Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (47 page)

Yet no doubt what she responded to most were the tender, yet firm, ministrations of an empathetic older woman she respected. There was a similar patronage taking place at the hungry i, where Barbra flourished under the careful, compassionate care of Banducci. Three thousand miles from home, Barbra had found, even if just temporarily, the parents she never had. Banducci was as erudite and sophisticated—if a bit more florid and flamboyant—as she imagined her father would have been. Like Barbra, he had discarded an inadequate first name—Harry—for something more distinctive, taking “Enrico” as a tribute to Enrico Caruso. At the age of thirteen he’d left his provincial hometown of Bakersfield, California, for exciting San Francisco, where he’d studied under the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. As proprietor of the hungry i—it meant “hungry intellectual”—since 1950, Banducci had been one of the first, along with Jay Landesman, another of Barbra’s patrons, to popularize the beatnik movement. To one reporter, Banducci “modestly disclaimed having
everything to do with the beatnik craze that . . . spread across the country,” but he was also “careful to imply that it did not happen without his good offices.” Nowadays the heavy-set, pencil-mustachioed Banducci was never seen without his brown beret, white sneakers, tan chinos, and “the most expansive white and figured sweater ever to encumber a man’s neck, chest, waist, and arms.”

It didn’t take long for Barbra to regain her footing in this supportive environment. Although she had struggled with distracted audiences elsewhere on this tour, she didn’t need to worry about that at the i, thanks to Banducci. The three-hundred-person audience was seated in a semicircle around the stage. And while their canvas chairs had wide, flat arms ideal for setting down their drinks—which were served by a solicitous corps of Japanese waiters—once the lights dimmed, all drinking and eating in the auditorium ceased. Banducci insisted on a “quietude in the audience” when the performer stepped out onto the stage. All alone, lit by a battery of spotlights in front of a stark brick wall, the performer could command the attention of the audience without any competition. For this, especially so soon after the Eden Roc fiasco, Barbra was no doubt very grateful to her host.

She’d also become close with the club’s announcer. Alvah Bessie had been a novelist, journalist, and Hollywood screenwriter, nominated for an Academy Award for
Objective Burma
in 1945. He’d also been a member of the Hollywood Ten, imprisoned for ten months and blacklisted by the film industry for refusing to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The blacklisting had destroyed his career. Now he was running the lights and sound board at the hungry i and introducing the entertainers. Bessie’s story was the complete inverse of those of Jerry Robbins and Isobel Lennart, two others of Barbra’s acquaintance who had histories with HUAC. Barbra likely took notice of how very different Bessie’s life was—hunched down anonymously in the shadows, positioning the spotlight on other people—from the lives of informers such as Robbins and Lennart—making movies and Broadway shows and being publicly acclaimed for it. For someone as perceptive as Barbra, the injustice must have resonated.

Her interval in San Francisco was a turning point for her. As she had in Detroit, she found a home away from home, a place where new friends and new challenges provided her with just the balm she needed. Certainly no place she’d ever been had
looked
quite as magical as San Francisco: the hills and the steep, winding streets, the delicate Queen Anne houses and Spanish mission churches, the Golden Gate Bridge shining in the distance, the clanging of the cable cars, and everywhere breathtaking vistas of land, sea, and sky. For Barbra, the city was a place of healing and tranquility.

On a night well into her four-week run at the hungry i, after numerous sessions with Judy Davis had restored a measure of her self-confidence, Barbra waited backstage for Alvah Bessie to announce her. She was ready for her comeback. She was, as local critic Ralph Gleason described her, “a tawny, feline, long-haired
girl with a mouth like a character from Oz” who was “a practiced performer . . . expert and effective.” Her ease onstage had returned, showing up in everything she did: the way she stood or sat, “her approach to the microphone, the tilt of her head, the spreading of her arms, the tossing of her hair, the raising of her eyebrows.”

Tonight the show would be recorded by a young engineer named Reese Hamel,
who kept his equipment in the back of his Volkswagen bus and dragged his cables through the club’s back door. A little less sophisticated than Columbia’s elaborate recording session at the Bon Soir in the fall, but it would prove far more successful. Hamel had suggested to Barbra that she might someday want to add a live recording to her Columbia catalog. When she’d agreed, he’d hauled in his cables. Obviously Barbra felt that her voice was better if she consented to be recorded.

“Now ladies and gentlemen,” Bessie announced over the loudspeaker, “the hungry i takes great pride in presenting Miss Barbra Streisand.” No doubt he had been instructed carefully by the lady herself on how to pronounce her name correctly, and he did.

As the packed house gave her a warm welcome, Barbra sailed into “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home.” As if to demonstrate that she was back in top form, she held the last note of the song for nine and a half seconds, an extraordinarily long time. If it seemed a bit show-offy, she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she could still do it. Next up was “Cry Me a River.” This night, Barbra’s rendition of the song was far superior to the manic howl she’d displayed on
The Dinah Shore Show
(though that program still hadn’t aired). She eschewed the theatrics that had so repelled Fran Stark and concentrated once again on the raw heartache of the song—which maybe, just maybe, reflected her own
via dolorosa
these past few months regarding Elliott. When she was finished, she clearly appreciated the applause. “
Grazie, grazie
,” she murmured.

She then launched into the kind of monologue that had been part of her act almost from the very start, but which in recent months had gained a more structured format. “I don’t like to sing all the time,” she said, and that much was certainly true. “I mean, one song right after another.” What she was doing was setting up a segment of her show that she’d rehearsed nearly as vigorously as the songs. “Let’s see,” she mused, “what should I talk about?” When someone shouted for her to talk about “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” she responded, “I
sing
that. I can’t talk about that.”

Of course, she needed no suggestions; she knew exactly what she was going to talk about. She commenced the story of a girl—“an African girl,” Barbra explained—whose sister had run off with her lover. Thinking this was the lead-in to a sad ballad, the audience sat in rapt, respectful silence. “She decided to kill herself,” Barbra said of the girl. “And she figured the best way to do this was to drown herself in the river.” Still the audience sat mute, hanging on every word. Could this be some old tribal morality tale? “So it was this one day,” Barbra went on, “and she was strolling down to the river to drown, and she tripped and scraped her knees.” A beat. “And also broke her glasses.”

Finally the audience tittered, starting to suspect that this all might be a joke. “Just at this moment,” Barbra continued, “the lover and the sister drove by in a taxi—they have them in Africa—and they started laughing at her.” By now the audience was laughing, too. The story went on from there—a long, ridiculous, rambling tale that ultimately ended with a feeble punch line that made little sense. But it didn’t matter that the story wasn’t really very funny or witty. By breaking out of the serious singer-by-the-piano mode, Barbra had shaken up tradition and thereby set herself apart—precisely what the “kooky” reputation was intended to do, whether in print or on television or on the stage. And the audience adored her for it.

She was, in fact, selling her personality as much as her voice. This came through again a short time later as she introduced the band. Slipping into her old Mae West impersonation, she gestured to drummer Benny Barth and cooed, “On the left side heah, weighin’ in at one-hundred-’n’-eighty-three in black trunks . . . is Benny.” There was another beat. “And he doesn’t.” Barbra waited for the audience to get her pun. When a handful of people started to laugh, she giggled. “Benny” was slang for Benzedrine tablets, which many in the nightclub scene took illegally as stimulants.

Barth and the rest of the band—which also included a bass and guitar—were hungry i employees. But the pianist, of course, was Peter Daniels, Barbra’s faithful companion on the road. She introduced him a little more intimately than she did the others, though she characteristically resisted sentimentality by affecting the air of a snooty society lady. “And now, for your pleasure, on the piano—he’s not on the piano, he’s sitting there in front of the piano—a very fine musician. He’s more than a pianist. He’s more than an arranger. He’s more than a friend. He’s—Petah!” She said his name as if she were Bette Davis, and this brought hoots from the audience right away. “Petah Daniels!”

The rest of the concert was more straightforward, though she did have some fun with the “Wolf” song, as she called it. “I’m going to do a standard,” she announced, playing on the old criticism that she rarely sang the kind of standards that encouraged people to “sing along, swing along, snap [their] fingers,” as Barbra put it. So, she announced, she would “compromise.” What she gave them, of course, was “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Some people did indeed sing along. Wrapping up the show was “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which Barbra put over gorgeously, and which earned sustained applause. “You’d be so nice to come home to,” she purred in gratitude to the audience.

Of course, at the moment, she had no one to come home to. She remained despondent without Elliott. But despondent did not mean desperate. What Hamel’s recording had documented for posterity was that, by the end of her run at the hungry i, Barbra had found herself again. Thanks to the solicitude of Judy Davis, the guardianship of Enrico Banducci, and the nightly outpouring of affection from San Franciscans, Barbra would leave that city on a wave of acclaim. She might not have a play, or a best-selling album, but the young woman on Hamel’s tape recording believed in herself again, and that was enough for now.