Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  Elliott hadn’t always been such a freethinker. He’d been “scared most of [his] life,” he admitted. As a kid, he’d been convinced that he possessed a strange ability—almost a “psychic power,” he said—that enabled him to intuit a person’s true feelings toward him. Someone might say he was smart, or talented, or handsome, but Elliott knew they were actually thinking just the opposite. For most of his twenty-three years, he had walked around with his head down avoiding making eye contact—not just from a sense of insecurity, but also from a preponderance of caution. Keeping his eyes on the floor, Elliott explained, ensured he wouldn’t “trip on anything.”

  He became an actor, he said, so he could “communicate in a world that was alien” to him and “get beneath the roots of self-doubt.” Winning the lead in a Broadway play had gone a long way toward that goal, but those roots of self-doubt ran very deep—as deep, or even deeper, than Barbra’s. It was unlikely that one show—or any amount of playacting on the stage—could ever completely overrule a belief that had been instilled in him from the time he was a very young boy.

  He was born Elliott Goldstein in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father, Bernard, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, was a salesman in the garment industry—further reason Arthur Laurents saw such verisimilitude in Elliott’s casting. Bernard was a distant, reserved man who was never demonstrative with his son; he had “too much pride” for that, Elliott believed. Indeed, the elder Goldstein sometimes seemed resentful of the little boy, telling a story of how he’d taken a very young Elliott to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers play the Cubs. “Four home runs were hit in the game,” Bernard groused. “I didn’t see one of them. I was in the men’s room with Elliott each time.”

  Part of his resentment may have stemmed from the fact that he’d never been in love with the boy’s mother, the former Lucille Raver, whom he’d married on the rebound after his true love’s parents had put a halt to their elopement. It was telling, no doubt, that Elliott was Bernard and Lucille’s only child.

  Like her husband, Lucille was the offspring of a Russian Jewish immigrant; her father had worked as a glass salesman in the Bronx. After her marriage, Lucille peddled artificial flowers throughout Bensonhurst to supplement Bernard’s income as a salesman. Unlike Emanuel Streisand, Bernard Goldstein was no intellect. He seemed to have no sense of the world beyond Bensonhurst, even after he came back from the war. He worked hard to support his family, but there was never any quest for something more.

  What Bernard lacked in ambition Lucille made up tenfold. From a young age she’d had stars in her eyes. Lucille wanted more than just a two-and-a-half-room apartment on Bay Parkway, but she knew her husband was never going to get it for her. They argued constantly. By the time Elliott was three years old, he instinctively understood that his mother and father didn’t belong together, that they “didn’t understand one another.” The unhappiness of his parents’ lives meant that the lessons they taught Elliott would be relentlessly pessimistic: “Be careful, don’t trust anybody, you’ve got to save.” With tension always crackling just under the surface, Elliott lived in constant fear that everything could explode at any moment. He grew up “in terror of conflict,” a feeling that lasted well into adulthood.

  And yet, on another level, Elliott absolutely worshipped his parents. They were his entire life. Until he was eleven, he shared a bedroom with them; the concept of privacy was completely alien to the boy. To Elliott, his parents were “Mr. and Mrs. Captain Marvel” —his heroes. “You won’t ever have better friends than us,” they often reminded him. Everything Elliott did, he did for them, because without them, he was lost. Lucille, especially, dominated her son’s daily thoughts. She dressed him, pampered him, took him everywhere with her. Eventually she’d come to acknowledge that she might have been a bit smothering, but it was always “done out of love,” she insisted. She would have cut off her arm for Elliott, Lucille declared.

  But even his mother’s constant doting couldn’t dissuade Elliott from the belief that he was an ugly child—yet another bond shared with Barbra. Growing up, Elliott felt too big for his age. He thought he had a “fat ass.” His hair was too curly, impossible to slick down—a problem because he wanted to look like Robert Wagner. More than anything Elliott wished he were Irish—a big, tough Irish brawler, the kind he saw on the streets, the kind who never let life beat them down. Despite being bar mitzvahed, Elliott maintained even less of a connection to his Jewishness than Barbra did with hers.

  Where Elliott could escape was in the darkened Marlboro Theatre, where, like Barbra in a similar movie house three miles away, he imagined himself up on the silver screen. His favorite stars were Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper because they seemed like ordinary people, unlike so many of the others—Robert Wagner perhaps most of all—who filled the fan magazines. Elliott wondered if anyone would ever want to see real people on the screen—people like himself—and not “creations of Hollywood.”

  At the age of eight, he started on a path to find out. Bored and desperate to find a way out of their dead-end life, Lucille began dragging her son off the basketball courts he loved so that he could audition for music shows and talent contests—anyplace, Elliott said, that was “looking to buy a kid.” Problem was, this kid couldn’t sing or dance. Elliott remained “very withdrawn, very shy and inhibited.” So Lucille enrolled him in Charles Lowe’s School of Theatrical Arts, located on an upper floor at 1650 Broadway, where, in the summer, giant electric fans turned in the windows as little children tap-danced across the oak wood floors. “Uncle Charlie,” as Lowe was known to his students, was a former vaudevillian in his late sixties with “parentheses-shaped legs” who, with his wife, a one-time silent-movie actress, taught the progeny of ambitious stage mothers how to tap, sing, and project personality.

  But when Lucille first tugged Elliott up the narrow stairs to Lowe’s school, her hopes for her tongue-tied son were much more modest. “Fix up his diction,” she pleaded with Lowe.

  “Sure,” the teacher replied. “We’ll give him a little drama, teach him to sing, teach him to dance.”

  “He’ll never dance,” Lucille predicted. “Just fix the diction.”

  But Uncle Charlie gave Elliott the works. “That meant everything,” Elliott griped, looking back. “Blow-your-nose lessons, dance lessons, wipe-yourself lessons.” All because of the “compulsions of a dissatisfied mother,” he later came to understand. But he went along with all the singing and dancing because he couldn’t imagine saying no to Lucille—because he never, ever questioned his parents.

  Lowe didn’t just teach. He also acted as a kind of agent, placing his students in shows on local stages and local television. “Whoever got any of the bread,” Elliott said, using the slang for money, “the kids sure as hell didn’t.” Every once in a while, he’d be rewarded with “a pastrami sandwich or a flashlight or something,” but his job was to go out there on stage and sing and dance while Lowe and his mother took home the cash.

  By the time he was ten, Elliott had been transformed into a little trouper straight out of old-time vaudeville. “Mary had a little lamb,” he’d warble onstage. “Some peas and mashed potatoes, an ear of corn, some buttered beets and then had sliced tomatoes.” Taking a breath, he started in on the next verse. “She said she wasn’t hungry, so I thought I had a break, but just to keep me company, she ordered up a steak.” Eight more cringe-inducing verses followed before he would tip his straw hat to the audience’s applause and run into the wings.

  On television he appeared on the Bonny Maid Versatile Varieties program, a song-and-dance fest on WNBT. It was for this show that Uncle Charlie tried to persuade Lucille to drop the name Goldstein and bill Elliott as “Gold.” Lucille deemed “Gould” a little more elegant, so it was as Elliott Gould that the boy made his television debut.

  By the time he was twelve, however, Elliott was a “has-been,” or at least that was how Lucille described him. He was “too old to be cute,” she thought. So she got
him work as a model. Elliott was a standard size eight, perfect for merchandise catalogs. For several years he dressed as a miniature grenadier and handed out pens at dry-goods conventions. And all the money he made went straight to his parents’ bank account.

  Barbra could barely comprehend such a childhood. In her typical way, she had grilled Elliott for all the details he could remember: the dancing classes, the elocution lessons, the backstage dramas. Most of all, she was fascinated by the idea of a mother who was so determined that her child succeed that she paid for all sorts of professional training—and by the idea of a child who really would have preferred to stay home. Here their experiences diverged sharply. Barbra had always wanted to be an achiever; Elliott had just wanted to play basketball. Their struggles with self-worth might have been similar, but Elliott, unlike Barbra, had felt no need to prove himself the best in everything he did. He was just hoping to get through it without falling down.

  When Elliott was in the eighth grade, his father relocated the family to West Orange, New Jersey. But if Elliott hoped that living an hour and a half outside the city would mean an end to all that singing and dancing, he was wrong. Lucille kept accepting assignments for him, and since his schooling would undoubtedly be affected by his performing schedule, she enrolled him in the Professional Children’s School at Broadway and Sixty-first Street in Manhattan. Since 1914 the school had been accommodating young performers, slipping in an education for them in between shows. Several times a week, Elliott commuted into the city and “got sick on the bus every time.” He hated the school, considered his education there “lame,” and said the teachers made him “feel like shit.” The anxiety that he felt “when [he] didn’t do well was severe.” More than anything, he wished he could have an ordinary life, but he never dared to say that to his parents.

  Yet there came a point when he, too, got bit by the bug of ambition. It was in May 1952, when he was thirteen, and he was booked at the Palace, the grand old theater at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street that was then featuring a bill of eight vaudeville acts plus a movie. Elliott had a short little number that he performed four times a day for two weeks straight. He would walk out onto the stage in a bellhop’s uniform shouting, “Telegram for Bill Callahan!” Callahan was then a popular song-and-dance man (he’d just finished a featured part in the Johnny Mercer musical Top Banana at the Winter Garden Theatre) who was next up on the bill. When the orchestra leader chased after Elliott, protesting that they had a show going on, Elliott replied with a song that served as Callahan’s musical introduction. The teenager always got a big hand from the audience and a wave of appreciation from the older performer.

  By now Elliott had shot up to six feet, which meant he could partner with his mother in mambo contests during the summers at borscht belt resorts in the Catskills. He also entertained resort guests twice a night on weekends dressed in high-waisted dancer’s pants and matching silk shirts, nervously shuffling his way through a soft-shoe rendition of the jazz standard “Crazy Rhythm.” Yet as much as he detested this part of his show business career, he was old enough to quit—and he didn’t. By the age of eighteen, he was auditioning for Broadway shows on his own, and he won a spot in the chorus line for the musical Rumple. In 1958 there was another spot in another chorus line in another musical, Say, Darling, composed by Jule Styne.

  Though he may have been more motivated these days, Elliott was still embarrassed by auditions. He considered it unnatural for a grown man to walk into a room, and sing and dance for other people’s approval. Maybe that was part of the reason that soon there were no shows at all. Out of work at the age of twenty-one, Elliott started gambling. For a while, it got pretty bad; he found himself deep in debt. He had to pawn some of his father’s jewelry, then he took jobs as a rug-cleaner salesman and an elevator operator at the Park Royal Hotel on Seventy-third Street. For another job, he wore yellow makeup and a long fake mustache to hawk a game called Confucius Say in Gimbel’s department store. Then, after pushing himself to audition for David Merrick, he’d landed the gig in Irma la Douce, which had led to Wholesale.

  To survive in the cutthroat world of the theater, Elliott had learned to become more of an extrovert, though it remained posturing: He still felt like turning and running away. But his mastery of dozens of dialects entertained guests at parties, and unsuspecting diner patrons were always amused when he pretended to make a meal of his napkin—a bit of an homage to Charlie Chaplin in The Kid. “For a repressed, inhibited, shy person,” Elliott said, to discover that he “could have an effect on people by making a joke” was a major revelation. So, rather late in the game, Elliott became a joker.

  And Barbra loved his jokes. After listening to her speak passionately about the Dalai Lama—a hero and a holy man to Zen Buddhists—Elliott had sent her a package of corned beef, pastrami, pickles, and coleslaw with a card signed “From the Deli Lama.” It was exactly the kind of offbeat humor she enjoyed, and the kind she used herself on PM East. They laughed together; they understood each other’s insecurities; they shared enough personal history to make communication easy. In so many ways, they seemed to be kindred souls.

  But that didn’t make Elliott any less nervous as he headed up the hotel stairs to meet her. This moment had been coming ever since he’d put that snow on her face in Rockefeller Center and kissed her lightly on the lips. Now the passion and energy of opening in Philadelphia had made the consummation of more than a month of flirtation inevitable.

  Elliott was terrified. His mother’s “ferocity,” he believed, had left him “scared of women,” so, at twenty-three, he was still a virgin. That was about to end. He had chosen Barbra to be his first.

  Ever since the very first play was performed, there has been something seductive about the daily ritual of putting on a show. With people living and working together so intimately, romances tend to blossom. Affairs begin and end, often dramatically. And usually one member of the cast—often the star, but not always—stands out from the rest as a sort of prize to be won. Arthur Laurents thought it was ironic that, due to the spotlight shined on her by the critics, Barbra became “the most attractive member of the show.” And as the acclaim for her grew, Barbra saw her desirability increase in Elliott’s eyes—especially since he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings. He knew Merrick wasn’t happy with him; he knew he was “terribly green” and was “trying too hard.” But Barbra seemed to do what she did so effortlessly. That gave her remarkable cachet with Elliott. Marilyn Cooper—prettier and higher on the bill—could never have offered the kind of aphrodisiac Barbra provided.

  The attraction went both ways. From Barbra’s perspective, she had landed the star of the show and that was exciting on its own, raising her profile among the company even higher. And the fact that she had won him away from pretty Marilyn Cooper likely made the romance even sweeter for her. The initial attraction between Barbra and Elliott had been random and impulsive. But it had deepened into something that dovetailed quite nicely with their individual ambitions and their own senses of themselves.

  By now, Barbra was as interested in Elliott as he was in her. Except when it came to looks. Elliott was everything Barré had been—smart, funny, devoted—but with a couple of crucial extra benefits. First, he was successful—or at least he was on the verge of being successful. Last Barbra knew, Barré was still struggling off-off-Broadway. And—no doubt the most important attribute of all—Elliott was heterosexual to his bones. “I bat from just one side of the plate myself,” he said, describing his sexuality. “The right side. I’m no good on the left.” After being surrounded by so many gay men over the past couple of years—all of whom loved her but could never give her what she really wanted—Barbra seemed, at least to some friends, to be absolutely relishing this sudden, surprising connection to a guy who was so unambiguously straight. Finally a guy—a real guy’s guy—wanted her.

  And yet Elliott was also sensitive and seemed completely unchauvinistic. Women’s liberation, he said, should have
nothing to do with gender, but should instead be concerned with “both men and women, with breaking tradition.” No wonder that by late February 1962, Barbra was head over heels in love with him. She’d find herself talking “gibberish” around him; one night, distracted by thoughts of Elliott, she’d gone on stage with only half her face made up. She guessed this was love.

  That night in Philly, they met in his room. Only they know what transpired, who kissed whom first, who undid the first button. But at one point, a bunch of the guys from the show began pounding on the door. Elliott ignored them. He was “trying to become a man,” he admitted, and this was “his moment”—a moment for which he’d waited a very long time. He “wasn’t about to let anyone take it away.” As Barbra and Elliott remained very still, the pounding finally died down, and they returned to the business at hand. Apparently, despite his fears, Elliott did okay; Barbra, after all, had a little more experience in such things. She remembered Muriel Choy telling her that the man didn’t “necessarily” always have to be on top, and so Barbra took charge. She was always good at running a show. So good, in fact, that within a very short time, Wilma Curley, a dancer in the chorus who had the room next to Elliott’s, had to rap on the door and tell them to keep it down.

  7.

  It was cold on February 27, opening night in Boston, but New Englanders were used to that. They were lining up outside the box office of the Colonial Theatre on Boylston Street well before showtime. That meant a full house for opening night. Cast and crew, taking their places backstage, were ecstatic.