Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  What made it worse were the national columnists, who were getting wind of the situation. Kilgallen told her readers that “they still haven’t decided whether it’s supposed to be a funny musical or a dramatic ‘plot’ musical.” Walter Winchell gushed about Barbra: “She excels . . . in every dept. . . . her second year in showbiz!” He added, “Three years ago she lived in a Brooklyn cold-water flat” (not so, it was in Manhattan and she had hot water) and “her entire wardrobe was draped over a chair” (it was more like crammed into a shopping bag). Hedda Hopper reported that Barbra was “a sensation . . . but the book will be overhauled before the New York opening” because “the writers devoted too much attention to Fanny’s husband.”

  Of course, at the same time, they were still selling out nearly every night in Boston, so the reviews hadn’t hurt them very much. Barbra was a powerful drawing card. As William Sarmento had pointed out in the Lowell Sun, Barbra, like Judy Garland, brought in “a cult of worshippers” to everything she did, who cheered and whistled at her every move.” Because of Barbra, Funny Girl was still the show to be seen and to be seen at. Promoting her film Strait-Jacket at local theaters, Joan Crawford made sure to attend a performance, being welcomed with a standing ovation from the audience when she was spotted and recognized. So there was no danger of them going under. As Elinor Hughes had pointed out, “If a musical comedy with only the public’s advance confidence can open to a sold-out and enthusiastic house on the night of Boston’s worst snow storm in some time, then its future should be a prosperous one.”

  But they couldn’t roll into New York with good notices for only their leading lady. “The hard fact,” Kevin Kelly had written in the Globe, “is that Funny Girl is meant to be more than the exploitation of a single talent.”

  Barbra could have coasted; the reviews hadn’t blamed her. She could have sat around pointing fingers. But she didn’t. She was at every rehearsal, every meeting, wolfing down greasy take-out Chinese food with everyone else—eating so much, in fact, that her costumes were getting tight. Barbra was there to try out new numbers and observe the ones (very few) that she was not in. She worked just as hard as everyone else in trying to make the show better.

  And maybe even a little harder. Few knew that the “cousin” who’d dropped by to watch Barbra during rehearsals was actually Allan Miller. Barbra had come a long way since her days at the Theatre Studio, much further than Miller had ever expected, even if Fanny Brice was hardly the Medea he’d guided her through in acting class. As a starry-eyed teenager, Barbra had thought no one was smarter or understood theater better than Miller, who was now teaching at the Circle in the Square Theatre School. It was natural that she would turn to him now, absent a director she trusted. Miller had first come around while they’d been rehearsing in New York, watching Barbra and giving her pointers at night. Barbra had insisted to Stark that she needed Miller’s continued assistance, so Stark had hired him as her coach, provided that Kanin never find out. Now, with the show in trouble, Barbra had summoned Miller to Boston, where she hoped he might offer some advice on what they could do to save it.

  But Kanin grew suspicious of the eagle-eyed “cousin” watching them rehearse. When he ascertained Miller’s true identity, he threw a fit and, uncharacteristically aggressive, ordered him out of the theater. “Biggest screaming scene of the season,” Walter Winchell reported. “When director Garson Kanin discovered star Barbra Streisand’s drama coach in the balcony during a run-through, everything stopt [sic] until he was escorted out by the elbows with both feet four inches off terra firma.” Whether it was really that dramatic or not, Miller was no longer permitted to come around, though Barbra still sought his advice on her own.

  Kanin had his own ideas about how to fix the show. With his cast assembled on stage, his wife finally silent behind him, he was running through a new comedy number for Act Two. If the critics had thought the second act was too depressing, then he’d give them something to laugh at. It was February 1, the last night of their Boston run. From here it was on to Philadelphia. Kanin hoped that this new number, written by Styne and Merrill, would allow them to go out with a bang.

  The song was called “Something About Me.” Lainie Kazan and half a dozen others were dressed as babies, wearing swaddling clothes and seated in cribs. Barbra came on stage, singing about the ways to tell little boy babies from little girl babies. It was a strange number, and they might have all been more inclined to laugh about it had there not been so much backstage drama of late.

  Kazan was at the center of the conflict. She had started dating Peter Daniels, who was working, thanks to Barbra, as an assistant conductor in the orchestra. When Garson Kanin suggested Kazan practice her numbers with Daniels, the spark between the two had been lit. Peter had insisted they keep their romance secret from Barbra, though Kazan couldn’t understand why. But such secrets, as Barbra and Sydney were also discovering, were very hard to keep in such close proximity. When word of the Daniels-Kazan affair leaked, Barbra was furious. Peter, in response, got angry right back, allowing some long-simmering tensions to finally boil over. It had been Peter’s arrangements that had made Barbra famous, after all, dating all the way back to the Bon Soir, and he felt that she had given him very little recognition. A wound was opened between the two old friends that never healed. Kazan came to realize that Barbra “didn’t like to share,” whether it be a role or a longtime arranger. Probably the fact that it was Kazan—Ray Stark’s protégée and fellow Erasmus Hall alumna—made her anger even worse.

  Yet everyone was professional enough not to crack the eggshells on which they walked, and so they got through rehearsals. On that last night in Boston, they headed out onto the stage to give the show one more try. All of them remained committed to making this show a hit.

  So was their producer, sitting out in the audience. While Barbra had gone around the director and placed a call for help to Allan Miller, Ray Stark had made his own surreptitious appeal, and to a very unlikely person. He sat with this potential savior now, watching the “Something About Me” number, with the cast all dressed as babies. Even as she performed it, Lainie Kazan knew the number was terrible, and if they weren’t literally “booed off the stage,” that would be how she’d remember the audience’s unenthusiastic reaction to the number.

  No doubt, watching his cast make fools of themselves on the stage, Ray Stark was very glad to be sitting next to Jerome Robbins. The show’s original director had come up to Boston, and he was going on with them to Philadelphia. He was the only man on earth, Stark had come to realize, who could save Funny Girl.

  4.

  What made it particularly awkward for Jerry Robbins was that he and Garson Kanin were staying at the same hotel in Philadelphia. Barbra and Sydney were over at the Warwick, while Robbins, Kanin, Ray Stark, Isobel Lennart, and Jule Styne were all at the Barclay, running into one another on the elevators, in the cozy Chinese Chippendale corner bar, or at the ornate Victorian filigreed front desk. Except not for much longer. After the little meeting Ray Stark had just called between the principals, no one expected Kanin to still be around in the morning.

  That was why Robbins was writing to him tonight. “Dear Gar,” he penned. “I want you to know that I consider Funny Girl your show. I was hoping to work on it with you but Ray, in deciding to take advantage of the little time left out of town, felt it could only proceed this way. I am very sorry indeed, believe me. I just hope I fulfill the very wonderful job you’ve already left here.”

  He called a bellhop to deliver the note to Kanin’s room. Then he began planning how to undo much of Kanin’s “wonderful job.”

  Robbins and Stark had indeed hoped to work with Kanin, and with Carol Haney. Robbins had tentatively agreed not to take a credit. He’d come, he told everyone, only to advise. And they had plenty of time to rehearse now; Stark had managed to get the New York premiere pushed back from February 27 to March 17, which gave them almost seven weeks to work. But then the show had opened at the Forrest Theatr
e on Walnut Street, and the first reviews had come in, and they weren’t that much different from those in Boston. “The first triumph belongs to Barbra Streisand,” wrote Henry T. Murdock in the Philadelphia Inquirer. That much was no doubt expected. But Murdock also saw scenes that went on past their logical conclusions, and songs whose potential would only be realized “as the run progresses.” In his second review of the show, Murdock concluded succinctly: “The funny girl should be funnier.”

  Robbins’s attempts to make that happen had been thwarted at every turn by objections from a deeply affronted Kanin, or from his equally aggrieved wife. It became clear that Robbins needed a free hand to whip the show into shape. Their seven weeks were now down to four. That meant Kanin had to go. Haney, too, as Robbins needed complete control over the choreography as well.

  Clearly Barbra was pushing for Robbins to take over; the director was exchanging notes with her about her performance almost daily, and it was common knowledge that she had lost faith in Kanin. But some wondered why Robbins had come back to a project that had given him so much aggravation in the past—and to a producer he frankly couldn’t stand and didn’t respect. No doubt Stark had concluded that if he was going to be paying Robbins royalties anyway for the use of his material, he might as well have him back on the job. Asking Robbins to return, however, must have been very difficult for the proud Stark. Humbling himself before a man he’d tried to outmaneuver legally less than a year before showed the desperation the producer was feeling—as well as his determination not to give up. For Robbins, it may have been the satisfaction of being told that he had been right all along that brought him back—that and a hefty financial agreement, the details of which were still being worked out. There may also have been a personal consideration: Buzz Miller, one of the lead dancers, was Robbins’s former lover and someone who still held a piece of his heart.

  And so, the next day, Kanin and his wife were gone. There were no good-byes made to the company. “He just kind of disappeared,” Sharon Vaughn said of their director. Kanin would keep his credit on the show, but soon everyone in Broadway circles knew he had been fired. As consolation, Stark sent him a set of antique china.

  Lainie Kazan felt sorry about Kanin’s departure, but she felt far worse for Carol Haney, who many in the company believed had been treated cavalierly. She had worked so hard and was willing to keep working hard, but Robbins wanted complete control. Haney, too, would keep her credit, even if the new director-choreographer was already reworking her steps and routines as he saw fit. Soon the company was hearing reports that Haney, stunned and depressed by her dismissal, was drinking again.

  5.

  Had Barbra switched on the television set in her room at the Warwick on the night of February 9, she would have seen that group of four Liverpool lads she’d heard while in London perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show. Almost from out of nowhere, the Beatles had exploded onto the American scene that winter, enjoying a meteoric ride to the top that made even Barbra’s ascent seem like a long time coming. They sang four songs on the Sullivan show, all of which were nearly drowned out by screaming teenaged fans in the audience, especially the last, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Sullivan declared, “This city has never witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters.”

  As they headed out on their first stateside tour, the Beatles were suddenly everywhere. “The British group, something like Presley quadruplets, have taken over the American record market,” one columnist observed. Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press complained it was “impossible to get a radio weather bulletin or time signal without running into ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’” Meanwhile, the Beatles’ first album had skyrocketed up the charts and managed to accomplish what Barbra hadn’t: knock the Singing Nun from the top spot. Along the way, the quartet had also passed Barbra’s second and first albums, now at numbers 9 and 14 respectively.

  The change at the top couldn’t have been more dramatic. Sister Smile’s simple, soothing sounds had been replaced by the Beatles’ vivacious, rule-breaking rock and roll—a sign that Americans, at least young Americans, were ready to start living again after the horrors of the fall. If Barbra, cloistered at the Forrest Theatre, hadn’t been paying much attention to what was happening in the music world, she would soon have to, for she had a new album on the way—and a new single as well.

  Arriving backstage a few hours before curtain time, one member of the company was still singing along to the Beatles tune she’d been playing in her hotel room. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” she warbled as she headed up the stairs to the dressing rooms. That was when she heard Barbra singing, too—only she quickly realized it wasn’t Barbra singing live, but on a record, and she was singing a song from the show, “You Are Woman,” the humorous love song she shared with Nick. But it sounded different somehow. Listening closely, the company member realized that Barbra was singing it solo, and the words had been changed to “I Am Woman.” When she got into the dressing room she shared with the other girls, she saw Marty Erlichman. He had just brought the single over and was playing it for them. The record had just been released to radio stations all across the country. The company member looked down at the disk spinning on the turntable and thought, “This sure ain’t the Beatles.”

  Indeed, it was suddenly a very different market. Although “I Am Woman”—with its flipside, “People”—earned some positive reviews and inclusion in Dick Kleiner’s top picks in his syndicated record column, it didn’t really stand a chance on a Top Ten list now dominated by Beatles hits (that week it was “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”) and other rock-pop singers such as Lesley Gore and the Four Seasons. Probably no one expected “I Am Woman” to chart very high. Recorded before Barbra left New York, the single was intended mostly as radio promotion for the show. But getting airplay was going to be very tough in this new market.

  That didn’t mean Barbra wasn’t making news on other fronts. Her weight gain hadn’t gone unnoticed, and that prompted rumors that she was pregnant. No surprise that Dorothy Kilgallen was the one to start the ball rolling. “Funny Girl must agree with Barbra Streisand, despite all the strenuous out-of-town performances and rehearsals,” the columnist insinuated. “She’s actually put on weight and some of her costumes have had to be altered.” That was enough to set tongues wagging, as Kilgallen surely intended. It led to someone—Stark? Marty? Solters? Barbra herself?—calling the ever-reliable Earl Wilson to set the record straight. “Tisn’t so, comes the word, loud and clear, from Philadelphia,” Wilson dutifully wrote.

  What made the rumors especially awkward was the affair going on between Barbra and Sydney. For those in the company who suspected some hanky-panky between their leading man and lady, talk of pregnancy led to all sorts of questions. The same company member who had heard Barbra’s record playing also heard stories of her romance with Sydney. At one point, she worked up the nerve to ask Jule Styne if, therefore, the pregnancy stories might be true. He told her “never to utter anything that crazy ever again.” So she didn’t.

  For his part, Sydney was hoping that Robbins could fix things for him along with the rest of the show. Indeed, there were indications that he might no longer be the albatross that the Boston reviews had made him out to be. Critics in the City of Brotherly Love had been much kinder to Sydney: Henry Murdock had found him “graceful, nimble, handsome, and most vocally able.” No doubt this pleased Barbra and likely kept the relationship between the two of them humming along even as chaos reigned in rehearsals. Now that Carol Haney had departed, Barbra and Sydney were the only ones among the principals to be lodged at the Warwick. That gave them a certain amount of privacy, just in case they wanted to spend any time together late at night after the curtain had been rung down.

  6.

  Jerry Robbins called them all together under the Erlanger Theatre’s glittery crystal chandelier and told them point-blank that they were running out of time.

  Ray Stark had just pulled off the impossibl
e and gotten them yet another reprieve. Their Broadway opening night had been moved from March 17 to March 24. That meant they had exactly twenty-five days to get this thing right.

  First order of the day, Robbins announced, as the company scrambled up onto the stage, many of them in socks or ballet shoes, was to rehearse the new “Sadie, Sadie” number. Originally part of an earlier script, the song was being brought back into the show to replace “Home” and “Who Are You Now?” at the top of the second act. “Home” would be scrapped; “Who Are You Now?” would be moved toward the end of the show. To kick off Act Two, they’d tried using the “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” number, the Ziegfeld Follies tribute to World War I doughboys that served no real plot purpose except to pep things up during the dreary second hour. But a transition was needed after the intermission to show that Fanny was now married, and Robbins didn’t want another duet with Sydney. So out came “Sadie.” He told the orchestra to hit it.

  “I’m Sadie, Sadie, married lady,” Barbra sang, as the company followed her across the stage in steps originally worked out by Haney and now finessed by Robbins to contain the number to three minutes.

  “She’s Sadie, Sadie, married lady,” the company echoed.

  “To tell the truth,” trilled Barbra, “it hurt my pride, the groom was prettier than the bride!”

  Yet another reference to her looks, but Barbra went along with it, no complaint, because Robbins liked the song. And at that point, she would have done almost anything Robbins suggested. Star and director were “getting along famously,” Lainie Kazan observed, even if the rest of the cast, used to the easygoing Kanin, wasn’t too happy about the “ferocious taskmaster” who’d showed up one day out of the blue and started making their lives more difficult.