Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 48

At last, Elliott had a job. He would play the Jester in Carol Burnett's television adaptation of her hit Broadway show Once Upon a Mattress. Joe Layton was set to direct, which was probably how Elliott had gotten the part. It might be just a supporting role, but it was a job. With a paycheck.

Three months ago, a job for Elliott would have been cause for joyous celebration between Barbra and him, and maybe they did celebrate now. But there was a good deal of other emotion weighing them down at the moment that may have kept the corks from popping. Elliott had heard the stories about Barbra's affair with Sydney. There had been some blind items in the columns that could only have meant the two of them. And when Elliott had confronted Barbra with the rumors, she hadn't denied them.

On March 17, Mike Connolly wrote, "The stories about the domestic status of Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould are sad," but just what those sad stories were, he didn't elaborate. Whatever his feelings about the affair, Elliott obviously didn't think it warranted the end of the marriage. In public, no matter their "sad domestic status," the Goulds put on happy faces. Elliott was frequently present at the Winter Garden, especially as opening night drew closer, posing for pictures with Barbra. It was from observing Elliott during this difficult period that Jerry Robbins formed some lasting impressions of Barbra's husband. "He handles it all very, very well," Robbins said. "Elliott is a gentleman."

10.

On March 26, Funny Girl finally opened on Broadway.

Tenacious radio reporter Fred Robbins kept thrusting his mike in Barbra's face as she prepared to go on stage. "So how do you feel?" he asked her.

"Nervous," she replied, p.r.o.nouncing it in heavy Brooklynese- "noivous." Already she was in character.

"Just nervous?" Robbins pressed.

"Yeah, not much more. We've had many openings already."

For Barbra, it was all rather anticlimactic. In some ways she felt that the show had "been open about two years." The only real difference tonight was all the press swarming around the place, and the knowledge that there would be no more rewrites, no new scenes to rehea.r.s.e. They'd frozen the show into place last night.

"You've been projected to the highest echelon of performers," Fred Robbins was saying. "How have you been able to adjust to it?"

"I haven't thought about it," Barbra replied. "I mean, I'm the same person. Things don't change me. I'm not impressed by things. With added success comes added problems."

"In your wildest dreams did you think this would happen?"

The look Barbra must have shot him was undoubtedly cla.s.sic. "Of course," she said, and went off to do the show.

In her dressing room sat telegrams from the famous. "Dear Barbra," Natalie Wood had cabled. "All the best tonight because you are." Ed Sullivan had wired, "Barb, I brought you up to Fifty-third Street, now you've slipped back to Fiftieth Street, so we are not making progress. Every wonderful wish." The place was filled with flowers from Jack Benny, Harold Arlen, Ethel Merman, and so many others that the vases were lined out into the hall. Barbra could never keep them all. She'd have to give some away to the stagehands.

Out in the theater, the audience was filling up, and despite the presence of some high-profile celebrities-Merman, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards, Lee Radziwill, Jacob Javits, diplomat and civil rights activist Ralph Bunche-Eugenia Sheppard thought that "fas.h.i.+on wise," the opening was a "flop ... compared with the glamorous previews that had gone before." But this was the show that really counted, and the house was packed with those who wanted to witness Barbra's big night. Such crowds would be the norm for the foreseeable future: the Winter Garden was back to making between fifteen and eighteen thousand dollars a day in advance ticketing.

As people took their seats, they were handed their Playbills, Barbra and Sydney on the cover, as themselves, not in character, in a serene pose, Barbra wearing pearls. She looked quite pretty and extraordinarily young. Yet inside, her biography reflected her new maturity. There were no mentions of Madagascar or Turkey, though she did claim to play field hockey and string crystal beads for sale in a Vermont general store. "For more personal information," the reader was told, "write to her mother."

The program also reflected the compromise that had been reached between Stark, Robbins, Kanin, and Haney. The show was still "directed by" Kanin and "musical staging" was still by Haney, but the special billing-"production supervised by Jerome Robbins," in the same point size as the other credits-told Broadway insiders all they needed to know.

Backstage, Robbins had left a note for the cast. "You can be my bagel on a plateful of onion rolls anytime! Love, luck, and many thanks, Jerry."

The overture was playing. Barbra had done this first scene many times now, in rehearsals, in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York previews. But tonight there were people out there with little pencils writing in critics' notebooks.

Sitting in the audience was Ray Kennedy, a thirty-year-old writer for Time magazine. "Barbra Streisand crosses the stage," he wrote, "stopping in the center to gaze out over the audience, her look preoccupied. She gives a shrug and goes off. In the moment's pause before she disappears as quickly as she came, she leaves an image in the eye-of a carelessly stacked girl with a long nose and bones awry, wearing a lumpy brown leopard-trimmed coat and looking like the star of nothing. But there is something in her clear, elliptical gaze that is beyond resistance. It invites too much sympathy to be as aggressive as it seems. People watching it can almost hear the last few ticks before Barbra Streisand explodes."

Sympathy and aggression-perhaps the two elemental components of Barbra's success. And explode, of course, was exactly what she was about to do.

"h.e.l.lo, gorgeous," Barbra said into the mirror when she returned to the stage.

The show was underway.

Even from just a night or two before, it was different. The last half hour of the show Barbra would carry almost entirely on her own. She had three solo numbers in a row, right up to the last reprise of "Don't Rain on My Parade," just before the curtain. With the exception of Kay Medford, who still had a song about her character ("Find Yourself a Man"), all the other parts and musical numbers now existed solely in service to f.a.n.n.y's character. The show would hit or miss because of Barbra and Barbra alone.

It hit. The laughs came in all the right places, the songs reached every note perfectly. Kennedy thought Barbra turned "the air around her into a cloud of tired ions." As she sang the last lines of the night-"n.o.body, no, n.o.body is gonna rain on my parade!"-the audience seemed unable to restrain themselves, applauding even before she was done, jumping to their feet, shouting and yelling as the curtain came down. This time Barbra made sure to wait until it touched the floor before she moved from the spot.

Then, suddenly, chaos. It was impossible to move backstage. Barbra's dressing room swarmed with press and well-wishers. Ethel Merman bounded in to pose for a photo with the new star. But Barbra had to get over to the big extravaganza Ray Stark was hosting at the Rainbow Room, at the top of the RCA Building, sixty-five floors high above Rockefeller Center. Already Lainie Kazan and Sharon Vaughn had made their way there, greeted by an army of photographers, flashbulbs popping, people shouting. Hundreds of invited guests were being treated to dinner and dancing with a live orchestra, all on Stark's dime.

Fred Robbins was weaving in and out of the crowd with his microphone, corraling the famous, drinks in hand, to comment for his radio show about what they had seen and heard that night.

"She has everything that I will call a star," declared Sophie Tucker. "From now on, nothing will stop Barbra Streisand."

Jason Robards was "stunned" by her performance. "I felt, you know, what am I doing? This twenty-one-year-old girl has all this talent and cla.s.s."

Robards's wife, Lauren Bacall, agreed. "I saw the best thing I ever saw in my life in that girl. She can act, she can sing, she has an electric personality, which is what makes a star."

The princ.i.p.als were arriving, and the radio interviewer hurried over to them. "We've written some songs," Jule Styne said as he came in with Bob Merrill, "and we heard them really sung tonight by Barbra Streisand. She's one of the greatest singers of my time, and I've heard them all."

Merrill added, "She's going to be in the theater for a long, long time. The theater needs Barbra Streisand and she needs the theater."

Then came Stark, walking with a cane. "The show seems to have gone very, very well," he said, in that soft-spoken, measured voice of his. "I think Barbra was brilliant."

Someone pointed out to Robbins a small woman looking a bit lost. "Well, Mama Streisand," the radioman asked, approaching Diana with his microphone, "what do you think of this whole thing?"

"Well, I'm terribly elated," she replied.

"Where does the spark come from?"

"Actually," Diana said, holding nothing back, "her singing would come from her mother and her acting ability would also come from her mother. Her intelligence, however"-she laughed-"stems from her dear father, who was a PhD who helped many pupils on the road to gain self-respect."

Robbins commented that if only Barbra's father had lived to see this night.

Diana seemed uncomfortable with the sentiment. "Oh, he ... ," she said. "Well, he's just with us right now."

Earl Wilson also grabbed the star's mother, whom he described as "overlooking the lights of the city her twenty-one-year-old daughter had just captured." He asked her if she'd taken the "a" out of Barbra's name. Diana seemed to bristle at the question. "She left it out, I didn't. She's a riot. Always was. She had a ninety-three average in school but always seemed to do the wrong things." She paused. "Till now."

A commotion at the entrance signaled the star had arrived. Barbra came into the room on Elliott's arm, "her face stiff, her backbone stiffer," one reporter thought. When she spotted someone she knew in the crowd, Barbra's features "contorted with relief for a moment." But then she was led away by Elliott into the crush of television lights and cameras. Some a.s.sistants ran on ahead, clearing a path so she could walk, while others surged in behind her. Barbra no longer seemed to be moving on her own accord. Rather, she seemed "swept and lifted into the ballroom."

"You tired, honey?" Fred Robbins asked her, his microphone back in her face.

"Yeah, I'm exhausted." Her voice sounded it. "I hate opening nights. Just horrible."

What she hated was the judging, she told Robbins, and the fact that the pressures of opening night "cut off" people's "emotional reaction" to the show. That was what she wanted-emotional reaction-not a microphone in her face. Elliott saw his wife's discomfort, saw the way "people were pawing her, sticking mikes down her bosom, telling her things she couldn't believe." This-all the cameras and the lights and the crush of people-hadn't been part of the dream. The show, yes, and the creation of the character and the applause and the good reviews and the declarations that she was great, very much yes. But not this. "All those cameras and lights" scared her, she said. The Rainbow Room's guest of honor just wanted to go home.

Then Barbra spotted her mother and rushed up to her. "Mama!" she said. "You didn't bring chicken soup."

"To the Rockefellers' nice building?" Diana replied.

They embraced. For all Barbra's problems with her mother, Diana was at least familiar to her. She was at least real.