Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  What Barbra was revealing to Schwartz was the defining dichotomy of her life. To another reporter, she admitted that sometimes, when she saw herself on television, she’d think, “What am I doing here? I don’t look good; I don’t sound good. What is it that they flip over?” True, Barbra had gotten as far as she had because of the enormous belief she had in herself, which, in turn, had inspired others to believe in her as well. But deep down, the little girl who’d once crawled on her belly so she wouldn’t disturb her stepfather was still there, seeking approval, craving acclaim, and convinced that if she ever got it, it would be quickly snatched away. So when Barbra saw her name on the marquee, she thought, “It’s this kid from Brooklyn. It’s not me.”

  But that kid from Brooklyn had glimpsed the future, and she liked what she saw. “I’m really very young,” she reminded Schwartz, and there was still so much more to do and get and experience. “I want homes all over the world,” Barbra said. “I’d like to live different places different parts of the year, in Europe, Mexico maybe . . .” Plus, she was going to be great. “I want to do everything,” she said. She wanted to make records “and be the greatest and sell the most.” She wanted to be on television and “get all the reviews.” She wanted to be in the theater and “be magnificent.” Despite the nagging, deep-down doubts, Barbra recognized she’d already done pretty damn well for herself. “So far,” she said, “it seems I’ve been pretty lucky about doing whatever I want to do.”

  Finally, Schwartz asked what she would be doing if she wasn’t in show business. Barbra didn’t wait long to reply. She said, very simply, “I don’t think I’d be alive.”

  7.

  There were movie stars waiting for her downstairs.

  Big movie stars. Some of the biggest ever. Henry Fonda, who’d liked Barbra so much back in Philadelphia. Edward G. Robinson and Ray Milland. Natalie Wood with her date, Arthur Loew, Jr., son of the president of MGM and grandson of two of Hollywood’s founders, Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor. Wood’s ex-husband Robert Wagner, with his new wife, Marion. Kirk and Anne Douglas, with Kirk glad-handing all around the room. Jack and Mary Benny. Gracie Allen. Roddy McDowall with Tammy Grimes. Director John Huston, whose face lit up when he met the young and pretty Sue Lyon, who’d just scored in Lolita.

  And then there were the songwriters. Jimmy McHugh, Sammy Cahn, and, of course, Jule Styne, who’d flown out from New York with his wife, Maggie, to be there for Barbra’s Hollywood debut. Afterward, Styne and Cahn were hosting a soiree in her honor. Singer Tony Bennett was there, too, checking out the young woman he was sometimes compared with, and with whom he was currently sharing the charts.

  In all, there were fifteen hundred people at the Grove that night, a record. There were even more outside, where fans mobbed the entrance, eager for a night of stargazing. As each celebrity arrived, cheers exploded from the crowd. Paparazzi cameras flashed. Long accustomed to the glare of the spotlight, Fonda, Douglas, and Wood smiled and waved graciously as they made their way inside.

  Upstairs in her fifth-floor hideout, however, Barbra was definitely not accustomed to all the hoopla. From the street below, she could hear the cheers from the crowd, and she grew more anxious by the moment. Proving herself to Hollywood was an enormous challenge. If she ever wanted to make movies—and more and more she talked about that—then these were the people who would make that happen, or not. She’d already received the benediction of the influential columnist Sheilah Graham, who’d written in her column that Fanny Brice “would have approved” of Barbra. That carried weight, because Graham had known Brice. But then again, so did an awful lot of the people who were waiting downstairs to see Barbra—including those two old warhorses Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, seated on opposite sides of the room from each other. Hopper was at Sammy Cahn’s table; Parsons was with Harriet and Armand Deutsch, Los Angeles society mainstays. Both columnists were waiting, eagle-eyed, to report on this young New York songstress who was going to play “their” Fanny Brice.

  But of all the audience members down there waiting for her, it was probably Fran Stark whom Barbra was most eager to impress. Ray and Fran, of course, were seated at one of the head tables. Barbra was their find; they were her benefactors. Barbra knew as many eyes would be on them as on her.

  Slipping into her black skirt and white midshipman’s blouse, Barbra may well have ruminated over who was not there as much as who was. She’d “wanted her mother to come to Los Angeles very much, to be there to see all those movie stars,” one friend of Diana’s understood. Maybe then, Barbra seemed to hope, Diana might grasp just how important her daughter had become. With all of Barbra’s travels, she hadn’t seen her mother in a while; Barbra had yet to give her the president’s autograph. Trying to remedy that, she’d offered to fly Diana out to Los Angeles, but her mother had turned her down flat. Diana was “much too afraid to fly,” her friend knew. To Barbra, however, it may have felt like yet another brush-off, one more example of her mother’s indifference toward her. But to her friends, Diana was bragging that “her Barbra” was singing where “Marlene Dietrich used to sing.”

  As Barbra dried her hair with a newfangled, handheld dryer, a knock at the door of her suite drew her attention. It was Sammy Cahn, wishing her well. David Begelman and Freddie Fields also came by, accompanied by Fields’s wife, actress Polly Bergen, who looked as “gay as a bird in a smart summer-flowered dress,” Hedda Hopper thought. Begelman and Fields were still eager to win Barbra as a client. A few days earlier, they had helped book her on The Jack Barry Show, a comeback program for the television host caught up in the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. Now Barry hosted a variety-format program on KTLA Channel 5 for celebrities promoting local appearances.

  But what Marty really wanted from Begelman and Fields was a guest spot for Barbra on The Judy Garland Show, which was set to premiere that fall. Since Garland was a client of theirs, the agents promised to see what they could do.

  Barbra was finally ready to head downstairs. She took one final glance in the mirror. She’d put on some weight. Where she’d once been a spindly 110, she was now a more curvy 125. All that ice cream and calorie-rich Chinese food she’d consumed on the road had packed on the pounds. But the extra weight made her look better than ever. She was sexier, more mature, more substantial. Those few extra pounds seemed to imbue her with greater authority and gravitas.

  The Cocoanut Grove lounge, on the first floor of the hotel, dated back to the very beginnings of Hollywood. In the Roaring Twenties, Joan Crawford had danced the Charleston on tabletops there; Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino had raised glasses spiked with bootleg liquor to their lips. Under the Grove’s three-story-high ceiling, painted to resemble a dark blue night sky studded with stars, Academy Awards and Golden Globes had been handed out over the years to Mary Pickford, Vivien Leigh, Hattie McDaniel, and Jennifer Jones. In the grove of giant potted palms, Frank Sinatra had sung; Martin and Lewis had traded barbs; and Dizzy Gillespie had fired up the house with his hot jazz.

  Barbra made her entrance through the back, the spotlight following her dramatically through the dark as the crowd gave her a rousing welcome. She had kept them waiting just long enough to settle her own nerves and to build a sense of anticipation in the audience. Roddy McDowall thought her entrance was perfectly timed—“just late enough to get people’s attention” but before anyone “started complaining.”

  Taking the stage, Barbra basked for a moment in the applause. “I’m the kind of nut who reads movie magazines,” she told the crowd, “and here you all are alive.” Then she delivered the evening’s best line: “If I’d known the place was going to be so crowded, I’d have had my nose fixed.” The audience roared in laughter. She’d broken the ice. With that one wisecrack, Barbra had won Hollywood over. By confronting head-on the supposedly insurmountable barrier to her potential movie stardom—her looks—Barbra, through her wit and personality, had rendered that argument obsolete.

  Of course, her voice helped, to
o. She warmed them up with “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” made them wistful with “I Stayed Too Long at the Fair,” and seduced them with “Lover, Come Back to Me.” Every song received sustained applause.

  Sitting there spellbound, Hedda Hopper thought Barbra used “her extraordinary voice range beautifully.” Hopper’s only problem was her tablemate, Sammy Cahn, who, having heard it all before, had hooked up a transistor radio to his ears so he could listen to the Los Angeles Dodgers play the St. Louis Cardinals. In the middle of Barbra’s rendering of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Cahn whispered to the table, “Dodgers won—sixteenth inning —2 to 1.” Hopper considered Cahn’s susurration “a bit disturbing,” but it didn’t spoil her enjoyment of the song. She was likely already composing in her head what she would write about Barbra the next day: “As relaxed as a cat on a hearth rug, she makes old songs sound new.”

  Her rival, Louella Parsons, went a step further in her support. Barbra, she wrote, would “be great as our beloved Fanny.” That seemed to be the consensus as the stellar crowd rose to its feet to cheer Barbra at the end of the night. Polly Bergen whispered to Freddie Fields, “I gave up singing just in time”—a line that her husband made sure to get out to the press. Although Los Angeles Times critic Margaret Harford overheard a couple of ladies in the powder room sniffing that they “didn’t care for her,” Barbra had won a host of other admirers that night. “She has high standards, direct methods and a voice that may still be shattering glass in Fresno,” Harford wrote in the Times. “I hope she never changes at the behest of press agents and powder room critics. Some of the sexy, no-talent babes who call themselves ‘vocalists’ should hear Miss Streisand. They would, I’m sure, go home and cut their pretty, pipsqueak throats.” Lee Solters himself couldn’t have written a more ringing endorsement of Barbra’s new kind of stardom.

  Outside, the fans were still cheering as the stars filed out of the Grove at one o’clock in the morning. Hurrying back upstairs, Barbra changed into a red-gingham dress with white puffy sleeves—also her own creation—and then made her way to the reception in her honor. Marty, as always, was right by her side. Passing through a battalion of photographers, Barbra lifted her hands to shield her face from the blinding flashes of the cameras.

  But things were more genteel at the party. Overcoming her old feelings of shyness when surrounded by so many people, Barbra allowed the Starks to lead her around, introducing her to all their Hollywood friends. Celebrities shouldered their way through the crowd to pay her homage. Tony Bennett congratulated her. Robert Wagner—the actor Elliott had always wished he looked like—posed for a photograph with her. Natalie Wood—one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood—told her that she was gorgeous. But mostly Barbra stuck close to Fran Stark’s side, their great big smiles telling the world that Fanny Brice’s daughter, no matter what anyone might have heard, thought the kid from Brooklyn was just swell.

  8.

  Elliott arrived in Los Angeles just in time for his birthday, August 29. Sitting in the Ambassador Hotel restaurant on a clear, warm, gorgeous day, Barbra ordered a slice of cake and asked the waitress to stick a candle in it. When the cake was set down on the table between them, Barbra told Elliott to make a wish.

  “I hope the Dodgers win the pennant,” he said, and blew out the candle.

  It was only natural for Elliott to be rooting for the Los Angeles Dodgers since they’d once been the Brooklyn Dodgers, the team he’d followed as a boy. That night the team was playing the San Francisco Giants, hoping to solidify their lead in the National League. But clearly baseball wasn’t all that was on Elliott’s mind that day.

  “Let’s get married,” he suddenly blurted.

  “Too late,” Barbra replied. “Candle’s out.”

  She was playing with him. She knew they had to get married. They were in a precarious situation. Everyone assumed they were already husband and wife. They were very publicly living together. The Saturday Evening Post piece had made their marriage a major focal point, quoting some friend—Barbra wasn’t sure who—who’d said “the marriage to Elliott” had been more important to her than even her fame. “Here was a girl . . . who never had the guys chasing her, never went steady and who really felt ugly inside,” this “friend” opined. “And then the leading man, a big, handsome, virile guy, falls in love and marries her.”

  Barbra’s friends all knew she wasn’t really married; anyone who was pontificating on the significance of her “marriage” would have had an ulterior motive for doing so. And since Pete Hamill would admit that at least one of his sources was Harvey Sabinson, this quote, too, may well have sprung from Barbra’s publicists. Indeed, it went to the heart of one of the fundamental components of her public persona: the wallflower who felt “ugly inside.” But now this pathetic image could be updated and transcended by the validation that came with the love of a good man. Even the descriptions of Elliott—“handsome” and “virile”—sounded as if they came from a press agent’s talking points. Barbra’s “marriage,” therefore, was good for the image.

  Eventually, however, someone would catch on that they weren’t really hitched. Although Barbra had deliberately called Elliott her husband when she’d sat down with Marv Schwartz—“Some nights I sleep in my husband’s pajamas,” she said—she also declared him off-limits to the discussion: “I can’t talk about him,” she replied when Schwartz asked her a question about Elliott. Barbra and Elliott were clearly going to have to be very careful in any interviews they gave.

  And, at least for Barbra, that would take considerable effort, since suddenly she was everywhere. In nearly every major entertainment column, Barbra had become a regular boldface name. She’d recently sat down with Lloyd Shearer of Parade for a major piece to be run in the popular Sunday newspaper supplement. She’d also just taped the season premiere of Bob Hope’s show, which was a surefire ratings winner. Barbra had sung “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” and “Gotta Move.” She’d also participated in a comedy skit, playing Bessie Mae, the distaff side of a hillbilly band called the Hog Chitlins and the Goat Grabber Three. Slung over her shoulders were two washboards that she played as instruments: “I’m in stereo,” she punned. They sang a version of “Blue Tail Fly,” but Barbra’s hillbilly accent didn’t work, and the jokes were painfully unfunny. And she seemed to know it.

  Far more accolades came for her continuing show at the Cocoanut Grove, where the box office sold out every night. Barbra had become “the new pet of the movie crowd,” in the words of one journalist. One night, Rosalind Russell hosted a table of ten, and Barbra was cued by Marty to introduce both her and Norma Shearer from the stage. Also at the table were Kate Paley, the teenaged daughter of the CBS founder, and her escort, Carter Burden, a young socialite and Vanderbilt cousin. Danny Thomas had been back to see Barbra at the Grove a couple of times, eager to sign her for an appearance on his show. Jack Paar was also asking, apparently no longer making cracks about Barbra’s looks.

  But Marty turned them both down, at least for the moment. He’d gotten a better offer—indeed, the one he’d been aiming for. Begelman and Fields had come through: Barbra was booked to appear on The Judy Garland Show that fall. And so the pair from CMA officially became Barbra’s new agents. They knew how to make things happen, and that’s what Barbra needed. For Garland, they’d refocused and revitalized her career. “You two are the luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” Garland had exulted. The pair, according to one observer, were “young, smart and, beneath their well-tailored suits, ferocious.” Just the kind of people Barbra wanted handling her affairs. Begelman and Fields promised her the world, even movies—though, in an attempt to not rattle Ray Stark too much, Barbra fibbed through her teeth when reporters asked if she was interested in making films. No, she told them: “I’ve got a job.”

  But her new agents knew better. Surely it was Begelman and Fields who lined up the tour Barbra took of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She was driven onto that legendary lot past the tall Cori
nthian columns into a fantasy world replete with New York brownstones, Tarzan’s jungle, Chinese temples, and Andy Hardy’s middle-American neighborhood. Afterward, Barbra toured the soundstages, where director George Sidney was filming a number with Ann-Margret for the upcoming Viva Las Vegas. After the sexy redhead purred through her song, the two singers were introduced. Enterprising press agents embroidered a bit of fluff from that meeting, claiming Barbra had asked Ann-Margret, “Where did you get the crazy spelling of your name?” To which the Swedish bombshell had supposedly replied, “I was just going to ask you the same question.”

  For all its monkeyshines and hoopla, Barbra loved Hollywood. The weather, the fragrance of citrus trees, the dream-factory atmosphere. “If you want to get away from everything,” Barbra’s friend Evelyn Layton said about Hollywood, “this place is perfect—so unreal it’s like being on another planet.” Heart-shaped swimming pools, shiny convertible cars, beach houses made out of glass. The place was magical. And that wasn’t even counting Disneyland, where Barbra got to spend a day, even if the lines had been too long for her to get on many of the rides.

  Besides, in Hollywood she was surrounded by people who kept telling her she was soon to be the biggest star in the world. NBC was reported to be “going to great pains to line up an exclusive contract” with her. She may have been discussing all her many options the night that Louis Sobol spotted her at La Scala, the swank Beverly Hills eatery, with Freddie Fields. In his column a few days later, Sobol wrote up a description of Barbra’s table, mentioning that Fields was accompanied by his wife, Polly Bergen, and that Phil Silvers, who was also present, had his wife with him as well.