As the summer drew to a close, the principals behind The Funny Girl seemed headed for a face-off. No one could predict what that would mean for the show.
6.
The legendary Groucho Marx wasn’t one to tangle with. He was the master of the one-liner, the ad-lib, the put-down, the comeback, the double entendre. Sitting at the desk of The Tonight Show on the night of August 21, he puffed on his ubiquitous cigar and wiggled his thick, lascivious eyebrows as he spoke with Lillian Roth about I Can Get It for You Wholesale, now in its sixth month on Broadway. Since Jack Paar’s departure earlier that year, Groucho had proved to be one of Tonight’s more frequent and popular guest hosts, keeping the chair warm for the incoming Johnny Carson, who still had several more weeks to go on his contract with rival network ABC.
After the break, the announcer, Hugh Downs, introduced Groucho’s next guest. It was Barbra Streisand. Except he pronounced it “Stree-sand.”
Barbra was furious. Downs should have known better! She’d been on this show twice before, and he hadn’t messed up her name then. She was seething as she strode out onto the stage.
Groucho greeted her warmly. “You’re a big success—”
But Barbra cut him off—actually cut off Groucho Marx! “How could I be such a big success,” she asked, “if he calls me Stree-sand? My name is Barbra Streisand!”
Groucho tried to make a joke, but Barbra was having none of it. If it wasn’t somebody placing that damned extra “a” in her first name, it was somebody else mangling her last name. When was she going to be famous enough that people got her name right?
Yet her crankiness was at least partly an act. In fact, that night with Groucho, Barbra was probably in a very good mood indeed. At long last, Goddard Lieberson had agreed to give her a recording contract. Terms were still being negotiated, but she was in. Marty had done it. He hadn’t failed her yet.
Not only that, but Ray Stark was being very solicitous of her. Even if she still wasn’t entirely sure Merrick was on her side, Barbra certainly had to feel that Stark was rooting for her. Big things, she must have felt, were right around the corner.
Indeed, Groucho thought so, too. “Now, Barbra Streisand,” he said, making sure he enunciated her name precisely, “you are a big success. I hear about you on the Coast . . .”
“No kiddin’,” she replied, perfectly in character. “Nothin’ you can prove, though, right?”
“Yes,” Groucho said, a little thrown off course, not used to playing the straight man. “Jule Styne, for example. I had dinner with him on the Coast last week, and he said you’d be just great for that show he’s doing. What’s the name of it, uh . . . ?”
Barbra helped him out. “The Fanny Brice story?”
“Yes, the Fanny Brice story. He said, ‘It’s between her and the girl who works for Garry Moore.’”
“Carol Burnett?”
Obviously Groucho’s conversation with Styne had taken place before Robbins and Stark mutually decided against proceeding further with Burnett. But Groucho also knew about Anne Bancroft—Styne didn’t share Stark’s penchant for secrecy—and he mentioned her as being in the running, too. “That’s pretty big-league company,” Groucho told Barbra. “If they are considering you against those two, I would say you have arrived.”
Barbra never liked such compliments. Being compared to other people, even to say she was in the same league as greats, never felt like flattery to her. She wasn’t out to be as good as anyone else, or to be the next whoever. She wanted to be the best that ever was, in her own way, under her own name—spelled and pronounced correctly. So the humble thank-you that someone else might have offered in reply to such a statement wasn’t forthcoming from her. Instead, she just kept up the shtick.
“It’s been very good, I guess,” she said. “I mean, I go to department stores and they still don’t wait on me.”
It was the Bergdorf Goodman line she’d used in other interviews and, as she intended, it got a big laugh.
But not everyone was laughing. An interesting phenomenon was occurring as Barbra became more successful. She was not only accumulating fans, but also a smaller, though increasingly vocal, group of detractors—critics and reviewers who stood defiantly outside her circle of applause. These opposing voices insisted that Barbra was “inauthentic” and “overhyped,” even as they begrudgingly admitted the voice was “worthy of praise”—though some sniped that she really should be singing more true “standards” instead of crazy concoctions like “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” which seemed to them more attention-getting than anything else. One Chicago writer dismissed Barbra as simply a “publicist’s creation.”
But everyone had a shtick; that was a fact of showbiz. Yet for some reason, there were those who really seemed to resent Barbra’s. Dorothy Kilgallen had called Barbra’s act “magnetic nonsense,” and while it had seemed a sort of compliment, nonsense was still nonsense no matter how magnetic it was, and that was Kilgallen’s point.
One of Barbra’s earliest boosters, Kilgallen had turned on her by the summer of 1962. She started by chiding the “strong-minded Barbra” for putting her hairdresser “in a swivet” on a recent television appearance (probably The Garry Moore Show) by insisting that she appear on camera with her hair “mussed.” That was bad enough, Kilgallen thought, but as word continued to reach her about Barbra’s demanding style and her recurrent lateness for Wholesale, the columnist began sharpening her claws. After observing Barbra’s pique on The Tonight Show with Groucho, Kilgallen had this to say in her next column: “Friends of the sensationally talented Barbra Streisand wish she’d shed that ‘angry woman’ attitude. She’s successful enough now to be relaxed and pleasant.”
It wasn’t entirely clear why Kilgallen had soured on her, or why Barbra seemed to elicit such hostility from certain quarters. Part of it, no doubt, could be explained by the fact that she didn’t play by the rules: the refusal to observe the political niceties that had so irked Harold Rome, for example. Had she, knowingly or not, snubbed Kilgallen in some way? But there was more to it. One entertainer who sometimes competed with Barbra for gigs and talk-show slots observed “a great deal of resentment building against her,” and she attributed it to a feeling that “Barbra didn’t deserve everything she was getting because she hadn’t paid all of her dues.” Worse than that, the entertainer said, was the sense that Barbra “wasn’t even grateful for all she was being given.”
Dues paid or not, Barbra had just won a recording contract, plus it seemed very likely that she’d be starring on Broadway the following season. “Barbra Streisand is the front-runner for the Fanny Brice show,” Dorothy Kilgallen revealed that summer, “and she’d be great in the part.” But these days Kilgallen rarely offered any praise for Barbra unqualified by criticism. “One important member of the executive cast,” the columnist continued, “is cool to the idea because Barbra made such trouble for the producers of I Can Get It for You Wholesale.” Kilgallen could only have meant Merrick, so perhaps the producer’s enthusiasm for Eydie Gormé had caused him to reconsider his reconsideration of Barbra. Kilgallen added that the show would not include “My Man,” or Brice as her Baby Snooks character, or a re-creation of the Ziegfeld Follies. “So what’s left?” she asked. “Good question.” Barbra, of course, would be left, if she was chosen to be the star—but for Kilgallen, apparently, that fact wasn’t significant. The columnist had succeeded in her apparent goal: saying something nice about Barbra for a change to demonstrate her objectivity, but then slipping in a potshot and throwing cold water on the whole idea of the show.
Two camps were indeed forming as Barbra became more prominent, but her detractors, no matter how vocal their resentment, remained far outnumbered by her admirers. Even as Kilgallen was preparing her censorious commentary, another figure, much more esteemed, was drafting a very different take on the rising star. Harold Clurman, in a long piece for the New York Times on the importance of musical theater, extolled the Mermans and Bolgers and Martins of th
e past, but he also looked toward the future. Perhaps, Clurman mused, Tammy Grimes, Robert Morse, and Barbra Streisand would be the greats of tomorrow.
Not a bad place to be for a young woman who, just a year ago, had been hounding a pair of novice producers to cast her in their off-Broadway show, but had to first convince them that she could hold her own against such “big” names as Diana Sands and Dom DeLuise. Since that time, Barbra had ridden a rocket, though she would be the first to point out that it hadn’t quite taken her all the way to the top. And the top, of course, was the only place she intended to go.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fall 1962
1.
From the stove wafted the mouthwatering aroma of chicken soup, vanquishing, at least for the moment, the pungency of fried fish. With a gentle nudge and a kiss on the forehead, Elliott woke Barbra, telling her breakfast was ready. He’d made the soup for her, filling the role her mother had long performed. With Diana keeping her distance now that her daughter was, as friends put it, “shacking up with” a man, Elliott had gladly stepped in to play Barbra’s chief cook and bottle washer.
He was blissfully happy. In their little tree house, Hansel and Gretel had only themselves. No managers, no publicists, no agents, no columnists, no audiences. When all the stress of their careers got to be too much, they retreated here and unburdened the frustrations of the day. Elliott was aware how “very dependent on each other” he and Barbra had become, but certainly that could only be a good thing for two people in love. After all, they were “so right for each other,” he believed—especially in terms of “ambition and business and identity and power.” They were both going to be big, big stars, they believed—important, serious actors. They would become rich and powerful, too, and they would chart their careers according to their terms and nobody else’s.
Such were the dreams, anyway, of a twenty-four-year-old kid and his twenty-year-old girlfriend. On this much, they saw eye to eye.
Finally getting out of bed, Barbra made her way to the sewing-machine stand where a steaming bowl of soup awaited. Elliott had learned how to make it just the way she liked it—which meant just the way her mother had always done. In learning how to make Barbra happy, Elliott had been an eager student. His was a personality that aimed to please. He’d grown up obeying without question the directions of his parents—especially his mother. It was no surprise that Elliott should prove to be the perfect boyfriend for Barbra, who rarely aimed to please anyone other than herself and for whom questioning directions was standard operating procedure. Elliott was correct in believing they were right for each other—but their compatibility was due as much to the fact that they were opposites as it was to the fact that they were in sync about their careers.
It boiled down to a simple dynamic. Barbra decided; Elliott agreed with her decisions. When Barbra was tired after a performance at the Bon Soir or Blue Angel, Elliott knew they would head immediately home, and that was fine with him. When she wanted to stay awhile and talk with people, they stayed and talked, and Elliott was never seen protesting. When Barbra wanted a new piece of furniture to cram into their already crowded flat, Elliott always seemed to concur that it was actually needed. By now, her tastes had completely rubbed off on him. Like Barbra, Elliott loved “old things and bizarre things and funny things”; he could be spotted buying his own antique Coca-Cola trays or painted toy soldiers to hang on the walls or stand on the tables. And when at one point Barbra didn’t like a painting he’d bought, he declared that “on second thought it wasn’t really right” and tossed it out with the trash, as one Wholesale company member observed.
But any differences between them seemed only to inspire Elliott to love Barbra more. While he was very aware of current events, Barbra didn’t “listen to the radio” or “know what was going on in the world,” Elliott said—unless, of course, it was nuclear testing, and even that she hadn’t been following closely these last few months. While Elliott loved music, Barbra had “never heard the Temptations sing.” Of course not. She rarely saw further than her own sphere of existence, her own plans and pursuits. But still, Elliott thought she was “remarkable.”
That was because Barbra wasn’t always so imperious as she seemed at first glance. She could, in fact, be very tender with Elliott. For his birthday just a week or so earlier, she’d presented him with a gold cup representing “the first annual Alexander the Great Award,” a takeoff on her “first annual Fanny Brice Award.” In the quiet of their little flat, with taxicabs bleating from the street below and Oscar the rat scuttling under the stove, they made a vow to never be apart on each other’s birthdays.
In giving Elliott an award to balance hers, Barbra was being particularly sensitive to the man she loved. On stage at the Shubert Theatre, Elliott was the star; she was just a supporting player. But as soon as they stepped out beyond the footlights, their positions leapfrogged. Not since Wholesale opened had there been any major media attention on Elliott. When he was mentioned at all in the press, it was as Barbra’s boyfriend.
Barbra said that she “didn’t want Elliott to be hurt . . . by [her] success.” So she trod very carefully, preserving two things that she wanted very much: professional success and personal fulfillment. Elliott’s love for her—and lust—had wrought an extraordinary transformation. The young woman who’d once believed herself too ugly for ribbons now saw herself as desirable. The theater student once too embarrassed to act out a scene from The Rose Tattoo now viewed sex as a thrilling enterprise. When asked what she liked best in a man, Barbra unambiguously replied, “Animalism . . . a certain animal quality.” She liked hair on a man, she said; hair was “important.” And Elliott had “great hair.” She admitted she was turned on by a man’s calves.
Barbra’s newfound sexual power extended past the confines of her little railroad flat. She enjoyed the authority it gave her, and she was becoming skilled at knowing exactly when “to turn it on,” one friend thought. At the theater, she’d flirt and smile and laugh with producers, musicians, or engineers who were “playful and sweet with her” and “who treated her like a woman.” Being treated that way was still something new and exciting for her. But at twenty, with the acne of her teen years gone, Barbra suddenly felt like a desirable woman—no matter how many critics still made snide mention of her nose. When she walked into a room, all eyes would immediately turn to her, and people seemed to fixate on her. Jule Styne was a good example of this phenomenon. And as the experience with Styne had demonstrated, Barbra was becoming an expert at exploiting her new powers.
For that, she could thank Elliott. Bob had made her see herself as beautiful and had given form and shape to the vision she’d had of herself as a little girl. But Bob had never desired her, at least not the way Elliott did. Sitting across from her, watching Barbra sip her soup, her hair still mussed from sleeping and her breasts peeking out from her nightgown, Elliott may well have decided that breakfast could wait. He may have stood, taken her by the hand, and led her back to bed. If it didn’t happen that day, it happened on plenty of others, and even the scavenging of Oscar the rat wouldn’t have been a distraction.
2.
It was the first time Barbra had ever seen palm trees, even if it was difficult for her to see through her tears.
Bob Banner, the producer for Garry Moore, had flown her out to Los Angeles to appear on The Dinah Shore Show, which he also produced. Ray Stark saw it as an opportunity to introduce Barbra to Isobel Lennart and, even more critical, to his wife. It was clear they were getting close to offering her the part; they’d even begun talking salary. Stark’s continuing enthusiasm for her must have encouraged Barbra, but even that couldn’t brighten her spirits as she was driven through the streets of L.A., nor did the chance to play hooky from Wholesale for a whole week. What had brought on the tears was her first prolonged separation from Elliott, which made her first visit to the Coast feel like, in her own word, “hell.”
But it was an important trip. Barbra’s limo brought her to
a boxy, warehouselike building at the corner of Alameda and Olive in Burbank. Near the top, the letters NBC glowed green. This was NBC’s Color City, the first television studio in the world equipped exclusively for color broadcasting. Whereas the other networks occasionally broadcast specials in color, NBC was leading a revolution, with the goal of achieving 100 percent color programming within a few years. While the soundstages of Color City were hardly the ornate theaters of Broadway, or even the grand, classical architecture that housed the recording and television studios of New York, they did represent the future.
Making her way into the capacious structure, Barbra knew that her performance on the Shore show was to be, yet again, an audition of sorts. In the studio audience that night would be Fran Stark, whose opinion, as it turned out, mattered as much as her husband’s. Barbra had met Mrs. Stark soon after her arrival in Los Angeles, at the Starks’ palatial home. The encounter between Brooklyn Barbra and Beverly Hills Fran was watched by everyone involved with eager eyes. The two women were cordial to each other, even if their contrasts were glaring to those present. Fran was elegant, poised, and reserved; Barbra was avant-garde, awkward, and earnest. Ray did his best to facilitate an affable occasion. Styne was there, too, no doubt also doing his best to keep everything flowing smoothly. Columnist Louella Parsons reported that Styne had come to L.A. on “some special business” ; no doubt it involved Barbra and Fran.
Fran Stark was one generation removed from the tenements and hardscrabble streets of her mother’s—and Barbra’s—youth. She’d been educated at the prestigious Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Every summer, young Frances had accompanied her mother to Europe, where they lived at the Hotel Carlton in Cannes, or at the Majestic Hotel, where Fanny took over an entire floor and gambled to her heart’s content. Meanwhile, Fran, who her mother had decided would be raised as a proper lady, was being taught French by a French mademoiselle.
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 30