Streisand: Her Life (14 page)

She found the auditioning process numbing, dehumanizing, mortifying. She would trudge through the cold, dirty streets of Manhattan, climb stairs to dinky little offices, and mill around with dozens of other would-be actors just to read for the walk-on part of a beatnik. The casting people would take one look at her and ask if she had done anything else professionally. “No,” she’d reply.

“Well, we have to see your work before we can hire you.”

“Why do you have to see my work?” she recalled asking them. “It’s a walk-on. I don’t even have to say anything.”

“We have to see some work.”

“How are you going to see my work if you don’t give me a chance to
do
the work?” But it was useless to argue. Over and over again she went through this charade, and whether she realized it at the time or not, the work prerequisite was just an excuse. Most
c
asting directors didn’t let her read because they didn’t like her looks. Even when she auditioned for a walk-on role as a beatnik for a television show, dressed in her trench coat and black tights, she was passed over. “I just had to look the part, and I looked the part but they said, ‘We have to see your work.
’”

When she went to an audition for a summer stock job with the New London Players in New Hampshire that April, she was allowed to read, but after she left, one of the owners turned to the others and said,
“
She’s very talented, but God, she’s so ugly. What are we gonna do with her?” She wasn’t hired. Sometimes darker prejudices came into play against Barbara as well. Years after she became a star, someone sent one of her resumes back to her. A casting agent had scribbled across it,
“
Talented. Who needs another Jewish broad.”

Barbara was devastated by the rejections. “I cried in every office,” she said. “I was humiliated—people looked at me like I was crazy. I could only bring myself to go to auditions twice a week.” Sometimes her tears hardened into anger. “Screw you!” she would yell at her startled judges.
“I
ain’t coming back and asking you for no work.”

She “made terrible enemies” this way, but she didn’t care. “My pride as a person was more important to me. I thought I’d rather be a hat designer than ask people for a job.” She stopped making rounds, but when her money began to run out, she needed some kind of work. Finally she was hired as a clerk for the Michael Press, a printing company on West Forty-fifth Street. She filed papers, made coffee, answered the phones. This was precisely the kind of job her mother had always said she should get, and of course Barbara hated every moment of it. Still, her meager salary paid the bills, and Diana would have been proud of her daughter’s responsible attitude toward money. Every payday she would cash her check, put some of the money into her savings account, then divvy up the rest into envelopes marked “phone,” “rent,” “laundry,” “food,” and finally “miscellaneous.”

Nonetheless certain that on her own Barbara was headed for disaster, Diana called her every day on her JUdson-6 exchange to “see how you’re doing,” and once or twice a week she’d come by the apartment unannounced, laden with bowls of chicken soup, chopped liver, and matzoh balls. These visits were far too frequent for Barbara’s taste, but her pleas to her mother to leave her alone went unheeded.

Barbara’s job at the Michael Press didn’t last long. Her lack of interest in her work, her insubordination, and her constant humming, which annoyed her boss no end, got her fired within nine months. She applied for unemployment benefits and collected a weekly check of $32.50. It was barely enough to survive, and when she and Susan Dwaorkowitz had a “clash of personalities,” Susan moved back to Brooklyn and left Barbara in dire need of a roommate. She posted a notice on the Actors’ Equity office bulletin board, and another aspiring actress, Marilyn Fried, answered the summons. “We decided we could get along,” Marilyn said, “and I moved in. Each of us was getting unemployment. It barely covered the rent and our fees for acting classes.” Once a week Marilyn made a trip home to stock up on food from her mother’s refrigerator, and Barbara soon followed suit, figuring that would keep Diana from showing up at her door when she least expected it.

Diana used this admission of need from Barbara as further proof that she would never make it as an actress, that she should move back home and get a typing job in Brooklyn. Instead, buoyed up by Allan Miller’s belief in her and by her classmates’ positive reaction to her scenes and exercises, Barbara invited her mother to attend a class and watch her do a scene that she felt particularly confident about. She was sure it would change Diana’s mind about her acting ambitions.

Diana came, Barbara did the scene, and Marilyn Fried thought it went extremely well. “Barbara was very proud of it,” she recalled. But afterward Mrs. Kind said nothing as she climbed the stairs to Barbara’s apartment. Once they got inside, Barbara sat on the edge of her bed, and Diana began a tirade that shocked Marilyn and totally deflated Barbara. “Her mother said Barbara should find another outlet for whatever she had to offer because she did not have the ability to be an actress,” Marilyn recollected. “I was heartbroken. And yet Barbara never felt any anger or hostility about it. After that embarrassing session, one night Barbara and I sat together wondering what we would like most to do if we ever made it as actresses, and she said, ‘First of all,
I
want to buy my mother a mink coat.
’”

Such a possibility grew less likely than ever after Barbara lost her unemployment benefits when her caseworker checked up on her and found out that she hadn’t looked for a job similar to the one she had lost, as required, but had tried out for acting work instead. But then disaster was averted when an audition finally worked out for Barbara. She was hired for another summer of stock, this one at the Cecilwood Theater in Fishkill, New York. She received $30. 00 a week plus room and board, and between June 30 and September 7 she worked on ten plays. The only production in which she had anything substantial to do was
Separate Tables
, but as always, she loved all of it. For Barbara now, the theater was home.

And her actor friends were family. They often congregated at Roy Scott’s place. He would whip up macaroni topped with ketchup and uncork cheap red wine, and everyone would philosophize about art and life and love and sex. As Simon Gribben recollected, “Sex was on the menu, and people would kind of sleep with whomever they slept with. Barbara was usually there, and Roy told me that his thing with Barbara had cooled off and that she kind of liked me—that it was there for me if I wanted it. At these parties she would give me the eye and I’d go over and say hello to her, but I’d look at her nose and think, I can’t do it.

“One time I brought a friend of mine to one of Roy’s parties. I could have gone to bed with Barbara that night, but I was really interested in this little blonde who was another one of Roy’s girls. So I went off with her, and my friend went to bed with Barbara. So the next morning my friend and Barbara and I went out for breakfast at a coffee shop across the street from Carnegie Hall. After Barbara left us, I asked him what had happened, and he said nothing, that they had just lain there.”

M
OST OF THE
time now she immersed herself in acting. Allan Miller arranged for her to study on scholarship with three other teachers—Eli Rill, Herbert Berghof, and Curt Conway. Barbara didn’t know Miller had interceded on her behalf, and because she feared her new teachers would think her disloyal to Miller, she used an alias she had found in the telephone book: Angelina Scarangella.

What struck Eli Rill most about Barbara was that she didn’t want to be funny. “She would perform scenes, and the students would laugh because she had a comical way of speaking and using her hands,” Rill recalled. “She hated it. She’d say to me, ‘If you’re such a good teacher, make it so that they’ll stop laughing.’ I told her they were laughing
with
her. But she wanted to be a
serious
actress.”

To help herself become a tragic muse, Barbara read Greek plays and biographies of actresses like Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. She worked on innumerable scenes for her four classes. She did some radio work for WNEW, and occasionally she appeared in special projects in front of an audience on the stage of the Theater Studio, condensed versions of famous plays prepared by Allan.

One of the students at the Theater Studio was Dustin Hoffman, and his memories of Barbara in one of the projects have remained vivid. “I remember this funny-looking girl on the stage sitting cross-legged... she had a very small part, she didn’t have many lines. But, boy, by some magic wave of her wand she was making everybody look at her.”

Barbara’s intensity seared into Hoffman’s memory as well. “Did you ever see those pictures of a mother bird with the worm and there’s a bunch of baby birds with their mouths open?” he asked. “Somehow there’s one that’s straining more than any other to get that worm from their mother. That would be Barbara.”

S
HE HUNGERED, BOTH
literally and figuratively. Food was love, she had learned from her mother, and she couldn’t afford much of it. She seemed to have an unending appetite; she would raid friends’ refrigerators, pick pieces of food off her companions’ dinner plates, go back for seconds and thirds and fourths if she could. Everyone who knew her marveled: how could she eat so much and stay so thin? What she was too proud to admit was that in most cases the meal they saw her devour provided the only food she’d eaten all day.

Even more than food she craved excitement, novelty, recognition, an outlet for artistic expression. In a way, she was like the country she lived in. After nearly a decade of complacency under a benign elderly Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, the United States stood on the verge of an extraordinary new decade. Within the next two years, America would elect its youngest president, the handsome, glamorous, visionary John F. Kennedy; it would put a man in space and make giant—if often violently opposed—steps to end racial segregation.

Barbara was not yet eighteen as the fifties came to an end, and her single-mindedness about her career left her with little concern for what was going on in the outside world. For while America was moving toward exciting new frontiers, so was Barbara Joan Streisand.

B
arbara sat on the living room floor of her apartment early in 1960, singing along to the guitar strums of a friend from acting class, Carl Esser. As her roommate, Marilyn Fried, prepared for bed in the next room she heard “this remarkable voice” waft in from what she assumed was the radio. Who is that marvelous singer? she wondered. She peeked into the living room to investigate.

The radio wasn’t on. Marilyn looked at Barbara and asked, “Who was that singing?” Her eyes widened in surprise at t
h
e answer. “Your voice is wonderful!” she blurted. “Why aren’t you singing.”

“I don’t know.... I don’t think I’m that good,” Barbara said.

“Out came the sensitivity, the insecurity, the shyness,” Marilyn recalled to the author René Jordan in 1974. When she and Carl both begged to differ, Barbara got caught up in their excitement and pulled the demo record she had made at thirteen out of a closet and played it for them. Marilyn loved it and told Barbara she reminded her of Fanny Brice.

“Who’s Fanny Brice?” Barbara asked.

“Barbara didn’t think the record sounded very good,” Marilyn recalled. “She could not believe she could sing. It was amazing.”

But the next day, unusually cheerful, Barbara flitted around the apartment singing. “Do I sound okay?” she wanted to know.

“You sound great,” Marilyn replied.

“Should I go for a singing audition?”

“Absolutely.”

“But I’m an actress, not a singer.”

“If it gets you a job, who cares? You’re broke.”

Barbara remained unsure. Standing up and singing seemed like so much silliness to her, compared to playing Medea or Juliet. And she later admitted that she wasn’t immune to the Victorian notion that singers were floozies. No, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she got a job as an usher at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater on West Forty-sixth Street, home of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein phenomenon
The Sound of Music
, starring Mary Martin. As she led people to their seats Barbara would turn her fa
c
e away from them so that “when I became a star nobody would remember I’d been an usher.”

Night after night she stood in the back of the theater and watched. She memorized every line and all of the songs. She studied Mary Martin’s every move, learning from—and sometimes faulting—one of America’s great musical comedy stars. She came to realize that acting in a musical could be artistically valid too. Now, just as she had when she saw
The Diary of Anne Frank
, Barbara told herself, I could do that.

Within a few weeks she heard that Eddie Blum, the show’s casting director, would soon hold auditions for the choruses of several touring companies of
The Sound of Music.
She rushed home that night and put her resume together with one of the photographs the students at a photography school had taken of her; the pictures had been given to her in exchange for the modeling. “The results were awful,” she said, “but I didn’t have any money for pictures, and they were all I had.” The photo Barbara sent Blum showed her wearing a Japanese kimono, long dangling earrings, and a hairpiece bun on top of her head. She looked about forty years old.

She got no response from Blum until several months later. “He told me he hadn’t called earlier because of the terrible picture. He couldn’t imagine what kind of actress would submit such a thing. Finally he decided to call me in ‘to see what this creep is like.”

Accompanied by Blum’s pianist Peter Daniels, who would become her accompanist and friend, Barbara sang the popular radio hit “Allegheny Moon,” and when she finished, Blum asked her if she could sing something else. She sang “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi,” which she had memorized by watching the show every night. Blum then asked if she wanted to have lunch with him, and while they ate, he asked about her background and her dreams for her future. Her responses so captivated him that their conversation stretched through dinner and beyond. As Marilyn Fried recalled it, “He spent the whole day talking to her. He was fascinated by her talent and her intelligence. Around ten-thirty that night he brought Barbara back to our apartment and gave her a lot of encouragement.”

She was all wrong for
The Sound of Music
, of course, so despite how much she had impressed Blum, he couldn’t hire her. “But for heaven’s sake use that voice!” he told her. “Get yourself a job singing in a nightclub or something.” Barbara fairly floated on air for the next few days, incredulous that someone as savvy as Eddie Blum had thought so highly of her talent. But she wasn’t thrilled about his suggestion that she sing in clubs. She still feared that singing was a trifle, not
important
like drama. But just in case another musical should need an actress-singer, she added “Voice” to her resume under “Training.”

In one of the more fortuitous twists of show business fate, it was during her next foray into legitimate acting that Barbara met a young man who finally persuaded her to sing for a living.

S
HE FIRST SAW
Barry Dennen on the stage of the Jan Hus Theater on East Seventy-fourth Street late in April while she and a raggle-taggle group of young performers who called themselves the Actors’ Co-Op (“A Nonprofit Group”) bustled around rehearsing their first and last show, a production of Karel and Josef Čapek’s
The Insect Comedy
, billed as “a parable of the human condition.” Barbara had been cast in three roles in the three-act play with prologue and epilogue: Apatura Clythia, one of the two main butterflies in Act I; the messenger in Act III; and the second moth in the epilogue.

Dennen, a twenty-two-year-old UCLA graduate from a wealthy Los Angeles family, played a cricket and a snail. Handsome in a gaunt, somber way, obsessive in his love for every aspect of show business, he would set his alarm clock for 3: 00
A. M.
in order to tape-record the soundtracks of old Mae West or Bette Davis movies from television. The shelves in his apartment on Ninth Street in Greenwich Village groaned under thousands of vintage records he had collected since childhood. He had all the greats: Ruth Etting, Al Jolson, Helen Kane, Lee Wiley, Ethel Waters, Edith Piaf, Fanny Brice, Fred Astaire, Mabel Mercer, Helen Morgan.

That he was also wonderfully pretentious, as “men of the theatuh” can be, is suggested by the fact that he billed himself as Barré Dennen in the show’s program. This was all guaranteed to attract and fascinate the impressionable Barbara, and Dennen returned the compliment. He considered the production they were in “slapped together, unspeakable, tacky, awful,” but he found Barbara’s performance “hysterically funny” as she chased after a boy butterfly crying, “Oh, you great, strong, handsome thing!” while her diaphanous pink wings fluttered and her wire antennae flopped wildly atop her head.

The Insect Comedy
lasted only three days, Sunday through Tuesday, May 8, 9, and 10. On Monday morning the New York
World Telegram and Sun
critic, Frank Aston, gave the show a good-natured pan, pointing out that “no one in it claimed to be anything like a pro.” He also gave Barbara her first Manhattan newspaper notice when he listed her as one of the residents of “Butterflyland, where the girls assail men but get nowhere because everyone dies too soon.”

The cast reassembled a few weeks later to do an audio version of the play for Radio Free Europe. The show had closed, but Barbara and Barry’s friendship had just begun. They started to date, first talking for hours in the nearby Pam Pam coffee shop, then watching late-show movies in his small, eclectically furnished eleventh-floor apartment stuffed with feathers and fans, Tiffany-style lamps, and candles. Soon the two were virtually inseparable. “We went everywhere together,” he recalled. “She was very young, endearing, and exceptionally serious about becoming a great actress.” Just as she had Allan Miller before him, Barbara asked Barry endless questions about acting and music and literature and art. He loved that she hung on his every word; she loved that she had met another man from whom she could learn.

Dennen owned a top-of-the-line Ampex stereo tape recorder with two microphones, so it followed naturally that when a prospective agent asked Barbara for a tape of her singing, she asked Barry to make it. She arrived at his apartment with Carl Esser in tow as an accompanist, and as Barry recalled it in 1974, “We spent the afternoon taping, and the moment I heard the first playback I went insane—I knew here was something special, a voice the microphone loved.” And Dennen could tell that Barbara, although completely untrained, had an inherent musicality, the same instincts that had led her to improvise on “You’ll Never Know” when she was thirteen. Excited, Barry joined those who had advised Barbara to become a singer. She gave him her standard reply: “I’m an
ehktress
.”

“Look,” he countered, “you can continue your acting classes and still do this. You’ll get seen, and you’ll make money.” Then he stressed that singing was a form of acting, that songs—especially the classic ballads—could be treated as three-act plays. He told her that a singer could create a character just as vibrant as any actress could in a play. Barbara’s eyes narrowed as she absorbed this argument. Later she said Barry had made her see that “Singing could be like acting, except I played all the parts myself.”

Barry caught the waver in her skepticism and threw down a gauntlet: a bar directly across the street from his apartment had a weekly talent contest on Monday nights, and he challenged her to enter it. She studied him. He said he would help her learn some new songs. She twisted her mouth. When he added that the winner would receive fifty dollars, a week’s engagement at the club, and free dinners, he saw the first real spark of interest flicker across Barbara’s face. “Mmm,” she murmured.