CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1.
Liberace—that flashy, flamboyant pianist, the idol of millions of blue-haired old ladies and the highest paid entertainer in the world—stood on the stage in his red-sequined tuxedo with a smile as wide as the silver candelabrum on his grand piano. He was getting ready to introduce Barbra, as he’d done nearly every night since they’d started their run together at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. He thought Barbra was marvelous, and he intended for his audiences to think so, too. Barbra might be his opening act, but Liberace wanted his fans to know he considered her far more special than that.
The glitzy musician had been an admirer of Barbra’s since seeing her at the Bon Soir; more recently, he’d appeared with her on Ed Sullivan. He’d been ecstatic to sign her for his Vegas show, but very quickly he discovered that his fans weren’t necessarily hers. The first couple of nights, the audience of ladies with too much costume jewelry and reluctant husbands sitting beside them hadn’t applauded Barbra quite as loudly as she was used to. Nor had they seemed to get her jokes. Barbra’s long, rambling African or Estonian or Armenian folktales probably fell horrendously flat in Vegas; even sophisticated hipsters in New York and San Francisco didn’t always know what to make of them. Peter Daniels, cringing at the piano, thought those first two nights were “disastrous.” So Liberace had decided to come out at the top of the show and do a bit of an opening number, then introduce Barbra as his “discovery.” He’d give it, he promised, “the old schmaltz.”
Opening his glittering arms as if to embrace the crowd packed into the gaudy Versailles Room, Liberace told them they were in for a real treat. This young lady, Barbra Streisand, had wowed them in New York and had a huge career ahead of her. With such a benediction from the master, Barbra could have then come out and read from Robert’s Rules of Order and Liberace’s audience would still have loved her. The pianist’s sway over his following was tremendous. He claimed more than two hundred official fan clubs with a combined membership of a quarter of a million. At the Riviera, he was a king, making a triumphant return after a five-year absence. The hotel promoted its headliners by printing thirty thousand souvenir postcards to sell in their gift shops. For Debbie Reynolds and Vince Edwards, that was plenty to last throughout their runs. But for Liberace, thirty thousand disappeared in three days.
Barbra was very grateful to “Lee,” as his friends knew the pianist. His introduction of her was extraordinarily generous. Not many performers would get all made up, coiffed, and costumed—and for Liberace that took no small amount of time—only to give up the stage after a few minutes. Yet because of the showman’s graciousness, things had completely turned around for Barbra. Now she took the stage to warm, welcoming applause.
Vegas was, in fact, abuzz about her. “By far the hottest singer on the circuit today,” one local columnist called her. Another Sin City reviewer declared that while Liberace might have “the edge in experience and publicity on his costar,” his readers should “watch the 21-year-old catch on like the doughnut.” Variety thought that those who were tired of “assembly-line singers will be quite happy with Miss Streisand.”
No doubt Charles Kahn, the Riviera’s vice president, was quite happy by the turnaround in Barbra’s reception at the hotel. After all, he was paying her $7,500 a week. For Barbra’s publicists, that figure was a selling point. All that summer she was being heralded as the “girl who went from $150 to $7,500,” though the comparison could have been made even more dramatic by using a starting figure of $108, which was what the Bon Soir had paid her at the very beginning.
Yet for all her success on the Strip, Barbra didn’t particularly like Las Vegas. Despite the opulence of the Riviera—the hotel was called “a city in a tower of luxury,” since under its roof were contained “swank shops,” a sidewalk café, a swimming pool, fountains, slot machines, blackjack tables, and a gourmet restaurant—Barbra thought it was all just too noisy. The constant jangling of the slot machines no doubt irritated her tinnitus. She was also becoming enough of a world traveler by now to compare and contrast the cities she’d visited, and Vegas just couldn’t compare in terms of culture to San Francisco or London or Chicago.
She was pleased, however, that friends had come to visit. In the audience were Joe and Evelyn Layton, back from London now that On the Town was running on its own—or running out of steam, no one was quite sure. But what was abundantly clear was that Elliott’s director was now one of Barbra’s biggest boosters. His wife shared his view. They’d come to Vegas specifically to see Barbra, and Evelyn was telling her friends they should see her, too. “If you haven’t heard Barbra sing,” she wrote to one pal, “run this minute and get her record. Greatest woman talent of this century—and she’s only twenty-one. I could crack her right in the mush.”
Lots of people were running to get Barbra’s record. All that touring and constant exposure had paid off. The week Barbra had opened in Vegas, The Barbra Streisand Album broke into the Top Ten on Billboard’s chart. Barbra’s reign as the top-selling woman in pop music continued. Her name was now enough of a draw that CBS had decided to use her appearance on The Keefe Brasselle Show as the premiere episode, bumping the original premiere, featuring Carol Channing, to the second week. Critics savaged the show except for the moments Barbra took center stage, when it “burst to astonishing life.” Rick DuBrow, who’d already made clear his love for Barbra in previous articles, called her “a one-woman recovery operation” and declared that she was “so far the superior of any of her competitors that there is really no one even in her league.” With reviews such as that, it was no surprise that some commentators, no doubt egged on by Lee Solters, had started calling 1963 “the year of Barbra Streisand.”
Tonight the audience in the Versailles Room seemed to agree. Barbra made a joke about the Mother Hubbard gown she was wearing, made entirely of gingham. The columnist Mike Connolly called it an “enigma of a gown,” and Barbra seemed to recognize, even relish, its eccentricity. She told the audience that the three novices who’d woven the gown in Brussels had been blind. Another time, sitting on a stool and smoothing out the gown over her knees, Barbra quipped, “I don’t want to wrinkle my tablecloth.” These sorts of lines, as she expected, drew big laughs.
After the show, Barbra and the Laytons caught up. She shared with them the news that she had found a new place to live, a gorgeous duplex on Central Park West. They might not have admitted it, but they all suspected that Elliott would be home soon. And Central Park West was a rather upmarket address for an unemployed actor.
2.
When Elliott gambled, he was always ready with a story. In London, he’d run up some pretty significant debts, and rarely had he been able to pay them. So he’d done “some of the best acting” of his career in order to make a quick escape. “Great inventive tales” were concocted on the spot as to why he was “temporarily without funds.” Usually this enabled him to get off the hook without getting too far in the hole.
Now he was back in New York, and his pockets were still empty. On the Town had closed on July 13. It had run just over a month, just over fifty performances. No way could that be spun as a success. The lukewarm review of the show in the Times hadn’t even mentioned him, while singling out Elspeth March and others. Elliott was humiliated. So back across the Atlantic he’d slunk, back to that smelly old apartment. Once he got there, he had orders from Barbra. Start packing.
They were taking everything they had to the new place. Not that their few pieces of furniture could fill the huge duplex on Central Park West. But Barbra was sentimentally attached to everything in the old apartment, all the antiques she’d found at shops and consignment stores, so she wanted to bring them all.
She was also, it would seem, sentimentally attached to Elliott, since she was letting him tag along even though he had very little money to chip in to the venture. To the world, of course, they were married. “Streisand’s husband comes home,” Earl Wilson wrote, heralding Elliott’s return to New York. And the public expected husbands and wives to live together.
As he stuffed books and boas and shoes into boxes, Elliott was, in his own words, “very depressed.” It was back to the unemployment line, and this time there were no job offers on the horizon. He paced a lot, constantly popping sunflower seeds in his mouth and smoking a ridiculous amount of pot. Marijuana was his salvation, Elliott believed; it allowed him to “switch into certain inner places” and escape all outer worries and frustrations. He saw no problem with smoking as much as he did. Grass, as he called it, didn’t make him do anything he “wouldn’t be capable of doing otherwise,” and besides, it was “far more pleasant than drinking . . . less messy and more private.” He didn’t have “the patience to sit in a bar and drink.” So he sat at home and got stoned.
Meanwhile, out there in the world, Barbra had just officially been announced as the star of Funny Girl. Dorothy Kilgallen, of all people, had broken the story on July 22: “After reading a zillion Broadway-bound scripts, Barbra Streisand has agreed to do Funny Girl for David Merrick. She’s a very hot property these days.” Kilgallen, perhaps trying to make amends for her recent cattiness, went on to suggest that Barbra’s album would soon be number 1. It had already reached number 8 on Billboard’s chart.
As Barbra soared, Elliott knew he had some decisions to make. Did he bolt? Did he expose their “marriage” as a sham and scramble out of her spotlight before the bluenoses started tossing bricks at her for living out of wedlock? Or did he stick around and let her carry him until he could find another job?
What made it worse was that people were talking about their situation. A very curious item had recently turned up in Walter Winchell’s column. Barbra was supposedly consoling a girlfriend, whose husband bought her everything she desired, but he had ceased being much of a conversationalist. “What do you want,” Barbra had reportedly asked, “a master of ceremonies or a meal ticket?” It was a line that could have, and maybe did, come directly from her act. But the irony was that, in her own case, it was Barbra who was the meal ticket for her “husband.”
3.
Ray Stark looked again at the magazine he held in his hands. It was the venerable Saturday Evening Post, and on the cover was a reverential drawing of the new pope, Paul VI. But it was the piece inside, decidedly less reverential, if still in its own way hagiographic, that interested him. GOODBYE BROOKLYN HELLO FAME was the headline. The subhead read: “A refugee from Flatbush with a wacky manner and steamy voice, Barbra Streisand is streaking to stardom.”
The article was written by Pete Hamill, a rising star in the world of journalism, but it had been engineered by Lee Solters, as well as by Stark himself. It was Solters—or possibly his partner, Harvey Sabinson —who, some weeks earlier, had pitched the idea to the Saturday Evening Post, and it was Stark who had called the editor to confirm that Barbra was indeed about to be named the star of Funny Girl. That made the piece timely, gave it a hook. And so the story was assigned to Hamill, a former reporter for the New York Post who had started writing for the magazine during the newspaper strike.
The two met, and Barbra, in that inimitable way she had with reporters, provided the bare bones of her life embellished with all the idiosyncrasies of her public persona. There was kookiness: “I like food, sleep, and clothes,” she said. “Food is a tangible thing, and so is sleep. When you’re tired, it’s so great.” And there was bold ambition mixed with hubris: “They tell me I’ll win everything eventually. The Emmy for TV, the Grammy for records, the Tony on Broadway, and the Oscar for the movies. It would be beautiful to win all those awards, to be rich, to have my name on marquees all over the world. And I guess a lot of those things will happen to me. I kind of feel they will.”
On the emerging Streisand mythos, Hamill left his own imprint. “To many observers,” he wrote, “her overnight success is bewildering. Show business, after all, is largely a bazaar for that tinselly commodity, glamour. To achieve stardom, unendowed young girls customarily acquire bobbed noses, capped teeth and cantilevered underwear. Not Barbra Streisand. ‘I’m me,’ she says with a disarming shrug. ‘And that’s all there is.’”
Of course, that was far from all there was, but that disarming shrug went a very long way toward establishing some radical new rules for that tinselly commodity. Maybe glamour in 1963 didn’t require bobbed noses. Maybe a bit of genuineness was just as attractive, maybe even more so. “She’s telling you the story of her life every time she gets up there,” Hamill quoted one friend of Barbra’s. “And the facts of that life have made her very sensitive.” The Barbra who emerged from Hamill’s piece was a genuine, real-life kid, a Cinderella who’d escaped “that bosky dell known as Flatbush” and a high school “gluey with fraternities and sororities” that was indifferent to the “honor student” with the “modest looks.” Most readers could relate. Even if Barbra was more ambitious than most, she was an everywoman—and why shouldn’t an everywoman win awards? Why did it always have to be the beautiful blond girls?
The Hamill piece was the ultimate documentation of the Streisand legend in the public’s mind, the culmination of a three-year process that had begun with Don Softness’s mimeograph machine. Yet while the article may have been just what Barbra needed at the time, just what her team had been hoping for, there were some points that were now settling into the collective consciousness that Barbra felt went too far. Hamill had quoted a “friend” of hers as saying that, to Barbra, Brooklyn “meant baseball, boredom, and bad breath.” It was true that she’d wanted out, and it was true that she’d felt Manhattan was “where people really lived.” But Barbra had never gone so far as to denigrate her hometown, and the line deeply troubled her. Yet these were the risks of opening the Pandora’s box of publicity: Journalists were going to dig up their own quotes and draw their own conclusions. The narrative could only be controlled so far.
From Ray Stark’s perspective, however, the article was the best possible propaganda for his show. The “angular young girl with the nose of an eagle, slightly out-of-focus eyes and a mouth engaged in a battle with a wad of gum” could just as easily have been Fanny Brice as Barbra Streisand. Stark was aware that by conflating the two—using Barbra’s established persona and biographical narrative to create and sell Funny Girl—he was, in some ways, eliminating his mother-in-law from the show. A year earlier, he’d been adamantly opposed to a similar suggestion from Anne Bancroft that she remake the character in her own image. “The personality of Anne Bancroft,” Stark had complained to Robbins and Styne, “will be the only personality to emerge.” Yet this was exactly what he was now allowing to occur with Barbra.
The difference was that Jerry Robbins was no longer with the show. By building on Barbra’s own mythos, Stark and his collaborators could claim they were basing nothing on Robbins’s contributions. That was going to be key, because as soon as Bob Fosse was announced, Robbins’s lawyer had written to Stark insisting that none of his client’s “suggestions, ideas, and material” be used “in any manner.” Aware of the bind that could put the show in, Stark had replied through his own attorney that he knew of “no creative contribution by Jerry” since he hadn’t been “privileged to attend the creative meetings.” And while Robbins hadn’t parried that wily legal maneuver so far, Stark knew they’d have to proceed with caution.
But Barbra’s background gave them the freedom they needed. If they had to start over, Stark reasoned, why not jump on a bandwagon that had already proven its marketability? Barbra’s quirky personality was already familiar to many people; Robbins’s contributions could be papered over with Barbra’s own well-known persona—the plucky wallflower who cracks jokes to cover up her longing for true love. Streisand was already “Second Hand Rose” (the title of one of Brice’s songs) in the public’s mind. If Robbins complained, Stark could simply counter that they weren’t using the Fanny Brice he’d created; they were using the Barbra Streisand created by Streisand herself.
So when Fanny got up to sing, “I’m the greatest star, I am by far, but no one knows it,” the line would resonate for anyone who’d read Hamill’s piece or any of the others like it. In the face of Robbins’s intractability, Stark saw Barbra as their way forward. Wherever possible, the producer encouraged Fosse to accentuate similarities between the lives of Barbra and Fanny. As Arthur Laurents understood it, “They needed to become the same thing, at least for promotional purposes.”
On one of his early scripts, Fosse penciled the remark “Make it like B.” next to Fanny’s confrontation with a theater owner. In working with his new leading lady, the director instructed her not to study Fanny Brice, because she’d “become a caricature.” Rather, Fosse told her, Barbra should just be herself. “I’m not approaching it as a life story of anybody,” Barbra told reporters. “I’m doing it as an actress doing another character.” Now that she was finally the star, Barbra wasn’t about to share top billing with anyone, not even with the woman she was playing.
Making everything circular, the persona Stark and Fosse were so happy to claim as a stand-in for Fanny’s own had been designed by Barbra and her team precisely to secure the role of Fanny Brice. So Barbra had been imitating Fanny to get Funny Girl and now Funny Girl was imitating Barbra imitating Fanny. Barbra told the press that she’d been chosen for the “certain natural characteristics” she shared with Fanny, and those were obvious: the prominent nose, the mother who worried she wouldn’t make it in showbiz, the childhood in Brooklyn where no one believed in her, the self-confidence that made success seem inevitable. But there were aspects of Barbra’s public persona that were less authentic and more calculated, such as all the kooky talk and behavior that had been invented specifically to draw comparisons with Brice. In fact, the two women weren’t as much alike as the Funny Girl team tried to insist. Fanny Brice had never longed to play Juliet, and her aspirations to be accepted by the ruling classes would have been anathema to Barbra. Most significantly, Fanny had let men run her career, and occasionally ruin it, which was about as far from Barbra as one could get.
Yet none of that mattered to Stark. What was relevant to this show was that both Barbra and Fanny were different-looking, different-sounding, different-acting ladies of great personal charisma who redefined what it meant to be glamorous.
Stark knew that he was giving the twenty-one-year-old an enormous gift. It wasn’t often that entire Broadway shows were built around actors with as little experience as Barbra. But Barbra’s story was the answer to his problems with both Robbins and the show. The book could now practically write itself—or at least he hoped it could. So up to Vegas he trekked with Fran to pose for photographs with Barbra showing how pleased they all were with her casting. Jule Styne and Bob Merrill also made the trip, running through the entire score for Barbra in her hotel room, tweaking lyrics where necessary. Everything was done now with Barbra in mind.
4.
Elliott paced anxiously at the corner of Ninety-second Street and Central Park West, smoking a cigarette. A friend of his, another out-of-work actor, spotted him and tried to engage him in conversation, but Elliott seemed distant and preoccupied. He kept looking over his shoulder as if he were waiting for someone. At last his friend saw a young woman come bounding around the block. He didn’t recognize her at first. She was wearing oversized sunglasses and black boots and a knee-length gingham dress. When Elliott kissed her, his friend realized this was his girlfriend, Barbra Streisand, whom everybody seemed to be talking about these days. The young man knew Barbra and Elliott weren’t married, and wondered why they kept up the pretense to the press that they were. They seemed to be very much in love. Barbra kept patting Elliott’s hand and kissing his scruffy cheek. Finally Elliott muttered a good-bye to his friend—Barbra hadn’t even said hello—and they hurried off.
But not far. Elliott’s friend was surprised to see the pair enter the exclusive apartment building behind them. What he didn’t know was that this was Barbra and Elliott’s new home. When he learned that fact later, the out-of-work actor was mightily impressed, especially since he remembered the railroad flat over Oscar’s Salt of the Sea. He also presumed the reason for the couple’s continuing marital ruse was the fact that they were now very publicly living together.
Indeed, it would have been difficult to keep private their move into the Ardsley at 320 Central Park West, one of Manhattan’s most impressive Art Deco structures. With Barbra freshly back from Vegas, many columnists gushed over her sudden ascension to the heights, which was evidenced by her stately new address. Built in 1931, the Ardsley had been designed by Emery Roth, the famed architect of so many of the city’s definitive hotels and apartment towers. Barbra’s new home was a stunning composition of black brick and bold geometric patterns; above the fifteenth floor, cantilevered balconies alternated with a series of setbacks to produce what one architecture critic called “an animated yet balanced profile.” Most of the Ardsley’s 198 apartments were small, the exceptions being the lavish duplex penthouses, one of which, at the very top, was now occupied by Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould.
The couple had considerable work ahead of them to furnish and decorate this place. Fifteen-foot-high ceilings buttressed by elegant crown moldings meant a lot of wall space for art. There were six rooms downstairs, with a grand circular staircase leading up to three more in the tower, where the master bedroom opened on to a rooftop terrace. The lower floor was also ringed with terraces from which Barbra could look down on the passing traffic on Central Park West or across the street into the bright summer green of the park itself. Rent for this palazzo in the sky was over $1,000 a week—an astronomical jump from $60. And the only smell here was the fragrance of freshly polished wood.
Barbra and Elliott quickly became aware that while the place stood mostly empty at the moment, it was nonetheless jumping with ghosts. Lights suddenly came on without switches being flipped; the ring of the telephone sometimes caused the television set to turn on. The building had, as they were discovering, a rather storied history. For most of its three decades, the Ardsley had been home to wealthy industrial barons, doctors, and city officials.
But it was in Barbra’s own apartment where the most famous ghosts still danced. In 1939, lyricist Lorenz Hart had rented these very same rooms, installing his mother downstairs and himself up in the tower. That was the year Hart and his songwriting partner Richard Rodgers had I Married an Angel, The Boys from Syracuse, and Too Many Girls all running on Broadway. Over the next half decade, in the same rooms Barbra and Elliott now occupied, Hart had written the words to such songs as “It Never Entered My Mind” for Higher and Higher and “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” for Pal Joey, which was now one of Barbra’s staples. Here, under these same chandeliers, Hart had entertained George Abbott, Ethel Merman, Gene Kelly, George Balanchine, Vera Zorina, Jimmy Durante, Ray Bolger, Josh Logan, June Havoc, and so many other Broadway luminaries of the period. Most likely David Merrick had been inside Barbra’s apartment years before she stepped across the threshold. And then there had been Hart’s more private parties, where the hard-drinking lyricist, known for his revelries, had entertained what one writer called “the homosexual elite” : Cole Porter and George Cukor visiting from Hollywood, or Noël Coward and John Gielgud from London, with all the attendant handsome young men who traveled with them.
In those few days she had in New York before flying off again, Barbra was anxious to start decorating her new place. She’d had most of her old furniture brought uptown—the dentist’s cabinet and the Victorian piece with the glass shelves—but there were so many more antiques yet to be found. The one piece of furniture she had managed to acquire so far was an Elizabethan four-poster canopy bed, three hundred years old and set up on a tiered marble platform so that it took two steps to get into bed—rather like ascending a dais, some friends joked, or a throne. Gone was that little single bed that had barely provided enough space for Barbra and Elliott to turn over. This new one offered them far more room, if perhaps a little less of the old intimacy.
But shopping sprees and decorating sessions would have to wait. Barbra’s tour wasn’t quite over yet. She’d closed out Vegas with a flourish. Liberace had left a night early, turning over the stage—and the starring position—to Barbra for her last show on August 4. The comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin had been her opening act. During her run at the Riviera, Barbra had gotten a fifty percent raise from Charles Kahn, and she’d reciprocated with a parting gift to him of a leather jewel box inscribed TO FLO FROM FANNY —appropriate since she’d been announced for Funny Girl while on Kahn’s stage. But Barbra’s real guardian angel during her time in Vegas had been Liberace. The showman had been so good to her that Barbra had agreed to perform with him again the following month at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe.
From Vegas, Barbra had flown back East and immediately headed out to Long Island to perform for one night at the Lido Club on Long Beach. The next day it was up to Kiamesha Lake in the Catskills for a show at the Concord Hotel. What her tour had done was prove to the doubters—and to Barbra herself—that she could play the big rooms. At the Concord, she’d sung for close to a thousand people in the hotel’s enormous auditorium, and she’d “torn the place apart,” said one man who was there.
Now there was a bit of a breather, but there still wasn’t much time to shop. Instead, Barbra occupied herself with designing the outfit she would wear at her next engagement. It was a white satin blouse with black piping in the style of a midshipman’s shirt, with a black collar that snapped into the low V-neck. Barbra seemed indifferent to the brickbats that were frequently tossed her way from critics who loved her voice but remained unimpressed with her couturiere skills. In fact, sniping about her clothes had largely replaced slandering her looks. In Vegas, Barney Glazer had recoiled from that infamous Mother Hubbard gingham gown. “My mind reverted to those historic days in Salem, Mass.,” the columnist wrote, “when the public played a game called Heap the Wood High, Strike the Matches Hard, Oh, No, You Didn’t Forget the Kerosene Again?”
Yet being compared to a witch didn’t seem to faze Barbra because here she was, designing another unique look to wear on stage. No doubt she expected her next destination would be a little looser, a little more sophisticated, a little more willing to try new things. On August 21, she was opening at the legendary Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
It was time for Barbra Streisand to meet Hollywood.
5.
As Barbra prepared to fly to Los Angeles, rehearsing daily with Peter Daniels and making last-minute adjustments to her satin sailor’s blouse with the seamstress, Elliott was undertaking a mission of his own. In a quiet little office somewhere in the city, he sat down opposite a Freudian psychoanalyst, seeking professional help for his rapidly worsening depression.
Elliott’s state of mind seemed to ratchet lower with every new success enjoyed by his girlfriend-cum-wife. When, in a recent column, Earl Wilson had declared Barbra “suddenly one of the hottest stars in the country,” he’d mentioned the fact that she’d just moved into a duplex penthouse with “her husband, Elliott Gould.” But he hadn’t included anything about Elliott’s current projects. That was because there weren’t any.
Elliott listened closely as his analyst asked him a question, and he gave it considerable thought before attempting an answer. He was taking his analysis very seriously. He was, he said, determined to restore some harmony in his life. “Without flats,” he’d come to realize, “the sharp notes stick out.” Using another metaphor, he said that he felt as if he were stuck in a leaky boat, constantly bailing to stay afloat. But with analysis, he was temporarily beaching his boat so he could find out where the holes were and then patch them. Elliott knew that taking their boat off the water was scary for some people; they feared they would never get it back out again. But Elliott had no choice. His boat was going down.
Was Barbra among the “some people” Elliott thought were too afraid to take their boats off the water? Quite possibly—for Barbra had tried analysis herself not long before, very likely at Elliott’s urging. Perhaps she’d even accompanied him to one of his sessions. In any event, she hadn’t liked it. The analyst kept winking at her. She wasn’t sure if he was putting her on or making a pass. So she’d walked out on him. “Maybe he was crazy,” she said—which seemed to be her verdict on the entire mental-health profession. Going to an analyst or a psychiatrist, Barbra said, was a “cop-out, [a] self-indulgence.” And while she indulged herself plenty when it came to her career, sitting around moaning about her problems had never been her style. She believed in getting out there and making things happen; if she griped about something, it was to someone who could do something about it, not to someone who would just sit there and nod his head.
When Pete Hamill had asked about her career, how she’d gotten to where she was, Barbra had demurred, saying she couldn’t “verbalize about it.” If she did, she feared, she’d “analyze it all out the window.” Clearly, to her, analysis was a fruitless and pointless exercise. “You’re paying to talk about yourself,” she said. “It’s really pampering yourself.” Besides, it “cost too much money.”
Was she footing the bill for Elliott’s analysis? Or was she resentful that his money was going toward such endeavors when she was paying most of the household bills? If Elliott’s analysis caused tension between them, neither of them said so. But certainly Elliott held a very different view of the process than Barbra did. Analysis wasn’t easy, he believed, but it was worth it. It was opening him up to “self-discovery,” he insisted. Barbra might be on a journey that took her ever farther out into the world, but Elliott hoped to go just as far inward.
6.
Barbra’s plane touched down at Los Angeles Airport. In the center stood the newly constructed Theme Building, designed to resemble a flying saucer landing on four spindly legs. New York’s airports sure didn’t look like this.
Stepping out of the plane, Barbra glanced down at the tarmac and spotted four waiting limousines. Another surprise. They were all for her.
The limos had been sent by David Begelman and Freddie Fields, two young, hotshot Hollywood agents who’d recently formed a company called Creative Management Associates. Begelman and Fields had been the reason Judy Garland had secured a weekly television program; at the moment, CMA was putting the finishing touches on a deal to bring Phil Silvers back to TV. Not so very long before, Begelman and Fields had turned Barbra down as a client. Now that she’d “hit it big,” as Marty observed with no small amount of satisfaction, they’d “changed their minds.” Begelman and Fields were calling him “two, three times a day” to win her over. The limousines were just the latest salvo in their campaign to woo her.
Making her way down the steps, Barbra watched as the chauffeur of the lead limo hopped out to open the door for her. Lined up behind, the other limos carried a menagerie of CMA agents, managers, and publicists, “each ready and eager to help her career,” noted columnist Bill Slocum. “Sammy Glicks don’t run anymore,” Slocum added wryly, referencing the ambitious Hollywood con man from What Makes Sammy Run? “They use air-conditioned Cadillacs.”
Barbra settled into the Cadillac’s leather seat as Marty took one of the limos behind her. A third limo may have been for Barbra’s new business manager—another Marty, this one named Bregman—who’d been hired because Barbra was suddenly making more money than the first Marty could manage on his own. Once everyone was settled into their respective limos, the sleek vehicles started their engines and rolled out across the tarmac. As they pulled onto the street, they resembled a presidential motorcade.
Quite a ride for a girl who’d grown up taking the subway. On her second trip to Los Angeles, Barbra was treated like visiting royalty, installed in a luxurious suite on the fifth floor of the Ambassador Hotel, located at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard. But she had little time to luxuriate. She had a show to do in a few days, and ahead of that, a good deal of promotion. And so, very soon after her arrival—maybe that afternoon or possibly the next day—she sat down with a public-relations man named Marv Schwartz, who had a few questions he wanted to ask her.
This was how things worked in the business of public relations: Barbra’s publicists, Solters and Sabinson, arranged for Schwartz, whose own agency, Kaufman Schwartz and Associates, had close connections to Hollywood columnists such as Sidney Skolsky, to interview their client upon her arrival in L.A. Schwartz would then have the interview transcribed, cut, pasted, and rearranged into a form suitable to send out to columnists—in this case, Skolsky, whose “Tintypes” were widely read in Tinseltown. A “Tintype” would be prepared on Barbra that was ready for publication; all Skolsky would have to do is add his byline. This process eliminated the possibility of an independent reporter probing too far or straying off that day’s message.
It also meant that, in the course of the interview, Barbra could ramble along, stream-of-consciousness style, the way she tended to do, without her publicists feeling the need to constrain her. They’d filter and finesse her comments long before they reached the public. Yet the tape recorder was running as Barbra sat there talking with Schwartz, preserving exactly how she was thinking and feeling on that warm, sunny day of August 14, 1963, a point when it seemed she had just rounded the last hill on her climb to stardom and caught a glimpse of the summit up ahead.
“What do you really enjoy doing when you’re not singing?” Schwartz asked.
“I hate to sing,” Barbra replied, “so what do you mean, what do I like doing away from singing?”
“You hate to sing?”
“Yeah.”
Schwartz was clearly incredulous. After all, this was the top female recording star in America. “Why do you hate to sing?” he asked.
“Well, it’s a big . . .” Barbra’s voice trailed off. “It’s just all that worry that goes into it, you know. You get on stage and they don’t applaud enough, you’re a nervous wreck, you know, and all that stuff.”
So, Schwartz wondered, would she give up singing for straight dramatic roles? No, Barbra replied, she wouldn’t give up singing entirely. “Why should I?” she asked. But singing remained “too hard . . . to enjoy.”
She didn’t mean nightclub singing necessarily. A nightclub no longer seemed such an anathema to her. Now that she was heading back to Broadway, Barbra suddenly seemed nostalgic for the world of clubs and cabarets. Despite all the time she’d spent feeling like a “floozy,” she seemed sad that her nightclub career might be ending. After all, “every night was different” in a club, she explained. To lure the audience’s attention away from “the influence of food and liquor,” she had to be spontaneous, varying her act to respond to circumstances. She told Schwartz that performing for people who just sat there “watching you” was “no fun”—a very peculiar sentiment coming from an actress about to open a Broadway show.
She was tired, she said, of all the “kooky” business. But she realized her public persona had taken on a life of its own. When Johnny Carson had asked her on The Tonight Show if she thought she was kooky, Barbra had heard what the audience was telling her through their laughter and applause. She felt they were saying, “Give us a yes!”—and it made her angry. The public didn’t know her “real” self, she believed, and didn’t “want to know.” That was fine; she wanted her privacy; if she had her druthers, she’d “rather shut up and let ’em guess” anyway. Barbra had come to understand that “the public creates stars” and “they don’t want the illusion to be broken.”
Still, she wanted to move past the kook. The thrift-shop angle was “a gimmick,” she admitted, that had run its course. She was tired of wearing all those old-time fashions; it was no longer the image she wanted to project. Instead, Barbra wanted to be contemporary. That’s why she’d gotten the new hairstyle—updated and maintained by celebrity stylist Fred Glaser—and why she’d started designing her own clothes. Her favorite fabric was gingham. It cost just sixty-nine cents a yard and was “more elegant” in its own way, she said, than all the shiny fabric and beads other singers wore.
Schwartz asked her about acting, and without much prompting, Barbra launched into a rather defensive spiel about actors who took themselves too seriously. Was she maybe feeling just a trifle self-conscious about heading into what some might consider a lightweight musical? Certainly the Actors Studio—and its exclusive environment of serious study—remained a sore subject for her, though she brought it up on her own to Schwartz. Barbra made it seem as if she had turned Lee Strasberg down, not the other way around. She insisted that she’d told Strasberg, “I’m not here to study with you. I have a teacher I’m perfectly happy with”—even though her great desire had been to study with Strasberg. But to Schwartz, Barbra implied that she’d just been a curious outsider sitting in on one of Strasberg’s classes. In her telling, there was no audition, no campaign to become one of Strasberg’s disciples. Not to Schwartz did she mention the Actors Studio acceptance letter that she kept as a “prized possession.”
Barbra seemed to feel the need to dismiss the culture that had so cavalierly dismissed her. “People like that kind of school,” she told Schwartz, “have no sense of what reality is . . . Their life is showing Strasberg they’re good. To me that’s stupid . . . Acting is so simple, you know, it’s really a pity to see people have to study it.” She told Schwartz she found it “a bore watching everybody work and going through these terrible agonies.” Eventually she was “fed up” with the Actors Studio pretension, she said, so she had walked out.
Even as she stood on the cusp of potentially enormous fame, Barbra remained bitter about having been rejected all those years ago. Her exclusion from the world of serious actors still stung enough that she was attempting to rewrite history in order to erase the hurt and humiliation. But as Schwartz continued to question her about the Actors Studio, the awestruck teenager she’d once been slowly reawakened. Barbra wondered now that she was “sort of” famous, if Strasberg would finally let her into one of his classes. “I wonder if he remembers me,” she mused. When Schwartz suggested she call Strasberg, Barbra admitted she was “afraid” to do so. Despite the fact that she’d just dismissed his whole school, she declared, “He’s the master, you know.” (She would go so far, in another setting, to call him “like a Zen master.” ) And that was why she wanted “to be friends with him,” she said. Barbra told Schwartz that she and Strasberg had a great deal in common, “a certain sensitivity that’s on the same level.” She saw herself as Strasberg’s equal; if only he would see her that way as well!
It wasn’t all that surprising, then, that when Schwartz asked her if success was what she thought it would be, Barbra said no. She was particularly unprepared for the envy that surrounded her. “People who don’t have success hate success,” she observed. “They hate famous people really.” Who was she talking about? Critics who needled her? Former friends who complained she wasn’t doing enough to help them? Colleagues jealous of her quick rise to the top? Whoever they were, Barbra felt there were lots of people out there waiting for “any opportunity” to take her down, watching for her “to make a mistake.” It was “a very scary position to be in,” she said.
But the fear she felt as she became more successful also arose from trying to navigate a terrain that remained very alien to her. When people asked for her autograph, Barbra told Schwartz, she often thought they were putting her on, making a joke. When she read stories about herself or saw her name on a club’s marquee, she felt strangely disconnected to it all. Barbra Streisand was “this kid” she remembered “from a long time ago.” So when people said to her that she was going to be “one of the greatest stars . . . in the history of the entertainment business,” even though that had been her life’s goal, she had a hard time reconciling the two visions of herself: ugly, unwanted kid and glamorous, acclaimed star.
What Barbra was revealing to Schwartz was the defining dichotomy of her life. To another reporter, she admitted that sometimes, when she saw herself on television, she’d think, “What am I doing here? I don’t look good; I don’t sound good. What is it that they flip over?” True, Barbra had gotten as far as she had because of the enormous belief she had in herself, which, in turn, had inspired others to believe in her as well. But deep down, the little girl who’d once crawled on her belly so she wouldn’t disturb her stepfather was still there, seeking approval, craving acclaim, and convinced that if she ever got it, it would be quickly snatched away. So when Barbra saw her name on the marquee, she thought, “It’s this kid from Brooklyn. It’s not me.”
But that kid from Brooklyn had glimpsed the future, and she liked what she saw. “I’m really very young,” she reminded Schwartz, and there was still so much more to do and get and experience. “I want homes all over the world,” Barbra said. “I’d like to live different places different parts of the year, in Europe, Mexico maybe . . .” Plus, she was going to be great. “I want to do everything,” she said. She wanted to make records “and be the greatest and sell the most.” She wanted to be on television and “get all the reviews.” She wanted to be in the theater and “be magnificent.” Despite the nagging, deep-down doubts, Barbra recognized she’d already done pretty damn well for herself. “So far,” she said, “it seems I’ve been pretty lucky about doing whatever I want to do.”
Finally, Schwartz asked what she would be doing if she wasn’t in show business. Barbra didn’t wait long to reply. She said, very simply, “I don’t think I’d be alive.”
7.
There were movie stars waiting for her downstairs.
Big movie stars. Some of the biggest ever. Henry Fonda, who’d liked Barbra so much back in Philadelphia. Edward G. Robinson and Ray Milland. Natalie Wood with her date, Arthur Loew, Jr., son of the president of MGM and grandson of two of Hollywood’s founders, Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor. Wood’s ex-husband Robert Wagner, with his new wife, Marion. Kirk and Anne Douglas, with Kirk glad-handing all around the room. Jack and Mary Benny. Gracie Allen. Roddy McDowall with Tammy Grimes. Director John Huston, whose face lit up when he met the young and pretty Sue Lyon, who’d just scored in Lolita.
And then there were the songwriters. Jimmy McHugh, Sammy Cahn, and, of course, Jule Styne, who’d flown out from New York with his wife, Maggie, to be there for Barbra’s Hollywood debut. Afterward, Styne and Cahn were hosting a soiree in her honor. Singer Tony Bennett was there, too, checking out the young woman he was sometimes compared with, and with whom he was currently sharing the charts.
In all, there were fifteen hundred people at the Grove that night, a record. There were even more outside, where fans mobbed the entrance, eager for a night of stargazing. As each celebrity arrived, cheers exploded from the crowd. Paparazzi cameras flashed. Long accustomed to the glare of the spotlight, Fonda, Douglas, and Wood smiled and waved graciously as they made their way inside.
Upstairs in her fifth-floor hideout, however, Barbra was definitely not accustomed to all the hoopla. From the street below, she could hear the cheers from the crowd, and she grew more anxious by the moment. Proving herself to Hollywood was an enormous challenge. If she ever wanted to make movies—and more and more she talked about that—then these were the people who would make that happen, or not. She’d already received the benediction of the influential columnist Sheilah Graham, who’d written in her column that Fanny Brice “would have approved” of Barbra. That carried weight, because Graham had known Brice. But then again, so did an awful lot of the people who were waiting downstairs to see Barbra—including those two old warhorses Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, seated on opposite sides of the room from each other. Hopper was at Sammy Cahn’s table; Parsons was with Harriet and Armand Deutsch, Los Angeles society mainstays. Both columnists were waiting, eagle-eyed, to report on this young New York songstress who was going to play “their” Fanny Brice.
But of all the audience members down there waiting for her, it was probably Fran Stark whom Barbra was most eager to impress. Ray and Fran, of course, were seated at one of the head tables. Barbra was their find; they were her benefactors. Barbra knew as many eyes would be on them as on her.
Slipping into her black skirt and white midshipman’s blouse, Barbra may well have ruminated over who was not there as much as who was. She’d “wanted her mother to come to Los Angeles very much, to be there to see all those movie stars,” one friend of Diana’s understood. Maybe then, Barbra seemed to hope, Diana might grasp just how important her daughter had become. With all of Barbra’s travels, she hadn’t seen her mother in a while; Barbra had yet to give her the president’s autograph. Trying to remedy that, she’d offered to fly Diana out to Los Angeles, but her mother had turned her down flat. Diana was “much too afraid to fly,” her friend knew. To Barbra, however, it may have felt like yet another brush-off, one more example of her mother’s indifference toward her. But to her friends, Diana was bragging that “her Barbra” was singing where “Marlene Dietrich used to sing.”
As Barbra dried her hair with a newfangled, handheld dryer, a knock at the door of her suite drew her attention. It was Sammy Cahn, wishing her well. David Begelman and Freddie Fields also came by, accompanied by Fields’s wife, actress Polly Bergen, who looked as “gay as a bird in a smart summer-flowered dress,” Hedda Hopper thought. Begelman and Fields were still eager to win Barbra as a client. A few days earlier, they had helped book her on The Jack Barry Show, a comeback program for the television host caught up in the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. Now Barry hosted a variety-format program on KTLA Channel 5 for celebrities promoting local appearances.
But what Marty really wanted from Begelman and Fields was a guest spot for Barbra on The Judy Garland Show, which was set to premiere that fall. Since Garland was a client of theirs, the agents promised to see what they could do.
Barbra was finally ready to head downstairs. She took one final glance in the mirror. She’d put on some weight. Where she’d once been a spindly 110, she was now a more curvy 125. All that ice cream and calorie-rich Chinese food she’d consumed on the road had packed on the pounds. But the extra weight made her look better than ever. She was sexier, more mature, more substantial. Those few extra pounds seemed to imbue her with greater authority and gravitas.
The Cocoanut Grove lounge, on the first floor of the hotel, dated back to the very beginnings of Hollywood. In the Roaring Twenties, Joan Crawford had danced the Charleston on tabletops there; Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino had raised glasses spiked with bootleg liquor to their lips. Under the Grove’s three-story-high ceiling, painted to resemble a dark blue night sky studded with stars, Academy Awards and Golden Globes had been handed out over the years to Mary Pickford, Vivien Leigh, Hattie McDaniel, and Jennifer Jones. In the grove of giant potted palms, Frank Sinatra had sung; Martin and Lewis had traded barbs; and Dizzy Gillespie had fired up the house with his hot jazz.
Barbra made her entrance through the back, the spotlight following her dramatically through the dark as the crowd gave her a rousing welcome. She had kept them waiting just long enough to settle her own nerves and to build a sense of anticipation in the audience. Roddy McDowall thought her entrance was perfectly timed—“just late enough to get people’s attention” but before anyone “started complaining.”
Taking the stage, Barbra basked for a moment in the applause. “I’m the kind of nut who reads movie magazines,” she told the crowd, “and here you all are alive.” Then she delivered the evening’s best line: “If I’d known the place was going to be so crowded, I’d have had my nose fixed.” The audience roared in laughter. She’d broken the ice. With that one wisecrack, Barbra had won Hollywood over. By confronting head-on the supposedly insurmountable barrier to her potential movie stardom—her looks—Barbra, through her wit and personality, had rendered that argument obsolete.
Of course, her voice helped, too. She warmed them up with “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” made them wistful with “I Stayed Too Long at the Fair,” and seduced them with “Lover, Come Back to Me.” Every song received sustained applause.
Sitting there spellbound, Hedda Hopper thought Barbra used “her extraordinary voice range beautifully.” Hopper’s only problem was her tablemate, Sammy Cahn, who, having heard it all before, had hooked up a transistor radio to his ears so he could listen to the Los Angeles Dodgers play the St. Louis Cardinals. In the middle of Barbra’s rendering of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Cahn whispered to the table, “Dodgers won—sixteenth inning —2 to 1.” Hopper considered Cahn’s susurration “a bit disturbing,” but it didn’t spoil her enjoyment of the song. She was likely already composing in her head what she would write about Barbra the next day: “As relaxed as a cat on a hearth rug, she makes old songs sound new.”
Her rival, Louella Parsons, went a step further in her support. Barbra, she wrote, would “be great as our beloved Fanny.” That seemed to be the consensus as the stellar crowd rose to its feet to cheer Barbra at the end of the night. Polly Bergen whispered to Freddie Fields, “I gave up singingjust in time”—a line that her husband made sure to get out to the press. Although Los Angeles Times critic Margaret Harford overheard a couple of ladies in the powder room sniffing that they “didn’t care for her,” Barbra had won a host of other admirers that night. “She has high standards, direct methods and a voice that may still be shattering glass in Fresno,” Harford wrote in the Times. “I hope she never changes at the behest of press agents and powder room critics. Some of the sexy, no-talent babes who call themselves ‘vocalists’ should hear Miss Streisand. They would, I’m sure, go home and cut their pretty, pipsqueak throats.” Lee Solters himself couldn’t have written a more ringing endorsement of Barbra’s new kind of stardom.
Outside, the fans were still cheering as the stars filed out of the Grove at one o’clock in the morning. Hurrying back upstairs, Barbra changed into a red-gingham dress with white puffy sleeves—also her own creation—and then made her way to the reception in her honor. Marty, as always, was right by her side. Passing through a battalion of photographers, Barbra lifted her hands to shield her face from the blinding flashes of the cameras.
But things were more genteel at the party. Overcoming her old feelings of shyness when surrounded by so many people, Barbra allowed the Starks to lead her around, introducing her to all their Hollywood friends. Celebrities shouldered their way through the crowd to pay her homage. Tony Bennett congratulated her. Robert Wagner—the actor Elliott had always wished he looked like—posed for a photograph with her. Natalie Wood—one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood—told her that she was gorgeous. But mostly Barbra stuck close to Fran Stark’s side, their great big smiles telling the world that Fanny Brice’s daughter, no matter what anyone might have heard, thought the kid from Brooklyn was just swell.
8.
Elliott arrived in Los Angeles just in time for his birthday, August 29. Sitting in the Ambassador Hotel restaurant on a clear, warm, gorgeous day, Barbra ordered a slice of cake and asked the waitress to stick a candle in it. When the cake was set down on the table between them, Barbra told Elliott to make a wish.
“I hope the Dodgers win the pennant,” he said, and blew out the candle.
It was only natural for Elliott to be rooting for the Los Angeles Dodgers since they’d once been the Brooklyn Dodgers, the team he’d followed as a boy. That night the team was playing the San Francisco Giants, hoping to solidify their lead in the National League. But clearly baseball wasn’t all that was on Elliott’s mind that day.
“Let’s get married,” he suddenly blurted.
“Too late,” Barbra replied. “Candle’s out.”
She was playing with him. She knew they had to get married. They were in a precarious situation. Everyone assumed they were already husband and wife. They were very publicly living together. The Saturday Evening Post piece had made their marriage a major focal point, quoting some friend—Barbra wasn’t sure who—who’d said “the marriage to Elliott” had been more important to her than even her fame. “Here was a girl . . . who never had the guys chasing her, never went steady and who really felt ugly inside,” this “friend” opined. “And then the leading man, a big, handsome, virile guy, falls in love and marries her.”
Barbra’s friends all knew she wasn’t really married; anyone who was pontificating on the significance of her “marriage” would have had an ulterior motive for doing so. And since Pete Hamill would admit that at least one of his sources was Harvey Sabinson, this quote, too, may well have sprung from Barbra’s publicists. Indeed, it went to the heart of one of the fundamental components of her public persona: the wallflower who felt “ugly inside.” But now this pathetic image could be updated and transcended by the validation that came with the love of a good man. Even the descriptions of Elliott—“handsome” and “virile”—sounded as if they came from a press agent’s talking points. Barbra’s “marriage,” therefore, was good for the image.
Eventually, however, someone would catch on that they weren’t really hitched. Although Barbra had deliberately called Elliott her husband when she’d sat down with Marv Schwartz—“Some nights I sleep in my husband’s pajamas,” she said—she also declared him off-limits to the discussion: “I can’t talk about him,” she replied when Schwartz asked her a question about Elliott. Barbra and Elliott were clearly going to have to be very careful in any interviews they gave.
And, at least for Barbra, that would take considerable effort, since suddenly she was everywhere. In nearly every major entertainment column, Barbra had become a regular boldface name. She’d recently sat down with Lloyd Shearer of Parade for a major piece to be run in the popular Sunday newspaper supplement. She’d also just taped the season premiere of Bob Hope’s show, which was a surefire ratings winner. Barbra had sung “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” and “Gotta Move.” She’d also participated in a comedy skit, playing Bessie Mae, the distaff side of a hillbilly band called the Hog Chitlins and the Goat Grabber Three. Slung over her shoulders were two washboards that she played as instruments: “I’m in stereo,” she punned. They sang a version of “Blue Tail Fly,” but Barbra’s hillbilly accent didn’t work, and the jokes were painfully unfunny. And she seemed to know it.
Far more accolades came for her continuing show at the Cocoanut Grove, where the box office sold out every night. Barbra had become “the new pet of the movie crowd,” in the words of one journalist. One night, Rosalind Russell hosted a table of ten, and Barbra was cued by Marty to introduce both her and Norma Shearer from the stage. Also at the table were Kate Paley, the teenaged daughter of the CBS founder, and her escort, Carter Burden, a young socialite and Vanderbilt cousin. Danny Thomas had been back to see Barbra at the Grove a couple of times, eager to sign her for an appearance on his show. Jack Paar was also asking, apparently no longer making cracks about Barbra’s looks.
But Marty turned them both down, at least for the moment. He’d gotten a better offer—indeed, the one he’d been aiming for. Begelman and Fields had come through: Barbra was booked to appear on The Judy Garland Show that fall. And so the pair from CMA officially became Barbra’s new agents. They knew how to make things happen, and that’s what Barbra needed. For Garland, they’d refocused and revitalized her career. “You two are the luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” Garland had exulted. The pair, according to one observer, were “young, smart and, beneath their well-tailored suits, ferocious.” Just the kind of people Barbra wanted handling her affairs. Begelman and Fields promised her the world, even movies—though, in an attempt to not rattle Ray Stark too much, Barbra fibbed through her teeth when reporters asked if she was interested in making films. No, she told them: “I’ve got a job.”
But her new agents knew better. Surely it was Begelman and Fields who lined up the tour Barbra took of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She was driven onto that legendary lot past the tall Corinthian columns into a fantasy world replete with New York brownstones, Tarzan’s jungle, Chinese temples, and Andy Hardy’s middle-American neighborhood. Afterward, Barbra toured the soundstages, where director George Sidney was filming a number with Ann-Margret for the upcoming Viva Las Vegas. After the sexy redhead purred through her song, the two singers were introduced. Enterprising press agents embroidered a bit of fluff from that meeting, claiming Barbra had asked Ann-Margret, “Where did you get the crazy spelling of your name?” To which the Swedish bombshell had supposedly replied, “I was just going to ask you the same question.”
For all its monkeyshines and hoopla, Barbra loved Hollywood. The weather, the fragrance of citrus trees, the dream-factory atmosphere. “If you want to get away from everything,” Barbra’s friend Evelyn Layton said about Hollywood, “this place is perfect—so unreal it’s like being on another planet.” Heart-shaped swimming pools, shiny convertible cars, beach houses made out of glass. The place was magical. And that wasn’t even counting Disneyland, where Barbra got to spend a day, even if the lines had been too long for her to get on many of the rides.
Besides, in Hollywood she was surrounded by people who kept telling her she was soon to be the biggest star in the world. NBC was reported to be “going to great pains to line up an exclusive contract” with her. She may have been discussing all her many options the night that Louis Sobol spotted her at La Scala, the swank Beverly Hills eatery, with Freddie Fields. In his column a few days later, Sobol wrote up a description of Barbra’s table, mentioning that Fields was accompanied by his wife, Polly Bergen, and that Phil Silvers, who was also present, had his wife with him as well.
Yet if Barbra’s “spouse” was there, too—as Elliott almost certainly was—Sobol failed to include his name. After all, the columnist was only interested in names he could boldface, and the tall, gangly man with bushy hair who sat beside Barbra could have been anybody, or nobody. Such a description seemed to sum up Elliott’s position pretty well—just a guy in the background as Barbra took the movie colony by storm.
9.
Bob Fosse, by his own admission, was beginning to feel a little bit paranoid.
The director of Funny Girl was doing his best to get the book in order so they could start rehearsals sometime that fall. The script was spread out in front of him, and his penciled comments were scrawled across every page. But the more he worked with Ray Stark, the less Fosse trusted him. When all the principals were present—Fosse, Stark, Barbra, Styne, Merrill, Lennart, and production designer Bob Randolph—everything seemed fine. The relationships among the collaborators seemed “good and productive.” Fosse found himself particularly “excited about Barbra.”
But when he was alone with Stark, or with Stark and just one or two others, Fosse noticed the producer’s penchant for talking behind people’s backs. This was classic Stark, keeping people on edge by playing them against each other. But it was nonetheless unnerving for Fosse to hear the producer “threatening to replace everyone.” If Stark was saying this about his authors or his designer, Fosse feared, he was likely saying it about his director as well.
That fear touched a nerve. Fosse hadn’t sought out this project; Stark had begged him to take it on when Robbins departed. Fosse had agreed only if Stark and Merrick were “willing to go all the way with him”—which meant he wanted a guarantee that he wouldn’t be fired out of town, something he’d seen happen all too often before. Fosse was concerned that “the inexperienced Stark” would “panic and make rash and often destructive decisions.” So he asked that everyone involved “think twice” and “not just grab [him] because the project was limping.” To make sure he was the right fit, Fosse even offered to work on spec “until everyone concerned had made up their minds.”
Stark had dismissed his concerns and assured him of their commitment. In good faith, Fosse had started work, picking up where Robbins had left off. It wasn’t easy. He had to eliminate anything that his predecessor might claim was his invention. For example, Fosse ditched the direct cutfrom Fanny’s line that she’d do anything that Ziegfeld asked her to the scene where she balks: “I’m not going to wear this costume!” He surely knew he’d lose the laugh, but there was little else he could do; Robbins had made clear the bit was his. Still, there were places Fosse could bring his own imprint. He brought on Carol Haney, the actress he’d helped nurture into a choreographer on The Pajama Game, to help with the musical numbers.
But his paranoia was growing by the week. In July he’d flown to Los Angeles, where he was overseeing the staging of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Philharmonic Auditorium. While Fosse was away, Stark had approached Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, the producers of How to Succeed, and reportedly asked them if they honestly thought the man who’d staged the musical numbers for their gigantic hit was “capable” as a director. When the pair pointed out that it was “a little late for that kind of question,” the wily producer of Funny Girl had replied, “No, we haven’t signed him yet.”
That was true. The contract still sat on Fosse’s lawyer’s desk. Why the director had so far withheld his signature was unclear. Stark had agreed to the language Fosse had requested, promising not to interfere with his direction “or hire anyone else to do his job.” If the agreement was violated, the producers of Funny Girl would still have to pay Fosse the rest of what he was owed (he was being paid $7,500, for which he’d receive $2,500 on signing, the rest in weekly intervals, plus three and a quarter percent of the box office gross per week). The contract seemed ironclad in its protections of Fosse, but although it was dated August 1, by the end of the month he still had not signed.
Part of the reason was his pique at Stark for his comments to Feuer and Martin, who had lost no time in repeating them back to Fosse. The director described himself as “stunned,” though he felt the news simply “affirmed [his] previous suspicions.” At first, he wondered if it was only Stark who was against him. Confiding his concerns to Barbra and Lennart, Fosse eventually came to the conclusion that “Stark had acted on his own.” So, as the summer ended and the start of rehearsals approached, he was left unsure of whether he really wanted to sign on with a man he could not fundamentally trust.
Still, Fosse plowed on. Looking at the script in front of him, he read the new opening that Lennart had come up with. Previous versions had opened in a theater with Fanny messing up a line of chorus girls. But in this new scene, Lennart had Fanny walking in, crossing the stage, then turning to look at herself in a mirror. “Hello, gorgeous,” she deadpans sarcastically. Then she picks up a stick of greasepaint and draws a line across her cheek, the first step in making herself up as an Indian for a comedy skit.
The scene was terrific. Fosse agreed it should open the show. But he crossed out the greasepaint, letting the bit end on “Hello, gorgeous.” It seemed more powerful that way. What a terrific star entrance for Barbra Streisand.
10.
Usually Lake Tahoe sparkled in the sunlight as it stretched off to the snowcapped mountains on the horizon. But this morning, September 13, as the rental car headed north on Route 50, snaking along the lake’s eastern edge, the sky was gray. Periodic sprinkles kept the windshield wipers moving across the glass. Thunderstorms threatened, and temperatures edged into the nineties. Despite the mugginess, Barbra, Elliott, and the two Martys—Erlichman and Bregman—were on a mission that morning, heading out of the bustling town of South Lake Tahoe, California, and crossing the border into Nevada. There, in the capital, Carson City, Barbra and Elliott planned to get married.
That previous weekend, the Parade magazine profile had appeared, turning up on the kitchen tables of tens of millions of Americans. Lloyd Shearer had reported that Barbra and “her husband” had married the previous March and since then had moved into a New York penthouse together. It had been Elliott’s love, Shearer surmised, that had “erased some of the insecurity of [Barbra’s] former years” and “calmed down some of her earlier ‘kookiness.’” Since a more serious, less kooky Barbra Streisand was something they all wanted the public to embrace, they were glad to promote the angle of “Elliott’s love” if that’s what it took.
But the lie was starting to rub just a little too close. They couldn’t keep saying Barbra and Elliott were married when they weren’t. Sooner or later, one of them would mess up in an interview, or some enterprising reporter would dig a little too deep. So they needed to get hitched and fast. And what better place than Nevada, which required no blood tests and had no community property laws? It might have been Friday the thirteenth, but it was also Marty Erlichman’s birthday, so it seemed as good a day as any to tie the knot.
For Elliott, the decision to get married had seemed almost like a business arrangement. It was as if they “shook on it,” he said. In some ways, given the publicity that increasingly made their marriage necessary, it was a business arrangement. From this point forward, Elliott understood he could not speak of Carson City. He couldn’t give the date of September 13. He’d have to backdate the ceremony to the previous winter, and he’d have to lie that he’d flown not to the West Coast but to Florida, where they would make believe he and Barbra had married just before he’d set off for London. Of course, Elliott knew—they all must have known—that the ruse was only as tenable as the privacy laws governing Florida’s public records.
Yet as the foursome drove up Route 50 in the rain, a white haze hanging over the lake to their left, they probably spoke about many other things besides the wedding. After all, the Parade piece had been Barbra’s best publicity yet. If not as long or as detailed as the Saturday Evening Post profile, it had reached many more people. Shearer had called Barbra “the hottest canary in the country.” His subject, however, wasn’t happy with the piece, feeling that it didn’t spend enough time on her acting ambitions, and she probably spent at least part of the ride grumbling about it. Marty, no doubt, felt that Parade was great advertising for the albums, but Barbra didn’t like to read anything written about herself. No matter how glowing a piece might ultimately be, there was always some point, large or small, that she believed the writer hadn’t understood or that should have been presented differently.
Even the Saturday Evening Post article was unsatisfactory. “Most newcomers would be thrilled by a story in the Saturday Evening Post,” observed the columnist Barney Glazer, but not Barbra. She claimed that Hamill had “stretched the facts to make the copy more interesting.” She vowed that from then on, she wouldn’t give any more interviews unless she saw “the advance copy.” Lee Solters obviously knew that wasn’t always going to be possible, but he probably hadn’t challenged her on her demand; that was never smart strategy with Barbra. Besides, she was getting famous enough that maybe someday she really could make such a demand and get away with it.
The Parade article had also reported that Barbra’s earnings for 1964 would be “somewhere between four and six hundred thousand dollars.” At Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, where she was currently appearing, once again alongside Liberace, Barbra was making ten thousand dollars a week. And her second album had just debuted on the Billboard chart. Everyone expected it would perform at least as well as the first.
Or maybe even better. Where The Barbra Streisand Album had languished for months before getting its first write-ups, critics were waiting on tenterhooks for The Second Barbra Streisand Album. “A fine new voice with an unusual quality and with tremendous acting ability,” one reviewer wrote. Another opined, “The results are best described as thrilling.” Billboard thought the disk had “precise phrasing, clarity of tone, and dramatic impact,” and that Barbra took her listeners “on a fine vocal-coaster ride.” These were “great tracks tailored for spins and sails,” the trade journal concluded. Columbia was sparing no effort this time, taking out full-page ads featuring the covers of both albums and the tagline: NOW THERE ARE TWO.
The album deserved the praise it was getting. It was that rare sophomore attempt that surpassed a superlative original. The raw sexuality of “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” seemed to jump off the vinyl; “Who Will Buy?” and “I Stayed Too Long at the Fair” startled listeners with their ageless poignancy, especially given Barbra’s youth; and the passionate “Gotta Move” exposed all of her ambition and willpower. Clearly Peter Matz was to Barbra what Nelson Riddle had been to Sinatra: an arranger who perfectly and intuitively understood her—“when to emphasize the brass for her ‘belt’ voice and when to float the vocal on a cushion of strings,” as one writer observed. The many reviews that pointed out Barbra’s dramatic acting efforts on the disk weren’t just following Lee Solters’s bullet points: these tracks really were miniature plays, and Barbra brilliantly interpreted every one of them. The excellence of the disk seemed to justify the control she’d seized in the studio and wielded over the defiant technicians. In her mind, she’d needed to take charge if she was to move from good to excellent. And now she had what she considered irrefutable proof that her way had been the right way. She wouldn’t let Columbia forget it.
For her soon-to-be husband, life with a woman who believed her way was, ipso facto, the right way was never going to be easy. No doubt Elliott still had his doubts about the advantages of marriage, fearful of the “technical” impositions it might bring to “an otherwise viable relationship.” But was their relationship still viable? That was the question. In London, Bob had witnessed the insecurities that bubbled beneath the surface. Other friends had seen—and heard—the arguments, “the boots being thrown across the room and the cascade of tears afterward.”
But one intimate insisted that in the midst of “all the exciting things that were happening to her,” Barbra still believed that “no one else was going to love her like Elliott did.” And Elliott, like the little boy he’d once been who’d looked to his mother to solve all his problems, remained “fixed on Barbra,” who was, to him, “like the sun, rising and setting.” Elliott himself admitted that, despite all their difficulties and distance, he hadn’t fallen out of love with Barbra. He was still besotted with her. Indeed, Arthur Laurents thought “something real . . . held them together,” even if it was fragile.
At the Ormsby County Courthouse, they brought the car to a stop. Stepping out and stretching their legs, they looked around and breathed in the slightly cooler air of the high desert. Carson City still resembled the frontier town it once had been. The streets were wide, the buildings were set far apart from each other, and many city and county officials wore different hats—not uncommon in a city of less than fifteen thousand inhabitants. The justice of the peace, who they’d come to see, was also the municipal court judge, the city recorder, and the coroner. As they headed up the steps of the courthouse, a neoclassical structure with four Tuscan columns out front, they would have discovered that the offices of the justice of the peace were on the first floor, while the second floor housed the sheriff and the jail cells.
Since marriages were only performed by appointment, Justice Pete Supera was waiting for them. A friendly, bespectacled man, Supera was in his third term as justice, having been elected twice without opposition. He’d told his wife that Barbra Streisand, the singer, was coming up from Lake Tahoe that morning to get married, and she’d hoped Pete might bring the couple to their home for the ceremony. But Barbra and Elliott didn’t have much time; the courthouse would have to suffice. They said their vows and signed their names; Barbra, just to make sure everything was legal, gave the spelling as “Barbara” for the marriage certificate. The two Martys affixed their own signatures as witnesses. With a final nod and a handshake, Supera pronounced Elliott and Barbra man and wife.
Barbra was now a married lady. One of the songs Styne and Merrill had written for Funny Girl was called “Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady,” in which Fanny Brice gushed over finally landing a man, swearing she’d do her “wifely job” and “sit at home, become a slob.” But where Barbra might have shared some of Fanny’s thrill that the man she loved had slipped a ring on her finger, she no doubt also saw the irony in the rest of the song’s lyrics. It wasn’t Barbra who’d be sitting around doing her nails, as Fanny imagined for herself, while her husband supported her in style. It would be, in fact, the very opposite. It would be Elliott for whom “all day the records play.” And despite the kisses, hugs, and congratulations they all surely bestowed on each other, that little fact was almost certainly on their minds as they returned to that hot, sweaty car and headed back to Tahoe so Barbra could make her eight o’clock curtain.