Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 28

3.

On the screen, a giant caterpillar made a meal of a few cars. Barbra and Elliott sat in the dark, cool theater, a relief from the ninety-degree temperatures outside, eyes fixed on Mothra, a badly dubbed j.a.panese monster flick. The lovers, sharing a bag of popcorn, were enjoying a rare break from Wholesale and all the other myriad obligations of their careers.

Actually, it was Barbra who had the myriad obligations. Elliott only had to show up every night at the Shubert. Barbra had to do that and make her way afterward to the Blue Angel (she'd finished her run at the Bon Soir only to start another engagement uptown). These days, she also was frequently meeting reporters for interviews or waking up early for one of her frequent appearances on Joe Franklin's show. There were also regular strategy sessions with Marty and Richard Falk and the Softness brothers on publicity, especially on ways to influence G.o.ddard Lieberson into giving her a contract. Finding the time for a date with Elliott must have felt like a gift from heaven.

Not that they had trouble seeing each other. Elliott had moved in with her, sharing the railroad flat over Oscar's Salt of the Sea and settling into a rather blissful pattern of domesticity. Although they could have easily afforded a bigger one, they kept Barbra's twin bed, which, given Elliott's large frame and long limbs, must have made sleeping uncomfortable at times-but also very intimate. They insisted that a bigger bed wouldn't have fit; maybe that was true. But Barbra always seemed to find room for other pieces of furniture that caught her eye. Just recently she'd bought two "marvelous Victorian cabinets with gla.s.s shelves," she told a writer from The New Yorker, at a shop called Foyniture Limited on Eighty-third Street. She seemed to get a kick out of the spelling.

Elliott adored living with her. He found her style "just wild ... genius, really." As a dining table, they used an old Singer sewing-machine stand. For meals, they ate Swanson's TV dinners and bricks of coffee ice cream for dessert. Like the kids they still were, they snacked on grapefruit, brownies, and pickled herring. When they saw a tail "about a yard long" flicking back and forth underneath their stove, they ran off in terror to a motel. But when the landlord refused to pay to exterminate, they moved back in and made peace with the rat, naming him Oscar after the cheapskate downstairs. They played Monopoly and checkers, and acted out scenes they hoped to someday play together, Barbra as Medea and Elliott as Jason. Calling each other Hansel and Gretel, they made a halfhearted attempt to learn Greek so they "could speak a secret language n.o.body else could understand." For the first time in their lives, Barbra and Elliott were deliriously happy being with another person. Elliott found it all "really romantic," likening Barbra and himself to "kids in a treehouse."

When Mothra was over, the oversized caterpillar having hatched into a giant imago and flown back to its island home, Barbra and Elliott walked hand in hand outside into Times Square. They enjoyed the fact that they could be stars on Broadway but still be largely anonymous on the streets of New York. That night, or one very much like it, they wandered the city, no one stopping them, no one telling them to look this way or sing that song. They played Pokerino in penny arcades. They bought gla.s.sware for the apartment. They ate vegetable fried rice in a greasy Chinese restaurant.

Such anonymity was important to Barbra. The fierce ambition the Softness brothers witnessed every time she barged into their offices, or the uncanny knack she had for drawing attention to herself, was not in the service of notoriety. It was part of her pursuit of excellence and achievement. But when she left the theater or the studio or the nightclub, Barbra wanted her life back. She wanted to wander through the streets of New York with her boyfriend unaccosted by people. So far, she still had that luxury. No matter how big a role she might someday land, she hoped that this much would never change.

Yet a future of anonymity seemed unlikely. Earl Wilson had just revealed the "hot romance backstage" between Barbra and Elliott, and was readying another column in which he would report the belief among cast members that the couple had secretly married. Such gossip was an inevitable byproduct of courting the columnists for other, more sought-after kinds of publicity, such as the items about the Brice show. Yet Barbra was unwilling to accept gossip about her personal life as an unavoidable component of her fame, and she had started speaking out against the practice. "They print such rotten things," she complained to one interviewer. "Like they wrote that I was smooching at the Harwyn Club." But then, impishly, she added, "It was 21"-showing that while she might detest such intrusive publicity, she knew how to make the best of it.

Barry was right: Barbra had indeed become very good at merchandizing herself. She told the press that it was she, with little to no help from Arthur Laurents, who had made Miss Marmelstein what she was. Barbra explained that she'd needed to "talk back to the director" in order to "work into the character" her own way. And if Laurents had persisted in obstructing her, she said, she would have walked out. "I just didn't care what happened," Barbra claimed. "I could go out and work in a nightclub again." Laurents scoffed at the contention that Barbra would have willingly walked away from a part in a Broadway show to return to singing in nightclubs.

But in selling Barbra Streisand to the public, it was important that the product be marketed as uniquely self-made. The narrative that Marty had been building over the last year-Barbra as the once-in-a-generation talent discovered like a glittering pearl in the brackish oyster beds of Brooklyn-could not accommodate stories of "helpers" or "boosters." She had to be given to the world fully formed, with no whiff of public-relations chicanery. If the contributions of a maestro such as Arthur Laurents had to be airbrushed out of her biography, then those less well-known people who had helped shape the creature being marketed as Barbra Streisand could certainly never expect to receive any kind of public acknowledgment.

It was, perhaps, easier to sell this rewritten history because so many a.s.sociates from Barbra's early days were no longer around. Terry Leong had headed for Europe without ever getting the chance to reconnect with the old friend whose style he had heavily influenced. Bob, too, had just sailed for Paris for an indefinite stay. And while there'd been a rapprochement with Barry, there'd been no attempt to stay in touch; in fact, he continued to feel that he was being deliberately kept away. Given how he'd broken her heart, it was easy for some friends to sympathize with Barbra on that point. But keeping Barry at a distance also meant that the enormous contributions he'd made to her career-from suggesting she enter the contest at the Lion in the first place to teaching her so much about music and performance-would be given no public forum.

Some old friends, such as Elaine Sobel, resented being held at arm's length. Now waiting tables at the Russian Tea Room, Elaine felt she'd been "brushed out" of Barbra's life just as her former roommate hit the big time on Broadway. Barbra, Elaine said, had taken advantage of her at a time when she, Barbra, needed help, but hadn't offered any reciprocation now that she was in a position to give it. That, perhaps, was key to understanding who survived in Barbra's...o...b..t and who didn't. Those who could still help her-such as Marty, Peter Daniels, and Don Softness-remained. Those who might want something from her now that she'd achieved a degree of fame and clout-such as Terry, Elaine, Barry, and possibly even Bob-did not. It was a common experience for many celebrities, and while unfortunate, not really all that difficult to understand.

And then there was Cis, who wanted absolutely nothing from Barbra except friendship. Cis remained Barbra's rock, the one person with whom she could be herself completely, without any pretense, performance, or marketing. By the summer of 1962, Barbra's three closest-and likely only-intimates were Cis, Marty, and Elliott.

But for a young woman in love, it was probably enough. Walking through the city with Elliott, her hand in his, her head resting occasionally on his shoulder, Barbra was content. Elliott understood her. They'd both grown up with mother issues; they'd both felt cheated out of real childhoods. Barbra could vent all her frustrations to Elliott, and he never pushed her away. He was "the stable one" in the relationship, she thought. When they'd occasionally argue, Barbra sometimes felt like stalking off, but Elliott always stopped her and got her to talk about what was really bothering her. She appreciated his "very clear mind." Elliott, Barbra said, "knows what he wants." And what was so thrilling, so wonderful, was that he wanted her.

4.

A pall hung over the crowd at the Blue Angel. People were still grieving Marilyn Monroe, who'd been found dead a week earlier at her home in Brentwood, either from an accidental overdose or suicide. One man who frequented the cabaret thought a sense of finality thrummed in the air that week, an awareness of an era coming to a close. Elizabeth Taylor still generated headlines, but few, if any, of the new generation of stars seemed to inspire the fascination and devotion that their predecessors did. That kind of stardom, many thought, was hopelessly moribund.

And yet, there was an undercurrent of excitement in the air as well. The young woman who was performing at the Angel for one final night seemed to trigger something in people. Grown men would sometimes act like teenaged girls when she sang. The young man who frequented the cabaret did so not because he particularly liked the Blue Angel's upholstered interior-he didn't-but because Barbra Streisand, the headliner, made him cry every time she sang. And laugh, and smile, and "feel all the things a really great singer can make a person feel," he said.

David Kapralik, a young executive at Columbia, could no doubt relate. He was there that night at the Blue Angel, just as he had been there the night before and the night before that. It was Barbra's last performance; he wouldn't have missed it. His admiration for her had started when he'd heard her sing "Happy Days" on The Garry Moore Show. He had realized that she was the kid Marty Erlichman had been pushing Columbia so hard about. Impressed with her voice, Kapralik had made it a point to see Barbra at the Angel. In no time at all, he had morphed, in his own words, into a "groupie."

Kapralik was just one of the growing number of young men and women Dorothy Kilgallen observed "packing into the clubs to see Barbra Streisand and her magnetic nonsense." If she and other pundits had taken a closer look at the phenomenon, they would have been disabused of any fears that old-time stardom, the kind manifested by Marilyn, was on its way out. Barbra's "groupies" adored her with all the same fervor that an earlier generation had brought to Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland. They were artsy, bohemian types who bucked trends: at the moment, the trend was toward folk singers like Peter, Paul, and Mary, though the rock-pop of Neil Sedaka and Dion still dominated the charts. Barbra didn't fit either category, which her fans seemed to appreciate. And, like all true devotees, they recruited others into the faith. This night, Kapralik had brought his boss, G.o.ddard Lieberson, nattily dressed as always.

Marty, of course, was thrilled that Lieberson had finally shown up. Marty believed that only by hearing Barbra sing in front of an audience, especially her audience, could the record exec really comprehend the effect she had on people. Lieberson had been softening. No doubt it was more than just Kapralik's enthusiasm that had finally moved him to come hear Barbra sing. The glowing reviews she'd gotten for the Wholesale and Pins and Needles disks couldn't have escaped his notice. Even G.o.d may have begun to doubt himself, to wonder whether he'd been wrong not to sign her.

Like her Bon Soir homecoming, Barbra's return to the Blue Angel had been marked by a welcome change in status. Last time she'd played second fiddle to Pat Harrington; now she was front and center, heading a bill that also included comic Bob Lewis and the Phoenix Singers, a folk trio who often sang with Harry Belafonte. A few weeks earlier, Max Gordon had bought out Herbert Jacoby's share in the club; Barbra was the first headliner under his solo management. She joked to Earl Wilson that she'd "hit the big time" since she was finally being paid as much as Peter Daniels, her accompanist. Obviously Gordon had as much faith in Barbra as she had in herself.

No doubt Lieberson had also seen the reviews for the show, which was wrapping up after five sold-out weeks. "Miss Streisand is a delightful and mercurial sprite," Variety had observed, keying in on the unpredictability that so enchanted her fans. "She is amply appreciated," the review concluded-an understatement.

And yet, at the Angel, sometimes appreciation was hard to discern. Performers had to "crack through the reserve," d.i.c.k Gautier found. At the posh club-peopled with blue bloods and celebrities who were often as famous, or more so, than those on the stage-it was "gauche to laugh too much, or applaud too much," Gautier said.

So it was saying a great deal that the applause following Barbra's "oddball" (Variety's word) rendition of "Much More" from The Fantasticks was loud and enthusiastic. On that little stage she stood, looking out into that long, narrow, coffinlike room suffused with the subtle fragrance of gladiolas, singing her heart out, knowing that Lieberson sat only a few feet away from her. It was not unlike the way she'd "auditioned" for Ray Stark at the Bon Soir. In both cases, she was hoping to provide for herself an escape hatch, a jailbreak from the stultifying routine of Wholesale. Not long before, she'd done what had once been unthinkable to her: She'd turned over the part of Miss Marmelstein to Louise La.s.ser, her understudy, for several days and taken a much-needed holiday.

Not that she'd rested. There never seemed to be time for that. The weekend of July 14 she, Elliott, Marty, Diana, and little Rosalind had driven up to Bill Hahn's Hotel in Westbrook, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, about two and a half hours from New York. The big, gregarious proprietor was hosting a birthday party for his sw.a.n.ky hotel with proceeds going to the American Cancer Society. He'd roped in Art Carney, who lived nearby, for the top of the bill, backed up by Barbra, Henny Youngman, jazz singer Johnny Hartman, and pop singer Tommy Sands, who introduced his wife, Nancy Sinatra, from the audience. The party was "strictly private for hotel guests," who tended to be affluent New York Jews. The thing Barbra probably enjoyed best was Hahn's giant birthday cake, which was sliced up and pa.s.sed around during intermission, though the pay-likely approaching four figures-was nice, too. But simply spending a few nights in the sea air, far away from Wholesale, would alone have made it all worthwhile.

Her publicists, in fact, had started a rumor that she might be ditching Broadway for good. Several columns that summer carried stories that Barbra was applying to Dartmouth College, which was discussing opening its doors to women for the first time. According to these reports, Barbra wanted to major in economics and languages: Italian, j.a.panese, and Greek. That was the giveaway that it was all just hype, a way to keep Barbra's name in the papers: Greek was the language she and Elliott imagined speaking among themselves, and Barbra's nightclub act often had her pretending to speak in various tongues. No doubt Don Softness or Richard Falk had read about Dartmouth going co-ed and thought of an angle for Barbra, who was of college age and known as a bit of a rebel. It might also have served as a nudge to Stark and Merrick-they'd better hurry up and sign her before she went off to school.

But higher education was hardly Barbra's goal. Out there in the audience, Lieberson was close to making up his mind. He'd said no so many times before, but he'd come to hear her tonight. That was a very good sign. Making an alb.u.m might not have been Barbra's big dream, but it could help ease her out of Wholesale-not to mention make her a good deal of money. So she put everything she had into her time on the Blue Angel stage. This night, there was no phoning it in.

"Right as the Rain" was solid ground for her; she knew it like she knew her own name, and once again Barbra nailed it. But she was also singing a newer, riskier addition to her repertoire. Peter had reworked "Happy Days Are Here Again" for her, slowing it down even more than was done for The Garry Moore Show, making it almost unbearably poignant. As Barbra launched into the song, a hush came over the club. It was, as the frequent Blue Angel patron put it, "truly an electric moment between Barbra and her audience." The emotion, he said, "quite literally crackled between her and us." The hairs on his arm stood up. Without even knowing it, he began to cry.

"So let's sing a song of cheer again," Barbra was keening, "happy days are here again."

With "Happy Days," Barbra smashed through the Angel's legendary reserve. People were on their feet, and even the club's upholstered walls couldn't m.u.f.fle the sounds of whistles and cheers. G.o.ddard Lieberson stood with the crowd. It seemed Barbra's performance had allowed him finally to glimpse her star potential. Marilyn Monroe might have been dead, and with her an entire era. But a whole new kind of star was about to explode.

5.

Jerry Robbins read the latest revisions Isobel Lennart had sent to him from Malibu and nearly wept. The man who had directed The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, and Gypsy, and doctored a dozen more ailing shows that needed his help, knew what a good libretto read like, and this script for The Funny Girl, no matter how much he adored Isobel, fell far short of the mark.

Surely Ray Stark, with his understanding of story, knew it, too. But what frustrated Robbins was the producer's absolute insistence that they move forward nonetheless. Stark was planning to return to New York from Beverly Hills now that Lennart had completed her revisions, and he felt it was "urgent [that an] immediate decision be made on casting." He hadn't changed his mind about his preferred candidate either. "I hope you will have settled on Barbra," Stark wrote to Robbins, and he urged the director to begin working with her on the show's second act.

The last time he'd been in New York, Stark had had a session with Carol Burnett, during which she'd read for the part and sung a few numbers. "A tremendous talent and a lovely gal," Stark concluded, but he didn't think she'd "turn out to be right for f.a.n.n.y." Robbins had apparently come to the same conclusion. After a short talk with the director outside an elevator after Burnett's audition, Stark had realized there was no need to send the second act to Burnett. Robbins, it seemed, was staying just as firm on his first choice as Stark was. He still wanted Anne Bancroft for the role.

"Dear Annie," Robbins had written when he sent her a copy of the script. "It's a rough with much over-written and too-explained-away moments. Isobel is already at work taking out all things that tend to weaken or sentimentalize. She will 'shorten, tighten, and toughen.'" He implored her to take the part even though the script wasn't ready, telling her they'd been playing "a waiting game" with all the other candidates until they heard from her. "I know it's going to be a wonderful play and you can fire it way up into the skies if you become part of it." He promised she'd have a "hard-working, tough-fighting ally" in him and "truly creative and cooperative collaborators" in Lennart, Styne, and Merrill. He didn't mention Stark.

That was because the producer was firing off his own communication to his own preferred candidate. "Dear Barbara," he wrote, misspelling her name, which surely didn't please her. "Jerry Robbins will probably be calling you within the next few days." He enclosed Lennart's revisions for her to study. Before he'd left town, he'd made it a point to see her at the Blue Angel, and he told her again what "a lovely evening" it had been. If not as effusive as Robbins's letter to Bancroft, it still gave Barbra reason to hope that the part might be hers-even if she was going to have to give Stark a lesson in spelling.

Yet other names continued to be considered for f.a.n.n.y, mostly funneled in from Merrick's casting agent, Michael Shurtleff. Eydie Gorme still seemed to excite Merrick, as did Judy Holliday, both of whom were attractive enough, and Jewish to boot. Stark, of course, had given up the idea of a conventionally pretty leading lady the moment he'd settled on Barbra, but his producing partner was, despite his decreased hostility, still concerned about appearances. And what remained a big unknown for everyone involved was what Fran Stark would say when she finally got a look at the candidate they all agreed upon so it was smart to keep Gorme and Holliday in reserve.

As he read through Lennart's revisions, however, Robbins seemed to harden in his resolve that only Bancroft could save them. Lennart might have shortened, but she hadn't tightened or toughened. By now, Robbins felt he had done as much as he could, "pushing the script until certain solutions were found." Much of what worked had, in fact, come from him. Lennart would "surely agree," Robbins believed, "that each scene as she wrote it" had been sent to him and that they had gone over each of them "with a fine-tooth comb." The same was also true for the music and lyrics. Styne and Merrill had run songs and arrangements by Robbins, and he'd had his say about them. While he didn't "point to any one line of dialogue or particular lyric" as being auth.o.r.ed by himself, Robbins did claim credit for the way all the "scenes, relationships, songs, musical conceptions, characters, settings, [and] musical ideas" came together.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the very first scene in the show-where f.a.n.n.y gets fired by theater owner Max Spiegel for being too outlandish. Robbins had considered the arguments made by stage manager Dave to keep f.a.n.n.y because she's special as "a small microcosm of the play." That had been Robbins's vision, setting up the entire story in that one scene. Robbins's fingerprints continued in a similar way all through the libretto. It was his idea to make Ziegfeld just a voice coming from above during his first meeting with f.a.n.n.y, and to cut directly from f.a.n.n.y's line "Anything Ziegfeld wants me to do, I'll do" to her declaration: "I'm not going to wear this costume!" In Lennart's original script, a whole scene had separated the two lines. Robbins had cut the scene for the contrast it would offer-and the laugh it would get.

He'd also shaped the musical numbers. On "I'm the Greatest Star," the original idea had been for f.a.n.n.y to sing it "out and out," as if she really meant it. But Robbins asked that it be changed so that she starts out kidding, mocking herself. During the course of the song, however, when she sees people like Dave who really believe in her, she evolves and "the guts come out and the tempo changes and she lets loose, free and wild, with her own feelings," as Robbins described it. Written by its composers with a time signature of 2/4 all the way through, it was Robbins's idea "to make it 2/4 only at the end." As such, it was a brilliant bit of characterization layered into a musical number.

Robbins also had been working with Styne and Merrill to open up the "People" number by including Dave and Nick. f.a.n.n.y singing the song alone, he felt, was just "too strong a come-on." Likewise, he'd moved "Don't Rain on My Parade" to the end of the first act. Originally, it had come near the beginning of the show, sung by f.a.n.n.y to her mother's friends who were discouraging her from a career. Robbins, astutely, saw the song as a way to showcase f.a.n.n.y's determination to win Nick's love and knew it would make a great send-off before intermission and possibly be reprised at the very end of the show.

But perhaps most significant, it had been Robbins who'd homed in right away on one of the chief flaws in the story: the characterization of Nick Arnstein, f.a.n.n.y's great love. Nick was a gambler, a con man, and a bit of rogue in real life, but Lennart had written him as upstanding and n.o.ble, a victim of circ.u.mstances. He was, after all, Fran Stark's father. Robbins pushed Lennart to make him more of the "reckless, shadowy promoter" that he really was. In the "Will I Talk?" number, it was Robbins's idea to have Nick sing it in "an evil, sardonic way," and then have f.a.n.n.y reprise it in a more "positive" way. That helped the story get off to a better start, but the book still bogged down during the second act, precisely because it was hard to sympathize with Nick because he was a crook or f.a.n.n.y because she was blindsided by a crook. And so far, for all his tremendous input, Robbins hadn't figured out a way to solve that problem.

And Stark and Merrick wanted to open in October!