Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  He won a job in his first Broadway show when he was eighteen by telephoning one of the producers, impersonating a well-known agent and selling the talents of ‘a kid named Elliott Gould’. Hired in 1957 for the chorus line, the show, Rumple, closed after forty-five performances which was fortunate because he was plagued with bursitis from lifting the rather hefty chorines in the dance numbers. Despite this experience, he went on to dance in the chorus of the Jule Styne show, Say, Darling (1958) and a revival of Hit the Deck at Jones Beach. Then came odd jobs such as a speed punching-bag demonstrator at Bloomingdale’s Department Store and as a toy salesman and elevator operator at both Gimbel’s and Macy’s.

  A loner, not terribly popular with the girls, he began to place bets on the horses. By the time he was eighteen, he had run up debts he could not pay, ‘borrowed’ his father’s jewellery to pawn and used the money he received to pay off the bookies. He also had the Goldstein’s home telephone disconnected when hoods started calling to demand the rest of their payment. His parents were furious but, fearful he might end up in the East River with a cement block attached to his feet, helped him out of his predicament. Elliott was screaming out for attention, however bad it was and he gambled as many habitual betters do – ultimately to lose because their failure validates their theory that fate does not look well upon them, that they hold no responsibility for what has happened in their lives.

  A job in the chorus of the David Merrick musical, Irma La Douce in 1960, led to his being hired first as the understudy to the lead in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, which originally was to have featured British actor Laurence Harvey. When Harvey backed out of his contract, the role went to the surprised Elliott. Open, friendly, funny, he was well liked by the members of the company, but it was Streisand to whom he paid the most attention. Once rehearsals began, he thought she was even more brilliant than he had first believed her to be. He treated her deferentially and often spent the little free time he had, for he was in a large percentage of the show’s scenes, listening to her practise.

  ‘I used to hear her warm up,’ Jack Kruschen remembered. ‘She had the most beautiful vocal acrobatics ... perfect pitch. She just blew my socks away the first time I heard her sing. Wholesale was one of the earliest Broadway shows where dialogue blended with music, where there was a great deal of recitative. Barbra had the only solo in one [in front of the curtain], ‘Miss Marmelstein’. She had her own ideas about how she wanted to sing it and Arthur did not always agree with her. It was a running battle.’

  Streisand later confided to journalist Joe Morgenstern, ‘I spent weeks trying to convince Arthur to let me use my secretary’s chair which had a movable seat that you could twist and tilt. I was told, “You’ve got no discipline, you can’t do anything twice the same way.” They yelled at me because I didn’t do the song with the same gestures each time I sang it. I kept asking for my chair. Finally, Arthur said, “All right, use your chair if you want to,” and when we opened in Philadelphia I stopped the show. I can’t tell you how I felt stopping that show. I felt guilty.’

  Laurents counters, ‘Nobody remembers the same thing. There are stories that start out an anecdote then become columnists’ grist and then they become fact. It is curious to me how they creep and spread. A recent book on Barbra has several lies in it about Wholesale. In fact the author told one lie three times. The basic lie is I never staged “Miss Marmelstein”, Herb Ross did.’

  This would imply that Streisand’s fight for the moving chair was with Ross, not Laurents, but whoever her adversary, the struggle had not been in vain. She had managed to convert the one number she had into a star tum calling attention to herself and away from the rest of the cast. And she had approximately four minutes of her own on stage in which to wheel and twirl her secretary’s chair contorting her legs and arms and never allowing any of this action to disrupt the flow and clarity of the comedic song-story she sang in thick Brooklynese. She gambled in a different way from Elliott – with her talent, her creative ability, her driven ambition that pushed aside all other considerations. She played for higher stakes – her career, which was to say her life. And she only knew how to gamble one way – to win.

  In November, shortly before her audition for Wholesale, Streisand had made an unexpected one-night appearance at the Blue Angel, an elite cabaret at 152 East 55th Street. The front-room lounge wrapped you in a cloak of sophistication as soon as you walked into its gleaming black and white cocktail lounge with its black bar, booths and patent-leather walls. The back room held the small stage, a plaster angel suspended over it. The stage was lit by a fixed spotlight, the room decorated in a deep lush pink, leather on the banquettes, fabric on the walls. The long, narrow room was difficult to play and yet, it was a launching pad for top artists (Dorothy Louden, Carol Burnett and Henry Belafonte had all sung there), a place where one came expressly to hear the entertainer. On the night that Streisand first appeared, Felicia Saunders was the star performer, but there was also a comic and he got violently ill just before the show. Desperate for someone to fill in and recalling things he had heard about Streisand being a funny lady, Herbert Jacoby, the co-owner, called her to come in for the single performance.

  ‘Two singers were never billed on one show,’ Arthur Gelb, of the New York Times said. ‘Jacoby must have thought Barbra was a comic. I was there to review Saunders and was overwhelmed when this strange-looking girl in a beaded dress took to the stage. Everyone was spellbound. I went back to the paper and wrote about this great new talent. I think it was the first review she ever got in a major paper and brought her to the attention of a lot of people.’

  While Wholesale was in rehearsal, she went back to the Blue Angel as the headliner. The club’s audience was far more conservative than the habitués of the Bon Soir. Frightening though it might have been to play to such an urbane group, Streisand liked being able to sing songs differently, to experiment. She sang an exquisite arrangement by Peter Daniels of the Harry Schmidt/Tom Jones song from The Fantastics ‘Soon It’s Going to Rain’ and an upbeat rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s seldom performed ‘I Hate Music’.

  Her reviews were glowing but a generally laudatory one in the show business bible, Variety, included an indelicate suggestion that she get a ‘schnoz bob’. Erlichman was furious. ‘I couldn’t believe that a guy like Abel Greene, the respected publisher of Variety, who’s entire life had been devoted to the business, would use an expression like “schnoz bob” for a nineteen-year-old girl,’ he said. ‘Against the advice of the press agent for the Blue Angel, who was worried about a possible backlash, I called Abel Greene and really yelled at him. “Would you do that to your own daughter? You can say nose job or have the nose fixed, but where do you come off saying, “schnoz bob”? It’s vulgar and tasteless.” And he apologised to me.’ The remark, however phrased, was inappropriate in a review of a singer.

  To compound this painful jibe, Radie Harris, a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, described her as having, ‘mousy-colored hair which hung straight and looked unwashed, a nose that a plastic surgeon would have loved to use his scalpel on, and she wore a black blouse and skirt that looked as though they’d been bought in Klein’s bargain basement.’ Unwittingly she validated Diana’s concern when she wrote near the conclusion of her review: ‘“Why would anyone who looks like that think she has a future in show business?” I thought as she sat nervous and uneasy beside me.’ But she added, ‘And then she got up to sing, and I knew why. Barbra Streisand was suddenly beautiful.’

  For weeks Streisand talked about nothing else except whether she should or should not have a nose job. ‘Can you become a new person with a new nose?’ Elliott asked her. They were seeing quite a lot of each other. One night he took her to a horror movie about giant caterpillars that ate cars. Later they went to a Chinese restaurant. About 2 a.m. it began to snow.

  ‘We were walking around the skating rink at Rockefeller Center when Elly chased me and we had a snow fight,’ she remembered. ‘He never h
eld me around or anything, but he put snow on my face and kissed me, very lightly. It sounds ookhy, but it was great. Like out of a movie!’

  A few weeks after the snow fight, she thought he was paying too much attention to Marilyn Cooper, the ingenue in the show, and refused to talk to him. That night he wandered the city and used up a pocketful of change calling her telephone number. Each time she hung up. Finally he went home to his small apartment on Morton Street in the Village. ‘About 4 a.m. my bell rings, and Barbra’s standing there like a little orphan child, in her nightgown, some kind of crocheted thing over her shoulders, tears streaming her face. I wrapped her up in a warm coat and took her home but when we reached her building, which housed a fish restaurant on the ground floor, the hallway stunk so that I refused to go upstairs.’

  ‘I didn’t care about the smell,’ Streisand once said. ‘For the first time in my life I had my own apartment.’ A connection might well be made with the fact that Manny Streisand had spent his early years in a flat over a fish market. Her father figured frequently in her conversations with Elliott and with Shelley. Her reverence for his reported intelligence, his ambition to make something of his life that might have taken him and his family out of Brooklyn, had grown to mythic proportions. Living over a fish restaurant perhaps gave her a sense of familiarity with something he had experienced. The $62 monthly rent was also cheaper than for most other apartments of its size and location and one she could afford. Money was always a consideration. She did not mind sacrificing something others might think a necessity for what was important to her. As a youngster she had forfeited lunch to buy cosmetics. Now she endured the odour of fish so that she could have some extra money for the purchase of clothes, furniture or items that caught her eye, and a telephone so that she did not have to hang around someone’s office or a telephone booth to receive a call.

  Although he kept the Morton Street apartment, Elliott managed to overcome his olfactory objections and was soon sharing the flat a good part of the time with her. ‘The only window looked out on a black brick wall,’ he recollected. ‘A big rat named Oscar [in dubious honour of the restaurant below] lived in the kitchen.’ They were very private about their relationship. At this point no one in the cast even knew they were living together. Their combined incomes after taxes was modest (his salary in Wholesale was not much larger than hers.) They entertained themselves on the cheap. Besides seeing horror movies, they played pokerino in penny arcades, saving up coupons from his winnings to supply their flat with dishes and glassware. She filled the apartment with scented candles and perfumed Chinese incense to overcome the odour of fish, but there was still the hallway to conquer. Elliott took the steps three at a time without breathing.

  Diana did not know that her daughter and Elliott were co-habiting. She would come by the theatre during rehearsals bringing large containers of chicken soup. ‘All those stories she tells about her mother,’ Laurents says, ‘it’s odd because her mother was very much there. When she introduced me to Mrs Kind, very fleetingly, it reminded me of Sandra Church when she was [starring] in Gypsy, introducing me to her mother, whose name was Rose. It seemed to me that they had a similar attitude, “Well, here’s Rose [Gypsy’s mother in the play and real life].” Meaning – pushy, and the daughter wanted to dismiss the mother. It may be that what Barbra has said about her mother is true. But she did bring chicken soup and it was very good and we all had it!’

  She continued to experiment with ways to play Miss Marmelstein, attempting to get a deeper understanding of the character. She was all over the place, making a mess of Laurents’s careful blocking. Then there was the matter of her chewing gum while on stage.

  ‘Get rid of it,’ he demanded one day in rehearsal.

  ‘Why?’ she argued. ‘If you ask me Yetta Marmelstein would’ve chewed gum in the office.’

  Before singing her big solo at the top of Act Two, she defiantly told him that she had pressed the wad of gum against her upper palate but she wouldn’t get rid of it.

  ‘I knew no one could sing like she did with a wad of chewing gum in her mouth,’ Laurents said later. ‘One day she pretended to take it out and press it on the bottom of her chair. After she finished her number, I asked my assistant to upturn the chair. There was nothing there. I then asked her to spit it out and she was silent for a moment. Then she said she’d swallowed it ... I’m sure there never had been any chewing gum in the first place ... In Boston,’ he continued, ‘Merrick wanted her fired. He felt she wasn’t funny enough. And she wasn’t. Audiences really didn’t get her until we got to New York. She wasn’t that successful on the road and she was madly in love with Elliott, who Merrick also wanted to fire. He wasn’t happy with Elliott. He wasn’t attractive and he had an unfortunate problem. Elliott is a sweater. He sweated so much that when he did a dance scene, the sweat blew over the first three rows of the audience. Merrick had him call Dr Miracle, Max Jacobson [who was known to push drugs on many Hollywood-New York celebrities] to get something to stop it. Whatever he gave Elliott worked – but it closed his vocal chords and he had to stop taking it.

  ‘I never saw anything quite like it. She wanted Elliott and she got him. But they were sweet together, really sweet. Romeo and Juliet. Besides Elliott, her close friend in the show was Sheree North. She was ten years older, had been around [a bride at fifteen, mother at sixteen], married four times and she had been having a rough time [after being dropped by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1958]. But Barbra recognised that there was a real purity in Sheree North. Sheree was going through a very, very bad patch and Barbra was good to her.’

  Sheree North was also the first movie star – albeit one on her uppers – with whom Streisand had ever had close contact. North had starred opposite Dan Dailey, Gordon MacCrae and Robert Cummings and once had been considered Betty Grable’s replacement at her studio. Streisand bombarded her with questions about Hollywood, what it was like to be under contract to a studio, how pictures were made and North, pleased to be asked, answered in detail. But Ellie Stone, who was Streisand’s understudy, and several of the other female members of the cast, say Streisand was cold and sometimes cruel to them. ‘She knew how to cut you down,’ one of them said, ‘make a stabbing remark about something you missed in your performance. She could use Sheree but she was a regular Eve [a reference to the overly ambitious character in the film All About Eve] with the other young women in the cast. You just knew she would go on half-dead before she would let an understudy go on for her. I had the feeling she considered Marilyn Cooper her arch enemy – maybe because of Elliott, but more likely because she had a larger role and was on stage more often.’

  In Philadelphia, Merrick’s threats to fire her began to look serious. With amazing chutzpah she went to Laurents and asked him to recast her in Marilyn Cooper’s role. ‘I told her – “It’s better to steal the show than play that part.” It just shows you that Barbra’s eye was on the brass ring all the time.’ The creative team were finding her abrasiveness and strong mindset difficult to take. ‘I have dealt with revolting people all my life,’ Jerome Weidman, the author, was quoted as saying. ‘I began my career working in the Garment Center after all. As far as I’m concerned she has not earned the right to act that way.’ He was referring to her continued lateness to rehearsals and her insistence on overruling Laurents’s direction. Even her champion, Harold Rome, found her cold and overbearingly self-absorbed.

  But Elliott was smitten. They were always together. Both of them loved to shop. In Boston, where the reviews were lukewarm, they discovered Filene’s Basement which was stocked with marked-down merchandise. In Philadelphia, where the reviews were not much better, they combed the city’s thrift shops. She was redoing the walk-up apartment better to accommodate the two of them and she sent parcels back on a daily basis containing anything from bits of fabric and lace to an old sewing-machine table with wrought-iron legs which she could make pillows and curtains with and also use as a table when it was closed. They could not be apart for more t
han half an hour. When she couldn’t be found during rehearsals, a chorus of voices would shout out, ‘Try Elliott’s dressing room!’

  The show opened in New York on the blustery night of 22 March 1962 at the Shubert Theater. An air of nostalgia pervaded the audience, many of whom had come to see old-timer Lillian Roth, who played Elliott’s mother, or had personal ties to the garment industry. ‘This could have meant they would be user-friendly or coldly critical,’ one cast member said. ‘We were all exceptionally nervous backstage, especially after the rather cool reception we received in Boston and then in Philadelphia.’

  Streisand, who occupied a small dressing room of her own, arrived early at the theatre and remained cloistered behind its closed door until curtain time although Elliott was seen to enter, remain about fifteen minutes and then leave. She was shaking as she stood in the wings preparing to make her entrance. ‘Once she was on stage,’ a co-worker recalled, ‘she was in total control. I never saw anything like it.’

  ‘She really hit her stride with “Miss Marmelstein”,’ an investor who had seen the out-of-town performances said. ‘This was her kind of audience – New Yorkers, predominantly Jewish or of some ethnic culture. Not Boston Brahmins or Philadelphia socialites. It was thrilling to watch as she twisted and twirled in her secretary’s chair, her voice startling in its uniqueness. She had the audience in the palm of her hand and you had the feeling that she knew it. When she finished her number, they went wild.’

  As she came off the stage into the wings, Elliott gave her a bear hug. She was flushed with excitement.

  ‘The evening’s find is Barbra Streisand, a girl with an oafish expression, a loud irascible voice and an arpeggiated laugh,’ wrote Harold Taubman, the theatre critic for the New York Times.