Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (36 page)

“There’s something about having
your girlfriend say, ‘Come on, let’s stop a minute and see Snooks,’” Stark remembered, “that keeps you from thinking in dignified terms like ‘mother-in-law.’” When he visited Fran at home, Fanny could usually be found listening to the Tijuana races on the radio and “making book” with a visiting Katharine Hepburn or Orry-Kelly. Fanny didn’t always remember Stark’s name, calling him “Franny’s boy,” but he liked her anyway. When Ray and Fran married in 1940, Fanny threw a big gala at her house in Holmby Hills.

From Warners, Stark moved on to Fawcett Publications, where he was the West Coast entertainment editor for
Family Circle, Motion Picture, Screen Secrets,
and other magazines. During World War II, he served in the navy. Both his father and uncle died while Stark was in the service; his mother passed away soon after he returned home. The resulting sale of the family properties gave Stark a much-needed financial boost as he attempted to restart his career in Tinseltown. The literary agent job led to Charles Feldman’s Famous Artists Agency, where Stark repped Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, William Holden, Kirk Douglas, and Ronald Reagan. But after a few years, he wanted out. As an agent, Stark made only ten percent on every deal he negotiated. He “decided to make a stab”
for the remaining “ninety percent” and became a producer on his own.

With a partner, Eliot Hyman, Stark founded Seven Arts Productions in 1957, a company
Variety
quickly nicknamed “Hollywood’s eighth major” after the seven top studios. Seven Arts had a string of successes producing films that were distributed by others:
Thunder in the Sun
for Paramount,
The Misfits
for United Artists,
Lolita
for MGM. Stark and Hyman tended to invest their own money in projects—a credo that violated the usual Hollywood production pattern—but that way they had the ability to make quick decisions. Stark and Hyman owned the largest block of stock in Seven Arts, and they wanted to keep it that way. Movies, theater, television—all fell under the Seven Arts banner. The company had purchased the rights to
The World of Suzie Wong,
a novel by Richard Mason, while the book was still in galleys, and raised the money for the successful Broadway production. A year later, they had a terrific hit with the film, which Stark personally produced. It was that same formula he had in mind for the Brice project.

But he needed two things first. One, a better script.
Suzie Wong
had had a tight-as-a-drum book by Paul Osborn. It had also had the charming France Nuyen in the lead, who turned out to be a sensation. That, of course, was the second thing Stark needed. Someone who’d make the critics take notice, who’d surprise them, intrigue them, dazzle them. So, as a spotlight suddenly appeared on the tiny stage at the Bon Soir, Stark sat back in his chair and kept his eyes peeled for Barbra Streisand.

Backstage, Barbra was very aware of who was in the audience that night. Jule Styne, who’d showed up in her dressing room after a performance of
Wholesale
not long before and basically declared himself her servant for life, had informed her that he’d brought Ray Stark, Fanny Brice’s son-in-law and David Merrick’s coproducer. And in no uncertain terms, Styne advised her that for tonight she should dispense with the usual eccentric banter and concentrate on singing. Barbra agreed to take his advice.

The last time she’d played here, Barbra had been the warm-up act; now she was the headliner. The contract her new agent, Joe Sully, had banged out guaranteed her “100 percent sole star billing,”
and he’d also arranged for the club to pay Peter Daniels as Barbra’s accompanist. Plus there was a car to whisk her from the theater to the Village every night. Quite the difference from the days when Barbra had first stumbled through the darkness, having no say in how things were done. Everything was different this time around. The club had a new owner, Nat Sackin, a handsome, somewhat mysterious character, and the flamboyant Jimmie Daniels had been replaced as emcee by Barbra’s old friend and booster, Burke McHugh. At least one reviewer missed Daniels’s “terse, mocking intros,”
especially given how “sincere, sentimental and very long” McHugh’s monologues tended to be.

But the biggest difference between now and the last time Barbra had appeared at the Bon Soir was how much more they were paying her. A year ago, she’d collected $175 a week. Now, a Broadway show, a Tony nomination, and a Drama Critics’ Circle Award later, she pulled in seven times that—$1,250. Once upon a time, it had been Barbra who hoped her association with the Bon Soir would raise her profile. Now it was the club that wanted her name to help sell itself as hip, timely, and relevant.

With Barbra backstage, as usual, was Elliott. Since the start of her run at the Bon Soir, he could usually be spotted “hanging around” the club somewhere, as noticed by Dick Gautier, the opening act. Elliott’s ubiquitous presence meant that others were prevented from spending too much one-on-one time with Barbra. One regular Bon Soir patron thought that Elliott acted as a kind of shield for her. According to this patron, Barbra seemed to have grown “a little wary of mingling too much with her fan base,” since she no longer came out and sat at the tables between shows. But it wasn’t just she who had changed; her fan base had, too. Once a friendly group of Villagers, many of whom knew Barry or Bob or Terry, now it had grown into an authentic phenomenon, a pack of mostly gay men whom Barbra had never met and who showed up every night to see her.

Gautier had no illusions that the standing-room-only crowds every night had much to do with him. On opening night, when he looked out into the room and saw Helen Hayes and other Broadway bigwigs, he knew they hadn’t come for his jokes, but to hear the girl who “stopped the show” every night over at the Shubert Theatre. But to Barbra’s credit, she never engaged in any one-upmanship, even though she enjoyed, as per her contract, “100 percent sole star billing.” She shared with Gautier, the original Conrad Birdie in the Broadway smash
Bye Bye Birdie,
a “mutual respect” that befitted two Tony-nominated Broadway performers.

Certainly Barbra was grateful that Gautier always handed over an upbeat audience to her. This night was no exception. The crowd was applauding in anticipation even before Burke McHugh had finished his introduction. Given his history with Barbra, and the very real credit McHugh could take for launching her career, his intro may have been one of the long and sentimental ones he was known for. But no matter what words he used or how long it took him to say them, the audience erupted into applause when the spotlight picked Barbra out, standing by Peter Daniels’s piano on the dark stage.

“Twenty-year-old Barbra
Streisand returns to Gotham’s intime [intimate] nitery circuit with the assurance of a performer who knows that the road ahead is strictly upward,”
Variety
had observed after opening night. “She knows what she’s about and makes the tablers aware that there’s something special happening on stage.”

Reviews rarely came much better than that. Barbra’s triumphant return to the Bon Soir meant that she was no fluke, no passing trend, and that she was so much more than Miss Marmelstein. One night, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, a songwriting couple who’d written the title track to Dean Martin’s
Sleep Warm
album, came backstage and asked her, “Do you know how wonderful
you are?” Barbra didn’t answer, but the Bergmans thought she did know. “You can’t be that wonderful and not know,” they mused.

It was clear that Barbra did know she was pretty wonderful, though as
Variety
observed, she didn’t come across “arrogant or smart-alecky.” She was simply suffused with confidence. When she sang Leonard Bernstein’s “My Name Is Barbara,” from his
I Hate Music: A Cycle of Five Kids’ Songs for Soprano and Piano,
she made it utterly her own, no matter its operatic style and that pesky extra “a.” “Value,” from
Harry Stoones,
once again proved a crowd-pleaser, as was Harold Arlen’s “I Had Myself a True Love.” But it was Barbra’s daring cover of “Lover Man,” so indelibly associated with Billie Holiday, that really impressed the crowd. Barbra might have been blissfully in love with a man who loved her back, but she was still able to put over the heartache of a lonely woman. As her voice trailed off on the last line—“Lover man, oh where can you be?”—the audience was jumping to its feet and banging the tables in appreciation.

This night, she obeyed Styne’s decree to tone down the banter, but her personality no doubt still came through, if only in the way she smiled or shrugged. So ingrained into her act was Barbra’s shtick by now that it had become impossible to completely eliminate.
Variety
had recognized that her “infectious juve [juvenile] giggle,” her “grimace,” her “wispy mood,” and her “straightforward belt” were all “calculated for maximum impact.” But such calculation didn’t make her act any less “winning,” the trade paper declared. “It works and that’s what counts.”

What remained to be seen was whether Ray Stark agreed with that assessment. When he came backstage to meet Barbra after the show, he said very little to her, although he did ask her to come in to his office the next week and give a reading from Lennart’s script. That was promising, but what he actually thought of Barbra as a performer he did not reveal. Ray Stark was known to be a secretive man. In Hollywood, where everyone had “a masseur, an analyst and a wife”
who could potentially blab details before a deal was inked, Stark had developed a real fetish for secrecy. He’d insist on absolute oaths of privacy when making a deal, ending his negotiations with “Swearsies?” The hard-driving dealmaker retained that childlike enjoyment of the high-stakes game he was so good at playing.

So when Stark left the club that night, Barbra—and Marty and Elliott and anyone else who had been watching his reactions carefully—would have had little clue as to what the producer was actually thinking. But Jule Styne surely knew. After the show, Stark told his collaborator what he had realized as he watched the kid perform. Barbra
was
Fanny Brice. And from that point on, Ray Stark could never think “of anyone else in the part.”

Barbra strode into the room wearing a buttons-and-epaulets outfit that Jule Styne thought looked like a Russian Cossack uniform. He might have been her biggest fan, but he thought the outfit was horrible.
Fortunately, it wasn’t her clothes that were auditioning that day in early June. Instead, Barbra stood bravely in front of Styne, Ray Stark, Jerry Robbins, Bob Merrill, and David Merrick ready to show them that she could act. They knew she could sing; they’d all been to the Bon Soir by this point. Handing her Isobel Lennart’s script for
The Funny Girl
—the name now attached to the project—they were willing to overlook the buttons and epaulets if she could convince them that she was Fanny Brice.

As usual, Marty Erlichman was at Barbra’s side. Marty, they all understood, made things happen for her. Barbra had come that day at Stark’s bidding, but it had been Marty who had made that invitation inevitable. Under Marty’s direction, the Softness brothers had kept up their wooing of newspaper columnists, and as a result, Earl Wilson
was currently suggesting in papers all across the country that Barbra should play Fanny Brice (with Jan Murray as Nick Arnstein). Stark and his collaborators couldn’t have missed it. Meanwhile, Marty had also wangled Barbra fancy new representation with the William Morris Agency,
a major step up from the more provincial Associated Booking, although the latter continued to handle her nightclub appearances. If Barbra was going to play in the major leagues—and it didn’t get much more major than the quintet sitting in front of her—she’d need major-league representation.

So the young woman who walked into the room that day was hardly some kid off the street, as the power brokers who sat watching her with keen, discerning eyes liked to call her in the press. “An unknown,”
Ray Stark described her. That was nonsense. Barbra might not have been an Anne Bancroft, or even a Carol Burnett, but an “unknown” wouldn’t have generated the kind of buzz she was getting that summer. The two albums she’d participated in—the cast recording of
Wholesale
and the
Pins and Needles
tribute—had just been released, and Barbra dominated virtually every review. John S. Wilson in the
New York Times
put it plainly:
Wholesale
wouldn’t be remembered for Harold Rome’s score, but rather as Barbra Streisand’s Broadway debut. “Miss Streisand has such
a vivid and pungent style of delivery,” Wilson declared, “that she rises out of the laboring ordinariness of her surroundings on this disk like a dazzling beacon.” Reviews for
Pins and Needles
nearly always trumpeted Barbra as well.

The irony was that both disks had been released by Columbia Records. But even those two successful albums hadn’t convinced Goddard Lieberson to offer Barbra a contract. Both Capitol and Atlantic had stepped forward with offers, but Marty insisted they hold out for Columbia. Barbra’s tireless manager spent many evenings at the Ho-Ho, a Chinese restaurant-bar where the record execs gathered after work, buying rounds of drinks for everybody and regaling them all with updates on the auditions for
The Funny Girl.
Lieberson, after all, had been Fanny Brice’s pal—though word was that he didn’t feel Barbra was right for the part.

Thankfully, those in the room that day thought otherwise. Even David Merrick, so opposed to Barbra in the past, seemed to be coming around, or at least that’s what they were hearing. Not long before, Bob had accompanied a friend to a swanky society party in Morristown, New Jersey, where, much to his surprise, he was introduced to the mercurial producer. Explaining that he was Barbra’s friend, Bob bravely asked Merrick if it was true that he didn’t want her for the Fanny Brice show. On the contrary, Merrick replied, he’d “
love
to work with her.” In fact, Barbra “could even be a producing partner” if she so chose—though that much, at least, was probably the champagne talking.