Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 29

Robbins had had enough. Increasingly, he was feeling manipulated by Stark. When Robbins had come on board to direct the Brice musical, Stark had agreed to invest $125,000 in Mother Courage, the pro- ject Robbins was planning with Cheryl Crawford, and for which he had far more pa.s.sion than he did for this current show. Stark's investment had been a bit of a quid pro quo: He'd put up the money if Crawford delayed the production and allowed Robbins to direct The Funny Girl first. Now, with the script so lacking, Robbins felt stuck between a rock and a hard place: Should he go forward with production the way Stark and Merrick were insisting and risk a terrible critical and commercial flop, or should he insist on still more rewrites and push Mother Courage even farther into the future?

Stark wasn't helping matters by doing everything he could to prevent the casting of Anne Bancroft and impose Barbra Streisand on the show. "If you don't hear today or tomorrow from Anne," he'd written just the other day to Robbins, "we should tie up Barbara [sic] before we lose her"-as if that were a real danger.

It wasn't that Robbins disliked Barbra. She was "extraordinarily talented," he thought. But with the book so deficient, it needed the skills of an experienced actress such as Bancroft. Robbins felt his reputation was on the line, and he didn't feel safe entrusting it to such a novice as Barbra.

By now, he'd largely given up on any hopes that he and Stark would ever agree on much about the show. Conceding that the book wasn't right, the producer was arguing they should use more from Brice's actual life, as the original screenplay had done. They should also change the t.i.tle to My Man, after Brice's best-known torch song. "A more honest or exploitable t.i.tle" he couldn't imagine, Stark wrote to Robbins, even though they'd all previously decided the score should be entirely new, with nothing from Brice's actual repertoire. Robbins made no reply to Stark's latest suggestions. He knew Anne Bancroft was never going to sing "My Man"; after all, she'd originally wanted to change the name of the character and make her only "based on" f.a.n.n.y Brice.

For Robbins, it was decision time. If he stayed on and Bancroft wasn't cast, could he work with Barbra Streisand? Knowing his dilemma, Isobel Lennart, who'd yet to see Barbra herself, had asked a friend, Doris Vidor, to check the young singer out at the Blue Angel and make an honest report to Robbins. Vidor was Hollywood royalty: the daughter of Harry Warner, a founder of Warner Bros.; widow of director Charles Vidor; and ex-wife of director Mervyn LeRoy. Vidor also worked for United Artists as a sort of "broker between script and stars." Not long before, she'd arranged a deal that brought Gary Cooper to the studio for three pictures. So Doris Vidor knew a little something about star quality.

And what she observed at the Blue Angel impressed her very much. "I have rarely seen anyone so talented," Vidor wrote to Robbins. "But it was the personality and what she stirred in me that impressed me so. There is a sadness and a deep, emotional impact that this girl projects to the audience that is very unique. It seemed to me that she was the young f.a.n.n.y Brice as you want her to appear."

Robbins didn't dispute that. But Barbra had to be more than the young f.a.n.n.y Brice. She had to be the older f.a.n.n.y, too, and he was just not convinced she'd be believable as that. When there was a flurry of interest among the collaborators about the fifty-three-year-old English actor Michael Rennie playing Nick, Robbins pointed out that if they went with Barbra as f.a.n.n.y, "the relationship really becomes like that in A Star Is Born." That "worried him," as well it should have. There was no more talk of Rennie.

There was, however, talk of Rip Torn, Brian Bedford, Harry Guardino, Peter Falk, Stuart Damon, Pernell Roberts, George Maharis, and George Chakiris. And word had reached them that Peter Lawford was "very interested" in playing Nick, though everyone agreed that Lawford didn't possess "a big enough voice."

That was not a problem with Barbra, of course. So Robbins had brought her back in for yet another reading, probably at the Imperial Theatre, on Forty-fifth Street, where Merrick's Carnival! was still running at night. In a few days, he'd be heading back to the Imperial to watch George Segal and Larry Hagman (Mary Martin's son) audition for the part of Dave. There were also auditions slated for the parts of Nora, f.a.n.n.y's beautiful chorus-girl best friend, and Mrs. Brice-and, significantly, for f.a.n.n.y herself. On the call sheet for two thirty on the afternoon of August 30 was Lee Becker, who'd played Anybodys in West Side Story and whom Robbins had once asked to marry him. Becker's audition suggested that no matter how hard Stark was pushing, and no matter all the superlatives from Doris Vidor and others, the director was still not quite ready to accept Barbra Streisand as the star of his production.

As the summer drew to a close, the princ.i.p.als behind The Funny Girl seemed headed for a face-off. No one could predict what that would mean for the show.

6.

The legendary Groucho Marx wasn't one to tangle with. He was the master of the one-liner, the ad-lib, the put-down, the comeback, the double entendre. Sitting at the desk of The Tonight Show on the night of August 21, he puffed on his ubiquitous cigar and wiggled his thick, lascivious eyebrows as he spoke with Lillian Roth about I Can Get It for You Wholesale, now in its sixth month on Broadway. Since Jack Paar's departure earlier that year, Groucho had proved to be one of Tonight's more frequent and popular guest hosts, keeping the chair warm for the incoming Johnny Carson, who still had several more weeks to go on his contract with rival network ABC.

After the break, the announcer, Hugh Downs, introduced Groucho's next guest. It was Barbra Streisand. Except he p.r.o.nounced it "Stree-sand."

Barbra was furious. Downs should have known better! She'd been on this show twice before, and he hadn't messed up her name then. She was seething as she strode out onto the stage.

Groucho greeted her warmly. "You're a big success-"

But Barbra cut him off-actually cut off Groucho Marx! "How could I be such a big success," she asked, "if he calls me Stree-sand? My name is Barbra Streisand!"

Groucho tried to make a joke, but Barbra was having none of it. If it wasn't somebody placing that d.a.m.ned extra "a" in her first name, it was somebody else mangling her last name. When was she going to be famous enough that people got her name right?

Yet her crankiness was at least partly an act. In fact, that night with Groucho, Barbra was probably in a very good mood indeed. At long last, G.o.ddard Lieberson had agreed to give her a recording contract. Terms were still being negotiated, but she was in. Marty had done it. He hadn't failed her yet.

Not only that, but Ray Stark was being very solicitous of her. Even if she still wasn't entirely sure Merrick was on her side, Barbra certainly had to feel that Stark was rooting for her. Big things, she must have felt, were right around the corner.

Indeed, Groucho thought so, too. "Now, Barbra Streisand," he said, making sure he enunciated her name precisely, "you are a big success. I hear about you on the Coast ..."

"No kiddin'," she replied, perfectly in character. "Nothin' you can prove, though, right?"

"Yes," Groucho said, a little thrown off course, not used to playing the straight man. "Jule Styne, for example. I had dinner with him on the Coast last week, and he said you'd be just great for that show he's doing. What's the name of it, uh ... ?"

Barbra helped him out. "The f.a.n.n.y Brice story?"

"Yes, the f.a.n.n.y Brice story. He said, 'It's between her and the girl who works for Garry Moore.'"

"Carol Burnett?"

Obviously Groucho's conversation with Styne had taken place before Robbins and Stark mutually decided against proceeding further with Burnett. But Groucho also knew about Anne Bancroft-Styne didn't share Stark's penchant for secrecy-and he mentioned her as being in the running, too. "That's pretty big-league company," Groucho told Barbra. "If they are considering you against those two, I would say you have arrived."

Barbra never liked such compliments. Being compared to other people, even to say she was in the same league as greats, never felt like flattery to her. She wasn't out to be as good as anyone else, or to be the next whoever. She wanted to be the best that ever was, in her own way, under her own name-spelled and p.r.o.nounced correctly. So the humble thank-you that someone else might have offered in reply to such a statement wasn't forthcoming from her. Instead, she just kept up the shtick.

"It's been very good, I guess," she said. "I mean, I go to department stores and they still don't wait on me."

It was the Bergdorf Goodman line she'd used in other interviews and, as she intended, it got a big laugh.

But not everyone was laughing. An interesting phenomenon was occurring as Barbra became more successful. She was not only acc.u.mulating fans, but also a smaller, though increasingly vocal, group of detractors-critics and reviewers who stood defiantly outside her circle of applause. These opposing voices insisted that Barbra was "inauthentic" and "overhyped," even as they begrudgingly admitted the voice was "worthy of praise"-though some sniped that she really should be singing more true "standards" instead of crazy concoctions like "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" which seemed to them more attention-getting than anything else. One Chicago writer dismissed Barbra as simply a "publicist's creation."

But everyone had a shtick; that was a fact of s...o...b..z. Yet for some reason, there were those who really seemed to resent Barbra's. Dorothy Kilgallen had called Barbra's act "magnetic nonsense," and while it had seemed a sort of compliment, nonsense was still nonsense no matter how magnetic it was, and that was Kilgallen's point.

One of Barbra's earliest boosters, Kilgallen had turned on her by the summer of 1962. She started by chiding the "strong-minded Barbra" for putting her hairdresser "in a swivet" on a recent television appearance (probably The Garry Moore Show) by insisting that she appear on camera with her hair "mussed." That was bad enough, Kilgallen thought, but as word continued to reach her about Barbra's demanding style and her recurrent lateness for Wholesale, the columnist began sharpening her claws. After observing Barbra's pique on The Tonight Show with Groucho, Kilgallen had this to say in her next column: "Friends of the sensationally talented Barbra Streisand wish she'd shed that 'angry woman' att.i.tude. She's successful enough now to be relaxed and pleasant."

It wasn't entirely clear why Kilgallen had soured on her, or why Barbra seemed to elicit such hostility from certain quarters. Part of it, no doubt, could be explained by the fact that she didn't play by the rules: the refusal to observe the political niceties that had so irked Harold Rome, for example. Had she, knowingly or not, snubbed Kilgallen in some way? But there was more to it. One entertainer who sometimes competed with Barbra for gigs and talk-show slots observed "a great deal of resentment building against her," and she attributed it to a feeling that "Barbra didn't deserve everything she was getting because she hadn't paid all of her dues." Worse than that, the entertainer said, was the sense that Barbra "wasn't even grateful for all she was being given."

Dues paid or not, Barbra had just won a recording contract, plus it seemed very likely that she'd be starring on Broadway the following season. "Barbra Streisand is the front-runner for the f.a.n.n.y Brice show," Dorothy Kilgallen revealed that summer, "and she'd be great in the part." But these days Kilgallen rarely offered any praise for Barbra unqualified by criticism. "One important member of the executive cast," the columnist continued, "is cool to the idea because Barbra made such trouble for the producers of I Can Get It for You Wholesale." Kilgallen could only have meant Merrick, so perhaps the producer's enthusiasm for Eydie Gorme had caused him to reconsider his reconsideration of Barbra. Kilgallen added that the show would not include "My Man," or Brice as her Baby Snooks character, or a re-creation of the Ziegfeld Follies. "So what's left?" she asked. "Good question." Barbra, of course, would be left, if she was chosen to be the star-but for Kilgallen, apparently, that fact wasn't significant. The columnist had succeeded in her apparent goal: saying something nice about Barbra for a change to demonstrate her objectivity, but then slipping in a potshot and throwing cold water on the whole idea of the show.

Two camps were indeed forming as Barbra became more prominent, but her detractors, no matter how vocal their resentment, remained far outnumbered by her admirers. Even as Kilgallen was preparing her censorious commentary, another figure, much more esteemed, was drafting a very different take on the rising star. Harold Clurman, in a long piece for the New York Times on the importance of musical theater, extolled the Mermans and Bolgers and Martins of the past, but he also looked toward the future. Perhaps, Clurman mused, Tammy Grimes, Robert Morse, and Barbra Streisand would be the greats of tomorrow.

Not a bad place to be for a young woman who, just a year ago, had been hounding a pair of novice producers to cast her in their off-Broadway show, but had to first convince them that she could hold her own against such "big" names as Diana Sands and Dom DeLuise. Since that time, Barbra had ridden a rocket, though she would be the first to point out that it hadn't quite taken her all the way to the top. And the top, of course, was the only place she intended to go.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fall 1962

1.

From the stove wafted the mouthwatering aroma of chicken soup, vanquishing, at least for the moment, the pungency of fried fish. With a gentle nudge and a kiss on the forehead, Elliott woke Barbra, telling her breakfast was ready. He'd made the soup for her, filling the role her mother had long performed. With Diana keeping her distance now that her daughter was, as friends put it, "shacking up with" a man, Elliott had gladly stepped in to play Barbra's chief cook and bottle washer.

He was blissfully happy. In their little tree house, Hansel and Gretel had only themselves. No managers, no publicists, no agents, no columnists, no audiences. When all the stress of their careers got to be too much, they retreated here and unburdened the frustrations of the day. Elliott was aware how "very dependent on each other" he and Barbra had become, but certainly that could only be a good thing for two people in love. After all, they were "so right for each other," he believed-especially in terms of "ambition and business and ident.i.ty and power." They were both going to be big, big stars, they believed-important, serious actors. They would become rich and powerful, too, and they would chart their careers according to their terms and n.o.body else's.

Such were the dreams, anyway, of a twenty-four-year-old kid and his twenty-year-old girlfriend. On this much, they saw eye to eye.

Finally getting out of bed, Barbra made her way to the sewing-machine stand where a steaming bowl of soup awaited. Elliott had learned how to make it just the way she liked it-which meant just the way her mother had always done. In learning how to make Barbra happy, Elliott had been an eager student. His was a personality that aimed to please. He'd grown up obeying without question the directions of his parents-especially his mother. It was no surprise that Elliott should prove to be the perfect boyfriend for Barbra, who rarely aimed to please anyone other than herself and for whom questioning directions was standard operating procedure. Elliott was correct in believing they were right for each other-but their compatibility was due as much to the fact that they were opposites as it was to the fact that they were in sync about their careers.

It boiled down to a simple dynamic. Barbra decided; Elliott agreed with her decisions. When Barbra was tired after a performance at the Bon Soir or Blue Angel, Elliott knew they would head immediately home, and that was fine with him. When she wanted to stay awhile and talk with people, they stayed and talked, and Elliott was never seen protesting. When Barbra wanted a new piece of furniture to cram into their already crowded flat, Elliott always seemed to concur that it was actually needed. By now, her tastes had completely rubbed off on him. Like Barbra, Elliott loved "old things and bizarre things and funny things"; he could be spotted buying his own antique Coca-Cola trays or painted toy soldiers to hang on the walls or stand on the tables. And when at one point Barbra didn't like a painting he'd bought, he declared that "on second thought it wasn't really right" and tossed it out with the trash, as one Wholesale company member observed.