by Anne Edwards
Once in Detroit, and wanting to make herself seem more interesting, she developed an exotic story to tell the press: she was born in Turkey. The local newspaper hailed her as ‘the Turkish-born, Brooklyn-raised songstress in a big hurry, with a totally untrained but remarkably true voice’.
An appearance on one of the popular television talk shows, she believed, would speed her ascent to heady stardom and she began to call and haunt the various programme bookers. ‘I said no to Barbra Streisand,’ bragged Bob Shanks, a talent co-ordinator for the Tonight Show, which was aired nationally every week night.3 Streisand refused to accept his negative response and kept calling. ‘Everybody in the business says you’re so sensitive and understanding about talent that I’ve got to talk to you,’ she told him. ‘I need your advice.’
She then explained in a most dramatic fashion that her mother was gravely ill in Cleveland and anxious for her to return home to marry a childhood sweetheart, whom she did not love. ‘If you could give me only one chance so that she could see me on the Tonight Show, it would keep me here and launch my career,’ she begged in such a poignant manner that Shanks was taken in.
‘Paar [who thought she was too overtly Jewish in looks and manner] didn’t think she was right for his show,’ Shanks says. But as fate would have it, Orson Bean – who had seen her at the Bon Soir and been overwhelmed by her talent – was to take over as guest host for Paar on 5 April and agreed with Shanks’s suggestion to book her. She interrupted her engagement in Detroit and flew – half-terrified, she had never been on a plane before – to New York to appear on her first national television show. Phyllis Diller was also on the programme. Looking fresh and young in a short, slim black dress with spaghetti shoulder straps – an outfit counselled by Schulenberg who told her that simple and elegant were also attention grabbers – she sang ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ and then somewhat nervously walked over to sit down between Diller and Bean.
‘This is so exciting,’ she beamed wide-eyed, her modish dress hiked several inches above the knees of her curvaceous crossed legs. ‘All these people and cameras and lights and people!’ She came off as this naïve, natural Brooklyn kook and the audience loved her.
Her television debut bolstered her self-confidence. She felt natural performing before the camera and not having to concern herself with a judgmental cabaret audience. This eased her tension and she talked glibly, sounding a bit oddball, but very likeable. She was, in effect, playing herself. This allowed her to capitalise only on the parts of her personality that she thought would create an interesting character, and she was right.
Immediately after the Tonight Show she flew back to Detroit and then went on to St Louis, from where she wrote Barry Dennen a businesslike letter asking him to send her the guitar chords he had arranged for ‘A Taste of Honey’. She added that maybe he could come up with a substitute for ‘Lover Come Back to Me’ as the closing of her act.
He answered her request and suggested ‘Cry Me a River’, a plaintive song that Julie London had successfully recorded. She returned to New York with tapes of the local radio shows on which she had appeared during her tour. ‘We went over them as we had at an earlier time,’ Dennen says. ‘I told her how to improve her performance, what songs to include in her repertoire: they were basically the ones she would later do in her first album. In May 1961, she came to my apartment one afternoon and we recorded “A Taste of Honey”.’ The reunion was not an easy one. ‘We both felt bitter, misused, sad,’ Dennen said. The love affair was over. They saw each other occasionally over the next few months, the meetings initiated by Streisand, who continued to seek his advice on musical arrangements. Then she simply stopped calling.
‘Barbra loved Barry, but it was much more than that,’ Schulenberg insists. ‘She respected him as a teacher, a driving force. When it didn’t work out between them, she was terribly hurt. She reacted by refusing to take advice from anyone.’
She appeared again at the Bon Soir shortly after her tour, including ‘Cry Me a River’ in her act, twisting the original concept of ‘a repentant lover who had come back for a second chance’ into a story about a once-scorned woman demanding tears of loss from the man who had involved her in a hurting relationship. ‘When I sang that,’ she admitted later, ‘I was thinking of one particular person; I tried to recreate in my mind the details of his face.’4 Barry Dennen.
Unquestionably, Streisand owed a great deal to Dennen, but she was also driven to succeed. No doubt she would have landed on top without Dennen’s coaching. None the less, he helped her speed up the progress. Once her transmogrification had occurred, she no longer needed him and she did not treat him kindly in the future when they happened to meet. ‘When she’s done with you, she’s done with you,’ another close associate observed. ‘When her need for you is over, so is the relationship.’
Although she expected them to do so, neither the tour nor her one appearance on national television catapulted her to stardom. She was nervous, anxious, once more insecure. What had happened? What had she done wrong? Why hadn’t she been offered a recording contract, a Broadway show, a screen test? ‘Here I am! Look at me!’ had been her attitude. Each day that passed without something spectacular happening in her career seemed a rejection. She suffered mood swings, ate compulsively and still lost weight. She did, however, undertake a three-week highly successful return engagement at the Bon Soir which counteracted some of her depression. But she was broke.
‘Usually at the end of an engagement,’ Tiger Haynes mused, ‘the performers gave the musicians a gift. I got tons of cufflinks and cigarette lighters from [other acts]. Streisand was so poor that she gave each of us a package of cheese in little wedges. Stamped in purple on the back was the price – ninety-nine cents.’ But to Streisand giving food was giving love and it would remain one of her favourite gifts for many years.
With no immediate work in sight and refusing to return to Brooklyn, she once again dragged her portable army cot around from a cousin’s sublet for a night or two, to Peter Daniels’s studio, to one acquaintance’s pad to another. Frantic, Diana would call Shelley when she could not locate her. ‘Do something, Shelley! Do something!’ she would scream.
‘I never questioned Barbra,’ he says. ‘I admired her spunk, I thought she should be left alone, she should be allowed to do what she wanted.’
Although she had no money, she did have a new manager, Marty Erlichman, a dark, husky man, about a decade her senior. Erlichman, raised in a predominantly Jewish section of the Bronx, was a determined, outspoken man who exuded sincerity and knew how to win over people’s trust. Like Irving Arthur, he had come backstage to meet Streisand after her show at the Bon Soir. Did she have representation? he asked. Yeah, she replied, she did. He gave her a card with a telephone number where he could be reached and told her that if one day she thought she might like to make a change to call him. She liked the way he looked her straight in the eyes, direct. ‘Yuh got many people you represent?’ she asked.
‘You’d make it two,’ he replied honestly, his only other clients at the time being the Clancy Brothers, an Irish folksinging group.
Unhappy with the financial arrangements made by Arthur for the second tour, she telephoned Erlichman from Detroit. ‘You still want to represent me?’ she asked. He flew at his own expense to her side, renegotiated the last two weeks of her contract, getting her free meals along with a raise of $25 dollars a week. What Streisand did not know was that Erlichman paid the extra money out of his own pocket, sure that he would find her a high-paying club date or a role in a Broadway show on her return to New York, but even Erlichman’s fired-up enthusiasm did not land her a job right away.
‘I was pretty hard to reach in those days because I didn’t have a phone,’ Streisand later recalled. ‘Neither did my manager, Marty Erlichman ... All he had was a roll of dimes and a phone booth on 53rd Street. He really believed in me because he sure went through a lot of change.’
She still was living a vagabond style without a
key to her own apartment. ‘I can’t stand it when I read in [a book] that someone has said she was DIRTY, which is so much the opposite of the truth,’ Schulenberg said angrily. ‘She always had beautiful nail care, her hair was clean and so was she! I remember a whole evening with her when she was occupying [a friend] Don Goftness’s office for the night and had to be out before the cleaning crew arrived in the morning – a whole evening she spent steaming and carefully wrapping her clothes in tissue paper – just like every teenager, right?’
She would put all the clothes she did not need in boxes and store them in the apartments of friends along with treasured items collected while living with Barry Dennen. ‘When Barbra left an accommodation she had borrowed for a night or two,’ a former host declares, ‘it didn’t even need a cleaning crew. She was immaculate and always left charming little thank-you notes. If this had not been the case people would not have been so willing to put her up.’
She never gave up auditioning for the theatre and was eventually offered a part in an off-Broadway revue Another Evening with Harry Stoones, with music and lyrics by Jeff Harris. The title was a take-off on the proliferation at that time of recent solo star Broadway appearances such as An Evening with Marlene Dietrich, but the revue had no character named Harry Stoones. The title was a gimmick, meant as a satirical comment. The show opened on 21 October 1961, at the Gramercy Arts Theater, a small house which did not even have a marquee. In the cast were two other newcomers, Dom de Luise and Diana Sands. Streisand contributed her own short and highly imaginative biographical notes for the playbill.
‘I wrote that I was born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon, and attended the yeshiva in Brooklyn,’ she later said. ‘I didn’t want people to read, “Streisand, Brooklyn, yeshiva,” and say to themselves, “Oh yes, I see who she is.”’ She was required to do a great deal of ensemble work which she did not feel was right for her. By the end of rehearsals, she had two solos, ‘Jersey’ and ‘Value’, (also known as ‘I’m in Love with Harold Mengert’). She bombarded the director, G. Adam Jordan, with complaints: the lighting was wrong, the costumes cheesy, the orchestrations too thin. She turned to Peter Daniels for help, with pleas of ‘I’m trapped, I’m trapped’, and he arranged the music on her solos. She felt that it was important that New York audiences and critics see her as more than a cabaret singer.
Another Evening with Harry Stoones closed after its opening night, but it gave her a taste of appearing in the theatre, which she liked. Next time, she told Erlichman, she wanted to move uptown to Broadway and do a full-scale, well-financed musical. Meanwhile, as she was in between engagements at the Bon Soir, she agreed with him that it was important for her to continue to be visible. She made a series of television talk-show guest appearances on the late-night theatrically oriented Joe Franklin Show and then was asked to audition for the low-budget P.M. East hosted by Mike Wallace, which ‘generally had to scrape pretty close to barrel bottom when it came to booking talent’.
Pre-interviews were conducted with the show’s lesser-known guests. ‘I remember [Barbra] was calling from a bar because she not only did not have a phone, she had no apartment,’ said Al Ramus, one of P.M. East’s writer-producers.
‘When I find a place that’s not being used or that has an extra room, I go there,’ she told him. ‘I carry around a bunch of keys my friends gave me so I can get in anywhere. I don’t make much money singing in little places but I have a typical Jewish mother. She waits outside wherever I’m singing till one or two in the morning with frozen steaks’ – an apocryphal story. Diana did bring containers of chicken soup to the Bon Soir but came backstage to give them to her. Streisand went on to tell him a fanciful story about her father: he was a genius who had travelled around the country, a wanderer on a bicycle. As a teenager Manny Streisand had hitchhiked through New Jersey and Pennsylvania one summer and for a brief time had delivered telegrams on a bicycle.
‘The voice was pure Brooklyn ... full of chutzpah ... But there was something about her, even over the phone, that was unique. She was like the essence of every confused, not-very-attractive girl who wanted extravagantly more out of life than birth or circumstances could possibly give her. Her voice, her lifestyle, were almost fictional, they were also so right for the role that I told her – by now it must’ve been past 1 a.m. – that whether she could sing or not she was going to be a star.’ He also arranged for her to audition the next day for the show at the Dumont Studios in midtown Manhattan.
She arrived about twenty minutes late clutching her music and shedding her coat on the floor as she hurried across the empty, unlighted stage. ‘Hey,’ she yelled to the lighting man. ‘Over here! Yeah!’ She grabbed a stool and sat on it, her back was broomstick straight, her legs gracefully posed, her head raised to catch the spot when it flashed on. Her voice soared as she sang ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ to a piano accompaniment.
‘[What happened] sounds like a bad Twentieth Century-Fox musical,’ Ramus commented, ‘but virtually everyone on the set, sound men, lighting men, secretaries ... they all stopped and listened. The night before I told her she’d be a star. Now I was sure of it.’
P.M. East had no studio audience (applause came from the technicians), and it was video-taped, both helpful in making a neophyte television performer feel relaxed. However, the show was built around a theme, which for this particular programme would be glamour. Two ravishing models who also happened to be sisters, Theodora and Suzy Parker, were to be guests along with model agent Candy Jones and photographer Milton Greene, famous for his pictures of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Those models were dressed to kill,’ Streisand later recalled, ‘every hair in place as if they’d been carried on a stretcher from the beauty salon to the Dumont studios.’
Dressed in a sleeveless black dress, a large silver Indian thunderbird pinned to it, her hair piled up in a beehive topped by her ‘Danish pastry’ pastiche she sang ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ seated on a stool and then climbed on to the top of the piano, legs crossed, skirt hiked so that her thigh was seductively visible and gave a scorching up-tempo rendition of ‘Lover Come Back to Me’.
Then she sat down and talked in nasal Brooklynese to Wallace and his guests about her vagabond lifestyle. She was funny, far-out, unabashed – and an instant hit. Wallace, a charismatic personality who would go on to become American television’s most outspoken and highest rated interviewer on SixtyMinutes, knew he had found a ratings’ booster and booked Barbra over a dozen times during the next few months. And he was right. Ratings went up as ‘this kook on TV with the knock-out voice’ became more and more outrageous every week.
‘The part I liked best [about appearing on the show],’ Streisand says, ‘was the talk segment. They never knew what I was going to say. Although sometimes I would suggest a topic – like nutrition, Zen Buddhism or the business about my keyring.’
One evening it would be the evils of drinking milk, which drew an angry response from the Dairy Association; another night she infuriated volatile television producer David Susskind, a guest on the show, by confronting him with a story about the time she had come into his office for an audition and he kept her waiting for hours and then didn’t see her. ‘People like you are ruining show business because you don’t let new talent emerge, you think it’s your duty to squelch them.’ Susskind was stunned and seemed unable to reply to her. ‘I scare you, don’t I?’ she smirked. ‘I’m so far out, I’m in.’
The attack on Susskind, who was fairly powerful in the entertainment world, was bold and foolhardy at the same time. It was not likely that he would want to hire Streisand for a production of his after this assault, but she was getting to enjoy the power such confrontations on live television gave her. When host Mike Wallace told her his show could help her be seen by Broadway producers, she snapped, ‘Now, let’s be honest. Those people don’t watch television, not the ones that do the hiring. A show like this gets the public interested in paying the minimum to see me at places like the Bon Soir.’
In January
1962, ending her appearances on P.M. East, she accepted a club tour to New Orleans, Miami and Chicago, this time with a considerable pay hike which enabled her to put some money aside. When she returned, she began yet another engagement at the Bon Soir. One night Michael Shurtleff, who worked as a casting director for the powerful Broadway producer, David Merrick, visited the club. Merrick, the producer of such stage hits as Fanny, Gypsy, Do Re Me, Carnival and Irma La Douce, was in pre-production of the show, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, based on the 1937 best-seller by Jerome Weidman about the New York garment district. A minor role in the script was that of a fifty-year-old Jewish secretary. The character was given one song about her psychosomatic abhorrence to the drab appellation with which she was continually addressed, ‘Miss Marmelstein’, but the character and the number had been recently cut. When Shurtleff heard Streisand sing at the Bon Soir he was determined to give her an audition with the hope that, hearing her, Merrick would reinstate the song which he greatly liked – with Streisand singing it.
There was one hitch. Merrick only liked beautiful women in his shows. Shurtleff took a hard look at Streisand and knew it might be difficult to convince ‘the abominable showman’, as Merrick was called by his many detractors, to make an exception this time. No less pushy than the lady he wanted to sell to his boss, the previous year Shurtleff had made up his mind that he would work for Merrick, wrote to him once a week for seven months discussing what was good and bad with each of Merrick’s many former Broadway shows. Next, he had mutual friends write to the producer to plead his case. Finally, piqued by curiosity, Merrick agreed to see the offensive letter writer. Shurtleff kept the meeting going for four hours and ended up with a job as casting director.
