Arthur Laurents wasn’t as serene, however. A big audience was good news only if the show was worthy of it. He’d made some changes to the book since Philadelphia, but whether they were enough, he wasn’t sure. In fact, he suspected they weren’t. But he’d been put through hell just to achieve this much. He’d wanted to make alterations only in cooperation with Weidman and Rome, but the changes the writers had come up with had been laughable in Laurents’s opinion. Recognizing that the first commandment of out-of-town musicals was “survive,” he did what he, as a writer himself, had once considered unthinkable: He cut, he pasted, and—“mea culpa, mea culpa”—he rewrote the book. “Poison-pen notes” from Rome started appearing under Laurents’s door every night until they grew so fat they had to be left at the front desk.
His friend Stephen Sondheim understood what he was dealing with. He had seen the show in Philadelphia and thought, despite its script problems, that Wholesale was terrific. If Laurents could resist the pressures from Merrick to “sweeten” and “explain” the nasty central character, then Wholesale “ought to have enormous impact,” Sondheim believed.
On a strictly financial basis, the company was looking pretty good. Attendance had been steady in Philadelphia through the very last show on February 24, and tonight’s packed house boded well for the Boston run. Merrick might not be able to make back his costs during previews, one critic observed, but ticket sales had been strong enough to allow him to “approach New York with a little less nail-biting than usual.”
The show was also getting good press. There had been Dorothy Kilgallen’s column singling out Barbra, and a couple of other mentions from Leonard Lyons, and a whole slew of articles profiling Lillian Roth’s comeback. Weidman and Rome had appeared on PM East, largely due to Barbra’s relationship with the show. There were also a series of syndicated articles about Elliott, which described him as a former child entertainer who had “persevered . . . despite the usual rough time in the beginning.”
If Merrick had his way, however, there would be no more publicity on Elliott. Even as the company moved to Boston, settling in at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the producer was still pressing Laurents to fire their leading man. Merrick was furious that when Elliott danced, the first several rows of the orchestra “were sprayed with sweat” —a charge Laurents had to admit was true. To solve the problem, they’d called in Dr. Max Jacobson—known as “Dr. Feelgood” for the amphetamine injections he gave to Tennessee Williams, Eddie Fisher, and President Kennedy—but the medication not only dried up Elliott’s flying perspiration but also his vocal chords. Merrick just wanted him gone. Laurents stepped in and said that if Elliott was fired, he’d quit. So far, the producer hadn’t called Laurents’s bluff.
Backstage, Barbra, in full makeup and costume, was already in the wings, since she was one of the first actors on the stage. The overture was playing. It was one of those rare moments of quiet contemplation right before a show. Perhaps Barbra meditated; perhaps she thought about everything that had brought her to this point. It was true that the Boston newspaper advertisements had billed Lillian Roth at the top, with Elliott and Sheree North at the bottom in special, larger print. It was true, too, that Barbra came dead last. (While Bambi Linn technically was listed after her, she was on a special line, denoting a special appearance.) So Barbra remained last billed. The least important, it would seem.
But those glowing reviews had followed her. No doubt she had taken some satisfaction in the fact that, a week earlier, it had been her stand-alone photograph—not Roth’s, not North’s, not even Elliott’s—that had been used to promote the show in the Boston Globe. Barbra had been called a “stage newcomer” ; her name had even been spelled correctly. When the overture ended and the curtain went up, she bounded out with all the confidence in the world. Backstage, there was a bit of a panic when Marilyn Cooper revealed she was having trouble with her voice, but such things didn’t concern Barbra. The director and the writers might be struggling over the show, but the young woman playing Miss Marmelstein wasn’t worried. She knew there was only one thing that would matter in the end, and that was her.
8.
The Softness brothers looked up in surprise when Barbra came barreling into their office. She’d always been an “assertive young woman,” in John Softness’s view, but never more so since returning to New York from the out-of-town tryouts of I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Now she seemed to the Softness brothers to be a woman on a mission. She barged into the room, shuffled through stacks of papers, made a couple of phone calls, and snapped out questions at the publicists in rapid-fire, machine-gun style. “She goes through brick walls,” John Softness thought in awe. Ever since Barbra had become their client, he’d observed that everything she did was fast, direct, and often aggressive. It wasn’t so much energy that propelled her, Softness felt, but rather a sense of “I’ve gotta get the work done, get it over with, finish it.” He imagined there must be “a softer, more relaxed side” to Barbra, but so far he had yet to witness it.
And he’d been spending plenty of time with her of late. The Softness Group was no longer only publicizing Barbra as part of PM East. Marty Erlichman had also asked them to handle Barbra’s personal publicity. (They’d taken on Marty’s other clients, the Clancy Brothers, as well.) The Softness brothers found a receptive audience for Barbra’s publicity as theatrical insiders had been buzzing about her for weeks. But the buzz wasn’t nearly as positive when it came to Wholesale.
The Boston critics, much to Arthur Laurents’s dismay, had been even less kind to the show than the ones in Philly. Elinor Hughes in the Boston Herald had found it “generally entertaining” but she confirmed all of David Merrick’s fears about Elliott when she said he “lacked enough style or experience to carry the difficult role of Harry Bogen.” Cyrus Durgin in the Boston Globe was still more dismissive of the show, playing off Miss Marmelstein’s song “What Are They Doing to Us Now?” when he wrote “What, indeed, are they doing to show business when such an acrid and gritty, unimaginative, literal and generally uninteresting item as this comes along under the guise of entertainment?”
After reading Durgin’s review, Weidman and Rome had thumped their chests in vindication, demanding that Laurents reinstate their original script. Merrick, much to the director’s chagrin, seemed to back them up. But it was a Machiavellian maneuver on the producer’s part. When Laurents tendered his resignation rather than return the show to “the piece of blubber” it had been, Merrick told Weidman and Rome that he had no choice but to close the show. Faced with such a possibility, the writers capitulated and accepted Laurents’s rewrite as permanent.
Yet throughout all this hullabaloo, there was one thing that everyone agreed was working: Barbra. The critics had been kind to Lillian Roth, but it was the young newcomer who had really excited them. Elinor Hughes thought Barbra displayed “a nice original sense of comedy,” and while Cyrus Durgin, known to be persnickety in his reviews, called Miss Marmelstein a “stock” character, he acknowledged that Barbra “wins applause” for playing her.
As the company returned to New York, the Softness brothers knew they had a hot commodity on their hands. With Marty, they often discussed Barbra’s future: what she could do, where she might go, who might give her a boost. There were so many avenues where Barbra could be marketed: the stage, television, records. That day in their office, as on so many similar days, they brainstormed for a while—Barbra and Marty and John and Don—and then one of the brothers rolled a piece of paper into their heavy black Royal typewriter and started banging out a press release.
“Barbra is striking in appearance” began one such release, which would be syndicated as a feature story. “She has a lithe and supple body, extremely expressive hands and arms, and the haughty mien and mesmeristic gaze of an Assyrian goddess.” It wasn’t so different from the “white goddess” image Bob had positioned her for: Barbra might play an ugly duckling on the stage, but she was hardly that in real life, or so her publicity went. It
was a hard sell, but that was the course they all decided on.
Some of the publicity undertaken by the Softness Group on Barbra’s behalf wasn’t as flagrant as that, however. There were tidbits passed along to gossip columnists, photos dropped off on editors’ desks in case they ever needed “to fill a hole on the amusements page.” There were also the popular “Q-and-A” columns that ran in many newspapers and TV-listings supplements. Not long before, a “Jane Ryan” had written to one syndicated column, “Viewers Speak,” asking about a girl on PM East “by the name of Barbara Smarzan or something.” She had appeared the same night as Julie Wilson and Rose Murphy. “Could you tell me if this girl has made any records?” Miss Ryan asked.
“The young lady’s name is Barbra Streisand,” the answer came. “My present information is that she has not made any recordings, but I am checking further and will make mention here if I find she does have a recording credit.”
Both question and answer, of course, had been penned by Barbra’s publicity team. Those ubiquitous “Q-and-A” columns were in actuality patched together by publicists using them as platforms for their clients. The question from “Jane Ryan” had appeared precisely at the point when Goddard Lieberson was reconsidering whether to give Barbra a record contract. The idea, obviously, was to create the impression that the public was clamoring for this exciting newcomer.
The record deal hadn’t materialized, but Don Softness kept the press releases flying out of his typewriter. He knew there was something else cooking out there that might be right up his client’s alley. As the buzz about Barbra’s performance in Wholesale grew louder in theater circles, inevitably another show in David Merrick’s pipeline was mentioned. During rehearsals, assistant stage manager Robert Schear had watched Barbra intently on the stage, then walked over to Lillian Roth and asked, “Who does that girl remind you of?” Before Roth could reply, Schear told her to write the name down on a piece of paper. He did the same. When they compared notes, they saw they had both written the same name: Fanny Brice.
For some time now, Merrick had been talking with Brice’s son-in-law, the producer Ray Stark, about a musical version of the late comedienne’s life. In December, just after Barbra had won the part in Wholesale, the columnist Sam Zolotow had announced plans for the Brice show in the New York Times. That winter, the show was on everybody’s lips—as was Barbra’s resemblance to the eccentric Jewish funny lady with the large honker. Mike Wallace had already made the comparison on the air on PM East.
But Merrick was having none of it. “She is not going to be Fanny Brice,” he told Schear when the stage manager made the suggestion. And that, apparently, was that.
The Softness Group wasn’t dissuaded. Barbra might have more immediate things to concentrate on: Some future show that might or might not ever be produced was surely way down on her list of priorities in the winter of 1962. But her publicists were paid to think down the road. And while Merrick might seem, at the moment, absolutely intransigent on the idea of Barbra’s casting, the Softness brothers knew there were still a few things they could do to change the Abominable Showman’s mind.
9.
I Can Get It for You Wholesale opened on Thursday, March 22, at the Shubert Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street, and Barbra couldn’t have been more pleased. Since then, the house had been packed every night, and the applause for her regularly reached the rafters. Not even two years after her first anxious performance at the Lion, Barbra was now walking in the footsteps of Peggy Wood, Clifton Webb, Katharine Hepburn, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne, all of whom had trod the boards of the Shubert in decades past. On opening night, Barbra’s mother, brother, and sister had been there to see her, and Diana had even offered some hearty congratulations—hearty for Diana, that is.
And so, on a night not long after the opening, everything seemed to be in perfect alignment for Barbra—except for one nagging detail. As she came off the stage from the final curtain call, the makeup still on her face, the large collar of Miss Marmelstein’s dress still flapping around her neck, Barbra couldn’t help but admit that Elliott simply wasn’t as good in the show as he needed to be. Put another way, he wasn’t as good as she was.
Most of the reviews had thought the same. At the first-night cast party at Sardi’s, the entire company had waited breathlessly for the notices. First came the New York Times, where Howard Taubman had declared that while Elliott was “a likeable newcomer,” Barbra was “the evening’s find.” Every review that followed, rushed into Sardi’s by newspaper boys eager for tips, had been a variation on that theme. John Chapman at the New York Daily News griped he couldn’t find one character to “give affection or admiration,” then corrected himself to say there was one: Barbra, who played “the homely frump of secretary . . . hilariously.” John McClain at the New York Journal-American hated most everything about the show, calling it “How to Almost Succeed in Business Without Really Being Very Honest, or Very Amusing Either, for That Matter,” but he couldn’t deny that Barbra, resembling “an amiable ant-eater,” had “her moment in the sun.”
McClain’s insult, even if it came wrapped in praise, rankled. “Why are people so mean?” she asked Bob. But Barbra could console herself that while the reviews for the show were very mixed—Walter Kerr at the Herald Tribune called it “a good, solid show” while Robert Coleman at the Daily Mirror thought it was a disappointment—the acclaim for her was unanimous. Taubman said Barbra’s “oafish expressions... loud irascible voice and . . . arpeggiated laugh” made her “a natural comedienne.” Kerr called her “great.”
That was the rub. In the days since the show’s opening, most of the buzz had centered around Barbra, not the actual stars. The breakout player wasn’t Elliott, as some had once expected; instead, it was his girlfriend, who was playing a much smaller role. To be sure, some reviews had been very kind to Elliott. The Wall Street Journal had called him “something of a find.” But Barbra was the one the critic declared had the “first-rate gift.”
The imbalance between Barbra and Elliott was something she felt quite keenly, friends observed. She felt “protective of him,” said one, and “wanted him to get the same kind of accolades” she was getting. It wasn’t really his fault, she believed. Elliott, after all, hadn’t had the benefit of training at the Theatre Studio the way she had. So the criticism of her new beau “really bothered” Barbra, friends knew.
That night, Bob had come backstage after the show, marveling at the hustle and bustle and all the well-wishers who were flocking to Barbra’s dressing room. Every corner of the space was filled with flowers. Less than a year ago, as Bob well remembered, a single bouquet—from her friends in Detroit—had celebrated her appearance on the Paar show. And less than two years ago, the tiny peapod-sized dressing room at the Bon Soir could never have accommodated all the people who were crowding in now to see her, to congratulate her, to tell her she was going to be huge. Watching his friend receive her admirers, Bob felt as if he were witnessing a fairy tale come true.
But for Barbra, there remained the niggling little problem of Elliott’s performance. Laurents might have been finally satisfied to leave things the way they were, but Barbra wasn’t so tranquil. She rarely was, of course, when she saw a detail out of place.
After everyone left her dressing room except for Bob, Barbra took out a piece of paper and began writing furiously. Bob asked her what she was doing. She was putting together some notes on how Elliott might improve his performance, she replied.
Bob thought that this might not be such a good idea, but he said nothing. Maybe Elliott would welcome such criticism; after all, he certainly seemed enamored enough of Barbra. Everyone had noticed his tremendous, and obvious, attraction to her. The sexual shenanigans between Barbra and Elliott made for titillating backstage gossip. In Boston, Barbra had been spied naked in the hotel corridor, locked out of Elliott’s room as a joke. Now they were frequently closed off in one or the other’s dressing room, only opening the door after persistent and fo
rceful knocking.
For Barbra, it was a heady adventure. The short-lived affairs since Barré had never been this passionate, nor had her beaus been infatuated with her in the way Elliott was. That may have been because, for the first time, Barbra was realizing her own sexual power. Arthur Laurents marveled at how sexy Barbra was—or rather, how sexual. On the stage, she did something very special with Miss Marmelstein, he thought. The harassed secretary had been written as an old maid, but as Barbra played her, she became a young woman brimming over with sexual drive and desire. The face might have read spinster, but the body and the mannerisms were all siren—as alluring as the Lorelei she had sung about in her nightclub act, who’d wanted to bite her initials into a sailor’s neck. It had taken Elliott’s devotion to bring Barbra’s sexuality out so fully.
So it was with a kind of audacious nonchalance that she handed Elliott her list of criticisms, expecting him to be grateful for her noblesse oblige. But as Bob watched the exchange, it was not gratitude he saw in Elliott’s eyes when he read what Barbra had written.
It was fury.
Elliott was indeed smitten with Barbra. But his own ego had taken quite enough assaults from the critics; he didn’t need Barbra weighing in, too. It was bad enough that his girlfriend, in a minor part not integral to the plot, was the one everyone was talking about, but to have her now, suddenly empowered, presume to instruct him how he might do his job better . . . well, that was just a little too close to what his mother had once done, telling him what to do and when and how to do it.
Elliott tossed the note aside and stormed off down the hallway.
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 23
