by Anne Edwards
‘She was very young and she – well, she didn’t look bad, but I think she thought that she did,’ Schulenberg recalled. ‘That was kind of heart-breaking because I knew how much she wanted to look beautiful and simply did not know how to bring it off. She really had a striking face, marvellous eyes and a profile that was pure Egyptian. I thought she could be really stunning and that I could help her, but it was a difficult, sensitive point. I thought about it a long time and in the end I made a simple drawing of her without any makeup so that I could study her face structure.’
During the month of August, while Dennen was rehearsing in the Central Park production of Measure for Measure, Schulenberg saw Barbra more frequently. During their wanderings about the Village, he gradually convinced her that she needed a make-up makeover. They were to attend Dennen’s opening night together and this seemed to present itself as the perfect occasion. Schulenberg came early to the apartment, armed with a theatrical make-up kit. ‘She had great eyes, a wonderful face. What I did was make cheekbones where there was still baby fat, and I contoured her eyes and feathered some false eyelashes shorter than her own, and I extended the line at the comer of her eyes. With each step I explained to her what I was doing and why. She didn’t have deep-set eyes and so she had to enforce it. The double layer of eyelashes helped that effect. I used heavy grease paint to hide the scars of her skin condition.’
She kept staring at herself in the mirror, turning her face at different angles, mumbling exdted comments. ‘I see! I see! Hey! Not bad, huh?’ She was very pleased, thrilled with the transformation.
Streisand and Schulenberg had been so involved with Barbra’s makeover that they arrived too late at Measure to Measure to see Dennen perform. He was deeply hurt and although they continued to live together, there was now an edge to their relationship. Dennen helped her with the act she was soon to present at the Bon Soir, concentrating on the dramatic presentation. Streisand now had a clear concept of how she wanted to sound and what she wanted to sing – great Harold Arlen songs such as ‘When the Sun Comes Out’, Fats Waller’s ‘Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now’ (sung by her in a breathless, seductive voice), and the childlike ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ which she turned into a campy, lively and raunchy interpretation. They were all included in her new act, which would work around the theme of a young girl’s transition from tease to love awakening to lost love and maturity – every song performed under Dennen’s direction as a mini-drama. Strong-willed, always striving to be at the top of her form, she was clever enough to accept outside ideas when she recognised their worth and she worked tirelessly to take in and adapt all he could contribute to her performance.
She practised her ‘look’ with Schulenberg with equal concentration. He did a portrait of Barbra with half her face made up as he designed it and the other side untouched. She would then take the drawing and all the make-up into the bathroom and patiently attempt to fill in the blank side of the picture on her face so that the two parts would match. When it did not she would scrub her face clean and start over again, sometimes four or five times, a process that often took several hours before she got it right.
Streisand was the centre of a curious trio, badgered and disciplined by two young men who were determined that she succeed – a Brooklyn Eliza Doolittle. But things are not always what they appear. Barbra Streisand’s wish to succeed was even greater than her mentors’ wish for her. Had they been less talented, had they not been able to help her advance her aims, she would have had little time for them. It was not that she was ungrateful. Streisand was in a desperate hurry to arrive at her planned destination and she accepted all that Dennen and Schulenberg could contribute to her growth as a performer.
She believed she loved Dennen, but she had no other experience with a close male-female relationship other than her mother’s disastrous marriage to Kind. She was seeking love and approval, an alliance where she was the centre of attention and Dennen gave this to her. What more could she ask of a man or of an affair?
Footnotes
1 Called The Insect Play in Great Britain, it had John Gielgud in its original 1923 London cast as Felix, a small role. This was Gielgud’s first West End appearance.
2 Barry Dennen would go on to create the show-stopping role of Pontius Pilate in the original Broadway production, film and the first double album of Jesus Christ Superstar. He was also the evil Emcee in the London company of Cabaret, for which he won the Evening Standard Award for Best Actor in 1968. He stayed in England and appeared in the BBC series Oppenheimer, Beau Geste and Pictures. On returning to the United States he had roles in numerous films and on television as a supporting player. More recently he has toured as Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music. In 1992, he won the Dramalogue Award for his performance as the Major-General in the Santa Barbara Light Opera Company’s production of The Pirates of Penzance. He has also written for theatre, films and television.
3 The original arrangement for ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ was done by Peter Daniels.
8
OPENING NIGHT AT the Bon Soir, Friday, 9 September 1960, she walked on stage to a packed house wearing a brown wool-jersey, thrift-shop dress, very tight fitting, a matching cloche hat from the twenties, and a pair of spike-heeled, ankle-strap shoes. Ice cubes clinked in glasses and people engaged in conversation as she tiptoed across the darkened stage to the microphone set up before a high stool. When the spotlight picked her up already seated, the audience took one look and mostly concluded that she was a comedienne.
A wave of terror washed over her. Unlike the audiences at The Lion, these were tough, up-town types who would judge her against the current top cabaret entertainers: Julie Wilson, Anita Ellis, Felicia Sanders, Portia Nelson and the sultry-voiced Julie London. She took a deep breath and began ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ in a hushed throb of a voice, the microphone no more than an inch from her mouth. It was a brave opening. Most cabaret acts started with a spirited number to catch the audience’s attention. A few moments into the song, her voice grew in volume and she extended her arm and open-palmed her hand where the bee was supposed to lie sleeping. Heads turned towards her. People leaned forward in their chairs. She could feel the audience’s attention. They exploded with applause when she ended the song and were entirely hers as she cut their response short and swept into ‘When the Sun Comes Out’ as if ‘she were announcing the eclipse of Western civilisation’.
‘When she got off the stage,’ comedian and impressionist Larry Storch, who was also making his way in the cabaret world, remembered, ‘Barbra was in a kind of a daze. I went to congratulate her. I think I said something like, “Kid, you are going to be a very great star!” Then they pushed her back on stage and, after singing those serious songs, she performed “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” How well planned that was! What a master stroke! It just killed everybody. They made her sing it three times. It was incredible. It was really like a scene from A Star Is Born.’1
Streisand was overwhelmed by the reception she received. There were tears in her eyes as she finished her set, she appeared feverish. More than her talent had been validated. Barbra Streisand had just discovered her power over an audience.
‘I knew that this was a STAR! It was all there,’ Phyllis Diller, who had the top billing that night, emphasises. ‘On her third note, every hair stood up all over my body ... She was a disciplined, devoted worker, a brilliant genius – and she was a child!’
When Diana came to see her on the second night, Barbra had changed her first outfit for a white lace Victorian morning coat and pink satin shoes from the 1920s. Diana was horrified, certain that her daughter was singing in her nightgown. To Barbra, the outfit was beautiful. ‘A few days later I realised people were talking about this girl who sings in these weird clothes. They thought it was a gimmick so I went back to the thrift shop ... I used to get lovely dresses at resale shops where rich ladies got rid of their stuff. What’s to be ashamed of! Those ladies were clean ... Then Phyllis Diller said, “You
can’t wear that stuff,” and took me shopping for a [contemporary] cocktail dress, and I actually put on one. I didn’t want to make her feel bad, but I could never wear it again. It wasn’t me.’
Diana admitted feeling a thrill with her daughter’s auspicious reception. She recognised, perhaps for the first time, the enormity of Barbra’s talent. She was proud and not hesitant in telling Shelley, who had accompanied her, that she didn’t know Barbra could sing so well. Yet, when she greeted her later, she could only criticise what she had worn. ‘Did you like the way I sang, Mama?’ Streisand finally asked.
‘Yeah, you did good,’ Diana replied.
The two women were unable to break their pattern. Diana would always find one thing of which she disapproved, Streisand would continue to seek her approval and feel abused when she did not wholly receive it. Despite her ongoing conflict with her mother, with her twice-nightly engagement at the Bon Soir her confidence grew. She sang five songs in her set and when people would ask afterwards if they could buy her a drink, she would order a baked potato with ‘hard crust and lots of butter’.
‘At the Bon Soir I got special satisfaction out of performing,’ Streisand says. ‘Well, in life I felt, you know, people paid no attention to me. When I would talk it came out so enthusiastically that they would disregard it. All of a sudden, singing, I could say what I felt and I was listened to.’
She battled to overcome nightly sieges of stage fright before she performed.
The cabaret’s regulars were a boisterous group, a mix of gays who packed the bar to ‘shop’ for a pick-up and high-tone, up-town night-club habitués who came to Village boîtes to listen to new talent with an arrogant ‘show me’ attitude. When a performer did, they could be fervent in their response. They could also be tough, daunting and clangorous.
‘What do I do?’ Streisand asked Dennen backstage one difficult night when a group in the audience seemed determined to continue laughing and talking during the act that preceded her. ‘They’re making a lot of noise.’
‘Stare them down,’ Dennen told her. ‘Stand there and think, “Shut up! Listen to me! Look at me!”
She went out front. The room was clouded with smoke and, except for one light over the cash register, in total blackness. Peter Daniels began the introduction to ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’. Conversation whirred, laughter trilled and cackled. Streisand stood there while Daniels repeated the introduction. This happened twice before someone could be heard saying, ‘Shh! Shhh!’ and she started to sing.
After a few performances, she grew easier and would talk to the audience between songs – not much, just to introduce her musicians. ‘Weighing in at 183 pounds in black trunks ...’ she would say in the seductive Mae West voice that Dennen had always thought was so funny. Before the end of her engagement a distinct group of devotees began to form. The word had got around. There was this odd-looking creature, clearly a misfit who sang ‘songs of unrequited love or the sudden, surprise discovery of romance’ in an inimitable voice. Her choice of material was unexpected, and there was simply no one else around who sounded or looked like her. Still, her first reviews were not all raves.
‘At the Bon Soir, Barbra Streisand, singer – file and forget,’ wrote Roger Whitaker in the New Yorker.
‘That old fart! What does he know?’ she snapped defiantly to Dennen, adding that the table section was booked to capacity and there was standing space only at the bar at the back of the room for her twice-nightly performances.
‘She would just do things that you had never heard anybody ever do,’ one regular remembers. ‘She was a hurricane of a certain kind of unbridled passion. She would hold notes until she would turn blue. And she would just gasp at the end of words you know, like uuuhhh! There was always a sort of edge, the sense that she was giving you so much more than you deserved, as opposed to Liza Minnelli [or Judy Garland] who was just begging you to love her. Streisand never did that...’
The Bon Soir raised her salary to $125 a week and extended her engagement for eleven weeks. Streisand was determined that she would use that time to improve her performance. Her lifelong obsession with perfection in whatever she did had begun in earnest, along with the dedicated work ethic she had inherited from her father. During the first two weeks Dennen brought in his tape recorder and fastidiously taped her act. Later they would go over every number, change phrasing, the position of certain songs, the back-up sound. At the end of that time he delegated Bob Schulenberg to look after her and left to visit his family in California, issuing as a final instruction that she was never to call him there as he had not yet discussed their situation with his parents.
Streisand was injured by his dictatorial manner but agreed to his terms. ‘He really cares about me,’ she told Schulenberg. ‘He’ll tell his parents about us in his own time.’
‘There was a certain date when Barry was coming back,’ Schulenberg recalls. ‘That night Barbra got all the things he loved to eat and we set up a beautiful table with a floral arrangement. We even had champagne in the refrigerator. We went to the Bon Soir and left him a note saying, “Eat up, we’ll be back after the show.” We ran back and he was not there. Barbra was really upset. She wondered if he’d missed the plane, but she couldn’t call his family. We sat up until about three in the morning but Barry didn’t call.’
The next night they went through the same procedure and when they returned to the apartment Dennen had still not returned. Days passed without any word from Dennen. She was at turns anxious, tearful and furious. ‘After a week,’ Schulenberg continues, ‘I think Barbra ate up all her emotion for Barry. Finally he came back and she was very cool. She just said, “Hi, how was your trip? Is your family well? Great – [and by the way] I’m still singing at the Bon Soir.”’
She remained at Dennen’s apartment, controlling her anger and her growing hostility to him. The flame was gone and she blamed him for it. He had humiliated and rejected her. In a short time she would manage to obliterate all conscious awareness of his great contribution to her development as a performer and hang on to the injury she believed she had suffered at his hands. She could not let go completely because in truth she still needed Dennen’s direction, but she began to rely more on Peter Daniels, her accompanist, who was now arranging her new material and with whom she had an empathetic alliance. This time, however, there was no sexual relationship and she was in control. She had growing respect for her own taste, perhaps shaped by Dennen but, none the less, now a reflection of herself.
Before her eleven-week engagement at the Bon Soir ended, she agreed to be represented by Ted Rozar, a talent agent who had gone backstage after hearing her sing and told her he wanted to be her manager. Curiously, this was the first inquiry she had received from an agent. The arrangement only lasted a few weeks.
‘They never hit it off,’ Schulenberg explained. ‘I saw him sometime later when they had parted company and he told me that “my little friend” would never make it because she thought she was hot stuff but was too undisciplined for big-time show business.’
She then tried to find another agent, without much luck at first. ‘They were very short-sighted,’ said Irving Arthur, who booked acts at Associated Booking Corporation at the time. ‘Her appearance kind of turned them off. But I had no doubt at all that she was going to be a star.’ He had come down to hear her sing at the Bon Soir and then took her to a nearby coffee shop.
‘I hired my first agent because he took me out for dinner. I could be bought for an avocado,’ she later joked.
Every night near midnight she called to ask, ‘Well? What have you got lined up for me tomorrow?’ An intrusion into his home life that wasn’t appreciated by Mrs Arthur.
‘So who’s this dame who’s calling you every night?’ she would ask him.
He would reply, ‘Just a star.’
She finally moved out of Dennen’s apartment after a serious argument over the tapes he had made of her voice, rehearsals and performances, dozens of them over the six months they
had been together. She wanted the master tapes and Dennen refused. Streisand felt they belonged to her – they were of her voice. Dennen disagreed. He had initiated, directed and recorded the tapes. Neither would give in and there was a bitter, unpleasant parting. ‘The tapes were like children in a divorce,’ Dennen told this author. ‘They represented a lot of things. We broke up as lovers who both felt hurt and misunderstood.’2
Streisand had nowhere to go and very little money. Packing what she had collected during her time with Dennen in boxes and shopping bags and with a folding cot she had acquired, she moved from one nightly ‘safe haven’ to another, refusing to go home to Diana and Brooklyn. She would spend a night or so with Schulenberg, at Peter Daniels’s studio, Irving Arthur’s office, the Millers – anywhere she could hang her hat. Her calls to Irving Arthur became more intense and he was relieved to inform her that he had arranged a tour from March to April 1961. The salary was $250 a week, out of which she had to pay her own living road expenses, which would eat up almost the entire amount. But she would be seen, accumulate reviews and perhaps interest a record company, so she agreed.
Before she left, Shelley took her to lunch. ‘I made her walk three feet behind me because of her clothes [she was wearing one of her more colourful outfits],’ he vividly remembers. ‘People stared at her. She had these horrible rips in the back of her stockings. I offered to buy her a new pair. She said, “They’re not ripped in front and I don’t see them in back, so they don’t bother me,” and refused to change them.’ Shelley, who had recently married, remained as close to her as she would let him. He was in constant touch with Diana and Streisand did not want things she might say to Shelley to go back to their mother. But he was still her big brother, the only immediate male relative she had, and there was a genuine fondness between them.
The tour would take her by train to Detroit, Cleveland and St Louis among other cities. ‘She was half exhilarated, half scared,’ Schulenberg recalls. ‘It was to be her first time out of New York. Finally [the day she was to leave] we packed her bags into a taxi and rode to the train station. Suddenly she asked if she could stop the taxi to get something at a drugstore ... She was late and I knew she would miss the train if we stopped, so I asked her point-blank what it was she had to get. She blurted out, “Do you think they have toothpaste in Detroit?”’ exposing her fear of the unknown she faced, perhaps hoping to delay or postpone it.
