Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (16 page)

Chapman asked what other interesting nuggets she could tell him about herself. She said she’d taken belly dancing lessons once. That got written down too. He asked about previous work. Barbra likely enthused over the Theatre Studio and
The Insect Comedy
and
The Boy Friend,
but Chapman wasn’t much interested in any of the acting credentials, undoubtedly to Barbra’s chagrin. But he seems to have paid attention to her meeting with Eddie Blum and wrote that part down.

In the resulting press release that was cranked out on Chapman’s mimeograph machine, the success Barbra had enjoyed in New York was hyperbolized with adjectives such as “phenomenal,” “unprecedented, ” and “groundbreaking”—standard publicist jargon. It was effective enough to get a few bites from various outlets, and that was how Barbra, nervous and fidgety, found herself sitting with Jack Harris in front of a microphone, speaking haltingly to perhaps twenty thousand listeners in metropolitan Detroit.

But what wasn’t halting was her rendition of “Right as the Rain,” one of the songs she’d banged out with Matt Michaels over the last few days. When Harris turned the mike over to her and asked her to sing, the kid with the strange clothes and crossed eyes let loose with a voice that left everyone in the studio impressed. “Right as the rain,” she sang, “that falls from above, so real, so right as our love . . .”

And out there in radioland, thousands listened and took note.

By day Fred Tew
was a PR guy for Chrysler, but at night he got to do what he loved best. Arriving at the Caucus Club, he was known by everyone. The Grubers clapped him on the back as a waiter brought over his regular drink. Being the Detroit point man for the entertainment trade paper
Variety
had its perks. Tew got to see every important new act or show that came through the city. So when he got a call from Ross Chapman telling him that the new kid at the Caucus was worth checking out, Tew was there. It was March 2. Barbra had been doing her show for about a week.

And in that week’s time, a lot had changed. The media campaign had paid off. Many of those filing into the Caucus that night had heard Barbra on Harris’s show, or on another radio program,
Guest House,
which also aired on WJR, at seven o’clock in the evening. Her little press junket
had also included some print interviews with local newspapers. Once again, Barbra had made sure to point out that she was on her way to being an actress and that singing was just a temporary diversion. With such an attitude, it was easy to become even more cavalier with the facts. Everyone had bought the idea that she’d been born in Turkey. Now, to a
Detroit News
reporter, Barbra fibbed further that her name had always been spelled with just two a’s. To a
Windsor Star
scribe, covering the Caucus for the Ontario city across the river, she created an imaginary happy family for herself: two parents living in Brooklyn and a ten-year-old sister who showed “great possibilities as a singer.”

Much of what else was written about her in the local press also played a little loose with factual history, appearing to be largely lifted verbatim from Ross Chapman’s press release. Detroit readers learned how Eddie Blum, “casting director for Rodgers and Hammerstein,” had seen “such potential in the slender brunette with the sultry, dark eyes,” and how Barbra’s dramatic “success story” could be considered “as exciting as the Lana Turner soda-fountain legend.” Old legends, after all, had a way of being recycled into new ones.

Taking his seat in the back room, Fred Tew waited for the show to begin. While
Variety
was hardly loved among showbiz types—its reviewers were notoriously tough, and Tew was no exception—it was certainly respected, being read by everyone in the business who mattered. A good review in
Variety
didn’t stay local; it was read in New York and Los Angeles and everywhere in between. The same thing was true, of course, for a bad review.

Around Tew, the room was filling up. Whether the star attraction was there or not, however, was anyone’s guess. What had become apparent, even in one week’s time, was that Barbra’s steely resolve to succeed was paired with an incongruent, distracted unprofessionalism. Just as she had at the Bon Soir, she was frequently late; at least once in the last week she’d taken the stage a full hour after she was scheduled—at eleven instead of ten. She explained that she couldn’t get a cab, an excuse the Grubers wouldn’t abide; walking from her hotel to Congress Street, where the club was located, took about five minutes. Yes, it had snowed a couple of days that week, but temperatures had averaged in the low forties. There had been no need for her to try to hail a cab.

One night, a bass player, who’d come in to work for free as a favor to the Grubers, grew irate as he waited for her. “I’m comin’ in to play
for nothing,” he said when Barbra finally arrived, “and the least you can do is be on time.” Barbra began to cry.

But her tears had no effect on her behavior. One young man, a local actor and a regular at the Caucus Club who’d gotten to know Barbra soon after she arrived in Detroit, thought her heart was “simply not into” singing for a living, and so she “dillydallied and went window shopping and wrote letters back to New York” before finally “realizing what time it was and making a mad dash” for the Caucus. No matter how hard she had worked to get ready for the gig, and she’d worked very hard; no matter how much she gave to her audience when she was onstage, and she gave her all; underneath, she wasn’t “all that happy about the singing thing,” her friend thought, “and that showed up as unprofessionalism.”

Maybe knowing that Fred Tew from
Variety
was in the audience that night caused Barbra to be on time. Certainly the reviewer made no comment about her being late. When she came out on stage, Barbra received a hearty welcome. Tew found her “striking rather than beautiful,
with a classic profile” emphasized by the “elevated hairdo” Bob had created for her before she left New York. Unlike so many others, including the Caucus Club proprietors, Tew had no problem with Barbra’s wardrobe; he thought she dressed “simply but effectively.”

But it was her voice that he came for, not her look. As her first number, Barbra had chosen the Gershwins’ “Lorelei,” from the 1933 musical
Pardon My English.
As Matt Michaels played the sassy opening few bars, Barbra began to sing. “Back in the days of knights and armor, there once lived a lovely charmer . . .” With gusto she got into the part of the sea siren who lured sailors to their death with her beauty. No doubt Tew’s eyes grew a little wider as Barbra complemented the lyrics with “plenty of body action to capture interest,” as he wrote in his review. Translated from “reviewerese,” that meant she was “slinking her sexy little body all across the stage,” said Barbra’s actor friend, who was sitting only seats away. With utter confidence Barbra sang, “I’m treacherous, yeah, I just can’t hold myself in check, I’m lecherous, yeah, I wanna bite my initials on a sailor’s neck.” Her facial expressions, Tew thought in his typically understated fashion, were “uninhibited and unusual”—which, according to Barbra’s friend, meant that she was “mugging and flirting all over the place.” In “Lorelei,” she had found a great choice for an opening. The audience was hooting and whistling by the time she sang the last note.

It helped that she had made a number of friends in the last week, many of whom came back night after night to see her. Sitting with her after the show, taking day trips to the Institute of Arts, these folks wouldn’t have recognized the tardy or “belligerent” girl described by Matt Michaels or others at the club. These people, like the actor friend who sat up front nearly every night, were bohemians, artists, and merrymakers—the “sociable downtown gang”
as one writer called them—who responded to Barbra’s offbeat charm. Bernie Moray, a furniture salesman, and Dick Sloan, a movie exhibitor, were self-described “bachelors about town”
who took a liking to the young singer and invited her to join them for dinner one night at the London Chop House. When Les Gruber spotted her at their table, he pulled her aside for a lecture on his policy against fraternizing with clients in his restaurant. But that didn’t deter the friendship. Moray and Sloan might have been a decade older than Barbra, but they loved her style, even offering “critiques” of her outfits. They found her naïveté absolutely endearing. “Do you know,
Bernie,” Barbra once remarked in wonder, “they change the sheets on my bed [at the hotel] every night!”

It was that more innocent Barbra who took over after the applause died down for “Lorelei.” Softly she began to sing, “When a bee lies sleepin’ in the palm of your hand . . .” Once again, her audience marveled at how easily Barbra could move from vixen to vulnerable. In moments such as these, when she sang numbers that seemed to expose the tender girl inside, it became possible to believe that her so-called belligerence might be explained by reasons other than self-absorption and ambition. The girl up on the stage—being critiqued and reviewed by
Variety
—had yet to turn nineteen. Her voice, however, demanded that she be accorded the respect of a much older performer, and she was being judged against people such as Judy Garland and Patti Page, not Annette Funicello, who was exactly Barbra’s age and still being treated like a Mouseketeer. Just six months into her career, Barbra was already playing for adult stakes. And it could be daunting.

For all his frustration with her tardiness, Les Gruber found himself increasingly sympathetic to the pressures Barbra faced. In the privacy of his office, he encountered not just the demanding Barbra but the depressed Barbra as well, a teenager who wasn’t sure that she was good, who was afraid she was disappointing him, and who was self-conscious about her looks, even if she pretended not to be. Gruber tried boosting her up as best he could. “You’re great,”
he told her. “You’re going to be great. It takes time.” Obviously her talent had already trumped her tardiness, for Gruber had just given Barbra a new contract,
extending her run through April and raising her salary to $150 a week.

But there was likely more to the “depression” Gruber witnessed than any of them knew. While Barbra was running around Detroit talking to radio stations and newspaper reporters, Barré’s twenty-third birthday had come and gone. Barbra was a girl who missed nothing; she certainly knew what day it was. She was also someone who had the power to just “turn off people”
who had hurt her, she said. So she made no call to Barré, sent no card. Back in New York, however, her friends were certain she was thinking about him.

For her third number that night Barbra sang “When the Sun Comes Out,” but it was her fourth, “Cry Me a River”—the last before the audience’s applause brought her back for an encore—that seemed to reveal what was really going on in her heart during that cold winter spent alone in Detroit. Vocally, it was her best, Fred Tew thought. That wasn’t surprising, given how much feeling must have gone into the words.

“Now you say you’re sorry, for being so untrue . . .”

When Bob heard her sing the song back in New York, it was obvious to him that she was singing about Barré. “All the anger and heartache, it was right there,” he said. Often in the past, Barbra’s songs had implied autobiography, sometimes calculatingly so. This time there was no need for calculation. The emotion was real.

“Come on and cry me a river, cry me a river . . .”

Deep breath.

“I cried a river over you.”

The crowd at the Caucus Club was on its feet as Barbra headed backstage in tears.

Bob had very specific instructions, relayed to him in an urgent telephone call from Detroit just a few days earlier. Barbra had ordered a pair of shoes—a very expensive pair of shoes—and Bob was to pick them up at Madame Daunou’s salon on East Fifty-seventh Street and deliver them this afternoon to Studio 6B in the RCA Building. Barbra, it seemed, was coming home. And she needed the shoes for a very important gig.

She was going to be on
The Jack Paar Show
.

National television. Millions of people were going to see her. Except for Ed Sullivan, Paar was the biggest star-maker on TV. It had all happened rather suddenly
—and quite serendipitously. Paar himself was on vacation; Orson Bean was scheduled to guest host. Ted Rozar pressed one client to help another, and so Bean had suggested to the NBC brass that Barbra, wunderkind of the Bon Soir, might appear on the show that coming Wednesday, April 5. Phyllis Diller was also slated to be a guest, so it would be perfect casting all around. NBC agreed, no doubt having read Fred Tew’s
Variety
review, which had extolled Barbra’s “natural talent.” The network would pay her $320 to sing two songs, as well as cover all transportation costs from Detroit. It would be Barbra’s first time on an airplane.

In the days leading up to the show, she’d been in a whirlwind, planning what she should sing and what she would wear. The first was not difficult: she knew “A Sleepin’ Bee” front and backward, and she’d been practicing Harold Arlen’s “When the Sun Comes Out” with Matt Michaels, which would give her set some up-tempo balance. But her sartorial choices weren’t quite as easy. She needed to wear something really striking for all those millions of television viewers, she told Bernie Moray, and as singular as her wardrobe might be, she felt there was nothing in her suitcase that quite did the trick. So she asked Moray if she might pilfer some upholstery fabric—burgundy damask, to be exact—from the furniture store where he worked. When he agreed, presenting her with several yards, Barbra set about designing a dress with the help of a local seamstress. For Barbra’s second number, Moray persuaded a female friend of his to loan Barbra a simple black dress—a frock not unlike the one Phyllis had bought for her at S. Klein’s and Barbra had returned to the store unworn.

There was also the matter of her shoes. To Barbra’s way of thinking, it didn’t matter that they’d barely be seen on the air. This was national television, after all, so she was going to splurge. She recalled a pair of shoes she’d spotted at Madame Daunou’s salon
back in New York—an establishment patronized by Babe Paley, Betsy Bloomingdale, and the new First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. Emboldened suddenly to think of herself in their company, Barbra rang the sixty-four-year- old Mina Daunou, a Parisian fashion doyenne, and ordered the shoes. But there was a slight complication, she explained. The shoes would clash with her burgundy dress, a problem since the show was broadcast in color. In passable French, Barbra asked the salon if it was possible to have the shoes dyed to match the dress.
Oui, madame,
she was told. The shoes and the dye would cost her sixty-five dollars—a fortune, but Barbra blithely agreed. A friend, Monsieur Robert Schulenberg, would be by to pick up the shoes, she told the salon.