Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (17 page)

On a crisp, sunny spring day, Bob performed his errand as instructed, collecting the shoes at Madame Daunou’s and hurrying them over to the NBC studios. Barbra wasn’t quite there yet, so he left the shoes in her dressing room and then passed the hours until showtime at the counter of a drugstore in Rockefeller Center.

Barbra, meantime, was being whisked into the city from the airport by an NBC driver. Flushed from the thrill of her first flight, she was escorted like a real celebrity up the elevator to the sixth floor where, in her dressing room, she found not only the shoes but a gorgeous bouquet of flowers from Bernie Moray and Dick Sloan. Astutely, her Detroit pals had suspected no one else would send her flowers: Bob couldn’t have afforded to do so and her mother was simply not the type. Besides, when Barbra had called home, Diana had told her that Shelly’s wife had just gone into the hospital to have a baby—Diana’s first grandchild. So it wasn’t clear that anyone in Barbra’s family would even be watching the show, which would be taped for broadcast later that night at 11:15.

No doubt Barbra wondered if Barré would be watching. Bob hadn’t told him, but the information was out there, although it may have been easy to miss. Barbra, feeling creative, had given her name as “Strysand” to the NBC publicists, and so it was as “Barbara [misspelled] Strysand
[not misspelled]” that her name was printed in newspaper television listings throughout the country. But at the
New York Times,
the typesetter left off a few crucial letters, which ensured that potential television viewers throughout the New York metro region—who would have included Barré, Barbra’s paternal grandparents, and all those snooty kids back in Brooklyn—would read only that a “Barbara Strys,” whoever that was, was appearing that night on the Paar show.

The booking wasn’t a guarantee of success—hundreds of unknowns had made appearances on the show over the years and hadn’t gone on to bigger things—but Barbra understood she now had a better chance at realizing her dream than the thousands who never got a shot on national TV. It was extraordinary, really; a little more than six months ago, she had been wandering the streets, traipsing through auditions and being stood up by David Susskind. Now she was on the Paar show.

She waited backstage—“a nervous wreck,” according to Bean—as the show opened. Hugh Downs called Bean onstage to deliver his monologue. Currently headlining at the Blue Angel uptown, Bean had a quick, dry sense of humor, displaying an easy rapport with the audience as he sat at the desk smoking cigarette after cigarette. His first guest was the erudite author and playwright Gore Vidal, whose novel
Messiah
was being issued in paperback the following week. Phyllis came on next, having just completed another run at the Bon Soir, and ran through her frantic comedy shtick. Then came veteran character actor Albert Dekker, perhaps best known for
Dr. Cyclops,
the 1940 horror film. Finally, nearly an hour into the show, Bean looked into the camera to introduce Barbra.

“This girl was a young girl
I saw down at a nightclub called the Bon Soir when she was there a couple of months ago,” Bean said. “She’s never been, to the best of my knowledge, on network television before. She has the most charming manner and the most charming voice. She’s flown in from Detroit to be with us for the night. She’s working out there at a club called the Caucus Club . . . Her name is Barbra Streisand . . . Welcome her.” Placing his cigarette back between his lips, Bean led the applause, and the camera switched over to the stage.

To Bob, sketching her in the audience, Barbra looked tiny. And she was—slight and slender in her burgundy dress that, except to the handful of viewers with color sets, looked gray on the screen, and her upswept hairdo, the one Bob had created to make her seem more sophisticated, but that actually made her look like a kid trying to play an adult, which wasn’t really so far from the truth. Barbra sang “A Sleepin’ Bee” with all the feeling she’d given it in her nightclub appearances, and with all the delicate hand gestures she’d perfected over the last several months, the ones Matt Michaels had observed her practicing so earnestly in the mirror.

The applause that followed the number was prodigious, but Barbra barely had time to hear it. She was rushing back to her dressing room to change into her second-act outfit while the technicians in the booth slipped in a commercial and Orson Bean lit another cigarette, convinced that Barbra’s transformation from a terrified kid into a silvery songstress could only be “a gift from God.”

After the break, Barbra was back in her slinky black dress with its thin shoulder straps, suddenly looking a couple of years older than she had before the commercial. There was nothing kiddish about that perfect figure. Bean told his audience, “I want you to hear another song by this delightful young lady, Barbra Streisand, who is an actress, as I told you before.” He hadn’t, actually, but no doubt that little addition to her bio had been urged by Barbra from backstage. For tonight, however, she was a singer, and she poured everything she had into “When the Sun Comes Out.” The song was far more lively than her first number, and when she got to the last note she gave it a little added oomph—“Then you’ll know the one I love walked in, when the sun comes . . . ow-oot!” She bowed, showing a flash of cleavage, and mouthed, “Yes!” She had nailed it, and she knew it.

The camera followed her as she walked over to join the group of guests and caught the triumphant grins she and Phyllis exchanged. Shaking hands with Gore Vidal, Barbra sat to his left, crossing her shapely legs. For a split second, she looked down at her new shoes. Hovering over all of them was a cloud of tobacco smoke. Orson Bean was on what seemed to be his twentieth cigarette, Phyllis was brandishing her trademark long cigarette holder, and Albert Dekker was puffing contentedly on a cigar.

“This is your first television show, isn’t it?” Bean asked her.

“This is so exciting, I just can’t tell you,” Barbra gushed, but the emotion that came from her lips seemed manufactured. She was nervous and excited, no doubt. But she was also acting, because that’s what actresses do when they are on a stage. “All these people,” she said grandly. “And lights. And people. Oh!”

“You were sensational,” said Phyllis, who was sitting on her other side. She took her hand.

“My hands are so cold,” Barbra said.

“Warm up her hands there, Gore,” Bean joked to Vidal, who took Barbra’s free hand for a moment, then, seeming to think better of it, let it go.

“I’ll give you my gloves,” Phyllis offered, getting a laugh from the audience as Barbra protested. Bean told her she should take the gloves because otherwise she’d catch cold. “And you’ll never play again,” Phyllis joshed.

Barbra took the gloves.

“I got some beautiful flowers from my friends,” she suddenly blurted out, looking around. “Where do I thank them?” She spotted the light on the camera and directed her eyes there. “Thank you, Bernie and Dick and everybody!”

She’d been coached to look at Bean or the other guests when she spoke, but she went her own way instead, sitting on the edge of her seat and looking into the camera or at the studio audience. Bean had tried leading her along with a host’s usual questions, but it was Barbra, all smiles and big hand gestures, who was running this show, her backstage nervousness evaporating now that she was front and center.

“I’m clothed by the Robinson Furniture Company of Detroit tonight,” she volunteered.

“You’re clothed by a furniture company?” Bean asked.

“Isn’t everybody?” Barbra asked, in what had to have been a rehearsed response.

“Such a beautiful chair you have on tonight,” Bean said, getting a big laugh.

“I’m the original Castro Convertible, moveable parts,” Barbra said. If she’d been hoping for a bigger laugh, she had to settle for merely a titter.

Bean pointed out the obvious: that it was her
first
dress of the night that had been made of upholstery material, not the one she was wearing. Phyllis arched an eyebrow in Barbra’s direction and concurred. “
That
one is sprayed on,” she quipped.

Barbra played her response perfectly. First came a big smile, then a double take, then a kind of vaudevillian mock offense. “You’re all heart, Phyllis,” she joked.

“You’re right,” Phyllis replied. “That’s why I’m shaped this way.” This got a huge laugh from the audience, and the old pro tilted her head toward Barbra. “Thanks for feeding me the lines, sweetie. You give me one more laugh and you’re through.”

But Phyllis quickly added, lest anyone think that there was any real competition between them, “I love Barbra. This is one of the great singing talents in the world.”

After the show, Phyllis and her husband, Sherwood—the “Fang” of her stand-up act—treated Barbra and Bob to a late dinner at the Brasserie. Barbra was giddy. She took considerable pleasure from the fact that, on national television, she had been treated like a sex symbol, with no caveats about her looks being “different” or “unusual.” She’d been sexy, plain and simple. And she’d been good, too: both songs had come across exactly as she’d hoped. Bob and Phyllis and Phyllis’s husband all lifted their glasses to her. Barbra was a hit, they said, and she could expect big things from now on.

When she called home later that night, she learned that her mother had watched the show after all, but most of the conversation centered around Sheldon’s new daughter, Erica. The next morning Barbra boarded a plane to head back to her pals in Detroit, who showed far more excitement about her television debut.

The first—and as far as Barbra could see, the only—“big thing” to come out of the Paar show appearance was a gig in St. Louis at a place called the Crystal Palace. It wasn’t exactly the superstardom Barbra was hoping for, but it had come, unexpectedly, with a few enjoyable perks—not the least of which was a young man named Tommy. Sitting opposite him, Barbra listened as he strummed a few chords on his guitar and made eyes at her. Not a bad way to mark her nineteenth birthday. Not bad at all.

After a final week and a half at the Caucus Club—during which the Grubers had given her a bonus for the great publicity they’d gotten when Orson Bean mentioned the name of the club on national television—Barbra had boarded the train to St. Louis, some five hundred and fifty miles southwest of Detroit. The Crystal Palace was a very different kind of venue than the chic Caucus Club. Phyllis had worked there the previous December, so she’d likely given Barbra the lowdown.

The owner, Jay Landesman, was a St. Louis–born Greenwich Village beatnik who’d founded the literary quarterly
Neurotica
in 1948, publishing Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Carl Solomon. Norman Mailer said that Landesman and his wife, Fran, “could be accused
of starting it all,” meaning the whole “beat” culture. Now Landesman was bringing the avant-garde, the offbeat, the new, and the different to America’s heartland. He’d opened the Crystal Palace in 1958, spurring a movement of restaurants and cabarets into St. Louis’s bustling Gaslight Square. The club’s “hep audience”
sat in a semicircle around an apron stage.

When Irvin Arthur had pitched the idea of a revue starring three acts from the Paar show, Landesman had quickly signed on. In addition to Barbra, there was Marc London, a young comic whom
Variety
called “as relaxed as an old shoe”
and who’d made a name for himself with his humorous take on the daily news, and the Smothers Brothers—Tommy and Dick—a guitar-and-bass duo who “lampooned folk singers to a fare-thee-well,”
Variety
opined, “satire with a capital S.” The Smothers Brothers had been on the Paar show on February 20. Grouping the three acts under a single banner, “Caught in the Act,” Landesman publicized the revue as the first in a series “to showcase rising new talent.”
The Smothers Brothers were billed first, and though Barbra came next, newspaper ads persisted in spelling her name “Barbara.”

Between the four performers a close bond was formed; in letters back to Bob, Barbra called them “her family on the road.” But the most intimate connection was with Tommy. Four months after her breakup with Barré, Barbra’s heartbreak was finally healing—at least enough to respond when a man flirted with her. And to her great surprise, she had flirted back. Finally, it seemed, she was learning a little of those “feminine wiles.”

Twenty-four-year-old Tom Smothers was the comic to his brother Dick’s straight man, often playing dim or naïve, when, in fact, he was as sharp as a tack, politically astute, and savvy in business. The brothers, who hailed from the Los Angeles area, had cut an album,
The Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion,
due to be released the next month by Mercury Records. Blond and soft-spoken, about as goyish as one could get, Tom came from a North Carolina family that dated back to the Confederacy. He was very attentive to Barbra. Jay Landesman, who had an eagle eye, felt certain the two of them were sleeping together.

On this night, Barbra’s birthday, “Caught in the Act” was staged twice, first at eight thirty and then at ten, as it was every weeknight (there were three shows on weekends). Barbra was in good spirits. The spelling of her name had finally been fixed in the ads, and their audiences had been picking up after a rather slow start. On the night the revue had opened, April 17, they’d been up against the telecast of the Academy Awards. That meant they’d played to a number of empty seats, since it seemed the entire world was tuning in to watch Elizabeth Taylor—at death’s door from pneumonia just weeks before—accept the Best Actress prize for
Butterfield 8.
In the following days, some people had stayed home out of anxiety over the Kennedy administration’s attempted intervention in Cuba—a failed enterprise the newspapers called the “Bay of Pigs invasion.” But as hostilities died down, people started filing into the Crystal Palace looking for some diversion from world affairs. Soon the word on the street was that “Caught in the Act” was “a zippy revue,
full of fun.”

The fun proved infectious. Working alongside three comedians, Barbra endeavored to keep up the pace, slipping in more and more of “their sort of patter
between her numbers,” Landesman noticed. Barbra had always included a few quick, humorous asides in her act, but now her rap was turning into rambling stories about the benefits of eating nuts or the hazards of sitting too close to a television. And she was amping up the Jewish shtick considerably. “Such
toomel,
” she’d giggle, using the Yiddish word for noisy chaos, when the audience would applaud her after a number. “You like my
schmatta?
” she’d ask, gesturing to her outfit. She told friends she was playing a character; she was an actress, after all, and it came naturally. But Landesman worried that the patter might distract from the mood of her songs, many of which were tender ballads. “But I get so bored doing the same thing every night,” Barbra replied, when he asked her to tone it down a bit. Landesman gave in and allowed her to continue.