Barbra, however, was having a ball. The more Robbins changed the scenes, the more she liked it. The more she had different songs to try out, the more she loved it. “Forty-one different last scenes!” she exclaimed, indicating the various versions of the script they were working from. Her castmates wilted under the pressure to keep all the different versions distinct, but Barbra found it “exciting, stimulating.” Anything to keep away the boredom she’d known during Wholesale.
Working with Robbins was like putting a different show on every day—which, in a sense, they were. Theatergoers who saw the show on a Wednesday would see a slightly different—or possibly even a radically different—show if they came back on a Friday. Lines were changed, songs were moved around. Not only that, but the production had actually switched theaters, vacating the Forrest for the Erlanger, on the northwest corner of Market and Twenty-first streets. The change had been made necessary by their extended tryout: Anyone Can Whistle was scheduled to open at the Forrest, and even though Stark had offered producer Kermit Bloomgarden ten thousand dollars to switch theaters, he couldn’t make a deal. So that meant packing everything up—props, costumes, equipment—and relearning the layout and sight lines of a brand-new venue. Barbra accepted it as one more adventure.
Settling into a seat in the empty auditorium to watch her cavort on the stage, Robbins marveled at this fascinating creature he’d inherited from Fosse and Kanin. Barbra hadn’t been his first choice for Fanny, of course. But now he couldn’t see anyone else in the part, not even his beloved Anne Bancroft. Barbra’s talent had impressed him, but it was her fierce dedication to the role that had finally won him over. Robbins found Barbra “jet-fueled with the robust, all-daring energy” of a novice, but “tempered by the taste, instinct and delicacy” of a veteran. She often arrived late to rehearsals, “haphazardly dressed,” but accepted the “twelve pages of new material” Robbins handed her without protest, “schnorring” part of his sandwich and “someone else’s Coke” as she read them. During rehearsals, “in her untidy exploratory meteoric fashion,” Barbra was “never afraid . . . to try anything,” Robbins observed. And as soon as she had figured out how to play a scene, she seemed “a sorceress sailing through every change without hesitation, leaving wallowing fellow players in her wake.”
And she hadn’t even turned twenty-two.
That was what was so uncanny, because the work they had been doing over the last few weeks—and the work they needed to keep doing for the next twenty-five days—might have sapped the creativity of even the most experienced old theater pro. Barbra was like no performer Robbins had ever worked with before. No matter the line in “Sadie,” the director thought she was exquisite. Musing about his leading lady, Robbins wrote, “Her beauty astounds, composed of impossibly unconventional features.” Her movements were both “wildly bizarre and completely elegant,” and her “El Greco hands” seemed to have “studied Siamese dancing and observed the antennae of insects.” It was Barbra’s contradictions he admired most: “Her cool is as strong as her passion. The child is also the woman. The first you want to protect, the second keep. She comes on with defiant independence—yet communicates an urgent need for both admiration and approval. She laughs at sexiness. She is sexy. She tests you with childish stubbornness, impetuosity and conceit, concedes you are right without admission, and balances all with her generous artistry and grace.”
Yet for all his fascination with the show’s leading lady, Robbins never really considered Funny Girl his own after he came back. There was a certain detachment, members of the company felt. Too many people had been involved by now for Robbins to ever feel very proprietary about the product. Still, if the show was a hit, he stood to make out pretty well. He’d just signed his contract with Stark, guaranteeing him five thousand dollars for his services plus two-and-a-half percent of the gross weekly box office, both during previews and after the Broadway opening, and including all performances of any subsequent road tour. He also was paid ten thousand dollars for the movie rights to his material; if the film was not made within seven years, Stark would need to come back to him for another agreement. The contract was a clear recognition of Robbins’s authorship, as well as the fact that previous directors’ imprints were minimal. Indeed, the show was now practically unrecognizable from the one that had premiered in Boston, and would be different still by the time they opened on Broadway.
No matter all the fixing going on, Robbins knew what he was doing was simply patching the holes in the book, not rebuilding a great play. Isobel Lennart admitted her work had fallen far short of the mark. “After twenty years of working in a field [screenwriting] where I know what am I doing and can do my job very well,” she told a reporter, “I have had the humbling experience of trying to do something I quickly discovered I knew nothing about.” In the little time they had left, Robbins was trying to salvage what he could. One of the first things he’d jettisoned was “Something About Me,” Kanin’s disastrous babies-in-the-cribs number, despite the loss of some ten thousand dollars in discarded costumes and props. He also sliced out “I’d Be Good for Her” and “Eddie’s Fifth Encore,” completely eliminating Eddie Ryan’s subplot. Robbins and Stark might not have agreed on much, but both understood that for Funny Girl to have any shot at success, it had to be all about Barbra.
Other changes Robbins wrought were less dramatic, but just as significant. Sitting in the back of the theater every night, he scribbled notes on Barclay Hotel stationery to present to the cast the next day. After the performance on the twenty-fourth, he’d thought Barbra was “working too hard” during “I’m the Greatest Star,” and she needed to be careful not to break up the lyrics so much during “Who Are You Now?” After the performance on the twenty-fifth, Robbins had switched “Cornet Man” and “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” and told Barbra not to show her face after she sat down in the “You Are Woman” number and for once let Nick take center stage.
He’d also declared, interestingly, that there was entirely “too much kissing” in the show, which, knowing what was going on after hours between Barbra and Sydney, might have had a little more resonance than Robbins indicated in his notes.
Every day, there was something else to be changed. On the twenty-sixth, Robbins had requested new watercolors be done for the sets and an entire redesign of the Henry Street bar where Fanny’s mother held court. On the twenty-seventh, he had submitted a list to Lennart of various cuts and changes. The speeches of Emma, Fanny’s maid, were too long, and Nick’s dialogue with Fanny had to emphasize his intention “to be head of the house.”
There was just so much, so very much, to do between now and opening night. Jule Styne was frequently sending over lists of changes he thought should be made, such as when inner curtains ought to be raised during songs and which lights should be used during different numbers. He’d also come up with an idea to close the show with a line from Fanny, “Hey, gorgeous, here we go again.” But although Robbins penciled “ok” next to the suggestion, he never used it. Clearly the director thought ending on a reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” was the better way to close.
Not everything he tried worked. At one point, Robbins had brought in a pair of wolfhounds to lead Fanny out onto the stage when she made her first entrance. Nothing says “star” more than a couple of hounds on a diamond-studded leash. But the dogs wouldn’t stop center stage as they were supposed to, so they were sent back to their trainer. Robbins had canned the song “A Helluva Group,” sung by the Henry Street saloon regulars as a lead-in to “People,” and replaced it with “Block Party,” and then “Downtown Rag,” but he still wasn’t happy. He had Styne and Merrill working up something else.
He’d also tried firing Lainie Kazan. His reasons were unclear. Had she been too close to Kanin? Was it a request from Barbra? Did he disapprove of the deal with Stark? From the moment Robbins arrived, Kazan felt he had ignored her. Through the grapevine she heard he was saying she was “too attractive to understudy Fanny Brice.” But when
she got her notice to vacate, Kazan decided she wouldn’t go easily. She called Robbins and asked for ten minutes. “I’m going to sing for you and do a scene for you, and if you really don’t like me, you can fire me,” she said. The director agreed, and Kazan sang “I’m the Greatest Star.” In response, Robbins said nothing, which left the anxious actress hanging. But the next day Kazan got a new script at her hotel room, which meant she could stay on. Probably Ray Stark, who had Kazan under contract, had had as much influence as her rendition of “I’m the Greatest Star.”
It was also true that Robbins had difficulty finding anyone else who could understudy Barbra. On the twenty-sixth, he had interviewed several potential understudies, including Louise Lasser, who had the experience, and Carol Arthur, who’d played with Elliott in On the Town. But none had seemed to catch fire with him. Robbins also had the idea of publicizing “standbys” for Barbra—celebrities who might step in and do the part when Barbra wanted a night off. He had in mind Eydie Gormé, Edie Adams, and Gisele MacKenzie, among others. But Gormé turned Robbins down quite publicly. Her manager issued a statement saying the job was “not in keeping with the image of a star of Eydie’s stature.” Apparently, since she’d been up for the part, Gormé wanted to play Fanny Brice full time or not at all.
Of all the changes Robbins brought to the show, nothing was more crucial than the insights he gave to the actors about the characters they were playing, something Kanin, apparently, hadn’t done. This was what Barbra had been craving. “Everything we know of [Fanny] must be shown,” Robbins told her, in words that could have come straight from her Theatre Studio classes, “not analyzed in talk and thus ‘forgiven’ or ‘understood.’” The trick wasn’t to find a plot device to explain Fanny’s foolishness in choosing (and staying with) Nick, but to make her real enough that the audience sympathized with her without needing any of that. “It must be put into action,” Robbins told Barbra. “Go, move, need, fight, want, fear, love, hate. We love [Fanny] not for her understanding, but from ours of her. Don’t beg off!”
These sessions with Barbra showed just how completely the two personas, Barbra’s and Fanny’s, had merged. Robbins explained to her that Nick needed Fanny so he could “feel needed and strong,” while Fanny needed Nick “to feel worthy and feminine.” One couldn’t get much closer to a description of Barbra and Elliott, but there was still more to come. Robbins put together a list of Fanny’s beliefs about herself: “I’m a dog. I get reaction through making people react to me. I can make them laugh or cry. I get even this way [Robbins’s emphasis]. I win their love. I must feel wanted. There is a large sensitive hole that needs filling up.” That last one, in particular, must have resonated with Barbra, echoing the line from Medea that she’d carried around with her for so long.
Whether Robbins knew how closely he was delineating Barbra’s own life isn’t clear. But the best directors, and that would certainly describe Robbins, always knew their actors inside and out. With so much focus over the last six months on conflating star and subject, Robbins must have been aware that he was asking Barbra not so much to create a character but to play herself—or at least to play the self that had seeped into the public consciousness by now. Yet Robbins’s descriptions went to the core of who Barbra was, to parts of herself that she kept hidden from her public and even from her friends. “Fanny has made out well with all the boys,” Robbins told Barbra, after believing for so long that she could never accomplish such a feat. She has even won “the best-looking” of them. But “then, having had them, finding she could get them, she threw them over with contempt because she thought them fools for wanting her.”
Was that what Barbra was doing with Elliott? Was it what Robbins thought she was doing with him? Certainly the dynamic was there in the show, layered into the character of Fanny, and it didn’t take long to find other comparisons. Nick, like Elliott, had “the seeds of self-destruction in him.” His attraction to Fanny “will either cure him or kill him.” At its core, Robbins argued, this was the “story of a strong woman who, to feel like a woman, picks an elegant, loving but weak man—and her own strength corrupts and kills his love and manliness.” That seemed to be precisely what was happening with Elliott. And with Sydney, too, as his selfish, masculine pride was wounded by the greater acclaim given to Barbra.
That dynamic between the lovers wasn’t helped by what Robbins did next. Despite the decent reviews Sydney had gotten in Philadelphia, it was clear that Lennart had never solved the essential problem of Nick’s character. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? Was he noble or weak? He may have been all of those, but there simply wasn’t enough material in the book to show him in any complexity. Since it was too late to rewrite very much, the answer was simply to cut. Sydney had a major number in the second act, “Sleep Now, Baby Bunting,” in which he sang a lullaby to his newborn daughter, bitterly calling himself “Mr. Fanny Brice.” The number was key to his character, explaining his resentment at being married to a woman who was more successful than he was. But Robbins cut it. His decision may have saved Elliott from squirming in his seat when he saw the show, but it also left Sydney with just two songs, both of which were duets with Barbra. He was not pleased.
But Ray Stark was. Back in New York, at a cost of ten thousand dollars, he’d erected an enormous, block-long sign announcing Funny Girl over the Winter Garden Theatre, giving it “several extra coats of paint,” Dorothy Kilgallen reported, “because he’s confident of a long, long run.” He was telling Robbins he was a genius and that “for the first time since the show started, he was able to have two dinners and go to the movies over the weekend.” He couldn’t believe what Robbins had done “for the morale of the company.” Stark had to put all of this in letters to Robbins’s secretary and ask that it be conveyed to him, however, because Robbins made it a point to spend as little time with Stark as possible.
But the combative producer could afford to be generous in his praise for his old adversary. Advance ticket sales for Funny Girl were averaging twenty thousand dollars a day. That was a very good thing, too, as the newspapers pointed out: given how much Stark had had to pay Merrick, plus “the top figure deal with the high-priced Jerome Robbins,” plus whatever deal had been worked out with Kanin, plus all the delays, Funny Girl was likely to arrive on Broadway as “the highest budgeted musical on record.” Some were estimating Stark’s costs to be in excess of half a million dollars.
And to think it all depended on one small, now slightly chubby, twenty-one-year-old kid.
7.
In her dressing room at the Erlanger, Barbra took the call from Earl Wilson herself. No, she told him firmly, denying yet again the story that she was pregnant. This was getting tedious. Wilson promised he’d print her denial.
Barbra’s new album had just been released, but all these newspapermen wanted to talk about was whether or not she was expecting a baby. Even the record columns weren’t giving her much ink, at least not compared to the last time she’d released a record. Maybe that was because her third album was fated to go head-to-head with the Beatles, which were all anybody seemed to want to talk about. But Barbra knew the album was good, maybe her best yet. Among the tracks she’d chosen this time were more traditional standards, giving in to those who complained her “standards” were usually too offbeat. So she sang “My Melancholy Baby,” “As Time Goes By,” “It Had to Be You,” and, of course, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” She worked with Peter Matz again, and her voice was pristine and supremely confident. It was the work of an artist who had found her groove and enjoyed an easy, smooth mastery over her many gifts. The songs together took the listener on a journey from longing to joy, from grief to hope. The gift for conveying a depth of emotion far greater than her years, displayed early on in Barbra’s career, had clearly never left her and, in fact, had deepened.
She called it, naturally, The Third Album. Kilgallen had reported that someone from Barbra’s team, maybe Solters or Marty, had told her they were planning on calling i
t The Fourth Barbra Streisand Album. That way, the fans would be “dashing into the record stores asking for the third Barbra Streisand album, which doesn’t exist,” Kilgallen said, calling it a “great gimmick.” But if anyone ever really considered such an idea, sanity prevailed. It was a class act all the way. Barbra even gave Peter Daniels credit on “Bewitched.” Roddy McDowall’s adorable shot of Barbra in her midshipman’s blouse from the Garland show was used as the cover. Sammy Cahn, following in the tradition of Arlen and Styne, wrote the liner notes.
Once again, Barbra had insisted on complete control of the production, getting her fingers into everything from “the arrangements, the cover, the copy, the editing.” This time, there were fewer complaints about her involvement. The early reviews, once again, seemed to justify all her efforts. “Every moment in the album is an exciting musical experience,” Billboard wrote. Syndicated record reviewer Al Price, in his “Platter Chatter” column, thought it possessed a “spellbinding effect . . . that is hard to describe.” The Third Album had landed on the charts at number 110, but by the next week, it was at 53. Maybe not Beatles-style velocity, but it was still quite respectable.
Barbra knew she had a good product, especially when she compared it to her first album, which now embarrassed her, she said. For all its freshness and youthful vitality, the first album was not as polished or as emotionally deep as her second and third outings. Barbra cringed remembering how she’d ended “Happy Days” on that first disk, wailing “oooooo, aaaaaay,” and her voice cracking. She’d been “yearning for just so much” back then, she said, that she could hear it in her voice, “very young, very high, very thin, like a bird.”
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 50