Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (39 page)

“So let’s sing a song of cheer again,” Barbra was keening, “happy days are here again.”

With “Happy Days,” Barbra smashed through the Angel’s legendary reserve. People were on their feet, and even the club’s upholstered walls couldn’t muffle the sounds of whistles and cheers. Goddard Lieberson stood with the crowd. It seemed Barbra’s performance had allowed him finally to glimpse her star potential. Marilyn Monroe might have been dead, and with her an entire era. But a whole new kind of star was about to explode.

Jerry Robbins read the latest revisions Isobel Lennart had sent to him from Malibu and nearly wept. The man who had directed
The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story,
and
Gypsy,
and doctored a dozen more ailing shows that needed his help, knew what a good libretto read like, and this script for
The Funny Girl,
no matter how much he adored Isobel, fell far short of the mark.

Surely Ray Stark, with his understanding of story, knew it, too. But what frustrated Robbins was the producer’s absolute insistence that they move forward nonetheless. Stark was planning to return to New York from Beverly Hills now that Lennart had completed her revisions, and he felt it was “urgent [that an] immediate
decision be made on casting.” He hadn’t changed his mind about his preferred candidate either. “I hope you will have
settled on Barbra,” Stark wrote to Robbins, and he urged the director to begin working with her on the show’s second act.

The last time he’d been in New York, Stark had had a session with Carol Burnett, during which she’d read for the part and sung a few numbers. “A tremendous talent
and a lovely gal,” Stark concluded, but he didn’t think she’d “turn out to be right for Fanny.” Robbins had apparently come to the same conclusion. After a short talk with the director outside an elevator after Burnett’s audition, Stark had realized there was no need to send the second act to Burnett. Robbins, it seemed, was staying just as firm on his first choice as Stark was. He still wanted Anne Bancroft for the role.

“Dear Annie,”
Robbins had written when he sent her a copy of the script. “It’s a rough with much over-written and too-explained-away moments. Isobel is already at work taking out all things that tend to weaken or sentimentalize. She will ‘shorten, tighten, and toughen.’” He implored her to take the part even though the script wasn’t ready, telling her they’d been playing “a waiting game” with all the other candidates until they heard from her. “I know it’s going to be a wonderful play and you can fire it way up into the skies if you become part of it.” He promised she’d have a “hard-working, tough-fighting ally” in him and “truly creative and cooperative collaborators” in Lennart, Styne, and Merrill. He didn’t mention Stark.

That was because the producer was firing off his own communication to his own preferred candidate. “Dear Barbara,”
he wrote, misspelling her name, which surely didn’t please her. “Jerry Robbins will probably be calling you within the next few days.” He enclosed Lennart’s revisions for her to study. Before he’d left town, he’d made it a point to see her at the Blue Angel, and he told her again what “a lovely evening” it had been. If not as effusive as Robbins’s letter to Bancroft, it still gave Barbra reason to hope that the part might be hers—even if she was going to have to give Stark a lesson in spelling.

Yet other names continued to be considered for Fanny, mostly funneled in from Merrick’s casting agent, Michael Shurtleff. Eydie Gormé still seemed to excite Merrick, as did Judy Holliday, both of whom were attractive enough, and Jewish to boot. Stark, of course, had given up the idea of a conventionally pretty leading lady the moment he’d settled on Barbra, but his producing partner was, despite his decreased hostility, still concerned about appearances. And what remained a big unknown for everyone involved was what Fran Stark would say when she finally got a look at the candidate they all agreed upon so it was smart to keep Gormé and Holliday in reserve.

As he read through Lennart’s revisions, however, Robbins seemed to harden in his resolve that only Bancroft could save them. Lennart might have shortened, but she hadn’t tightened or toughened. By now, Robbins felt he had done as much as he could, “pushing the script until certain
solutions were found.” Much of what worked had, in fact, come from him. Lennart would “surely agree,” Robbins believed, “that each scene as she wrote it” had been sent to him and that they had gone over each of them “with a fine-tooth comb.” The same was also true for the music and lyrics. Styne and Merrill had run songs and arrangements by Robbins, and he’d had his say about them. While he didn’t “point to any one line of dialogue or particular lyric” as being authored by himself, Robbins did claim credit for the way all the “scenes, relationships, songs, musical conceptions, characters, settings, [and] musical ideas” came together.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the very first scene in the show—where Fanny gets fired by theater owner Max Spiegel for being too outlandish. Robbins had considered the arguments made by stage manager Dave to keep Fanny because she’s special as “a small microcosm of the play.” That had been Robbins’s vision, setting up the entire story in that one scene. Robbins’s fingerprints continued in a similar way all through the libretto. It was his idea to make Ziegfeld just a voice coming from above during his first meeting with Fanny, and to cut directly from Fanny’s line “Anything Ziegfeld wants me to do, I’ll do” to her declaration: “I’m not going to wear this costume!” In Lennart’s original script, a whole scene had separated the two lines. Robbins had cut the scene for the contrast it would offer—and the laugh it would get.

He’d also shaped the musical numbers. On “I’m the Greatest Star,” the original idea had been for Fanny to sing it “out and out,” as if she really meant it. But Robbins asked that it be changed so that she starts out kidding, mocking herself. During the course of the song, however, when she sees people like Dave who really believe in her, she evolves and “the guts come out and the tempo changes and she lets loose, free and wild, with her own feelings,” as Robbins described it. Written by its composers with a time signature of 2/4 all the way through, it was Robbins’s idea “to make it 2/4 only at the end.” As such, it was a brilliant bit of characterization layered into a musical number.

Robbins also had been working with Styne and Merrill to open up the “People” number by including Dave and Nick. Fanny singing the song alone, he felt, was just “too strong a come-on.” Likewise, he’d moved “Don’t Rain on My Parade” to the end of the first act. Originally, it had come near the beginning of the show, sung by Fanny to her mother’s friends who were discouraging her from a career. Robbins, astutely, saw the song as a way to showcase Fanny’s determination to win Nick’s love and knew it would make a great send-off before intermission and possibly be reprised at the very end of the show.

But perhaps most significant, it had been Robbins who’d homed in right away on one of the chief flaws in the story: the characterization of Nick Arnstein, Fanny’s great love. Nick was a gambler, a con man, and a bit of rogue in real life, but Lennart had written him as upstanding and noble, a victim of circumstances. He was, after all, Fran Stark’s father. Robbins pushed Lennart to make him more of the “reckless, shadowy promoter” that he really was. In the “Will I Talk?” number, it was Robbins’s idea to have Nick sing it in “an evil, sardonic way,” and then have Fanny reprise it in a more “positive” way. That helped the story get off to a better start, but the book still bogged down during the second act, precisely because it was hard to sympathize with Nick because he was a crook or Fanny because she was blindsided by a crook. And so far, for all his tremendous input, Robbins hadn’t figured out a way to solve that problem.

And Stark and Merrick wanted to open in October!

Robbins had had enough. Increasingly, he was feeling manipulated by Stark. When Robbins had come on board to direct the Brice musical, Stark had agreed to invest $125,000 in
Mother Courage,
the pro- ject Robbins was planning with Cheryl Crawford, and for which he had far more passion than he did for this current show. Stark’s investment had been a bit of a quid pro quo: He’d put up the money if Crawford delayed the production and allowed Robbins to direct
The Funny Girl
first. Now, with the script so lacking, Robbins felt stuck between a rock and a hard place: Should he go forward with production the way Stark and Merrick were insisting and risk a terrible critical and commercial flop, or should he insist on still more rewrites and push
Mother Courage
even farther into the future?

Stark wasn’t helping matters by doing everything he could to prevent the casting of Anne Bancroft and impose Barbra Streisand on the show. “If you don’t hear
today or tomorrow from Anne,” he’d written just the other day to Robbins, “we should tie up Barbara [
sic
] before we lose her”—as if that were a real danger.

It wasn’t that Robbins disliked Barbra. She was “extraordinarily talented,” he thought. But with the book so deficient, it needed the skills of an experienced actress such as Bancroft. Robbins felt his reputation was on the line, and he didn’t feel safe entrusting it to such a novice as Barbra.

By now, he’d largely given up on any hopes that he and Stark would ever agree on much about the show. Conceding that the book wasn’t right, the producer was arguing they should use more from Brice’s actual life, as the original screenplay had done. They should also change the title to
My Man,
after Brice’s best-known torch song. “A more honest or exploitable
title” he couldn’t imagine, Stark wrote to Robbins, even though they’d all previously decided the score should be entirely new, with nothing from Brice’s actual repertoire. Robbins made no reply to Stark’s latest suggestions. He knew Anne Bancroft was never going to sing “My Man”; after all, she’d originally wanted to change the name of the character and make her only “based on” Fanny Brice.

For Robbins, it was decision time. If he stayed on and Bancroft wasn’t cast, could he work with Barbra Streisand? Knowing his dilemma, Isobel Lennart, who’d yet to see Barbra herself, had asked a friend, Doris Vidor, to check the young singer out at the Blue Angel and make an honest report to Robbins. Vidor was Hollywood royalty: the daughter of Harry Warner, a founder of Warner Bros.; widow of director Charles Vidor; and ex-wife of director Mervyn LeRoy. Vidor also worked for United Artists as a sort of “broker between script and stars.”
Not long before, she’d arranged a deal that brought Gary Cooper to the studio for three pictures. So Doris Vidor knew a little something about star quality.

And what she observed at the Blue Angel impressed her very much. “I have rarely seen anyone
so talented,” Vidor wrote to Robbins. “But it was the personality and what she stirred in me that impressed me so. There is a sadness and a deep, emotional impact that this girl projects to the audience that is very unique. It seemed to me that she was the young Fanny Brice as you want her to appear.”

Robbins didn’t dispute that. But Barbra had to be more than the
young
Fanny Brice. She had to be the
older
Fanny, too, and he was just not convinced she’d be believable as that. When there was a flurry of interest among the collaborators about the fifty-three-year-old English actor Michael Rennie playing Nick, Robbins pointed out that if they went with Barbra as Fanny, “the relationship really becomes
like that in
A Star Is Born.
” That “worried him,” as well it should have. There was no more talk of Rennie.

There was, however, talk of Rip Torn, Brian Bedford, Harry Guardino, Peter Falk, Stuart Damon, Pernell Roberts, George Maharis, and George Chakiris. And word had reached them that Peter Lawford was “very interested”
in playing Nick, though everyone agreed that Lawford didn’t possess “a big enough voice.”

That was not a problem with Barbra, of course. So Robbins had brought her back in for yet another reading, probably at the Imperial Theatre, on Forty-fifth Street, where Merrick’s
Carnival!
was still running at night. In a few days, he’d be heading back to the Imperial to watch George Segal and Larry Hagman (Mary Martin’s son) audition for the part of Dave. There were also auditions slated for the parts of Nora, Fanny’s beautiful chorus-girl best friend, and Mrs. Brice—and, significantly, for Fanny herself. On the call sheet for two thirty
on the afternoon of August 30 was Lee Becker, who’d played Anybodys in
West Side Story
and whom Robbins had once asked to marry him. Becker’s audition suggested that no matter how hard Stark was pushing, and no matter all the superlatives from Doris Vidor and others, the director was still not quite ready to accept Barbra Streisand as the star of his production.

As the summer drew to a close, the principals behind
The Funny Girl
seemed headed for a face-off. No one could predict what that would mean for the show.

The legendary Groucho Marx wasn’t one to tangle with. He was the master of the one-liner, the ad-lib, the put-down, the comeback, the double entendre. Sitting at the desk of
The Tonight Show
on the night of August 21, he puffed on his ubiquitous cigar and wiggled his thick, lascivious eyebrows as he spoke with Lillian Roth about
I Can Get It for You Wholesale,
now in its sixth month on Broadway. Since Jack Paar’s departure earlier that year, Groucho had proved to be one of
Tonight
’s more frequent and popular guest hosts, keeping the chair warm for the incoming Johnny Carson, who still had several more weeks to go on his contract with rival network ABC.

After the break, the announcer, Hugh Downs, introduced Groucho’s next guest. It was Barbra Streisand. Except he pronounced it “Stree-sand.”

Barbra was furious. Downs should have known better! She’d been on this show twice before, and he hadn’t messed up her name then. She was seething as she strode out onto the stage.

Groucho greeted her warmly. “You’re a big success—”

But Barbra cut him off—actually cut off Groucho Marx! “How could I be such a big success,” she asked, “if he calls me Stree-sand? My name is Barbra Streisand!”