Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (28 page)

“Do you have to ask me like that?” she responded. “You think you’re gonna ask me about Zen Buddhism and you think I’m going to tell you that I’m enlightened and all about Zen Buddhism, but that’s all foolishness.”

“But you wanted to talk about it,” Wallace said. “So go ahead and talk.”

Barbra remained silent. Wallace told her she was being impolite.

“Let me tell you something,” Barbra finally said, leveling her gaze at the host. “I used to like you.”

Nervous laughter in the studio.

“This is the truth,” Barbra continued. “I really like what he does. A lot of people don’t.”

More nervous laughter.

“It’s the truth,” Wallace admitted.

“I like the fact that you are provoking,” Barbra said. “But don’t provoke
me.
”

Of course, that only made Wallace want to provoke her more. Soon he was making a joke about the keys on Barbra’s keychain. “So you sort of sleep all over town?” he asked. Barbra insisted he make a distinction between “sleeping around” and “sleeping around town.” It got a good laugh, but the hostility was now palpable.

So it was perhaps not surprising that by the time Lorraine Gordon and Dagmar Wilson came out to discuss nuclear testing and the folly of building fallout shelters, Barbra seemed exhausted. After her comrades in the peace movement delivered impassioned calls for disarmament, Barbra was next in line for Wallace’s questioning. “You’re involved in this,
too?” he asked, seeming to imply: Zen Buddhism, thrift shops, long fingernails, a crusade against smoked foods—and now the
peace movement
?

“Oh, yeah,” Barbra said, as Gordon remembered it. “We’re like a bunch of lemmings. We all follow each other and jump off the cliff.”

She gave Wallace the laugh he wanted instead of taking the opportunity to endorse the politics so fervently expressed by Gordon and Wilson. Gordon was livid at what seemed like a betrayal. She gave Barbra a kick under the table.

Yet few could stay angry with Barbra for long when she started to sing. On that show, she finally had a chance to show off how she’d mastered “Moon River.” Once again, the nineteen-year-old girl became ageless. “Moon River, wider than a mile,” Barbra sang. When she was finished, Mike Wallace looked into the camera and said, “It’s always a pleasure to listen to that girl sing.” No matter how much the kid might get under his skin at other times, the admiration in Wallace’s voice was real.

The harmony and good feeling of the first day of rehearsal had quickly evaporated at the Fifty-fourth Street Theatre.

“No, that is
not
the way to do it!” Laurents shouted at Barbra. “Too much, too much!”

She paid him no mind and kept on singing. She was rehearsing her solo number, “Miss Marmelstein,” a song that had been written for the show, then taken out, then put back in so Barbra would have more to do. As written, Miss Marmelstein was “just another piece of furniture,”
Weidman admitted, but Barbra’s stage presence, so big, so overpowering, made that unworkable. Therefore, early in the second act, a battalion of garment execs would march across the stage, ordering Miss M to perform various tasks for them. “At the end of her tether”—or so the stage directions described—the harried, homely secretary would look out at the audience and launch into her eponymous number.

“Why is it always Miss Marmelstein?” Barbra wailed as Laurents watched from the sidelines. She lamented how nobody ever called her “baby doll, or honey dear, or sweetie pie,” like they did other girls. Even her first name would be “preferable,” she griped, “though it’s terrible, it might be bettah, it’s Yetta.” The kvetching went on like this, as offstage voices kept up a running chorus of “Miss Marmelstein!” The number was intended to give the script a lift at a particular moment when it could use one. The audience needed a chance to laugh, Laurents realized, as Harry Bogen’s odious schemes began to unravel.

The problem was that Barbra had no sense of restraint. She was flailing around the stage, arms flying, eyes bugging out. She used her long fingernails to great effect as she flung her hands around—but it was the mannerism of a diva, Laurents grumbled, not a secretary. “Overkill,” Laurents called Barbra’s interpretation of the part. “Too many twitches
and collapses, giggles and gasps, too many take-ums.” He didn’t want to lose her uniqueness—he thought her characterization of Miss Marmelstein was “very funny, a bizarre collection of idiosyncrasies which came from instinct and were probably rehearsed at home”—but he did want to “edit, to cut out the extraneous contortions.” Her performance, he realized, was coming “from the fingernails, not from inside.”

Striding out onto the stage, the director gave Barbra the signal to stop the number. The pianist broke off playing, and an uneasy silence fell over the empty theater.

Barbra wasn’t pleased. This back-and-forth with Laurents had been going on for a while. Not long before, they’d come to loggerheads when she’d asked to be excused from a rehearsal because she had to appear on
PM East.
Expecting permission to be granted, Barbra was already choosing what outfit to wear when Laurents had said no. Vexed, she tried finagling permission from Herbert Ross, who sent her back to Laurents. The director came to realize that Barbra felt “she was different,
she was special” and that “future stars were not to be ignored.” When Laurents proved intransigent, Barbra sulked.

Even worse from her perspective was the director’s insistence “on blueprinting exactly how
[she] should do everything.” That had never been her style. She preferred “to work slowly into the part,” playing it “by ear.” As in her nightclub acts, Barbra found it very difficult to do “anything twice in exactly the same way.” So she spoke up, arguing her point of view forcefully, a far cry from the timid little girl who’d blanched when Barré had dared to challenge Vasek Simek during
The Insect Comedy.

But when she argued, she always did so respectfully, which Laurents appreciated. As much as she had her own, very definite opinions, she was also smart enough to recognize that, on her own, she lacked the discipline needed to shape Miss Marmelstein into a well-balanced character. That was one reason, she admitted, that she was glad she was in
Wholesale
—“to learn
discipline in the theater.” But discipline required concentration, and concentration required listening—one skill Laurents felt Barbra lacked. It was her “low threshold
for boredom” that gave her so much trouble, Laurents believed. It was also that old unremitting narcissism. When it was her turn to perform, Laurents noted, Barbra came alive, but when she had to listen—to him or to other performers—“Miss Marmelstein went home and in her place stood Barbra Streisand, uncomfortable in a costume.”

Laurents tolerated the narcissism because of Barbra’s specialness. Others weren’t as forgiving. Harold Rome had fought to have “Miss Marmelstein” put back into the show, arranging it specifically for Barbra. He’d also written her into several other numbers, agreeing that Barbra’s enormous stage presence had to be balanced throughout the two acts. But for his efforts, Rome never got a word of thanks, a fact the composer resented. To him, the teenager was “ungrateful” and “arrogant.”
But Barbra figured she gave and they gave; they each “got something out of it.”
There was no need, therefore, for any thanks. It was the same attitude her acting teacher Eli Rill had observed: Barbra was unwilling to perform the expected niceties—the “ass-kissing,” as one of Barbra’s friends put it bluntly. Rill hadn’t minded, but Harold Rome did. And from that moment on, the composer soured on the girl he’d once been so enthusiastic about.

There was indeed a degree of youthful hubris about Barbra. She was riding high, and even a second rejection from Goddard Lieberson (he’d told Laurents that Barbra was “too special for records”
) had been only a minor irritant. Music, after all, was only a means to an end. “I want to be a straight
dramatic actress,” she’d tell a reporter around this time. “I really can’t explain it. It’s almost a compulsion.”

That was her underlying attitude, her core belief, as she stood face-to-face with her director, arms akimbo. It took choreographer Herbert Ross
to break the impasse. Hurrying up the stairs to the stage, Ross had an idea. He was a young man, just thirty-four, but already a veteran Broadway choreographer. He’d staged
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and a revival of
Finian’s Rainbow,
and just recently he had finished the critically praised
The Gay Life
with Barbara Cook. Ross was talented, perceptive, and diplomatic. Why not, he asked, as he wheeled Miss Marmelstein’s chair across the stage on its casters, let Barbra do the number sitting down? After all, she’d auditioned that way. Laurents agreed to give it a try.

It worked—wonderfully. Miss Marmelstein could sing her humorous tale of woe while sliding across the stage in her secretary’s chair, first this way, then that way, all precisely choreographed by Ross. Barbra was pleased as well, feeling the chair had really been her idea—which, no doubt, Ross had anticipated when he’d suggested she use it.

In the wings, Elliott Gould watched it all unfold. Though he’d been enjoying a bit of a flirtation with his leading lady, Marilyn Cooper, the more Elliott observed Barbra, the more “fascinated” he became. She might have a formidable stage presence, but underneath, Elliott felt, she needed “to be protected.”
Barbra was “a very fragile little girl,” Elliott suspected, one he found “absolutely exquisite.” Although he figured Barbra didn’t “commit easily,” he had “a desire to make her feel secure.”

And so, that afternoon or one very much like it, Elliott Gould asked Barbra Streisand out on a date.

It was two o’clock in the morning in Rockefeller Center. They’d been wandering the city together all night, their cheeks cold and rosy, their conversation as meandering as their walk. Suddenly, without warning, Barbra bent down, shaped a snowball in her mittened hands, and lobbed it across at Elliott, nailing him perfectly. His competitive nature triggered, Elliott scooped up his own ammunition and retaliated, his aim proving to be as good as hers. Within moments, a full-scale snowball fight
was underway, the laughter of the two combatants echoing through the empty plaza.

More than snowballs were ricocheting between them that night. Elliott was utterly smitten. To him, Barbra was a combination of Sophia Loren—love goddess—and Y. A. Tittle—the New York Giants’ tenacious quarterback who’d helped the team win the Eastern Division title in December. Walking Barbra to the subway after rehearsals, Elliott had come to think of her as the “most innocent thing”
he’d ever seen. But something about Barbra scared him, too. She was a beatnik and a bohemian, after all, so very different from the other girls he knew. Yet despite his fear, or maybe partially because of it, Elliott “really dug her”—and he sensed he might have been “the first person who really did.”

At last overwhelming her with snowballs—he called it a “hex”—Elliott began to chase her around the skating rink. Barbra squealed with delight. Elliott’s pursuit of her was “strange and wonderful,” she’d admitted to one friend. His interest was plainly evident, whereas, in the past, there had always been doubts with other men. Barbra had come to feel that her pursuit of men who weren’t as interested in her as she was in them reflected “a throwback”
to Louis Kind, when she’d tried in vain to make her stepfather like her.

But Elliott—she’d started calling him “Elly”—was the antithesis of all that. He’d phoned her; he’d walked her to the subway; he’d asked her out. She hadn’t gone after him; he’d come after her. That was significant. Now, wrestling her down in the snow, Elly looked into her blue eyes. He saw insecurity behind the bravado; Barbra’s “weirdness,” he realized,
was merely a defense. Scooping some snow in his hands, he “very delicately” washed her face with it. Then, just as tenderly, he kissed her lips. Nothing too demonstrative, but it was perhaps the most romantic gesture any man had ever extended to her. “Like out of a movie,”
Barbra thought. And for once she was playing the part of the leading lady, as she’d always believed she could.

Moonlight filled a cloudless sky over Philadelphia in the early morning hours of February 13. At the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, its magnificent French Renaissance architecture resplendent in the moonlight, Barbra and the rest of the
Wholesale
company hurried down the famous marble-and-iron elliptical staircase to the Tiffany-glass ballroom, where a celebration was underway after their first-night preview performance. But the cheers and clinking of champagne flutes belied the anxiety they all—but mostly their director—felt. The morning edition of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
would soon be out, and the critics would have their say.

Arthur Laurents still worried that the book wasn’t entirely right. He had hoped some clever directing and skillful acting might bridge the gaps, but after tonight’s performance, he knew the problems wouldn’t be solved until Weidman’s script was chopped up and reassembled. The director concluded he’d been too respectful of the writer’s work, and he feared the critics wouldn’t forgive him for such a dereliction of duty. Many shows died in Philadelphia, he knew all too well, before they ever reached New York.

On the surface, everything had seemed to go well. Showtime at the Shubert Theatre had been at eight o’clock, and the house, to Laurents’s great relief, had been full. That same week, David Merrick had opened a second show in Philly, the touring company of
Irma la Douce,
but he’d insisted that the two premieres be staggered so as not to compete with each other.

Most people in that first-night crowd had turned out to see Lillian Roth, who’d received the lion’s share of preshow publicity. In the
Inquirer
just that morning, Whitney Bolton had devoted an entire column to Roth’s comeback. “Just thirty years
after her last appearance on Broadway,” Bolton wrote, “she is destined to be back again on the street where the lights twinkle, where the only thing that counts is talent—and one’s use of it.” Roth’s connection to a glamorous, long-vanished Broadway—she’d worked for Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll—impressed the columnists and the public.