Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (55 page)

But of all the audience members down there waiting for her, it was probably Fran Stark whom Barbra was most eager to impress. Ray and Fran, of course, were seated at one of the head tables. Barbra was their find; they were her benefactors. Barbra knew as many eyes would be on them as on her.

Slipping into her black skirt and white midshipman’s blouse, Barbra may well have ruminated over who was
not
there as much as who was. She’d “wanted her mother to come to Los Angeles very much, to be there to see all those movie stars,” one friend of Diana’s understood. Maybe then, Barbra seemed to hope, Diana might grasp just how important her daughter had become. With all of Barbra’s travels, she hadn’t seen her mother in a while; Barbra had yet to give her the president’s autograph.
Trying to remedy that, she’d offered to fly Diana out to Los Angeles, but her mother had turned her down flat. Diana was “much too afraid to fly,” her friend knew. To Barbra, however, it may have felt like yet another brush-off, one more example of her mother’s indifference toward her. But to her friends, Diana was bragging that “her Barbra” was singing where “Marlene Dietrich used to sing.”

As Barbra dried her hair with a newfangled, handheld dryer, a knock at the door of her suite drew her attention. It was Sammy Cahn, wishing her well. David Begelman and Freddie Fields also came by, accompanied by Fields’s wife, actress Polly Bergen, who looked as “gay as a bird
in a smart summer-flowered dress,” Hedda Hopper thought. Begelman and Fields were still eager to win Barbra as a client. A few days earlier, they had helped book her on
The Jack Barry Show,
a comeback program for the television host caught up in the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. Now Barry hosted a variety-format program on KTLA Channel 5 for celebrities promoting local appearances.

But what Marty really wanted from Begelman and Fields was a guest spot for Barbra on
The Judy Garland Show,
which was set to premiere that fall. Since Garland was a client of theirs, the agents promised to see what they could do.

Barbra was finally ready to head downstairs. She took one final glance in the mirror. She’d put on some weight. Where she’d once been a spindly 110, she was now a more curvy 125. All that ice cream and calorie-rich Chinese food she’d consumed on the road had packed on the pounds. But the extra weight made her look better than ever. She was sexier, more mature, more substantial. Those few extra pounds seemed to imbue her with greater authority and gravitas.

The Cocoanut Grove lounge, on the first floor of the hotel, dated back to the very beginnings of Hollywood. In the Roaring Twenties, Joan Crawford had danced the Charleston on tabletops there; Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino had raised glasses spiked with bootleg liquor to their lips. Under the Grove’s three-story-high ceiling, painted to resemble a dark blue night sky studded with stars, Academy Awards and Golden Globes had been handed out over the years to Mary Pickford, Vivien Leigh, Hattie McDaniel, and Jennifer Jones. In the grove of giant potted palms, Frank Sinatra had sung; Martin and Lewis had traded barbs; and Dizzy Gillespie had fired up the house with his hot jazz.

Barbra made her entrance through the back, the spotlight following her dramatically through the dark as the crowd gave her a rousing welcome. She had kept them waiting just long enough to settle her own nerves and to build a sense of anticipation in the audience. Roddy McDowall thought her entrance was perfectly timed—“just late enough
to get people’s attention” but before anyone “started complaining.”

Taking the stage, Barbra basked for a moment in the applause. “I’m the kind of nut
who reads movie magazines,” she told the crowd, “and here you all are alive.” Then she delivered the evening’s best line: “If I’d known the place
was going to be so crowded, I’d have had my nose fixed.” The audience roared in laughter. She’d broken the ice. With that one wisecrack, Barbra had won Hollywood over. By confronting head-on the supposedly insurmountable barrier to her potential movie stardom—her looks—Barbra, through her wit and personality, had rendered that argument obsolete.

Of course, her voice helped, too. She warmed them up with “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” made them wistful with “I Stayed Too Long at the Fair,” and seduced them with “Lover, Come Back to Me.” Every song received sustained applause.

Sitting there spellbound, Hedda Hopper thought Barbra used “her extraordinary voice range beautifully.” Hopper’s only problem was her tablemate, Sammy Cahn, who, having heard it all before, had hooked up a transistor radio to his ears so he could listen to the Los Angeles Dodgers play the St. Louis Cardinals. In the middle of Barbra’s rendering of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Cahn whispered to the table, “Dodgers won—sixteenth inning
—2 to 1.” Hopper considered Cahn’s susurration “a bit disturbing,” but it didn’t spoil her enjoyment of the song. She was likely already composing in her head what she would write about Barbra the next day: “As relaxed as a cat on a hearth rug, she makes old songs sound new.”

Her rival, Louella Parsons, went a step further in her support. Barbra, she wrote, would “be great as our beloved
Fanny.” That seemed to be the consensus as the stellar crowd rose to its feet to cheer Barbra at the end of the night. Polly Bergen whispered to Freddie Fields, “I gave up singing
just in time”—a line that her husband made sure to get out to the press. Although
Los Angeles Times
critic Margaret Harford overheard a couple of ladies in the powder room sniffing that they “didn’t care for her,”
Barbra had won a host of other admirers that night. “She has high standards, direct methods and a voice that may still be shattering glass in Fresno,” Harford wrote in the
Times.
“I hope she never changes at the behest of press agents and powder room critics. Some of the sexy, no-talent babes who call themselves ‘vocalists’ should hear Miss Streisand. They would, I’m sure, go home and cut their pretty, pipsqueak throats.” Lee Solters himself couldn’t have written a more ringing endorsement of Barbra’s new kind of stardom.

Outside, the fans were still cheering as the stars filed out of the Grove at one o’clock in the morning. Hurrying back upstairs, Barbra changed into a red-gingham dress with white puffy sleeves—also her own creation—and then made her way to the reception in her honor. Marty, as always, was right by her side. Passing through a battalion of photographers, Barbra lifted her hands to shield her face from the blinding flashes of the cameras.

But things were more genteel at the party. Overcoming her old feelings of shyness when surrounded by so many people, Barbra allowed the Starks to lead her around, introducing her to all their Hollywood friends. Celebrities shouldered their way through the crowd to pay her homage. Tony Bennett congratulated her. Robert Wagner—the actor Elliott had always wished he looked like—posed for a photograph with her. Natalie Wood—one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood—told her that she was gorgeous. But mostly Barbra stuck close to Fran Stark’s side, their great big smiles telling the world that Fanny Brice’s daughter, no matter what anyone might have heard, thought the kid from Brooklyn was just swell.

Elliott arrived in Los Angeles just in time for his birthday, August 29. Sitting in the Ambassador Hotel restaurant on a clear, warm, gorgeous day, Barbra ordered a slice of cake and asked the waitress to stick a candle in it. When the cake was set down on the table between them, Barbra told Elliott to make a wish.

“I hope the Dodgers
win the pennant,” he said, and blew out the candle.

It was only natural for Elliott to be rooting for the Los Angeles Dodgers since they’d once been the Brooklyn Dodgers, the team he’d followed as a boy. That night the team was playing the San Francisco Giants, hoping to solidify their lead in the National League. But clearly baseball wasn’t all that was on Elliott’s mind that day.

“Let’s get married,” he suddenly blurted.

“Too late,” Barbra replied. “Candle’s out.”

She was playing with him. She knew they had to get married. They were in a precarious situation. Everyone assumed they were already husband and wife. They were very publicly living together. The
Saturday Evening Post
piece had made their marriage a major focal point, quoting some friend—Barbra wasn’t sure who—who’d said “the marriage to Elliott”
had been more important to her than even her fame. “Here was a girl . . . who never had the guys chasing her, never went steady and who really felt ugly inside,” this “friend” opined. “And then the leading man, a big, handsome, virile guy, falls in love and marries her.”

Barbra’s friends all knew she wasn’t really married; anyone who was pontificating on the significance of her “marriage” would have had an ulterior motive for doing so. And since Pete Hamill would admit that at least one of his sources was Harvey Sabinson, this quote, too, may well have sprung from Barbra’s publicists. Indeed, it went to the heart of one of the fundamental components of her public persona: the wallflower who felt “ugly inside.” But now this pathetic image could be updated and transcended by the validation that came with the love of a good man. Even the descriptions of Elliott—“handsome” and “virile”—sounded as if they came from a press agent’s talking points. Barbra’s “marriage,” therefore, was good for the image.

Eventually, however, someone would catch on that they weren’t really hitched. Although Barbra had deliberately called Elliott her husband when she’d sat down with Marv Schwartz—“Some nights I sleep in my husband’s pajamas,” she said—she also declared him off-limits to the discussion: “I can’t talk about him,” she replied when Schwartz asked her a question about Elliott. Barbra and Elliott were clearly going to have to be very careful in any interviews they gave.

And, at least for Barbra, that would take considerable effort, since suddenly she was everywhere. In nearly every major entertainment column, Barbra had become a regular boldface name. She’d recently sat down with Lloyd Shearer of
Parade
for a major piece to be run in the popular Sunday newspaper supplement. She’d also just taped the season premiere of Bob Hope’s show,
which was a surefire ratings winner. Barbra had sung “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” and “Gotta Move.” She’d also participated in a comedy skit, playing Bessie Mae, the distaff side of a hillbilly band called the Hog Chitlins and the Goat Grabber Three. Slung over her shoulders were two washboards that she played as instruments: “I’m in stereo,” she punned. They sang a version of “Blue Tail Fly,” but Barbra’s hillbilly accent didn’t work, and the jokes were painfully unfunny. And she seemed to know it.

Far more accolades came for her continuing show at the Cocoanut Grove, where the box office sold out every night. Barbra had become “the new pet of the movie crowd,”
in the words of one journalist. One night, Rosalind Russell hosted
a table of ten, and Barbra was cued by Marty to introduce both her and Norma Shearer from the stage. Also at the table were Kate Paley, the teenaged daughter of the CBS founder, and her escort, Carter Burden, a young socialite and Vanderbilt cousin. Danny Thomas had been
back to see Barbra at the Grove a couple of times, eager to sign her for an appearance on his show. Jack Paar was also asking, apparently no longer making cracks about Barbra’s looks.

But Marty turned them both down, at least for the moment. He’d gotten a better offer—indeed, the one he’d been aiming for. Begelman and Fields had come through: Barbra was booked to appear on
The Judy Garland Show
that fall. And so the pair from CMA officially became Barbra’s new agents. They knew how to make things happen, and that’s what Barbra needed. For Garland, they’d refocused and revitalized her career. “You two are the luckiest
thing that ever happened to me,” Garland had exulted. The pair, according to one observer, were “young, smart and, beneath their well-tailored suits, ferocious.” Just the kind of people Barbra wanted handling her affairs. Begelman and Fields promised her the world, even movies—though, in an attempt to not rattle Ray Stark too much, Barbra fibbed through her teeth when reporters asked if she was interested in making films. No, she told them: “I’ve got a job.”

But her new agents knew better. Surely it was Begelman and Fields who lined up the tour Barbra took of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She was driven onto that legendary lot past the tall Corinthian columns into a fantasy world replete with New York brownstones, Tarzan’s jungle, Chinese temples, and Andy Hardy’s middle-American neighborhood. Afterward, Barbra toured the soundstages, where director George Sidney was filming a number with Ann-Margret for the upcoming
Viva Las Vegas.
After the sexy redhead purred through her song, the two singers were introduced. Enterprising press agents embroidered a bit of fluff from that meeting, claiming Barbra had asked Ann-Margret, “Where did you get
the crazy spelling of your name?” To which the Swedish bombshell had supposedly replied, “I was just going to ask you the same question.”

For all its monkeyshines and hoopla, Barbra loved Hollywood. The weather, the fragrance of citrus trees, the dream-factory atmosphere. “If you want to get away
from everything,” Barbra’s friend Evelyn Layton said about Hollywood, “this place is perfect—so unreal it’s like being on another planet.” Heart-shaped swimming pools, shiny convertible cars, beach houses made out of glass. The place was magical. And that wasn’t even counting Disneyland, where Barbra got to spend
a day, even if the lines had been too long for her to get on many of the rides.

Besides, in Hollywood she was surrounded by people who kept telling her she was soon to be the biggest star in the world. NBC was reported to be “going to great pains
to line up an exclusive contract” with her. She may have been discussing all her many options the night that Louis Sobol spotted her at La Scala, the swank Beverly Hills eatery, with Freddie Fields. In his column a few days later, Sobol wrote up a description
of Barbra’s table, mentioning that Fields was accompanied by his wife, Polly Bergen, and that Phil Silvers, who was also present, had his wife with him as well.

Yet if Barbra’s “spouse” was there, too—as Elliott almost certainly was—Sobol failed to include his name. After all, the columnist was only interested in names he could boldface, and the tall, gangly man with bushy hair who sat beside Barbra could have been anybody, or nobody. Such a description seemed to sum up Elliott’s position pretty well—just a guy in the background as Barbra took the movie colony by storm.