Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (23 page)

Lost in her meditations, Barbra could forget about such unpleasant moments. Zen was a handy tool to have. At the moment, the practice was rather fashionable among Barbra’s crowd. One friend, who got turned on to the practice at the same time, thought Barbra seemed “an expert, really so smart about Zen, really knowledgeable about going within.” When she wasn’t traveling, Barbra liked to hang out in the Village and talk Eastern philosophy with her pals. What Barbra sought, her friends understood, was “peace of mind.”

Recently, she’d endured another scene in Irvin Arthur’s office. With no gigs on the horizon, Barbra had shown up to see her agent, and she ran into Enrico Banducci, proprietor of the influential San Francisco club, the hungry i, who was on “one of his cyclical
forays into New York to ferret out fresh talent.” It was, of course, very likely that Barbra knew Banducci was going to be there that day and her confrontation with him had been planned. “Why don’t you give me a job?” Barbra asked the club manager. She’d admit the question was “a bit”
—a performance. She was acting the part of an aggressive character demanding a job. But she was also serious. Banducci took chances on unknowns. So why not take a chance on her? He ought to hire her now, Barbra declared, because later, when she was famous, she’d be too expensive for him. The iconoclastic Banducci, an expert at self-promotion himself, enjoyed her little performance. He promptly signed Barbra up for $350 a week for an unspecified future date.

Yet this kind of “begging” for jobs was one of the main reasons Barbra detested the nightclub life. She had no choice, however. She needed the money so she could get an apartment. She couldn’t keep lugging that cot around forever.

That summer Barbra faced a career slump. Zen might help her attain some peace of mind, but there was another force—more practical, more tangible—that was also coming to her aid. Marty Erlichman was walking the pavement and knocking on doors on Barbra’s behalf—something Rozar had never done. Marty was hopeful that he could get his new client an engagement at the uptown, upscale Blue Angel. And given his contacts at Columbia Records through the Clancy Brothers, he was optimistic about landing a record deal for her as well. But most important, at least to Barbra’s mind, was that Marty had helped secure her an audition for a
play.
Not a nightclub gig, but a play. Sure, it was a revue, but
Another Evening with Harry Stoones
would require learning lines and playing parts in addition to singing songs. Barbra wouldn’t just be some floozy standing next to a piano. How refreshing that would be.

And so Barbra closed her eyes and meditated some more. She could see her success, as clear as ever. Now only if the rest of the world would as well.

His mother kept mispronouncing
the name of his show as
Another Evening with Daniel Boone
or
Another Evening in Harry’s Saloon,
but author-composer-lyricist Jeff Harris was convinced his debut production had the right stuff to be a major hit. Until now Harris had been best known for playing the homicidal maniac Jenning Carlson on the television soap opera
The Edge of Night.
But since Carlson had bled to death on a special Christmas Eve episode last year, Harris had turned his attention to his revue
Another Evening with Harry Stoones.

Except that it wasn’t really a revue; it was just set up to look like one. In fact,
Harry Stoones
was conceived for “people who hate revues”
—a takeoff on all those tiresome “Evening with” shows that lately had become “epidemic”
off-Broadway. No cheesy lounge singers with velvet voices here. This was going to be smart, sassy, and successful. Indeed, Harris and his collaborators were so confident that they’d agreed to a long-term lease on the Gramercy Arts Theatre at Twenty-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue.

On such youthful hubris did
Harry Stoones
run. Harris and his two producers, Harvard graduates G. Adam Jordan and Fred Mueller, were all just twenty-six years old. Their newly formed Stenod Productions had managed to raise $15,000
from twenty-five investors in the last few months. The show would consist of comedy skits divided into two acts, “The Civil War” and “The Roaring Twenties”—time periods that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the show. This same sort of cheekiness was also evident in the non sequitur Harris had pulled out of thin air to use as a title: No Harry Stoones ever appeared (or was even mentioned) in the script.

Problems arose with casting, which Harris felt was “absolutely impossible.” In the auditorium of the Gramercy Arts, the playwright sat with Jordan, who would direct the show, growing bleary-eyed as they looked at headshot after headshot. What they needed were “down-to-earth performers,” Harris said, “not the typical smiley, happy, hooray type.” For days they’d been auditioning dozens of actors, but so far had only settled on a few. Diana Sands, who’d won the Outer Critics Circle Award for her portrayal of the daughter in
A Raisin in the Sun,
was their big name. The rest of the actors they’d chosen were largely newcomers: Kenny Adams had been in the ensemble of the Frank Loesser musical
Greenwillow
the previous year, while Sheila Copelan and Lou Antonio had done some television. To round out their cast, Harris and his partners needed two more women and two more men. The hopefuls kept trotting onto the stage, and the search continued.

Looking over the pile of headshots one more time, Harris kept pausing whenever he’d spot the face of one particular girl. Her name was Barbra Streisand. She’d come in with her manager, a boxy guy named Erlichman who wore a suit with a hole in the left sleeve. The small, slender kid with the large nose and curious eyes had climbed up on the stage and belted out a couple of songs for them, and they’d all thought she was “hot, clearly talented,
and very different”—precisely what they wanted in the show. But she was a singer, they believed, not an actress, and the show didn’t need singers; it needed people who could act. The skits demanded perfect comedy timing; the gags couldn’t be played too broad. So, with some regret, they had turned the Streisand kid down.

But her face kept coming back to Harris. It was her difference that stayed in his mind. The way she had looked, the way she had “answered funny” when they’d asked her questions. Few of the actors they’d interviewed so far had been more “down-to-earth” than she was, and no one would ever describe Barbra Streisand as “the typical smiley, happy, hooray type.” She was, when they came right down to it, exactly what they were looking for. If Streisand couldn’t act, Harris decided, then he’d write a few extra songs for her. So, with little more than a month before their scheduled opening date, he and his partners decided to call the kid back.

On an afternoon in mid-September, Barbra walked alongside Marty as they entered the Columbia Records building at 799 Seventh Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets. It was an old building, seven stories tall, with peeling paint and pipes that frequently burst, hardly the place one would imagine as the home of one of the biggest record companies in the world. The first floor was rented out to shops, but the rest of the building was a beehive of constantly humming activity. The basement contained the record archive—a treasure trove dating back to the 1920s with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and Ruth Etting that also included original Rodgers and Hammerstein cast recordings, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, and Leonard Bernstein. The top two floors of the building housed the recording studios. But it was to the fourth floor, entirely occupied by the offices of company president Goddard Lieberson, that Barbra and Marty were heading this day.

That Marty had managed to wrangle a meeting—a prelude to an actual audition—with the big cheese of Columbia Records was only one of his miracles that late summer of 1961. No doubt, as she rode the rickety elevator up from the ground floor, Barbra was awash in excitement, her mind filled with everything that was suddenly going on for her. Record deals were fine; “easy money” was how Barbra told friends she viewed the chance to record an album. But far more important to her was the fact that she’d gotten the part in
Another Evening with Harry Stoones,
just as Marty had predicted. Rehearsals had recently gotten underway at the Gramercy Arts. Now Barbra had the chance to prove to the world that she was so much more than just a singer.

The deal Harris had offered her, of course, had been terrible. “This is off-Broadway,” he’d told Marty; there was practically no money. Barbra would be paid $37.50 a week—a huge drop from the $350 a week she’d just been promised by the hungry i. But it was a chance for her to
act,
to do the kind of work she’d been denied now for more than a year, ever since she’d closed in
The Boy Friend.
And Barbra truly believed that
Harry Stoones
was going to get attention from the critics. Advance buzz on the show was good. New cast members included Dom DeLuise, who’d done
Little Mary Sunshine
off-Broadway, and Susan Belink,
a wonderful student from the Manhattan School of Music who would be singing most of the songs, for which Barbra was extremely grateful. Best of all, however, in terms of garnering critical attention, was the addition of Joe Milan, who’d assisted none other than Jerome Robbins on
Gypsy,
as the show’s choreographer.

Surviving on the thirty-seven dollars that
Harry Stoones
promised to pay her, however, would have been impossible. But yet again Marty had come to Barbra’s rescue. As they stepped out of the elevator and entered the reception area for Lieberson’s office, Barbra could thank Marty for a good many things, and he’d been her manager for barely one month. But it was the gig he’d just gotten her, at the Blue Angel, that could prove to be the most lucrative.

Barbra had tried once before to audition at the Angel, one of the toniest nightclubs in the city, but hadn’t gotten anywhere with its owner, the snobbish Herbert Jacoby. Then Marty had intervened. He’d had some success getting the Clancy Brothers onto the Angel’s stage, so he knew the best strategy was to bypass Jacoby and work directly with the club’s second owner, Max Gordon. While Gordon had little to do with the daily ins and outs at the Angel—concentrating instead on the Village Vanguard, where he’d heard Barbra sing not long before—his opinions carried weight, even if Jacoby wished he’d keep them downtown. And while Gordon had decided Barbra wasn’t right for the Vanguard, he thought she’d fit in
quite well at the more eclectic Angel. So he’d pressured Jacoby to relent and give Barbra the audition she wanted. Of course, whenever Barbra was given the chance to sing, she usually won over any doubters, and Jacoby was no exception. He’d signed her to a two-week run in November with a salary in excess of three hundred a week. So, thanks to Marty, that thirty-seven dollars a week from
Stoones
could be used as pocket change—bus fare and late-night noshing at the Brasserie.

At last things were going Barbra’s way. So it was with some renewed spring in her step that she accompanied Marty into Goddard Lieberson’s office.
Few people ever made it this far. Lieberson was a formidable figure, keeping his record company remarkably independent from its corporate parent, CBS. His recently hired legal counsel, Walter Yetnikoff, described Columbia as Goddard’s “own fiefdom,”
over which he ruled as a benevolent—and stylish—dictator. The man who was now shaking hands with Barbra and Marty had all his shirts custom-made in London; his tweed jackets inevitably sported leather patches on the elbows. He was the rare man who could get away with wearing pink—shirts, ties, pocket silks—without any collateral damage to his masculinity. When he wore an ascot, it seemed “appropriate,” Yetnikoff said, “never pretentious.” Married to the former ballerina Vera Zorina, the dark-haired, graying-at-the-temples Lieberson was the only employee CBS president William Paley and his wife, Babe, considered their social equal.

It had been Lieberson who’d overseen the introduction of the 33⅓ rpm LP record that had revolutionized the music industry in 1948. It had been Lieberson who’d convinced CBS to invest in the musical
My Fair Lady,
which had made the company a fortune. It had been Lieberson who’d launched the Record of the Month Club, which had caused profits to skyrocket. Whatever Goddard Lieberson wanted, he got; what he didn’t want, no one took. It wasn’t surprising that people shuddered when summoned to his office: “God would like to see you now” was how the memo read.

Standing before God, neither Barbra nor Marty cowered. They were there on a mission. Lieberson gestured for them to sit at the large round table in his office, where Marty pulled a few of Barbra’s reviews from his briefcase and read them out loud. Then he set a tape recorder on the table and played some of her songs. Lieberson listened politely, not saying much. No doubt he was aware that much more than a table separated him from the two people across from him. They all might have been Jewish, but Lieberson had been born in Hanley, Staffordshire, England, not Brooklyn, New York. And while his immigrant father had been a manufacturer of rubber heels, Lieberson had attended the prestigious Eastman College of Music instead of hustling his way into show business like these two characters. At Eastman, Lieberson had written chamber music set to Elizabethan poetry. By 1939, he had composed more than a hundred works, many of which were performed by Works Progress Administration orchestras. Even after being hired by Columbia, he’d found time to write a novel and master Japanese.

With seemingly infinite patience, the erudite Lieberson now sat back in his chair and listened as the plain-talking Erlichman made his pitch. After all, the guy had brought the Clancy Brothers to Columbia; Lieberson owed him that much. But the slender, odd-looking girl sitting beside Erlichman did not impress God. Marty seemed to sense this, and so, instead of asking for an immediate decision, suggested that Lieberson keep the tapes for a while. He told him that Barbra was special. “Listen to her when the phones
aren’t ringing,” he told Lieberson, who indulgently agreed.