Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 47

Of all the changes Robbins brought to the show, nothing was more crucial than the insights he gave to the actors about the characters they were playing, something Kanin, apparently, hadn't done. This was what Barbra had been craving. "Everything we know of [f.a.n.n.y] must be shown," Robbins told her, in words that could have come straight from her Theatre Studio cla.s.ses, "not a.n.a.lyzed in talk and thus 'forgiven' or 'understood.'" The trick wasn't to find a plot device to explain f.a.n.n.y's foolishness in choosing (and staying with) Nick, but to make her real enough that the audience sympathized with her without needing any of that. "It must be put into action," Robbins told Barbra. "Go, move, need, fight, want, fear, love, hate. We love [f.a.n.n.y] not for her understanding, but from ours of her. Don't beg off!"

These sessions with Barbra showed just how completely the two personas, Barbra's and f.a.n.n.y's, had merged. Robbins explained to her that Nick needed f.a.n.n.y so he could "feel needed and strong," while f.a.n.n.y needed Nick "to feel worthy and feminine." One couldn't get much closer to a description of Barbra and Elliott, but there was still more to come. Robbins put together a list of f.a.n.n.y's beliefs about herself: "I'm a dog. I get reaction through making people react to me. I can make them laugh or cry. I get even this way [Robbins's emphasis]. I win their love. I must feel wanted. There is a large sensitive hole that needs filling up." That last one, in particular, must have resonated with Barbra, echoing the line from Medea that she'd carried around with her for so long.

Whether Robbins knew how closely he was delineating Barbra's own life isn't clear. But the best directors, and that would certainly describe Robbins, always knew their actors inside and out. With so much focus over the last six months on conflating star and subject, Robbins must have been aware that he was asking Barbra not so much to create a character but to play herself-or at least to play the self that had seeped into the public consciousness by now. Yet Robbins's descriptions went to the core of who Barbra was, to parts of herself that she kept hidden from her public and even from her friends. "f.a.n.n.y has made out well with all the boys," Robbins told Barbra, after believing for so long that she could never accomplish such a feat. She has even won "the best-looking" of them. But "then, having had them, finding she could get them, she threw them over with contempt because she thought them fools for wanting her."

Was that what Barbra was doing with Elliott? Was it what Robbins thought she was doing with him? Certainly the dynamic was there in the show, layered into the character of f.a.n.n.y, and it didn't take long to find other comparisons. Nick, like Elliott, had "the seeds of self-destruction in him." His attraction to f.a.n.n.y "will either cure him or kill him." At its core, Robbins argued, this was the "story of a strong woman who, to feel like a woman, picks an elegant, loving but weak man-and her own strength corrupts and kills his love and manliness." That seemed to be precisely what was happening with Elliott. And with Sydney, too, as his selfish, masculine pride was wounded by the greater acclaim given to Barbra.

That dynamic between the lovers wasn't helped by what Robbins did next. Despite the decent reviews Sydney had gotten in Philadelphia, it was clear that Lennart had never solved the essential problem of Nick's character. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? Was he n.o.ble or weak? He may have been all of those, but there simply wasn't enough material in the book to show him in any complexity. Since it was too late to rewrite very much, the answer was simply to cut. Sydney had a major number in the second act, "Sleep Now, Baby Bunting," in which he sang a lullaby to his newborn daughter, bitterly calling himself "Mr. f.a.n.n.y Brice." The number was key to his character, explaining his resentment at being married to a woman who was more successful than he was. But Robbins cut it. His decision may have saved Elliott from squirming in his seat when he saw the show, but it also left Sydney with just two songs, both of which were duets with Barbra. He was not pleased.

But Ray Stark was. Back in New York, at a cost of ten thousand dollars, he'd erected an enormous, block-long sign announcing Funny Girl over the Winter Garden Theatre, giving it "several extra coats of paint," Dorothy Kilgallen reported, "because he's confident of a long, long run." He was telling Robbins he was a genius and that "for the first time since the show started, he was able to have two dinners and go to the movies over the weekend." He couldn't believe what Robbins had done "for the morale of the company." Stark had to put all of this in letters to Robbins's secretary and ask that it be conveyed to him, however, because Robbins made it a point to spend as little time with Stark as possible.

But the combative producer could afford to be generous in his praise for his old adversary. Advance ticket sales for Funny Girl were averaging twenty thousand dollars a day. That was a very good thing, too, as the newspapers pointed out: given how much Stark had had to pay Merrick, plus "the top figure deal with the high-priced Jerome Robbins," plus whatever deal had been worked out with Kanin, plus all the delays, Funny Girl was likely to arrive on Broadway as "the highest budgeted musical on record." Some were estimating Stark's costs to be in excess of half a million dollars.

And to think it all depended on one small, now slightly chubby, twenty-one-year-old kid.

7.

In her dressing room at the Erlanger, Barbra took the call from Earl Wilson herself. No, she told him firmly, denying yet again the story that she was pregnant. This was getting tedious. Wilson promised he'd print her denial.

Barbra's new alb.u.m had just been released, but all these newspapermen wanted to talk about was whether or not she was expecting a baby. Even the record columns weren't giving her much ink, at least not compared to the last time she'd released a record. Maybe that was because her third alb.u.m was fated to go head-to-head with the Beatles, which were all anybody seemed to want to talk about. But Barbra knew the alb.u.m was good, maybe her best yet. Among the tracks she'd chosen this time were more traditional standards, giving in to those who complained her "standards" were usually too offbeat. So she sang "My Melancholy Baby," "As Time Goes By," "It Had to Be You," and, of course, "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered." She worked with Peter Matz again, and her voice was pristine and supremely confident. It was the work of an artist who had found her groove and enjoyed an easy, smooth mastery over her many gifts. The songs together took the listener on a journey from longing to joy, from grief to hope. The gift for conveying a depth of emotion far greater than her years, displayed early on in Barbra's career, had clearly never left her and, in fact, had deepened.

She called it, naturally, The Third Alb.u.m. Kilgallen had reported that someone from Barbra's team, maybe Solters or Marty, had told her they were planning on calling it The Fourth Barbra Streisand Alb.u.m. That way, the fans would be "das.h.i.+ng into the record stores asking for the third Barbra Streisand alb.u.m, which doesn't exist," Kilgallen said, calling it a "great gimmick." But if anyone ever really considered such an idea, sanity prevailed. It was a cla.s.s act all the way. Barbra even gave Peter Daniels credit on "Bewitched." Roddy McDowall's adorable shot of Barbra in her mids.h.i.+pman's blouse from the Garland show was used as the cover. Sammy Cahn, following in the tradition of Arlen and Styne, wrote the liner notes.

Once again, Barbra had insisted on complete control of the production, getting her fingers into everything from "the arrangements, the cover, the copy, the editing." This time, there were fewer complaints about her involvement. The early reviews, once again, seemed to justify all her efforts. "Every moment in the alb.u.m is an exciting musical experience," Billboard wrote. Syndicated record reviewer Al Price, in his "Platter Chatter" column, thought it possessed a "spellbinding effect ... that is hard to describe." The Third Alb.u.m had landed on the charts at number 110, but by the next week, it was at 53. Maybe not Beatles-style velocity, but it was still quite respectable.

Barbra knew she had a good product, especially when she compared it to her first alb.u.m, which now embarra.s.sed her, she said. For all its freshness and youthful vitality, the first alb.u.m was not as polished or as emotionally deep as her second and third outings. Barbra cringed remembering how she'd ended "Happy Days" on that first disk, wailing "oooooo, aaaaaay," and her voice cracking. She'd been "yearning for just so much" back then, she said, that she could hear it in her voice, "very young, very high, very thin, like a bird."

Of course, she'd never felt much a part of the music industry and that was even more the case now, competing with the likes of the Beatles, and Joan Baez, and even fourteen-year-old Stevie Wonder, who all wrote their own music or played their own instruments. Barbra admitted to feeling a little bit "inadequate [about] singing other people's songs." There was also the generational conflict. The teenagers who were buying millions of copies of Meet the Beatles! weren't also buying The Third Alb.u.m. That was left up to a rather eclectic group of housewives, gay men, theater aficionados, and artistic types, of which only a small percentage were likely teenagers. And yet Barbra was the same age as Paul McCartney, and two years younger than John Lennon and Ringo Starr. She might indeed be "a mixture of old and new," as she called herself in one interview, but her newness didn't seem to have the same impact on the youth market as Baez or the Beatles did.

That was significant because the success of those acts had demonstrated there was a huge, untapped slice of the market out there. Teenagers had always been a subset of the record-buying audience, driving the sales of Elvis Presley and other rock-and-rollers. But they had not been the major force of sales. Now, as the "baby boomers"-those born in the decade after the end of World War II-reached their teens, it was becoming increasingly clear that the future of the music industry lay with young people. Barbra's age and her iconoclasm should have made her a natural favorite for this group. But her music-chosen for her by her theater and nightclub handlers-was their parents' music.

A poll taken of teenagers at the end of the previous year-before the Beatles' breakout-showed that their favorite female singers were Connie Francis, Joan Baez, Brenda Lee, Connie Stevens, and Lesley Gore. Only Lee and Gore were younger than Barbra. And only when teenagers were asked about stars of the future did Barbra turn up at all: the kids predicted Gore, Peggy March, and Barbra, in that order. Folk music was their favorite genre, beating out rock and pop. If taken in March 1964, the poll likely would have showed a different result, given the unprecedented success of the Beatles. But the point remained: Barbra was no folk singer, and she was even less a rock-and-roller. Exactly where and how could she compete in an industry dominated by teenagers? As her third alb.u.m made its way up the charts, only time would tell.

Such speculation, however, was better left to her managers and publicists. For Barbra, one goal predominated: getting Funny Girl to Broadway in one piece. As she headed out of her dressing room, she may have run into Sydney, as she often did, on her way to the stage. He still liked to tell her that she was brilliant and gorgeous. He may have whispered it again in her ear. But the truth was, with all the glowing reviews, she didn't really need to hear it anymore. Her confidence didn't need that extra boost. And Sydney realized that. It made him feel "less necessary, less important," Orson Bean understood. It was a feeling Elliott Gould could have empathized with.

To Bean, Sydney would share his suspicions on why his amorous relations.h.i.+p with Barbra had suddenly cooled in those last few days in Philadelphia. "Once his numbers were cut and the show didn't need him as much," Bean said, "Sydney felt Barbra wasn't in love with him anymore."

He may have been right. Besides, they were going back to New York. And Barbra had a husband waiting for her there.

8.

The block-long sign announcing Funny Girl above the Winter Garden on Broadway had been weathering in the rain, snow, sun, and city soot for the past several weeks as the premiere was delayed yet again, from March 24 to March 26. The show still wasn't ready. At least the company was now back in New York under the Winter Garden's roof, and curious theatergoers were flocking to the previews in order to get a peek at the show in development before Jerry Robbins froze it on opening night.

Backstage, Barbra greeted the well-wishers who thronged the hallway and pushed their way into her dressing room, many bearing flowers. No one seemed to be waiting for the official premiere. Already there was buzz that Barbra was a hit. Word was spreading about the elaborate way she took her curtain calls, "like rituals performed in a Buddhist temple," Dorothy Kilgallen said. Most of the columnists had come to see the show; it seemed there wasn't anyone of any standing or influence in the theatrical community who hadn't been by. "The craze to get in ahead of time" made fas.h.i.+on columnist Eugenia Sheppard nostalgic for "the old days when any kind of opening was a big thrill." Now, she said, the official opening night was "for squares."

Of course, no newspaper would publish a review quite yet, but they did send reporters to check things out. On this night, Joanne Stang of the New York Times observed the procession of people trooping into Barbra's dressing room to tell her how magnificent she'd been out on the stage. Shouldering his way through them came Jule Styne, who told Barbra he was concerned that the show still ran too long. In his opinion, they "should cut at least twenty-eight minutes." While all this was going on, Barbra was being fussed over by "a press agent, a personal manager, a photographer, a maid, a dressmaker, and two costume a.s.sistants waving swatches of fabrics." Each one received her attention in turn, and she dealt with each issue they raised in a quiet manner. Then the new script for the next day was delivered to her, with requests from Robbins and Lennart that she "go over the new changes right away."

As the crowd dispersed from the room, Stang watched as Barbra stretched out on an army cot covered in pink sheets in the corner of the room. She began flipping through the script. "We had three new scenes in the second act tonight," she told Stang, "so I'm a little tired." But she was loving it. She loved getting new scripts with different things to say and do and sing every night. Robbins was still scribbling notes during each and every performance and going over them with the cast and crew the next day. Sometimes the changes were big-a whole new scene-and sometimes they were small-a rewrite of a line. But Barbra loved the challenge of something new every night.

There had been new lyrics to "I'm the Greatest Star" that had come and gone. There had been a new version of "Cornet Man" that had stuck. "Downtown Rag" had been replaced with an entirely new number, "Henry Street." Robbins had even asked Carol Haney to come in and fix the ending of "Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat" and put a finish on "Find Yourself a Man," Mrs. Brice's humorous number in the second act, yet another attempt to liven up the show's last hour, though whether Haney came is unclear.

And every morning Robbins arrived at Barbra's dressing room with a handful of notes just for her. He had reversed his earlier objections and come to the conclusion that Barbra should sing "People" alone. No longer, apparently, did he find it "too strong a come-on." After the performance on March 2, Robbins had also cautioned his leading lady against seeming "too desperate" at the ending of "Greatest Star." After the performance on the fifth, Robbins had asked Barbra for more concentration in the mirror before she said, "h.e.l.lo, gorgeous." A few days later, he was telling her to wait longer for the laugh after Nick's line, "I'm minding them for a friend." And sometimes, Robbins said, there was just "too much Mae West" in her f.a.n.n.y Brice.

After they had started the New York previews on the tenth, Robbins's criticism had gotten sharper. He told Barbra to stand up straight during "Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat," and to let the curtain hit the floor before she exited. She needed to be less harsh on the line "Whatever he tells me to do, I'll do," and at the end of the bride blackout, where f.a.n.n.y shocks the audience by showing up pregnant in a wedding dress, Robbins wanted Barbra to hold her pose longer. She should shrug before the line "I would have ordered roast beef and potatoes" and laugh after the line "I'm not bossy," because she knew she was. Lines such as "Oy, what a day I had" the director wanted to be more Jewish, and Barbra "should be more elegant, like a showgirl" during "Sadie." And after watching Barbra play f.a.n.n.y's farewell scene with Eddie, an exhausted Robbins handed her a note with just one short bit of feedback: "Barbra-cla.s.s!"

But the biggest problem in Barbra's performance, it seemed, was how she related to Sydney. "What are you playing while Sydney sings 'You Are Woman'?" Robbins asked her with some befuddlement. The scene just didn't work; Ray Stark even sent Robbins a memo complaining that it was no longer "getting the laughs it used to," that the "small laughs" were "killing the big laughs." The chemistry between the two players seemed suddenly off. A week later, Robbins was still asking the same question: "What are you playing?" Taking both his leads aside, Robbins rehea.r.s.ed them extra hard, just the three of them in the room. The problems weren't confined to "You Are Woman." The railroad scene, where f.a.n.n.y and Nick part and the audience is supposed to feel their heartache, wasn't working either. Robbins encouraged Barbra and Sydney to rehea.r.s.e all their scenes together on their own. No longer was he complaining about too much kissing. Now he wanted more pa.s.sion, a quality that had seemed to evaporate in the past couple of weeks.

Very possibly, what the director was picking up on was the cooling of the affair between his two leads. Barbra had begun to distance herself from Sydney, and he was both hurt and angry. No doubt, too, he was frustrated by the fact that Robbins kept singling him out for criticism. The essential problem of Nick as a character had never been solved. Robbins was still trying to figure out "how to make Nick a wheeler-dealer and still make him sympathetic." One idea was to make him funnier with the addition of some new dialogue on the twentieth: "Whose oil well?" f.a.n.n.y asks. "Our oil well," Nick replies. "When does our oil well start producing?" f.a.n.n.y wants to know. "As soon as we dig it," Nick tells her. Robbins worried what the critics would say about Sydney after the official opening night.

Barbra, however, didn't need to wait that long to know what her reviews would be. The audience's reaction at every preview told her all she needed to know. Joanne Stang of the Times had been struck at how some people had stood on their seats to applaud Barbra at the end. Indeed, starting on the seventeenth, the notes Robbins sent to Barbra were more compliments than critiques. Even Bob Merrill had come around. The lyricist had been impressed with Barbra's progress in the show, "astounded by the way she had refined all the rough edges," his wife said. Merrill believed Barbra had "metamorphosed from an angry, rebellious kid to an elegant, polished, powerful performer with the ability to transmit great emotion-maybe even more than he and Jule had written," his wife thought.

Outside the theater, however, things weren't quite so sanguine. The five delays Funny Girl had endured had left ticket agents and theatergoers unhappy. Stark couldn't deny they faced "the wrath of the public." Notifying customers of changed dates meant considerable extra costs and clerical work; so far, the show's delays were estimated to have added close to one hundred thousand dollars to its costs, bringing total production expenses to more than six hundred thousand. They were still in the black, since about nine hundred thousand dollars in advance sales had already been made. But it was a very small cus.h.i.+on of comfort.

No doubt the numbers made Ray Stark anxious. That could explain the night he made a beeline for Barbra's dressing room after one preview-he had gotten surprisingly fast on those crutches-and began shouting at her in a "shrill and high-pitched" voice, as one company member overheard. On the twentieth, he had complained to Robbins about a lack of depth in Barbra's performance of certain scenes; maybe he was frustrated that he hadn't seen an improvement. Whatever his reasons, he was unhappy, and let Barbra know it in no uncertain terms.

Barbra had her own grievances with the producer. While she was pleased that Stark and Seven Arts had decided that she should play f.a.n.n.y in the inevitable movie version of Funny Girl, she wasn't happy about the terms of the deal, and neither were Begelman and Fields. True, it was reportedly "one of the biggest deals ever given an actress for her first film role"-one million dollars was the figure being bandied about-but it came with a catch: Barbra would be, in effect, Stark's personal property for the next eight years. Most actresses just starting out in pictures would have been thrilled by the job security; but Barbra, of course, was not most actresses. She knew that the four pictures she'd be required to make for Stark would be, "in essence," his choices; Barbra would only get to make films that Stark green-lighted, and she'd already discovered how often they failed to see eye to eye on things.

Just as he had with the contract for the show, Stark had played hardball. If Barbra didn't want to sign the long-term contract, then she wouldn't play f.a.n.n.y Brice in the movie version of Funny Girl. There was precedent. When Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had been made into a film, Howard Hawks hadn't used Carol Channing, who'd been a smash as Lorelei Lee on Broadway. Instead, he'd hired Marilyn Monroe. When, just this past year, George Cukor had cast My Fair Lady, he hadn't gone with Julie Andrews, even though she'd been such a hit in the part on the stage. He'd hired Audrey Hepburn. There were plenty of big Hollywood names who would jump at playing f.a.n.n.y Brice in the movie version-Anne Bancroft, perhaps?-and Barbra knew it.

She resented being backed into a corner like that. It was one of the things she disliked most about show business. Ray Stark had become both benefactor and bete noire. To Barbra, he was "a real character, an original." Without his early champions.h.i.+p, she would not have been sitting in that dressing room at the Winter Garden Theatre. But ever since the contract battles of the previous fall, the relations.h.i.+p between producer and leading lady had turned into what she called a "love-hate" tug-of-war. Stark could be a bully, Barbra admitted. For all his charm, for all his patrician good manners, there were those who remembered how he'd shoved and kicked a photographer at Idlewild Airport who'd tried to take his and Fran's photograph. For all his graciousness, there were those who thought he behaved terribly to his own son, Peter, a dreamy, artistic boy whom Stark was always trying to toughen up by browbeating him in public. No doubt that Ray Stark could be a bully, and Barbra felt she was being bullied over the movie contract.

She appealed to Fields for help. "Look, if you're prepared to lose it," her agent told her, "then we can say sorry, we'll sign only one picture at a time." But Barbra was "not prepared to lose it." She knew the risks. She didn't want to be Carol Channing or Julie Andrews. So she signed the four-picture deal with Stark and had been resentful about it ever since.

That could explain why, when Stark started shouting at her in her dressing room, Barbra had a simple reply: "f.u.c.k you." She'd cursed similarly at Kanin, but directing the words at Stark was a much bigger deal.

"You can't say that to me," the producer sputtered.

"This is my dressing room," Barbra said, "and I'm saying it to you."

Later, she'd express amazement with herself for her words, but she didn't have to worry about any real repercussions. She was untouchable, at least until the show premiered.

9.