Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  “—that they understand the answer and they’d like another song.”

  As Barbra headed over to the stage to sing, Wallace asked his viewers to decide whether she looked more like the regal actress Judith Anderson, best known for playing Medea on Broadway and Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, or Fanny Brice, the Ziegfeld Follies comic best known for playing Baby Snooks on the radio.

  The orchestra began playing and Barbra sang “Lover, Come Back to Me” with all the power she’d given it at the Bon Soir. In the control booth, the contrast between Barbra’s two personae—the quirky kid and the soulful woman—was received with great appreciation by the show’s producers. Even before Barbra had finished singing, they had decided to have her back whenever her schedule permitted.

  2.

  In the late afternoon of the first Sunday in July, Barbra arrived at the Village Vanguard, one of the oldest clubs in the Village, located in a cellar at 178 Seventh Avenue South. Here Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, Blossom Dearie, and Sonny Rollins had all made names for themselves, but the biggest star currently associated with the club was trumpeter Miles Davis. Davis’s band was setting up the day Barbra walked in. The Shirley Horn Trio was also on the bill.

  Barbra had come to the Vanguard at the behest of an old friend from acting school, Rick Edelstein, who worked as a waiter at the club. In the past, Edelstein had sometimes sneaked Barbra into the club so she could catch the last show. Primarily a jazz club, the Vanguard had recently headlined Gerry Mulligan, Ahmad Jamal, Nina Simone, and the edgy comedian Lenny Bruce. Any of these shows Barbra might have seen. Edelstein served her ginger ale, because he understood that Barbra “didn’t drink”; perhaps the memory of that one bottle of wine too many with Bob had lingered. After the show, Barbra and Rick would head over to the Pam Pam, split a baked potato, and talk until three AM.

  This afternoon, however, Barbra had come for more than just the show. During the Sunday matinees, which began at four thirty, the Vanguard occasionally allowed a few surprise acts, who hoped a warm reception from the afternoon audience might get them invited back as an official part of the bill some evening. In the extremely competitive nightclub business, such opportunities were rare, but the Vanguard’s easygoing owner, Max Gordon, was known to have “an eye for promising newcomers and the ability to help them blossom.” When Edelstein suggested that Barbra perform a few numbers that afternoon, Gordon agreed; he’d heard her sing before, probably at the Bon Soir, and thought she was “great.” He even asked Miles Davis to play backup for her, but the jazz great refused, saying he didn’t play “behind no girl singer.”

  Yet, if singing in a club made her feel like a floozy, why was Barbra even there? Why had she curled her hair, drawn those elaborate lines around her eyes, picked out a fashionable dress, slipped into some antique shoes, and trooped over that afternoon to the Village Vanguard? She didn’t even really need the money, at least not at that particular moment. She’d just been paid for PM East, and there was a looming gig in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Irvin Arthur would surely get her more nightclub jobs if she needed them. So why put herself through all of this?

  The answer, perhaps, came from the most recent man in her life.

  His name was Stanley Beck, and he had told Barbra that her problem was simple: She didn’t like herself very much. Stanley had known Barbra long enough to speak with some degree of authority. He’d first met her at the Malden Bridge Playhouse when Barbra was fifteen and he was twenty-one. Though he’d found her attractive, Stanley had kept a respectable distance from the underage girl. It was not until one night in the late spring of 1961 that they’d reconnected. Barbra and her roommate, Elaine, had gone to see The Balcony, the Jean Genet play being directed by José Quintero at the Circle in the Square Theatre. Stanley had recently taken over the part of the executioner, and Barbra had recognized him. After the show, they met up, and during the past few weeks had been seeing quite a bit of each other.

  Barbra, according to friends, had initially been smitten. Shortly before meeting Stanley, she’d lamented to Elaine, “Will I ever get a guy? Do you think anyone could ever love this face?” The affair with Tommy Smothers may have given Barbra a boost, but for someone with self-doubts that ran as deep as hers, it was going to take much more than that to convince her of her own allure. So when Stanley returned her interest, she was elated.

  Stanley had picked up on her insecurities. He’d told Barbra plainly that the reason “she was attracted to guys who paid no attention to her” was because it confirmed her own deep-seated belief that “she was nothing.” That might explain, some friends thought, why she kept trudging into nightclubs, craving the approval of the managers and the applause of their patrons.

  Standing in the Vanguard now, waiting for Rick Edelstein to corral a musician to play backup for her, Barbra was as alone as she’d ever been in her life. Nearly seven months after the breakup with Barré, her renditions of “Cry Me a River” had lost none of their intensity. Even Stanley’s muscular frame couldn’t compete with the memory of Barré. At first, Barbra had been attracted enough to Stanley to buy a diaphragm in case she ever gave in and had sex with him. But as time went on, she told Elaine that she “could take him or leave him.” Stanley wasn’t the devoted, nurturing mentor Barré had been. He was also perhaps just a bit too honest. He spoke with a directness that Barbra wasn’t used to, and he articulated a truth that went to the core of her being. To no one’s great surprise, shortly before her audition at the Vanguard, Barbra had stopped seeing Stanley Beck.

  Up on the stage, Edelstein was motioning to Barbra that the musician was ready. Barbra stepped up and sang three numbers. The audience, as expected, cheered and whistled. Watching from the back of the room, Max Gordon’s wife, Lorraine, felt as if there was nothing Barbra “couldn’t do with her voice—she had such control, top to bottom.” But her husband didn’t offer Barbra a job that day. The Vanguard was a jazz club, and Barbra was no Nina Simone. This day, the affirmation she sought so desperately would not be forthcoming.

  At least not from the club managers. As Barbra was leaving, an older woman from the audience stopped her. “You are fantastic,” she said. “Don’t ever change.”

  Barbra looked at her matter-of-factly. “Of course I’ll change,” she said. “Life changes people.”

  Indeed, she was counting on change. She didn’t want to stay the same, singing in clubs, bastardizing her art, begging for jobs. That lady was crazy. Barbra was impatient for change. Bring it on, she might well have said. The sooner the better.

  3.

  Homesickness can get pretty acute seventeen hundred miles away.

  Everything seemed so different in Canada. At the nightclub, men wore short-sleeved shirts with no ties. No matter that the temperatures had reached ninety degrees Fahrenheit that week, Barbra found the practice peculiar, especially since the Town ‘n’ Country, the three-story theater-restaurant where she was playing, seemed more like a palace than a club. “Beautiful,” she proclaimed. “Very posh.” Yet the club’s management wasn’t even springing for her accommodations. For her two-week stint in Winnipeg, from July 3 to 15, Barbra had to pay her own way at the local YWCA. True, she was being paid better than she had ever been before—$350 Canadian a week, about the same in American dollars—but that was quickly whittled down when she figured in travel, food, and lodging. She’d made a few friends, who had taken her out horseback riding, which she’d enjoyed. But mostly she spent her days alone in her room, talking with Elaine on the phone or writing letters to Bob.

  Worst of all, however, were the audiences, to whom she played three shows nightly, finding them both dull and noisy. On this night, it was the latter. People kept on talking as she tried to sing. It was like being in the Catskills all over again. With her tinnitus probably clanging in her ears, as it usually did in loud, stressful situations, Barbra stopped singing and abruptly walked off the stage.

  The club’s manager, Auby Galpern, wasn’t pleased. He liked Barbra, even if h
e’d been distinctly unimpressed with her sartorial choices. He’d also been befuddled by her singing style. For a rendition of “Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking,” one of Cole Porter’s less well-known and more outlandish compositions, Barbra pounded on a bongo drum, flung her hair around, and swayed her torso. Reviewers took note. “Miss Streisand is the type of singer you’d expect to find in the Blue Angel or San Francisco’s hungry i,” Gene Telpner wrote in the Winnipeg Free Press. “That’s why Winnipeggers may find her rather strange.” Telpner repeated the fiction, still part of Barbra’s official publicity, that she’d been born in Turkey. He thought it gave her a “semi-Oriental look.”

  Still, in the end, the review had been positive. Barbra’s act, Telpner concluded, “was really worth hearing.” That was what had saved her in Galpern’s view, at least so far. Barbra might be different from the acts he usually headlined at the Towers, the Town ‘n’ Country’s performing space, but she was good. Very good. The boys in the band had declared she was “terrific,” and Galpern knew his musicians were his best judges of talent.

  But walking off the stage as Barbra had done—that was unacceptable. Galpern and his young singer exchanged some heated words over the incident. No doubt, there were some tears. Phoning Elaine, Barbra said she might have just been fired.

  But she wasn’t. Galpern forgave her, and she went on the next night. The gig would turn out just fine. In the beginning, she may have had Winnipeggers asking, “What’s she doing?” But “after they knew who I was,” she said, “they listened to me.”

  4.

  Back in New York, Elaine was very excited to watch her roommate on PM East. It was Wednesday, July 12, and Barbra’s episode was finally set to air. With Elaine was her boyfriend, the young actor Dustin Hoffman, who remembered Barbra from the Theatre Studio. Since those days, Hoffman had done some impressive off-Broadway work and had just appeared on Naked City, the television police drama.

  Elaine told Hoffman that he had to hear Barbra sing. But the young man tried to demur. “I’ve seen her act,” he said, remembering some rather stilted Theatre Studio student productions. “She’s not that great.”

  But Elaine insisted. So it was with some reluctance that Hoffman stood in front of the television set, watching as a grid of lights flashed across the screen and came together to spell out PM East. Host Mike Wallace conversed with his guest models—the “beauties of New York,” the ads had called them—and then finally introduced Barbra. To Hoffman, his old schoolmate seemed to be “really laying on the New York thing, the accent.” Finally, Barbra headed over to the stage and sat on a stool to sing.

  “When a bee lies sleepin’ in the palm of your hand . . .”

  Hoffman had to sit down. He “couldn’t believe” the beauty of Barbra’s voice. This little girl, this offbeat character who’d skulked around acting school with acne on her face and clothes smelling of mothballs, had opened her mouth and “this blessing,” as Hoffman described it, had come out. He was surprised by how emotional he got.

  All across the country, many others were feeling exactly the same way.

  5.

  Barbra was fed up. She’d thought of Detroit almost as a second home, but here were the Grubers, having hired her yet again to sing at the Caucus Club, refusing her request that meals be included in her contract. On a tour that had been one long hassle, this was the last straw. Furious, Barbra rang Irvin Arthur, but he couldn’t help; she wasn’t even able to get Ted Rozar on the phone. So she dug out Marty Erlichman’s card and placed a call to New York. When she learned that he was in San Francisco, Barbra tracked him down there.

  Finally getting Marty on the line, Barbra asked if he still wanted to manage her. He replied that he did. So she told him about the stalemate she’d reached with the Grubers. Marty listened. And then he did something Barbra couldn’t have predicted.

  He got on a plane and flew to Detroit.

  Now, cloistered with the club owners in their office, Marty leveled with them. Barbra was distraught, and he was certain they didn’t want a distraught singer. He pointed out that they were paying her just $150 a week, the same as her last appearance at their club, while she’d made more than $300 in Winnipeg. Even her last gig in New York had brought her $175. The Grubers agreed to match the $175, but Marty knew that wouldn’t satisfy Barbra. She was holding out for the meals for the principle of the thing. So Marty told the brothers, in confidence, that he’d pay them an additional $25 if they threw in dinners for Barbra. The Grubers’ jaws nearly hit their desks. “Let us get this straight,” one of them said. “You flew here at your own expense so you could pay us twenty-five dollars and you’re not even her manager?”

  Although the Grubers might not have thought so, Marty Erlichman was a shrewd operator. He knew his investment of $25 had just raised Barbra’s American asking price from $175 to $200. Her next employer would have to top that.

  Yet Marty’s shrewdness went beyond dollars. Barbra’s new manager— although he couldn’t quite call himself that yet, given the contract still in place with Rozar—had no intention of keeping his deal with the Gruber brothers a secret. Right from the start, it was meant to leak, and already Marty knew exactly how he’d sell it. “You must really believe this girl is going to be a star,” he’d quote the Grubers as saying, to which Marty replied he “sure as hell did.” It was a great anecdote with which to sell a new client.

  There was no question that Marty truly believed in Barbra’s potential—he wouldn’t have taken her on if he hadn’t—but managing the Clancy Brothers had taught him a valuable lesson. You didn’t let the public decide if an act was important or worthy. You told them so ahead of time. The Clancys had been sold as groundbreaking musicians who had single-handedly jump-started America’s love affair with Irish music, and that was exactly how the public had bought them. Therefore, a similar angle was needed to merchandize Marty’s latest client. For Barbra, it wasn’t national identity that he figured he could sell. Rather it was sheer, raw, once-in-a-generation talent.

  So Marty let the word get out that Barbra wasn’t paying him any commissions, that he was helping her simply because he thought she was so amazingly gifted. In doing so, he was building the narrative he wanted associated with her. Of course, Marty’s spin also had a more immediate, practical application. It prevented Ted Rozar from claiming that Barbra had violated her exclusive contract with him by paying someone else.

  For Barbra, a switch in managers couldn’t have happened fast enough. Marty was far easier to relate to than Rozar ever was. He was a fellow Jew from Brooklyn, but he also had a reassuring manner about him; Rozar had often made her feel uneasy. With Rozar, Barbra had to take care of so many little details herself; Marty promised he’d oversee everything from contracts to cab rides. He was there to listen to her as she kvetched in Detroit; in the past, Barbra had had to kvetch alone. Rozar had always been flirting with other girls, but Marty only had eyes for Barbra. Rozar had declared that what Barbra wanted in a manager was a “slave.” Marty wasn’t quite that, but he made sure Barbra felt as if she were his top—his only—priority. Nothing less would have sufficed.

  And he told the world that she paid him not one dime.

  In many ways, Marty was the strong, indulgent, protective father Barbra had always dreamed of having. His thirteen years of seniority—there had been only a few with Rozar—made all the difference. With his thick accent and frank way of speaking, Marty might not have been as erudite as Barbra expected her father would have been, but she could have a conversation with him about Chekhov or Mozart or Billie Holiday, and that was important to her. Most of all, Marty was the kind of direct and forthright advocate she’d longed for all her life—the kind of father who might have stood up for her at school or provided a counterbalance to her mother’s lack of encouragement. The white-knight rescue Marty had performed for Barbra in Detroit seemed to suggest that he could be as devoted to her as Barré had once been for those few short, wonderful months. And devotion was wha
t Barbra wanted. Needed.

  Rozar would have to be dealt with when they got back to New York. But for now, Barbra settled in for a happy month at the Caucus Club, enjoying all the Rocqueburgers and corned beef she could possibly eat.

  6.

  Given the stresses she faced on her return to New York, it was no wonder that Barbra took solace from what might have seemed an unlikely source: Zen Buddhism.

  Sitting in quiet meditation, the sounds of the city quickly receded from her consciousness. For a little while, Barbra was able to push from her mind the stressful fact that she had nowhere to live. Sharing Elaine’s apartment was never meant to be permanent, and now Barbra found herself traipsing from friend to friend, sometimes staying with Bob, sometimes with Peter Daniels, sometimes crashing at Sheldon’s office. She’d taken to carrying a cheap fold-up cot under her arm because she never knew when she might stumble across a good place to spend the night.

  But during her Zen meditations, Barbra could forget all of her troubles, which included a recent, and nasty, break with Rozar. Associated Booking had advanced her $700 to “buy him off,” though Rozar insisted that it was money she owed him for commissions. Barbra had shown up at his office with what he called a “big goon” at her side. As she handed her former manager the money and gathered her belongings, Barbra refused to look Rozar in the eye so he was forced to talk to the back of her head. He told her he felt “disappointed” and “somewhat betrayed.” But when Barbra and the goon left—just who he was Rozar didn’t know, and Barbra didn’t say—there was “no apology, no explanation, not even a good-bye.” Rozar was deeply hurt. He felt he had done right by Barbra, negotiating her salary up, connecting her with nightclub owners. But he knew he’d never be the “hand-holder” that she wanted.