Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Actually, Barbara had a voracious appetite. She loved to eat and having often denied herself lunch as a young woman to buy make-up, food was the greatest reward she could give herself. She remained pencil-sharpened thin due to her tremendous nervous energy, chewed gum when she wasn’t smoking a cigarette or eating, and kept up a steady flow of conversation if she felt so inclined. She hated her job and paid little attention to the way she dressed to go to work.

  Ben Sackheim, her boss, had an eye for pretty girls and Barbara resembled none of the attractive women among his fifty or so female employees. ‘She was waiflike, her hair pinned carelessly on top of her head. She wasn’t attractive, well-dressed or even kempt,’ Milton Mensch, an account supervisor with the same company recalled. ‘Her dresses looked as if they needed to be pressed. And she had a terrible complexion – adolescence, I thought.

  ‘Shelley and I used to have lunch together and two or three times Barbara joined us at a small restaurant near the office in mid-town Manhattan. Barbara spoke about her ambitions in the theatre and I thought, “How is this girl going to make it?” She had a mouth like a truck driver and used four-letter words comfortably. She quit after three or four months and shortly after she left Shelley asked me to see if my brother-in-law Ralph Mann, an agent, would represent her. She went to see him and Ralph as graciously as possible said no. He told me she didn’t look like she could get an audience to rise to its feet.’

  Again she left Diana and Brooklyn, this time for a short while she shared an apartment with Marilyn Fried, a friend from the Cherry Lane Theater. ‘We lived in total poverty on Forty-Eighth Street,’ Fried recounted. ‘Each of us was getting thirty-two dollars a week in unemployment cheques. It barely covered the rent and our fees for acting classes. Once a week when it really got bad each of us had to go to see Mama, to get the bread and the margarine and the soup. Barbara would go to Brooklyn and I’d go to the Bronx to mine. We’d both come back with the groceries and we’d take everything out of the boxes in the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator. That is how we survived.

  ‘Once Mrs Kind came down to Miller’s workshop. She did not say a word after the performance. There was this terrible silence. Then, when we got upstairs to our apartment, it began. Her mother said that Barbara should get a job because she did not have the ability to be an actress. We spent half an hour in the bedroom listening to this nonsense. I was heartbroken because she was not encouraging Barbara ... One night Barbara and I sat together wondering what we would like most to do if ever we made it as actresses and she said, “First of all, I want to buy my mother a mink coat.”’

  This shocked Fried, who did not feel she should comment on how strange she found this wish in view of Diana’s negative attitude toward Barbara’s career. However, this was exactly what motivated Barbara’s desire to give her mother such an extravagant gift. ‘I’ll show you!’ she was saying. ‘You thought I could never become rich and a star!’

  Diana urged her to return to Newkirk Street. Shelley offered a small loan if she changed her mind about college, but she was consumed with the need to make her mark as quickly as she could. She had dreams – big dreams: stardom, nothing less would be acceptable. She intended to show Brooklyn, her family, her classmates that they were wrong about her. She was a winner. Not quite seventeen when she graduated from Erasmus Hall, she expected to be on her way to her goal in a year’s time. Meanwhile, she continued to usher during Saturday matin­e and evening performances in Broadway theatres. When there was no job, she would go back on unemployment.

  Thinking perhaps that her own ethnic roots were a deterrent, she took the name Angelina Scarangella from the New York telephone book. Newly named, her hair dyed red, dressed in black tights, feather boas and 1925 hats, found for little money in Village secondhand stores, she went out unsuccessfully on auditions and finally dropped the nom de plume. Without telling Allan Miller, she started acting classes simultaneously with Eli Rill, also a disciple of Lee Strasberg. Her ability to make the other students laugh infuriated Rill. ‘I kept telling her she had to develop what she had and not try to be somebody else,’ Rill remembered. ‘She would make it clear that my role was to make her into a tragic muse.’

  She was still working on songs with Carl Esser and, except for Cis Corman, had not yet sung in front of anyone else. One evening Marilyn Fried was in the bedroom of their small apartment and Barbara was in the living room with Esser. ‘He was strumming a guitar,’ Fried recalled. ‘I suddenly heard this remarkable voice coming out of the living room. My immediate reaction was to go to the radio and find out who was singing so marvellously. But the radio was not on. I realised there must be someone in this tiny apartment who had this magnitude, this power. [I went into the room] and asked Barbara, “Who was singing?” She said, “I was.”’ Fried insisted that she must do something about it.

  ‘Yeah? You really think so?’ Barbara mused. Esser agreed with Fried that it was time she did. ‘I don’t know. What’s it mean to be a singer?’ she shrugged, appearing to Fried, at least, to think it was something demeaning.

  None the less, the enthusiastic approval she had received did not go unnoticed nor had it been so innocently solicited. Privately, she had been honing her talent on the assumption that it might help pave the way to getting a role on Broadway. She had hoped that Marilyn Fried would react to her singing in the same way that Cis Corman had, needed that affirmation before she tested herself in a professional situation. Now she had it.

  Footnote

  1 Tab Hunter (born Arthur Gelien) had made his movie debut in 1950, at the age of eighteen, in The Lawless. His all-American, blond, athletic good looks made him a teenage and homosexual idol during the 1950s. He appeared in many films, on television and in recent years on Broadway and in three campy movies pairing him with female impersonator Divine.

  7

  IN THE SUMMER of 1959, Barbara circulated a résumé to casting directors stating that she was both an actress and a singer. Attached was a highly idiosyncratic 8 x 10 glossy. Her features could hardly be discerned, and certainly not her chronic skin condition, as she was ‘swathed in cloaks and veils and earrings and chatchkalas, looking like Ruth St Denis [the modem dancer] in a moving moment’. Eddie Blum of the Rodgers and Hammerstein casting office was so intrigued by the photograph that he called her and asked her what she really looked like.

  ‘What part are you asking me to audition for?’ she shot back.

  ‘It’s for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Sound of Music,’ he replied. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Do you know the story?’

  The show was about to go into rehearsal starring Mary Martin, as former nun, Baroness Maria Von Trapp, who had escaped from the Nazis over the Alps with a brood of singing stepchildren. Three years earlier a German film, never released in the United States, had been made about the Von Trapp family. Rodgers and Hammerstein had bought the rights to adapt it for the stage. There had been various articles about the Von Trapps’ adventure, although Barbara had not read any of them.

  ‘Sure!’ she lied.

  ‘Well, it’s the oldest Von Trapp child, Lisl; the one who falls in love with the boy in the Nazi youth movement. She’s blonde, Christian and sixteen years old,’ he told her.

  ‘I’d be perfect!’ she exclaimed. She went right down to his office to read for the part. Lisl was a singing role requiring a sweet soprano; her one solo was ‘I Am Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ and was germane to the character who had to convey girlish naïveté. Barbara went over the music a few times with the rehearsal pianist and then gave it an admirable try. Blum knew from the moment she had entered his office dressed in an outfit that could only be described as ‘Baby Doll camp’ (referring to the Tennessee Williams play about a seductive child wife in the deep South), that she was entirely wrong for the role and he warned her of this almost immediately. Her determination made him curious enough to allow her to audition. After she sang Lisl’s song, she sensed he was going to tum to her down.

&nb
sp; ‘You should see me with blonde hair,’ she pressed. ‘I bleached it once and even my mother thought I was gentile.’ Impressed with her voice, Blum suggested she apply her efforts more to singing.

  With the few dollars she had, she began voice lessons. Her teacher, found through an advertisement in a theatre magazine, had once sung minor roles in a small opera company, and spent entire lessons on vocal exercises and voice production. ‘I feel that singing is a natural thing,’ Barbara said, recalling those lessons and how she was being taught to form sounds. ‘It is an extension of speaking on a heightened level.’ The singing lessons, which she had also found disturbing due to her chronic ear problem, came to an abrupt end.

  The clicks and buzzing that she had once heard in her ears had evolved into a high-pitched noise, not a ringing that was spasmodic, but continuous. She never heard the silence. She had her ears examined and was told about her condition and that she had supersonic hearing. ‘I hear high-range, high-pitch noises off the machine,’ she explained. ‘But I also hear this noise. There were periods in my life when I was very unhappy and it would drive me nuts ... I had this secret. I never told anybody. I didn’t want to be different. I felt totally abnormal. It made me listen very carefully to life. I would listen like nobody listened. But it’s not good, it’s not fun. I’m like inside my body, I hear my body. I’m very aware of my body’s functions. It’s very frightening.’

  This distressing affliction played a critical role in how she interpreted lines, lyrics and music. She could feel the cadences, the change in rhythm, the silence between beats. She could move effortlessly from the deeper chest sounds to the higher pitched head sounds, an ability that usually takes years of musical training to achieve. At the same time, since she heard things more clearly and sharply than most musicians, when she sang she was conscious of every small imperfection in her voice. She seldom listened to the radio because on the simple machines to which she had access the fidelity was poor and caused her to concentrate on the defects.

  Shortly after the tum down by Eddie Blum, she cashed her last unemployment cheque and joined the Actors Co-op which consisted of a group of somewhat desperate out-of-work performers all hoping for an appearance in a legitimate theatre where they would be seen and reviewed. They leased the small off-Broadway Jan Hus Theater in Yorktown, Manhattan’s German centre and, mysteriously, chose the brothers Karel and Josef Čapek’s play, The Insect Comedy,1 a satire on human society and totalitarianism. Written in 1920, all the actors in the play were citizens of an insect world. Streisand had three roles; as a butterfly, a moth and as Aparthera Clythia, a messenger.

  Also in the company was Barry Dennen, a slim, dark-haired, charismatic young actor from Los Angeles, California, who was cast as a cricket and a snail. ‘The whole production was slapped together,’ Dennen remembers. ‘It was unspeakable, tacky, awful, and Barbara was hysterically funny. She was young, endearing, and exceptionally serious about becoming an actress.’

  The two were drawn to each other. Dennen, who had attended UCLA and was several years older than Barbara, came from a well-to-do West Coast Jewish family. Lean, lithe, bronzed by the sun which he loved, Dennen was most appealing. He was also well educated and possessed innate style. He was to be Streisand’s first grand attraction and her mentor. Multi-talented, he could do mime, comedy or drama, had a unique singing style, was dedicated to theatre and dreamed eventually of becoming a director.2

  They shared a sense of far-out humour and began to create short skits that had nothing to do with the Čapeks’ play. In one, Barbara was Mae West and Dennen was an unscrupulous diamond smuggler who has forced a poodle to swallow the gems so that he can get them past customs. ‘Whatsa matter with your animal?’ Barbara would ask in her most seductive Mae West voice. This double entendre would be accompanied by a provocative sway of her shoulders and a raised eyebrow. They never got to Dennen’s reply because they would be laughing so hard.

  The Insect World closed on 11 May 1960, after three performances. ‘No one [in this play] claimed to be anything like a pro ...’ wrote the reviewer from the World Telegram and Sun. This was Barbara’s first major press notice and it did nothing to get her career off to even a slow start. Her financial situation was desperate. She and Marilyn were about to be evicted from their apartment.

  She refused to go to Diana and Brooklyn. ‘If I could sing like you, I’d know what to do,’ Marilyn prodded. ‘I’d try to get a singing job. All you need is a demo tape to give to an agent.’ In view of their dire circumstances, Streisand agreed singing might be preferable to sleeping on a park bench. The problem was that making a tape would cost money that she did not have. Then she recalled that Dennen, suggesting they might record their comedy routine, had told her he owned an excellent Ampex stereo tape recorder and two good mikes.

  The next day she appeared at his apartment with Carl Esser in tow. ‘We spent the afternoon taping [the song ‘Day by Day’], and the moment I heard the first playback I went insane,’ Dennen later related. ‘I knew here was something special, a voice the microphone loved ... But I thought she had a better chance of getting an agent if she was performing somewhere. There was a club across the street from where I lived [on West Ninth Street in the Village], called The Lion. They had a talent contest on Thursdays. If she would actually walk in there and sign up, I would work with her on a set of songs, help her choose the material, and direct her act.’ Her terms reversed the order. If she thought she had a chance after his coaching then she would sign up. Dennen agreed.

  For the first time Barbara used a microphone. Transfixed by the experience, she spent hours experimenting with it, learning how to shade her voice, project it without strain. Under Dennen’s fevered tutelage she mastered microphone technique in a matter of a few days, adding her own instinctive touches, never pausing to breathe in the middle of a lyric thought, bringing the instrument closer to her lips to enhance the intimacy of a phrase. Her phrasing – good to begin with – improved even more. Dennen pushed her as hard as he could and she responded with more questions, repeating a song dozens of times before she was satisfied with her interpretation.

  At the end of a week, he accompanied her to The Lion, standing over her as she inscribed her name as Barbra Streisand on the audition sheet. It was not an accident, she told him later. There were too many Barbaras and she wanted to be different. She did, however, want to keep her last name so that everyone in Brooklyn would know it was her when she became famous. Dennen had recorded her practice sessions and played them back for her to study. The newly named Barbra Streisand was confident she was on the road to stardom, a belief that drove her to rehearse at fever pitch for the audition, not stopping until both of them were too exhausted to continue.

  Dennen had made arrangements for her of ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ and ‘Lover Come Back to Me’, a ‘switch’, that is a song usually sung in slow tempo but given an up-tempo driving beat. He conceived ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ as a set theatre piece, evolving the character of the girl in the lyric story through various moods. It was a perfect choice, enabling Streisand to watch an imaginary bee who sleeps in the palm of her hand. Dennen told her the Jamaican legend of the insect which won’t fly away, which won’t sting you if you have found true love. Under his direction her graceful hands created a unique stage picture as she acted and sang to this tiny, fantasy creature which somehow seemed unbelievably real.

  Demanding and tough, Dennen worked her hard, phrase by phrase, ‘trying this, trying that, shaping gestures, timing, the kind of effect Barbra and I wanted’. She lent herself willingly to his strict instruction, picking up on everything he told her, adding her own improvements both musically and interpretatively; an unexpected change of key, a word given surprising stress. He warned her not to interact with the audience while she was performing as this would destroy the reality she was creating in her song. He taught her how to be still and yet commanding as she waited to begin her act, what to do with her hands, how to stand, how to sit, how to hold a m
icrophone, how to look out at an audience without seeing them. He insisted she treat each song as if it was a short, crucial scene in a drama, to play a part with music and lyrics. She was a voracious student and by the end of the week had progressed from amateur to the threshold of professionalism. Clearly, they were a good creative team.

  Dennen was falling in love with her but he also recognised her distinctiveness and her vast untapped talent. There was something almost obsessive about his need to develop her into a professional performer, which she had not been when they first began to work together. He later told this author, ‘Barbra was my creation, at least I created her musical taste and gave her support, confidence and the direction she needed to be able to do anything.’

  Although she recognised just how much Dennen could contribute to her future, she never appeared grateful. Dennen did not expect her to be. She had become enamoured with herself and he believed that quality was one that would have a positive effect on her performance. Whatever satisfaction he gained from helping her metamorphose into an exciting performer was her repayment. To Barbra, Dennen’s considerable help and encouragement were deemed a small measure of compensation for all the years of being put down by Diana and that she considered was due from someone whom she loved.