Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 46

Yet everyone was professional enough not to crack the eggsh.e.l.ls on which they walked, and so they got through rehearsals. On that last night in Boston, they headed out onto the stage to give the show one more try. All of them remained committed to making this show a hit.

So was their producer, sitting out in the audience. While Barbra had gone around the director and placed a call for help to Allan Miller, Ray Stark had made his own surrept.i.tious appeal, and to a very unlikely person. He sat with this potential savior now, watching the "Something About Me" number, with the cast all dressed as babies. Even as she performed it, Lainie Kazan knew the number was terrible, and if they weren't literally "booed off the stage," that would be how she'd remember the audience's unenthusiastic reaction to the number.

No doubt, watching his cast make fools of themselves on the stage, Ray Stark was very glad to be sitting next to Jerome Robbins. The show's original director had come up to Boston, and he was going on with them to Philadelphia. He was the only man on earth, Stark had come to realize, who could save Funny Girl.

4.

What made it particularly awkward for Jerry Robbins was that he and Garson Kanin were staying at the same hotel in Philadelphia. Barbra and Sydney were over at the Warwick, while Robbins, Kanin, Ray Stark, Isobel Lennart, and Jule Styne were all at the Barclay, running into one another on the elevators, in the cozy Chinese Chippendale corner bar, or at the ornate Victorian filigreed front desk. Except not for much longer. After the little meeting Ray Stark had just called between the princ.i.p.als, no one expected Kanin to still be around in the morning.

That was why Robbins was writing to him tonight. "Dear Gar," he penned. "I want you to know that I consider Funny Girl your show. I was hoping to work on it with you but Ray, in deciding to take advantage of the little time left out of town, felt it could only proceed this way. I am very sorry indeed, believe me. I just hope I fulfill the very wonderful job you've already left here."

He called a bellhop to deliver the note to Kanin's room. Then he began planning how to undo much of Kanin's "wonderful job."

Robbins and Stark had indeed hoped to work with Kanin, and with Carol Haney. Robbins had tentatively agreed not to take a credit. He'd come, he told everyone, only to advise. And they had plenty of time to rehea.r.s.e now; Stark had managed to get the New York premiere pushed back from February 27 to March 17, which gave them almost seven weeks to work. But then the show had opened at the Forrest Theatre on Walnut Street, and the first reviews had come in, and they weren't that much different from those in Boston. "The first triumph belongs to Barbra Streisand," wrote Henry T. Murdock in the Philadelphia Inquirer. That much was no doubt expected. But Murdock also saw scenes that went on past their logical conclusions, and songs whose potential would only be realized "as the run progresses." In his second review of the show, Murdock concluded succinctly: "The funny girl should be funnier."

Robbins's attempts to make that happen had been thwarted at every turn by objections from a deeply affronted Kanin, or from his equally aggrieved wife. It became clear that Robbins needed a free hand to whip the show into shape. Their seven weeks were now down to four. That meant Kanin had to go. Haney, too, as Robbins needed complete control over the ch.o.r.eography as well.

Clearly Barbra was pushing for Robbins to take over; the director was exchanging notes with her about her performance almost daily, and it was common knowledge that she had lost faith in Kanin. But some wondered why Robbins had come back to a project that had given him so much aggravation in the past-and to a producer he frankly couldn't stand and didn't respect. No doubt Stark had concluded that if he was going to be paying Robbins royalties anyway for the use of his material, he might as well have him back on the job. Asking Robbins to return, however, must have been very difficult for the proud Stark. Humbling himself before a man he'd tried to outmaneuver legally less than a year before showed the desperation the producer was feeling-as well as his determination not to give up. For Robbins, it may have been the satisfaction of being told that he had been right all along that brought him back-that and a hefty financial agreement, the details of which were still being worked out. There may also have been a personal consideration: Buzz Miller, one of the lead dancers, was Robbins's former lover and someone who still held a piece of his heart.

And so, the next day, Kanin and his wife were gone. There were no good-byes made to the company. "He just kind of disappeared," Sharon Vaughn said of their director. Kanin would keep his credit on the show, but soon everyone in Broadway circles knew he had been fired. As consolation, Stark sent him a set of antique china.

Lainie Kazan felt sorry about Kanin's departure, but she felt far worse for Carol Haney, who many in the company believed had been treated cavalierly. She had worked so hard and was willing to keep working hard, but Robbins wanted complete control. Haney, too, would keep her credit, even if the new director-ch.o.r.eographer was already reworking her steps and routines as he saw fit. Soon the company was hearing reports that Haney, stunned and depressed by her dismissal, was drinking again.

5.

Had Barbra switched on the television set in her room at the Warwick on the night of February 9, she would have seen that group of four Liverpool lads she'd heard while in London perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show. Almost from out of nowhere, the Beatles had exploded onto the American scene that winter, enjoying a meteoric ride to the top that made even Barbra's ascent seem like a long time coming. They sang four songs on the Sullivan show, all of which were nearly drowned out by screaming teenaged fans in the audience, especially the last, "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Sullivan declared, "This city has never witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters."

As they headed out on their first stateside tour, the Beatles were suddenly everywhere. "The British group, something like Presley quadruplets, have taken over the American record market," one columnist observed. Cynthia Lowry of the a.s.sociated Press complained it was "impossible to get a radio weather bulletin or time signal without running into 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.'" Meanwhile, the Beatles' first alb.u.m had skyrocketed up the charts and managed to accomplish what Barbra hadn't: knock the Singing Nun from the top spot. Along the way, the quartet had also pa.s.sed Barbra's second and first alb.u.ms, now at numbers 9 and 14 respectively.

The change at the top couldn't have been more dramatic. Sister Smile's simple, soothing sounds had been replaced by the Beatles' vivacious, rule-breaking rock and roll-a sign that Americans, at least young Americans, were ready to start living again after the horrors of the fall. If Barbra, cloistered at the Forrest Theatre, hadn't been paying much attention to what was happening in the music world, she would soon have to, for she had a new alb.u.m on the way-and a new single as well.

Arriving backstage a few hours before curtain time, one member of the company was still singing along to the Beatles tune she'd been playing in her hotel room. "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah," she warbled as she headed up the stairs to the dressing rooms. That was when she heard Barbra singing, too-only she quickly realized it wasn't Barbra singing live, but on a record, and she was singing a song from the show, "You Are Woman," the humorous love song she shared with Nick. But it sounded different somehow. Listening closely, the company member realized that Barbra was singing it solo, and the words had been changed to "I Am Woman." When she got into the dressing room she shared with the other girls, she saw Marty Erlichman. He had just brought the single over and was playing it for them. The record had just been released to radio stations all across the country. The company member looked down at the disk spinning on the turntable and thought, "This sure ain't the Beatles."

Indeed, it was suddenly a very different market. Although "I Am Woman"-with its flipside, "People"-earned some positive reviews and inclusion in d.i.c.k Kleiner's top picks in his syndicated record column, it didn't really stand a chance on a Top Ten list now dominated by Beatles. .h.i.ts (that week it was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You") and other rock-pop singers such as Lesley Gore and the Four Seasons. Probably no one expected "I Am Woman" to chart very high. Recorded before Barbra left New York, the single was intended mostly as radio promotion for the show. But getting airplay was going to be very tough in this new market.

That didn't mean Barbra wasn't making news on other fronts. Her weight gain hadn't gone unnoticed, and that prompted rumors that she was pregnant. No surprise that Dorothy Kilgallen was the one to start the ball rolling. "Funny Girl must agree with Barbra Streisand, despite all the strenuous out-of-town performances and rehearsals," the columnist insinuated. "She's actually put on weight and some of her costumes have had to be altered." That was enough to set tongues wagging, as Kilgallen surely intended. It led to someone-Stark? Marty? Solters? Barbra herself?-calling the ever-reliable Earl Wilson to set the record straight. "Tisn't so, comes the word, loud and clear, from Philadelphia," Wilson dutifully wrote.

What made the rumors especially awkward was the affair going on between Barbra and Sydney. For those in the company who suspected some hanky-panky between their leading man and lady, talk of pregnancy led to all sorts of questions. The same company member who had heard Barbra's record playing also heard stories of her romance with Sydney. At one point, she worked up the nerve to ask Jule Styne if, therefore, the pregnancy stories might be true. He told her "never to utter anything that crazy ever again." So she didn't.

For his part, Sydney was hoping that Robbins could fix things for him along with the rest of the show. Indeed, there were indications that he might no longer be the albatross that the Boston reviews had made him out to be. Critics in the City of Brotherly Love had been much kinder to Sydney: Henry Murdock had found him "graceful, nimble, handsome, and most vocally able." No doubt this pleased Barbra and likely kept the relationship between the two of them humming along even as chaos reigned in rehearsals. Now that Carol Haney had departed, Barbra and Sydney were the only ones among the princ.i.p.als to be lodged at the Warwick. That gave them a certain amount of privacy, just in case they wanted to spend any time together late at night after the curtain had been rung down.

6.

Jerry Robbins called them all together under the Erlanger Theatre's glittery crystal chandelier and told them point-blank that they were running out of time.

Ray Stark had just pulled off the impossible and gotten them yet another reprieve. Their Broadway opening night had been moved from March 17 to March 24. That meant they had exactly twenty-five days to get this thing right.

First order of the day, Robbins announced, as the company scrambled up onto the stage, many of them in socks or ballet shoes, was to rehea.r.s.e the new "Sadie, Sadie" number. Originally part of an earlier script, the song was being brought back into the show to replace "Home" and "Who Are You Now?" at the top of the second act. "Home" would be sc.r.a.pped; "Who Are You Now?" would be moved toward the end of the show. To kick off Act Two, they'd tried using the "Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat" number, the Ziegfeld Follies tribute to World War I doughboys that served no real plot purpose except to pep things up during the dreary second hour. But a transition was needed after the intermission to show that f.a.n.n.y was now married, and Robbins didn't want another duet with Sydney. So out came "Sadie." He told the orchestra to hit it.

"I'm Sadie, Sadie, married lady," Barbra sang, as the company followed her across the stage in steps originally worked out by Haney and now finessed by Robbins to contain the number to three minutes.

"She's Sadie, Sadie, married lady," the company echoed.

"To tell the truth," trilled Barbra, "it hurt my pride, the groom was prettier than the bride!"

Yet another reference to her looks, but Barbra went along with it, no complaint, because Robbins liked the song. And at that point, she would have done almost anything Robbins suggested. Star and director were "getting along famously," Lainie Kazan observed, even if the rest of the cast, used to the easygoing Kanin, wasn't too happy about the "ferocious taskmaster" who'd showed up one day out of the blue and started making their lives more difficult.

Barbra, however, was having a ball. The more Robbins changed the scenes, the more she liked it. The more she had different songs to try out, the more she loved it. "Forty-one different last scenes!" she exclaimed, indicating the various versions of the script they were working from. Her castmates wilted under the pressure to keep all the different versions distinct, but Barbra found it "exciting, stimulating." Anything to keep away the boredom she'd known during Wholesale.

Working with Robbins was like putting a different show on every day-which, in a sense, they were. Theatergoers who saw the show on a Wednesday would see a slightly different-or possibly even a radically different-show if they came back on a Friday. Lines were changed, songs were moved around. Not only that, but the production had actually switched theaters, vacating the Forrest for the Erlanger, on the northwest corner of Market and Twenty-first streets. The change had been made necessary by their extended tryout: Anyone Can Whistle was scheduled to open at the Forrest, and even though Stark had offered producer Kermit Bloomgarden ten thousand dollars to switch theaters, he couldn't make a deal. So that meant packing everything up-props, costumes, equipment-and relearning the layout and sight lines of a brand-new venue. Barbra accepted it as one more adventure.

Settling into a seat in the empty auditorium to watch her cavort on the stage, Robbins marveled at this fascinating creature he'd inherited from Fosse and Kanin. Barbra hadn't been his first choice for f.a.n.n.y, of course. But now he couldn't see anyone else in the part, not even his beloved Anne Bancroft. Barbra's talent had impressed him, but it was her fierce dedication to the role that had finally won him over. Robbins found Barbra "jet-fueled with the robust, all-daring energy" of a novice, but "tempered by the taste, instinct and delicacy" of a veteran. She often arrived late to rehearsals, "haphazardly dressed," but accepted the "twelve pages of new material" Robbins handed her without protest, "schnorring" part of his sandwich and "someone else's c.o.ke" as she read them. During rehearsals, "in her untidy exploratory meteoric fashion," Barbra was "never afraid ... to try anything," Robbins observed. And as soon as she had figured out how to play a scene, she seemed "a sorceress sailing through every change without hesitation, leaving wallowing fellow players in her wake."

And she hadn't even turned twenty-two.

That was what was so uncanny, because the work they had been doing over the last few weeks-and the work they needed to keep doing for the next twenty-five days-might have sapped the creativity of even the most experienced old theater pro. Barbra was like no performer Robbins had ever worked with before. No matter the line in "Sadie," the director thought she was exquisite. Musing about his leading lady, Robbins wrote, "Her beauty astounds, composed of impossibly unconventional features." Her movements were both "wildly bizarre and completely elegant," and her "El Greco hands" seemed to have "studied Siamese dancing and observed the antennae of insects." It was Barbra's contradictions he admired most: "Her cool is as strong as her pa.s.sion. The child is also the woman. The first you want to protect, the second keep. She comes on with defiant independence-yet communicates an urgent need for both admiration and approval. She laughs at s.e.xiness. She is s.e.xy. She tests you with childish stubbornness, impetuosity and conceit, concedes you are right without admission, and balances all with her generous artistry and grace."

Yet for all his fascination with the show's leading lady, Robbins never really considered Funny Girl his own after he came back. There was a certain detachment, members of the company felt. Too many people had been involved by now for Robbins to ever feel very proprietary about the product. Still, if the show was a hit, he stood to make out pretty well. He'd just signed his contract with Stark, guaranteeing him five thousand dollars for his services plus two-and-a-half percent of the gross weekly box office, both during previews and after the Broadway opening, and including all performances of any subsequent road tour. He also was paid ten thousand dollars for the movie rights to his material; if the film was not made within seven years, Stark would need to come back to him for another agreement. The contract was a clear recognition of Robbins's authorship, as well as the fact that previous directors' imprints were minimal. Indeed, the show was now practically unrecognizable from the one that had premiered in Boston, and would be different still by the time they opened on Broadway.

No matter all the fixing going on, Robbins knew what he was doing was simply patching the holes in the book, not rebuilding a great play. Isobel Lennart admitted her work had fallen far short of the mark. "After twenty years of working in a field [screenwriting] where I know what am I doing and can do my job very well," she told a reporter, "I have had the humbling experience of trying to do something I quickly discovered I knew nothing about." In the little time they had left, Robbins was trying to salvage what he could. One of the first things he'd jettisoned was "Something About Me," Kanin's disastrous babies-in-the-cribs number, despite the loss of some ten thousand dollars in discarded costumes and props. He also sliced out "I'd Be Good for Her" and "Eddie's Fifth Encore," completely eliminating Eddie Ryan's subplot. Robbins and Stark might not have agreed on much, but both understood that for Funny Girl to have any shot at success, it had to be all about Barbra.

Other changes Robbins wrought were less dramatic, but just as significant. Sitting in the back of the theater every night, he scribbled notes on Barclay Hotel stationery to present to the cast the next day. After the performance on the twenty-fourth, he'd thought Barbra was "working too hard" during "I'm the Greatest Star," and she needed to be careful not to break up the lyrics so much during "Who Are You Now?" After the performance on the twenty-fifth, Robbins had switched "Cornet Man" and "Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat," and told Barbra not to show her face after she sat down in the "You Are Woman" number and for once let Nick take center stage.

He'd also declared, interestingly, that there was entirely "too much kissing" in the show, which, knowing what was going on after hours between Barbra and Sydney, might have had a little more resonance than Robbins indicated in his notes.

Every day, there was something else to be changed. On the twenty-sixth, Robbins had requested new watercolors be done for the sets and an entire redesign of the Henry Street bar where f.a.n.n.y's mother held court. On the twenty-seventh, he had submitted a list to Lennart of various cuts and changes. The speeches of Emma, f.a.n.n.y's maid, were too long, and Nick's dialogue with f.a.n.n.y had to emphasize his intention "to be head of the house."

There was just so much, so very much, to do between now and opening night. Jule Styne was frequently sending over lists of changes he thought should be made, such as when inner curtains ought to be raised during songs and which lights should be used during different numbers. He'd also come up with an idea to close the show with a line from f.a.n.n.y, "Hey, gorgeous, here we go again." But although Robbins penciled "ok" next to the suggestion, he never used it. Clearly the director thought ending on a reprise of "Don't Rain on My Parade" was the better way to close.

Not everything he tried worked. At one point, Robbins had brought in a pair of wolfhounds to lead f.a.n.n.y out onto the stage when she made her first entrance. Nothing says "star" more than a couple of hounds on a diamond-studded leash. But the dogs wouldn't stop center stage as they were supposed to, so they were sent back to their trainer. Robbins had canned the song "A h.e.l.luva Group," sung by the Henry Street saloon regulars as a lead-in to "People," and replaced it with "Block Party," and then "Downtown Rag," but he still wasn't happy. He had Styne and Merrill working up something else.

He'd also tried firing Lainie Kazan. His reasons were unclear. Had she been too close to Kanin? Was it a request from Barbra? Did he disapprove of the deal with Stark? From the moment Robbins arrived, Kazan felt he had ignored her. Through the grapevine she heard he was saying she was "too attractive to understudy f.a.n.n.y Brice." But when she got her notice to vacate, Kazan decided she wouldn't go easily. She called Robbins and asked for ten minutes. "I'm going to sing for you and do a scene for you, and if you really don't like me, you can fire me," she said. The director agreed, and Kazan sang "I'm the Greatest Star." In response, Robbins said nothing, which left the anxious actress hanging. But the next day Kazan got a new script at her hotel room, which meant she could stay on. Probably Ray Stark, who had Kazan under contract, had had as much influence as her rendition of "I'm the Greatest Star."

It was also true that Robbins had difficulty finding anyone else who could understudy Barbra. On the twenty-sixth, he had interviewed several potential understudies, including Louise La.s.ser, who had the experience, and Carol Arthur, who'd played with Elliott in On the Town. But none had seemed to catch fire with him. Robbins also had the idea of publicizing "standbys" for Barbra-celebrities who might step in and do the part when Barbra wanted a night off. He had in mind Eydie Gorme, Edie Adams, and Gisele MacKenzie, among others. But Gorme turned Robbins down quite publicly. Her manager issued a statement saying the job was "not in keeping with the image of a star of Eydie's stature." Apparently, since she'd been up for the part, Gorme wanted to play f.a.n.n.y Brice full time or not at all.