Streisand: Her Life (20 page)

The smoked foods controversy erupted during a party-themed show on which Woody Allen, the actor Paul Dooley, and the trombone-playing nightclub singer Lillian Briggs were also guests. Wallace’s co-host, Joyce Davidson, had prepared an elaborate spread of food, most of which, Barbra protested, could kill you. She knew the health food pioneer Robert Rodale and sometimes slept in his office. She had taken to heart many of his warnings about the health risks posed by much of the food Americans ate. One Streisand fan’s audiotape of the show preserves the dialogue for posterity:

BARBRA:
I’ll tell you, I’m very hungry.... Oh, wait a minute! Wait a minute! Don’t you understand? They’re all smoked foods. You’re not allowed to eat that stuff! [Laughter from the others.] Don’t eat it, I’m
telling
you!

MIKE WALLACE:
Aw, c’mon, you used to buy it all the time. It looks wonderful.

BARBRA:
No, you wanna hear something? The highest cancer rate is in Iceland. [More laughs] No, wait a minute. People think there’s nothing doing up in Iceland. Did you know there was a big medical university in Iceland?

JOYCE DAVIDSON:
Eat the sandwich.

BARBRA:
It’s a fact. Up in Iceland there’s a big medical university, and they made tests on these things.... A lot of people in Iceland don’t have refrigerators, so they have to smoke the food. They can’t eat raw meat. They gotta smoke—

PAUL DOOLEY:
No cigarettes?

BARBRA:
Cut it out! Don’t you care if you die or not?

WOODY ALLEN:
Streisand’s a little sick, folks.

BARBRA:
You know what happens? They get a lot of cancer up there in Iceland.

LILLIAN BRIGGS:
From what?

BARBRA:
Smoked foods!

WALLACE:
Barbra, why don’t you
sing?

M
ARTY ERLICHMAN DIDN’T
take long to prove himself to Barbra. From the outset it was clear that he was willing to devote all his energies to the care and feeding of the Streisand career and to hold her hand as much as necessary to keep her on an even keel. And he took no guff from anybody about Barbra. When Abel Greene, the influential owner of the show business bible
Variety
, wrote that Streisand should consider “a schnoz bob,” Marty hit the roof. Against all advice, he called Greene. “Would you do that to your own daughter?” he railed at the startled publisher. “You can say nose job or have the nose fixed, but where do you come off saying ‘schnoz bob’? It’s vulgar and tasteless.” Greene apologized, but not in print.

Erlichman had very little money and no office. Barbra later said that his headquarters was a phone booth on Fifty-third Street and his capital was a pocketful of dimes. She was only half joking. What Erlichman did have in abundance was belief in Streisand and a willingness to pound the pavement day and night to get the word out about her. Perhaps an even more important contribution of Marty’s to Barbra’s career was his insistence that she deserved only the best. “I always treated Barbra like a star,” he recalled, “not by giving her limousines but by making decisions for her as if she
were
a star, not settling, but demanding the best treatment for her by everyone.”

Erlichman felt Barbra was overdue to move up from the Bon Soir to one of the classier uptown Manhattan nightspots. One of the poshest was Herbert Jacoby’s Blue Angel on Fifty-fifth Street near Third Avenue, a gleaming den of sophistication with a red-carpeted entrance where celebrities like Tallulah Bankhead, Beatrice Lillie, and Truman Capote came to hear Pearl Bailey, Eartha Kitt, Johnny Mathis, and other top-notch performers.

Barbra had already auditioned for Jacoby on March 27, but he had found her “too weird” for his tastes. Late in August Marty started to badger him to give Barbra another look, and finally he relented. In September she auditioned again, with toned-down material and a dressed-up look. This time Jacoby liked what he saw, and he scheduled Barbra for a two-week engagement beginning that November.

S
TILL, WHAT SHE
really wanted was to get back on a theater stage. After several rejections, Marty got her an audition for
Another Evening with Harry Stoones,
an irreverent, wacky off-Broadway revue with music written by Jeff Harris, a brash twenty-five-year-old newcomer, and partially backed by
Guys and Dolls
composer Frank Loesser. Harris already had as his star Diana Sands, the beautiful actress who had scored a major hit on Broadway as the feisty daughter in
A Raisin in the Sun.
“It was an anti-revue,” Harris recalled. “All the sketches kind of made fun of everything.”

Harris and his director, G. Adam Jordan, asked Barbra to audition twice. “Both times she came in with Marty Erlichman,” Harris recalled. “Marty wore the same suit to both auditions; it had a hole in the left sleeve.” Barbra’s singing greatly impressed Harris. “She certainly was hot, clearly talented, and very different.” Abba Bogin, the show’s musical director, found Barbra’s voice “startling” and her personality “funny, kooky. You asked her something and she answered funny. It was perfect for the show.”

Still, Harris and Jordan turned her down at first. They saw her as a singer, not as an actress, and the show had a limited number of songs, most of them earmarked for Susan Belink, who went on to renown as the opera singer Susan Belling. The rest of the cast—Dom DeLuise, Sheila Copelan, Virgil Curry, Kenny Adams, and Ben Keller in addition to Diana Sands—were all primarily straight or comic actors.

The auditions continued for a fourth girl to round out the cast, but Harris and Jordan found they couldn’t keep the memory of Barbra Streisand from gnawing at their minds. Finally they called her in for a second audition, and she impressed them so much once again that Harris decided that if his show didn’t have enough songs for Barbra Streisand to sing, he’d just have to write a few more. Abba Bogin recalled that they told Marty Erlichman on the spot that they wanted Barbra, “and we told him what the deal was. The deal was terrible. This was off Broadway. There was practically no money involved. [Barbra would be paid $37.50 a week.] But it was a chance for her to do something in an important revue, a chance to be
seen
.”

When Barbra arrived for the first day of rehearsals at the Gramercy Arts Theater on East Twenty-seventh Street the second week of September, she was so nervous she vomited in the ladies’ room. As rehearsals got under way, Bogin discovered that Barbra “had no theatrical discipline at all. She always showed up late. The stage manager would admonish her, and she’d say, ‘I couldn’t get here’ or ‘I overslept’ or something like that. But she’d also say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be ready,’ and she always was.”

Harry Stoones
featured thirty-eight sketches, songs, and comic blackouts that ran the gamut from sophomoric to brilliant. Fourteen featured Barbra, including three solo numbers, two of which (“Jersey” and “Value”) Harris wrote specifically for her. In “Jersey” she lamented the fact that her boyfriend had left New York and moved to the deep, dark wilds of the Garden State. “It was a full-blast jungle number right from a movie,” Harris explained. “She worries about all the dangers that can befall you in Jersey, and there are native jungle rhythms. She resolves to go after him—even though she may die—and bring him out.” At the end of the song, Barbra sang, “I won’t yell, I won’t scream, I won’t squawk—because it’s better to die together in Jersey than be single in New Yawk.”

In “Value” she comically compares the finances and automobiles of her two rich boyfriends, Harold Mengert and Arnie Fleischer. Another tune had her singing nothing but “I’ve got the blues, I’ve got the blues, boy, do I have the blues” over and over again for three minutes until finally she announces, “Now I feel better.”

In her comic sketches, Barbra played a klutzy ballet-dancing Wendy in a
Peter Pan
spoof, an Indian maiden during Columbus’s discovery of America, and a mousy secretary sitting through boring dictation until she stands up, looks amorously at her boss, played by Dom DeLuise, and drops her skirt. Another sketch, “Big Barry,” takes place in the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms of a high school. Ace, a macho jock, is bragging to his friend Jimbo and a nerdy little fellow, Barry, about his conquest of the night before. In the girls’ room, Tina and Jo Jo are waxing poetic about their romances while mousy Nancy, played by Barbra, listens quietly. Finally mousy Nancy and nerdy Barry meet in the hallway. “Barry,” Nancy whispers, “I’m pregnant.”

Another Evening with Hairy Stoones
opened on Sunday evening, October 21, 1961, after five weeks of rehearsals and two weeks of previews. For the opening sketch, “Carnival in Capri,” the entire cast rushed onstage, called out “Hello, Good-bye, and Thanks,” and rushed off again as the lights went out. It was an unfortunately appropriate bit, because the show never had another performance. The Monday morning reviews in
The New York Times
(“not exactly unbearable if nonetheless none too stimulating”) and the
Herald Tribune
(“callow... too predictable to be inspired”) were enough to kill the precariously financed show before later positive reviews appeared in
The New Yorker, Women’s Wear Daily,
and elsewhere.

Barbra’s reviews were unifor
m
ly good. “Barbra Streisand is a slim, offbeat, deadpan comedienne with an excellent flair for dropping a dour blackout gag,”
Variety’
s reviewer wrote. Michael Smith in the
Village Voice
felt that “Barbra Streisand can put across a lyric
m
elody and make fine fun of herself at the same time.”

After the show, Jeff Harris had scheduled a potluck party for the company in his Riverside Drive apartment. “Everybody came except Barbra. It was a real downer because of the notices. Everybody left and I got ready for bed. The doorbell rang, and it was Barbra. She brought a loaf of rye bread, and she was so proud because it had been freshly baked and sliced. That was the level of affluen
c
e we all shared at that point. I had to explain to her that the party was over—in more ways than one.”