Of course, she’d never felt much a part of the music industry and that was even more the case now, competing with the likes of the Beatles, and Joan Baez, and even fourteen-year-old Stevie Wonder, who all wrote their own music or played their own instruments. Barbra admitted to feeling a little bit “inadequate [about] singing other people’s songs.” There was also the generational conflict. The teenagers who were buying millions of copies of Meet the Beatles! weren’t also buying The Third Album. That was left up to a rather eclectic group of housewives, gay men, theater aficionados, and artistic types, of which only a small percentage were likely teenagers. And yet Barbra was the same age as Paul McCartney, and two years younger than John Lennon and Ringo Starr. She might indeed be “a mixture of old and new,” as she called herself in one interview, but her newness didn’t seem to have the same impact on the youth market as Baez or the Beatles did.
That was significant because the success of those acts had demonstrated there was a huge, untapped slice of the market out there. Teenagers had always been a subset of the record-buying audience, driving the sales of Elvis Presley and other rock-and-rollers. But they had not been the major force of sales. Now, as the “baby boomers”—those born in the decade after the end of World War II—reached their teens, it was becoming increasingly clear that the future of the music industry lay with young people. Barbra’s age and her iconoclasm should have made her a natural favorite for this group. But her music—chosen for her by her theater and nightclub handlers—was their parents’ music.
A poll taken of teenagers at the end of the previous year—before the Beatles’ breakout—showed that their favorite female singers were Connie Francis, Joan Baez, Brenda Lee, Connie Stevens, and Lesley Gore. Only Lee and Gore were younger than Barbra. And only when teenagers were asked about stars of the future did Barbra turn up at all: the kids predicted Gore, Peggy March, and Barbra, in that order. Folk music was their favorite genre, beating out rock and pop. If taken in March 1964, the poll likely would have showed a different result, given the unprecedented success of the Beatles. But the point remained: Barbra was no folk singer, and she was even less a rock-and-roller. Exactly where and how could she compete in an industry dominated by teenagers? As her third album made its way up the charts, only time would tell.
Such speculation, however, was better left to her managers and publicists. For Barbra, one goal predominated: getting Funny Girl to Broadway in one piece. As she headed out of her dressing room, she may have run into Sydney, as she often did, on her way to the stage. He still liked to tell her that she was brilliant and gorgeous. He may have whispered it again in her ear. But the truth was, with all the glowing reviews, she didn’t really need to hear it anymore. Her confidence didn’t need that extra boost. And Sydney realized that. It made him feel “less necessary, less important,” Orson Bean understood. It was a feeling Elliott Gould could have empathized with.
To Bean, Sydney would share his suspicions on why his amorous relationship with Barbra had suddenly cooled in those last few days in Philadelphia. “Once his numbers were cut and the show didn’t need him as much,” Bean said, “Sydney felt Barbra wasn’t in love with him anymore.”
He may have been right. Besides, they were going back to New York. And Barbra had a husband waiting for her there.
8.
The block-long sign announcing Funny Girl above the Winter Garden on Broadway had been weathering in the rain, snow, sun, and city soot for the past several weeks as the premiere was delayed yet again, from March 24 to March 26. The show still wasn’t ready. At least the company was now back in New York under the Winter Garden’s roof, and curious theatergoers were flocking to the previews in order to get a peek at the show in development before Jerry Robbins froze it on opening night.
Backstage, Barbra greeted the well-wishers who thronged the hallway and pushed their way into her dressing room, many bearing flowers. No one seemed to be waiting for the official premiere. Already there was buzz that Barbra was a hit. Word was spreading about the elaborate way she took her curtain calls, “like rituals performed in a Buddhist temple,” Dorothy Kilgallen said. Most of the columnists had come to see the show; it seemed there wasn’t anyone of any standing or influence in the theatrical community who hadn’t been by. “The craze to get in ahead of time” made fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard nostalgic for “the old days when any kind of opening was a big thrill.” Now, she said, the official opening night was “for squares.”
Of course, no newspaper would publish a review quite yet, but they did send reporters to check things out. On this night, Joanne Stang of the New York Times observed the procession of people trooping into Barbra’s dressing room to tell her how magnificent she’d been out on the stage. Shouldering his way through them came Jule Styne, who told Barbra he was concerned that the show still ran too long. In his opinion, they “should cut at least twenty-eight minutes.” While all this was going on, Barbra was being fussed over by “a press agent, a personal manager, a photographer, a maid, a dressmaker, and two costume assistants waving swatches of fabrics.” Each one received her attention in turn, and she dealt with each issue they raised in a quiet manner. Then the new script for the next day was delivered to her, with requests from Robbins and Lennart that she “go over the new changes right away.”
As the crowd dispersed from the room, Stang watched as Barbra stretched out on an army cot covered in pink sheets in the corner of the room. She began flipping through the script. “We had three new scenes in the second act tonight,” she told Stang, “so I’m a little tired.” But she was loving it. She loved getting new scripts with different things to say and do and sing every night. Robbins was still scribbling notes during each and every performance and going over them with the cast and crew the next day. Sometimes the changes were big—a whole new scene—and sometimes they were small—a rewrite of a line. But Barbra loved the challenge of something new every night.
There had been new lyrics to “I’m the Greatest Star” that had come and gone. There had been a new version of “Cornet Man” that had stuck. “Downtown Rag” had been replaced with an entirely new number, “Henry Street.” Robbins had even asked Carol Haney to come in and fix the ending of “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” and put a finish on “Find Yourself a Man,” Mrs. Brice’s humorous number in the second act, yet another attempt to liven up the show’s last hour, though whether Haney came is unclear.
And every morning Robbins arrived at Barbra’s dressing room with a handful of notes just for her. He had reversed his earlier objections and come to the conclusion that Barbra should sing “People” alone. No longer, apparently, did he find it “too strong a come-on.” After the performance on March 2, Robbins had also cautioned his leading lady against seeming “too desperate” at the ending of “Greatest Star.” After the performance on the fifth, Robbins had asked Barbra for more concentration in the mirror before she said, “Hello, gorgeous.” A few days later, he was telling her to wait longer for the laugh after Nick’s line, “I’m minding them for a friend.” And sometimes, Robbins said, there was just “too much Mae West” in her Fanny Brice.
After they had started the New York previews on the tenth, Robbins’s criticism had gotten sharper. He told Barbra to stand up straight during “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” and to let the curtain hit the floor before she exited. She needed to be less harsh on the line “Whatever he tells me to do, I’ll do,” and at the end of the bride blackout, where Fanny shocks the audience by showing up pregnant in a wedding dress, Robbins wanted Barbra to hold her pose longer. She should shrug before the line “I would have ordered roast beef and potatoes” and laugh after the line “I’m not bossy,” because she knew she was. Lines such as “Oy, what a day I had” the director wanted to be more Jewish, and Barbra “should be more elegant, like a showgirl” during “Sadie.” And after watching Barbra play Fanny’s farewell scene with Eddie, an exhausted Robbins handed her a note with just one short bit of feedback: “Barbra—class!”
B
ut the biggest problem in Barbra’s performance, it seemed, was how she related to Sydney. “What are you playing while Sydney sings ‘You Are Woman’?” Robbins asked her with some befuddlement. The scene just didn’t work; Ray Stark even sent Robbins a memo complaining that it was no longer “getting the laughs it used to,” that the “small laughs” were “killing the big laughs.” The chemistry between the two players seemed suddenly off. A week later, Robbins was still asking the same question: “What are you playing?” Taking both his leads aside, Robbins rehearsed them extra hard, just the three of them in the room. The problems weren’t confined to “You Are Woman.” The railroad scene, where Fanny and Nick part and the audience is supposed to feel their heartache, wasn’t working either. Robbins encouraged Barbra and Sydney to rehearse all their scenes together on their own. No longer was he complaining about too much kissing. Now he wanted more passion, a quality that had seemed to evaporate in the past couple of weeks.
Very possibly, what the director was picking up on was the cooling of the affair between his two leads. Barbra had begun to distance herself from Sydney, and he was both hurt and angry. No doubt, too, he was frustrated by the fact that Robbins kept singling him out for criticism. The essential problem of Nick as a character had never been solved. Robbins was still trying to figure out “how to make Nick a wheeler-dealer and still make him sympathetic.” One idea was to make him funnier with the addition of some new dialogue on the twentieth: “Whose oil well?” Fanny asks. “Our oil well,” Nick replies. “When does our oil well start producing?” Fanny wants to know. “As soon as we dig it,” Nick tells her. Robbins worried what the critics would say about Sydney after the official opening night.
Barbra, however, didn’t need to wait that long to know what her reviews would be. The audience’s reaction at every preview told her all she needed to know. Joanne Stang of the Times had been struck at how some people had stood on their seats to applaud Barbra at the end. Indeed, starting on the seventeenth, the notes Robbins sent to Barbra were more compliments than critiques. Even Bob Merrill had come around. The lyricist had been impressed with Barbra’s progress in the show, “astounded by the way she had refined all the rough edges,” his wife said. Merrill believed Barbra had “metamorphosed from an angry, rebellious kid to an elegant, polished, powerful performer with the ability to transmit great emotion—maybe even more than he and Jule had written,” his wife thought.
Outside the theater, however, things weren’t quite so sanguine. The five delays Funny Girl had endured had left ticket agents and theatergoers unhappy. Stark couldn’t deny they faced “the wrath of the public.” Notifying customers of changed dates meant considerable extra costs and clerical work; so far, the show’s delays were estimated to have added close to one hundred thousand dollars to its costs, bringing total production expenses to more than six hundred thousand. They were still in the black, since about nine hundred thousand dollars in advance sales had already been made. But it was a very small cushion of comfort.
No doubt the numbers made Ray Stark anxious. That could explain the night he made a beeline for Barbra’s dressing room after one preview—he had gotten surprisingly fast on those crutches—and began shouting at her in a “shrill and high-pitched” voice, as one company member overheard. On the twentieth, he had complained to Robbins about a lack of depth in Barbra’s performance of certain scenes; maybe he was frustrated that he hadn’t seen an improvement. Whatever his reasons, he was unhappy, and let Barbra know it in no uncertain terms.
Barbra had her own grievances with the producer. While she was pleased that Stark and Seven Arts had decided that she should play Fanny in the inevitable movie version of Funny Girl, she wasn’t happy about the terms of the deal, and neither were Begelman and Fields. True, it was reportedly “one of the biggest deals ever given an actress for her first film role”—one million dollars was the figure being bandied about—but it came with a catch: Barbra would be, in effect, Stark’s personal property for the next eight years. Most actresses just starting out in pictures would have been thrilled by the job security; but Barbra, of course, was not most actresses. She knew that the four pictures she’d be required to make for Stark would be, “in essence,” his choices; Barbra would only get to make films that Stark green-lighted, and she’d already discovered how often they failed to see eye to eye on things.
Just as he had with the contract for the show, Stark had played hardball. If Barbra didn’t want to sign the long-term contract, then she wouldn’t play Fanny Brice in the movie version of Funny Girl. There was precedent. When Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had been made into a film, Howard Hawks hadn’t used Carol Channing, who’d been a smash as Lorelei Lee on Broadway. Instead, he’d hired Marilyn Monroe. When, just this past year, George Cukor had cast My Fair Lady, he hadn’t gone with Julie Andrews, even though she’d been such a hit in the part on the stage. He’d hired Audrey Hepburn. There were plenty of big Hollywood names who would jump at playing Fanny Brice in the movie version—Anne Bancroft, perhaps?—and Barbra knew it.
She resented being backed into a corner like that. It was one of the things she disliked most about show business. Ray Stark had become both benefactor and bête noire. To Barbra, he was “a real character, an original.” Without his early championship, she would not have been sitting in that dressing room at the Winter Garden Theatre. But ever since the contract battles of the previous fall, the relationship between producer and leading lady had turned into what she called a “love-hate” tug-of-war. Stark could be a bully, Barbra admitted. For all his charm, for all his patrician good manners, there were those who remembered how he’d shoved and kicked a photographer at Idlewild Airport who’d tried to take his and Fran’s photograph. For all his graciousness, there were those who thought he behaved terribly to his own son, Peter, a dreamy, artistic boy whom Stark was always trying to toughen up by browbeating him in public. No doubt that Ray Stark could be a bully, and Barbra felt she was being bullied over the movie contract.
She appealed to Fields for help. “Look, if you’re prepared to lose it,” her agent told her, “then we can say sorry, we’ll sign only one picture at a time.” But Barbra was “not prepared to lose it.” She knew the risks. She didn’t want to be Carol Channing or Julie Andrews. So she signed the four-picture deal with Stark and had been resentful about it ever since.
That could explain why, when Stark started shouting at her in her dressing room, Barbra had a simple reply: “Fuck you.” She’d cursed similarly at Kanin, but directing the words at Stark was a much bigger deal.
“You can’t say that to me,” the producer sputtered.
“This is my dressing room,” Barbra said, “and I’m saying it to you.”
Later, she’d express amazement with herself for her words, but she didn’t have to worry about any real repercussions. She was untouchable, at least until the show premiered.
9.
At last, Elliott had a job. He would play the Jester in Carol Burnett’s television adaptation of her hit Broadway show Once Upon a Mattress. Joe Layton was set to direct, which was probably how Elliott had gotten the part. It might be just a supporting role, but it was a job. With a paycheck.
Three months ago, a job for Elliott would have been cause for joyous celebration between Barbra and him, and maybe they did celebrate now. But there was a good deal of other emotion weighing them down at the moment that may have kept the corks from popping. Elliott had heard the stories about Barbra’s affair with Sydney. There had been some blind items in the columns that could only have meant the two of them. And when Elliott had confronted Barbra with the rumors, she hadn’t denied them.
On March 17, Mike Connolly wrote, “The stories about the domestic status of Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould are sad,” but just what those sad stories were, he didn’t elaborate. Whatever his feelings about the affair, Elliott obviously didn’t think it warranted the end of the marriage. In public, no matter their “sad domestic status,” the Goulds put on happy fac
es. Elliott was frequently present at the Winter Garden, especially as opening night drew closer, posing for pictures with Barbra. It was from observing Elliott during this difficult period that Jerry Robbins formed some lasting impressions of Barbra’s husband. “He handles it all very, very well,” Robbins said. “Elliott is a gentleman.”
10.
On March 26, Funny Girl finally opened on Broadway.
Tenacious radio reporter Fred Robbins kept thrusting his mike in Barbra’s face as she prepared to go on stage. “So how do you feel?” he asked her.
“Nervous,” she replied, pronouncing it in heavy Brooklynese— “noivous.” Already she was in character.
“Just nervous?” Robbins pressed.
“Yeah, not much more. We’ve had many openings already.”
For Barbra, it was all rather anticlimactic. In some ways she felt that the show had “been open about two years.” The only real difference tonight was all the press swarming around the place, and the knowledge that there would be no more rewrites, no new scenes to rehearse. They’d frozen the show into place last night.
“You’ve been projected to the highest echelon of performers,” Fred Robbins was saying. “How have you been able to adjust to it?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” Barbra replied. “I mean, I’m the same person. Things don’t change me. I’m not impressed by things. With added success comes added problems.”
“In your wildest dreams did you think this would happen?”
The look Barbra must have shot him was undoubtedly classic. “Of course,” she said, and went off to do the show.
In her dressing room sat telegrams from the famous. “Dear Barbra,” Natalie Wood had cabled. “All the best tonight because you are.” Ed Sullivan had wired, “Barb, I brought you up to Fifty-third Street, now you’ve slipped back to Fiftieth Street, so we are not making progress. Every wonderful wish.” The place was filled with flowers from Jack Benny, Harold Arlen, Ethel Merman, and so many others that the vases were lined out into the hall. Barbra could never keep them all. She’d have to give some away to the stagehands.
Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Page 51