Finally he decided that he was not going to sit at home by himself on New Year’s Eve.
Fifteen miles southwest, Barbra was feeling exactly the same way. She had sought out a girlfriend, one of those acquaintances she kept separate from Barré and Bob, and together they’d taken the ferry over to Staten Island. Barbra’s companion had suggested they ring in the new year at a club called the Townhouse. Finding the manager, Barbra offered to sing a few songs if he paid her fifty dollars. Without any work over the last month, she was strapped for cash, and she’d learned that this voice of hers could be merchandized. The manager had no idea about her Bon Soir success, but since he was short an act, he agreed, and Barbra climbed up on stage.
The crowd liked her, but a few of them didn’t much care for her friend, who was black. So, while Barbra was singing, the manager made a “cutting gesture” across his throat—“eight bars and off.” Taking the cash, Barbra and her friend beat it out of there, no doubt glad to leave such a racist place behind.
It was in such a mood that Barbra returned to the apartment.
She walked in to find Barré having sex with a man, a light-skinned black man she didn’t recognize. In that moment, the shocking truth of their nine months together suddenly came crashing down on her—a truth she had known, of course, but had done her best to block out of her mind.
When Barbra had fallen in love with Barré, she had just turned eighteen. He was her first love. She was young, innocent, and inexperienced. She had given Barré her body. When asked later if she remembered much about the night she’d lost her virginity, she’d say, “A lot, yeah.” That was because she’d given Barré more than just her body; she’d given him her heart. She thought he had changed, that she had changed him. She had even allowed herself to imagine a future with him, going so far as to speak of marriage. Now her illusions were shattering around her like glass. The image of Barré and his lover seared itself into her brain. She would live with it, she’d admit, for the rest of her life.
CHAPTER FIVE
Winter–Spring 1961
1.
Sometimes the best way to heal a broken heart is to get out of town.
The streets of Detroit were a lot wider than those in New York, and Barbra missed the subway. But it was good to be away.
She almost hadn’t made it. Hurrying with Bob to Penn Station, she had insisted she needed to stop at the drugstore first. Bob warned her that she risked missing her train if she did so. What could she possibly need at the drugstore?
“Toothpaste,” she answered.
“Barbra,” Bob told her, trying to be patient, “they have toothpaste in Detroit.”
Now she was six hundred miles from New York, the farthest she’d ever been from home. She’d arrived in the Motor City alone, without knowing a soul. Irvin Arthur had finally landed her a gig, and the owners of the Caucus Club, a swanky supper club in Detroit’s bustling downtown, had hired her sight unseen on the agency’s recommendation. They’d arranged for her to stay at the high-rise, Venetian-styled Henrose Hotel on Cadillac Square. It was almost as if Barbra were a real star.
Yet her audiences at the Caucus Club these past several nights hadn’t exactly been standing room only. The buzz from the Bon Soir hadn’t traveled quite as far as Detroit, and the Caucus Club’s lack of newspaper advertisements hadn’t helped either. So now Barbra was undertaking something she’d never done before in her short career: a media blitz. To drum up some business for this unknown out-of-towner, the club’s publicist, Ross Chapman, had booked Barbra on the Jack Harris radio show, which aired mornings on WJR at nine thirty. They’d taken a cab over to the studio together. Taking a deep breath to calm herself—in a few minutes, not just a few dozen people would be listening to her but a few thousand—Barbra headed inside the station.
Chapman had already given Harris a heads-up on what to expect. Barbra was “different,” Chapman had warned him, and indeed, as the young woman walked into the studio, Harris had to agree. Barbra was wearing a bulky antique coat and, as often happened when she was nervous, was twitching noticeably. Not quite knowing what to make of this unusual-looking kid, Harris asked her, on the air, “How’d you get into the singing business, for goodness’ sake?”
“Well,” Barbra replied, her voice trembling, “I had no money . . .”
From behind her, laughter rose from the technicians and others in the studio.
“ . . . and I entered a talent contest at a little . . .” Barbra hesitated. She couldn’t exactly describe the Lion honestly for what it was. “A little joint,” she finished.
It was the first time Barbra had been asked to tell her story in her own words. When Harris queried if she hadn’t then gone on to perform at one of the bigger New York clubs, she seemed to find her footing by reiterating the talking point that Rozar had been pushing these past few weeks. She told Harris that, yes, indeed, from there she went on to the Bon Soir “for eleven weeks, my first professional engagement.” No matter how she looked, eleven weeks at a New York club for an untrained singer was very impressive.
It already seemed like a long time ago. Soon after the new year, Barbra had moved out of Barré’s and into a hotel; she couldn’t go on living in Barré’s apartment with “all the cold-shouldering” they gave to each other, not to mention the heartbreak she carried around with her but didn’t dare articulate. Thankfully a pal from the Theatre Studio, Elaine Sobel, invited her to move in with her temporarily at her place on East Thirty-fourth Street, near Second Avenue. In no time, Barbra had stuffed all her clothes and belongings back into a half dozen shopping bags and lugged them right over.
But even twenty-nine blocks was still too close to Barré, so it was with tremendous relief in early February that she learned Irvin Arthur had secured the Detroit assignment. The Caucus Club would pay her $125 a week, which was seventeen dollars more than she’d made at the Bon Soir. Barbra was pleased.
Yet from the moment she arrived in Detroit, it would have been difficult to miss the posters announcing the touring company of The Sound of Music, starring Florence Henderson, which opened at the Grand Riviera Theater the same week Barbra opened at the Caucus Club. Barbra, it seemed, had been destined for Detroit. If she’d won the role of Liesl, she would’ve arrived in the city this very same week, though under very different circumstances. She wouldn’t have arrived alone, for one thing. She would have been happily ensconced within a company of fellow actors as she found her way through a city that was so very different from New York.
But while she fervently wished she was acting on a stage instead of singing in a club, at least she’d been impressed by the venue that had hired her. The Caucus Club was run by two brothers, Les and Sam Gruber, who also owned what was considered by many to be Detroit’s finest restaurant, the London Chop House, directly across the street. The Chopper, as it was called, was a favorite spot for the barons of the city’s auto industry, for whom special red phones were brought over to the tables so they might continue doing business as they ate their lunch or dinner. The Caucus, however, was a different animal altogether. It was a private men’s club—a discriminatory policy Barbra surely found antiquated—though the entertainment in the back room, where she performed, was open to everyone.
Barbra’s bohemian style didn’t fit with the Grubers’ regimented precision. The first day Barbra showed up, Les Gruber had looked at her bulky black turtleneck and black slacks and snapped, “Go back to your hotel and put on a dress.” For Ross Chapman, “weird” was the only way to describe Barbra’s appearance. The club’s pianist, Matt Michaels, was more specific: He thought she looked like “a hippie.” If Barbra’s “thrift-shop couture” had encountered some criticism even in anything-goes Greenwich Village, it sure wasn’t going to work in buttoned-down Detroit.
Even worse from the management’s point of view was the fact that Barbra arrived knowing only a handful of songs. Under her arm she carried “a big stack of dog-eared music” —the songs she’d practiced with Barré and
arranged with Peter Daniels. With only a few additions, she’d stuck to basically the same set for her entire run at the Bon Soir. But the Caucus Club was a very different kind of engagement, as she quickly discovered. A flushed Matt Michaels walked up to Chapman after running over material with Barbra. “My God, Ross,” he said. “That broad only knows four songs.”
She knew more than four, but Michaels’s point was taken. Barbra was to do four spots a night at the Caucus Club; Chapman estimated she’d need at least eleven numbers. No one had expected her to arrive with such a limited repertoire. For her part, Barbra had naïvely assumed that she could just keep coasting along on what she knew. After all, she hadn’t had Barré’s help these past few months in expanding her song list.
For the first few nights, they determined, they could get by with “A Sleepin’ Bee” and the rest. But in a very short amount of time, Chapman insisted, Barbra would need to add seven or eight numbers to her act. Could she do it? Looking him straight in the eye, Barbra replied, “I’m a fast learner.” And so she and Michaels got down to work.
Matt Michaels, however, was no Peter Daniels, enchanted with the quirky young imp standing in front of his piano. To Michaels, Barbra looked like a witch—“All she needed was a broomstick”—and acted like one too. At twenty-eight, Michaels was a veteran musician highly regarded in Detroit, and he didn’t take kindly to Barbra refusing his suggestions on how to arrange a piece or insisting he play the piano precisely the way she told him. Practicing in the ballroom of a nearby hotel, Michaels told Barbra that if she actually knew how to read music, he might take her demands more seriously. But when he offered to teach her, he discovered she had no interest in learning; he thought she was afraid to try. A “tough lady,” Michaels told people when they asked about her. Throughout their time together, although he found it a “pleasure to accompany her,” he never grew “particularly enamored of her.”
It wasn’t the first time Barbra’s single-minded, unflappable dedication to her own way of doing things had come across as rude or self-absorbed. But there was a method, she believed, to her madness. While it was true that she couldn’t read music, those eleven weeks at the Bon Soir—and probably that fiasco in the Catskills as well—had taught her what worked for her and what did not. On one of her first nights at the Caucus, Barbra had stunned Michaels by telling a talkative audience to “shut up.” If she had to sing old ditties for a living, and not play Juliet, then she’d at least do it her way.
Working with her in that hotel ballroom, Michaels saw very clearly Barbra’s intense desire “to be a star.” Patrons had begun to comment on the delicacy of her hand movements on stage, an innate characteristic that had served her so well at the Bon Soir. But it was no longer spontaneous, Michaels discerned. He watched as Barbra stood “in front of a mirror four and five hours a day perfecting her gestures.” Everything about herself needed to be fine-tuned, Barbra believed. Yet for all her drive and determination, Michaels doubted Barbra would succeed in the end. She just carried too much “belligerence” around with her, he thought.
Of course, that belligerence had always been Barbra’s shield, a lesson absorbed from Diana. It was an attitude that enabled her to deflect criticism and refuse to take no for an answer. It also allowed her to ignore hecklers, which won Gruber’s grudging admiration one night after he witnessed some patrons razzing her.
So the decision was made to get Barbra out talking to the newspapers and radio stations. Ross Chapman asked her to tell him a few salient facts about herself so he “could do a squib on her to hand out.” To Chapman’s frustration, Barbra had brought no publicity material with her from New York, not even any photographs. Chapman declared they needed to build her up, make her interesting, get people talking.
So she told him she was from Turkey, and Chapman dutifully wrote it down. If it seemed an odd lie, it wasn’t really. Calling herself Turkish, one friend surmised, hinted at some embarrassment Barbra may have felt about “her appearance . . . [about] how Jewish she looked to everyone the moment she walked into the room.” Such a thought, of course, was never raised with Barbra—her friend didn’t dare—but the idea lingered, and there may have been something to it. Barbra would admit that when she told people she “came from Brooklyn,” she assumed they got a certain “image” of her: “She must be that kind of performer,” she assumed they thought, though she didn’t explain just what “that” kind of performer was. Being Turkish, however, could explain away so much—the name, the nose—and it could turn being just a plain outsider into being an exotic one.
Chapman asked what other interesting nuggets she could tell him about herself. She said she’d taken belly dancing lessons once. That got written down too. He asked about previous work. Barbra likely enthused over the Theatre Studio and The Insect Comedy and The Boy Friend, but Chapman wasn’t much interested in any of the acting credentials, undoubtedly to Barbra’s chagrin. But he seems to have paid attention to her meeting with Eddie Blum and wrote that part down.
In the resulting press release that was cranked out on Chapman’s mimeograph machine, the success Barbra had enjoyed in New York was hyperbolized with adjectives such as “phenomenal,” “unprecedented, ” and “groundbreaking”—standard publicist jargon. It was effective enough to get a few bites from various outlets, and that was how Barbra, nervous and fidgety, found herself sitting with Jack Harris in front of a microphone, speaking haltingly to perhaps twenty thousand listeners in metropolitan Detroit.
But what wasn’t halting was her rendition of “Right as the Rain,” one of the songs she’d banged out with Matt Michaels over the last few days. When Harris turned the mike over to her and asked her to sing, the kid with the strange clothes and crossed eyes let loose with a voice that left everyone in the studio impressed. “Right as the rain,” she sang, “that falls from above, so real, so right as our love . . .”
And out there in radioland, thousands listened and took note.
2.
By day Fred Tew was a PR guy for Chrysler, but at night he got to do what he loved best. Arriving at the Caucus Club, he was known by everyone. The Grubers clapped him on the back as a waiter brought over his regular drink. Being the Detroit point man for the entertainment trade paper Variety had its perks. Tew got to see every important new act or show that came through the city. So when he got a call from Ross Chapman telling him that the new kid at the Caucus was worth checking out, Tew was there. It was March 2. Barbra had been doing her show for about a week.
And in that week’s time, a lot had changed. The media campaign had paid off. Many of those filing into the Caucus that night had heard Barbra on Harris’s show, or on another radio program, Guest House, which also aired on WJR, at seven o’clock in the evening. Her little press junket had also included some print interviews with local newspapers. Once again, Barbra had made sure to point out that she was on her way to being an actress and that singing was just a temporary diversion. With such an attitude, it was easy to become even more cavalier with the facts. Everyone had bought the idea that she’d been born in Turkey. Now, to a Detroit News reporter, Barbra fibbed further that her name had always been spelled with just two a’s. To a Windsor Star scribe, covering the Caucus for the Ontario city across the river, she created an imaginary happy family for herself: two parents living in Brooklyn and a ten-year-old sister who showed “great possibilities as a singer.”
Much of what else was written about her in the local press also played a little loose with factual history, appearing to be largely lifted verbatim from Ross Chapman’s press release. Detroit readers learned how Eddie Blum, “casting director for Rodgers and Hammerstein,” had seen “such potential in the slender brunette with the sultry, dark eyes,” and how Barbra’s dramatic “success story” could be considered “as exciting as the Lana Turner soda-fountain legend.” Old legends, after all, had a way of being recycled into new ones.
Taking his seat in the back room, Fred Tew waited for the show to begin. While Variety was
hardly loved among showbiz types—its reviewers were notoriously tough, and Tew was no exception—it was certainly respected, being read by everyone in the business who mattered. A good review in Variety didn’t stay local; it was read in New York and Los Angeles and everywhere in between. The same thing was true, of course, for a bad review.
Around Tew, the room was filling up. Whether the star attraction was there or not, however, was anyone’s guess. What had become apparent, even in one week’s time, was that Barbra’s steely resolve to succeed was paired with an incongruent, distracted unprofessionalism. Just as she had at the Bon Soir, she was frequently late; at least once in the last week she’d taken the stage a full hour after she was scheduled—at eleven instead of ten. She explained that she couldn’t get a cab, an excuse the Grubers wouldn’t abide; walking from her hotel to Congress Street, where the club was located, took about five minutes. Yes, it had snowed a couple of days that week, but temperatures had averaged in the low forties. There had been no need for her to try to hail a cab.
One night, a bass player, who’d come in to work for free as a favor to the Grubers, grew irate as he waited for her. “I’m comin’ in to play for nothing,” he said when Barbra finally arrived, “and the least you can do is be on time.” Barbra began to cry.
But her tears had no effect on her behavior. One young man, a local actor and a regular at the Caucus Club who’d gotten to know Barbra soon after she arrived in Detroit, thought her heart was “simply not into” singing for a living, and so she “dillydallied and went window shopping and wrote letters back to New York” before finally “realizing what time it was and making a mad dash” for the Caucus. No matter how hard she had worked to get ready for the gig, and she’d worked very hard; no matter how much she gave to her audience when she was onstage, and she gave her all; underneath, she wasn’t “all that happy about the singing thing,” her friend thought, “and that showed up as unprofessionalism.”
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 12
