Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Although Dennen had not yet found a theatre job that could pay his rent, he lived at a considerably higher standard than other struggling actors in a ’small, but modern, clean cockroachless apartment at 69 West Ninth Street’ which he paid for with the help of his parents. In Barbra’s eyes, the flat with its paisley fabric walls, black leather chairs and massive plants in containers made of bamboo, was the essence of sophistication. Dennen had flair and his two rooms, plus kitchen and bathroom, had been smartly turned out on a modest budget. He also had quality hi-fi equipment and an amazing collection of more than a thousand records of the great entertainers of the twentieth century which he had shipped from his family home on the West Coast.

  Dennen’s parents owned an estate in the fashionable stretch of Coldwater Canyon off Sunset Boulevard. His brother and he each had their own small house set a short distance from the main building with a swimming pool between them. Barbra never tired of hearing him describe the glamorous decor of that home, what the staff were like, and the parties the family hosted, movies shown in a private projection room, cocktail parties by the pool, huge barbecues, all attended by the rich and sometimes famous. She was impressed.

  Dennen now proposed she move in with him. The decision was not difficult for they had developed an unusual closeness and she had been evicted from her former apartment. Not only was she dependent upon his emotional and financial support, she was in love. While preparing for her audition at The Lion, they entered into a physical relationship. Although she had been attracted to several young men during her early Village days, Dennen was her first real affair, and the only man she had lived with. She had not given up her prime ambition to be an actress, but she was now convinced that goal would be attainable if she could make a name for herself as a singer who was an actress. Phrasing, choice of material, putting together a class act was what was needed and her instincts told her that Dennen could expedite this.

  Always together, in what free time they had he dragged her to thrift shops and costumiers to get together some outfits to wear in her act when she won the contest – he was so sure she would. He had an unerring eye for spotting the one elegant scarf, pair of gloves or shoes in a pile of junk, and Barbra was a fast learner who instinctively knew how to put together the bits and pieces of old-world elegance they found to make an intriguing and fashionable ensemble. The finished result, if somewhat bizarre, was a look that would be remembered.

  This was at the time of the mid-calf hemline ushered in by Dior with skirts worn over several full petticoats, of wholesome vocalists such as Doris Day and Dinah Shore, of night-club singers gowned in glitzy gold and sequins. By contrast Barbra combined a short 1920s dress with coloured stockings and T-strapped twenties shoes with four-inch heels. For another costume, a boa in bright crimson was slung around the shoulders of an oyster-white Victorian negligée. Together Barbra and Dennen found extraordinary paste necklaces, dangly earrings and Venetian glass bracelets that she wore as she walked around the Village so that they became comfortable, old friends. She was costumed rather than dressed but she had gained a new persona. To some she looked kookie in her flea-market attire, but there was no doubt that she stood out from the crowd and that if she was viewed with a fashion-trained eye she was more avant than derrière garde.

  At the end of this frantic week of transformation, she was ready. The talent contest, they both believed, would lead to her debut as a cabaret performer. The contest was held on 2 July 1960, a muggy, airless evening. Barbra had celebrated her eighteenth birthday the previous April. She looked older by a few years.

  The Lion was a ‘crummy’ back room with tables where they served a limited menu. Summers, when their customers liked to go to Fire Island or various other beach areas, were slow. To stimulate business the owner had inaugurated a Thursday night talent contest, the winner to receive $50 a week for a two-week engagement and all the food and drink he or she could consume. The food offer was a great incentive to the hard-up young actress, who loved to eat. The Lion was not the hottest small club in town, but it was a good showcase for performers and was frequented by agents and scouts looking for new talent.

  Among her six or seven competitors that evening were a comedian, a black blues singer and a duo who sang Broadway show songs. The room was dimly lit. There was no stage, just a dark area in front of the piano like a small dance floor. The comedian went first. Then came Barbra. Dennen handed her music to the accompanist and then held her back for a moment and asked for a spot. A few moments went by and a pink light came on. She stepped up to the piano looking like a bird of paradise, eyes outlined in blue, a silver and gold blouse with large Elizabethan sleeves worn over a shocking-pink fuchsia skirt a daring inch above the knee, chocolate brown stockings and her T-wrapped 1927 gold and silver vamp shoes with accents of red. A bang hid part of her forehead, the rest of her dyed auburn hair was piled up atop her head with an added hairpiece for extra height.

  Glasses were lowered to study this apparition as she stood behind the microphone in the pink light. She should have looked simply weird. Instead she was startling, breathtakingly unique. She boosted herself on to the seat of a stool. She was chewing bubblegum and as she waited for silence (as Dennen had told her she must) she took the gum out of her mouth and stuck it under the seat – her own innovation. The audience laughed and immediately warmed to her.

  Seated out front was a young, struggling actor named Dustin Hoffman who had been attending acting classes with her. ‘I thought: “What a smart girl,”’ he recalled, reflecting on that night. ‘It was a seemingly natural act but it had method to its madness. It was quite provoking, and suddenly, out of this amiable ant-eater, came this magic.’ She sang ‘Sleepin’ Bee’ in a melting, completely original voice, nasal at times, that rose to the ceiling, circled the small, crowded, smoke-filled room and in the end brought the house to its feet (so much for agent Ralph Mann’s dour prediction that this would never occur). The acts that followed had lost before they began.

  Barbra Streisand had arrived.

  Now that she had unleashed her voice, she realised its power and range. Despite her youth, it was none the less a mature woman’s voice with a certain nasal urgency that was nothing like the youthful yearning, the throaty vulnerability that was so recognisably Judy Garland’s at that same age. And when she sang, Brooklyn was lost – unless she chose to incorporate it for fun into a line. She became whoever she chose to be.

  The amazing thing was how she learned so quickly to turn a song into a vignette, create an entire scene. To broaden her limited knowledge of vocal styling, Dennen played her countless records and tapes – Ruth Etling, Helen Morgan, Lee Wiley, Ethel Waters, Mabel Mercer, Shirley Temple, Fanny Brice and Fred Astaire – all performers who possessed strong individual styles. They would analyse and study the songs these artists sang. He recorded Astaire and Rogers dances from televised re-runs of their old films, and – a fine dancer – Dennen would whirl around the room with her, jumping on and off the bed and furniture in imitation of that great dance team.

  A friend of Dennen’s from California, Ira Levy, also lived in the Village and would join them with another friend, Stan Gurell. ‘We would do an entire review in Barry’s living room. All of us singing – but mainly Barbra – songs starting from the tum of the century and continuing on pretty much to the present. Barbra’s voice was amazing. You could tell she had a future. And it was incredible how fast she got the period sounds – pre-World War One, the twenties, the thirties. She was terrific.’

  Despite the comfort of his upbringing, Dennen’s childhood and youth had been lonely as his parents had been preoccupied with their own lives. He longed for the sense of family that he felt he had missed. Marriage did not seem the answer for he was not yet prepared for such a step either emotionally or financially. But he welcomed with fond approval the fans, feathers, costume jewellery and vintage clothing that kept closet doors from closing; the Tiffany-style lamps that she had seized upon and that he had bought for h
er at a good price in their scavenging through the back rooms of thrift shops; the idiosyncratic collection of period bibelots, additional recording equipment, and the dozens of candles with which she lit their private dinners when she cooked. His modest-sized flat was crowded and overflowing with things that evoked her eclectic personality. ‘Barbra had fully moved in and made the apartment her home,’ he says. Still, it was not truly hers and the life she led with Dennen was filled with humiliations as well as with exciting highs. Believing his father would cut off his support if he knew he was living with Barbra, Dennen insisted she did not answer the telephone and introduced her to the doorman of the building as his cousin. This charade was kept up, although it is doubtful that the apartment staff were ever fooled.

  Streisand was convinced she was deeply in love with Dennen. He possessed a prodigious memory and she was learning from him about music, history, politics. Ideas bounced back and forth between them. An eager pupil, she challenged him at every tum. She trusted and believed in his taste in clothes, decor and above all – music; consuming and squirrelling away everything he had to give her. She had found that she had learned more about acting from interpreting the lyrics of the songs than she had in most of her combined acting classes.

  During her two-week run at The Lion, Dennen was there every evening taking notes on her performance and the reaction of the audience. And he would work with her on new numbers. ‘I would pick material that was excellent musically,’ Dennen explains, ‘that would show off her voice and also songs that were unusual, forgotten, or outrageous. It was my idea to have her perform [later] “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” in front of New York’s cleverest and sharpest [cabaret] audience.’3

  Her affair with Dennen was something quite apart from first love. It was the beginning of learning to love herself. He was intelligent, possessed tremendous energy, talent, originality of thought and good taste and he had chosen her, believed she had the potential of becoming something spedal – a star. He also found her sexy, appealing. More unsure of himself at the time than his bravura indicated, Dennen benefited greatly from the knowledge that he had discovered someone original, bound for success and that her trust in him validated his own worth. His most important lesson to her as an artist was to show her that she could display her acting ability within the framework of a song; his greatest contributions to her as a woman were to help her feel beautiful, desired and confident.

  Her two-week engagement at The Lion ended on 16 July. The best cabarets in New York would be closed for the month of August. Impatiently, she waited while the scorching late summer days stripped Manhattan of much of its glamour. Heat steamed up from the sidewalks, trapped between the tunnels of high-rises. Streets smelled pungently of burning rubber and baked-in waste matter. The fire department turned on the fire hydrants in the poor sections so that the kids could dart in and out of the water to cool off. Those who could packed their weekend bags for the country. Barbra remained in the city, hardly leaving Dennen’s apartment.

  He was preparing her for an audition at the Bon Soir, one of the most sophisticated and popular cabaret rooms in the Village. He was very strict with her, working on the act for hours on end. Dennen’s good friend, Bob Schulenberg, arrived in the city from Los Angeles on the last day of The Lion engagement. Dennen met him at the airport and brought him down to the Village.

  ‘The first time I saw her we were walking down Sixth Avenue,’ Schulenberg remembered. ‘Barbra approached us with two shopping bags in each hand and out of them were coming feathers, sequins, net, all sorts of accessory stuff, lots of it ... She had little wisps of eyeliner and darkened eyelids under her brow. Her wide and generous mouth was accentuated with mahogany-purple lipstick ... Her earrings were glass balls that seemed to hang all the way down to her thorax and she had an assortment of necklace chains with glass interspersed and she had a dozen exquisite Venetian-glass bracelets on one arm, plus rings on practically all the fingers of her two hands. Outside of The King and I no one had looked that way ever, even on the streets of Greenwich Village.’

  Schulenberg, a talented illustrator, make-up man and designer, was not so much taken aback as he was impressed. ‘I found her extraordinary from the beginning. She was just so amazing. I never encountered someone with so many ideas and so many wishes, so many desires. We three became a kind of trio. We would terrorise the town, do numbers at the various clubs [to call attention to themselves], even tried to steal pottery from tables at restaurants.

  ‘[She and Barry] talked about getting married and I was shocked. I was just really stunned,’ Schulenberg says. ‘They were very young. As I remember, Barbra was only eighteen and Barry twenty-one.’ Dennen was rehearsing a role in Measure for Measure in a Shakespearean series being presented in Central Park. When she was on her own, Schulenberg would see that she was occupied. They became good friends. ‘I think she was the most intelligent person I’d ever met. She had a great understanding of what she read and tremendous curiosity. If you were introdudng a new topic to her she pelted you with questions. I don’t recall her ever putting me off with a feminine tract. She was just her own person. There are certain woman who don’t act like men but are people without any of the constrictions. Barbra was the first woman I had met that was like that. At the same time an intriguing aura of naïveté clung to her.

  ‘I think I took her to the first [elegant] restaurant she’d ever been to ... a chic midtown smörgåsbord restaurant. She was fasdnated by this huge table full of strange food. She would feel the texture of everything with her fingers. There was this marvellous orgiastic tactile experience of touching all the food ... “Look at this,” she’d sigh. It was wonderful to watch. It was also poignant because you realised it was such a thrill for her. Doing things with Barbra in those days was like the first time it had ever been done.’

  She auditioned for the Bon Soir on a humid Sunday evening in late July. ‘This is the beginning of something,’ she remembered thinking on the way to the club with Dennen, Schulenberg and Bark McHugh, an older off-Broadway producer Dennen knew who was also a scout for new cabaret talent and who had arranged the audition. When a cool breeze suddenly rose she felt a chill through her entire body. She has recalled that she felt different, surer of herself that evening. She walked so fast the men had a difficult time keeping up with her.

  The Bon Soir was a Mafia-owned cellar club. The gay bar at the rear of the one large room it occupied existed through policy pay-offs. The club was known for its all-black company of regular performers, who included Mae Barnes, ‘a five-by-five singer with dark saucer eyes, a grainy powerhouse voice, and the sassiest good-time spirit ever to haunt a night-club stage’, as well as the Tiger Haynes Trio, each member a spectacular solo musician. It was also an important showcase for coming white performers – Kaye Ballard, Phyllis Diller and Dick Cavett among them.

  With the club closed on Sundays, they entered through a rear door that led down a steep, dimly lit flight of stairs. The place was almost entirely in darkness. Only a few tables were occupied by the management and some employees. One overhead spot was illuminated. The respected guitarist Tiger Haynes watched her from across the room as she went over to the accompanist, the Englishman Peter Daniels, and discussed the music she had just handed him – ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ – and then went up on the narrow stage and positioned the microphone. A sense of command pervaded her attitude. The Bon Soir was several times larger than The Lion and although it was in the Village it had a reputation that brought New York’s most sophisticated uptown cabaret-goers to its cellar doors on Eighth Street.

  Her usual ‘bizarre’ attire was abandoned because of the intense heat for a simple, sleeveless brown cotton dress. Her hair was piled high on top her head. She insisted on a blue rather than a pink spotlight and the effect was startling. She looked like a Modigliani painting. A shock ran through the darkened, silent room the moment she started to sing, a spine-tingling urgency behind every note. The sound was pure, commanding, her phrasin
g remarkable. It was an astonishing performance. She played to that nearly empty room as though every chair was filled and the phantom occupants raptly listening to her. The magic in her voice was tangible. ‘It looks good,’ Bark McHugh told Dennen when she had finished. Tiger Haynes’s girlfriend, a diminutive woman named Bea, came over to Streisand and said, ‘Little girl, you got dollar signs written all over you!’

  ‘Yeah? You really think so?’ she grinned. ‘Maybe you can tell the management.’

  Her salary was $108 a week for a two-week engagement. She was only to be the featured artist. Comedian Phyllis Diller was the headliner. ‘Hey!’ Barbra told one friend. ‘This is only the beginning. Next time the stakes will be higher and the place classier.’

  ‘It’s curious,’ Bob Schulenberg confided, ‘I always thought Barry would be the legend and Barbra the cabaret performer.’ The two men had first met on the set of an amateur film that Dennen had written when they both were attending UCLA. ‘He was a brilliant performer, very clever. He did performances of Les Fourberies de Scapin that I designed at UCLA and his French was so impeccable that everyone thought he was French. He’s an amazing performer. A perfectionist, a visionary. He always brought something new to the character he played.’

  Schulenberg had been an assistant art director for Berman Costumes in Hollywood, and had designed for the Ice Capades. He had arrived in New York to start a job as art director for the firm of West, Weir and Bartell, which was where – as coinddence would have it – Shelley was now employed. ‘I liked him very much, but I had the sense that he was a little embarrassed by Barbra, at least at that point in time.’ A great fan of both contemporary and legendary cabaret artists, Schulenberg had been overwhelmed with admiration for Barbra when he first heard her sing. He also felt that proper make-up would add much to her appearance.