Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 7

The Boy Friend had enjoyed a good run. Audiences had applauded heartily for Barbra as Hortense, even if one of the other members of the company had quipped that if Hortense's accent was French, it was "French from the moon." Hortense had one number in the show, "Nicer in Nice," which everyone agreed Barbra sang humorously and energetically. But in her spare time she could be heard out back practicing "A Sleepin' Bee." She'd come to understand that the Bon Soir gig was vitally important. Barre might pontificate about her voice being her ticket to fame, but Barbra saw other reasons to antic.i.p.ate her appearance at the Bon Soir. She knew that some of the city's most influential columnists were likely to be in the audience. A blurb from one of them would be extremely helpful in getting casting directors to take her seriously for parts on Broadway.

She'd had fun playing Hortense-she was an actress, after all, and needed to act-but Barbra was glad to be back in the city, gladder still to be back with Barre, hunkered down in their intimate little practice sessions. Barbra loved Barre's apartment, loved calling it home even more. Even if she could have decorated it herself, she wouldn't have changed a thing. The place evoked a nostalgia for past decades, especially the Gay Nineties and the Roaring Twenties. Theatrical posters hung on the walls; a ventriloquist's dummy was propped in a corner. Bookshelves were crammed full with old volumes and record alb.u.ms, ornamented with fans and feathers. In the evenings, Tiffany lamps cast a soft amber glow over everything. Sitting cross-legged on the slipcovered Victorian couch, happily ensconced among Art Nouveau and Art Deco, Barbra seemed more at home here than she ever had anywhere else.

The summer was rapidly drawing to a close. More sunshine than people filled the Village streets, the usual throngs having decamped to Jones Beach or Fire Island for the long Labor Day weekend. But for Barbra and Barre, there was no such holiday. Less than a week stretched between them and Barbra's opening at the Bon Soir. As they settled down in their living room for some last-minute polishing, they both hoped Barbra hadn't forgotten too much during her two-week sojourn in Fishkill. Setting the needle down on the phonograph, Barre began singing the words to a song they'd been practicing almost nonstop since Barbra had returned, "Lover, Come Back to Me." It was a Sigmund Romberg ballad from the operetta The New Moon, the same show from which Diana had chosen "One Kiss" when she and Barbra had made their records at the Nola Recording Studio. The words to "Lover, Come Back to Me" were simple, but one line had continually given Barbra trouble, leaving her tongue-tied: "When I remember every little thing you used to do ..."

Maybe it was the idea of remembering things that tripped her up. Barbra rarely looked back and kept her eyes securely on the future. Whatever it was, the line always stopped her cold, and she developed what Barre called a "psychological block." She insisted that she wanted to sc.r.a.p the song from the act, but Barre argued it was too good to cut. They'd given it a faster beat, and when she got going on it, Barbra could drive the song "like a freight train," Barre told her.

So he'd suggested that she not worry so much about the words. When she started to sing, he advised, she should think about his wet socks hanging in the bathroom, one of his habits that had driven her crazy since moving in. Smiling, Barbra agreed to give the technique a try. Now, as she sang along with Barre, she nailed it. They both let out whoops of triumph when they were finished.

Up went the needle and another disk dropped onto the turntable. This time it was "n.o.body's Heart" from the Rodgers and Hart musical By Jupiter. In the show, the song was sung by the tomboyish Amazon warrior Antiope, a misfit in the world of men: "n.o.body's heart belongs to me, heigh ho, who cares?" The emotion behind the words, Barre believed, came from the misery of lyricist Lorenz Hart's own unhappy existence as a repressed gay man. Barre suggested that Barbra perform it very personally in order to make people believe she was singing about herself: "n.o.body's arms belong to me, no arms feel strong to me." The irony was that for the first time in her life, Barbra felt loved by a man. But she understood all too well what loneliness felt like-and she'd benefit if waves of sympathy came at her from the audience, Barre argued. The misfit girl who wants to be loved had always been a successful character on stage and in movies.

Any pathos in Barbra's stage presence, however, needed to be quickly offset by an even stronger sense of resilience and grit, and the next record that dropped onto Barre's phonograph offered the necessary balance. By now Barbra had become very familiar with the Bronx-accented voice of Helen Kane, a popular singer of the Roaring Twenties and the inspiration for the cartoon character Betty Boop. As soon as she recognized Kane's music, Barbra wrapped one of Barre's feathered boas around her shoulders and started to sing along with the record: "I wanna be kissed by you, just you, and n.o.body else but you, I wanna be kissed by you, alone ... boop boop a doop!"

But as he listened to her sing it, Barre nixed the song. It might have made a fun little addition to Barbra's act, he said, but it was "too well-known to be surprising" and would probably just sound "camp and precious" if Barbra sang it at the Bon Soir. So they settled on a less familiar Kane tune, "I Want to Be Bad." Rehearsing the song that Labor Day weekend, Barbra was the perfect reincarnation of Kane, a mix of s.e.x and silliness with an overlay of New York character: "If it's naughty to rouge your lips, shake your shoulders and shake your hips, let a lady confess, 'I want to be bad!'" When she finished singing, Barbra took her bows to her enthusiastic audience of one.

But the most important lady that Barre kept playing for Barbra that weekend was one who had no song in the Bon Soir lineup. From the phonograph came the creaky voice of Gertrude Lawrence, the eccentric musical-comedy star of the 1920s and 1930s, singing the songs of Cole Porter. When Barbra had first heard Lawrence, her reaction had been similar to her opinion of Mabel Mercer: "She can't sing." But as he had done the night at the Roundtable, Barre told her to listen to Lawrence's voice "through the squeaks and the faulty pitch." What they were working on was style and presence. Gertrude Lawrence was the "quintessence of vulnerability," Barre explained, who, despite her less-than-mellifluent voice and rather plain appearance, made "every man in the audience think she was singing only to him." Barbra asked how she was able to do that. "It's called acting," Barre told her.

During that summer of 1960, Barbra came to understand that when she sang a song, she was as much an actress as a singer. "If I can identify as an actress to the lyric and sail on the melody," she realized, "it will be me." The actual singing came easy. But the emotional backstory that went into the song required all the skills she'd been sharpening for the past two years at the Theatre Studio. So "Lover, Come Back to Me" became a miniature play about a woman who wanted to hang on to the love of her life, "n.o.body's Heart" the story of a homely girl who's never known love, and "I Want to Be Bad" the chronicle of a girl finally set loose on her own to live her life as she pleased. All of them were aspects of herself, and Barre told her to make sure her audience saw that.

No doubt somewhere in that cluttered apartment there was a clip of the August 21 edition of Flatbush Life, a Brooklyn newspaper that her mother had saved for her. Cranking out press releases for The Boy Friend, the Theatre Studio had made sure one of them reached the city desk of Barbra's hometown paper. The photo of herself that looked up at Barbra was one she had come to despise-with her rather pretentious dangling earrings and her hair piled up on her head. But the headline compensated for any disdain for the photo: FLATBUSH ACTRESS HEADS FOR STARDOM. The article, probably lifted verbatim from the press release, noted her work on stage in The Insect Comedy and The Boy Friend, as well as her upcoming appearance at the Bon Soir. If Barbra needed any affirmation-and occasionally, despite her fervent belief in herself, she did-there it was, spelled out in black and white. Barbra Streisand was "headed for stardom."

Barre and Barbra had taken a break from their rehearsals and were sharing a BLT when the intercom buzzed. It was Bob, and Barre told him to come up. When Bob entered the apartment, he saw Barbra nibbling on the sandwich while Barre still held it in his hands. On the phonograph floated the strains of Ralph Vaughan Williams's elegant piece for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending. Walking into this happy little love nest, Bob was unprepared for what he was about to discover. "Hey, Bob," Barbra purred. "Guess what?"

"What?" he asked.

"Barre and I are talking about getting married."

Bob was stunned. Barre and Barbra as a married couple was a concept he had a hard time "getting his head around." Carole Gister, when she heard the news a short time later, had a similar reaction. For all his claims of bis.e.xuality, Barre was essentially attracted to men, and both Bob and Carole knew it. They thought Barbra did as well. "They're going to have to work very, very hard to make a marriage between them succeed," Bob thought to himself.

Yet he dared not articulate such misgivings to the dreamy-eyed lovebirds who sat shoulder to shoulder on the couch, eating from both ends of a BLT, the hypnotic sound of the violin from The Lark Ascending wafting through the living room.

7.

A bit of a heat wave had settled over the city on the night of Friday, September 9. Temperatures that day had reached the high eighties and hadn't dropped much since the sun had set. Summer wasn't quite ready to release its grip on the city. Yet there was a sense that things were about to change. At that very moment, Hurricane Donna was lashing the Florida Keys, on target to swipe the entire eastern seaboard in the next few days. She'd bring torrential rain, ma.s.sive flooding, and powerful gusts.

But Hurricane Donna wasn't the only thing about to hit New York.

With careful steps in her white buckled shoes, Barbra headed out of her apartment and onto Sixth Avenue, Barre and Bob in tow. For her debut at the Bon Soir, she wore a long black dress under a Persian vest of silk brocade that Terry had found for her in a boutique on Ninth Avenue. Female nightclub performers were expected to wear evening gowns, she'd been told, but both Barre and Bob had felt that Barbra needed to dress to make a statement, to a.s.sert the quirky individuality that had set her apart at the Lion. So she b.u.t.toned herself into the vest and slipped into the 1920s-era shoes with the big buckles. Her eyes were ringed with Bob's signature two rows of false eyelashes, and her cheeks and lips were painted in homage to Helen Kane and other ladies of the period.

The decade they'd just completed, all three agreed, had been dull and boring. "The twenties and thirties were where the real excitement was," Bob insisted, and they hoped the sixties might have a little of those earlier decades' style and polish. With Barbra's closet full of vintage clothing and shoes, Bob's a.s.sortment of old fashion magazines, and Barre's collection of cla.s.sic recordings, they'd been able to evoke the glamour of the past while making it all seem fresh and new. Barbra had slipped into the persona of a saucy Roaring Twenties chanteuse as easily as she had that vintage black dress. As Barre lugged his heavy Ampex tape recorder behind her, the onetime misfit from Brooklyn strode confidently through the streets of Greenwich Village, looking as if she'd just stepped out of the pages of Harper's Bazaar, circa 1925.

The Village was teeming with eccentric, creative types like Barbra who dressed in fashions that, to the rest of the world, seemed outre, but here along these crooked and narrow streets were deemed trendsetting and cutting-edge. The Village was in the midst of a cultural renaissance, or so claimed the New York Times, "once again throbbing with talent" in a way not seen since the postWorld War I era of the Provincetown Players. "Box offices are busy," columnist Dorothy Kilgallen noted as the season got underway. "Taxis are spinning around Manhattan full of people pleasure bent."

Many of those taxis were heading to the Village, where this new phenomenon called "off-off-Broadway" was coalescing. No longer was theater the sole province of Midtown. Now it could be found "tucked behind a facade of food and drink," one critic remarked, a popular alternative due to "the felicitous marriage of the muse and booze." And while clubs like the Bon Soir had been around for a long time, with some insisting they were past their primes, the new energy flowing into the Village signaled a "rebirth," a sense of "florescence" that Barre believed was centered in the supper clubs. To Barre, it all seemed a replay of the glory days of Andre Charlot's revues of forty years earlier, when Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, or Jessie Matthews sang the songs of Noel Coward.

What was more, the young performers dancing and singing in revues across Village stages were exceptionally talented, people such as Beatrice Arthur, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Dody Goodman. One could wander through Village cabarets and catch a young actor named George Segal playing tunes from the 1920s on a banjo, or a sarcastic comedian named Joan Rivers (who'd played with Barbra in that attic production of Driftwood) kvetching about men, or an amiable Englishman named Dudley Moore playing the piano downstairs at the Duplex. All of them were in this together, Barre believed, and any one of them had as good a chance as any other of becoming a star in the fertile proving ground of the Village.

Rounding the corner onto Eighth Street, Barbra and her boys found themselves in front of the Bon Soir. Down the thirty-one steep steps they went, Barbra slowly and deliberately in her high heels. It seemed as if they were descending into a pit of darkness, for the only light flickering below came from a single shaded bulb over the cash register. The walls of the Bon Soir were painted jet black. People in the club moved as if they were shadows.

Terry was there to greet her, throwing his arms around her and finding her "a bundle of anxious energy." She had reason to be anxious. Entertainers in nightclubs faced challenges unthinkable elsewhere. "Customers who jam the darkened, smoky rooms to eat and drink up their $3 to $7 minimums," the Times observed, "have a tendency to grow sulky if their funny bones are not tickled or their heartstrings tweaked at the rate of at least once every twenty seconds." When the pace lagged, hecklers took up the slack.

At the Bon Soir, Barbra had awfully big shoes to fill. Here in this small, dark club-a "refreshing blend of Greenwich Village bohemianism and East Side smartness and sophistication," one critic thought-some of the most exciting acts of the last decade had made their marks, many of them the "far-out females" for which the Bon Soir was famous. The cheeky ladies who played the club broke all the rules. The boisterous Mae Barnes, whose records Barre had played for Barbra, had become a sensation at the Bon Soir after dancing in all-black revues in Harlem. The brash-talking Sylvia Syms, who'd polished her bluesy style under Billie Holiday, had blown the roof off the joint a few years earlier, and Felicia Sanders, who made "Fly Me to the Moon" a standard well before Sinatra, regularly had patrons lined up out to the curb. The Bon Soir was a particularly good s.p.a.ce for female performers, singer-actress Kaye Ballard thought, because of its small, intimate shape, but also because of "all the gay guys" who regularly patronized the club.

Ballard's shtick-lying on the piano and delivering her monologue as if the audience were up on the ceiling-had earned her a place in the club's hall of fame, but her record as the Bon Soir's biggest moneymaker had been overtaken by the current headliner, Phyllis Diller, a crazy-haired housewife from San Francisco. Dorothy Kilgallen called Diller "the funniest woman in the world ... a flax white blonde who comes out on the stage in a vaguely outrageous costume that might be chic on someone else, points a cigarette holder at the audience, and talks. When she talks, the audience screams. It's as simple as that." For all her wild hair and makeup, Diller was known as a clotheshorse, always wearing the latest designers-sometimes topped with a necklace of maraschino cherries that she'd eat, one by one, on stage. All this was done while taking potshots at her husband, whom she called Fang, and, most of all, herself. "Isn't my fur stole pitiful?" she'd ask the audience. "How unsuccessful can a girl look? People think I'm wearing anchovies. The worst of it is, I trapped these under my own sink." Then she'd let loose with her trademark fingernails-on-the-blackboard laugh-a gimmick that had originated from nerves, but which had stayed in the act after Diller noticed the laughs the laugh got.

When Barbra and her friends arrived, only a few customers were milling about the place. Sgroi emerged from the back office to greet her. Taking her by the arm, he escorted her to the women's dressing room. Diller frequently grumbled that the room was the size of a peapod and that she and her fellow performers were forced to change clothes "b.u.t.t to b.u.t.t." From a single window, a rusty old air conditioner dripped water into a bucket. Clothes hung from hooks on the wall since there wasn't room for a closet or shelves. When Barbra walked in, Diller was sitting on a stool threading her maraschino cherries. Sgroi introduced them, and Diller told Barbra she liked her unusual shoes. "They cost me thirty-five cents," Barbra replied. That was the extent of their conversation. Diller found the kid standoffish and deemed her way too young to be singing in a club.

Around eleven, the place started filling up and the band began to play. The Three Flames was a wisecracking piano, ba.s.s, and guitar trio who integrated the jive of the Harlem streets into their act. The Bon Soir was that rare place where blacks and whites mixed without tension and without rank, where three black guys from Harlem could share a stage with a white housewife from San Francisco and a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. On many nights a touch of cla.s.s was provided by Norene Tate, a stately, silver-haired pianist who'd also played the Lion. The emcee was Jimmie Daniels, a Texan who'd sung in Parisian boites before the war. Always impeccably dressed and unfailingly polite, Daniels was famous for never uttering a bad word about anyone, a far cry from the often raucous acts he introduced. In the 1930s, he'd run an eponymous club in Harlem and was rumored to have been one of Cole Porter's lovers.

Around midnight, the Three Flames gave way to the comics Tony and Eddie, whose act consisted mostly of mime and sight gags, using wigs, false teeth, and prop weapons. In one bit, Tony played a patient and Eddie a doctor, with the recording of a coloratura soprano giving voice to Tony's pain each time he got a shot.

If Barbra had ventured to peer out from the dressing room, she would have discerned waiters weaving in and out among the tables carrying tiny flashlights in order to spot who needed refills. This produced a flickering, bouncing light that made the room seem, in the words of New York Times reviewer Arthur Gelb, "a-twinkle with glow worms." Gelb wasn't the only major newspaperman sipping vino and smoking cigarettes in the audience. Dorothy Kilgallen, one of the widest-read syndicated theater columnists, was out there, too. If the news made Barbra anxious, she could take heart that the Bon Soir's pianist that night was Peter Daniels, the same friendly Englishman she'd met back when she'd auditioned for Eddie Blum several months earlier and who'd helpfully rehea.r.s.ed with her at his apartment on Riverside Drive in the days leading up to this night.

Finally, it was Barbra's turn to go on. Jimmie Daniels stood in the middle of the stage and introduced her as "a girl with a magical set of pipes." Suddenly the bright white spotlight swung across the stage and caught Barbra, already seated on her stool and staring directly out into the audience. It was her moment, and she was ready for it. The applause she received was respectful, though hardly the enthusiastic greeting bestowed upon the more familiar Tony and Eddie. Hoping to fill in the s.p.a.ces, Barre and Bob leaped to their feet, cheering as loudly as they could, nudging friends to do the same.

Once the applause died down and Barbra was sure all eyes were on her, she slowly and deliberately removed the gum from her mouth and stuck it on the microphone. It was by now a well-practiced bit of shtick that won the hoped-for snickers. Still, the audience, including those hard-to-please columnists, didn't know quite what to make of the small girl in the spotlight with the queer shoes and absurdly long fingernails. She seemed both frightened and confident, her quivery smile revealing as much pluck as it did apprehension.

Barbra took a deep breath. Giving a nod to Peter Daniels, she launched into the first song of her set, Fats Waller's "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now." The little love ditty became a "s.e.xy, playful, naughty" flirtation with the audience, just as she and Barre had worked out. The applause at the end was heartier this time, and sailing on a burst of adrenaline, Barbra segued into the song that had started it all for her. "When a bee lies sleepin' in the palm of your hand ..." The audience was riveted. Cries of "Gorgeous!" were heard when she finished the song.

Barre was sitting on the edge of his seat, mouthing the words to each song along with Barbra while his Ampex tape recorder, off to the side, captured the music for posterity. Bob sat sketching Barbra as she sang, preserving the night in his own way with pen and ink. When Peter Daniels's piano introduction indicated it was time for "I Want to Be Bad," Barbra stood from her stool so she could move her body seductively to the words. The audience hooted and whistled. "She's killing them," Barre whispered. "They love her!" Three songs in, Barbra had them eating out of her hands-those lovely, exquisite hands that Bob watched in a sort of awe that night as they moved through the air with all the grace and precision of an orchestra conductor.

At the beginning of her fourth number, Barbra closed her eyes. For the sad ballad "When Sunny Gets Blue," Barre had told her to think about a cla.s.smate of hers back at Erasmus Hall who'd been even more of a misfit than she was. Picked on, lonely, the girl had elicited sympathy from Barbra, who would smile at her in the corridors. Barre had told Barbra to think of that girl when she sang the song, and so, drawing on all of her acting ability, Barbra stood on the stage, emotions exposed. This tender number was immediately followed by her bouncy rendition of "Lover, Come Back to Me," with the line Barbra had once found so difficult now flying "like a bullet," Barre thought. All those weeks of practice, of picturing his socks in the bathroom, had paid off.

Then came "n.o.body's Heart," the perfect penultimate song for Barbra's set. As she and Barre had planned, the audience seemed to feel that she was singing about herself. How could they not? There she was in front of them, so small, so unusual, seeming so desperate for their approval, coming more alive with each round of applause. The lyrics seemed to fill in all the autobiography that had been missing from Jimmie Daniels's scanty introduction of her. She was a girl who'd been "sad at times, and disinclined to play, but it's not bad at times, to go your own sweet way." That's what people took away from hearing her. When, at the finish of the song, she dropped her chin onto her chest, the audience was on its feet, shouting "Brava! Brava!"

The spotlight swung back to Jimmie Daniels. "Miss Barbra Streisand!" he announced. As expected, the cries of "Encore!" began. With a smile and a wave of his hand, Daniels surrendered the stage again to Barbra. Back into view she charged, all five feet five inches of her, a hundred and fifteen pounds of determination, singing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" She was suddenly transformed into a ringleader of merriment, letting her instinct take over in ways that even Barre hadn't expected. With "semioperatic swoops and shrieks," she bounded across the stage warbling the words that many people in the audience remembered from their childhoods. They laughed, clapped, and nodded their heads along to the familiar but utterly unexpected tune. Singing about the third pig, Barbra put her hands on her hips and spontaneously invoked Mae West: "Nix on tricks, I will build my house of bricks!" The audience roared its approval.

Barre was overwhelmed. He'd coached Barbra to think about Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies, which he called "an homage to madness," during her rendition of "Big Bad Wolf," but this was beyond anything they'd rehea.r.s.ed. It was anarchic brilliance cooked up on the spot, one observer said, "almost like the Marx Brothers, if Groucho had been able to sing." To each pig she had bequeathed a different voice, and when the brick house stands firm and the wolf gets roasted in the fireplace, she let out a "triumphant roar." At the end of the song, Barbra fled the stage laughing hysterically, as if she were "being chased by the Furies," Barre thought. The audience, in his words, went "nuts."

Bob's reaction was quieter. He sat in a kind of stunned silence, remembering the time he'd seen Edith Piaf at the Biltmore Theatre in Los Angeles. No elaborate orchestration had supported the great French chanteuse. Piaf had relied only on the force of her voice and personality. Bob had wondered then why America had no Piaf of its own, why the best his country had seemed able to produce was Patti Page singing "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" Watching Barbra that night, alone on the stage working her magic without any props, without any major orchestration, Bob thought solemnly to himself, "This could be our Piaf."

Friends, of course, might be expected to imagine such heights for each other, but Bob wasn't alone in his response. Terry was once again in tears hearing Barbra sing. Carole Gister, also in the audience, was "blown away" by the fact that each of Barbra's songs had seemed like "a self-contained play." In her dressing room, Phyllis Diller had been drawn by the sound of Barbra's voice, and despite having been unimpressed with the kid in person, found herself getting goose b.u.mps listening to her sing. It wasn't often that Diller had to take the stage with an audience still buzzing over the warm-up act.

Part of what the audience had responded to was Barbra's obvious awareness of, and proficiency with, the traditions of the stage. It hadn't just been West she'd invoked up there. She'd displayed the raw power of Piaf and sung her songs in the storytelling style of Mabel Mercer and connected with her audience as personally as had Gertrude Lawrence. She'd flirted like Helen Kane, belted like Mae Barnes, and smoldered like Ruth Etting. Yet the audience wasn't applauding any of those venerable ladies. Barbra was no imitator. When Mercer sang, she barely moved a muscle on stage, but Barbra had used her hands to dazzling effect. Lawrence's cadences had often induced cringes, but Barbra's euphonious voice had soared through the room mesmerizing her audience. The spontaneous combustion that had left Barre stunned and Bob speechless was the result of an inexplicable alchemy that had taken all of those influences, shaken them together, and conjured something entirely new. Something that called herself Barbra Streisand.

CHAPTER FOUR

Fall 1960