CHAPTER FOUR
1.
Diana would have come earlier, she insisted to friends, but Hurricane Donna—“one of the biggest hurricanes ever to hit New York” meteorologists had called it—had prevented her from making the trip in from Brooklyn. The fact that the storm had been over for several days now, with sunshine and mild temperatures returning to the city, was not pointed out to Diana by her friends. They were just glad that she was finally heading into Manhattan, accompanied by Sheldon, to see Barbra sing at the Bon Soir.
Word had spread fast—even out to Brooklyn—that Barbra was a hit. Diana was aware of the reviews, even if she hadn’t read them all. The New York World-Telegram had declared Barbra “the find of the year,” praising her “range and power,” her “natural gift for musical comedy,” and her ability to handle “with aplomb the most meaningful of ballads.” But it was Dorothy Kilgallen’s syndicated column that had the most tongues wagging in Brooklyn. “The pros are talking about a rising new star on the local scene,” Kilgallen wrote. “Eighteen-year-old Barbra Streisand never had a singing lesson in her life, doesn’t know how to walk, dress, or take a bow, but she projects well enough to bring the house down.” Diana’s circle of friends were dazzled that somebody as well-known as Kilgallen—a panelist on the TV game show What’s My Line? in addition to her newspaper duties—had even acknowledged such a neophyte.
Most people overlooked the mild criticism of Barbra’s unpolished presentation that was imbedded in Kilgallen’s review, but Diana had keyed right into it. At least one of her friends suspected that, as she waited in line with Sheldon outside the Bon Soir, she was probably fretting over the fact that Kilgallen—always so elegant in her cocktail dresses and pearls on television—had declared to the world that Barbra didn’t know “how to walk, dress, or take a bow.”
Yet the fact remained that this teenage tyro had somehow managed to seduce everybody else who queued up outside the club that night waiting to see her. Barré had been extremely percipient. Barbra’s audiences had conflated her lyrics with her life, no matter how manufactured that might have been, and taken her utterly into their hearts. As one reviewer observed, on stage Barbra displayed “a dynamic passion that tells the listener that this plain Jane is holding up a vocal mirror to her own life.”
For most people, this presumption of autobiography, along with the sheer force of Barbra’s personality, had been enough to smooth over the rough edges Kilgallen had identified. Critic Frank Judge thought Barbra might sometimes wander off pitch, but her audience was “too trapped by herbewitching theatrical interpretation of the song to notice.” And if they did notice, like Kilgallen, they seemed not to care.
What finally won people over, however, was Barbra’s own steadfast belief in herself, a quality that seemed to radiate from her the moment she stepped onto the stage. “Barbra believed she was beautiful,” said Kaye Ballard, who’d snuck in one night to watch her. “She was thoroughly convinced of the fact. Me, when I started, I thought I was so ugly that I had to do comedy and then sing. Barbra knew right off she could do ballads.”
At nine thirty, the doors of the Bon Soir opened. Diana and Sheldon made their way down the steep steps and found seats at one of the small tables crowded in front of the stage. It was unlikely that Barbra was even in the house yet. She was probably still out running around somewhere—running herself down and getting herself sick, her mother likely worried. Diana still fretted over her daughter, although she no longer schlepped into Manhattan with any regularity. She hadn’t even seen Barbra’s latest apartment or met her latest roommate. But whenever Barbra came home, Diana still made sure to load her up with groceries she could take back with her on the subway.
Shortly after ten, the Three Flames started to play. Diana and Sheldon watched as the comics came out and did their thing. Finally, close to midnight, Jimmie Daniels introduced Barbra. The spotlight found her and the slight teenaged girl burst into “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.” Diana shuddered. What was her daughter wearing?
To Barbra, it was a chic white-lace Victorian combing jacket, and her shoes the scarlet satin T-straps Bob had so admired. But to Diana she looked as if she had come out onto the stage wearing a nightgown and slippers.
Still, as Barbra continued to sing, Diana’s distaste gradually faded. As her daughter skated gracefully from song to song, trading the campy lyrics of “I Want to Be Bad” for the touching sentiments of “When Sunny Gets Blue,” Diana began to mellow. She watched Barbra closely. That was her daughter up there, receiving all that applause between each number. And Diana couldn’t deny that Barbra deserved it.
Maternal pride, however, was no doubt mixed with another, less noble emotion. Later, when Diana returned to Brooklyn and told her friends about Barbra’s performance, she seemed “just the trifle bit jealous,” one friend said. Sitting there in the Bon Soir audience, was Diana imagining what it might have been like if she had gotten the chance to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus all those years earlier, instead of being ordered to quit by her overbearing father?
During the break between the two shows, Barbra came out to see her mother. Barré stood in the wings, watching the interaction.
“What did you think, Mama?” Barbra asked.
“You were good,” Diana told her.
You were good. For a second, Barbra seemed frozen. It seemed as if she had never heard such a sentiment from her mother before. She looked as if she might cry.
“Now, look, your clothes,” Diana continued, shaking her head in horror. “You should let the world see you sing in your nightgown?”
“But you thought I was good?” Barbra asked.
Diana looked at her. For a moment there was something like compassion, or at least a truce, between the two women. “Yes,” Diana said. “I thought you were good.”
If anyone was hoping there might be an embrace, however, they were disappointed.
“Sometimes the voice was a little thin,” Diana added, never knowing when to leave well enough alone. “Maybe you should see a vocal coach.”
Back in Brooklyn, Diana bragged to her friends that Barbra had “all the big critics falling down on their knees in front of her.” But never would she let her daughter know how proud she was of her. “It would just give her a swelled head,” Diana insisted to friends. She still hoped Barbra would settle down with a steady job, grabbing what little security she could from a world that would crush her ambitions and break her heart, much as it had her own.
2.
It was supposed to be a day of fun, a break from performing, as Barbra and Barré rode a tandem bicycle downtown and then took the ferry to Staten Island. But something had gone wrong between them.
From the moment it was clear that Barbra was a hit at the Bon Soir, their lives had become, in Barré’s words, “a series of manic ups and crashing downs.” They veered between “hysterical fits of uncontrollable laughter to the black pit of . . . misunderstandings . . . arguments and screaming.” Barré blamed it on “the bubble” they lived in, “a circumscribed universe . . . in which nothing else existed except what we were doing together: the creation of ‘Barbra.’”
Pygmalion had grown resentful of his Galatea.
Friends noted that while Barbra was suddenly the sensation of Greenwich Village, Barré’s success in Henry V just a couple of months earlier seemed utterly forgotten, and no new jobs were beckoning on the horizon. Barré might not have minded so much if Barbra had seemed genuinely thankful for all he’d done for her, but he took her growing distance from him as a lack of gratitude and an indifference to his place in her life. Try as he might, he “couldn’t seem to let go” of the memory of how she’d missed his Central Park performance. It was always there, burning away, popping up in unexpected moments.
They stood looking out over the water as the sun dropped lower in the sky. Barbra was quiet. It wasn’t just Barbra’s usual self-absorption that was the issue. There was more going through her eighteen-year-old mind than Barré seemed to understand. Finally, looking across the blue water at the gray and copper skyline of Brooklyn, she shared a little of how she was feeling.
Too much good was happening to her, she said. And whenever that happened, she explained, whenever God saw her happy, he swooped down and—“boom!”—took it all away. Barré told her that was nonsense, but Barbra explained that was how she’d been brought up to think. “Whenever anything good happened,” she told him, “my mother would dry-spit through her fingers.” And she demonstrated the gesture for him as they stood on the pier.
Boarding the ferry, Barbra’s contemplative mood only deepened. Sitting beside Barré on a wooden bench in the empty passenger room, the grinding of the ferry’s motors serving as unpleasant background music, she dared to articulate at least one of her fears.
“So,” she asked quietly, “what are we gonna do about sex?”
Barré was taken aback. “What do you mean, what are we gonna do about sex?”
“We ain’t having any,” Barbra said plainly.
It had been nearly two months since they’d last been intimate. Barrétried making excuses. They were both so busy, he said, so focused on her performance, that they simply didn’t have the time or energy. But Barbra was smarter than that. She fell silent again as a cold wind blew off the East River. Barré put his arms around her to keep her warm.
She knew Barré’s story, of course, but she blamed herself at least partly for the failings in their relationship—at least Barré thought she did. Barbra’s belief in her own beauty and talent, so powerful and convincing on the stage, always seemed to dim in private moments such as these. She lamented that she’d never learned “feminine wiles.” Growing up ignorant of the opposite sex, she’d never mastered the art of “manipulating men”—her own words—and she envied those women who had. For all her street smarts and stage presence, Barbra still felt she didn’t know how to “sidle up” to a man or “sweet-talk” him. It was something she’d have to learn. But that day on the ferry, she was no doubt just waiting for God to move in and—boom!—take Barré away.
Once they arrived on Staten Island, the sun set completely. They turned around and rode the ferry back through the steely darkness, Barbra resting her head on Barré’s shoulder. Neither of them spoke a word on the way home.
3.
The two of them together produced more noise than Grand Central Station during rush hour.
A flurry of silk scarves trailed behind Barbra and Phyllis Diller as they made their way across Union Square, their voices ricocheting through the park like competing bursts of gunfire. Pigeons took flight as the two women hurried toward the statue of George Washington on his horse, Phyllis’s cackle rising up into the trees, where the leaves were just beginning to fade to yellow. That autumn day, the two friends, twenty-five years apart in age, “talked, talked, talked about everything under the sun,” Phyllis said—money, managers, men, marriage. Everything except politics, as Phyllis learned when she asked Barbra what she thought about the recent presidential debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy. On that subject alone, Barbra had no opinion to offer—because “the only politics she was interested in were the politics of how to get a job,” Phyllis quickly realized.
On that score, Barbra was apparently learning fast. So successful had she been at the Bon Soir that Ernie Sgroi had just extended her run into November. At first, Barbra admitted to Phyllis, she wasn’t sure if she should accept; nightclub singing drained her of the energy she needed to look for acting jobs. Phyllis told her opportunity could happen anywhere; after all, Phyllis had just finished playing Texas Guinan in a cameo for the upcoming movie Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. And she’d gotten that job because of her nightclub work.
As they crossed Fourteenth Street, Phyllis told Barbra she should consider herself lucky that the club had renewed her contract. She shouldn’t expect to coast by on luck and her fresh face and sound for much longer. Barbra’s habit of showing up at the very last minute before she was set to go on was eventually going to work against her with the management, Phyllis warned. On a night not long before, Phyllis had waited anxiously for Barbra to arrive, while a grumbling, muttering Sgroi smoldered in his office. Finally Barbra had come skidding in with the explanation that she’d been at a movie and had to “wait to see all the credits.” The applause that had followed her performance that night had momentarily assuaged Sgroi’s pique, but Phyllis cautioned her young friend that it would come roaring back if she kept pulling stunts like that.
Barbra was never good at hearing criticism about herself. She’d go silent when Barré was sharp with her, turn a deaf ear to Bob or Terry, and had never put much stock in what her mother had to say. But for some reason, she didn’t get defensive when Phyllis counseled her. Like Allan Miller, Phyllis was an older figure Barbra respected, someone who possessed qualities that she wanted for herself: knowledge, experience, expertise. So she was inclined to listen when Phyllis spoke. The older woman, who had daughters not so far from Barbra’s age, was another of those mother figures she was drawn to who showed her the kind of interest and regard that Diana never had.
That was because Phyllis understood what the kid was up against. Barbra was “just starting out . . . and when you’re that young, everybody around you thinks they’re an expert.” Barré was always telling her how to sing, Bob how to dress. One of the Three Flames’ girlfriends routinely camped in the dressing room to advise Barbra on fixing her nose and styling her hair. The first time the woman had started in on her, Barbra had looked up to catch a sympathetic glance from Phyllis. In that moment, the two of them had “bonded,” Phyllis said.
It had been inevitable. “We’re two of a kind,” Phyllis told Barbra, “just two slightly unusual girls trying to make it in showbiz.” With their offbeat looks, Phyllis figured she and Barbra “faced exactly the same kind of pressures.” And so Phyllis had taken the teenager under her Chanel-draped wing.
They made their way into S. Klein’s department store. Klein’s sold clothes, dishware, toys, and furniture, and even offered a full-service pet department. At the moment, the store was pushing a sale on RCA color televisions “just in time for the World Series.” Color television was something Barbra could scarcely imagine, but Phyllis hadn’t brought her to the store to look at TVs. She hurried her across the polished wood floor toward Klein’s “Fashion Annex.”
The day before, Sgroi had approached Phyllis with a problem concerning Barbra that, in his opinion, was even more serious than her tardiness. “The little black lady in charge of the restroom,” Sgroi told Phyllis, “overheard some of the ladies complaining about Barbra’s outfits.” The eavesdropping attendant had promptly rushed the tidbit to Sgroi, who came to Phyllis pleading, “Would you take Barbra out and get her some clothes she can wear on stage?” If the buzz about her sloppy appearance continued, Sgroi worried, it could stall her career—and hurt his ticket sales.
Phyllis took great umbrage at the suggestion that Barbra was “sloppy”; in fact, the teenager was fastidiously put together, Phyllis believed. It was just that she dressed in her own idiosyncratic style. Phyllis, in fact, thought Barbra “looked good in anything.” She was “a real beauty,” Phyllis thought, with “beautiful lips, sexy legs, all the right curves, those beautiful hands with those long nails.” She told Sgroi he was a “crazy Charlie” for wanting Barbra to change her style.
But Sgroi was insistent. He flattered Phyllis by calling her “terribly chic,” pointing to her wardrobe full of Chanels and Trigères. Sgroi pleaded with Phyllis to give Barbra a makeover. Predictably, the manager didn’t offer to pay for it. But wanting to help out her young friend, Phyllis agreed to take Barbra shopping.
And so they embarked on a frustrating day of traipsing from boutique to boutique, trying on dozens of dresses. For Barbra, it was a world very different from the thrift shops she was used to. She despised department stores as a rule. They were “too dear,” she said, and the salespeople “so unpleasant and haughty.” Besides, they wouldn’t bargain. It wasn’t surprising that nothing caught Barbra’s fancy on her outing with Phyllis. “None of this stuff is me,” she said.
So it was on to Klein’s. But it seemed that this, too, was a lost cause. Then Phyllis spotted the store’s “Designer Room,” which contained “original designs created by America’s foremost ‘name’ fashion houses”—and all at S. Klein bargain prices between $39.99 and $150. Here, Phyllis hoped, was their answer. Slipping Barbra into what she called “the dress of the year”—a black knee-length Chanel she’d seen in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar—Phyllis stood back to admire her friend. Barbra looked gorgeous, Phyllis declared—sophisticated and all grown-up. Reluctantly, Barbra agreed to the dress, and Phyllis hurried to pay the cashier. It was getting late, and they had a show to do that night.
A few hours later, at the Bon Soir, Phyllis observed the dress hanging forlornly from a hook in the dressing room while Barbra buttoned up her usual antique thrift-shop garb. “I’ll wear the dress tomorrow night,” Barbra said. “I already had this all laid out. I’ll wear the dress tomorrow. Or maybe on the weekend.”
Phyllis just smiled. Nobody, she realized, told this kid what to do.
4.
At a little candlelit Italian eatery on Cornelia Street, the waiter asked them if they wanted a bottle of wine with dinner.
“I don’t think so,” Bob said. “She’s performing in a couple of hours.”
But Barbra insisted it was fine. She’d enjoy a little drink. There was talk up in Albany of raising the state drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one, so she might as well get it while she could. Besides, a night out with Bob allowed her to forget, for a little while anyway, the tensions with Barré and the stresses of the Bon Soir.
Sipping her wine, laughing as she twirled her spaghetti around on her fork, Barbra began to lament the “drudgery” of having to sing every night. She missed the old days when she and Bob—or Barré or Terry or Cis or any of her friends from the Theatre Studio—could just wander around the city, unrestricted by time. Now she had to be at the club every night by nine o’clock—though she often pushed it as late as she could, to nine thirty or even ten. Looking over at Bob and slurring her words ever so slightly, she told him she could not wait for this gig to be over. Then she surprised him by ordering another bottle of wine.
By the time they were rushing up Sixth Avenue in order not to be late to the club, Barbra was tipsy. Bob watched uneasily from her dressing room as she headed out onto the stage when Jimmie Daniels called her name. “Keepin’ out of mischief now,” Barbra sang. “I really am in love and how . . .”
She seemed okay, and Bob breathed a sigh of relief. But it wasn’t long before he began to notice a couple of missed lyrics. Anxiously he stood and peered out at Barbra from the wings. She wasn’t messy or slurry, but she wasn’t the disciplined creature she usually was out there. Her timing was off, just by a fraction, but it was enough to cede control of the show to her audience. When people began singing along with her and clapping their hands to the beat, Bob knew she had lost them. They were having fun, but this audience would not leave the club enthralled as their predecessors had, telling their friends that they just had to get down to the Village to see this girl. Tonight Barbra had not been extraordinary. Bob felt she had “broken the illusion.”
Afterward, he told her plainly, “We shouldn’t have had the wine. That was a bad show, Barbra.”
She reacted angrily. “They come to see me. Whatever I do, that’s what they get.”
But Bob could tell she was troubled. He hadn’t needed to tell her it was a bad show. She’d known it, even if she wouldn’t admit it.
Barbra stewed. She kept insisting she’d been fine, that Bob was overreacting, that the audience had been pleased, that it was her show and she could do it any way she wanted to. This damn singing business was taking away her life! But for all her defensive blather, never again did Bob see her take a drink before a show.
5.
Heading into the dressing room, Phyllis noticed that the black Chanel dress, which had been hanging on its hook for days, was now wrapped in paper and placed in a box.
She turned to see Barbra hovering nearby, unusually timid.
“Phyllis,” the girl asked, “would you mind very much if I took that dress back and bought fabric instead and used it to make a dress that I design myself?”
Phyllis looked at her. How sweet the kid was for worrying that she might hurt her feelings—or maybe, Phyllis thought, Barbra was just worried she’d “blow a gasket,” since Phyllis had paid for the damn thing. No matter what motivated Barbra’s timidity, Phyllis just smiled at her.
“Of course, baby,” she said. “In fact, that’s exactly what you should do.”
Barbra beamed.
Phyllis had no idea if the kid would make it in showbiz. It was a tough racket, after all. But even more than talent, which she had in spades, Barbra had something else, Phyllis thought. She had the courage to be herself—which would either boost her to the top or keep her forever on the bottom. Watching the kid head back to Klein’s, the dress tucked under her arm, Phyllis figured if she had to bet, she’d lay odds with the former.
6.
Tonight Barbra was on fire.
“Every note was perfect,” said the man who was sitting in the front row looking up at her, impressed and surprised by this ungainly neophyte. “Every move she made, every gesture, every lift of her eyebrows was on target.”
The man’s name was Ted Rozar. His broad-shouldered, six-foot-plus frame was barely contained in the small chair on the Bon Soir floor. An entertainment manager by occupation, Rozar had come down to the Village that night to see his client, comedian Paul Dooley, who’d taken over from the departing Tony and Eddie. Dooley was performing material written by another of Rozar’s clients, David Panich. At Rozar’s side was a third client, Orson Bean, who had told him before the show began that this Streisand kid was a “knockout.” But Rozar hadn’t expected to be as impressed as he was.
It was an exciting period all around. Just ten days before, John F. Kennedy had been elected president. The air vibrated with newness, change, and youth. Maybe some of that came through in Barbra’s performance that night. Yet what lifted her up most was the review she had long been waiting for, which had just been published days earlier.
“A startlingly young, stylish and vibrant-voiced gamine named Barbra Streisand is one of the pleasures of a club called the Bon Soir, ” Arthur Gelb had written in the New York Times. “[Patrons] seem to enjoy the way she sidles up to a microphone and gargles love songs into it in Spanish, French and broken English.”
Gelb was the same reviewer who had given Barré a mention that summer. And now Barbra had gotten her own name in the Times, with considerably more ink than Barré had received.
What’s more, Gelb hadn’t just liked her voice and her banter (lately she’d been throwing out a few phrases in other languages, including Yiddish). He’d also called her “stylish.” Barbra took great satisfaction from that. So much for those bluenoses in the ladies’ room who’d made disparaging remarks about her clothes.
Ted Rozar thought she was perfect. Everything about her—“her voice, her look, her way with the audience”—was “superb.” Leaning over to Bean during the applause, he whispered that Barbra was a cross between Eydie Gormé and Lily Pons. He said he wanted to represent her.
So, after the show was over, Bean took Rozar backstage.
“Barbra Streisand!” Rozar called out in his big, booming, deep-throated voice. She couldn’t have avoided him even if she’d wanted to. Rozar’s giant frame towered over her and he took her face into his large hands. She looked up at him with wide eyes.
“Barbra Streisand,” he repeated. “I love you.”
And with great dramatic flair, he kissed her on the cheek.
“My name is Ted Rozar. Do you know who I am?”
She said she did. Orson Bean had already filled her in.
“Do you have a manager?” Rozar asked.
Barbra replied that she did not. Her voice was small, wavering, unsure of this giant who still held her in his grip.
“I’d like to manage you,” Rozar said. He explained that he’d been an agent at MCA before going into management at Bean’s request. He was building “an impressive roster,” he told her, and wanted to add her to it.
“Will you hang on a minute?” Barbra asked, slipping out from Rozar’s grip and scrambling into the Bon Soir’s kitchen to call Barré. When she got him on the phone, she told him he had to come over. Right away.
Barré was there in less than ten minutes. Taking one look at Rozar, he thought he was “the whitest white man” he’d ever seen. Rozar had long blond hair that was combed straight back from his forehead and a “blazingly white smile” that made Barré think he might have to shield his eyes. Indeed, Rozar distinguished himself in a field predominated by Jews by calling himself “the only Gentile in the business.” Wary of him for some reason, Barré nonetheless suggested they head over to the Pam Pam to talk.
As they slid into a leatherette booth, Rozar was already pitching. “I think we can make great music together,” he was telling Barbra.
Barbra stared over at him. She wanted to act, she said, not just sing.
“Absolutely,” Rozar said. “You should do it all.”
The coffee and pastries were on him, he said, which won him some points in Barbra’s favor. In fact, he told her, all of her meals would be on him when they were together. He’d only let her pick up the tab, he said, when she hit it big. Then, he said, “you can take me to dinner.”
Barbra listened as Rozar promised to promote her for not just club dates and record deals but theater and television as well. She’d need an agent, and he could help her find one. Barré looked over and saw Barbra’s mind whirling. She seemed on the verge of saying yes and signing with Rozar right then and there, but suddenly she backed off. She had to get back to the club for her second show, she announced. She told Rozar she’d have to think about it for a while. He gave her his card. “Please, please, call me,” he implored.
Barbra said she’d give his offer some consideration.
Out on the street, when they were alone, Barré asked Barbra what she thought.
It was clear she was enticed by the promises Rozar had made. Theater. Television. That meant acting, she said, not just singing. But there was something about the manager’s blond all-American good looks that had left her uneasy. Could he really understand her? Did he really, honestly get her? “He’s such a goy,” she said at last to Barré, and they started to laugh. They laughed all the way back to the club, walking arm in arm.
It was a rare moment of levity and connection between them these days, and both of them made sure to relish it.
7.
Less than a week later, on November 23, Barbra signed with Ted Rozar. They agreed on a three-year contract, with Rozar taking ten percent if she made less than $350 a week, and twenty percent if she earned more. With his assistance, she had just signed with an agent as well, Irvin Arthur of the Associated Booking Corporation, who’d briefly run the RSVP nightclub and kept Mabel Mercer employed. Associated Booking had represented Billie Holiday until her death in 1959 and currently helmed the careers of Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and about “ninety percent of jazz’stop stars.”
And this—this—was where they booked her.
From the little raised stage in the dining room of this “family” hotel somewhere deep in the fir forests of the Catskill Mountains, Barbra did her best to win over her audience, an assemblage of senior citizens who looked and sounded an awful lot like her grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They were far more interested in discussing the lackluster menu offerings and the pinochle games they’d played that afternoon than listening to the little girl who’d gotten up to sing. Barbra trilled the first strains of “A Sleepin’ Bee,” but the audience kept right on talking. Rozar, who sat with his wife and Barré at a table near the back, finally stood and asked people to quiet down, waving his long arms and big hands. But it did no good. People just looked at him, perhaps wondering why this blond meshuggeneh goy was making so much noise.
Driving back to New York after the show, Rozar told Barbra that she shouldn’t be discouraged. Lady Luck was an unpredictable dame. When he was eighteen years old, he told her, fighting in the Korean War, he’d parachuted from an airplane and broke his back, spending nine months in a Stryker Frame as his spinal cord healed. That turned out to be “the luckiest thing that ever happened” to him, he said, because it allowed him to count his blessings. He could still see, hear, feel, think—and that deep belief in himself had allowed him to walk again. “It’s all in the attitude,” he said, puffing on his cigarette.
No doubt Barbra felt that her new manager wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. She’d been carrying plenty of attitude ever since she was twelve years old. But attitude was nothing without instinct, and her gut was telling her she was off to a bad start with Rozar. Barbra did not want to make a career singing in clubs and resorts. She thought she had made that clear. Nearly all of her acting-school classmates were practicing the craft they’d spent years—and buckets of blood, sweat, and tears—honing at the Theatre Studio. Carl Esser had just opened in Whisper to Me off-Broadway after spending the summer touring with Hans Conried in Not in the Book. Even Barbra’s old boyfriend, Roy Scott, was currently in rehearsals for Montserrat, a revival of Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Emmanuel Roblès’ play. Everybody was acting, it seemed.
Everybody except Barbra.
8.
Barbra sat very still, chin in the air, eyes looking upward. Determined to get out of the advertising game and make his living as an artist, Bob needed a sample portrait for his portfolio, and Barbra, he insisted, with her swan’s neck and aquiline nose, was an ideal model. The flattery won her over, and she’d agreed to sit for him. After all, there wasn’t much else going on for her these days. Since the disaster in the Catskills, not a single job offer had come her way. Calling Irvin Arthur every day had produced the same answer: “Sorry, nothing.” So she spent her days perched up on a stool, striking a pose like a queen, while Bob drew her with his charcoal pencil. But as much as she enjoyed playing artist’s model, Barbra’s mind was a million miles away.
Or, to be more accurate, three thousand miles away. Not long after they’d returned from the mountains, Barré had flown to Los Angeles to visit his family for the week of Hanukkah. Even before he left, Barbra had started missing him. She’d bought him a book of French art to read on the plane and had slipped little notes into it every ten or fifteen pages. On one note she’d written that she knew it was tough living with her, but she promised that when Barré returned—and here he had to flip the note over to continue reading—it would get even worse! Barré had laughed reading it, just as he was sure she had intended him to do.
But it was her last note, slipped into the final pages of the book, that had contained as much vulnerability as Barbra ever let herself reveal—offstage, that is. In that last note, she wrote that she would miss Barré and that she hoped he knew she was with him in spirit. It was signed with “a small bundle of love.”
Bob asked her to lift her chin a bit more.
Barbra complied. It was a very specific look that Bob was going for in his sketch. He wanted it to evoke the kind of drawings René Bouché did for Vogue, languid renderings of the rich and famous, people like Lady Astor and Elsa Maxwell and the Duchess of Windsor. For the sitting, he’d helped Barbra select a gorgeous Geoffrey Beene dress, one of those finds she’d snatched up at a thrift shop. As usual, he’d done her makeup, exaggerating her eyes with the now-standard double set of false eyelashes.
But something had been troubling Bob about Barbra’s look, and it took this sketch to figure it out. Until then, she’d been wearing “very elaborate teenage hairstyles,” usually with bangs and hairpieces and sometimes a ponytail. Bob arranged her hair simply, without any of the hairpieces, and instantly an entire new persona emerged.
For the first time, Bob thought, Barbra exuded a kind of “legitimate, mainstream beauty,” sophisticated and mature. The Victorian combing jackets and Roaring Twenties buckle shoes, while stylish, had been more like costumes. Now, looking over at her, Bob thought she seemed to conjure Audrey Hepburn, gamine yet elegant, youthful yet sophisticated, delicate yet durable.
Out of the corner of her eye, Barbra managed a few peeks at herself in the mirror as she sat there on her stool. Bob thought she liked what she saw, discovering parts of herself she hadn’t known were there. Without the romantic complication that existed with Barré, Barbra’s friendship with Bob could be a safe haven from whatever else might be troubling her, and she seemed to confide in him things she revealed to no one else. One time they gabbed for a solid nine hours on the telephone, then, realizing they both had a hankering for ice cream, met up for a cone and talked some more. Bob had observed that Barbra didn’t have a “tight group of friends” with whom she could take refuge and comfort. She still kept her friends distinctly separate and saw them one-on-one. Bob had never met Cis or Harvey Corman, for example, and while he’d met Terry Leong, he never socialized with him and Barbra.
Sometimes he wondered if the Barbra he knew was the same Barbra they knew. Did she share different parts of herself with different people? How many Barbras were there? Looking at her that day, as she sat on her stool appearing so comfortable in her newly created, cosmopolitan persona while secretly longing for a man who seemed increasingly unavailable, it would have been fair for Bob to wonder.
9.
Barré was coming home, and Barbra was beside herself with anticipation.
It had to be today, she reasoned. She’d mixed up the dates, expecting him the day before, and when he hadn’t shown, she figured she’d been a day off. Barré had told her that he’d be gone for a week. Hanukkah was over by now. So it must be today.
She and Bob had prepared quite the welcome-home feast. The table was loaded with lox and bagels, cream cheese, olives, and smoked fish, all of Barré’s favorites. The apartment was decorated with candles and flowers. When Barré hadn’t shown at what Barbra was certain was his appointed time of return, she’d become worried. Maybe there’d been an accident, she said to Bob. A plane crash. She called the airline and was told that the flight from Los Angeles had touched down safely earlier that day. She couldn’t phone Barré’s parents’ house to inquire if he was still there; Barré, like Barbra, hadn’t told his family that he was living with anyone. Barbra was stymied.
Outside, it was snowing again. A blast of cold rain had rid the city of much of the snow and grime that had pocked its streets for the past week, but now another storm was blowing across the island of Manhattan. Temperatures were dropping close to zero. The weatherman said a bitter cold wave was expected to stick around straight through Christmas, which was almost upon them. Barbra worried some more.
Finally, close to midnight, she accepted the fact that Barré wasn’t coming home this night either. It must be tomorrow, she told Bob. How could she have mixed the dates up so badly?
They ate some of the bagels and lox, fearful they’d spoil, and stuffed the rest of the food into the refrigerator. The next day, they took it all out once more and laid it on the table. The wait was on again. Barbra relit the candles, freshened the flowers. She and Bob sat in the living room on the slipcovered couch, under the fans and the feathers and the theatrical posters, beside the ventriloquist’s dummy and the cabinets filled with Barré’s collection of old record albums. All afternoon and into the evening they sat there, trying to make light conversation, trying to laugh about silly, inconsequential things, but Bob noticed how often Barbra’s eyes flickered over to the door, how every sound in the hallway made her jump.
No Barré that night either.
Once again, they ate some of the food and refrigerated the rest. For nearly a week, they repeated the process, until there was no food left and all the flowers had wilted.
And still Barré did not come home.
10.
Barré finally returned to New York more than a week late. He walked into the apartment to find Barbra on the telephone. She didn’t look up or say hello. “As cold as salted ice,” he described her when she finally hung up, and it had remained that way between them for these past few days. Barbra was “fed up” with him, Barré realized, and he was fast becoming “just as fed up with her.”
Barré knew that he had been wrong to stay so long in California without calling Barbra to explain. Sitting in his parents’ living room, he had watched the weather reports of the cold wave barreling down over the Northeast. “What are you hurrying back there for?” his father had asked. “You got anything to go back to?”
Barré had told his father no.
Part of his behavior, he admitted, was an attempt “to stick it” to Barbra. After all, he’d spent the last nine months completely in her service. Everything they did—everything they talked about—was somehow related to her career, her ambition, her life. It was never about him, Barré felt. That was why he told his father he had nothing to go back to in New York. But surely his reluctance to return to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend also had something to do with Barbra’s question: “What are we gonna do about sex?” It hung over Barré’s head like the sword of Damocles.
Now he was back. And Barbra was having her revenge.
It was New Year’s Eve. She’d left him alone in their apartment without telling him where she was going or when she’d be back. Turnabout was fair play after all.
As the hands of the clock drew ever closer to midnight, Barré sat in the apartment stewing. Yes, Bob had given him the details of how Barbra had waited for him, night after night, constantly hoping he’d walk through the door. But hadn’t that been exactly the way Barré had waited for her the night of his show in Central Park?
Finally he decided that he was not going to sit at home by himself on New Year’s Eve.
Fifteen miles southwest, Barbra was feeling exactly the same way. She had sought out a girlfriend, one of those acquaintances she kept separate from Barré and Bob, and together they’d taken the ferry over to Staten Island. Barbra’s companion had suggested they ring in the new year at a club called the Townhouse. Finding the manager, Barbra offered to sing a few songs if he paid her fifty dollars. Without any work over the last month, she was strapped for cash, and she’d learned that this voice of hers could be merchandized. The manager had no idea about her Bon Soir success, but since he was short an act, he agreed, and Barbra climbed up on stage.
The crowd liked her, but a few of them didn’t much care for her friend, who was black. So, while Barbra was singing, the manager made a “cutting gesture” across his throat—“eight bars and off.” Taking the cash, Barbra and her friend beat it out of there, no doubt glad to leave such a racist place behind.
It was in such a mood that Barbra returned to the apartment.
She walked in to find Barré having sex with a man, a light-skinned black man she didn’t recognize. In that moment, the shocking truth of their nine months together suddenly came crashing down on her—a truth she had known, of course, but had done her best to block out of her mind.
When Barbra had fallen in love with Barré, she had just turned eighteen. He was her first love. She was young, innocent, and inexperienced. She had given Barré her body. When asked later if she remembered much about the night she’d lost her virginity, she’d say, “A lot, yeah.” That was because she’d given Barré more than just her body; she’d given him her heart. She thought he had changed, that she had changed him. She had even allowed herself to imagine a future with him, going so far as to speak of marriage. Now her illusions were shattering around her like glass. The image of Barré and his lover seared itself into her brain. She would live with it, she’d admit, for the rest of her life.