“More than good,” she replied quickly.
He smiled. The discussion was over.
Barbara liked this guy. They’d been hanging out a lot together since he’d joined the cast. Something very different was crackling between her and Barré than what she felt for Terry. With Terry, Barbara whispered and giggled; with Barré, she found herself holding eye contact for a few seconds longer than necessary, which made her cheeks flush as she finally looked away. The attraction between them was obvious to Terry, and to anyone else who saw them together. A few inches taller than Barbara, Barré had jet-black hair and a smile that was both sweet and sly. He could be flip and funny, smart and ironic, but he could also be sensitive.
He was a rich kid—a “Beverly Hills brat,” in his own words. A theatrical life had been foretold when his mother had bestowed upon him at birth an accent aigu even though his name was pronounced “Barry.” His father had come to Southern California as if he were the hero in a Horatio Alger tale, fleeing a hardscrabble life in Chicago to make a fortune selling venetian blinds in the land of sunshine and palm trees. Barré grew up in a luxurious modern glass house in Coldwater Canyon, with a pool and a yard and housekeepers and gardeners. When Barré announced he wanted to be an actor, his father hadn’t tried to talk him out of it, but happily enrolled him in UCLA’s theater department. After graduation, he had generously paid for Barré’s move to New York. Since that time, Barré had understudied the role of Bub in the revival of Leave It to Jane at the Sheridan Square Playhouse and landed a rather exquisite apartment in a brand-new building on Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, all paid for by Dad. Friends predicted that golden boy Barré Dennen was on his way to big things.
He was twenty-two. Barbara had just turned eighteen. Their first time out together, sharing a baked potato with sour cream and chives at a midtown diner, she’d drilled him like an investigative journalist. What was it like to have a live-in maid? What did his pool look like? What kinds of cars did his parents drive? What kinds of furs did his mother own? Barré found her questions captivating. There’d been no one like her in California.
As the rest of their class chattered about Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot who had crash-landed in Russia and was being called a spy, Barbara and Barré spent the time talking about acting. The sun was setting; the rehearsal was done. Given Vasek’s intransigence, it was only at times like these, after they had disbanded for the night, that Barbara could get any real advice about her craft.
The auditorium was emptying as Barbara stood facing Barré, arms akimbo. She wanted the truth. He was a theater-school graduate, after all, so his opinion mattered. She wanted to know if she’d gotten to the heart of her character—a sexy little butterfly who makes violent love, desperate to stay alive. “Be honest,” she insisted.
Barré smiled. He asked her if she’d ever seen Mae West. Barbara didn’t understand why he was asking the question, but she told him she thought she had, in some old movie, late at night. Barré suggested that maybe her butterfly was a little too esoteric, that it might benefit from “a little Mae West.” Barbara was surprised. That was his suggestion? Mae West? Nothing about going deep down inside and feeling what a butterfly might feel when it’s winter and she knows she’s got to mate because she’s about to die? Barré nodded. “Try a little Mae West,” he said. “Can you do Mae West?”
Barbara tried, but couldn’t quite get the right Westian inflection, so Barré demonstrated for her. “Oh, you,” he intoned, one hand on his hip, the other pushing at an imaginary bouffant. “You shameless creature, you.”
Good mimic that she was, Barbara quickly got the hang of it. “Oh,” she purred. “You great, strong, handsome thing.”
“That’s it,” he told her. “Play it like that!”
They both dissolved in laughter.
Method acting indeed.
2.
The Insect Comedy came and went, three performances, May 8, 9, and 10, with barely a notice from anyone. So much for Vasek’s eminent reputation. So much for Barbara’s going straight to the top. One German-language newspaper had, however, called her “ausgezeichnet”—excellent—so Barbara hung on to that, thankful she’d come up with that Mae West business to set herself apart. That had been clever on her part. But now she needed a job. She had rent to pay.
The ushering at the Lunt-Fontanne had ended when she’d signed up for The Insect Comedy. For Barbara, jobs never seemed to last longer than a few months. Her first job in Manhattan had been as a clerk at a business firm. There she’d driven her bosses crazy by stumbling in late nearly every morning, groggy from late-night, after-class critiques she and the others held over pancakes and syrup at some Times Square eatery. Yet what really grated on her employers’ nerves was Barbara’s tendency to hum as she sashayed around the office filing papers and answering telephones. “Stop humming around here!” one of them barked at her. “What do you think you’re in, a show?”
She wasn’t in a show then, but she was hoping she would be now. The Sound of Music was preparing for a fall tour. Florence Henderson, a perky chanteuse who’d made a splash on Broadway in producer David Merrick’s Fanny a few years back, was likely to take over Mary Martin’s part. The other roles hadn’t yet been cast, so Barbara had set her sights on Liesl, the pretty eldest daughter who sings “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” She had no worries about her singing voice. When she was a kid trilling on the stoops of her neighborhood, she knew the reason people didn’t chase her away was because they liked her voice. At Erasmus Hall, she’d sung in the Chorale Club, even if she was frustrated that she never got a solo—strictly ensemble work was never for Barbara since it precluded a chance for her to shine on her own. But anyone who’d ever heard her recording of “You’ll Never Know” agreed that she could sing.
Still, trying out for The Sound of Music was a lark. Liesl wasn’t Juliet or Medea. The show was hardly Barbara’s idea of great theater. This time there were no grand hopes tucked between the pages of her audition script. Heading into the audition, she knew this was just about getting a job. But warbling “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” would be better than filing papers in an office.
Greeting her at the audition was Eddie Blum, a bluff, hearty fellow who’d been casting director for Rodgers and Hammerstein for the last couple of years, overseeing Flower Drum Song before taking on The Sound of Music. At the piano was Peter Daniels, an Englishman with piercing blue eyes that looked out from behind a pair of thick glasses. No doubt both were surprised by the young gamine who’d wandered into the studio to sing for them. Barbara stood there chewing gum, as obviously Jewish as a girl could be, trying out for the part of Liesl von Trapp, that flower of young Aryan maidenhood. Blum was amused—and impressed—by Barbara’s chutzpah in thinking she could convincingly play the stepdaughter of Florence Henderson.
She asked Daniels if he could accompany her on “Allegheny Moon,” Patti Page’s hit from a few years back. Daniels began tickling the ivories. “Allegheny moon,” Barbara sang. “Your silver beams can lead the way to golden dreams . . . So shine, shine, shine . . .”
Blum was transfixed.
“What Eddie Blum saw,” said one friend, “was this brave little meydele with a big schnozzle and acne on her face singing her heart out for the part and not seeing any reason why she shouldn’t. She was a teenage girl. Liesl was a teenage girl. Why shouldn’t a Jewish girl come in and try out for Liesl? And that’s what charmed Eddie Blum.”
3.
Barré was pleasantly surprised. The kid could really sing.
They were at his apartment at 69 West Ninth Street. The windows were closed tightly to seal off noise from the traffic below. Carl Esser was tuning his guitar and Barbara was practicing a few bars of the song she was about to sing. Barré listened approvingly as he screwed microphones onto stands and plugged cables into the jacks of his Ampex stereo tape recorder. No longer would Barbara have to wait weeks or pay big bucks to have a record made of her singing. Barré possessed the lat
est technology right here in his apartment to give her a tape this very afternoon.
She had called, asking for a favor. Eddie Blum had thought she was terrific, and although he didn’t give her the job on the spot, he’d asked for a tape of her singing, presumably so he could convince some higher-ups—maybe Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves—that she was perfect for Liesl.
Listening as she practiced Sammy Cahn’s “Day by Day,” Barré was impressed not only with the quality of Barbara’s voice but with the determination and focus she brought to the job at hand. She was “on fire with commitment to get it right,” he thought. Should she sit or stand? Where should she position herself so the tape recorder could best pick up her voice? Was Carl’s guitar tuned correctly?
Barré supposed it was Barbara’s preoccupation with making the tape that led her to barely react when he shared his own big news. Just days before, he’d been signed by Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival, which put on free plays during the summer at the Belvedere Lake Theatre in Central Park. First up was Henry V, and Barré had landed the small but potentially scene-grabbing part of a French soldier. He’d told Barbara all about it when she and Carl first arrived, and her response was to say “great” and then ask whether she should use the microphone or not when making her tape.
She had arrived, as usual, lugging her crumpled paper shopping bags. Feathers and sequined clothes tumbled over the top of one bag; another seemed ready to burst from her collection of buttons and scraps of cloth. A third bag held costume jewelry and shoes. Barbara told anyone who asked that she never knew when she might be called upon to whip up a costume. But a fourth bag was a relatively new addition to Barbara’s luggage. Barré noticed that she was now toting around crackers, fruit, and bottles of juice. He was aware she was leading a rather nomadic existence at the moment, having been forced to give up her apartment due to a lack of funds. She was staying at various places, including her brother’s office on West Forty-fifth Street, and sometimes housesitting for friends Barré had never met who lived on West Fifty-fourth Street. He knew better than to offer any sympathy or express any concern about her living situation. Barbara would have just brushed him off by insisting she was fine.
She was looking at Barré now, waiting for his signal to start. Checking the connections on the tape recorder one more time, he nodded.
Carl played a few chords on his guitar, then Barbara began to sing. “Day by day, I’m falling more in love with you, and day by day, my love seems to grow . . .”
Barré watched and listened. She was good. No doubt about that. Very good. He wondered why Barbara had never told him that she could sing. Certainly she knew about his love of music. Visits to his apartment meant listening to Edith Piaf or Shirley Horn or Billie Holiday on Barré’s record player. But never had Barbara told Barré that she could sing herself. He found it very odd. Certainly Barbara was never shy when it came to announcing or demonstrating her talents.
When she was done singing, Barré switched off the tape recorder. He told her he’d make a copy since he was certain she’d never get the tape back after she gave it to Blum. Barbara thanked him. He added that she had a beautiful voice. Again, she thanked him, and their eyes, as usual, held a little longer than absolutely necessary.
Barré wasn’t surprised that Barbara hung around after Carl packed up his guitar and left. She sat beside Barré on the couch, their shoulders touching. Barré told her she needed to do something with her voice. It was a gift he hadn’t known about. Her ability to sing opened up a whole new range of options for her. But beyond trying out for the part of Liesl, Barbara seemed ambivalent about the idea. Barré kept on pressing her. Down the block, he said, there was a nightclub called the Lion. He went there sometimes. The Lion held talent contests on Tuesday nights. She should enter. She could win fifty bucks. She could certainly use some cash at the moment, couldn’t she?
Barbara said she’d consider it. But nothing, she said, could get in the way of her becoming an actress.
Barré countered that singing was really just another form of acting. An Edith Piaf record was playing on the stereo, and Barré told Barbara to listen carefully to the way Piaf told a story with her songs. This particular song was about a depressed man who turned on the gas before he got into bed. From the record player, Piaf hissed like an open gas jet: “You were so sure, so sure, sooo ssssssure . . .” Barbara leaned forward, “sitting stone still,” Barré observed, listening. When the record was done, she said it was “really something.”
They sat there on the couch, quiet for a moment, still shoulder to shoulder. Every time they’d been in each other’s company, the buzz between them had grown stronger, though neither of them had spoken of it or made a move. Barbara was unlike any girl Barré had ever known. Not that there had been all that many—in fact, he’d only slept with two girls in his life. But one of them, about a year ago, on a night of a power outage, had gotten pregnant. Somewhere out there Barré had a three-month-old son he’d never seen. So he was understandably cautious about moving too fast. He didn’t want a repeat of what had happened on the night of the blackout.
But, if he was honest with himself—which, these days, he was struggling more and more to be—he knew that his careful approach with Barbara was even more complicated than that. The girls he’d been with—slept with or simply dated—had all been diversions from the real feelings he’d always done his best to hide. The club he told Barbara about, the Lion, was a gay club, and Barré didn’t patronize it just for the talent contests. He went because he felt he belonged there. Not that there had been all that many men in his life either. But Barré was a percipient young man. He was twenty-two. He’d had these feelings since adolescence. He knew they weren’t going away.
But he might be able to contain them. And Barbara excited him like no girl had ever done. He found her “adorable, sweet, funny, tender.” She had beautiful eyes and a beautiful body, though her skin troubled him a bit because the smell of Clearasil repelled him when he got too close. But she was neat and clean, almost compulsively so—surprising for a girl who practically lived out of a shopping bag. If an article of clothing came back from the dry cleaners not cleaned to her specifications, Barbara would be irate. She made sure she always looked put together, from her hat down to her shoes, even if, to some, her wardrobe seemed eccentric. But Barbara had her own particular style, a trait Barré very much admired.
As he’d learned these past few weeks, she was a girl of very definite likes and dislikes. She loved gardenias, she told him. They had a smell that no perfumer could ever replicate, which made her like them even more. She loved Cokes, and ice-cream cones, and French fries that tasted of bacon. She also adored chantilly lace, avocados, gingerbread, and lavender roses, as well as “the feel of fur blankets and the smell of Italian cooking.” But while she loved “the color of wine,” she didn’t care for “the taste of it,” she said, and among her greatest dislikes were eggs, arriving early to appointments, crowded streets, dirty ashtrays, and “opportunistic people.” That last one would make Barré laugh when he heard it because he felt she—he—all of them—were just waiting to pounce on the very first opportunity that came their way.
He was impressed by how much Barbara knew about literature. She could speak at length about Chekhov and Shakespeare and Euripides, thanks to her time with the Cormans and the Millers. But about music she was largely ignorant, except for some classical works and pop singer Joni James. She knew nothing of the great vocalists—Piaf, Holiday, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee. Still, she’d learned quickly after Barré started playing their records. Barbara admired Piaf, but it was Holiday she loved, sinking down into the cushions of Barré’s couch, closing her eyes as she soaked up Billie’s blues. She had a similar response in museums, Barré noticed. Barbara might know little about art, but she was drawn instinctively to the very best as they walked past—Monets at the Met, Picassos at MoMA.
But for all her flair, Barbara could be terribly shy, too, especia
lly in gatherings of Barré’s UCLA friends. When these slightly older college graduates came by, Barbara seemed to shut down, to become physically smaller than she was. Carole Gister, one of Barré’s closest friends, had perceived the slender girl sitting off to the side as “a perfectly nice quiet child who’d seemed to have run away from home with a mattress on her head.” Barbara would explain that her shyness was “unconventional.” She might be strong and assertive in most areas of her life, but upon first meeting people, she didn’t always “like them straight away.” She was “a little more wary,” she said. Barré’s friends would have agreed with her assessment.
Once, trying to engage Barbara, some of those friends had begun asking about her acting ambitions. Someone came up with the idea that she could work as a hand model, and everyone enthusiastically agreed since Barbara had “these fabulous hands with long, delicate fingers,” Gister observed. But Barbara, not surprisingly, wasn’t interested. She would have had to cut her nails, for one thing.
Sitting next to her on the couch now, Barré suddenly reached over and kissed her. At least that would be how he remembered that day, insisting that, in addition to kissing her, he played records for her all afternoon: Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Ruth Etting’s “Ten Cents a Dance,” Lee Wiley’s “Baby’s Awake Now,” and comedy vocals from Bea Lillie and Mae Barnes. Whether every single one of those records spun on his turntable that day or not, they certainly did so in the days that followed. There was also some Helen Morgan, Ethel Waters, Libby Holman, and Marion Harris. And also more kisses. Eventually Barré took a cloth and tenderly wiped the Clearasil from Barbara’s face.
But one thing was certain about that day Barbara recorded her tape for Eddie Blum in Barré’s apartment. When she left, she still had not asked anything about Barré’s part in Henry V. He wasn’t offended. He understood how “desperate she was to make it,” how “hungry she was for attention and success.” Barbara’s ambition, Barré felt, “had become a kind of living, breathing ache inside her that blotted out everything else.”
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 5
