Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (12 page)

Barbra took a deep breath. Giving a nod to Peter Daniels, she launched into the first song of her set, Fats Waller’s “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.”
The little love ditty became a “sexy, playful, naughty” flirtation with the audience, just as she and Barré had worked out. The applause at the end was heartier this time, and sailing on a burst of adrenaline, Barbra segued into the song that had started it all for her. “When a bee lies sleepin’ in the palm of your hand . . .” The audience was riveted. Cries of “Gorgeous!” were heard when she finished the song.

Barré was sitting on the edge of his seat, mouthing the words to each song along with Barbra while his Ampex tape recorder, off to the side, captured the music for posterity. Bob sat sketching Barbra as she sang, preserving the night in his own way with pen and ink. When Peter Daniels’s piano introduction indicated it was time for “I Want to Be Bad,” Barbra stood from her stool so she could move her body seductively to the words. The audience hooted and whistled. “She’s killing them,” Barré whispered. “They love her!” Three songs in, Barbra had them eating out of her hands—those lovely, exquisite hands that Bob watched in a sort of awe that night as they moved through the air with all the grace and precision of an orchestra conductor.

At the beginning of her fourth number, Barbra closed her eyes. For the sad ballad “When Sunny Gets Blue,” Barré had told her to think about a classmate of hers back at Erasmus Hall who’d been even more of a misfit than she was. Picked on, lonely, the girl had elicited sympathy from Barbra, who would smile at her in the corridors. Barré had told Barbra to think of that girl when she sang the song, and so, drawing on all of her acting ability, Barbra stood on the stage, emotions exposed. This tender number was immediately followed by her bouncy rendition of “Lover, Come Back to Me,” with the line Barbra had once found so difficult now flying “like a bullet,” Barré thought. All those weeks of practice, of picturing his socks in the bathroom, had paid off.

Then came “Nobody’s Heart,” the perfect penultimate song for Barbra’s set. As she and Barré had planned, the audience seemed to feel that she was singing about herself. How could they not? There she was in front of them, so small, so unusual, seeming so desperate for their approval, coming more alive with each round of applause. The lyrics seemed to fill in all the autobiography that had been missing from Jimmie Daniels’s scanty introduction of her. She was a girl who’d been “sad at times, and disinclined to play, but it’s not bad at times, to go your own sweet way.” That’s what people took away from hearing her. When, at the finish of the song, she dropped her chin onto her chest, the audience was on its feet, shouting “Brava! Brava!”

The spotlight swung back to Jimmie Daniels. “Miss Barbra Streisand!” he announced. As expected, the cries of “Encore!” began. With a smile and a wave of his hand, Daniels surrendered the stage again to Barbra. Back into view she charged, all five feet five inches of her, a hundred and fifteen pounds of determination, singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” She was suddenly transformed into a ringleader of merriment, letting her instinct take over in ways that even Barré hadn’t expected. With “semioperatic swoops and shrieks,” she bounded across the stage warbling the words that many people in the audience remembered from their childhoods. They laughed, clapped, and nodded their heads along to the familiar but utterly unexpected tune. Singing about the third pig, Barbra put her hands on her hips and spontaneously invoked Mae West: “Nix on tricks, I will build my house of bricks!” The audience roared its approval.

Barré was overwhelmed. He’d coached Barbra to think about Jean-Paul Sartre’s play
The Flies,
which he called “an homage to madness,” during her rendition of “Big Bad Wolf,” but this was beyond anything they’d rehearsed. It was anarchic brilliance cooked up on the spot, one observer said, “almost like the Marx Brothers, if Groucho had been able to sing.” To each pig she had bequeathed a different voice, and when the brick house stands firm and the wolf gets roasted in the fireplace, she let out a “triumphant roar.”
At the end of the song, Barbra fled the stage laughing hysterically, as if she were “being chased by the Furies,” Barré thought. The audience, in his words, went “nuts.”

Bob’s reaction was quieter. He sat in a kind of stunned silence, remembering the time he’d seen Edith Piaf at the Biltmore Theatre in Los Angeles. No elaborate orchestration had supported the great French chanteuse. Piaf had relied only on the force of her voice and personality. Bob had wondered then why America had no Piaf of its own, why the best his country had seemed able to produce was Patti Page singing “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” Watching Barbra that night, alone on the stage working her magic without any props, without any major orchestration, Bob thought solemnly to himself, “This could be our Piaf.”

Friends, of course, might be expected to imagine such heights for each other, but Bob wasn’t alone in his response. Terry was once again in tears hearing Barbra sing. Carole Gister, also in the audience, was “blown away” by the fact that each of Barbra’s songs had seemed like “a self-contained play.” In her dressing room, Phyllis Diller had been drawn by the sound of Barbra’s voice, and despite having been unimpressed with the kid in person, found herself getting goose bumps listening to her sing. It wasn’t often that Diller had to take the stage with an audience still buzzing over the warm-up act.

Part of what the audience had responded to was Barbra’s obvious awareness of, and proficiency with, the traditions of the stage. It hadn’t just been West she’d invoked up there. She’d displayed the raw power of Piaf and sung her songs in the storytelling style of Mabel Mercer and connected with her audience as personally as had Gertrude Lawrence. She’d flirted like Helen Kane, belted like Mae Barnes, and smoldered like Ruth Etting. Yet the audience wasn’t applauding any of those venerable ladies. Barbra was no imitator. When Mercer sang, she barely moved a muscle on stage, but Barbra had used her hands to dazzling effect. Lawrence’s cadences had often induced cringes, but Barbra’s euphonious voice had soared through the room mesmerizing her audience. The spontaneous combustion that had left Barré stunned and Bob speechless was the result of an inexplicable alchemy that had taken all of those influences, shaken them together, and conjured something entirely new. Something that called herself Barbra Streisand.

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 her
bewitching 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.

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.