Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  5.

  Heading into the dressing room, Phyllis noticed that the black Chanel dress, which had been hanging on its hook for days, was now wrapped in paper and placed in a box.

  She turned to see Barbra hovering nearby, unusually timid.

  “Phyllis,” the girl asked, “would you mind very much if I took that dress back and bought fabric instead and used it to make a dress that I design myself?”

  Phyllis looked at her. How sweet the kid was for worrying that she might hurt her feelings—or maybe, Phyllis thought, Barbra was just worried she’d “blow a gasket,” since Phyllis had paid for the damn thing. No matter what motivated Barbra’s timidity, Phyllis just smiled at her.

  “Of course, baby,” she said. “In fact, that’s exactly what you should do.”

  Barbra beamed.

  Phyllis had no idea if the kid would make it in showbiz. It was a tough racket, after all. But even more than talent, which she had in spades, Barbra had something else, Phyllis thought. She had the courage to be herself—which would either boost her to the top or keep her forever on the bottom. Watching the kid head back to Klein’s, the dress tucked under her arm, Phyllis figured if she had to bet, she’d lay odds with the former.

  6.

  Tonight Barbra was on fire.

  “Every note was perfect,” said the man who was sitting in the front row looking up at her, impressed and surprised by this ungainly neophyte. “Every move she made, every gesture, every lift of her eyebrows was on target.”

  The man’s name was Ted Rozar. His broad-shouldered, six-foot-plus frame was barely contained in the small chair on the Bon Soir floor. An entertainment manager by occupation, Rozar had come down to the Village that night to see his client, comedian Paul Dooley, who’d taken over from the departing Tony and Eddie. Dooley was performing material written by another of Rozar’s clients, David Panich. At Rozar’s side was a third client, Orson Bean, who had told him before the show began that this Streisand kid was a “knockout.” But Rozar hadn’t expected to be as impressed as he was.

  It was an exciting period all around. Just ten days before, John F. Kennedy had been elected president. The air vibrated with newness, change, and youth. Maybe some of that came through in Barbra’s performance that night. Yet what lifted her up most was the review she had long been waiting for, which had just been published days earlier.

  “A startlingly young, stylish and vibrant-voiced gamine named Barbra Streisand is one of the pleasures of a club called the Bon Soir, ” Arthur Gelb had written in the New York Times. “[Patrons] seem to enjoy the way she sidles up to a microphone and gargles love songs into it in Spanish, French and broken English.”

  Gelb was the same reviewer who had given Barré a mention that summer. And now Barbra had gotten her own name in the Times, with considerably more ink than Barré had received.

  What’s more, Gelb hadn’t just liked her voice and her banter (lately she’d been throwing out a few phrases in other languages, including Yiddish). He’d also called her “stylish.” Barbra took great satisfaction from that. So much for those bluenoses in the ladies’ room who’d made disparaging remarks about her clothes.

  Ted Rozar thought she was perfect. Everything about her—“her voice, her look, her way with the audience”—was “superb.” Leaning over to Bean during the applause, he whispered that Barbra was a cross between Eydie Gormé and Lily Pons. He said he wanted to represent her.

  So, after the show was over, Bean took Rozar backstage.

  “Barbra Streisand!” Rozar called out in his big, booming, deep-throated voice. She couldn’t have avoided him even if she’d wanted to. Rozar’s giant frame towered over her and he took her face into his large hands. She looked up at him with wide eyes.

  “Barbra Streisand,” he repeated. “I love you.”

  And with great dramatic flair, he kissed her on the cheek.

  “My name is Ted Rozar. Do you know who I am?”

  She said she did. Orson Bean had already filled her in.

  “Do you have a manager?” Rozar asked.

  Barbra replied that she did not. Her voice was small, wavering, unsure of this giant who still held her in his grip.

  “I’d like to manage you,” Rozar said. He explained that he’d been an agent at MCA before going into management at Bean’s request. He was building “an impressive roster,” he told her, and wanted to add her to it.

  “Will you hang on a minute?” Barbra asked, slipping out from Rozar’s grip and scrambling into the Bon Soir’s kitchen to call Barré. When she got him on the phone, she told him he had to come over. Right away.

  Barré was there in less than ten minutes. Taking one look at Rozar, he thought he was “the whitest white man” he’d ever seen. Rozar had long blond hair that was combed straight back from his forehead and a “blazingly white smile” that made Barré think he might have to shield his eyes. Indeed, Rozar distinguished himself in a field predominated by Jews by calling himself “the only Gentile in the business.” Wary of him for some reason, Barré nonetheless suggested they head over to the Pam Pam to talk.

  As they slid into a leatherette booth, Rozar was already pitching. “I think we can make great music together,” he was telling Barbra.

  Barbra stared over at him. She wanted to act, she said, not just sing.

  “Absolutely,” Rozar said. “You should do it all.”

  The coffee and pastries were on him, he said, which won him some points in Barbra’s favor. In fact, he told her, all of her meals would be on him when they were together. He’d only let her pick up the tab, he said, when she hit it big. Then, he said, “you can take me to dinner.”

  Barbra listened as Rozar promised to promote her for not just club dates and record deals but theater and television as well. She’d need an agent, and he could help her find one. Barré looked over and saw Barbra’s mind whirling. She seemed on the verge of saying yes and signing with Rozar right then and there, but suddenly she backed off. She had to get back to the club for her second show, she announced. She told Rozar she’d have to think about it for a while. He gave her his card. “Please, please, call me,” he implored.

  Barbra said she’d give his offer some consideration.

  Out on the street, when they were alone, Barré asked Barbra what she thought.

  It was clear she was enticed by the promises Rozar had made. Theater. Television. That meant acting, she said, not just singing. But there was something about the manager’s blond all-American good looks that had left her uneasy. Could he really understand her? Did he really, honestly get her? “He’s such a goy,” she said at last to Barré, and they started to laugh. They laughed all the way back to the club, walking arm in arm.

  It was a rare moment of levity and connection between them these days, and both of them made sure to relish it.

  7.

  Less than a week later, on November 23, Barbra signed with Ted Rozar. They agreed on a three-year contract, with Rozar taking ten percent if she made less than $350 a week, and twenty percent if she earned more. With his assistance, she had just signed with an agent as well, Irvin Arthur of the Associated Booking Corporation, who’d briefly run the RSVP nightclub and kept Mabel Mercer employed. Associated Booking had represented Billie Holiday until her death in 1959 and currently helmed the careers of Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and about “ninety percent of jazz’s top stars.”

  And this—this—was where they booked her.

  From the little raised stage in the dining room of this “family” hotel somewhere deep in the fir forests of the Catskill Mountains, Barbra did her best to win over her audience, an assemblage of senior citizens who looked and sounded an awful lot like her grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They were far more interested in discussing the lackluster menu offerings and the pinochle games they’d played that afternoon than listening to the little girl who’d gotten up to sing. Barbra trilled the first strains of “A Sleepin’ Bee,” but the audience kept right on talking. Rozar, who s
at with his wife and Barré at a table near the back, finally stood and asked people to quiet down, waving his long arms and big hands. But it did no good. People just looked at him, perhaps wondering why this blond meshuggeneh goy was making so much noise.

  Driving back to New York after the show, Rozar told Barbra that she shouldn’t be discouraged. Lady Luck was an unpredictable dame. When he was eighteen years old, he told her, fighting in the Korean War, he’d parachuted from an airplane and broke his back, spending nine months in a Stryker Frame as his spinal cord healed. That turned out to be “the luckiest thing that ever happened” to him, he said, because it allowed him to count his blessings. He could still see, hear, feel, think—and that deep belief in himself had allowed him to walk again. “It’s all in the attitude,” he said, puffing on his cigarette.

  No doubt Barbra felt that her new manager wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. She’d been carrying plenty of attitude ever since she was twelve years old. But attitude was nothing without instinct, and her gut was telling her she was off to a bad start with Rozar. Barbra did not want to make a career singing in clubs and resorts. She thought she had made that clear. Nearly all of her acting-school classmates were practicing the craft they’d spent years—and buckets of blood, sweat, and tears—honing at the Theatre Studio. Carl Esser had just opened in Whisper to Me off-Broadway after spending the summer touring with Hans Conried in Not in the Book. Even Barbra’s old boyfriend, Roy Scott, was currently in rehearsals for Montserrat, a revival of Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Emmanuel Roblès’ play. Everybody was acting, it seemed.

  Everybody except Barbra.

  8.

  Barbra sat very still, chin in the air, eyes looking upward. Determined to get out of the advertising game and make his living as an artist, Bob needed a sample portrait for his portfolio, and Barbra, he insisted, with her swan’s neck and aquiline nose, was an ideal model. The flattery won her over, and she’d agreed to sit for him. After all, there wasn’t much else going on for her these days. Since the disaster in the Catskills, not a single job offer had come her way. Calling Irvin Arthur every day had produced the same answer: “Sorry, nothing.” So she spent her days perched up on a stool, striking a pose like a queen, while Bob drew her with his charcoal pencil. But as much as she enjoyed playing artist’s model, Barbra’s mind was a million miles away.

  Or, to be more accurate, three thousand miles away. Not long after they’d returned from the mountains, Barré had flown to Los Angeles to visit his family for the week of Hanukkah. Even before he left, Barbra had started missing him. She’d bought him a book of French art to read on the plane and had slipped little notes into it every ten or fifteen pages. On one note she’d written that she knew it was tough living with her, but she promised that when Barré returned—and here he had to flip the note over to continue reading—it would get even worse! Barré had laughed reading it, just as he was sure she had intended him to do.

  But it was her last note, slipped into the final pages of the book, that had contained as much vulnerability as Barbra ever let herself reveal—offstage, that is. In that last note, she wrote that she would miss Barré and that she hoped he knew she was with him in spirit. It was signed with “a small bundle of love.”

  Bob asked her to lift her chin a bit more.

  Barbra complied. It was a very specific look that Bob was going for in his sketch. He wanted it to evoke the kind of drawings René Bouché did for Vogue, languid renderings of the rich and famous, people like Lady Astor and Elsa Maxwell and the Duchess of Windsor. For the sitting, he’d helped Barbra select a gorgeous Geoffrey Beene dress, one of those finds she’d snatched up at a thrift shop. As usual, he’d done her makeup, exaggerating her eyes with the now-standard double set of false eyelashes.

  But something had been troubling Bob about Barbra’s look, and it took this sketch to figure it out. Until then, she’d been wearing “very elaborate teenage hairstyles,” usually with bangs and hairpieces and sometimes a ponytail. Bob arranged her hair simply, without any of the hairpieces, and instantly an entire new persona emerged.

  For the first time, Bob thought, Barbra exuded a kind of “legitimate, mainstream beauty,” sophisticated and mature. The Victorian combing jackets and Roaring Twenties buckle shoes, while stylish, had been more like costumes. Now, looking over at her, Bob thought she seemed to conjure Audrey Hepburn, gamine yet elegant, youthful yet sophisticated, delicate yet durable.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Barbra managed a few peeks at herself in the mirror as she sat there on her stool. Bob thought she liked what she saw, discovering parts of herself she hadn’t known were there. Without the romantic complication that existed with Barré, Barbra’s friendship with Bob could be a safe haven from whatever else might be troubling her, and she seemed to confide in him things she revealed to no one else. One time they gabbed for a solid nine hours on the telephone, then, realizing they both had a hankering for ice cream, met up for a cone and talked some more. Bob had observed that Barbra didn’t have a “tight group of friends” with whom she could take refuge and comfort. She still kept her friends distinctly separate and saw them one-on-one. Bob had never met Cis or Harvey Corman, for example, and while he’d met Terry Leong, he never socialized with him and Barbra.

  Sometimes he wondered if the Barbra he knew was the same Barbra they knew. Did she share different parts of herself with different people? How many Barbras were there? Looking at her that day, as she sat on her stool appearing so comfortable in her newly created, cosmopolitan persona while secretly longing for a man who seemed increasingly unavailable, it would have been fair for Bob to wonder.

  9.

  Barré was coming home, and Barbra was beside herself with anticipation.

  It had to be today, she reasoned. She’d mixed up the dates, expecting him the day before, and when he hadn’t shown, she figured she’d been a day off. Barré had told her that he’d be gone for a week. Hanukkah was over by now. So it must be today.

  She and Bob had prepared quite the welcome-home feast. The table was loaded with lox and bagels, cream cheese, olives, and smoked fish, all of Barré’s favorites. The apartment was decorated with candles and flowers. When Barré hadn’t shown at what Barbra was certain was his appointed time of return, she’d become worried. Maybe there’d been an accident, she said to Bob. A plane crash. She called the airline and was told that the flight from Los Angeles had touched down safely earlier that day. She couldn’t phone Barré’s parents’ house to inquire if he was still there; Barré, like Barbra, hadn’t told his family that he was living with anyone. Barbra was stymied.

  Outside, it was snowing again. A blast of cold rain had rid the city of much of the snow and grime that had pocked its streets for the past week, but now another storm was blowing across the island of Manhattan. Temperatures were dropping close to zero. The weatherman said a bitter cold wave was expected to stick around straight through Christmas, which was almost upon them. Barbra worried some more.

  Finally, close to midnight, she accepted the fact that Barré wasn’t coming home this night either. It must be tomorrow, she told Bob. How could she have mixed the dates up so badly?

  They ate some of the bagels and lox, fearful they’d spoil, and stuffed the rest of the food into the refrigerator. The next day, they took it all out once more and laid it on the table. The wait was on again. Barbra relit the candles, freshened the flowers. She and Bob sat in the living room on the slipcovered couch, under the fans and the feathers and the theatrical posters, beside the ventriloquist’s dummy and the cabinets filled with Barré’s collection of old record albums. All afternoon and into the evening they sat there, trying to make light conversation, trying to laugh about silly, inconsequential things, but Bob noticed how often Barbra’s eyes flickered over to the door, how every sound in the hallway made her jump.

  No Barré that night either.

  Once again, they ate some of the food and refrigerated the rest. For nearly a week,
they repeated the process, until there was no food left and all the flowers had wilted.

  And still Barré did not come home.

  10.

  Barré finally returned to New York more than a week late. He walked into the apartment to find Barbra on the telephone. She didn’t look up or say hello. “As cold as salted ice,” he described her when she finally hung up, and it had remained that way between them for these past few days. Barbra was “fed up” with him, Barré realized, and he was fast becoming “just as fed up with her.”

  Barré knew that he had been wrong to stay so long in California without calling Barbra to explain. Sitting in his parents’ living room, he had watched the weather reports of the cold wave barreling down over the Northeast. “What are you hurrying back there for?” his father had asked. “You got anything to go back to?”

  Barré had told his father no.

  Part of his behavior, he admitted, was an attempt “to stick it” to Barbra. After all, he’d spent the last nine months completely in her service. Everything they did—everything they talked about—was somehow related to her career, her ambition, her life. It was never about him, Barré felt. That was why he told his father he had nothing to go back to in New York. But surely his reluctance to return to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend also had something to do with Barbra’s question: “What are we gonna do about sex?” It hung over Barré’s head like the sword of Damocles.

  Now he was back. And Barbra was having her revenge.

  It was New Year’s Eve. She’d left him alone in their apartment without telling him where she was going or when she’d be back. Turnabout was fair play after all.

  As the hands of the clock drew ever closer to midnight, Barré sat in the apartment stewing. Yes, Bob had given him the details of how Barbra had waited for him, night after night, constantly hoping he’d walk through the door. But hadn’t that been exactly the way Barré had waited for her the night of his show in Central Park?