if it meant moving her closer to what she told Softness was "the epitome of achievement"-success as a "straight dramatic actress." Miss Marmelstein might be one giant step toward that goal, but she was still, bottom line, just a small-bit character who sang. Barbra made clear to her publicist that she hadn't given up her long-held dream of playing Juliet. That was all well and good, Softness replied. But before she could be Juliet, Softness told her, she had to become something else. For now, he was calling it a "kook."

10.

In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, in all of the markets across the country that carried PM East, television viewers on the night of December 21 tuned in to see kooky Barbra Streisand do her thing. And they bore witness to the particular satisfaction she took in having her revenge, at long last, on David Susskind.

"People like you are ruining show business because you don't let new talent emerge," she said, sitting right beside the producer two years after she hadn't even been permitted into his office. "You think it's your duty to squelch it."

The usually eloquent Susskind, there to promote his upcoming production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, seemed at a loss on how to respond to Barbra's accusation. He only stammered in reply. In the booth, the show's producers were beaming. Although they'd never admit it publicly, they loved Barbra's broadside against Susskind. Moments like these were what made for great television.

Indeed, the theme of the show that night was success. "The uphill grind, the knifings, the falls and the comebacks, the heartbreaks and the rewards," Don Softness had written in his press release. Barbra would lead off the show "as a young performer aspiring to glory," producer Mert Koplin intended, "and then Susskind's famous people would come in." These would include Anthony Quinn and a returning Mickey Rooney, the stars of Requiem. No one expected Barbra to do and say what she did, but no one stopped her either. She was on a roll. The kooky Jewish kid from Brooklyn spoke her mind to the big-shot producer, then delivered a touching rendition of "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" before wrapping it all up with a big, mod, offbeat reimagining of "DingDong! The Witch Is Dead." It was fair to say there was no one else quite like Barbra Streisand on television, or anywhere else, for that matter.

"I scare you," she said, quite astutely, to Susskind. "I'm so far out, I'm in."

Or she would be soon if she and the team behind her had their way.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Winter 1962

1.

On the first day of rehearsals for I Can Get It for You Wholesale, stagehands were busy sweeping up the snow and slush tracked in by the cast and crew on this cold and wet day. A New Year's Day storm had left the streets a mess. Flurries continued today, January 2, with temperatures hovering around twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. More than ever, Barbra loved her caracul-and-fox coat.

With more than a little bit of trepidation, she stepped into the Fifty-fourth Street Theatre, where rehearsals were being held, with a satchel bag slung over her shoulder. Another of David Merrick's shows, Do Re Mi, was presented here at night, but during the day, the stage was theirs. The cast was already sitting in a circle-most on the floor, though Lillian Roth was perched gracefully on a metal folding chair-when Barbra walked in, a burst of cold air following her from the open door.