Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (37 page)

Still, Merrick’s change of heart appeared genuine. It had apparently come about after he’d seen her at the Bon Soir—which seemed to do the trick for any doubter. After the show, impressed with a new maturity in Barbra’s performance, Merrick told Marty, “Tell Barbra I think
she’s aged.” Not long afterward, upon the expiration of Barbra’s current
Wholesale
contract, Merrick gave her an increase in salary, bringing her more in line with what Elliott and Lillian Roth were making.

So Barbra was a bona fide Broadway professional when she came in that day to read from Lennart’s script. She might have been just twenty years old, a supporting player in a so-so play, but she was also a star in the world of nightclubs and a darling of the critics. She was also a television celebrity, a critical point in her favor everyone would have appreciated. Although
PM East
had recently been cancelled, it had made Barbra’s name and face familiar to a wide swath of the public who had never been to a New York nightclub or a Broadway show.

Accepting the script for her read-through, Barbra looked into the faces of the five men who had the power to give her either the boost she craved or stop her cold in her tracks. But one face was missing from
The Funny Girl
team that day: the very author of the material Barbra held in her hand. Isobel Lennart might have tempered some of the testosterone-fueled pressure in the room, but she was three thousand miles away at her home in Malibu, frantically revising the first act. Even as Barbra read through her scenes, everyone knew the book remained deeply flawed. In her glass-enclosed “teahouse”
overlooking the ocean, Lennart was trying to figure out how to balance the comedy of the first act with the tragedy of the second. “God knows she has
it in her,” Robbins, ever Lennart’s champion, had written to Stark, “but she and I are well aware of the problem of translating this into a different medium”—screenplay to libretto.

Stark, however, wasn’t as optimistic. He’d asked John Patrick, who’d written the screenplay for
The World of Suzie Wong,
if he could improve Lennart’s book, but Patrick was doubtful that much could be done without starting over from scratch—which none of them wanted to do. There simply wasn’t time. Merrick was talking about an opening date in October, which was just five months away, and Stark had sent around a memo stating it was his “desire and intention to
proceed on this basis.” That would mean, if Barbra was cast, that she’d have to bow out of
Wholesale.
Since Merrick held her contract, that wouldn’t be a problem. But they had lost the luxury of time.

There was another important reason they needed to start right away. Jerry Robbins had indicated that if they didn’t move forward soon, he was out of the project. Producer Cheryl Crawford was eager for him to direct a version of Bertolt Brecht’s
Mother Courage and Her Children.
Robbins didn’t want to lose this opportunity if
The Funny Girl
was delayed further
.

So it was decision time. With Lennart trying to fix the book, casting was the next order of business. Not long before, Stark had circulated another list of possibilities for Fanny to his collaborators: Burnett, Streisand, Gwen Verdon, Mitzi Gaynor, Janis Paige, Betty Comden, Elaine May, Elaine Stritch, and (probably just to placate his wife) Mary Martin. They were “listed haphazardly,”
he insisted, “and not in order of preference.” One name, however, was conspicuous by its absence. “For the record,” Stark wrote, “I would like to say that I have a negative feeling regarding Anne Bancroft, predicated on the fact that she may have a completely different concept of the kind of play we all desire.” If others wanted to keep Bancroft in the running, Stark wanted to be reassured that she was “capable of singing from a stage.” Bottom line, Stark said, he felt “a lack of humor and warmth” from her, “which most certainly is the basis of our characterization.”

Robbins begged to differ. “If she can sing,”
he wrote of Bancroft, “then I still feel she would be the best for it.” He’d recently spoken with her, and Bancroft remained “interested,” though she was waiting to see what Lennart came up with for the new first act. Yet while Robbins’s support for Bancroft remained strong, there were growing doubts about the viability of her casting. She was insisting on an eighteen-month clause, which would allow her to escape from the show after just a year and a half. Stark argued that this would make a successful run “very difficult.” But the bigger worry was her voice, which even Robbins seemed to acknowledge, given his caveat “if she can sing.”

The composers had their own doubts as well. Months earlier, Styne and Merrill had run through the score for Bancroft. There was some history there: Merrill and Bancroft had dated,
and the relationship had ended badly. Merrill suspected some of the hostility Bancroft displayed that day at the Beverly Hills Hotel, as she listened to them sing the score, grew out of old personal resentments. Despite the fact that Merrill had actually written “People” with Bancroft in mind, she’d been unimpressed when she’d heard it, stalking out of the hotel in a huff, claiming it was “unsingable.”

Maybe, Stark had come to believe,
nothing
was singable for Bancroft, who, after all, was known more for her dramatic prowess than her singing voice. Robbins may have begun to agree with him on that point, since in the past few weeks he’d been advocating strongly for Carol Burnett as his second choice. Burnett wanted to do it, Robbins informed his collaborators just days before Barbra came in to do her reading. But he also acknowledged that he would need “to work with her a bit
on the dramatic scenes to see whether she [was] capable of them.” The concerns they had with Burnett were the exact opposite of the concerns they had with Bancroft.

What they were looking for on the day Barbra strolled in looking like a Cossack was someone who could both sing
and
act. Ray Stark and Jule Styne thought they’d found that someone, and Merrick seemed at least amenable to the idea. But there were two holdouts. Robbins had seen Barbra at the Bon Soir and agreed that she was terrific, but nonetheless she remained third on his list. Bob Merrill’s doubts were bigger, which made for some awkwardness between him and Styne, his partner. But then again, their contrasts seemed to define them as a team. Styne was short and stout and loquacious; Merrill was tall and thin and taciturn. Styne was always upbeat, Merrill often dour. But together they had produced a score that everyone involved believed was destined to become a classic.

Merrill’s objections to Barbra were fundamental. He, too, had seen her at the Bon Soir, but for once the magic hadn’t happened. As a songwriter, Merrill didn’t like how Barbra played fast and loose with words and tempos. He believed songs were written a certain way by their composers and such authorial choices should be respected. Barbra, Merrill felt, assumed far too much ownership of other people’s work.

But there was more to his visceral dislike of her—or at least his wife, Suzanne, came to suspect as much. Merrill was a ladies’ man. If he wrote a song for a woman, he wanted to be attracted to her; the dynamic inspired him creatively, even if no romance ever bloomed between them. And Barbra, to Merrill, was not “girlfriend material,” his wife understood.

It wasn’t as frivolous an objection as it might sound, and Merrill probably had some sympathy from Merrick at least, if not from the smitten Styne. Beauty was obviously in the eye of the beholder, but their Fanny Brice had to be attractive enough not to look completely incongruous playing opposite the actor cast as Nick—who, judging from the list then being circulated by Stark, was going to be a looker. Christopher Plummer, Tony Franciosa, Robert Goulet, Keith Michell, and Farley Granger were the top choices, though Merrick wanted to approach Rock Hudson as well. “People insist he wants
to be in a Broadway musical,” Merrick’s office had told Robbins. “Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?” Unlikely or not, the idea to cast the top box-office star in the country was intriguing—and surely had them all considering how Barbra Streisand would look opposite the extravagantly handsome Hudson.

Barbra’s audition changed no minds
that day. Those who wanted her continued to want her; those who had doubts remained doubtful. Robbins would admit that Barbra had given “a marvelously sensitive reading,”
but he cautioned they needed “to face the problem of her youth.” Could a twenty-year-old convincingly play the middle-aged Fanny of the second act? Robbins was skeptical and was soon back to sending notes of encouragement to Anne Bancroft. Merrick, meanwhile, perhaps heeding Merrill’s reservations, was suddenly “really anxious”
to have Eydie Gormé come in and audition.

In a letter he wrote to Robbins not long after Barbra’s reading, Stark said he appreciated everyone’s varying opinions. With tremendous diplomacy, he recognized that all of the candidates had their advantages and that he was thankful to Robbins for considering them all. “You, of course, know
my preference,” he wrote at the end.

His preference remained Barbra. Yet what Stark failed to mention was his wife’s preference or if he’d even broached Barbra’s name with her at this point. And it would be Fran Stark, everyone knew, who would have the last word.

Sitting in the audience that night at the Shubert Theatre was Lillian Gish, the exquisite and ethereal star of the silent screen, who, with pioneering director D. W. Griffith, had made some of the most important early American films:
The Birth of a Nation, Way Down East, Broken Blossoms.
Backstage, Gish’s presence caused some excitement among the company’s cineastes, but Barbra seemed clueless.
She was in a foul mood that night. She was tired of the show, tired of Miss Marmelstein. She hoped fervently that come this fall she’d be playing Fanny Brice in
The Funny Girl,
not just for the artistic challenges the role offered but simply for the chance to get out of
Wholesale.
If this was the reality of Broadway—doing the same damn thing every night—Barbra told friends that maybe she really should start thinking about movies. Not that she knew much about them—as evidenced by her lack of recognition of Miss Gish.

Her boredom with the show was trying the patience of her fellow castmates and the stage manager, who attempted, without much effect, to get firm with her. Barbra was still showing up late, repeating a pattern that had developed during rehearsals. Even an official reprimand from Actors’ Equity hadn’t changed her behavior. Arthur Laurents’s assistant, Ashley Feinstein, thought Barbra’s unprofessionalism
stood out all the more starkly because everyone else in the show was so professional. Even Elliott, who was never late, didn’t seem to be able to get through to Barbra.

And everyone could tell when she was just “phoning it in,” said a frequent member of the audience, one of the growing number of Streisand devotees who showed up several times a week to see the show. Yet still the applause came, which, as always, infuriated Barbra. She knew when she was good and when she wasn’t, and she resented undeserved applause. But what she really resented was performing the part at all. She needed a change—and fast. She hoped that Stark and Robbins and the rest would make their decision soon.

That night, “she wasn’t great,” said the frequent audience member, “but she wasn’t terrible either.” Lillian Gish, however, thought Barbra was absolutely marvelous. Making her way backstage, Gish removed the earrings she’d been wearing and handed them over to Barbra as a token of her admiration. It was a tremendous gesture from a legendary figure, and Barbra accepted the earrings graciously—although only later did she fully discover who Gish was and why she mattered. Barry could have told her, or Bob or Terry. But they, of course, weren’t around anymore.

On the screen, a giant caterpillar made a meal of a few cars. Barbra and Elliott sat in the dark,
cool theater, a relief from the ninety-degree temperatures outside, eyes fixed on
Mothra,
a badly dubbed Japanese monster flick. The lovers, sharing a bag of popcorn, were enjoying a rare break from
Wholesale
and all the other myriad obligations of their careers.

Actually, it was Barbra who had the myriad obligations. Elliott only had to show up every night at the Shubert. Barbra had to do that and make her way afterward to the Blue Angel (she’d finished her run at the Bon Soir only to start another engagement uptown). These days, she also was frequently meeting reporters for interviews or waking up early for one of her frequent appearances on Joe Franklin’s show. There were also regular strategy sessions with Marty and Richard Falk and the Softness brothers on publicity, especially on ways to influence Goddard Lieberson into giving her a contract. Finding the time for a date with Elliott must have felt like a gift from heaven.

Not that they had trouble seeing each other. Elliott had moved in with her, sharing the railroad flat over Oscar’s Salt of the Sea and settling into a rather blissful pattern of domesticity. Although they could have easily afforded a bigger one, they kept Barbra’s twin bed, which, given Elliott’s large frame and long limbs, must have made sleeping uncomfortable at times—but also very intimate. They insisted that a bigger bed wouldn’t have fit; maybe that was true. But Barbra always seemed to find room for other pieces of furniture that caught her eye. Just recently she’d bought two “marvelous Victorian cabinets
with glass shelves,” she told a writer from
The New Yorker,
at a shop called Foyniture Limited on Eighty-third Street. She seemed to get a kick out of the spelling.

Elliott adored living with her. He found her style “just wild . . . genius,
really.” As a dining table, they used an old Singer sewing-machine stand. For meals, they ate Swanson’s TV dinners and bricks of coffee ice cream for dessert. Like the kids they still were, they snacked on grapefruit, brownies, and pickled herring. When they saw a tail “about a yard long” flicking back and forth underneath their stove, they ran off in terror to a motel. But when the landlord refused to pay to exterminate, they moved back in and made peace with the rat, naming him Oscar after the cheapskate downstairs. They played Monopoly and checkers, and acted out scenes they hoped to someday play together, Barbra as Medea and Elliott as Jason. Calling each other Hansel and Gretel, they made a halfhearted attempt to learn Greek so they “could speak a secret language nobody else could understand.” For the first time in their lives, Barbra and Elliott were deliriously happy being with another person. Elliott found it all “really romantic,” likening Barbra and himself to “kids in a treehouse.”