by Anne Edwards
Working at the New China in the few spare hours she had each week, she earned enough money to have her two missing teeth replaced and, as well, to return to Malden Bridge in the summer of 1958. This time she immediately found her niche. Cast as the tomboy sister, Millie, in William Inge’s Picnic, she split the skirt of her costume to the director’s fury so that she could place her leg on a table in comedic imitation of Marlene Dietrich, a piece of stage business which was cheered by the audience and then was left in. Her next role was as the uneducated, over-sexed ingenue in Erskine Caldwell’s lusty hit play Tobacco Road. She had the ability to uncover the humour in her lines and to speak them as if they were ad-libbed, fresh, giving the character greater humanity.
A small part as a French maid in Sandy Wilson’s musical pastiche of the twenties, The Boyfriend, the first time she would sing on a stage, came next. ‘She was extraordinary,’ recalled actor Ron Rifkin, who also was performing at the theatre that summer. ‘She made up this crazy accent – French from the moon – and during the rehearsal lunch breaks, she wouldn’t eat but would stay in the empty theatre practising a song, “A Sleepin’ Bee”, [from the 1954 Broadway musical House of Flowers]. She was obsessed by it. There was a single-mindedness about her, a drive that I had never seen before.’
Rifkin appears to be the only co-worker to have recognised her singing ability. None the less, her brief appearance in The Boyfriend was a momentous step in her life. The short song she sang was a throwaway, of little importance in the score. She had tried out for the show with much trepidation, unsure that her voice was really any good and although she had no chance to display any true vocal ability, the idea that she could sing well enough to land a job in a musical, however small the part, began to brew. She knew if she was to attempt to try something along that line, she would have to have an audition piece and so she had chosen ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’, an odd, non-commercial ballad – but very beautiful – that required as much acting as singing and which it seemed no other job aspirant would use.
Her work with Allan Miller continued. On her return from Malden Bridge, the first scene she did for him in his class was an earthy one of female seduction from Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. The character was a mature widow who finally puts aside the memory of her dead husband when she meets a robust truck driver. Barbara thought she couldn’t do it but Miller convinced her she could if she kept the right image in her mind as she played it. ‘A week or two later,’ Miller recalled, ‘she comes in with this scene. Within one minute, the boy doing it with her was beet red with embarrassment. It was the sexiest scene I think I have ever watched in my life.’
‘It was a scene of sexual exploration,’ Streisand herself explained. ‘All I did was pick a technical task, which was just physically touching the actor I played with. At one point, he stood up and I stood on his feet; one time I jumped on his back; one time I pretended I was blind, and while I was talking I touched his face. It was this awkward sexuality. I didn’t know what I would do next ... it’s what they call inspiration.’
‘The poor guy in the scene with her’, Miller continued, ‘couldn’t deal with it. He could hardly put his hand on her without her turning it into a red-hot iron.’
Her talent for displaying an almost raw sexuality was the end result of all her self-practice in looking sexy. She now knew how to internalise the feeling by concentrating on something that could make her sexual temperature rise. In the scene from The Rose Tattoo, it had been the need to touch and be touched. Once she mastered this technique, it seemed to free her as an actress, enabling her to begin to dredge up her own deeply felt emotions in performance, although off-stage she kept the same trained cool detachment caused by her fear of rejection. Among the Cherry Lane players, and in and out of the Millers’ apartment and Allan Miller’s teaching classes, were many attractive young actors, but Barbara was not ready for a relationship that might interfere with her dedication to her purpose of becoming a professional and famous actress. After all, Susan Strasberg was seventeen when she played Anne Frank on Broadway, the same age as Jean Seberg who had won the film role of Joan of Arc during Preminger’s talent search.
The Millers had two small dogs and Barbara traded off lessons by dogsitting. By the end of a few weeks she was staying in Manhattan with them and commuting to Erasmus Hall to attend classes. Unable to get Barbara to return to Brooklyn, Diana called Miller and accused him of keeping her under-age daughter from her mother and her home. Miller left the dedsion to Barbara, who chose to remain with him and his wife. This was a wounding response which caused a deeper chasm between mother and daughter. Barbara was only sixteen at the time, and it would have been possible for Diana to seek a court order to make her return home. She did not, knowing that it would only make matters worse between them. Despite her anger and resentment, she was also confident that the Millers were good, respectable people.
Streisand has claimed that until this time the only books she had read other than those assigned in English classes were Nancy Drew mysteries, but her work with the Millers fired her with the need to read plays by great writers. The dramas she most liked were the ones that had once starred the likes of Bernhardt and Duse; those by Alexandre Dumas fils, Greek tragedies, Russian novels. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, she says, changed her life.
‘I had never been exposed to literature, to painting, to classical music. I remember hearing Respighi’s Pines of Rome that summer; The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky. Can you imagine what that’s like? To hear that music for the first time ... It was a very vivid experience, that first hearing of classical music when I was sixteen.’
A school paper written by her father at the same age had been the motivation for her cultural baptism. ‘At sixteen, he wrote about all the things he loved, and I read it, and it was all the things I loved – I read Tolstoy for the first time, heard classical music for the first time. I went to the 42nd Street Library and read Victorien Sardou, Alexandre Dumas,’ she said later, ticking off the similarities. ‘Even though I never knew him, I am very much like my father.’ She paused dramatically. ‘That was the most exciting time of my life, I think.’
Her tendency was to dramatise her life, to reinvent certain periods of the past, to place an emphasis on events and non-events that altered their importance. Her English classes at Erasmus before she was sixteen certainly introduced her to literature – Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Henry James, George Eliot. Diana liked to listen to light classical music and operetta on the radio. Shelley was an art major. Barbara, too, had been exposed to the arts, she simply had not pursued them further until the age of sixteen.
Her passion to consume new foods, culture, education was enormous. She was not satisfied to limit her acting lessons to Allan Miller. She wanted to work with the man he had learned from, Lee Strasberg, the master of theatre technique at that time. She wrote letters to him that she was yet too insecure to mail. In them she detailed her reactions to Miller’s classes. The late 1950s in New York were an exciting time for young performers. Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio was the centre for method acting, a technique inspired by Stanislavsky’s teaching which stressed the importance of the actor’s inner identification with the character and the actor’s natural use of body and voice. The Studio (as it was called) exerted considerable influence on the American theatre and cinema during that decade, having nurtured the talents of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Eli Wallach, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and even Marilyn Monroe, who had fled Hollywood in 1955 to study what she termed ‘serious acting’ with Strasberg.
Suddenly, off-Broadway was burgeoning, bustling, electrifying – the place for serious theatre that found its home in vast, empty warehouses, small, raftered attics, vacant manufacturing lofts, the back rooms of bars and unused storage cellars, and the Village was the teeming heart of it all. Cabarets sprang up like wild flowers and a great army of struggling, unknown young performers lived on the edge of poverty and did so with willing enthusiasm while either auditi
oning or appearing in one of the dozens of Lilliputian venues. There was a sense of being in at the beginning of something terribly exciting. Unless you were in a Broadway show or you were a cabaret artist who could play the great clubs and hotel rooms, your pay as a performer was nominal, if at all. You acted because you loved the theatre and because you believed in the American dream that could breed hope for sudden stardom, a life where you were one of the specially anointed rich and famous.
Struggling neophytes like Streisand shared digs and mooched off friends. You learned to create a cup of free soup at the Automat by taking the tomato ketchup that was supplied for use with a paid-for meal and pouring some into a cup of boiling water provided for tea drinkers. ‘Making it’ meant eating in real restaurants where you were served and having your own apartment in a building with an elevator and a doorman out front. The lucky ones were few and Streisand’s wish was to be among them as soon as possible.
Whereas she had hated being poor in Brooklyn she was energised by her early days of being nearly penniless in the Village, sleeping on someone’s couch in a four-flight walk-up or a cold-water flat, gorging herself whenever she was invited out for a meal. The Village was young, experimental. There was the whiff of newness in the air – fresh, brash, biting. Barbara was drugged with the exhilaration of it and who could blame her? This was her time of self-discovery. She believed she could do anything. Nothing daunted her – empty purse, rejections, or her mother’s harassment. She never sacrificed her work at Erasmus Hall. ‘I learned a lot in Brooklyn,’ she later acknowledged. ‘Out there you couldn’t be dumb and survive.’
Equally aware that you had to make your own luck, she never turned down a chance to audition for a good role however ill-suited it might seem to her looks, age and talent. At the same time she nurtured an unconcealed contempt for producers and casting directors. This perverse and imperious attitude did not endear her to the prospective hirer, but it did provide her with a ready excuse for failure to win a part. ‘I would read magazines like Show Business in which they announced casting calls,’ she recalled. ‘I used to look like a real beatnik. I wore black stockings and had this trench coat and they wanted walk-ons for a breatnik. Now, you don’t have to be Sarah Bernhardt to do a walk-on as a beatnik! I remember going to this audition and they said, “Well, we have to see your work.” I said, “Why do you have to see my work? It’s a walk-on. I don’t even have to say anything.” It was so nuts ... people in these powerful positions. That’s when I got so angry and said, “Screw you, cause I ain’t comin’ back and asking you for no work.” I was feeling this strange power of struggle. I felt that it was a very undignified position to ask anyone for a job. I decided I would design hats before I begged anyone for a job. That’, she adds, ‘was when I started to sing.’
The first person to whom she confided her decision to try her luck at singing was Carl Esser, a young acting hopeful and guitarist who had befriended her. He found her naturally musical and sometimes when the Cherry Lane was deserted, they would use a corner of the stage where Barbara would sing to his accompaniment. It was also about this time that she met Cis Corman. Married to a very nice young man who was just starting out in practice as an analyst, the older Cis, who was taking acting classes, became Barbara’s confidante and adviser. Despite this, many months were to pass since their friendship began before Cis even became aware that Barbara had any vocal talent or thoughts along that line. One day Barbara asked her to stay a little later at the theatre. They were joined by Esser.
‘I want to sing something for you,’ Barbara told Cis, ‘but you have to turn around so that I can’t see you or I won’t be able to do it.’
Cis did as she was asked. Barbara sang ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’. Cis was overwhelmed. What she heard was a voice and interpretation that was natural, yet highly professional, and lyrics that were phrased so meaningfully that the singer seemed to be inventing them. She encouraged her young friend and this new confidence bonded them further.
But aside from Cis and Esser she kept this side of her talent to herself for the time being, practising a cappella or with Esser whenever she had a private place to do so. Suddenly, she discovered something in herself when she sang. There was an involuntary connection between her throat and her heart. ‘When I sing, something happens, and I can’t even tell you what is in that process,’ she later said, ‘a certain musicality to the voice that is not even verbal. Speaking it’s sometimes harder to connect the heart and the throat.’ She chose ballads, show tunes, emotional songs. ‘I don’t know how to sing on the beat,’ she explained, ‘and I think you have to sing on the beat, in pop music.’
To her despair at this time she developed a serious case of acne. Her insecurities intensified. She took a part-time job as a theatre usher to help with her expenses and later claimed that she would tum her face away when people spoke to her, ’so that they wouldn’t recognise me [when she became famous]’. The reality was more moving. She was self-conscious and embarrassed that she had acne. The skin eruptions could be partially masked with the use of thick make-up but the problem remained and caused her much angst. She took to wearing no make-up whenever possible, hoping it would help eliminate the condition. It became a daunting problem.
In October 1958, she was cast in a play called Seawood by the author-producer Armand de Beauchamp. joan Rivers, then using her family name, joan Molinsky, was also in the cast. ‘“It’s not the best production you’ll ever be in and no money [I was told], but it can be a showcase.” I said fine,’ Rivers remembered. ‘Showcase is the talisman word which electrifies actors, enticing them into all kinds of absurdities in the hope that some agent will materialise and see gleams of talent.’
Armand de Beauchamp conducted his School for the Theater in an old sixth-floor brownstone walk-up. The attic above these quarters, named appropriately the Garret Theater, was where he staged his plays and it held – at full capacity – no more than twenty seats. De Beauchamp was a tall, pale, fleshy young man with flowing blond hair who was in the habit of wearing heavy, knee-high, storm-trooper boots. He would stare at his cast with faded, incurious blue eyes.
Readings and rehearsals were held in his living room. ‘The place seemed furnished by an eccentric, impoverished maiden aunt with no taste and too much proximity to a Salvation Army,’ Rivers recalled. There was a broken-down sofa. Tables held lamps with ‘shades mottled black from bum spots’. A coffee table, once on someone’s lawn, rusted and peeling, was littered with dog-eared Theater Arts magazines. On the blotched beige-papered walls ‘were photographs of his grateful students, not one of them recognisable except for Tab Hunter,1 prominently displayed and frequently mentioned by Armand’, Rivers continues.
Rivers also remembered ‘a skinny high school girl with a large nose and a pin that said GO ERASMUS’ on her blouse. ‘We had immediate rapport, maybe because she seemed a tough little hustler ... but obviously still vulnerable ... Despite being the youngest person by far, she was very outgoing and at the first rehearsal came right over to me and said, “Hi, what’s your name? My name’s Barbara Streisand.”’
What impressed Rivers most was that Barbara was ‘carrying at her age a full theatrical make-up kit with greasepaint in tubes and an Equity card earned in summer stock [Malden Bridge]’. Barbara did not befriend Rivers. She was always judgmental about the actors and directors with whom she worked. If she felt she had nothing to learn from them – a snap decision she often made – she did not encourage familiarity. Rivers was a complete novice at this time and Barbara felt more knowledgeable. She was not cold or indifferent, just self-involved. Cast in the play as lesbian lovers, they rehearsed their parts for two weeks. This was during a record January cold spell and de Beauchamp could not afford heat so during rehearsals the cast wore coats and gloves. The play was set in a cottage in the heat of summer and on opening night they almost froze in their skimpy beach-style costumes. To ward off frostbite, they waited for their entrances in front of the kitchen stove in the apartment
while the small audience filed up the rickety stairs past them to the unheated attic theatre.
‘The actual performance is a blur – the mind protects itself,’ Rivers joked. ‘I do remember I had a big love scene where I told Barbara I loved her very much and she rejected me and I had a knife in my hand and tried to kill her and then myself. I also remember a horrendous lot of coughing [from the audience] like a tubercular ward ... ’ A review in the next issue of Show Business proclaimed that the acting could not be evaluated because the material was so bad. De Beauchamp was undaunted and the play continued to run for six weeks to near-empty houses. One evening, about fifteen minutes before curtain, Rivers, descending the staircase of de Beauchamp’s apartment, met Streisand on her way up. ‘It’s closed,’ Rivers said. ‘There’s no play.’
Streisand shrugged. ‘That’s just as well. I got finals.’
She graduated from Erasmus two weeks later, at the end of January 1959, with a 93 per cent average and a medal for special achievement in Spanish. Trudy Wallace, who was in the Choral Club with her, was voted class singer. Streisand was so disturbed over this that years later resentment edged her words as she spoke of the still unknown opera hopeful: ‘She was going to be a big star they said.’
Shelley, now working in Manhattan, kept an eye on her and tried to steer her towards furthering her education, but to no avail. It does not seem that she made any college applications or cared about taking the final college boards. True, money was short, but her grades were high enough for her to have applied for a partial scholarship. The reality was that she was driven by one, and only one, aspiration – to become a rich and famous actress. To do so she would have to make enough money to tide her over until she found employment in the theatre. Her goal was $750. Shelley was an assistant art director at Ben Sackheim Advertising and he secured her a job as a receptionist for $90 a week. Reluctantly she agreed to a plan that her mother and brother devised. She would return to Newkirk Street, commute back and forth to Manhattan, and put away half of her salary until she had saved the money she required. The arrangement was not a happy one. She now had to contend with Rosalind, an overweight child of eight, who felt some resentment at the return of her older half-sister into a household that she had dominated in her absence. Nor was the arrangement an easy one for Diana. Her two daughters bickered constantly and Barbara would shout at her mother, ‘Why do you keep pushing food in her mouth? She’s fat and at this rate she’s going to be obese.’
