Streisand: Her Life (40 page)

B
Y THE END
of 1964 Barbra Streisand had become a very rich woman. Her
Funny Girl
salary tallied up to more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, and the annual royalties from her record sales amounted to at least that. On top of it all she had just signed a $5 million contract with CBS to star in five television specials.

She was nearly a millionaire, but Barbra considered her new wealth “play money”; the figures bandied about by her agents and manager were too fantastical for her to take seriously on an everyday basis. Marty Erlichman recalled relaying an offer to her to sing for one night for fifty thousand dollars. Barbra told him no, then asked, “Why does it cost twelve-fifty to send a messenger across town?”

“Barbra,” Marty replied, “you just turned down fifty thousand and you’re worried about twelve dollars?”

“You know me better than that, Marty,” she replied. “I can
relate
to twelve dollars.”

For Barbra, the best part of having this kind of money was that it allowed her to do anything she wanted to do with the duplex on Central Park West. Its decoration and renovation became a year-long project that occupied just about all of her spare time. She hired a decorator, Charles Murray, “to help me realize my vision.” She and Murray haunted the thrift shops for “great old things,” but now she could afford to reupholster a couch in the finest, most expensive fabrics, and anything she couldn’t find, she could have custom-made. She loved many different eras and styles, and now she could afford to live with them all—sometimes in the same room. Describing the apartment in an interview, she said, “My dining room and my living room and my foyer [are] French, and my kitchen and my office [are] sort of crazy Victorian and American—early American—and the den is contemporary Victorian and Modern, and the bedroom is English Tudor and Jacobean and Italian.”

Every surface of the bathroom was covered with red patent leather; chandeliers hung in six of the rooms, including the bathroom. “Sure it’s expensive,” Barbra told the columnist Earl Wilson. “Everything good is expensive.”

T
HE WINTER GARDEN
remained dark on Monday night, January 18, 1965, so that Barbra could perform at Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural gala. Johnson had helped America heal itself in the wake of John Kennedy’s death, and to the delight of Kennedy admirers who feared that with his southern conservative background Johnson would reverse many of Kennedy’s progressive policies, he had created the Great Society program, the most liberal package of government aid to the poor since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. To even greater surprise he worked for and signed into law the most sweeping civil rights legislation in the country’s history. In November of 1964 he had been elected to his own full term as president by an overwhelming majority over the conservative Republican Arizona senator Barry M. Goldwater. On January 20 he would be sworn in, and Barbra had been asked to be a part of the week-long celebration in Washington.

Barbra was delighted to accept, and she appeared along with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, Alfred Hitchcock, Julie Andrews, Carol Channing (who sang “Hello, Lyndon!”), Harry Belafonte, the comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Carol Burnett, Johnny Carson, and Woody Allen, among others. During the rehearsal she took a wad of gum out of her mouth and stuck it under a wooden three-legged stool. When she left, two young girls rushed up to the stage and retrieved it.

Glittery in a beaded dress in shades of gold, orange, and red, she held the audience in the National Armory spellbound with a stunning rendition of “People” despite a minor mix-up in her lighting cues. The columnist Dorothy Kilgallen observed that “Barbra Streisand came on and sang flawlessly, moving her arms sinuously, using her hands with maximum effect, turning her elaborate beehive wig toward all parts of the auditorium as she made ‘People’ sound like the most important song next to the National Anthem.” Walter Winchell concurred: “No other star won such rapt attention and respect.”

On Sunday, April 4, Barbra participated in a three-hour benefit to raise money for civil rights groups. The event—attended by eighteen hundred people including the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a leader of several protest marches—raised $150,000, the most ever for a one-night fundraiser. Barbra sang Harold Arlen’s “That’s a Fine Kind of Freedom.”

A
S THE MONTHS
onstage in
Funny Girl
dragged on, Barbra began to dread doing the show night after night. The out-of-town tryouts, as stressful as they were, had exhilarated her. She had learned the sometimes hourly changes in a flash; she had thrived on the excitement, the danger, of doing a scene for the first time while in front of a paying audience. She was handed a new version of the show’s fina
l
scene twenty minutes before the curtain went up on opening night in New York—and she loved it. But as the months wore on, and
Funny Girl
continued to sell out, thoughts of her run-of-the-play contract made Barbra cringe. “My last year on stage in
Funny Girl
was a nightmare,” she said. “It drove me into analysis. I felt like I was locked up in prison.... It was very trying to be at the whim of every audience, to have to go out and try all over again every performance. If the laughs were smaller at one performance than another, then I’d worry why they were smaller. I’d worry during the performance. I’d keep thinking, I can’t seem to please these people enough. It was very, very exhausting.”

Sometimes she wasn’t up to doing the whole two and a half hours eight times a week. George Reeder recalled that there were three versions of the show, and which one they did at any given performance depended on Barbra. “There was the full version, then a shorter version where she wouldn’t do one or two of the reprises. In the shortest version we’d eliminate entire scenes and all of the reprises except ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ at the end.”

Early in 1965 the cast found themselves doing the shorter shows more frequently, because Barbra was preoccupied with filming
My Name Is Barbra,
the first television special in her multimillion-dollar contract with CBS.

I
n March of 1965 Marty Erlichman, David Begelman, and CBS programming chief Michael Dann gathered for a meeting at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. Dann had just screened
My Name Is Barbra,
and as Marty slid into the leather banquette he wondered just how effusive Dann’s praise would be.

“Let me get this out of the way,” Dann began. “I just saw the special, and in one fell swoop you’re gonna ruin this girl’s career.” Marty’s eyes widened and his astonished gaze went from Dann to Begelman and back again.

“That show is gonna do
daytime
ratings,” Dann went on. “It’s gonna be blasted by the critics. We’ve got a firm air date that we can’t move, so here’s what I think you should do to save the show. I would rearrange the three sections of it and put the second one first, where she does the comedy monologue. I mean, how dare you take this girl, with a name nobody’s even gonna be able to pronounce, and allow her to open up a TV show by singing for seventeen straight minutes before she even says hello to the audience?”

Maybe I should have expected this, Marty thought, because once again Barbra was trying to break the mold. Television specials always had guest stars, usually performers who were under contract to the network airing the special. Months earlier, Dann had suggested that Barbra have Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin on her show.

“I saw that show,” Marty had told him. “It was called
Judy Garland and Friends
.”

“You’re right,” Dann had replied. “Let’s go instead with two big CBS stars, Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffith.”

Barbra wouldn’t give that idea a second thought. “Why did
n
’t I want guest stars?” she said later. “It’s that idle, silly talk you have to indulge in on TV shows. It doesn’t interest me.”

Now Marty couldn’t believe that Dann, who must have been speaking for others at CBS as well, hadn’t seen the quality of Barbra’s show. He told Dann he was dead wrong and offered to void the entire CBS deal. “Daytime numbers? She’ll double them. It will be the highest-rated variety special this year. And reviews? She’ll win every award.” Marty could afford to hold his ground because Barbra had complete creative control over her special and was answerab
l
e only to the network censors.
My Name Is Barbra
would be aired as it was or not at all.

Barbra’s contract with CBS called for one special a year for three years, a possible series in the
f
uture, and further specials to stretch over a ten-year period, for which she would reportedly earn $5 million. “I’m fuzzy on the details,” she told the Associated Press. “But it gives me creative control over my programs. That’s the main thing. I don’t have to get sponsor approval.” Indeed, shortly after the contract was announced, Chemstrand Carpeting agreed to sponsor the first special sight unseen.

“I want to do something vital,” Barbra said, “something important.” She and Marty assembled a pool of innovative young talent that included director Dwight Hemion, scenic designer Tom John, and the thirty-four-year-old Joe Layton, credited with the conception of the production numbers. Peter Matz would arrange and conduct the music. “We all decided,” Marty said, “that the whole show [with the exception of a brief comic monologue] would be Barbra just singing. We didn’t want to worry about getting that funny piece of sketch material that may or may not work.”

Rehearsals and production began in January, scheduled around Barbra’s eight weekly performances at the Winter Garden. The first act of the special, taped at a Midtown CBS television soundstage, had Barbra rush around a multilevel set to the strains of
“
I’m Late,” stopping only to sing lovely renditions of “Make Believe” and “How Does the Wine Taste?” before cavorting as a five-year-old in an oversized playground while she sang of tigers and polar bears and giraffes. The second act took place at the elegant Bergdorf Goodman department store on Fifth Avenue and featured Barbra singing songs of poverty and deprivation while she pranced around the store in fur coats, diamonds, and fancy hats. For the third act Barbra sang in concert.

On April 25, three nights before the show aired, Barbra made a rare promotional appearance on the venerable quiz show
What’s My Line?
As the mystery guest, Streisand signed in on a blackboard, and she immediately managed to plug her special by boldly scrawling “My Name Is Barbra.” Before a blindfolded panel composed of the actors Tony Randall and Arlene Francis, the publisher Bennett Cerf, and the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Barbra attempted to obscure her voice by responding in Italian to questions designed to determine her identity. It didn’t work; she was recognized quickly, thanks in part to continuous cheers from the studio audience. At the conclusion of the segment, host John Charles Daly announced, “Our camera and sound men worked with Miss Streisand [on part of her special], and they think it’s gonna be one of the great successes of all time.”

T
HE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY,
April 28, Barbra and the entire
Funny Girl
cast crowded into her dressing room to watch the first fifteen minutes of the special during their intermission. “Finally the big moment came—nine o’clock!” Barbra said. “But there was no
singing
, there was no
picture.
My first television special and the engineer had forgotten to push the button to start the show! I couldn’t believe it.” Streisand the perfectionist recalls the moment as being more dramatic than it really was. Only the first second and a ha
l
f of the show was missed, and it was barely noticed by anyone but Barbra.

After she completed that night’s performance of
Funny Girl
, Barbra, accompanied by Elliott and Marty, swept into a swank cocktail party in her honor hosted by Bergdorf Goodman owner Andrew Goodman in his twenty-two-room penthouse above the store. Sybil Burton, Bill Blass, and Arlene Francis joined most of Manhattan’s high society in singing Streisand’s praises. Wearing a jeweled evening gown in paisley voile, “and beautiful silver-painted fingernails to match,” Barbra accepted the compliments graciously, but soon repaired nervously to a bedroom, where early reviews of the show were read to her over the phone. The first one was an ecstatic rave, but Barbra’s reaction to it surprised the guests. “They must be more specific,” she fretted to no one in particular. “I want to know everything.”

“Everything” turned out to be all that Barbra could have hoped for. The majority opinion was echoed by a review by Rick DuBrow of United Press International that has become a milestone in the Streisand lore. The special, he felt, was “a pinnacle moment of American show business, in any form, in any period. She is so great, it is shocking, something like being in love.... She may well be the most supremely talented and complete popular entertainer this country has ever produced.... She sang... but that is as complete as saying Tolstoy was a writer.... She touches you to your toes, and then she knocks you out.”

For days afterward critical raves continued to pour into Marty Erlichman’s office, but his favorite response came from Mike Dann, the man who weeks earlier had told him the show would ruin Barbra’s career. Dann’s phone call was the first one he got the morning after the show aired. “I apo
l
ogize,” Dann said simply. “I was wrong.” By the end of the week it was clear Marty had been right about the viewership, too.
My Name Is Barbra
garnered a terrific 35.6 percent share of the viewing audience, topping its competition.

The importance of
My Name Is Barbra
to the broadening appeal of Barbra Streisand can scarcely be overstated. In a single hour she cemented the already passionate loyalty of her existing fans and won millions of new admirers. Gone forever was the unkempt gum-chewing
mieskeit
in secondhand finery who sometimes shrieked the climaxes of her songs. She had been replaced by a silkily assured performer who despite her youth could now be placed confidently in the same league as such esteemed veterans as Garland and Sinatra. For those who hadn’t seen Barbra on television since the days of
PM East
, the transformation was nothing short of jaw-dropping.

Not everyone, though, was entranced. Following the showing of
My Name Is Barbra
, Streisand became one of the most controversial women in America. Almost everything about her became fodder for intense debate: her looks, her fashions, her fingernails, her dramatic vocal delivery, her Jewishness, her sex appeal, her lack of it. What some considered vast, wondrous talent others saw as shameless showing off. She made the best-dressed list and the worst-dressed list. She was regarded as exotically beautiful by many, hopelessly ugly by many others.

The allure of Barbra’s glitzy success was especially inspiring to youngsters who didn’t fit into the WASPish mold of cheerleader or captain of the football team. If she could turn homely into exotic and a prominent “schnoz” into a classic profile, and make the cover of
Vogue
in the bargain, maybe they could, too. Within days of the airing of
My Name Is Barbra,
teenage girls in high schools across America proudly sported exaggerated eye makeup and blunt-cut pageboys while they struggled to grow their fingernails to “dragon lady” lengths. Barbra Streisand had truly become a national phenomenon.

T
O NO ONE’S
surprise,
My Name Is Barbra
received six Emmy nominations, and at ceremonies held simultaneously in New York and Hollywood on September 15, 1965, the show won five of the awards, including Outstanding Program Achievement in Entertainment and Outstanding Individual Achievement by an Actor or Performer. Looking a bit zaftig but tanned and glowing, Barbra accepted her Emmy with relaxed good cheer. “I think I have a run in my stocking,” she quipped. “Of all nights.” She told the audience that she used to watch award shows as a little girl only “to see who showed up drunk.” She then announced that she had figured out she would have to perform in
Funny Girl
for fifty-six years to be seen by as many people as had watched
My Name Is Barbra.
She closed her remarks by recalling a letter she had received shortly after the special was aired. “Of all the people on your show,” a young fan wrote, “I
l
iked you the best.”