Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  For most people, this presumption of autobiography, along with the sheer force of Barbra’s personality, had been enough to smooth over the rough edges Kilgallen had identified. Critic Frank Judge thought Barbra might sometimes wander off pitch, but her audience was “too trapped by her bewitching theatrical interpretation of the song to notice.” And if they did notice, like Kilgallen, they seemed not to care.

  What finally won people over, however, was Barbra’s own steadfast belief in herself, a quality that seemed to radiate from her the moment she stepped onto the stage. “Barbra believed she was beautiful,” said Kaye Ballard, who’d snuck in one night to watch her. “She was thoroughly convinced of the fact. Me, when I started, I thought I was so ugly that I had to do comedy and then sing. Barbra knew right off she could do ballads.”

  At nine thirty, the doors of the Bon Soir opened. Diana and Sheldon made their way down the steep steps and found seats at one of the small tables crowded in front of the stage. It was unlikely that Barbra was even in the house yet. She was probably still out running around somewhere—running herself down and getting herself sick, her mother likely worried. Diana still fretted over her daughter, although she no longer schlepped into Manhattan with any regularity. She hadn’t even seen Barbra’s latest apartment or met her latest roommate. But whenever Barbra came home, Diana still made sure to load her up with groceries she could take back with her on the subway.

  Shortly after ten, the Three Flames started to play. Diana and Sheldon watched as the comics came out and did their thing. Finally, close to midnight, Jimmie Daniels introduced Barbra. The spotlight found her and the slight teenaged girl burst into “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.” Diana shuddered. What was her daughter wearing?

  To Barbra, it was a chic white-lace Victorian combing jacket, and her shoes the scarlet satin T-straps Bob had so admired. But to Diana she looked as if she had come out onto the stage wearing a nightgown and slippers.

  Still, as Barbra continued to sing, Diana’s distaste gradually faded. As her daughter skated gracefully from song to song, trading the campy lyrics of “I Want to Be Bad” for the touching sentiments of “When Sunny Gets Blue,” Diana began to mellow. She watched Barbra closely. That was her daughter up there, receiving all that applause between each number. And Diana couldn’t deny that Barbra deserved it.

  Maternal pride, however, was no doubt mixed with another, less noble emotion. Later, when Diana returned to Brooklyn and told her friends about Barbra’s performance, she seemed “just the trifle bit jealous,” one friend said. Sitting there in the Bon Soir audience, was Diana imagining what it might have been like if she had gotten the chance to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus all those years earlier, instead of being ordered to quit by her overbearing father?

  During the break between the two shows, Barbra came out to see her mother. Barré stood in the wings, watching the interaction.

  “What did you think, Mama?” Barbra asked.

  “You were good,” Diana told her.

  You were good. For a second, Barbra seemed frozen. It seemed as if she had never heard such a sentiment from her mother before. She looked as if she might cry.

  “Now, look, your clothes,” Diana continued, shaking her head in horror. “You should let the world see you sing in your nightgown?”

  “But you thought I was good?” Barbra asked.

  Diana looked at her. For a moment there was something like compassion, or at least a truce, between the two women. “Yes,” Diana said. “I thought you were good.”

  If anyone was hoping there might be an embrace, however, they were disappointed.

  “Sometimes the voice was a little thin,” Diana added, never knowing when to leave well enough alone. “Maybe you should see a vocal coach.”

  Back in Brooklyn, Diana bragged to her friends that Barbra had “all the big critics falling down on their knees in front of her.” But never would she let her daughter know how proud she was of her. “It would just give her a swelled head,” Diana insisted to friends. She still hoped Barbra would settle down with a steady job, grabbing what little security she could from a world that would crush her ambitions and break her heart, much as it had her own.

  2.

  It was supposed to be a day of fun, a break from performing, as Barbra and Barré rode a tandem bicycle downtown and then took the ferry to Staten Island. But something had gone wrong between them.

  From the moment it was clear that Barbra was a hit at the Bon Soir, their lives had become, in Barré’s words, “a series of manic ups and crashing downs.” They veered between “hysterical fits of uncontrollable laughter to the black pit of . . . misunderstandings . . . arguments and screaming.” Barré blamed it on “the bubble” they lived in, “a circumscribed universe . . . in which nothing else existed except what we were doing together: the creation of ‘Barbra.’”

  Pygmalion had grown resentful of his Galatea.

  Friends noted that while Barbra was suddenly the sensation of Greenwich Village, Barré’s success in Henry V just a couple of months earlier seemed utterly forgotten, and no new jobs were beckoning on the horizon. Barré might not have minded so much if Barbra had seemed genuinely thankful for all he’d done for her, but he took her growing distance from him as a lack of gratitude and an indifference to his place in her life. Try as he might, he “couldn’t seem to let go” of the memory of how she’d missed his Central Park performance. It was always there, burning away, popping up in unexpected moments.

  They stood looking out over the water as the sun dropped lower in the sky. Barbra was quiet. It wasn’t just Barbra’s usual self-absorption that was the issue. There was more going through her eighteen-year-old mind than Barré seemed to understand. Finally, looking across the blue water at the gray and copper skyline of Brooklyn, she shared a little of how she was feeling.

  Too much good was happening to her, she said. And whenever that happened, she explained, whenever God saw her happy, he swooped down and—“boom!”—took it all away. Barré told her that was nonsense, but Barbra explained that was how she’d been brought up to think. “Whenever anything good happened,” she told him, “my mother would dry-spit through her fingers.” And she demonstrated the gesture for him as they stood on the pier.

  Boarding the ferry, Barbra’s contemplative mood only deepened. Sitting beside Barré on a wooden bench in the empty passenger room, the grinding of the ferry’s motors serving as unpleasant background music, she dared to articulate at least one of her fears.

  “So,” she asked quietly, “what are we gonna do about sex?”

  Barré was taken aback. “What do you mean, what are we gonna do about sex?”

  “We ain’t having any,” Barbra said plainly.

  It had been nearly two months since they’d last been intimate. Barrétried making excuses. They were both so busy, he said, so focused on her performance, that they simply didn’t have the time or energy. But Barbra was smarter than that. She fell silent again as a cold wind blew off the East River. Barré put his arms around her to keep her warm.

  She knew Barré’s story, of course, but she blamed herself at least partly for the failings in their relationship—at least Barré thought she did. Barbra’s belief in her own beauty and talent, so powerful and convincing on the stage, always seemed to dim in private moments such as these. She lamented that she’d never learned “feminine wiles.” Growing up ignorant of the opposite sex, she’d never mastered the art of “manipulating men”—her own words—and she envied those women who had. For all her street smarts and stage presence, Barbra still felt she didn’t know how to “sidle up” to a man or “sweet-talk” him. It was something she’d have to learn. But that day on the ferry, she was no doubt just waiting for God to move in and—boom!—take Barré away.

  Once they arrived on Staten Island, the sun set completely. They turned around and rode the ferry back through the steely darkness, Barbra resting her head on Barré’s shoulder. Neither of them spoke a word on the
way home.

  3.

  The two of them together produced more noise than Grand Central Station during rush hour.

  A flurry of silk scarves trailed behind Barbra and Phyllis Diller as they made their way across Union Square, their voices ricocheting through the park like competing bursts of gunfire. Pigeons took flight as the two women hurried toward the statue of George Washington on his horse, Phyllis’s cackle rising up into the trees, where the leaves were just beginning to fade to yellow. That autumn day, the two friends, twenty-five years apart in age, “talked, talked, talked about everything under the sun,” Phyllis said—money, managers, men, marriage. Everything except politics, as Phyllis learned when she asked Barbra what she thought about the recent presidential debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy. On that subject alone, Barbra had no opinion to offer—because “the only politics she was interested in were the politics of how to get a job,” Phyllis quickly realized.

  On that score, Barbra was apparently learning fast. So successful had she been at the Bon Soir that Ernie Sgroi had just extended her run into November. At first, Barbra admitted to Phyllis, she wasn’t sure if she should accept; nightclub singing drained her of the energy she needed to look for acting jobs. Phyllis told her opportunity could happen anywhere; after all, Phyllis had just finished playing Texas Guinan in a cameo for the upcoming movie Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. And she’d gotten that job because of her nightclub work.

  As they crossed Fourteenth Street, Phyllis told Barbra she should consider herself lucky that the club had renewed her contract. She shouldn’t expect to coast by on luck and her fresh face and sound for much longer. Barbra’s habit of showing up at the very last minute before she was set to go on was eventually going to work against her with the management, Phyllis warned. On a night not long before, Phyllis had waited anxiously for Barbra to arrive, while a grumbling, muttering Sgroi smoldered in his office. Finally Barbra had come skidding in with the explanation that she’d been at a movie and had to “wait to see all the credits.” The applause that had followed her performance that night had momentarily assuaged Sgroi’s pique, but Phyllis cautioned her young friend that it would come roaring back if she kept pulling stunts like that.

  Barbra was never good at hearing criticism about herself. She’d go silent when Barré was sharp with her, turn a deaf ear to Bob or Terry, and had never put much stock in what her mother had to say. But for some reason, she didn’t get defensive when Phyllis counseled her. Like Allan Miller, Phyllis was an older figure Barbra respected, someone who possessed qualities that she wanted for herself: knowledge, experience, expertise. So she was inclined to listen when Phyllis spoke. The older woman, who had daughters not so far from Barbra’s age, was another of those mother figures she was drawn to who showed her the kind of interest and regard that Diana never had.

  That was because Phyllis understood what the kid was up against. Barbra was “just starting out . . . and when you’re that young, everybody around you thinks they’re an expert.” Barré was always telling her how to sing, Bob how to dress. One of the Three Flames’ girlfriends routinely camped in the dressing room to advise Barbra on fixing her nose and styling her hair. The first time the woman had started in on her, Barbra had looked up to catch a sympathetic glance from Phyllis. In that moment, the two of them had “bonded,” Phyllis said.

  It had been inevitable. “We’re two of a kind,” Phyllis told Barbra, “just two slightly unusual girls trying to make it in showbiz.” With their offbeat looks, Phyllis figured she and Barbra “faced exactly the same kind of pressures.” And so Phyllis had taken the teenager under her Chanel-draped wing.

  They made their way into S. Klein’s department store. Klein’s sold clothes, dishware, toys, and furniture, and even offered a full-service pet department. At the moment, the store was pushing a sale on RCA color televisions “just in time for the World Series.” Color television was something Barbra could scarcely imagine, but Phyllis hadn’t brought her to the store to look at TVs. She hurried her across the polished wood floor toward Klein’s “Fashion Annex.”

  The day before, Sgroi had approached Phyllis with a problem concerning Barbra that, in his opinion, was even more serious than her tardiness. “The little black lady in charge of the restroom,” Sgroi told Phyllis, “overheard some of the ladies complaining about Barbra’s outfits.” The eavesdropping attendant had promptly rushed the tidbit to Sgroi, who came to Phyllis pleading, “Would you take Barbra out and get her some clothes she can wear on stage?” If the buzz about her sloppy appearance continued, Sgroi worried, it could stall her career—and hurt his ticket sales.

  Phyllis took great umbrage at the suggestion that Barbra was “sloppy”; in fact, the teenager was fastidiously put together, Phyllis believed. It was just that she dressed in her own idiosyncratic style. Phyllis, in fact, thought Barbra “looked good in anything.” She was “a real beauty,” Phyllis thought, with “beautiful lips, sexy legs, all the right curves, those beautiful hands with those long nails.” She told Sgroi he was a “crazy Charlie” for wanting Barbra to change her style.

  But Sgroi was insistent. He flattered Phyllis by calling her “terribly chic,” pointing to her wardrobe full of Chanels and Trigères. Sgroi pleaded with Phyllis to give Barbra a makeover. Predictably, the manager didn’t offer to pay for it. But wanting to help out her young friend, Phyllis agreed to take Barbra shopping.

  And so they embarked on a frustrating day of traipsing from boutique to boutique, trying on dozens of dresses. For Barbra, it was a world very different from the thrift shops she was used to. She despised department stores as a rule. They were “too dear,” she said, and the salespeople “so unpleasant and haughty.” Besides, they wouldn’t bargain. It wasn’t surprising that nothing caught Barbra’s fancy on her outing with Phyllis. “None of this stuff is me,” she said.

  So it was on to Klein’s. But it seemed that this, too, was a lost cause. Then Phyllis spotted the store’s “Designer Room,” which contained “original designs created by America’s foremost ‘name’ fashion houses”—and all at S. Klein bargain prices between $39.99 and $150. Here, Phyllis hoped, was their answer. Slipping Barbra into what she called “the dress of the year”—a black knee-length Chanel she’d seen in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar—Phyllis stood back to admire her friend. Barbra looked gorgeous, Phyllis declared—sophisticated and all grown-up. Reluctantly, Barbra agreed to the dress, and Phyllis hurried to pay the cashier. It was getting late, and they had a show to do that night.

  A few hours later, at the Bon Soir, Phyllis observed the dress hanging forlornly from a hook in the dressing room while Barbra buttoned up her usual antique thrift-shop garb. “I’ll wear the dress tomorrow night,” Barbra said. “I already had this all laid out. I’ll wear the dress tomorrow. Or maybe on the weekend.”

  Phyllis just smiled. Nobody, she realized, told this kid what to do.

  4.

  At a little candlelit Italian eatery on Cornelia Street, the waiter asked them if they wanted a bottle of wine with dinner.

  “I don’t think so,” Bob said. “She’s performing in a couple of hours.”

  But Barbra insisted it was fine. She’d enjoy a little drink. There was talk up in Albany of raising the state drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one, so she might as well get it while she could. Besides, a night out with Bob allowed her to forget, for a little while anyway, the tensions with Barré and the stresses of the Bon Soir.

  Sipping her wine, laughing as she twirled her spaghetti around on her fork, Barbra began to lament the “drudgery” of having to sing every night. She missed the old days when she and Bob—or Barré or Terry or Cis or any of her friends from the Theatre Studio—could just wander around the city, unrestricted by time. Now she had to be at the club every night by nine o’clock—though she often pushed it as late as she could, to nine thirty or even ten. Looking over at Bob and slurring her words ever so slightly, she told hi
m she could not wait for this gig to be over. Then she surprised him by ordering another bottle of wine.

  By the time they were rushing up Sixth Avenue in order not to be late to the club, Barbra was tipsy. Bob watched uneasily from her dressing room as she headed out onto the stage when Jimmie Daniels called her name. “Keepin’ out of mischief now,” Barbra sang. “I really am in love and how . . .”

  She seemed okay, and Bob breathed a sigh of relief. But it wasn’t long before he began to notice a couple of missed lyrics. Anxiously he stood and peered out at Barbra from the wings. She wasn’t messy or slurry, but she wasn’t the disciplined creature she usually was out there. Her timing was off, just by a fraction, but it was enough to cede control of the show to her audience. When people began singing along with her and clapping their hands to the beat, Bob knew she had lost them. They were having fun, but this audience would not leave the club enthralled as their predecessors had, telling their friends that they just had to get down to the Village to see this girl. Tonight Barbra had not been extraordinary. Bob felt she had “broken the illusion.”

  Afterward, he told her plainly, “We shouldn’t have had the wine. That was a bad show, Barbra.”

  She reacted angrily. “They come to see me. Whatever I do, that’s what they get.”

  But Bob could tell she was troubled. He hadn’t needed to tell her it was a bad show. She’d known it, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

  Barbra stewed. She kept insisting she’d been fine, that Bob was overreacting, that the audience had been pleased, that it was her show and she could do it any way she wanted to. This damn singing business was taking away her life! But for all her defensive blather, never again did Bob see her take a drink before a show.