Streisand: Her Life (23 page)

Consistency, of course, is the essence of the theater—without it there’s anarchy—and Laurents put his foot down. “She didn’t know very much about the stage,” he recalled. “She was very undisciplined. She’s inventive, but it never occurred to her that the invention should be for rehearsals and not for onstage. She would throw the other actors off cue. I had to be rather sharp with her just before we opened in New York, and from that point on, the performance was solid and stable.”

From David Merrick’s standpoint, Barbra’s employment was far from stable—and so was Elliott’s. “I had a battle every night with Merrick,” Laurents said. “He wanted to fire them because he thought they were both unattractive, and he didn’t think Barbra was funny.”

Laurents thought Barbra was funny. “We kept giving her more to do in the musical numbers, taking what was a group number and highlighting her. Merrick wasn’t that concerned with Barbra after a while because she wasn’t the lead. But Elliott was, and he wanted me to fire him.” Elliott’s out-of town reviews didn’t help his cause; most of them criticized his singing and his character’s unlikability. “I was terribly green, and I was trying too hard,” Elliott admitted. Merrick kept up the pressure on Laurents to dismiss Gould. “In Philly and Boston, Merrick kept bringing in every leading man in town” to find a replacement for him, Laurents said, but the director held his ground. “I thought he was fine in the role. When Merrick finally said he was going to fire Elliott, I threatened to quit. Elliott stayed.”

E
LEVEN WEEKS AFTER
its first rehearsal,
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
opened on Thursday, March 22, 1962, at the Shubert Theater on West Forty-fourth Street. Barbra made her greatest impression about ten minutes into the second act. She had had just a few lines and had sung just snippets in two musical numbers in the first act. But now out of the wings she rolled, whizzing across the floorboards on her swivel chair, arms and legs aflail, pencil stuck in her beehive hairdo, her face framed by a huge white collar like the subject of a portrait by Holbein the Younger.

She stopped the chair in the middle of the stage by planting her feet squarely in front of her. She lowered her head into her hands, then looked up imploringly at the audience as the music began. “Oh,
why
is it always Miss Marmelstein,” she fairly sobbed, her Brooklyn accent unrestrained.

The girl who hadn’t wanted to be laughed at put her audience into hysterics. She was hilarious. She was touching. She whined, she mugged, she belted. The audience laughed with her, rooted for her, adored her. When she finally came to a defeated conclusion and fairly spat out, “Ooooh, I could
bust
,” they jumped to their feet to cheer and applaud her for a solid three minutes—an eternity in the theater. She had stopped the show cold. At that moment—9: 35
P. M.
on the fourth Thursday in March 1962—Barbra Streisand became a Broadway star.

Friday morning’s reviews of the show ran the gamut from raves to pans. The majority of the critics found the story and its hero too unpleasant to be enjoyable, but Barbra’s performance garnered unanimous raves. “Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School should call a holiday to celebrate the success of its spectacular alumna, Barbra Streisand.” Norman Nadel wrote in the
World Telegram & Sun.
“As a secretary, she sets the show in motion and hypos it all the way.”

Theatre Arts
critic John Simon, who would later write witheringly of Barbra’s looks and personality, praised her “Chekhovian brand of heartbreaking merriment. Gifted with a face that shuttles between those of a tremulous young borzoi and a fatigued Talmudic scholar... she can also sing the lament of the unreconstructed drudge with the clarion peal of an Unliberty Bell.” The critic for
The Nation
likened Barbra to “an innocent Modigliani model. Her Miss Marmelstein—a screaming, hysterical, efficient, harassed, nervously giggling secretary—is a delightful comic miniature.”

Overnight, Barbra became the toast of Broadway. On April 4 she appeared on
Today,
hosted by John Chancellor. After she sang “Much More” and “Right as the Rain,” Chancellor asked her whether she missed the
a
in her name and what she was made of—“sugar and spice and everything nice.” Barbra winced slightly and replied, “No.”

“What, then?” Chancellor pressed. “Songs?”

“Flesh and bones,” she said weakly.

Within weeks
Life
magazine had featured her prominently as one of that season’s “Broadway Showstoppers.”
Mademoiselle
chose her, along with Barbara Lang, Barbara Harris, and Sue Lyon, “Most Likely to Succeed.”
The New Yorker
called her a “coming star” and ran an interview in which she bragged about finding a hundred-dollar dress marked down to twelve-fifty in Filene’s Basement in Boston.

She spoke of her mother too, and frankly. “She did come to the opening night of
Wholesale,
but I don’t think she understood what I was trying to do in it. Why should she? The things that interest her about me are whether I’m eating enough and whether I am warmly enough dressed. She’s a very simple, nonintellectual, nontheatrical person who lives and breathes.”

Elaine Sobel had walked with Barbra’s mother from the theater to the opening-night party at Sardi’s. Along the way she turned to Diana and said, “You must be thrilled—your daughter’s a Broadway star.”

“Yes, that’s nice,” Diana replied. “But I still think she’d be more secure working in a school as a
real
secretary.”

T
HE SWORD OF
her new success, as it often does, had two edges for Barbra. “I was the most hated girl on Broadway,” she said. “Elliott was the only one in the show who liked me. No one could understand how a girl like me could suddenly come off with all those raves. Everyone expects you to slave in seventy plays before you make it.”

Barbra’s unpopularity had less to do with her raves, in fact, than with her behavior. Her lateness and unpredictable entrances annoyed the company, and her occasional childishness grated on them. Wilma Curley recalled finding some makeup missing from her dressing room. “Who has my stuff,” she yelled into the hallway.

“Oh, I do,” Barbra called out. “I needed it.”

“She wanted it, she needed it, she took it,” Wilma said. “It wasn’t a gigantic problem, but it annoyed me because she had gotten someone to open my dressing room door. And she’d never return anything unless I asked for it. She was self-engrossed. Everything was just me, me, me.”

Already Barbra had become the subject of bitchy repartee. At a cocktail party Elliott and Barbra attended, one young lady told anyone who would listen, “Barbra Streisand thinks she’s flat-chested so she’s got the front of her dress stuffed with tissue paper. You can hear it crackling! Go look.”

Any animosity that existed toward Barbra among the
Wholesale
company surely deepened when she became the only member of the cast or crew to win a nomination for the coveted Antoinette Perry Award (the Tony). At the April 29 ceremonies in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, she vied for Best Featured or Supporting Actress in a Musical with Elizabeth Allen in
The Gay Life
, Barbara Harris in the revue
From the Second City
, and Phyllis Newman in David Merrick’s other new show that season,
Subways Are for Sleeping.

Merrick managed to insult both of his young nominees that night. He sat at Newman’s table rather than Barbra’s, but as the list of nominees was read, he turned to Newman and said, “Streisand’s going to win, and I voted for her.”

In fact the winner was Newman, and Marty Erlichman’s prediction that Barbra would win every major award would have to wait. Why didn’t Barbra, who had clearly made the biggest impact among Broadway neophytes that year, win the Tony? That
Wholesale
was her first show hurt rather than helped; she was correct that many people prefer to honor someone who has paid some dues. And word of Barbra’s reprimand by Actors’ Equity for her repeated latenesses surely didn’t help.

Barbra did collect the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the lion’s share of that Broadway season’s acclaim and publicity. She also won the leading man. Shortly after
Wholesale
opened, Elliott moved into Barbra’s apartment above a seafood restaurant on Third Avenue.

I
T WAS A
tiny one-bedroom cold-water flat. The only window in the living room looked smack out onto a brick wall. The bathtub sat in the middle of the kitchen, the floor was so uneven that visitors felt they were listing, and there were no closets. Barbra didn’t mind, though: the rent was only $67. 20 a month, and for the first time she had an apartment all her own.

By all accounts, the place was a wonder. “The smell of fish!” Elaine Sobel exclaimed. “And the
shmattehs
hanging everywhere!”
(Shmattehs
are rags, or inexpensive clothes. ) A close friend of Barbra and Elliott’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was “the filthiest apartment I’ve ever seen. Awfully, awfully dirty. I’d go over there to play cards with Elliott and I used to kid him and say, ‘Where the hell are you fucking this girl?’ Because they slept on a
folding cot.
For two people! And Elliott’s a big guy. No mattress cover or anything like that. God! And her idea of art was a toilet seat hung on the wall.”