Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (53 page)

So when Fanny got up to sing, “I’m the greatest star, I am by far, but no one knows it,” the line would resonate for anyone who’d read Hamill’s piece or any of the others like it. In the face of Robbins’s intractability, Stark saw Barbra as their way forward. Wherever possible, the producer encouraged Fosse to accentuate similarities between the lives of Barbra and Fanny. As Arthur Laurents understood it, “They needed to become the same thing, at least for promotional purposes.”

On one of his early scripts, Fosse penciled the remark “Make it like B.”
next to Fanny’s confrontation with a theater owner. In working with his new leading lady, the director instructed her not to study Fanny Brice, because she’d “become a caricature.”
Rather, Fosse told her, Barbra should just be herself. “I’m not approaching it
as a life story of anybody,” Barbra told reporters. “I’m doing it as an actress doing another character.” Now that she was finally the star, Barbra wasn’t about to share top billing with anyone, not even with the woman she was playing.

Making everything circular, the persona Stark and Fosse were so happy to claim as a stand-in for Fanny’s own had been designed by Barbra and her team precisely to secure the role of Fanny Brice. So Barbra had been imitating Fanny to get
Funny Girl
and now
Funny Girl
was imitating Barbra imitating Fanny. Barbra told the press that she’d been chosen for the “certain natural characteristics”
she shared with Fanny, and those were obvious: the prominent nose, the mother who worried she wouldn’t make it in showbiz, the childhood in Brooklyn where no one believed in her, the self-confidence that made success seem inevitable. But there were aspects of Barbra’s public persona that were less authentic and more calculated, such as all the kooky talk and behavior that had been invented specifically to draw comparisons with Brice. In fact, the two women weren’t as much alike as the
Funny Girl
team tried to insist. Fanny Brice had never longed to play Juliet, and her aspirations to be accepted by the ruling classes would have been anathema to Barbra. Most significantly, Fanny had let men run her career, and occasionally ruin it, which was about as far from Barbra as one could get.

Yet none of that mattered to Stark. What was relevant to this show was that both Barbra and Fanny were different-looking, different-sounding, different-acting ladies of great personal charisma who redefined what it meant to be glamorous.

Stark knew that he was giving the twenty-one-year-old an enormous gift. It wasn’t often that entire Broadway shows were built around actors with as little experience as Barbra. But Barbra’s story was the answer to his problems with both Robbins and the show. The book could now practically write itself—or at least he hoped it could. So up to Vegas he trekked with Fran to pose for photographs with Barbra showing how pleased they all were with her casting. Jule Styne and Bob Merrill also made the trip, running through the entire score for Barbra in her hotel room, tweaking lyrics where necessary. Everything was done now with Barbra in mind.

Elliott paced anxiously at the corner of Ninety-second Street and Central Park West, smoking a cigarette. A friend of his, another out-of-work actor, spotted him and tried to engage him in conversation, but Elliott seemed distant and preoccupied. He kept looking over his shoulder as if he were waiting for someone. At last his friend saw a young woman come bounding around the block. He didn’t recognize her at first. She was wearing oversized sunglasses and black boots and a knee-length gingham dress. When Elliott kissed her, his friend realized this was his girlfriend, Barbra Streisand, whom everybody seemed to be talking about these days. The young man knew Barbra and Elliott weren’t married, and wondered why they kept up the pretense to the press that they were. They seemed to be very much in love.
Barbra kept patting Elliott’s hand and kissing his scruffy cheek. Finally Elliott muttered a good-bye to his friend—Barbra hadn’t even said hello—and they hurried off.

But not far. Elliott’s friend was surprised to see the pair enter the exclusive apartment building behind them. What he didn’t know was that this was Barbra and Elliott’s new home. When he learned that fact later, the out-of-work actor was mightily impressed, especially since he remembered the railroad flat over Oscar’s Salt of the Sea. He also presumed the reason for the couple’s continuing marital ruse was the fact that they were now very publicly living together.

Indeed, it would have been difficult to keep private their move into the Ardsley at 320 Central Park West, one of Manhattan’s most impressive Art Deco structures. With Barbra freshly back from Vegas, many columnists gushed over her sudden ascension to the heights, which was evidenced by her stately new address. Built in 1931, the Ardsley had been designed by Emery Roth, the famed architect of so many of the city’s definitive hotels and apartment towers. Barbra’s new home was a stunning composition of black brick and bold geometric patterns; above the fifteenth floor, cantilevered balconies alternated with a series of setbacks to produce what one architecture critic called “an animated yet balanced
profile.” Most of the Ardsley’s 198 apartments were small, the exceptions being the lavish duplex penthouses, one of which, at the very top, was now occupied by Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould.

The couple had considerable work ahead of them to furnish and decorate this place. Fifteen-foot-high ceilings buttressed by elegant crown moldings meant a lot of wall space for art. There were six rooms downstairs, with a grand circular staircase leading up to three more in the tower, where the master bedroom opened on to a rooftop terrace. The lower floor was also ringed with terraces from which Barbra could look down on the passing traffic on Central Park West or across the street into the bright summer green of the park itself. Rent for this palazzo in the sky was over $1,000 a week—an astronomical jump from $60. And the only smell here was the fragrance of freshly polished wood.

Barbra and Elliott quickly became aware that while the place stood mostly empty at the moment, it was nonetheless jumping with ghosts. Lights suddenly came on without switches being flipped; the ring of the telephone sometimes caused the television set to turn on. The building had, as they were discovering, a rather storied history.
For most of its three decades, the Ardsley had been home to wealthy industrial barons, doctors, and city officials.

But it was in Barbra’s own apartment where the most famous ghosts still danced. In 1939, lyricist Lorenz Hart had rented
these very same rooms, installing his mother downstairs and himself up in the tower. That was the year Hart and his songwriting partner Richard Rodgers had
I Married an Angel, The Boys from Syracuse,
and
Too Many Girls
all running on Broadway. Over the next half decade, in the same rooms Barbra and Elliott now occupied, Hart had written the words to such songs as “It Never Entered My Mind” for
Higher and Higher
and “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” for
Pal Joey,
which was now one of Barbra’s staples. Here, under these same chandeliers, Hart had entertained George Abbott, Ethel Merman, Gene Kelly, George Balanchine, Vera Zorina, Jimmy Durante, Ray Bolger, Josh Logan, June Havoc, and so many other Broadway luminaries of the period. Most likely David Merrick had been inside Barbra’s apartment years before she stepped across the threshold. And then there had been Hart’s more private parties, where the hard-drinking lyricist, known for his revelries, had entertained what one writer called “the homosexual elite”
: Cole Porter and George Cukor visiting from Hollywood, or Noël Coward and John Gielgud from London, with all the attendant handsome young men who traveled with them.

In those few days
she had in New York before flying off again, Barbra was anxious to start decorating her new place. She’d had most of her old furniture brought uptown—the dentist’s cabinet and the Victorian piece with the glass shelves—but there were so many more antiques yet to be found. The one piece of furniture she had managed to acquire so far was an Elizabethan four-poster canopy bed, three hundred years old and set up on a tiered marble platform so that it took two steps to get into bed—rather like ascending a dais, some friends joked, or a throne. Gone was that little single bed that had barely provided enough space for Barbra and Elliott to turn over. This new one offered them far more room, if perhaps a little less of the old intimacy.

But shopping sprees and decorating sessions would have to wait. Barbra’s tour wasn’t quite over yet. She’d closed out Vegas with a flourish. Liberace had left a night early,
turning over the stage—and the starring position—to Barbra for her last show on August 4. The comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin had been her opening act. During her run at the Riviera, Barbra had gotten a fifty percent raise
from Charles Kahn, and she’d reciprocated with a parting gift to him of a leather jewel box inscribed
TO FLO FROM FANNY
—appropriate since she’d been announced for
Funny Girl
while on Kahn’s stage. But Barbra’s real guardian angel during her time in Vegas had been Liberace. The showman had been so good to her that Barbra had agreed to perform with him again the following month at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe.

From Vegas, Barbra had flown back East and immediately headed out to Long Island to perform for one night at the Lido Club on Long Beach. The next day it was up to Kiamesha Lake in the Catskills for a show at the Concord Hotel. What her tour had done was prove to the doubters—and to Barbra herself—that she could play the big rooms. At the Concord, she’d sung for close to a thousand people in the hotel’s enormous auditorium, and she’d “torn the place apart,”
said one man who was there.

Now there was a bit of a breather, but there still wasn’t much time to shop. Instead, Barbra occupied herself with designing the outfit she would wear at her next engagement. It was a white satin blouse with black piping in the style of a midshipman’s shirt, with a black collar that snapped into the low V-neck. Barbra seemed indifferent to the brickbats that were frequently tossed her way from critics who loved her voice but remained unimpressed with her couturiere skills. In fact, sniping about her clothes had largely replaced slandering her looks. In Vegas, Barney Glazer had recoiled from that infamous Mother Hubbard gingham gown. “My mind reverted
to those historic days in Salem, Mass.,” the columnist wrote, “when the public played a game called Heap the Wood High, Strike the Matches Hard, Oh, No, You Didn’t Forget the Kerosene Again?”

Yet being compared to a witch didn’t seem to faze Barbra because here she was, designing another unique look to wear on stage. No doubt she expected her next destination would be a little looser, a little more sophisticated, a little more willing to try new things. On August 21, she was opening at the legendary Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

It was time for Barbra Streisand to meet Hollywood.

As Barbra prepared to fly to Los Angeles, rehearsing daily with Peter Daniels and making last-minute adjustments to her satin sailor’s blouse with the seamstress, Elliott was undertaking a mission of his own. In a quiet little office somewhere in the city, he sat down opposite a Freudian psychoanalyst, seeking professional help for his rapidly worsening depression.

Elliott’s state of mind seemed to ratchet lower with every new success enjoyed by his girlfriend-cum-wife. When, in a recent column, Earl Wilson had declared Barbra “suddenly one of the hottest stars in the country,” he’d mentioned the fact that she’d just moved into a duplex penthouse with “her husband, Elliott Gould.” But he hadn’t included anything about Elliott’s current projects. That was because there weren’t any.

Elliott listened closely as his analyst asked him a question, and he gave it considerable thought before attempting an answer. He was taking his analysis very seriously. He was, he said, determined to restore some harmony in his life. “Without flats,”
he’d come to realize, “the sharp notes stick out.” Using another metaphor, he said that he felt as if he were stuck in a leaky boat,
constantly bailing to stay afloat. But with analysis, he was temporarily beaching his boat so he could find out where the holes were and then patch them. Elliott knew that taking their boat off the water was scary for some people; they feared they would never get it back out again. But Elliott had no choice. His boat was going down.

Was Barbra among the “some people” Elliott thought were too afraid to take their boats off the water? Quite possibly—for Barbra had tried analysis herself not long before, very likely at Elliott’s urging. Perhaps she’d even accompanied him to one of his sessions. In any event, she hadn’t liked it. The analyst kept winking at her. She wasn’t sure if he was putting her on or making a pass. So she’d walked out on him. “Maybe he was crazy,”
she said—which seemed to be her verdict on the entire mental-health profession. Going to an analyst or a psychiatrist, Barbra said, was a “cop-out, [a] self-indulgence.” And while she indulged herself plenty when it came to her career, sitting around moaning about her problems had never been her style. She believed in getting out there and making things happen; if she griped about something, it was to someone who could do something about it, not to someone who would just sit there and nod his head.

When Pete Hamill had asked about her career, how she’d gotten to where she was, Barbra had demurred, saying she couldn’t “verbalize about it.”
If she did, she feared, she’d “analyze it all out the window.” Clearly, to her, analysis was a fruitless and pointless exercise. “You’re paying to talk
about yourself,” she said. “It’s really pampering yourself.” Besides, it “cost too much money.”

Was she footing the bill for Elliott’s analysis? Or was she resentful that his money was going toward such endeavors when she was paying most of the household bills? If Elliott’s analysis caused tension between them, neither of them said so. But certainly Elliott held a very different view of the process than Barbra did. Analysis wasn’t easy, he believed, but it was worth it. It was opening him up to “self-discovery,”
he insisted. Barbra might be on a journey that took her ever farther out into the world, but Elliott hoped to go just as far inward.