Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (11 page)

During that summer of 1960, Barbra came to understand that when she sang a song, she was as much an actress as a singer. “If I can identify
as an actress to the lyric and sail on the melody,” she realized, “it will be me.” The actual singing came easy. But the emotional backstory that went into the song required all the skills she’d been sharpening for the past two years at the Theatre Studio. So “Lover, Come Back to Me” became a miniature play about a woman who wanted to hang on to the love of her life, “Nobody’s Heart” the story of a homely girl who’s never known love, and “I Want to Be Bad” the chronicle of a girl finally set loose on her own to live her life as she pleased. All of them were aspects of herself, and Barré told her to make sure her audience saw that.

No doubt somewhere in that cluttered apartment there was a clip of the August 21 edition of
Flatbush Life,
a Brooklyn newspaper that her mother had saved for her. Cranking out press releases for
The Boy Friend,
the Theatre Studio had made sure one of them reached the city desk of Barbra’s hometown paper. The photo of herself that looked up at Barbra was one she had come to despise—with her rather pretentious dangling earrings and her hair piled up on her head. But the headline compensated for any disdain for the photo:
FLATBUSH ACTRESS HEADS FOR STARDOM
. The article, probably lifted verbatim from the press release, noted her work on stage in
The Insect Comedy
and
The Boy Friend,
as well as her upcoming appearance at the Bon Soir. If Barbra needed any affirmation—and occasionally, despite her fervent belief in herself, she did—there it was, spelled out in black and white. Barbra Streisand was “headed for stardom.”

Barré and Barbra had taken a break from their rehearsals and were sharing a BLT when the intercom buzzed. It was Bob, and Barré told him to come up. When Bob entered the apartment, he saw Barbra nibbling on the sandwich while Barré still held it in his hands. On the phonograph floated the strains of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s elegant piece for violin and orchestra,
The Lark Ascending.
Walking into this happy little love nest, Bob was unprepared for what he was about to discover. “Hey, Bob,” Barbra purred. “Guess what?”

“What?” he asked.

“Barré and I are talking about getting married.”

Bob was stunned. Barré and Barbra as a married couple was a concept he had a hard time “getting his head around.” Carole Gister, when she heard the news a short time later, had a similar reaction. For all his claims of bisexuality, Barré was essentially attracted to men, and both Bob and Carole knew it. They thought Barbra did as well. “They’re going to have to work very, very hard to make a marriage between them succeed,” Bob thought to himself.

Yet he dared not articulate such misgivings to the dreamy-eyed lovebirds who sat shoulder to shoulder on the couch, eating from both ends of a BLT, the hypnotic sound of the violin from
The Lark Ascending
wafting through the living room.

A bit of a heat wave had settled over the city on the night of Friday, September 9. Temperatures that day had reached the high eighties and hadn’t dropped much since the sun had set. Summer wasn’t quite ready to release its grip on the city. Yet there was a sense that things were about to change. At that very moment, Hurricane Donna was lashing the Florida Keys, on target to swipe the entire eastern seaboard in the next few days. She’d bring torrential rain, massive flooding, and powerful gusts.

But Hurricane Donna wasn’t the only thing about to hit New York.

With careful steps in her white buckled shoes, Barbra headed out of her apartment and onto Sixth Avenue, Barré and Bob in tow. For her debut at the Bon Soir, she wore a long black dress under a Persian vest of silk brocade that Terry had found for her in a boutique on Ninth Avenue. Female nightclub performers were expected to wear evening gowns, she’d been told, but both Barré and Bob had felt that Barbra needed to dress to make a statement, to assert the quirky individuality that had set her apart at the Lion. So she buttoned herself into the vest and slipped into the 1920s-era shoes with the big buckles. Her eyes were ringed with Bob’s signature two rows of false eyelashes, and her cheeks and lips were painted in homage to Helen Kane and other ladies of the period.

The decade they’d just completed, all three agreed, had been dull and boring. “The twenties and thirties were where the real excitement was,” Bob insisted, and they hoped the sixties might have a little of those earlier decades’ style and polish. With Barbra’s closet full of vintage clothing and shoes, Bob’s assortment of old fashion magazines, and Barré’s collection of classic recordings, they’d been able to evoke the glamour of the past while making it all seem fresh and new. Barbra had slipped into the persona of a saucy Roaring Twenties chanteuse as easily as she had that vintage black dress. As Barré lugged his heavy Ampex tape recorder behind her, the onetime misfit from Brooklyn strode confidently through the streets of Greenwich Village, looking as if she’d just stepped out of the pages of
Harper’s Bazaar,
circa 1925.

The Village was teeming with eccentric, creative types like Barbra who dressed in fashions that, to the rest of the world, seemed outré, but here along these crooked and narrow streets were deemed trendsetting and cutting-edge. The Village was in the midst of a cultural renaissance, or so claimed the
New York Times,
“once again throbbing
with talent” in a way not seen since the post–World War I era of the Provincetown Players. “Box offices are busy,”
columnist Dorothy Kilgallen noted as the season got underway. “Taxis are spinning around Manhattan full of people pleasure bent.”

Many of those taxis were heading to the Village, where this new phenomenon called “off-off-Broadway” was coalescing. No longer was theater the sole province of Midtown. Now it could be found “tucked behind a façade
of food and drink,” one critic remarked, a popular alternative due to “the felicitous marriage of the muse and booze.” And while clubs like the Bon Soir had been around for a long time, with some insisting they were past their primes, the new energy flowing into the Village signaled a “rebirth,” a sense of “florescence” that Barré believed was centered in the supper clubs. To Barré, it all seemed a replay of the glory days of André Charlot’s revues of forty years earlier, when Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, or Jessie Matthews sang the songs of Noël Coward.

What was more, the young performers dancing and singing in revues across Village stages were exceptionally talented, people such as Beatrice Arthur, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Dody Goodman. One could wander through Village cabarets and catch a young actor named George Segal playing tunes from the 1920s on a banjo, or a sarcastic comedian named Joan Rivers (who’d played with Barbra in that attic production of
Driftwood
) kvetching about men, or an amiable Englishman named Dudley Moore playing the piano downstairs at the Duplex. All of them were in this together, Barré believed, and any one of them had as good a chance as any other of becoming a star in the fertile proving ground of the Village.

Rounding the corner onto Eighth Street, Barbra and her boys found themselves in front of the Bon Soir. Down the thirty-one steep steps they went, Barbra slowly and deliberately in her high heels. It seemed as if they were descending into a pit of darkness, for the only light flickering below came from a single shaded bulb over the cash register. The walls of the Bon Soir were painted jet black. People in the club moved as if they were shadows.

Terry was there to greet her, throwing his arms around her and finding her “a bundle of anxious energy.” She had reason to be anxious. Entertainers in nightclubs faced challenges unthinkable elsewhere. “Customers who jam
the darkened, smoky rooms to eat and drink up their $3 to $7 minimums,” the
Times
observed, “have a tendency to grow sulky if their funny bones are not tickled or their heartstrings tweaked at the rate of at least once every twenty seconds.” When the pace lagged, hecklers took up the slack.

At the Bon Soir, Barbra had awfully big shoes to fill. Here in this small, dark club—a “refreshing blend of Greenwich Village bohemianism and East Side smartness and sophistication,” one critic thought—some of the most exciting acts of the last decade had made their marks, many of them the “far-out females”
for which the Bon Soir was famous. The cheeky ladies who played the club broke all the rules. The boisterous Mae Barnes, whose records Barré had played for Barbra, had become a sensation at the Bon Soir after dancing in all-black revues in Harlem. The brash-talking Sylvia Syms, who’d polished her bluesy style under Billie Holiday, had blown the roof off the joint a few years earlier, and Felicia Sanders, who made “Fly Me to the Moon” a standard well before Sinatra, regularly had patrons lined up out to the curb. The Bon Soir was a particularly good space for female performers, singer-actress Kaye Ballard thought, because of its small, intimate shape, but also because of “all the gay guys”
who regularly patronized the club.

Ballard’s shtick—lying on the piano and delivering her monologue as if the audience were up on the ceiling—had earned her a place in the club’s hall of fame, but her record as the Bon Soir’s biggest moneymaker had been overtaken by the current headliner, Phyllis Diller, a crazy-haired housewife from San Francisco. Dorothy Kilgallen called Diller “the funniest woman
in the world . . . a flax white blonde who comes out on the stage in a vaguely outrageous costume that might be chic on someone else, points a cigarette holder at the audience, and talks. When she talks, the audience screams. It’s as simple as that.” For all her wild hair and makeup, Diller was known as a clotheshorse, always wearing the latest designers—sometimes topped with a necklace of maraschino cherries that she’d eat, one by one, on stage. All this was done while taking potshots at her husband, whom she called Fang, and, most of all, herself. “Isn’t my fur stole pitiful?” she’d ask the audience. “How unsuccessful can a girl look? People think I’m wearing anchovies. The worst of it is, I trapped these under my own sink.” Then she’d let loose with her trademark fingernails-on-the-blackboard laugh—a gimmick that had originated from nerves, but which had stayed in the act after Diller noticed the laughs the laugh got.

When Barbra and her friends arrived, only a few customers were milling about the place. Sgroi emerged from the back office to greet her. Taking her by the arm, he escorted her to the women’s dressing room. Diller frequently grumbled that the room was the size of a peapod
and that she and her fellow performers were forced to change clothes “butt to butt.” From a single window, a rusty old air conditioner dripped water into a bucket. Clothes hung from hooks on the wall since there wasn’t room for a closet or shelves. When Barbra walked in, Diller was sitting on a stool threading her maraschino cherries. Sgroi introduced them, and Diller told Barbra she liked her unusual shoes. “They cost me thirty-five cents,” Barbra replied. That was the extent of their conversation. Diller found the kid standoffish and deemed her way too young to be singing in a club.

Around eleven, the place started
filling up and the band began to play. The Three Flames was a wisecracking piano, bass, and guitar trio who integrated the jive of the Harlem streets into their act. The Bon Soir was that rare place where blacks and whites mixed without tension and without rank, where three black guys from Harlem could share a stage with a white housewife from San Francisco and a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. On many nights a touch of class was provided by Norene Tate, a stately, silver-haired pianist who’d also played the Lion. The emcee was Jimmie Daniels, a Texan who’d sung in Parisian boîtes before the war. Always impeccably dressed and unfailingly polite, Daniels was famous for never uttering a bad word about anyone, a far cry from the often raucous acts he introduced. In the 1930s, he’d run an eponymous club in Harlem and was rumored to have been one of Cole Porter’s lovers.

Around midnight, the Three Flames gave way to the comics Tony and Eddie, whose act consisted mostly of mime and sight gags, using wigs, false teeth, and prop weapons. In one bit, Tony played a patient and Eddie a doctor, with the recording of a coloratura soprano giving voice to Tony’s pain each time he got a shot.

If Barbra had ventured to peer out from the dressing room, she would have discerned waiters weaving in and out among the tables carrying tiny flashlights in order to spot who needed refills. This produced a flickering, bouncing light that made the room seem, in the words of
New York Times
reviewer Arthur Gelb, “a-twinkle with glow worms.”
Gelb wasn’t the only major newspaperman sipping vino and smoking cigarettes in the audience. Dorothy Kilgallen, one of the widest-read syndicated theater columnists, was out there, too. If the news made Barbra anxious, she could take heart that the Bon Soir’s pianist that night was Peter Daniels, the same friendly Englishman she’d met back when she’d auditioned for Eddie Blum several months earlier and who’d helpfully rehearsed with her at his apartment on Riverside Drive in the days leading up to this night.

Finally, it was Barbra’s turn to go on. Jimmie Daniels stood in the middle of the stage and introduced her as “a girl with a magical set of pipes.” Suddenly the bright white spotlight swung across the stage and caught Barbra, already seated on her stool and staring directly out into the audience. It was her moment, and she was ready for it. The applause she received was respectful, though hardly the enthusiastic greeting bestowed upon the more familiar Tony and Eddie. Hoping to fill in the spaces, Barré and Bob leaped to their feet, cheering as loudly as they could, nudging friends to do the same.

Once the applause died down and Barbra was sure all eyes were on her, she slowly and deliberately removed the gum from her mouth and stuck it on the microphone. It was by now a well-practiced bit of shtick that won the hoped-for snickers. Still, the audience, including those hard-to-please columnists, didn’t know quite what to make of the small girl in the spotlight with the queer shoes and absurdly long fingernails. She seemed both frightened and confident, her quivery smile revealing as much pluck as it did apprehension.