Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 33

The indignities only continued. From Boston it was on to Cleveland, where she cohosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week starting February 11. With the genial host, Barbra had spoofed Jeanette MacDonaldNelson Eddy movies, played tiddlywinks on the floor, and partic.i.p.ated in some calisthenics taught by a visiting exercise instructor-though not with much enthusiasm. By the end of the set, Barbra-never much of a "joiner"-had retreated to the back where she stood watching the rest of the cast bend and squat, a somewhat condescending smile fixed on her face. There were, apparently, some limits to what she would put herself through.

But the Douglas show also gave her the chance to sing every song from the upcoming alb.u.m-fantastic publicity as far as it went, which actually wasn't very far at all. The syndicated show, a Westinghouse production like PM East, reached only Midwest audiences ; the New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and West Coast markets had no idea as yet who Mike Douglas was. Going into the gig, Barbra and Marty would have understood that any boost the Douglas show might bring to her alb.u.m sales would be confined to the Midwest. No doubt that was why they'd asked for a concurrent nightclub act, to maximize their time and effort. Douglas got them booked at the Chateau, located in Lakewood, a west-side suburb of Cleveland. Barbra was paid $2,500 for the week-decent money, but it turned out to be a dismal experience. A cold snap inhibited turnout, and Barbra played to half-empty houses for most of her run. Peter Daniels, who'd come along as her accompanist, could see that she was "a little depressed."

A little depression turned into a whole lot by the time she faced the indifferent audiences at the Eden Roc in Miami. Soldiering on with her nightclub appearances, Barbra had been distressed to realize that for all her effort, the tour hadn't seemed to help the alb.u.m much at all. A few weeks after its release, The Barbra Streisand Alb.u.m remained mired at the bottom of the charts.

Yet whenever she'd fret, Marty a.s.sured her that he believed the alb.u.m would take off. She had, after all, the backing of some pretty important people in the world of music. Jule Styne was still out there rooting for her. Stephen Sondheim, once unsure of her, was now considering her for a musical he was writing, Anyone Can Whistle. Leonard Bernstein, impressed with how she sang "My Name Is Barbara," was talking her up to colleagues. Sammy Cahn thought she was absolutely adorable after she'd told him that he looked like her dentist, so he gave her a little box inscribed TO THE SINGER FROM THE DENTIST and told everyone within earshot that he thought she was the best.

And, in the most public expression of support of all, Harold Arlen had written her alb.u.m's back-cover liner notes. "Did you ever hear Helen Morgan sing?" Arlen asked, with the alb.u.m designer cleverly positioning a thumbnail photo of Morgan next to the question. "Or were you ever at the theatre when f.a.n.n.y Brice clowned in her cla.s.sic comedic way-or Beatrice Lillie deliciously poked fun at all sham and pomp?" (Thumbnails of Brice and Lillie accompanied the text.) "Have you heard our top vocalists 'belt,' 'whisper,' or sing with that steady and urgent beat behind them? Have you ever seen a painting by Modigliani?" (A little sketch of an odd-looking woman followed.) "If you have, do not think the above has been ballooned out of proportion. I advise you to watch Barbra Streisand's career. This young lady (a mere twenty) has a stunning future."

The old-guard musical-theater elite had lined up in solid support behind the enterprise of Barbra Streisand. Word up and down Broadway was that the alb.u.m was a must; it was no surprise that a musical-theater type such as Anthony Newley had it in his hands soon after it was released. But what was missing from Barbra's publicity was any sense of youth. Comparing her to Helen Morgan and Beatrice Lillie was hardly going to attract those who were buying the alb.u.ms of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Still, the biggest-selling alb.u.m at the moment was the soundtrack to West Side Story, so Broadway music was still profitable. The trouble was that The Barbra Streisand Alb.u.m, for all Barbra's Broadway provenance, wasn't a show-tunes record. Just what it was remained something of mystery.

And that was a problem. G.o.ddard Lieberson had said that Barbra couldn't be categorized-and while he'd used that as a compliment when he'd introduced her at the Bon Soir, he had also worried about that fact right from the start. The question remained how to position Barbra and her alb.u.m, which contained a mix of up- and down-tempo songs, offbeat standards, and performance pieces such as "Come to the Supermarket" and "Big Bad Wolf." For the predominately youthful record-buying market, these weren't draws, and no amount of accolades from Harold Arlen was going to persuade a young fan of Elvis Presley or Lesley Gore to give Barbra's alb.u.m a shot.

By the middle part of March, while Barbra was languis.h.i.+ng in Miami, there was a terrible feeling among everyone involved that the alb.u.m was sinking like a rock. It had now been out for a month, and it still hadn't caught fire. Maybe Lieberson had been right: Barbra was simply too special for records. The lack of enthusiasm at the Chateau and the Eden Roc seemed to prove that her audience of gay men, urban hipsters, and theater aficionados was just too small for major commercial success. After all the trouble of the contract and the tour, it would be a terrible admission for Barbra and Marty to have to make.

As Barbra walked offstage and headed back to her room, the depression she was feeling was as much personal as it was professional. Elliott had been with her for the start of the tour in Boston and Cleveland. But during a brief interim in New York before she'd flown to Florida, Barbra had bid her boyfriend farewell as he headed off to London to start rehearsals for On the Town. Earl Wilson reported that Barbra had been "talked out of going to London" with Elliott by her managers, who "feared she would stop her career right when it [was] starting." In return for Barbra's agreement to stay in the U.S., Wilson revealed, her managers promised to get her three television shows in England "so she could visit three times" in the course of the next year.

Still, it was hard for some to believe that she ever truly considered going to London without a job just so she could cling to Elliott's side. Barbra was hardly "the backstage kind of girlfriend," Bob said. Besides, with the possibility of the Brice show still out there-or The Student Gypsy, or Anyone Can Whistle, or David Merrick's musical revival of The Rainmaker, for which her name had also been mentioned-Barbra wasn't likely to go anywhere that made it difficult for her to get in to audition.

And maybe a bit of a break from Elliott wasn't all that terrible to contemplate. Barbra was still in love with him and still committed to making the relations.h.i.+p work. No one doubted that. In fact, as friends had heard, there had even been a brief consideration of marriage before he left, to seal the deal between them and provide a veneer of protection while they were apart. But Elliott had a dim view of the inst.i.tution of marriage. He thought it imposed "something technical on an otherwise viable relations.h.i.+p," and he worried it could change things "dramatically." That Barbra didn't push it suggested that she, too, wasn't quite ready, and that maybe she saw some benefit in having a bit of a breather. They had been arguing more than ever after all, and Barbra had found herself increasingly impatient with Elliott's career insecurities, especially as she was going through her own anxieties.

So she retreated alone to her room at the Eden Roc. After this, it was off to San Francisco to fulfill her long-ago contract with Enrico Banducci at the hungry i, then back to New York for a gig at Basin Street East at the Shelton Towers Hotel. There were more clubs after that if she could bear to look at the list. And after that-who knew? All Barbra could have known at that point was that the winter of 1963 looked an awful lot like the winter of 1961. Whatever had happened to going straight to the top?

6.

The crowds had returned to hear her, but now the problem was something else. Barbra couldn't sing. Or she didn't think she could sing.

With Marty at her side, she found the little studio opposite the Safeway grocery store on Oakland's busy College Avenue, about half an hour's walk from the Berkeley campus. This was where she'd been told she could find the woman who might help her. Anxious and frightened, Barbra made her way inside a small room with all the curtains drawn to keep out the light.

A few nights earlier, she'd opened at the hungry i across the bay in San Francisco. Banducci had done a good job of talking her up: "This town will go crazy for her," he quoted himself on the posters announcing her opening night. To the press, he also told the story of their first meeting back in New York, reframing it with the buzzwords of Barbra's current publicity: "She was easily the kookiest, most arresting-looking kid I'd ever seen." In building up her offbeat appeal, Banducci had Barbra calling him a "moron" and an "idiot" in Irvin Arthur's office, and instead of being offended, he said he'd replied, "Sign that girl for me right away." Certainly Barbra had been calculatingly direct in that first meeting, but she wasn't the type to call someone names, especially someone she'd just met. But the theatrical Banducci knew how to plant the seeds of a legend.

Meanwhile, Columbia, responding to Marty's calls to do more to promote the alb.u.m, had sent out invitations to some of San Francisco's better-known critics to a special preshow concert at six PM. That meant Barbra had to go on stage three times that first evening, since she performed two shows a night, at eight and eleven. (The two shows were distinct from each other, and some people from the first show stayed for the second.) But the preshow event proved to be a smart move because it created a real buzz about her, and the tough-to-please critics, feeling catered to, had responded enthusiastically, ensuring sizeable crowds every night since.

"Barbra Streisand is unquestionably one of the most successful performers ever to appear at the hungry i," Ralph J. Gleason wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. "People went away talking about her and three hours later, I heard two couples on Broadway singing one of the songs she did. Barbra Streisand has that kind of impact." The Chronicle ran photos of Barbra making all sorts of faces as she sang-pouting, serious, comical-next to the headline: A SPECIAL KIND OF MAGIC.

But all that singing was getting to her. Barbra was finding that she was having trouble holding her notes. When she had arrived in San Francisco, her voice had been somewhat hoa.r.s.e. Certainly all the leapfrogging from climate to climate couldn't have helped: mid-twenties in Cleveland; teens and icy rain in New York; eighties in Miami; forties and rainy when she'd made a quick flight back to New York to make another appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show; then the low fifties, cloudy and damp, when she'd arrived in San Francisco. After all that, who wouldn't catch a cold? But clearly Barbra worried that her voice troubles were the result of more than just a pa.s.sing bug. That's why Marty had asked Banducci if he might recommend a vocal coach with whom Barbra could do some work. The club owner had known exactly the woman to send them to. And so they made their way to this dark little studio on College Avenue.

Judy Davis called herself "a vocal plumber." What she did was simple: "I fix pipes," she said. She was a bra.s.sy, grandiloquent lady who dressed in colorful clothes and reminded at least one student of Auntie Mame. "Well, my dear," she'd say, after listening to a prospective student sing and examining his or her throat and diaphragm, "I must tell you, this is exactly what you're doing wrong. We're going to have to rearrange some of these things, break this habit." Singers had many bad habits, Davis believed, like improper breathing or insufficient projection. "Singers are not known to be bright," she'd tell a pupil who didn't regularly perform the exercises she'd prescribed, "but don't prove it to the world."

For all her expertise, Davis herself couldn't sing a note. When she was nineteen, her vocal chords had been injured during a tonsillectomy, leaving her with a raspy voice that prevented a singing career of her own. To understand what had happened to her on the operating table, Davis turned to Gray's Anatomy, thoroughly familiarizing herself with the physiology of the human voice. After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in music from the University of California at Berkeley, she headed to Los Angeles, where she taught movie actors how to lip-synch soundtracks. Now married to professional tennis player Frank Kovacs, Davis attracted a stellar clientele to her voice studio in Oakland. Frank Sinatra had been known to fly her to Las Vegas to help him practice before a show. Much of the talent that came through the hungry i or its sister club across the street, the Purple Onion, had spent time in Davis's studio. She had pretty much taught the Kingston Trio how to sing. When people asked her to describe her methods, which they often did, Davis found she was unable to do so. She just knew when people were "obstructing the performance of their vocal chords," she explained, and through exercises and breathing techniques, she could show them "how not to do that."

The fear that had brought Barbra to Judy Davis was as much psychological as physical. It was, after all, an extremely low period for her. She felt Elliott's absence keenly. That may have been why she'd allowed a story to spread that they had gotten married. Earl Wilson was reporting, "Funny singer Barbra Streisand wanted to keep it a secret that she married actor Elliott Gould just before he left for London, but forgot herself and wore her wedding ring to The Ed Sullivan Show." Whatever ring Barbra had been wearing when she'd made that flying trip from Miami to New York hadn't been a wedding band, but apparently she was okay with giving that impression. She knew that admitting she'd been living with a man outside of matrimony would have been completely unacceptable to a large swath of the public; surely Lee Solters had pointed out that the bluenoses still hadn't forgiven Elizabeth Taylor for shacking up with Richard Burton. Unmarried cohabitation simply wasn't tolerated in the public eye. Even couples clearly not ready to tie the knot, such as Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin, had been forced to do so anyway to ward off impressions that they might be sleeping together.

Yet for Barbra, some friends believed, the lie about being married to Elliott went even deeper than that. She was lonely, feeling untethered to the man she loved. So Barbra may have liked imagining that something was holding her and Elliott together.

For the moment, all she had to sustain her was her voice. If her voice went, she had nothing. And suddenly, in the midst of her depression, she began questioning herself: How did she hold her notes so long? How was she able to sing without ever having been trained in voice?

In the past, Barbra had just shrugged off such questions. If she willed herself, she believed, she could do anything. But now her self-confidence had plummeted. One night she suspected she wasn't holding her notes quite as long, and when she tried deliberately to hold them, she found she couldn't. Her "consciousness of an unconscious thing," she realized, had made her "impotent."

Sitting there in Davis's dimly lit studio, Barbra felt like, in her own words, "a person who was paralyzed in her legs having to relearn to walk." She was being dramatic; it was hardly as bad as all that. She was performing two shows every night at the hungry i, and the applause was certainly greater there than it had been in Cleveland or Miami. But what mattered was how Barbra felt-and she felt she wasn't at her best. No doubt she remembered off nights during Wholesale when she knew she was less than perfect and the way people had still applauded for her. She felt they'd been conditioned to do so; and she probably felt that way now. She didn't deserve the applause, she believed, and Barbra could never enjoy acclaim that she hadn't earned.

And this particular gig was crucial. In some ways, San Francisco was as important as New York to a singer's career. The city by the bay was a cultural mecca of its own, fiercely independent, producing and nurturing talent like nowhere else-and the hungry i, at 599 Jackson Street in the North Beach neighborhood, was its chief breeding ground. Mort Sahl, the sharp-tongued political comedian, had gotten his start there; so had the Kingston Trio. Both Phyllis Diller and Orson Bean had played the club, and Bill Cosby, folk singer Glenn Yarbrough, jazzman Vince Guaraldi, comedian Sh.e.l.ley Berman, and musical satirist Tom Lehrer had all received career boosts from the i. For the first few nights of Barbra's run, her opening act had been fellow game changer and rule breaker, comedian Woody Allen.

It was with justification that Howard Taubman of the New York Times called the i "the most influential nightclub west of the Mississippi." If Barbra could make it there, winning over San Francisco sophisticates, then she'd prove she wasn't just a New York phenomenon. She needed to generate the kind of buzz on the West Coast that she already enjoyed on the East if her career was ever going to go national.

So there was a great deal riding on the slender shoulders of the scared twenty-year-old who sat looking up at Judy Davis and asking for her help. Davis's heart went out to the kid. She recognized that Barbra was "being catapulted into a position" most performers took many years to reach, "almost as if she were shot out of a cannon," Davis thought. What this "sensitive girl" craved, Davis realized, was "a hand to hold and a pat on the back and somebody to tell her everything was all right." Certainly that had never been the norm in Barbra's life; it was precisely what she had given up expecting so many years ago from her mother. But when Davis offered her a hand to hold, Barbra took it eagerly. That day, in the forty-four-year-old nurturing Davis, Barbra found another mother subst.i.tute, a parental figure to fill that hole in the middle of herself.

Immediately the two of them got down to work. The little studio was a safe haven for Barbra; its simple piano and soft, diffused light-and the frolicking of Davis's black poodle Poupette-made Barbra feel at home. Davis was under no illusions that she needed to teach Barbra to sing, even if that was what her client suddenly believed she needed to learn. "No singing teacher can teach anyone to sing," she explained. A singer was born a singer, she said, and all she could do was teach "what tones are right and what techniques are best." She found Barbra to be "a curious, searching girl" who wanted to understand how "this instrument of hers" worked. Davis produced photographs and diagrams of the lungs, esophagus, and diaphragm, explaining to Barbra the physical process of singing. That alone seemed to ease some of Barbra's fears.

Yet no doubt what she responded to most were the tender, yet firm, ministrations of an empathetic older woman she respected. There was a similar patronage taking place at the hungry i, where Barbra flourished under the careful, compa.s.sionate care of Banducci. Three thousand miles from home, Barbra had found, even if just temporarily, the parents she never had. Banducci was as erudite and sophisticated-if a bit more florid and flamboyant-as she imagined her father would have been. Like Barbra, he had discarded an inadequate first name-Harry-for something more distinctive, taking "Enrico" as a tribute to Enrico Caruso. At the age of thirteen he'd left his provincial hometown of Bakersfield, California, for exciting San Francisco, where he'd studied under the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. As proprietor of the hungry i-it meant "hungry intellectual"-since 1950, Banducci had been one of the first, along with Jay Landesman, another of Barbra's patrons, to popularize the beatnik movement. To one reporter, Banducci "modestly disclaimed having everything to do with the beatnik craze that ... spread across the country," but he was also "careful to imply that it did not happen without his good offices." Nowadays the heavy-set, pencil-mustachioed Banducci was never seen without his brown beret, white sneakers, tan chinos, and "the most expansive white and figured sweater ever to enc.u.mber a man's neck, chest, waist, and arms."

It didn't take long for Barbra to regain her footing in this supportive environment. Although she had struggled with distracted audiences elsewhere on this tour, she didn't need to worry about that at the i, thanks to Banducci. The three-hundred-person audience was seated in a semicircle around the stage. And while their canvas chairs had wide, flat arms ideal for setting down their drinks-which were served by a solicitous corps of j.a.panese waiters-once the lights dimmed, all drinking and eating in the auditorium ceased. Banducci insisted on a "quietude in the audience" when the performer stepped out onto the stage. All alone, lit by a battery of spotlights in front of a stark brick wall, the performer could command the attention of the audience without any compet.i.tion. For this, especially so soon after the Eden Roc fiasco, Barbra was no doubt very grateful to her host.

She'd also become close with the club's announcer. Alvah Bessie had been a novelist, journalist, and Hollywood screenwriter, nominated for an Academy Award for Objective Burma in 1945. He'd also been a member of the Hollywood Ten, imprisoned for ten months and blacklisted by the film industry for refusing to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The blacklisting had destroyed his career. Now he was running the lights and sound board at the hungry i and introducing the entertainers. Bessie's story was the complete inverse of those of Jerry Robbins and Isobel Lennart, two others of Barbra's acquaintance who had histories with HUAC. Barbra likely took notice of how very different Bessie's life was-hunched down anonymously in the shadows, positioning the spotlight on other people-from the lives of informers such as Robbins and Lennart-making movies and Broadway shows and being publicly acclaimed for it. For someone as perceptive as Barbra, the injustice must have resonated.

Her interval in San Francisco was a turning point for her. As she had in Detroit, she found a home away from home, a place where new friends and new challenges provided her with just the balm she needed. Certainly no place she'd ever been had looked quite as magical as San Francisco: the hills and the steep, winding streets, the delicate Queen Anne houses and Spanish mission churches, the Golden Gate Bridge s.h.i.+ning in the distance, the clanging of the cable cars, and everywhere breathtaking vistas of land, sea, and sky. For Barbra, the city was a place of healing and tranquility.

7.

On a night well into her four-week run at the hungry i, after numerous sessions with Judy Davis had restored a measure of her self-confidence, Barbra waited backstage for Alvah Bessie to announce her. She was ready for her comeback. She was, as local critic Ralph Gleason described her, "a tawny, feline, long-haired girl with a mouth like a character from Oz" who was "a practiced performer ... expert and effective." Her ease onstage had returned, showing up in everything she did: the way she stood or sat, "her approach to the microphone, the tilt of her head, the spreading of her arms, the tossing of her hair, the raising of her eyebrows."

Tonight the show would be recorded by a young engineer named Reese Hamel, who kept his equipment in the back of his Volkswagen bus and dragged his cables through the club's back door. A little less sophisticated than Columbia's elaborate recording session at the Bon Soir in the fall, but it would prove far more successful. Hamel had suggested to Barbra that she might someday want to add a live recording to her Columbia catalog. When she'd agreed, he'd hauled in his cables. Obviously Barbra felt that her voice was better if she consented to be recorded.

"Now ladies and gentlemen," Bessie announced over the loudspeaker, "the hungry i takes great pride in presenting Miss Barbra Streisand." No doubt he had been instructed carefully by the lady herself on how to p.r.o.nounce her name correctly, and he did.

As the packed house gave her a warm welcome, Barbra sailed into "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home." As if to demonstrate that she was back in top form, she held the last note of the song for nine and a half seconds, an extraordinarily long time. If it seemed a bit show-offy, she didn't care. All that mattered was that she could still do it. Next up was "Cry Me a River." This night, Barbra's rendition of the song was far superior to the manic howl she'd displayed on The Dinah Sh.o.r.e Show (though that program still hadn't aired). She eschewed the theatrics that had so repelled Fran Stark and concentrated once again on the raw heartache of the song-which maybe, just maybe, reflected her own via dolorosa these past few months regarding Elliott. When she was finished, she clearly appreciated the applause. "Grazie, grazie," she murmured.

She then launched into the kind of monologue that had been part of her act almost from the very start, but which in recent months had gained a more structured format. "I don't like to sing all the time," she said, and that much was certainly true. "I mean, one song right after another." What she was doing was setting up a segment of her show that she'd rehea.r.s.ed nearly as vigorously as the songs. "Let's see," she mused, "what should I talk about?" When someone shouted for her to talk about "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" she responded, "I sing that. I can't talk about that."

Of course, she needed no suggestions; she knew exactly what she was going to talk about. She commenced the story of a girl-"an African girl," Barbra explained-whose sister had run off with her lover. Thinking this was the lead-in to a sad ballad, the audience sat in rapt, respectful silence. "She decided to kill herself," Barbra said of the girl. "And she figured the best way to do this was to drown herself in the river." Still the audience sat mute, hanging on every word. Could this be some old tribal morality tale? "So it was this one day," Barbra went on, "and she was strolling down to the river to drown, and she tripped and sc.r.a.ped her knees." A beat. "And also broke her gla.s.ses."

Finally the audience t.i.ttered, starting to suspect that this all might be a joke. "Just at this moment," Barbra continued, "the lover and the sister drove by in a taxi-they have them in Africa-and they started laughing at her." By now the audience was laughing, too. The story went on from there-a long, ridiculous, rambling tale that ultimately ended with a feeble punch line that made little sense. But it didn't matter that the story wasn't really very funny or witty. By breaking out of the serious singer-by-the-piano mode, Barbra had shaken up tradition and thereby set herself apart-precisely what the "kooky" reputation was intended to do, whether in print or on television or on the stage. And the audience adored her for it.

She was, in fact, selling her personality as much as her voice. This came through again a short time later as she introduced the band. Slipping into her old Mae West impersonation, she gestured to drummer Benny Barth and cooed, "On the left side heah, weighin' in at one-hundred-'n'-eighty-three in black trunks ... is Benny." There was another beat. "And he doesn't." Barbra waited for the audience to get her pun. When a handful of people started to laugh, she giggled. "Benny" was slang for Benzedrine tablets, which many in the nightclub scene took illegally as stimulants.

Barth and the rest of the band-which also included a ba.s.s and guitar-were hungry i employees. But the pianist, of course, was Peter Daniels, Barbra's faithful companion on the road. She introduced him a little more intimately than she did the others, though she characteristically resisted sentimentality by affecting the air of a snooty society lady. "And now, for your pleasure, on the piano-he's not on the piano, he's sitting there in front of the piano-a very fine musician. He's more than a pianist. He's more than an arranger. He's more than a friend. He's-Petah!" She said his name as if she were Bette Davis, and this brought hoots from the audience right away. "Petah Daniels!"

The rest of the concert was more straightforward, though she did have some fun with the "Wolf" song, as she called it. "I'm going to do a standard," she announced, playing on the old criticism that she rarely sang the kind of standards that encouraged people to "sing along, swing along, snap [their] fingers," as Barbra put it. So, she announced, she would "compromise." What she gave them, of course, was "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" Some people did indeed sing along. Wrapping up the show was "Happy Days Are Here Again," which Barbra put over gorgeously, and which earned sustained applause. "You'd be so nice to come home to," she purred in grat.i.tude to the audience.