Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  Yet if Barbra’s “spouse” was there, too—as Elliott almost certainly was—Sobol failed to include his name. After all, the columnist was only interested in names he could boldface, and the tall, gangly man with bushy hair who sat beside Barbra could have been anybody, or nobody. Such a description seemed to sum up Elliott’s position pretty well—just a guy in the background as Barbra took the movie colony by storm.

  9.

  Bob Fosse, by his own admission, was beginning to feel a little bit paranoid.

  The director of Funny Girl was doing his best to get the book in order so they could start rehearsals sometime that fall. The script was spread out in front of him, and his penciled comments were scrawled across every page. But the more he worked with Ray Stark, the less Fosse trusted him. When all the principals were present—Fosse, Stark, Barbra, Styne, Merrill, Lennart, and production designer Bob Randolph—everything seemed fine. The relationships among the collaborators seemed “good and productive.” Fosse found himself particularly “excited about Barbra.”

  But when he was alone with Stark, or with Stark and just one or two others, Fosse noticed the producer’s penchant for talking behind people’s backs. This was classic Stark, keeping people on edge by playing them against each other. But it was nonetheless unnerving for Fosse to hear the producer “threatening to replace everyone.” If Stark was saying this about his authors or his designer, Fosse feared, he was likely saying it about his director as well.

  That fear touched a nerve. Fosse hadn’t sought out this project; Stark had begged him to take it on when Robbins departed. Fosse had agreed only if Stark and Merrick were “willing to go all the way with him”—which meant he wanted a guarantee that he wouldn’t be fired out of town, something he’d seen happen all too often before. Fosse was concerned that “the inexperienced Stark” would “panic and make rash and often destructive decisions.” So he asked that everyone involved “think twice” and “not just grab [him] because the project was limping.” To make sure he was the right fit, Fosse even offered to work on spec “until everyone concerned had made up their minds.”

  Stark had dismissed his concerns and assured him of their commitment. In good faith, Fosse had started work, picking up where Robbins had left off. It wasn’t easy. He had to eliminate anything that his predecessor might claim was his invention. For example, Fosse ditched the direct cut from Fanny’s line that she’d do anything that Ziegfeld asked her to the scene where she balks: “I’m not going to wear this costume!” He surely knew he’d lose the laugh, but there was little else he could do; Robbins had made clear the bit was his. Still, there were places Fosse could bring his own imprint. He brought on Carol Haney, the actress he’d helped nurture into a choreographer on The Pajama Game, to help with the musical numbers.

  But his paranoia was growing by the week. In July he’d flown to Los Angeles, where he was overseeing the staging of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Philharmonic Auditorium. While Fosse was away, Stark had approached Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, the producers of How to Succeed, and reportedly asked them if they honestly thought the man who’d staged the musical numbers for their gigantic hit was “capable” as a director. When the pair pointed out that it was “a little late for that kind of question,” the wily producer of Funny Girl had replied, “No, we haven’t signed him yet.”

  That was true. The contract still sat on Fosse’s lawyer’s desk. Why the director had so far withheld his signature was unclear. Stark had agreed to the language Fosse had requested, promising not to interfere with his direction “or hire anyone else to do his job.” If the agreement was violated, the producers of Funny Girl would still have to pay Fosse the rest of what he was owed (he was being paid $7,500, for which he’d receive $2,500 on signing, the rest in weekly intervals, plus three and a quarter percent of the box office gross per week). The contract seemed ironclad in its protections of Fosse, but although it was dated August 1, by the end of the month he still had not signed.

  Part of the reason was his pique at Stark for his comments to Feuer and Martin, who had lost no time in repeating them back to Fosse. The director described himself as “stunned,” though he felt the news simply “affirmed [his] previous suspicions.” At first, he wondered if it was only Stark who was against him. Confiding his concerns to Barbra and Lennart, Fosse eventually came to the conclusion that “Stark had acted on his own.” So, as the summer ended and the start of rehearsals approached, he was left unsure of whether he really wanted to sign on with a man he could not fundamentally trust.

  Still, Fosse plowed on. Looking at the script in front of him, he read the new opening that Lennart had come up with. Previous versions had opened in a theater with Fanny messing up a line of chorus girls. But in this new scene, Lennart had Fanny walking in, crossing the stage, then turning to look at herself in a mirror. “Hello, gorgeous,” she deadpans sarcastically. Then she picks up a stick of greasepaint and draws a line across her cheek, the first step in making herself up as an Indian for a comedy skit.

  The scene was terrific. Fosse agreed it should open the show. But he crossed out the greasepaint, letting the bit end on “Hello, gorgeous.” It seemed more powerful that way. What a terrific star entrance for Barbra Streisand.

  10.

  Usually Lake Tahoe sparkled in the sunlight as it stretched off to the snowcapped mountains on the horizon. But this morning, September 13, as the rental car headed north on Route 50, snaking along the lake’s eastern edge, the sky was gray. Periodic sprinkles kept the windshield wipers moving across the glass. Thunderstorms threatened, and temperatures edged into the nineties. Despite the mugginess, Barbra, Elliott, and the two Martys—Erlichman and Bregman—were on a mission that morning, heading out of the bustling town of South Lake Tahoe, California, and crossing the border into Nevada. There, in the capital, Carson City, Barbra and Elliott planned to get married.

  That previous weekend, the Parade magazine profile had appeared, turning up on the kitchen tables of tens of millions of Americans. Lloyd Shearer had reported that Barbra and “her husband” had married the previous March and since then had moved into a New York penthouse together. It had been Elliott’s love, Shearer surmised, that had “erased some of the insecurity of [Barbra’s] former years” and “calmed down some of her earlier ‘kookiness.’” Since a more serious, less kooky Barbra Streisand was something they all wanted the public to embrace, they were glad to promote the angle of “Elliott’s love” if that’s what it took.

  But the lie was starting to rub just a little too close. They couldn’t keep saying Barbra and Elliott were married when they weren’t. Sooner or later, one of them would mess up in an interview, or some enterprising reporter would dig a little too deep. So they needed to get hitched and fast. And what better place than Nevada, which required no blood tests and had no community property laws? It might have been Friday the thirteenth, but it was also Marty Erlichman’s birthday, so it seemed as good a day as any to tie the knot.

  For Elliott, the decision to get married had seemed almost like a business arrangement. It was as if they “shook on it,” he said. In some ways, given the publicity that increasingly made their marriage necessary, it was a business arrangement. From this point forward, Elliott understood he could not speak of Carson City. He couldn’t give the date of September 13. He’d have to backdate the ceremony to the previous winter, and he’d have to lie that he’d flown not to the West Coast but to Florida, where they would make believe he and Barbra had married just before he’d set off for London. Of course, Elliott knew—they all must have known—that the ruse was only as tenable as the privacy laws governing Florida’s public records.

  Yet as the foursome drove up Route 50 in the rain, a white haze hanging over the lake to their left, they probably spoke about many other things besides the wedding. After all, the Parade piece had been Barbra’s best publicity yet. If not as long or as detailed as the Saturday Evening Post profile, it had reached many more people. She
arer had called Barbra “the hottest canary in the country.” His subject, however, wasn’t happy with the piece, feeling that it didn’t spend enough time on her acting ambitions, and she probably spent at least part of the ride grumbling about it. Marty, no doubt, felt that Parade was great advertising for the albums, but Barbra didn’t like to read anything written about herself. No matter how glowing a piece might ultimately be, there was always some point, large or small, that she believed the writer hadn’t understood or that should have been presented differently.

  Even the Saturday Evening Post article was unsatisfactory. “Most newcomers would be thrilled by a story in the Saturday Evening Post,” observed the columnist Barney Glazer, but not Barbra. She claimed that Hamill had “stretched the facts to make the copy more interesting.” She vowed that from then on, she wouldn’t give any more interviews unless she saw “the advance copy.” Lee Solters obviously knew that wasn’t always going to be possible, but he probably hadn’t challenged her on her demand; that was never smart strategy with Barbra. Besides, she was getting famous enough that maybe someday she really could make such a demand and get away with it.

  The Parade article had also reported that Barbra’s earnings for 1964 would be “somewhere between four and six hundred thousand dollars.” At Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, where she was currently appearing, once again alongside Liberace, Barbra was making ten thousand dollars a week. And her second album had just debuted on the Billboard chart. Everyone expected it would perform at least as well as the first.

  Or maybe even better. Where The Barbra Streisand Album had languished for months before getting its first write-ups, critics were waiting on tenterhooks for The Second Barbra Streisand Album. “A fine new voice with an unusual quality and with tremendous acting ability,” one reviewer wrote. Another opined, “The results are best described as thrilling.” Billboard thought the disk had “precise phrasing, clarity of tone, and dramatic impact,” and that Barbra took her listeners “on a fine vocal-coaster ride.” These were “great tracks tailored for spins and sails,” the trade journal concluded. Columbia was sparing no effort this time, taking out full-page ads featuring the covers of both albums and the tagline: NOW THERE ARE TWO.

  The album deserved the praise it was getting. It was that rare sophomore attempt that surpassed a superlative original. The raw sexuality of “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” seemed to jump off the vinyl; “Who Will Buy?” and “I Stayed Too Long at the Fair” startled listeners with their ageless poignancy, especially given Barbra’s youth; and the passionate “Gotta Move” exposed all of her ambition and willpower. Clearly Peter Matz was to Barbra what Nelson Riddle had been to Sinatra: an arranger who perfectly and intuitively understood her—“when to emphasize the brass for her ‘belt’ voice and when to float the vocal on a cushion of strings,” as one writer observed. The many reviews that pointed out Barbra’s dramatic acting efforts on the disk weren’t just following Lee Solters’s bullet points: these tracks really were miniature plays, and Barbra brilliantly interpreted every one of them. The excellence of the disk seemed to justify the control she’d seized in the studio and wielded over the defiant technicians. In her mind, she’d needed to take charge if she was to move from good to excellent. And now she had what she considered irrefutable proof that her way had been the right way. She wouldn’t let Columbia forget it.

  For her soon-to-be husband, life with a woman who believed her way was, ipso facto, the right way was never going to be easy. No doubt Elliott still had his doubts about the advantages of marriage, fearful of the “technical” impositions it might bring to “an otherwise viable relationship.” But was their relationship still viable? That was the question. In London, Bob had witnessed the insecurities that bubbled beneath the surface. Other friends had seen—and heard—the arguments, “the boots being thrown across the room and the cascade of tears afterward.”

  But one intimate insisted that in the midst of “all the exciting things that were happening to her,” Barbra still believed that “no one else was going to love her like Elliott did.” And Elliott, like the little boy he’d once been who’d looked to his mother to solve all his problems, remained “fixed on Barbra,” who was, to him, “like the sun, rising and setting.” Elliott himself admitted that, despite all their difficulties and distance, he hadn’t fallen out of love with Barbra. He was still besotted with her. Indeed, Arthur Laurents thought “something real . . . held them together,” even if it was fragile.

  At the Ormsby County Courthouse, they brought the car to a stop. Stepping out and stretching their legs, they looked around and breathed in the slightly cooler air of the high desert. Carson City still resembled the frontier town it once had been. The streets were wide, the buildings were set far apart from each other, and many city and county officials wore different hats—not uncommon in a city of less than fifteen thousand inhabitants. The justice of the peace, who they’d come to see, was also the municipal court judge, the city recorder, and the coroner. As they headed up the steps of the courthouse, a neoclassical structure with four Tuscan columns out front, they would have discovered that the offices of the justice of the peace were on the first floor, while the second floor housed the sheriff and the jail cells.

  Since marriages were only performed by appointment, Justice Pete Supera was waiting for them. A friendly, bespectacled man, Supera was in his third term as justice, having been elected twice without opposition. He’d told his wife that Barbra Streisand, the singer, was coming up from Lake Tahoe that morning to get married, and she’d hoped Pete might bring the couple to their home for the ceremony. But Barbra and Elliott didn’t have much time; the courthouse would have to suffice. They said their vows and signed their names; Barbra, just to make sure everything was legal, gave the spelling as “Barbara” for the marriage certificate. The two Martys affixed their own signatures as witnesses. With a final nod and a handshake, Supera pronounced Elliott and Barbra man and wife.

  Barbra was now a married lady. One of the songs Styne and Merrill had written for Funny Girl was called “Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady,” in which Fanny Brice gushed over finally landing a man, swearing she’d do her “wifely job” and “sit at home, become a slob.” But where Barbra might have shared some of Fanny’s thrill that the man she loved had slipped a ring on her finger, she no doubt also saw the irony in the rest of the song’s lyrics. It wasn’t Barbra who’d be sitting around doing her nails, as Fanny imagined for herself, while her husband supported her in style. It would be, in fact, the very opposite. It would be Elliott for whom “all day the records play.” And despite the kisses, hugs, and congratulations they all surely bestowed on each other, that little fact was almost certainly on their minds as they returned to that hot, sweaty car and headed back to Tahoe so Barbra could make her eight o’clock curtain.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Fall 1963

  1.

  The aroma of chlorine on her skin and in her hair, Barbra leaped onto Elliott’s back, producing a great splash of water. Around them enormous palm trees shot up against a startlingly blue sky, ringing the sun-dappled swimming pool nestled inside the pink walls of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Barbra, in a bikini, her hair tied up on top of her head, was clinging to Elliott’s torso as he hoisted her onto his right shoulder. They were standing in the shallow end of the pool.

  On the deck, photographer Bob Willoughby was focusing his camera. Willoughby had made a name for himself photographing Judy Garland, and Begelman and Fields had arranged a shoot for him with their newest client. At some point, Willoughby suggested that Barbra climb up on Elliott’s shoulders. But once she was up there, surely it was her idea to do what she did next.

  Just as Willoughby snapped the picture, Barbra reached her left hand around to cover Elliott’s face. The resulting photo revealed a small Mona Lisa smile on Barbra’s face.

  It was all in jest, of course. They were having fun. Lots of photos were taken that day. Lots of splashing went on in the pool, lots of lounging was
enjoyed poolside. At least for now, it was the closest to a honeymoon that Barbra and Elliott were going to get. They told reporters they hoped to escape to Italy before Barbra started rehearsals for Funny Girl—but at the moment the big question was if those rehearsals would happen at all. Yet again, there had been a major setback for the show, and Funny Girl faced the possibility of being postponed once more. As everyone knew, whenever a show was postponed, there was a chance it would never start up again.

  Bob Fosse had resigned from the show. The press called it an “unexpected change,” but Barbra likely saw it coming since Fosse had confided in her his continuing distrust of Stark. When Feuer and Martin, his producers on How to Succeed, asked him to direct their forthcoming musical, I Picked a Daisy, with a score by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, Fosse bolted. Stark, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, supervising the start of filming on The Night of the Iguana, was furious. “Cannot believe that [a] professional like you would attempt to quit show at this late date,” he wired Fosse, demanding that the director fulfill his agreement or face an injunction. Stark warned of “losses running into the thousands of dollars” for which he insisted Fosse would be held liable.

  The erstwhile director was not intimidated. Writing to Barbra, Lennart, Styne, and Merrill, Fosse expressed his desire to “just withdraw and leave to you any and all ideas” he had contributed so far. But the threatened lawsuit from Stark, he explained, precluded him from being “so generous at the moment.” That left them exactly where they’d been when Robbins left: potentially starting over from scratch.