Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 40

That was true. The contract still sat on Fosse's lawyer's desk. Why the director had so far withheld his signature was unclear. Stark had agreed to the language Fosse had requested, promising not to interfere with his direction "or hire anyone else to do his job." If the agreement was violated, the producers of Funny Girl would still have to pay Fosse the rest of what he was owed (he was being paid $7,500, for which he'd receive $2,500 on signing, the rest in weekly intervals, plus three and a quarter percent of the box office gross per week). The contract seemed ironclad in its protections of Fosse, but although it was dated August 1, by the end of the month he still had not signed.

Part of the reason was his pique at Stark for his comments to Feuer and Martin, who had lost no time in repeating them back to Fosse. The director described himself as "stunned," though he felt the news simply "affirmed [his] previous suspicions." At first, he wondered if it was only Stark who was against him. Confiding his concerns to Barbra and Lennart, Fosse eventually came to the conclusion that "Stark had acted on his own." So, as the summer ended and the start of rehearsals approached, he was left unsure of whether he really wanted to sign on with a man he could not fundamentally trust.

Still, Fosse plowed on. Looking at the script in front of him, he read the new opening that Lennart had come up with. Previous versions had opened in a theater with f.a.n.n.y messing up a line of chorus girls. But in this new scene, Lennart had f.a.n.n.y walking in, crossing the stage, then turning to look at herself in a mirror. "h.e.l.lo, gorgeous," she deadpans sarcastically. Then she picks up a stick of greasepaint and draws a line across her cheek, the first step in making herself up as an Indian for a comedy skit.

The scene was terrific. Fosse agreed it should open the show. But he crossed out the greasepaint, letting the bit end on "h.e.l.lo, gorgeous." It seemed more powerful that way. What a terrific star entrance for Barbra Streisand.

10.

Usually Lake Tahoe sparkled in the sunlight as it stretched off to the snowcapped mountains on the horizon. But this morning, September 13, as the rental car headed north on Route 50, snaking along the lake's eastern edge, the sky was gray. Periodic sprinkles kept the winds.h.i.+eld wipers moving across the gla.s.s. Thunderstorms threatened, and temperatures edged into the nineties. Despite the mugginess, Barbra, Elliott, and the two Martys-Erlichman and Bregman-were on a mission that morning, heading out of the bustling town of South Lake Tahoe, California, and crossing the border into Nevada. There, in the capital, Carson City, Barbra and Elliott planned to get married.

That previous weekend, the Parade magazine profile had appeared, turning up on the kitchen tables of tens of millions of Americans. Lloyd Shearer had reported that Barbra and "her husband" had married the previous March and since then had moved into a New York penthouse together. It had been Elliott's love, Shearer surmised, that had "erased some of the insecurity of [Barbra's] former years" and "calmed down some of her earlier 'kookiness.'" Since a more serious, less kooky Barbra Streisand was something they all wanted the public to embrace, they were glad to promote the angle of "Elliott's love" if that's what it took.

But the lie was starting to rub just a little too close. They couldn't keep saying Barbra and Elliott were married when they weren't. Sooner or later, one of them would mess up in an interview, or some enterprising reporter would dig a little too deep. So they needed to get hitched and fast. And what better place than Nevada, which required no blood tests and had no community property laws? It might have been Friday the thirteenth, but it was also Marty Erlichman's birthday, so it seemed as good a day as any to tie the knot.

For Elliott, the decision to get married had seemed almost like a business arrangement. It was as if they "shook on it," he said. In some ways, given the publicity that increasingly made their marriage necessary, it was a business arrangement. From this point forward, Elliott understood he could not speak of Carson City. He couldn't give the date of September 13. He'd have to backdate the ceremony to the previous winter, and he'd have to lie that he'd flown not to the West Coast but to Florida, where they would make believe he and Barbra had married just before he'd set off for London. Of course, Elliott knew-they all must have known-that the ruse was only as tenable as the privacy laws governing Florida's public records.

Yet as the foursome drove up Route 50 in the rain, a white haze hanging over the lake to their left, they probably spoke about many other things besides the wedding. After all, the Parade piece had been Barbra's best publicity yet. If not as long or as detailed as the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post profile, it had reached many more people. Shearer had called Barbra "the hottest canary in the country." His subject, however, wasn't happy with the piece, feeling that it didn't spend enough time on her acting ambitions, and she probably spent at least part of the ride grumbling about it. Marty, no doubt, felt that Parade was great advertising for the alb.u.ms, but Barbra didn't like to read anything written about herself. No matter how glowing a piece might ultimately be, there was always some point, large or small, that she believed the writer hadn't understood or that should have been presented differently.

Even the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post article was unsatisfactory. "Most newcomers would be thrilled by a story in the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post," observed the columnist Barney Glazer, but not Barbra. She claimed that Hamill had "stretched the facts to make the copy more interesting." She vowed that from then on, she wouldn't give any more interviews unless she saw "the advance copy." Lee Solters obviously knew that wasn't always going to be possible, but he probably hadn't challenged her on her demand; that was never smart strategy with Barbra. Besides, she was getting famous enough that maybe someday she really could make such a demand and get away with it.

The Parade article had also reported that Barbra's earnings for 1964 would be "somewhere between four and six hundred thousand dollars." At Harrah's Lake Tahoe, where she was currently appearing, once again alongside Liberace, Barbra was making ten thousand dollars a week. And her second alb.u.m had just debuted on the Billboard chart. Everyone expected it would perform at least as well as the first.

Or maybe even better. Where The Barbra Streisand Alb.u.m had languished for months before getting its first write-ups, critics were waiting on tenterhooks for The Second Barbra Streisand Alb.u.m. "A fine new voice with an unusual quality and with tremendous acting ability," one reviewer wrote. Another opined, "The results are best described as thrilling." Billboard thought the disk had "precise phrasing, clarity of tone, and dramatic impact," and that Barbra took her listeners "on a fine vocal-coaster ride." These were "great tracks tailored for spins and sails," the trade journal concluded. Columbia was sparing no effort this time, taking out full-page ads featuring the covers of both alb.u.ms and the tagline: NOW THERE ARE TWO.

The alb.u.m deserved the praise it was getting. It was that rare soph.o.m.ore attempt that surpa.s.sed a superlative original. The raw s.e.xuality of "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home" seemed to jump off the vinyl; "Who Will Buy?" and "I Stayed Too Long at the Fair" startled listeners with their ageless poignancy, especially given Barbra's youth; and the pa.s.sionate "Gotta Move" exposed all of her ambition and willpower. Clearly Peter Matz was to Barbra what Nelson Riddle had been to Sinatra: an arranger who perfectly and intuitively understood her-"when to emphasize the bra.s.s for her 'belt' voice and when to float the vocal on a cus.h.i.+on of strings," as one writer observed. The many reviews that pointed out Barbra's dramatic acting efforts on the disk weren't just following Lee Solters's bullet points: these tracks really were miniature plays, and Barbra brilliantly interpreted every one of them. The excellence of the disk seemed to justify the control she'd seized in the studio and wielded over the defiant technicians. In her mind, she'd needed to take charge if she was to move from good to excellent. And now she had what she considered irrefutable proof that her way had been the right way. She wouldn't let Columbia forget it.

For her soon-to-be husband, life with a woman who believed her way was, ipso facto, the right way was never going to be easy. No doubt Elliott still had his doubts about the advantages of marriage, fearful of the "technical" impositions it might bring to "an otherwise viable relations.h.i.+p." But was their relations.h.i.+p still viable? That was the question. In London, Bob had witnessed the insecurities that bubbled beneath the surface. Other friends had seen-and heard-the arguments, "the boots being thrown across the room and the cascade of tears afterward."

But one intimate insisted that in the midst of "all the exciting things that were happening to her," Barbra still believed that "no one else was going to love her like Elliott did." And Elliott, like the little boy he'd once been who'd looked to his mother to solve all his problems, remained "fixed on Barbra," who was, to him, "like the sun, rising and setting." Elliott himself admitted that, despite all their difficulties and distance, he hadn't fallen out of love with Barbra. He was still besotted with her. Indeed, Arthur Laurents thought "something real ... held them together," even if it was fragile.

At the Ormsby County Courthouse, they brought the car to a stop. Stepping out and stretching their legs, they looked around and breathed in the slightly cooler air of the high desert. Carson City still resembled the frontier town it once had been. The streets were wide, the buildings were set far apart from each other, and many city and county officials wore different hats-not uncommon in a city of less than fifteen thousand inhabitants. The justice of the peace, who they'd come to see, was also the munic.i.p.al court judge, the city recorder, and the coroner. As they headed up the steps of the courthouse, a neocla.s.sical structure with four Tuscan columns out front, they would have discovered that the offices of the justice of the peace were on the first floor, while the second floor housed the sheriff and the jail cells.

Since marriages were only performed by appointment, Justice Pete Supera was waiting for them. A friendly, bespectacled man, Supera was in his third term as justice, having been elected twice without opposition. He'd told his wife that Barbra Streisand, the singer, was coming up from Lake Tahoe that morning to get married, and she'd hoped Pete might bring the couple to their home for the ceremony. But Barbra and Elliott didn't have much time; the courthouse would have to suffice. They said their vows and signed their names; Barbra, just to make sure everything was legal, gave the spelling as "Barbara" for the marriage certificate. The two Martys affixed their own signatures as witnesses. With a final nod and a handshake, Supera p.r.o.nounced Elliott and Barbra man and wife.

Barbra was now a married lady. One of the songs Styne and Merrill had written for Funny Girl was called "Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady," in which f.a.n.n.y Brice gushed over finally landing a man, swearing she'd do her "wifely job" and "sit at home, become a slob." But where Barbra might have shared some of f.a.n.n.y's thrill that the man she loved had slipped a ring on her finger, she no doubt also saw the irony in the rest of the song's lyrics. It wasn't Barbra who'd be sitting around doing her nails, as f.a.n.n.y imagined for herself, while her husband supported her in style. It would be, in fact, the very opposite. It would be Elliott for whom "all day the records play." And despite the kisses, hugs, and congratulations they all surely bestowed on each other, that little fact was almost certainly on their minds as they returned to that hot, sweaty car and headed back to Tahoe so Barbra could make her eight o'clock curtain.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Fall 1963

1.

The aroma of chlorine on her skin and in her hair, Barbra leaped onto Elliott's back, producing a great splash of water. Around them enormous palm trees shot up against a startlingly blue sky, ringing the sun-dappled swimming pool nestled inside the pink walls of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Barbra, in a bikini, her hair tied up on top of her head, was clinging to Elliott's torso as he hoisted her onto his right shoulder. They were standing in the shallow end of the pool.

On the deck, photographer Bob Willoughby was focusing his camera. Willoughby had made a name for himself photographing Judy Garland, and Begelman and Fields had arranged a shoot for him with their newest client. At some point, Willoughby suggested that Barbra climb up on Elliott's shoulders. But once she was up there, surely it was her idea to do what she did next.

Just as Willoughby snapped the picture, Barbra reached her left hand around to cover Elliott's face. The resulting photo revealed a small Mona Lisa smile on Barbra's face.

It was all in jest, of course. They were having fun. Lots of photos were taken that day. Lots of splas.h.i.+ng went on in the pool, lots of lounging was enjoyed poolside. At least for now, it was the closest to a honeymoon that Barbra and Elliott were going to get. They told reporters they hoped to escape to Italy before Barbra started rehearsals for Funny Girl-but at the moment the big question was if those rehearsals would happen at all. Yet again, there had been a major setback for the show, and Funny Girl faced the possibility of being postponed once more. As everyone knew, whenever a show was postponed, there was a chance it would never start up again.

Bob Fosse had resigned from the show. The press called it an "unexpected change," but Barbra likely saw it coming since Fosse had confided in her his continuing distrust of Stark. When Feuer and Martin, his producers on How to Succeed, asked him to direct their forthcoming musical, I Picked a Daisy, with a score by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, Fosse bolted. Stark, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, supervising the start of filming on The Night of the Iguana, was furious. "Cannot believe that [a] professional like you would attempt to quit show at this late date," he wired Fosse, demanding that the director fulfill his agreement or face an injunction. Stark warned of "losses running into the thousands of dollars" for which he insisted Fosse would be held liable.

The erstwhile director was not intimidated. Writing to Barbra, Lennart, Styne, and Merrill, Fosse expressed his desire to "just withdraw and leave to you any and all ideas" he had contributed so far. But the threatened lawsuit from Stark, he explained, precluded him from being "so generous at the moment." That left them exactly where they'd been when Robbins left: potentially starting over from scratch.

The restrictions placed on the script by Robbins had exacerbated Fosse's problems at the helm of Funny Girl. Shortly before he resigned, an itemized list of contributions made by his predecessor had been received from Robbins's lawyer, who was finally parrying Stark's legal maneuvers. Since Stark hadn't attended creative meetings, Robbins's lawyer had insisted, not only could he not say what Robbins's creative contributions were, he could also not say for sure that he "didn't make contributions." An "upset and angry" Robbins had tape-recorded an hour-long recitation of every single scene, line of dialogue, song change, and character suggestion he'd ever made during his time with the project. The "only practical resolution," Robbins's lawyer said, would be to pay his client royalties if even one word or one idea of his was used in the show.

With such an exhaustive catalog of contributions, it was clear that nearly every page of the script owed something to Robbins-an idea Isobel Lennart couldn't honestly challenge. Fosse may have felt the show was doomed, since the book was now in such drastic need of overhaul, though he couldn't admit that as a reason for wanting out. It was more strategic to pin the blame on Stark's backstabbing. "Mr. Stark imposed an atmosphere of distrust that I found too difficult to overcome," Fosse wrote to Barbra and his other collaborators, never mentioning that the contract he left unsigned contained precisely the kind of language he'd insisted upon as self-protection.

The show was once again without a director, and for all intents and purposes, given Robbins's threats, without a book. Just how rehearsals could begin in a matter of months was anybody's guess.

Barbra knew that her contract with David Merrick meant they'd have to pay her a pretty penny if they postponed the show. Not for nothing did Barbra's camp keep reminding the columnists-and through them, Stark and Merrick-that she was forfeiting a hundred grand in club dates by signing on for Funny Girl. But as much as she enjoyed having it, money was secondary to Barbra; it was the possibility of seeing this-her best and quite possibly only chance to star in a Broadway show-slip through her fingers that no doubt truly distressed her. Finis.h.i.+ng her Lake Tahoe gig, Barbra likely found the few days of lounging around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel very welcome indeed.

She still planned to head back to New York, however; no one had yet called off rehearsals. In fact, Carol Haney was still on the job as ch.o.r.eographer, already auditioning dancers. The deal that Fosse eventually struck with Stark had allowed them to use his ideas and contributions if the threat of a lawsuit was dropped and if they kept Haney on board. So, at least to the outside world, the show was proceeding apace. The columns continued to buzz over who might be Barbra's costar. Hedda Hopper reported that Hugh O'Brian was "ready to sign," then reversed herself and said Tony Martin was in as Nick. Mike Connolly claimed Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., was in the running; Walter Winch.e.l.l declared Nick was going to be played by Richard Kiley.

The one name no one ever mentioned was Elliott. He was clearly not viewed as a big enough name. But Elliott wasn't likely all that eager to play second fiddle to his wife, either. Indeed, he'd recognized that he needed to establish himself independent of Barbra, and so he had decided to stick around on the West Coast even after Barbra went back East, staying "long enough to make one serious Hollywood bid," he told columnist Barney Glazer. It would mean another separation from Barbra, but Elliott had to find a way to start bringing in some money to their household. Besides, Barbra wasn't leaving California for a while: she had the Garland show to do in a couple of weeks, plus the concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Hansel and Gretel could frolic in the pool a while longer-even if Gretel did tend to cover Hansel's face in photographs.

Meanwhile, Diana had sent them a wedding gift. She'd been saving for this day, a little bit from her paycheck over the years whenever she could afford it. She'd managed to acc.u.mulate $750. To Diana, that was a substantial sum with which to start married life. If her own mother had given her that much money when she married Emanuel, she would have been overjoyed and overwhelmed. Barbra expressed her thanks, of course, but her mother's gift hardly registered among the multiple savings and investment accounts now being managed by Marty Bregman. The truth was, Barbra didn't need any money from Diana. What she needed from her mother was something else entirely, but she had long ago stopped hoping to get it.

2.

As she'd been doing for the last few weeks, Judy Garland was playing The Barbra Streisand Alb.u.m, becoming familiar with the young singer-twenty years her junior-who'd be appearing on her show. It was the first day of rehearsals, and Barbra would be arriving at the CBS Television City studios at Fairfax and Beverly within moments, if she wasn't already there. When musical director Mel Torme walked into Garland's dressing room, he found the star singing along to "Happy Days Are Here Again"-except that she was singing her own song "Get Happy" from the movie Summer Stock. Torme thought the combination sounded "electrifying" and decided on the spot that Judy and Barbra should sing the two songs in counterpoint on the show. Garland smiled. That had been her plan all along. She had just wanted it to be somebody else's idea, in case Barbra didn't like it.

At forty-one, Garland looked a decade older. Pills, alcohol, heartache, illness, roller-coaster dieting-and the recent ongoing battles with her husband over their children-had all taken their toll. This television show, for which she'd now taped eight episodes, was supposed to make her rich. That was what Begelman and Fields had promised. Garland was always broke, due to bad financial management and overspending. She envied male contemporaries such as Bing Crosby and Bob Hope who were rolling in the dough, much of it earned in television. This show, she hoped, would change all that. Her agents had never been wrong before.

But problems had arisen almost from the start. Garland's first producer was fired after six weeks, and another crew was brought in. The format of the show went through several changes before it made it on the air. CBS President James T. Aubrey, Jr.-known as "the Smiling Cobra"-never liked the program. The network was spending a great deal of money on Garland: $100,000 to refurbish the stage alone. In addition, Garland's dressing room was an elaborate one-hundred-ten-foot-long trailer decorated to resemble the star's Brentwood home, and the hallway leading from the dressing room to the stage was a replica of the Yellow Brick Road from The Wizard of Oz. Only if the show turned out to be a huge ratings. .h.i.t would Aubrey feel the expense had been worth it.

The first episode had just aired on September 29. Although the official ratings weren't in, overnight projections had showed Garland coming in second to NBC's western drama, Bonanza. Still, supporters pointed out that in certain markets, such as Philadelphia, Garland had been number one, and nearly everywhere she'd left all other rivals in the dust, including the crime drama Arrest and Trial on ABC. That wasn't a bad start at all. The reviews, however, had been decidedly mixed. Most seemed to feel Garland herself was "in fine fettle," but no one seemed to like her comic foil, Jerry Van d.y.k.e. The writing and pacing of the show came under fire.

Perhaps there were those at Television City who recalled the reviews for The Keefe Bra.s.selle Show that had described Barbra as "a one-woman recovery operation." Certainly Barbra had always been a standout guest on all her previous television spots. So it was with tremendous enthusiasm that Torme and Norman Jewison, Garland's producer, welcomed Barbra to the show. With the possible exception of Lena Horne, with whom they'd taped an episode in July, Barbra was the most exciting, most talked-about guest they'd had on their brand-new revolving stage since they'd started production. Everyone was hoping Barbra could bring a little of the razzle-dazzle she'd bestowed upon Bra.s.selle and Garry Moore and Dinah Sh.o.r.e-and the ratings and the reviews as well.

In her trailer at the end of the mock Yellow Brick Road, Garland wasn't unaware of the excitement being generated by the arrival of this Streisand kid. She was "nervous and anxious and jealous," one friend, Tucker Fleming, observed. Looking at her face in the mirror, Garland ran her fingers down the wrinkles and creases she saw there, clearly aware of the youthful features of the singer she would soon be rehearsing with. It was one thing to perform alongside her own seventeen-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli, as Garland had done on a previous show, taped and waiting to be broadcast. But the only other female guests she'd had on the show so far had been Horne and June Allyson. Garland was "very aware of how she looked" as compared to the twenty-one-year-old Streisand, and "it made her very insecure and anxious," Fleming said.