Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (54 page)

Barbra’s plane touched down at Los Angeles Airport. In the center stood the newly constructed Theme Building, designed to resemble a flying saucer landing on four spindly legs. New York’s airports sure didn’t look like this.

Stepping out of the plane, Barbra glanced down at the tarmac and spotted four waiting limousines. Another surprise. They were all for her.

The limos had been sent by David Begelman and Freddie Fields, two young, hotshot Hollywood agents who’d recently formed a company called Creative Management Associates. Begelman and Fields had been the reason Judy Garland had secured a weekly television program; at the moment, CMA was putting the finishing touches on a deal to bring Phil Silvers back to TV. Not so very long before, Begelman and Fields had turned Barbra down as a client. Now that she’d “hit it big,”
as Marty observed with no small amount of satisfaction, they’d “changed their minds.” Begelman and Fields were calling him “two, three times a day” to win her over. The limousines were just the latest salvo in their campaign to woo her.

Making her way down the steps, Barbra watched as the chauffeur of the lead limo hopped out to open the door for her. Lined up behind, the other limos carried a menagerie of CMA agents, managers, and publicists, “each ready and eager
to help her career,” noted columnist Bill Slocum. “Sammy Glicks don’t run anymore,” Slocum added wryly, referencing the ambitious Hollywood con man from
What Makes Sammy Run?
“They use air-conditioned Cadillacs.”

Barbra settled into the Cadillac’s leather seat as Marty took one of the limos behind her. A third limo may have been for Barbra’s new business manager—another Marty, this one named Bregman—who’d been hired because Barbra was suddenly making more money than the first Marty could manage on his own. Once everyone was settled into their respective limos, the sleek vehicles started their engines and rolled out across the tarmac. As they pulled onto the street, they resembled a presidential motorcade.

Quite a ride for a girl who’d grown up taking the subway. On her second trip to Los Angeles, Barbra was treated like visiting royalty, installed in a luxurious suite on the fifth floor of the Ambassador Hotel, located at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard. But she had little time to luxuriate. She had a show to do in a few days, and ahead of that, a good deal of promotion. And so, very soon after her arrival—maybe that afternoon or possibly the next day—she sat down with a public-relations man named Marv Schwartz, who had a few questions he wanted to ask her.

This was how things worked in the business of public relations: Barbra’s publicists, Solters and Sabinson, arranged for Schwartz, whose own agency, Kaufman Schwartz and Associates, had close connections to Hollywood columnists such as Sidney Skolsky, to interview their client upon her arrival in L.A. Schwartz would then have the interview transcribed, cut, pasted, and rearranged into a form suitable to send out to columnists—in this case, Skolsky, whose “Tintypes” were widely read in Tinseltown. A “Tintype” would be prepared on Barbra that was ready for publication; all Skolsky would have to do is add his byline. This process eliminated the possibility of an independent reporter probing too far or straying off that day’s message.

It also meant that, in the course of the interview, Barbra could ramble along, stream-of-consciousness style, the way she tended to do, without her publicists feeling the need to constrain her. They’d filter and finesse her comments long before they reached the public. Yet the tape recorder was running as Barbra sat there talking with Schwartz, preserving exactly how she was thinking and feeling on that warm, sunny day of August 14, 1963, a point when it seemed she had just rounded the last hill on her climb to stardom and caught a glimpse of the summit up ahead.

“What do you really enjoy
doing when you’re not singing?” Schwartz asked.

“I hate to sing,” Barbra replied, “so what do you mean, what do I like doing away from singing?”

“You hate to sing?”

“Yeah.”

Schwartz was clearly incredulous. After all, this was the top female recording star in America. “Why do you hate to sing?” he asked.

“Well, it’s a big . . .” Barbra’s voice trailed off. “It’s just all that worry that goes into it, you know. You get on stage and they don’t applaud enough, you’re a nervous wreck, you know, and all that stuff.”

So, Schwartz wondered, would she give up singing for straight dramatic roles? No, Barbra replied, she wouldn’t give up singing entirely. “Why should I?” she asked. But singing remained “too hard . . . to enjoy.”

She didn’t mean nightclub singing necessarily. A nightclub no longer seemed such an anathema to her. Now that she was heading back to Broadway, Barbra suddenly seemed nostalgic for the world of clubs and cabarets. Despite all the time she’d spent feeling like a “floozy,” she seemed sad that her nightclub career might be ending. After all, “every night was different” in a club, she explained. To lure the audience’s attention away from “the influence of food and liquor,” she had to be spontaneous, varying her act to respond to circumstances. She told Schwartz that performing for people who just sat there “watching you” was “no fun”—a very peculiar sentiment coming from an actress about to open a Broadway show.

She was tired, she said, of all the “kooky” business. But she realized her public persona had taken on a life of its own. When Johnny Carson had asked her on
The
Tonight Show
if she thought she was kooky, Barbra had heard what the audience was telling her through their laughter and applause. She felt they were saying, “Give us a yes!”—and it made her angry. The public didn’t know her “real” self, she believed, and didn’t “want to know.” That was fine; she wanted her privacy; if she had her druthers, she’d “rather shut up and let ’em guess” anyway. Barbra had come to understand that “the public creates stars” and “they don’t want the illusion to be broken.”

Still, she wanted to move past the kook. The thrift-shop angle was “a gimmick,” she admitted, that had run its course. She was tired of wearing all those old-time fashions; it was no longer the image she wanted to project. Instead, Barbra wanted to be contemporary. That’s why she’d gotten the new hairstyle—updated and maintained by celebrity stylist Fred Glaser—and why she’d started designing her own clothes. Her favorite fabric was gingham. It cost just sixty-nine cents a yard and was “more elegant” in its own way, she said, than all the shiny fabric and beads other singers wore.

Schwartz asked her about acting, and without much prompting, Barbra launched into a rather defensive spiel about actors who took themselves too seriously. Was she maybe feeling just a trifle self-conscious about heading into what some might consider a lightweight musical? Certainly the Actors Studio—and its exclusive environment of serious study—remained a sore subject for her, though she brought it up on her own to Schwartz. Barbra made it seem as if
she
had turned Lee Strasberg down, not the other way around. She insisted that she’d told Strasberg, “I’m not here to study with you. I have a teacher I’m perfectly happy with”—even though her great desire had been to study with Strasberg. But to Schwartz, Barbra implied that she’d just been a curious outsider sitting in on one of Strasberg’s classes. In her telling, there was no audition, no campaign to become one of Strasberg’s disciples. Not to Schwartz did she mention the Actors Studio acceptance letter that she kept as a “prized possession.”

Barbra seemed to feel the need to dismiss the culture that had so cavalierly dismissed her. “People like that kind of school,” she told Schwartz, “have no sense of what reality is . . . Their life is showing Strasberg they’re good. To me that’s stupid . . . Acting is so simple, you know, it’s really a pity to see people have to study it.” She told Schwartz she found it “a bore watching everybody work and going through these terrible agonies.” Eventually she was “fed up” with the Actors Studio pretension, she said, so she had walked out.

Even as she stood on the cusp of potentially enormous fame, Barbra remained bitter about having been rejected all those years ago. Her exclusion from the world of serious actors still stung enough that she was attempting to rewrite history in order to erase the hurt and humiliation. But as Schwartz continued to question her about the Actors Studio, the awestruck teenager she’d once been slowly reawakened. Barbra wondered now that she was “sort of” famous, if Strasberg would finally let her into one of his classes. “I wonder if he remembers me,” she mused. When Schwartz suggested she call Strasberg, Barbra admitted she was “afraid” to do so. Despite the fact that she’d just dismissed his whole school, she declared, “He’s the master, you know.” (She would go so far, in another setting, to call him “like a Zen master.”
) And that was why she wanted “to be friends with him,”
she said. Barbra told Schwartz that she and Strasberg had a great deal in common, “a certain sensitivity that’s on the same level.” She saw herself as Strasberg’s equal; if only he would see her that way as well!

It wasn’t all that surprising, then, that when Schwartz asked her if success was what she thought it would be, Barbra said no. She was particularly unprepared for the envy that surrounded her. “People who don’t have success hate success,” she observed. “They hate famous people really.” Who was she talking about? Critics who needled her? Former friends who complained she wasn’t doing enough to help them? Colleagues jealous of her quick rise to the top? Whoever they were, Barbra felt there were lots of people out there waiting for “any opportunity” to take her down, watching for her “to make a mistake.” It was “a very scary position to be in,” she said.

But the fear she felt as she became more successful also arose from trying to navigate a terrain that remained very alien to her. When people asked for her autograph, Barbra told Schwartz, she often thought they were putting her on, making a joke. When she read stories about herself or saw her name on a club’s marquee, she felt strangely disconnected to it all. Barbra Streisand was “this kid” she remembered “from a long time ago.” So when people said to her that she was going to be “one of the greatest stars . . . in the history of the entertainment business,” even though that had been her life’s goal, she had a hard time reconciling the two visions of herself: ugly, unwanted kid and glamorous, acclaimed star.

What Barbra was revealing to Schwartz was the defining dichotomy of her life. To another reporter, she admitted that sometimes, when she saw herself on television, she’d think, “What am I doing here?
I don’t look good; I don’t sound good. What is it that they flip over?” True, Barbra had gotten as far as she had because of the enormous belief she had in herself, which, in turn, had inspired others to believe in her as well. But deep down, the little girl who’d once crawled on her belly so she wouldn’t disturb her stepfather was still there, seeking approval, craving acclaim, and convinced that if she ever got it, it would be quickly snatched away. So when Barbra saw her name on the marquee, she thought, “It’s this kid from Brooklyn.
It’s not me.”

But that kid from Brooklyn had glimpsed the future, and she liked what she saw. “I’m really very young,” she reminded Schwartz, and there was still so much more to do and get and experience. “I want homes all over the world,” Barbra said. “I’d like to live different places different parts of the year, in Europe, Mexico maybe . . .” Plus, she was going to be great. “I want to do everything,” she said. She wanted to make records “and be the greatest and sell the most.” She wanted to be on television and “get all the reviews.” She wanted to be in the theater and “be magnificent.” Despite the nagging, deep-down doubts, Barbra recognized she’d already done pretty damn well for herself. “So far,” she said, “it seems I’ve been pretty lucky about doing whatever I want to do.”

Finally, Schwartz asked what she would be doing if she wasn’t in show business. Barbra didn’t wait long to reply. She said, very simply, “I don’t think I’d be alive.”

There were movie stars
waiting for her downstairs.

Big movie stars. Some of the biggest ever. Henry Fonda, who’d liked Barbra so much back in Philadelphia. Edward G. Robinson and Ray Milland. Natalie Wood with her date, Arthur Loew, Jr., son of the president of MGM and grandson of two of Hollywood’s founders, Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor. Wood’s ex-husband Robert Wagner, with his new wife, Marion. Kirk and Anne Douglas, with Kirk glad-handing all around the room. Jack and Mary Benny. Gracie Allen. Roddy McDowall with Tammy Grimes. Director John Huston, whose face lit up when he met the young and pretty Sue Lyon, who’d just scored in
Lolita.

And then there were the songwriters. Jimmy McHugh, Sammy Cahn, and, of course, Jule Styne, who’d flown out from New York with his wife, Maggie, to be there for Barbra’s Hollywood debut. Afterward, Styne and Cahn were hosting a soiree in her honor. Singer Tony Bennett was there, too, checking out the young woman he was sometimes compared with, and with whom he was currently sharing the charts.

In all, there were fifteen hundred people at the Grove that night, a record. There were even more outside, where fans mobbed the entrance, eager for a night of stargazing. As each celebrity arrived, cheers exploded from the crowd. Paparazzi cameras flashed. Long accustomed to the glare of the spotlight, Fonda, Douglas, and Wood smiled and waved graciously as they made their way inside.

Upstairs in her fifth-floor hideout, however, Barbra was definitely not accustomed to all the hoopla. From the street below, she could hear the cheers from the crowd, and she grew more anxious by the moment. Proving herself to Hollywood was an enormous challenge. If she ever wanted to make movies—and more and more she talked about that—then these were the people who would make that happen, or not. She’d already received the benediction of the influential columnist Sheilah Graham, who’d written in her column that Fanny Brice “would have approved”
of Barbra. That carried weight, because Graham had known Brice. But then again, so did an awful lot of the people who were waiting downstairs to see Barbra—including those two old warhorses Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, seated on opposite sides of the room from each other. Hopper was at Sammy Cahn’s table; Parsons was with Harriet and Armand Deutsch, Los Angeles society mainstays. Both columnists were waiting, eagle-eyed, to report on this young New York songstress who was going to play “their” Fanny Brice.