Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  If there was one thing Barbra understood after her extraordinary year, it was the nature of the business she was in. Image mattered. Not for nothing did Barbra donate five hundred dollars’ worth of her old clothes to a local thrift shop and allow her publicists to leak word of it to the columnists. Metaphorically, she was shedding the old, kooky, thrift-shop Barbra. She was now a self-proclaimed couturiere, designing her own clothes and being written up in fashion columns. Earl Wilson pointed out that Barbra had once shopped in thrift stores because that was all she could afford; now she was handing over her surplus to them. “And that’s what one year can do for you in show business,” Wilson wrote.

  As people stepped aside to let her pass, Barbra took the stage at the Gotham, accepting the award from Cue publisher Edward Loeb. If she had looked out into the crowd, she would have seen her face everywhere, as copies of the current issue were held in nearly every hand. Inside, a piece by editor Emory Lewis explained why they had chosen this twenty-one-year-old over so many others. “Streisand is an original,” Lewis wrote, “and originals are rare in our industrial, homogenized society.” But how far could an original go? Barbra might be the entertainer of the year, but what about next year? What happened if Funny Girl flopped, doomed by its deficient book and ineffectual director? How long could an original like Barbra last?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Winter 1964

  1.

  All over the city of Boston on the night of January 8, residents double locked their doors, still on edge. The latest victim of the infamous Strangler had been found in an apartment on Charles Street. There was no moon this night, and temperatures hovered just above freezing. And in the quiet, carpeted corridors of a luxurious Back Bay hotel, Sydney Chaplin, convinced that most everyone was sound asleep, decided it was time to make his move.

  They’d all arrived that afternoon for two days of rehearsals at the Shubert Theatre on Tremont Street. Ray Stark, still on crutches, conducted a series of meet and greets with the local press, sharing his optimism about the show, especially the music. Despite his earlier arguments to the contrary, Stark now insisted he was glad that none of “the old things” that Fanny Brice used to sing, such as “My Man,” were in the show because they “wouldn’t stand up to the Styne-Merrill score.” Stark seemed to truly believe that all the show’s problems had been solved, or maybe he’d simply instructed everyone to give that impression ahead of Funny Girl’s first preview, a benefit for the Boston Lying-in Hospital on January 11. Indeed, when columnist Marjorie Mills spotted Garson Kanin, he was “trying his best not to look jubilant.”

  In the still of the night, Sydney rapped lightly on Barbra’s door.

  She was twenty-one years old. He was thirty-seven. She was a kid from Brooklyn; he was Hollywood royalty. She was always being reminded of her unconventional looks; he was equally celebrated for being matinee-idol handsome. She was the leading lady; he was her leading man. Barbra would have needed to be made of stone not to let him in.

  Whether their affair began that night, as Sydney’s friends believed, or on a night not long before or after, it began nonetheless. Back in New York, Elliott was helping the vivacious Italian actress Anna Maria Alberghetti stage a new nightclub act with song-and-dance man John W. Bubbles. Alberghetti was beautiful and single, and Elliott worked with her late into the night. There was talk, as of course there would be. Barbra may have heard the talk, which may have been one more reason why she opened the door when Sydney knocked.

  Barbra’s trysts with Sydney were conducted in the privacy of hotel rooms, always in secret. The company couldn’t know; the press certainly couldn’t know. Unlike the exuberant couple of Wholesale, whose affair had started the same way and who hadn’t minded if the occupants of adjoining rooms could hear them, Barbra and Sydney were both married to other people. So this had to be discreet. But there was no question that it also had to be.

  The attraction had been impossible to resist. Barbra had become a young woman who unapologetically liked sex, even if the sex was often about “playing games with men —that image game,” as she explained in her own words. Here she and Sydney were, astride their world, the queen and her king. In theatrical companies, said Sydney’s friend Orson Bean, “the leading man and the leading lady often fell in love,” finding only in each other a worthy companion.

  It was true, too, that Sydney filled a need that Elliott hadn’t satisfied in some time. Barbra was attracted to confident, successful men. Sydney was a Tony winner; Elliott was still unemployed. Sydney seemed to know exactly who he was; Elliott, Barbra believed, “really didn’t have a sense of himself.” Barbra had tried telling him he was a brilliant comedian, a fine actor, and a smart businessman. But Elliott never seemed to listen.

  He was also gambling again. Elliott admitted there was something within himself that was “very self-destructive.” He gambled in large part because “winning or losing a bet seemed to represent a hard-edged reality” that offset the artificiality of show business. He really was not so different from the Nick Arnstein of the play, whose gambling destroys his marriage to Fanny. And like Arnstein, Elliott gambled out of a deep lack of self-worth. He’d had more respect for himself, Elliott said, when he was a teenager “operating the night elevator in the Park Royal Hotel.” Certainly it had offered steadier work; certainly he’d felt more needed. By now, Elliott was deeper than ever into analysis. “I’m just finding myself,” he explained—a laudable goal, but to Barbra, he might have been speaking a foreign language.

  In his quest for greater self-awareness, Elliott was also still smoking a lot of grass and experimenting with other drugs. Some of the “trips” he’d been on had given him an “inner understanding” of himself that he might not have achieved otherwise. Barbra, of course, was far too single-minded, far too self-controlled to participate in such trips. And so the experiences of husband and wife grew even more separate.

  Meanwhile, there was Sydney, waiting for her every day at rehearsals. He had begun whispering in her ear, “Kid, you’re gorgeous” or “Baby, you’re brilliant.” Sydney couldn’t flatter her enough. Bean thought that such flattery, at least in part, stemmed from Sydney’s worries that Barbra’s self-confidence might flag as they approached the opening, and he knew that without the force of her strong personality, the show would sink. But he was also, his friend said, as dazzled with her as she was with him.

  Alone in their Boston hotel room, their spouses far away, a debonair Sydney was winning over a tough, driven Barbra in much the same way their characters were doing on the stage. Elliott wasn’t the only one who resembled Nick Arnstein; Sydney was as much the smooth operator as the man he played on stage. If she felt any guilt, Barbra kept it as private as she kept the affair. “Sydney was giving Barbra the confidence to be great,” Bean said. Such encouragement, so necessary at that point, could never have come from her depressed husband. It could only come from Barbra’s very own real-life Nicky Arnstein.

  2.

  The snow started falling early on the morning of January 13. By noon, there were already several inches on the ground, and weather forecasters were telling the city to batten down the hatches for an “old fashioned nor’easter.” By late in the afternoon, the winds were hitting sixty miles per hour, the temperature had dropped to zero, and the beaches were flooded. Trains and buses were thrown off schedule. Logan Airport was closed. A citywide parking ban was instituted. By the time it was all over, forecasters warned, Beantown would be covered in a foot of snow.

  Inside the Shubert Theatre, the decision was made that the show would go on.

  They couldn’t cancel their first official preview. The house was sold out. To try to refund and reschedule now would produce a disaster worse than the blizzard. And so the company proceeded to makeup and then to wardrobe. The lighting men and engineers climbed into the booth. Everyone hoped for the best.

  Their unofficial preview, two nights earlier, had gone well. The Shubert had been packed with a fashionable audienc
e dressed in glittering gowns and tuxedos. To support the Lying-in Hospital, the crème of Boston society had turned out: the Harborne Stuarts, the John Marshalls, the Bayard Henrys, and so many others, weighted down with jewelry and social connections. They were all there to see Barbra Streisand, a young woman who’d grown up rather far away from Beacon Hill and Harvard Square. And even though the show had run until after midnight, all the socialites were still in their seats cheering when the curtain finally came down. As agreed, none of the press in attendance published a word about the show itself, leaving that for the official preview, though one writer from the Globe couldn’t resist commenting on “the handsome Irene Sharaff costumes” and how the legendary designer herself watched the show from a box.

  Now, as the snow piled up outside and the wind whistled through the eaves of the fifty-year-old theater, Sharaff made last-minute inspections of the show’s seven glamorous showgirls as they stepped into and zipped up their extraordinary Ziegfeldian costumes. Lainie Kazan’s hat needed to come down a little more over her eyes. Boas were fluffed, hems were straightened, and bustiers tightened to push up more cleavage. Sharaff had won a Tony for The King and I, Oscars for West Side Story and Cleopatra. She had dressed Gertrude Lawrence, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ingrid Bergman. Now she added Barbra Streisand to that list.

  From outside, they could probably hear the plows, busy removing snow from the streets, a thankless job since half an hour later they had to do it again. The heavy winds created drifts that were higher than a man’s head. The storm was forecast to continue straight through to morning without letting up. All Boston-area schools were closed until further notice. Shubert house manager M. D. “Doc” Howe told Ray Stark to expect quite a few unfilled seats at tonight’s performance.

  What was it about this show that brought a new crisis every few months? Now, at the moment when it was finally ready to present to the world, when they could finally brace themselves for critical reaction, they were being stalled yet again. And right at the point where everything finally seemed set. Kanin had acquiesced to many of the changes Barbra had insisted on, and Lennart had dashed out yet another script in time for the Boston premiere. With the part of Nora eliminated, the plot seemed to flow more seamlessly. What was left of Nora’s dialogue was given to the character of Mimsey, played by Sharon Vaughn, a recent addition to the cast. A number of songs were also sliced out, disappointing chorus girls like Diana Lee Nielsen, who now had no songs of their own. Nielsen was told “The songs were unimportant to the story”—Fanny’s story.

  Now it was the critics’ turn to tell them what else, if anything, needed to be changed. This was the cast’s chance to get much-needed outside feedback before they froze the show for Broadway. It was a vital part of the process. Richard Rodgers said he “wouldn’t open a can of sardines without taking it first to Boston.”

  Stark kept an eye out front. A few hardy souls, shaking the snow from their boots in the lobby, had arrived. Stark was a wreck. The show needed a good response in Boston if they were going to roll into New York with the kind of word of mouth that would win over Broadway. Of course, if the critics hated the show, maybe it would be better if there wasn’t much of an audience to confirm their opinions. But a good house could also fire up the actors; empty houses were dispiriting.

  Then, from backstage, came word that one of the dancers had just broken her foot. Would the curse never end?

  But in the end, their worries were for naught. As the eight o’clock showtime neared, all but two of the auditorium’s 1,600 seats were filled. William Sarmento, reviewer for the nearby Lowell Sun, quipped that “every Barbra Streisand fan in existence showed up via dogsled, skis and snowshoes.” Indeed, as columnist Herb Michelson, not always such a fan himself, pointed out, Barbra was “pre-sold” to the audience, “a personality the crowds love before even seeing her.”

  Whether Barbra felt that love backstage is unknown. She was, however, getting some from Sydney, who whispered in her ear that she was wonderful. The overture was playing. Barbra waited for her cue, and when it came, she walked out onto the stage to generous applause.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” she said into the onstage mirror, her Brooklyn twang echoing through the old Boston theater. The line received the titter of laughter it was supposed to generate. Maybe, despite all the worry, things would go okay after all.

  3.

  They didn’t.

  Nearly three weeks after the premiere, Garson Kanin was still trying to fix all the things the critics had said were wrong. With much of the cast assembled on the Shubert stage, the director was running them through scene after scene, while his wife sat fifth row center, flipping through the script. Whenever she’d call, “Oh, Gar . . . ,” Kanin would stop whatever he was doing and hurry over to hear her thoughts.

  Those first-night reviews still hung heavy over all of them. “What begins with bright, cheeky promise ends, I’m afraid, close to the edge of disaster,” Kevin Kelly had written in the Boston Globe. During the first act, the show had seemed “like a winner,” Kelly wrote, but then “a downpour of dullness”—a pun on the “Don’t Rain on My Parade” number—had overcome the second act. It was a common refrain, and none of the criticism could have come as much of a surprise: the problem, as always, boiled down to the script. “The music almost has enough force to make the book unimportant,” Kelly wrote, “but not quite.” Cameron DeWar in Billboard thought Lennart had written “more of a movie scenario than a stage piece,” and that the second act was “tedious and inept.” All the reviews said a variant of the same thing.

  They had something else in common as well: They all thought Barbra was fantastic. As with Wholesale, the critics were largely sour on the show but sweet on her: Was it even possible for Barbra to get a bad review? Kelly thought she was “very nearly perfect.” DeWar said she “scored a bull’s eye.” William Sarmento in the Lowell Sun suggested the producers of Funny Girl might have been better off “to sell the costumes and scenery, disband the supporting players, and give the audience a three-hour concert of Miss Streisand.” Elinor Hughes in the Boston Herald thought Barbra had “a quality that makes you want her on the stage every minute and leaves you thinking about her when she is in the wings.”

  That was the problem with the second act: Barbra wasn’t front and center enough. “The second act becomes Nick’s act more than it becomes Fanny’s,” Hughes wrote in a second review of the show a few nights later, “and though Sydney Chaplin is personable and charming, the figure that he creates isn’t really alive and interesting, and what happens to him doesn’t matter, except that we see less of Barbra-Fanny.” Hughes was actually kind in her assessment of Sydney. Elliot Norton, in the Boston Evening American, declared Sydney made “the weakness of the libretto glaringly apparent.” Kelly, in the Globe, thought Sydney played Nick Arnstein in “a heavy, oracular style” and “sung in a voice resonant with nothing whatever musical.” He placed the blame clearly: “Arnstein botches the show.”

  For Sydney, it was a tremendous blow to his ego, especially as his ladylove was being lauded to the skies. He wasn’t just embarrassed; he was angry. When Dorothy Kilgallen read the Evening American review, she thought Norton was “auditioning for a punch in the nose from the terrible-tempered Sydney.” Chaplin didn’t think his performance was the problem; the problem was Lennart’s book, he believed, which gave him so little to work with. Barbra was sympathetic. But she also started giving Sydney tips about how he might improve his performance, much to his chagrin. It was all terribly similar to what had happened during Wholesale.

  Loud, boisterous, often chaotic rehearsals followed, with everyone—Stark, Styne, Merrill, Lennart, and certainly Barbra—offering their ideas to Kanin about how the show could be fixed. Much of the revisions did, indeed, center around Sydney. Tireless choreographer Carol Haney had despaired of ever teaching him to dance. With her pixie face, shaggy hair, and throaty voice, Haney had proven to be a regular dynamo during rehearsals. Every other day,
it seemed, she’d had to conceive and orchestrate a new dance number to go along with the new songs being added, which were just as frequently taken out. Buzz Miller, like many of the dancers in the show, had a long history with Haney; they’d danced together in the famous “Steam Heat” number in Pajama Game, the role that had made Haney an overnight sensation. In the last few weeks, as he’d watched Haney work, Miller had worried that “she was driving herself to death.” But nothing seemed to slow her down—until Sydney Chaplin. Haney, who struggled to keep a drinking problem under control, was sorely tested in working with Sydney. His soft-shoe number, “Temporary Arrangement,” was switched with another, “Come Along with Me,” in which he didn’t have to move, just sing.

  As changes such as these were made, new scripts were prepared and handed out to the cast, who sometimes had less than a day to learn new lines, new steps, and new entrances. The critics, of course, came back to see how they were doing, and the prognosis was not good. “I regret to report Funny Girl is little better than it was the first time,” Sarmento reported, questioning the wisdom of giving another number to Sydney, “who makes every note sound like he needed to gargle.” Elinor Hughes still wasn’t happy with the second act; she still found it too depressing. She thought Fanny Brice would be advising them: “Leave ’em laughing!” The Globe’s “Stage Today” column ran a daily capsule review of the show that pretty much said it all—and no doubt left Sydney steaming: “The first half is a delight, the second is a drag, but Barbra Streisand is magnetic. The cast also includes Sydney Chaplin, who’s not very good.”