Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisa Part 49

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Spring 1964

1.

Barbra came gliding down the winding staircase from her tower bedroom wearing a padded lemon-silk robe, "looking as stylized and elegant as a j.a.panese empress," her visitor thought, "the mannered effect jarred by a kitchen spoon of tomato-dripping stew in her slender hand."

An interior decorator thrust a handful of swatches at her. "Which flocking for the foyer?" he asked.

Barbra glanced over at the swatches and pointed out the ones she liked, all while compiling a shopping list in her head. "Mayonnaise, garbage bags," she itemized to herself. Barbra hadn't gotten as far in her career as she had without knowing how to accomplish more than one thing at a time.

Her visitor that day was Shana Alexander, a writer for Life magazine and, not incidentally, the daughter of Milton Ager, the man who'd written "Happy Days Are Here Again." Alexander had arrived at Barbra's duplex to write a cover story on the young woman who'd taken Broadway by storm, and she had walked into the middle of a major decoration project. After nine months in the place, Barbra had decided it was high time to get the apartment furnished and decorated.

"Didja see the bed yet?" Barbra asked Alexander. "Upstairs. It's the first thing that we bought."

But the bed, for all its Elizabethan grandness, was nearly bare. Upholsterers were busy fluttering around it, considering ideas. Barbra told them she wanted the entire bed "draped and skirted with olive-gold damask," and the top should be folded so that it made "a crown, with sort of ta.s.sels hanging down." And she wanted "a red fur bedspread," and damask curtains surrounding the bed that could either be pulled to enclose her or looped back to the bedposts to expose the lace curtains inside.

"Lace!" the decorator shrieked.

It wasn't surprising that Barbra wanted the bed of a queen. Just days earlier, she'd sat for her portrait, like some sixteenth-century monarch. Life wasn't the only magazine doing a cover story on her. So was Time, and the publisher there, Bernhard Auer, had sent over Henry Koerner, who had painted President Kennedy, to get Barbra's likeness. She had sat for him in three sittings, staring straight ahead, her chin held still, her eyes painted with the signature Egyptian look Bob had designed for her so long ago. Astors and Vanderbilts got their portraits painted. Now Streisands did, too.

It had been a regal few weeks for Barbra. When, in the wee hours of the morning, the Funny Girl reviews had come rolling into the Rainbow Room, they'd all been predictably superlative. "Everybody knew that Barbra Streisand would be a star, and so she is," Walter Kerr proclaimed in the Herald Tribune. "Hail to thee, Barbra Streisand!" exulted Norman Nadel in the World-Telegram. Barbra "proves ... she can sing and clown in a way to live up to her immodest advance billing," Richard P. Cooke judged in the Wall Street Journal. John Chapman in the Daily News thought the show was a "remarkable demonstration of skill and endurance on the part of Barbra Streisand."

She'd run away with all the personal reviews, though a few critics had also offered kind words about Kay Medford, Danny Meehan, and even Sydney, who Chapman thought gave a "poised and likeable performance." But Barbra dominated, and the magnitude of her performance was so blinding that critics truly didn't care that the book remained fundamentally unsound. Kerr acknowledged that the second act was "thinner than it should be," but declared that this wasn't enough of a letdown to make him reconsider the entire play. Nadel said the show was "just this side of great," but its defects paled beside the "big-voiced, belting singer and bra.s.s gong of a personality" that was Barbra.

Yet the most important reviews, for Barbra at least, were those that actually considered her acting as much as her voice and personality. Howard Taubman in the New York Times thought there was some "honest emotion underneath the clowning," and Kerr had pointed to a moment near the end where he thought Barbra justified her stardom with some brilliant acting. It was the moment when f.a.n.n.y is willing to take Nick back, but then realizes that he has come to ask for a divorce, so she covers up her true feelings. Kerr observed that in that brief scene, Barbra momentarily dropped "the maturity [f.a.n.n.y] has been struggling toward through the entire second act" and reverted to the innocent, love-struck girl of the beginning. And she did so, the critic stressed, in a "half-sentence." Kerr felt Barbra showed f.a.n.n.y to be "an oak with the spine of a willow inside," which, of course, could describe Barbra as well.

Trailed by Shana Alexander and her reporter's notebook, Barbra gathered her entourage and hurried from the bedroom down to the street, where she hailed a fleet of taxis. It was time, she announced, to do some shopping. Elliott came along, too. At one antique shop, he grumbled about how much money Barbra was spending on an old, ornate piano that didn't play. Barbra was certain it could be fixed, and besides, as everyone knew, it was her money, and she could spend it as she pleased.

Perhaps that was what irked Elliott. He wouldn't let the matter of the piano drop, even though there was a reporter present. Or maybe, in some perverse way, Alexander's presence actually spurred him on. The squabbling seemed to begin in jest, a "mock-fight, an actors' fight," Alexander thought. But suddenly the carefully crafted facade of a happy marriage cracked. Before the startled eyes of the reporter from Life, the Goulds were suddenly in the midst of "a screaming, four-letter fight in the street, hopping in and out of taxis, over curbs, past startled pedestrians, oblivious of decorator, friends, pa.s.sersby." It was big and theatrical and very unlike Barbra, for whom, most of the time, nothing seemed more important than control.

But the fault lines had become too unstable; as Barbra soared and Elliott stumbled, it was impossible to keep the tension between them hidden any longer. Alexander knew the conflict wasn't really about the piano. It was about who was "in charge." The next day, Barbra would make sure the reporter knew about the cactus plant adorned with a single rose that Elliott sent to her dressing room as a peace offering. But the damage was done. If they couldn't pretend to the public that their marriage was secure and happy, how could they go on pretending to themselves?

2.

They'd vowed to always be together on their birthdays, but on April 24, the day Barbra turned twenty-two, Elliott wasn't there.

Ray Stark had sent around champagne and chocolate cake for everybody, which meant the stagehands had sticky fingers as they worked the curtains that night. After the show, Marty was hosting a supper party in Barbra's honor. But none of it took the place of Elliott. Not long before, Barbra's husband had flown to Jamaica, where he was shooting The Confession, an independent film starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland. The island's Blue Mountain Inn was doubling as a northern Italian bordello presided over by Rogers as a black-wigged madam. The director was one of the old Hollywood greats, William Dieterle, whose credits stretched back to the silent era. Elliott was playing a deaf-mute who suddenly finds his voice after a shock. There was every reason, he had told Barbra, to expect big things.

Barbra was pleased that Elliott had work, but she missed him. No matter their squabbles, this would be the first birthday they weren't together, and her husband's absence was painfully significant. He'd been powerless to change location shooting dates, especially when the location was in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

So Elliott made sure the gifts he sent Barbra were memorable. If he couldn't be there with her on her special day, he provided her with some company: a rabbit, a canary, and a goldfish. Her publicists made sure to get the story to Earl Wilson, but if there was any particular significance to the animals, it wasn't revealed. When Bob heard the story, he wondered if the gifts were Elliott's codes for "s.e.x, singing, and their life in a goldfish bowl."

Putting aside any feelings of loneliness, Barbra prepared to go on stage. It had now been a month since opening night, and the boredom had set in just as it had on Wholesale. Barbra felt as if she were "locked up in prison" doing the same thing in exactly the same way every night, and her two-year sentence had only just begun. Walter Kerr, in his review of the show, had predicted it might happen. So much of Funny Girl was all about f.a.n.n.y that he suspected it would only be a matter of time before "inspiration wanes and craft must make do in its place." Kerr probably hadn't expected it to happen this quickly, but he'd identified the problem clearly: "One feels the management is trying to cram an entire career into one show."

It wasn't just boredom Barbra was feeling. There was a growing antagonism with Sydney, whose ego had never recovered from being dumped and whose supporting role to the woman who had dumped him was beginning to chafe. The antagonism was only exacerbated by Barbra's requests that Sydney change certain things that disturbed the "flow of her performance," as she put it in notes left for him in his dressing room. Clearly Barbra hadn't learned from doing a similar thing with Elliott. Instead of honoring her requests, Sydney tossed Barbra's notes aside and began whispering to her as she came off the stage, "You really f.u.c.ked that number up" or "You really ought to start writing some notes to yourself." It was exactly the opposite of the little whispers of encouragement he'd once given her.

Yet there was even more to turn the young star into a nervous wreck backstage. Copies of Time with Barbra's face on the cover were strewn everywhere. "She is the sort that comes along once in a generation," the magazine had proclaimed. All those grandiose statements on opening night from people such as Lauren Bacall ("best thing I ever saw") and Jule Styne ("greatest singer of my time") might have been exactly what Barbra had been waiting to hear all her life. But they also had the power to overwhelm and terrify her. In the end, to everyone's great surprise, including her own, the kid was only human.

"Now that I'm supposed to be a success," Barbra told Joanne Stang, "I'm worried about the responsibility. People will no longer be coming to see a new talent they've heard about. I now have to live up to their concept of a great success. I'm not the underdog, the homely kid from Brooklyn they can root for anymore. I'm fair game." Her stomach began to twist up at the most inconvenient times. Before a show she often felt nauseous or wracked with the worst heartburn. The doctors had prescribed Donnatal to control her intestinal cramping.

That night, Barbra took her curtain calls to the usual rapturous applause. She'd been wonderful as always; no one would have known that she felt sick to her stomach, pressured and claustrophobic, bullied by her costar, and lonely for her husband. But they did know something else. Suddenly, someone from a box seat called out, "Happy birthday!" Another box holder from across the way took up the cry, and then another, and then people in the balconies were shouting it. Soon the orchestra was striking up "Happy Birthday" and the whole theater was singing to her. Barbra, touched but also embarra.s.sed, began tossing the roses she was given every night back over the footlights to the audience.

All those people out there whom she didn't know-people she couldn't see, people she'd probably never encounter again-loved her. They didn't know her-they knew only the image she had given them-but they really seemed to love her.

It was something Barbra struggled to understand.

3.

Stuart Lippner was a young man of sixteen who'd been to see Funny Girl multiple times. He'd first become aware of Barbra on PM East, when his mother had called him in from the other room to see some "nut on TV." From that moment on, Stuart had been fascinated. "Here she was," he said, "a nothing, telling important people they were schizy and all that." He liked her "because she wasn't afraid of people bigger than she was." Yet for the longest time he wasn't even sure of her name. She was just "the nut from TV."

But Stuart sure knew Barbra's name now, as did all the "Winter Garden Kids," as they called themselves, who were gathered around the stage door. They were there for every performance, waiting for their heroine to arrive. Many of them were school dropouts, so that meant they could be there all the time for every show. "Their lives were just wrapped around Barbra," Stuart explained. Some of them saved their money and followed her on tour. They owned all her records. If they couldn't afford to buy the disks themselves, they shared them with one another.

Stuart was still in school, and he worked in the evenings, so he was on the periphery of the Winter Garden Kids. But he knew them all from being there on weekends, and he shared their devotion. These kids dressed like Barbra, with thrift-shop hats and scarves, and talked like her, too, even the ones who didn't hail from Brooklyn. Stuart was a fellow Brooklynite, however, and expressed grat.i.tude to Barbra for "doing a lot" for the accent. "A lot of kids aren't ashamed of it anymore," he told a reporter.

Out on the street, one of the boys was posted as a lookout, to let the rest of them know when Barbra arrived. Usually she never made it to the theater until half an hour before showtime. Other teenagers might idolize the Beatles, but these kids were different from the rest. They were "misfits," Stuart said. Boys and girls who weren't the sports heroes or the cheerleaders, who weren't the pretty ones who got all the dates. Many of them were gay, Stuart realized, like himself, even if few admitted it. A number of them had "f.u.c.ked-up home lives." To them, Barbra was an inspiration. One boy named David admired how "everything she did was premeditated." Barbra had wanted "to look weird" to get attention, David told a reporter who had come to interview the Winter Garden Kids, which made her not so different from himself or the other kids at the stage door, with their bushy sideburns and pointy shoes and black eye makeup. One girl named Barbara-spelled with three a's, at least for now-thought that because their heroine "couldn't look common and couldn't look beautiful ... she chose to look different." And what, she asked, was wrong with that?

"Nothing," Stuart replied. "She made it work. I give her credit for it."

Stuart might not have been an official member of the Winter Garden Kids, but they sure envied him. That was because he'd actually made contact with their heroine, if a little indirectly. After reading in Barbra's program bio that anyone who wanted "more personal information" should write to her mother, Stuart had thought, "Why not?"

Except he hadn't written, he'd called. As it turned out, Mrs. Louis Kind was listed in the Brooklyn phonebook. When a young female voice answered, Stuart a.s.sumed it was Barbra, but contained his excitement and asked for Mrs. Kind. When Diana came to the phone, Stuart explained the reason he was calling, mentioning the program bio. Barbra's mother seemed amused. Stuart asked if that had been Barbra who'd answered.

"No, that was Barbra's younger sister, Rosalind," Diana said. She paused. "How old are you?" she asked. Stuart told her sixteen. "Are you Jewish?" Mrs. Kind asked next. When he told her that he was, Barbra's mother said, "Well, Rosalind is fifteen. Would you like to come over?"

Stuart jumped at the chance. Of course, he was aware that Mrs. Kind was attempting to "set him up with Rozzie," but that didn't stop him. Romance might not have been in the cards, but Stuart and Rozzie quickly became fast friends. Barbra's little sister now weighed close to two hundred pounds, standing barely five-two. Far shyer than her older sister had ever been, Rozzie was so dowdy that some people mistook her for Barbra's aunt. The young, impressionable girl envied her hotshot sister and longed to be a star just like she was, but the poor kid often froze up when speaking with Barbra. She didn't know "how to approach a big sister who had gotten so famous," Diana observed.

But with Stuart she found a soul mate. Despite Barbra's discomfort with a fan getting so close with her family, Diana invited the young man back often to spend time with her younger daughter. Sometimes Stuart stayed for dinner. Afterward Rozzie would play the Funny Girl alb.u.m, and the two of them would sing along, knowing all the words and imitating Barbra together.

One night, Stuart took Rozzie to meet the Winter Garden Kids, and Barbra's younger sister had been much friendlier to them than the star herself. That was the strange paradox of it all: Here were these kids with so much affection for her, and Barbra seemed not to want it from them.