Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (29 page)

But not Barbra. Barré and Bob and Marty had all tried to instill in her an appreciation of the old-time greats, but she never had much feeling for history. She was smart enough, and decent enough, to treat Roth with the proper respect. But there was never any adulation, never any closeness. One friend asked Barbra if she ever sat at Roth’s knee and listened to her stories about Broadway’s Golden Age. Barbra replied, “What, are you crazy? Why would I do that?”

She was, in fact, frustrated that the advance publicity for
Wholesale
barely mentioned her at all. A caricature of the cast in the February 11 edition of the
Inquirer
had included nearly everyone but her. The young stars being promoted with the most press releases and interviews were Elliott, of course, and Marilyn Cooper, who played Harry Bogen’s girlfriend. But Harold Lang, Jack Kruschen, and Bambi Linn had also been singled out for publicity. Not a word, however, about Barbra.

Part of the publicists’ reluctance to highlight their youngest cast member no doubt stemmed from Merrick’s continued distaste for her, and his not-so-subtle hints to Laurents that she be replaced. Even this late in the game, it remained a possibility: Marilyn Lovell, playing the voluptuous showgirl, had been given the boot just before they’d headed to Philadelphia and was replaced by Sheree North, the onetime rival to Marilyn Monroe who Merrick thought had more sex appeal. But Barbra refused even to contemplate such a possibility. Instead, she was blithely planning how she might get herself noticed even without the help of the show’s press agents. Her strategy, as it turned out, was nothing if not original.

Jerome Weidman discovered what she was up to at one rehearsal. He’d spotted her scribbling away, presumably taking notes. But when he got a closer look, he discovered that Barbra had actually been writing her bio for the show’s playbill. “Born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon,” Barbra had written of herself. Encouraged by her publicists at the Softness Group, Barbra saw a golden opportunity to get herself some attention, in the same way she’d used comparable gambits in Detroit and Winnipeg. She’d written a similar bio for the
Harry Stoones
program, too, but this one would be seen by a lot more people. After all, Barbra reasoned, she was playing a Jewish secretary, so saying she was “from Brooklyn and brought up
in Flatbush” would have “meant nothing.” But if audiences thought she came from Madagascar . . .

That wasn’t all she wrote. Miss Streisand, the bio concluded, “is not a member of the Actors Studio.” With that one simple little line, Barbra had her revenge against all those pretentious up-and-comers who loved to flaunt their training at the Actors Studio—an education that Barbra had, of course,
not
been able to secure for herself. Indeed, by thumbing her nose at the “pompous and serious” tradition of program biographies, Barbra had turned a deficiency into an asset. If it seemed more like the modus operandi of the kook from
PM East
than the unassuming, by-the-book Miss Marmelstein, it didn’t matter. That night it was Barbra’s bio that stood out in the program more than anyone else’s, and that was the point.

Barbra herself also stood out on the stage. When Miss Marmelstein had come rolling out on her chair, kvetching about her life, she had gotten the loudest, most sustained applause of the night. Barbra had to have felt good about her performance, and about the reception she had received from the audience. Certainly Laurents did. He was pleased that her performance, even if it came more from her fingernails than it did her heart, had made such a connection with the audience. But critics had been known to see things very differently from those sitting around them.

It wasn’t yet light out when the first editions of the
Inquirer
made it to the Bellevue-Stratford. The ink was still moist as Laurents pulled open the paper, bypassing the news on the front page—Secretary of State Dean Rusk was trying to negotiate with the Soviets about nuclear arms—to go directly to the theater section. Under the headline
GARMENT SHOP BACK ON STAGE
, the review confirmed Laurents’s fears. Critic Henry T. Murdock, who’d been with the
Inquirer
since 1950 and whose tastes tended more toward musicals
such as
Guys and Dolls,
thought Harold Rome’s score possessed “range and versatility”
and that Herbert Ross had taken a “unique approach to dancing.” But when it came to the book, he wrote, “our enthusiasm dwindles.”
Wholesale
was supposed to be a musical comedy, Murdock argued, but he couldn’t find the comedy. The “hero-heel,” the critic wrote, was just not redeeming enough in the way Gene Kelly or Robert Morse had been in similar parts in
Pal Joey
and
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
The fault, Murdock wrote, could not be handed to Elliott, “who gives Harry everything the libretto demands.” Rather, the flaw of the show was the script. Laurents felt as if he could have penned the review himself.

But there was one moment Murdock felt compelled to single out. With comedy in such short supply, the critic welcomed the show’s “most truly comic song”: the “Miss Marmelstein” number that had roused the audience from its near torpor the night before. “Barbra Streisand,” Murdock wrote, “brings down the house.”
Among the company it was now obvious that the show had problems—perhaps serious ones—but the one part that worked without question was Barbra.

A few days later, when a second review appeared in the
Inquirer,
the strength of her position was confirmed. Barbra was the only cast member singled out for praise. “She stops the show
in its tracks,” the reviewer declared, a line Merrick’s publicists were quick to incorporate into all of their press releases from that point on. The acclaim kept coming. Dorothy Kilgallen, a fan of Barbra’s since the first Bon Soir appearance, reported in her syndicated column—which reached far more readers than the local Philly papers—that none other than Henry Fonda had seen
Wholesale
and had “registered considerable enthusiasm
for comedienne Barbra Streisand.” Merrick’s grumbling about her abruptly ceased.

No matter what might happen to
I Can Get It for You Wholesale,
one thing had become abundantly clear by the end of February. Barbra was going to be a hit.

Elliott Gould’s eyes, one reporter observed, were “as large and melancholy
as a Saint Bernard’s, an animal with which he shares the same shambling gait.” But this night, those hangdog eyes seemed to flicker with a kind of electricity as the young man made his way up the elliptical staircase of the Bellevue-Stratford.

Arthur Laurents knew where Elliott was headed, and it made him smile. Only now was the company catching on to the fact that Harry Bogen was romancing Miss Marmelstein. Marilyn Cooper had been stung when Elliott transferred his attentions from her to Barbra. But despite his leading lady’s disappointment, Laurents had encouraged the budding affair—“Godfathering the romance,”
he called his efforts. To the director, Elliott and Barbra seemed a “Jewish show-business Romeo and Juliet, in love with each other and ice cream.” The sweet treat was indeed a point of commonality between them. Many nights Elliott would carry a box of Breyer’s coffee ice cream up to Barbra’s room, two spoons tucked into the front pocket of his shirt.

Sex was in the air. The newspapers were filled with dispatches from the set of
Cleopatra
in Rome about the affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both married to other people. So notorious was the scandal that it bumped John Glenn’s historic space flight off the first pages of many tabloids, keeping “Liz and Dick” front and center. In Philadelphia, as in most places around the planet, talk of “Le Scandale” was on everyone’s lips, and the
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
company was no exception. For the freethinkers among them—which included Barbra and Elliott—the chutzpah of Taylor and Burton would have seemed remarkable, even admirable. Instead of offering denials or apologies, the celebrity pair seemed to be insisting that love—and sex—was more important than propriety.

Elliott hadn’t always been such a freethinker. He’d been “scared most of [his] life,”
he admitted. As a kid, he’d been convinced that he possessed a strange ability—almost a “psychic power,”
he said—that enabled him to intuit a person’s true feelings toward him. Someone might say he was smart, or talented, or handsome, but Elliott knew they were actually thinking just the opposite. For most of his twenty-three years, he had walked around with his head down avoiding making eye contact—not just from a sense of insecurity, but also from a preponderance of caution. Keeping his eyes on the floor, Elliott explained, ensured he wouldn’t “trip on anything.”

He became an actor, he said, so he could “communicate in a world
that was alien” to him and “get beneath the roots
of self-doubt.” Winning the lead in a Broadway play had gone a long way toward that goal, but those roots of self-doubt ran very deep—as deep, or even deeper, than Barbra’s. It was unlikely that one show—or any amount of playacting on the stage—could ever completely overrule a belief that had been instilled in him from the time he was a very young boy.

He was born Elliott Goldstein in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father, Bernard, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, was a salesman in the garment industry—further reason Arthur Laurents saw such verisimilitude in Elliott’s casting. Bernard was a distant, reserved man who was never demonstrative with his son; he had “too much pride” for that, Elliott believed. Indeed, the elder Goldstein sometimes seemed resentful of the little boy, telling a story of how he’d taken a very young Elliott to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers play the Cubs. “Four home runs
were hit in the game,” Bernard groused. “I didn’t see one of them. I was in the men’s room with Elliott each time.”

Part of his resentment may have stemmed from the fact that he’d never been in love with the boy’s mother, the former Lucille Raver, whom he’d married on the rebound after his true love’s parents had put a halt to their elopement. It was telling, no doubt, that Elliott was Bernard and Lucille’s only child.

Like her husband, Lucille was the offspring
of a Russian Jewish immigrant; her father had worked as a glass salesman in the Bronx. After her marriage, Lucille peddled artificial flowers throughout Bensonhurst to supplement Bernard’s income as a salesman. Unlike Emanuel Streisand, Bernard Goldstein was no intellect. He seemed to have no sense of the world beyond Bensonhurst, even after he came back from the war. He worked hard to support his family, but there was never any quest for something more.

What Bernard lacked in ambition Lucille made up tenfold. From a young age she’d had stars in her eyes. Lucille wanted more than just a two-and-a-half-room apartment on Bay Parkway, but she knew her husband was never going to get it for her. They argued constantly. By the time Elliott was three years old, he instinctively understood that his mother and father didn’t belong together, that they “didn’t understand one another.”
The unhappiness of his parents’ lives meant that the lessons they taught Elliott would be relentlessly pessimistic: “Be careful, don’t trust
anybody, you’ve got to save.” With tension always crackling just under the surface, Elliott lived in constant fear that everything could explode at any moment. He grew up “in terror of conflict,”
a feeling that lasted well into adulthood.

And yet, on another level, Elliott absolutely worshipped his parents. They were his entire life. Until he was eleven, he shared a bedroom with them; the concept of privacy was completely alien to the boy. To Elliott, his parents were “Mr. and Mrs. Captain Marvel”
—his heroes. “You won’t ever have
better friends than us,” they often reminded him. Everything Elliott did, he did for them, because without them, he was lost. Lucille, especially, dominated her son’s daily thoughts. She dressed him, pampered him, took him everywhere with her. Eventually she’d come to acknowledge that she might have been a bit smothering, but it was always “done out of love,”
she insisted. She would have cut off her arm for Elliott, Lucille declared.

But even his mother’s constant doting couldn’t dissuade Elliott from the belief that he was an ugly child—yet another bond shared with Barbra. Growing up, Elliott felt too big for his age. He thought he had a “fat ass.”
His hair was too curly, impossible to slick down—a problem because he wanted to look like Robert Wagner. More than anything Elliott wished he were Irish—a big, tough Irish brawler, the kind he saw on the streets, the kind who never let life beat them down. Despite being bar mitzvahed, Elliott maintained even less of a connection to his Jewishness than Barbra did with hers.

Where Elliott could escape was in the darkened Marlboro Theatre, where, like Barbra in a similar movie house three miles away, he imagined himself up on the silver screen. His favorite stars were Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper because they seemed like ordinary people, unlike so many of the others—Robert Wagner perhaps most of all—who filled the fan magazines. Elliott wondered if anyone would ever want to see real people on the screen—people like himself—and not “creations of Hollywood.”

At the age of eight, he started on a path to find out. Bored and desperate to find a way out of their dead-end life, Lucille began dragging her son off the basketball courts he loved so that he could audition for music shows and talent contests—anyplace, Elliott said, that was “looking to buy a kid.”
Problem was, this kid couldn’t sing or dance. Elliott remained “very withdrawn,
very shy and inhibited.” So Lucille enrolled him in Charles Lowe’s School of Theatrical Arts, located on an upper floor at 1650 Broadway, where, in the summer, giant electric fans turned in the windows as little children tap-danced across the oak wood floors. “Uncle Charlie,” as Lowe was known to his students, was a former vaudevillian in his late sixties with “parentheses-shaped legs”
who, with his wife, a one-time silent-movie actress, taught the progeny of ambitious stage mothers how to tap, sing, and project personality.