Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (73 page)

Sitting there at her window overlooking Central Park, watching the traffic and longing for the sky, Barbra described feeling “alone with [her] thoughts”
and dreading “the hour of showtime.” That first year of
Funny Girl
proved to be excruciating. Sydney Chaplin’s hostility only got worse, to the point where he was cursing at Barbra onstage and trying to deliberately throw her off track. In early 1965, she filed harassment charges against him with Actors’ Equity. Although the sympathetic “old boys’ club,” as Orson Bean called them, let Chaplin off after interviewing him, Barbra’s ex-lover departed the show soon after that, much to her relief, replaced by Johnny Desmond.

Later that same year, Diana finally consented to her daughter’s insistence that she move into an upscale, all-expenses-paid apartment in Manhattan. Little Rosalind would drop the weight and change her name to Roslyn and, before the decade was out, launch a career of her own as a singer, headlining at nightclubs and enduring comparisons with her more famous sister. Diana told friends she felt Rozzie was by far the more talented of the two.

Arguments and separations continued to mark the marriage of Barbra and Elliott, but they strove to stay together, even having a baby, Jason, in December 1966. But after a couple more years, they finally called it quits and were divorced in 1971. Only after splitting with Barbra did Elliott’s career take off again. He became a top box-office movie star with
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
and
M*A*S*H,
among others. Still, as successful as he became, Elliott never considered himself “larger than life”
in the way he saw Barbra. Looking back on all he and his former wife had been through, Elliott had to wonder why anyone would want to “make themselves into something that wasn’t real.”

What Barbra had made herself into was a movie star. After two long, tedious years on the stage in
Funny Girl,
both on Broadway and in London, Barbra turned her back on the theater and went to Hollywood, where she starred in the film version of
Funny Girl
and won an Oscar for doing so. Within a few years, she was the biggest female movie star in the world, and by now, no one was surprised. She did relent and make more musical films—people were always clamoring for her to sing—but she also got to play the kinds of parts she’d always wanted, glamorous women and complex characters, even if, to date, she still has never played Juliet or Medea. But she did get to play Dolly Levi, and Daisy Gamble, and Esther Hoffman, and Katie in
The Way We Were.
And with all those profits she fashioned herself a palace overlooking the Pacific Ocean that provided her with plentiful views of the sky.

Working with Ray Stark, as Barbra anticipated, wasn’t easy, and the battles with her mercurial producer continued. When, in 1974, she had finally fulfilled her four-picture contract with him (
Funny Girl, The Owl and the Pussycat, The Way We Were,
and
Funny Lady,
once more putting on Fanny Brice’s cloche hats), Barbra presented Stark with an antique mirror on which she had scrawled in lipstick Paid in full. Yet for all the frustrations and bitterness she carried, she still recognized that without Stark’s early championship she might not have come as far as she had, or at least she would have needed to have taken a very different route.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to simply remain a successful actress, so Barbra became a director, starting in 1983 with
Yentl,
and won accolades for her work. She kept on recording, too, staying relevant by making a successful transition to rock-pop with the
Stoney End
album in 1971. She ended up with more Top Ten albums than any other female artist in history—fifty-one of them gold, thirty platinum, and thirteen multiplatinum. And then it wasn’t enough to just
sing
her songs, but she had to
write
them, too. Barbra won another Oscar for her composition of “Evergreen” for
A Star Is Born.
With a special Tony for theatrical excellence, Barbra had made good on her goal to win all four major showbiz awards. From that old doubter, Sheilah Graham, nothing was heard.

And, at last, after many ups and downs, there seemed to be some personal fulfillment, too. In 1996 Barbra met James Brolin and married him two years later. They are still together.

All of her childhood dreams had come true, and on her own terms. But as the years went on, the older Streisand seemed less genuine, less spontaneous, and more guarded than the girl of that first half decade. Barbra’s fear of not being as good as people claimed she was—or not being as good as she was on her last record or in her last film—only magnified as she aged. She found herself holding back more, no longer giving her all when she sang. “You must only give three-quarters,”
she explained. “Five eighths.” Giving one’s all, Barbra believed, exposed a desperate need to be loved by the public, and she wasn’t desperate for that, not if that meant letting the public in too close. After all, giving one’s all was what Judy Garland had done, and Judy was dead, burned out, at the age of forty-seven. So increasingly Barbra withheld parts of herself, leaving her audiences always wanting more. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, emotionally or strategically, since it kept people coming back. But it did make some people nostalgic for that young singer who’d so fearlessly exposed the empty place in the middle of her heart every time she got up to sing.

Of course, Streisand had always been made of stronger stuff than Garland. From the time she was very young, Barbra had seen and heard things beyond the range of mere mortals; she had understood her own specialness. “I have visions in my head,”
she said, looking back and trying to explain the unexplainable—the drive that had always propelled her forward. “I hear music. I dream.”

She had needed to be great—great enough to transcend the boring, the quotidian, the desultory Brooklyn afternoons. That was why she had started to climb and what would keep her scaling the heights. In her striving, there was a message, and it said, “Keep on.” If Garland was the goddess of self-destruction and vulnerability, Streisand was the diva of self-confidence and strength—as well as of a certain kind of magic, one that can elevate the everyday and transform even an ordinary kid into a star.

“Her performances astound,
arouse, fulfill,” Jerry Robbins had declared. Watching Barbra move across the stage in
Funny Girl,
he had glimpsed potential still untapped. “She is still forming. There is more to come, things will change, something will happen. The next is not going to be like the last.”

Sitting there in her duplex penthouse, with showtime looming, Barbra cast one last glance over the treetops of Central Park and pulled herself away from the window.

Down on the street, a car waited to take her to the theater. Stony-faced, Barbra rushed past the fans who waited, as always, along the curb. Suddenly one young man shouted, “Keep on daring to dream, Barbra!”

For once Barbra stopped. Somehow the words had penetrated the invisible armor she always wore in public. For the first time that her fans could recall, their heroine turned to look at them. They were surprised to see a little smile blooming on her face. “You can count on that,” Barbra said.

Then she got into the car and sped away.

Although I had enjoyed the work of Barbra Streisand in the past, I certainly didn’t consider myself a fan when my editor suggested her as the subject of my next book. To be honest, I didn’t really understand Streisand’s massive appeal—why she was such a big deal to so many. What I knew about her at that point consisted mostly of
The Way We Were
and
Yentl
—which, as it turned out, would be far beyond the scope of my study.

So, being a Streisand novice, I embarked on a quest to discover everything I could about her first years in showbiz: her nightclub performances, her television appearances, her singles, her albums. Fortunately, I didn’t have to re-create the wheel. There have been dozens of Streisand biographies, several of them excellent, and my use of them is cited in the notes. Even when some of their fundamental assumptions were wrong—Ray Stark being opposed to Streisand’s casting in
Funny Girl,
for example—I was grateful that previous authors had snared interviews with key figures who have since passed on. I was also very lucky to have the help and advice of several Streisand veterans who were far more knowledgeable of the lady’s career than I was at the time. My gratitude especially goes to Christopher Nickens.

Still, the kind of crash course I needed to take in Streisandiana wasn’t going to be easy. Fortunately, most of Streisand’s early television spots are now online. Even the audio of some of her nightclub performances—at the hungry i, for example—is available. What’s truly remarkable is the fact that much of this critical primary material has been gathered under one umbrella, the exceptional
Barbra-Archives.com
, run by the exacting Matt Howe. On day one, I bookmarked Matt’s site; rarely did a period of time go by that I didn’t visit once, twice, or more times a day. At the height of writing the book, I just left the site open on my desktop because I was constantly checking something. I could not have written this book without the Barbra Archives. My thanks to Matt not only for his phenomenal work online, but also for answering the many questions I lobbed his way. Also helpful were other excellent Streisand websites, including but not limited to the All About Barbra fanzine site, Barbra Timeless, Barbra News, and Streisand’s own website.

I was also aided by a bootleg copy of the DVD
Just for the Record,
which had been intended to supplement Streisand’s CD of the same name but was never actually released. So much early material is included on this DVD that I could easily contrast, for example, the way Streisand sang “Cry Me a River” on
The Dinah Shore Show
with the way she sang it on
Ed Sullivan,
or see how she responded to Groucho Marx as compared to Johnny Carson. (A special thank-you to the source who provided me with a copy, who asked to remain nameless.)

The digitization of newspapers also gave my research the kind of authority I could only have dreamed about when I first started writing biographies in the mid-1990s. There’s no need anymore to make vague statements about what the columnists were saying at any particular time. Now I’ve got virtually every single column written by Earl Wilson, Dorothy Kilgallen, Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, and hundreds of others. With this technology in place for the Streisand project, I could pinpoint when contracts were signed, when singles were released, when albums started climbing the charts, when rumors started, and when publicity changed course.

But, as always, the most important sources were the collections of personal papers of some of my subject’s most important collaborators. At the top of the list, of course, is the Jerome Robbins Collection in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, but nearly as important are the Bob Fosse Collection and the Robert Merrill Collection at the Library of Congress. Also, the collections of David Merrick (Library of Congress); Herbert Ross and Roddy McDowall (Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center); Sidney Skolsky, Jane Ardmore, Jack Hirshberg, Hedda Hopper (Margaret Herrick Library); Lainie Kazan, Jo Mielziner, Thomas Higgins (for Joe and Evelyn Layton), Leland Hayward, Richard Lewine, and Abe Burrows (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) were also helpful. All collections are fully cited in the notes.

I’d also like to single out a few archivists who provided special assistance: Mark Horowitz at the Music Division of the Library of Congress; Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Jeremy Megraw at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; and J. C. Johnson at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

I must also note the extraordinary collection of Lou Papalas, whose careful preservation of so much Streisand memorabilia—from magazines to costumes to photographs to scripts—has truly been a labor of love. I am especially grateful to Lou for allowing me to see many of Streisand’s original contracts.

Personal interviews with those who were actually
there
—friends, lovers, colleagues, publicists, managers, fans—provide the human perspective in this book. I am grateful to everyone who shared their stories, insights, and memorabilia, not just on Streisand but also on the times of the early 1960s: Bob Schulenberg, who is truly blessed with the gift of total recall; Barry Dennen; Don Softness; Phyllis Diller; Orson Bean; Ted Rozar; Kaye Ballard; Lainie Kazan; Suzanne Merrill; Janet Matz; Dick Gautier; Sammy Shore; Paul Dooley; Carole Gister; Bob Avian; Linda Gerard; Stuart Lippner; Adam Pollock, partner of Terry Leong; and several others—friends, family, and colleagues of Streisand, Elliott Gould, Diana Kind, Marty Erlichman, Ray Stark, and others—who asked that their identities be kept anonymous. There were more of these people than usual on this book, given my subject’s well-known dislike of biographies. All are extremely reliable sources.

I was particularly fortunate to have interviewed Arthur Laurents on a couple of previous occasions, although his passing meant I was not able to ask a handful of follow-up questions. Still, what he’d shared earlier about his work with Streisand proved invaluable to this book. I was also blessed to be good friends with the late Tucker Fleming and the late Charles Williamson who, as intimates of Judy Garland, had shared with me Garland’s impressions of working with Streisand.

Also paramount to my study were the dozens of men and women I spoke with who were there to see Streisand perform in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, and elsewhere, or who were friends of her associates, or who worked with journalists who interviewed her, or who bought the albums when they first came out, or who were in New York gay bars watching her when she appeared on
PM East
back in 1962. Given the structure of this book, I have not always used their names in the actual narrative, though many can be found in the notes. To these lifelong fans, I am deeply grateful for helping me to understand the passion that has followed Streisand ever since she first appeared on the scene and that has lifted her to the lofty heights she enjoys today.