Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  When she called home later that night, she learned that her mother had watched the show after all, but most of the conversation centered around Sheldon’s new daughter, Erica. The next morning Barbra boarded a plane to head back to her pals in Detroit, who showed far more excitement about her television debut.

  4.

  The first—and as far as Barbra could see, the only—“big thing” to come out of the Paar show appearance was a gig in St. Louis at a place called the Crystal Palace. It wasn’t exactly the superstardom Barbra was hoping for, but it had come, unexpectedly, with a few enjoyable perks—not the least of which was a young man named Tommy. Sitting opposite him, Barbra listened as he strummed a few chords on his guitar and made eyes at her. Not a bad way to mark her nineteenth birthday. Not bad at all.

  After a final week and a half at the Caucus Club—during which the Grubers had given her a bonus for the great publicity they’d gotten when Orson Bean mentioned the name of the club on national television—Barbra had boarded the train to St. Louis, some five hundred and fifty miles southwest of Detroit. The Crystal Palace was a very different kind of venue than the chic Caucus Club. Phyllis had worked there the previous December, so she’d likely given Barbra the lowdown.

  The owner, Jay Landesman, was a St. Louis–born Greenwich Village beatnik who’d founded the literary quarterly Neurotica in 1948, publishing Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Carl Solomon. Norman Mailer said that Landesman and his wife, Fran, “could be accused of starting it all,” meaning the whole “beat” culture. Now Landesman was bringing the avant-garde, the offbeat, the new, and the different to America’s heartland. He’d opened the Crystal Palace in 1958, spurring a movement of restaurants and cabarets into St. Louis’s bustling Gaslight Square. The club’s “hep audience” sat in a semicircle around an apron stage.

  When Irvin Arthur had pitched the idea of a revue starring three acts from the Paar show, Landesman had quickly signed on. In addition to Barbra, there was Marc London, a young comic whom Variety called “as relaxed as an old shoe” and who’d made a name for himself with his humorous take on the daily news, and the Smothers Brothers—Tommy and Dick—a guitar-and-bass duo who “lampooned folk singers to a fare-thee-well,” Variety opined, “satire with a capital S.” The Smothers Brothers had been on the Paar show on February 20. Grouping the three acts under a single banner, “Caught in the Act,” Landesman publicized the revue as the first in a series “to showcase rising new talent.” The Smothers Brothers were billed first, and though Barbra came next, newspaper ads persisted in spelling her name “Barbara.”

  Between the four performers a close bond was formed; in letters back to Bob, Barbra called them “her family on the road.” But the most intimate connection was with Tommy. Four months after her breakup with Barré, Barbra’s heartbreak was finally healing—at least enough to respond when a man flirted with her. And to her great surprise, she had flirted back. Finally, it seemed, she was learning a little of those “feminine wiles.”

  Twenty-four-year-old Tom Smothers was the comic to his brother Dick’s straight man, often playing dim or naïve, when, in fact, he was as sharp as a tack, politically astute, and savvy in business. The brothers, who hailed from the Los Angeles area, had cut an album, The Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion, due to be released the next month by Mercury Records. Blond and soft-spoken, about as goyish as one could get, Tom came from a North Carolina family that dated back to the Confederacy. He was very attentive to Barbra. Jay Landesman, who had an eagle eye, felt certain the two of them were sleeping together.

  On this night, Barbra’s birthday, “Caught in the Act” was staged twice, first at eight thirty and then at ten, as it was every weeknight (there were three shows on weekends). Barbra was in good spirits. The spelling of her name had finally been fixed in the ads, and their audiences had been picking up after a rather slow start. On the night the revue had opened, April 17, they’d been up against the telecast of the Academy Awards. That meant they’d played to a number of empty seats, since it seemed the entire world was tuning in to watch Elizabeth Taylor—at death’s door from pneumonia just weeks before—accept the Best Actress prize for Butterfield 8. In the following days, some people had stayed home out of anxiety over the Kennedy administration’s attempted intervention in Cuba—a failed enterprise the newspapers called the “Bay of Pigs invasion.” But as hostilities died down, people started filing into the Crystal Palace looking for some diversion from world affairs. Soon the word on the street was that “Caught in the Act” was “a zippy revue, full of fun.”

  The fun proved infectious. Working alongside three comedians, Barbra endeavored to keep up the pace, slipping in more and more of “their sort of patter between her numbers,” Landesman noticed. Barbra had always included a few quick, humorous asides in her act, but now her rap was turning into rambling stories about the benefits of eating nuts or the hazards of sitting too close to a television. And she was amping up the Jewish shtick considerably. “Such toomel,” she’d giggle, using the Yiddish word for noisy chaos, when the audience would applaud her after a number. “You like my schmatta?” she’d ask, gesturing to her outfit. She told friends she was playing a character; she was an actress, after all, and it came naturally. But Landesman worried that the patter might distract from the mood of her songs, many of which were tender ballads. “But I get so bored doing the same thing every night,” Barbra replied, when he asked her to tone it down a bit. Landesman gave in and allowed her to continue.

  People began to comment on Barbra’s speaking voice, which could be soft and wispy, compared to her singing voice, which seemed to grow bolder, stronger, and more confident every time she performed. Certainly that night, on her birthday, Barbra had every reason to feel confident about herself and her career. Singing “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” from the off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks, she had the audience shouting for an encore. The Variety review that appeared a few days later declared that Barbra had an “inimitable, sultry way with a ballad . . . She shapes as a comer.”

  Yes indeed, reason for confidence. Three cities in a row had now gotten behind her. Three major cities, where she had brought people to their feet, cheering and hooting for more. But perhaps what was even more important to her that spring was a quieter, more personal breakthrough. She had discovered that there were other fish in the sea than Barré Dennen, and some of them might even find her attractive. Tommy Smothers’s attentions had come at exactly the right moment. Barbra came to understand the power she could have when she zeroed in on someone and turned on the full seductive force of her personality.

  5.

  Coming home to New York after eight weeks in Detroit and three in St. Louis should have been a happy occasion. But it wasn’t.

  Rain fell as Barbra made her way from Elaine Sobel’s apartment in Murray Hill to Greenwich Village. She’d been back in the city for less than forty-eight hours and here she was, schlepping right back to where she’d started, to the Bon Soir to commence another four-week singing engagement. Arthur had completed all the arrangements for the gig while she was in St. Louis, ensuring no disruption in Barbra’s income, for which she was undeniably grateful. He’d even gotten her salary raised to $175 a week. But where were the acting jobs? Before she’d left Detroit, Barbra had interrupted the radio host Jack Harris when he’d observed on air that she’d “switched to singing” from acting. “I’m going back to acting!” she’d insisted.

  Indeed, this time around, the Bon Soir seemed rather sordid, Barbra told friends. Making her living as a singer struck her as “wrong.” Deep down, she thought, singing in a nightclub was “a floozy job.”

  Her companion in the tiny, cramped dressing room this time was Renée Taylor, a big, blowsy, twenty-eight-year-old powerhouse whose broad, blatant comedy, heavily accented with Jewish shtick, was familiar to television audiences through regular appearances on the Jack Paar and Perry Como shows. It was Taylor who was the headliner this night, so it was magnanimous of her to len
d Barbra a pair of stockings, since the younger performer had discovered a run in hers at the last moment. Barbra trooped out onto the stage and sang her songs, then yanked her stockings off and tossed them to Taylor backstage, who promised to slip them back to her in time for the second show.

  This was definitely not the kind of career Barbra had dreamed about. During the break between shows, she stood by the coffee urn in the Bon Soir’s steamy kitchen, the aromas of garlic and grease hanging in the air. Waiters rushed past her, carrying trays of the club’s latest delicacy, a three-layer pastry that Variety decreed had “only intermittent nutritional value.” How could she be a serious artist in a place like this? Was this what she had labored so hard for at the Theatre Studio? Was this why she had dug so deep into her heart and soul during Allan Miller’s acting classes?

  During the day, in the privacy of her room, whether she was in Detroit, St. Louis, or New York, Barbra had endeavored to keep her dreams alive by acting out scenes from Shakespeare and Chekhov. And even though she carried that passion and determination with her into the clubs, striving to use her acting skills every time she sang, invoking Shakespeare to interpret Gershwin, Barbra still couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was “bastardizing her art.” Hadn’t Rozar promised her work in the theater?

  She’d begun having second thoughts about her big blond manager. For one thing, his roving eye, quick to follow any pretty girl who walked into the room, irritated her to no end. Barbra was never one to tolerate a gaze that wandered too far from her own direction. And wouldn’t it be nice, she added in her rants to her pals, if she had a manager who actually traveled with her, as other performers did? Then she wouldn’t have to make her way on the road all by herself.

  Before the show that night, she’d exchanged a few sharp words with Rozar. She was annoyed that he expected her to reimburse him for phone calls and postage. Whatever happened to him never expecting a woman to pay for anything? That was just the way things were done, Rozar tried explaining, but he knew Barbra’s pique was about more than just money. He understood that she was irritated by the fact that he spent, in her opinion, “too much time” with his other clients and even with his family. He’d come to recognize in Barbra the same self-absorption that had so exasperated Barré, the furious narcissism that blazed within her, fueled by that old pipeline of insecurities. Barbra wanted a manager “who would pay all his own expenses and expect nothing from her,” Rozar now realized, “who would travel with her wherever she went, who would be there to hold her hand, fight her battles, tell her she was wonderful, and be her slave.”

  In between shows that night, they didn’t speak. Rozar sat with his wife in the audience. Barbra stood by herself beside the coffee urn in the Bon Soir kitchen. That was when she looked up to see a stocky, bespectacled man approaching her. He told her his name was Marty Erlichman.

  6.

  Marty had been looking forward to seeing his old pal, actor and comedian Phil Leeds, perform that night at the Bon Soir. Phil was sharing a bill that included Renée Taylor and her comedy partner, Frank Baxter; and some girl singer Marty had never heard of. On a night as raw and rainy as this, Marty probably wouldn’t have come out except to show his support to Phil. Bluff and often brusque, Marty nonetheless had a sentimental side.

  Yet the performer who impressed him the most that evening was that unknown girl singer. Barbra sang five songs that gave Marty “chills through all of them.” The rest of his table, all “industry people,” hadn’t been as impressed. Instead of the usual up-tempo number, Barbra had opened with a ballad, no doubt trying to alleviate the boredom she felt doing the same thing every night. One of the agents at Marty’s table shook his head and called that a mistake. Barbra, he said, had “a lot to learn.”

  Marty wasn’t so sure. He had a feeling this kid knew exactly what she was doing. As an entertainment manager, he had an eye for talent in the rough. Not long before, he’d spotted a group of Irish singers who called themselves the Clancy Brothers and pegged them, despite their lack of experience and polish, as potential stars. When he noticed one of the Clancys wearing a white Aran sweater sent over from Ireland by his mother, Marty had decided that the whole group should wear them. It gave them a look. And so the sweaters had become their trademark, launching a bit of a national fad when Marty succeeded in booking the Clancys on The Ed Sullivan Show just a couple of months previous. That appearance had led to a five-year, $100,000 recording contract with Columbia Records, with none other than Pete Seeger on backup banjo. The Clancy Brothers were suddenly riding high—and along with them, their manager.

  Marty shared not a few characteristics with that girl singer he so admired. He’d been born in Brooklyn, about two and a half miles from where Barbra grew up, though Martin Lee Erlichman was thirteen years older than Barbra Joan Streisand. But like her, Marty was also the grandchild of Russian Jewish immigrants and had dreamed of making a name for himself in the world of showbiz from a very young age. His father, Jack, short for Jacob, managed a confectionery; his grandfather Joseph had worked in an ice-cream factory in Manhattan. But vending candy and sweets was not going to be Marty’s fate. As a young man he got a job as a time-log clerk at CBS radio. In the summer of 1959, he produced “Jazz on the Hudson,” a series of four-hour cruises that left Pier 80 at the foot of West Forty-second Street every Friday night, regaling passengers with the sounds of Morgana King, Donald Byrd, Sam Most, Pepper Adams, the Horace Silver Quintet, and others.

  With a business partner, Lenny Rosenfeld, Marty broke into the personal-management field when he signed his first client, Josh White, the blues singer-songwriter. With White now working primarily on English television, Marty was primarily concentrating on the Clancy Brothers. But he was still looking for “the big one”—the client who could put him up there with George Scheck, the powerful manager of Connie Francis, or maybe even Colonel Tom Parker, who had guided Elvis Presley to the top.

  Marty certainly wouldn’t have pegged Barbra as being his ticket to the big time, but he was clearly impressed. Her vulnerability and the poignant sense of autobiography that resonated in her songs had been strikingly apparent. To Marty, Barbra had “what Chaplin had.” Moviegoers always rooted for the little tramp against anyone who tried to beat him down. It was the same, Marty felt, with Barbra. To him, Barbra was “the girl the guys never look at twice,” and when she sang of the pathos of that—of “being like an invisible woman”—the audience rose up and wanted “to protect her.” This was definitely a marketable act, Marty told himself, and so, during the intermission, he excused himself from his table and went to look for this girl named Barbra Streisand.

  He found her beside the coffee urn in the kitchen.

  Without any niceties or small talk, he bluntly told her that she was terrific and asked if she had representation. Barbra liked Marty’s direct manner, so much like her own. But she had to reply that she already had a manager. Marty pulled his card from his pocket and handed it to her. She should call him, he said, if her situation ever changed. Before he had a chance to leave, Barbra asked Marty if he thought she ought to fix her nose or change her name. Marty told her she shouldn’t change a thing.

  Barbra made sure to keep Marty Erlichman’s card.

  7.

  Ted Rozar had seen the little transaction between Barbra and Marty. He’d spotted Erlichman in the audience and knew who he was, and he’d watched with interest Marty’s hasty beeline backstage between shows.

  “He wants her,” Rozar told his wife as they headed out of the club. “I could see it in his eyes.”

  Once inside a cab, Rozar laughed. “Well, if he wants her, let him try to get her,” he said. “He’ll see what she wants. And if he can give it to her, then he can have her.”

  8.

  It was time for a little makeover, Barbra felt, and it came, as always, courtesy of good old Bob.

  She sat on her usual stool in Bob’s apartment on Gay Street as her pal walked in circles slowly around her, stroking his c
hin, as if she were a half-finished piece of sculpture and he was considering where to wield his chisel next. They laughed, often and easily. But Bob was quite serious in believing Barbra’s appearance was critical in taking her to the next level of her professional career. She was definitely on the move. She’d just been booked for a second appearance on the Paar show, and the Bon Soir had, once again, extended her run by a couple of weeks. Bob thought it was time she left behind anything too girlish, anything too “Greenwich Village beatnik,” and homed in on something entirely new and surprising.

  For all Barbra’s flirtation with the idea of a new manager, she was grateful that Rozar had landed her a repeat appearance on the Paar show, again with the able assistance of Orson Bean, who was once more in the guest host’s chair. So she was up for whatever Bob had in mind for her. A new wardrobe or hairdo. Anything to make her stand out on television.

  Bob got down to work. A dress was shortened; a pair of long gloves was tried on. It was Bob’s desire that Barbra stop conversation when she made an appearance. She had to be “queen of the room,” he said. Terry Leong’s thrift-shop creations had been interesting, Bob thought, but “they were costumes, not clothes.” That look had worked very well to get her noticed, Bob believed, but it was entirely “too theatrical” to take Barbra to the next level of her public success. Now, Bob urged her, she needed to think “sophistication . . . poise . . . Park Avenue cocktail party.”