Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  Some people thought Haney’s dismissal from Funny Girl had played a part in her death. “It not only destroyed her career,” Lainie Kazan said, “but her life.” When, twenty minutes before showtime, word reached the Winter Garden that Haney had passed away, a pall had fallen over the company. A suggestion that her death be announced to the audience was nixed, however. “There’s nothing we can do for her except to do her steps,” Richard Evans said. “We have got to do her work tonight, no matter how hard it is for us.” Upstairs, in her dressing room, Barbra received word of Haney’s death from a reporter. She was solemn as she ran her fingers through her hair. “God,” she said. “She was so talented and so gentle.”

  But gentle didn’t often survive in a world of wolves. Barbra had understood that right from the start.

  Sitting at the table at the Waldorf, Barbra heard her name called as the winner for Best Female Vocal Performance. She’d just been named the “best” by her peers, which mattered a great deal to her. Who would have thought such a thing possible the day she’d sung “Day by Day” in Barry’s apartment? Now, more than four years later, Barbra had just been adjudged better than any of her fellow nominees—Eydie Gormé, Miriam Makeba, Peggy Lee—Peggy Lee!—and, in an occurrence that no doubt made Barbra smile, the Singing Nun. She wasn’t just the most commercially successful; she was also the best.

  She was disappointed when Henry Mancini’s “Days of Wine and Roses” beat out “Happy Days Are Here Again” as Record of the Year. But the big prize was still ahead. At the end of the evening, the nominees were announced for Album of the Year. Barbra was up against the Singing Nun, Mancini, Al Hirt, and the Swingle Singers, who used their voices to interpret Bach’s great compositions. When the envelope was opened, The Barbra Streisand Album was named the winner.

  Better than even Bach, it seemed.

  Technically, this was Berniker’s award as producer. As the room filled with applause, however, he leaned over to Barbra. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  She looked at him. “That’s my line,” she said, “because you did it.” Then she added, “I love you.”

  It was a thoughtful, if slightly uncharacteristic, moment. Barbra didn’t always recognize the efforts of other people who had roles in bringing her to the top. But she wasn’t all drive and self-absorbed ambition.

  She could also sometimes be gentle.

  7.

  In Paris, Bob was eager for news of home.

  He’d asked a friend who was visiting the United States to bring him back some newspapers and magazines. Bob had been in Europe for almost two years now, and he felt out of touch. So it was with considerable excitement that he received the publications his friend had brought back. But when he got a look at the covers of Time and Life, he stopped short.

  Barbra was on both of them.

  His friend Barbra. The girl he’d put up on a stool to experiment with hairdos and makeup. The same Barbra who’d once talked with him for hours on the phone about her dreams and her ambitions and her favorite flavors of ice cream.

  Bob was aware that Barbra had been doing well. He knew she’d cut several albums. She’d sent him copies, in fact, asking him to get them out to “influential people” in Paris. He’d given the albums to the disquaire affiliated with Chez Castel, the popular Parisian discotheque. And the last time he’d seen her, in London, Barbra was hoping to get the part in Funny Girl. Bob had heard she’d gotten it, and he was aware she’d opened on Broadway a couple of months ago, so he knew things were going great for her.

  But these covers ...

  Bob hadn’t been around to see the gradual climb, the Ed Sullivan and Judy Garland shows, the Cocoanut Grove, the Hollywood Bowl, the first, second, and then third albums prominently displayed in record stores. Even though he knew Barbra was doing very well for herself, Bob still had a picture of her in his mind as a little girl in pink nylons and scarlet satin shoes wandering around Greenwich Village with a shopping bag full of boas. Once that little girl had pointed up to the marquees of Broadway and told Bob she wanted her name up there someday.

  Bob looked again at the face of his friend on the magazine covers. She was wearing the distinctive eye makeup he’d designed for her, that she had made her own through her inability to glue false eyelashes by herself.

  He knew Barbra had become a success.

  But, in fact, he’d had no idea.

  8.

  Stuart Lippner was flushed with excitement. Mrs. Kind was taking him to the holiest of holies: Barbra’s dressing room.

  The Winter Garden Kids burned green with envy as Stuart walked past them into the theater behind Barbra’s mother, carrying a large Tupperware container of chicken soup. The young man had been spending a great deal of time at the Kinds’ apartment. Diana often included him in meals or on outings she’d take with Rozzie. Stuart liked Mrs. Kind. She wasn’t a “come here, bubby, let me give you a hug” type, but she was very maternal in her own way, he thought, always cooking up a storm and enjoying being able to dole it out to her family. Sheldon and his wife and daughter were often there for dinner, and Stuart would take his place at the table beside Rozzie. But so far, Barbra and Elliott had never shown up, even though Mrs. Kind insisted she’d asked them.

  So Diana brought the soup to Barbra instead of Barbra coming to the soup. She also brought fruit. Peaches, apples, cantaloupes. Barbra needed fruit for the vitamins they provided. She had a tendency to be anemic—her mother had not forgotten.

  Watching the two of them in Barbra’s dressing room, Stuart, an outsider, saw their relationship in a way they could not. Mother and daughter seemed stuck somehow, incapable of telling each other what they really wanted to say. That there was great love there, Stuart had no doubt. He’d seen all the photographs of Barbra in Diana’s apartment. Not so many childhood photos that he could see, but eight-by-ten glossies from Columbia Records, or images carefully clipped out of magazines. Diana’s apartment was crammed with stuff—it looked as if she never threw anything away—but all Stuart had had to do was move one stack of papers to realize that most of it was all about Barbra.

  Stuart would often walk in and find Diana singing along to Barbra’s albums in “a beautiful, clear soprano voice.” Rozzie had told Stuart that her mother’s father, the cantor, hadn’t let her sing at the Met. Stuart thought maybe Diana was jealous of her daughter, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes not.

  It wasn’t so much that Diana had wanted to be a star, her brief dreams of the opera notwithstanding. It was that Barbra had been able to see beyond the concrete tenement walls that had penned them in and kept them back, something Diana had never been able to do. With frightening audacity, Barbra had declared that she would go through those walls and see what the world looked like on the other side. Diana had declared it an impossible dream. And when Barbra had shown that one could indeed break free, her mother had worried that she’d end up disappointed and frustrated, pushed back into her place by a world that put no stock in homely Jewish girls from Brooklyn tenements.

  How could she have known how wrong she’d be?

  And Diana couldn’t admit to being wrong. People who’d had to scrape and struggle all their lives were never going to find it easy to admit that the world might not be as limiting as they’d always imagined it to be.

  Barbra was standing there now in her dressing room, in costume and makeup, a posse of photographers around her while an assistant did her nails. Thanking her mother for the chicken soup, she said she didn’t have time to talk. She had a show to do.

  It was just like her mother to show up just before the curtain. In truth, Diana embarrassed Barbra. Her mother was “simple [and] nonintellectual,” she told the press. To observers, the two women seemed to be completely different creatures, Barbra in her duplex on Central Park West, Diana in her Brooklyn tenement. So far Diana had resisted Barbra’s offers to move her into a more fashionable apartment in Manhattan. But she had accepted a fur coat, the fulfillment of a long-ago pledge Barbra had
made to herself.

  Yet her mother’s gratitude seemed minimal. Diana might call and tell Barbra that “so-and-so in the office . . . read something nice” about her in some article. But it never seemed “to mean anything to her personally,” Barbra felt. That was what still stuck in her craw even after all these years.

  Maybe that was why Barbra still pushed herself so hard, or at least part of the reason. And why rejection still stung. Certainly there’d been a run of rejection of late. She hadn’t won the Tony. After everyone had been telling Barbra that she was a shoo-in, Carol Channing had taken the award for Hello, Dolly!—the show for which David Merrick had dumped Funny Girl. How Ray Stark had seethed when Merrick had won Best Musical as well. No one from Funny Girl had won a damn thing—not Sydney, not Styne and Merrill, not Kay Medford, not Danny Meehan, not poor Carol Haney, even though they’d all been nominated. Hello, Dolly! pretty much crushed everybody else.

  And, on top of that, Barbra hadn’t won the Emmy either. Danny Kaye had taken the award, winning over both Barbra and Judy Garland, whose show had finally been cancelled even after she’d submitted to such humiliation from network executives. It was one more lesson in the vagaries of fame, and the dangers of not being tough enough.

  Barbra had come to realize that in some very real way her mother was responsible for her fighting spirit. Diana’s limited view of the world and their place in it hadn’t discouraged Barbra: It had challenged her. When all she’d heard growing up was “No, no, can’t be done,” Barbra grew determined to prove that yes, yes, it could. To one interviewer, she declared she was actually “thankful” to her mother. By not believing there was a way through to the other side of the wall, Diana had forced her obstinate, strong-willed, defiant daughter to keep chipping away, bit by bit, until she’d broken through. And so Barbra, as she bid her mother good-bye and headed out on stage to a groundswell of applause, was very pleased for all Diana had and hadn’t done.

  Somewhere deep down, the teenaged Diana Rosen, the one who’d been accepted to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, was probably pleased as well.

  9.

  On a warm, balmy night in June, Barbra sauntered into fashion designer Rudi Gernreich’s fashion show at the Gotham Hotel wearing a white linen suit, a white straw hat encircled by a black patent leather band, a black pullover, a rope of pearls, and silvery iridescent polish on her long nails. For a moment, everyone turned away from Gernreich’s infamous topless bathing suit to get a look at the glamorous Broadway star.

  The fashionistas loved her. Not long before, Barbra had turned up for Cosmo Sirchio’s collection, amid talk she might make him her personal designer. Now Gernreich spoke of dressing Barbra for a fashion layout, maybe for Vogue or another magazine. Barbra had predicted this would happen. “I am high fashion!” she had exclaimed just last winter. “Pretty soon women will copy what I wear.”

  Now they were doing just that, and it wasn’t only the Winter Garden Kids. Barbra had become a regular boldface name in Eugenia Sheppard’s fashion column. No matter that she’d also been named to the worst-dressed list by that stuffy Mr. Blackwell—below Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor but above Bette Davis and Elliott’s costar, Ginger Rogers—Barbra had become a fashion icon. If anyone doubted that fact, all they needed to do was watch the fashion writers gush over her purchase of Gernreich’s black chiffon, above-the-knee baby dress, to be worn over black tights. They knew Barbra could set the style. What they didn’t know was that, less than five years earlier, Barbra had known nothing about fashion. Terry Leong had had to explain to her the differences between Alberto Fabiani and Pauline Trigère.

  Now Barbra wore all the latest designers. Money, of course, was no object, even if she still instinctively peeked at the price tags. She knew she wasn’t supposed to “ask how much things cost,” given that people were aware of how much money she made. Still, there were times when Barbra felt she needed to ask: Life could become “mushy if you don’t evaluate things sometimes,” she said. Her accountant gave her a weekly allowance of $25 for pocket money, but Barbra never spent it. She saved it, out of habit, as if she were back at the switchboard at Ben Sackheim and earmarking part of her pay for rent, part for food, and part to splurge on taxis.

  To one interviewer, she tried describing how she had gotten from there to here. She’d never had a room of her own as a kid, she said. And when you don’t have a room of your own, she explained, “All you think about is ‘How can I get a room of my own?’ You just get to the point where you have to make good.”

  She’d made good all right. That black designer dress, the duplex apartment, the mink coat Earl Wilson said cost twelve thousand dollars were all evidence of that. True, people still sometimes misspelled or mispronounced her name, but the instances were far fewer now. And when Barbra shopped at Bergdorf Goodman, the clerks all knew who she was.

  10.

  Sitting, literally, on top of the world in her penthouse apartment, as decorators trundled expensive antique furniture through the door, Barbra looked out her windows over the treetops of Central Park. Beyond them rose the East Side peaks, and beyond those lay Brooklyn. Barbra couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there.

  That morning, the Times had broken some rather big news about the star of Funny Girl. Barbra had been signed to a million-dollar television contract by CBS. Marty was crowing that he’d just negotiated the biggest deal ever made in television and offered to pay one-hundredth of that sum to anyone who could prove otherwise. Barbra’s contract allowed her to star in one one-hour special per year for the next decade, and she was guaranteed $100,000 annually. The specials could be of her choosing: comedy, variety, or musical drama. Outraged over this newcomer’s unprecedented terms, old pros like Danny Kaye and Lucille Ball unleashed their agents on the network. “The screaming,” one columnist reported, “could be heard up and down Madison Avenue.”

  Three years earlier, Marty had promised to take Barbra to the top, and he had delivered. This latest coup was being hailed in the press as “nothing less than phenomenal” and garnered a rare public acknowledgment of Barbra’s “brilliant young manager.” Those who weren’t expressing envy of Barbra were asking to work with her. Carol Burnett proposed a joint special, like the one she’d done with Julie Andrews, but Barbra preferred to go it solo. She hadn’t worked this hard to share top billing.

  If screaming was raging along Madison Avenue, a quiet contemplation had settled over Central Park West this morning. Sitting there looking out of her window, waiting for the clock to demand that she head downtown to play Fanny Brice for the hundred and fiftieth or hundred and sixtieth time, Barbra had begun to wonder just how long she could be happy living here. Despite all her antiques and redecoration, when she looked out over the city, all she could see was the “traffic going by.” Suddenly she was painfully aware that she “never really saw the sky.”

  By the late spring of 1964, Barbra’s success, for all the envy and admiration it engendered in others, was not what she’d dreamed it would be. Despite the Donnatal, her anxieties before every performance had only worsened, and she found herself admitting that the stage fright that had been creeping up on her ever since the Hollywood Bowl was not going away. Some nights were worse than others; for one show, she bounded out in front of the audience with all her old confidence, but for another she’d be a wreck backstage. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for her fears, except that she knew interaction with people was becoming more difficult. It was seeing the faces of those watching her, judging her, and following her that left her rattled. More than ever Barbra missed her old anonymity. Critics called her arrogant, and claimed that success had gone to her head for refusing interviews or not shaking hands with fans. Only Cis, her cherished Cis, seemed to understand: “Stardom is a part of [Barbra’s] life that has always been difficult for her,” Cis tried to explain to one reporter.

  What was more, Barbra hadn’t counted on her heart getting in the way of her enjoying her success. She and Elliott h
ad settled into a sort of fun-house existence, where nothing was quite what it seemed. True, they had reconciled after their terrible winter; they were making a determined go of things. “To end the rash of rumors,” columnist Alex Freeman reported, “Barbra Streisand is neither pregnant nor unhappily married to actor Elliott Gould. The Goulds weathered their first big marital crisis recently and everything is swinging.”

  Swinging. Was that the word? Despite all the hope and hype of the last few months, Elliott was still struggling to make himself known. He’d been cute in Once Upon a Mattress and witty on an episode of the topical television series That Was the Week That Was. But The Confession had been confiscated by its Jamaican financial backers; producer William Marshall was now suing to get the rights. There was no idea when, if ever, the film would be released. Trying to boost her husband, Barbra told reporters that Elliott was “going to be a big movie star,” that he was “the American Jean-Paul Belmondo.” But all the American Belmondo had on tap was a summer-stock tour of The Fantasticks with Judy Garland’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli. Elliott fell deeper into analysis and found himself depending more and more on pot. His marriage to Barbra, he said in his own eccentric style, was like taking “a bath in lava.”