And so there came into her mind the idea to make one last try with her mother. Maybe it was suggested by Cis, sitting in her living room, talking about The Insect Comedy and human survival and Shaw and Ibsen. Or maybe it was an idea entirely of Barbara’s own formation, a conviction that, if she believed strongly enough, even her mother might come around to seeing her talent and her worth.
Back at her little flat on Forty-eighth Street, Barbara picked up the telephone, called her mother, and invited her to come watch her act.
6.
The first thing one noticed walking into the Brooklyn apartment of Diana Rosen Streisand Kind was the smell. Even when nothing was cooking on the stove, the place reeked of kale. Diana used kale to make soup, which she then ladled into Tupperware containers and lugged into the city to drop off at Barbara’s apartment. She did this twice a week. And no, she didn’t expect a thank-you for her efforts because none had ever been forthcoming from that girl in the entire seventeen years of her life.
The idea of watching Barbara perform in some little playlet did not thrill Diana, but she agreed to go. Otherwise, no doubt, Barbara would say that Diana never showed her any support or encouragement. So she pulled on her coat, locked the door to apartment 4-G, and headed down to the subway at the corner of Nostrand Avenue.
Diana knew how unhappy Barbara had been growing up. She knew that her daughter thought she didn’t understand her. But Diana did understand “in her own way,” as at least one of her friends believed. Barbara’s mother hadn’t been very happy in her own life either. For most of the last two decades, she was found in either one of two places: at her typewriter at work trying to earn a living to support her family, or at the stove in her apartment cooking soup or potato pancakes to feed her family. “If I close my eyes and picture Diana,” said one friend, “she’s always standing at that old, rusty stove.”
Depositing her fifteen-cent token, Diana pushed through the turnstile and waited on the platform for the train. She was a small woman, not unpretty, even at fifty-two, though the years and the struggle had left their marks on her face. Her eyes always seemed tired and the corners of her mouth tended to droop down. Bundled in her coat, standing by herself, she drew no particular attention from the others who gathered on the platform. They didn’t know she’d once had dreams not dissimilar to her daughter’s, that the little girl who had been born Ida Rosen in the East New York section of Brooklyn had adopted the name Diana because it sounded more glamorous, or that she’d once been accepted to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus—when she was Barbara’s age, in fact. For a couple of heady weeks, Diana, who’d been told for years she had a beautiful voice, imagined herself singing arias at the Met. But her father, a cantor at their Orthodox synagogue, objected to how late she got home, so that was the end of that.
Instead of singing at the Met, Diana had married Emanuel Streisand, whom she’d met at the home of one of her friends and who had impressed her with his love poems and grand ambitions. She’d enjoyed being Manny’s wife and had never really gotten over his death. She knew Barbara hadn’t either, though she never spoke of him to her. It was too difficult. In Diana’s memory there was etched the image of Barbara at the age of one, pulling herself up in her crib to look out the window. “Watch for your father,” Diana would say, and when Manny came through the door, he’d lift the tiny girl in his arms. But then came the day when Manny no longer came home. For several nights, Barbara still hoisted herself up to look out the window. Diana never said a word to her about what had happened. After all, Barbara was just a baby.
The train arrived with a loud grinding of metal against metal. Diana stepped inside and took her seat as the subway started to move again. Six years earlier, Diana had taken this same route with Barbara, then eleven years old. The fare was only ten cents then, and tokens weren’t in use yet so you had to use a real dime. Hearing Barbara sing with some of the neighborhood girls on the tenement stoops, Diana had come to believe that her daughter might have inherited her musical talents so she’d taken the child into Manhattan for an audition for MGM Records. She’d dressed Barbara in a pretty blue dress with a white collar and cuffs, and instructed her to warble “Have You Heard?” for the record-company executives. But the little girl wasn’t offered a contract, only a spot in their training program. When Diana heard “No pay,” she said, “No child,” and hustled Barbara back home to Brooklyn.
Two years later there was another trip into the city. Barbara was now thirteen. She’d told her mother about the Nola Recording Studio, where anyone could go in and make a record on real vinyl disks. With memories of her own childhood dreams, Diana had agreed to give it a whirl. It was with considerable excitement that both mother and daughter practiced what they were going to sing. Diana arranged for a pianist to meet them at the studios, housed inside Steinway Hall on West Fifty-seventh Street. Barbara sang “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” and “You’ll Never Know,” revealing a surprisingly strong voice for a girl so young, though the child in her could still be heard, especially when she struggled to reach the high note at the end of the phrase “how much I care.” Diana’s voice was more polished. She’d chosen “One Kiss” from the operetta The New Moon. With Barbara watching from behind the glass, Diana stood at the microphone and sang with all the feeling she could muster: “One kiss, one man to save it for . . .”
It had been a rare interlude of happiness and lightheartedness for Diana and her elder daughter. But the “one man” they headed back home to in Brooklyn that night was hardly the Galahad that Diana sang about in “One Kiss.” In the beginning, Lou Kind had been charming, bringing Diana little gifts. But when she’d found herself pregnant with his child, Kind had balked at marrying her. He had just left one wife; he didn’t want another. Diana’s father forced her to leave the house when he discovered she was pregnant. So she’d found the place on Newkirk Avenue for herself, Sheldon, Barbara, and the upcoming baby. Finally, just two weeks before Rosalind was born, Kind gave in and married Diana.
For the next five years she was miserable, probably even more miserable than her daughter. Kind slept with other women, “scandalously flaunting” his affairs with them in front of her, Diana later told a judge. He mocked her. He shouted at her. He used “vile, obscene, and scurrilous language.” He stayed out all night. And he hit her.
Kind countered that Diana had used the same sort of language with him and that she refused to cook for him when he came home from work. He worked two jobs, he charged, because of Diana’s “ever increasing demands for money.”
But he wasn’t working two jobs, or even one, when he finally left the house some five months after Diana’s trip to the Nola Recording Studio. When Diana sued him for child-support payments for six-year-old Rosalind, he told the judge he was too sick to work. The judge called him a “pathological liar” and ordered him to pay Diana thirty-seven dollars a month. It wasn’t much, and Diana didn’t always get it.
So the mother who often seemed to be the bane of Barbara’s existence had her own heartaches. Friends who knew her well insisted that Diana wasn’t really opposed to her daughter’s dreams of being an actress. She had signed the form allowing her to graduate early, hadn’t she? And she’d allowed Barbara—at the tender age of fifteen—to apprentice one hundred and sixty miles away in Malden Bridge. A year later Diana had even permitted Barbara—at sixteen!—to move on her own into Manhattan in order to pursue her dreams. How could Barbara say her mother didn’t support her? That was something Diana simply couldn’t comprehend. Of course she supported her. She took this long subway ride twice a week to bring her chicken soup!
What worried Diana most about Barbara living in Manhattan was that she’d get sick. Barbara, to her mother’s mind, was not a strong girl. When Barbara was five, Diana had to send her to a health camp because she was so anemic. She also suffered from asthma whenever she spent too much time in the fresh air. Now, making matters worse, Diana feared that Barbara’s acting school was working her way
too hard. How that Allan Miller could expect so much from a teenaged girl Diana could never understand. If anemics didn’t eat right, they could get very, very sick—maybe even die. That’s why Diana had insisted Barbara attend Hebrew health camps. She knew the girl hated them, but it was the best thing for her—just as breaking up her entanglement with that older boy, Roy Scott, had also been for her own good. It was very hurtful that Barbara never trusted that Diana knew best.
Rosalind did, however. Rosalind was a far more obedient, pliable, and cooperative child than Barbara was, eating whatever Diana put in front of her. So what if Rozzie was a little plump? It was better than having Barbara’s skinny arms.
Diana was aware that she spent more time with her younger daughter than she ever did with her older one and that it might appear to some that she played favorites. But she was hoping to do for Rozzie what she “had failed to do with Barbara—be more involved in her life.” But the truth was that Barbara had never wanted advice, Diana felt, only approval. Barbara scared her a little, Diana acknowledged, because she was “so smart [and] had an answer for most things.” And for the few questions Barbara did ask, Diana “never knew how to answer.”
Diana admitted that she wasn’t all that affectionate. Anyone who knew her knew how stiff she could be when they hugged her hello or good-bye. She wasn’t a kissy type and never claimed to be. Who had time for sentiment when they were struggling to make ends meet and raise three kids all by themselves? And no, she didn’t gush all over Barbara’s wild dreams about becoming a big Broadway star. How could she do that and then sit back and watch her fail? Why would she encourage her daughter’s hopes for something that simply was never going to happen? Where was the love in that? Better to protect Barbara from the kind of disappointment that she, Diana, had felt—the disappointment that life inevitably handed to people like them. Diana had no patience for criticisms that she didn’t hug Barbara enough or that she didn’t jump up and down supporting her dreams. She brought her chicken soup. Twice a week. What more could she do?
At last the train reached Times Square, and Diana got off. The sun was setting, striping the corridors of the theater district with long purple shadows as she made her way across town to watch her daughter playact on the stage.
7.
Inside the Theatre Studio, the students were busy preparing for their show. On hand that evening to lend support to Barbara were Terry, Carl, and Barbara’s roommate, Marilyn. Even Allan Miller was aware that tonight’s little presentation was Barbara’s big moment to convince her mother that she was on the right course. Not an easy task, Miller knew. Mrs. Kind had once called him and accused him of putting her daughter into “white slavery.”
Setting up the room to perform the little playlet, Barbara was certainly aware that the real drama tonight was between her mother and herself. She could be acutely self-reflective at times. She knew very well that she’d sought an acting career to fill up an empty place inside of her, to get the attention she had “missed as a child.” In downtown Brooklyn she had spent “a lot of time and money in the penny arcades,” snapping pictures of herself in the little photo booths, experimenting with different colored mascara on her eyes, trying out “all kinds of different hairstyles and sexy poses.” Living in this colorful world of her imagination, Barbara could be as pretty as she wanted to be. And so, as an actress, Barbara would never be content with the heroine’s less attractive, wisecracking best friend. She was going to be the lead, the star. “Is it crazy for me to want to play the love scenes?” she asked. “Is love only for blue-eyed blondes?”
Those in her class knew her dream parts. She wanted to play Camille and Juliet. She could “bring so many facets” to Juliet, she believed. So far, her favorite part had been Medea, which she had performed soon after her arrival at the Theatre Studio. In her head she carried one of the lines from that play: “I have this hole in the middle of myself.” The line actually read: “Why . . . this open wound in the middle of myself?” Either way, its resonance in Barbara’s life was understandable.
Looking up, she saw her mother enter the room wearing her old cloth coat. Diana took her seat, and the little presentation began. Barbara was no doubt anxious. Diana sat watching, her hands folded in her lap.
Just what scene Barbara enacted for her mother’s benefit that night has gone unrecorded. But whatever part she played, she no doubt gave it everything she had. This night had been a long time in coming—at least since Barbara’s fourteenth birthday, when she had seen The Diary of Anne Frank at the Cort Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street, just a couple of blocks from where she now lived and went to classes. Watching Susan Strasberg enact the role of Anne, Barbara had been filled with envy. “I can do that,” she told herself, and she also told her mother the same thing when she returned home that night to Brooklyn. But Strasberg had the kind of connections Barbara did not: she was the daughter of Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio, the most prestigious acting school in the country.
For Barbara, the Actors Studio was her own personal mecca. The Theatre Studio was fine as far as it went, but Strasberg was king. On the subway, Barbara had written impassioned letters to the great acting teacher, begging him to see her. Once, angry and resentful that only people with connections seemed to be admitted to the Actors Studio, she’d scrawled to Strasberg, “I hear you’re a starfucker.”
Wisely, she never mailed any of the letters—because there did come a day when she finally got a chance to show Strasberg what she could do. Almost a year earlier, Anita Miller had asked Barbara to be her audition partner at the Actors Studio (Allan was a member). That had given Barbara the “in” she needed, and soon afterward, she secured a spot in a three-month course at the studio. The letter telling her she’d been accepted became a “prized possession.” But disillusionment quickly set in. The course had “so many people,” Barbara discovered, that the chance of any one-on-one time with Strasberg was minimal to nonexistent. There was also little connection with her fellow students, who seemed like alien creatures to her. They loved “struggling” during class, Barbara observed, but when they put on “a regular face . . . they would freeze up.” She had crashed the gate, but she still wasn’t one of them.
Even worse, when she’d gotten up to perform a selection from the Richard Nash drama The Young and Fair, her nerves had taken over, and she’d cried all the way through her rendition. No surprise, she was not invited to join the Actors Studio after that.
Might it have been a scene from The Young and Fair that she performed that night with her mother looking on? Or maybe it was Medea. Whatever it was, at the end of it, everyone applauded, including Diana. Marilyn thought Barbara was “very proud of it.” But Diana said little. Outside on Forty-eighth Street, she agreed to accompany Barbara and Marilyn back to their apartment. Terry trooped along as well.
Climbing the several flights of stairs, no one said a word. The old building had settled, and the steps weren’t always even. The walls were cracked, and the fragrance of mold and dust was everywhere. Inside the flat, the three younger people sat on the bed while Barbara’s mother stood and lectured them on eating right. Finally Diana said she’d seen nothing tonight to convince her that Barbara had what it took to be a success as an actress. She didn’t want Barbara’s heart broken, her hopes dashed. “And look at you,” Diana said. “Your arms are still too skinny.”
Soon after that, she left.
Barbara seemed unfazed. To her friends, she expressed no anger or hostility toward her mother. Instead, when she and Marilyn sat imagining what their lives would be like after they became successful, Barbara said that the first thing she’d do was buy her mother a mink coat.
CHAPTER TWO
Spring 1960
1.
For Barbara, telling a director he was wrong was a radical new idea and possibly a dangerous one at that. But that’s exactly what Barré was doing, and it was with wide eyes and open mouth that she stood behind him watching.
From the au
ditorium Vasek Simek was shouting, “Did you never see moths?” His arms were flailing and his bushy eyebrows were moving across his forehead like caterpillars. “Flap, flap, flap! They keep moving!” Except, in his Czech accent, it came out, “Dey keep movink!” It was all Barbara could do to keep from laughing.
But Barré wasn’t amused. “The girls can burst into little flurries of flap-flap-flaps,” he argued. “But we have to figure out exactly when. It can’t be all the time.”
For Barbara, Barré Dennen was a revelation. He had joined the cast late. He was a friend of Carl Esser’s from UCLA, where he’d known Simek on campus. And unlike the rest of the cast, Barré wasn’t intimidated by their director’s temper tantrums. Since rehearsals had begun in April, Vasek had used his association with the Actors Studio to lord over his cast, parading around the Jan Hus Playhouse like some cut-rate Stanislavski. But when finally confronted by Barré Dennen, he spilled his coffee all over himself, swore, and stalked off in a huff. That was probably the last they’d see of him for the day.
Barbara tapped Barré on the shoulder. She wanted to know if he really thought what he’d just done was a good idea. Did he want to keep them there all night? She explained that when Vasek got upset, it often took him hours to get over it. The Insect Comedy was opening in less than a week. Getting Vasek riled up was not helpful.
Barré just shrugged. Taking advantage of their volatile director’s absence, he sat on the edge of the stage and motioned for Barbara to sit beside him. She complied. He lit up a cigarette and asked if she wanted one. She demurred; she’d given up smoking for the time being. The late-afternoon sun was filling up the hall. From the open windows came the heavily accented voices of Czech women on the street below. Barré looked over at Barbara with dark, soulful eyes. Yes, he told her, he did think confronting Vasek was a good idea. It was never worth staying quiet if it meant the difference between being mediocre and being good. And was he wrong to feel she wanted to be good?
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 4
