Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 23

Where Elliott could escape was in the darkened Marlboro Theatre, where, like Barbra in a similar movie house three miles away, he imagined himself up on the silver screen. His favorite stars were Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper because they seemed like ordinary people, unlike so many of the others-Robert Wagner perhaps most of all-who filled the fan magazines. Elliott wondered if anyone would ever want to see real people on the screen-people like himself-and not "creations of Hollywood."

At the age of eight, he started on a path to find out. Bored and desperate to find a way out of their dead-end life, Lucille began dragging her son off the basketball courts he loved so that he could audition for music shows and talent contests-anyplace, Elliott said, that was "looking to buy a kid." Problem was, this kid couldn't sing or dance. Elliott remained "very withdrawn, very shy and inhibited." So Lucille enrolled him in Charles Lowe's School of Theatrical Arts, located on an upper floor at 1650 Broadway, where, in the summer, giant electric fans turned in the windows as little children tap-danced across the oak wood floors. "Uncle Charlie," as Lowe was known to his students, was a former vaudevillian in his late sixties with "parentheses-shaped legs" who, with his wife, a one-time silent-movie actress, taught the progeny of ambitious stage mothers how to tap, sing, and project personality.

But when Lucille first tugged Elliott up the narrow stairs to Lowe's school, her hopes for her tongue-tied son were much more modest. "Fix up his diction," she pleaded with Lowe.

"Sure," the teacher replied. "We'll give him a little drama, teach him to sing, teach him to dance."

"He'll never dance," Lucille predicted. "Just fix the diction."

But Uncle Charlie gave Elliott the works. "That meant everything," Elliott griped, looking back. "Blow-your-nose lessons, dance lessons, wipe-yourself lessons." All because of the "compulsions of a dissatisfied mother," he later came to understand. But he went along with all the singing and dancing because he couldn't imagine saying no to Lucille-because he never, ever questioned his parents.

Lowe didn't just teach. He also acted as a kind of agent, placing his students in shows on local stages and local television. "Whoever got any of the bread," Elliott said, using the slang for money, "the kids sure as h.e.l.l didn't." Every once in a while, he'd be rewarded with "a pastrami sandwich or a flashlight or something," but his job was to go out there on stage and sing and dance while Lowe and his mother took home the cash.

By the time he was ten, Elliott had been transformed into a little trouper straight out of old-time vaudeville. "Mary had a little lamb," he'd warble onstage. "Some peas and mashed potatoes, an ear of corn, some b.u.t.tered beets and then had sliced tomatoes." Taking a breath, he started in on the next verse. "She said she wasn't hungry, so I thought I had a break, but just to keep me company, she ordered up a steak." Eight more cringe-inducing verses followed before he would tip his straw hat to the audience's applause and run into the wings.

On television he appeared on the Bonny Maid Versatile Varieties program, a song-and-dance fest on WNBT. It was for this show that Uncle Charlie tried to persuade Lucille to drop the name Goldstein and bill Elliott as "Gold." Lucille deemed "Gould" a little more elegant, so it was as Elliott Gould that the boy made his television debut.

By the time he was twelve, however, Elliott was a "has-been," or at least that was how Lucille described him. He was "too old to be cute," she thought. So she got him work as a model. Elliott was a standard size eight, perfect for merchandise catalogs. For several years he dressed as a miniature grenadier and handed out pens at dry-goods conventions. And all the money he made went straight to his parents' bank account.

Barbra could barely comprehend such a childhood. In her typical way, she had grilled Elliott for all the details he could remember: the dancing cla.s.ses, the elocution lessons, the backstage dramas. Most of all, she was fascinated by the idea of a mother who was so determined that her child succeed that she paid for all sorts of professional training-and by the idea of a child who really would have preferred to stay home. Here their experiences diverged sharply. Barbra had always wanted to be an achiever; Elliott had just wanted to play basketball. Their struggles with self-worth might have been similar, but Elliott, unlike Barbra, had felt no need to prove himself the best in everything he did. He was just hoping to get through it without falling down.

When Elliott was in the eighth grade, his father relocated the family to West Orange, New Jersey. But if Elliott hoped that living an hour and a half outside the city would mean an end to all that singing and dancing, he was wrong. Lucille kept accepting a.s.signments for him, and since his schooling would undoubtedly be affected by his performing schedule, she enrolled him in the Professional Children's School at Broadway and Sixty-first Street in Manhattan. Since 1914 the school had been accommodating young performers, slipping in an education for them in between shows. Several times a week, Elliott commuted into the city and "got sick on the bus every time." He hated the school, considered his education there "lame," and said the teachers made him "feel like s.h.i.+t." The anxiety that he felt "when [he] didn't do well was severe." More than anything, he wished he could have an ordinary life, but he never dared to say that to his parents.

Yet there came a point when he, too, got bit by the bug of ambition. It was in May 1952, when he was thirteen, and he was booked at the Palace, the grand old theater at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street that was then featuring a bill of eight vaudeville acts plus a movie. Elliott had a short little number that he performed four times a day for two weeks straight. He would walk out onto the stage in a bellhop's uniform shouting, "Telegram for Bill Callahan!" Callahan was then a popular song-and-dance man (he'd just finished a featured part in the Johnny Mercer musical Top Banana at the Winter Garden Theatre) who was next up on the bill. When the orchestra leader chased after Elliott, protesting that they had a show going on, Elliott replied with a song that served as Callahan's musical introduction. The teenager always got a big hand from the audience and a wave of appreciation from the older performer.

By now Elliott had shot up to six feet, which meant he could partner with his mother in mambo contests during the summers at borscht belt resorts in the Catskills. He also entertained resort guests twice a night on weekends dressed in high-waisted dancer's pants and matching silk s.h.i.+rts, nervously shuffling his way through a soft-shoe rendition of the jazz standard "Crazy Rhythm." Yet as much as he detested this part of his show business career, he was old enough to quit-and he didn't. By the age of eighteen, he was auditioning for Broadway shows on his own, and he won a spot in the chorus line for the musical Rumple. In 1958 there was another spot in another chorus line in another musical, Say, Darling, composed by Jule Styne.

Though he may have been more motivated these days, Elliott was still embarra.s.sed by auditions. He considered it unnatural for a grown man to walk into a room, and sing and dance for other people's approval. Maybe that was part of the reason that soon there were no shows at all. Out of work at the age of twenty-one, Elliott started gambling. For a while, it got pretty bad; he found himself deep in debt. He had to p.a.w.n some of his father's jewelry, then he took jobs as a rug-cleaner salesman and an elevator operator at the Park Royal Hotel on Seventy-third Street. For another job, he wore yellow makeup and a long fake mustache to hawk a game called Confucius Say in Gimbel's department store. Then, after pus.h.i.+ng himself to audition for David Merrick, he'd landed the gig in Irma la Douce, which had led to Wholesale.

To survive in the cutthroat world of the theater, Elliott had learned to become more of an extrovert, though it remained posturing: He still felt like turning and running away. But his mastery of dozens of dialects entertained guests at parties, and unsuspecting diner patrons were always amused when he pretended to make a meal of his napkin-a bit of an homage to Charlie Chaplin in The Kid. "For a repressed, inhibited, shy person," Elliott said, to discover that he "could have an effect on people by making a joke" was a major revelation. So, rather late in the game, Elliott became a joker.

And Barbra loved his jokes. After listening to her speak pa.s.sionately about the Dalai Lama-a hero and a holy man to Zen Buddhists-Elliott had sent her a package of corned beef, pastrami, pickles, and coleslaw with a card signed "From the Deli Lama." It was exactly the kind of offbeat humor she enjoyed, and the kind she used herself on PM East. They laughed together; they understood each other's insecurities; they shared enough personal history to make communication easy. In so many ways, they seemed to be kindred souls.

But that didn't make Elliott any less nervous as he headed up the hotel stairs to meet her. This moment had been coming ever since he'd put that snow on her face in Rockefeller Center and kissed her lightly on the lips. Now the pa.s.sion and energy of opening in Philadelphia had made the consummation of more than a month of flirtation inevitable.

Elliott was terrified. His mother's "ferocity," he believed, had left him "scared of women," so, at twenty-three, he was still a virgin. That was about to end. He had chosen Barbra to be his first.

Ever since the very first play was performed, there has been something seductive about the daily ritual of putting on a show. With people living and working together so intimately, romances tend to blossom. Affairs begin and end, often dramatically. And usually one member of the cast-often the star, but not always-stands out from the rest as a sort of prize to be won. Arthur Laurents thought it was ironic that, due to the spotlight s.h.i.+ned on her by the critics, Barbra became "the most attractive member of the show." And as the acclaim for her grew, Barbra saw her desirability increase in Elliott's eyes-especially since he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings. He knew Merrick wasn't happy with him; he knew he was "terribly green" and was "trying too hard." But Barbra seemed to do what she did so effortlessly. That gave her remarkable cachet with Elliott. Marilyn Cooper-prettier and higher on the bill-could never have offered the kind of aphrodisiac Barbra provided.

The attraction went both ways. From Barbra's perspective, she had landed the star of the show and that was exciting on its own, raising her profile among the company even higher. And the fact that she had won him away from pretty Marilyn Cooper likely made the romance even sweeter for her. The initial attraction between Barbra and Elliott had been random and impulsive. But it had deepened into something that dovetailed quite nicely with their individual ambitions and their own senses of themselves.

By now, Barbra was as interested in Elliott as he was in her. Except when it came to looks. Elliott was everything Barre had been-smart, funny, devoted-but with a couple of crucial extra benefits. First, he was successful-or at least he was on the verge of being successful. Last Barbra knew, Barre was still struggling off-off-Broadway. And-no doubt the most important attribute of all-Elliott was heteros.e.xual to his bones. "I bat from just one side of the plate myself," he said, describing his s.e.xuality. "The right side. I'm no good on the left." After being surrounded by so many gay men over the past couple of years-all of whom loved her but could never give her what she really wanted-Barbra seemed, at least to some friends, to be absolutely relis.h.i.+ng this sudden, surprising connection to a guy who was so unambiguously straight. Finally a guy-a real guy's guy-wanted her.

And yet Elliott was also sensitive and seemed completely unchauvinistic. Women's liberation, he said, should have nothing to do with gender, but should instead be concerned with "both men and women, with breaking tradition." No wonder that by late February 1962, Barbra was head over heels in love with him. She'd find herself talking "gibberish" around him; one night, distracted by thoughts of Elliott, she'd gone on stage with only half her face made up. She guessed this was love.

That night in Philly, they met in his room. Only they know what transpired, who kissed whom first, who undid the first b.u.t.ton. But at one point, a bunch of the guys from the show began pounding on the door. Elliott ignored them. He was "trying to become a man," he admitted, and this was "his moment"-a moment for which he'd waited a very long time. He "wasn't about to let anyone take it away." As Barbra and Elliott remained very still, the pounding finally died down, and they returned to the business at hand. Apparently, despite his fears, Elliott did okay; Barbra, after all, had a little more experience in such things. She remembered Muriel Choy telling her that the man didn't "necessarily" always have to be on top, and so Barbra took charge. She was always good at running a show. So good, in fact, that within a very short time, Wilma Curley, a dancer in the chorus who had the room next to Elliott's, had to rap on the door and tell them to keep it down.

7.

It was cold on February 27, opening night in Boston, but New Englanders were used to that. They were lining up outside the box office of the Colonial Theatre on Boylston Street well before showtime. That meant a full house for opening night. Cast and crew, taking their places backstage, were ecstatic.

Arthur Laurents wasn't as serene, however. A big audience was good news only if the show was worthy of it. He'd made some changes to the book since Philadelphia, but whether they were enough, he wasn't sure. In fact, he suspected they weren't. But he'd been put through h.e.l.l just to achieve this much. He'd wanted to make alterations only in cooperation with Weidman and Rome, but the changes the writers had come up with had been laughable in Laurents's opinion. Recognizing that the first commandment of out-of-town musicals was "survive," he did what he, as a writer himself, had once considered unthinkable: He cut, he pasted, and-"mea culpa, mea culpa"-he rewrote the book. "Poison-pen notes" from Rome started appearing under Laurents's door every night until they grew so fat they had to be left at the front desk.

His friend Stephen Sondheim understood what he was dealing with. He had seen the show in Philadelphia and thought, despite its script problems, that Wholesale was terrific. If Laurents could resist the pressures from Merrick to "sweeten" and "explain" the nasty central character, then Wholesale "ought to have enormous impact," Sondheim believed.

On a strictly financial basis, the company was looking pretty good. Attendance had been steady in Philadelphia through the very last show on February 24, and tonight's packed house boded well for the Boston run. Merrick might not be able to make back his costs during previews, one critic observed, but ticket sales had been strong enough to allow him to "approach New York with a little less nail-biting than usual."

The show was also getting good press. There had been Dorothy Kilgallen's column singling out Barbra, and a couple of other mentions from Leonard Lyons, and a whole slew of articles profiling Lillian Roth's comeback. Weidman and Rome had appeared on PM East, largely due to Barbra's relations.h.i.+p with the show. There were also a series of syndicated articles about Elliott, which described him as a former child entertainer who had "persevered ... despite the usual rough time in the beginning."

If Merrick had his way, however, there would be no more publicity on Elliott. Even as the company moved to Boston, settling in at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the producer was still pressing Laurents to fire their leading man. Merrick was furious that when Elliott danced, the first several rows of the orchestra "were sprayed with sweat" -a charge Laurents had to admit was true. To solve the problem, they'd called in Dr. Max Jacobson-known as "Dr. Feelgood" for the amphetamine injections he gave to Tennessee Williams, Eddie Fisher, and President Kennedy-but the medication not only dried up Elliott's flying perspiration but also his vocal chords. Merrick just wanted him gone. Laurents stepped in and said that if Elliott was fired, he'd quit. So far, the producer hadn't called Laurents's bluff.

Backstage, Barbra, in full makeup and costume, was already in the wings, since she was one of the first actors on the stage. The overture was playing. It was one of those rare moments of quiet contemplation right before a show. Perhaps Barbra meditated; perhaps she thought about everything that had brought her to this point. It was true that the Boston newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts had billed Lillian Roth at the top, with Elliott and Sheree North at the bottom in special, larger print. It was true, too, that Barbra came dead last. (While Bambi Linn technically was listed after her, she was on a special line, denoting a special appearance.) So Barbra remained last billed. The least important, it would seem.

But those glowing reviews had followed her. No doubt she had taken some satisfaction in the fact that, a week earlier, it had been her stand-alone photograph-not Roth's, not North's, not even Elliott's-that had been used to promote the show in the Boston Globe. Barbra had been called a "stage newcomer" ; her name had even been spelled correctly. When the overture ended and the curtain went up, she bounded out with all the confidence in the world. Backstage, there was a bit of a panic when Marilyn Cooper revealed she was having trouble with her voice, but such things didn't concern Barbra. The director and the writers might be struggling over the show, but the young woman playing Miss Marmelstein wasn't worried. She knew there was only one thing that would matter in the end, and that was her.

8.

The Softness brothers looked up in surprise when Barbra came barreling into their office. She'd always been an "a.s.sertive young woman," in John Softness's view, but never more so since returning to New York from the out-of-town tryouts of I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Now she seemed to the Softness brothers to be a woman on a mission. She barged into the room, shuffled through stacks of papers, made a couple of phone calls, and snapped out questions at the publicists in rapid-fire, machine-gun style. "She goes through brick walls," John Softness thought in awe. Ever since Barbra had become their client, he'd observed that everything she did was fast, direct, and often aggressive. It wasn't so much energy that propelled her, Softness felt, but rather a sense of "I've gotta get the work done, get it over with, finish it." He imagined there must be "a softer, more relaxed side" to Barbra, but so far he had yet to witness it.

And he'd been spending plenty of time with her of late. The Softness Group was no longer only publicizing Barbra as part of PM East. Marty Erlichman had also asked them to handle Barbra's personal publicity. (They'd taken on Marty's other clients, the Clancy Brothers, as well.) The Softness brothers found a receptive audience for Barbra's publicity as theatrical insiders had been buzzing about her for weeks. But the buzz wasn't nearly as positive when it came to Wholesale.

The Boston critics, much to Arthur Laurents's dismay, had been even less kind to the show than the ones in Philly. Elinor Hughes in the Boston Herald had found it "generally entertaining" but she confirmed all of David Merrick's fears about Elliott when she said he "lacked enough style or experience to carry the difficult role of Harry Bogen." Cyrus Durgin in the Boston Globe was still more dismissive of the show, playing off Miss Marmelstein's song "What Are They Doing to Us Now?" when he wrote "What, indeed, are they doing to show business when such an acrid and gritty, unimaginative, literal and generally uninteresting item as this comes along under the guise of entertainment?"

After reading Durgin's review, Weidman and Rome had thumped their chests in vindication, demanding that Laurents reinstate their original script. Merrick, much to the director's chagrin, seemed to back them up. But it was a Machiavellian maneuver on the producer's part. When Laurents tendered his resignation rather than return the show to "the piece of blubber" it had been, Merrick told Weidman and Rome that he had no choice but to close the show. Faced with such a possibility, the writers capitulated and accepted Laurents's rewrite as permanent.

Yet throughout all this hullabaloo, there was one thing that everyone agreed was working: Barbra. The critics had been kind to Lillian Roth, but it was the young newcomer who had really excited them. Elinor Hughes thought Barbra displayed "a nice original sense of comedy," and while Cyrus Durgin, known to be persnickety in his reviews, called Miss Marmelstein a "stock" character, he acknowledged that Barbra "wins applause" for playing her.

As the company returned to New York, the Softness brothers knew they had a hot commodity on their hands. With Marty, they often discussed Barbra's future: what she could do, where she might go, who might give her a boost. There were so many avenues where Barbra could be marketed: the stage, television, records. That day in their office, as on so many similar days, they brainstormed for a while-Barbra and Marty and John and Don-and then one of the brothers rolled a piece of paper into their heavy black Royal typewriter and started banging out a press release.

"Barbra is striking in appearance" began one such release, which would be syndicated as a feature story. "She has a lithe and supple body, extremely expressive hands and arms, and the haughty mien and mesmeristic gaze of an a.s.syrian G.o.ddess." It wasn't so different from the "white G.o.ddess" image Bob had positioned her for: Barbra might play an ugly duckling on the stage, but she was hardly that in real life, or so her publicity went. It was a hard sell, but that was the course they all decided on.

Some of the publicity undertaken by the Softness Group on Barbra's behalf wasn't as flagrant as that, however. There were tidbits pa.s.sed along to gossip columnists, photos dropped off on editors' desks in case they ever needed "to fill a hole on the amus.e.m.e.nts page." There were also the popular "Q-and-A" columns that ran in many newspapers and TV-listings supplements. Not long before, a "Jane Ryan" had written to one syndicated column, "Viewers Speak," asking about a girl on PM East "by the name of Barbara Smarzan or something." She had appeared the same night as Julie Wilson and Rose Murphy. "Could you tell me if this girl has made any records?" Miss Ryan asked.

"The young lady's name is Barbra Streisand," the answer came. "My present information is that she has not made any recordings, but I am checking further and will make mention here if I find she does have a recording credit."

Both question and answer, of course, had been penned by Barbra's publicity team. Those ubiquitous "Q-and-A" columns were in actuality patched together by publicists using them as platforms for their clients. The question from "Jane Ryan" had appeared precisely at the point when G.o.ddard Lieberson was reconsidering whether to give Barbra a record contract. The idea, obviously, was to create the impression that the public was clamoring for this exciting newcomer.

The record deal hadn't materialized, but Don Softness kept the press releases flying out of his typewriter. He knew there was something else cooking out there that might be right up his client's alley. As the buzz about Barbra's performance in Wholesale grew louder in theater circles, inevitably another show in David Merrick's pipeline was mentioned. During rehearsals, a.s.sistant stage manager Robert Schear had watched Barbra intently on the stage, then walked over to Lillian Roth and asked, "Who does that girl remind you of?" Before Roth could reply, Schear told her to write the name down on a piece of paper. He did the same. When they compared notes, they saw they had both written the same name: f.a.n.n.y Brice.