The rest of the concert was more straightforward, though she did have some fun with the “Wolf” song, as she called it. “I’m going to do a standard,” she announced, playing on the old criticism that she rarely sang the kind of standards that encouraged people to “sing along, swing along, snap [their] fingers,” as Barbra put it. So, she announced, she would “compromise.” What she gave them, of course, was “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Some people did indeed sing along. Wrapping up the show was “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which Barbra put over gorgeously, and which earned sustained applause. “You’d be so nice to come home to,” she purred in gratitude to the audience.
Of course, at the moment, she had no one to come home to. She remained despondent without Elliott. But despondent did not mean desperate. What Hamel’s recording had documented for posterity was that, by the end of her run at the hungry i, Barbra had found herself again. Thanks to the solicitude of Judy Davis, the guardianship of Enrico Banducci, and the nightly outpouring of affection from San Franciscans, Barbra would leave that city on a wave of acclaim. She might not have a play, or a best-selling album, but the young woman on Hamel’s tape recording believed in herself again, and that was enough for now.
As Barbra and Chaplin pose for their Playbill photo, their body language provides evidence that their affair, once passionate, was over. © Bettmann / CORBIS
A rare glimpse of the Funny Girl company before their Boston preview, December 1963. Danny Meehan, Allyn Ann McLerie, Sydney Chaplin, and Barbra listen to director Garson Kanin. Within the month, Meehan's part would be marginalized and McLerie's would be cut entirely. Kanin would be fired after the show premiered in Boston. Photofest
Barbra with the men who wrote the songs that would provide the soundtrack to her legend: Jule Styne (at piano) and Bob Merrill. Styne was infatuated with her; Merrill was more wary. © Bettmann / CORBIS
The famous pregnant bride scene from Funny Girl. Barbra had proven that she was as much a "kook" as Fanny Brice ever was; by now, the two had been conflated into one image. Photofest
Fran Stark—Ray's wife and Fanny Brice's daughter—had been less enthusiastic about Barbra's casting, but by the time of the premiere, she was all smiles. Here she is presenting the star to her brother, William Brice. mptvimages.com
With their marriage back on track (for the moment), Elliott kisses Barbra at the opening night party after the Funny Girl premiere. He knew how uncomfortable she was and wanted to protect her. © Bettmann / CORBIS
The man who'd guided Barbra's rise to the top, her manager, Marty Erlichman, continued to keep a close eye on his charge even as she tries to escape the theater in disguise. Barbra had come to fear the crush of fans every night outside the stage door. Collection of Matt Howe
For all her acclaim, Barbra still found it difficult to win praise from her mother, Diana Kind, who joined her backstage (top) with an uncle and aunt, and who insisted Barbra and Elliott be present for sister Rozzie's sweet-sixteen birthday party. The stress of performing every night was getting to Barbra, and if the photo (bottom) is any evidence, she had started smoking again. Collection of Stuart Lippner
In just five years, a redefinition of beauty, talent, and success. © 1978 Bob Willoughby / mptvimages.com
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Spring 1963
1.
After almost a year, Barbra and Bob were enjoying a happy reunion. This afternoon they were hunched down in a movie theater, popping handfuls of Raisinets, watching Dolores Hart jet around the world as a stewardess in Come Fly with Me. As Frankie Avalon crooned the title tune, panoramic shots of London, Paris, and the Mediterranean filled the screen, and Barbra let out a sigh. “Wouldn’t it be great to go there someday?” she mused.
“But, Barbra,” Bob said, “we’re already here.”
That was the odd thing. They were in Oxford, England, watching the film, not New York. A couple of weeks earlier, Bob, whose extended Paris vacation had turned into a residency when he started contributing to magazines there, had gotten a wire from Barbra. She was flying to London to see Elliott. But since Elliott had rehearsals during the day, could Bob pop over from Paris to keep her company? Barbra’s old pal had happily obliged, but now that he was there, he could barely get her out of her hotel room. Barbra preferred staying put, “steaming her clothes, folding and organizing them, then folding and organizing them again,” Bob observed. The movie theater was the farthest she’d strayed so far.
But Barbra hadn’t come to England for sightseeing. She’d come with one purpose and one purpose only: to reconnect with Elliott. The separation had been weighing heavily on her. If she hadn’t come now, she wouldn’t have had another chance to see him until maybe next fall, since she was booked solid through the summer. At the moment, she had a bit of a break before her next obligation, a two-week engagement at the New York nightclub Basin Street East that started on May 13. And besides, hadn’t she and Elliott made a vow to always be together on their birthdays? So, very soon after leaving San Francisco, Barbra, her new passport in hand, had boarded a flight for her first transcontinental trip. On April 24, she had turned twenty-one in England, Elliott at her side. Which was the way it was supposed to be.
Not that it had been all honey pie and happiness between them. Barbra found that Elliott had been gambling quite a bit, and he seemed to want to believe that she’d been cheating on him in New York or San Francisco. He was also consumed with rehearsals most of the time, which were being held at a small theater in the town of Oxford. The cast was lodged at a local hotel, where Barbra had settled in as well. As much as Oxford might be, in the words of the poet Matthew Arnold, the “sweet city with her dreaming spires,” and home to a magnificent medieval university, it was hardly swinging London. Barbra quickly grew bored with Elliott gone all day and often into the evenings. She’d been thrilled when Bob had showed up—though she still wouldn’t risk venturing too far afield with him just in case Elliott got out of rehearsals early.
Wandering the streets of Oxford with Bob, daffodils growing everywhere, Barbra wore a heavy fur coat, bell-bottomed jeans, and tennis shoes. In the United States, thanks to all her TV appearances, she was beginning to be recognized as she strolled through New York or other cities. But here she was still anonymous. She and Bob often ate at a Chinese restaurant near the hotel, where Barbra enjoyed paying with the colorful British money. In her head, however, she was always converting pounds into dollars, keeping track of how much she was spending on this trip.
Despite her frugality, money was no longer really an issue for her. Not only were there the increased revenues from nightclubs, but at last report, Barbra’s album was finally on the move. On April 18, the disk had made it on to Billboard’s chart of the Top 150 Albums (at number 118). This reflected sales from the week before, and Barbra could thank San Francisco record buyers for much of her surge, as well as her March 24 appearance on Ed Sullivan, on which she’d sung “Cry Me a River.” The following week the album had raced up the chart to number 83 and won Billboard’s coveted red star that indicated an album markedly on the rise. By the following week, April 27, The Barbra Streisand Album had reached number 41. The momentum was clear.
Barbra’s impressive rise on the charts was also fueled by a sudden explosion of reviews, which Solters had finally managed to secure a month and a half after the album’s release. No doubt he’d been working the phones and calling in as many favors as he could. Record critic Dick Van Patten admitted that he’d overlooked the album the previous month, rectifying the situation by calling Barbra “a potentially great new stylist [who] sounds like a veteran already.” Dick Kleiner, who’d already been an advocate for Barbra, now listed her ahead of Judy Garland in his syndicated roundup of the best new albums for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, saying that with this disk, Barbra “shows herself to be one of the greatest.” Walter Winchell also weighed in, raving about the album and especially the way Barbra put “the silk in ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’”
The columnist added that she reminded him of “Judy, Lena, and Peggy.”
After they left the movie theater, or on a night very similar, Barbra brought Bob to dinner with Elliott and Elspeth March, who was playing Madam Dilly, the music teacher, in On the Town. March, once married to the movie actor Stewart Granger, had made a number of films in the past year—Playboy of the Western World and Dr. Crippen, among others—and was about to go into production on The Three Lives of Thomasina, in which she would provide the voice of the cat. Barbra peppered the older actress with questions about moviemaking. She seemed to like how March had been able to play so many different characters in the course of a year.
To the distinguished British actress, Barbra must have seemed like a wide-eyed young novice. Not to March was Barbra anything noteworthy. She didn’t know about the nightclub appearances, or the kooky guest spots with Carson and Sullivan, or the album that was climbing the charts. Elliott may have tried telling his castmates about Barbra, but since they were so far away from it all, none of it would have really sunk in. Here, in Oxford, Barbra was just the girlfriend of the star of the show. For the moment, the situation between her and Elliott had reverted to what it had been back in the very beginning. He was the star; she was his girlfriend. But they both must have known, deep down, that the moment was fleeting. Elliott, raising his pint of ale in a toast to the success of On the Town, made sure to enjoy it while he could.
2.
That spring, Ray Stark was a busy man. He’d had to fly to Dublin, where problems had arisen on the set of Seven Arts’s remake of Of Human Bondage. Kim Novak was having trouble with the part of the Cockney waitress, Mildred, and the situation wasn’t helped when kidnap threats were made against her and costar Laurence Harvey. After dealing with all of that, Stark had needed to swoop down to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to scout locations for Seven Arts’s upcoming production of The Night of the Iguana. Then it was back across the Atlantic to London, where he’d courted Elizabeth Taylor as a possible replacement for Novak in Bondage.
Now Stark was back in California, but his social calendar for May was already very full. All of this left precious little opportunity for him to get anything done on Funny Girl—which is what they were now calling the musical about his mother-in-law—but for a workaholic such as Stark, there was always time to be found. He was still burned up over Jerry Robbins and the monkey wrench he’d thrown into the project, but he was determined to get things moving again. And he’d found the ideal man to make that happen: Bob Fosse, the young, celebrated choreographer of The Pajama Game and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying who’d recently started directing as well (Redhead and Little Me). Sam Zolotow in the New York Times said Funny Girl was “almost definite” on Fosse’s agenda.
That still left them with the problem of the book, however. Stark had sent Fosse a copy of the last finished script and urged him to consider how they might strip it of Robbins’s imprint without losing the whole storyline.
It was, to say the least, a daunting task—made even more daunting by an ailing Broadway economy. This past season had been the worst in memory. Investors had lost more than five million dollars, according to an official study conducted by the New York Times; other estimates placed the losses at closer to seven million. The reasons were many: a slump on Wall Street the previous spring; the newspaper strike; the increasing popularity of art-house films taking people away from the theater; and an ill-timed increase in ticket prices. This was hardly a good time to try to get a show off the ground.
The only way to do it, Stark understood, was to hire a surefire crowd-pleaser. Kaye Ballard was knocking them dead at the Persian Room in the Plaza Hotel with her uncanny impersonations of Brice. Kaye Stevens was drawing raves after adding “My Man” to her act. But Stark had no doubt noticed that The Barbra Streisand Album had just passed Eydie Gormé’s Blame It on the Bossa Nova on Billboard’s chart. The music industry’s trade journal probably sat right beside Stark’s copies of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter on his poolside table. The producer would surely have taken note of the red star next to Barbra’s name, indicating that she was on a fast ride to the top. Stark had been right all along about her potential. None of the others had red stars next to their names.
Barbra was the one with the momentum. Columnists were regularly linking her name with the show anyway; some presumed she’d already been cast. When Barbra had performed in San Francisco, the local press reported she’d “been signed for the role.” Whether that was a journalist’s error or a strategic exaggeration on the part of Lee Solters, neither Barbra’s camp nor Ray Stark had seen the need to correct the claim.
The producer did act to fix something else, however. No doubt at her husband’s request, Fran Stark had diplomatically withdrawn from any public comment on Barbra. But there was still a lingering perception out there that she disapproved. So Stark placed a call to Mike Connolly at the Hollywood Reporter. A conversation with Ray Stark was the only explanation for the interesting little item that Connolly subsequently ran, quoting a reader asking what had happened to the Fanny Brice musical. “They’ve been having a tough time finding the right girl for this great part,” Connolly replied. “But ever since Mrs. Ray Stark, Fanny’s daughter, saw Barbra Streisand in I Can Get It for You Wholesale she’s been insisting on Barbra for it.”
That, of course, was a bit of Orwellian revision, but the spin was necessary if they were going to tamp down the stories of Fran’s disapproval. A few weeks later, Connolly was reporting even more definitively on the matter: “That funny Barbra Streisand is all set to star in the Broadway-bound Funny Girl, formerly The Fanny Brice Story.”
That’s what Stark had been communicating privately to Marty Erlichman as well. Now all he needed was Bob Fosse to come through, and they’d have a show.
3.
Barbra sat in what she considered “an ordinary beauty shop” in London, getting her hair cut, “shorter in back than on the sides,” as she described it. The look was catching on among the swinging chicks in the capital, an asymmetrical bob popularized by celebrity hairstylist Vidal Sassoon that relied on the natural shine and shape of the hair for its effect. That meant no more curlers or hairpieces or lacquers or endless fussing in front of a mirror. With her hair cut this way, Barbra could just wash it, shake it, and voilà! She was done. That made her very happy indeed.
What was more, she now looked like a very contemporary, hip young woman, a more grown-up version of the cosmopolite look Bob had styled a couple of years back. Having finally made it out of her hotel room in Oxford to London, Barbra seemed to come alive amid the city’s cultural renaissance. It was an optimistic period that celebrated the new and the modern in fashion, art, and personal expression. Girls sashayed down the street in oversized sunglasses and knee-high vinyl boots; their boyfriends sported double-breasted blazers and patent-leather ankle shoes with zippers. And everywhere Barbra went, she would have heard the music of the Beatles—an exciting new rock-and-roll band consisting of four young men from Liverpool—soaring from radios and record players. The Beatles’ songs “Love Me Do” and “From Me to You,” as well as others from their debut album, Please Please Me, provided an exuberant soundtrack to life in London during the spring of 1963. They might not have been songs she’d sing, but Barbra was enchanted. She absolutely loved the city.
The move to London had come as rehearsals for On the Town were transferred to the show’s eventual venue, the Prince of Wales Theatre, on the corner of Coventry and Oxendon Street. The theater’s white artificial stone was a landmark on the walk from Piccadilly to Leicester Square. To Barbra, the West End seemed every bit as exciting as Broadway. With Bob, she’d seen Half a Sixpence at the Cambridge Theatre, a few blocks away from the Prince of Wales on the corner of Earlham and Mercer streets. The show starred Tommy Steele, one of Britain’s most popular teen idols.
During the day, Barbra wandered the city with Bob, who’d taken off time from his job to be with her, taking in antique
shops and outdoor markets. Elliott sometimes accompanied them as well when he wasn’t rehearsing. But when Elliott was with them, there was always a bit of tension. Barbra’s boyfriend rarely spoke directly to her old friend, avoiding eye contact at all times. Such behavior grew out of Elliott’s self-described “insecurities with everyone,” but Bob thought it also had to do with the fact that Elliott was still “uncomfortable with anyone who knew Barbra from the old days.”
After Bob returned to Paris, however, Elliott livened up. Strolling through London with Barbra on his arm wasn’t so different from the days when they used to wander New York in complete anonymity. They’d poke through the shops along Carnaby Street, trying on clothes, eating fish and chips or Indian food, and buying tchotchkes that caught their eyes. Any suspicions or fears that had festered between them during their separation dissolved as they rediscovered the simple joys of being together. Barbra realized, “to her great relief,” one friend noticed, that she was “still in love with Elliott and he with her.” The trip to London had been worth it.
Sometimes on their tours of the city they were also joined by the director of On the Town, Joe Layton, a tall, dark man with sharp features, and his wife, the actress Evelyn Russell. Both Laytons possessed keen senses of humor that Barbra enjoyed. Like Peter Matz, Joe Layton had been boosted in his career by Noël Coward, who called him “the most sought-after and up-and-coming young choreographer on the scene.” Layton had choreographed Coward’s Sail Away, for which Matz had done the music arrangements. Now he turned his attentions to On the Town, and he had great hopes for the production. Leonard Bernstein had thrown his support behind the revival, and planned to be there on opening night, which was now just a few weeks away. Elliott, as ever, was bedeviled by self-doubt, fearful he wouldn’t be able to hold his own playing a part that had been immortalized by Gene Kelly in the film version. He didn’t voice such fears. But if one looked closely, the terror could be discerned in the way Elliott’s eyes darted from place to place whenever someone asked him about the show.
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 36