CHAPTER TEN
1.
Barbra strode into the room wearing a buttons-and-epaulets outfit that Jule Styne thought looked like a Russian Cossack uniform. He might have been her biggest fan, but he thought the outfit was horrible. Fortunately, it wasn’t her clothes that were auditioning that day in early June. Instead, Barbra stood bravely in front of Styne, Ray Stark, Jerry Robbins, Bob Merrill, and David Merrick ready to show them that she could act. They knew she could sing; they’d all been to the Bon Soir by this point. Handing her Isobel Lennart’s script for The Funny Girl—the name now attached to the project—they were willing to overlook the buttons and epaulets if she could convince them that she was Fanny Brice.
As usual, Marty Erlichman was at Barbra’s side. Marty, they all understood, made things happen for her. Barbra had come that day at Stark’s bidding, but it had been Marty who had made that invitation inevitable. Under Marty’s direction, the Softness brothers had kept up their wooing of newspaper columnists, and as a result, Earl Wilson was currently suggesting in papers all across the country that Barbra should play Fanny Brice (with Jan Murray as Nick Arnstein). Stark and his collaborators couldn’t have missed it. Meanwhile, Marty had also wangled Barbra fancy new representation with the William Morris Agency, a major step up from the more provincial Associated Booking, although the latter continued to handle her nightclub appearances. If Barbra was going to play in the major leagues—and it didn’t get much more major than the quintet sitting in front of her—she’d need major-league representation.
So the young woman who walked into the room that day was hardly some kid off the street, as the power brokers who sat watching her with keen, discerning eyes liked to call her in the press. “An unknown,” Ray Stark described her. That was nonsense. Barbra might not have been an Anne Bancroft, or even a Carol Burnett, but an “unknown” wouldn’t have generated the kind of buzz she was getting that summer. The two albums she’d participated in—the cast recording of Wholesale and the Pins and Needles tribute—had just been released, and Barbra dominated virtually every review. John S. Wilson in the New York Times put it plainly: Wholesale wouldn’t be remembered for Harold Rome’s score, but rather as Barbra Streisand’s Broadway debut. “Miss Streisand has such a vivid and pungent style of delivery,” Wilson declared, “that she rises out of the laboring ordinariness of her surroundings on this disk like a dazzling beacon.” Reviews for Pins and Needles nearly always trumpeted Barbra as well.
The irony was that both disks had been released by Columbia Records. But even those two successful albums hadn’t convinced Goddard Lieberson to offer Barbra a contract. Both Capitol and Atlantic had stepped forward with offers, but Marty insisted they hold out for Columbia. Barbra’s tireless manager spent many evenings at the Ho-Ho, a Chinese restaurant-bar where the record execs gathered after work, buying rounds of drinks for everybody and regaling them all with updates on the auditions for The Funny Girl. Lieberson, after all, had been Fanny Brice’s pal—though word was that he didn’t feel Barbra was right for the part.
Thankfully, those in the room that day thought otherwise. Even David Merrick, so opposed to Barbra in the past, seemed to be coming around, or at least that’s what they were hearing. Not long before, Bob had accompanied a friend to a swanky society party in Morristown, New Jersey, where, much to his surprise, he was introduced to the mercurial producer. Explaining that he was Barbra’s friend, Bob bravely asked Merrick if it was true that he didn’t want her for the Fanny Brice show. On the contrary, Merrick replied, he’d “love to work with her.” In fact, Barbra “could even be a producing partner” if she so chose—though that much, at least, was probably the champagne talking.
Still, Merrick’s change of heart appeared genuine. It had apparently come about after he’d seen her at the Bon Soir—which seemed to do the trick for any doubter. After the show, impressed with a new maturity in Barbra’s performance, Merrick told Marty, “Tell Barbra I think she’s aged.” Not long afterward, upon the expiration of Barbra’s current Wholesale contract, Merrick gave her an increase in salary, bringing her more in line with what Elliott and Lillian Roth were making.
So Barbra was a bona fide Broadway professional when she came in that day to read from Lennart’s script. She might have been just twenty years old, a supporting player in a so-so play, but she was also a star in the world of nightclubs and a darling of the critics. She was also a television celebrity, a critical point in her favor everyone would have appreciated. Although PM East had recently been cancelled, it had made Barbra’s name and face familiar to a wide swath of the public who had never been to a New York nightclub or a Broadway show.
Accepting the script for her read-through, Barbra looked into the faces of the five men who had the power to give her either the boost she craved or stop her cold in her tracks. But one face was missing from The Funny Girl team that day: the very author of the material Barbra held in her hand. Isobel Lennart might have tempered some of the testosterone-fueled pressure in the room, but she was three thousand miles away at her home in Malibu, frantically revising the first act. Even as Barbra read through her scenes, everyone knew the book remained deeply flawed. In her glass-enclosed “teahouse” overlooking the ocean, Lennart was trying to figure out how to balance the comedy of the first act with the tragedy of the second. “God knows she has it in her,” Robbins, ever Lennart’s champion, had written to Stark, “but she and I are well aware of the problem of translating this into a different medium”—screenplay to libretto.
Stark, however, wasn’t as optimistic. He’d asked John Patrick, who’d written the screenplay for The World of Suzie Wong, if he could improve Lennart’s book, but Patrick was doubtful that much could be done without starting over from scratch—which none of them wanted to do. There simply wasn’t time. Merrick was talking about an opening date in October, which was just five months away, and Stark had sent around a memo stating it was his “desire and intention to proceed on this basis.” That would mean, if Barbra was cast, that she’d have to bow out of Wholesale. Since Merrick held her contract, that wouldn’t be a problem. But they had lost the luxury of time.
There was another important reason they needed to start right away. Jerry Robbins had indicated that if they didn’t move forward soon, he was out of the project. Producer Cheryl Crawford was eager for him to direct a version of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Robbins didn’t want to lose this opportunity if The Funny Girl was delayed further.
So it was decision time. With Lennart trying to fix the book, casting was the next order of business. Not long before, Stark had circulated another list of possibilities for Fanny to his collaborators: Burnett, Streisand, Gwen Verdon, Mitzi Gaynor, Janis Paige, Betty Comden, Elaine May, Elaine Stritch, and (probably just to placate his wife) Mary Martin. They were “listed haphazardly,” he insisted, “and not in order of preference.” One name, however, was conspicuous by its absence. “For the record,” Stark wrote, “I would like to say that I have a negative feeling regarding Anne Bancroft, predicated on the fact that she may have a completely different concept of the kind of play we all desire.” If others wanted to keep Bancroft in the running, Stark wanted to be reassured that she was “capable of singing from a stage.” Bottom line, Stark said, he felt “a lack of humor and warmth” from her, “which most certainly is the basis of our characterization.”
Robbins begged to differ. “If she can sing,” he wrote of Bancroft, “then I still feel she would be the best for it.” He’d recently spoken with her, and Bancroft remained “interested,” though she was waiting to see what Lennart came up with for the new first act. Yet while Robbins’s support for Bancroft remained strong, there were growing doubts about the viability of her casting. She was insisting on an eighteen-month clause, which would allow her to escape from the show after just a year and a half. Stark argued that this would make a successful run “very difficult.” But the bigger worry was her voice, which even Robbins seemed to acknowledge, given his caveat “if she can sing.”
The composers had their own doubts as well. Months earlier, Styne and Merrill had run through the score for Bancroft. There was some history there: Merrill and Bancroft had dated, and the relationship had ended badly. Merrill suspected some of the hostility Bancroft displayed that day at the Beverly Hills Hotel, as she listened to them sing the score, grew out of old personal resentments. Despite the fact that Merrill had actually written “People” with Bancroft in mind, she’d been unimpressed when she’d heard it, stalking out of the hotel in a huff, claiming it was “unsingable.”
Maybe, Stark had come to believe, nothing was singable for Bancroft, who, after all, was known more for her dramatic prowess than her singing voice. Robbins may have begun to agree with him on that point, since in the past few weeks he’d been advocating strongly for Carol Burnett as his second choice. Burnett wanted to do it, Robbins informed his collaborators just days before Barbra came in to do her reading. But he also acknowledged that he would need “to work with her a bit on the dramatic scenes to see whether she [was] capable of them.” The concerns they had with Burnett were the exact opposite of the concerns they had with Bancroft.
What they were looking for on the day Barbra strolled in looking like a Cossack was someone who could both sing and act. Ray Stark and Jule Styne thought they’d found that someone, and Merrick seemed at least amenable to the idea. But there were two holdouts. Robbins had seen Barbra at the Bon Soir and agreed that she was terrific, but nonetheless she remained third on his list. Bob Merrill’s doubts were bigger, which made for some awkwardness between him and Styne, his partner. But then again, their contrasts seemed to define them as a team. Styne was short and stout and loquacious; Merrill was tall and thin and taciturn. Styne was always upbeat, Merrill often dour. But together they had produced a score that everyone involved believed was destined to become a classic.
Merrill’s objections to Barbra were fundamental. He, too, had seen her at the Bon Soir, but for once the magic hadn’t happened. As a songwriter, Merrill didn’t like how Barbra played fast and loose with words and tempos. He believed songs were written a certain way by their composers and such authorial choices should be respected. Barbra, Merrill felt, assumed far too much ownership of other people’s work.
But there was more to his visceral dislike of her—or at least his wife, Suzanne, came to suspect as much. Merrill was a ladies’ man. If he wrote a song for a woman, he wanted to be attracted to her; the dynamic inspired him creatively, even if no romance ever bloomed between them. And Barbra, to Merrill, was not “girlfriend material,” his wife understood.
It wasn’t as frivolous an objection as it might sound, and Merrill probably had some sympathy from Merrick at least, if not from the smitten Styne. Beauty was obviously in the eye of the beholder, but their Fanny Brice had to be attractive enough not to look completely incongruous playing opposite the actor cast as Nick—who, judging from the list then being circulated by Stark, was going to be a looker. Christopher Plummer, Tony Franciosa, Robert Goulet, Keith Michell, and Farley Granger were the top choices, though Merrick wanted to approach Rock Hudson as well. “People insist he wants to be in a Broadway musical,” Merrick’s office had told Robbins. “Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?” Unlikely or not, the idea to cast the top box-office star in the country was intriguing—and surely had them all considering how Barbra Streisand would look opposite the extravagantly handsome Hudson.
Barbra’s audition changed no minds that day. Those who wanted her continued to want her; those who had doubts remained doubtful. Robbins would admit that Barbra had given “a marvelously sensitive reading,” but he cautioned they needed “to face the problem of her youth.” Could a twenty-year-old convincingly play the middle-aged Fanny of the second act? Robbins was skeptical and was soon back to sending notes of encouragement to Anne Bancroft. Merrick, meanwhile, perhaps heeding Merrill’s reservations, was suddenly “really anxious” to have Eydie Gormé come in and audition.
In a letter he wrote to Robbins not long after Barbra’s reading, Stark said he appreciated everyone’s varying opinions. With tremendous diplomacy, he recognized that all of the candidates had their advantages and that he was thankful to Robbins for considering them all. “You, of course, know my preference,” he wrote at the end.
His preference remained Barbra. Yet what Stark failed to mention was his wife’s preference or if he’d even broached Barbra’s name with her at this point. And it would be Fran Stark, everyone knew, who would have the last word.
2.
Sitting in the audience that night at the Shubert Theatre was Lillian Gish, the exquisite and ethereal star of the silent screen, who, with pioneering director D. W. Griffith, had made some of the most important early American films: The Birth of a Nation, Way Down East, Broken Blossoms. Backstage, Gish’s presence caused some excitement among the company’s cineastes, but Barbra seemed clueless. She was in a foul mood that night. She was tired of the show, tired of Miss Marmelstein. She hoped fervently that come this fall she’d be playing Fanny Brice in The Funny Girl, not just for the artistic challenges the role offered but simply for the chance to get out of Wholesale. If this was the reality of Broadway—doing the same damn thing every night—Barbra told friends that maybe she really should start thinking about movies. Not that she knew much about them—as evidenced by her lack of recognition of Miss Gish.
Her boredom with the show was trying the patience of her fellow castmates and the stage manager, who attempted, without much effect, to get firm with her. Barbra was still showing up late, repeating a pattern that had developed during rehearsals. Even an official reprimand from Actors’ Equity hadn’t changed her behavior. Arthur Laurents’s assistant, Ashley Feinstein, thought Barbra’s unprofessionalism stood out all the more starkly because everyone else in the show was so professional. Even Elliott, who was never late, didn’t seem to be able to get through to Barbra.
And everyone could tell when she was just “phoning it in,” said a frequent member of the audience, one of the growing number of Streisand devotees who showed up several times a week to see the show. Yet still the applause came, which, as always, infuriated Barbra. She knew when she was good and when she wasn’t, and she resented undeserved applause. But what she really resented was performing the part at all. She needed a change—and fast. She hoped that Stark and Robbins and the rest would make their decision soon.
That night, “she wasn’t great,” said the frequent audience member, “but she wasn’t terrible either.” Lillian Gish, however, thought Barbra was absolutely marvelous. Making her way backstage, Gish removed the earrings she’d been wearing and handed them over to Barbra as a token of her admiration. It was a tremendous gesture from a legendary figure, and Barbra accepted the earrings graciously—although only later did she fully discover who Gish was and why she mattered. Barry could have told her, or Bob or Terry. But they, of course, weren’t around anymore.
3.
On the screen, a giant caterpillar made a meal of a few cars. Barbra and Elliott sat in the dark, cool theater, a relief from the ninety-degree temperatures outside, eyes fixed on Mothra, a badly dubbed Japanese monster flick. The lovers, sharing a bag of popcorn, were enjoying a rare break from Wholesale and all the other myriad obligations of their careers.
Actually, it was Barbra who had the myriad obligations. Elliott only had to show up every night at the Shubert. Barbra had to do that and make her way afterward to the Blue Angel (she’d finished her run at the Bon Soir only to start another engagement uptown). These days, she also was frequently meeting reporters for interviews or waking up early for one of her frequent appearances on Joe Franklin’s show. There were also regular strategy sessions with Marty and Richard Falk and the Softness brothers on publicity, especially on ways to influence Goddard Lieberson into giving her a contract. Finding the time for a date with Elliott must have felt like a gift from heaven.
Not that they had trouble seeing each other. Elliott had moved in with her, sharing the railroad flat over Oscar’s Salt of the Sea and settling into a rather blissful pattern of domesticity. Although they could have easily afforded a bigger one, they kept Barbra’s twin bed, which, given Elliott’s large frame and long limbs, must have made sleeping uncomfortable at times—but also very intimate. They insisted that a bigger bed wouldn’t have fit; maybe that was true. But Barbra always seemed to find room for other pieces of furniture that caught her eye. Just recently she’d bought two “marvelous Victorian cabinets with glass shelves,” she told a writer from The New Yorker, at a shop called Foyniture Limited on Eighty-third Street. She seemed to get a kick out of the spelling.
Elliott adored living with her. He found her style “just wild . . . genius, really.” As a dining table, they used an old Singer sewing-machine stand. For meals, they ate Swanson’s TV dinners and bricks of coffee ice cream for dessert. Like the kids they still were, they snacked on grapefruit, brownies, and pickled herring. When they saw a tail “about a yard long” flicking back and forth underneath their stove, they ran off in terror to a motel. But when the landlord refused to pay to exterminate, they moved back in and made peace with the rat, naming him Oscar after the cheapskate downstairs. They played Monopoly and checkers, and acted out scenes they hoped to someday play together, Barbra as Medea and Elliott as Jason. Calling each other Hansel and Gretel, they made a halfhearted attempt to learn Greek so they “could speak a secret language nobody else could understand.” For the first time in their lives, Barbra and Elliott were deliriously happy being with another person. Elliott found it all “really romantic,” likening Barbra and himself to “kids in a treehouse.”
When Mothra was over, the oversized caterpillar having hatched into a giant imago and flown back to its island home, Barbra and Elliott walked hand in hand outside into Times Square. They enjoyed the fact that they could be stars on Broadway but still be largely anonymous on the streets of New York. That night, or one very much like it, they wandered the city, no one stopping them, no one telling them to look this way or sing that song. They played Pokerino in penny arcades. They bought glassware for the apartment. They ate vegetable fried rice in a greasy Chinese restaurant.
Such anonymity was important to Barbra. The fierce ambition the Softness brothers witnessed every time she barged into their offices, or the uncanny knack she had for drawing attention to herself, was not in the service of notoriety. It was part of her pursuit of excellence and achievement. But when she left the theater or the studio or the nightclub, Barbra wanted her life back. She wanted to wander through the streets of New York with her boyfriend unaccosted by people. So far, she still had that luxury. No matter how big a role she might someday land, she hoped that this much would never change.
Yet a future of anonymity seemed unlikely. Earl Wilson had just revealed the “hot romance backstage” between Barbra and Elliott, and was readying another column in which he would report the belief among cast members that the couple had secretly married. Such gossip was an inevitable byproduct of courting the columnists for other, more sought-after kinds of publicity, such as the items about the Brice show. Yet Barbra was unwilling to accept gossip about her personal life as an unavoidable component of her fame, and she had started speaking out against the practice. “They print such rotten things,” she complained to one interviewer. “Like they wrote that I was smooching at the Harwyn Club.” But then, impishly, she added, “It was 21”—showing that while she might detest such intrusive publicity, she knew how to make the best of it.
Barry was right: Barbra had indeed become very good at merchandizing herself. She told the press that it was she, with little to no help from Arthur Laurents, who had made Miss Marmelstein what she was. Barbra explained that she’d needed to “talk back to the director” in order to “work into the character” her own way. And if Laurents had persisted in obstructing her, she said, she would have walked out. “I just didn’t care what happened,” Barbra claimed. “I could go out and work in a nightclub again.” Laurents scoffed at the contention that Barbra would have willingly walked away from a part in a Broadway show to return to singing in nightclubs.
But in selling Barbra Streisand to the public, it was important that the product be marketed as uniquely self-made. The narrative that Marty had been building over the last year—Barbra as the once-in-a-generation talent discovered like a glittering pearl in the brackish oyster beds of Brooklyn—could not accommodate stories of “helpers” or “boosters.” She had to be given to the world fully formed, with no whiff of public-relations chicanery. If the contributions of a maestro such as Arthur Laurents had to be airbrushed out of her biography, then those less well-known people who had helped shape the creature being marketed as Barbra Streisand could certainly never expect to receive any kind of public acknowledgment.
It was, perhaps, easier to sell this rewritten history because so many associates from Barbra’s early days were no longer around. Terry Leong had headed for Europe without ever getting the chance to reconnect with the old friend whose style he had heavily influenced. Bob, too, had just sailed for Paris for an indefinite stay. And while there’d been a rapprochement with Barry, there’d been no attempt to stay in touch; in fact, he continued to feel that he was being deliberately kept away. Given how he’d broken her heart, it was easy for some friends to sympathize with Barbra on that point. But keeping Barry at a distance also meant that the enormous contributions he’d made to her career—from suggesting she enter the contest at the Lion in the first place to teaching her so much about music and performance—would be given no public forum.
Some old friends, such as Elaine Sobel, resented being held at arm’s length. Now waiting tables at the Russian Tea Room, Elaine felt she’d been “brushed out” of Barbra’s life just as her former roommate hit the big time on Broadway. Barbra, Elaine said, had taken advantage of her at a time when she, Barbra, needed help, but hadn’t offered any reciprocation now that she was in a position to give it. That, perhaps, was key to understanding who survived in Barbra’s orbit and who didn’t. Those who could still help her—such as Marty, Peter Daniels, and Don Softness—remained. Those who might want something from her now that she’d achieved a degree of fame and clout—such as Terry, Elaine, Barry, and possibly even Bob—did not. It was a common experience for many celebrities, and while unfortunate, not really all that difficult to understand.
And then there was Cis, who wanted absolutely nothing from Barbra except friendship. Cis remained Barbra’s rock, the one person with whom she could be herself completely, without any pretense, performance, or marketing. By the summer of 1962, Barbra’s three closest—and likely only—intimates were Cis, Marty, and Elliott.
But for a young woman in love, it was probably enough. Walking through the city with Elliott, her hand in his, her head resting occasionally on his shoulder, Barbra was content. Elliott understood her. They’d both grown up with mother issues; they’d both felt cheated out of real childhoods. Barbra could vent all her frustrations to Elliott, and he never pushed her away. He was “the stable one” in the relationship, she thought. When they’d occasionally argue, Barbra sometimes felt like stalking off, but Elliott always stopped her and got her to talk about what was really bothering her. She appreciated his “very clear mind.” Elliott, Barbra said, “knows what he wants.” And what was so thrilling, so wonderful, was that he wanted her.
4.
A pall hung over the crowd at the Blue Angel. People were still grieving Marilyn Monroe, who’d been found dead a week earlier at her home in Brentwood, either from an accidental overdose or suicide. One man who frequented the cabaret thought a sense of finality thrummed in the air that week, an awareness of an era coming to a close. Elizabeth Taylor still generated headlines, but few, if any, of the new generation of stars seemed to inspire the fascination and devotion that their predecessors did. That kind of stardom, many thought, was hopelessly moribund.
And yet, there was an undercurrent of excitement in the air as well. The young woman who was performing at the Angel for one final night seemed to trigger something in people. Grown men would sometimes act like teenaged girls when she sang. The young man who frequented the cabaret did so not because he particularly liked the Blue Angel’s upholstered interior—he didn’t—but because Barbra Streisand, the headliner, made him cry every time she sang. And laugh, and smile, and “feel all the things a really great singer can make a person feel,” he said.
David Kapralik, a young executive at Columbia, could no doubt relate. He was there that night at the Blue Angel, just as he had been there the night before and the night before that. It was Barbra’s last performance; he wouldn’t have missed it. His admiration for her had started when he’d heard her sing “Happy Days” on The Garry Moore Show. He had realized that she was the kid Marty Erlichman had been pushing Columbia so hard about. Impressed with her voice, Kapralik had made it a point to see Barbra at the Angel. In no time at all, he had morphed, in his own words, into a “groupie.”
Kapralik was just one of the growing number of young men and women Dorothy Kilgallen observed “packing into the clubs to see Barbra Streisand and her magnetic nonsense.” If she and other pundits had taken a closer look at the phenomenon, they would have been disabused of any fears that old-time stardom, the kind manifested by Marilyn, was on its way out. Barbra’s “groupies” adored her with all the same fervor that an earlier generation had brought to Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland. They were artsy, bohemian types who bucked trends: at the moment, the trend was toward folk singers like Peter, Paul, and Mary, though the rock-pop of Neil Sedaka and Dion still dominated the charts. Barbra didn’t fit either category, which her fans seemed to appreciate. And, like all true devotees, they recruited others into the faith. This night, Kapralik had brought his boss, Goddard Lieberson, nattily dressed as always.
Marty, of course, was thrilled that Lieberson had finally shown up. Marty believed that only by hearing Barbra sing in front of an audience, especially her audience, could the record exec really comprehend the effect she had on people. Lieberson had been softening. No doubt it was more than just Kapralik’s enthusiasm that had finally moved him to come hear Barbra sing. The glowing reviews she’d gotten for the Wholesale and Pins and Needles disks couldn’t have escaped his notice. Even God may have begun to doubt himself, to wonder whether he’d been wrong not to sign her.
Like her Bon Soir homecoming, Barbra’s return to the Blue Angel had been marked by a welcome change in status. Last time she’d played second fiddle to Pat Harrington; now she was front and center, heading a bill that also included comic Bob Lewis and the Phoenix Singers, a folk trio who often sang with Harry Belafonte. A few weeks earlier, Max Gordon had bought out Herbert Jacoby’s share in the club; Barbra was the first headliner under his solo management. She joked to Earl Wilson that she’d “hit the big time” since she was finally being paid as much as Peter Daniels, her accompanist. Obviously Gordon had as much faith in Barbra as she had in herself.
No doubt Lieberson had also seen the reviews for the show, which was wrapping up after five sold-out weeks. “Miss Streisand is a delightful and mercurial sprite,” Variety had observed, keying in on the unpredictability that so enchanted her fans. “She is amply appreciated,” the review concluded—an understatement.
And yet, at the Angel, sometimes appreciation was hard to discern. Performers had to “crack through the reserve,” Dick Gautier found. At the posh club—peopled with blue bloods and celebrities who were often as famous, or more so, than those on the stage—it was “gauche to laugh too much, or applaud too much,” Gautier said.
So it was saying a great deal that the applause following Barbra’s “oddball” (Variety’s word) rendition of “Much More” from The Fantasticks was loud and enthusiastic. On that little stage she stood, looking out into that long, narrow, coffinlike room suffused with the subtle fragrance of gladiolas, singing her heart out, knowing that Lieberson sat only a few feet away from her. It was not unlike the way she’d “auditioned” for Ray Stark at the Bon Soir. In both cases, she was hoping to provide for herself an escape hatch, a jailbreak from the stultifying routine of Wholesale. Not long before, she’d done what had once been unthinkable to her: She’d turned over the part of Miss Marmelstein to Louise Lasser, her understudy, for several days and taken a much-needed holiday.
Not that she’d rested. There never seemed to be time for that. The weekend of July 14 she, Elliott, Marty, Diana, and little Rosalind had driven up to Bill Hahn’s Hotel in Westbrook, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, about two and a half hours from New York. The big, gregarious proprietor was hosting a birthday party for his swanky hotel with proceeds going to the American Cancer Society. He’d roped in Art Carney, who lived nearby, for the top of the bill, backed up by Barbra, Henny Youngman, jazz singer Johnny Hartman, and pop singer Tommy Sands, who introduced his wife, Nancy Sinatra, from the audience. The party was “strictly private for hotel guests,” who tended to be affluent New York Jews. The thing Barbra probably enjoyed best was Hahn’s giant birthday cake, which was sliced up and passed around during intermission, though the pay—likely approaching four figures—was nice, too. But simply spending a few nights in the sea air, far away from Wholesale, would alone have made it all worthwhile.
Her publicists, in fact, had started a rumor that she might be ditching Broadway for good. Several columns that summer carried stories that Barbra was applying to Dartmouth College, which was discussing opening its doors to women for the first time. According to these reports, Barbra wanted to major in economics and languages: Italian, Japanese, and Greek. That was the giveaway that it was all just hype, a way to keep Barbra’s name in the papers: Greek was the language she and Elliott imagined speaking among themselves, and Barbra’s nightclub act often had her pretending to speak in various tongues. No doubt Don Softness or Richard Falk had read about Dartmouth going co-ed and thought of an angle for Barbra, who was of college age and known as a bit of a rebel. It might also have served as a nudge to Stark and Merrick—they’d better hurry up and sign her before she went off to school.
But higher education was hardly Barbra’s goal. Out there in the audience, Lieberson was close to making up his mind. He’d said no so many times before, but he’d come to hear her tonight. That was a very good sign. Making an album might not have been Barbra’s big dream, but it could help ease her out of Wholesale—not to mention make her a good deal of money. So she put everything she had into her time on the Blue Angel stage. This night, there was no phoning it in.
“Right as the Rain” was solid ground for her; she knew it like she knew her own name, and once again Barbra nailed it. But she was also singing a newer, riskier addition to her repertoire. Peter had reworked “Happy Days Are Here Again” for her, slowing it down even more than was done for The Garry Moore Show, making it almost unbearably poignant. As Barbra launched into the song, a hush came over the club. It was, as the frequent Blue Angel patron put it, “truly an electric moment between Barbra and her audience.” The emotion, he said, “quite literally crackled between her and us.” The hairs on his arm stood up. Without even knowing it, he began to cry.
“So let’s sing a song of cheer again,” Barbra was keening, “happy days are here again.”
With “Happy Days,” Barbra smashed through the Angel’s legendary reserve. People were on their feet, and even the club’s upholstered walls couldn’t muffle the sounds of whistles and cheers. Goddard Lieberson stood with the crowd. It seemed Barbra’s performance had allowed him finally to glimpse her star potential. Marilyn Monroe might have been dead, and with her an entire era. But a whole new kind of star was about to explode.
5.
Jerry Robbins read the latest revisions Isobel Lennart had sent to him from Malibu and nearly wept. The man who had directed The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, and Gypsy, and doctored a dozen more ailing shows that needed his help, knew what a good libretto read like, and this script for The Funny Girl, no matter how much he adored Isobel, fell far short of the mark.
Surely Ray Stark, with his understanding of story, knew it, too. But what frustrated Robbins was the producer’s absolute insistence that they move forward nonetheless. Stark was planning to return to New York from Beverly Hills now that Lennart had completed her revisions, and he felt it was “urgent [that an] immediate decision be made on casting.” He hadn’t changed his mind about his preferred candidate either. “I hope you will have settled on Barbra,” Stark wrote to Robbins, and he urged the director to begin working with her on the show’s second act.
The last time he’d been in New York, Stark had had a session with Carol Burnett, during which she’d read for the part and sung a few numbers. “A tremendous talent and a lovely gal,” Stark concluded, but he didn’t think she’d “turn out to be right for Fanny.” Robbins had apparently come to the same conclusion. After a short talk with the director outside an elevator after Burnett’s audition, Stark had realized there was no need to send the second act to Burnett. Robbins, it seemed, was staying just as firm on his first choice as Stark was. He still wanted Anne Bancroft for the role.
“Dear Annie,” Robbins had written when he sent her a copy of the script. “It’s a rough with much over-written and too-explained-away moments. Isobel is already at work taking out all things that tend to weaken or sentimentalize. She will ‘shorten, tighten, and toughen.’” He implored her to take the part even though the script wasn’t ready, telling her they’d been playing “a waiting game” with all the other candidates until they heard from her. “I know it’s going to be a wonderful play and you can fire it way up into the skies if you become part of it.” He promised she’d have a “hard-working, tough-fighting ally” in him and “truly creative and cooperative collaborators” in Lennart, Styne, and Merrill. He didn’t mention Stark.
That was because the producer was firing off his own communication to his own preferred candidate. “Dear Barbara,” he wrote, misspelling her name, which surely didn’t please her. “Jerry Robbins will probably be calling you within the next few days.” He enclosed Lennart’s revisions for her to study. Before he’d left town, he’d made it a point to see her at the Blue Angel, and he told her again what “a lovely evening” it had been. If not as effusive as Robbins’s letter to Bancroft, it still gave Barbra reason to hope that the part might be hers—even if she was going to have to give Stark a lesson in spelling.
Yet other names continued to be considered for Fanny, mostly funneled in from Merrick’s casting agent, Michael Shurtleff. Eydie Gormé still seemed to excite Merrick, as did Judy Holliday, both of whom were attractive enough, and Jewish to boot. Stark, of course, had given up the idea of a conventionally pretty leading lady the moment he’d settled on Barbra, but his producing partner was, despite his decreased hostility, still concerned about appearances. And what remained a big unknown for everyone involved was what Fran Stark would say when she finally got a look at the candidate they all agreed upon so it was smart to keep Gormé and Holliday in reserve.
As he read through Lennart’s revisions, however, Robbins seemed to harden in his resolve that only Bancroft could save them. Lennart might have shortened, but she hadn’t tightened or toughened. By now, Robbins felt he had done as much as he could, “pushing the script until certainsolutions were found.” Much of what worked had, in fact, come from him. Lennart would “surely agree,” Robbins believed, “that each scene as she wrote it” had been sent to him and that they had gone over each of them “with a fine-tooth comb.” The same was also true for the music and lyrics. Styne and Merrill had run songs and arrangements by Robbins, and he’d had his say about them. While he didn’t “point to any one line of dialogue or particular lyric” as being authored by himself, Robbins did claim credit for the way all the “scenes, relationships, songs, musical conceptions, characters, settings, [and] musical ideas” came together.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the very first scene in the show—where Fanny gets fired by theater owner Max Spiegel for being too outlandish. Robbins had considered the arguments made by stage manager Dave to keep Fanny because she’s special as “a small microcosm of the play.” That had been Robbins’s vision, setting up the entire story in that one scene. Robbins’s fingerprints continued in a similar way all through the libretto. It was his idea to make Ziegfeld just a voice coming from above during his first meeting with Fanny, and to cut directly from Fanny’s line “Anything Ziegfeld wants me to do, I’ll do” to her declaration: “I’m not going to wear this costume!” In Lennart’s original script, a whole scene had separated the two lines. Robbins had cut the scene for the contrast it would offer—and the laugh it would get.
He’d also shaped the musical numbers. On “I’m the Greatest Star,” the original idea had been for Fanny to sing it “out and out,” as if she really meant it. But Robbins asked that it be changed so that she starts out kidding, mocking herself. During the course of the song, however, when she sees people like Dave who really believe in her, she evolves and “the guts come out and the tempo changes and she lets loose, free and wild, with her own feelings,” as Robbins described it. Written by its composers with a time signature of 2/4 all the way through, it was Robbins’s idea “to make it 2/4 only at the end.” As such, it was a brilliant bit of characterization layered into a musical number.
Robbins also had been working with Styne and Merrill to open up the “People” number by including Dave and Nick. Fanny singing the song alone, he felt, was just “too strong a come-on.” Likewise, he’d moved “Don’t Rain on My Parade” to the end of the first act. Originally, it had come near the beginning of the show, sung by Fanny to her mother’s friends who were discouraging her from a career. Robbins, astutely, saw the song as a way to showcase Fanny’s determination to win Nick’s love and knew it would make a great send-off before intermission and possibly be reprised at the very end of the show.
But perhaps most significant, it had been Robbins who’d homed in right away on one of the chief flaws in the story: the characterization of Nick Arnstein, Fanny’s great love. Nick was a gambler, a con man, and a bit of rogue in real life, but Lennart had written him as upstanding and noble, a victim of circumstances. He was, after all, Fran Stark’s father. Robbins pushed Lennart to make him more of the “reckless, shadowy promoter” that he really was. In the “Will I Talk?” number, it was Robbins’s idea to have Nick sing it in “an evil, sardonic way,” and then have Fanny reprise it in a more “positive” way. That helped the story get off to a better start, but the book still bogged down during the second act, precisely because it was hard to sympathize with Nick because he was a crook or Fanny because she was blindsided by a crook. And so far, for all his tremendous input, Robbins hadn’t figured out a way to solve that problem.
And Stark and Merrick wanted to open in October!
Robbins had had enough. Increasingly, he was feeling manipulated by Stark. When Robbins had come on board to direct the Brice musical, Stark had agreed to invest $125,000 in Mother Courage, the pro- ject Robbins was planning with Cheryl Crawford, and for which he had far more passion than he did for this current show. Stark’s investment had been a bit of a quid pro quo: He’d put up the money if Crawford delayed the production and allowed Robbins to direct The Funny Girl first. Now, with the script so lacking, Robbins felt stuck between a rock and a hard place: Should he go forward with production the way Stark and Merrick were insisting and risk a terrible critical and commercial flop, or should he insist on still more rewrites and push Mother Courage even farther into the future?
Stark wasn’t helping matters by doing everything he could to prevent the casting of Anne Bancroft and impose Barbra Streisand on the show. “If you don’t hear today or tomorrow from Anne,” he’d written just the other day to Robbins, “we should tie up Barbara [sic] before we lose her”—as if that were a real danger.
It wasn’t that Robbins disliked Barbra. She was “extraordinarily talented,” he thought. But with the book so deficient, it needed the skills of an experienced actress such as Bancroft. Robbins felt his reputation was on the line, and he didn’t feel safe entrusting it to such a novice as Barbra.
By now, he’d largely given up on any hopes that he and Stark would ever agree on much about the show. Conceding that the book wasn’t right, the producer was arguing they should use more from Brice’s actual life, as the original screenplay had done. They should also change the title to My Man, after Brice’s best-known torch song. “A more honest or exploitable title” he couldn’t imagine, Stark wrote to Robbins, even though they’d all previously decided the score should be entirely new, with nothing from Brice’s actual repertoire. Robbins made no reply to Stark’s latest suggestions. He knew Anne Bancroft was never going to sing “My Man”; after all, she’d originally wanted to change the name of the character and make her only “based on” Fanny Brice.
For Robbins, it was decision time. If he stayed on and Bancroft wasn’t cast, could he work with Barbra Streisand? Knowing his dilemma, Isobel Lennart, who’d yet to see Barbra herself, had asked a friend, Doris Vidor, to check the young singer out at the Blue Angel and make an honest report to Robbins. Vidor was Hollywood royalty: the daughter of Harry Warner, a founder of Warner Bros.; widow of director Charles Vidor; and ex-wife of director Mervyn LeRoy. Vidor also worked for United Artists as a sort of “broker between script and stars.” Not long before, she’d arranged a deal that brought Gary Cooper to the studio for three pictures. So Doris Vidor knew a little something about star quality.
And what she observed at the Blue Angel impressed her very much. “I have rarely seen anyone so talented,” Vidor wrote to Robbins. “But it was the personality and what she stirred in me that impressed me so. There is a sadness and a deep, emotional impact that this girl projects to the audience that is very unique. It seemed to me that she was the young Fanny Brice as you want her to appear.”
Robbins didn’t dispute that. But Barbra had to be more than the young Fanny Brice. She had to be the older Fanny, too, and he was just not convinced she’d be believable as that. When there was a flurry of interest among the collaborators about the fifty-three-year-old English actor Michael Rennie playing Nick, Robbins pointed out that if they went with Barbra as Fanny, “the relationship really becomes like that in A Star Is Born.” That “worried him,” as well it should have. There was no more talk of Rennie.
There was, however, talk of Rip Torn, Brian Bedford, Harry Guardino, Peter Falk, Stuart Damon, Pernell Roberts, George Maharis, and George Chakiris. And word had reached them that Peter Lawford was “very interested” in playing Nick, though everyone agreed that Lawford didn’t possess “a big enough voice.”
That was not a problem with Barbra, of course. So Robbins had brought her back in for yet another reading, probably at the Imperial Theatre, on Forty-fifth Street, where Merrick’s Carnival! was still running at night. In a few days, he’d be heading back to the Imperial to watch George Segal and Larry Hagman (Mary Martin’s son) audition for the part of Dave. There were also auditions slated for the parts of Nora, Fanny’s beautiful chorus-girl best friend, and Mrs. Brice—and, significantly, for Fanny herself. On the call sheet for two thirty on the afternoon of August 30 was Lee Becker, who’d played Anybodys in West Side Story and whom Robbins had once asked to marry him. Becker’s audition suggested that no matter how hard Stark was pushing, and no matter all the superlatives from Doris Vidor and others, the director was still not quite ready to accept Barbra Streisand as the star of his production.
As the summer drew to a close, the principals behind The Funny Girl seemed headed for a face-off. No one could predict what that would mean for the show.
6.
The legendary Groucho Marx wasn’t one to tangle with. He was the master of the one-liner, the ad-lib, the put-down, the comeback, the double entendre. Sitting at the desk of The Tonight Show on the night of August 21, he puffed on his ubiquitous cigar and wiggled his thick, lascivious eyebrows as he spoke with Lillian Roth about I Can Get It for You Wholesale, now in its sixth month on Broadway. Since Jack Paar’s departure earlier that year, Groucho had proved to be one of Tonight’s more frequent and popular guest hosts, keeping the chair warm for the incoming Johnny Carson, who still had several more weeks to go on his contract with rival network ABC.
After the break, the announcer, Hugh Downs, introduced Groucho’s next guest. It was Barbra Streisand. Except he pronounced it “Stree-sand.”
Barbra was furious. Downs should have known better! She’d been on this show twice before, and he hadn’t messed up her name then. She was seething as she strode out onto the stage.
Groucho greeted her warmly. “You’re a big success—”
But Barbra cut him off—actually cut off Groucho Marx! “How could I be such a big success,” she asked, “if he calls me Stree-sand? My name is Barbra Streisand!”
Groucho tried to make a joke, but Barbra was having none of it. If it wasn’t somebody placing that damned extra “a” in her first name, it was somebody else mangling her last name. When was she going to be famous enough that people got her name right?
Yet her crankiness was at least partly an act. In fact, that night with Groucho, Barbra was probably in a very good mood indeed. At long last, Goddard Lieberson had agreed to give her a recording contract. Terms were still being negotiated, but she was in. Marty had done it. He hadn’t failed her yet.
Not only that, but Ray Stark was being very solicitous of her. Even if she still wasn’t entirely sure Merrick was on her side, Barbra certainly had to feel that Stark was rooting for her. Big things, she must have felt, were right around the corner.
Indeed, Groucho thought so, too. “Now, Barbra Streisand,” he said, making sure he enunciated her name precisely, “you are a big success. I hear about you on the Coast . . .”
“No kiddin’,” she replied, perfectly in character. “Nothin’ you can prove, though, right?”
“Yes,” Groucho said, a little thrown off course, not used to playing the straight man. “Jule Styne, for example. I had dinner with him on the Coast last week, and he said you’d be just great for that show he’s doing. What’s the name of it, uh . . . ?”
Barbra helped him out. “The Fanny Brice story?”
“Yes, the Fanny Brice story. He said, ‘It’s between her and the girl who works for Garry Moore.’”
“Carol Burnett?”
Obviously Groucho’s conversation with Styne had taken place before Robbins and Stark mutually decided against proceeding further with Burnett. But Groucho also knew about Anne Bancroft—Styne didn’t share Stark’s penchant for secrecy—and he mentioned her as being in the running, too. “That’s pretty big-league company,” Groucho told Barbra. “If they are considering you against those two, I would say you have arrived.”
Barbra never liked such compliments. Being compared to other people, even to say she was in the same league as greats, never felt like flattery to her. She wasn’t out to be as good as anyone else, or to be the next whoever. She wanted to be the best that ever was, in her own way, under her own name—spelled and pronounced correctly. So the humble thank-you that someone else might have offered in reply to such a statement wasn’t forthcoming from her. Instead, she just kept up the shtick.
“It’s been very good, I guess,” she said. “I mean, I go to department stores and they still don’t wait on me.”
It was the Bergdorf Goodman line she’d used in other interviews and, as she intended, it got a big laugh.
But not everyone was laughing. An interesting phenomenon was occurring as Barbra became more successful. She was not only accumulating fans, but also a smaller, though increasingly vocal, group of detractors—critics and reviewers who stood defiantly outside her circle of applause. These opposing voices insisted that Barbra was “inauthentic” and “overhyped,” even as they begrudgingly admitted the voice was “worthy of praise”—though some sniped that she really should be singing more true “standards” instead of crazy concoctions like “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” which seemed to them more attention-getting than anything else. One Chicago writer dismissed Barbra as simply a “publicist’s creation.”
But everyone had a shtick; that was a fact of showbiz. Yet for some reason, there were those who really seemed to resent Barbra’s. Dorothy Kilgallen had called Barbra’s act “magnetic nonsense,” and while it had seemed a sort of compliment, nonsense was still nonsense no matter how magnetic it was, and that was Kilgallen’s point.
One of Barbra’s earliest boosters, Kilgallen had turned on her by the summer of 1962. She started by chiding the “strong-minded Barbra” for putting her hairdresser “in a swivet” on a recent television appearance (probably The Garry Moore Show) by insisting that she appear on camera with her hair “mussed.” That was bad enough, Kilgallen thought, but as word continued to reach her about Barbra’s demanding style and her recurrent lateness for Wholesale, the columnist began sharpening her claws. After observing Barbra’s pique on The Tonight Show with Groucho, Kilgallen had this to say in her next column: “Friends of the sensationally talented Barbra Streisand wish she’d shed that ‘angry woman’ attitude. She’s successful enough now to be relaxed and pleasant.”
It wasn’t entirely clear why Kilgallen had soured on her, or why Barbra seemed to elicit such hostility from certain quarters. Part of it, no doubt, could be explained by the fact that she didn’t play by the rules: the refusal to observe the political niceties that had so irked Harold Rome, for example. Had she, knowingly or not, snubbed Kilgallen in some way? But there was more to it. One entertainer who sometimes competed with Barbra for gigs and talk-show slots observed “a great deal of resentment building against her,” and she attributed it to a feeling that “Barbra didn’t deserve everything she was getting because she hadn’t paid all of her dues.” Worse than that, the entertainer said, was the sense that Barbra “wasn’t even grateful for all she was being given.”
Dues paid or not, Barbra had just won a recording contract, plus it seemed very likely that she’d be starring on Broadway the following season. “Barbra Streisand is the front-runner for the Fanny Brice show,” Dorothy Kilgallen revealed that summer, “and she’d be great in the part.” But these days Kilgallen rarely offered any praise for Barbra unqualified by criticism. “One important member of the executive cast,” the columnist continued, “is cool to the idea because Barbra made such trouble for the producers of I Can Get It for You Wholesale.” Kilgallen could only have meant Merrick, so perhaps the producer’s enthusiasm for Eydie Gormé had caused him to reconsider his reconsideration of Barbra. Kilgallen added that the show would not include “My Man,” or Brice as her Baby Snooks character, or a re-creation of the Ziegfeld Follies. “So what’s left?” she asked. “Good question.” Barbra, of course, would be left, if she was chosen to be the star—but for Kilgallen, apparently, that fact wasn’t significant. The columnist had succeeded in her apparent goal: saying something nice about Barbra for a change to demonstrate her objectivity, but then slipping in a potshot and throwing cold water on the whole idea of the show.
Two camps were indeed forming as Barbra became more prominent, but her detractors, no matter how vocal their resentment, remained far outnumbered by her admirers. Even as Kilgallen was preparing her censorious commentary, another figure, much more esteemed, was drafting a very different take on the rising star. Harold Clurman, in a long piece for the New York Times on the importance of musical theater, extolled the Mermans and Bolgers and Martins of the past, but he also looked toward the future. Perhaps, Clurman mused, Tammy Grimes, Robert Morse, and Barbra Streisand would be the greats of tomorrow.
Not a bad place to be for a young woman who, just a year ago, had been hounding a pair of novice producers to cast her in their off-Broadway show, but had to first convince them that she could hold her own against such “big” names as Diana Sands and Dom DeLuise. Since that time, Barbra had ridden a rocket, though she would be the first to point out that it hadn’t quite taken her all the way to the top. And the top, of course, was the only place she intended to go.