Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (71 page)

But this night, unbeknownst to Barbra or the cast, Ray Stark had slipped into the audience. Either he had decided to make a rare, surprise visit from the Coast or someone had clued him in to what was going on. Not everyone was as complacent with Barbra’s tinkering, after all. Sydney Chaplin, who would certainly have had a motive for cluing Stark in, thought Barbra’s tinkering was “completely and utterly unprofessional,” one company member understood.

Backstage, Vaughn watched as Barbra went over the night’s changes with Evans. A few song introductions were moved around; a few scenes were shortened, eliminating the need for a couple of costumes. The production manager nodded in assent.

At the end of the show, there was great, tumultuous applause, just as there always was. But then, as the curtain dropped for the last time and the lights came up, the company heard the shouting.

Vaughn stopped cold in her tracks. Stark was limping backstage, shouting at the top of his lungs. “You will never change my show again! You will not change your costumes as you did! You will not change your songs! Do you understand me?”

Barbra understood all too well. She had hoped she was through with Stark’s outbursts, but it was clear that she was bound to him in all the ways she had feared. This was what the next eight years would look like: a series of high-decibel clashes between two people who abhorred the art of compromise. For now, Barbra held her tongue. There were ways to work around Ray Stark, she’d come to learn. She knew that soon he’d be consumed with getting
The Night of the Iguana
ready for release, and she could go back to tweaking the show. She really had no other choice. It was the only way she could keep herself from going stir-crazy.

Under the Jamaican sun,
Elliott was sweltering. Temperatures spiked into the nineties, but it was the humidity that really wore people out. The Jamaican government was financing
The Confession
as part of an initiative to bring in foreign filmmakers. The film’s producer was the cowboy-booted William Marshall, whose only qualification for the job was that he was Ginger Rogers’s husband. But William Dieterle was an old hand at moviemaking; he kept the shoot progressing, even if conditions were difficult. Most of the bit parts were being filled by Jamaican locals, who proved rather stiff in front of the cameras. “Now look,” the German-born Dieterle directed them. “Vy you look so sad? You are entering a brothel! You are about to have a voman! You must look happy!”

As Elliott waited to be called for his scenes, he knew that his own woman, some fifteen hundred miles northeast of him, was, if possible, having an even more difficult time of things. The pressures of carrying
Funny Girl
were intense, and that wasn’t even considering all the demands Barbra faced from the media, the public, and the fans. More and more, Elliott felt he needed to get back to New York in order to “protect her.” It may have been rather chauvinistic of him: “She was my woman,”
he said as an explanation for his feelings, and Barbra needed protection from “those fucking fan-magazine photographers” who stalked her every time she headed out on the street. Elliott was no doubt pleased that Dieterle thought they’d be wrapping up the shoot in the next week or so. For all his conflicts with his wife over the last few months, Elliott wasn’t ready to give up on their marriage quite yet.

Still, he wanted to believe the separation had been worth it. People were saying he was giving “a remarkable performance”
in this film. He would need good reviews from
The Confession
to take his career to the next level because, as usual, there wasn’t anything else on the horizon, except the television play with Carol Burnett. There’d been talk that he might be cast in
Fiddler on the Roof,
but that had come to nothing.

So he sweated through the shoot and endured the sunburn. Three days of shooting in the oven of a roofless, ruined church without windows had turned the cast into baked goods. Maybe Elliott’s analyst had been right when he’d called him a “masochist.”
But suffering through heat and humidity was the least of it. The real masochism, Elliott surely knew, would start again when he was back in New York. As much as he wanted to be by Barbra’s side, he also knew that once he returned, he’d fall right back into the old pattern, trying to keep up with his wife’s soaring success. The “perversity of fame,” as he so astutely called it, would prove far more debilitating than the Jamaican sun.

On the stage of the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria, singer Jack Jones suddenly froze,
forgetting the lyrics to the song he was singing, “The Good Life,” one of the nominees for Song of the Year. Tony Bennett came bounding up from his seat and relieved Jones of the microphone, finishing the number with aplomb. But except for that little kerfuffle, the ninth annual Grammy Awards banquet had been pretty boring.

Barbra sat at a table with, among others, Mike Berniker. The two of them had come a long way in the last year and a half. Berniker had taken Barbra on when she’d been an unproven commodity that no one else at Columbia was eager to produce. Back then, Barbra had said to Berniker, “Let’s go,” and go they certainly had. Currently,
The Third Album
was holding steady at number 8 on the charts, and even all these months later, the first and second albums were at 24 and 23, respectively. Barbra had ended up making an extraordinary amount of money for Columbia.

Now they hoped that she’d win them a Grammy, or two or three. But Barbra had known disappointment in this room before. It was here at the Waldorf that she hadn’t won the Tony Award for
Wholesale.
Still, in the last few days, it had seemed as if her audacious prediction was on the fast track to coming true: first the three Grammy nominations, then the unexpected Emmy nomination, and finally, on May 4, the Tony nomination for
Funny Girl.
Only the Oscar would have to wait.

But for every premium her success paid, Barbra seemed also to be reminded of the costs of fame. On the morning after the Tony nominations had been announced, Carol Haney had been found unconscious in the Bowery. Their erstwhile choreographer had been nominated for her work in the show—work that had been significantly restructured by Jerry Robbins, as Haney well knew. She’d been drinking heavily; she was also a diabetic and had been without insulin for a dangerously long time. Rushed to Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, she was diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia, but that was only the surface of her problems. Haney was later transferred to New York Hospital, where, two days ago, she had died.

Some people thought Haney’s dismissal from
Funny Girl
had played a part in her death. “It not only destroyed her career,” Lainie Kazan said, “but her life.” When, twenty minutes before showtime, word reached the Winter Garden that Haney had passed away, a pall had fallen over the company. A suggestion that her death be announced to the audience was nixed, however. “There’s nothing we can do
for her except to do her steps,” Richard Evans said. “We have got to do her work tonight, no matter how hard it is for us.” Upstairs, in her dressing room, Barbra received word of Haney’s death from a reporter. She was solemn as she ran her fingers through her hair. “God,” she said. “She was so talented and so gentle.”

But gentle didn’t often survive in a world of wolves. Barbra had understood that right from the start.

Sitting at the table at the Waldorf, Barbra heard her name called as the winner for Best Female Vocal Performance. She’d just been named the “best” by her peers, which mattered a great deal to her. Who would have thought such a thing possible the day she’d sung “Day by Day” in Barry’s apartment? Now, more than four years later, Barbra had just been adjudged better than any of her fellow nominees—Eydie Gormé, Miriam Makeba, Peggy Lee—
Peggy Lee!
—and, in an occurrence that no doubt made Barbra smile, the Singing Nun. She wasn’t just the most commercially successful; she was also the
best.

She was disappointed when Henry Mancini’s “Days of Wine and Roses” beat out “Happy Days Are Here Again” as Record of the Year. But the big prize was still ahead. At the end of the evening, the nominees were announced for Album of the Year. Barbra was up against the Singing Nun, Mancini, Al Hirt, and the Swingle Singers, who used their voices to interpret Bach’s great compositions. When the envelope was opened,
The Barbra Streisand Album
was named the winner.

Better than even Bach, it seemed.

Technically, this was Berniker’s award as producer. As the room filled with applause, however, he leaned over to Barbra. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

She looked at him. “That’s my line,”
she said, “because you did it.” Then she added, “I love you.”

It was a thoughtful, if slightly uncharacteristic, moment. Barbra didn’t always recognize the efforts of other people who had roles in bringing her to the top. But she wasn’t all drive and self-absorbed ambition.

She could also sometimes be gentle.

In Paris, Bob was eager for news of home.

He’d asked a friend who was visiting the United States to bring him back some newspapers and magazines. Bob had been in Europe for almost two years now, and he felt out of touch. So it was with considerable excitement that he received the publications his friend had brought back. But when he got a look at the covers of
Time
and
Life,
he stopped short.

Barbra was on both of them.

His friend Barbra. The girl he’d put up on a stool to experiment with hairdos and makeup. The same Barbra who’d once talked with him for hours on the phone about her dreams and her ambitions and her favorite flavors of ice cream.

Bob was aware that Barbra had been doing well. He knew she’d cut several albums. She’d sent him copies, in fact, asking him to get them out to “influential people” in Paris. He’d given the albums to the
disquaire
affiliated with Chez Castel, the popular Parisian discotheque. And the last time he’d seen her, in London, Barbra was hoping to get the part in
Funny Girl.
Bob had heard she’d gotten it, and he was aware she’d opened on Broadway a couple of months ago, so he knew things were going great for her.

But these covers ...

Bob hadn’t been around to see the gradual climb, the Ed Sullivan and Judy Garland shows, the Cocoanut Grove, the Hollywood Bowl, the first, second, and then third albums prominently displayed in record stores. Even though he knew Barbra was doing very well for herself, Bob still had a picture of her in his mind as a little girl in pink nylons and scarlet satin shoes wandering around Greenwich Village with a shopping bag full of boas. Once that little girl had pointed up to the marquees of Broadway and told Bob she wanted her name up there someday.

Bob looked again at the face of his friend on the magazine covers. She was wearing the distinctive eye makeup he’d designed for her, that she had made her own through her inability to glue false eyelashes by herself.

He knew Barbra had become a success.

But, in fact, he’d had no idea.

Stuart Lippner was flushed with excitement. Mrs. Kind was taking him to the holiest of holies: Barbra’s dressing room.

The Winter Garden Kids burned green with envy as Stuart walked past them into the theater behind Barbra’s mother, carrying a large Tupperware container of chicken soup. The young man had been spending a great deal of time at the Kinds’ apartment. Diana often included him in meals or on outings she’d take with Rozzie. Stuart liked Mrs. Kind. She wasn’t a “come here, bubby, let me give you a hug” type, but she was very maternal in her own way, he thought, always cooking up a storm and enjoying being able to dole it out to her family. Sheldon and his wife and daughter were often there for dinner, and Stuart would take his place at the table beside Rozzie. But so far, Barbra and Elliott had never shown up, even though Mrs. Kind insisted she’d asked them.

So Diana brought the soup to Barbra instead of Barbra coming to the soup. She also brought fruit. Peaches, apples, cantaloupes. Barbra needed fruit for the vitamins they provided. She had a tendency to be anemic—her mother had not forgotten.

Watching the two of them in Barbra’s dressing room, Stuart, an outsider, saw their relationship in a way they could not. Mother and daughter seemed stuck somehow, incapable of telling each other what they really wanted to say. That there was great love there, Stuart had no doubt. He’d seen all the photographs of Barbra in Diana’s apartment. Not so many childhood photos that he could see, but eight-by-ten glossies from Columbia Records, or images carefully clipped out of magazines. Diana’s apartment was crammed with stuff—it looked as if she never threw anything away—but all Stuart had had to do was move one stack of papers to realize that most of it was all about Barbra.

Stuart would often walk in and find Diana singing along to Barbra’s albums in “a beautiful, clear soprano voice.” Rozzie had told Stuart that her mother’s father, the cantor, hadn’t let her sing at the Met. Stuart thought maybe Diana was jealous of her daughter, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes not.

It wasn’t so much that Diana had wanted to be a star, her brief dreams of the opera notwithstanding. It was that Barbra had been able to see beyond the concrete tenement walls that had penned them in and kept them back, something Diana had never been able to do. With frightening audacity, Barbra had declared that she would go through those walls and see what the world looked like on the other side. Diana had declared it an impossible dream. And when Barbra had shown that one could indeed break free, her mother had worried that she’d end up disappointed and frustrated, pushed back into her place by a world that put no stock in homely Jewish girls from Brooklyn tenements.

How could she have known how wrong she’d be?

And Diana couldn’t admit to being wrong. People who’d had to scrape and struggle all their lives were never going to find it easy to admit that the world might not be as limiting as they’d always imagined it to be.

Barbra was standing there now in her dressing room, in costume and makeup, a posse of photographers around her while an assistant did her nails. Thanking her mother for the chicken soup, she said she didn’t have time to talk. She had a show to do.