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“All those stars are something,” a makeup man said.

“Something is right,” Callow said. “Tight is what you mean. No wonder they’re all rich. Nineteen packs of cigarettes.” He shook his head. “Sid Mintz told me a story once. He was working over at Paramount, working as Jack Oakie’s wardrobe man. Well, when the picture started, Sid tells Oakie he’ll take good care of his things. First thing you know, Oakie starts bringing his suits in in the morning for Sid to get cleaned. Not his wardrobe. His suits, from home, from his own closet, so help me God. Then his wife’s dresses, then his laundry. Sid tells me he even brings the sheets. Well, when the picture is over, Oakie, he says to Sid, ‘You took real good care of me, Sid, go out and buy yourself a good cigar.’ And he gives him a twenty-five-cent piece.”

The crowd around Callow guffawed. “Oh, I tell you,” Callow said, “the true story of Hollywood’s never been written. There’s so many funny things happen, you wish you had written them down.”

He looked at his watch. Julie Andrews’ car was sliding down the street. She jumped from the back seat, wearing a long, sleeveless cotton bathrobe.

“Oh, I’m sorry I’m late,” she said.

The star had arrived and the desultory swapping of tales about the stars was over for the day.

“Let’s go to work,” Callow said.

The start of shooting on
Hello, Dolly!
was marked by an exchange of gifts, notes of encouragement and a small champagne and caviar party for Barbra Streisand, who was playing the title role, in the office of director Gene Kelly. Richard Zanuck sent producer Ernest Lehman an additional supply of champagne and caviar along with a note that said:

For his part, Lehman sent Kelly a gift of brandy and whiskey, which brought the following note in return:

There was an 89-day shooting schedule on
Hello, Dolly!
and at the end of the first week’s shooting, Ernest Lehman still did not have a completed budget. In his five-room suite of offices in the Old Writers Building, Lehman fretted. Worry seems almost endemic to him. He is a slender man in his early fifties with long graying sideburns and thinning hair arranged artfully across the top of his head. He had been a top screenwriter for over fifteen years, several times a nominee for the Academy Award and the recipient of a number of best screenplay awards from the Writers Guild. His last assignment at the Studio was the screenplay of
The Sound of Music
, for which, in addition to his normal salary, he received a token 2 per cent of the picture’s profits, a piece that now amounted to nearly a million dollars.
Hello, Dolly!
was only the second picture that Lehman had produced. The first was
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and the disparity between the two projects seemed at times to overwhelm him. “I’ve got some goddamn nerve,” he said. “From a four-character picture to this.” A pained look crossed his harried face. “You know, there’s one sequence where we’re going to put out a call for 2,500 extras.”

He was wearing a checked jacket and a soft white
Zhivago shirt and on his wrist he wore a thin gold watch on which the letters of his name replaced the numbers, like this:

“You’ve got to have twelve letters in your name,” Lehman said. “Otherwise it won’t work. And it’s best to have six in your first name and six in your last.”

He buzzed his secretary and asked her to ring Chico Day, the production manager on
Hello, Dolly!
His wistful eyes rested on the painting of Barbra Streisand that dominated his office. “It’s by Claire Trevor,” he said, cupping his hand over the phone. There was also a photograph of Barbra Streisand on an end table, in a silver frame that was a gift from Mike Nichols, who had directed
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Engraved on the frame were the words, “Hello, Forever. Love, Nichols.
Virginia Woolf
. 1965.”

“Chico,” Lehman said, when Day came to the phone, “how are we doing on the rain insurance?”
Hello, Dolly!
was supposed to go on location for a month in Garrison, N.Y., and the weather in the East was always a problem. Cover sets were being built in Garrison so that the
company could shoot interiors in the event of rain. A prolonged rain spell could be prohibitively costly, forcing a company to shut down and adding as much as several million dollars to the budget of a major picture, only a fraction of which could be recouped by rain insurance.

“We’ve only got cover for three days, Chico, so I need the figures on what it’s going to cost,” Lehman said. He listened for a moment, his face growing even more mournful. “You can only get it by the hour? Jesus, if it rains, it gets so muddy you can’t shoot all day. An hour’s rain is going to cost us a day anyway, so let’s try and get this insurance by the day and forget this hour stuff.”

He hung up the phone and picked up a stack of publicity photographs of himself, examining each one through a pair of glasses without temples that resembled a lorgnette. “Gee, is my double chin as bad as in these pictures?” Lehman said, patting himself under the chin. “I don’t think so.” He handed the photographs back to Patricia Newcomb, the public relations woman assigned to
Hello, Dolly!
“See if they can do something with my chin.”

The telephone rang. It was Barbra Streisand, soliciting funds for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. A number of people in the entertainment business had pledged the SCLC one per cent of their annual income and Lehman was one of those from whom a similar contribution was being asked.

“Gee, Barbra, this is going to be an expensive telephone call,” Lehman said. “Why don’t you call Freddie Fields? He’s rich. Or Dick Shepherd? He’s got a lot of that Goetz money.”

Late that afternoon, Lehman drove his Cadillac over to Stage 14 where Michael Kidd, who was choreographing
Hello, Dolly!
, was rehearsing the title number with Barbra Streisand. The set was the most complicated interior for
Hello, Dolly!
, and at $375,000, the most costly of all the inside sets. It was called Harmonia Gardens and was suggested by the more lavish restaurants of New York’s gaslight era. Lehman’s production designer, John DeCuir, had built the set on four levels, foyer, bar, dining room and dance floor. Fittings and furnishings were burnished gold and ivory, and curtains, upholstery and carpeting were crimson, pink and salmon. There were two large 28-foot fountains, twenty columns each ringed with a fountain of its own, four domed private dining alcoves and, dominating the set, a huge staircase. It was at the top of this staircase that Barbra Streisand was now standing, chewing placidly on a hangnail.

She was wearing a lightweight muslin version of the beaded topaz dress designed by Irene Sharaff for the
Hello, Dolly!
number. The purpose of the rehearsal was to see if the dress was functional. Both Lehman and Kidd suspected that the original, still unfinished, was too heavy for Barbra Streisand to execute the high kicks choreographed by Kidd. Standing in the sunken dance floor on the lowest level of the set, Kidd clapped his hands. The male dancers lounging in rehearsal clothes at the foot of the staircase took their positions. Lehman pulled up a stool and perched on it beside Kidd. The music for the number had already been pre-recorded and Kidd motioned for it to begin. Beating rhythm with his hands, he said, “Okay, let’s take it from the top.”

Barbra Streisand began moving slowly down the red-carpeted staircase, mouthing the words of “Hello, Dolly.” “Hello, Rudy. Well, hello, Harry.” When she reached the bottom of the stairs, the tempo picked up. The dancers swirled around her, circling the ramp above the sunken dance floor. Twice Barbra Streisand tripped over the train of her dress and twice more the dancers stepped on it. The number concluded, after a complete circuit of the set had been made, with Barbra Streisand, all alone, ascending the staircase. Kidd whistled through his teeth for the music to stop.

“The train’s got to go, Ern,” Kidd said to Lehman.

“Maybe we’d better get Irene over here,” Lehman said hesitantly.

“Sure, Ern, get Irene over here, but the train’s still got to go,” Kidd said amiably.

A call was put in to Irene Sharaff to come immediately to Stage 14. Lehman fingered the neck of his Zhivago shirt. “Michael, I don’t think the number ends right,” he said. “I think Barbra should be coming down toward the camera, not going away from it.”

“No question, Ern, it stinks,” Kidd said pleasantly.

“What I mean, Mike …” Lehman began.

“No problem, Ern,” Kidd said. “The number’s not finished. We’re just here to see how the dress works and how the set works.”

“It doesn’t stink, Mike, that’s not what I meant.”

“Ern, the number’s not finished,” Kidd said firmly.

The stage door opened and Irene Sharaff walked onto the set. Winner of five Academy Awards and a number of Broadway awards for costume design, she was an intense, formidable, chain-smoking woman in late middle age. She was wearing a suede miniskirt, foulard
blouse and ranch hat, and as Kidd explained the problem with the dress, she sat noncommittally on a stool, puffing on a cigarette.

“Perhaps I’d better see what you’re talking about, Michael,” she said when Kidd finished. Her tone was deliberate and slightly patronizing.

Kidd motioned for the number to be done again. The music began, and as Barbra Streisand and the dancers circled the set, Irene Sharaff twisted slowly on her stool, following their movements. Again both Barbra Streisand and the dancers tripped on the train of the dress.

“See what I mean?” Kidd said when the music stopped.

Irene Sharaff ground out her cigarette with the toe of her shoe. “No, Michael, I don’t see what the problem is.”

“It’s simple, Irene,” Kidd said. “Barbra trips on it, the dancers step on it.”

“Perhaps if you changed the movements, Michael, the dancers wouldn’t step on it,” Irene Sharaff said.

Lehman wiped his brow nervously. Kidd seemed unperturbed. “We’ve still got Barbra tripping on it.”

“I don’t think in the finished dress she will,” Irene Sharaff said. “The material is so heavy, it flows much better than the muslin.”

“There’s another problem, Irene,” Kidd said patiently. “The dress is so heavy Barbra won’t be able to kick at the end of the number.”

“But, Michael,” Irene Sharaff said as if to a child. “Is the kick necessary?”

“I think it is, yeah,” Kidd said. He seemed unfazed by Irene Sharaff’s recalcitrance.

“The dress will be finished next week, Michael,”
Irene Sharaff said. “Why don’t we wait until we see it on Barbra before we talk about changes?”

“Sure, Irene,” Kidd said cheerfully. “And if the dress doesn’t work, there’ll be some changes made.”

Michael Kidd was also unhappy about the set. The dance floor, the lowest of the set’s four levels, was in a sunken well bordered with booths and banquettes that were topped with gaslights and curlicue grillwork. The circuit made by the dancers in the
Hello, Dolly!
number was to be on the next higher level, around the rim of the well. But much of the number was going to be shot from the floor of the well and Kidd wanted the booths lining the sunken dance floor ripped out. His reasons were that the diners in the booths and the gaslights and the grillwork would all be in the foreground of the shot, detracting from Barbra Streisand and the dancers doing the number immediately above and behind. With the booths out, the cameras could concentrate on the main action.

“But, Michael, the set is supposed to be a restaurant,” said John DeCuir, the production designer on
Hello, Dolly!
and a winner of Academy Awards for both
The King and I
and
Cleopatra
.

“John, I know it’s a restaurant, but is the purpose of this set to show a number or to show a lot of people eating?” Kidd said.

“I’m just saying, Michael, that if we take out the booths, then there was no reason making the set a restaurant,” DeCuir said.

“And I’m saying, John, that people aren’t going to pay $3.50 a ticket to see someone gumming down a lamb
chop,” Kidd said. He dispatched his assistant, Sheila Hackett, to one of the booths, and then he crouched and squinted in the middle of the well, using his hands as a camera to frame a shot. “See, we’ve got Sheila right there in the foreground, right? She’s a nice kid, but the people aren’t paying to see her, they’re paying to see Barbra. And Barbra’s going to be behind her.”

Lehman shook his head in annoyance. “For Christ’s sake, why does this have to come up now?” he said angrily. “We had sketches of this set, we had a model of this set, so why didn’t you two get together before this? You know what this set cost, you know Stan Hough’s on my ass about it, you know we can’t spend another goddamn nickel on it, and now you’re telling me we’ve got to rip out some booths.”