Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  ‘I liked Barbra immediately,’ Kanin recalled. ‘She was funny, relentlessly ambitious, nothing was going to keep her down. I felt those qualities were very important because they were principal aspects of the Fanny Brice I knew.’ He went home from their lunch, which had lasted several hours, and reread Lennart’s libretto. He now could hear Streisand’s voice as he read certain lines and had begun to visualise her, not Fanny, in the role. He was excited and passed on his enthusiasm to Stark, who still was not certain Streisand could carry a show or that she was attractive enough to please an audience or his wife. He was talking to Shirley MacLaine about the role, he told Kanin.

  While Streisand fretted nervously about what was happening and kept nudging Marty Erlichman to do something about getting a decision on whether she had the part, a meeting was called with all the principal players, Merrick, the Starks, the Kanins, Patrick, Lennart, Styne and Merrill. The Kanins made a lively plea in Streisand’s defence. A mesmerising performer, she had the quirkiness, the Jewish shtick, the stage charisma also possessed by Brice. Styne and Merrill insisted she was the only one to sing the score. The Starks were difficult to convince but finally yielded to the overwhelming majority.

  Streisand was asked to meet Stark at his office. Erlichman had already told her she had won the role. Merrick was also there. For Streisand it was an important moment. Fanny Brice was not only the lead of Funny Girl, she was the main focus of the story. Streisand had gone from supporting player to star. In playing the role she could be funny, romantic, tragic, joyous, sexy. She could prove that she could act. Stark remained cool throughout most of the meeting. Merrill thought maybe he had changed his mind. Midway through, Streisand began talking a lot out of sheer irrepressible nervousness. ‘It wasn’t what she said, it was the way she rattled it off,’ Merrick recalled. ‘She somehow got under your skin. She was naturally funny. Ray loosened up and by the time she left it was agreed. She would play Fanny Brice.’

  Starry-eyed, she signed a contract with Merrick’s company as Stark, whose first play this was to be, did not yet have an Actors Equity agreement. She was flying high. Despite all the problems she had encountered in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, she was confident that she and the play would succeed. Stardom was within her grasp.

  She left for Los Angeles on 3 October in an euphoric mood to appear on The Judy Garland Show, where she planned to announce that she was to play Fanny Brice. Garland’s show had been moulded into an imitation of other prosaic television variety shows, although the one-woman concert format was where she felt most comfortable. CBS forced her to make chitchat with her guests and to take a back seat while they performed. It was to prove disastrous for Garland but for Streisand it was a grandstand opportunity to display her talent on a television programme watched by millions and she ran with it. Originally scheduled to sing one solo and one duet with Garland, she doubled her spots with Garland’s approval once they were in rehearsal.

  A generous performer, Garland was much taken by Streisand’s talent. Mel Tormé, musical director of the show, recalled being asked during rehearsals to see Garland in her dressing room. ‘She was playing Streisand’s record of “Happy Days Are Here Again”. As Streisand’s voice came through the speaker, Judy began to sing “Get Happy” in counterpoint to “Happy Days”. The result was electrifying.’

  Tormé went directly to his office and called Streisand. He was sitting at the piano waiting for her when she came. ‘Since you sing in any key, try “Happy Days” in this one,’ he said. Then beginning the introduction in a key suitable to his own range, he motioned her to start, whereupon he joined in, as Garland had, with ‘Get Happy’. ‘Barbra kept singing as she half-turned to me, a wide smile on her face. When we finished she exclaimed, “That’s terrific! I mean it! Your idea?”’

  ‘No, Judy’s,’ he replied honestly.

  Ethel Merman was taping The Red Skelton Show in the adjoining studio and agreed to appear in one segment when she would ‘accidentally’ be discovered in the audience and brought up on stage where the three women would try to outbelt each other in a rousing rendition of ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’. Merman was the indisputable decibel winner, but the show placed Streisand on a new plateau, equal with the two icons with whom she appeared.

  Her high spirits prevailed upon her return to New York as she looked forward to the next step up in her career – the lead in a Broadway show. At this point Stark and Merrick suffered a hard falling out over who would have final word on production matters. It was a power struggle and Stark would not give in. ‘Life is too short to deal with Ray Stark,’ Merrick said and backed out of the agreement. For a week Streisand was left in limbo. She was near hysteria, on the telephone constantly to Erlichman, wolfing ice-cream and walking the floors half the night as she worried out loud to a groggy Elliott, refusing to talk to Diana who kept calling to find out if she did or did not have the role. One day the show was being abandoned, the next it was back on. Finally Erlichman called her to tell her the good news. Stark was ready to go into production and he, and Bella Linden, who had become Streisand’s lawyer, were renegotiating better terms for her.

  Seduced by the lure of her name in lights on Broadway, she hurtled forward, self-absorbed. Elliott had not had an offer for a show since his return from London. She knew he was depressed about this, that she should spend more time and effort with him in working out his problems, but she could not stop or slow down on her momentum to do so. Up ahead was the realisation of all her dreams.

  That is, if she played it right.

  Footnotes

  1 The Fabulous Fanny was later finished and published posthumously.

  2 Fanny Brice once said, ‘I loved the man [Arnstein] I didn’t like and liked the man [Rose] I didn’t love.’

  3 ‘I’m the Greatest Star’, ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’, ‘Who Are You Now?’ and ‘People’.

  4 Born Fanny Borach in New York City, 29 October 1891, Fanny Brice had neither a Brooklyn nor a Jewish accent. Her parents were saloon keepers in a predominantly Irish neighbourhood. In a tape made for her proposed autobiography Brice said, ‘In 1910 I needed a song to sing to audition for a job in “College Girls”. I raced up to where Irving Berlin had an office and asked him if he had a song for me. Irving sang in a Jewish accent “Sadie Salome, Come Home” a song about a girl from the Bronx who became a hula-hula dancer, that he had written the lyrics but not the music for. I had never had any idea of doing a song with a Jewish accent, didn’t even understand Yiddish. But I thought, if that’s the way Irving sings it, that’s the way I’ll sing it. If he had sung it with an Irish brogue, I probably would have become an Irish comedienne. So Irving is really responsible for the whole thing.’ Florenz Ziegfeld later hired her for $75 a week to appear in his 1910 Follies after hearing her sing in dialect. Berlin wrote music and lyrics for ‘Goodbye, Becky Cohen’, also a dialect song, for her. It became a hit. Thereafter, she used the dialect in her comedy skits although not when she sang ballads.

  12

  FROM THE OUTSET she knew that Funny Girl was her one-way ticket to fame. Everything in her was now geared for becoming a star. That brought added responsibility, but it also meant that if she succeeded – and she refused to think otherwise – she would not just be on her way, she would already have arrived.

  Fanny Brice was not the usual light-hearted, simple-minded, Broadway musical comedy heroine. Brice was a woman of strong character, outrageously funny as a performer, a real woman with whom audiences could identify. Brice had once said, ‘People like to feel miserable. You make them laugh they will forget you, but if you make them cry they will never forget you.’ The marvellous thing about Fanny Brice was that she could make you do both – laugh and cry. Brice also contended that it was her good fortune to have been born homely – it had given her the desperate ambition to become a great star and she had not settled for less.

  ‘It was scary,’ Streisand admitted, ‘I read certain conversations that had never been p
ublished [from the transcript of Brice’s tapes] and it was very peculiar. We were very much alike in a very deep area, in spirit. I knew that I would do her justice by being true to myself. It didn’t interest me to have copied her walk. I was interested in the essence of her. Her essence and my essence were very similar. That is a little spooky, you know?’

  One of the greatest problems she would have with audiences and critics was being compared to Brice who had died only twelve years earlier and who had been much loved by the American public during the last twenty years of her life as radio’s Baby Snooks. Every interview that Streisand gave at this time included a denial that she had ever heard or seen Fanny Brice perform, which is likely as Brice’s last movie was released in 1946.1 However, according to Barry Dennen, this was not true. He had played numerous Brice recordings when they were living together. Streisand apparently wished to give the impression that she was creating the character from her own perception of the playscript.

  On the first day of rehearsal, 6 December 1963, her hair piled high in a huge beehive, bangs falling over her forehead, Streisand arrived an hour late at the Winter Garden (ironically the same theatre where Brice had last appeared in the Follies), wearing high brown snow boots and a chic chocolate-brown wool suit under a 1920s coccoon-shaped brown caracul coat. She now shopped at Bergdorf Goodman, one of New York City’s most fashionable department stores. Although she had not discarded her eclectic thrift-shop wardrobe, she liked to mix new with old. And so with boots that cost over $100 and a suit for which she had paid three times that amount, she wore a $20 second-hand fur coat. She was particularly fond of furs, especially striking ones like leopard and pony and was having several of her own designs for suits and coats made up. She realised that, like Fanny Brice, she had a natural flair for design and decoration. Of greater significance were their similar ethnic backgrounds, their drive and their early success – Brice had her big chance at nineteen as a star of the Ziegfeld Follies.

  The cast was gathered on the large stage where Garson Kanin was discussing procedures with them. He stopped when he saw Streisand and went over to where she was standing by an upright piano. She talked quietly with him for a few moments about some of her scenes, but remained fairly aloof from the rest of the company as introductions were made. Ruth Gordon then took her backstage to her dressing room. ‘She wasn’t sure how the star of a show should behave,’ Gordon said later. ‘How could she? I thought she was shy and that her coolness was a cover for her nervousness.’ But her attitude had not been well received by most of the cast members.

  Streisand’s situation differed greatly from her last experience where she had been a supporting player with no major credits, a small salary and only one song to sing. Now she was the star of the show and the score was being written expressly with her voice and character in mind. Since 10 November, two weeks before rehearsals, she had worked on the songs with Jule Styne and Robert Merrill at Peter Daniels’s studio, where she had slept in less affluent days. (Daniels was the show’s associate musical director.) She was more comfortable with Styne and Merrill than she was with the cast. Styne was an energetic man with a buoyant personality and an incredibly facile ability to compose good, singable melodies. Normally a bright mood prevailed at these rehearsals, but on 22 November President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. The country was in despair. Streisand wept openly as they went over her songs and smoothed out some of the rough spots. She had been awed by Kennedy when they had met at the White House. Her sense of loss translated into the emotion with which she sang.

  Styne and Merrill recognised that they had a singing star of the first magnitude and the power and meaning that she gave their songs encouraged them to write more numbers for her. Styne would claim that he composed fifty-five pieces of music for Funny Girl. In the end there were fifteen songs, some instrumental interludes and dance music (the latter arranged by Luther Henderson). Her rendition of ‘People’ so overwhelmed the song’s writers that a decision was made for her to record it as a single and release it as soon as possible, with the hope that its success would give the show momentum. Columbia, Streisand’s regular label, recorded ‘People’ with ‘I Am Woman’ on the flip side2 with Peter Daniels on piano, the orchestra under the direction of Peter Matz. When they listened to the playback after the session, composer and lyricist were certain that the release would be a big hit.

  Styne and Merrill were a cohesive team although they appeared to have little else in common. Of small, neatly compressed stature, Styne seemed to be in perpetual movement, hands gesticulating as he spoke a rapid verbal shorthand of phrases that was often difficult to follow, his short legs carrying him in double time when he walked. Born in the East End of London in 1907, at the age three he emigrated with his family to Chicago. Five years later his parents were sure he would be a concert pianist, but his hands were deemed too small by his piano teacher. Instead, he played dance music and the popular songs of the day, ending up as a teenager playing on an upright in a burlesque house and making his first bet on the ponies. Unfortunately he won, and he was to be compulsive, self-destructive gambler for the better part of his life. He started composing for films in the late 1930s and for the musical theatre in 1947, careening from one success to another – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bells Are Ringing and Gypsy.

  Styne should have been a rich man. Instead he was on the brink of financial disaster and heavily in debt to the IRS (who eventually appropriated most of his earnings from Funny Girl.) For a time he worked tirelessly on Funny Girl and Fade Out, Fade In with Carol Burnett, in tandem. That did not stop him from betting, but it did set an exhausting pace for his lyricist, who was more easy-going.

  At 6'2", Merrill towered over Styne. A man of even disposition and of a more conservative nature, he had been a popular songwriter until 1957 when he wrote music and lyrics for New Girl in Town and followed this with Jackie Gleason’s hit show, Take Me Along, and his finest score, Carnival in 1961, which was still running on Broadway. Styne and Merrill were both brilliant at what they did and Stark trusted their first decision on Funny Girl not to include any of the numbers that Fanny Brice had made famous such as ‘My Man', ‘Rose of Washington Square’, or ‘I’m an Indian’. Instead they created new songs – ‘Private Schwartz’, ‘The Music that Makes Me Dance’ – numbers that were original, contemporary and evocative at the same time.

  Funny Girl was to rehearse in New York for three weeks, then play out of town in two dties – Boston and Philadelphia – before coming to Broadway at the Winter Garden on 27 February, the planned opening date. Nine days into the cast rehearsals on the stage of the Winter Garden, the schedule looked unrealistic. Things were definitely not going well. Sydney Chaplin, son of the great Charles, had been cast as Nicky Arnstein and although a ‘gorgeous’ hunk of a man, as required for the role, he was as charmless in his readings as he had been winning in his performance opposite Judy Holiday in the Styne, Comden and Green Broadway hit, Bells Are Ringing.

  ‘If we could give him an image to imitate it might help,’ Ray Stark told Garson Kanin, ‘William Powell or Errol Flynn rather than his trying to be Cary Grant.’ Then, going down a list of other problems in the cast, he added, ‘Strangely, Barbra doesn’t have a sense of humour about herself from her reading. She does things that are funny but they don’t come out of inner humour.’

  Throughout rehearsals during the frigid weeks in December, the air in the cavernous Winter Garden was raw with cold, the heat miserly low to save costs. One sub-zero, blustery day, Ray and Fran Stark – his dark red hair meticulously barbered, her make-up impeccably applied – were seated in the auditorium along with Lennart, Merrill (Styne was up on stage), Gordon, Erlichman and Patrick (‘I don’t think anyone in the company knew why I was there,’ Patrick later said). On the otherwise bare stage, members of the cast sat on straight-backed wooden chairs arranged in a circle around Garson Kanin, wearing a dapper brown pin-striped suit, a small brimmed black hat that was his talisman (a gift from Spe
ncer Tracy), cocked on his head. Streisand stood somewhat aloof on the edge of the circle wrapped in her caracul coat, which she had been wearing almost every day. Kanin was giving a pep talk to his cast and Streisand seemed impatient for it to end.

  ‘I need your imagination,’ Kanin told his company. ‘The best of our show is the unexplored areas. Do not be inhibited. If something tends to come up, then let go. And as you go along you will begin to antidpate problems. Please bring those problems to me. We’re all terribly, terribly kind here.’

  In an apparent attempt to ease the tension between Streisand and the cast, Kay Medford, who was playing Mama Brice, leaned back in her chair and stage-whispered in a Yiddish accent to Streisand, who was standing behind her, ‘Did you get the coat honestly?’

  Streisand glanced down at her unamused.

  Styne was bouncing around the stage, talking to the technidans, hands flying. Kanin’s assistant gave the order to please clear the stage for the first run through. The director moved with Styne out into the orchestra and sat down behind a wooden table with a microphone atop it. The order was given for the run through to start. Streisand entered from the wings still bundled up in her fur coat. She crossed slowly to the stage piano and began to finger the keys. At the rear of the stage was a brick wall with painted grey steam pipes running along the bottom half.