While Ruark’s point was that appearances shouldn’t matter, Solters decided a little counteroffensive was necessary when it came to Barbra’s looks. He seems to have gotten an early look at Ruark’s column, for nearly simultaneously, Earl Wilson’s column carried what seemed like a rebuttal: “A bump on a girl’s nose doesn’t make any difference,” Wilson quoted Barbra as saying. “After all, what is sex appeal but the bumps not only on a girl’s nose but elsewhere?”
This became the new meme. Rather than just sit back and wait for the next snide comment about Barbra’s “anteater nose,” Solters now presented her as the girl who would “never get her nose fixed.” She was defiant, proud of herself just as she was. No one need ever know she’d once considered a little reconstructive surgery.
Another piece orchestrated by Solters at this time was written by Mel Heimer, a Yonkers-based columnist for the King Features Syndicate, whose “My New York” column was a perfect venue for Barbra, especially during the strike. This one pushed that other recurring meme—Barbra the kook—and firmly established the term as being synonymous with the performer. “There is a full-blown, top-drawer kook in town,” Heimer reported. “Miss Streisand has a good part of New York in the air, wondering if she’s for real. Miss S. is a slim, slightly round-shouldered sort who, even when being interviewed, seems to have her eyes and ears fixed on the sight and sound of far-away flutes.” (Rarely has an interviewer described Barbra’s ambition better.) “She will do anything to arouse attention, the first requirement of a good kook.” (As examples, Heimer gave the “born in Madagascar” line and the bit about the nightgown being worn as a dress.) “These nights she’s doubling into places like the Bon Soir and Blue Angel to sing, and all I can only hope is that meeting normal people won’t standardize her.” (Barbra’s kookiness, then, was something to love.)
The most unusual publicity Solters was able to wrangle for his client that strike-hobbled winter was inclusion in a “Singing Valentines” spread in the February issue of Show magazine. Various celebrities were photographed in amusing situations accompanied by a Valentine’s verse. Barbra was shot from above hooked up to a cardiogram machine—how much kookier could one get?—while curled in a fetal position, her hair loose and her eyes closed. “Roses are red, cardiograms are blue,” her verse went. “I’m Barbra Streisand . . . so nu?” An asterisk led to a definition of nu as a “central European” word to describe a mix of assertion, weltschmerz (world weariness), and wonder. “Miss Streisand,” the magazine assured its readers, “uses it here to mean Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Finally, there was more of that old publicity trick of strategically placing questions in syndicated “TV Mailbag” columns. “I think Barbara Streisand is a very exciting performer,” wrote one correspondent, who, of course, was really Solters, misspelling her name purposely and making sure to mention her single “My Coloring Book,” which had just been released. “What else has she done?” he wanted to know. The answer, also written by Solters, pointed out the correct spelling was “Barbra,” and revealed that she was “packing them in every night at the Blue Angel”—a nice bit of publicity for that show since the local papers weren’t able to report on it.
This was extraordinary coverage for a young woman who no longer had a regular television or Broadway show to make her newsworthy. The flurry of publicity that Solters managed to rake up for Barbra during the winter of 1962–63 proved how valuable he could be to her. Not only was he attempting to drum up business for her at the Blue Angel, but he was also keeping her long-range goals in mind as well. To Mike Connolly, the gossip columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, Solters seems to have passed on a few juicy, if unsubstantiated, tidbits. Connolly had just announced that Barbra was set to fly out to the Coast to do an episode of the television show Stoney Burke, a Western series starring Jack Lord. “From there,” Connolly continued, it would “be just a step for Barbra to star in The Fanny Brice Story.” If there was ever talk about Barbra appearing on Stoney Burke, it was just that—talk—and certainly any announcement about starring in the Brice story was still just wishful thinking. But that hardly got in the way of a good press agent like Solters. Besides, he knew the Hollywood Reporter was read every day by Ray Stark, and of all the people he didn’t want forgetting Barbra during this interval, Stark was on the top of his list.
4.
Backstage at the Shubert Theatre, where Barbra had dressed every night for Wholesale not so long ago, Barry Dennen was practicing the lead role for the national touring company of the Broadway smash, David Merrick’s Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. He wasn’t practicing the lead because he had the lead—that had gone to Joel Grey—but because he was the lead’s understudy. Still, after so much summer stock and off-Broadway, Barry was exultant that he was “in a Broadway theater at last.” It was his “first real, important job.” The company planned to open in Milwaukee, but for now they were rehearsing at the Shubert, where the Broadway version was still running. In the process they’d gotten to know some of the Broadway cast, including the director-star Anthony Newley. On this afternoon, Newley popped his head out of his dressing room and invited Barry and a few others to come in and hear a new album of a “really fabulous performer . . . [a] wonderful singer.”
For some reason, Barry felt uneasy. Inside the dressing room, he discovered the reason for his dread when Newley held up the album for them to see. On the cover was a photograph of Barbra, emerging from the shadows, standing in front of a microphone in a herringbone vest, her red lips pursed in song. Her eyes were heavy with the mascara and false eyelashes Barry had seen Bob give her dozens of times in his apartment. The Barbra Streisand Album was the simple yet effective title.
Newley dropped the disk onto the record player. “Cry Me a River” was the first track, a song Barry had never heard Barbra sing, but which, in its earliest renditions, had been all about him. Other tracks were more familiar. Barry had been the one to teach Barbra “A Sleepin’ Bee” and “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.” Barbra had never heard these songs until Barry had played them for her. Now they were on her album. But the hardest of all to hear was “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Barry still remembered the day they’d dreamed it up, almost as a joke.
Looking around at his fellow actors as they enjoyed the album, Barry wondered how he might explain to them his “part in Barbra’s story.” He realized it would be impossible. He’d probably sound bitter, or jealous, or regretful for not treating her better—or, worse still, as if he were trying to name-drop. It was hard to believe that saying he knew Barbra Streisand—the skinny kid with the shopping bags—might now be considered name-dropping. Overcome with emotion, Barry slipped out of Newley’s dressing room, making his way out to the empty theater. There, slumping down into a seat, he buried his face in his hands.
5.
Standing in front of a distracted crowd at the Café Pompeii at the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach, Barbra might have been forgiven for thinking that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Here she was, back on a nightclub tour, singing to rooms that were sometimes half empty and almost always noisy. But she was on tour to promote her album, which needed all the help it could get. Released on February 25, The Barbra Streisand Album—a title she’d settled on after Columbia had suggested Sweet and Saucy Streisand, which had made her nauseous—had gotten off to a lackluster start, despite a decent (albeit somewhat late) review from Billboard, which predicted it “should draw an enormous amount of play from the good radio stations.”
So far that hadn’t happened. Barbra’s album was overshadowed by blockbusters from, among others, Joan Baez, who’d released a live concert album, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, who were riding the wave of their number one hit, “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Barbra, however, was doing her best to drive up sales. Her tour had been arranged by Marty and Joe Glaser, the president and founder of Associated Booking who had taken over as her nightclub agent, which showed how high Barbra had risen in the agency’s
esteem. She’d kicked off things at the beginning of February at the Revere Frolic, a seaside theater outside Boston, where she performed two shows nightly. Although Billboard thought Barbra was “getting the kind of reception [at the Frolic] accorded artists on their way up,” the Boston Globe advertised her as “Miss Marmel Steisand,” clearly having no idea who she was.
The indignities only continued. From Boston it was on to Cleveland, where she cohosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week starting February 11. With the genial host, Barbra had spoofed Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy movies, played tiddlywinks on the floor, and participated in some calisthenics taught by a visiting exercise instructor—though not with much enthusiasm. By the end of the set, Barbra—never much of a “joiner”—had retreated to the back where she stood watching the rest of the cast bend and squat, a somewhat condescending smile fixed on her face. There were, apparently, some limits to what she would put herself through.
But the Douglas show also gave her the chance to sing every song from the upcoming album—fantastic publicity as far as it went, which actually wasn’t very far at all. The syndicated show, a Westinghouse production like PM East, reached only Midwest audiences ; the New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and West Coast markets had no idea as yet who Mike Douglas was. Going into the gig, Barbra and Marty would have understood that any boost the Douglas show might bring to her album sales would be confined to the Midwest. No doubt that was why they’d asked for a concurrent nightclub act, to maximize their time and effort. Douglas got them booked at the Chateau, located in Lakewood, a west-side suburb of Cleveland. Barbra was paid $2,500 for the week—decent money, but it turned out to be a dismal experience. A cold snap inhibited turnout, and Barbra played to half-empty houses for most of her run. Peter Daniels, who’d come along as her accompanist, could see that she was “a little depressed.”
A little depression turned into a whole lot by the time she faced the indifferent audiences at the Eden Roc in Miami. Soldiering on with her nightclub appearances, Barbra had been distressed to realize that for all her effort, the tour hadn’t seemed to help the album much at all. A few weeks after its release, The Barbra Streisand Album remained mired at the bottom of the charts.
Yet whenever she’d fret, Marty assured her that he believed the album would take off. She had, after all, the backing of some pretty important people in the world of music. Jule Styne was still out there rooting for her. Stephen Sondheim, once unsure of her, was now considering her for a musical he was writing, Anyone Can Whistle. Leonard Bernstein, impressed with how she sang “My Name Is Barbara,” was talking her up to colleagues. Sammy Cahn thought she was absolutely adorable after she’d told him that he looked like her dentist, so he gave her a little box inscribed TO THE SINGER FROM THE DENTIST and told everyone within earshot that he thought she was the best.
And, in the most public expression of support of all, Harold Arlen had written her album’s back-cover liner notes. “Did you ever hear Helen Morgan sing?” Arlen asked, with the album designer cleverly positioning a thumbnail photo of Morgan next to the question. “Or were you ever at the theatre when Fanny Brice clowned in her classic comedic way—or Beatrice Lillie deliciously poked fun at all sham and pomp?” (Thumbnails of Brice and Lillie accompanied the text.) “Have you heard our top vocalists ‘belt,’ ‘whisper,’ or sing with that steady and urgent beat behind them? Have you ever seen a painting by Modigliani?” (A little sketch of an odd-looking woman followed.) “If you have, do not think the above has been ballooned out of proportion. I advise you to watch Barbra Streisand’s career. This young lady (a mere twenty) has a stunning future.”
The old-guard musical-theater elite had lined up in solid support behind the enterprise of Barbra Streisand. Word up and down Broadway was that the album was a must; it was no surprise that a musical-theater type such as Anthony Newley had it in his hands soon after it was released. But what was missing from Barbra’s publicity was any sense of youth. Comparing her to Helen Morgan and Beatrice Lillie was hardly going to attract those who were buying the albums of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Still, the biggest-selling album at the moment was the soundtrack to West Side Story, so Broadway music was still profitable. The trouble was that The Barbra Streisand Album, for all Barbra’s Broadway provenance, wasn’t a show-tunes record. Just what it was remained something of mystery.
And that was a problem. Goddard Lieberson had said that Barbra couldn’t be categorized—and while he’d used that as a compliment when he’d introduced her at the Bon Soir, he had also worried about that fact right from the start. The question remained how to position Barbra and her album, which contained a mix of up- and down-tempo songs, offbeat standards, and performance pieces such as “Come to the Supermarket” and “Big Bad Wolf.” For the predominately youthful record-buying market, these weren’t draws, and no amount of accolades from Harold Arlen was going to persuade a young fan of Elvis Presley or Lesley Gore to give Barbra’s album a shot.
By the middle part of March, while Barbra was languishing in Miami, there was a terrible feeling among everyone involved that the album was sinking like a rock. It had now been out for a month, and it still hadn’t caught fire. Maybe Lieberson had been right: Barbra was simply too special for records. The lack of enthusiasm at the Chateau and the Eden Roc seemed to prove that her audience of gay men, urban hipsters, and theater aficionados was just too small for major commercial success. After all the trouble of the contract and the tour, it would be a terrible admission for Barbra and Marty to have to make.
As Barbra walked offstage and headed back to her room, the depression she was feeling was as much personal as it was professional. Elliott had been with her for the start of the tour in Boston and Cleveland. But during a brief interim in New York before she’d flown to Florida, Barbra had bid her boyfriend farewell as he headed off to London to start rehearsals for On the Town. Earl Wilson reported that Barbra had been “talked out of going to London” with Elliott by her managers, who “feared she would stop her career right when it [was] starting.” In return for Barbra’s agreement to stay in the U.S., Wilson revealed, her managers promised to get her three television shows in England “so she could visit three times” in the course of the next year.
Still, it was hard for some to believe that she ever truly considered going to London without a job just so she could cling to Elliott’s side. Barbra was hardly “the backstage kind of girlfriend,” Bob said. Besides, with the possibility of the Brice show still out there—or The Student Gypsy, or Anyone Can Whistle, or David Merrick’s musical revival of The Rainmaker, for which her name had also been mentioned—Barbra wasn’t likely to go anywhere that made it difficult for her to get in to audition.
And maybe a bit of a break from Elliott wasn’t all that terrible to contemplate. Barbra was still in love with him and still committed to making the relationship work. No one doubted that. In fact, as friends had heard, there had even been a brief consideration of marriage before he left, to seal the deal between them and provide a veneer of protection while they were apart. But Elliott had a dim view of the institution of marriage. He thought it imposed “something technical on an otherwise viable relationship,” and he worried it could change things “dramatically.” That Barbra didn’t push it suggested that she, too, wasn’t quite ready, and that maybe she saw some benefit in having a bit of a breather. They had been arguing more than ever after all, and Barbra had found herself increasingly impatient with Elliott’s career insecurities, especially as she was going through her own anxieties.
So she retreated alone to her room at the Eden Roc. After this, it was off to San Francisco to fulfill her long-ago contract with Enrico Banducci at the hungry i, then back to New York for a gig at Basin Street East at the Shelton Towers Hotel. There were more clubs after that if she could bear to look at the list. And after that—who knew? All Barbra could have known at that point was that the winter of 1963 looked an awful lot like the winter of 1961. Whatever had happened to
going straight to the top?
6.
The crowds had returned to hear her, but now the problem was something else. Barbra couldn’t sing. Or she didn’t think she could sing.
With Marty at her side, she found the little studio opposite the Safeway grocery store on Oakland’s busy College Avenue, about half an hour’s walk from the Berkeley campus. This was where she’d been told she could find the woman who might help her. Anxious and frightened, Barbra made her way inside a small room with all the curtains drawn to keep out the light.
A few nights earlier, she’d opened at the hungry i across the bay in San Francisco. Banducci had done a good job of talking her up: “This town will go crazy for her,” he quoted himself on the posters announcing her opening night. To the press, he also told the story of their first meeting back in New York, reframing it with the buzzwords of Barbra’s current publicity: “She was easily the kookiest, most arresting-looking kid I’d ever seen.” In building up her offbeat appeal, Banducci had Barbra calling him a “moron” and an “idiot” in Irvin Arthur’s office, and instead of being offended, he said he’d replied, “Sign that girl for me right away.” Certainly Barbra had been calculatingly direct in that first meeting, but she wasn’t the type to call someone names, especially someone she’d just met. But the theatrical Banducci knew how to plant the seeds of a legend.
Meanwhile, Columbia, responding to Marty’s calls to do more to promote the album, had sent out invitations to some of San Francisco’s better-known critics to a special preshow concert at six PM. That meant Barbra had to go on stage three times that first evening, since she performed two shows a night, at eight and eleven. (The two shows were distinct from each other, and some people from the first show stayed for the second.) But the preshow event proved to be a smart move because it created a real buzz about her, and the tough-to-please critics, feeling catered to, had responded enthusiastically, ensuring sizeable crowds every night since.
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 34
