Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (63 page)

Including the leading man.

“We hate each other,”
Barbra teased, looking across the table at Sydney Chaplin at the Italian restaurant where they were having supper together.

But the reporter interviewing them knew that was just an “inverted way of expressing mutual admiration.” Barbra and Sydney, he observed, were “two of a kind.”

In fact, they were more like complementary opposites. Sydney was the perfect follower to Barbra’s leader. Barbra had heard stories of Sydney’s temper, but to her he had never been less than flattering or accommodating. Playing love scenes with Sydney proved to be very pleasant indeed. Once Barbra had asked why a girl like her couldn’t play love scenes. Now she was in the hero’s arms, and the company noticed just how much she seemed to enjoy being kissed by Sydney in front of everyone. “She glowed,” said dancer Sharon Vaughn. “She loved it,” said a member of the chorus. Wardrobe lady Ceil Mack detected sparks flying between the show’s two leads. Kanin, too, became aware of how “very chummy”
Barbra and Sydney had suddenly become.

But while much of their chemistry was personal, there was also a professional reason for it. Sydney shared Barbra’s belief that
Funny Girl
“needed to be their story” and proved to be a powerful ally in her determination to streamline the production. At the moment, the show ran more than four hours. There was no question that it needed to be cut.

Consequently, over Kanin’s objections, a decision was made to fire Allyn Ann McLerie. Kanin argued that Nora had brought “a note to the show
which it needed”—a note of balance, since otherwise it was all Fanny, all the time. But clearly Kanin was overruled on the matter. The only people with enough clout to do that would have been Stark and Barbra. The official reason given for McLerie’s ouster, and it was partly true, was “the length of the musical.”
Funny Girl
was indeed too long. But without her, the script tipped precariously close to becoming a one-woman show.

The bigger problem, at least according to Barbra, was Kanin himself. The director was never going to be someone she held in high regard. The thin, gray-haired Kanin affected a certain simplicity, wearing wool shirts and knitted ties, but he could be very showy in other ways. He had a reedy little voice that he used to pontificate on various subjects, whether it be socialism or Hollywood art direction. He covered his wife in so much jewelry that Cecil Beaton thought she resembled “a little Burmese idol.”
Kanin’s marriage to the much-older Gordon had not only produced an extremely successful professional partnership, but had also provided cover for his deeply conflicted and circumspect homosexuality. “Gar” could be warm and friendly, but also sly and manipulative, and he invariably chose passive aggression over direct action. In that way, Kanin resembled Ray Stark, and Barbra already had one Stark to deal with.

It was Kanin’s reticence to take a stand on what she was doing with the role that really unsettled her. He just sat there, with his ubiquitous wife, watching her. Once, during a run-through of “People,” Barbra had done everything opposite from the way they’d originally rehearsed it, and Kanin had remained immobile, never saying a word. Jule Styne, meanwhile, had thought Barbra was “on fire”
and told the musical director to let her go and have the orchestra follow her lead. Styne thought Barbra’s interpretation had been brilliant, far better than what Kanin had tried to set up. But Kanin said not a word, either in protest or in praise. His method of directing Barbra, he said, “was to attempt to get her
to realize all those important facets of her own personality.” It was his job as director, he said, to simply “create an atmosphere in which her personality could flower.” In other words, it was all up to her.

While it was very true that Barbra didn’t like being told what to do, she also resented the supposed top guy just sitting there and letting her do all the work. Arthur Laurents hadn’t abdicated his authority in this way; neither had Barbra when she walked into the studio to make her second album. She was willing to do the same here. But unlike her album, where she’d been through the process before, this was her first time starring in a Broadway show. A little help, a little direction, was going to be necessary.

A director, in her opinion, couldn’t be neutral. “The actor has to have some
feedback, some mirror, some opinion, even if it’s wrong,” she said. She was going to have her own ideas, that was a given—but she needed to bounce them off someone she respected. A director needed “to talk to the actors, give them a sense of their own importance.” She also needed to feel that her director “loved [her] ... wanted to make
[her] beautiful.” Laurents had done both. Kanin seemed to do neither.

Just a few days earlier, she had asked him a question, and Kanin had replied by asking what
she
thought. “Fuck you,” Barbra had said to him, and walked away, leaving Lainie Kazan and others in the company with mouths agape.

“I have a problem with tact,” Barbra admitted. “I only know how to be direct.” She didn’t know how to
shmeykhl
somebody, she said, how to beat around the bush, to get something she wanted—especially not with a director who was supposed to be ensuring her show would be a hit.

Sitting with Sydney in that Italian restaurant, Barbra didn’t raise such concerns, not with a reporter from the
Boston Globe
present. But she knew Sydney shared her worries. In her quarrels with Kanin, he had supported her one hundred percent. Sydney had even started looking to Barbra for advice on how he should play the part of Nick. He agreed that the show wasn’t in anywhere near the shape it should be this close to their first previews. They were working from a deeply flawed book, and both of them knew it. The trick was not letting anyone outside the show know they knew it. “Whatever happens to the show,”
Barbra told the reporter, putting the best face on things, “it will have been fun.”

When word came that they were needed back at rehearsals, the two costars stood to leave. Sydney, silent for so much of the interview, turned to the reporter. “It’ll be a hit,” he said. No doubt he believed that, too, as he followed his fiery, determined, tactless leading lady back into the theater.

The Gotham Hotel was one of New York’s great old luxury lodgings. On the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, the granite Beaux Arts structure shot up twenty-four stories. Barbra had arrived at the hotel on the cold and snowy evening of December 27 to accept the Entertainer of the Year Award from
Cue
magazine, an honor that had previously gone to Diahann Carroll and Zero Mostel. Not only was she getting the award, but her face also graced the cover of
Cue,
“the entertainment guide to New York and suburbs,” with a circulation of more than 200,000 for its five different editions. As she walked into the jam-packed Grand Ballroom, filled with hundreds of showmen, pressmen, and performers, all of them applauding for her, Barbra was on the threshold of achieving everything she’d once dreamed about, of claiming the future she’d often been unable to visualize as a kid back in Brooklyn.

At the moment, an Associated Press story about her, running in hundreds of papers all across the country, was calling her the “world’s hottest young star.” She’d just finished recording the tracks for her third album, which Columbia wanted out early next year before
Funny Girl
opened.
Mademoiselle
magazine had recently presented her with one of their ten annual Merit Awards given to young women of achievement, honoring her alongside Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, fashion designer Deanna Littell, French-Indian actress Leela Naidu, and writer Susan Sontag. More heady company came in Louis Sobol’s column featuring
the most exciting New Yorkers of 1963. Here Barbra was included with British transplant Albert Finney, Senator Jacob Javits, and playwright Edward Albee. Not bad for a kid from the corner of Newkirk and Nostrand.

Outside of showbiz, though, things were a little different. Barbra no longer had any real friends
except for Cis and Harvey Corman, the only people she spent time with when she wasn’t working. Rarely did Barbra accept social invitations from professional colleagues; she almost never asked people to her home. She could have, of course: the duplex was gradually coming together, with antique spool cabinets and beautifully mismatched china sets and glowing theater exit signs over the doors. The place was built for entertaining. Around the enormous bar, Larry Hart had once played host to hundreds. But since Barbra had moved in, the bar remained unadorned and unused.

Instead, the heart of the house for Barbra had become the kitchen, where she’d covered the walls with red patent leather and added antique stools. She might not cook big dinners for friends, but here Elliott whipped up her chicken soup, waiting for her to come home from the theater. In the mornings he called Barbra on the intercom to come down and eat. Most nights, it was just the two of them.

In some ways, as one journalist put it, Barbra and Elliott were “encamped there like a pair
of gypsies in a half-wrecked enchanted castle, leading a grandiose, accelerated version of the same raggle- taggle life they led over the fish restaurant.” Beside their bed in the tower suite they’d installed a refrigerator so they wouldn’t have to trudge all the way downstairs if they wanted a dish of Breyer’s coffee or cherry-vanilla ice cream late at night. Elliott liked to believe he and Barbra remained very simple
people. One of their “conjugal delights,” he said, was still a Nathan’s hot dog.

But their seclusion from the social whirl of New York also grew out of Barbra’s shyness, her fear of discovering that among these sophisticated socialites, she wouldn’t fit in. A part of her scorned them for their pretenses. Deep down, Barbra knew that even her move to the apartment at the Ardsley had been a concession to a pretentious, affected way of thinking: “I am now a mature,
successful woman,” she said to one writer, explaining the move. “Hah! So I should move out of my tiny third-floor walk-up. And I did, into a large duplex, because the more successful you get, the less secure you get. It’s the nature of the business.”

If there was one thing Barbra understood after her extraordinary year, it was the nature of the business she was in. Image mattered. Not for nothing did Barbra donate five hundred dollars’ worth of her old clothes to a local thrift shop and allow her publicists to leak word of it to the columnists. Metaphorically, she was shedding the old, kooky, thrift-shop Barbra. She was now a self-proclaimed couturiere, designing her own clothes and being written up in fashion columns. Earl Wilson pointed out that Barbra had once shopped in thrift stores because that was all she could afford; now she was handing over her surplus to them. “And that’s what one year
can do for you in show business,” Wilson wrote.

As people stepped aside to let her pass, Barbra took the stage at the Gotham, accepting the award from
Cue
publisher Edward Loeb. If she had looked out into the crowd, she would have seen her face everywhere, as copies of the current issue were held in nearly every hand. Inside, a piece by editor Emory Lewis explained why they had chosen this twenty-one-year-old over so many others. “Streisand is an original,”
Lewis wrote, “and originals are rare in our industrial, homogenized society.” But how far could an original go? Barbra might be the entertainer of the year, but what about next year? What happened if
Funny Girl
flopped, doomed by its deficient book and ineffectual director? How long could an original like Barbra last?

All over the city of Boston on the night of January 8, residents double locked their doors, still on edge. The latest victim of the infamous Strangler had been found in an apartment on Charles Street. There was no moon this night, and temperatures hovered just above freezing. And in the quiet, carpeted corridors of a luxurious Back Bay hotel, Sydney Chaplin, convinced that most everyone was sound asleep, decided it was time to make his move.

They’d all arrived that afternoon for two days of rehearsals at the Shubert Theatre on Tremont Street. Ray Stark, still on crutches, conducted a series of meet and greets with the local press, sharing his optimism about the show, especially the music. Despite his earlier arguments to the contrary, Stark now insisted he was glad that none of “the old things”
that Fanny Brice used to sing, such as “My Man,” were in the show because they “wouldn’t stand up to the Styne-Merrill score.” Stark seemed to truly believe that all the show’s problems had been solved, or maybe he’d simply instructed everyone to give that impression ahead of
Funny Girl
’s first preview, a benefit for the Boston Lying-in Hospital on January 11. Indeed, when columnist Marjorie Mills spotted Garson Kanin, he was “trying his best
not to look jubilant.”

In the still of the night, Sydney rapped lightly on Barbra’s door.

She was twenty-one years old. He was thirty-seven. She was a kid from Brooklyn; he was Hollywood royalty. She was always being reminded of her unconventional looks; he was equally celebrated for being matinee-idol handsome. She was the leading lady; he was her leading man. Barbra would have needed to be made of stone not to let him in.

Whether their affair began that night, as Sydney’s friends believed, or on a night not long before or after, it began nonetheless. Back in New York, Elliott was helping the vivacious Italian actress Anna Maria Alberghetti stage a new nightclub act with song-and-dance man John W. Bubbles. Alberghetti was beautiful and single, and Elliott worked with her late into the night. There was talk, as of course there would be. Barbra may have heard the talk, which may have been one more reason why she opened the door when Sydney knocked.

Barbra’s trysts with Sydney were conducted in the privacy of hotel rooms, always in secret. The company couldn’t know; the press certainly couldn’t know. Unlike the exuberant couple of
Wholesale,
whose affair had started the same way and who hadn’t minded if the occupants of adjoining rooms could hear them, Barbra and Sydney were both married to other people. So this had to be discreet. But there was no question that it also had to be.