Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (72 page)

It was just like her mother to show up just before the curtain. In truth, Diana embarrassed Barbra. Her mother was “simple [and] nonintellectual,”
she told the press. To observers, the two women seemed to be completely different creatures, Barbra in her duplex on Central Park West, Diana in her Brooklyn tenement. So far Diana had resisted Barbra’s offers to move her into a more fashionable apartment in Manhattan. But she
had
accepted a fur coat, the fulfillment of a long-ago pledge Barbra had made to herself.

Yet her mother’s gratitude seemed minimal. Diana might call and tell Barbra that “so-and-so in the office . . . read something nice” about her in some article. But it never seemed “to mean anything to her personally,” Barbra felt. That was what still stuck in her craw even after all these years.

Maybe that was why Barbra still pushed herself so hard, or at least part of the reason. And why rejection still stung. Certainly there’d been a run of rejection of late. She hadn’t won the Tony. After everyone had been telling Barbra that she was a shoo-in, Carol Channing had taken the award for
Hello, Dolly!
—the show for which David Merrick had dumped
Funny Girl.
How Ray Stark had seethed when Merrick had won Best Musical as well. No one from
Funny Girl
had won a damn thing—not Sydney, not Styne and Merrill, not Kay Medford, not Danny Meehan, not poor Carol Haney, even though they’d all been nominated.
Hello, Dolly!
pretty much crushed everybody else.

And, on top of that, Barbra hadn’t won the Emmy either. Danny Kaye had taken the award, winning over both Barbra and Judy Garland, whose show had finally been cancelled even after she’d submitted to such humiliation from network executives. It was one more lesson in the vagaries of fame, and the dangers of not being tough enough.

Barbra had come to realize that in some very real way her mother was responsible for her fighting spirit. Diana’s limited view of the world and their place in it hadn’t discouraged Barbra: It had challenged her. When all she’d heard growing up was “No, no, can’t be done,”
Barbra grew determined to prove that yes, yes, it could. To one interviewer, she declared she was actually “thankful” to her mother. By not believing there was a way through to the other side of the wall, Diana had forced her obstinate, strong-willed, defiant daughter to keep chipping away, bit by bit, until she’d broken through. And so Barbra, as she bid her mother good-bye and headed out on stage to a groundswell of applause, was very pleased for all Diana had and hadn’t done.

Somewhere deep down, the teenaged Diana Rosen, the one who’d been accepted to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, was probably pleased as well.

On a warm, balmy night in June, Barbra sauntered into fashion designer
Rudi Gernreich’s fashion show at the Gotham Hotel wearing a white linen suit, a white straw hat encircled by a black patent leather band, a black pullover, a rope of pearls, and silvery iridescent polish on her long nails. For a moment, everyone turned away from Gernreich’s infamous topless bathing suit to get a look at the glamorous Broadway star.

The fashionistas loved her. Not long before, Barbra had turned up for Cosmo Sirchio’s collection,
amid talk she might make him her personal designer. Now Gernreich spoke of dressing Barbra for a fashion layout, maybe for
Vogue
or another magazine. Barbra had predicted this would happen. “I am high fashion!”
she had exclaimed just last winter. “Pretty soon women will copy what I wear.”

Now they were doing just that, and it wasn’t only the Winter Garden Kids. Barbra had become a regular boldface name in Eugenia Sheppard’s fashion column. No matter that she’d also been named to the worst-dressed list
by that stuffy Mr. Blackwell—below Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor but above Bette Davis and Elliott’s costar, Ginger Rogers—Barbra had become a fashion icon. If anyone doubted that fact, all they needed to do was watch the fashion writers gush over her purchase of Gernreich’s black chiffon, above-the-knee baby dress, to be worn over black tights. They knew Barbra could set the style. What they didn’t know was that, less than five years earlier, Barbra had known nothing about fashion. Terry Leong had had to explain to her the differences between Alberto Fabiani and Pauline Trigère.

Now Barbra wore all the latest designers. Money, of course, was no object, even if she still instinctively peeked at the price tags. She knew she wasn’t supposed to “ask how much things cost,”
given that people were aware of how much money she made. Still, there were times when Barbra felt she
needed
to ask: Life could become “mushy if you don’t evaluate things sometimes,” she said. Her accountant gave her a weekly allowance of $25 for pocket money,
but Barbra never spent it. She saved it, out of habit, as if she were back at the switchboard at Ben Sackheim and earmarking part of her pay for rent, part for food, and part to splurge on taxis.

To one interviewer, she tried describing how she had gotten from there to here. She’d never had a room of her own as a kid, she said. And when you don’t have a room of your own, she explained, “All you think about is
‘How can I
get
a room of my own?’ You just get to the point where you
have
to make good.”

She’d made good all right. That black designer dress, the duplex apartment, the mink coat Earl Wilson said cost twelve thousand dollars were all evidence of that. True, people still sometimes misspelled or mispronounced her name, but the instances were far fewer now. And when Barbra shopped at Bergdorf Goodman, the clerks all knew who she was.

Sitting, literally, on top of the world in her penthouse apartment, as decorators trundled expensive antique furniture through the door, Barbra looked out her windows over the treetops of Central Park. Beyond them rose the East Side peaks, and beyond those lay Brooklyn. Barbra couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there.

That morning, the
Times
had broken some rather big news about the star of
Funny Girl.
Barbra had been signed to a million-dollar television
contract by CBS. Marty was crowing
that he’d just negotiated the biggest deal ever made in television and offered to pay one-hundredth of that sum to anyone who could prove otherwise. Barbra’s contract allowed her to star in one one-hour special per year for the next decade, and she was guaranteed $100,000 annually. The specials could be of her choosing: comedy, variety, or musical drama. Outraged over this newcomer’s unprecedented terms, old pros like Danny Kaye and Lucille Ball unleashed their agents on the network. “The screaming,” one columnist reported, “could be heard
up and down Madison Avenue.”

Three years earlier, Marty had promised to take Barbra to the top, and he had delivered. This latest coup was being hailed in the press as “nothing less than phenomenal” and garnered a rare public acknowledgment of Barbra’s “brilliant young manager.” Those who weren’t expressing envy of Barbra were asking to work with her. Carol Burnett proposed a joint
special, like the one she’d done with Julie Andrews, but Barbra preferred to go it solo. She hadn’t worked this hard to share top billing.

If screaming was raging along Madison Avenue, a quiet contemplation had settled over Central Park West this morning. Sitting there looking out of her window, waiting for the clock to demand that she head downtown to play Fanny Brice for the hundred and fiftieth or hundred and sixtieth time, Barbra had begun to wonder just how long she could be happy living here. Despite all her antiques and redecoration, when she looked out over the city, all she could see was the “traffic going by.”
Suddenly she was painfully aware that she “never really saw the sky.”

By the late spring of 1964, Barbra’s success, for all the envy and admiration it engendered in others, was not what she’d dreamed it would be. Despite the Donnatal, her anxieties before every performance had only worsened, and she found herself admitting that the stage fright that had been creeping up on her ever since the Hollywood Bowl was not going away. Some nights were worse than others; for one show, she bounded out in front of the audience with all her old confidence, but for another she’d be a wreck backstage. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for her fears, except that she knew interaction with people was becoming more difficult. It was seeing the faces of those watching her, judging her, and following her that left her rattled. More than ever Barbra missed her old anonymity. Critics called her arrogant, and claimed that success had gone to her head for refusing interviews or not shaking hands with fans. Only Cis, her cherished Cis, seemed to understand: “Stardom is a part of
[Barbra’s] life that has always been difficult for her,” Cis tried to explain to one reporter.

What was more, Barbra hadn’t counted on her heart getting in the way of her enjoying her success. She and Elliott had settled into a sort of fun-house existence, where nothing was quite what it seemed. True, they had reconciled after their terrible winter; they were making a determined go of things. “To end the rash of rumors,”
columnist Alex Freeman reported, “Barbra Streisand is neither pregnant nor unhappily married to actor Elliott Gould. The Goulds weathered their first big marital crisis recently and everything is swinging.”

Swinging. Was that the word? Despite all the hope and hype of the last few months, Elliott was still struggling to make himself known. He’d been cute in
Once Upon a Mattress
and witty on an episode of the topical television series
That Was the Week That Was.
But
The Confession
had been confiscated by its Jamaican financial backers; producer William Marshall was now suing to get the rights. There was no idea when, if ever, the film would be released. Trying to boost her husband, Barbra told reporters that Elliott was “going to be a big movie star,”
that he was “the American Jean-Paul Belmondo.” But all the American Belmondo had on tap was a summer-stock tour of
The Fantasticks
with Judy Garland’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli. Elliott fell deeper into analysis and found himself depending more and more on pot. His marriage to Barbra, he said in his own eccentric style, was like taking “a bath in lava.”

So when people envied her, Barbra thought, “Oh, God, don’t envy me.
I have my own pains. Money doesn’t wipe that out.”

What she wanted, she said, was to see the sky.

Sitting there at her window looking down on the bleating, congested traffic of Central Park West, Barbra held in her mind an idyllic image of California’s blue skies and palm trees. Sure, sometimes the sky in Los Angeles was smoggy, but there one could live in a gated estate surrounded by trees and beautiful gardens. In Los Angeles, one traveled in limousines. There was always a protective barrier between a star and those fans who would accost her if they had a chance, unlike New York, where they could wait for her in the street, or right outside her door, or gather at the theater, jumping her every time she went in or came out.

And in Los Angeles, they made movies.

Barbra’s name was finally up on a Broadway marquee—the final destination on the roadmap to success that she’d charted for herself some five years earlier. But she’d only been able to see so far. With the brass ring now in her hand, Barbra was faced with a set of questions that had never occurred to her before. Where did she go from here? Finding herself on the summit she’d always dreamed of reaching, she looked off into the distance and spotted yet another peak waiting to be scaled. And along its craggy hills rambled one word:
HOLLYWOOD
.

“Being a star is being a movie star,”
Barbra now declared. Movie stars didn’t have to do the same thing exactly the same way every night for two years. She had a contract to make four pictures, and she was prepared to fight Ray Stark with all of her considerable strength if necessary to make the films she wanted to make. After
Funny Girl,
she insisted, she was through with musicals. Didn’t people know she was an actress? That was what had set her on this path: she had wanted a chance to play Juliet. And if she couldn’t play Juliet on the stage, then maybe she could play her on the screen.

Elliott, if Barbra had asked him, might have responded that her discontent was classic, at least in psychoanalytic terms: The more one achieves, the more one wants. Someone who grew up feeling dissatisfied wasn’t going to suddenly become satisfied by the simple accumulation of things or achievements. Barbra might even have agreed with that assessment. She was “a practical person,”
or at least she liked to call herself one, and she could be unsparingly honest about her own needs and motivations at times. “The dream,” she mused. “You never achieve it and that’s what’s depressing. The excitement of life lies in the hope, in the stirring for something rather than the attainment.” She lamented that she “couldn’t hold success in her hand like a hard-boiled egg.”

But how could it be otherwise, especially for her? Barbra had grown up feeling as if something were always missing. Not knowing her father had started Barbra “off on the track of always
feeling resentful,” she admitted; it would leave her “always missing something” in her life. The crisis of faith she experienced once
Funny Girl
was on the stage led to something she couldn’t have predicted a year before. Like Elliott, Barbra surrendered to analysis, where it seemed certain that her father would be a prime topic of conversation. When she finally worked up the courage to confront her mother about why she never mentioned Emanuel’s name—why Barbra’s father had always been one of the great unspoken tensions between them—Diana replied, “I didn’t want you
to miss him.” As if not speaking about him could have prevented that.

And so Barbra had no choice but to keep on climbing.

Along the way, she’d lose some of those who’d started the climb with her. The intimates dwindled to a very few. Cis, as always, was steadfast. Marty remained her chief lieutenant. But when Terry Leong tried to connect with Barbra backstage at
Funny Girl,
he was told she was too busy to see him. When Barry Dennen refused to hand over the tapes he’d made of her, claiming they belonged to him, Barbra threatened legal action, though she never followed through. With Peter Daniels, tensions continued to escalate, especially after Lainie Kazan went on in Barbra’s place one night during
Funny Girl
’s first year and alerted the press to come see her. Soon afterward, Kazan was out of the show, and Daniels wasn’t far behind. Only decades later would Barbra acknowledge her longtime accompanist’s influence and help, dedicating a concert to him. Even Bob Schulenberg fell out of Barbra’s orbit when he returned from Europe, finding he shared little in common with his old pal turned superstar.