Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 22

Striding out onto the stage, the director gave Barbra the signal to stop the number. The pianist broke off playing, and an uneasy silence fell over the empty theater.

Barbra wasn't pleased. This back-and-forth with Laurents had been going on for a while. Not long before, they'd come to loggerheads when she'd asked to be excused from a rehearsal because she had to appear on PM East. Expecting permission to be granted, Barbra was already choosing what outfit to wear when Laurents had said no. Vexed, she tried finagling permission from Herbert Ross, who sent her back to Laurents. The director came to realize that Barbra felt "she was different, she was special" and that "future stars were not to be ignored." When Laurents proved intransigent, Barbra sulked.

Even worse from her perspective was the director's insistence "on blueprinting exactly how [she] should do everything." That had never been her style. She preferred "to work slowly into the part," playing it "by ear." As in her nightclub acts, Barbra found it very difficult to do "anything twice in exactly the same way." So she spoke up, arguing her point of view forcefully, a far cry from the timid little girl who'd blanched when Barre had dared to challenge Vasek Simek during The Insect Comedy.

But when she argued, she always did so respectfully, which Laurents appreciated. As much as she had her own, very definite opinions, she was also smart enough to recognize that, on her own, she lacked the discipline needed to shape Miss Marmelstein into a well-balanced character. That was one reason, she admitted, that she was glad she was in Wholesale-"to learn discipline in the theater." But discipline required concentration, and concentration required listening-one skill Laurents felt Barbra lacked. It was her "low threshold for boredom" that gave her so much trouble, Laurents believed. It was also that old unremitting narcissism. When it was her turn to perform, Laurents noted, Barbra came alive, but when she had to listen-to him or to other performers-"Miss Marmelstein went home and in her place stood Barbra Streisand, uncomfortable in a costume."

Laurents tolerated the narcissism because of Barbra's specialness. Others weren't as forgiving. Harold Rome had fought to have "Miss Marmelstein" put back into the show, arranging it specifically for Barbra. He'd also written her into several other numbers, agreeing that Barbra's enormous stage presence had to be balanced throughout the two acts. But for his efforts, Rome never got a word of thanks, a fact the composer resented. To him, the teenager was "ungrateful" and "arrogant." But Barbra figured she gave and they gave; they each "got something out of it." There was no need, therefore, for any thanks. It was the same att.i.tude her acting teacher Eli Rill had observed: Barbra was unwilling to perform the expected niceties-the "a.s.s-kissing," as one of Barbra's friends put it bluntly. Rill hadn't minded, but Harold Rome did. And from that moment on, the composer soured on the girl he'd once been so enthusiastic about.

There was indeed a degree of youthful hubris about Barbra. She was riding high, and even a second rejection from G.o.ddard Lieberson (he'd told Laurents that Barbra was "too special for records" ) had been only a minor irritant. Music, after all, was only a means to an end. "I want to be a straight dramatic actress," she'd tell a reporter around this time. "I really can't explain it. It's almost a compulsion."

That was her underlying att.i.tude, her core belief, as she stood face-to-face with her director, arms akimbo. It took ch.o.r.eographer Herbert Ross to break the impa.s.se. Hurrying up the stairs to the stage, Ross had an idea. He was a young man, just thirty-four, but already a veteran Broadway ch.o.r.eographer. He'd staged A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and a revival of Finian's Rainbow, and just recently he had finished the critically praised The Gay Life with Barbara Cook. Ross was talented, perceptive, and diplomatic. Why not, he asked, as he wheeled Miss Marmelstein's chair across the stage on its casters, let Barbra do the number sitting down? After all, she'd auditioned that way. Laurents agreed to give it a try.

It worked-wonderfully. Miss Marmelstein could sing her humorous tale of woe while sliding across the stage in her secretary's chair, first this way, then that way, all precisely ch.o.r.eographed by Ross. Barbra was pleased as well, feeling the chair had really been her idea-which, no doubt, Ross had antic.i.p.ated when he'd suggested she use it.

In the wings, Elliott Gould watched it all unfold. Though he'd been enjoying a bit of a flirtation with his leading lady, Marilyn Cooper, the more Elliott observed Barbra, the more "fascinated" he became. She might have a formidable stage presence, but underneath, Elliott felt, she needed "to be protected." Barbra was "a very fragile little girl," Elliott suspected, one he found "absolutely exquisite." Although he figured Barbra didn't "commit easily," he had "a desire to make her feel secure."

And so, that afternoon or one very much like it, Elliott Gould asked Barbra Streisand out on a date.

4.

It was two o'clock in the morning in Rockefeller Center. They'd been wandering the city together all night, their cheeks cold and rosy, their conversation as meandering as their walk. Suddenly, without warning, Barbra bent down, shaped a s...o...b..ll in her mittened hands, and lobbed it across at Elliott, nailing him perfectly. His compet.i.tive nature triggered, Elliott scooped up his own ammunition and retaliated, his aim proving to be as good as hers. Within moments, a full-scale s...o...b..ll fight was underway, the laughter of the two combatants echoing through the empty plaza.

More than s...o...b..a.l.l.s were ricocheting between them that night. Elliott was utterly smitten. To him, Barbra was a combination of Sophia Loren-love G.o.ddess-and Y. A. t.i.ttle-the New York Giants' tenacious quarterback who'd helped the team win the Eastern Division t.i.tle in December. Walking Barbra to the subway after rehearsals, Elliott had come to think of her as the "most innocent thing" he'd ever seen. But something about Barbra scared him, too. She was a beatnik and a bohemian, after all, so very different from the other girls he knew. Yet despite his fear, or maybe partially because of it, Elliott "really dug her"-and he sensed he might have been "the first person who really did."

At last overwhelming her with s...o...b..a.l.l.s-he called it a "hex"-Elliott began to chase her around the skating rink. Barbra squealed with delight. Elliott's pursuit of her was "strange and wonderful," she'd admitted to one friend. His interest was plainly evident, whereas, in the past, there had always been doubts with other men. Barbra had come to feel that her pursuit of men who weren't as interested in her as she was in them reflected "a throwback" to Louis Kind, when she'd tried in vain to make her stepfather like her.

But Elliott-she'd started calling him "Elly"-was the ant.i.thesis of all that. He'd phoned her; he'd walked her to the subway; he'd asked her out. She hadn't gone after him; he'd come after her. That was significant. Now, wrestling her down in the snow, Elly looked into her blue eyes. He saw insecurity behind the bravado; Barbra's "weirdness," he realized, was merely a defense. Scooping some snow in his hands, he "very delicately" washed her face with it. Then, just as tenderly, he kissed her lips. Nothing too demonstrative, but it was perhaps the most romantic gesture any man had ever extended to her. "Like out of a movie," Barbra thought. And for once she was playing the part of the leading lady, as she'd always believed she could.

5.

Moonlight filled a cloudless sky over Philadelphia in the early morning hours of February 13. At the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, its magnificent French Renaissance architecture resplendent in the moonlight, Barbra and the rest of the Wholesale company hurried down the famous marble-and-iron elliptical staircase to the Tiffany-gla.s.s ballroom, where a celebration was underway after their first-night preview performance. But the cheers and clinking of champagne flutes belied the anxiety they all-but mostly their director-felt. The morning edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer would soon be out, and the critics would have their say.

Arthur Laurents still worried that the book wasn't entirely right. He had hoped some clever directing and skillful acting might bridge the gaps, but after tonight's performance, he knew the problems wouldn't be solved until Weidman's script was chopped up and rea.s.sembled. The director concluded he'd been too respectful of the writer's work, and he feared the critics wouldn't forgive him for such a dereliction of duty. Many shows died in Philadelphia, he knew all too well, before they ever reached New York.

On the surface, everything had seemed to go well. Showtime at the Shubert Theatre had been at eight o'clock, and the house, to Laurents's great relief, had been full. That same week, David Merrick had opened a second show in Philly, the touring company of Irma la Douce, but he'd insisted that the two premieres be staggered so as not to compete with each other.

Most people in that first-night crowd had turned out to see Lillian Roth, who'd received the lion's share of preshow publicity. In the Inquirer just that morning, Whitney Bolton had devoted an entire column to Roth's comeback. "Just thirty years after her last appearance on Broadway," Bolton wrote, "she is destined to be back again on the street where the lights twinkle, where the only thing that counts is talent-and one's use of it." Roth's connection to a glamorous, long-vanished Broadway-she'd worked for Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll-impressed the columnists and the public.

But not Barbra. Barre and Bob and Marty had all tried to instill in her an appreciation of the old-time greats, but she never had much feeling for history. She was smart enough, and decent enough, to treat Roth with the proper respect. But there was never any adulation, never any closeness. One friend asked Barbra if she ever sat at Roth's knee and listened to her stories about Broadway's Golden Age. Barbra replied, "What, are you crazy? Why would I do that?"

She was, in fact, frustrated that the advance publicity for Wholesale barely mentioned her at all. A caricature of the cast in the February 11 edition of the Inquirer had included nearly everyone but her. The young stars being promoted with the most press releases and interviews were Elliott, of course, and Marilyn Cooper, who played Harry Bogen's girlfriend. But Harold Lang, Jack Kruschen, and Bambi Linn had also been singled out for publicity. Not a word, however, about Barbra.

Part of the publicists' reluctance to highlight their youngest cast member no doubt stemmed from Merrick's continued distaste for her, and his not-so-subtle hints to Laurents that she be replaced. Even this late in the game, it remained a possibility: Marilyn Lovell, playing the voluptuous showgirl, had been given the boot just before they'd headed to Philadelphia and was replaced by Sheree North, the onetime rival to Marilyn Monroe who Merrick thought had more s.e.x appeal. But Barbra refused even to contemplate such a possibility. Instead, she was blithely planning how she might get herself noticed even without the help of the show's press agents. Her strategy, as it turned out, was nothing if not original.

Jerome Weidman discovered what she was up to at one rehearsal. He'd spotted her scribbling away, presumably taking notes. But when he got a closer look, he discovered that Barbra had actually been writing her bio for the show's playbill. "Born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon," Barbra had written of herself. Encouraged by her publicists at the Softness Group, Barbra saw a golden opportunity to get herself some attention, in the same way she'd used comparable gambits in Detroit and Winnipeg. She'd written a similar bio for the Harry Stoones program, too, but this one would be seen by a lot more people. After all, Barbra reasoned, she was playing a Jewish secretary, so saying she was "from Brooklyn and brought up in Flatbush" would have "meant nothing." But if audiences thought she came from Madagascar ...

That wasn't all she wrote. Miss Streisand, the bio concluded, "is not a member of the Actors Studio." With that one simple little line, Barbra had her revenge against all those pretentious up-and-comers who loved to flaunt their training at the Actors Studio-an education that Barbra had, of course, not been able to secure for herself. Indeed, by thumbing her nose at the "pompous and serious" tradition of program biographies, Barbra had turned a deficiency into an a.s.set. If it seemed more like the modus operandi of the kook from PM East than the una.s.suming, by-the-book Miss Marmelstein, it didn't matter. That night it was Barbra's bio that stood out in the program more than anyone else's, and that was the point.

Barbra herself also stood out on the stage. When Miss Marmelstein had come rolling out on her chair, kvetching about her life, she had gotten the loudest, most sustained applause of the night. Barbra had to have felt good about her performance, and about the reception she had received from the audience. Certainly Laurents did. He was pleased that her performance, even if it came more from her fingernails than it did her heart, had made such a connection with the audience. But critics had been known to see things very differently from those sitting around them.

It wasn't yet light out when the first editions of the Inquirer made it to the Bellevue-Stratford. The ink was still moist as Laurents pulled open the paper, bypa.s.sing the news on the front page-Secretary of State Dean Rusk was trying to negotiate with the Soviets about nuclear arms-to go directly to the theater section. Under the headline GARMENT SHOP BACK ON STAGE, the review confirmed Laurents's fears. Critic Henry T. Murdock, who'd been with the Inquirer since 1950 and whose tastes tended more toward musicals such as Guys and Dolls, thought Harold Rome's score possessed "range and versatility" and that Herbert Ross had taken a "unique approach to dancing." But when it came to the book, he wrote, "our enthusiasm dwindles." Wholesale was supposed to be a musical comedy, Murdock argued, but he couldn't find the comedy. The "hero-heel," the critic wrote, was just not redeeming enough in the way Gene Kelly or Robert Morse had been in similar parts in Pal Joey and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The fault, Murdock wrote, could not be handed to Elliott, "who gives Harry everything the libretto demands." Rather, the flaw of the show was the script. Laurents felt as if he could have penned the review himself.

But there was one moment Murdock felt compelled to single out. With comedy in such short supply, the critic welcomed the show's "most truly comic song": the "Miss Marmelstein" number that had roused the audience from its near torpor the night before. "Barbra Streisand," Murdock wrote, "brings down the house." Among the company it was now obvious that the show had problems-perhaps serious ones-but the one part that worked without question was Barbra.

A few days later, when a second review appeared in the Inquirer, the strength of her position was confirmed. Barbra was the only cast member singled out for praise. "She stops the show in its tracks," the reviewer declared, a line Merrick's publicists were quick to incorporate into all of their press releases from that point on. The acclaim kept coming. Dorothy Kilgallen, a fan of Barbra's since the first Bon Soir appearance, reported in her syndicated column-which reached far more readers than the local Philly papers-that none other than Henry Fonda had seen Wholesale and had "registered considerable enthusiasm for comedienne Barbra Streisand." Merrick's grumbling about her abruptly ceased.

No matter what might happen to I Can Get It for You Wholesale, one thing had become abundantly clear by the end of February. Barbra was going to be a hit.

6.

Elliott Gould's eyes, one reporter observed, were "as large and melancholy as a Saint Bernard's, an animal with which he shares the same shambling gait." But this night, those hangdog eyes seemed to flicker with a kind of electricity as the young man made his way up the elliptical staircase of the Bellevue-Stratford.

Arthur Laurents knew where Elliott was headed, and it made him smile. Only now was the company catching on to the fact that Harry Bogen was romancing Miss Marmelstein. Marilyn Cooper had been stung when Elliott transferred his attentions from her to Barbra. But despite his leading lady's disappointment, Laurents had encouraged the budding affair-"G.o.dfathering the romance," he called his efforts. To the director, Elliott and Barbra seemed a "Jewish show-business Romeo and Juliet, in love with each other and ice cream." The sweet treat was indeed a point of commonality between them. Many nights Elliott would carry a box of Breyer's coffee ice cream up to Barbra's room, two spoons tucked into the front pocket of his shirt.

s.e.x was in the air. The newspapers were filled with dispatches from the set of Cleopatra in Rome about the affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both married to other people. So notorious was the scandal that it b.u.mped John Glenn's historic s.p.a.ce flight off the first pages of many tabloids, keeping "Liz and d.i.c.k" front and center. In Philadelphia, as in most places around the planet, talk of "Le Scandale" was on everyone's lips, and the I Can Get It for You Wholesale company was no exception. For the freethinkers among them-which included Barbra and Elliott-the chutzpah of Taylor and Burton would have seemed remarkable, even admirable. Instead of offering denials or apologies, the celebrity pair seemed to be insisting that love-and s.e.x-was more important than propriety.

Elliott hadn't always been such a freethinker. He'd been "scared most of [his] life," he admitted. As a kid, he'd been convinced that he possessed a strange ability-almost a "psychic power," he said-that enabled him to intuit a person's true feelings toward him. Someone might say he was smart, or talented, or handsome, but Elliott knew they were actually thinking just the opposite. For most of his twenty-three years, he had walked around with his head down avoiding making eye contact-not just from a sense of insecurity, but also from a preponderance of caution. Keeping his eyes on the floor, Elliott explained, ensured he wouldn't "trip on anything."

He became an actor, he said, so he could "communicate in a world that was alien" to him and "get beneath the roots of self-doubt." Winning the lead in a Broadway play had gone a long way toward that goal, but those roots of self-doubt ran very deep-as deep, or even deeper, than Barbra's. It was unlikely that one show-or any amount of playacting on the stage-could ever completely overrule a belief that had been instilled in him from the time he was a very young boy.

He was born Elliott Goldstein in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father, Bernard, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, was a salesman in the garment industry-further reason Arthur Laurents saw such verisimilitude in Elliott's casting. Bernard was a distant, reserved man who was never demonstrative with his son; he had "too much pride" for that, Elliott believed. Indeed, the elder Goldstein sometimes seemed resentful of the little boy, telling a story of how he'd taken a very young Elliott to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers play the Cubs. "Four home runs were hit in the game," Bernard groused. "I didn't see one of them. I was in the men's room with Elliott each time."

Part of his resentment may have stemmed from the fact that he'd never been in love with the boy's mother, the former Lucille Raver, whom he'd married on the rebound after his true love's parents had put a halt to their elopement. It was telling, no doubt, that Elliott was Bernard and Lucille's only child.

Like her husband, Lucille was the offspring of a Russian Jewish immigrant; her father had worked as a gla.s.s salesman in the Bronx. After her marriage, Lucille peddled artificial flowers throughout Bensonhurst to supplement Bernard's income as a salesman. Unlike Emanuel Streisand, Bernard Goldstein was no intellect. He seemed to have no sense of the world beyond Bensonhurst, even after he came back from the war. He worked hard to support his family, but there was never any quest for something more.

What Bernard lacked in ambition Lucille made up tenfold. From a young age she'd had stars in her eyes. Lucille wanted more than just a two-and-a-half-room apartment on Bay Parkway, but she knew her husband was never going to get it for her. They argued constantly. By the time Elliott was three years old, he instinctively understood that his mother and father didn't belong together, that they "didn't understand one another." The unhappiness of his parents' lives meant that the lessons they taught Elliott would be relentlessly pessimistic: "Be careful, don't trust anybody, you've got to save." With tension always crackling just under the surface, Elliott lived in constant fear that everything could explode at any moment. He grew up "in terror of conflict," a feeling that lasted well into adulthood.

And yet, on another level, Elliott absolutely worshipped his parents. They were his entire life. Until he was eleven, he shared a bedroom with them; the concept of privacy was completely alien to the boy. To Elliott, his parents were "Mr. and Mrs. Captain Marvel" -his heroes. "You won't ever have better friends than us," they often reminded him. Everything Elliott did, he did for them, because without them, he was lost. Lucille, especially, dominated her son's daily thoughts. She dressed him, pampered him, took him everywhere with her. Eventually she'd come to acknowledge that she might have been a bit smothering, but it was always "done out of love," she insisted. She would have cut off her arm for Elliott, Lucille declared.

But even his mother's constant doting couldn't dissuade Elliott from the belief that he was an ugly child-yet another bond shared with Barbra. Growing up, Elliott felt too big for his age. He thought he had a "fat a.s.s." His hair was too curly, impossible to slick down-a problem because he wanted to look like Robert Wagner. More than anything Elliott wished he were Irish-a big, tough Irish brawler, the kind he saw on the streets, the kind who never let life beat them down. Despite being bar mitzvahed, Elliott maintained even less of a connection to his Jewishness than Barbra did with hers.