by Anne Edwards
The show opened backstage. Fanny was already a star, with many memories and a broken marriage; Arnstein after being released from jail has just walked out on her. She sings a song, later cut, and then the story moves back to her youth. A piano in the orchestra pit starts the song. The musician cannot be seen. It is an eager, eighteen-year-old bespectacled Marvin Hamlisch (who ten years later would compose the score for Chorus Line) hired for his first big job as rehearsal pianist. Everyone is edgy. Streisand has moved too slowly. She’s not standing where she has been told to stand. Then she begins to sing.
‘Her voice came off this bare stage and it started to reach around the empty theatre,’ reported Jimmy Breslin who was seated in the auditorium to write one of Streisand’s first profiles as a coming star. ‘She was doing some sort of a dance while she sang and when her voice came on stronger Jule Styne, slumped in his seat, began to nod with the tune. Then there was this sort of growl in Barbra Streisand’s voice and now you didn’t notice the bare stage or the chairs or the guy carrying the ladder. It didn’t matter where you were. She is that kind of a singer.’
Kanin’s head rocked back and forth with the song. ‘Yeah,’ he said out loud and smiled as she sang.
Fran Stark, always smartly turned out and quick with her opinion, was still not convinced that Streisand could or should play her mother, but it was now too late to do anything about it. Marty Erlichman and Streisand’s lawyer, Bella Linden, had seen to it that their client was well paid at $5,000 a week, plus a percentage of the gross, and safeguarded: if fired she would have to be paid off handsomely. The already escalating costs of the show – now upwards of $500,000 – seemed to prohibit such a move. Memos flew back and forth between Ray Stark (often dictated by Fran) and Kanin. Putting it simply, Fran thought Streisand lacked class – the element that had always been evident in Fanny Brice’s on and off-stage demeanour, even her comedic roles – and how did one teach a performer class? Kanin was sure he could. He called it elegance.
He took Streisand aside. ‘Elegance is making an art of life,’ he told her. He went on to explain that an artist’s function was to achieve a modicum of order out of chaos. From order came refinement, which in art, meant rhythm, tempo, style, form and – ‘best of all – elegance. Fanny Brice had elegance,’ he stressed, adding, ‘there has never been a great comedian who did not have elegance.’
For the next three weeks while they were still rehearsing in New York, Kanin took her aside whenever he could and worked with her on the matter of elegance. He told her about Chaplin, Brice, Keaton – legendary comedians who had brought dignity to their art. ‘I want you to stand tall, lift your head, listen to your fellow actors when they are talking to you on stage. Don’t make the mistake of believing that the public loves you for yourself when in truth they only love you for your talent.
‘Finally, it penetrated,’ he recalled. ‘She had more dignity, human nobility, self-respect and respect for the audience. She left all the common and cheap effect and was on the road.’
Streisand was learning things from Kanin that she knew would benefit her immensely – how to move on stage, project her voice, react to what other performers were saying. She lapped up this kind of teaching, pulled more and more from him, wanted to know more about the stars he had worked with like Katherine Hepburn and Judy Holiday. Kanin kept her as sheltered as possible from the confusion that raged around her. The script was in a constant state of flux, which did not seem to trouble Streisand, who would learn a new scene in a matter of minutes.
The most pressing problems were, and would continue to be, the weak portrait of Nicky Arnstein, the downhill slide of the second act and the unhappy ending which was totally contrary to what was then expected in musical comedies even eighteen years after Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which had endowed the genre with a new seriousness of purpose. Lennart would write a new scene according to suggestions given to her by the Starks and Kanin. Ruth Gordon privately sent memos of her ideas. John Patrick, meanwhile, confided his comments to Ray Stark, who passed many of them on to Lennart, who wrote and rewrote and rewrote again. Streisand took all these changes with seasoned equanimity. In fact, as she has said, she loved the process of reworking scenes in rehearsals – ‘week after week being able to experiment, to modify, to change, to discover what worked and what didn’t, and why’.
No one knew the extent to which Lennart’s private life was in upheaval and the strain, the pressures of the show, exacted on her. She had been an informer during the early 1950s for Senator joseph McCarthy and the hearings of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee when so many of her former co-workers’ lives were ruined and many more painfully affected and blacklisted.3 Wounds ran deep and there were bitter feelings towards those who had informed on friends and colleagues. Some members of the executive staff of Funny Girl and the cast looked upon her as a pariah and she felt their scorn. Her son was being treated for drug addiction, her husband drinking heavily and, as they were both 3,000 miles away in California, her telephone bills were astronomic. She was on edge and quickly dissolved into tears under stress. To bridge this problem, Stark now had Patrick work with Lennart in her hotel suite so that she would not be exposed to his criticism at meetings or allow any rumours to spread that he was acting as a play doctor.
Streisand remained detached from the members of the company. ‘Once in a while I would sit on the floor next to her during rehearsals,’ John Patrick said, ‘but we never became close. She was not, in my opinion, a lovable human being, as most actors are. There was a great hostility in the company. [At the beginning] Barbra and Sydney Chaplin, her leading man, hated each other. In the scene where she sat on the doorsteps and sang “People”, he would look up at her adoringly, and whisper out of the side of his mouth, “You’re off key, you bitch!” Ray tried to fire him but he had a run-of-the-play contract. Ray used me to talk to him and order him not to invent dialogue of his own. Sydney would reply, “Well, I don’t like the dialogue I’m given, so I’m inventing my own.” Ray devised several funny schemes to make him quit, but Sydney paid no attention to them.’
On the few days that Streisand had off from rehearsals she indulged in her most consuming passion – shopping for antiques. She and Elliott were still in the throes of decorating their duplex penthouse. No longer limited to thrift-shop purchasing, she dragged Elliott to Manhattan’s high-priced wholesale antique district with the same avidity. She plunged into vast warehouses, trailed by Elliott and their decorator, dashing from item to item, shouting ‘How much?’, the decorator, hired on a friend’s recommendation, busily making notes. They would thread from one warehouse to another.
During one such buying orgy, when they were accompanied by Life’s Shana Alexander, the hefty owners of a shop specialising in mirrors and glass refused to haggle over the price. Suddenly the Goulds fancied that the proprietors of this shop didn’t like them. ‘It’s a front, Barbra. It’s a bookie joint. They’re gangsters,’ Alexander quoted Elliott as saying to soothe his wife’s ego and then wandered off to investigate on his own. A while later on their way back up the street Streisand rapped on the window of the supposed ‘bookie joint’ and, waving a sales check from another establishment, shouted: ‘Yah! You thought I wasn’t gonna buy, huh? Well, I spent $3,000 next door.’
She had bought five glorious crystal chandeliers and an ornate early nineteenth-century piano, its interior no longer operative. Once again reunited with Elliott, she excitedly told him about the piano. ‘How could you buy a piano without consulting me?’ he demanded, seriously offended.
‘Don’t you care about our home?’ she countered. ‘It’s the most beautiful piano I’ve ever seen!’
‘It’s hideous!’ he yelled.
‘Elly, it has painted scenes on it,’ she shot back stubbornly.
There followed ‘a screaming, four-letter fight in the street, hopping in and out of taxis, over curbs, past startled pedestrians, oblivious of decorator [reporter] and passersby,’ Alexande
r wrote of her eye-witness involvement.
In the weeks since Streisand had started rehearsals, she and Elliott had engaged in a great many verbal battles in less than private situations – stores, restaurants, the lobby of their building – which would end in a cold silence between them and could last from one day to the next. ‘Elliott was fighting for what he considered to be his masculine identity. Barbra could not and would not understand that,’ one friend said. They disagreed about almost every item Streisand bought for the penthouse. Beyond that, they fought about what was to go where, notably her dedsion – which she won – to hang one of the ornate chandeliers in the master bedroom. Their bed was the one exception. Both of them wanted it to approximate a stage setting. ‘It should be like the place Desdemona got strangled in,’ Elliott told a bewildered upholsterer commissioned to make the quilted spread and hangings in green brocade for it. On the bedside table was a gilt-edged photo of Streisand licking a large lollipop and inscribed: ‘Too Eleot i wuv you Barbrra’.
Streisand was undergoing a major upheaval in her career and in her private life. Celebrity and riches had come to her in a span of only three years and she had not been prepared for the drastic changes they would bring with them. The newly wedded Goulds seldom had time alone together. Now she was too involved in what was happening at the Winter Garden and in her career to share much else and she moved in a crowd of people: Erlichman, record producers and representatives, her musical director and arranger, staff from the show, reporters, decorators, drivers and dedicated fans who were happy to be gofers, running errands, fetching the containers of Chinese food that she greedily devoured.
In rehearsals she was proving to be difficult. Nothing escaped her critical attention. A costume or wig that did not fit exactly right was rejected. She did not like a song ‘I Tried’ that Styne and Merrill had written for the finale and refused to sing it. It was cut from the show. Unsure of her dancing ability she was constantly at dagger’s end with Carol Haney, the choreographer. A roller-skate number had been written and choreographed for her and despite the fact that the logo for the show had been drawn from this number (Fanny upside down with skates in the air) she insisted that it be cut.
Her behaviour did not endear her to her co-workers, but by now there was a general consensus that the success of Funny Girl was greatly dependent upon her performance and the power of her voice. Kanin sincerely believed no other actress/singer could carry the show and he did his best to appease her detractors. ‘Barbra’s just tense,’ he would say. ‘She’s new at this and she’s carrying a heavy weight on her shoulders.’
One day during rehearsal Kanin noticed a man – unknown to him – seated in the balcony apparently taking notes. Outsiders were not permitted into rehearsals and so he went up to confront him. Streisand, nervous about the slow progress she was making in bringing her character to life, had called Allan Miller to come in secretly to observe everything she was doing and work with her on her interpretation. Miller claims she also called on him when she was in rehearsals for I Can Get It for You Wholesale.
‘Who are you?’ Kanin asked. ‘And why are you sitting up here taking notes?’
‘I’m Barbra’s cousin,’ Miller said.
Kanin was not taken in. He had heard a rumour that his star was working with a coach in private, a situation intolerable for a director staging a show. ‘There is only one director here,’ Kanin insisted. Miller departed but Streisand made certain that Kanin knew she was displeased. During another rehearsal, Kanin had her repeat a line numerous times. There were words. It was the star’s will against the director’s and it looked for an hour or so that one of them might quit. It ended in a draw.
Her faith had been lost in Kanin, believing that he did not understand the character as deeply as she did or that he could help her bring more strength and pathos to interpretation. Frustrated, fearful that her great opportunity might slip her grasp, she became tense and short-tempered.
The day following her stand-off with Kanin, Milton Rosenstock, the musical director, arrived early for rehearsal. Streisand – who was usually late – was sitting on a stool, waiting under a single work light. Rosenstock felt ‘a dread, as if a dynamite fuse had been lighted in the theatre. She hardly spoke to him and remained where she was without moving. The cast wandered in. She glared at them with defiance, as if to say, ‘Goddamit, you didn’t expect me today, did you?’ Rosenstock noted.
‘OK let’s take it from the top,’ Kanin ordered when he arrived on the scene. Rosenstock remembered ‘an absolute hush in the theatre for a few minutes. Then, as the music [to ‘People’] started, what Streisand did went purposefully against every instruction Kanin had given her. If she was supposed to stand still, she moved; if she was supposed to move, she stood still. She was running all over the stage, doing crazy things. She was like a maniac, improvising. As I looked back toward the seats, I saw Garson sitting with his mouth open. Then Jule was on me in a minute, squeezing my shoulder until it hurt. His face was white. He literally snarled, “Leave her alone, Milt, she’s on fire. Just follow, follow...’”
Finally, when the rehearsal moved on to ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’, she collapsed into sobs. ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried, ‘I’m so sorry.’ No one came forward to comfort her. Rosenstock stopped the orchestra and she walked off the stage. Kanin cancelled rehearsals for the rest of the day.
Rosenstock said she came to him a few days later and said, ‘I got it now. It’s a duet.’
‘What do you mean, a duet?’ he asked.
‘I’m not alone up there. I’ve got you. I’ve got the whole orchestra. I’m not up there alone.’
‘Jesus Christ, no, you’re not alone,’ Rosenstock replied with strong irritation.
None the less, she never overcame the sense of ‘being out there alone’, of having only herself to rely upon. A manifestation of her insecurity, her fear that she would fail because of other people, it made her seem aloof, utterly self-centred. She did not have the close companionship of Elliott or Sheree North as she had in Wholesale, or the empathy of a Jack Kruschen. One cast member recalls. ‘It was strange. Although she was the star, Barbra always seemed to be the outsider.’
The libretto was in deeper trouble than ever. Streisand and the rest of the company would have to memorise new scenes and complicated song and dance numbers on a daily basis. Now even the survival of the song ‘People’, which she had already recorded as a single, was questioned. Kanin believed that it was a great number but that it set the wrong mood and did not belong in the show.
‘At that moment ... [Fanny’s] just met the fellow [Nick]. Why should she become philosophical?’ Kanin asked the song’s writers. Kanin had not been the first or only one to think ‘People’ was wrong for the show. Stark agreed, and Styne and Merrill might well have given in, but they were certain that Streisand’s recording of it would be a big hit. They promised to write a backup to ‘People’ if Kanin would leave the number in during the Boston try-out and after the record’s release.
‘I promise you, Gar, when you put the right light on her opening night and she sings this song she’ll bring the house down,’ Merrill vowed. ‘People’ stayed in.
A few days before the Funny Girl company was to leave for Boston, Elliott was cast as the court jester in a television version of Mary Rodgers’ Once Upon a Mattress, a musical based on the fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, which starred Carol Burnett as the zany princess, a role she had played in the original Broadway production five years earlier. Since that time, Burnett had become a huge television star. Though only two weeks’ work, it was the first job Elliott had had since On the Town. Streisand left for the Boston and Philadelphia try-outs without him. In Boston, she was given a suite in the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
Sydney Chaplin was down the hall.
Footnotes
1 Fanny Brice made only sporadic film appearances. But she had played a cameo as herself in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), was part of the all-star cast in Everybody Sing (1938
), in which she sang a duet with Judy Garland and in Ziegfeld Follies (1946) did a sketch with Hume Cronyn. Brice also appeared in the part-talkie film My Man and headlined in By Yourself shortly after.
2 ‘I am Woman’ is the same song as ‘You Are Woman’. In this case it was sung as a solo and with feminine lyrics.
3 People brought up before HUAC were asked to name friends and co-workers whose liberal views made them suspect as fellow travellers or communists. Many frightened witnesses implicated others innocent of nothing more than a belief in something they considered to be an American right – freedom of speech. It was one of the darkest periods in American history.
13
SWADDLED IN A new mink coat, a matching hat pulled down over her ears, Streisand stepped off the train in Boston and into the shivery cold. It was late afternoon on 7 January 1964, and in six days Funny Girl would open there at the Shubert Theater. A state of frenzy existed as Carol Haney instituted new dance routines, Irene Sharaff redesigned costumes, Isobel Lennart persistently reworked the second act, and Styne and Merrill put the finishing touches to five new songs that in the end would be cut before they left Boston. Despite the large company, Streisand at first appeared very much alone. She missed Elliott, the carefree times they had shared during the out-of-town try-out of I Can Get It for You Wholesale, shopping for cheap treasures for their walk-up railroad flat. There had been no intermediate stage in her life. One day she lived over a fish restaurant, the next her home was a lavish Central Park West penthouse.
As she was in almost every scene in the show and had to learn new lines with each rehearsal, she had little outside time. Allan Miller came up from New York at her request and without Kanin’s knowledge and again worked privately with her on her performance, trying to get her to relate what was happening in certain scenes with events in her own life. To infuse more emotional depth into her interpretation he told her to think about her father and how she would feel if he were in the audience. To bring the role closer to her, he would have done better to introduce the similarities to Brice, the maturing process of a girl deemed homely, the unerring taste, the penchant for both comedy and tragedy and even a marriage to an unrepentant gambler. Miller claims a great measure of responsibility for Streisand’s effectiveness in the role, but his presence was also detrimental to her relationship with Kanin and her ability to take direction from him. In the end it added to her confusion.