Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Streisand’s audition was scheduled by Shurtleff for late the next afternoon to follow several other singers trying out for minor roles, hoping that as the final auditionee of the day, her extraordinary voice would so outshine her predecessors, Merrick would not say – as he had so often before – ‘Too ugly’.

  That morning, she had moved into her first apartment, three rooms over Oscar’s, a fish restaurant in the Sixties on the upper East Side, and in her words was ‘excited and furtumphed’. She dashed out on the stage of the St James Theater on West 44th Street where the auditions were being held just as the final singer turned to leave. ‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ she said, staring at her unseen audience beyond the blinding footlights of the stage. ‘On the way over, saw some things in a thrift shop window on Second Avenue near where I just rented my first apartment and I just had to go in and buy them – to celebrate, you know?’ She did a model’s turn to show off the forty-year-old amazingly stylish raccoon coat that she was wearing along with a commissar’s hat in an unidentifiable fur which was perched precariously on top of her beehive hairdo.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked. When there was no reply, she stepped forward as far as she could without falling into the orchestra pit. The glare of the footlights made it difficult for her to see out into the otherwise vast, darkened 1,600-seat auditorium and she cupped her hands above her eyes attempting to see better. ‘Is there anyone out there?’ she asked in a thick Brooklyn twang.

  ‘Is this girl sane?’ Merrick asked Shurtleff, who was seated next to his boss about midway up the centre aisle of the orchestra section.

  ‘No,’ Shurtleff replied.

  ‘Then, why are you putting us through this?’ Merrick barked.

  ‘Miss Streisand, would you sing?’ Shurtleff called out.

  She glanced uncomfortably around. Behind her was the backdrop, a New York skyline from Merrick’s current musical offering, Subways Are for Sleeping.

  ‘I had never seen her until she walked on to the stage for the audition,’ Wholesale’s director, Arthur Laurents, told this author. ‘She had on what I call her “calculated” look. Her thrift-shop look. She looked like an antique. And she did something right at the beginning that impressed me. I hadn’t seen this done before – nor have I since. She had the pages of her music taped together. She put it on the piano stage-right, an upright piano. And then, with a flourish, flipped it like an accordion on to and across the stage. A great trick. And I thought, “She knows what she’s doing.”’

  She glanced at the music spread out in front of her, unsure which of the three songs she had brought with her would be the most appropriate. Apart from Merrick, Shurtleff and Laurents, the small, select audience that she could not see included among others: Herbert Ross, the choreographer, Jerome Weidman, the author/playwright, and one of Hollywood and Broadway’s most successful composer/lyricists, Harold Rome, who leaned forward and asked, ‘Have you got an “up song” you can sing?’

  ‘If I didn’t have an “up song”, would I be auditioning for a musical?’ she replied.

  Merrick bristled.

  ‘I can’t sing without a stool,’ she complained. A stool was found and placed before the microphone. She removed her coat. ‘Someone could maybe hold this while I sing?’ she called out looking around her. A stagehand took it from her. Merrick was about to walk. Shurtleff placed a restraining hand on his arm.

  She shuffled through her music, picked it up, and then conferred in a whispery voice with the rehearsal pianist.

  ‘We’re waiting, Miss Streisand,’ Merrick yelled out.

  ‘I’m coming! I’m coming,’ she shouted back and lifted herself on to the stool.

  She sang ‘Value’. There was no response from the auditorium of the darkened theatre. She started across the stage to reclaim her coat. ‘Could you sing a ballad for us?’ Rome shouted.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ she said, and came back to the piano. A few moments later she was reseated on the stool and sang a lovely, lyrical story song, ‘Too Long at the Fair’ by Billy Barnes. Again there was no response other than some mumbling among her unseen audience. ‘Well, did you like it or not?’ she asked into the microphone.

  ‘We liked it. But we need to be convinced,’ Rome replied.

  The third song she had brought with her was her favourite audition piece, ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’. ‘When she sang that song,’ Laurents says, ‘I didn’t care about anything else. I had never heard anyone sing like that. I just kept her singing. And it was extraordinary. Now there was no part for her at the time in the show. She was nineteen, unattractive and emphasised it, making herself look deliberately gawky. I think she sort of invented a character for that audition – this loose-limbed girl out of the woodwork. [I was so taken with her] I said to the authors, “Why does Miss Marmelstein have to be fifty? Why do we have to say her age?”’

  ‘I sang,’ Streisand later remembered, ‘and then I sort of ran around the stage yelling my phone number and saying, “Wow! Will somebody call me, please! Even if I don’t get the part, just call!” I yelled out the number and then repeated it. I’d gotten my first phone that day, and I was wild to get calls on it.’ She was also admittedly excited and nervous over auditioning for a role in a major Broadway show.

  She folded up her music and headed into the wings. Merrick turned sharply to Shurtleff and complained, ‘How many times have I told you I don’t want ugly girls in my shows?’

  ‘You can get her for scale,’ Harold Rome intervened, thinking much as Laurents had and hoping that he could reintroduce ‘Miss Marmelstein’ into the score.

  ‘You’re the most anti-Semitic guy I know,’ Merrick countered. ‘You’ve hired every ugly Jew in town for this show, and now you want me to hire this meeskite.’

  Finally, in view of the zeal of the show’s creators, Merrick agreed to give her a chance if Miss Marmelstein was reinstated. She was asked to come back on to the stage where Shurtleff introduced her to Merrick, Laurents, Ross, Rome and Weidman. She was given the music to ‘Miss Marmelstein’ and told to return for a second audition in a few hours. She immediately called Peter Daniels, dashed over to his studio and ran through the number several times. Although she did not read music, she had the ability of hearing a song once and recording the music in her head. She also possessed the gift of perfect pitch.

  ‘When I returned to the theatre that afternoon,’ she recalled, ‘I wanted to sing the number sitting down for two reasons. One – because I was nervous, and two – because I thought it would be funny to have a secretary moving her chair around the stage with her legs, like a wallflower on wheels. So I sat down, took my gum out of my mouth, stuck it under the chair and sang.’

  Arthur Laurents claims that there was never a secretary’s chair on the stage for the audition, that Streisand sang Miss Marmelstein’ perched on the stool, although she did store her gum under the seat. ‘The moving chair came later, during rehearsals,’ Laurents insists. Whatever the prop was that she used, her interpretation of the song impressed both its composer and Laurents. That night, Laurents went down to the Bon Soir and after her performance told her that she was hired. The next day she signed a contract for $165 a week on conditional terms which gave Merrick the right to fire her on a week’s notice.

  Slouched in the back of the darkened theatre on the cold November day in 1961 of Streisand’s audition, Elliott Gould, the young man just cast as the romantic lead, was fascinated by ‘this strange-looking, skinny creature with long, spiky hair, spidery hands, two-inch nails and purple lipstick’.

  ‘A freak – a fantastic freak!’ Gould thought at the time. That evening before she left for her stint at the Bon Soir he telephoned her. ‘You said you wanted to get calls, so I called,’ he said. ‘You were brilliant.’ Then he hung up.

  Footnotes

  1 A future reviewer would write: ‘[“Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” is] the song that children sing. But in her version, it seemed new, tripping perilously along the edg of probability, its innocen
ce in doubt [in the dark room] which had suddenly become the dripping jaws of some unruly canine.’ Time, 10 April 1964.

  2 Dennen never sent Streisand the controversial tapes. In 1994, Marty Erlichman approached Dennen about the possibility of including a number from the tapes in Streisand’s For the Record album. ‘He never followed up,’ Dennen told me, ‘consequently, I never played them for him.’

  3 Successive hosts were Steve Allen, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno. The Tonight Show, which is still on the air, is the longest-running talk show in the United States.

  4 Eight years later she told a Life reporter: ‘The song no longer works for me as well, mostly because I don’t feel that way about that person any more.’

  Broadway Baby

  ‘She was the most innocent thing I’d

  ever seen, like a beautiful flower that

  hadn’t blossomed yet. But she was so

  strange that I was afraid.’

  ELLIOTT GOULD

  9

  BARBRA STREISAND HAD made it to Broadway at the age of nineteen. Her initiation was not going to be easy. Almost the entire company of I Can Get It for You Wholesale were seasoned performers. In this story of the brash, opportunistic young Jew, Harry Bogen (Elliott), he uses a strike in the firm of Maurice Pulverman (Jack Kruschen) to his own advantage. Miss Marmelstein was Pulverman’s secretary. Except for Kruschen, who had been the Oscar nominee for supporting player the previous year for his role in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, most of the other cast members were counting on this show to mark either their rise to stardom or their comeback.1 It was an intense, make-or-break situation not ameliorated by the tough treatment Streisand met at the hands of her producer and director.

  Kruschen, a bear of a man always younger than the roles he played, felt ‘bad for Barbra. She had poise. But she didn’t have the wordliness to know how to handle some of David Merrick’s or Arthur Laurents’s brusque, hard knocks. One morning during rehearsals she arrived a little late. She liked to shop at places like the Goodwill, and she was wearing this 1920s diaphanous kind of day dress – foamy, filmy – kind of odd. Arthur, who wasn’t the nicest guy to her, told her to go change her clothes. He was directing, and he was fresh out of his big success as the librettist of West Side Story and Gypsy and he was feeling exceptionally macho.

  ’I thought she was going to cry. He had chosen to tell her this in front of the entire company. There was nothing she could have done but go home and change her clothes. And he said, “I don’t care what you put on, but don’t put on stuff like this and don’t come to work like this again.” I felt – how dare he. His rough treatment of her endeared her to me. She knew very little about the stage. Sometimes she’d hit a mark [where she was supposed to stand on stage] and sometimes she wouldn’t. That caused problems for the rest of the cast. As Spencer Tracy once told some young performers, “Learn your lines and for God’s sake, don’t bump into each other.”’

  Arthur Laurents replies, ‘I was tough on Barbra because she wanted to do what she wanted to do and as director I couldn’t have that. I can remember one time, I staged a scene so that when a character entered, everyone had to turn their back on him, he was ostracised, but she didn’t. She said she didn’t feel like it. She didn’t realise that unless you’re [a monologuist], you cannot play alone. You have an obligation. You have to be there for your fellow actors. A musical has to be carefully blocked. You can’t decide suddenly to go here or there.’

  Laurents was firm with her, but he also recognised her potential and was one of her staunchest enthusiasts. ‘Shortly after her audition for the show, I sent her to Goddard Lieberson, then head of Columbia Records. She thanked me,’ he smiled with an appreciative look on his intelligent face. ‘Then I got a note from him: “Thank you for sending me Barbra Streisand. Indeed, she has a spectacular voice, but she is too special for records.” I also dragged Stephen Sondheim down to the Bon Soir before the show opened. He didn’t like the way she sang.2 Then, at the time of Anyone Can Whistle, I sent her some of the songs and she didn’t like his songs. [Much later she would have a change of heart.]

  ’I thought she had an extraordinary voice and was very talented as an actress, but she was really so inexperienced and more concerned with what she was doing with her nails than with the other players. I told her, “When you cut your nails I’ll know you really want to be an actress.”’

  Laurents is, and was at that time, one of the American theatre’s finest playwrights as well as a director and Streisand quickly recognised that she had much she could learn from him. ‘I began fattening her part because it was obvious that she was a phenomenal talent, which she knew and told us she was. She had no doubt she was going to be a star. It was not shared [by Merrick and others] I think because of what she looked like.’

  Elliott, on the other hand, thought she looked just dandy and was intrigued by her eclecticism. They did not actually meet until the first day of rehearsals which she attended in a man’s tattered black coat, circa 1930, that reached her ankles, the sleeves turned back so that her hands could show, a turn-of-the-century, black medical satchel bag serving as a purse. Outside, February winds blasted through the tunnel-like streets of New York, wintry blue-grey skyscrapers rising like steel traps on either side. Her face was red with cold. ‘She looked like a young Fagin,’ Elliott remembers. ‘She scared me, but I really dug her. I think I was the first person who ever did.’

  This, of course, was not true, but Elliott saw her with new romantic eyes. She was not a woman he wanted to change or a performer he wished to mould. He loved her kookiness, her naturalness, her hunger to devour food, people, new experiences. She was drawn to him almost immediately. He was distinctive but he did not look like her idea of a leading man. Tall (six feet, three inches), chunky, with dark bushy hair and ethnic features, his clothes, whether custom-tailored or ready-made – never quite fitted. He managed to execute a dance when required with surprising expertise, but was constantly stumbling on and off stage.

  Born in 1938 and four years older than Streisand, he was the product of a frustrated, confused childhood with an overbearing mother, an overshadowed father and all the tensions that go with being an only male child in a middle-class Jewish household. Until the age of eleven he had shared a small bedroom in a cramped 2½ room flat in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn with his parents, Lucille and Bernard Goldstein. Bernard was a book-keeper in New York’s garment district. From an early age, Elliott recognised that his intrusion into Bernard’s otherwise ordered life was resented.

  Bensonhurst was Jewish and Italian and only a short distance from the slightly more affluent Flatbush area where Streisand lived after her mother’s marriage to Louis Kind. It was said that the slain bodies of infamous members of Murder Inc. were buried near the school he attended, but neighbours looked after each other’s kids and the streets were kept reasonably safe for them to gather.

  ‘We’d play things like Ring-o-leevio, Three Feet to Germany, Johnny on the Pony,’ Gould recalled, ‘but I excelled at flipping trading cards bought by the fistful down at Irving’s Candy Store. There were Smilin’ Jack cards, baseball cards, World War Two cards with General MacArthur and the bombing of Tokyo on them,’ he added fondly. He was, he insists, ‘terribly conscious of a degree of vulnerability, of not wanting to make a fool of myself. I didn’t feel abnormal, but I certainly didn’t feel normal.’

  Lucille’s memories are sharper. ‘This child was too good to be true. He was too well behaved. He wanted to please so desperately. I was too strict with him.’ She shakes her head. ‘Yes, Mama watched over him perhaps too closely. But it was done out of love. I wouldn’t leave any stone unturned as far as this child went. I’d cut off my arm for this child.’ Alone with her somewhat bumbling son, when Bernard went off to fight during World War Two, Lucille decided he must have drama, singing and dancing lessons to help him gain self-confidence. She took him to Charlie Lowe’s Broadway Show Business School for Children.

  ‘He’
ll never dance,’ she told Charlie firmly. ‘Just fix up his diction and the way he walks.’ Instead Charlie Lowe put Elliott through the regular routine that he taught.

  ‘That meant everything,’ Elliott claimed. ‘Blow-your-nose lessons, dance lessons, wipe yourself lessons, masturbation lessons, bunko. Compulsions for a dissatisfied mother. Why did I go? Because I loved my mother a lot. That’s why I did it.’ Within a year Charlie Lowe placed Elliott on local TV shows to sing and dance. As he was about to go on camera for the first time, Lowe asked him if he would like to be announced as Gold, instead of Goldstein. Elliott said, ‘No, Gould,’ bearing in mind the well-known composer and orchestra leader Morton Gould.

  He went on to Professional Children’s School in Manhattan and, when his father returned from the war, the family would vacation each year in the Catskill borscht belt3 where Elliott won dance contests doing the mambo with his mother.

  ‘When an entertainer needed a stooge,’ his father remembered, ‘Elliott would be the one they’d choose. [At the age of fifteen] he could do a dozen dialects – German, Italian, Jewish, all of them.’ After he graduated from high school, he spent three weeks in summer stock. This was followed by a second lead in a pre-Broadway show at Woodstock, Some Little Honor (1955), which never made it into Manhattan.

  ‘He was always doing bits,’ one friend added. ‘He would go into a diner, sit next to a little old lady and calmly make a meal out of his paper napkin – complete with salt, pepper and ketchup. He also liked to knock on strangers’ doors and inquire politely, “Is this the party?” Or walk into one door of a Checker cab stopped in traffic and out the other, apologising to the passenger as he made his exit.’