CHAPTER EIGHT
1.
On the first day of rehearsals for I Can Get It for You Wholesale, stagehands were busy sweeping up the snow and slush tracked in by the cast and crew on this cold and wet day. A New Year’s Day storm had left the streets a mess. Flurries continued today, January 2, with temperatures hovering around twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. More than ever, Barbra loved her caracul-and-fox coat.
With more than a little bit of trepidation, she stepped into the Fifty-fourth Street Theatre, where rehearsals were being held, with a satchel bag slung over her shoulder. Another of David Merrick’s shows, Do Re Mi, was presented here at night, but during the day, the stage was theirs. The cast was already sitting in a circle—most on the floor, though Lillian Roth was perched gracefully on a metal folding chair—when Barbra walked in, a burst of cold air following her from the open door.
Elliott Gould caught one glimpse of her and thought she looked like “a young Fagin,” the vagabond leader of the street urchins from Oliver Twist. Barbra caught his glance and thought the long-limbed, curly-topped Elliott was “funny looking.” Then she settled down into the circle, cross-legged, with the rest of the cast.
Walking around them was a very serious taskmaster, the likes of whom Barbra had never known before. Arthur Laurents, with Gypsy and West Side Story under his belt, was a name, a power, a force to be reckoned with. He told his cast he expected them to be “better than excellent.” Anyone who wasn’t up to the challenge, he said, looking each one of them in the eye, should leave immediately.
The cast went over the script. Miss Marmelstein was one of the first to appear, with a whole stretch of dialogue talking into a phone—never the easiest task for an actor—while also simultaneously carrying on a conversation with her boss, Mr. Pulvermacher. So that first read-through saw Barbra, the youngest and least experienced of them, carrying on not one but two conversations all by herself.
“Maurice Pulvermacher, Eye, En, See,” she said, pretending to answer a phone in her best Jewish Brooklynese. “Gowns of distinction, street and formal.”
She looked up as if speaking to her boss while the caller droned on in her ear. “What should I tell I. Magnin?”
Then into the phone: “Boston?”
Covering the mouthpiece, speaking again to her boss: “Oh, it must be Filene’s.”
Back into the phone: “Yes? Hello? I’m sorry. We don’t know when we can ship your order. This strike—it’s the shipping clerks, yes—they’ve tied up the whole garment center.”
Here she was instructed by the stage directions to once again cover the mouthpiece and “hiss” over to Pulvermacher: “You want to talk to them?” She did as directed and then, finally, thankfully, it was someone else’s turn to speak.
Laurents was pleased. He liked this kid. He liked her style, her gumption, her ambition. But most of all, he liked her voice. Liked it so much, in fact, that he’d called Goddard Lieberson, an old friend, and asked him to reconsider the record deal he’d been too quick, in Laurents’s less-than-humble opinion, to dismiss. On the strength of Laurents’s recommendation, Lieberson told Marty Erlichman to bring Barbra into the Columbia studios and record a demo tape. The Columbia chief wanted to hear how she’d sound on a professionally produced album.
No such orchestrations, however, had been necessary to convince Laurents of Barbra’s talent. On that first day of rehearsals, the director felt nothing but optimism—toward Barbra, the rest of his cast, and the entire show. Their budget might be small, but Laurents believed a show needed imagination more than it needed money. “A limited amount of the latter,” the director said, forced “an almost unlimited supply of the former.”
And while he knew the book needed work, Laurents was pleased with its “tough, cynical attitude toward society”—precisely the reason he’d accepted the assignment in the first place. Wholesale, he felt, was something new and radically different for Broadway, something that was infused with “a sarcastic energy, a drive, a reality almost exotic for musicals.” It was the story of Harry Bogen, a pushy, ambitious, unethical garment-trade worker in Depression-era New York. For Bogen of the Bronx—much like a certain young lady from Brooklyn—it needed to be right to the top or nowhere at all. But unlike Barbra, there was nothing disarming, vulnerable, or redeeming about Bogen’s ambition. He embezzles, betrays his friends, and dumps the girl who loves him to take up with a floozy from the Club Rio Rhumba. By the time of the final curtain, he’s lost his friends and his job and is facing bankruptcy. Not exactly Curly and Laurey heading off on their honeymoon in that shiny little surrey with the fringe on top.
But Laurents had never been interested in stories that simply upheld the status quo. He’d subverted norms in Rope, upended expectations in Home of the Brave, and challenged the way audiences saw themselves in West Side Story. With Wholesale, there was similar potential, Laurents believed, providing he could overcome the flaws of the script. To do this, he was going to need the help of his actors, who would have to find ways to ground their performances in an “emotional reality”—never easy to do in the surreal world of musicals—but made even more difficult by Weidman’s substandard book.
Still, he was confident his actors were up to the task. Laurents had chosen them well, often fighting Merrick and the moneymen for the person he felt was best. Barbra hadn’t been his only battle. Laurents had also gone against Merrick’s wishes in the casting of Elliott Gould, arguing the young, rangy actor looked more the part than Laurence Harvey, Merrick’s original idea, or Steve Lawrence, who’d been championed by “those who threw the best theater parties.” The director insisted that “the only chance” the show had “to succeed completely was for it to succeed artistically.”
As he looked around at his cast that first day, Laurents felt Wholesale was on track to do just that. He had in his company some “exceptional singers and dancers,” and every one of them, including the neophyte who was playing Miss Marmelstein, could act. With these actors, Laurents believed, “the prosaic flatness of [the script] could be given theatrical life.” He could “trust his players to make his inventions work.”
From the very first moment, it was clear that Laurents was in charge, that he would oversee everything. The director knew not only how they should say their lines, but where they needed to be standing when they said them, and what they should be wearing, and how the light should be hitting their faces. Barbra, whose character was only in a handful of scenes, had plenty of opportunity to sit back and observe the director at work. She understood, right from the first day of rehearsals, that they could either be good or they could be great. Without a strong director, the show might still be a hit. But Laurents wanted more than box-office success. He wanted excellence. That was why he took such authority over every last detail of the show. It was a lesson that Barbra absorbed well.
Already she shared some of Laurents’s proprietary attitude. A few days earlier, she’d run into May Muth, Wholesale’s stage manager, at the Brasserie. “I hear you’re gonna be with my show,” she’d said to the Broadway veteran, whose credits dated back to 1929. And when, after the read-through was finished, she met her understudy, a young redhead named Louise Lasser, the girlfriend of rising nightclub comic Woody Allen, Barbra felt even more possessive of Miss Marmelstein. Barbra told one friend she would never give Lasser the chance to play the part “even if she was as sick as a dog.”
Barbra was, at that moment, the very picture of a theater gypsy. Some nights she stayed at Don Softness’s office, other nights at Peter Daniels’s studio (“very spooky,” Barbra called the big dark space). There were at least four other crash pads, some of which were in “very bad neighborhoods,” as she told Mike Wallace on the air. Diana was once again making regular grocery visits: Softness’s brother, John, often found “all this great kosher food” in his office refrigerator, like applesauce and Doxsee clam chowder.
For the next several weeks, however, most of Barbra’s time would be spent at the Fifty-fourth Street Theatre. Elliott Gould, passing out celebratory cigars after their first rehearsal was over, noticed her standing off to the side and thought she seemed like “a loner.” With apparently some special earnestness, he approached her with a cigar. At his solicitude, Barbra couldn’t help but smile. Elliott handed her the cigar, his big, dopey grin stretching across his long face. Barbra thought he seemed “like a little kid.” Although she didn’t inhale when he bent down and lit the cigar for her, she was enchanted by his gesture just the same.
2.
That night, Lorraine Gordon turned on the television to watch PM East. The show had been taped a week or so earlier. A friend of Mike Wallace’s, Gordon had inveigled her way on the program despite the host’s rather chauvinistic disregard for Women Strike for Peace. She brought along Dagmar Wilson, the founder of the group. Barbra was also scheduled to be on the show, so Gordon figured she’d have a good chorus of voices espousing the antinuclear position.
It didn’t quite turn out that way. Though the sparring between Barbra and Mike Wallace was entertaining to audiences, the two were growing to dislike each other more and more. The show started out well, however, with Wallace lauding Barbra’s recent accomplishments. “You know it’s exciting when something starts to happen in front of you,” he read from the prepared script. He pointed out that in the few months since Barbra’s debut on the show, she’d begun “to get into all kinds of interesting jobs.” While he couldn’t yet reveal anything about I Can Get It for YouWholesale, as Merrick hadn’t officially announced the cast, Wallace did mention the Blue Angel and the fact that Barbra’s run there had been extended. “So it’s beginning to happen,” the host said, looking over at Barbra.
“It’s crazy,” she replied.
“And she owes it all to Zen Buddhism,” the host said with a laugh.
Barbra had known ahead of time that they would talk about Zen. With the show’s producers, she’d gone over how she’d describe her meditation. She would explain how it had helped her and, as always, was willing to make her explanation amusing and eccentric. Still, Wallace’s condescending tone irked her.
“Do you have to ask me like that?” she responded. “You think you’re gonna ask me about Zen Buddhism and you think I’m going to tell you that I’m enlightened and all about Zen Buddhism, but that’s all foolishness.”
“But you wanted to talk about it,” Wallace said. “So go ahead and talk.”
Barbra remained silent. Wallace told her she was being impolite.
“Let me tell you something,” Barbra finally said, leveling her gaze at the host. “I used to like you.”
Nervous laughter in the studio.
“This is the truth,” Barbra continued. “I really like what he does. A lot of people don’t.”
More nervous laughter.
“It’s the truth,” Wallace admitted.
“I like the fact that you are provoking,” Barbra said. “But don’t provoke me.”
Of course, that only made Wallace want to provoke her more. Soon he was making a joke about the keys on Barbra’s keychain. “So you sort of sleep all over town?” he asked. Barbra insisted he make a distinction between “sleeping around” and “sleeping around town.” It got a good laugh, but the hostility was now palpable.
So it was perhaps not surprising that by the time Lorraine Gordon and Dagmar Wilson came out to discuss nuclear testing and the folly of building fallout shelters, Barbra seemed exhausted. After her comrades in the peace movement delivered impassioned calls for disarmament, Barbra was next in line for Wallace’s questioning. “You’re involved in this, too?” he asked, seeming to imply: Zen Buddhism, thrift shops, long fingernails, a crusade against smoked foods—and now the peace movement?
“Oh, yeah,” Barbra said, as Gordon remembered it. “We’re like a bunch of lemmings. We all follow each other and jump off the cliff.”
She gave Wallace the laugh he wanted instead of taking the opportunity to endorse the politics so fervently expressed by Gordon and Wilson. Gordon was livid at what seemed like a betrayal. She gave Barbra a kick under the table.
Yet few could stay angry with Barbra for long when she started to sing. On that show, she finally had a chance to show off how she’d mastered “Moon River.” Once again, the nineteen-year-old girl became ageless. “Moon River, wider than a mile,” Barbra sang. When she was finished, Mike Wallace looked into the camera and said, “It’s always a pleasure to listen to that girl sing.” No matter how much the kid might get under his skin at other times, the admiration in Wallace’s voice was real.
3.
The harmony and good feeling of the first day of rehearsal had quickly evaporated at the Fifty-fourth Street Theatre.
“No, that is not the way to do it!” Laurents shouted at Barbra. “Too much, too much!”
She paid him no mind and kept on singing. She was rehearsing her solo number, “Miss Marmelstein,” a song that had been written for the show, then taken out, then put back in so Barbra would have more to do. As written, Miss Marmelstein was “just another piece of furniture,” Weidman admitted, but Barbra’s stage presence, so big, so overpowering, made that unworkable. Therefore, early in the second act, a battalion of garment execs would march across the stage, ordering Miss M to perform various tasks for them. “At the end of her tether”—or so the stage directions described—the harried, homely secretary would look out at the audience and launch into her eponymous number.
“Why is it always Miss Marmelstein?” Barbra wailed as Laurents watched from the sidelines. She lamented how nobody ever called her “baby doll, or honey dear, or sweetie pie,” like they did other girls. Even her first name would be “preferable,” she griped, “though it’s terrible, it might be bettah, it’s Yetta.” The kvetching went on like this, as offstage voices kept up a running chorus of “Miss Marmelstein!” The number was intended to give the script a lift at a particular moment when it could use one. The audience needed a chance to laugh, Laurents realized, as Harry Bogen’s odious schemes began to unravel.
The problem was that Barbra had no sense of restraint. She was flailing around the stage, arms flying, eyes bugging out. She used her long fingernails to great effect as she flung her hands around—but it was the mannerism of a diva, Laurents grumbled, not a secretary. “Overkill,” Laurents called Barbra’s interpretation of the part. “Too many twitches and collapses, giggles and gasps, too many take-ums.” He didn’t want to lose her uniqueness—he thought her characterization of Miss Marmelstein was “very funny, a bizarre collection of idiosyncrasies which came from instinct and were probably rehearsed at home”—but he did want to “edit, to cut out the extraneous contortions.” Her performance, he realized, was coming “from the fingernails, not from inside.”
Striding out onto the stage, the director gave Barbra the signal to stop the number. The pianist broke off playing, and an uneasy silence fell over the empty theater.
Barbra wasn’t pleased. This back-and-forth with Laurents had been going on for a while. Not long before, they’d come to loggerheads when she’d asked to be excused from a rehearsal because she had to appear on PM East. Expecting permission to be granted, Barbra was already choosing what outfit to wear when Laurents had said no. Vexed, she tried finagling permission from Herbert Ross, who sent her back to Laurents. The director came to realize that Barbra felt “she was different, she was special” and that “future stars were not to be ignored.” When Laurents proved intransigent, Barbra sulked.
Even worse from her perspective was the director’s insistence “on blueprinting exactly how [she] should do everything.” That had never been her style. She preferred “to work slowly into the part,” playing it “by ear.” As in her nightclub acts, Barbra found it very difficult to do “anything twice in exactly the same way.” So she spoke up, arguing her point of view forcefully, a far cry from the timid little girl who’d blanched when Barré had dared to challenge Vasek Simek during The Insect Comedy.
But when she argued, she always did so respectfully, which Laurents appreciated. As much as she had her own, very definite opinions, she was also smart enough to recognize that, on her own, she lacked the discipline needed to shape Miss Marmelstein into a well-balanced character. That was one reason, she admitted, that she was glad she was in Wholesale—“to learn discipline in the theater.” But discipline required concentration, and concentration required listening—one skill Laurents felt Barbra lacked. It was her “low threshold for boredom” that gave her so much trouble, Laurents believed. It was also that old unremitting narcissism. When it was her turn to perform, Laurents noted, Barbra came alive, but when she had to listen—to him or to other performers—“Miss Marmelstein went home and in her place stood Barbra Streisand, uncomfortable in a costume.”
Laurents tolerated the narcissism because of Barbra’s specialness. Others weren’t as forgiving. Harold Rome had fought to have “Miss Marmelstein” put back into the show, arranging it specifically for Barbra. He’d also written her into several other numbers, agreeing that Barbra’s enormous stage presence had to be balanced throughout the two acts. But for his efforts, Rome never got a word of thanks, a fact the composer resented. To him, the teenager was “ungrateful” and “arrogant.” But Barbra figured she gave and they gave; they each “got something out of it.”There was no need, therefore, for any thanks. It was the same attitude her acting teacher Eli Rill had observed: Barbra was unwilling to perform the expected niceties—the “ass-kissing,” as one of Barbra’s friends put it bluntly. Rill hadn’t minded, but Harold Rome did. And from that moment on, the composer soured on the girl he’d once been so enthusiastic about.
There was indeed a degree of youthful hubris about Barbra. She was riding high, and even a second rejection from Goddard Lieberson (he’d told Laurents that Barbra was “too special for records” ) had been only a minor irritant. Music, after all, was only a means to an end. “I want to be a straight dramatic actress,” she’d tell a reporter around this time. “I really can’t explain it. It’s almost a compulsion.”
That was her underlying attitude, her core belief, as she stood face-to-face with her director, arms akimbo. It took choreographer Herbert Ross to break the impasse. Hurrying up the stairs to the stage, Ross had an idea. He was a young man, just thirty-four, but already a veteran Broadway choreographer. He’d staged A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and a revival of Finian’s Rainbow, and just recently he had finished the critically praised The Gay Life with Barbara Cook. Ross was talented, perceptive, and diplomatic. Why not, he asked, as he wheeled Miss Marmelstein’s chair across the stage on its casters, let Barbra do the number sitting down? After all, she’d auditioned that way. Laurents agreed to give it a try.
It worked—wonderfully. Miss Marmelstein could sing her humorous tale of woe while sliding across the stage in her secretary’s chair, first this way, then that way, all precisely choreographed by Ross. Barbra was pleased as well, feeling the chair had really been her idea—which, no doubt, Ross had anticipated when he’d suggested she use it.
In the wings, Elliott Gould watched it all unfold. Though he’d been enjoying a bit of a flirtation with his leading lady, Marilyn Cooper, the more Elliott observed Barbra, the more “fascinated” he became. She might have a formidable stage presence, but underneath, Elliott felt, she needed “to be protected.” Barbra was “a very fragile little girl,” Elliott suspected, one he found “absolutely exquisite.” Although he figured Barbra didn’t “commit easily,” he had “a desire to make her feel secure.”
And so, that afternoon or one very much like it, Elliott Gould asked Barbra Streisand out on a date.
4.
It was two o’clock in the morning in Rockefeller Center. They’d been wandering the city together all night, their cheeks cold and rosy, their conversation as meandering as their walk. Suddenly, without warning, Barbra bent down, shaped a snowball in her mittened hands, and lobbed it across at Elliott, nailing him perfectly. His competitive nature triggered, Elliott scooped up his own ammunition and retaliated, his aim proving to be as good as hers. Within moments, a full-scale snowball fight was underway, the laughter of the two combatants echoing through the empty plaza.
More than snowballs were ricocheting between them that night. Elliott was utterly smitten. To him, Barbra was a combination of Sophia Loren—love goddess—and Y. A. Tittle—the New York Giants’ tenacious quarterback who’d helped the team win the Eastern Division title in December. Walking Barbra to the subway after rehearsals, Elliott had come to think of her as the “most innocent thing” he’d ever seen. But something about Barbra scared him, too. She was a beatnik and a bohemian, after all, so very different from the other girls he knew. Yet despite his fear, or maybe partially because of it, Elliott “really dug her”—and he sensed he might have been “the first person who really did.”
At last overwhelming her with snowballs—he called it a “hex”—Elliott began to chase her around the skating rink. Barbra squealed with delight. Elliott’s pursuit of her was “strange and wonderful,” she’d admitted to one friend. His interest was plainly evident, whereas, in the past, there had always been doubts with other men. Barbra had come to feel that her pursuit of men who weren’t as interested in her as she was in them reflected “a throwback” to Louis Kind, when she’d tried in vain to make her stepfather like her.
But Elliott—she’d started calling him “Elly”—was the antithesis of all that. He’d phoned her; he’d walked her to the subway; he’d asked her out. She hadn’t gone after him; he’d come after her. That was significant. Now, wrestling her down in the snow, Elly looked into her blue eyes. He saw insecurity behind the bravado; Barbra’s “weirdness,” he realized, was merely a defense. Scooping some snow in his hands, he “very delicately” washed her face with it. Then, just as tenderly, he kissed her lips. Nothing too demonstrative, but it was perhaps the most romantic gesture any man had ever extended to her. “Like out of a movie,” Barbra thought. And for once she was playing the part of the leading lady, as she’d always believed she could.
5.
Moonlight filled a cloudless sky over Philadelphia in the early morning hours of February 13. At the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, its magnificent French Renaissance architecture resplendent in the moonlight, Barbra and the rest of the Wholesale company hurried down the famous marble-and-iron elliptical staircase to the Tiffany-glass ballroom, where a celebration was underway after their first-night preview performance. But the cheers and clinking of champagne flutes belied the anxiety they all—but mostly their director—felt. The morning edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer would soon be out, and the critics would have their say.
Arthur Laurents still worried that the book wasn’t entirely right. He had hoped some clever directing and skillful acting might bridge the gaps, but after tonight’s performance, he knew the problems wouldn’t be solved until Weidman’s script was chopped up and reassembled. The director concluded he’d been too respectful of the writer’s work, and he feared the critics wouldn’t forgive him for such a dereliction of duty. Many shows died in Philadelphia, he knew all too well, before they ever reached New York.
On the surface, everything had seemed to go well. Showtime at the Shubert Theatre had been at eight o’clock, and the house, to Laurents’s great relief, had been full. That same week, David Merrick had opened a second show in Philly, the touring company of Irma la Douce, but he’d insisted that the two premieres be staggered so as not to compete with each other.
Most people in that first-night crowd had turned out to see Lillian Roth, who’d received the lion’s share of preshow publicity. In the Inquirer just that morning, Whitney Bolton had devoted an entire column to Roth’s comeback. “Just thirty years after her last appearance on Broadway,” Bolton wrote, “she is destined to be back again on the street where the lights twinkle, where the only thing that counts is talent—and one’s use of it.” Roth’s connection to a glamorous, long-vanished Broadway—she’d worked for Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll—impressed the columnists and the public.
But not Barbra. Barré and Bob and Marty had all tried to instill in her an appreciation of the old-time greats, but she never had much feeling for history. She was smart enough, and decent enough, to treat Roth with the proper respect. But there was never any adulation, never any closeness. One friend asked Barbra if she ever sat at Roth’s knee and listened to her stories about Broadway’s Golden Age. Barbra replied, “What, are you crazy? Why would I do that?”
She was, in fact, frustrated that the advance publicity for Wholesale barely mentioned her at all. A caricature of the cast in the February 11 edition of the Inquirer had included nearly everyone but her. The young stars being promoted with the most press releases and interviews were Elliott, of course, and Marilyn Cooper, who played Harry Bogen’s girlfriend. But Harold Lang, Jack Kruschen, and Bambi Linn had also been singled out for publicity. Not a word, however, about Barbra.
Part of the publicists’ reluctance to highlight their youngest cast member no doubt stemmed from Merrick’s continued distaste for her, and his not-so-subtle hints to Laurents that she be replaced. Even this late in the game, it remained a possibility: Marilyn Lovell, playing the voluptuous showgirl, had been given the boot just before they’d headed to Philadelphia and was replaced by Sheree North, the onetime rival to Marilyn Monroe who Merrick thought had more sex appeal. But Barbra refused even to contemplate such a possibility. Instead, she was blithely planning how she might get herself noticed even without the help of the show’s press agents. Her strategy, as it turned out, was nothing if not original.
Jerome Weidman discovered what she was up to at one rehearsal. He’d spotted her scribbling away, presumably taking notes. But when he got a closer look, he discovered that Barbra had actually been writing her bio for the show’s playbill. “Born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon,” Barbra had written of herself. Encouraged by her publicists at the Softness Group, Barbra saw a golden opportunity to get herself some attention, in the same way she’d used comparable gambits in Detroit and Winnipeg. She’d written a similar bio for the Harry Stoones program, too, but this one would be seen by a lot more people. After all, Barbra reasoned, she was playing a Jewish secretary, so saying she was “from Brooklyn and brought up in Flatbush” would have “meant nothing.” But if audiences thought she came from Madagascar . . .
That wasn’t all she wrote. Miss Streisand, the bio concluded, “is not a member of the Actors Studio.” With that one simple little line, Barbra had her revenge against all those pretentious up-and-comers who loved to flaunt their training at the Actors Studio—an education that Barbra had, of course, not been able to secure for herself. Indeed, by thumbing her nose at the “pompous and serious” tradition of program biographies, Barbra had turned a deficiency into an asset. If it seemed more like the modus operandi of the kook from PM East than the unassuming, by-the-book Miss Marmelstein, it didn’t matter. That night it was Barbra’s bio that stood out in the program more than anyone else’s, and that was the point.
Barbra herself also stood out on the stage. When Miss Marmelstein had come rolling out on her chair, kvetching about her life, she had gotten the loudest, most sustained applause of the night. Barbra had to have felt good about her performance, and about the reception she had received from the audience. Certainly Laurents did. He was pleased that her performance, even if it came more from her fingernails than it did her heart, had made such a connection with the audience. But critics had been known to see things very differently from those sitting around them.
It wasn’t yet light out when the first editions of the Inquirer made it to the Bellevue-Stratford. The ink was still moist as Laurents pulled open the paper, bypassing the news on the front page—Secretary of State Dean Rusk was trying to negotiate with the Soviets about nuclear arms—to go directly to the theater section. Under the headline GARMENT SHOP BACK ON STAGE, the review confirmed Laurents’s fears. Critic Henry T. Murdock, who’d been with the Inquirer since 1950 and whose tastes tended more toward musicals such as Guys and Dolls, thought Harold Rome’s score possessed “range and versatility” and that Herbert Ross had taken a “unique approach to dancing.” But when it came to the book, he wrote, “our enthusiasm dwindles.” Wholesale was supposed to be a musical comedy, Murdock argued, but he couldn’t find the comedy. The “hero-heel,” the critic wrote, was just not redeeming enough in the way Gene Kelly or Robert Morse had been in similar parts in Pal Joey and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The fault, Murdock wrote, could not be handed to Elliott, “who gives Harry everything the libretto demands.” Rather, the flaw of the show was the script. Laurents felt as if he could have penned the review himself.
But there was one moment Murdock felt compelled to single out. With comedy in such short supply, the critic welcomed the show’s “most truly comic song”: the “Miss Marmelstein” number that had roused the audience from its near torpor the night before. “Barbra Streisand,” Murdock wrote, “brings down the house.” Among the company it was now obvious that the show had problems—perhaps serious ones—but the one part that worked without question was Barbra.
A few days later, when a second review appeared in the Inquirer, the strength of her position was confirmed. Barbra was the only cast member singled out for praise. “She stops the show in its tracks,” the reviewer declared, a line Merrick’s publicists were quick to incorporate into all of their press releases from that point on. The acclaim kept coming. Dorothy Kilgallen, a fan of Barbra’s since the first Bon Soir appearance, reported in her syndicated column—which reached far more readers than the local Philly papers—that none other than Henry Fonda had seen Wholesale and had “registered considerable enthusiasm for comedienne Barbra Streisand.” Merrick’s grumbling about her abruptly ceased.
No matter what might happen to I Can Get It for You Wholesale, one thing had become abundantly clear by the end of February. Barbra was going to be a hit.
6.
Elliott Gould’s eyes, one reporter observed, were “as large and melancholy as a Saint Bernard’s, an animal with which he shares the same shambling gait.” But this night, those hangdog eyes seemed to flicker with a kind of electricity as the young man made his way up the elliptical staircase of the Bellevue-Stratford.
Arthur Laurents knew where Elliott was headed, and it made him smile. Only now was the company catching on to the fact that Harry Bogen was romancing Miss Marmelstein. Marilyn Cooper had been stung when Elliott transferred his attentions from her to Barbra. But despite his leading lady’s disappointment, Laurents had encouraged the budding affair—“Godfathering the romance,” he called his efforts. To the director, Elliott and Barbra seemed a “Jewish show-business Romeo and Juliet, in love with each other and ice cream.” The sweet treat was indeed a point of commonality between them. Many nights Elliott would carry a box of Breyer’s coffee ice cream up to Barbra’s room, two spoons tucked into the front pocket of his shirt.
Sex was in the air. The newspapers were filled with dispatches from the set of Cleopatra in Rome about the affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both married to other people. So notorious was the scandal that it bumped John Glenn’s historic space flight off the first pages of many tabloids, keeping “Liz and Dick” front and center. In Philadelphia, as in most places around the planet, talk of “Le Scandale” was on everyone’s lips, and the I Can Get It for You Wholesale company was no exception. For the freethinkers among them—which included Barbra and Elliott—the chutzpah of Taylor and Burton would have seemed remarkable, even admirable. Instead of offering denials or apologies, the celebrity pair seemed to be insisting that love—and sex—was more important than propriety.
Elliott hadn’t always been such a freethinker. He’d been “scared most of [his] life,” he admitted. As a kid, he’d been convinced that he possessed a strange ability—almost a “psychic power,” he said—that enabled him to intuit a person’s true feelings toward him. Someone might say he was smart, or talented, or handsome, but Elliott knew they were actually thinking just the opposite. For most of his twenty-three years, he had walked around with his head down avoiding making eye contact—not just from a sense of insecurity, but also from a preponderance of caution. Keeping his eyes on the floor, Elliott explained, ensured he wouldn’t “trip on anything.”
He became an actor, he said, so he could “communicate in a world that was alien” to him and “get beneath the roots of self-doubt.” Winning the lead in a Broadway play had gone a long way toward that goal, but those roots of self-doubt ran very deep—as deep, or even deeper, than Barbra’s. It was unlikely that one show—or any amount of playacting on the stage—could ever completely overrule a belief that had been instilled in him from the time he was a very young boy.
He was born Elliott Goldstein in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father, Bernard, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, was a salesman in the garment industry—further reason Arthur Laurents saw such verisimilitude in Elliott’s casting. Bernard was a distant, reserved man who was never demonstrative with his son; he had “too much pride” for that, Elliott believed. Indeed, the elder Goldstein sometimes seemed resentful of the little boy, telling a story of how he’d taken a very young Elliott to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers play the Cubs. “Four home runs were hit in the game,” Bernard groused. “I didn’t see one of them. I was in the men’s room with Elliott each time.”
Part of his resentment may have stemmed from the fact that he’d never been in love with the boy’s mother, the former Lucille Raver, whom he’d married on the rebound after his true love’s parents had put a halt to their elopement. It was telling, no doubt, that Elliott was Bernard and Lucille’s only child.
Like her husband, Lucille was the offspring of a Russian Jewish immigrant; her father had worked as a glass salesman in the Bronx. After her marriage, Lucille peddled artificial flowers throughout Bensonhurst to supplement Bernard’s income as a salesman. Unlike Emanuel Streisand, Bernard Goldstein was no intellect. He seemed to have no sense of the world beyond Bensonhurst, even after he came back from the war. He worked hard to support his family, but there was never any quest for something more.
What Bernard lacked in ambition Lucille made up tenfold. From a young age she’d had stars in her eyes. Lucille wanted more than just a two-and-a-half-room apartment on Bay Parkway, but she knew her husband was never going to get it for her. They argued constantly. By the time Elliott was three years old, he instinctively understood that his mother and father didn’t belong together, that they “didn’t understand one another.” The unhappiness of his parents’ lives meant that the lessons they taught Elliott would be relentlessly pessimistic: “Be careful, don’t trust anybody, you’ve got to save.” With tension always crackling just under the surface, Elliott lived in constant fear that everything could explode at any moment. He grew up “in terror of conflict,” a feeling that lasted well into adulthood.
And yet, on another level, Elliott absolutely worshipped his parents. They were his entire life. Until he was eleven, he shared a bedroom with them; the concept of privacy was completely alien to the boy. To Elliott, his parents were “Mr. and Mrs. Captain Marvel” —his heroes. “You won’t ever have better friends than us,” they often reminded him. Everything Elliott did, he did for them, because without them, he was lost. Lucille, especially, dominated her son’s daily thoughts. She dressed him, pampered him, took him everywhere with her. Eventually she’d come to acknowledge that she might have been a bit smothering, but it was always “done out of love,” she insisted. She would have cut off her arm for Elliott, Lucille declared.
But even his mother’s constant doting couldn’t dissuade Elliott from the belief that he was an ugly child—yet another bond shared with Barbra. Growing up, Elliott felt too big for his age. He thought he had a “fat ass.” His hair was too curly, impossible to slick down—a problem because he wanted to look like Robert Wagner. More than anything Elliott wished he were Irish—a big, tough Irish brawler, the kind he saw on the streets, the kind who never let life beat them down. Despite being bar mitzvahed, Elliott maintained even less of a connection to his Jewishness than Barbra did with hers.
Where Elliott could escape was in the darkened Marlboro Theatre, where, like Barbra in a similar movie house three miles away, he imagined himself up on the silver screen. His favorite stars were Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper because they seemed like ordinary people, unlike so many of the others—Robert Wagner perhaps most of all—who filled the fan magazines. Elliott wondered if anyone would ever want to see real people on the screen—people like himself—and not “creations of Hollywood.”
At the age of eight, he started on a path to find out. Bored and desperate to find a way out of their dead-end life, Lucille began dragging her son off the basketball courts he loved so that he could audition for music shows and talent contests—anyplace, Elliott said, that was “looking to buy a kid.” Problem was, this kid couldn’t sing or dance. Elliott remained “very withdrawn, very shy and inhibited.” So Lucille enrolled him in Charles Lowe’s School of Theatrical Arts, located on an upper floor at 1650 Broadway, where, in the summer, giant electric fans turned in the windows as little children tap-danced across the oak wood floors. “Uncle Charlie,” as Lowe was known to his students, was a former vaudevillian in his late sixties with “parentheses-shaped legs” who, with his wife, a one-time silent-movie actress, taught the progeny of ambitious stage mothers how to tap, sing, and project personality.
But when Lucille first tugged Elliott up the narrow stairs to Lowe’s school, her hopes for her tongue-tied son were much more modest. “Fix up his diction,” she pleaded with Lowe.
“Sure,” the teacher replied. “We’ll give him a little drama, teach him to sing, teach him to dance.”
“He’ll never dance,” Lucille predicted. “Just fix the diction.”
But Uncle Charlie gave Elliott the works. “That meant everything,” Elliott griped, looking back. “Blow-your-nose lessons, dance lessons, wipe-yourself lessons.” All because of the “compulsions of a dissatisfied mother,” he later came to understand. But he went along with all the singing and dancing because he couldn’t imagine saying no to Lucille—because he never, ever questioned his parents.
Lowe didn’t just teach. He also acted as a kind of agent, placing his students in shows on local stages and local television. “Whoever got any of the bread,” Elliott said, using the slang for money, “the kids sure as hell didn’t.” Every once in a while, he’d be rewarded with “a pastrami sandwich or a flashlight or something,” but his job was to go out there on stage and sing and dance while Lowe and his mother took home the cash.
By the time he was ten, Elliott had been transformed into a little trouper straight out of old-time vaudeville. “Mary had a little lamb,” he’d warble onstage. “Some peas and mashed potatoes, an ear of corn, some buttered beets and then had sliced tomatoes.” Taking a breath, he started in on the next verse. “She said she wasn’t hungry, so I thought I had a break, but just to keep me company, she ordered up a steak.” Eight more cringe-inducing verses followed before he would tip his straw hat to the audience’s applause and run into the wings.
On television he appeared on the Bonny Maid Versatile Varieties program, a song-and-dance fest on WNBT. It was for this show that Uncle Charlie tried to persuade Lucille to drop the name Goldstein and bill Elliott as “Gold.” Lucille deemed “Gould” a little more elegant, so it was as Elliott Gould that the boy made his television debut.
By the time he was twelve, however, Elliott was a “has-been,” or at least that was how Lucille described him. He was “too old to be cute,” she thought. So she got him work as a model. Elliott was a standard size eight, perfect for merchandise catalogs. For several years he dressed as a miniature grenadier and handed out pens at dry-goods conventions. And all the money he made went straight to his parents’ bank account.
Barbra could barely comprehend such a childhood. In her typical way, she had grilled Elliott for all the details he could remember: the dancing classes, the elocution lessons, the backstage dramas. Most of all, she was fascinated by the idea of a mother who was so determined that her child succeed that she paid for all sorts of professional training—and by the idea of a child who really would have preferred to stay home. Here their experiences diverged sharply. Barbra had always wanted to be an achiever; Elliott had just wanted to play basketball. Their struggles with self-worth might have been similar, but Elliott, unlike Barbra, had felt no need to prove himself the best in everything he did. He was just hoping to get through it without falling down.
When Elliott was in the eighth grade, his father relocated the family to West Orange, New Jersey. But if Elliott hoped that living an hour and a half outside the city would mean an end to all that singing and dancing, he was wrong. Lucille kept accepting assignments for him, and since his schooling would undoubtedly be affected by his performing schedule, she enrolled him in the Professional Children’s School at Broadway and Sixty-first Street in Manhattan. Since 1914 the school had been accommodating young performers, slipping in an education for them in between shows. Several times a week, Elliott commuted into the city and “got sick on the bus every time.” He hated the school, considered his education there “lame,” and said the teachers made him “feel like shit.” The anxiety that he felt “when [he] didn’t do well was severe.” More than anything, he wished he could have an ordinary life, but he never dared to say that to his parents.
Yet there came a point when he, too, got bit by the bug of ambition. It was in May 1952, when he was thirteen, and he was booked at the Palace, the grand old theater at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street that was then featuring a bill of eight vaudeville acts plus a movie. Elliott had a short little number that he performed four times a day for two weeks straight. He would walk out onto the stage in a bellhop’s uniform shouting, “Telegram for Bill Callahan!” Callahan was then a popular song-and-dance man (he’d just finished a featured part in the Johnny Mercer musical Top Banana at the Winter Garden Theatre) who was next up on the bill. When the orchestra leader chased after Elliott, protesting that they had a show going on, Elliott replied with a song that served as Callahan’s musical introduction. The teenager always got a big hand from the audience and a wave of appreciation from the older performer.
By now Elliott had shot up to six feet, which meant he could partner with his mother in mambo contests during the summers at borscht belt resorts in the Catskills. He also entertained resort guests twice a night on weekends dressed in high-waisted dancer’s pants and matching silk shirts, nervously shuffling his way through a soft-shoe rendition of the jazz standard “Crazy Rhythm.” Yet as much as he detested this part of his show business career, he was old enough to quit—and he didn’t. By the age of eighteen, he was auditioning for Broadway shows on his own, and he won a spot in the chorus line for the musical Rumple. In 1958 there was another spot in another chorus line in another musical, Say, Darling, composed by Jule Styne.
Though he may have been more motivated these days, Elliott was still embarrassed by auditions. He considered it unnatural for a grown man to walk into a room, and sing and dance for other people’s approval. Maybe that was part of the reason that soon there were no shows at all. Out of work at the age of twenty-one, Elliott started gambling. For a while, it got pretty bad; he found himself deep in debt. He had to pawn some of his father’s jewelry, then he took jobs as a rug-cleaner salesman and an elevator operator at the Park Royal Hotel on Seventy-third Street. For another job, he wore yellow makeup and a long fake mustache to hawk a game called Confucius Say in Gimbel’s department store. Then, after pushing himself to audition for David Merrick, he’d landed the gig in Irma la Douce, which had led to Wholesale.
To survive in the cutthroat world of the theater, Elliott had learned to become more of an extrovert, though it remained posturing: He still felt like turning and running away. But his mastery of dozens of dialects entertained guests at parties, and unsuspecting diner patrons were always amused when he pretended to make a meal of his napkin—a bit of an homage to Charlie Chaplin in The Kid. “For a repressed, inhibited, shy person,” Elliott said, to discover that he “could have an effect on people by making a joke” was a major revelation. So, rather late in the game, Elliott became a joker.
And Barbra loved his jokes. After listening to her speak passionately about the Dalai Lama—a hero and a holy man to Zen Buddhists—Elliott had sent her a package of corned beef, pastrami, pickles, and coleslaw with a card signed “From the Deli Lama.” It was exactly the kind of offbeat humor she enjoyed, and the kind she used herself on PM East. They laughed together; they understood each other’s insecurities; they shared enough personal history to make communication easy. In so many ways, they seemed to be kindred souls.
But that didn’t make Elliott any less nervous as he headed up the hotel stairs to meet her. This moment had been coming ever since he’d put that snow on her face in Rockefeller Center and kissed her lightly on the lips. Now the passion and energy of opening in Philadelphia had made the consummation of more than a month of flirtation inevitable.
Elliott was terrified. His mother’s “ferocity,” he believed, had left him “scared of women,” so, at twenty-three, he was still a virgin. That was about to end. He had chosen Barbra to be his first.
Ever since the very first play was performed, there has been something seductive about the daily ritual of putting on a show. With people living and working together so intimately, romances tend to blossom. Affairs begin and end, often dramatically. And usually one member of the cast—often the star, but not always—stands out from the rest as a sort of prize to be won. Arthur Laurents thought it was ironic that, due to the spotlight shined on her by the critics, Barbra became “the most attractive member of the show.” And as the acclaim for her grew, Barbra saw her desirability increase in Elliott’s eyes—especially since he was painfully aware of his own shortcomings. He knew Merrick wasn’t happy with him; he knew he was “terribly green” and was “trying too hard.” But Barbra seemed to do what she did so effortlessly. That gave her remarkable cachet with Elliott. Marilyn Cooper—prettier and higher on the bill—could never have offered the kind of aphrodisiac Barbra provided.
The attraction went both ways. From Barbra’s perspective, she had landed the star of the show and that was exciting on its own, raising her profile among the company even higher. And the fact that she had won him away from pretty Marilyn Cooper likely made the romance even sweeter for her. The initial attraction between Barbra and Elliott had been random and impulsive. But it had deepened into something that dovetailed quite nicely with their individual ambitions and their own senses of themselves.
By now, Barbra was as interested in Elliott as he was in her. Except when it came to looks. Elliott was everything Barré had been—smart, funny, devoted—but with a couple of crucial extra benefits. First, he was successful—or at least he was on the verge of being successful. Last Barbra knew, Barré was still struggling off-off-Broadway. And—no doubt the most important attribute of all—Elliott was heterosexual to his bones. “I bat from just one side of the plate myself,” he said, describing his sexuality. “The right side. I’m no good on the left.” After being surrounded by so many gay men over the past couple of years—all of whom loved her but could never give her what she really wanted—Barbra seemed, at least to some friends, to be absolutely relishing this sudden, surprising connection to a guy who was so unambiguously straight. Finally a guy—a real guy’s guy—wanted her.
And yet Elliott was also sensitive and seemed completely unchauvinistic. Women’s liberation, he said, should have nothing to do with gender, but should instead be concerned with “both men and women, with breaking tradition.” No wonder that by late February 1962, Barbra was head over heels in love with him. She’d find herself talking “gibberish” around him; one night, distracted by thoughts of Elliott, she’d gone on stage with only half her face made up. She guessed this was love.
That night in Philly, they met in his room. Only they know what transpired, who kissed whom first, who undid the first button. But at one point, a bunch of the guys from the show began pounding on the door. Elliott ignored them. He was “trying to become a man,” he admitted, and this was “his moment”—a moment for which he’d waited a very long time. He “wasn’t about to let anyone take it away.” As Barbra and Elliott remained very still, the pounding finally died down, and they returned to the business at hand. Apparently, despite his fears, Elliott did okay; Barbra, after all, had a little more experience in such things. She remembered Muriel Choy telling her that the man didn’t “necessarily” always have to be on top, and so Barbra took charge. She was always good at running a show. So good, in fact, that within a very short time, Wilma Curley, a dancer in the chorus who had the room next to Elliott’s, had to rap on the door and tell them to keep it down.
7.
It was cold on February 27, opening night in Boston, but New Englanders were used to that. They were lining up outside the box office of the Colonial Theatre on Boylston Street well before showtime. That meant a full house for opening night. Cast and crew, taking their places backstage, were ecstatic.
Arthur Laurents wasn’t as serene, however. A big audience was good news only if the show was worthy of it. He’d made some changes to the book since Philadelphia, but whether they were enough, he wasn’t sure. In fact, he suspected they weren’t. But he’d been put through hell just to achieve this much. He’d wanted to make alterations only in cooperation with Weidman and Rome, but the changes the writers had come up with had been laughable in Laurents’s opinion. Recognizing that the first commandment of out-of-town musicals was “survive,” he did what he, as a writer himself, had once considered unthinkable: He cut, he pasted, and—“mea culpa, mea culpa”—he rewrote the book. “Poison-pen notes” from Rome started appearing under Laurents’s door every night until they grew so fat they had to be left at the front desk.
His friend Stephen Sondheim understood what he was dealing with. He had seen the show in Philadelphia and thought, despite its script problems, that Wholesale was terrific. If Laurents could resist the pressures from Merrick to “sweeten” and “explain” the nasty central character, then Wholesale “ought to have enormous impact,” Sondheim believed.
On a strictly financial basis, the company was looking pretty good. Attendance had been steady in Philadelphia through the very last show on February 24, and tonight’s packed house boded well for the Boston run. Merrick might not be able to make back his costs during previews, one critic observed, but ticket sales had been strong enough to allow him to “approach New York with a little less nail-biting than usual.”
The show was also getting good press. There had been Dorothy Kilgallen’s column singling out Barbra, and a couple of other mentions from Leonard Lyons, and a whole slew of articles profiling Lillian Roth’s comeback. Weidman and Rome had appeared on PM East, largely due to Barbra’s relationship with the show. There were also a series of syndicated articles about Elliott, which described him as a former child entertainer who had “persevered . . . despite the usual rough time in the beginning.”
If Merrick had his way, however, there would be no more publicity on Elliott. Even as the company moved to Boston, settling in at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the producer was still pressing Laurents to fire their leading man. Merrick was furious that when Elliott danced, the first several rows of the orchestra “were sprayed with sweat” —a charge Laurents had to admit was true. To solve the problem, they’d called in Dr. Max Jacobson—known as “Dr. Feelgood” for the amphetamine injections he gave to Tennessee Williams, Eddie Fisher, and President Kennedy—but the medication not only dried up Elliott’s flying perspiration but also his vocal chords. Merrick just wanted him gone. Laurents stepped in and said that if Elliott was fired, he’d quit. So far, the producer hadn’t called Laurents’s bluff.
Backstage, Barbra, in full makeup and costume, was already in the wings, since she was one of the first actors on the stage. The overture was playing. It was one of those rare moments of quiet contemplation right before a show. Perhaps Barbra meditated; perhaps she thought about everything that had brought her to this point. It was true that the Boston newspaper advertisements had billed Lillian Roth at the top, with Elliott and Sheree North at the bottom in special, larger print. It was true, too, that Barbra came dead last. (While Bambi Linn technically was listed after her, she was on a special line, denoting a special appearance.) So Barbra remained last billed. The least important, it would seem.
But those glowing reviews had followed her. No doubt she had taken some satisfaction in the fact that, a week earlier, it had been her stand-alone photograph—not Roth’s, not North’s, not even Elliott’s—that had been used to promote the show in the Boston Globe. Barbra had been called a “stage newcomer” ; her name had even been spelled correctly. When the overture ended and the curtain went up, she bounded out with all the confidence in the world. Backstage, there was a bit of a panic when Marilyn Cooper revealed she was having trouble with her voice, but such things didn’t concern Barbra. The director and the writers might be struggling over the show, but the young woman playing Miss Marmelstein wasn’t worried. She knew there was only one thing that would matter in the end, and that was her.
8.
The Softness brothers looked up in surprise when Barbra came barreling into their office. She’d always been an “assertive young woman,” in John Softness’s view, but never more so since returning to New York from the out-of-town tryouts of I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Now she seemed to the Softness brothers to be a woman on a mission. She barged into the room, shuffled through stacks of papers, made a couple of phone calls, and snapped out questions at the publicists in rapid-fire, machine-gun style. “She goes through brick walls,” John Softness thought in awe. Ever since Barbra had become their client, he’d observed that everything she did was fast, direct, and often aggressive. It wasn’t so much energy that propelled her, Softness felt, but rather a sense of “I’ve gotta get the work done, get it over with, finish it.” He imagined there must be “a softer, more relaxed side” to Barbra, but so far he had yet to witness it.
And he’d been spending plenty of time with her of late. The Softness Group was no longer only publicizing Barbra as part of PM East. Marty Erlichman had also asked them to handle Barbra’s personal publicity. (They’d taken on Marty’s other clients, the Clancy Brothers, as well.) The Softness brothers found a receptive audience for Barbra’s publicity as theatrical insiders had been buzzing about her for weeks. But the buzz wasn’t nearly as positive when it came to Wholesale.
The Boston critics, much to Arthur Laurents’s dismay, had been even less kind to the show than the ones in Philly. Elinor Hughes in the Boston Herald had found it “generally entertaining” but she confirmed all of David Merrick’s fears about Elliott when she said he “lacked enough style or experience to carry the difficult role of Harry Bogen.” Cyrus Durgin in the Boston Globe was still more dismissive of the show, playing off Miss Marmelstein’s song “What Are They Doing to Us Now?” when he wrote “What, indeed, are they doing to show business when such an acrid and gritty, unimaginative, literal and generally uninteresting item as this comes along under the guise of entertainment?”
After reading Durgin’s review, Weidman and Rome had thumped their chests in vindication, demanding that Laurents reinstate their original script. Merrick, much to the director’s chagrin, seemed to back them up. But it was a Machiavellian maneuver on the producer’s part. When Laurents tendered his resignation rather than return the show to “the piece of blubber” it had been, Merrick told Weidman and Rome that he had no choice but to close the show. Faced with such a possibility, the writers capitulated and accepted Laurents’s rewrite as permanent.
Yet throughout all this hullabaloo, there was one thing that everyone agreed was working: Barbra. The critics had been kind to Lillian Roth, but it was the young newcomer who had really excited them. Elinor Hughes thought Barbra displayed “a nice original sense of comedy,” and while Cyrus Durgin, known to be persnickety in his reviews, called Miss Marmelstein a “stock” character, he acknowledged that Barbra “wins applause” for playing her.
As the company returned to New York, the Softness brothers knew they had a hot commodity on their hands. With Marty, they often discussed Barbra’s future: what she could do, where she might go, who might give her a boost. There were so many avenues where Barbra could be marketed: the stage, television, records. That day in their office, as on so many similar days, they brainstormed for a while—Barbra and Marty and John and Don—and then one of the brothers rolled a piece of paper into their heavy black Royal typewriter and started banging out a press release.
“Barbra is striking in appearance” began one such release, which would be syndicated as a feature story. “She has a lithe and supple body, extremely expressive hands and arms, and the haughty mien and mesmeristic gaze of an Assyrian goddess.” It wasn’t so different from the “white goddess” image Bob had positioned her for: Barbra might play an ugly duckling on the stage, but she was hardly that in real life, or so her publicity went. It was a hard sell, but that was the course they all decided on.
Some of the publicity undertaken by the Softness Group on Barbra’s behalf wasn’t as flagrant as that, however. There were tidbits passed along to gossip columnists, photos dropped off on editors’ desks in case they ever needed “to fill a hole on the amusements page.” There were also the popular “Q-and-A” columns that ran in many newspapers and TV-listings supplements. Not long before, a “Jane Ryan” had written to one syndicated column, “Viewers Speak,” asking about a girl on PM East “by the name of Barbara Smarzan or something.” She had appeared the same night as Julie Wilson and Rose Murphy. “Could you tell me if this girl has made any records?” Miss Ryan asked.
“The young lady’s name is Barbra Streisand,” the answer came. “My present information is that she has not made any recordings, but I am checking further and will make mention here if I find she does have a recording credit.”
Both question and answer, of course, had been penned by Barbra’s publicity team. Those ubiquitous “Q-and-A” columns were in actuality patched together by publicists using them as platforms for their clients. The question from “Jane Ryan” had appeared precisely at the point when Goddard Lieberson was reconsidering whether to give Barbra a record contract. The idea, obviously, was to create the impression that the public was clamoring for this exciting newcomer.
The record deal hadn’t materialized, but Don Softness kept the press releases flying out of his typewriter. He knew there was something else cooking out there that might be right up his client’s alley. As the buzz about Barbra’s performance in Wholesale grew louder in theater circles, inevitably another show in David Merrick’s pipeline was mentioned. During rehearsals, assistant stage manager Robert Schear had watched Barbra intently on the stage, then walked over to Lillian Roth and asked, “Who does that girl remind you of?” Before Roth could reply, Schear told her to write the name down on a piece of paper. He did the same. When they compared notes, they saw they had both written the same name: Fanny Brice.
For some time now, Merrick had been talking with Brice’s son-in-law, the producer Ray Stark, about a musical version of the late comedienne’s life. In December, just after Barbra had won the part in Wholesale, the columnist Sam Zolotow had announced plans for the Brice show in the New York Times. That winter, the show was on everybody’s lips—as was Barbra’s resemblance to the eccentric Jewish funny lady with the large honker. Mike Wallace had already made the comparison on the air on PM East.
But Merrick was having none of it. “She is not going to be Fanny Brice,” he told Schear when the stage manager made the suggestion. And that, apparently, was that.
The Softness Group wasn’t dissuaded. Barbra might have more immediate things to concentrate on: Some future show that might or might not ever be produced was surely way down on her list of priorities in the winter of 1962. But her publicists were paid to think down the road. And while Merrick might seem, at the moment, absolutely intransigent on the idea of Barbra’s casting, the Softness brothers knew there were still a few things they could do to change the Abominable Showman’s mind.
9.
I Can Get It for You Wholesale opened on Thursday, March 22, at the Shubert Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street, and Barbra couldn’t have been more pleased. Since then, the house had been packed every night, and the applause for her regularly reached the rafters. Not even two years after her first anxious performance at the Lion, Barbra was now walking in the footsteps of Peggy Wood, Clifton Webb, Katharine Hepburn, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne, all of whom had trod the boards of the Shubert in decades past. On opening night, Barbra’s mother, brother, and sister had been there to see her, and Diana had even offered some hearty congratulations—hearty for Diana, that is.
And so, on a night not long after the opening, everything seemed to be in perfect alignment for Barbra—except for one nagging detail. As she came off the stage from the final curtain call, the makeup still on her face, the large collar of Miss Marmelstein’s dress still flapping around her neck, Barbra couldn’t help but admit that Elliott simply wasn’t as good in the show as he needed to be. Put another way, he wasn’t as good as she was.
Most of the reviews had thought the same. At the first-night cast party at Sardi’s, the entire company had waited breathlessly for the notices. First came the New York Times, where Howard Taubman had declared that while Elliott was “a likeable newcomer,” Barbra was “the evening’s find.” Every review that followed, rushed into Sardi’s by newspaper boys eager for tips, had been a variation on that theme. John Chapman at the New York Daily News griped he couldn’t find one character to “give affection or admiration,” then corrected himself to say there was one: Barbra, who played “the homely frump of secretary . . . hilariously.” John McClain at the New York Journal-American hated most everything about the show, calling it “How to Almost Succeed in Business Without Really Being Very Honest, or Very Amusing Either, for That Matter,” but he couldn’t deny that Barbra, resembling “an amiable ant-eater,” had “her moment in the sun.”
McClain’s insult, even if it came wrapped in praise, rankled. “Why are people so mean?” she asked Bob. But Barbra could console herself that while the reviews for the show were very mixed—Walter Kerr at the Herald Tribune called it “a good, solid show” while Robert Coleman at the Daily Mirror thought it was a disappointment—the acclaim for her was unanimous. Taubman said Barbra’s “oafish expressions... loud irascible voice and . . . arpeggiated laugh” made her “a natural comedienne.” Kerr called her “great.”
That was the rub. In the days since the show’s opening, most of the buzz had centered around Barbra, not the actual stars. The breakout player wasn’t Elliott, as some had once expected; instead, it was his girlfriend, who was playing a much smaller role. To be sure, some reviews had been very kind to Elliott. The Wall Street Journal had called him “something of a find.” But Barbra was the one the critic declared had the “first-rate gift.”
The imbalance between Barbra and Elliott was something she felt quite keenly, friends observed. She felt “protective of him,” said one, and “wanted him to get the same kind of accolades” she was getting. It wasn’t really his fault, she believed. Elliott, after all, hadn’t had the benefit of training at the Theatre Studio the way she had. So the criticism of her new beau “really bothered” Barbra, friends knew.
That night, Bob had come backstage after the show, marveling at the hustle and bustle and all the well-wishers who were flocking to Barbra’s dressing room. Every corner of the space was filled with flowers. Less than a year ago, as Bob well remembered, a single bouquet—from her friends in Detroit—had celebrated her appearance on the Paar show. And less than two years ago, the tiny peapod-sized dressing room at the Bon Soir could never have accommodated all the people who were crowding in now to see her, to congratulate her, to tell her she was going to be huge. Watching his friend receive her admirers, Bob felt as if he were witnessing a fairy tale come true.
But for Barbra, there remained the niggling little problem of Elliott’s performance. Laurents might have been finally satisfied to leave things the way they were, but Barbra wasn’t so tranquil. She rarely was, of course, when she saw a detail out of place.
After everyone left her dressing room except for Bob, Barbra took out a piece of paper and began writing furiously. Bob asked her what she was doing. She was putting together some notes on how Elliott might improve his performance, she replied.
Bob thought that this might not be such a good idea, but he said nothing. Maybe Elliott would welcome such criticism; after all, he certainly seemed enamored enough of Barbra. Everyone had noticed his tremendous, and obvious, attraction to her. The sexual shenanigans between Barbra and Elliott made for titillating backstage gossip. In Boston, Barbra had been spied naked in the hotel corridor, locked out of Elliott’s room as a joke. Now they were frequently closed off in one or the other’s dressing room, only opening the door after persistent and forceful knocking.
For Barbra, it was a heady adventure. The short-lived affairs since Barré had never been this passionate, nor had her beaus been infatuated with her in the way Elliott was. That may have been because, for the first time, Barbra was realizing her own sexual power. Arthur Laurents marveled at how sexy Barbra was—or rather, how sexual. On the stage, she did something very special with Miss Marmelstein, he thought. The harassed secretary had been written as an old maid, but as Barbra played her, she became a young woman brimming over with sexual drive and desire. The face might have read spinster, but the body and the mannerisms were all siren—as alluring as the Lorelei she had sung about in her nightclub act, who’d wanted to bite her initials into a sailor’s neck. It had taken Elliott’s devotion to bring Barbra’s sexuality out so fully.
So it was with a kind of audacious nonchalance that she handed Elliott her list of criticisms, expecting him to be grateful for her noblesse oblige. But as Bob watched the exchange, it was not gratitude he saw in Elliott’s eyes when he read what Barbra had written.
It was fury.
Elliott was indeed smitten with Barbra. But his own ego had taken quite enough assaults from the critics; he didn’t need Barbra weighing in, too. It was bad enough that his girlfriend, in a minor part not integral to the plot, was the one everyone was talking about, but to have her now, suddenly empowered, presume to instruct him how he might do his job better . . . well, that was just a little too close to what his mother had once done, telling him what to do and when and how to do it.
Elliott tossed the note aside and stormed off down the hallway.
Bob saw the distressed look that crossed Barbra’s face, a look that only worsened as Elliott’s voice echoed through the dressing rooms.
“Hey, Marilyn!” He called into Marilyn Cooper’s dressing room. “You want to head out together?”
It was clear to Bob that Elliott was trying to make Barbra jealous, to get her back for her presumptuousness. He succeeded—though only Bob, having known Barbra longer than anyone else there, saw it. With carefully controlled actions and an utterly expressionless countenance, Barbra gathered her things and left the theater. Only much later did Elliott even realize that she had left.
And then he was devastated. His devotion to Barbra was greater than his wounded ego; he feared his impulsive rage had lost her. Hurrying off into the chilly March night, he barricaded himself in a telephone booth and used up a pocketful of change calling Barbra’s flat. Each time she answered and he started to speak, she hung up. Finally, dejected, Elliott went back to his own place and fell into a restless sleep.
Four o’clock that morning, his bell rang.
Groggily, Elliott made his way to the intercom. It was Barbra, and he buzzed her in. When he opened his door, she stood there in the hallway looking “like a little orphan child, in her nightgown, tears streaming down her face.” Putting his long arms around her, Elliott brought her inside. Their first fight was over. It had lasted six hours at the most. They could only hope that subsequent ones would end as quickly and as well.