Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (41 page)

It was the first time Barbra had ever seen palm trees, even if it was difficult for her to see through her tears.

Bob Banner, the producer for Garry Moore, had flown her out to Los Angeles to appear on
The Dinah Shore Show,
which he also produced. Ray Stark saw it as an opportunity to introduce Barbra to Isobel Lennart and, even more critical, to his wife. It was clear they were getting close to offering her the part; they’d even begun talking salary.
Stark’s continuing enthusiasm for her must have encouraged Barbra, but even that couldn’t brighten her spirits as she was driven through the streets of L.A., nor did the chance to play hooky from
Wholesale
for a whole week. What had brought on the tears was her first prolonged separation from Elliott, which made her first visit to the Coast feel like, in her own word, “hell.”

But it was an important trip. Barbra’s limo brought her to a boxy, warehouselike building at the corner of Alameda and Olive in Burbank. Near the top, the letters NBC glowed green. This was NBC’s Color City, the first television studio in the world equipped exclusively for color broadcasting. Whereas the other networks occasionally broadcast specials in color, NBC was leading a revolution, with the goal of achieving 100 percent color programming within a few years. While the soundstages of Color City were hardly the ornate theaters of Broadway, or even the grand, classical architecture that housed the recording and television studios of New York, they did represent the future.

Making her way into the capacious structure, Barbra knew that her performance on the Shore show was to be, yet again, an audition of sorts. In the studio audience that night would be Fran Stark, whose opinion, as it turned out, mattered as much as her husband’s. Barbra had met Mrs. Stark soon after her arrival in Los Angeles, at the Starks’ palatial home. The encounter between Brooklyn Barbra and Beverly Hills Fran was watched by everyone involved with eager eyes. The two women were cordial to each other, even if their contrasts were glaring to those present. Fran was elegant, poised, and reserved; Barbra was avant-garde, awkward, and earnest. Ray did his best to facilitate an affable occasion. Styne was there, too, no doubt also doing his best to keep everything flowing smoothly. Columnist Louella Parsons reported that Styne had come to L.A. on “some special business”
; no doubt it involved Barbra and Fran.

Fran Stark was one generation removed from the tenements and hardscrabble streets of her mother’s—and Barbra’s—youth. She’d been educated at the prestigious Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Every summer, young Frances had accompanied her mother to Europe, where they lived at the Hotel Carlton in Cannes, or at the Majestic Hotel, where Fanny took over an entire floor and gambled to her heart’s content. Meanwhile, Fran, who her mother had decided would be raised as a proper lady, was being taught French by a French mademoiselle.

In her teens, Fran became an accomplished horsewoman, winning awards at the National Horse Show. When her mother moved to Hollywood, Fran was introduced around as one of the more eligible young ladies in town, but her heart was won by the up-and-coming Ray Stark. Their marriage was one of the social events of the season for the movie colony. The newlyweds filled their home on South Peck Drive with modern art, starting with a single Chagall, then adding a Rouault, which they placed over the mantel. Now Fran was one of the great ladies of Hollywood, a perennial on best-dressed lists, ranking alongside Jackie Kennedy and Babe Paley.

It was, no doubt, with a raised eyebrow or two that she regarded Barbra’s more bohemian wardrobe. Both of the Starks could be snobbish. They were particular about their images and their hard-won place in society. Their children were Peter, eighteen when Barbra met him, and Wendy, sixteen. Even their names suggested the magical world to which their parents aspired. Peter and Wendy grew up
among the other offspring of the rich and famous. Wendy played with Candice Bergen, went to school with Liza Minnelli, and shopped Rodeo Drive with Yasmin Khan. In that elite Hollywood social circle, parents competed against one another to throw the most spectacular birthday parties for their children. The Starks often won. On one birthday, Wendy was startled when her father shouted “Surprise!” and pulled back the curtain to reveal two elephants, one big and one small, grazing in her backyard.

The Starks threw some of the biggest, most elaborate parties in Los Angeles, with large tents and usually a theme. It took Fran at least a month to plan her gatherings. There had to be two bands: one for traditional dancing music during the dinner, and then a dance band for afterward—to play the bossa nova or the twist. A Stark soiree two years ago was still being called “the outstanding Hollywood party
of the season.” A tent had been erected in the backyard large enough to accommodate a small circus. Under this big top sat 280 guests at twenty-eight tables. Thrown for investors in the film version of
The World of Suzie Wong,
the goal of the bash was to “launch” (Hollywood jargon for “introduce”) Nancy Kwan, who was taking over the lead in the film. The usual mix of Los Angeles society—Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale, William Haines and Jimmie Shields—had sipped champagne and air-kissed each other. At the end of the night, Fran was just pleased that no one “had fallen into the swimming pool”—it had happened before—and that all of the jewelry that had been lost had been reclaimed. Except for one topaz ring. “I suppose,” Fran confided to a reporter, “since it is not a diamond no one will admit wearing it.”

No such extravaganza, however, was thrown in Barbra’s honor; she wasn’t, after all, signed yet. The first meeting between Barbra and Fran Stark most likely was just a small affair, cocktails or maybe a light dinner. Yet no doubt it was enough for Barbra to get a glimpse of a very alien world. From Barry and Bob, she had heard a little about life among Southern California’s upper class, but seeing it firsthand—the swimming pools and housekeepers and long winding driveways and Aston Martins and Bentleys—was something else entirely. Although Barbra told one friend she found Fran Stark “pretentious,” she was also intrigued by the world in which she and Ray lived. When Fran shook Barbra’s hand for the first time, her wrists sparkled with platinum-and-emerald bracelets and her ears dripped with diamonds. Upstairs there was a treasure chest of gems
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Standing under the chandelier in the Starks’ home, surrounded by Picassos and Calders, Barbra had entered a world far, far away from her mother’s apartment in Brooklyn, where everything reeked of kale, and where tattered cookbooks and cracked china were piled on the dining-room table.

Heading into the studio to tape the Shore show, Barbra knew that Fran Stark sat out in the audience waiting to judge her. Rehearsals, sans audience, had gone well, and there was every reason to think that this final taping would proceed just as smoothly. But given Barbra’s tendency for first-night jitters, there was, almost certainly, more than a little anxiety as she slipped into her dress for the evening. A thumbs-down from Fran could kill the whole deal, no matter how much Ray and Jule might plead her case. To lose
The Funny Girl
now was unthinkable. Barbra had sought out her old teacher Allan Miller for some private coaching so she’d get better and better at each reading. But none of that would matter if the elegantly dressed woman sitting out in the audience tonight didn’t like what she saw and heard.

So it was with considerable determination that Barbra steadied her nerves and headed out in front of the cameras.

Dinah Shore was a television mainstay, having hosted various shows for a decade. This current series aired once a month, in color, on Sunday nights after
Bonanza
—a terrific ratings lead-in. Tonight’s episode, which would be taped for a later airdate, was to be pitched as “a group of vocal performers”
who, in Shore’s opinion, would be the “important entertainers of tomorrow.” In addition to Barbra, the guests were Georgia Brown, who’d briefly also been in the running to play Fanny Brice; pop singer Sam Fletcher; and the Chad Mitchell Trio, who were folk singers.

Shore, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, had grown up in Tennessee; with her lilting accent, she cultivated the image of a Southern belle. She swept out onto the stage this night in a long gown and glittering top, her earrings sparkling as the orchestra played a soulful introduction. She read from a script prepared by the show’s writers, with input from Marty, that was intended to keep the momentum going for Barbra. But right off the bat, Shore got it wrong.

“Barbra Streisand,” she said, placing the accent only on the first syllable of “Streisand” and practically swallowing the second. To Barbra, such pronunciation was like fingernails on a blackboard. Someone, evidently, had failed to school Shore the way they’d schooled Garry Moore. Shore, unaware, went on in her flowery drawl. She called her next guest “a girl barely out of her teens,” who was “wistful, funny, appealing, and enormously talented.” Then came the obligatory key point, made every time Barbra appeared on television but which tonight was especially important since Fran Stark was sitting in the audience. “She’s basically a comedienne,” Shore said of Barbra, “but she’s a fine dramatic actress, too, as you’ll see when she sings her torch song.”

The giant TK-41 color television camera then dollied across the stark, expressionist set to find Barbra standing at the foot of an open staircase. She seemed somewhat ill at ease. The added pressure of the night couldn’t have helped, but Barbra’s nerves could also have sprung from the proximity of that monstrous mechanical beast. The camera had to be rolled in practically to her toes whenever a close shot was needed, as it contained no zoom lens. Yet Barbra looked fabulous, taking full advantage of the color broadcast by wearing a bright orange, floor-length, Grecian-style dress secured by a brooch at the waist—a perfect representation of Bob’s “white goddess.”

But when she opened her mouth to sing, a rather strange thing occurred. Usually this was the moment when people described the hair standing up on the backs of their necks, or tingles suddenly vibrating down their spines, or some other physical manifestation of their reaction to Barbra’s voice. But something was off tonight. To at least one reviewer, who saw the show when it was broadcast, Barbra seemed “anxious.”
Whether it was Fran Stark, the metal leviathan at her shoulder, or Shore mispronouncing her name, Barbra was off her game. She launched into a shrill, stylized rendition of “Cry Me a River,” a song that usually blew people away in nightclubs, but which here seemed overdone, overwrought, almost a parody of a “serious actress” trying to express herself in a song. Barbra’s eyes seemed to keep crossing as she snapped out the lyrics, staccato-style, and at times she was all mouth, summoning very little of the pathos she’d brought to the song in the days when the pain of losing Barry had been so recent.

Then, after the audience’s applause, she dramatically flung her filmy tangerine cape over her shoulder and ascended the stairs to emerge into another modernistic set, where she sang “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The song had become Barbra’s signature very quickly during her nightclub appearances. For some loyal fans, however, who’d heard Barbra sing it dozens of times at the Bon Soir or the Blue Angel, it was impossible not to think she was performing it this night as if she were Fanny Brice keening “My Man.” She seemed to be summoning the same heartache that Brice had brought to her own signature song, the same defiant strength in the face of adversity. But did it feel real? That much her fans were divided on. Once again, she was all mouth and teeth as she threw back her head. “Happy days are . . . here . . . a . . . gain!”

Later in the show, there was a little more lightheartedness, as Barbra joined Shore and the rest of the cast for an upbeat rendition of “Brotherhood of Man,” from
Wholesale
’s chief Broadway rival,
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Perhaps it might have been smarter to pair “Happy Days” with something more rousing like this, because Barbra’s two solo numbers hadn’t allowed for any of her quirky humor. Styne, of course, had previously advised her to play that down, and she seemed to be heeding his words again this night. Whether that was a mistake was unknown, as the critics wouldn’t get a crack at the show until it was aired a few months down the road.

But one critic had already seen all she needed to see. Whether it was the lack of humor and warmth, the stylized singing, the odd facial expressions, or something else entirely, Fran Stark had not been won over by Barbra’s performance. Privately, she would declare that if it were up to her, Barbra Streisand would never play
her mother.

Sitting at a desk, wearing a dark dress and a long strand of pearls, Barbra raised her eyes to the photographer who was recording the moment for posterity—and for distribution in Columbia press kits. Standing beside her was Goddard Lieberson, smartly dressed in a well-cut suit and a French-cuffed, tab-collared shirt. As Barbra looked on beaming, God leaned down and signed the contract that had been placed in front of her on the desk. That day, October 1, Barbra officially became a Columbia recording artist.

Soon after her return from Los Angeles, she’d learned from Marty that, after weeks of negotiations, her contract was ready to be signed. Dorothy Kilgallen had reported, without hiding her scorn, that Marty had been seeking $100,000 as an advance for his client—which, Kilgallen sniped, was “a lot of loot
for a new name, especially a singer who hasn’t hit it big by herself in the record market.” At such a figure Columbia had indeed balked, but Marty had just moved on to what he had really wanted for Barbra all along: complete “creative control, no coupling,
and the right to choose her own material.” (Coupling meant being paired with another artist.) This was granted. After all, David Kapralik reasoned, Barbra had built a successful nightclub career on her own. Why mess with a proven formula? Plus, Marty had secured a clause
that allowed her, should she get cast in another Broadway show after
Wholesale,
to participate in a show-tune album with another record label. As always, Marty thought ahead.