Streisand: Her Life (11 page)

The production proved “a disaster,” according to Ingrid. “John Hale had pretty much lost control of the playhouse by then, and our evening audiences were dwindling. At the three matinees we did over the last weekend, we had maybe twenty, thirty people in the audience.” Before the last performance on Sunday, Ingrid recalled, a black Cadillac drove up alongside the stage. A tall, balding man got out and slipped into a back row seat. “About halfway through the performance, somebody whispered offstage, ‘William Inge is here!’ We were all flabbergasted,” Ingrid said. “He didn’t stay very long. I’m sure he sat there and said to himself, ‘Oh, dear.
’”

On the last day of the season, the company threw a farewe
l
l party. Barbara partook liberally of the punch, which was spiked. Emily Cobb recalled what ensued: “Barbara started looking a litt
l
e green, so she excused herself and said she was going to lie down. I was concerned about her, so I followed her to the dormitory. When I got there she had vomited all over the floor and she lay on the bed, moaning. I got a mop and started cleaning up. She struggled to an upright position and protested, ‘Emily, no, you can’t be cleaning up after me. You’re a leading lady and I’m just an apprentice!
’”

T
HE NEXT DAY
Barbara took a bus back to Brooklyn, and the most stimulating, exciting summer of her life so far drew to a close. “I had such a
wonderful
time,” she burbled to her mother. “Well, she finally got home,” Diana later said, “and I thought she was cured of her acting ideas. But no way.”

When she got back to school the second week of September, the halls of Erasmus seemed bleaker than ever. Barbara had tasted real theater, had bathed in the glow of a paying audience’s applause. A theater critic had implied she was
sexy!
She felt she
had
to continue what she’d started at Malden Bridge. There could be no turning back. Despite the demands of school, she auditioned for the role of Ethel Merman’s daughter in
Happy Hunting
, a musical based on the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. She didn’t get the part.

A few weeks later she read about a year-round apprenticeship program at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Without her mother’s knowledge, she took the subway into Manhattan the next Saturday to audition, and she was accepted. This time Diana argued that Barbara couldn’t possibly work at a theater in Manhattan several nights after school and on weekends and still keep up her grade average, but Barbara assured her mother that she would—“If I don’t get good grades, I’ll quit.” Once again Diana relented and, rather remarkably, allowed her fifteen-year-old daughter, barely a high school junior, to join the bohemian world of the off-Broadway theater.

Barbara could not have anticipated the impact her sojourn at the Cherry Lane Theater would have on her. There she would meet an acting mentor who would influence her life and career for years to come. She would develop a maturity far beyond her years. And with the help of a handsome twenty-three-year-old fellow acting student, she would experience the joys of sexual awakening.

T
he people who surrounded Barbara in Manhattan that fall of 1957 were actors to the core. They sat in Greenwich Village coffee shops quoting Shakespeare and arguing about Jean Genet. They wore black sweatshirts and berets and trench coats; they drank espresso and smoked Gitanes. They’d analyze the films of Fellini and Bergman and vow never to sell out to Hollywood. They were bohemian and liberal and free-spirited, sexually unconstrained and intellectually exuberant. And fifteen-year-old Barbara Streisand hungrily soaked up every ounce of their ambience and intelligence and creative ardor like the culturally starved sponge that she was.

T
HINGS DIDN’T BEGIN
all that promisingly for Barbara at the Cherry Lane Theater, however. Three evenings a week after school, and on weekends, she traipsed to the Village by subway to help out with their production of Sean O’Casey’s
Purple Dust,
which had been running for months. Mostly she swept floors and scurried out to pick up food for the cast and “stayed on book,” holding the script offstage and throwing lines to anyone who forgot them. During lulls she did her homework. “I called myself the assistant stage manager,” she said. An overstatement to be sure, but she was thrilled nonetheless just to work in a real off-Broadway theater, even without a chance to act. Noel Behn, the manager of the theater, later remembered Barbara only as “a dirty little girl who was always running around humming.”

Anita Miller, the wife of the acting coach Allan Miller, played Avril in the show, and while Barbara has said she understudied Avril, Anita recalled that the production didn’t have understudies. Still, as the weeks wore on, Anita grew fascinated by this singular teenager. “She was stagestruck and life-struck,” Anita recalled. “She had a voracious mind. She wanted to know what everything was, what everything meant. She was like someone who had been starved.”

More than she knew, Anita was right about Barbara. She was hungry for knowledge, for encouragement, for acceptance, and she latched on to Anita, who listened to her and answered her questions and came to strongly believe in her talent. Before long, Anita urged her husband to take this extraordinary girl into his acting classes. “I don’t want to talk to her,” he replied. “I’m not going to talk to a fifteen-year-old about being in the theater. It’s too hard. She’s too young.”

Allan Miller preferred not to work with young people because, as he explained it, “most teenagers are in such a state of flux about their own identities that to try to get them into emotional areas where they can truly express themselves is very difficult. But Anita kept bringing her name up to me.”

Barbara soon asked Anita to be her partner in a scene she wanted to do for an audition at the Actors Studio. Anita and Allan were both members of Lee Strasberg’s cadre of Method actors, and Anita reminded Barbara that the minimum age for admission was eighteen. Barbara said she only wanted to “practice for the real thing,” but she probably planned to lie about her age again.

Barbara chose a scene from N. Richard Nash’s
The Young and Fair,
a drama set in a private girls’ junior college, in which a troubled student tries to persuade a teacher to sanction the vigilante group she has created to catch a dormitory burglar. Why the material appealed to Barbara is clear: at one point her character says, “Once I was an ugly little kid—afraid of everything—always scared! When my parents were divorced, I lived alone.... I’d be alone at school and I’d be alone at home.” Anita found Barbara’s reading of the scene “fantastic” and thought it revealed “tremendous talent.” Still, Barbara wasn’t welcomed into the Actors Studio. “I couldn’t understand why they didn’t accept her,” Anita said, “unless they found out she was too young.”

Anita persisted with her husband, who remained implacable. Finally she invited Barbara to dinner at their apartment on Fifty-fourth Street near Sixth Avenue. Barbara chattered nonstop throughout the meal, asking Miller an avalanche of questions. At first he looked aghast at this “creature” and thought, Oh, my God, if this was my kid I’d get her some good clothes to wear and cut down on her crazy eccentricities. He considered her “a misbegotten, misshapen, skinny little nudnik”—a nuisance.

And yet as the evening progressed, Miller found himself agreeing with Anita’s assessment of this girl as “valuable and dazzling and interesting”: “There was no question that she had something special. She had an insatiable desire to know everything that anyone around her could impart, from acting to world politics to raising a kid. I had never been around a teenager who was so willing to expose herself as ignorant, to admit she didn’t know something. She’d keep saying, ‘Can I ask you something?’ It was not simpleminded openness and hunger. She was intellectually keen and very alive. I found myself wanting to convey to her everything I knew, make her feel loved and wanted. She was so hungry for nurturing—emotional as well as intellectual and spiritual.”

After dinner Anita announced that she and Barbara had a surprise for Allan, and they performed the scene from
The Young and Fair.
Barbara’s reading, Miller thought, “was the worst I think I’ve ever seen in my life. I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so ignorant of acting technique that her arms and body would contort and do things that had nothing to do with the emotional life she was trying to project. The vocal patterns were equally disconnected. Nothing linked together.” Still Barbara impressed Miller. “She was trying to achieve something but didn’t have the tools to do it. I was dumbstruck by the ferocity of this young woman. I found myself wanting to help her.”

E
ARLY IN
1958 Miller took the delighted Barbara into his workshop, a part of the Theater Studio of New York on West Forty-eighth Street, in exchange for baby-sitting with his two sons (Barbara called this a “scholarship”). The other students included Elaine Sobel, an Audrey Hepburn type with a sensitive spirit and a fluency in Yiddish; Bob Venier, an Alain Delon look-alike who had acted opposite Marilyn Monroe at the Actors Studio; Simon Gribben, a nineteen-year-old who was not really sure he wanted to be an actor; Davey Marlin Jones, an aspiring director; and Roy Scott, a short, handsome twenty-three-year-old in the Brad Davis mold who originally wanted to be a priest.

“We all loved Roy,” Elaine Sobe
l
recalled. “He was absolutely
gorgeous
.” Scott immediately felt attracted to and protective toward Barbara, who seemed to him “very sweet, sensitive and shy. She was afraid of everything, and easily hurt. She was very plain, but I found her wondrous in her own way, with her big, beautiful eyes, her bone structure. There was sweetness and beauty inside her. She reminded me almost of a doe, a fawn.”

For months Barbara merely watched as the other actors performed scenes. “She was very afraid,” Roy Scott felt. “And very shy—too shy, really.” Occasionally she asked a question, but mostly she learned by watching. “I learned what not to do,” she has said. “Not learned deliberately, but subconsciously it seeped into my head.”

When she finally began to do scenes, Miller wouldn’t allow her to speak during any of them. “
W
hat I discovered very quickly with Barbara was that all the intellectual concepts about acting in the world would not help her act. So I began working with her purely physically. She had to make only sounds in her exercises, no words. I wanted her to make a connection between what was happening to her viscerally, without words interfering.”

One of her exercises required her to be a chocolate chip cookie baking in an oven, and she stunned her classmates with her expressiveness. As she was put in the oven, she let her body go limp and motionless. Then, as the heat built around her, she jumped to jerky life. She huffed and wheezed as the dough expanded and steam puffed out. Then she began to wi
l
t and finally fell limp again as the cookie took its final baked shape. “She was impressive,” Roy Scott said. “We were Method actors, so we learned to have everything come from within.”

Barbara pestered Miller for months to let her do a speaking role, and finally he was pleased enough with her progress that he suggested a scene from Tennessee Williams’s
The Rose Tattoo
in which a young girl tries to get her sailor boyfriend to make love to her. Because her mother has made him promise that he won’t sleep with her, he tries to deflect her advances. Barbara read the play and called Miller the next day. “Hey, listen,” she said.
“I
can’t do
that
scene.”

“Why not?”

“Well,
you know.”

“She meant she was a virgin,” Miller said. “She didn’t have any experience to base her performance on. I told her, ‘Listen, I want you to find some way of behaving in this scene without it having anything to do with sex,’ and I hung up.”

Barbara rehearsed the scene with a boy from class for about a week, but the night they performed it she shocked him by doing it totally differently. “At one point he stood up,” she said, “and I stood on his feet; one time I jumped on his back; one time I pretended I was blind, and while I was talking I was touching his face. It was this awkward sexuality.” Barbara had planned none of this. “I didn’t know what I would do next. I was as interested as the people watching.”

When the scene was over, Barbara’s partner stood crimson-faced with embarrassment while the rest of the class cheered. “It was a great scene,” Miller felt. “She looked like a girl in the most extreme heat who didn’t have the faintest idea how to behave toward a boy, which is exactly what the material called for.” Miller asked her to explain what she had been trying to do. She mumbled something, and he asked her to speak up. “Louder, come on, say it.”