Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 17

4.

Back in New York, Elaine was very excited to watch her roommate on PM East. It was Wednesday, July 12, and Barbra's episode was finally set to air. With Elaine was her boyfriend, the young actor Dustin Hoffman, who remembered Barbra from the Theatre Studio. Since those days, Hoffman had done some impressive off-Broadway work and had just appeared on Naked City, the television police drama.

Elaine told Hoffman that he had to hear Barbra sing. But the young man tried to demur. "I've seen her act," he said, remembering some rather stilted Theatre Studio student productions. "She's not that great."

But Elaine insisted. So it was with some reluctance that Hoffman stood in front of the television set, watching as a grid of lights flashed across the screen and came together to spell out PM East. Host Mike Wallace conversed with his guest models-the "beauties of New York," the ads had called them-and then finally introduced Barbra. To Hoffman, his old schoolmate seemed to be "really laying on the New York thing, the accent." Finally, Barbra headed over to the stage and sat on a stool to sing.

"When a bee lies sleepin' in the palm of your hand ..."

Hoffman had to sit down. He "couldn't believe" the beauty of Barbra's voice. This little girl, this offbeat character who'd skulked around acting school with acne on her face and clothes smelling of mothb.a.l.l.s, had opened her mouth and "this blessing," as Hoffman described it, had come out. He was surprised by how emotional he got.

All across the country, many others were feeling exactly the same way.

5.

Barbra was fed up. She'd thought of Detroit almost as a second home, but here were the Grubers, having hired her yet again to sing at the Caucus Club, refusing her request that meals be included in her contract. On a tour that had been one long ha.s.sle, this was the last straw. Furious, Barbra rang Irvin Arthur, but he couldn't help; she wasn't even able to get Ted Rozar on the phone. So she dug out Marty Erlichman's card and placed a call to New York. When she learned that he was in San Francisco, Barbra tracked him down there.

Finally getting Marty on the line, Barbra asked if he still wanted to manage her. He replied that he did. So she told him about the stalemate she'd reached with the Grubers. Marty listened. And then he did something Barbra couldn't have predicted.

He got on a plane and flew to Detroit.

Now, cloistered with the club owners in their office, Marty leveled with them. Barbra was distraught, and he was certain they didn't want a distraught singer. He pointed out that they were paying her just $150 a week, the same as her last appearance at their club, while she'd made more than $300 in Winnipeg. Even her last gig in New York had brought her $175. The Grubers agreed to match the $175, but Marty knew that wouldn't satisfy Barbra. She was holding out for the meals for the principle of the thing. So Marty told the brothers, in confidence, that he'd pay them an additional $25 if they threw in dinners for Barbra. The Grubers' jaws nearly hit their desks. "Let us get this straight," one of them said. "You flew here at your own expense so you could pay us twenty-five dollars and you're not even her manager?"

Although the Grubers might not have thought so, Marty Erlichman was a shrewd operator. He knew his investment of $25 had just raised Barbra's American asking price from $175 to $200. Her next employer would have to top that.

Yet Marty's shrewdness went beyond dollars. Barbra's new manager- although he couldn't quite call himself that yet, given the contract still in place with Rozar-had no intention of keeping his deal with the Gruber brothers a secret. Right from the start, it was meant to leak, and already Marty knew exactly how he'd sell it. "You must really believe this girl is going to be a star," he'd quote the Grubers as saying, to which Marty replied he "sure as h.e.l.l did." It was a great anecdote with which to sell a new client.

There was no question that Marty truly believed in Barbra's potential-he wouldn't have taken her on if he hadn't-but managing the Clancy Brothers had taught him a valuable lesson. You didn't let the public decide if an act was important or worthy. You told them so ahead of time. The Clancys had been sold as groundbreaking musicians who had single-handedly jump-started America's love affair with Irish music, and that was exactly how the public had bought them. Therefore, a similar angle was needed to merchandize Marty's latest client. For Barbra, it wasn't national ident.i.ty that he figured he could sell. Rather it was sheer, raw, once-in-a-generation talent.

So Marty let the word get out that Barbra wasn't paying him any commissions, that he was helping her simply because he thought she was so amazingly gifted. In doing so, he was building the narrative he wanted a.s.sociated with her. Of course, Marty's spin also had a more immediate, practical application. It prevented Ted Rozar from claiming that Barbra had violated her exclusive contract with him by paying someone else.

For Barbra, a switch in managers couldn't have happened fast enough. Marty was far easier to relate to than Rozar ever was. He was a fellow Jew from Brooklyn, but he also had a rea.s.suring manner about him; Rozar had often made her feel uneasy. With Rozar, Barbra had to take care of so many little details herself; Marty promised he'd oversee everything from contracts to cab rides. He was there to listen to her as she kvetched in Detroit; in the past, Barbra had had to kvetch alone. Rozar had always been flirting with other girls, but Marty only had eyes for Barbra. Rozar had declared that what Barbra wanted in a manager was a "slave." Marty wasn't quite that, but he made sure Barbra felt as if she were his top-his only-priority. Nothing less would have sufficed.

And he told the world that she paid him not one dime.

In many ways, Marty was the strong, indulgent, protective father Barbra had always dreamed of having. His thirteen years of seniority-there had been only a few with Rozar-made all the difference. With his thick accent and frank way of speaking, Marty might not have been as erudite as Barbra expected her father would have been, but she could have a conversation with him about Chekhov or Mozart or Billie Holiday, and that was important to her. Most of all, Marty was the kind of direct and forthright advocate she'd longed for all her life-the kind of father who might have stood up for her at school or provided a counterbalance to her mother's lack of encouragement. The white-knight rescue Marty had performed for Barbra in Detroit seemed to suggest that he could be as devoted to her as Barre had once been for those few short, wonderful months. And devotion was what Barbra wanted. Needed.

Rozar would have to be dealt with when they got back to New York. But for now, Barbra settled in for a happy month at the Caucus Club, enjoying all the Rocqueburgers and corned beef she could possibly eat.

6.

Given the stresses she faced on her return to New York, it was no wonder that Barbra took solace from what might have seemed an unlikely source: Zen Buddhism.

Sitting in quiet meditation, the sounds of the city quickly receded from her consciousness. For a little while, Barbra was able to push from her mind the stressful fact that she had nowhere to live. Sharing Elaine's apartment was never meant to be permanent, and now Barbra found herself traipsing from friend to friend, sometimes staying with Bob, sometimes with Peter Daniels, sometimes cras.h.i.+ng at Sheldon's office. She'd taken to carrying a cheap fold-up cot under her arm because she never knew when she might stumble across a good place to spend the night.

But during her Zen meditations, Barbra could forget all of her troubles, which included a recent, and nasty, break with Rozar. a.s.sociated Booking had advanced her $700 to "buy him off," though Rozar insisted that it was money she owed him for commissions. Barbra had shown up at his office with what he called a "big goon" at her side. As she handed her former manager the money and gathered her belongings, Barbra refused to look Rozar in the eye so he was forced to talk to the back of her head. He told her he felt "disappointed" and "somewhat betrayed." But when Barbra and the goon left-just who he was Rozar didn't know, and Barbra didn't say-there was "no apology, no explanation, not even a good-bye." Rozar was deeply hurt. He felt he had done right by Barbra, negotiating her salary up, connecting her with nightclub owners. But he knew he'd never be the "hand-holder" that she wanted.

Lost in her meditations, Barbra could forget about such unpleasant moments. Zen was a handy tool to have. At the moment, the practice was rather fas.h.i.+onable among Barbra's crowd. One friend, who got turned on to the practice at the same time, thought Barbra seemed "an expert, really so smart about Zen, really knowledgeable about going within." When she wasn't traveling, Barbra liked to hang out in the Village and talk Eastern philosophy with her pals. What Barbra sought, her friends understood, was "peace of mind."

Recently, she'd endured another scene in Irvin Arthur's office. With no gigs on the horizon, Barbra had shown up to see her agent, and she ran into Enrico Banducci, proprietor of the influential San Francisco club, the hungry i, who was on "one of his cyclical forays into New York to ferret out fresh talent." It was, of course, very likely that Barbra knew Banducci was going to be there that day and her confrontation with him had been planned. "Why don't you give me a job?" Barbra asked the club manager. She'd admit the question was "a bit" -a performance. She was acting the part of an aggressive character demanding a job. But she was also serious. Banducci took chances on unknowns. So why not take a chance on her? He ought to hire her now, Barbra declared, because later, when she was famous, she'd be too expensive for him. The iconoclastic Banducci, an expert at self-promotion himself, enjoyed her little performance. He promptly signed Barbra up for $350 a week for an unspecified future date.

Yet this kind of "begging" for jobs was one of the main reasons Barbra detested the nightclub life. She had no choice, however. She needed the money so she could get an apartment. She couldn't keep lugging that cot around forever.

That summer Barbra faced a career slump. Zen might help her attain some peace of mind, but there was another force-more practical, more tangible-that was also coming to her aid. Marty Erlichman was walking the pavement and knocking on doors on Barbra's behalf-something Rozar had never done. Marty was hopeful that he could get his new client an engagement at the uptown, upscale Blue Angel. And given his contacts at Columbia Records through the Clancy Brothers, he was optimistic about landing a record deal for her as well. But most important, at least to Barbra's mind, was that Marty had helped secure her an audition for a play. Not a nightclub gig, but a play. Sure, it was a revue, but Another Evening with Harry Stoones would require learning lines and playing parts in addition to singing songs. Barbra wouldn't just be some floozy standing next to a piano. How refres.h.i.+ng that would be.

And so Barbra closed her eyes and meditated some more. She could see her success, as clear as ever. Now only if the rest of the world would as well.

7.

His mother kept misp.r.o.nouncing the name of his show as Another Evening with Daniel Boone or Another Evening in Harry's Saloon, but author-composer-lyricist Jeff Harris was convinced his debut production had the right stuff to be a major hit. Until now Harris had been best known for playing the homicidal maniac Jenning Carlson on the television soap opera The Edge of Night. But since Carlson had bled to death on a special Christmas Eve episode last year, Harris had turned his attention to his revue Another Evening with Harry Stoones.

Except that it wasn't really a revue; it was just set up to look like one. In fact, Harry Stoones was conceived for "people who hate revues" -a takeoff on all those tiresome "Evening with" shows that lately had become "epidemic" off-Broadway. No cheesy lounge singers with velvet voices here. This was going to be smart, sa.s.sy, and successful. Indeed, Harris and his collaborators were so confident that they'd agreed to a long-term lease on the Gramercy Arts Theatre at Twenty-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue.

On such youthful hubris did Harry Stoones run. Harris and his two producers, Harvard graduates G. Adam Jordan and Fred Mueller, were all just twenty-six years old. Their newly formed Stenod Productions had managed to raise $15,000 from twenty-five investors in the last few months. The show would consist of comedy skits divided into two acts, "The Civil War" and "The Roaring Twenties"-time periods that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the show. This same sort of cheekiness was also evident in the non sequitur Harris had pulled out of thin air to use as a t.i.tle: No Harry Stoones ever appeared (or was even mentioned) in the script.

Problems arose with casting, which Harris felt was "absolutely impossible." In the auditorium of the Gramercy Arts, the playwright sat with Jordan, who would direct the show, growing bleary-eyed as they looked at headshot after headshot. What they needed were "down-to-earth performers," Harris said, "not the typical smiley, happy, hooray type." For days they'd been auditioning dozens of actors, but so far had only settled on a few. Diana Sands, who'd won the Outer Critics Circle Award for her portrayal of the daughter in A Raisin in the Sun, was their big name. The rest of the actors they'd chosen were largely newcomers: Kenny Adams had been in the ensemble of the Frank Loesser musical Greenwillow the previous year, while Sheila Copelan and Lou Antonio had done some television. To round out their cast, Harris and his partners needed two more women and two more men. The hopefuls kept trotting onto the stage, and the search continued.

Looking over the pile of headshots one more time, Harris kept pausing whenever he'd spot the face of one particular girl. Her name was Barbra Streisand. She'd come in with her manager, a boxy guy named Erlichman who wore a suit with a hole in the left sleeve. The small, slender kid with the large nose and curious eyes had climbed up on the stage and belted out a couple of songs for them, and they'd all thought she was "hot, clearly talented, and very different"-precisely what they wanted in the show. But she was a singer, they believed, not an actress, and the show didn't need singers; it needed people who could act. The skits demanded perfect comedy timing; the gags couldn't be played too broad. So, with some regret, they had turned the Streisand kid down.

But her face kept coming back to Harris. It was her difference that stayed in his mind. The way she had looked, the way she had "answered funny" when they'd asked her questions. Few of the actors they'd interviewed so far had been more "down-to-earth" than she was, and no one would ever describe Barbra Streisand as "the typical smiley, happy, hooray type." She was, when they came right down to it, exactly what they were looking for. If Streisand couldn't act, Harris decided, then he'd write a few extra songs for her. So, with little more than a month before their scheduled opening date, he and his partners decided to call the kid back.

8.

On an afternoon in mid-September, Barbra walked alongside Marty as they entered the Columbia Records building at 799 Seventh Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets. It was an old building, seven stories tall, with peeling paint and pipes that frequently burst, hardly the place one would imagine as the home of one of the biggest record companies in the world. The first floor was rented out to shops, but the rest of the building was a beehive of constantly humming activity. The bas.e.m.e.nt contained the record archive-a treasure trove dating back to the 1920s with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and Ruth Etting that also included original Rodgers and Hammerstein cast recordings, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, and Leonard Bernstein. The top two floors of the building housed the recording studios. But it was to the fourth floor, entirely occupied by the offices of company president G.o.ddard Lieberson, that Barbra and Marty were heading this day.

That Marty had managed to wrangle a meeting-a prelude to an actual audition-with the big cheese of Columbia Records was only one of his miracles that late summer of 1961. No doubt, as she rode the rickety elevator up from the ground floor, Barbra was awash in excitement, her mind filled with everything that was suddenly going on for her. Record deals were fine; "easy money" was how Barbra told friends she viewed the chance to record an alb.u.m. But far more important to her was the fact that she'd gotten the part in Another Evening with Harry Stoones, just as Marty had predicted. Rehearsals had recently gotten underway at the Gramercy Arts. Now Barbra had the chance to prove to the world that she was so much more than just a singer.