Streisand: Her Life (34 page)

It was at this time that Allan Miller saw Barbra give “the most surpassing
l
y beautiful performance I’ve ever seen on a musical comedy stage.” He had been working with her daily, refining her interpretation of Fanny, developing the nuances that make a characterization memorable. The night before, he had suggested that Barbra dedicate her next performance to her father, in the hope that the deep feelings she had for him would translate into a richer emotional outpouring from her.

It worked. After the performance, Miller recalled, Ray Stark, Jule Styne, Bob Merrill, and Milton Rosenstock went to Barbra’s dressing room. “They said to her, ‘Barbra, if we ever had any doubts about you, please forgive us. You are golden. Anything you want is yours.’ And they literally bowed down in front of this twenty-one-year-old girl for this incredible performance.”

Miller remained after the others left. “So what did
you
think?” Barbra asked. Miller simply hugged her.

“No notes tonight?”

“No notes. You were flawless. Let’s go out and celebrate.”

The next night, as he watched Barbra’s performance, Miller was even more stunned. “She tried to do everything the same from the night before, and it was a travesty.
I
t was unhuman, unfeeling. Nothing worked. She was back to indicating, not feeling. Ray Stark stormed out of the theater in the middle of it, and later in her dressing room it was just her and me.”

“Don’t say anything,” Barbra said softly. “I know, I know.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re going to go over what we worked on.”

“Oh, God.”

“Yes, we are. We’re going to go over everything we worked on the other night to get you back into focus. You can’t do this again.”

The next night Miller felt Barbra had brought the performance about two-thirds of the way back, but that evidently wasn’t enough for Ray Stark. According to Miller, “Stark came zooming back to her dressing room and flung open the door. He barreled in and barked at me, You get out of my way!’ Then he
screamed
at Barbra. ‘You bitch! You goddamn fucking little bitch! How did I trust you? You’ll never work in the theater again! I want Monday night’s performance back!
’”

“What are you yelling at me about?” Barbra wailed.

“I’m yelling at you because it’s my show. I own you.”

“You do not own me! You get out of here. My throat is hurting and I don’t want to yell. Fuck you! Get out!”

Stark was shocked. “You can’t say that to me!”

“This is my dressing room. And I’m saying it to you!
Fuck you!
Get out!”

Stark stormed out, slamming the door behind him. Barbra looked at Miller wide-eyed. “Did you hear what I said to him?”

“Good!” Miller said.

Barbra giggled. “Do you think I should call the others in and say it to them, too?”

“No, you don’t need to do that,” Miller replied.

“Wow,” Barbra whispered. “I really said ‘Fuck you!’ to Ray Stark!”

S
TREISAND’S INCONSISTENCY,
unresolved book problems, the lack of a firm directorial hand in Garson Kanin—as
Funny Girl
plodded toward its Broadway previews, all of these problems convinced Ray Stark that he had to bring in another director to “whip the show into shape.” He asked Jerome Robbins to come back. Robbins caught a performance in Philadelphia and he agreed to return as “production supervisor” only because “Streisand has gotten so good, I want the rest of the show to live up to what she’s doing.”

Robbins lost no time. He pushed back the Broadway opening, which had already been postponed twice, from March 14 to March 24. He immediately restaged most of the dance routines Carol Haney had created for the show, and jettisoned even more of the musical numbers and scenes that didn’t highlight Barbra. “They wanted every number to stop the show,” Garson Kanin said. “And who can blame them?”

Robbins was amazed at how much Streisand had grown as a performer in less than a year. She had soaked up every ounce of advice from Allan Miller, and she had honed her theatrical instincts to the point where she was able to make the right interpretive decisions on her own. She seemed to thrive on the creative chaos that drove all around her to distraction. Robbins later wrote, “She accepts the twelve pages of new material to go in that evening’s performance and pores over them while
shnorring
part of your sandwich and someone else’s Coke. She reads, and like an instantaneous translator, she calculates how all the myriad changes will affect the emotional and physical patterns.... When she finishes reading, her reactions are immediate and violent—loving or hating them—and she will not change her mind. Not that day. During the rehearsal, in her untidy, exploratory, meteoric fashion, she goes way out, never afraid to let herself go anywhere or try anything.... That night onstage, in place of the messy, grubby girl, a sorceress sails through every change without hesitation, leaving wallowing fellow players in her wake... her performances astound, arouse, fulfill.”

W
hen Barbra opened on Broadway,” Shana Alexander wrote in a
Life
magazine profile, “the entire gorgeous, rattletrap show business Establishment blew sky-high. Overnight critics began raving, photographers flipping, flacks yakking and columnists flocking. Thanks to such massive stimulation the American public has now worked itself into a perfect star-is-born swivet.”

The opening-night audience was stunned by this starburst of talent. Onstage Barbra seemed to possess a pulsating life force, unbound by theatrical convention. She was gangly and defiant as the young Fanny Brice surrounded by a chorus of nay-saying neighbors who mocked her show business ambitions because “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty...” Then she rattled the Winter Garden to its rafters with one of the most powerful statements of a dream and a belief in oneself ever written for the musical theater, “I’m the Greatest Star.” She reduced her audience to helpless hilarity as the pregnant bride in “His Love Makes Me Beautiful.” She touched every heart during her awkward and nervous introduction to the “gorgeous” Nick Arnstein and with her yearning rendition of
“
People.” She ended Act One with a thrilling anthem to the power of love, “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”

By now the audience members, awed by the power and versatility of this twenty-one-year-old Broadway tyro, knew they were seeing an extraordinary melding of performer and role. Barbra’s background had become well known enough that the similarities between her life story and Fanny Brice’s were lost on very few. As the audience cheered Fanny on through poverty to stardom and love and loss, they also cheered Barbra’s incredible rise from a housing project in Brooklyn to the top of her profession. It was the start of the Streisand cult.

The reviews could have been written by Barbra’s press agent.

“If New York were Paris,”
Time’s
critic felt, “Broadway could temporarily consider renaming itself the Rue Streisand. Some stars merely brighten up a marquee; Barbra Streisand sets an entire theater ablaze.... Actress, songstress, comedienne, mimic, clown—she is the theater’s new girl for all seasons.”

On this memorable night—March 26, 1964—yet another of Barbra Streisand’s girlhood dreams came true.

T
HE FAME AND
the adulation that
Funny Girl
brought Barbra staggered her. Two weeks after the show opened, an evocative portrait of her by the artist Henry Koerner graced the cover of
Time
magazine, placing her among a select group of entertainers so honored by a publication that then generally featured scientists and statesmen on its cover. The six-page article, complete with color photos, rare in that era, was headlined simply “The Girl.”

Six weeks later
Life
did its own cover story on Barbra, entitled “A Born Loser’s Success and Precarious Love.” Reporter Shana Alexander’s perceptive and glowing profile described Streisand as “Cinderella at the ball, every hopeless kid’s hopeless dream come true.... Her show is a sellout and her albums are a smash. Even more remarkable is the sudden nationwide frenzy to achieve the Streisand ‘look.’ Hairdressers are being besieged with requests for Streisand wigs (Beatle, but kempt). Women’s magazines are hastily assembling features on the Streisand fashion (threadbare) and the Streisand eye makeup (proto-Cleopatra
)
.”

The success Barbra had dreamed about for so long left her exhilarated yet oddly unfulfilled. “The reality can never live up to the fantasy, can it?” she mused to a reporter. “The excitement of life lies in the hope, in the striving for something rather than the attainment.” In her fantasies there had been no stress, no exhaustion, no poor performances, no stomachaches from nerves, no battles with co-stars and producers, no disappointments.

She took little joy in the hosannas thrown her way by everyone from gossip columnists to august national publications. In the most glowing review, she would fixate on the one reservation the critic expressed about her performance. Again and again she would ask reporters, “So am I great or am I lousy? I gotta know!”

She mistrusted the effusive praise. In the syndrome her former boyfriend Stanley Beck had first pointed out to her, she thought less of anyone who considered her great. How much can they know? she would think. Tonight’s performance was lousy! She didn’t understand that what she considered lousy was still enthralling to anyone seeing her for the first time.

She had been told for so long that she was unattractive, that her clothes were ugly, that she would never make it. Now that she was described as beautiful, named a fashion trendsetter, and celebrated as the toast of Broadway, she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. “The trouble with Barbra,” Elliott later said, “is that she can’t seem to let herself be happy.”

Of all the disillusionments Barbra had suffered on her way to the top, Marlon Brando supplied one of the worst when she finally met her girlhood heartthrob. “I wanted to say to him, ‘Let us speak to one another because I understand you. You are just like me.’ So one night I’m waiting to go on at a benefit, and somebody comes up behind me and starts caressing my shoulder and nuzzling my neck. I turn around, and there he is! It’s Brando. And he says, ‘I’m letting you off easy,’ and I laugh and say, ‘Whaddaya mean, easy? This is the best part!’ And then, I don’t know, what the hell was there to say? It was kind of sad, because he wasn’t like me at all.”

The kids who waited every day outside the stage door for a glimpse of Barbra, an autograph, perhaps a picture, felt that she was like them, too. Some of them were homely, some overweight, some homosexual, some just different in one way or another. All of them felt like misfits, and Barbra Streisand was the most gloriously successful misfit since James Dean. If she could triumph, capture the spotlight, win fame and wealth, maybe they could too. She became a symbol to them, proof that they were indeed what they felt like inside: not strange but special.

They were prepared to idolize her, but she didn’t want to be worshiped. As Barbra finished an evening’s performance and got ready to leave the theater, she would ask her dresser, Ceil Mack, “Are they out there?”

“They’re always out there,” Ceil would reply. “You know that.”

“Tell them I’ve already left.”

“They know you haven’t left.”

“Oh, God, I wish they’d leave me alone,” Barbra would sigh. Then she’d put on dark glasses, a babushka over her hair, and an oversized coat and leave the theater through the front door, unrecognized among the last of the audience as they filed out.

While she waited for a cab in the rain one day, a teenage fan took off his coat and threw it over a puddle in the gutter for her to walk on, a Broadway Sir Walter Raleigh.
“
Don’t do that for me!” Barbra exclaimed, shocked. “Pick your coat up.” Chagrined, the young man did as he was told. Barbra looked back at him as she got into the cab and said, “Have more respect for yourself than that.”

Sometimes she found the fervor of her fans frightening, even threatening. Her arranger Peter Matz, working with her on a new album, recalled walking with Barbra to the theater one evening. “We approached the backstage entrance, and it was mobbed by those autograph people. Many of them are very weird. When they saw Barbra coming, they started screaming, ‘Here’s Barbra! Here’s Barbra!’ and they headed toward us en masse. Barbra dug her fingers into my arm to the point that blood was coming out. Her face was totally drained white. She was terrified of this assault. The doorman cleared the way and we got inside, but she was shaking and sweating.”

A
FEW WEEKS
after
Funny Girl
opened, Barbra scratched one of her corneas, and although she went to the theater she was advised not to perform because the tremendous exertion her role required might aggravate the injury. “My understudy was getting ready to go on in my place,” Barbra said. “Then I got this little dish of candy from my stepfather—he was out in front, in the audience.” Although Louis Kind and her mother had never divorced, Barbra had not seen or heard from him in the eight years since he had walked out on the family. The minute she heard Kind was in the audience, Barbra told the stage manager, “I’m going on.”

Her doctor gave her some anesthetic for the eye, and she walked onstage determined to show her stepfather how wrong he had been about her. “I never did a show like that,” Barbra said. “It was the best performance I ever gave.” Afterward she went to her dressing room and refused all visitors, waiting for Lou Kind to come backstage and finally tell her that she had done something well. She waited for over an hour, but he never appeared.

Barbra kept the dish of candy—the only thing Kind had given her since that doll when she was six—for twenty-three years. Then, in 1987, she said, “After all these years I just threw it out. So I got rid of him.”

Knowing whether she had finally impressed her stepfather was especially important to Barbra because her mother, even after all the acclaim—the cover of
Time
for goodness’ sake!—still hadn’t come around. “I wish I could convince my mother that I’m a success,” Barbra told an interviewer. “Even today she calls me and says, ‘So-and-so in the office says he read something nice about you in the papers.’ But it never seems to mean anything to
her
personally.”

Mrs. Kind subscribed to the theory that if she praised her daughter too highly to her face she’d get “a swelled head.” She did express pride in Barbra’s accomplishment to a reporter, however: “One of the big thrills for me was seeing her open in Philadelphia in
Funny Girl
.... I was so nervous before the show—I seemed to feel everything Barbra was going through. I was so overwhelmed that I just couldn’t sit still. I had to leave my seat and stand in the back of the theater. As I heard Barbra singing, I got emotional. She was so terrific it upset my balance—my feelings just welled up in me. I felt fearful for her—and excited and proud, all at the same time.” But for whatever reason, Mrs. Kind never said any of this directly to Barbra.