Streisand: Her Life (28 page)

Barbra went to see a voice teacher, Judy Davis. Apprehensive after her last go-round with a coach, Barbra was pleasantly surprised by Davis. “I was frightened and she reassured me that I was doing everything right, but I was like a person who was paralyzed in their legs having to relearn how to walk. Judy showed me pictures of the area, showed me physiologically what the process was.” In her sessions with Davis, Barbra learned how to achieve through conscious effort what before she had just left to chance. “I will always remain grateful to her,” Barbra said.

O
N APRIL
13
The Barbra Streisand Album
broke into
Billboard
magazine’s Top 100 Albums chart, bolstered by Barbra’s March 24 appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and by huge sales in San Francisco. A week later her hungry i gig ended. Enrico Banducci hated to see her go, but he couldn’t extend her engagement because he had earlier booked another act to follow her. “In another year,” he told a columnist, “no one will be able to afford her at all.”

After Barbra’s last show, Banducci bounded onstage, his violin in hand, and joined her in a parody of an Italian opera in which the characters are dying but continually manage to summon up one last ounce of strength to continue singing. As Barbra coughed and wheezed, prone on the floor, Banducci floridly sang to her in flawless Italian. She gamely responded with a mixture of Italianate gibberish and Yiddish. The audience loved it, and Barbra left San Francisco on April 21 awash in applause, laughter, and love.

B
arbra returned to New York in time to celebrate her twenty-first birthday on April 24 with Marty Erlichman and a few close friends. As thrilled as she was by her success so far, she desperately missed Elliott and longed to fly to London to see him. She could have—her engagement at New York’s top supper club, Basin Street East, wouldn’t begin until May
1
3—but Elliott asked her not to. “The show needs a lot of work, Barb,” he told her. “I have to concentrate. You’d be a distraction.” She understood, sort of. When she next spoke to him, she told him she wanted to start looking for a new apartment—“Something big, like a duplex, and nice, like on Central Park West or something.” Elliott said he didn’t think he’d be able to afford that. “That’s okay,” Barbra replied. “I’m making enough for both of us now.”

O
N MAY
13, the night after her appearance on Dinah Shore’s NBC variety show, Barbra began a triumphant three-week stand at the posh Basin Street East in the Shelton Towers Hotel on East Forty-eighth Street, a booking that signaled like a clarion peal that she had
arrived.
She opened for the legendary swing man Benny Goodman, whose All star Sextet joined Peter Daniels behind her. As the New York
Daily Mirror
columnist Jack Thompson pointed out, “It takes an immensely courageous girl to allow herself to be booked on the same bill with Benny Goodman, and even expect to be noticed. To appear on the same program with the great clarinetist and to run away with the show reveals something akin to show business supremacy.”

In many ways this was a homecoming for Barbra, and her fans descended on the club to welcome back the local girl who was making the big time. The lines stretched a block down Forty-eighth Street to Third Avenue. Astounded by Barbra’s drawing power, Barney Ward, the manager of the club, reportedly offered her a five-year contract to appear there exclusively. She turned him down.

Barbra’s more demonstrative fans caused Benny Goodman some chagrin when they chanted “We want Barbra! We want Barbra,” during his set. Barney Ward told an employee of the hotel, “I’ve got a real problem with her. When Benny Goodman comes on, there’s no interest, they can’t wait for him to get off and for her to come back. They’re unruly. They heckle him. They heckle
Benny Goodman
.”

Marvin Stein, Barbra’s former Flatbush neighbor, worked in the Shelton Towers health club, and he recalled that Barbra asked him if she could use the steam room “because I have nodules on my vocal cords and the doctor says steam will help.” Stein told her to be his guest. A few days into Barbra’s engagement, Mrs. Kind came into the hote
l
and ran into Stein. “Marvin, you have to do me a favor,” she said. “Barbra won’t tell me what she’s earning for her appearance here, and I really want to know. Could you find out for me?” Stein asked Ward, who told him that Barbra’s salary was $2, 500 a week. “Mrs. Kind was flabbergasted,” Stein recalled. “That was an awful lot of money, and obviously Barbra wasn’t giving any of it to her mother. The woman was in that lobby
every day
, trying to hustle Barbra.”

B
ARBRA TOOK FOUR
days off in the middle of her Basin Street East stand to fulfill some commitments. The first took her to Washington, where she sang for President John F. Kennedy at the annual Press Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton Hotel, the closest thing America has to a royal command performance, on Friday, May 24. She had tingled with excitement over the invitation for weeks; in San Francisco early in April she told a reporter that she couldn’t decide what to wear. “Something Empire? Something Napoleonic? Something—
Caligula
.” She decided on the Empire, accessorized with long white gloves and a feather boa and topped off with the new pageboy-and-bangs hairstyle fashioned for her by the popular stylist Fredrick Glaser.

She stole the show that night with five numbers, including “Happy Days Are Here Again,” during which she rarely took her eyes off the handsome young president. Afterward she stood in a reception line to meet Kennedy, and emcee Merv Griffin told her that protocol didn’t allow the president to be
“
detained” as he made his way down the line. There were to be no requests for autographs.

When Kennedy wended his way down to Barbra, he stopped and asked her how long she’d been singing. “About as long as you’ve been president,” she replied. Then she blurted, “Mr. President, my mother in Brooklyn is a big fan of yours, and if I don’t get your autograph she’ll kill me.”

Several people winced, but Kennedy just laughed. He asked to borrow Peter Daniels’s back for support and signed the program Barbra had handed him. “Thanks,” Barbra purred. “You’re a doll.” The next morning at breakfast Merv Griffin admonished her. “They specifically asked us not to stop the president.”

“But I wanted his autograph,” Barbra replied. “How many times would I get the chance to have the president sign an autograph?”

In his autobiography, Griffin says that when he asked Barbra if Kennedy had written an inscription, she said that he had scribbled “Fuck you. The President.” Barbra of course was joking. Years later she admitted that JFK had actually penned, “Best wishes—John F. Kennedy.” She also confessed that she misplaced the signature before she had a chance to give it to her mother.

Later that Saturday, Barbra hied herself off to London to catch Elliott’s opening in
On the Town
the next night. He was worried about the show, he had told her, and she wanted to be there to lend hi
m
moral support. As matters turned out, he needed it. Although Barbra led boisterous cheers at the opening, the reviews on Monday morning were lukewarm at best and full of insidious comparisons to the movie version that had featured Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin. Clearly
On the Town
wouldn’t last very long, and that prospect fell over Barbra’s reunion with Elliott like a soggy mantle. She had to leave on Tuesday to resume her Basin Street East engagement, so there was little time to discuss their future. Barbra tried to keep things light as they drove through picturesque villages north of London, stopping at tiny antique stores where she burbled with excitement about the treasures she found.

In the few days she was in England, Barbra learned what Elliott had been doing those nights when he called her later than scheduled, or not at all: he had been gambling. The news didn’t faze her much, as long as he didn’t overdo it.

W
HEN BARBRA RETURNED
to New York, Marty gave her the thrilling news that her album had jumped into the top twenty nationally. Within a few weeks it peaked at number eight, and at that point Barbra became the bestselling female vocalist in the country. Marty resisted the urge to call everyone at Columbia and bray “I told you so,” but he did roll his eyes whenever one of the label’s salesmen insisted he had known all along that Streisand would be a sensation.

The Barbra Streisand Album
ended up the most successful debut album in history released without singles support. The disc remained in the Top 40 for a phenomenal seventy-four weeks and, eighteen months after its release, received the coveted gold certification from the Record Industry Association of America, signaling that it had achieved $1 million in sales at the manufacturer’s wholesale price (33⅓ percent of the retail list price). Thus, Barbra’s first album sold approximately 700,000 units in both monaural at $3. 98 and stereo at $4. 98; in
1
963 sales of the two formats were about equal.

The album for which Barbra had been paid a $20,000 advance earned her royalties of approximately $140,000 in a year and a half and enriched Columbia’s coffers by more than $750,000. Now the company wanted Barbra back in the recording studio. With her schedule virtually nonstop for the next six months, the only time she had to spare was the first week of June. She had hoped to rejoin Elliott in London, but this was pressing. He would be home soon anyway, she told herself.

Barbra recorded eleven tracks over four days in early June. The record’s sound engineer, Frank Laico, saw a difference in Streisand from her previous sessions.
“
It’s like she got her feet wet with that first album,” he said, “and now she was ready to take over. She came into the control room and started asking, ‘Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that?’ I listened and then said, ‘Hey, Barbra, you didn’t know anything with that first album, and look how successful it’s become. I’m still the same person. I have the same ears. I’m not going to let you down.
’”

After the first session, Laico found himself flanked at the control board by Barbra on one side and Marty on the other, each giving him advice on how to mix the tracks. Laico went to Mike Berniker, who was again producing, and threatened to quit unless they
l
et him do his job as he saw fit. Berniker replied, “We’ve got to be careful. We don’t want to upset them.”