The composers had their own doubts as well. Months earlier, Styne and Merrill had run through the score for Bancroft. There was some history there: Merrill and Bancroft had dated, and the relationship had ended badly. Merrill suspected some of the hostility Bancroft displayed that day at the Beverly Hills Hotel, as she listened to them sing the score, grew out of old personal resentments. Despite the fact that Merrill had actually written “People” with Bancroft in mind, she’d been unimpressed when she’d heard it, stalking out of the hotel in a huff, claiming it was “unsingable.”
Maybe, Stark had come to believe, nothing was singable for Bancroft, who, after all, was known more for her dramatic prowess than her singing voice. Robbins may have begun to agree with him on that point, since in the past few weeks he’d been advocating strongly for Carol Burnett as his second choice. Burnett wanted to do it, Robbins informed his collaborators just days before Barbra came in to do her reading. But he also acknowledged that he would need “to work with her a bit on the dramatic scenes to see whether she [was] capable of them.” The concerns they had with Burnett were the exact opposite of the concerns they had with Bancroft.
What they were looking for on the day Barbra strolled in looking like a Cossack was someone who could both sing and act. Ray Stark and Jule Styne thought they’d found that someone, and Merrick seemed at least amenable to the idea. But there were two holdouts. Robbins had seen Barbra at the Bon Soir and agreed that she was terrific, but nonetheless she remained third on his list. Bob Merrill’s doubts were bigger, which made for some awkwardness between him and Styne, his partner. But then again, their contrasts seemed to define them as a team. Styne was short and stout and loquacious; Merrill was tall and thin and taciturn. Styne was always upbeat, Merrill often dour. But together they had produced a score that everyone involved believed was destined to become a classic.
Merrill’s objections to Barbra were fundamental. He, too, had seen her at the Bon Soir, but for once the magic hadn’t happened. As a songwriter, Merrill didn’t like how Barbra played fast and loose with words and tempos. He believed songs were written a certain way by their composers and such authorial choices should be respected. Barbra, Merrill felt, assumed far too much ownership of other people’s work.
But there was more to his visceral dislike of her—or at least his wife, Suzanne, came to suspect as much. Merrill was a ladies’ man. If he wrote a song for a woman, he wanted to be attracted to her; the dynamic inspired him creatively, even if no romance ever bloomed between them. And Barbra, to Merrill, was not “girlfriend material,” his wife understood.
It wasn’t as frivolous an objection as it might sound, and Merrill probably had some sympathy from Merrick at least, if not from the smitten Styne. Beauty was obviously in the eye of the beholder, but their Fanny Brice had to be attractive enough not to look completely incongruous playing opposite the actor cast as Nick—who, judging from the list then being circulated by Stark, was going to be a looker. Christopher Plummer, Tony Franciosa, Robert Goulet, Keith Michell, and Farley Granger were the top choices, though Merrick wanted to approach Rock Hudson as well. “People insist he wants to be in a Broadway musical,” Merrick’s office had told Robbins. “Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?” Unlikely or not, the idea to cast the top box-office star in the country was intriguing—and surely had them all considering how Barbra Streisand would look opposite the extravagantly handsome Hudson.
Barbra’s audition changed no minds that day. Those who wanted her continued to want her; those who had doubts remained doubtful. Robbins would admit that Barbra had given “a marvelously sensitive reading,” but he cautioned they needed “to face the problem of her youth.” Could a twenty-year-old convincingly play the middle-aged Fanny of the second act? Robbins was skeptical and was soon back to sending notes of encouragement to Anne Bancroft. Merrick, meanwhile, perhaps heeding Merrill’s reservations, was suddenly “really anxious” to have Eydie Gormé come in and audition.
In a letter he wrote to Robbins not long after Barbra’s reading, Stark said he appreciated everyone’s varying opinions. With tremendous diplomacy, he recognized that all of the candidates had their advantages and that he was thankful to Robbins for considering them all. “You, of course, know my preference,” he wrote at the end.
His preference remained Barbra. Yet what Stark failed to mention was his wife’s preference or if he’d even broached Barbra’s name with her at this point. And it would be Fran Stark, everyone knew, who would have the last word.
2.
Sitting in the audience that night at the Shubert Theatre was Lillian Gish, the exquisite and ethereal star of the silent screen, who, with pioneering director D. W. Griffith, had made some of the most important early American films: The Birth of a Nation, Way Down East, Broken Blossoms. Backstage, Gish’s presence caused some excitement among the company’s cineastes, but Barbra seemed clueless. She was in a foul mood that night. She was tired of the show, tired of Miss Marmelstein. She hoped fervently that come this fall she’d be playing Fanny Brice in The Funny Girl, not just for the artistic challenges the role offered but simply for the chance to get out of Wholesale. If this was the reality of Broadway—doing the same damn thing every night—Barbra told friends that maybe she really should start thinking about movies. Not that she knew much about them—as evidenced by her lack of recognition of Miss Gish.
Her boredom with the show was trying the patience of her fellow castmates and the stage manager, who attempted, without much effect, to get firm with her. Barbra was still showing up late, repeating a pattern that had developed during rehearsals. Even an official reprimand from Actors’ Equity hadn’t changed her behavior. Arthur Laurents’s assistant, Ashley Feinstein, thought Barbra’s unprofessionalism stood out all the more starkly because everyone else in the show was so professional. Even Elliott, who was never late, didn’t seem to be able to get through to Barbra.
And everyone could tell when she was just “phoning it in,” said a frequent member of the audience, one of the growing number of Streisand devotees who showed up several times a week to see the show. Yet still the applause came, which, as always, infuriated Barbra. She knew when she was good and when she wasn’t, and she resented undeserved applause. But what she really resented was performing the part at all. She needed a change—and fast. She hoped that Stark and Robbins and the rest would make their decision soon.
That night, “she wasn’t great,” said the frequent audience member, “but she wasn’t terrible either.” Lillian Gish, however, thought Barbra was absolutely marvelous. Making her way backstage, Gish removed the earrings she’d been wearing and handed them over to Barbra as a token of her admiration. It was a tremendous gesture from a legendary figure, and Barbra accepted the earrings graciously—although only later did she fully discover who Gish was and why she mattered. Barry could have told her, or Bob or Terry. But they, of course, weren’t around anymore.
3.
On the screen, a giant caterpillar made a meal of a few cars. Barbra and Elliott sat in the dark, cool theater, a relief from the ninety-degree temperatures outside, eyes fixed on Mothra, a badly dubbed Japanese monster flick. The lovers, sharing a bag of popcorn, were enjoying a rare break from Wholesale and all the other myriad obligations of their careers.
Actually, it was Barbra who had the myriad obligations. Elliott only had to show up every night at the Shubert. Barbra had to do that and make her way afterward to the Blue Angel (she’d finished her run at the Bon Soir only to start another engagement uptown). These days, she also was frequently meeting reporters for interviews or waking up early for one of her frequent appearances on Joe Franklin’s show. There were also regular strategy sessions with Marty and Richard Falk and the Softness brothers on publicity, especially on ways to influence Goddard Lieberson into giving her a contract. Finding the time for a date with Elliott must have felt like a gift from heaven.
Not that they had trouble seeing each other. Elliott had moved in with her, sharing the ra
ilroad flat over Oscar’s Salt of the Sea and settling into a rather blissful pattern of domesticity. Although they could have easily afforded a bigger one, they kept Barbra’s twin bed, which, given Elliott’s large frame and long limbs, must have made sleeping uncomfortable at times—but also very intimate. They insisted that a bigger bed wouldn’t have fit; maybe that was true. But Barbra always seemed to find room for other pieces of furniture that caught her eye. Just recently she’d bought two “marvelous Victorian cabinets with glass shelves,” she told a writer from The New Yorker, at a shop called Foyniture Limited on Eighty-third Street. She seemed to get a kick out of the spelling.
Elliott adored living with her. He found her style “just wild . . . genius, really.” As a dining table, they used an old Singer sewing-machine stand. For meals, they ate Swanson’s TV dinners and bricks of coffee ice cream for dessert. Like the kids they still were, they snacked on grapefruit, brownies, and pickled herring. When they saw a tail “about a yard long” flicking back and forth underneath their stove, they ran off in terror to a motel. But when the landlord refused to pay to exterminate, they moved back in and made peace with the rat, naming him Oscar after the cheapskate downstairs. They played Monopoly and checkers, and acted out scenes they hoped to someday play together, Barbra as Medea and Elliott as Jason. Calling each other Hansel and Gretel, they made a halfhearted attempt to learn Greek so they “could speak a secret language nobody else could understand.” For the first time in their lives, Barbra and Elliott were deliriously happy being with another person. Elliott found it all “really romantic,” likening Barbra and himself to “kids in a treehouse.”
When Mothra was over, the oversized caterpillar having hatched into a giant imago and flown back to its island home, Barbra and Elliott walked hand in hand outside into Times Square. They enjoyed the fact that they could be stars on Broadway but still be largely anonymous on the streets of New York. That night, or one very much like it, they wandered the city, no one stopping them, no one telling them to look this way or sing that song. They played Pokerino in penny arcades. They bought glassware for the apartment. They ate vegetable fried rice in a greasy Chinese restaurant.
Such anonymity was important to Barbra. The fierce ambition the Softness brothers witnessed every time she barged into their offices, or the uncanny knack she had for drawing attention to herself, was not in the service of notoriety. It was part of her pursuit of excellence and achievement. But when she left the theater or the studio or the nightclub, Barbra wanted her life back. She wanted to wander through the streets of New York with her boyfriend unaccosted by people. So far, she still had that luxury. No matter how big a role she might someday land, she hoped that this much would never change.
Yet a future of anonymity seemed unlikely. Earl Wilson had just revealed the “hot romance backstage” between Barbra and Elliott, and was readying another column in which he would report the belief among cast members that the couple had secretly married. Such gossip was an inevitable byproduct of courting the columnists for other, more sought-after kinds of publicity, such as the items about the Brice show. Yet Barbra was unwilling to accept gossip about her personal life as an unavoidable component of her fame, and she had started speaking out against the practice. “They print such rotten things,” she complained to one interviewer. “Like they wrote that I was smooching at the Harwyn Club.” But then, impishly, she added, “It was 21”—showing that while she might detest such intrusive publicity, she knew how to make the best of it.
Barry was right: Barbra had indeed become very good at merchandizing herself. She told the press that it was she, with little to no help from Arthur Laurents, who had made Miss Marmelstein what she was. Barbra explained that she’d needed to “talk back to the director” in order to “work into the character” her own way. And if Laurents had persisted in obstructing her, she said, she would have walked out. “I just didn’t care what happened,” Barbra claimed. “I could go out and work in a nightclub again.” Laurents scoffed at the contention that Barbra would have willingly walked away from a part in a Broadway show to return to singing in nightclubs.
But in selling Barbra Streisand to the public, it was important that the product be marketed as uniquely self-made. The narrative that Marty had been building over the last year—Barbra as the once-in-a-generation talent discovered like a glittering pearl in the brackish oyster beds of Brooklyn—could not accommodate stories of “helpers” or “boosters.” She had to be given to the world fully formed, with no whiff of public-relations chicanery. If the contributions of a maestro such as Arthur Laurents had to be airbrushed out of her biography, then those less well-known people who had helped shape the creature being marketed as Barbra Streisand could certainly never expect to receive any kind of public acknowledgment.
It was, perhaps, easier to sell this rewritten history because so many associates from Barbra’s early days were no longer around. Terry Leong had headed for Europe without ever getting the chance to reconnect with the old friend whose style he had heavily influenced. Bob, too, had just sailed for Paris for an indefinite stay. And while there’d been a rapprochement with Barry, there’d been no attempt to stay in touch; in fact, he continued to feel that he was being deliberately kept away. Given how he’d broken her heart, it was easy for some friends to sympathize with Barbra on that point. But keeping Barry at a distance also meant that the enormous contributions he’d made to her career—from suggesting she enter the contest at the Lion in the first place to teaching her so much about music and performance—would be given no public forum.
Some old friends, such as Elaine Sobel, resented being held at arm’s length. Now waiting tables at the Russian Tea Room, Elaine felt she’d been “brushed out” of Barbra’s life just as her former roommate hit the big time on Broadway. Barbra, Elaine said, had taken advantage of her at a time when she, Barbra, needed help, but hadn’t offered any reciprocation now that she was in a position to give it. That, perhaps, was key to understanding who survived in Barbra’s orbit and who didn’t. Those who could still help her—such as Marty, Peter Daniels, and Don Softness—remained. Those who might want something from her now that she’d achieved a degree of fame and clout—such as Terry, Elaine, Barry, and possibly even Bob—did not. It was a common experience for many celebrities, and while unfortunate, not really all that difficult to understand.
And then there was Cis, who wanted absolutely nothing from Barbra except friendship. Cis remained Barbra’s rock, the one person with whom she could be herself completely, without any pretense, performance, or marketing. By the summer of 1962, Barbra’s three closest—and likely only—intimates were Cis, Marty, and Elliott.
But for a young woman in love, it was probably enough. Walking through the city with Elliott, her hand in his, her head resting occasionally on his shoulder, Barbra was content. Elliott understood her. They’d both grown up with mother issues; they’d both felt cheated out of real childhoods. Barbra could vent all her frustrations to Elliott, and he never pushed her away. He was “the stable one” in the relationship, she thought. When they’d occasionally argue, Barbra sometimes felt like stalking off, but Elliott always stopped her and got her to talk about what was really bothering her. She appreciated his “very clear mind.” Elliott, Barbra said, “knows what he wants.” And what was so thrilling, so wonderful, was that he wanted her.
4.
A pall hung over the crowd at the Blue Angel. People were still grieving Marilyn Monroe, who’d been found dead a week earlier at her home in Brentwood, either from an accidental overdose or suicide. One man who frequented the cabaret thought a sense of finality thrummed in the air that week, an awareness of an era coming to a close. Elizabeth Taylor still generated headlines, but few, if any, of the new generation of stars seemed to inspire the fascination and devotion that their predecessors did. That kind of stardom, many thought, was hopelessly moribund.
And yet, there was an undercurrent of excitement in the air as well. The young woman wh
o was performing at the Angel for one final night seemed to trigger something in people. Grown men would sometimes act like teenaged girls when she sang. The young man who frequented the cabaret did so not because he particularly liked the Blue Angel’s upholstered interior—he didn’t—but because Barbra Streisand, the headliner, made him cry every time she sang. And laugh, and smile, and “feel all the things a really great singer can make a person feel,” he said.
David Kapralik, a young executive at Columbia, could no doubt relate. He was there that night at the Blue Angel, just as he had been there the night before and the night before that. It was Barbra’s last performance; he wouldn’t have missed it. His admiration for her had started when he’d heard her sing “Happy Days” on The Garry Moore Show. He had realized that she was the kid Marty Erlichman had been pushing Columbia so hard about. Impressed with her voice, Kapralik had made it a point to see Barbra at the Angel. In no time at all, he had morphed, in his own words, into a “groupie.”
Kapralik was just one of the growing number of young men and women Dorothy Kilgallen observed “packing into the clubs to see Barbra Streisand and her magnetic nonsense.” If she and other pundits had taken a closer look at the phenomenon, they would have been disabused of any fears that old-time stardom, the kind manifested by Marilyn, was on its way out. Barbra’s “groupies” adored her with all the same fervor that an earlier generation had brought to Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland. They were artsy, bohemian types who bucked trends: at the moment, the trend was toward folk singers like Peter, Paul, and Mary, though the rock-pop of Neil Sedaka and Dion still dominated the charts. Barbra didn’t fit either category, which her fans seemed to appreciate. And, like all true devotees, they recruited others into the faith. This night, Kapralik had brought his boss, Goddard Lieberson, nattily dressed as always.
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 28
