Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (62 page)

To Marv Schwartz, she had admitted she was “affected by things.”
If she didn’t like “the color of the rug,” for example, she’d become “affected,” and so the color had to be changed. She couldn’t help that; she was “a sensory kind of person.” And she truly believed that what affected her also affected her ability to work, and that, in turn, affected the show. If she seemed demanding, it was only in the interest of the project at hand. “I’m the easiest person to work with and the hardest to work with,” she said. She never demanded retakes when appearing on television, for example. Since she believed there was “no such thing as making a mistake,” she accepted it when she sang a little differently than she intended. It wasn’t wrong; it was just different. She insisted that she would never walk off in the middle of a performance, as she’d seen some pretty big names do. Instead, she’d stick around and figure out what the problem was and then correct it. “So if the musicians are lousy,” she said, “I’ve got to . . . work harder.”

That was what she was doing with
Funny Girl.
The director, in her opinion, was lousy. The script wasn’t all that terrific either. So Barbra was working harder. Sometimes it was hard to explain her reasons, but she knew, in her gut, that she was right. That made things difficult sometimes. “It’s hard to argue with me,” she conceded.

Heading back out onto the stage with Stark and Lennart and a revised script, Barbra was very pleased with the authority she’d been given. If she was honest with herself, which she could sometimes be, she’d admit that occasionally simply winning an argument was as important as achieving the desired change in the script, or the costume, or the music. Just a few months ago, Marv Schwartz had asked her if she demanded certain things because she really believed in them or because she just wanted to have her own way. It hadn’t taken long for Barbra to answer. “Both,” she had said.

The one person who didn’t think Barbra knew better than everyone else was Bob Merrill. Sitting with her at the piano, he was ready to tell her, quite frankly, to go to hell, but he let the more diplomatic Jule Styne take the lead, as he usually did in these matters.

What had them up in arms was a note they’d received from Marty Erlichman telling them that, upon consideration, Barbra “didn’t think she wanted
to sing” either “People” or “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”

Styne had immediately gotten her on the phone. “Barbra,” he told her, “you don’t sing ‘People,’ you don’t sing my score.”

For Styne to have been so firm with her was unusual and emphasized the passion he felt about the issue. Right from the start, those two songs had defined the score. Merrill’s notebooks documented how much time he had spent composing the lyrics, especially on “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” He’d experimented with various couplets—“Don’t tell me not to fly,
I’ve started soarin’, The stars are flyin’ by, The wind is roarin’”—before crossing them out and settling on the final lyrics. He and Styne had spent two years on these songs, and now Barbra didn’t want to sing them.

Styne was devastated; Merrill was furious. Why she suddenly, inexplicably, wanted the two songs excised—or “given to someone else,” as Merrill understood—they didn’t know. Perhaps Barbra, like others, thought “People,” as lovely as it was, made little sense in the show, or at least where it was placed in the show. Fanny, at that early stage, isn’t thinking about needing other people: She just wants to be famous. Or perhaps Barbra didn’t like how difficult the songs were to sing, each in their own way, as Merrill’s wife, Suzanne, wondered. Whatever Barbra’s reasons, the composers weren’t backing down. With great patience, Styne had explained to their leading lady that those two songs were “going to be the ones everyone remembered.” Maybe that would make a difference to her, he told Merrill.

And it seemed it had. Standing beside the piano, Barbra blithely told the composers that she’d come around and now shared their viewpoint. Both Styne and Merrill breathed long sighs of relief. A serious crisis had been averted. Yet Barbra’s easy capitulation raised the question of how serious she had been. Merrill wondered if she had been playing them.

He still hadn’t entirely warmed to her. He still felt Barbra was “a know-it-all.” And it seemed as soon as one issue was resolved, another one arose. Now it was Barbra’s first song in the show, “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty.” She was to sing a reprise of it after it was introduced by Mrs. Brice and her friend, Mrs. Strakosh. Barbra hated it. Talk about autobiography. The song was all about people telling an ugly duckling she can never be a swan. “Is a nose with deviation such a crime against the nation?” went one line. Maybe, instead of ditching the other two, she could ditch this one?

That was a question for Kanin, the composers told her. They’d written these songs with certain characters in mind, but shuffling numbers among the cast was par for the course in musicals. The problem that really hung Merrill up was the liberties Barbra took in interpreting the words he’d written. He believed it was “very important to a lyricist to have the singer pronounce the words the way he intended them.” Inflections, accents, emphasis could all change meanings, throw off rhymes. As Barbra sang the sad ballad “Who Are You Now?”—one of the last numbers in the show—Merrill jumped up and complained that she held the word “someone” too long in the line “Are you someone better?” It changed his intent, he argued. “This is my song,” he said, “and I want you to do it this way.” Barbra was equally adamant she knew how to sing a lyric.

Merrill didn’t view it as an artistic interpretation. He saw it as “fiddling” with his composition. In some ways, he was an awful lot like Barbra. Merrill felt he knew the best way to sing something, and he didn’t want anyone telling him otherwise. His wife thought “Don’t Rain on My Parade” could have been Merrill’s theme song: “Don’t bug me, get out of my way” was exactly the message he sent to those around him.

As always, it was Styne who played the good cop to his partner’s bad cop. “Everyone loved Jule,” Merrill’s wife observed. “Not everyone loved Bob.” It would be Styne who approached Barbra to ask her tactfully if she might try to sing a song differently; failing that, he might try adjusting the music to appease them both. The “teeny tiny” Styne would get up out of his seat and bustle from person to person, Lainie Kazan observed, always followed by two assistants who matched him in diminutive size. Kazan couldn’t help but smile when she saw “these three little people moving across the room in unison,” putting out fires, carrying ideas, trying new arrangements, and trying to keep the peace. Styne was always talking, Kazan noted—always chirping away giddily, anxiously, expressively. Merrill sat there silently.

Perhaps some of Styne’s energy came from his belief, as he put it, that he was “in a desperate race
with the calendar.” Despite all his great movie compositions, he felt his career hadn’t really gotten moving until 1952, when he’d coproduced a revival of
Pal Joey
with Richard Rodgers. It was Broadway where Styne’s heart resided, and at the age of fifty-seven, even with
Gypsy
and other shows under his belt, there was still “so much [he wanted] to say musically.” He longed to be a singular artist, to have his work easily identifiable as being his. “Don’t be a minor Cole Porter,” Rodgers had told him. “Be yourself and the critics will gradually have respect for you.” This was Styne’s greatest hope.

And so it was a good thing that Barbra was singing “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”
Funny Girl,
Styne sensed, might be a very important part of his legacy.

The Christmas season arrived in New York that year in sheets of snow and gloom. Still in mourning for their slain president, most Americans headed into the holiday celebrations more muted than usual, trying to come to grips with the murder and its grisly aftermath, in which the president’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had himself been murdered, giving rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories. Frigid temperatures had gripped the northeast in a stranglehold, plunging New York into a kind of perpetual shudder. That year, few smiles cracked the cold, red faces of those who shopped along Fifth Avenue.

Heading to rehearsals in a cab, Barbra wasn’t smiling either. Stark hadn’t met her terms. He’d offered $5,000 instead of $7,500 and had nixed the other perks, including the chauffeured limousine. Barbra felt the producer was being stingy; Stark felt she had tried to take advantage of Merrick’s departure by setting her high-powered agents on him. What had been a largely cordial relationship suddenly turned antagonistic. Fosse’s complaints about Stark’s devious nature may suddenly have resonated with Barbra. Stark had called her bluff. He knew she wasn’t any more willing to walk away from the show than he was to lose her.

The aggravation over contract negotiations couldn’t have helped the mood at rehearsals, which every day was becoming bleaker. As Barbra arrived at the Winter Garden on a frosty morning in mid- December, she knew that something had to change. Garson Kanin just sat there, giving her hardly any feedback, while the scenes went “on and on with no sense of cohesion,” one member of the company observed. The show was too long, Barbra believed.

Any cuts couldn’t affect the main storyline, however, which concerned Fanny’s rise to the top while falling in love with, and then losing, Nick. So while there were some bits with Fanny that could be deleted—a roller-skating scene Barbra had been practicing for weeks, for example—the majority of cuts would affect the supporting characters. Eddie Ryan had a solo, “Take Something for Nothing,” that seemed destined for the chopping block, even though it fleshed out his character by showing his love for Fanny. The chorus girls, all compellingly individual in early scripts, would have to be blended together.

But it was the part of the beautiful Nora that Barbra objected to most. She seemed “uncomfortable with how significant that part was,” one company member thought, watching the number of changes in the scenes between Fanny and Nora. From Stark and the show’s composers, Lainie Kazan observed a growing sense that “the entire focus of
Funny Girl
needed to be Fanny.” As a consequence, she said, “everyone else became incidental.” When Nora came into a scene, for example, she “took away from Fanny,” and that was a problem that needed to be addressed.

McLerie had a solo number, “Baltimore Sun,” that she sung toward the end of Act One, at the point where she and Vera lament their fading looks. “Enter the star, wearing pearls to save insurance and brown paper bags to save tips,” Nora was scripted to say as Fanny made her entrance. That led to the line where Fanny declared she didn’t worry about losing her looks. To which Nora was to reply, in one of the several astute confrontations the script gave her: “But you
like
standing next to us. And proving that what you have is so much better. That there isn’t a man you couldn’t get away from any one of us—if you really wanted to.”

That was one of the underlying themes of
Funny Girl:
Fanny’s desirability wasn’t dependent on looks. But what Nora was doing was actually pointing out Fanny’s narcissism, a fact that was made even clearer later on when, drunk and depressed, Nora laments that she won’t be in next year’s Follies. Fanny tells her to fight back. Nora replies, “Don’t you ever look at the people you care about? Don’t you ever see them?” Fanny tells her that she cares about people. Nora waits a beat before answering. “Very depressing, how big you are,” she says at last. “Makes smaller people feel—too small.”

Her message was plain: Not everyone—not Nora, not Nick—was as strong as Fanny. Fanny was superhuman in her strength, and those high standards—that perfectionism—kept her separated from those who might be a little less mighty, but perhaps more human, than she was. Fanny, according to Ray Stark, “very probably made it difficult
for the man she married to live up to her, or with her.” The autobiography was perhaps getting a little too close for Barbra. Whispers had already begun that Elliott, another gambler living in the shadow of a famous wife, was not so different from Nick. How long would the scene stay in the show? That was the question some were asking.

But autobiography was what
Funny Girl
had become. It had, in fact, become a selling point. “This play is really about
me,” Barbra told the Associated Press. “It simply happened to happen before to Fanny Brice.”

There was one moment that carried particular resonance. In an early scene, before Fanny has become famous, she makes the case that she ought to be given a chance. “Look,” she says. “Suppose all you ever had for breakfast was onion rolls. All of a sudden one morning in walks a bagel. You’d say, ‘Ugh! What’s that?’ Until you tried it. That’s my problem. I’m a bagel on a plateful of onion rolls!” That about summed up what Barbra had been dealing with ever since she’d started out on her quest for fame.

To another reporter, Barbra mused on how long it had taken Stark to get this show produced. “Ten years ago they started
on this idea,” she said, “when I was only eleven years old.” When the reporter asked why it had taken so long, Barbra replied, “I wasn’t old enough then. They were waiting for me.” She was only half joking. While she and Fanny had become in many ways interchangeable, Barbra insisted that she was not Fanny, even if Fanny had become her. “I don’t want to imitate
anybody,” Barbra admitted to one reporter. “My ego’s too big.”

Without that healthy ego, Barbra would never have made it to the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre—but for some people, that superhuman confidence was as grating as it was to Nora in the script. Sheilah Graham, who’d been so complimentary ahead of Barbra’s performance at the Cocoanut Grove, had subsequently been turned off by the young singer-actress’s boast that she’d win every award there was. “Little girl,”
Graham wrote now. “This is too much, too soon.”

But that little girl was the show’s best chance for success. Her voice and personality and yes, her ego, were intended to carry
Funny Girl
despite the substandard script. That was why Ray Stark was letting Barbra take the director’s reins away from Kanin. Most of the company agreed that their director wasn’t up to fixing the problems inherent in the book, and they looked to Barbra to make things right. She seemed “to know exactly what she was doing,” said one company member, “to instinctively know what was best for the show.” So everyone put their faith in their twenty-one-year-old leading lady.