Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  Out in the theater, the audience was filling up, and despite the presence of some high-profile celebrities—Merman, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards, Lee Radziwill, Jacob Javits, diplomat and civil rights activist Ralph Bunche—Eugenia Sheppard thought that “fashion wise,” the opening was a “flop . . . compared with the glamorous previews that had gone before.” But this was the show that really counted, and the house was packed with those who wanted to witness Barbra’s big night. Such crowds would be the norm for the foreseeable future: the Winter Garden was back to making between fifteen and eighteen thousand dollars a day in advance ticketing.

  As people took their seats, they were handed their Playbills, Barbra and Sydney on the cover, as themselves, not in character, in a serene pose, Barbra wearing pearls. She looked quite pretty and extraordinarily young. Yet inside, her biography reflected her new maturity. There were no mentions of Madagascar or Turkey, though she did claim to play field hockey and string crystal beads for sale in a Vermont general store. “For more personal information,” the reader was told, “write to her mother.”

  The program also reflected the compromise that had been reached between Stark, Robbins, Kanin, and Haney. The show was still “directed by” Kanin and “musical staging” was still by Haney, but the special billing—“production supervised by Jerome Robbins,” in the same point size as the other credits—told Broadway insiders all they needed to know.

  Backstage, Robbins had left a note for the cast. “You can be my bagel on a plateful of onion rolls anytime! Love, luck, and many thanks, Jerry.”

  The overture was playing. Barbra had done this first scene many times now, in rehearsals, in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York previews. But tonight there were people out there with little pencils writing in critics’ notebooks.

  Sitting in the audience was Ray Kennedy, a thirty-year-old writer for Time magazine. “Barbra Streisand crosses the stage,” he wrote, “stopping in the center to gaze out over the audience, her look preoccupied. She gives a shrug and goes off. In the moment’s pause before she disappears as quickly as she came, she leaves an image in the eye—of a carelessly stacked girl with a long nose and bones awry, wearing a lumpy brown leopard-trimmed coat and looking like the star of nothing. But there is something in her clear, elliptical gaze that is beyond resistance. It invites too much sympathy to be as aggressive as it seems. People watching it can almost hear the last few ticks before Barbra Streisand explodes.”

  Sympathy and aggression—perhaps the two elemental components of Barbra’s success. And explode, of course, was exactly what she was about to do.

  “Hello, gorgeous,” Barbra said into the mirror when she returned to the stage.

  The show was underway.

  Even from just a night or two before, it was different. The last half hour of the show Barbra would carry almost entirely on her own. She had three solo numbers in a row, right up to the last reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” just before the curtain. With the exception of Kay Medford, who still had a song about her character (“Find Yourself a Man”), all the other parts and musical numbers now existed solely in service to Fanny’s character. The show would hit or miss because of Barbra and Barbra alone.

  It hit. The laughs came in all the right places, the songs reached every note perfectly. Kennedy thought Barbra turned “the air around her into a cloud of tired ions.” As she sang the last lines of the night—“Nobody, no, nobody is gonna rain on my parade!”—the audience seemed unable to restrain themselves, applauding even before she was done, jumping to their feet, shouting and yelling as the curtain came down. This time Barbra made sure to wait until it touched the floor before she moved from the spot.

  Then, suddenly, chaos. It was impossible to move backstage. Barbra’s dressing room swarmed with press and well-wishers. Ethel Merman bounded in to pose for a photo with the new star. But Barbra had to get over to the big extravaganza Ray Stark was hosting at the Rainbow Room, at the top of the RCA Building, sixty-five floors high above Rockefeller Center. Already Lainie Kazan and Sharon Vaughn had made their way there, greeted by an army of photographers, flashbulbs popping, people shouting. Hundreds of invited guests were being treated to dinner and dancing with a live orchestra, all on Stark’s dime.

  Fred Robbins was weaving in and out of the crowd with his microphone, corraling the famous, drinks in hand, to comment for his radio show about what they had seen and heard that night.

  “She has everything that I will call a star,” declared Sophie Tucker. “From now on, nothing will stop Barbra Streisand.”

  Jason Robards was “stunned” by her performance. “I felt, you know, what am I doing? This twenty-one-year-old girl has all this talent and class.”

  Robards’s wife, Lauren Bacall, agreed. “I saw the best thing I ever saw in my life in that girl. She can act, she can sing, she has an electric personality, which is what makes a star.”

  The principals were arriving, and the radio interviewer hurried over to them. “We’ve written some songs,” Jule Styne said as he came in with Bob Merrill, “and we heard them really sung tonight by Barbra Streisand. She’s one of the greatest singers of my time, and I’ve heard them all.”

  Merrill added, “She’s going to be in the theater for a long, long time. The theater needs Barbra Streisand and she needs the theater.”

  Then came Stark, walking with a cane. “The show seems to have gone very, very well,” he said, in that soft-spoken, measured voice of his. “I think Barbra was brilliant.”

  Someone pointed out to Robbins a small woman looking a bit lost. “Well, Mama Streisand,” the radioman asked, approaching Diana with his microphone, “what do you think of this whole thing?”

  “Well, I’m terribly elated,” she replied.

  “Where does the spark come from?”

  “Actually,” Diana said, holding nothing back, “her singing would come from her mother and her acting ability would also come from her mother. Her intelligence, however”—she laughed—“stems from her dear father, who was a PhD who helped many pupils on the road to gain self-respect.”

  Robbins commented that if only Barbra’s father had lived to see this night.

  Diana seemed uncomfortable with the sentiment. “Oh, he . . . ,” she said. “Well, he’s just with us right now.”

  Earl Wilson also grabbed the star’s mother, whom he described as “overlooking the lights of the city her twenty-one-year-old daughter had just captured.” He asked her if she’d taken the “a” out of Barbra’s name. Diana seemed to bristle at the question. “She left it out, I didn’t. She’s a riot. Always was. She had a ninety-three average in school but always seemed to do the wrong things.” She paused. “Till now.”

  A commotion at the entrance signaled the star had arrived. Barbra came into the room on Elliott’s arm, “her face stiff, her backbone stiffer,” one reporter thought. When she spotted someone she knew in the crowd, Barbra’s features “contorted with relief for a moment.” But then she was led away by Elliott into the crush of television lights and cameras. Some assistants ran on ahead, clearing a path so she could walk, while others surged in behind her. Barbra no longer seemed to be moving on her own accord. Rather, she seemed “swept and lifted into the ballroom.”

  “You tired, honey?” Fred Robbins asked her, his microphone back in her face.

  “Yeah, I’m exhausted.” Her voice sounded it. “I hate opening nights. Just horrible.”

  What she hated was the judging, she told Robbins, and the fact that the pressures of opening night “cut off” people’s “emotional reaction” to the show. That was what she wanted—emotional reaction—not a microphone in her face. Elliott saw his wife’s discomfort, saw the way “people were pawing her, sticking mikes down her bosom, telling her things she couldn’t believe.” This—all the cameras and the lights and the crush of people—hadn’t been part of the dream. The show, yes, and the creation of the character and the applause and the good reviews and the declarations that she was grea
t, very much yes. But not this. “All those cameras and lights” scared her, she said. The Rainbow Room’s guest of honor just wanted to go home.

  Then Barbra spotted her mother and rushed up to her. “Mama!” she said. “You didn’t bring chicken soup.”

  “To the Rockefellers’ nice building?” Diana replied.

  They embraced. For all Barbra’s problems with her mother, Diana was at least familiar to her. She was at least real.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Spring 1964

  1.

  Barbra came gliding down the winding staircase from her tower bedroom wearing a padded lemon-silk robe, “looking as stylized and elegant as a Japanese empress,” her visitor thought, “the mannered effect jarred by a kitchen spoon of tomato-dripping stew in her slender hand.”

  An interior decorator thrust a handful of swatches at her. “Which flocking for the foyer?” he asked.

  Barbra glanced over at the swatches and pointed out the ones she liked, all while compiling a shopping list in her head. “Mayonnaise, garbage bags,” she itemized to herself. Barbra hadn’t gotten as far in her career as she had without knowing how to accomplish more than one thing at a time.

  Her visitor that day was Shana Alexander, a writer for Life magazine and, not incidentally, the daughter of Milton Ager, the man who’d written “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Alexander had arrived at Barbra’s duplex to write a cover story on the young woman who’d taken Broadway by storm, and she had walked into the middle of a major decoration project. After nine months in the place, Barbra had decided it was high time to get the apartment furnished and decorated.

  “Didja see the bed yet?” Barbra asked Alexander. “Upstairs. It’s the first thing that we bought.”

  But the bed, for all its Elizabethan grandness, was nearly bare. Upholsterers were busy fluttering around it, considering ideas. Barbra told them she wanted the entire bed “draped and skirted with olive-gold damask,” and the top should be folded so that it made “a crown, with sort of tassels hanging down.” And she wanted “a red fur bedspread,” and damask curtains surrounding the bed that could either be pulled to enclose her or looped back to the bedposts to expose the lace curtains inside.

  “Lace!” the decorator shrieked.

  It wasn’t surprising that Barbra wanted the bed of a queen. Just days earlier, she’d sat for her portrait, like some sixteenth-century monarch. Life wasn’t the only magazine doing a cover story on her. So was Time, and the publisher there, Bernhard Auer, had sent over Henry Koerner, who had painted President Kennedy, to get Barbra’s likeness. She had sat for him in three sittings, staring straight ahead, her chin held still, her eyes painted with the signature Egyptian look Bob had designed for her so long ago. Astors and Vanderbilts got their portraits painted. Now Streisands did, too.

  It had been a regal few weeks for Barbra. When, in the wee hours of the morning, the Funny Girl reviews had come rolling into the Rainbow Room, they’d all been predictably superlative. “Everybody knew that Barbra Streisand would be a star, and so she is,” Walter Kerr proclaimed in the Herald Tribune. “Hail to thee, Barbra Streisand!” exulted Norman Nadel in the World-Telegram. Barbra “proves . . . she can sing and clown in a way to live up to her immodest advance billing,” Richard P. Cooke judged in the Wall Street Journal. John Chapman in the Daily News thought the show was a “remarkable demonstration of skill and endurance on the part of Barbra Streisand.”

  She’d run away with all the personal reviews, though a few critics had also offered kind words about Kay Medford, Danny Meehan, and even Sydney, who Chapman thought gave a “poised and likeable performance.” But Barbra dominated, and the magnitude of her performance was so blinding that critics truly didn’t care that the book remained fundamentally unsound. Kerr acknowledged that the second act was “thinner than it should be,” but declared that this wasn’t enough of a letdown to make him reconsider the entire play. Nadel said the show was “just this side of great,” but its defects paled beside the “big-voiced, belting singer and brass gong of a personality” that was Barbra.

  Yet the most important reviews, for Barbra at least, were those that actually considered her acting as much as her voice and personality. Howard Taubman in the New York Times thought there was some “honest emotion underneath the clowning,” and Kerr had pointed to a moment near the end where he thought Barbra justified her stardom with some brilliant acting. It was the moment when Fanny is willing to take Nick back, but then realizes that he has come to ask for a divorce, so she covers up her true feelings. Kerr observed that in that brief scene, Barbra momentarily dropped “the maturity [Fanny] has been struggling toward through the entire second act” and reverted to the innocent, love-struck girl of the beginning. And she did so, the critic stressed, in a “half-sentence.” Kerr felt Barbra showed Fanny to be “an oak with the spine of a willow inside,” which, of course, could describe Barbra as well.

  Trailed by Shana Alexander and her reporter’s notebook, Barbra gathered her entourage and hurried from the bedroom down to the street, where she hailed a fleet of taxis. It was time, she announced, to do some shopping. Elliott came along, too. At one antique shop, he grumbled about how much money Barbra was spending on an old, ornate piano that didn’t play. Barbra was certain it could be fixed, and besides, as everyone knew, it was her money, and she could spend it as she pleased.

  Perhaps that was what irked Elliott. He wouldn’t let the matter of the piano drop, even though there was a reporter present. Or maybe, in some perverse way, Alexander’s presence actually spurred him on. The squabbling seemed to begin in jest, a “mock-fight, an actors’ fight,” Alexander thought. But suddenly the carefully crafted façade of a happy marriage cracked. Before the startled eyes of the reporter from Life, the Goulds were suddenly in the midst of “a screaming, four-letter fight in the street, hopping in and out of taxis, over curbs, past startled pedestrians, oblivious of decorator, friends, passersby.” It was big and theatrical and very unlike Barbra, for whom, most of the time, nothing seemed more important than control.

  But the fault lines had become too unstable; as Barbra soared and Elliott stumbled, it was impossible to keep the tension between them hidden any longer. Alexander knew the conflict wasn’t really about the piano. It was about who was “in charge.” The next day, Barbra would make sure the reporter knew about the cactus plant adorned with a single rose that Elliott sent to her dressing room as a peace offering. But the damage was done. If they couldn’t pretend to the public that their marriage was secure and happy, how could they go on pretending to themselves?

  2.

  They’d vowed to always be together on their birthdays, but on April 24, the day Barbra turned twenty-two, Elliott wasn’t there.

  Ray Stark had sent around champagne and chocolate cake for everybody, which meant the stagehands had sticky fingers as they worked the curtains that night. After the show, Marty was hosting a supper party in Barbra’s honor. But none of it took the place of Elliott. Not long before, Barbra’s husband had flown to Jamaica, where he was shooting The Confession, an independent film starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland. The island’s Blue Mountain Inn was doubling as a northern Italian bordello presided over by Rogers as a black-wigged madam. The director was one of the old Hollywood greats, William Dieterle, whose credits stretched back to the silent era. Elliott was playing a deaf-mute who suddenly finds his voice after a shock. There was every reason, he had told Barbra, to expect big things.

  Barbra was pleased that Elliott had work, but she missed him. No matter their squabbles, this would be the first birthday they weren’t together, and her husband’s absence was painfully significant. He’d been powerless to change location shooting dates, especially when the location was in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

  So Elliott made sure the gifts he sent Barbra were memorable. If he couldn’t be there with her on her special day, he provided her with some company: a rabbit, a canary, and a goldfish. Her publicists made sure to get the sto
ry to Earl Wilson, but if there was any particular significance to the animals, it wasn’t revealed. When Bob heard the story, he wondered if the gifts were Elliott’s codes for “sex, singing, and their life in a goldfish bowl.”

  Putting aside any feelings of loneliness, Barbra prepared to go on stage. It had now been a month since opening night, and the boredom had set in just as it had on Wholesale. Barbra felt as if she were “locked up in prison” doing the same thing in exactly the same way every night, and her two-year sentence had only just begun. Walter Kerr, in his review of the show, had predicted it might happen. So much of Funny Girl was all about Fanny that he suspected it would only be a matter of time before “inspiration wanes and craft must make do in its place.” Kerr probably hadn’t expected it to happen this quickly, but he’d identified the problem clearly: “One feels the management is trying to cram an entire career into one show.”

  It wasn’t just boredom Barbra was feeling. There was a growing antagonism with Sydney, whose ego had never recovered from being dumped and whose supporting role to the woman who had dumped him was beginning to chafe. The antagonism was only exacerbated by Barbra’s requests that Sydney change certain things that disturbed the “flow of her performance,” as she put it in notes left for him in his dressing room. Clearly Barbra hadn’t learned from doing a similar thing with Elliott. Instead of honoring her requests, Sydney tossed Barbra’s notes aside and began whispering to her as she came off the stage, “You really fucked that number up” or “You really ought to start writing some notes to yourself.” It was exactly the opposite of the little whispers of encouragement he’d once given her.