Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 37

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Summer 1963

1.

Liberace-that flashy, flamboyant pianist, the idol of millions of blue-haired old ladies and the highest paid entertainer in the world-stood on the stage in his red-sequined tuxedo with a smile as wide as the silver candelabrum on his grand piano. He was getting ready to introduce Barbra, as he'd done nearly every night since they'd started their run together at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. He thought Barbra was marvelous, and he intended for his audiences to think so, too. Barbra might be his opening act, but Liberace wanted his fans to know he considered her far more special than that.

The glitzy musician had been an admirer of Barbra's since seeing her at the Bon Soir; more recently, he'd appeared with her on Ed Sullivan. He'd been ecstatic to sign her for his Vegas show, but very quickly he discovered that his fans weren't necessarily hers. The first couple of nights, the audience of ladies with too much costume jewelry and reluctant husbands sitting beside them hadn't applauded Barbra quite as loudly as she was used to. Nor had they seemed to get her jokes. Barbra's long, rambling African or Estonian or Armenian folktales probably fell horrendously flat in Vegas; even sophisticated hipsters in New York and San Francisco didn't always know what to make of them. Peter Daniels, cringing at the piano, thought those first two nights were "disastrous." So Liberace had decided to come out at the top of the show and do a bit of an opening number, then introduce Barbra as his "discovery." He'd give it, he promised, "the old schmaltz."

Opening his glittering arms as if to embrace the crowd packed into the gaudy Versailles Room, Liberace told them they were in for a real treat. This young lady, Barbra Streisand, had wowed them in New York and had a huge career ahead of her. With such a benediction from the master, Barbra could have then come out and read from Robert's Rules of Order and Liberace's audience would still have loved her. The pianist's sway over his following was tremendous. He claimed more than two hundred official fan clubs with a combined members.h.i.+p of a quarter of a million. At the Riviera, he was a king, making a triumphant return after a five-year absence. The hotel promoted its headliners by printing thirty thousand souvenir postcards to sell in their gift shops. For Debbie Reynolds and Vince Edwards, that was plenty to last throughout their runs. But for Liberace, thirty thousand disappeared in three days.

Barbra was very grateful to "Lee," as his friends knew the pianist. His introduction of her was extraordinarily generous. Not many performers would get all made up, coiffed, and costumed-and for Liberace that took no small amount of time-only to give up the stage after a few minutes. Yet because of the showman's graciousness, things had completely turned around for Barbra. Now she took the stage to warm, welcoming applause.

Vegas was, in fact, abuzz about her. "By far the hottest singer on the circuit today," one local columnist called her. Another Sin City reviewer declared that while Liberace might have "the edge in experience and publicity on his costar," his readers should "watch the 21-year-old catch on like the doughnut." Variety thought that those who were tired of "a.s.sembly-line singers will be quite happy with Miss Streisand."

No doubt Charles Kahn, the Riviera's vice president, was quite happy by the turnaround in Barbra's reception at the hotel. After all, he was paying her $7,500 a week. For Barbra's publicists, that figure was a selling point. All that summer she was being heralded as the "girl who went from $150 to $7,500," though the comparison could have been made even more dramatic by using a starting figure of $108, which was what the Bon Soir had paid her at the very beginning.

Yet for all her success on the Strip, Barbra didn't particularly like Las Vegas. Despite the opulence of the Riviera-the hotel was called "a city in a tower of luxury," since under its roof were contained "sw.a.n.k shops," a sidewalk cafe, a swimming pool, fountains, slot machines, blackjack tables, and a gourmet restaurant-Barbra thought it was all just too noisy. The constant jangling of the slot machines no doubt irritated her tinnitus. She was also becoming enough of a world traveler by now to compare and contrast the cities she'd visited, and Vegas just couldn't compare in terms of culture to San Francisco or London or Chicago.

She was pleased, however, that friends had come to visit. In the audience were Joe and Evelyn Layton, back from London now that On the Town was running on its own-or running out of steam, no one was quite sure. But what was abundantly clear was that Elliott's director was now one of Barbra's biggest boosters. His wife shared his view. They'd come to Vegas specifically to see Barbra, and Evelyn was telling her friends they should see her, too. "If you haven't heard Barbra sing," she wrote to one pal, "run this minute and get her record. Greatest woman talent of this century-and she's only twenty-one. I could crack her right in the mush."

Lots of people were running to get Barbra's record. All that touring and constant exposure had paid off. The week Barbra had opened in Vegas, The Barbra Streisand Alb.u.m broke into the Top Ten on Billboard's chart. Barbra's reign as the top-selling woman in pop music continued. Her name was now enough of a draw that CBS had decided to use her appearance on The Keefe Bra.s.selle Show as the premiere episode, b.u.mping the original premiere, featuring Carol Channing, to the second week. Critics savaged the show except for the moments Barbra took center stage, when it "burst to astonis.h.i.+ng life." Rick DuBrow, who'd already made clear his love for Barbra in previous articles, called her "a one-woman recovery operation" and declared that she was "so far the superior of any of her compet.i.tors that there is really no one even in her league." With reviews such as that, it was no surprise that some commentators, no doubt egged on by Lee Solters, had started calling 1963 "the year of Barbra Streisand."

Tonight the audience in the Versailles Room seemed to agree. Barbra made a joke about the Mother Hubbard gown she was wearing, made entirely of gingham. The columnist Mike Connolly called it an "enigma of a gown," and Barbra seemed to recognize, even relish, its eccentricity. She told the audience that the three novices who'd woven the gown in Brussels had been blind. Another time, sitting on a stool and smoothing out the gown over her knees, Barbra quipped, "I don't want to wrinkle my tablecloth." These sorts of lines, as she expected, drew big laughs.

After the show, Barbra and the Laytons caught up. She shared with them the news that she had found a new place to live, a gorgeous duplex on Central Park West. They might not have admitted it, but they all suspected that Elliott would be home soon. And Central Park West was a rather upmarket address for an unemployed actor.

2.

When Elliott gambled, he was always ready with a story. In London, he'd run up some pretty significant debts, and rarely had he been able to pay them. So he'd done "some of the best acting" of his career in order to make a quick escape. "Great inventive tales" were concocted on the spot as to why he was "temporarily without funds." Usually this enabled him to get off the hook without getting too far in the hole.

Now he was back in New York, and his pockets were still empty. On the Town had closed on July 13. It had run just over a month, just over fifty performances. No way could that be spun as a success. The lukewarm review of the show in the Times hadn't even mentioned him, while singling out Elspeth March and others. Elliott was humiliated. So back across the Atlantic he'd slunk, back to that smelly old apartment. Once he got there, he had orders from Barbra. Start packing.

They were taking everything they had to the new place. Not that their few pieces of furniture could fill the huge duplex on Central Park West. But Barbra was sentimentally attached to everything in the old apartment, all the antiques she'd found at shops and consignment stores, so she wanted to bring them all.

She was also, it would seem, sentimentally attached to Elliott, since she was letting him tag along even though he had very little money to chip in to the venture. To the world, of course, they were married. "Streisand's husband comes home," Earl Wilson wrote, heralding Elliott's return to New York. And the public expected husbands and wives to live together.

As he stuffed books and boas and shoes into boxes, Elliott was, in his own words, "very depressed." It was back to the unemployment line, and this time there were no job offers on the horizon. He paced a lot, constantly popping sunflower seeds in his mouth and smoking a ridiculous amount of pot. Marijuana was his salvation, Elliott believed; it allowed him to "switch into certain inner places" and escape all outer worries and frustrations. He saw no problem with smoking as much as he did. Gra.s.s, as he called it, didn't make him do anything he "wouldn't be capable of doing otherwise," and besides, it was "far more pleasant than drinking ... less messy and more private." He didn't have "the patience to sit in a bar and drink." So he sat at home and got stoned.

Meanwhile, out there in the world, Barbra had just officially been announced as the star of Funny Girl. Dorothy Kilgallen, of all people, had broken the story on July 22: "After reading a zillion Broadway-bound scripts, Barbra Streisand has agreed to do Funny Girl for David Merrick. She's a very hot property these days." Kilgallen, perhaps trying to make amends for her recent cattiness, went on to suggest that Barbra's alb.u.m would soon be number 1. It had already reached number 8 on Billboard's chart.

As Barbra soared, Elliott knew he had some decisions to make. Did he bolt? Did he expose their "marriage" as a sham and scramble out of her spotlight before the bluenoses started tossing bricks at her for living out of wedlock? Or did he stick around and let her carry him until he could find another job?

What made it worse was that people were talking about their situation. A very curious item had recently turned up in Walter Winch.e.l.l's column. Barbra was supposedly consoling a girlfriend, whose husband bought her everything she desired, but he had ceased being much of a conversationalist. "What do you want," Barbra had reportedly asked, "a master of ceremonies or a meal ticket?" It was a line that could have, and maybe did, come directly from her act. But the irony was that, in her own case, it was Barbra who was the meal ticket for her "husband."

3.

Ray Stark looked again at the magazine he held in his hands. It was the venerable Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, and on the cover was a reverential drawing of the new pope, Paul VI. But it was the piece inside, decidedly less reverential, if still in its own way hagiographic, that interested him. GOODBYE BROOKLYN h.e.l.lO FAME was the headline. The subhead read: "A refugee from Flatbush with a wacky manner and steamy voice, Barbra Streisand is streaking to stardom."

The article was written by Pete Hamill, a rising star in the world of journalism, but it had been engineered by Lee Solters, as well as by Stark himself. It was Solters-or possibly his partner, Harvey Sabinson -who, some weeks earlier, had pitched the idea to the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, and it was Stark who had called the editor to confirm that Barbra was indeed about to be named the star of Funny Girl. That made the piece timely, gave it a hook. And so the story was a.s.signed to Hamill, a former reporter for the New York Post who had started writing for the magazine during the newspaper strike.

The two met, and Barbra, in that inimitable way she had with reporters, provided the bare bones of her life embellished with all the idiosyncrasies of her public persona. There was kookiness: "I like food, sleep, and clothes," she said. "Food is a tangible thing, and so is sleep. When you're tired, it's so great." And there was bold ambition mixed with hubris: "They tell me I'll win everything eventually. The Emmy for TV, the Grammy for records, the Tony on Broadway, and the Oscar for the movies. It would be beautiful to win all those awards, to be rich, to have my name on marquees all over the world. And I guess a lot of those things will happen to me. I kind of feel they will."

On the emerging Streisand mythos, Hamill left his own imprint. "To many observers," he wrote, "her overnight success is bewildering. Show business, after all, is largely a bazaar for that tinselly commodity, glamour. To achieve stardom, unendowed young girls customarily acquire bobbed noses, capped teeth and cantilevered underwear. Not Barbra Streisand. 'I'm me,' she says with a disarming shrug. 'And that's all there is.'"

Of course, that was far from all there was, but that disarming shrug went a very long way toward establis.h.i.+ng some radical new rules for that tinselly commodity. Maybe glamour in 1963 didn't require bobbed noses. Maybe a bit of genuineness was just as attractive, maybe even more so. "She's telling you the story of her life every time she gets up there," Hamill quoted one friend of Barbra's. "And the facts of that life have made her very sensitive." The Barbra who emerged from Hamill's piece was a genuine, real-life kid, a Cinderella who'd escaped "that bosky dell known as Flatbush" and a high school "gluey with fraternities and sororities" that was indifferent to the "honor student" with the "modest looks." Most readers could relate. Even if Barbra was more ambitious than most, she was an everywoman-and why shouldn't an everywoman win awards? Why did it always have to be the beautiful blond girls?

The Hamill piece was the ultimate doc.u.mentation of the Streisand legend in the public's mind, the culmination of a three-year process that had begun with Don Softness's mimeograph machine. Yet while the article may have been just what Barbra needed at the time, just what her team had been hoping for, there were some points that were now settling into the collective consciousness that Barbra felt went too far. Hamill had quoted a "friend" of hers as saying that, to Barbra, Brooklyn "meant baseball, boredom, and bad breath." It was true that she'd wanted out, and it was true that she'd felt Manhattan was "where people really lived." But Barbra had never gone so far as to denigrate her hometown, and the line deeply troubled her. Yet these were the risks of opening the Pandora's box of publicity: Journalists were going to dig up their own quotes and draw their own conclusions. The narrative could only be controlled so far.

From Ray Stark's perspective, however, the article was the best possible propaganda for his show. The "angular young girl with the nose of an eagle, slightly out-of-focus eyes and a mouth engaged in a battle with a wad of gum" could just as easily have been f.a.n.n.y Brice as Barbra Streisand. Stark was aware that by conflating the two-using Barbra's established persona and biographical narrative to create and sell Funny Girl-he was, in some ways, eliminating his mother-in-law from the show. A year earlier, he'd been adamantly opposed to a similar suggestion from Anne Bancroft that she remake the character in her own image. "The personality of Anne Bancroft," Stark had complained to Robbins and Styne, "will be the only personality to emerge." Yet this was exactly what he was now allowing to occur with Barbra.

The difference was that Jerry Robbins was no longer with the show. By building on Barbra's own mythos, Stark and his collaborators could claim they were basing nothing on Robbins's contributions. That was going to be key, because as soon as Bob Fosse was announced, Robbins's lawyer had written to Stark insisting that none of his client's "suggestions, ideas, and material" be used "in any manner." Aware of the bind that could put the show in, Stark had replied through his own attorney that he knew of "no creative contribution by Jerry" since he hadn't been "privileged to attend the creative meetings." And while Robbins hadn't parried that wily legal maneuver so far, Stark knew they'd have to proceed with caution.

But Barbra's background gave them the freedom they needed. If they had to start over, Stark reasoned, why not jump on a bandwagon that had already proven its marketability? Barbra's quirky personality was already familiar to many people; Robbins's contributions could be papered over with Barbra's own well-known persona-the plucky wallflower who cracks jokes to cover up her longing for true love. Streisand was already "Second Hand Rose" (the t.i.tle of one of Brice's songs) in the public's mind. If Robbins complained, Stark could simply counter that they weren't using the f.a.n.n.y Brice he'd created; they were using the Barbra Streisand created by Streisand herself.

So when f.a.n.n.y got up to sing, "I'm the greatest star, I am by far, but no one knows it," the line would resonate for anyone who'd read Hamill's piece or any of the others like it. In the face of Robbins's intractability, Stark saw Barbra as their way forward. Wherever possible, the producer encouraged Fosse to accentuate similarities between the lives of Barbra and f.a.n.n.y. As Arthur Laurents understood it, "They needed to become the same thing, at least for promotional purposes."

On one of his early scripts, Fosse penciled the remark "Make it like B." next to f.a.n.n.y's confrontation with a theater owner. In working with his new leading lady, the director instructed her not to study f.a.n.n.y Brice, because she'd "become a caricature." Rather, Fosse told her, Barbra should just be herself. "I'm not approaching it as a life story of anybody," Barbra told reporters. "I'm doing it as an actress doing another character." Now that she was finally the star, Barbra wasn't about to share top billing with anyone, not even with the woman she was playing.

Making everything circular, the persona Stark and Fosse were so happy to claim as a stand-in for f.a.n.n.y's own had been designed by Barbra and her team precisely to secure the role of f.a.n.n.y Brice. So Barbra had been imitating f.a.n.n.y to get Funny Girl and now Funny Girl was imitating Barbra imitating f.a.n.n.y. Barbra told the press that she'd been chosen for the "certain natural characteristics" she shared with f.a.n.n.y, and those were obvious: the prominent nose, the mother who worried she wouldn't make it in s...o...b..z, the childhood in Brooklyn where no one believed in her, the self-confidence that made success seem inevitable. But there were aspects of Barbra's public persona that were less authentic and more calculated, such as all the kooky talk and behavior that had been invented specifically to draw comparisons with Brice. In fact, the two women weren't as much alike as the Funny Girl team tried to insist. f.a.n.n.y Brice had never longed to play Juliet, and her aspirations to be accepted by the ruling cla.s.ses would have been anathema to Barbra. Most significantly, f.a.n.n.y had let men run her career, and occasionally ruin it, which was about as far from Barbra as one could get.

Yet none of that mattered to Stark. What was relevant to this show was that both Barbra and f.a.n.n.y were different-looking, different-sounding, different-acting ladies of great personal charisma who redefined what it meant to be glamorous.

Stark knew that he was giving the twenty-one-year-old an enormous gift. It wasn't often that entire Broadway shows were built around actors with as little experience as Barbra. But Barbra's story was the answer to his problems with both Robbins and the show. The book could now practically write itself-or at least he hoped it could. So up to Vegas he trekked with Fran to pose for photographs with Barbra showing how pleased they all were with her casting. Jule Styne and Bob Merrill also made the trip, running through the entire score for Barbra in her hotel room, tweaking lyrics where necessary. Everything was done now with Barbra in mind.

4.

Elliott paced anxiously at the corner of Ninety-second Street and Central Park West, smoking a cigarette. A friend of his, another out-of-work actor, spotted him and tried to engage him in conversation, but Elliott seemed distant and preoccupied. He kept looking over his shoulder as if he were waiting for someone. At last his friend saw a young woman come bounding around the block. He didn't recognize her at first. She was wearing oversized sungla.s.ses and black boots and a knee-length gingham dress. When Elliott kissed her, his friend realized this was his girlfriend, Barbra Streisand, whom everybody seemed to be talking about these days. The young man knew Barbra and Elliott weren't married, and wondered why they kept up the pretense to the press that they were. They seemed to be very much in love. Barbra kept patting Elliott's hand and kissing his scruffy cheek. Finally Elliott muttered a good-bye to his friend-Barbra hadn't even said h.e.l.lo-and they hurried off.