Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  Yet there was even more to turn the young star into a nervous wreck backstage. Copies of Time with Barbra’s face on the cover were strewn everywhere. “She is the sort that comes along once in a generation,” the magazine had proclaimed. All those grandiose statements on opening night from people such as Lauren Bacall (“best thing I ever saw”) and Jule Styne (“greatest singer of my time”) might have been exactly what Barbra had been waiting to hear all her life. But they also had the power to overwhelm and terrify her. In the end, to everyone’s great surprise, including her own, the kid was only human.

  “Now that I’m supposed to be a success,” Barbra told Joanne Stang, “I’m worried about the responsibility. People will no longer be coming to see a new talent they’ve heard about. I now have to live up to their concept of a great success. I’m not the underdog, the homely kid from Brooklyn they can root for anymore. I’m fair game.” Her stomach began to twist up at the most inconvenient times. Before a show she often felt nauseous or wracked with the worst heartburn. The doctors had prescribed Donnatal to control her intestinal cramping.

  That night, Barbra took her curtain calls to the usual rapturous applause. She’d been wonderful as always; no one would have known that she felt sick to her stomach, pressured and claustrophobic, bullied by her costar, and lonely for her husband. But they did know something else. Suddenly, someone from a box seat called out, “Happy birthday!” Another box holder from across the way took up the cry, and then another, and then people in the balconies were shouting it. Soon the orchestra was striking up “Happy Birthday” and the whole theater was singing to her. Barbra, touched but also embarrassed, began tossing the roses she was given every night back over the footlights to the audience.

  All those people out there whom she didn’t know—people she couldn’t see, people she’d probably never encounter again—loved her. They didn’t know her—they knew only the image she had given them—but they really seemed to love her.

  It was something Barbra struggled to understand.

  3.

  Stuart Lippner was a young man of sixteen who’d been to see Funny Girl multiple times. He’d first become aware of Barbra on PM East, when his mother had called him in from the other room to see some “nut on TV.” From that moment on, Stuart had been fascinated. “Here she was,” he said, “a nothing, telling important people they were schizy and all that.” He liked her “because she wasn’t afraid of people bigger than she was.” Yet for the longest time he wasn’t even sure of her name. She was just “the nut from TV.”

  But Stuart sure knew Barbra’s name now, as did all the “Winter Garden Kids,” as they called themselves, who were gathered around the stage door. They were there for every performance, waiting for their heroine to arrive. Many of them were school dropouts, so that meant they could be there all the time for every show. “Their lives were just wrapped around Barbra,” Stuart explained. Some of them saved their money and followed her on tour. They owned all her records. If they couldn’t afford to buy the disks themselves, they shared them with one another.

  Stuart was still in school, and he worked in the evenings, so he was on the periphery of the Winter Garden Kids. But he knew them all from being there on weekends, and he shared their devotion. These kids dressed like Barbra, with thrift-shop hats and scarves, and talked like her, too, even the ones who didn’t hail from Brooklyn. Stuart was a fellow Brooklynite, however, and expressed gratitude to Barbra for “doing a lot” for the accent. “A lot of kids aren’t ashamed of it anymore,” he told a reporter.

  Out on the street, one of the boys was posted as a lookout, to let the rest of them know when Barbra arrived. Usually she never made it to the theater until half an hour before showtime. Other teenagers might idolize the Beatles, but these kids were different from the rest. They were “misfits,” Stuart said. Boys and girls who weren’t the sports heroes or the cheerleaders, who weren’t the pretty ones who got all the dates. Many of them were gay, Stuart realized, like himself, even if few admitted it. A number of them had “fucked-up home lives.” To them, Barbra was an inspiration. One boy named David admired how “everything she did was premeditated.” Barbra had wanted “to look weird” to get attention, David told a reporter who had come to interview the Winter Garden Kids, which made her not so different from himself or the other kids at the stage door, with their bushy sideburns and pointy shoes and black eye makeup. One girl named Barbara—spelled with three a’s, at least for now—thought that because their heroine “couldn’t look common and couldn’t look beautiful . . . she chose to look different.” And what, she asked, was wrong with that?

  “Nothing,” Stuart replied. “She made it work. I give her credit for it.”

  Stuart might not have been an official member of the Winter Garden Kids, but they sure envied him. That was because he’d actually made contact with their heroine, if a little indirectly. After reading in Barbra’s program bio that anyone who wanted “more personal information” should write to her mother, Stuart had thought, “Why not?”

  Except he hadn’t written, he’d called. As it turned out, Mrs. Louis Kind was listed in the Brooklyn phonebook. When a young female voice answered, Stuart assumed it was Barbra, but contained his excitement and asked for Mrs. Kind. When Diana came to the phone, Stuart explained the reason he was calling, mentioning the program bio. Barbra’s mother seemed amused. Stuart asked if that had been Barbra who’d answered.

  “No, that was Barbra’s younger sister, Rosalind,” Diana said. She paused. “How old are you?” she asked. Stuart told her sixteen. “Are you Jewish?” Mrs. Kind asked next. When he told her that he was, Barbra’s mother said, “Well, Rosalind is fifteen. Would you like to come over?”

  Stuart jumped at the chance. Of course, he was aware that Mrs. Kind was attempting to “set him up with Rozzie,” but that didn’t stop him. Romance might not have been in the cards, but Stuart and Rozzie quickly became fast friends. Barbra’s little sister now weighed close to two hundred pounds, standing barely five-two. Far shyer than her older sister had ever been, Rozzie was so dowdy that some people mistook her for Barbra’s aunt. The young, impressionable girl envied her hotshot sister and longed to be a star just like she was, but the poor kid often froze up when speaking with Barbra. She didn’t know “how to approach a big sister who had gotten so famous,” Diana observed.

  But with Stuart she found a soul mate. Despite Barbra’s discomfort with a fan getting so close with her family, Diana invited the young man back often to spend time with her younger daughter. Sometimes Stuart stayed for dinner. Afterward Rozzie would play the Funny Girl album, and the two of them would sing along, knowing all the words and imitating Barbra together.

  One night, Stuart took Rozzie to meet the Winter Garden Kids, and Barbra’s younger sister had been much friendlier to them than the star herself. That was the strange paradox of it all: Here were these kids with so much affection for her, and Barbra seemed not to want it from them.

  The lookout shouted that Barbra had arrived. The kids quickly arranged themselves so she would have to pass through them. “Hi, Barbra!” they shouted. “We love you, Barbra!” “Can we come up with you to your dressing room? Please, Barbra?”

  From Barbra’s vantage point, the kids seemed like a gang of hoodlums waiting to jump her. She felt “threatened and frightened” as she hurried past them. Dressed in her usual attire, a pair of white wool pants and a knee-length cabled sweater—a look a number of the girls and even some of the boys were copying—Barbra did her best not to make eye contact with any of them. These kids hadn’t been part of the picture when she’d dreamed of being famous, nor were the fans who chased after her on the street shouting for an autograph. Barbra often felt as if she were being followed around. Presents were left for her outside her apartment building. One time some kid had jumped in front of her out of nowhere as she was getting into a cab to pay her fare for her. “It’s insane,” she told a reporter.

  As her fan mail swelled, Marty start
ed going through it to take out “the real screwy ones,” as Barbra called them, before they could frighten her further. That didn’t mean there weren’t some “nice, great letters” that made her feel good, letters that began “I’ve never written a fan letter before.” The sincerity of these letters moved Barbra. These people were responding to her work—to her art—not to her personality, she felt. And, to her relief, they were usually safely removed from her, in places like Albuquerque or Ottawa. They weren’t kids dressing up to look like her and running after her in the street.

  As the Winter Garden Kids shouted they loved her, Barbra covered her face and rushed past them into the theater. Barbra felt they loved “the symbol” of what she was, not “the flesh and blood,” because they didn’t know the flesh and blood. The fans who had sung to her in the theater might have known it was her birthday, but that was all they knew. It frustrated her that fans and journalists could speak and write as if they knew her—her private self, not the public creature from television talk shows and nightclub acts. She was determined to keep a dividing line between the two. Barbra wished fervently she could just “be admired on the stage and then left alone in life.” But she was coming to realize that was impossible.

  Back outside the stage door, her snub hadn’t discouraged the Winter Garden Kids. They were used to it. They remained steadfast in their devotion. “She reminds me of Shaw’s Cleopatra,” Stuart told a reporter. “She has the same ability to charm people without beauty. She has ambition and will. Personally, I think her success will be greater than Cleopatra’s.”

  “Let’s hope she doesn’t end the same way,” said the Barbara with three a’s.

  4.

  When word reached her backstage that she’d been nominated for an Emmy, Barbra was both thrilled and a little embarrassed. On the one hand, almost as if by a miracle, she was proving her prediction that she’d win all four major showbiz awards. The Grammy nominations had been expected: The Barbra Streisand Album was up for Best Album, Barbra herself was up for Best Female Vocal Performance, and “Happy Days Are Here Again”—which Columbia had paid so little attention to on its release—was up for Record of the Year. But no one had really dared to hope that Barbra would get an Emmy nod as well. The television academy had seen fit to give her one anyhow, for Outstanding Performance in a Variety or Musical Program or Series. The problem was that Barbra was nominated for her appearance on The Judy Garland Show, and so was Garland in the very same category. Thus, Barbra’s one-shot was competing against Judy’s entire season. That was the reason for the embarrassment.

  Some in the company thought Barbra seemed “a little too cocky” after the nominations came out; others, such as recently hired swing boy Bob Avian, felt nothing but pride in their leading lady. But there was no denying that Barbra called the shots now; with Robbins off to work on Fiddler on the Roof and Stark mostly in Los Angeles, it was Barbra who decided how the show would go each night.

  So it wasn’t surprising on this evening for Sharon Vaughn to overhear Barbra telling Richard Evans, Funny Girl’s young, bearded production manager, that she would make her own script for the show. It had become common practice. During the period when they’d all been recording the cast album, Barbra had suggested a few tucks and trims to the script so the tired and overworked cast could get out of the theater ten or fifteen minutes earlier each night. But even after the album was finished, Barbra had continued to switch things around. She might ask the orchestra to end “Don’t Rain on My Parade” a little early, for example, or decide that “Cornet Man” should go on without its introduction.

  It was a way of stirring things up, of tackling the boredom Barbra experienced doing the exact same thing every night. She was careful, however, never to alter the basic framework, Bob Avian said, understanding “the frame was just as important as she was.” Any cuts Barbra asked for were never going to hurt the show, Avian insisted. Someone who’d been to see Funny Girl before might not even notice such small changes.

  But this night, unbeknownst to Barbra or the cast, Ray Stark had slipped into the audience. Either he had decided to make a rare, surprise visit from the Coast or someone had clued him in to what was going on. Not everyone was as complacent with Barbra’s tinkering, after all. Sydney Chaplin, who would certainly have had a motive for cluing Stark in, thought Barbra’s tinkering was “completely and utterly unprofessional,” one company member understood.

  Backstage, Vaughn watched as Barbra went over the night’s changes with Evans. A few song introductions were moved around; a few scenes were shortened, eliminating the need for a couple of costumes. The production manager nodded in assent.

  At the end of the show, there was great, tumultuous applause, just as there always was. But then, as the curtain dropped for the last time and the lights came up, the company heard the shouting.

  Vaughn stopped cold in her tracks. Stark was limping backstage, shouting at the top of his lungs. “You will never change my show again! You will not change your costumes as you did! You will not change your songs! Do you understand me?”

  Barbra understood all too well. She had hoped she was through with Stark’s outbursts, but it was clear that she was bound to him in all the ways she had feared. This was what the next eight years would look like: a series of high-decibel clashes between two people who abhorred the art of compromise. For now, Barbra held her tongue. There were ways to work around Ray Stark, she’d come to learn. She knew that soon he’d be consumed with getting The Night of the Iguana ready for release, and she could go back to tweaking the show. She really had no other choice. It was the only way she could keep herself from going stir-crazy.

  5.

  Under the Jamaican sun, Elliott was sweltering. Temperatures spiked into the nineties, but it was the humidity that really wore people out. The Jamaican government was financing The Confession as part of an initiative to bring in foreign filmmakers. The film’s producer was the cowboy-booted William Marshall, whose only qualification for the job was that he was Ginger Rogers’s husband. But William Dieterle was an old hand at moviemaking; he kept the shoot progressing, even if conditions were difficult. Most of the bit parts were being filled by Jamaican locals, who proved rather stiff in front of the cameras. “Now look,” the German-born Dieterle directed them. “Vy you look so sad? You are entering a brothel! You are about to have a voman! You must look happy!”

  As Elliott waited to be called for his scenes, he knew that his own woman, some fifteen hundred miles northeast of him, was, if possible, having an even more difficult time of things. The pressures of carrying Funny Girl were intense, and that wasn’t even considering all the demands Barbra faced from the media, the public, and the fans. More and more, Elliott felt he needed to get back to New York in order to “protect her.” It may have been rather chauvinistic of him: “She was my woman,” he said as an explanation for his feelings, and Barbra needed protection from “those fucking fan-magazine photographers” who stalked her every time she headed out on the street. Elliott was no doubt pleased that Dieterle thought they’d be wrapping up the shoot in the next week or so. For all his conflicts with his wife over the last few months, Elliott wasn’t ready to give up on their marriage quite yet.

  Still, he wanted to believe the separation had been worth it. People were saying he was giving “a remarkable performance” in this film. He would need good reviews from The Confession to take his career to the next level because, as usual, there wasn’t anything else on the horizon, except the television play with Carol Burnett. There’d been talk that he might be cast in Fiddler on the Roof, but that had come to nothing.

  So he sweated through the shoot and endured the sunburn. Three days of shooting in the oven of a roofless, ruined church without windows had turned the cast into baked goods. Maybe Elliott’s analyst had been right when he’d called him a “masochist.” But suffering through heat and humidity was the least of it. The real masochism, Elliott surely knew, would start again when he was back in New York. As m
uch as he wanted to be by Barbra’s side, he also knew that once he returned, he’d fall right back into the old pattern, trying to keep up with his wife’s soaring success. The “perversity of fame,” as he so astutely called it, would prove far more debilitating than the Jamaican sun.

  6.

  On the stage of the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria, singer Jack Jones suddenly froze, forgetting the lyrics to the song he was singing, “The Good Life,” one of the nominees for Song of the Year. Tony Bennett came bounding up from his seat and relieved Jones of the microphone, finishing the number with aplomb. But except for that little kerfuffle, the ninth annual Grammy Awards banquet had been pretty boring.

  Barbra sat at a table with, among others, Mike Berniker. The two of them had come a long way in the last year and a half. Berniker had taken Barbra on when she’d been an unproven commodity that no one else at Columbia was eager to produce. Back then, Barbra had said to Berniker, “Let’s go,” and go they certainly had. Currently, The Third Album was holding steady at number 8 on the charts, and even all these months later, the first and second albums were at 24 and 23, respectively. Barbra had ended up making an extraordinary amount of money for Columbia.

  Now they hoped that she’d win them a Grammy, or two or three. But Barbra had known disappointment in this room before. It was here at the Waldorf that she hadn’t won the Tony Award for Wholesale. Still, in the last few days, it had seemed as if her audacious prediction was on the fast track to coming true: first the three Grammy nominations, then the unexpected Emmy nomination, and finally, on May 4, the Tony nomination for Funny Girl. Only the Oscar would have to wait.

  But for every premium her success paid, Barbra seemed also to be reminded of the costs of fame. On the morning after the Tony nominations had been announced, Carol Haney had been found unconscious in the Bowery. Their erstwhile choreographer had been nominated for her work in the show—work that had been significantly restructured by Jerry Robbins, as Haney well knew. She’d been drinking heavily; she was also a diabetic and had been without insulin for a dangerously long time. Rushed to Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, she was diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia, but that was only the surface of her problems. Haney was later transferred to New York Hospital, where, two days ago, she had died.