Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  The Village was teeming with eccentric, creative types like Barbra who dressed in fashions that, to the rest of the world, seemed outré, but here along these crooked and narrow streets were deemed trendsetting and cutting-edge. The Village was in the midst of a cultural renaissance, or so claimed the New York Times, “once again throbbing with talent” in a way not seen since the post–World War I era of the Provincetown Players. “Box offices are busy,” columnist Dorothy Kilgallen noted as the season got underway. “Taxis are spinning around Manhattan full of people pleasure bent.”

  Many of those taxis were heading to the Village, where this new phenomenon called “off-off-Broadway” was coalescing. No longer was theater the sole province of Midtown. Now it could be found “tucked behind a façade of food and drink,” one critic remarked, a popular alternative due to “the felicitous marriage of the muse and booze.” And while clubs like the Bon Soir had been around for a long time, with some insisting they were past their primes, the new energy flowing into the Village signaled a “rebirth,” a sense of “florescence” that Barré believed was centered in the supper clubs. To Barré, it all seemed a replay of the glory days of André Charlot’s revues of forty years earlier, when Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, or Jessie Matthews sang the songs of Noël Coward.

  What was more, the young performers dancing and singing in revues across Village stages were exceptionally talented, people such as Beatrice Arthur, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Dody Goodman. One could wander through Village cabarets and catch a young actor named George Segal playing tunes from the 1920s on a banjo, or a sarcastic comedian named Joan Rivers (who’d played with Barbra in that attic production of Driftwood) kvetching about men, or an amiable Englishman named Dudley Moore playing the piano downstairs at the Duplex. All of them were in this together, Barré believed, and any one of them had as good a chance as any other of becoming a star in the fertile proving ground of the Village.

  Rounding the corner onto Eighth Street, Barbra and her boys found themselves in front of the Bon Soir. Down the thirty-one steep steps they went, Barbra slowly and deliberately in her high heels. It seemed as if they were descending into a pit of darkness, for the only light flickering below came from a single shaded bulb over the cash register. The walls of the Bon Soir were painted jet black. People in the club moved as if they were shadows.

  Terry was there to greet her, throwing his arms around her and finding her “a bundle of anxious energy.” She had reason to be anxious. Entertainers in nightclubs faced challenges unthinkable elsewhere. “Customers who jam the darkened, smoky rooms to eat and drink up their $3 to $7 minimums,” the Times observed, “have a tendency to grow sulky if their funny bones are not tickled or their heartstrings tweaked at the rate of at least once every twenty seconds.” When the pace lagged, hecklers took up the slack.

  At the Bon Soir, Barbra had awfully big shoes to fill. Here in this small, dark club—a “refreshing blend of Greenwich Village bohemianism and East Side smartness and sophistication,” one critic thought—some of the most exciting acts of the last decade had made their marks, many of them the “far-out females” for which the Bon Soir was famous. The cheeky ladies who played the club broke all the rules. The boisterous Mae Barnes, whose records Barré had played for Barbra, had become a sensation at the Bon Soir after dancing in all-black revues in Harlem. The brash-talking Sylvia Syms, who’d polished her bluesy style under Billie Holiday, had blown the roof off the joint a few years earlier, and Felicia Sanders, who made “Fly Me to the Moon” a standard well before Sinatra, regularly had patrons lined up out to the curb. The Bon Soir was a particularly good space for female performers, singer-actress Kaye Ballard thought, because of its small, intimate shape, but also because of “all the gay guys” who regularly patronized the club.

  Ballard’s shtick—lying on the piano and delivering her monologue as if the audience were up on the ceiling—had earned her a place in the club’s hall of fame, but her record as the Bon Soir’s biggest moneymaker had been overtaken by the current headliner, Phyllis Diller, a crazy-haired housewife from San Francisco. Dorothy Kilgallen called Diller “the funniest woman in the world . . . a flax white blonde who comes out on the stage in a vaguely outrageous costume that might be chic on someone else, points a cigarette holder at the audience, and talks. When she talks, the audience screams. It’s as simple as that.” For all her wild hair and makeup, Diller was known as a clotheshorse, always wearing the latest designers—sometimes topped with a necklace of maraschino cherries that she’d eat, one by one, on stage. All this was done while taking potshots at her husband, whom she called Fang, and, most of all, herself. “Isn’t my fur stole pitiful?” she’d ask the audience. “How unsuccessful can a girl look? People think I’m wearing anchovies. The worst of it is, I trapped these under my own sink.” Then she’d let loose with her trademark fingernails-on-the-blackboard laugh—a gimmick that had originated from nerves, but which had stayed in the act after Diller noticed the laughs the laugh got.

  When Barbra and her friends arrived, only a few customers were milling about the place. Sgroi emerged from the back office to greet her. Taking her by the arm, he escorted her to the women’s dressing room. Diller frequently grumbled that the room was the size of a peapod and that she and her fellow performers were forced to change clothes “butt to butt.” From a single window, a rusty old air conditioner dripped water into a bucket. Clothes hung from hooks on the wall since there wasn’t room for a closet or shelves. When Barbra walked in, Diller was sitting on a stool threading her maraschino cherries. Sgroi introduced them, and Diller told Barbra she liked her unusual shoes. “They cost me thirty-five cents,” Barbra replied. That was the extent of their conversation. Diller found the kid standoffish and deemed her way too young to be singing in a club.

  Around eleven, the place started filling up and the band began to play. The Three Flames was a wisecracking piano, bass, and guitar trio who integrated the jive of the Harlem streets into their act. The Bon Soir was that rare place where blacks and whites mixed without tension and without rank, where three black guys from Harlem could share a stage with a white housewife from San Francisco and a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. On many nights a touch of class was provided by Norene Tate, a stately, silver-haired pianist who’d also played the Lion. The emcee was Jimmie Daniels, a Texan who’d sung in Parisian boîtes before the war. Always impeccably dressed and unfailingly polite, Daniels was famous for never uttering a bad word about anyone, a far cry from the often raucous acts he introduced. In the 1930s, he’d run an eponymous club in Harlem and was rumored to have been one of Cole Porter’s lovers.

  Around midnight, the Three Flames gave way to the comics Tony and Eddie, whose act consisted mostly of mime and sight gags, using wigs, false teeth, and prop weapons. In one bit, Tony played a patient and Eddie a doctor, with the recording of a coloratura soprano giving voice to Tony’s pain each time he got a shot.

  If Barbra had ventured to peer out from the dressing room, she would have discerned waiters weaving in and out among the tables carrying tiny flashlights in order to spot who needed refills. This produced a flickering, bouncing light that made the room seem, in the words of New York Times reviewer Arthur Gelb, “a-twinkle with glow worms.” Gelb wasn’t the only major newspaperman sipping vino and smoking cigarettes in the audience. Dorothy Kilgallen, one of the widest-read syndicated theater columnists, was out there, too. If the news made Barbra anxious, she could take heart that the Bon Soir’s pianist that night was Peter Daniels, the same friendly Englishman she’d met back when she’d auditioned for Eddie Blum several months earlier and who’d helpfully rehearsed with her at his apartment on Riverside Drive in the days leading up to this night.

  Finally, it was Barbra’s turn to go on. Jimmie Daniels stood in the middle of the stage and introduced her as “a girl with a magical set of pipes.” Suddenly the bright white spotlight swung across the stage and caught Barbra, already seated on her stool and staring directly out into the au
dience. It was her moment, and she was ready for it. The applause she received was respectful, though hardly the enthusiastic greeting bestowed upon the more familiar Tony and Eddie. Hoping to fill in the spaces, Barré and Bob leaped to their feet, cheering as loudly as they could, nudging friends to do the same.

  Once the applause died down and Barbra was sure all eyes were on her, she slowly and deliberately removed the gum from her mouth and stuck it on the microphone. It was by now a well-practiced bit of shtick that won the hoped-for snickers. Still, the audience, including those hard-to-please columnists, didn’t know quite what to make of the small girl in the spotlight with the queer shoes and absurdly long fingernails. She seemed both frightened and confident, her quivery smile revealing as much pluck as it did apprehension.

  Barbra took a deep breath. Giving a nod to Peter Daniels, she launched into the first song of her set, Fats Waller’s “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.” The little love ditty became a “sexy, playful, naughty” flirtation with the audience, just as she and Barré had worked out. The applause at the end was heartier this time, and sailing on a burst of adrenaline, Barbra segued into the song that had started it all for her. “When a bee lies sleepin’ in the palm of your hand . . .” The audience was riveted. Cries of “Gorgeous!” were heard when she finished the song.

  Barré was sitting on the edge of his seat, mouthing the words to each song along with Barbra while his Ampex tape recorder, off to the side, captured the music for posterity. Bob sat sketching Barbra as she sang, preserving the night in his own way with pen and ink. When Peter Daniels’s piano introduction indicated it was time for “I Want to Be Bad,” Barbra stood from her stool so she could move her body seductively to the words. The audience hooted and whistled. “She’s killing them,” Barré whispered. “They love her!” Three songs in, Barbra had them eating out of her hands—those lovely, exquisite hands that Bob watched in a sort of awe that night as they moved through the air with all the grace and precision of an orchestra conductor.

  At the beginning of her fourth number, Barbra closed her eyes. For the sad ballad “When Sunny Gets Blue,” Barré had told her to think about a classmate of hers back at Erasmus Hall who’d been even more of a misfit than she was. Picked on, lonely, the girl had elicited sympathy from Barbra, who would smile at her in the corridors. Barré had told Barbra to think of that girl when she sang the song, and so, drawing on all of her acting ability, Barbra stood on the stage, emotions exposed. This tender number was immediately followed by her bouncy rendition of “Lover, Come Back to Me,” with the line Barbra had once found so difficult now flying “like a bullet,” Barré thought. All those weeks of practice, of picturing his socks in the bathroom, had paid off.

  Then came “Nobody’s Heart,” the perfect penultimate song for Barbra’s set. As she and Barré had planned, the audience seemed to feel that she was singing about herself. How could they not? There she was in front of them, so small, so unusual, seeming so desperate for their approval, coming more alive with each round of applause. The lyrics seemed to fill in all the autobiography that had been missing from Jimmie Daniels’s scanty introduction of her. She was a girl who’d been “sad at times, and disinclined to play, but it’s not bad at times, to go your own sweet way.” That’s what people took away from hearing her. When, at the finish of the song, she dropped her chin onto her chest, the audience was on its feet, shouting “Brava! Brava!”

  The spotlight swung back to Jimmie Daniels. “Miss Barbra Streisand!” he announced. As expected, the cries of “Encore!” began. With a smile and a wave of his hand, Daniels surrendered the stage again to Barbra. Back into view she charged, all five feet five inches of her, a hundred and fifteen pounds of determination, singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” She was suddenly transformed into a ringleader of merriment, letting her instinct take over in ways that even Barré hadn’t expected. With “semioperatic swoops and shrieks,” she bounded across the stage warbling the words that many people in the audience remembered from their childhoods. They laughed, clapped, and nodded their heads along to the familiar but utterly unexpected tune. Singing about the third pig, Barbra put her hands on her hips and spontaneously invoked Mae West: “Nix on tricks, I will build my house of bricks!” The audience roared its approval.

  Barré was overwhelmed. He’d coached Barbra to think about Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Flies, which he called “an homage to madness,” during her rendition of “Big Bad Wolf,” but this was beyond anything they’d rehearsed. It was anarchic brilliance cooked up on the spot, one observer said, “almost like the Marx Brothers, if Groucho had been able to sing.” To each pig she had bequeathed a different voice, and when the brick house stands firm and the wolf gets roasted in the fireplace, she let out a “triumphant roar.” At the end of the song, Barbra fled the stage laughing hysterically, as if she were “being chased by the Furies,” Barré thought. The audience, in his words, went “nuts.”

  Bob’s reaction was quieter. He sat in a kind of stunned silence, remembering the time he’d seen Edith Piaf at the Biltmore Theatre in Los Angeles. No elaborate orchestration had supported the great French chanteuse. Piaf had relied only on the force of her voice and personality. Bob had wondered then why America had no Piaf of its own, why the best his country had seemed able to produce was Patti Page singing “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” Watching Barbra that night, alone on the stage working her magic without any props, without any major orchestration, Bob thought solemnly to himself, “This could be our Piaf.”

  Friends, of course, might be expected to imagine such heights for each other, but Bob wasn’t alone in his response. Terry was once again in tears hearing Barbra sing. Carole Gister, also in the audience, was “blown away” by the fact that each of Barbra’s songs had seemed like “a self-contained play.” In her dressing room, Phyllis Diller had been drawn by the sound of Barbra’s voice, and despite having been unimpressed with the kid in person, found herself getting goose bumps listening to her sing. It wasn’t often that Diller had to take the stage with an audience still buzzing over the warm-up act.

  Part of what the audience had responded to was Barbra’s obvious awareness of, and proficiency with, the traditions of the stage. It hadn’t just been West she’d invoked up there. She’d displayed the raw power of Piaf and sung her songs in the storytelling style of Mabel Mercer and connected with her audience as personally as had Gertrude Lawrence. She’d flirted like Helen Kane, belted like Mae Barnes, and smoldered like Ruth Etting. Yet the audience wasn’t applauding any of those venerable ladies. Barbra was no imitator. When Mercer sang, she barely moved a muscle on stage, but Barbra had used her hands to dazzling effect. Lawrence’s cadences had often induced cringes, but Barbra’s euphonious voice had soared through the room mesmerizing her audience. The spontaneous combustion that had left Barré stunned and Bob speechless was the result of an inexplicable alchemy that had taken all of those influences, shaken them together, and conjured something entirely new. Something that called herself Barbra Streisand.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fall 1960

  1.

  Diana would have come earlier, she insisted to friends, but Hurricane Donna—“one of the biggest hurricanes ever to hit New York” meteorologists had called it—had prevented her from making the trip in from Brooklyn. The fact that the storm had been over for several days now, with sunshine and mild temperatures returning to the city, was not pointed out to Diana by her friends. They were just glad that she was finally heading into Manhattan, accompanied by Sheldon, to see Barbra sing at the Bon Soir.

  Word had spread fast—even out to Brooklyn—that Barbra was a hit. Diana was aware of the reviews, even if she hadn’t read them all. The New York World-Telegram had declared Barbra “the find of the year,” praising her “range and power,” her “natural gift for musical comedy,” and her ability to handle “with aplomb the most meaningful of ballads.” But it was Dorothy Kilgallen’s syndicated column that had the most tongues
wagging in Brooklyn. “The pros are talking about a rising new star on the local scene,” Kilgallen wrote. “Eighteen-year-old Barbra Streisand never had a singing lesson in her life, doesn’t know how to walk, dress, or take a bow, but she projects well enough to bring the house down.” Diana’s circle of friends were dazzled that somebody as well-known as Kilgallen—a panelist on the TV game show What’s My Line? in addition to her newspaper duties—had even acknowledged such a neophyte.

  Most people overlooked the mild criticism of Barbra’s unpolished presentation that was imbedded in Kilgallen’s review, but Diana had keyed right into it. At least one of her friends suspected that, as she waited in line with Sheldon outside the Bon Soir, she was probably fretting over the fact that Kilgallen—always so elegant in her cocktail dresses and pearls on television—had declared to the world that Barbra didn’t know “how to walk, dress, or take a bow.”

  Yet the fact remained that this teenage tyro had somehow managed to seduce everybody else who queued up outside the club that night waiting to see her. Barré had been extremely percipient. Barbra’s audiences had conflated her lyrics with her life, no matter how manufactured that might have been, and taken her utterly into their hearts. As one reviewer observed, on stage Barbra displayed “a dynamic passion that tells the listener that this plain Jane is holding up a vocal mirror to her own life.”