Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (24 page)

Leaving the office that day, Marty may well have been filled with anxiety about getting a positive answer from Lieberson. But Barbra, friends noticed, was much more tranquil about her prospects. What held far more opportunity than a record deal, Barbra believed, was
Another Evening with Harry Stoones,
and for that she didn’t need to wait for any decision from God. With a little help from Marty, she had done that herself.

With her hair piled up on top of her head, wearing a dark sleeveless dress and an air of entitled nonchalance, Barbra took complete charge of the taping of her second appearance on
PM East.
Disregarding the script and directing the conversation, she forced the pugnacious Mike Wallace to follow her lead. When he asked about life in Brooklyn, Wallace found himself in the rare position of being outmaneuvered by a guest who didn’t want to answer the question. “In Detroit they think I come from Turkey,” Barbra said. “In St. Louis they think I come from Israel. It doesn’t matter where I come from.” Then she launched into “Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking” with all the eccentricities that had startled her audiences in Winnipeg: “They have sunflower cakes, moonbeam cakes, gizzard cakes, lizard cakes, pickled eels, pickled snakes . . .”

It was precisely for this outsized personality that they’d brought her back. The reaction to Barbra’s debut on the program had been “so enthusiastic,”
Wallace admitted, that they decided to make her a semiregular guest. Watching from the booth, the show’s publicist, Don Softness, marveled at the way the kid
bantered easily with the hosts and then segued into musical numbers that left audiences dazzled. “She was born a star,” Softness thought. Not only did Barbra have “this beautiful voice,” but she had “something more than self-confidence.” It was a quality of “expectation,” Softness realized, of “claiming what was her due.”

Of course, at that particular moment, Barbra had every reason to feel on top of her game. For one thing, she finally had a place to live. A cousin had passed on to her a sublet he’d been renting on West Eighteenth Street in Chelsea, and Barbra had redecorated with feather boas and esoteric posters. She was even considering getting her own phone for the first time in her life. Meanwhile, rehearsals for
Another Evening with Harry Stoones
were going well, with everyone convinced that it would be a hit. What was more, Marty was angling to get her an audition for an honest-to-god Broadway show, David Merrick’s
What’s in It for Me?
Columnist Hedda Hopper had reported that Tony Franciosa might star,
and the
Times
had just announced that Arthur Laurents would direct
and Sylvia Sidney would play the protagonist’s mother. If Barbra got a part in the show, she’d have to bow out of
Harry Stoones.
But everyone would understand. After all, this was David Merrick, the biggest producer on Broadway!

While it may have been a long shot, Barbra told Softness and the rest of the folks at
PM East
about Merrick’s show. When Mike Wallace suggested on air that being on
PM East
would help her attract the attention of big-time producers such as Merrick, Barbra just laughed and cut him down to size. “Now, let’s be honest,” she said. “Those people don’t watch television, not the ones that do the hiring. A show like this just gets the public interested in paying the minimum to see me at places like the Bon Soir.” No doubt, despite his outward amusement, Wallace seethed.

There was more sass to come. Before she went on to sing, Barbra scolded Wallace for failing to give a plug for
Stoones,
which was opening soon. “You forgot to mention the play I’m in,” she said, shouting over the host to give the name of the theater and the opening date. After all, the whole reason she appeared on
PM East
was to get publicity for herself
.

Watching her, Don Softness understood her attitude and figured they could work to each other’s mutual advantage. His job was to publicize
PM East,
and “an interesting guest could be used as a peg” to bring the show some notice. But at the same time, those same interesting guests would benefit by having their own profiles raised by doing publicity for the show. And Barbra, Softness thought, “was as interesting as they came.”

So when Barbra was finished taping that day, Softness approached her. He asked if she’d be willing to do some publicity. Even as the question was still on Softness’s lips, Barbra blurted out, “Yes!” She had a manager and an agent; a publicist was the logical next step. And Softness seemed a good man for the job. He and his brother, John, had opened the Softness Group
two years earlier; their client list had been building steadily ever since. So they made an appointment to meet at Softness’s office on Madison Avenue in order to “get some press material out on her.” They shook hands.

The merchandizing of Barbra Streisand was about to begin.

Who cared that the house wasn’t even half full? The show was only in previews. There was still time for word to get out and bring in the crowds. Besides, how could Barbra be upset about anything when she’d just gotten her picture in the
New York Times
?
Even if they’d spelled her name with three a’s, and even if the photo wasn’t all that flattering—her mouth was open midsong—it was still her, and no doubt everyone in Brooklyn (and a certain ex-boyfriend in Manhattan) had seen it.

On stage at the Gramercy Arts Theatre, Barbra had just gotten a big laugh from the small audience for telling her lover in one skit that she was pregnant. The lead-up to the punch line was a group of jocks bragging about their conquests with all the pretty girls at school while their nebbish friend listens, seemingly in envy. But it’s only the nebbish who turns out to have gotten any action, for after everyone has left, the homely tagalong of the pretty girls (Barbra) comes up to him and announces, “Barry, I’m pregnant.” Only Barbra would have appreciated the irony of the boy’s name.

Most of her bits in
Harry Stoones
were in the first act. She played an Indian maiden, sang a goofy song called “Value” about being in love with a guy called Harold Mengert, and lampooned, in two different skits, the blues and New Jersey. So after her “I’m pregnant” line, which led off the second act, she mostly just sat backstage. But she was “just happy to be acting,” one friend understood.

And that photo in the
Times
! How could she not be happy? Barbra might be listed last in the credits for the show, but it was
her
picture with which the
Times
had chosen to announce
Stoones
’s opening—not Sands’s, not Dom DeLuise’s. No one could be quite sure how that had happened, but in addition to the official mimeographs issued from the show’s publicists, newspaper editors were also receiving notices from Don Softness promoting
PM East
’s latest discovery, a brilliant singer and offbeat character named Barbra Streisand. In choosing to go with a picture of the television personality, the
Times
was counting on the fact that Barbra might actually be more recognizable to its readers than the revue’s other, ostensibly bigger names.

As Barbra rejoined her castmates on stage for the final curtain call, taking her bows as the meager audience got to its feet, there was a sense in the air that it was she—last on the bill, the butt of so many of the jokes—who was the fastest on the move.

At Bob’s little “postshow get-together” after
Harry Stoones
’s opening night on Saturday, October 21, Barbra seemed less focused on the reviews than on the fact that Barré had come to see the show. The critics hadn’t been kind. The reviewer who’d shown up from the
Times,
Lewis Funke, was perhaps the least simpatico with a revue that strove so earnestly to be avant-garde. Funke was a former sports reporter and, at fifty, part of another generation entirely than the kids cavorting up on stage. If Funke gave them a negative review, which everyone expected, there would likely never be another evening with Harry Stoones
.

But the fear of closing didn’t seem to be in the forefront of Barbra’s mind. Rather, she was more interested to learn from Bob that Barré had taken notes on her performance. Instead of being offended, she was eager to see what her former boyfriend had written. Holed up in a corner of Bob’s new apartment—he’d taken a gorgeous place on Gramercy Park South just a few blocks from the theater, with sixteen-foot ceilings, a Steinway grand piano, and enormous windows that overlooked the park—Barbra pored over Barré’s notes. He thought she’d been “great,” beautifully “underplaying her numbers.” Her voice had been terrific, he said, especially on “Value”—the Harold Mengert number—but it was her timing and her acting that had really impressed him and that was what mattered most to Barbra. Barré’s opinion, Bob realized, was still “very important to her.” Part of her had moved on from that heartbreak, but another part remained tethered to this man who had meant so much.

For a performer faced with the closing of her show, Barbra seemed to Bob to possess remarkable sangfroid. It wasn’t just
Another Evening with Harry Stoones
that had proved to be a disappointment either. She’d also recently learned that Goddard Lieberson wouldn’t be offering her a record deal. But Barbra seemed calm, collected, confident. That fall, many of her friends sensed that she was getting very close to something big. And so as one show faced the ax, Barbra seemed to roll with the punches and turned her determined eyes to another—the appropriately named
What’s in It for Me?

The temperatures were mild on Thursday, November 16, but the skies had turned a solid slate gray, pregnant with rain, which only made Jerome Weidman’s mood
all the bleaker. The novelist-playwright had just come from his doctor’s office where he’d been told he needed an abdominal operation. He should have gone home and rested, but instead he took a taxi up to the St. James Theatre on Forty-fourth Street. Auditions were being held that day for the show he was scheduled to start rehearsing in five weeks, which Weidman had adapted from his 1937 novel,
I Can Get It for You Wholesale.

It wasn’t as if the auditions that day were all that important. Most of the bigger parts had already been chosen. Weidman could have, “without compunction or hesitation,” left the selection of these less vital players in the very capable hands of the director, Arthur Laurents. But after writing the books for such successful shows as
Fiorello!
and
Tenderloin,
he had learned that it was “as impossible to become partially involved with a show” as it was “to partially fall in love.”

Laurents was already at the theater.
The director sat in the audience, watching the hopefuls on the stage. Although he’d written the books for many of Broadway’s biggest hits of recent years—
The Time of the Cuckoo, Gypsy, West Side Story
—this was only his second time directing, and his first time directing someone else’s material. When David Merrick had asked him to take the helm, Laurents, never one to be impressed by hype—his or anyone else’s—took it in stride. Merrick, he believed, “must have been turned down
by the big-name directors he went after first.” He accepted the job, despite his belief that the script—the story of a scheming con man named Harry Bogen—was “flawed” and “unmarked for success,”
because he’d always wanted to work with Merrick. He also believed he could make something special out of that flawed script.

Sitting there that day, watching the aspiring actors troop across the stage at the St. James Theatre, Laurents felt confident he could pull it off—so long as Weidman didn’t fight him too much. He considered that unlikely. Of the two, Laurents was known as the greater wordsmith, with a body of work that also included such esteemed films as
Rope, Anastasia,
and
Bonjour Tristesse.
Weidman, for his part, had never written anything to top
Wholesale,
his first novel, and his one major film had been the middlebrow melodrama
The Damned Don’t Cry,
starring Joan Crawford.

If any script battles were to come, however, they lay in the future, so when Weidman arrived at the theater, he and Laurents greeted each other warmly. There were backslaps and good words also with Harold Rome, the lyricist, and Herbert Ross, the choreographer. For the moment, everything was smiles and handshakes, and the men putting on this show for David Merrick settled down into the darkened red-velvet auditorium and turned their attention to the stage.

All auditions followed a similar pattern. The applicant would trudge up to the stage and stand beneath the glare of a bare bulb while the stage manager shouted out a name. To Weidman, “the names of all unknown actors and actresses, when heard for the first time in a darkened theater at an audition,” sounded like anagrams “composed of letters taken from the sides of Lithuanian Pullman cars.” With such incomprehensible cacophony, the name “Barbra Streisand” reached Weidman’s ears.

Barbra wore “a fur coat . . . a combination of tans, browns, yellows, and whites, all swirling around in great shapeless blotches, like a child’s painting.” From below the coat Weidman discerned “a couple of very shapely legs.” Laurents astutely pegged the coat as “an old movie-star wrap,” and Barbra was indeed intentionally hoping to evoke a bit of old-time movie-star glamour. Dressing for the audition with Bob, she’d chosen a “fabulous” caracul coat. The lamb’s fur was also ornamented with a bit of fox. The coat had come from a thrift shop, but it still looked “pristine,” Bob thought, “like something Dietrich would have worn.”

Yet for this particular audition Barbra would play the white goddess only on the outside. When she opened the fur coat, she revealed a simple wool dress, hardly the high couture most would-be actresses wore to auditions. Her hair wasn’t coiffed either, but was instead knotted in an old-maidish bun on the top of her head. Laurents got precisely the impression she wanted him to get: “Spinster incarnate,” he thought to himself when he got his first good look at her.