Streisand: Her Life (22 page)

B
ARBRA WAS DETERMINED
to create her Miss Marmelstein entirely on her own. “I listened to what they wanted me to do,” she recalled, “and I argued. I almost got fired, but I did it the way I wanted to, finally. I didn’t want help.”

A serious disagreement between Arthur Laurents and Barbra arose around her one solo musical number, “Miss Marmelstein,” the comic lament of a drudge whom no one ever calls “bubelah” or “passion pie.” Barbra wanted to do it sitting in a secretarial chair, just as she had when she sang “Value” at her audition. Laurents preferred that she stand while she delivered the number, but when she rehearsed it for the first time she grabbed the chair, settled herself into it, and started to sing before Laurents could stop her. When she finished, he told her to do it again—on her feet this time.

Her second performance was perfunctory, and Laurents exploded in anger. He dressed her down in front of the cast, and Jerome Weidman recalled that his heart went out to her. “There she sat, head down, her face concealed by that curtain of tumbled hair, her hands making small twitching motions in her lap. The sight of Miss Streisand’s suffering filled me with so much pity and horror that I could neither speak nor move.”

Finally it was over, and after Laurents left, Weidman recalled he walked over to Barbra and said, “I’m sorry, kid.”

“Listen, Jerry,” she said, “whaddaya think of this?” Her hands had been twitching while she scratched a pencil across a diagram of a new apartment she had just rented. “Here’s where I wanna put the couch,” she said without looking up, “but the fireplace is all the way over here on
this
wall. Where the hell would
you
put the couch.”

At that moment Weidman decided that Barbra possessed the vital ingredient for success: “She was made of copper tubing.”

She wasn’t, of course, but she’d be damned if she’d let anybody see her uncertainty, her vulnerability, her fear. And no matter what, she had made up her mind that if she felt something was right for her, she wouldn’t let anyone talk her out of it. Not a producer, not a director. No one. She was too afraid of failure to do something that went against her instincts. “The reason I talked back to the director was that I sincerely felt I’d be better off walking out of the show if I couldn’t play the character my own way. I just didn’t care what happened. I could go out and work in a nightclub again.”

As the rehearsal came to an end, Barbra ran around handing out slips of paper to anyone who would take one. “I just got a phone installed in my new apartment,” she announced. “Call me.” That night the telephone rang just once. A male voice on the other end of the line said, “You asked for somebody to call, so I called. I just wanted to say you were brilliant today. This is Elliott Gould.” Before Barbra could say anything, he had hung up. Later Gould would say that when he watched her perform “Miss Marmelstein,” she had reminded him of his mother.

I
T WAS DURING
out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia that the company first noticed something was going on between Barbra and the show’s tall, dark, handsome, and teddy-bearish leading man. Wilma Curley, a dancer in the chorus, recalled that Barbra frequently made her entrance from the wrong side of the stage, which would put the other actors off kilter. “Harold Lang [a cast member] would go to a door and call for Miss Marmelstein, and she’d come in from the opposite side. He got pretty annoyed because it would throw his timing and staging off.”

After a while the company realized that Barbra’s errant entrances were always made from the direction of Elliott Gould’s dressing room, the side of the stage opposite hers. “It was like, ‘Ah, she’s in Elliott’s dressing room,
’”
Wilma recalled. “We were a little surprised, because he had been dating Marilyn Cooper. Marilyn wasn’t very pleased when Barbra stepped in. She said to me, ‘I really
l
ike this guy, but Barbra’s out to get him.’ And of course she did get him.”

Barbra hadn’t liked Elliott initially, and he had been too shy to ask her out at first. But he would sometimes walk her to the subway after rehearsals. When he finally asked for a date, Barbra recalled, “I thought he was being funny because he was always joking around and doing nutty things.” Their evening out consisted of dinner and coffee in a diner after a late rehearsal. “I found myself always laughing when Elliott was close by,” Barbra said. They talked until the small hours of the morning, and as they spent more and more time together, Elliott opened up his heart to her. She was amazed at how much alike they turned out to be, far beyond the surface similarities of their profession, their Jewish faith, and their Brooklyn upbringing.

Insecure about his appearance, Elliott had spent his childhood thinking that he had “a fat ass” and wishing he looked like Robert Wagner. He had always had difficulty being on time. He had adored Jerry Lewis and pantomimed to his records. He had escaped from hot Brooklyn summers inside movie houses. They were, he said, “my sanctuary.”

He had needed sanctuary from the stifling two-and-a-half-room apartment he shared with his parents, Bernard and Lucille Goldstein, in the Bensonhurst section southwest of Flatbush, where he had slept in the same room with them for eleven years, listening to their ever-worsening battles. “That’s the place where
I
was most vulnerable, where I began to withdraw and become self-conscious,” he told
Playboy
in 1970. “I would have loved to have taken a bat and just destroyed every wall and every shelf and everything else in it.”

He could have been talking about Barbra and Louis Kind and apartment 4G. But as much as their commonalities captured Barbra’s imagination, it was the one major difference between them that fascinated her the most: from the age of nine, Elliott Goldstein had spent his childhood singing and dancing, pushed into lessons and auditions and recitals by his ambitious mother. He had appeared on television—an assignment for which his mother changed his name without telling him “because it sounded better”—and at thirteen had been part of a vaudeville bill on the stage of New York’s fabled Palace Theater, playing a singing bellboy.

“Oh, that must have been wonderful,” Barbra burbled.

“I hated every minute of it,” he replied.

“But
why
,” Barbra couldn’t imagine how anyone could have hated doing what she had so longed to do as a girl.

He explained that he’d had no choice, that he was constantly pushed, pushed, pushed. He had never harbored a deep ambition to be a performer. Yet here he was, the leading man in a Broadway show at twenty-three, and it amazed Barbra that she and Elliott had arrived at this point via such different avenues.

The more she saw him and the more they talked, the more enamored she became. The feeling was mutual. “I was fascinated with her,” E
l
liott recalled in 1964. “She needs to be protected. She is a very fragile little girl. She doesn’t commit easily, but she liked me.” Just as Roy Scott had four years earlier, Elliott found Barbra “absolutely exquisite. She was the most innocent thing I’d ever seen, like a beautiful flower that hadn’t blossomed yet.”

“I was beginning to feel something for the guy, and it scared me half to death,” Barbra recalled. “I found myself talking gibberish.... One night I even went onstage with half my face made up.... I guess I was in love.”

Their romance took on the trappings of a Manhattan fairy tale. They’d walk around the city in the night cold, duck into Forty-second Street theaters for midnight showings of low-budget horror movies about giant ants and caterpillars that ate cars, seek out all-night diners on Ninth Avenue for rice pudding and coffee ice cream, play Pokerino in penny arcades off Times Square.

One night, Barbra recalled, “we were walking around the skating rink at Rockefeller Center when he chased me and we had a snowball fight. He never held me around or anything, but he put snow on my face and kissed me, very lightly.... It was great. Like out of a movie.”

On the opening night of
Wholesale
in Philadelphia, Barbra sent Elliott a note: “To my clandestine lover.” They had not yet been intimate, but that would change a few days later. Was Elliott still a virgin? That depends on which of his stories one chooses to believe. In one interview he said that he had “become a man” at fourteen with a very fat girl wearing a girdle who fell asleep on top of him. In another interview he said his first sexual experience was in a Boston hotel room in 1958, when he was nineteen.

But in a proposal for his autobiography that made the rounds of publishers in New York, Elliott claimed he had “surrendered” his virginity to Barbra in a room at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. “Barbra was the one I chose,” he wrote. “I was excited, but I was frightened.” Just as he and Barbra were reaching heights of ecstasy, Elliott said, a bunch of his pals showed up. “I was trying to become a man, and these guys were pounding on the door. I wouldn’t open it. This was my moment, and I wasn’t about to let anyone take it from me.”

If Elliott was a sexual neophyte, he and Barbra evidently made up for lost time. They spent most of their free hours in his room, and their activity disturbed Wilma Curley, who had the room next door. “I’d be trying to get to sleep and their bed would start bouncing,” she recalled. “One time I had to go over, rap on the door, and tell them to keep it down. One night I heard Barbra pounding on the door and screaming at him to let her back in. I peeked out and there she was, stark naked. Finally he let her back in.

“They were like high school kids. They’d have food fights in restaurants, they giggled all the time, he’d lock her out of the room. None of us thought of them as having an affair—it wasn’t mature enough to be an affair.”

A
RTHUR LAURENTS HAD
come to doubt that Barbra Streisand was mature enough to be an actress on Broadway. He had given in to her on the issue of the chair, and when she stopped the show on opening night in Philade
l
phia by whirling on casters across the stage while she sang “Miss Marmelstein,” he was glad to concede she’d been right. But the next night she altered her inflections, her movements, her timing, and Laurents was furious. “I gave the director a bad time,” Barbra later admitted. “He insisted on blueprinting exactly how I should do everything. I can’t work that way.... I find it very difficult to do anything twice in exactly the same way.”