“Why is it always Miss Marmelstein?” Barbra wailed as Laurents watched from the sidelines. She lamented how nobody ever called her “baby doll, or honey dear, or sweetie pie,” like they did other girls. Even her first name would be “preferable,” she griped, “though it’s terrible, it might be bettah, it’s Yetta.” The kvetching went on like this, as offstage voices kept up a running chorus of “Miss Marmelstein!” The number was intended to give the script a lift at a particular moment when it could use one. The audience needed a chance to laugh, Laurents realized, as Harry Bogen’s odious schemes began to unravel.
The problem was that Barbra had no sense of restraint. She was flailing around the stage, arms flying, eyes bugging out. She used her long fingernails to great effect as she flung her hands around—but it was the mannerism of a diva, Laurents grumbled, not a secretary. “Overkill,” Laurents called Barbra’s interpretation of the part. “Too many twitches and collapses, giggles and gasps, too many take-ums.” He didn’t want to lose her uniqueness—he thought her characterization of Miss Marmelstein was “very funny, a bizarre collection of idiosyncrasies which came from instinct and were probably rehearsed at home”—but he did want to “edit, to cut out the extraneous contortions.” Her performance, he realized, was coming “from the fingernails, not from inside.”
Striding out onto the stage, the director gave Barbra the signal to stop the number. The pianist broke off playing, and an uneasy silence fell over the empty theater.
Barbra wasn’t pleased. This back-and-forth with Laurents had been going on for a while. Not long before, they’d come to loggerheads when she’d asked to be excused from a rehearsal because she had to appear on PM East. Expecting permission to be granted, Barbra was already choosing what outfit to wear when Laurents had said no. Vexed, she tried finagling permission from Herbert Ross, who sent her back to Laurents. The director came to realize that Barbra felt “she was different, she was special” and that “future stars were not to be ignored.” When Laurents proved intransigent, Barbra sulked.
Even worse from her perspective was the director’s insistence “on blueprinting exactly how [she] should do everything.” That had never been her style. She preferred “to work slowly into the part,” playing it “by ear.” As in her nightclub acts, Barbra found it very difficult to do “anything twice in exactly the same way.” So she spoke up, arguing her point of view forcefully, a far cry from the timid little girl who’d blanched when Barré had dared to challenge Vasek Simek during The Insect Comedy.
But when she argued, she always did so respectfully, which Laurents appreciated. As much as she had her own, very definite opinions, she was also smart enough to recognize that, on her own, she lacked the discipline needed to shape Miss Marmelstein into a well-balanced character. That was one reason, she admitted, that she was glad she was in Wholesale—“to learn discipline in the theater.” But discipline required concentration, and concentration required listening—one skill Laurents felt Barbra lacked. It was her “low threshold for boredom” that gave her so much trouble, Laurents believed. It was also that old unremitting narcissism. When it was her turn to perform, Laurents noted, Barbra came alive, but when she had to listen—to him or to other performers—“Miss Marmelstein went home and in her place stood Barbra Streisand, uncomfortable in a costume.”
Laurents tolerated the narcissism because of Barbra’s specialness. Others weren’t as forgiving. Harold Rome had fought to have “Miss Marmelstein” put back into the show, arranging it specifically for Barbra. He’d also written her into several other numbers, agreeing that Barbra’s enormous stage presence had to be balanced throughout the two acts. But for his efforts, Rome never got a word of thanks, a fact the composer resented. To him, the teenager was “ungrateful” and “arrogant.” But Barbra figured she gave and they gave; they each “got something out of it.” There was no need, therefore, for any thanks. It was the same attitude her acting teacher Eli Rill had observed: Barbra was unwilling to perform the expected niceties—the “ass-kissing,” as one of Barbra’s friends put it bluntly. Rill hadn’t minded, but Harold Rome did. And from that moment on, the composer soured on the girl he’d once been so enthusiastic about.
There was indeed a degree of youthful hubris about Barbra. She was riding high, and even a second rejection from Goddard Lieberson (he’d told Laurents that Barbra was “too special for records” ) had been only a minor irritant. Music, after all, was only a means to an end. “I want to be a straight dramatic actress,” she’d tell a reporter around this time. “I really can’t explain it. It’s almost a compulsion.”
That was her underlying attitude, her core belief, as she stood face-to-face with her director, arms akimbo. It took choreographer Herbert Ross to break the impasse. Hurrying up the stairs to the stage, Ross had an idea. He was a young man, just thirty-four, but already a veteran Broadway choreographer. He’d staged A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and a revival of Finian’s Rainbow, and just recently he had finished the critically praised The Gay Life with Barbara Cook. Ross was talented, perceptive, and diplomatic. Why not, he asked, as he wheeled Miss Marmelstein’s chair across the stage on its casters, let Barbra do the number sitting down? After all, she’d auditioned that way. Laurents agreed to give it a try.
It worked—wonderfully. Miss Marmelstein could sing her humorous tale of woe while sliding across the stage in her secretary’s chair, first this way, then that way, all precisely choreographed by Ross. Barbra was pleased as well, feeling the chair had really been her idea—which, no doubt, Ross had anticipated when he’d suggested she use it.
In the wings, Elliott Gould watched it all unfold. Though he’d been enjoying a bit of a flirtation with his leading lady, Marilyn Cooper, the more Elliott observed Barbra, the more “fascinated” he became. She might have a formidable stage presence, but underneath, Elliott felt, she needed “to be protected.” Barbra was “a very fragile little girl,” Elliott suspected, one he found “absolutely exquisite.” Although he figured Barbra didn’t “commit easily,” he had “a desire to make her feel secure.”
And so, that afternoon or one very much like it, Elliott Gould asked Barbra Streisand out on a date.
4.
It was two o’clock in the morning in Rockefeller Center. They’d been wandering the city together all night, their cheeks cold and rosy, their conversation as meandering as their walk. Suddenly, without warning, Barbra bent down, shaped a snowball in her mittened hands, and lobbed it across at Elliott, nailing him perfectly. His competitive nature triggered, Elliott scooped up his own ammunition and retaliated, his aim proving to be as good as hers. Within moments, a full-scale snowball fight was underway, the laughter of the two combatants echoing through the empty plaza.
More than snowballs were ricocheting between them that night. Elliott was utterly smitten. To him, Barbra was a combination of Sophia Loren—love goddess—and Y. A. Tittle—the New York Giants’ tenacious quarterback who’d helped the team win the Eastern Division title in December. Walking Barbra to the subway after rehearsals, Elliott had come to think of her as the “most innocent thing” he’d ever seen. But something about Barbra scared him, too. She was a beatnik and a bohemian, after all, so very different from the other girls he knew. Yet despite his fear, or maybe partially because of it, Elliott “really dug her”—and he sensed he might have been “the first person who really did.”
At last overwhelming her with snowballs—he called it a “hex”—Elliott began to chase her around the skating rink. Barbra squealed with delight. Elliott’s pursuit of her was “strange and wonderful,” she’d admitted to one friend. His interest was plainly evident, whereas, in the past, there had always been doubts with other men. Barbra had come to feel that her pursuit of men who weren’t as interested in her as she was in them reflected “a throwback” to Louis Kind, when she’d tried in vain to make her stepfather like her.
But Elliott—she’d started calling him “Elly”—was the antithesis of all that. He’d phoned
her; he’d walked her to the subway; he’d asked her out. She hadn’t gone after him; he’d come after her. That was significant. Now, wrestling her down in the snow, Elly looked into her blue eyes. He saw insecurity behind the bravado; Barbra’s “weirdness,” he realized, was merely a defense. Scooping some snow in his hands, he “very delicately” washed her face with it. Then, just as tenderly, he kissed her lips. Nothing too demonstrative, but it was perhaps the most romantic gesture any man had ever extended to her. “Like out of a movie,” Barbra thought. And for once she was playing the part of the leading lady, as she’d always believed she could.
5.
Moonlight filled a cloudless sky over Philadelphia in the early morning hours of February 13. At the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, its magnificent French Renaissance architecture resplendent in the moonlight, Barbra and the rest of the Wholesale company hurried down the famous marble-and-iron elliptical staircase to the Tiffany-glass ballroom, where a celebration was underway after their first-night preview performance. But the cheers and clinking of champagne flutes belied the anxiety they all—but mostly their director—felt. The morning edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer would soon be out, and the critics would have their say.
Arthur Laurents still worried that the book wasn’t entirely right. He had hoped some clever directing and skillful acting might bridge the gaps, but after tonight’s performance, he knew the problems wouldn’t be solved until Weidman’s script was chopped up and reassembled. The director concluded he’d been too respectful of the writer’s work, and he feared the critics wouldn’t forgive him for such a dereliction of duty. Many shows died in Philadelphia, he knew all too well, before they ever reached New York.
On the surface, everything had seemed to go well. Showtime at the Shubert Theatre had been at eight o’clock, and the house, to Laurents’s great relief, had been full. That same week, David Merrick had opened a second show in Philly, the touring company of Irma la Douce, but he’d insisted that the two premieres be staggered so as not to compete with each other.
Most people in that first-night crowd had turned out to see Lillian Roth, who’d received the lion’s share of preshow publicity. In the Inquirer just that morning, Whitney Bolton had devoted an entire column to Roth’s comeback. “Just thirty years after her last appearance on Broadway,” Bolton wrote, “she is destined to be back again on the street where the lights twinkle, where the only thing that counts is talent—and one’s use of it.” Roth’s connection to a glamorous, long-vanished Broadway—she’d worked for Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll—impressed the columnists and the public.
But not Barbra. Barré and Bob and Marty had all tried to instill in her an appreciation of the old-time greats, but she never had much feeling for history. She was smart enough, and decent enough, to treat Roth with the proper respect. But there was never any adulation, never any closeness. One friend asked Barbra if she ever sat at Roth’s knee and listened to her stories about Broadway’s Golden Age. Barbra replied, “What, are you crazy? Why would I do that?”
She was, in fact, frustrated that the advance publicity for Wholesale barely mentioned her at all. A caricature of the cast in the February 11 edition of the Inquirer had included nearly everyone but her. The young stars being promoted with the most press releases and interviews were Elliott, of course, and Marilyn Cooper, who played Harry Bogen’s girlfriend. But Harold Lang, Jack Kruschen, and Bambi Linn had also been singled out for publicity. Not a word, however, about Barbra.
Part of the publicists’ reluctance to highlight their youngest cast member no doubt stemmed from Merrick’s continued distaste for her, and his not-so-subtle hints to Laurents that she be replaced. Even this late in the game, it remained a possibility: Marilyn Lovell, playing the voluptuous showgirl, had been given the boot just before they’d headed to Philadelphia and was replaced by Sheree North, the onetime rival to Marilyn Monroe who Merrick thought had more sex appeal. But Barbra refused even to contemplate such a possibility. Instead, she was blithely planning how she might get herself noticed even without the help of the show’s press agents. Her strategy, as it turned out, was nothing if not original.
Jerome Weidman discovered what she was up to at one rehearsal. He’d spotted her scribbling away, presumably taking notes. But when he got a closer look, he discovered that Barbra had actually been writing her bio for the show’s playbill. “Born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon,” Barbra had written of herself. Encouraged by her publicists at the Softness Group, Barbra saw a golden opportunity to get herself some attention, in the same way she’d used comparable gambits in Detroit and Winnipeg. She’d written a similar bio for the Harry Stoones program, too, but this one would be seen by a lot more people. After all, Barbra reasoned, she was playing a Jewish secretary, so saying she was “from Brooklyn and brought up in Flatbush” would have “meant nothing.” But if audiences thought she came from Madagascar . . .
That wasn’t all she wrote. Miss Streisand, the bio concluded, “is not a member of the Actors Studio.” With that one simple little line, Barbra had her revenge against all those pretentious up-and-comers who loved to flaunt their training at the Actors Studio—an education that Barbra had, of course, not been able to secure for herself. Indeed, by thumbing her nose at the “pompous and serious” tradition of program biographies, Barbra had turned a deficiency into an asset. If it seemed more like the modus operandi of the kook from PM East than the unassuming, by-the-book Miss Marmelstein, it didn’t matter. That night it was Barbra’s bio that stood out in the program more than anyone else’s, and that was the point.
Barbra herself also stood out on the stage. When Miss Marmelstein had come rolling out on her chair, kvetching about her life, she had gotten the loudest, most sustained applause of the night. Barbra had to have felt good about her performance, and about the reception she had received from the audience. Certainly Laurents did. He was pleased that her performance, even if it came more from her fingernails than it did her heart, had made such a connection with the audience. But critics had been known to see things very differently from those sitting around them.
It wasn’t yet light out when the first editions of the Inquirer made it to the Bellevue-Stratford. The ink was still moist as Laurents pulled open the paper, bypassing the news on the front page—Secretary of State Dean Rusk was trying to negotiate with the Soviets about nuclear arms—to go directly to the theater section. Under the headline GARMENT SHOP BACK ON STAGE, the review confirmed Laurents’s fears. Critic Henry T. Murdock, who’d been with the Inquirer since 1950 and whose tastes tended more toward musicals such as Guys and Dolls, thought Harold Rome’s score possessed “range and versatility” and that Herbert Ross had taken a “unique approach to dancing.” But when it came to the book, he wrote, “our enthusiasm dwindles.” Wholesale was supposed to be a musical comedy, Murdock argued, but he couldn’t find the comedy. The “hero-heel,” the critic wrote, was just not redeeming enough in the way Gene Kelly or Robert Morse had been in similar parts in Pal Joey and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The fault, Murdock wrote, could not be handed to Elliott, “who gives Harry everything the libretto demands.” Rather, the flaw of the show was the script. Laurents felt as if he could have penned the review himself.
But there was one moment Murdock felt compelled to single out. With comedy in such short supply, the critic welcomed the show’s “most truly comic song”: the “Miss Marmelstein” number that had roused the audience from its near torpor the night before. “Barbra Streisand,” Murdock wrote, “brings down the house.” Among the company it was now obvious that the show had problems—perhaps serious ones—but the one part that worked without question was Barbra.
A few days later, when a second review appeared in the Inquirer, the strength of her position was confirmed. Barbra was the only cast member singled out for praise. “She stops the show in its tracks,” the reviewer declared, a line Merrick’s publicists were quick to incorporate into all of their press releases from
that point on. The acclaim kept coming. Dorothy Kilgallen, a fan of Barbra’s since the first Bon Soir appearance, reported in her syndicated column—which reached far more readers than the local Philly papers—that none other than Henry Fonda had seen Wholesale and had “registered considerable enthusiasm for comedienne Barbra Streisand.” Merrick’s grumbling about her abruptly ceased.
No matter what might happen to I Can Get It for You Wholesale, one thing had become abundantly clear by the end of February. Barbra was going to be a hit.
6.
Elliott Gould’s eyes, one reporter observed, were “as large and melancholy as a Saint Bernard’s, an animal with which he shares the same shambling gait.” But this night, those hangdog eyes seemed to flicker with a kind of electricity as the young man made his way up the elliptical staircase of the Bellevue-Stratford.
Arthur Laurents knew where Elliott was headed, and it made him smile. Only now was the company catching on to the fact that Harry Bogen was romancing Miss Marmelstein. Marilyn Cooper had been stung when Elliott transferred his attentions from her to Barbra. But despite his leading lady’s disappointment, Laurents had encouraged the budding affair—“Godfathering the romance,” he called his efforts. To the director, Elliott and Barbra seemed a “Jewish show-business Romeo and Juliet, in love with each other and ice cream.” The sweet treat was indeed a point of commonality between them. Many nights Elliott would carry a box of Breyer’s coffee ice cream up to Barbra’s room, two spoons tucked into the front pocket of his shirt.
Sex was in the air. The newspapers were filled with dispatches from the set of Cleopatra in Rome about the affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both married to other people. So notorious was the scandal that it bumped John Glenn’s historic space flight off the first pages of many tabloids, keeping “Liz and Dick” front and center. In Philadelphia, as in most places around the planet, talk of “Le Scandale” was on everyone’s lips, and the I Can Get It for You Wholesale company was no exception. For the freethinkers among them—which included Barbra and Elliott—the chutzpah of Taylor and Burton would have seemed remarkable, even admirable. Instead of offering denials or apologies, the celebrity pair seemed to be insisting that love—and sex—was more important than propriety.
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 21
