Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  For Barbra, finally landing a spot on the top variety show was no doubt satisfying, though, in its own way, probably a little unsettling as well. Everything she did seemed to be an audition for something else, for something bigger.

  Just as it was tonight with Fran Stark.

  Taking one last look in the mirror, Barbra headed out onto the stage. If she was hoping for a decision, some sign that she’d cinched the deal, she was disappointed. Everyone was cordial at the end of the night, but whether she’d changed Fran’s mind, Barbra had no idea. Mrs. Stark was playing it all very cool.

  7.

  The news had come with just a couple of days’ notice. A letter from Merrick posted backstage thanked them all for their work and dedication, then dropped the bomb: Wholesale would be closing on Saturday, December 8. After a strong start, the show had faltered in recent months, and even various special half-price ticket deals that were promoted to boost attendance hadn’t made a difference. The great hope that the show’s low production budget, coupled with strong early box office, would mean profits for everyone hadn’t materialized; by the start of December, Wholesale was $140,000 in the hole and sinking further. Even all the publicity about the girl who “stopped the show cold” every night had failed to keep up the momentum.

  There were tears all around, but not from Barbra. Now, on the show’s last night, when the final curtain dropped, she bounded backstage chortling, “I’m free! I’m free!” Wiping off her makeup and discarding Miss Marmelstein’s frumpy dress for the last time, Barbra, with Elliott at her side, practically danced out into the cold dark night, the air swirling with snow flurries. They might have, as so many theater people did on finding themselves suddenly out of work, enjoyed a bit of a holiday, gotten away from showbiz for a while, taken a much-needed breather. But Barbra had no time for such luxuries. She had to get the tracks laid down for her album, which Columbia had agreed to produce in the studio next month after the results of their live recording effort at the Bon Soir had proven unsatisfactory to everyone. She also had to rehearse for the Sullivan show, which was coming up in just a few days. No, there was no time for any holiday.

  Elliott, on the other hand, had all the time in the world. On Monday, as Barbra headed over to Peter Daniels’s studio to practice, Elliott slunk down to the labor offices on Fifty-eighth Street and applied for fifty dollars a week in unemployment benefits.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Winter 1963

  1.

  Barbra had had it. All during rehearsals Ed Sullivan had been saying, “Now let’s hear it from the Columbia recording star Barbra Streis-land.” No matter how many times she tried to correct him, he still got her name wrong, and few things irritated her more. Now, during the live broadcast, furious with fear that he’d do it again, Barbra positioned herself right behind the curtain, waiting to pounce as soon as the commercial break was over and it was her turn to be introduced.

  The light on the camera flashed, indicating they were about to go live. “Streisand!” Barbra hissed through the curtain. “Streisand! Like sand on the beach!”

  Sullivan started to laugh, then realized he was on camera. “She’s breaking me up over here,” he said as way of explanation. Then, composing himself, he announced: “Here’s a young Columbia star, a very great talent, here’s Barbra Streisand”—he said it perfectly—“so let’s have a nice welcome.”

  Clearly relieved, Barbra did a little jig as she hurried out onto stage. She wore a short white dress and her hair was flipped out at the ends, with a big bun on top. She sang two songs for Sullivan. Her rendition of “Lover, Come Back to Me” turned out to be very hubba-hubba, conjuring up red-hot-mama Sophie Tucker. “Lover” was the flipside of Barbra’s second single, which had just been released. As promised, Columbia had put more effort into this one, pressing twenty thousand copies and mailing demos to DJs all across the country. The front side of the single was the John Kander–Fred Ebb composition “My Coloring Book,” recorded just a few days before, and Barbra also performed it that night on the Sullivan show. Kander and Ebb had written the song for Kaye Ballard, but when she’d wanted to perform it on The Perry Como Show, she was denied permission, because it was too serious and she was the show’s comedienne. Enter Barbra, who recorded the song and made it her own, much to Ballard’s exasperation.

  “My Coloring Book” was Barbra doing what she did best, bringing an almost unbearable poignancy to a simple song about heartbreak. Marty immediately sent a copy to Ray Stark in California, and the producer, reportedly, was “bowled over.” Whether his wife shared his opinion, no one was quite sure. Fran Stark had fallen utterly silent on the matter of Barbra Streisand. There were reports that she’d left the Bon Soir after Barbra’s performance still adamantly opposed to her; others said Barbra’s performance had won her over. What seems to have been the case is that, no matter her own personal feelings, Fran was simply deferring to her husband’s judgment. But her silence fostered stories that Mrs. Stark was waging a fierce, one-woman, behind-the-scenes campaign against Barbra.

  It was hard, however, to imagine such a position in the wake of the release of “My Coloring Book.” The song might have been schmaltz, but Barbra’s heartbreak was beautifully convincing. If anyone had doubted her ability to convey the range of emotions needed to play Fanny Brice, all they needed to do was listen to this record.

  The richness of the emotion apparent in Barbra’s voice may have arisen from a new, and unexpected, understanding of the lyrics. She sang of watching the man she loved drift away: “Color him gone.” As 1962 turned into 1963, Barbra and Elliott had suddenly found life in their little tree house was no longer quite so harmonious. Their hectic, yet sustaining, routine had been shattered by the closing of Wholesale. Barbra was still rushing hither and yon, but Elliott, never good at being idle, just moped around the apartment. He was developing “terrible anxieties” waiting in the unemployment line. He felt, he admitted, like “such a failure collecting that $50.”

  For all his insistence that both men and women needed to “break tradition” in their relationships with each other, Elliott found himself hopelessly stuck in an earlier view: He was the man and he was out of work, dependent on the income of a woman, so, ergo, he must be a failure. The fact that Barbra’s success kept steamrolling along even after Wholesale closed—even if she herself was dissatisfied with its progress—was very difficult for Elliott. He had been the star—but Barbra had ended up making as much as he had in Wholesale, and now, while she got calls for nightclubs and television shows, he was schlepping down to the labor office.

  One acquaintance thought it was “a bit of a self-pity party Elliott was throwing for himself.” Since, in fact, those unemployment checks were just temporary. Elliott had very quickly landed himself another job after Wholesale closed. Although he wouldn’t start until the following spring, Elliott had won the lead in the London revival of On the Town, to be staged at the Prince of Wales Theatre. But where the job should have made him feel more secure, it caused a whole new set of problems. Elliott wanted Barbra to go with him to London; if she didn’t, who knew how long they’d be apart and what would happen to their relationship then. The uncertainty of all that frightened Barbra, too, so she may have genuinely considered director Joe Layton’s offer of a part in the show. He proposed that she play Hildy, the man-hungry taxi driver who’d been brought to life on the Broadway stage by Nancy Walker—in a show, by the way, conceived and choreographed by Jerome Robbins. Taking a supporting role in another musical that starred Elliott would keep them together. It would also re-create the dynamic of the past half year.

  But Barbra knew it would be a career misstep. Playing Hildy would have typed her as a character actress and conceivably prevented her from ever being considered for a leading role. Agreeing to On the Town would not only have meant losing out on Fanny Brice if that show made it to the stage, but also forfeiting, according to her agents, $100,000 worth of other offers—a year or more of television, nightclubs, a
nd records—an estimate that Lee Solters made sure to supply Earl Wilson, who ran it in his column to explain why Barbra had turned the part down. The implication was clear: She had become too important to play a secondary part in Elliott’s show.

  The reality of that fractured their home life. One photographer who came to take photos of Barbra for some interview was witness to a noisy argument between the couple, with some “pretty heavy shouting,” though the photographer couldn’t tell “what they were shouting about.” One day, Diana made a rare visit—every once in a while she still felt obliged to stop by with some soup—and found the atmosphere in her daughter’s apartment to be “so thick with tension it could be cut with a pair of scissors,” said a friend who was with her. Barbra was sulking in one corner and Elliott was in another, neither speaking to the other, which made things rather difficult, given how small the flat was.

  One acquaintance thought their squabbling reflected more than just a case of clashing egos or a contest over who was more successful. Their rancor grew even more, their acquaintance said, from a sense of “fear—a deep-rooted fear that everything was changing, and that without the glue of Wholesale, their relationship was coming apart.”

  For Barbra, it was a core dilemma. She wanted success and acclaim, everyone knew that; but she also wanted love. The decisions she’d be asked to make in the next few months would force her to make some hard choices between those two competing desires.

  2.

  In just twelve hours, the temperature in New York had plunged thirty-three degrees, bottoming out at five above zero. Snow blew into Barbra’s face as she stepped out of the car, wrapped, almost certainly, in her caracul coat and wool hat. At least there was no one telling her that she should be wearing stockings and high heels.

  Hurrying into the Columbia Records headquarters on Seventh Avenue, Barbra shook the snow from her coat and headed into the elevator. It was January 24, the second day of recording her album. This time it was Studio A, at the top of the building, where she was working her magic. Yesterday, she’d recorded “A Taste of Honey,” “I’ll Tell the Man in the Street,” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” but today the agenda was more ambitious, with “My Honey’s Lovin’ Arms,” “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now,” “Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking,” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” all on the roster. And if they had time, she’d record even more, as “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” “Cry Me a River,” “A Sleepin’ Bee,” “Much More,” and, of course, “Happy Days Are Here Again” were set to be included on the album as well.

  If Barbra was tired—she was, after all, back at the Blue Angel every night, her name above the club’s in newspaper advertisements—she didn’t sound it. On these tracks, her voice was absolutely exquisite. Part of the reason why she sounded so good was the man she greeted as she slipped off her snowy coat: Peter Matz, the arranger and conductor Harold Arlen had recommended she work with on the album. Right from the start, Barbra had adored the bespectacled, goateed thirty-four-year-old Matz, trusting his artistic instincts completely. He’d arranged for Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward, and just this past year had been nominated for a Tony for his musical direction of No Strings. Coward had called Matz “vital and imaginative,” and thought the young arranger knew “more about the range of various instruments and the potentialities of different combinations than anyone . . . very exciting and stimulating.”

  Matz also had a sense of humor so dry that Coward’s secretary called it “dehydrated.” Delivering his droll observations with a straight face, Matz could make Barbra laugh, which wasn’t easy, and which always went a very long way with her.

  They’d worked out most of the songs ahead of time in Matz’s West End Avenue apartment, just the two of them at the piano, while Matz’s wife and two young sons listened from the other room. Matz took Peter Daniels’s arrangements and expanded them for the orchestra, which Daniels considered “a big compliment.” Although Matz had taken over as accompanist, Daniels still felt part of the collaboration and was set to go on tour with Barbra the following month to promote the album after its release.

  In a remarkably short time, Barbra had developed a working relationship with this new Peter that was nearly as smooth and fruitful as the one with Daniels. Janet Matz, sitting behind a glass partition the day of the recording, marveled at how fluidly her husband and Barbra worked together. She knew Pete could be a bit of a perfectionist, and sometimes two perfectionists clashed, but she saw “no conflict whatsoever” with Barbra. Pete “took cues from her,” Janet observed. If he saw Barbra struggling with a note, for example, he might say, “Let’s keep the strings out here,” knowing intuitively how to solve the problem. All Barbra needed to do was lift an eyebrow and Matz would understand he ought to consider slowing down the tempo or changing the color of the piece. In the control booth, engineer Frank Laico thought some of Barbra’s vocals were “very harsh at times,” but with Matz’s “colors she sounded so great.”

  The collaboration with Matz worked so well, his wife believed, because he had “a strong personality” that matched Barbra’s own. “Pete wasn’t afraid of telling anyone off” if necessary, and so there were times when he bluntly told Barbra to just trust him and stop bellyaching. But neither was Matz someone who needed to have his way all the time. “Other people’s ideas didn’t threaten him,” his wife said—the way Barbra had seemed to suspect Laurents or Weidman or Rome had felt threatened when she’d suggested changing something in Wholesale. To her delight, Matz was open to hearing what she thought, and sometimes he actually used her ideas. He discovered that two and a half years of nightclubs and Broadway had taught this young woman with no formal training an awful lot. Barbra’s musical abilities, Matz concluded, were “monumental.”

  Yet still the Columbia brass wasn’t sure of her. Mike Berniker was “walking a tightrope,” Matz observed, “between the upstairs guys” and those in the recording studio. The execs were still telling Berniker, “Look, we can’t spend a lot of money on this, we don’t know if this woman is going to sell records.” So the orchestra was doled out to Matz in small combinations in different sessions, rather than as one big band as he would have preferred. One session would have a small string section; another one, a rhythm section and four trombones. All because the guys in the suits still weren’t sure this eccentric kid with the big voice would make them any money.

  Undeterred by their lack of faith in her, Barbra took her place beside the microphone. Outside, the wind and snow were raging, but Barbra stayed supremely focused on the task at hand. She put everything out of her mind—the winter storm, the moneymen’s doubts, the fear and anxiety she felt at home—and began to sing. Listening to her, the man conducting the orchestra was filled with far more faith in her potential than the record executives possessed. Before the year was out, Peter Matz believed, Barbra Streisand “would be a very big star.”

  3.

  Lee Solters had his work cut out for him. Just as he was about to inaugurate a major publicity blitz for Barbra, all seven New York newspapers, plus two Long Island dailies, went on strike. That had happened on December 8; the strike was now approaching its second month. That meant no New York reviews for Barbra’s album, set to be released in a few weeks, nor any for her Blue Angel engagement. In fact, to get the word out that she was even at the club, Max Gordon had advertised in the Wall Street Journal, which wasn’t affected by the strike. But most significantly, the strike meant no New York coverage of Barbra herself—no profiles, no interviews—a critical loss at a very critical time. For, as Arthur Laurents had heard, Barbra was continually haranguing her publicists and agents, “Get me out there! Get me something new!”

  Solters picked up the phone and started dialing. In his raspy Brooklyn accent, he pitched stories about this twenty-year-old sensation who’d stopped the show cold and was kooky as all get-out and possessed the voice of an angel—the standard talking points when pitching Barbra. With the strike on, Solters knew he�
�d have to rely on the syndicated columnists, even if most of the people who did the important hiring wouldn’t see items run in the Idaho Falls Post Reporter or the Corpus Christi Times.

  Some columnists, however, such as Earl Wilson and Dorothy Kilgallen, had their columns clipped and mailed regularly to Broadway producers and managers, and Wilson, at least, could be counted on to give Barbra good press. He’d just declared her the “hottest young comedienne in the country.” Solters secured a number of such syndicated pieces during the strike and made sure to clip and mail them himself if necessary to get them into the hands of the city’s movers and shakers.

  And if the articles Solters arranged lacked New York visibility, they made up for it in their enthusiasm toward Barbra. Robert Ruark, whose thrice-weekly column for the Scripps-Howard newspapers was further distributed through the United Features Syndicate, wrote about everything that made him “glad, sad or mad.” And Barbra Streisand made him glad. “She packs more personal dynamic power than anybody I can recall since Libby Holman or Helen Morgan,” Ruark wrote after seeing Barbra at the Blue Angel. “She is the hottest thing to hit the entertainment field since Lena Horne erupted, and she will be around fifty years from now if good songs are still written to be sung by good singers.”

  Yet while the piece was a paean to Barbra’s talent, style, and personality—“the next musical she makes will see her name over the title,” Ruark wrote, which certainly went right into Barbra’s press kit, highlighted for any prospective employers to see—it also spent a considerable amount of ink on her appearance. In 1963, Barbra Streisand’s difference—her “otherness”—was so striking that people couldn’t help but comment on it. “Her nose is more evocative of moose than muse,” Ruark wrote, suggesting only the Blue Angel could have “established a girl with a bumpy nose and the unwieldy name of Streisand as a candidate for immortality.” As the night went on, Ruark concluded, Barbra became “beautiful in your ears.”