“Barbra Streisand is unquestionably one of the most successful performers ever to appear at the hungry i,” Ralph J. Gleason wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “People went away talking about her and three hours later, I heard two couples on Broadway singing one of the songs she did. Barbra Streisand has that kind of impact.” The Chronicle ran photos of Barbra making all sorts of faces as she sang—pouting, serious, comical—next to the headline: A SPECIAL KIND OF MAGIC.
But all that singing was getting to her. Barbra was finding that she was having trouble holding her notes. When she had arrived in San Francisco, her voice had been somewhat hoarse. Certainly all the leapfrogging from climate to climate couldn’t have helped: mid-twenties in Cleveland; teens and icy rain in New York; eighties in Miami; forties and rainy when she’d made a quick flight back to New York to make another appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show; then the low fifties, cloudy and damp, when she’d arrived in San Francisco. After all that, who wouldn’t catch a cold? But clearly Barbra worried that her voice troubles were the result of more than just a passing bug. That’s why Marty had asked Banducci if he might recommend a vocal coach with whom Barbra could do some work. The club owner had known exactly the woman to send them to. And so they made their way to this dark little studio on College Avenue.
Judy Davis called herself “a vocal plumber.” What she did was simple: “I fix pipes,” she said. She was a brassy, grandiloquent lady who dressed in colorful clothes and reminded at least one student of Auntie Mame. “Well, my dear,” she’d say, after listening to a prospective student sing and examining his or her throat and diaphragm, “I must tell you, this is exactly what you’re doing wrong. We’re going to have to rearrange some of these things, break this habit.” Singers had many bad habits, Davis believed, like improper breathing or insufficient projection. “Singers are not known to be bright,” she’d tell a pupil who didn’t regularly perform the exercises she’d prescribed, “but don’t prove it to the world.”
For all her expertise, Davis herself couldn’t sing a note. When she was nineteen, her vocal chords had been injured during a tonsillectomy, leaving her with a raspy voice that prevented a singing career of her own. To understand what had happened to her on the operating table, Davis turned to Gray’s Anatomy, thoroughly familiarizing herself with the physiology of the human voice. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from the University of California at Berkeley, she headed to Los Angeles, where she taught movie actors how to lip-synch soundtracks. Now married to professional tennis player Frank Kovacs, Davis attracted a stellar clientele to her voice studio in Oakland. Frank Sinatra had been known to fly her to Las Vegas to help him practice before a show. Much of the talent that came through the hungry i or its sister club across the street, the Purple Onion, had spent time in Davis’s studio. She had pretty much taught the Kingston Trio how to sing. When people asked her to describe her methods, which they often did, Davis found she was unable to do so. She just knew when people were “obstructing the performance of their vocal chords,” she explained, and through exercises and breathing techniques, she could show them “how not to do that.”
The fear that had brought Barbra to Judy Davis was as much psychological as physical. It was, after all, an extremely low period for her. She felt Elliott’s absence keenly. That may have been why she’d allowed a story to spread that they had gotten married. Earl Wilson was reporting, “Funny singer Barbra Streisand wanted to keep it a secret that she married actor Elliott Gould just before he left for London, but forgot herself and wore her wedding ring to The Ed Sullivan Show.” Whatever ring Barbra had been wearing when she’d made that flying trip from Miami to New York hadn’t been a wedding band, but apparently she was okay with giving that impression. She knew that admitting she’d been living with a man outside of matrimony would have been completely unacceptable to a large swath of the public; surely Lee Solters had pointed out that the bluenoses still hadn’t forgiven Elizabeth Taylor for shacking up with Richard Burton. Unmarried cohabitation simply wasn’t tolerated in the public eye. Even couples clearly not ready to tie the knot, such as Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin, had been forced to do so anyway to ward off impressions that they might be sleeping together.
Yet for Barbra, some friends believed, the lie about being married to Elliott went even deeper than that. She was lonely, feeling untethered to the man she loved. So Barbra may have liked imagining that something was holding her and Elliott together.
For the moment, all she had to sustain her was her voice. If her voice went, she had nothing. And suddenly, in the midst of her depression, she began questioning herself: How did she hold her notes so long? How was she able to sing without ever having been trained in voice?
In the past, Barbra had just shrugged off such questions. If she willed herself, she believed, she could do anything. But now her self-confidence had plummeted. One night she suspected she wasn’t holding her notes quite as long, and when she tried deliberately to hold them, she found she couldn’t. Her “consciousness of an unconscious thing,” she realized, had made her “impotent.”
Sitting there in Davis’s dimly lit studio, Barbra felt like, in her own words, “a person who was paralyzed in her legs having to relearn to walk.” She was being dramatic; it was hardly as bad as all that. She was performing two shows every night at the hungry i, and the applause was certainly greater there than it had been in Cleveland or Miami. But what mattered was how Barbra felt—and she felt she wasn’t at her best. No doubt she remembered off nights during Wholesale when she knew she was less than perfect and the way people had still applauded for her. She felt they’d been conditioned to do so; and she probably felt that way now. She didn’t deserve the applause, she believed, and Barbra could never enjoy acclaim that she hadn’t earned.
And this particular gig was crucial. In some ways, San Francisco was as important as New York to a singer’s career. The city by the bay was a cultural mecca of its own, fiercely independent, producing and nurturing talent like nowhere else—and the hungry i, at 599 Jackson Street in the North Beach neighborhood, was its chief breeding ground. Mort Sahl, the sharp-tongued political comedian, had gotten his start there; so had the Kingston Trio. Both Phyllis Diller and Orson Bean had played the club, and Bill Cosby, folk singer Glenn Yarbrough, jazzman Vince Guaraldi, comedian Shelley Berman, and musical satirist Tom Lehrer had all received career boosts from the i. For the first few nights of Barbra’s run, her opening act had been fellow game changer and rule breaker, comedian Woody Allen.
It was with justification that Howard Taubman of the New York Times called the i “the most influential nightclub west of the Mississippi.” If Barbra could make it there, winning over San Francisco sophisticates, then she’d prove she wasn’t just a New York phenomenon. She needed to generate the kind of buzz on the West Coast that she already enjoyed on the East if her career was ever going to go national.
So there was a great deal riding on the slender shoulders of the scared twenty-year-old who sat looking up at Judy Davis and asking for her help. Davis’s heart went out to the kid. She recognized that Barbra was “being catapulted into a position” most performers took many years to reach, “almost as if she were shot out of a cannon,” Davis thought. What this “sensitive girl” craved, Davis realized, was “a hand to hold and a pat on the back and somebody to tell her everything was all right.” Certainly that had never been the norm in Barbra’s life; it was precisely what she had given up expecting so many years ago from her mother. But when Davis offered her a hand to hold, Barbra took it eagerly. That day, in the forty-four-year-old nurturing Davis, Barbra found another mother substitute, a parental figure to fill that hole in the middle of herself.
Immediately the two of them got down to work. The little studio was a safe haven for Barbra; its simple piano and soft, diffused light—and the frolicking of Davis’s black poodle Poupette—made Barbra feel at home. Davis was under no illusions that she needed to teach Barbra to sing, even if th
at was what her client suddenly believed she needed to learn. “No singing teacher can teach anyone to sing,” she explained. A singer was born a singer, she said, and all she could do was teach “what tones are right and what techniques are best.” She found Barbra to be “a curious, searching girl” who wanted to understand how “this instrument of hers” worked. Davis produced photographs and diagrams of the lungs, esophagus, and diaphragm, explaining to Barbra the physical process of singing. That alone seemed to ease some of Barbra’s fears.
Yet no doubt what she responded to most were the tender, yet firm, ministrations of an empathetic older woman she respected. There was a similar patronage taking place at the hungry i, where Barbra flourished under the careful, compassionate care of Banducci. Three thousand miles from home, Barbra had found, even if just temporarily, the parents she never had. Banducci was as erudite and sophisticated—if a bit more florid and flamboyant—as she imagined her father would have been. Like Barbra, he had discarded an inadequate first name—Harry—for something more distinctive, taking “Enrico” as a tribute to Enrico Caruso. At the age of thirteen he’d left his provincial hometown of Bakersfield, California, for exciting San Francisco, where he’d studied under the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. As proprietor of the hungry i—it meant “hungry intellectual”—since 1950, Banducci had been one of the first, along with Jay Landesman, another of Barbra’s patrons, to popularize the beatnik movement. To one reporter, Banducci “modestly disclaimed having everything to do with the beatnik craze that . . . spread across the country,” but he was also “careful to imply that it did not happen without his good offices.” Nowadays the heavy-set, pencil-mustachioed Banducci was never seen without his brown beret, white sneakers, tan chinos, and “the most expansive white and figured sweater ever to encumber a man’s neck, chest, waist, and arms.”
It didn’t take long for Barbra to regain her footing in this supportive environment. Although she had struggled with distracted audiences elsewhere on this tour, she didn’t need to worry about that at the i, thanks to Banducci. The three-hundred-person audience was seated in a semicircle around the stage. And while their canvas chairs had wide, flat arms ideal for setting down their drinks—which were served by a solicitous corps of Japanese waiters—once the lights dimmed, all drinking and eating in the auditorium ceased. Banducci insisted on a “quietude in the audience” when the performer stepped out onto the stage. All alone, lit by a battery of spotlights in front of a stark brick wall, the performer could command the attention of the audience without any competition. For this, especially so soon after the Eden Roc fiasco, Barbra was no doubt very grateful to her host.
She’d also become close with the club’s announcer. Alvah Bessie had been a novelist, journalist, and Hollywood screenwriter, nominated for an Academy Award for Objective Burma in 1945. He’d also been a member of the Hollywood Ten, imprisoned for ten months and blacklisted by the film industry for refusing to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The blacklisting had destroyed his career. Now he was running the lights and sound board at the hungry i and introducing the entertainers. Bessie’s story was the complete inverse of those of Jerry Robbins and Isobel Lennart, two others of Barbra’s acquaintance who had histories with HUAC. Barbra likely took notice of how very different Bessie’s life was—hunched down anonymously in the shadows, positioning the spotlight on other people—from the lives of informers such as Robbins and Lennart—making movies and Broadway shows and being publicly acclaimed for it. For someone as perceptive as Barbra, the injustice must have resonated.
Her interval in San Francisco was a turning point for her. As she had in Detroit, she found a home away from home, a place where new friends and new challenges provided her with just the balm she needed. Certainly no place she’d ever been had looked quite as magical as San Francisco: the hills and the steep, winding streets, the delicate Queen Anne houses and Spanish mission churches, the Golden Gate Bridge shining in the distance, the clanging of the cable cars, and everywhere breathtaking vistas of land, sea, and sky. For Barbra, the city was a place of healing and tranquility.
7.
On a night well into her four-week run at the hungry i, after numerous sessions with Judy Davis had restored a measure of her self-confidence, Barbra waited backstage for Alvah Bessie to announce her. She was ready for her comeback. She was, as local critic Ralph Gleason described her, “a tawny, feline, long-haired girl with a mouth like a character from Oz” who was “a practiced performer . . . expert and effective.” Her ease onstage had returned, showing up in everything she did: the way she stood or sat, “her approach to the microphone, the tilt of her head, the spreading of her arms, the tossing of her hair, the raising of her eyebrows.”
Tonight the show would be recorded by a young engineer named Reese Hamel, who kept his equipment in the back of his Volkswagen bus and dragged his cables through the club’s back door. A little less sophisticated than Columbia’s elaborate recording session at the Bon Soir in the fall, but it would prove far more successful. Hamel had suggested to Barbra that she might someday want to add a live recording to her Columbia catalog. When she’d agreed, he’d hauled in his cables. Obviously Barbra felt that her voice was better if she consented to be recorded.
“Now ladies and gentlemen,” Bessie announced over the loudspeaker, “the hungry i takes great pride in presenting Miss Barbra Streisand.” No doubt he had been instructed carefully by the lady herself on how to pronounce her name correctly, and he did.
As the packed house gave her a warm welcome, Barbra sailed into “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home.” As if to demonstrate that she was back in top form, she held the last note of the song for nine and a half seconds, an extraordinarily long time. If it seemed a bit show-offy, she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she could still do it. Next up was “Cry Me a River.” This night, Barbra’s rendition of the song was far superior to the manic howl she’d displayed on The Dinah Shore Show (though that program still hadn’t aired). She eschewed the theatrics that had so repelled Fran Stark and concentrated once again on the raw heartache of the song—which maybe, just maybe, reflected her own via dolorosa these past few months regarding Elliott. When she was finished, she clearly appreciated the applause. “Grazie, grazie,” she murmured.
She then launched into the kind of monologue that had been part of her act almost from the very start, but which in recent months had gained a more structured format. “I don’t like to sing all the time,” she said, and that much was certainly true. “I mean, one song right after another.” What she was doing was setting up a segment of her show that she’d rehearsed nearly as vigorously as the songs. “Let’s see,” she mused, “what should I talk about?” When someone shouted for her to talk about “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” she responded, “I sing that. I can’t talk about that.”
Of course, she needed no suggestions; she knew exactly what she was going to talk about. She commenced the story of a girl—“an African girl,” Barbra explained—whose sister had run off with her lover. Thinking this was the lead-in to a sad ballad, the audience sat in rapt, respectful silence. “She decided to kill herself,” Barbra said of the girl. “And she figured the best way to do this was to drown herself in the river.” Still the audience sat mute, hanging on every word. Could this be some old tribal morality tale? “So it was this one day,” Barbra went on, “and she was strolling down to the river to drown, and she tripped and scraped her knees.” A beat. “And also broke her glasses.”
Finally the audience tittered, starting to suspect that this all might be a joke. “Just at this moment,” Barbra continued, “the lover and the sister drove by in a taxi—they have them in Africa—and they started laughing at her.” By now the audience was laughing, too. The story went on from there—a long, ridiculous, rambling tale that ultimately ended with a feeble punch line that made little sense. But it didn’t matter that the story wasn’t really very funny or witty. By breaking out
of the serious singer-by-the-piano mode, Barbra had shaken up tradition and thereby set herself apart—precisely what the “kooky” reputation was intended to do, whether in print or on television or on the stage. And the audience adored her for it.
She was, in fact, selling her personality as much as her voice. This came through again a short time later as she introduced the band. Slipping into her old Mae West impersonation, she gestured to drummer Benny Barth and cooed, “On the left side heah, weighin’ in at one-hundred-’n’-eighty-three in black trunks . . . is Benny.” There was another beat. “And he doesn’t.” Barbra waited for the audience to get her pun. When a handful of people started to laugh, she giggled. “Benny” was slang for Benzedrine tablets, which many in the nightclub scene took illegally as stimulants.
Barth and the rest of the band—which also included a bass and guitar—were hungry i employees. But the pianist, of course, was Peter Daniels, Barbra’s faithful companion on the road. She introduced him a little more intimately than she did the others, though she characteristically resisted sentimentality by affecting the air of a snooty society lady. “And now, for your pleasure, on the piano—he’s not on the piano, he’s sitting there in front of the piano—a very fine musician. He’s more than a pianist. He’s more than an arranger. He’s more than a friend. He’s—Petah!” She said his name as if she were Bette Davis, and this brought hoots from the audience right away. “Petah Daniels!”
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 35