Streisand: Her Life (26 page)

When she showed up, she was visibly upset. She wrung her hands in anguish as she explained why she had asked to see him. “You really don’t know much about me,” she began haltingly. “I’m from Cleveland and, well, my mother is back there and she’s not well. As a matter of fact, she’s dying, Bob.” She choked back a sob. “It would mean so much to her to be able to see me on
Tonight.
If you could please just give me
one chance
...”

“Well,” Garland sighed as he summed up the story, “she got her
Tonight
booking and went on from there.”

Barbra made her debut on
Tonight
with guest host Groucho Marx on August 21. The first thing she did was complain that the announcer had pronounced her name “Streesand.” Just as she had on
PM East,
she quickly established herself as an audience favorite, and she was brought back roughly once a month between October 4, 1962, and March 5, 1963.

The October 4 show was her first with Johnny Carson, the regular host. Carson asked her if she planned to marry someday. “Of course,” Barbra replied.

“But not until you fulfill your career? Or does it make any difference?”

“No, that doesn’t matter at all. I might give up my career, if my husband wants me to.”

“You’re not that dedicated to the theater, then.”

“No.”

“You’d give it up if you got married. I think that’s a smart move.”

“Yeah.”

During her appearance on February 1, 1963, Johnny mentioned that
Time
magazine had done an article on Barbra the week before. Then he added, “I suppose when you get to be a big star we’ll never see you again.”

“No,” Barbra replied with a laugh. “Never.”

“That will be it, huh?”

“Never. I will never come here again.”

“You know,” Johnny concluded, “she probably means it, too.”

E
LLIOTT PACED BACK
and forth in front of the open door to Barbra’s dressing room after a performance of
Wholesale.
Whenever one of the chorus girls passed by, he whistled and patted her fanny and asked, very loudly, whether she had any plans for later in the evening. Barbra ignored him while she dabbed off her makeup in front of her mirror and chatted with Bob Schulenberg, who had come backstage to pay her a visit. Bob listened to Elliott for a while, then had to ask: “What on
earth
is he doing.”

Barbra peeled off a false eyelash. “Getting back at me, I suppose.”

“What for?”

“I told him he was flat on his last note tonight.”

Finally Elliott huffed off. Barbra and Bob went out to eat, and afterward Barbra invited Bob up to her apartment for coffee. When she opened the door, they saw Elliott sitting alone in the darkened living room, illuminated only by the rose light filtering through a red glass lampshade. He didn’t move or say hello. Barbra turned to Schulenberg. “I think we’d better not have that coffee,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

Working together and living together often put a strain on Barbra and Elliott’s relationship. “We fought all the time,” he said. “I wasn’t always sure about what.” After one disagreement, Barbra locked Elliott out of the apartment and refused to answer the door or pick up the phone to talk to him. He went home to Brooklyn. Another time he locked her out in the rain until four in the morning before he opened the door to a wet, cold Barbra, her face awash with tears.

But always they would kiss and hug and make up, and later they’d laugh about it all. “I was madly in love with her,” Elliott said.

B
Y THE FALL
of 1962
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
had been running for six months, mostly on half-price twofers (the musical ultimately lost money). Barbra couldn’t wait for the show to close. She hated the interpretive strait-jacket that tied her into the same performance as Miss Marmelstein every night. Only three months into the run she had said, “I see the part differently now from the way it was written and directed, and I’d like to do it differently, but I can’t.” She missed the wild improvisation she had done in acting class, longed for the delicious chance to surprise even herself.

Her boredom, the sameness of it all, caused her performance occasionally to flag. “Every time she did ‘Miss Marmelstein’ I’d go to the back of the theater and watch her,” said her dresser, Ceil Mack. “Once in a while she wasn’t so good. Her performance wasn’t big enough, it lacked that
ruff!
she gave it on a good night. But the audiences never knew the difference. She stopped the show cold every night.”

That was part of the problem for Barbra, too. She had proven herself in
Wholesale.
She knew she could wow an audience even on an off night. She wanted fresh challenges, wanted to conquer unknown worlds. So many opportunities lay before her as 1962 drew to a close. She longed to begin new journeys.

In October a tremendous challenge and a nearly unprecedented opportunity were laid at Barbra’s feet when she was chosen over far more established actresses to star as the legendary Ziegfeld Follies comedienne and singer Fanny Brice in a major new Broadway musical,
Funny Girl.
It seemed a perfect part for her: Fanny Brice was Jewish, had a prominent nose, struggled up from poverty, and combined humor with pathos to make her audiences laugh and cry and adore her.

Marty had lobbied for her to get the part for over a year, and Barbra wanted it so badly that when she learned she had it, standing in Broadway’s Shubert Alley, she felt almost numb. “Because I cared so much,” she said, “I didn’t care at all. Deep down I knew the part belonged to me, but for that reason I made myself think nothing of it.... I always think the worst. Actually, it’s a combination of positive and negative thinking, superego and complete insecurity. Things come to me... if I think of the worst.”

T
HE LAST PERFORMANCE
of
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
fell Sunday, December 9, and when the curtain came down, Barbra ran backstage yelling, “I’m free! I’m free.” The next morning she met with Marty Erlichman to discuss her appearance one week later on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
plan her nationwide concert tour, go over the songs for her first album, and figure out when she would have the time to start rehearsals for
Funny Girl.
Marty told the show’s producers that she probably wouldn’t be available full-time until the end of 1963. They didn’t see that as a problem, since the show’s score and book needed a great deal of work. Besides, they reasoned, if Marty’s plans for Barbra panned out, they might be getting a big star to play Fanny Brice after all.

Elliott had pressing business too that Monday morning. He walked down to East Fifty-eighth Street, took his place in line, and applied for fifty dollars a week in unemployment benefits.

O
VER THREE DAYS
late in January 1963, Barbra laid down the eleven tracks that would make up her first album, essentially a studio version of her nightclub act. For weeks she had rehearsed in the West End Avenue apartment of Peter Matz, a gifted young arranger-conductor whom Harold Arlen had recommended to her, and the two of them hit it off well. Every day she rushed over to Matz’s place, her lunch in a brown paper bag. (One day she was so late she ran out of her apartment wearing only blue jeans and a bra under her raincoat. )

“It was a delight to work with her,” Matz recalled. “She didn’t know how to read music, but she could follow it up and down on paper. With her instincts she didn’t have to read. People credit me for those early arrangements, but really most of the ideas and the songs came from Barbra and Peter Daniels. They made my job very easy.”

Barbra found studio recording far less satisfying than live performing. “The exciting thing about being a performer, the really creative thing,” she said, “is going onstage or stepping in front of a microphone in a nightclub and creating something just for the people who are there. You may be great or you may be lousy that night, but that’s the exciting thing about creating it all over again each time. But when you go into a recording studio, you’ve got three hours.... You can never do your best under those conditions. The way I’d like to record would be to have an indefinite closing time on the session.”