Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (68 page)

There had been new lyrics to “I’m the Greatest Star” that had come and gone. There had been a new version of “Cornet Man” that had stuck. “Downtown Rag” had been replaced with an entirely new number, “Henry Street.” Robbins had even asked Carol Haney to come in and fix the ending of “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” and put a finish on “Find Yourself a Man,” Mrs. Brice’s humorous number in the second act, yet another attempt to liven up the show’s last hour, though whether Haney came is unclear.

And every morning Robbins arrived at Barbra’s dressing room with a handful of notes
just for her. He had reversed his earlier objections and come to the conclusion that Barbra should sing “People” alone. No longer, apparently, did he find it “too strong a come-on.” After the performance on March 2, Robbins had also cautioned his leading lady against seeming “too desperate” at the ending of “Greatest Star.” After the performance on the fifth, Robbins had asked Barbra for more concentration in the mirror before she said, “Hello, gorgeous.” A few days later, he was telling her to wait longer for the laugh after Nick’s line, “I’m minding them for a friend.” And sometimes, Robbins said, there was just “too much Mae West” in her Fanny Brice.

After they had started the New York previews on the tenth, Robbins’s criticism had gotten sharper. He told Barbra to stand up straight during “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” and to let the curtain hit the floor before she exited. She needed to be less harsh on the line “Whatever he tells me to do, I’ll do,” and at the end of the bride blackout, where Fanny shocks the audience by showing up pregnant in a wedding dress, Robbins wanted Barbra to hold her pose longer. She should shrug before the line “I would have ordered roast beef and potatoes” and laugh after the line “I’m not bossy,” because she knew she was. Lines such as “Oy, what a day I had” the director wanted to be more Jewish, and Barbra “should be more elegant, like a showgirl” during “Sadie.” And after watching Barbra play Fanny’s farewell scene with Eddie, an exhausted Robbins handed her a note with just one short bit of feedback: “Barbra—class!”

But the biggest problem in Barbra’s performance, it seemed, was how she related to Sydney. “What are you playing while Sydney sings ‘You Are Woman’?” Robbins asked her with some befuddlement. The scene just didn’t work; Ray Stark even sent Robbins a memo complaining that it was no longer “getting the laughs it used to,”
that the “small laughs” were “killing the big laughs.” The chemistry between the two players seemed suddenly off. A week later, Robbins was still asking the same question: “What are you playing?” Taking both his leads aside, Robbins rehearsed them extra hard, just the three of them in the room. The problems weren’t confined to “You Are Woman.” The railroad scene, where Fanny and Nick part and the audience is supposed to feel their heartache, wasn’t working either. Robbins encouraged Barbra and Sydney to rehearse all their scenes together on their own. No longer was he complaining about too much kissing. Now he wanted more passion, a quality that had seemed to evaporate in the past couple of weeks.

Very possibly, what the director was picking up on was the cooling of the affair between his two leads. Barbra had begun to distance herself from Sydney, and he was both hurt and angry. No doubt, too, he was frustrated by the fact that Robbins kept singling him out for criticism. The essential problem of Nick as a character had never been solved. Robbins was still trying to figure out “how to make Nick a wheeler-dealer and still make him sympathetic.” One idea was to make him funnier with the addition of some new dialogue on the twentieth: “Whose oil well?” Fanny asks. “Our oil well,” Nick replies. “When does our oil well start producing?” Fanny wants to know. “As soon as we dig it,” Nick tells her. Robbins worried what the critics would say about Sydney after the official opening night.

Barbra, however, didn’t need to wait that long to know what her reviews would be. The audience’s reaction at every preview told her all she needed to know. Joanne Stang of the
Times
had been struck at how some people had stood on their seats to applaud Barbra at the end. Indeed, starting on the seventeenth, the notes Robbins sent to Barbra were more compliments than critiques. Even Bob Merrill had come around. The lyricist had been impressed with Barbra’s progress in the show, “astounded by the way she had refined all the rough edges,” his wife said. Merrill believed Barbra had “metamorphosed from an angry, rebellious kid to an elegant, polished, powerful performer with the ability to transmit great emotion—maybe even more than he and Jule had written,” his wife thought.

Outside the theater, however, things weren’t quite so sanguine. The five delays
Funny Girl
had endured had left ticket agents and theatergoers unhappy. Stark couldn’t deny they faced “the wrath of the public.”
Notifying customers of changed dates meant considerable extra costs and clerical work; so far, the show’s delays were estimated to have added close to one hundred thousand dollars to its costs, bringing total production expenses to more than six hundred thousand. They were still in the black, since about nine hundred thousand dollars in advance sales had already been made. But it was a very small cushion of comfort.

No doubt the numbers made Ray Stark anxious. That could explain the night he made a beeline for Barbra’s dressing room after one preview—he had gotten surprisingly fast on those crutches—and began shouting at her in a “shrill and high-pitched” voice, as one company member overheard. On the twentieth, he had complained to Robbins about a lack of depth in Barbra’s performance of certain scenes; maybe he was frustrated that he hadn’t seen an improvement. Whatever his reasons, he was unhappy, and let Barbra know it in no uncertain terms.

Barbra had her own grievances with the producer. While she was pleased that Stark and Seven Arts had decided that she should play Fanny in the inevitable movie version of
Funny Girl,
she wasn’t happy about the terms of the deal, and neither were Begelman and Fields. True, it was reportedly “one of the biggest deals
ever given an actress for her first film role”—one million dollars was the figure being bandied about—but it came with a catch: Barbra would be, in effect, Stark’s personal property for the next eight years. Most actresses just starting out in pictures would have been thrilled by the job security; but Barbra, of course, was not most actresses. She knew that the four pictures she’d be required to make for Stark would be, “in essence,”
his choices; Barbra would only get to make films that Stark green-lighted, and she’d already discovered how often they failed to see eye to eye on things.

Just as he had with the contract for the show, Stark had played hardball. If Barbra didn’t want to sign the long-term contract, then she wouldn’t play Fanny Brice in the movie version of
Funny Girl.
There was precedent. When
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
had been made into a film, Howard Hawks hadn’t used Carol Channing, who’d been a smash as Lorelei Lee on Broadway. Instead, he’d hired Marilyn Monroe. When, just this past year, George Cukor had cast
My Fair Lady,
he hadn’t gone with Julie Andrews, even though she’d been such a hit in the part on the stage. He’d hired Audrey Hepburn. There were plenty of big Hollywood names who would jump at playing Fanny Brice in the movie version—Anne Bancroft, perhaps?—and Barbra knew it.

She resented being backed into a corner like that. It was one of the things she disliked most about show business. Ray Stark had become both benefactor and bête noire. To Barbra, he was “a real character, an original.” Without his early championship, she would not have been sitting in that dressing room at the Winter Garden Theatre. But ever since the contract battles of the previous fall, the relationship between producer and leading lady had turned into what she called a “love-hate” tug-of-war. Stark could be a bully,
Barbra admitted. For all his charm, for all his patrician good manners, there were those who remembered how he’d shoved and kicked a photographer
at Idlewild Airport who’d tried to take his and Fran’s photograph. For all his graciousness, there were those who thought he behaved terribly to his own son, Peter, a dreamy, artistic boy whom Stark was always trying to toughen up by browbeating him in public. No doubt that Ray Stark could be a bully, and Barbra felt she was being bullied over the movie contract.

She appealed to Fields for help. “Look, if you’re prepared
to lose it,” her agent told her, “then we can say sorry, we’ll sign only one picture at a time.” But Barbra was “not prepared to lose it.” She knew the risks. She didn’t want to be Carol Channing or Julie Andrews. So she signed the four-picture deal with Stark and had been resentful about it ever since.

That could explain why, when Stark started shouting at her in her dressing room, Barbra had a simple reply: “Fuck you.”
She’d cursed similarly at Kanin, but directing the words at Stark was a much bigger deal.

“You can’t say that to me,” the producer sputtered.

“This is my dressing room,” Barbra said, “and I’m saying it to you.”

Later, she’d express amazement with herself for her words, but she didn’t have to worry about any real repercussions. She was untouchable, at least until the show premiered.

At last, Elliott had a job.
He would play the Jester in Carol Burnett’s television adaptation of her hit Broadway show
Once Upon a Mattress.
Joe Layton was set to direct, which was probably how Elliott had gotten the part. It might be just a supporting role, but it was a job. With a paycheck.

Three months ago, a job for Elliott would have been cause for joyous celebration between Barbra and him, and maybe they did celebrate now. But there was a good deal of other emotion weighing them down at the moment that may have kept the corks from popping. Elliott had heard the stories about Barbra’s affair with Sydney. There had been some blind items in the columns
that could only have meant the two of them. And when Elliott had confronted Barbra with the rumors, she hadn’t denied them.

On March 17, Mike Connolly wrote, “The stories about the domestic
status of Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould are sad,” but just what those sad stories were, he didn’t elaborate. Whatever his feelings about the affair, Elliott obviously didn’t think it warranted the end of the marriage. In public, no matter their “sad domestic status,” the Goulds put on happy faces. Elliott was frequently present at the Winter Garden, especially as opening night drew closer, posing for pictures with Barbra. It was from observing Elliott during this difficult period that Jerry Robbins formed some lasting impressions of Barbra’s husband. “He handles it all very,
very well,” Robbins said. “Elliott is a gentleman.”

On March 26,
Funny Girl
finally opened on Broadway.

Tenacious radio reporter Fred Robbins kept thrusting his mike in Barbra’s face as she prepared to go on stage. “So how do you feel?”
he asked her.

“Nervous,” she replied, pronouncing it in heavy Brooklynese— “noivous.” Already she was in character.

“Just nervous?” Robbins pressed.

“Yeah, not much more. We’ve had many openings already.”

For Barbra, it was all rather anticlimactic. In some ways she felt that the show had “been open about two years.”
The only real difference tonight was all the press swarming around the place, and the knowledge that there would be no more rewrites, no new scenes to rehearse. They’d frozen the show into place last night.

“You’ve been projected to the highest echelon of performers,” Fred Robbins was saying. “How have you been able to adjust to it?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” Barbra replied. “I mean, I’m the same person. Things don’t change me. I’m not impressed by things. With added success comes added problems.”

“In your wildest dreams did you think this would happen?”

The look Barbra must have shot him was undoubtedly classic. “Of course,” she said, and went off to do the show.

In her dressing room sat telegrams from the famous. “Dear Barbra,” Natalie Wood had cabled. “All the best tonight because you are.” Ed Sullivan had wired, “Barb, I brought you up to Fifty-third Street,
now you’ve slipped back to Fiftieth Street, so we are not making progress. Every wonderful wish.” The place was filled with flowers from Jack Benny, Harold Arlen, Ethel Merman, and so many others that the vases were lined out into the hall. Barbra could never keep them all. She’d have to give some away to the stagehands.

Out in the theater, the audience was filling up, and despite the presence of some high-profile celebrities—Merman, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards, Lee Radziwill, Jacob Javits, diplomat and civil rights activist Ralph Bunche—Eugenia Sheppard thought that “fashion wise,”
the opening was a “flop . . . compared with the glamorous previews that had gone before.” But this was the show that really counted, and the house was packed with those who wanted to witness Barbra’s big night. Such crowds would be the norm for the foreseeable future: the Winter Garden was back to making between fifteen and eighteen thousand dollars
a day in advance ticketing.

As people took their seats, they were handed their
Playbill
s
,
Barbra and Sydney on the cover, as themselves, not in character, in a serene pose, Barbra wearing pearls. She looked quite pretty and extraordinarily young. Yet inside, her biography reflected her new maturity. There were no mentions of Madagascar or Turkey, though she did claim to play field hockey and string crystal beads for sale in a Vermont general store. “For more personal information,” the reader was told, “write to her mother.”

The program also reflected the compromise that had been reached between Stark, Robbins, Kanin, and Haney. The show was still “directed by” Kanin and “musical staging” was still by Haney, but the special billing—“production supervised by Jerome Robbins,” in the same point size as the other credits—told Broadway insiders all they needed to know.

Backstage, Robbins had left a note for the cast. “You can be my bagel
on a plateful of onion rolls anytime! Love, luck, and many thanks, Jerry.”

The overture was playing. Barbra had done this first scene many times now, in rehearsals, in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York previews. But tonight there were people out there with little pencils writing in critics’ notebooks.