Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  Marty, of course, was thrilled that Lieberson had finally shown up. Marty believed that only by hearing Barbra sing in front of an audience, especially her audience, could the record exec really comprehend the effect she had on people. Lieberson had been softening. No doubt it was more than just Kapralik’s enthusiasm that had finally moved him to come hear Barbra sing. The glowing reviews she’d gotten for the Wholesale and Pins and Needles disks couldn’t have escaped his notice. Even God may have begun to doubt himself, to wonder whether he’d been wrong not to sign her.

  Like her Bon Soir homecoming, Barbra’s return to the Blue Angel had been marked by a welcome change in status. Last time she’d played second fiddle to Pat Harrington; now she was front and center, heading a bill that also included comic Bob Lewis and the Phoenix Singers, a folk trio who often sang with Harry Belafonte. A few weeks earlier, Max Gordon had bought out Herbert Jacoby’s share in the club; Barbra was the first headliner under his solo management. She joked to Earl Wilson that she’d “hit the big time” since she was finally being paid as much as Peter Daniels, her accompanist. Obviously Gordon had as much faith in Barbra as she had in herself.

  No doubt Lieberson had also seen the reviews for the show, which was wrapping up after five sold-out weeks. “Miss Streisand is a delightful and mercurial sprite,” Variety had observed, keying in on the unpredictability that so enchanted her fans. “She is amply appreciated,” the review concluded—an understatement.

  And yet, at the Angel, sometimes appreciation was hard to discern. Performers had to “crack through the reserve,” Dick Gautier found. At the posh club—peopled with blue bloods and celebrities who were often as famous, or more so, than those on the stage—it was “gauche to laugh too much, or applaud too much,” Gautier said.

  So it was saying a great deal that the applause following Barbra’s “oddball” (Variety’s word) rendition of “Much More” from The Fantasticks was loud and enthusiastic. On that little stage she stood, looking out into that long, narrow, coffinlike room suffused with the subtle fragrance of gladiolas, singing her heart out, knowing that Lieberson sat only a few feet away from her. It was not unlike the way she’d “auditioned” for Ray Stark at the Bon Soir. In both cases, she was hoping to provide for herself an escape hatch, a jailbreak from the stultifying routine of Wholesale. Not long before, she’d done what had once been unthinkable to her: She’d turned over the part of Miss Marmelstein to Louise Lasser, her understudy, for several days and taken a much-needed holiday.

  Not that she’d rested. There never seemed to be time for that. The weekend of July 14 she, Elliott, Marty, Diana, and little Rosalind had driven up to Bill Hahn’s Hotel in Westbrook, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, about two and a half hours from New York. The big, gregarious proprietor was hosting a birthday party for his swanky hotel with proceeds going to the American Cancer Society. He’d roped in Art Carney, who lived nearby, for the top of the bill, backed up by Barbra, Henny Youngman, jazz singer Johnny Hartman, and pop singer Tommy Sands, who introduced his wife, Nancy Sinatra, from the audience. The party was “strictly private for hotel guests,” who tended to be affluent New York Jews. The thing Barbra probably enjoyed best was Hahn’s giant birthday cake, which was sliced up and passed around during intermission, though the pay—likely approaching four figures—was nice, too. But simply spending a few nights in the sea air, far away from Wholesale, would alone have made it all worthwhile.

  Her publicists, in fact, had started a rumor that she might be ditching Broadway for good. Several columns that summer carried stories that Barbra was applying to Dartmouth College, which was discussing opening its doors to women for the first time. According to these reports, Barbra wanted to major in economics and languages: Italian, Japanese, and Greek. That was the giveaway that it was all just hype, a way to keep Barbra’s name in the papers: Greek was the language she and Elliott imagined speaking among themselves, and Barbra’s nightclub act often had her pretending to speak in various tongues. No doubt Don Softness or Richard Falk had read about Dartmouth going co-ed and thought of an angle for Barbra, who was of college age and known as a bit of a rebel. It might also have served as a nudge to Stark and Merrick—they’d better hurry up and sign her before she went off to school.

  But higher education was hardly Barbra’s goal. Out there in the audience, Lieberson was close to making up his mind. He’d said no so many times before, but he’d come to hear her tonight. That was a very good sign. Making an album might not have been Barbra’s big dream, but it could help ease her out of Wholesale—not to mention make her a good deal of money. So she put everything she had into her time on the Blue Angel stage. This night, there was no phoning it in.

  “Right as the Rain” was solid ground for her; she knew it like she knew her own name, and once again Barbra nailed it. But she was also singing a newer, riskier addition to her repertoire. Peter had reworked “Happy Days Are Here Again” for her, slowing it down even more than was done for The Garry Moore Show, making it almost unbearably poignant. As Barbra launched into the song, a hush came over the club. It was, as the frequent Blue Angel patron put it, “truly an electric moment between Barbra and her audience.” The emotion, he said, “quite literally crackled between her and us.” The hairs on his arm stood up. Without even knowing it, he began to cry.

  “So let’s sing a song of cheer again,” Barbra was keening, “happy days are here again.”

  With “Happy Days,” Barbra smashed through the Angel’s legendary reserve. People were on their feet, and even the club’s upholstered walls couldn’t muffle the sounds of whistles and cheers. Goddard Lieberson stood with the crowd. It seemed Barbra’s performance had allowed him finally to glimpse her star potential. Marilyn Monroe might have been dead, and with her an entire era. But a whole new kind of star was about to explode.

  5.

  Jerry Robbins read the latest revisions Isobel Lennart had sent to him from Malibu and nearly wept. The man who had directed The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, and Gypsy, and doctored a dozen more ailing shows that needed his help, knew what a good libretto read like, and this script for The Funny Girl, no matter how much he adored Isobel, fell far short of the mark.

  Surely Ray Stark, with his understanding of story, knew it, too. But what frustrated Robbins was the producer’s absolute insistence that they move forward nonetheless. Stark was planning to return to New York from Beverly Hills now that Lennart had completed her revisions, and he felt it was “urgent [that an] immediate decision be made on casting.” He hadn’t changed his mind about his preferred candidate either. “I hope you will have settled on Barbra,” Stark wrote to Robbins, and he urged the director to begin working with her on the show’s second act.

  The last time he’d been in New York, Stark had had a session with Carol Burnett, during which she’d read for the part and sung a few numbers. “A tremendous talent and a lovely gal,” Stark concluded, but he didn’t think she’d “turn out to be right for Fanny.” Robbins had apparently come to the same conclusion. After a short talk with the director outside an elevator after Burnett’s audition, Stark had realized there was no need to send the second act to Burnett. Robbins, it seemed, was staying just as firm on his first choice as Stark was. He still wanted Anne Bancroft for the role.

  “Dear Annie,” Robbins had written when he sent her a copy of the script. “It’s a rough with much over-written and too-explained-away moments. Isobel is already at work taking out all things that tend to weaken or sentimentalize. She will ‘shorten, tighten, and toughen.’” He implored her to take the part even though the script wasn’t ready, telling her they’d been playing “a waiting game” with all the other candidates until they heard from her. “I know it’s going to be a wonderful play and you can fire it way up into the skies if you become part of it.” He promised she’d have a “hard-working, tough-fighting ally” in him and “truly creative and cooperative collaborators” in Lennart, Styne, and Merrill. He didn’t mention St
ark.

  That was because the producer was firing off his own communication to his own preferred candidate. “Dear Barbara,” he wrote, misspelling her name, which surely didn’t please her. “Jerry Robbins will probably be calling you within the next few days.” He enclosed Lennart’s revisions for her to study. Before he’d left town, he’d made it a point to see her at the Blue Angel, and he told her again what “a lovely evening” it had been. If not as effusive as Robbins’s letter to Bancroft, it still gave Barbra reason to hope that the part might be hers—even if she was going to have to give Stark a lesson in spelling.

  Yet other names continued to be considered for Fanny, mostly funneled in from Merrick’s casting agent, Michael Shurtleff. Eydie Gormé still seemed to excite Merrick, as did Judy Holliday, both of whom were attractive enough, and Jewish to boot. Stark, of course, had given up the idea of a conventionally pretty leading lady the moment he’d settled on Barbra, but his producing partner was, despite his decreased hostility, still concerned about appearances. And what remained a big unknown for everyone involved was what Fran Stark would say when she finally got a look at the candidate they all agreed upon so it was smart to keep Gormé and Holliday in reserve.

  As he read through Lennart’s revisions, however, Robbins seemed to harden in his resolve that only Bancroft could save them. Lennart might have shortened, but she hadn’t tightened or toughened. By now, Robbins felt he had done as much as he could, “pushing the script until certain solutions were found.” Much of what worked had, in fact, come from him. Lennart would “surely agree,” Robbins believed, “that each scene as she wrote it” had been sent to him and that they had gone over each of them “with a fine-tooth comb.” The same was also true for the music and lyrics. Styne and Merrill had run songs and arrangements by Robbins, and he’d had his say about them. While he didn’t “point to any one line of dialogue or particular lyric” as being authored by himself, Robbins did claim credit for the way all the “scenes, relationships, songs, musical conceptions, characters, settings, [and] musical ideas” came together.

  Nowhere was this more obvious than in the very first scene in the show—where Fanny gets fired by theater owner Max Spiegel for being too outlandish. Robbins had considered the arguments made by stage manager Dave to keep Fanny because she’s special as “a small microcosm of the play.” That had been Robbins’s vision, setting up the entire story in that one scene. Robbins’s fingerprints continued in a similar way all through the libretto. It was his idea to make Ziegfeld just a voice coming from above during his first meeting with Fanny, and to cut directly from Fanny’s line “Anything Ziegfeld wants me to do, I’ll do” to her declaration: “I’m not going to wear this costume!” In Lennart’s original script, a whole scene had separated the two lines. Robbins had cut the scene for the contrast it would offer—and the laugh it would get.

  He’d also shaped the musical numbers. On “I’m the Greatest Star,” the original idea had been for Fanny to sing it “out and out,” as if she really meant it. But Robbins asked that it be changed so that she starts out kidding, mocking herself. During the course of the song, however, when she sees people like Dave who really believe in her, she evolves and “the guts come out and the tempo changes and she lets loose, free and wild, with her own feelings,” as Robbins described it. Written by its composers with a time signature of 2/4 all the way through, it was Robbins’s idea “to make it 2/4 only at the end.” As such, it was a brilliant bit of characterization layered into a musical number.

  Robbins also had been working with Styne and Merrill to open up the “People” number by including Dave and Nick. Fanny singing the song alone, he felt, was just “too strong a come-on.” Likewise, he’d moved “Don’t Rain on My Parade” to the end of the first act. Originally, it had come near the beginning of the show, sung by Fanny to her mother’s friends who were discouraging her from a career. Robbins, astutely, saw the song as a way to showcase Fanny’s determination to win Nick’s love and knew it would make a great send-off before intermission and possibly be reprised at the very end of the show.

  But perhaps most significant, it had been Robbins who’d homed in right away on one of the chief flaws in the story: the characterization of Nick Arnstein, Fanny’s great love. Nick was a gambler, a con man, and a bit of rogue in real life, but Lennart had written him as upstanding and noble, a victim of circumstances. He was, after all, Fran Stark’s father. Robbins pushed Lennart to make him more of the “reckless, shadowy promoter” that he really was. In the “Will I Talk?” number, it was Robbins’s idea to have Nick sing it in “an evil, sardonic way,” and then have Fanny reprise it in a more “positive” way. That helped the story get off to a better start, but the book still bogged down during the second act, precisely because it was hard to sympathize with Nick because he was a crook or Fanny because she was blindsided by a crook. And so far, for all his tremendous input, Robbins hadn’t figured out a way to solve that problem.

  And Stark and Merrick wanted to open in October!

  Robbins had had enough. Increasingly, he was feeling manipulated by Stark. When Robbins had come on board to direct the Brice musical, Stark had agreed to invest $125,000 in Mother Courage, the pro- ject Robbins was planning with Cheryl Crawford, and for which he had far more passion than he did for this current show. Stark’s investment had been a bit of a quid pro quo: He’d put up the money if Crawford delayed the production and allowed Robbins to direct The Funny Girl first. Now, with the script so lacking, Robbins felt stuck between a rock and a hard place: Should he go forward with production the way Stark and Merrick were insisting and risk a terrible critical and commercial flop, or should he insist on still more rewrites and push Mother Courage even farther into the future?

  Stark wasn’t helping matters by doing everything he could to prevent the casting of Anne Bancroft and impose Barbra Streisand on the show. “If you don’t hear today or tomorrow from Anne,” he’d written just the other day to Robbins, “we should tie up Barbara [sic] before we lose her”—as if that were a real danger.

  It wasn’t that Robbins disliked Barbra. She was “extraordinarily talented,” he thought. But with the book so deficient, it needed the skills of an experienced actress such as Bancroft. Robbins felt his reputation was on the line, and he didn’t feel safe entrusting it to such a novice as Barbra.

  By now, he’d largely given up on any hopes that he and Stark would ever agree on much about the show. Conceding that the book wasn’t right, the producer was arguing they should use more from Brice’s actual life, as the original screenplay had done. They should also change the title to My Man, after Brice’s best-known torch song. “A more honest or exploitable title” he couldn’t imagine, Stark wrote to Robbins, even though they’d all previously decided the score should be entirely new, with nothing from Brice’s actual repertoire. Robbins made no reply to Stark’s latest suggestions. He knew Anne Bancroft was never going to sing “My Man”; after all, she’d originally wanted to change the name of the character and make her only “based on” Fanny Brice.

  For Robbins, it was decision time. If he stayed on and Bancroft wasn’t cast, could he work with Barbra Streisand? Knowing his dilemma, Isobel Lennart, who’d yet to see Barbra herself, had asked a friend, Doris Vidor, to check the young singer out at the Blue Angel and make an honest report to Robbins. Vidor was Hollywood royalty: the daughter of Harry Warner, a founder of Warner Bros.; widow of director Charles Vidor; and ex-wife of director Mervyn LeRoy. Vidor also worked for United Artists as a sort of “broker between script and stars.” Not long before, she’d arranged a deal that brought Gary Cooper to the studio for three pictures. So Doris Vidor knew a little something about star quality.

  And what she observed at the Blue Angel impressed her very much. “I have rarely seen anyone so talented,” Vidor wrote to Robbins. “But it was the personality and what she stirred in me that impressed me so. There is a sadness and a deep, emotional impact that this girl projects to the audience that is
very unique. It seemed to me that she was the young Fanny Brice as you want her to appear.”

  Robbins didn’t dispute that. But Barbra had to be more than the young Fanny Brice. She had to be the older Fanny, too, and he was just not convinced she’d be believable as that. When there was a flurry of interest among the collaborators about the fifty-three-year-old English actor Michael Rennie playing Nick, Robbins pointed out that if they went with Barbra as Fanny, “the relationship really becomes like that in A Star Is Born.” That “worried him,” as well it should have. There was no more talk of Rennie.

  There was, however, talk of Rip Torn, Brian Bedford, Harry Guardino, Peter Falk, Stuart Damon, Pernell Roberts, George Maharis, and George Chakiris. And word had reached them that Peter Lawford was “very interested” in playing Nick, though everyone agreed that Lawford didn’t possess “a big enough voice.”

  That was not a problem with Barbra, of course. So Robbins had brought her back in for yet another reading, probably at the Imperial Theatre, on Forty-fifth Street, where Merrick’s Carnival! was still running at night. In a few days, he’d be heading back to the Imperial to watch George Segal and Larry Hagman (Mary Martin’s son) audition for the part of Dave. There were also auditions slated for the parts of Nora, Fanny’s beautiful chorus-girl best friend, and Mrs. Brice—and, significantly, for Fanny herself. On the call sheet for two thirty on the afternoon of August 30 was Lee Becker, who’d played Anybodys in West Side Story and whom Robbins had once asked to marry him. Becker’s audition suggested that no matter how hard Stark was pushing, and no matter all the superlatives from Doris Vidor and others, the director was still not quite ready to accept Barbra Streisand as the star of his production.