Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  ‘Miss Streisand possesses nothing short of a Chekhovian brand of heart-breaking merriment,’ John Simon enthused in Theater Arts. ‘Gifted with a face that shuttles between those of a tremulous young borzoi and a fatigued Talmudic scholar ... she can also sing the lament of the unreconstructed drudge with the clarion peal of an Unliberty Bell.’

  Most of the reviews had very little to say in favour of the show’s attributes, although Elliott, Kruschen, Roth, Lang, Cooper, North and Linn received good personal notices. But it was Streisand who was lauded as a star discovery. Photo articles in Life and Look, the two picture magazines with the largest national circulation, and a two-page profile in Time appeared shortly after the opening of the show. She was portrayed as a startling, new discovery, but her first name was occasionally spelled with three a’s and interviewers mispronounced Streisand.

  Merrick still had her on a week-to-week contract. He was now forced to renegotiate with Marty Erlichman to make certain she remained with the show for six months. Merrick offered her much the same terms. She refused, which left him with a new star who could leave on a week’s notice. Furious at her ‘attempted blackmail’, he had all her out-front theatre photographs taken down and killed her publicity. ‘So she came to me crying, puzzled,’ Laurents recalled, ‘and I said to her, “Why should he build you up if you’re going to leave?” She said, “Oh ...” and signed an extended contract, but it was renegotiated with better terms for her.’ She was to receive a $50 weekly raise, a sum which hardly made her rich.

  During the rest of their time in the show,4 she and Elliott holed up in the cluttered, ‘remodelled’ flat over Oscar’s, the small rooms littered with her thrift-shop scavenges including a battered dentist’s cabinet filled with old shoe buckles and an apothecary’s jar of faded beauty marks. They would still go down to Elliott’s apartment in the Village to keep up the façade.

  They loved to play games – Monopoly, chess, checkers, cards – and made wild plans. ‘Barbra decided we should speak a secret language nobody else could understand,’ Elliott explained. ‘We swore never to be apart on our birthdays, and we shopped for special presents.’ He gave her a blue marble egg that she cherished. She presented him with a gold cup inscribed ‘First Annual Alexander the Great Award’, since he was a great admirer of the indomitable Greek conqueror.

  Barbra Streisand had not only made it on to Broadway, she had a lover for whom she cared deeply. This should have made her ecstatically happy, but it was not enough. Perhaps nothing ever would be.

  Footnotes

  1 In the other main roles were Sheree North (femme fatale in the show), old-timer Lillian Roth (as Bogen’s mother), Harold Lang (star of the 1952 revival of Pal Joey about another 24-carat heel), Bambi Linn (who had made her debut sixteen years earlier in Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Carousel), and Marilyn Cooper as the ingenue lead.

  2 Laurents wrote the book and Sondheim the score for Anyone Can Whistle. They had also worked together on West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959) for which Sondheim wrote only lyrics. Laurents’s non-musical plays include Home of the Brave, The Time of the Cuckoo, A Clearing in the Woods and Invitation to a March. He also wrote the screenplays for The Way We Were, The Snake Pit, Rope and Anastasia among many others.

  3 The Catskill Mountains, 150 miles north of New York City, were dotted with resort hotels featuring kosher food and catering to a Jewish clientèle.

  4 I Can Get It for You Wholesale closed after eight-and-a-half months and 300 performances on 8 December 1962. In the last ten weeks of the run, Barbra Streisand was replaced by Louise Lasser. Elliott Gould was replaced by Larry Kert at about the same time.

  10

  THEY EXISTED IN a romantic aura. Hurtful memories of Barry Dennen were assuaged by Elliott’s honest love and affection. There was something childlike in their relationship, artless, natural. They did not have to put on airs with each other. Both were Jewish and from Brooklyn. She never had to prove herself to Elliott as she had felt obliged to with Dennen. They shared the same far-out humour; they were conspirators; it was them against the world. She thought he was an intuitively gifted actor, that all he had to be was himself – a funny, crazy person – and he would succeed. She felt safe with him, protected, small, feminine. She liked watching him pull his big mitt-like hands through his thick, dark, curly hair; was touched when he gazed endearingly at her with his enormous velvet brown eyes, found the deep cleft in his chin sexy. He had a cuddly teddy bear quality about him and yet he was this enormous fella 6’3" tall, weighing 206 pounds. She believed she loved Elliott.

  Elliott never doubted the depth of his feelings for her. ‘It was my love that powered the relationship,’ he confesses. ‘I don’t think Barbra knew how to love me back. She was incapable of real love because she never had it from her father, and I don’t think she ever came to terms with that. So I gave her something she had never had before: a true, normal, natural love. But I never was able to accept that she didn’t know how to love me back. I felt it was my fault ... I told her once, “Your mother thinks affection is something people use to get something.” Barbra replied, “That’s why I am the way I am.”’

  She played the seductress but sex was given as a reward. She was, he admitted, self-involved, happiest when he was concentrating on her problems. He was convinced he could change all that. He had never had a strong man–woman relationship before. He loved her unreservedly and thought she was beautiful when she awoke all rumpled in the morning. He considered her the smartest person he ever knew and the most talented. He found it difficult to keep his hands off her – she was incredibly sexy to him. He wanted to get married and move into an apartment that did not stink of fish. She wanted to wait.

  ‘I don’t think she even wanted to marry me,’ Elliott says in retrospect. ‘I dwelled on it and insisted. I sublimated my own personality in my quest to please Barbra ... I so needed attention that I overcompensated by being good to Barbra, believing I would get it that way, overly trying to please. I really loved her. My love for her was pure and never exploitative nor opportunistic. She once said she thought I loved her more than anyone else could. Maybe that’s right.’

  He was understanding and supportive of the long hours she worked during the show’s run, as she was ‘doubling out’ after the show, appearing late at night – first at the Bon Soir and then the Blue Angel and then back again at the Bon Soir. Her stamina was tremendous. She would go straight from final curtain to a waiting taxi and on to the cabaret where she was performing. During the days when there wasn’t a matinée she would often tape guest spots on TV. On 29 May, not long after Wholesale opened, she created a sensation on the Garry Moore Show. Every week Moore celebrated a particular year in music. The chosen date for the show with Streisand’s segment was 1929, remembered always as the year the stock market crashed. For Streisand’s appearance, the Emmy-winning writer and musical director of the show, Ken Welch, chose to use ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, a Depression song usually sung up-beat and associated with political conventions.

  When she expressed her discomfort with singing the number as written, Ken Welch and his talented writer-wife, Mitzie Welch, wrote a verse for it and created a scene where a woman had lost all her money and most of her jewels in the crash. Adding to the irony of the song, they had Streisand seated alone in a plush night club. She splurges and orders champagne. A smartly turned-out waiter presents her with the check, she slowly removes her diamond earrings and places them on his tray. A haunting vamp by Ken Welch, that telegraphs the rhythm to come, sets the tone for what has – perhaps more than any one of her numbers – become Streisand’s musical signature. The Welches slowed down the tempo of the song and added some lush, moving chords. The difference was startling. They had given an old standard a fresh and moving new life.

  Her rendition of ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ was memorable. The lyrics no longer connoted the past, nor did they seem to have anything to do with a political party as they once had. The familiar words
and tune took on a poignant irony. Streisand had personalised them, become a woman who had lost in love and security, a model with whom everyone could identify. Immediate interest in her as a recording artist was generated. She cut an audition demo for RCA Records, ten songs from her cabaret repertoire, with Marty Gold, their staff accompanist. Included was an arrangement by Barry Dennen of ‘At the Codfish Ball’, an old Shirley Temple number. RCA were convinced she was uncommercial and to her great disappointment did not sign her.

  Then the cast recording of Wholesale was released and sold well and a record she made along with several other artists as a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Harold Rome’s 1937 revue Pins and Needles, in which she gave a ‘gorgeously funny performance’ of ‘Nobody Makes a Pass at Me’, a precursor to ‘Miss Marmelstein’, netted her good reviews. Both records were produced by Columbia. Erlichman tried to convince them to sign her. The executives there thought she was too removed in style from the commercial scene of pop records.

  Her hopes soared once again when record and cabaret revue producer Bill Bagley approached her to join Carol Channing and Jerry Orbach on an album he was compiling to feature rare songs of the late lyricist John Latouche, who with composer Vernon Duke had written the score to Cabin in the Sky and with Jerome Moross The Golden Apple, both shows critical standouts. Streisand, a tremendous fan of Latouche, was to sing ‘Takin’ a Chance on Love’ from the first and ‘It’s the Going Home Together’ and ‘Lazy Afternoon’ from the latter.1 The rights to the songs, however, were withdrawn shortly before the recording session was to be conducted and the album was abandoned.

  A jazz label, Atlantic Records, which issued mostly singles, now offered her a contract but Erlichman decided they should hold out for an album-producing company. ‘It was a difficult thing to do,’ he confessed, ‘turning down an offer after we had waited so long. And neither of us had much money. But we both thought it would be better not to jump at the first offer just because we were hungry.’

  Early in the run of Wholesale Streisand and Sandy Dennis, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, tied in the New York Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress of 1962. Streisand’s hopes were high that she would win the coveted Tony for the same category in a musical, but she was severely disappointed when it went to Phyllis Newman from David Merrick’s Subway’s Are for Sleeping. She found it difficult to be a good loser. It wasn’t that she doubted the other person’s right to win, rather it made her worry about why she had not won, what was wrong with her performance. On the taxi ride home, up the stairs to their apartment and in the kitchen as they shared a late-night snack (assorted deli meats, pickles and ice cream), she kept up a running inquisition with Elliott on why she had lost the award, finally deciding that she had not had a strong enough speaking role. In the next show – and there would be a next show, she insisted – her part would have to be considerably larger and more central to the story.

  Towards the end of the New York run, Arthur Laurents often drove Elliott and Barbra in his convertible into the country on antique outings. She was a compulsive collector, loved the texture and feel of objects and fabrics, could indulge in an orgy of touching – the curves of a vase, the soft pile of velvet, the cool, hard feel of marble. Elliott shared her enthusiasm, although not with the same consuming passion.

  ‘I never had much as a girl,’ she told him. ‘I like to own beautiful things. It makes me feel rich, even if I’m not.’ She made a habit of keeping a record of what she paid for each item. ‘Well, I might want to sell something one day,’ she said, ‘and it would be dumb if I didn’t remember how much it cost.’

  Wholesale closed on 8 December 1962. ‘I was very friendly with Lena Home and with Anita Ellis, the jazz singer,’ Arthur Laments recalls, ‘and I gave a small party and invited these two ladies and Barbra. I remember Christmas tree trimmings. It was at my house in the Village. Well, Barbra was afraid to even walk into the room. She was odd that way. Obsessed by her own fame at the time, timid of the fame of others. She was in awe of Lena and, if you listen, you will hear some of Lena in her voice – and why not? We take the best we can from the artists we most admire whatever our field of art. You have to have the taste and good sense to pick up the right things from the right people and she certainly did.’

  Erlichman did not want her to lose the momentum she had gained from her Broadway debut. She appeared on three segments of the new Johnny Carson Tonight Show which was filmed in New York. She then flew out to California to tape an appearance on the popular weekly Dinah Shore Show. It was the first time she and Elliott were separated. ‘It was hell,’ Streisand admitted. ‘I had to be out there for seven days and I cried every day.’

  Within a short time, she grew more accustomed to their separations as Erlichman secured an engagement for her at Mr Kelly’s in Chicago and the Hungry i in San Francisco. Erlichman was commanding $5,000 a week for her by the time she returned to New York for an engagement at the extremely popular upscale cabaret, Basin Street East. Her new wealth gave her a sense of independence. With her ability to demand this kind of money had come power and she liked the feeling.

  Then the moment that she and Marty Erlichman had been waiting for suddenly happened. Goddard Lieberson had been following her career ever since Laments had first sent her to him. One of the problems, he claimed, was that in listening to an in-performance cabaret tape she had made at the Hungry i,2 he could not tell if she was black or white. Erlichman persuaded him to come to the Blue Angel and hear her live. Lieberson liked what he heard and agreed to sign her to a five-year contract with Columbia Records.

  By forfeiting an even larger up-front payment – she received $20,000 which seemed a fortune to her – Erlichman gained her complete artistic control, most unusual for all but well-proven and top-selling recording artists. But Lieberson believed she was going to be a big asset to his company. Hers would be the final say, from the quality of studio recording to the design of the album cover, a precedent that would influence all her future business contracts. Power was the operative word, and with artistic control she had it.

  Before recording her first album, she cut a single 45 rpm record in the Columbia studio on 30th Street: ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ on the A side, ‘When the Sun Comes Out’, the Harold Arlen classic, on the back. The record went nowhere. This was followed by a second release, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s ‘My Coloring Book’ on one side, ‘Lover, Come Back to Me’ on the flip side; it did not sell either. Erlichman and Columbia executives met to discuss the album Streisand was to make. She did not feel comfortable recording in a studio, he explained. She needed a live audience and familiar surroundings. Columbia agreed to have her record in performance at the Bon Soir with Peter Daniels on the piano and the Tiger Haynes Trio as back-up.

  The record company transported its engineering crew to the Bon Soir on Monday evening, 5 November. ‘They brought in a paid audience,’ Tiger Haynes remembered, ‘and recorded her first show for the rest of the week, through Saturday. Same musicians, same songs, every night, so that they had six tracks of every number.’ After listening to the playback of the edited tape, she insisted that they record another live performance. This one had flaws in the musical accompaniment and in her performance. She had sung the wrong lyrics at one point, not gone for an obligatory high note at another. ‘I can do better,’ she kept urging. ‘Let’s try again.’

  ‘Columbia scrapped the whole bunch of tapes,’ Haynes continued, ‘but Streisand made sure we got paid.’ This setback only fired her drive to make a commercial record. She needed a musical director, a professional who like Dennen could put together a solid, cohesive set of songs. Through composer Harold Arlen, many of whose songs she sang and whose advice she sought after he had seen her and come backstage following a cabaret performance, she met musical director and arranger Peter Matz. Matz would create the musical back-up that would help Streisand transform herself from a cabaret performer with a limited audience into a wildly successful commercial recording
artist.

  Matz brought a rhythmic vitality to her recording performance that she did not have in the early singles and the aborted Bon Soir album.3 At that time, many singers, including Sinatra, were backed up on recordings by a sweeping string section. For Streisand, Matz brought the brass and the winds into play and when he needed the music to weep, he swept in the strings. This gave her records a fresh, new sound and brought out an urgency to her voice. The intimacy she had as a live cabaret performer was replaced by a startling record voice, full-bodied, soaring, able to move an audience even though disembodied, the acting conveyed solely through the voice of the singer. Matz had given her the commercial sound that would make her a recording success.

  An innovative musician in his early thirties, Matz was raised in Los Angeles where, like Barry Dennen, he had attended UCLA, but it had taken a year in France and several more in New York for him to develop his talent. Of medium stature, wiry, with penetrating eyes and an enthusiastic manner of speaking, it was his keen intelligence and immense energy that captured Streisand’s attention. She liked him immediately, respected his opinions and advice and the way he matched her industry in preparing the material for what would be her first released album.

  ‘You could smell the air of desperation about her,’ one associate observed. She was determined to become a star and so far she had been a supporting player and a cabaret performer, however highly praised or well paid. Matz understood what it was beside her amazing voice that set her apart from other singers. The very thing that Barry Dennen had known instinctively. At heart she was more actress than singer. Each song became a solid, complete scene – a musical soliloquy. What had to be done was to put all these segments together to form a whole. That could be achieved by placing the songs correctly and then using daring and fresh orchestrations to unite them. Streisand recognised what Matz could contribute to her growth as a major artist.