Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  As always, it was Styne who played the good cop to his partner’s bad cop. “Everyone loved Jule,” Merrill’s wife observed. “Not everyone loved Bob.” It would be Styne who approached Barbra to ask her tactfully if she might try to sing a song differently; failing that, he might try adjusting the music to appease them both. The “teeny tiny” Styne would get up out of his seat and bustle from person to person, Lainie Kazan observed, always followed by two assistants who matched him in diminutive size. Kazan couldn’t help but smile when she saw “these three little people moving across the room in unison,” putting out fires, carrying ideas, trying new arrangements, and trying to keep the peace. Styne was always talking, Kazan noted—always chirping away giddily, anxiously, expressively. Merrill sat there silently.

  Perhaps some of Styne’s energy came from his belief, as he put it, that he was “in a desperate race with the calendar.” Despite all his great movie compositions, he felt his career hadn’t really gotten moving until 1952, when he’d coproduced a revival of Pal Joey with Richard Rodgers. It was Broadway where Styne’s heart resided, and at the age of fifty-seven, even with Gypsy and other shows under his belt, there was still “so much [he wanted] to say musically.” He longed to be a singular artist, to have his work easily identifiable as being his. “Don’t be a minor Cole Porter,” Rodgers had told him. “Be yourself and the critics will gradually have respect for you.” This was Styne’s greatest hope.

  And so it was a good thing that Barbra was singing “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Funny Girl, Styne sensed, might be a very important part of his legacy.

  10.

  The Christmas season arrived in New York that year in sheets of snow and gloom. Still in mourning for their slain president, most Americans headed into the holiday celebrations more muted than usual, trying to come to grips with the murder and its grisly aftermath, in which the president’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had himself been murdered, giving rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories. Frigid temperatures had gripped the northeast in a stranglehold, plunging New York into a kind of perpetual shudder. That year, few smiles cracked the cold, red faces of those who shopped along Fifth Avenue.

  Heading to rehearsals in a cab, Barbra wasn’t smiling either. Stark hadn’t met her terms. He’d offered $5,000 instead of $7,500 and had nixed the other perks, including the chauffeured limousine. Barbra felt the producer was being stingy; Stark felt she had tried to take advantage of Merrick’s departure by setting her high-powered agents on him. What had been a largely cordial relationship suddenly turned antagonistic. Fosse’s complaints about Stark’s devious nature may suddenly have resonated with Barbra. Stark had called her bluff. He knew she wasn’t any more willing to walk away from the show than he was to lose her.

  The aggravation over contract negotiations couldn’t have helped the mood at rehearsals, which every day was becoming bleaker. As Barbra arrived at the Winter Garden on a frosty morning in mid- December, she knew that something had to change. Garson Kanin just sat there, giving her hardly any feedback, while the scenes went “on and on with no sense of cohesion,” one member of the company observed. The show was too long, Barbra believed.

  Any cuts couldn’t affect the main storyline, however, which concerned Fanny’s rise to the top while falling in love with, and then losing, Nick. So while there were some bits with Fanny that could be deleted—a roller-skating scene Barbra had been practicing for weeks, for example—the majority of cuts would affect the supporting characters. Eddie Ryan had a solo, “Take Something for Nothing,” that seemed destined for the chopping block, even though it fleshed out his character by showing his love for Fanny. The chorus girls, all compellingly individual in early scripts, would have to be blended together.

  But it was the part of the beautiful Nora that Barbra objected to most. She seemed “uncomfortable with how significant that part was,” one company member thought, watching the number of changes in the scenes between Fanny and Nora. From Stark and the show’s composers, Lainie Kazan observed a growing sense that “the entire focus of Funny Girl needed to be Fanny.” As a consequence, she said, “everyone else became incidental.” When Nora came into a scene, for example, she “took away from Fanny,” and that was a problem that needed to be addressed.

  McLerie had a solo number, “Baltimore Sun,” that she sung toward the end of Act One, at the point where she and Vera lament their fading looks. “Enter the star, wearing pearls to save insurance and brown paper bags to save tips,” Nora was scripted to say as Fanny made her entrance. That led to the line where Fanny declared she didn’t worry about losing her looks. To which Nora was to reply, in one of the several astute confrontations the script gave her: “But you like standing next to us. And proving that what you have is so much better. That there isn’t a man you couldn’t get away from any one of us—if you really wanted to.”

  That was one of the underlying themes of Funny Girl: Fanny’s desirability wasn’t dependent on looks. But what Nora was doing was actually pointing out Fanny’s narcissism, a fact that was made even clearer later on when, drunk and depressed, Nora laments that she won’t be in next year’s Follies. Fanny tells her to fight back. Nora replies, “Don’t you ever look at the people you care about? Don’t you ever see them?” Fanny tells her that she cares about people. Nora waits a beat before answering. “Very depressing, how big you are,” she says at last. “Makes smaller people feel—too small.”

  Her message was plain: Not everyone—not Nora, not Nick—was as strong as Fanny. Fanny was superhuman in her strength, and those high standards—that perfectionism—kept her separated from those who might be a little less mighty, but perhaps more human, than she was. Fanny, according to Ray Stark, “very probably made it difficult for the man she married to live up to her, or with her.” The autobiography was perhaps getting a little too close for Barbra. Whispers had already begun that Elliott, another gambler living in the shadow of a famous wife, was not so different from Nick. How long would the scene stay in the show? That was the question some were asking.

  But autobiography was what Funny Girl had become. It had, in fact, become a selling point. “This play is really about me,” Barbra told the Associated Press. “It simply happened to happen before to Fanny Brice.”

  There was one moment that carried particular resonance. In an early scene, before Fanny has become famous, she makes the case that she ought to be given a chance. “Look,” she says. “Suppose all you ever had for breakfast was onion rolls. All of a sudden one morning in walks a bagel. You’d say, ‘Ugh! What’s that?’ Until you tried it. That’s my problem. I’m a bagel on a plateful of onion rolls!” That about summed up what Barbra had been dealing with ever since she’d started out on her quest for fame.

  To another reporter, Barbra mused on how long it had taken Stark to get this show produced. “Ten years ago they started on this idea,” she said, “when I was only eleven years old.” When the reporter asked why it had taken so long, Barbra replied, “I wasn’t old enough then. They were waiting for me.” She was only half joking. While she and Fanny had become in many ways interchangeable, Barbra insisted that she was not Fanny, even if Fanny had become her. “I don’t want to imitate anybody,” Barbra admitted to one reporter. “My ego’s too big.”

  Without that healthy ego, Barbra would never have made it to the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre—but for some people, that superhuman confidence was as grating as it was to Nora in the script. Sheilah Graham, who’d been so complimentary ahead of Barbra’s performance at the Cocoanut Grove, had subsequently been turned off by the young singer-actress’s boast that she’d win every award there was. “Little girl,” Graham wrote now. “This is too much, too soon.”

  But that little girl was the show’s best chance for success. Her voice and personality and yes, her ego, were intended to carry Funny Girl despite the substandard script. That was why Ray Stark was letting Barbra take the director’s reins away from Kanin. Most of the company agreed tha
t their director wasn’t up to fixing the problems inherent in the book, and they looked to Barbra to make things right. She seemed “to know exactly what she was doing,” said one company member, “to instinctively know what was best for the show.” So everyone put their faith in their twenty-one-year-old leading lady.

  Including the leading man.

  11.

  “We hate each other,” Barbra teased, looking across the table at Sydney Chaplin at the Italian restaurant where they were having supper together.

  But the reporter interviewing them knew that was just an “inverted way of expressing mutual admiration.” Barbra and Sydney, he observed, were “two of a kind.”

  In fact, they were more like complementary opposites. Sydney was the perfect follower to Barbra’s leader. Barbra had heard stories of Sydney’s temper, but to her he had never been less than flattering or accommodating. Playing love scenes with Sydney proved to be very pleasant indeed. Once Barbra had asked why a girl like her couldn’t play love scenes. Now she was in the hero’s arms, and the company noticed just how much she seemed to enjoy being kissed by Sydney in front of everyone. “She glowed,” said dancer Sharon Vaughn. “She loved it,” said a member of the chorus. Wardrobe lady Ceil Mack detected sparks flying between the show’s two leads. Kanin, too, became aware of how “very chummy” Barbra and Sydney had suddenly become.

  But while much of their chemistry was personal, there was also a professional reason for it. Sydney shared Barbra’s belief that Funny Girl “needed to be their story” and proved to be a powerful ally in her determination to streamline the production. At the moment, the show ran more than four hours. There was no question that it needed to be cut.

  Consequently, over Kanin’s objections, a decision was made to fire Allyn Ann McLerie. Kanin argued that Nora had brought “a note to the show which it needed”—a note of balance, since otherwise it was all Fanny, all the time. But clearly Kanin was overruled on the matter. The only people with enough clout to do that would have been Stark and Barbra. The official reason given for McLerie’s ouster, and it was partly true, was “the length of the musical.” Funny Girl was indeed too long. But without her, the script tipped precariously close to becoming a one-woman show.

  The bigger problem, at least according to Barbra, was Kanin himself. The director was never going to be someone she held in high regard. The thin, gray-haired Kanin affected a certain simplicity, wearing wool shirts and knitted ties, but he could be very showy in other ways. He had a reedy little voice that he used to pontificate on various subjects, whether it be socialism or Hollywood art direction. He covered his wife in so much jewelry that Cecil Beaton thought she resembled “a little Burmese idol.” Kanin’s marriage to the much-older Gordon had not only produced an extremely successful professional partnership, but had also provided cover for his deeply conflicted and circumspect homosexuality. “Gar” could be warm and friendly, but also sly and manipulative, and he invariably chose passive aggression over direct action. In that way, Kanin resembled Ray Stark, and Barbra already had one Stark to deal with.

  It was Kanin’s reticence to take a stand on what she was doing with the role that really unsettled her. He just sat there, with his ubiquitous wife, watching her. Once, during a run-through of “People,” Barbra had done everything opposite from the way they’d originally rehearsed it, and Kanin had remained immobile, never saying a word. Jule Styne, meanwhile, had thought Barbra was “on fire” and told the musical director to let her go and have the orchestra follow her lead. Styne thought Barbra’s interpretation had been brilliant, far better than what Kanin had tried to set up. But Kanin said not a word, either in protest or in praise. His method of directing Barbra, he said, “was to attempt to get her to realize all those important facets of her own personality.” It was his job as director, he said, to simply “create an atmosphere in which her personality could flower.” In other words, it was all up to her.

  While it was very true that Barbra didn’t like being told what to do, she also resented the supposed top guy just sitting there and letting her do all the work. Arthur Laurents hadn’t abdicated his authority in this way; neither had Barbra when she walked into the studio to make her second album. She was willing to do the same here. But unlike her album, where she’d been through the process before, this was her first time starring in a Broadway show. A little help, a little direction, was going to be necessary.

  A director, in her opinion, couldn’t be neutral. “The actor has to have some feedback, some mirror, some opinion, even if it’s wrong,” she said. She was going to have her own ideas, that was a given—but she needed to bounce them off someone she respected. A director needed “to talk to the actors, give them a sense of their own importance.” She also needed to feel that her director “loved [her] ... wanted to make [her] beautiful.” Laurents had done both. Kanin seemed to do neither.

  Just a few days earlier, she had asked him a question, and Kanin had replied by asking what she thought. “Fuck you,” Barbra had said to him, and walked away, leaving Lainie Kazan and others in the company with mouths agape.

  “I have a problem with tact,” Barbra admitted. “I only know how to be direct.” She didn’t know how to shmeykhl somebody, she said, how to beat around the bush, to get something she wanted—especially not with a director who was supposed to be ensuring her show would be a hit.

  Sitting with Sydney in that Italian restaurant, Barbra didn’t raise such concerns, not with a reporter from the Boston Globe present. But she knew Sydney shared her worries. In her quarrels with Kanin, he had supported her one hundred percent. Sydney had even started looking to Barbra for advice on how he should play the part of Nick. He agreed that the show wasn’t in anywhere near the shape it should be this close to their first previews. They were working from a deeply flawed book, and both of them knew it. The trick was not letting anyone outside the show know they knew it. “Whatever happens to the show,” Barbra told the reporter, putting the best face on things, “it will have been fun.”

  When word came that they were needed back at rehearsals, the two costars stood to leave. Sydney, silent for so much of the interview, turned to the reporter. “It’ll be a hit,” he said. No doubt he believed that, too, as he followed his fiery, determined, tactless leading lady back into the theater.

  12.

  The Gotham Hotel was one of New York’s great old luxury lodgings. On the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, the granite Beaux Arts structure shot up twenty-four stories. Barbra had arrived at the hotel on the cold and snowy evening of December 27 to accept the Entertainer of the Year Award from Cue magazine, an honor that had previously gone to Diahann Carroll and Zero Mostel. Not only was she getting the award, but her face also graced the cover of Cue, “the entertainment guide to New York and suburbs,” with a circulation of more than 200,000 for its five different editions. As she walked into the jam-packed Grand Ballroom, filled with hundreds of showmen, pressmen, and performers, all of them applauding for her, Barbra was on the threshold of achieving everything she’d once dreamed about, of claiming the future she’d often been unable to visualize as a kid back in Brooklyn.

  At the moment, an Associated Press story about her, running in hundreds of papers all across the country, was calling her the “world’s hottest young star.” She’d just finished recording the tracks for her third album, which Columbia wanted out early next year before Funny Girl opened. Mademoiselle magazine had recently presented her with one of their ten annual Merit Awards given to young women of achievement, honoring her alongside Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, fashion designer Deanna Littell, French-Indian actress Leela Naidu, and writer Susan Sontag. More heady company came in Louis Sobol’s column featuring the most exciting New Yorkers of 1963. Here Barbra was included with British transplant Albert Finney, Senator Jacob Javits, and playwright Edward Albee. Not bad for a kid from the corner of Newkirk and Nostrand.

  Outside of showbiz, though, things were a little di
fferent. Barbra no longer had any real friends except for Cis and Harvey Corman, the only people she spent time with when she wasn’t working. Rarely did Barbra accept social invitations from professional colleagues; she almost never asked people to her home. She could have, of course: the duplex was gradually coming together, with antique spool cabinets and beautifully mismatched china sets and glowing theater exit signs over the doors. The place was built for entertaining. Around the enormous bar, Larry Hart had once played host to hundreds. But since Barbra had moved in, the bar remained unadorned and unused.

  Instead, the heart of the house for Barbra had become the kitchen, where she’d covered the walls with red patent leather and added antique stools. She might not cook big dinners for friends, but here Elliott whipped up her chicken soup, waiting for her to come home from the theater. In the mornings he called Barbra on the intercom to come down and eat. Most nights, it was just the two of them.

  In some ways, as one journalist put it, Barbra and Elliott were “encamped there like a pair of gypsies in a half-wrecked enchanted castle, leading a grandiose, accelerated version of the same raggle- taggle life they led over the fish restaurant.” Beside their bed in the tower suite they’d installed a refrigerator so they wouldn’t have to trudge all the way downstairs if they wanted a dish of Breyer’s coffee or cherry-vanilla ice cream late at night. Elliott liked to believe he and Barbra remained very simple people. One of their “conjugal delights,” he said, was still a Nathan’s hot dog.

  But their seclusion from the social whirl of New York also grew out of Barbra’s shyness, her fear of discovering that among these sophisticated socialites, she wouldn’t fit in. A part of her scorned them for their pretenses. Deep down, Barbra knew that even her move to the apartment at the Ardsley had been a concession to a pretentious, affected way of thinking: “I am now a mature, successful woman,” she said to one writer, explaining the move. “Hah! So I should move out of my tiny third-floor walk-up. And I did, into a large duplex, because the more successful you get, the less secure you get. It’s the nature of the business.”