Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (2 page)

But she has always worn this insistence on precision as a badge of pride. “I really don’t like being called a ‘perfectionist’ as if it’s a crime,” she has said. Certainly Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins, her earliest examples of auteurship, had been no shrinking violets when it came to taking control over their work. “What is so offensive
about a woman doing the same thing?” Streisand has asked. Even her detractors concede she has a point on that score.

Perhaps this accounts for Streisand’s recent prominence on the scene. Suddenly she’s everywhere: giving concerts, celebrated on
Glee,
collecting awards, invoked in pop-rap songs, top-lining a movie for the first time in sixteen years. I suspect that our renewed fondness, even adoration, of Streisand is evidence of a nostalgia for a time when striving for excellence was at least as important as making a buck, and when originality was prized over focus-grouped packaging. In the early 1960s, Streisand reset the cultural parameters when she walked onstage in
Funny Girl
and said “Hello, gorgeous” to herself in the mirror—a slender, unusual girl who wouldn’t compromise on appearance, performance, or integrity. Fifty years later, she still matters, and for all the same reasons.

All scenes and events described herein are based on primary sources: interviews, letters, production records, journals, and contemporary news and weather reports. Nothing has been created simply for dramatic sake. Anything within quotation marks comes from interviews or other sources; dialogue is used only when it originates directly from these sources. Attitudes, motivations, and feelings attributed to Streisand or others always come from descriptions given in interviews. Full citations are found in the notes.

For sixty-five cents
you could get a piece of fish, a heaping helping of French fries, a tub of coleslaw, and some tartar sauce at the smoky little diner on Broadway just south of Times Square. But since they only had ninety-three cents and some pocket lint between them, they decided to order one meal and split it, throwing in an additional dime apiece for a couple of glasses of birch beer.

It hadn’t escaped Barbara’s attention—few things ever did—that today, February 5, was her father’s birthday. He would have been fifty-two if he hadn’t died when she was fifteen months old, and quite possibly, instead of eating greasy fried fish with her friend Carl, she’d have spent this unseasonably warm winter day wandering through the city discussing Chekhov with the man she had come to idolize, a devotee of the Russian playwright, as well as of Shaw and Shakespeare. It was, after all, Chekhov’s centennial, and as serious students of the theater, both Barbara and Emanuel Streisand would have been well aware of that fact. She and her father might even have taken in
Three Sisters
that night at the Fourth Street Theater in the East Village—a production Barbara had been dying to see, but for which she’d been unable to afford a ticket.

Looking up at Carl over their French fries with a sudden, surprising passion, Barbara insisted that everything would have been very different if her father had lived. Certainly she wouldn’t have had to spend her nights at the Lunt-Fontanne, ushering giddy housewives from New Jersey to their seats to see Mary Martin warble her way through
The Sound of Music,
hiding her face “so nobody would remember” her after she became famous.

Barbara Joan Streisand was seventeen years old. She had been living in Manhattan now for almost exactly a year, and she was getting impatient with the pace of her acting career. So far her résumé consisted of summer stock and one play in somebody’s attic. But she wasn’t anywhere near to giving up. Her grandmother had called her “
farbrent
”
—Yiddish for “on fire”—because even as a child Barbara had never been able to accept “no” for an answer. Growing up in Brooklyn in near poverty, she’d existed in a world of her own imagination of “what life should be
like.” She was driven by “a need to be great,” she said, a need that burned in her like the passion of a “preacher”
and necessitated getting out of Brooklyn as soon as she could. And so it was that, in January 1959, just weeks after graduating (six months early) from Erasmus Hall High School, Barbara had hopped on the subway and, several stops later, emerged into her new life amid the lights of Times Square. Manhattan, she believed, was “where people really
lived.”

With the childlike enthusiasm that could, in an instant, melt her usual steely resolve, Barbara looked over at Carl with her wide blue eyes, telling him about her father, the intellectual, the man of culture. Her hands in frenetic motion, her outrageously long fingernails drawing considerable attention, she insisted that her father would have understood her. She missed him “in her bones.” All her life, she’d felt she was “missing something,” and she had to fill up the empty place he had left.

But, asked about her mother, Barbara fell silent. Crumpling her napkin and tossing it onto her plate, she slid out of the booth, plopped her share of coins onto the table, and trudged out of the restaurant. Carl had to gulp down the last of his birch beer before hurrying after her. Barbara was already out the door and striding down the sidewalk, the fringe of her antique lace shawl swinging as she walked.

Carl Esser knew very little about this strange urchin he’d met just a few weeks before in a Theatre Studio workshop, except that she fascinated him. Sex and romance had nothing to do with the attraction, at least not for him. At twenty-four, Carl was seven years Barbara’s senior, and besides, the small girl who was already half a block ahead of him wasn’t exactly what most people would call pretty. A layer of heavy pancake makeup covered an angry blush of teenage acne. Her eyes, no matter how cornflower blue, had a tendency to look crossed. Most of all, she had a nose that was likened by some in their acting class to an anteater’s snout—behind Barbara’s back, of course. But her breasts were full, her waist was small, and her hips were nicely rounded, making for an odd and rather contradictory package.

Carl knew—everyone in their acting class knew—how intensely Barbara wanted to be great. She wanted to be Duse, she said, though she’d never seen Duse act,
only read about her in books on theater in her acting teacher’s library. That didn’t matter. Duse had been a great artist, perhaps the greatest, and that’s what Barbara wanted. There were others in the class who claimed they wanted to be great, but what they really wanted was fame and applause. That wasn’t what fired Barbara up. She didn’t sit around idolizing movie stars or the latest Broadway sensation du jour. She wanted to be remembered for being great, for making art.

Taxicabs bleated their horns as Barbara and Carl crossed Times Square. Policemen blew high-pitched whistles as tiny brand-new Ford Falcons scooted past sleek Chevrolet Impalas with their sweeping tail fins. Steam from the Seventh Avenue subway rose through the grates like fog from an underground river. On every block hung the fragrance of roasting chestnuts, while tourists in fur coats gaped up at the news ticker on the New York Times Building, its 14,800 bulbs spelling out the latest in the U.S.-Soviet space race.

Barbara and Carl headed west on Forty-eighth Street. At Barbara’s apartment, number 339, the friends bid each other good-bye, and if Barbara was hoping there might be a kiss, she didn’t wait for it. It was clear that Carl, like all the others, wasn’t interested in her that way. If anyone had asked, she would’ve insisted it didn’t matter. With all her big dreams, she would’ve said that she didn’t have time for romance.

That day, or one very much like it, Barbara walked up the stairs to her apartment to the smell of boiled chicken. On the stove bubbled a pot of her mother’s chicken soup. Barbara’s roommate, Marilyn, told her that her mother had just walked in, dropped off the soup, and left. No message, no note. But the chicken soup, as always, was welcome because that fried fish and coleslaw would last only so long.

Striding into her acting class, Barbara was boiling with all the ferocity of her mother’s soup.
Who
did this Susskind guy think he was?

Word around the Theatre Studio had been that the producer David Susskind was always looking for new talent. It might be only for television, not the stage, but Susskind’s production of
Lullaby
for Channel 13’s
Play of the Week
had recently won approving notices for Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, and next up was
The Devil and Daniel Webster
for
NBC Sunday Showcase.
The guy was making something worthwhile out of the boob tube. And since Susskind had been an agent, Barbara no doubt figured stopping by his office on Columbus Circle couldn’t hurt, to drop off some headshots if nothing else.

But rarely had she encountered such rudeness. Carl, who’d gotten an earful on the way to class, was trying to calm her down, but Barbara was on a roll. Susskind had agreed to see her, but then Barbara had sat in his office for hours to no avail. Finally she’d stormed out, and the storm had yet to subside. People such as Susskind, she raged, were refusing to let new talent emerge, almost as if they had a “duty to squelch”
it. That was the problem with this business, Barbara carped. Whenever she tried to sign up with agents, she was told they only represented people who were working. But you couldn’t get work without an agent! Talk about double binds! Barbara took it all very personally.

The others in her class looked on with a mixture of amusement and weariness. To them, Barbara was that nutty kid who was always stumbling in late eating yogurt and wearing “a coat
of some immense plaid,” as one of them described. When she spoke, Barbara reminded some people of a Jules Feiffer cartoon
from the
Village Voice
—cynical, ironic, sometimes angry, and always quintessentially New York. When asked why she talked so much, often to the point where other students closed their eyes in exhaustion, she was apt to blame it on her tinnitus, a condition that had plagued her since she was eight. “I never hear
the silence,” she said. Neither, her classmates might have replied, did they.

The Theatre Studio was located at 353 West Forty-eighth Street, just a few doors from Barbara’s apartment, precisely the reason she’d chosen to live there. The school was one of about a hundred such institutions
in a twenty-block radius of Times Square. In the previous decade acting schools had proliferated in New York. With the elite “big three”—the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the American Theatre Wing, and the Neighborhood Playhouse—only being able to accommodate about six hundred aspiring actors, newer schools quickly formed to fill the need. Celebrated coaches like Herbert Berghof and Stella Adler established their own ateliers. The Theatre Studio was part of this same tradition, having been founded in 1952 by Curt Conway, a member of the groundbreaking Group Theatre and a major proponent of Method acting. In addition to the classrooms on Forty-eighth Street, Conway had acquired the Cecilwood Playhouse in Fishkill, New York, for summer productions, and a weekly radio program
on station WEVD where his students interpreted new and classical work. The school offered
three levels of courses, from fundamental to advanced acting, and special workshops conducted by some of the greats
Conway had worked with, including Joseph Anthony, Howard Da Silva, Paddy Chayefsky, and Harold Clurman.

Not that Barbara, a neophyte, had gotten to study with any of them. Her primary teacher was Allan Miller, a young up-and-comer who’d studied under Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen and who was best known for playing the second lead (behind Warren Beatty) in a summer tour of
A Hatful of Rain.
Under Miller’s tutelage, Barbara was beginning to blossom. Finally she was in an environment where people believed in her potential as much as she did. Any student with enough “appetite,”
Miller believed, could be trained to act. With such a philosophy, it was no surprise that Barbara responded well to Miller’s instruction. “We all have deep, secret feelings,” he told his students—and that was certainly true enough of Barbara. With enough craft and discipline, Miller said, she could use those feelings to hone and express her acting talent.

Barbara had enrolled at the Theatre Studio when she was not quite sixteen, younger than most people who were admitted. Her only real acting experience came from a summer internship with the Malden Bridge Playhouse in upstate New York between her sophomore and junior years, where she’d gotten to act in
Picnic
and won a nice review in the local newspaper.
Her acceptance into the Theatre Studio had come about only through the intercession of Miller’s wife, Anita, whom Barbara had met at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where she’d secured herself yet another internship. As soon as Barbara had realized that her new friend’s husband taught at the Theatre Studio, she’d bombarded her with questions, coming across to Anita “like someone who
had been starved.” Impressed by her passion, Anita had prevailed upon her husband to accept Barbara into his class. Instead of paying tuition ($180 for a fifteen-week course
), Barbara babysat the Millers’ two young sons. It wasn’t unheard of for students to barter their tuition in this way; another young hopeful, an enterprising kid from California named Dustin Hoffman,
swept the floors and emptied the trash at night. Barbara told her mother she’d received a “scholarship.”

Although she took classes with other teachers, it was Allan Miller who became Barbara’s mentor. Handsome, intelligent, passionate, Miller offered Barbara a glimpse of what her life might have been like if her father had still been around. In the days before she got her apartment, Barbara would sometimes sleep on the Millers’ couch instead of schlepping back to Brooklyn. She’d fall asleep with books about theater, art, or literature resting on her chest. These were the kind of treatises she believed her father would have kept around the house: Socrates, Euripides,
French farces, and Russian literature.
Anna Karenina
“changed her life,” she said. During this same period Barbara also heard her first classical music: Respighi’s
Pines of Rome
and Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring.
“Can you imagine
what that’s like?” she asked, looking back. “To hear that music for the first time?”