Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  5.

  They had become regular events, these little concerts in Barré’s apartment. Barré would arrange and orchestrate Barbra’s numbers, and Bob would do her makeup. Carole Gister sat among the usual UCLA clique in the living room, waiting for the show to begin. Barbra was on a stool in the kitchen, where Bob was touching up her lipstick. Carole understood these concerts were dry runs for Barbra’s upcoming gig at the Bon Soir. The shy little runaway had certainly blossomed, Carole thought.

  At her audition, Barbra had wowed Ernie Sgroi Sr. The Bon Soir was the closest the Village came to a posh supper club, the “Greenwich Village version of uptown Blue Angel,” according to Variety. The New York World-Telegram called the venue “one of the lead funspots” in the Village, a “yock-laden place” given the number of comedy acts that alternated with the torch singers and jazz artists. Every night patrons would line up down the block from the Bon Soir’s front door. Downstairs in the club’s dark interior, regular joes rubbed shoulders with celebrities. Frequent headliner Kaye Ballard never knew who she might spot sitting in her audience. Sometimes it was Gregory Peck, other times it was Marlene Dietrich. Shows at the Bon Soir generated a real buzz, with patrons often returning two or three nights in a row.

  For her audition, Barbra had brought along Barré, Bob, and Burke McHugh to provide support. Not surprisingly, she’d sung “A Sleepin’ Bee,” since all the arrangements had already been worked out. It was the first time Bob had ever heard Barbra sing. He was so impressed, so moved, that when they all decamped afterward to the Pam Pam for French fries and coleslaw, he’d been unable to speak.

  Sgroi had been equally impressed, but he’d wanted to make sure this ambitious little tyro could actually work an audience. So he’d told Barbra to come back that night, where he’d slip her in as a “surprise guest” on the bill. In between numbers by comedian Larry Storch and the jazz trio the Three Flames, Barbra came out on stage to sing “A Sleepin’ Bee” as well as one other song, a new orchestration that she and Barré had worked out. It was a strange, whimsical choice, and it was this song that she came out of the kitchen singing at her little concert in Barré’s apartment. Carole Gister and the rest of the UCLA contingent were stunned. The song on Barbra’s lips was “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from the Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs.

  It had started as a joke. One day while rehearsing for the Bon Soir audition, Barbra had said she “wanted to do something completely wrong” and out of place for the “sophisticated, posh little nightclub.” Sophistication “annoyed” her, she told Barré. She felt like going in there and singing “a nursery rhyme or something.”

  A bell went off in Barré’s head. He knew part of the reason Sgroi Jr. had recommended Barbra to his father was her irreverent style. So he located the sheet music for “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” in an old record shop, brought it home, and was stunned by how “double-entendre” the lyrics were. Barbra would sing them just as they were written, he decided, but with a little of her own razzmatazz.

  That razzmatazz was evident from the moment she stepped onto the stage the night of her surprise tryout at the Bon Soir. As soon as the spotlight was on her, Barbra removed the gum she’d been chewing and stuck it on the microphone. It was something she often did during practice, and both Barré and Bob had suggested she keep it in the act. As they predicted, the audience howled with laughter. Barbra would tell people she’d forgotten the gum was in her mouth, but that, too, was part of the act, part of the saucy, impertinent stage persona they were developing. So when she capped her set with her sexy rendition of “Big Bad Wolf,” the cheers went through the roof. “Kid, you are going to be a very great star,” headliner Larry Storch told Barbra. Right on the spot, Sgroi hired her for a two-week run starting September 9 at $108 a week.

  For the crowd in Barré’s apartment, “Big Bad Wolf” went over just as well. Barbra bounded throughout the living room, looking into the faces of each person present, trilling lots of tra-la-las and rolling her r’s. “Forrrr the big bad, very big, very bad wolf, they did not give three figs!” Her voice was full and rich and utterly confident. But after she was finished and her friends all applauded, she covered her face with her hands and blushed a deep scarlet.

  She was uncomfortable with their acclaim. Singing just came too damn easy. “It just seems the right sounds come out of me in the right way,” she said. Barré thought singing came so effortlessly for her that Barbra “didn’t consider it valuable.” At the end of the night, as people filed out of the apartment praising her voice as a “gift from God,” Barbra’s attitude in response was “Well, yeah, but that’s not what’s important.” Her voice wasn’t anything that she had worked on or studied for. To become an actress, she’d worked very, very hard, harder than she’d ever worked for anything else. But when she sang, Barré said, it was as if she were “on automatic pilot.”

  He remained convinced her voice was her ticket to the top, however, and he tried to persuade her of the same. She wanted to be successful, didn’t she? She wanted to find a way to beat all those agents who wouldn’t take her on at their own game, didn’t she? She wanted the whole world to know who she was, didn’t she?

  Barré pulled her close to him on the couch and kissed her forehead. “When you make your first record, promise you’ll let me produce it.” She nodded against his chest. “Promise?” he asked again, lifting her chin so he could look her in the eyes.

  She returned his smile. “Cross my heart,” she said.

  6.

  Transistor radios all over the city were blaring the summer’s number one hit “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” as Barbra lugged the last of her stuff out of Fifty-fourth Street and downtown to Barré’s via the hot and sweaty subway. Likely this was one of the times she dreamed about a future as a successful actress being “chauffeured around” the city. But for now, Barbra hauled her bags herself across the stifling subway platform then up the grimy steps to Sheridan Square.

  By now, the concierge of Barré’s building knew her; the guy who ran the elevator greeted her by name. Since returning to Manhattan from her two-week run in The Boy Friend, Barbra had been living with Barré. His friends now officially considered them a couple. The only person who didn’t know they were together was Barbra’s mother, who thought Barbra was living with a girlfriend. But Cis was pleased to see Barbra looking and acting so happy for a change, even if, as was Barbra’s custom, she kept most of her friends separate from each other. Barré had met Cis only once, briefly at the Lion, despite Barbra’s describing her as her “best friend.”

  The Boy Friend had enjoyed a good run. Audiences had applauded heartily for Barbra as Hortense, even if one of the other members of the company had quipped that if Hortense’s accent was French, it was “French from the moon.” Hortense had one number in the show, “Nicer in Nice,” which everyone agreed Barbra sang humorously and energetically. But in her spare time she could be heard out back practicing “A Sleepin’ Bee.” She’d come to understand that the Bon Soir gig was vitally important. Barré might pontificate about her voice being her ticket to fame, but Barbra saw other reasons to anticipate her appearance at the Bon Soir. She knew that some of the city’s most influential columnists were likely to be in the audience. A blurb from one of them would be extremely helpful in getting casting directors to take her seriously for parts on Broadway.

  She’d had fun playing Hortense—she was an actress, after all, and needed to act—but Barbra was glad to be back in the city, gladder still to be back with Barré, hunkered down in their intimate little practice sessions. Barbra loved Barré’s apartment, loved calling it home even more. Even if she could have decorated it herself, she wouldn’t have changed a thing. The place evoked a nostalgia for past decades, especially the Gay Nineties and the Roaring Twenties. Theatrical posters hung on the walls; a ventriloquist’s dummy was propped in a corner. Bookshelves were crammed full with old volumes and record albums, ornamented with fan
s and feathers. In the evenings, Tiffany lamps cast a soft amber glow over everything. Sitting cross-legged on the slipcovered Victorian couch, happily ensconced among Art Nouveau and Art Deco, Barbra seemed more at home here than she ever had anywhere else.

  The summer was rapidly drawing to a close. More sunshine than people filled the Village streets, the usual throngs having decamped to Jones Beach or Fire Island for the long Labor Day weekend. But for Barbra and Barré, there was no such holiday. Less than a week stretched between them and Barbra’s opening at the Bon Soir. As they settled down in their living room for some last-minute polishing, they both hoped Barbra hadn’t forgotten too much during her two-week sojourn in Fishkill. Setting the needle down on the phonograph, Barré began singing the words to a song they’d been practicing almost nonstop since Barbra had returned, “Lover, Come Back to Me.” It was a Sigmund Romberg ballad from the operetta The New Moon, the same show from which Diana had chosen “One Kiss” when she and Barbra had made their records at the Nola Recording Studio. The words to “Lover, Come Back to Me” were simple, but one line had continually given Barbra trouble, leaving her tongue-tied: “When I remember every little thing you used to do . . .”

  Maybe it was the idea of remembering things that tripped her up. Barbra rarely looked back and kept her eyes securely on the future. Whatever it was, the line always stopped her cold, and she developed what Barré called a “psychological block.” She insisted that she wanted to scrap the song from the act, but Barré argued it was too good to cut. They’d given it a faster beat, and when she got going on it, Barbra could drive the song “like a freight train,” Barré told her.

  So he’d suggested that she not worry so much about the words. When she started to sing, he advised, she should think about his wet socks hanging in the bathroom, one of his habits that had driven her crazy since moving in. Smiling, Barbra agreed to give the technique a try. Now, as she sang along with Barré, she nailed it. They both let out whoops of triumph when they were finished.

  Up went the needle and another disk dropped onto the turntable. This time it was “Nobody’s Heart” from the Rodgers and Hart musical By Jupiter. In the show, the song was sung by the tomboyish Amazon warrior Antiope, a misfit in the world of men: “Nobody’s heart belongs to me, heigh ho, who cares?” The emotion behind the words, Barré believed, came from the misery of lyricist Lorenz Hart’s own unhappy existence as a repressed gay man. Barré suggested that Barbra perform it very personally in order to make people believe she was singing about herself: “Nobody’s arms belong to me, no arms feel strong to me.” The irony was that for the first time in her life, Barbra felt loved by a man. But she understood all too well what loneliness felt like—and she’d benefit if waves of sympathy came at her from the audience, Barré argued. The misfit girl who wants to be loved had always been a successful character on stage and in movies.

  Any pathos in Barbra’s stage presence, however, needed to be quickly offset by an even stronger sense of resilience and grit, and the next record that dropped onto Barré’s phonograph offered the necessary balance. By now Barbra had become very familiar with the Bronx-accented voice of Helen Kane, a popular singer of the Roaring Twenties and the inspiration for the cartoon character Betty Boop. As soon as she recognized Kane’s music, Barbra wrapped one of Barré’s feathered boas around her shoulders and started to sing along with the record: “I wanna be kissed by you, just you, and nobody else but you, I wanna be kissed by you, alone . . . boop boop a doop!”

  But as he listened to her sing it, Barré nixed the song. It might have made a fun little addition to Barbra’s act, he said, but it was “too well-known to be surprising” and would probably just sound “camp and precious” if Barbra sang it at the Bon Soir. So they settled on a less familiar Kane tune, “I Want to Be Bad.” Rehearsing the song that Labor Day weekend, Barbra was the perfect reincarnation of Kane, a mix of sex and silliness with an overlay of New York character: “If it’s naughty to rouge your lips, shake your shoulders and shake your hips, let a lady confess, ‘I want to be bad!’” When she finished singing, Barbra took her bows to her enthusiastic audience of one.

  But the most important lady that Barré kept playing for Barbra that weekend was one who had no song in the Bon Soir lineup. From the phonograph came the creaky voice of Gertrude Lawrence, the eccentric musical-comedy star of the 1920s and 1930s, singing the songs of Cole Porter. When Barbra had first heard Lawrence, her reaction had been similar to her opinion of Mabel Mercer: “She can’t sing.” But as he had done the night at the Roundtable, Barré told her to listen to Lawrence’s voice “through the squeaks and the faulty pitch.” What they were working on was style and presence. Gertrude Lawrence was the “quintessence of vulnerability,” Barré explained, who, despite her less-than-mellifluent voice and rather plain appearance, made “every man in the audience think she was singing only to him.” Barbra asked how she was able to do that. “It’s called acting,” Barré told her.

  During that summer of 1960, Barbra came to understand that when she sang a song, she was as much an actress as a singer. “If I can identify as an actress to the lyric and sail on the melody,” she realized, “it will be me.” The actual singing came easy. But the emotional backstory that went into the song required all the skills she’d been sharpening for the past two years at the Theatre Studio. So “Lover, Come Back to Me” became a miniature play about a woman who wanted to hang on to the love of her life, “Nobody’s Heart” the story of a homely girl who’s never known love, and “I Want to Be Bad” the chronicle of a girl finally set loose on her own to live her life as she pleased. All of them were aspects of herself, and Barré told her to make sure her audience saw that.

  No doubt somewhere in that cluttered apartment there was a clip of the August 21 edition of Flatbush Life, a Brooklyn newspaper that her mother had saved for her. Cranking out press releases for The Boy Friend, the Theatre Studio had made sure one of them reached the city desk of Barbra’s hometown paper. The photo of herself that looked up at Barbra was one she had come to despise—with her rather pretentious dangling earrings and her hair piled up on her head. But the headline compensated for any disdain for the photo: FLATBUSH ACTRESS HEADS FOR STARDOM. The article, probably lifted verbatim from the press release, noted her work on stage in The Insect Comedy and The Boy Friend, as well as her upcoming appearance at the Bon Soir. If Barbra needed any affirmation—and occasionally, despite her fervent belief in herself, she did—there it was, spelled out in black and white. Barbra Streisand was “headed for stardom.”

  Barré and Barbra had taken a break from their rehearsals and were sharing a BLT when the intercom buzzed. It was Bob, and Barré told him to come up. When Bob entered the apartment, he saw Barbra nibbling on the sandwich while Barré still held it in his hands. On the phonograph floated the strains of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s elegant piece for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending. Walking into this happy little love nest, Bob was unprepared for what he was about to discover. “Hey, Bob,” Barbra purred. “Guess what?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Barré and I are talking about getting married.”

  Bob was stunned. Barré and Barbra as a married couple was a concept he had a hard time “getting his head around.” Carole Gister, when she heard the news a short time later, had a similar reaction. For all his claims of bisexuality, Barré was essentially attracted to men, and both Bob and Carole knew it. They thought Barbra did as well. “They’re going to have to work very, very hard to make a marriage between them succeed,” Bob thought to himself.

  Yet he dared not articulate such misgivings to the dreamy-eyed lovebirds who sat shoulder to shoulder on the couch, eating from both ends of a BLT, the hypnotic sound of the violin from The Lark Ascending wafting through the living room.

  7.

  A bit of a heat wave had settled over the city on the night of Friday, September 9. Temperatures that day had reached the high eighties and hadn’t dropped much since the sun h
ad set. Summer wasn’t quite ready to release its grip on the city. Yet there was a sense that things were about to change. At that very moment, Hurricane Donna was lashing the Florida Keys, on target to swipe the entire eastern seaboard in the next few days. She’d bring torrential rain, massive flooding, and powerful gusts.

  But Hurricane Donna wasn’t the only thing about to hit New York.

  With careful steps in her white buckled shoes, Barbra headed out of her apartment and onto Sixth Avenue, Barré and Bob in tow. For her debut at the Bon Soir, she wore a long black dress under a Persian vest of silk brocade that Terry had found for her in a boutique on Ninth Avenue. Female nightclub performers were expected to wear evening gowns, she’d been told, but both Barré and Bob had felt that Barbra needed to dress to make a statement, to assert the quirky individuality that had set her apart at the Lion. So she buttoned herself into the vest and slipped into the 1920s-era shoes with the big buckles. Her eyes were ringed with Bob’s signature two rows of false eyelashes, and her cheeks and lips were painted in homage to Helen Kane and other ladies of the period.

  The decade they’d just completed, all three agreed, had been dull and boring. “The twenties and thirties were where the real excitement was,” Bob insisted, and they hoped the sixties might have a little of those earlier decades’ style and polish. With Barbra’s closet full of vintage clothing and shoes, Bob’s assortment of old fashion magazines, and Barré’s collection of classic recordings, they’d been able to evoke the glamour of the past while making it all seem fresh and new. Barbra had slipped into the persona of a saucy Roaring Twenties chanteuse as easily as she had that vintage black dress. As Barré lugged his heavy Ampex tape recorder behind her, the onetime misfit from Brooklyn strode confidently through the streets of Greenwich Village, looking as if she’d just stepped out of the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, circa 1925.