Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (3 page)

At the Millers’ house, Barbara soaked up more culture than she “ever did in high school.”
She viewed the Millers’ life with a sort of wonder. They were happy; their kids were happy; they were smart and curious and engaged with the world. It was as if she were peering through a looking glass into another world.

During Barbara’s first semester at the Theatre Studio, she took Miller’s Fundamentals course, which met twice weekly and included an hour of body training and seventy-five minutes of voice and speech instruction. “Acting is the only art
in which the actor is both the piano and the pianist,” Miller wrote. Her teacher found Barbara “very awkward, emotionally
and physically, in her expression of herself,” so in the beginning he insisted she perform her scenes in class using sounds instead of words.

Gradually, Barbara shed some of her awkwardness and developed some effective techniques, though she seemed, to some at least, to be surprisingly ungrateful to those who helped her. To her, it was as if her new skills were her accomplishments and hers alone. One teacher, Eli Rill, thought Barbara eschewed “the political niceties
. . . the brownnosing” that most students practiced. There was no “thank you very much,” Rill said—no card, no phone call, even after he took a chance on her and cast her in a production he was directing. Rill didn’t mind,though he found Barbara’s behavior different enough to comment on it.

Barbara then advanced to Miller’s Intermediate Acting class. Here a “sensory approach” was taught to perfect “concentration, relaxation, and emotion.” Barbara was fascinated by this forceful man who taught her how to breathe, how to move, how to delve deeply into a whole range of emotions. She was a girl who knew very little about men. She’d never known her father, and her mother’s second husband, a crass used-car salesman who’d barely ever spoken to her, had been gone by the time she was thirteen. Her brother, Sheldon, seven years older than she was, had left when Barbara was ten to study at the Pratt Institute. By the time Barbara moved out of the apartment, the household consisted of her, her mother, and her younger sister, Rosalind, who was now an overweight child of nine.

Her encounters with the opposite sex had been fleeting—though intense enough to leave her extremely curious. The longest lasting one had been her fling with her fellow student Roy Scott the previous year. Roy was Barbara’s brother’s age, twenty-four, a grown man—even if he still poured ketchup on his macaroni and drank cheap wine. She had spent many late nights at Roy’s place, the two of them talking about acting, the theater, and life. Barbara thought Roy was the best-looking guy in Miller’s class, and she couldn’t fathom why he paid so much attention to a girl like her.

That such a brash, outspoken girl harbored such self-doubt surprised many people. When she wasn’t striving to become the great Method actor who could believe herself to be anything, including beautiful, Barbara would inevitably remember the “real ugly
kid” she’d been in Brooklyn, “the kind who looks ridiculous with a ribbon in her hair,” as she described herself. When someone avoided her eyes, she felt certain they “couldn’t bear to look”
at her. But Roy assured her that all this was nonsense. She was “very pretty and attractive.”
It may have been the first time Barbara had ever heard those words.

Barbara’s mother, however, hadn’t been pleased with the relationship. Barbara rarely spoke of her mother; her roommate, Marilyn, only knew she existed from the chicken soup she’d drop off at the apartment. To her daughter’s friends, Diana Streisand Kind seemed “somebody far removed from Barbara, somebody she preferred not to even think about.” But she would be heard. “My daughter’s too young to be involved with your son,” Diana told Roy’s mother after tracking her down through the school. Barbara’s mother was adamant about such things. Even holding hands was frowned upon in Barbara’s household. “You’ll get a disease,”
Diana warned. Thereafter, Roy kept his distance.

The breakup with Roy hadn’t helped Barbara’s confidence or her faith in her own appeal. But Allan Miller identified a raw sexuality in her work in class. Acting out a scene from
The Rose Tattoo,
Barbara was embarrassed to play the seductress, so Miller advised her to find a way to convey the girl’s desire without thinking about sex. What followed astonished him. Barbara pretended she was blind, and as she spoke, she touched her partner’s face. At one point, she stood on his feet; at another, she jumped on his back. Miller thought it was “the sexiest scene”
he’d ever witnessed in his life.

Yet toward men, Barbara seemed skeptical and wary. She was content to bask in the lectures of her intense, impassioned teacher and to pal around with platonic friends such as Carl Esser, heedless of the game of musical beds being played by other Theatre Studio students. Those who watched Barbara as she sauntered in and out of class wearing her fringed jackets and oversized boots, projecting that fragile pretense of superiority so peculiar to misfit teenagers, had the sense that she was somehow frozen in midbloom.

The flyer tacked to the wall contained only the barest of details, but Allan Miller suggested that his students give it a read.

Barbara, Carl, and the others gathered around. A group called the Actors Co-op was holding auditions for a play called
The Insect Comedy,
written by the Czech playwrights Josef and Karel Ĉapek and set to be staged at a little playhouse on East Seventy-fourth Street. The director was a man named Vasek Simek, who, according to word around the Theatre Studio, was “a big deal,”
a Czech who’d once worked for Radio Free Europe.
The Insect Comedy,
therefore, would be a “very significant play.”

Both she and Carl decided to audition. This, Barbara hoped, could be her big break. True, she had a rather sparse résumé, but challenge was what Barbara thrived on. She’d gotten herself to Manhattan to make something of herself, and to show her mother and everyone back in Brooklyn that they just hadn’t known how special she was. When Barbara was nine, a gang of girls had formed a circle around her, making fun of her until she cried. Although Barbara wasn’t crying anymore, she still tried to understand what she had done to elicit such cruelty. What exactly did she “vibrate,”
she wondered, that brought out such hostility from people, even in her acting class?

One friend thought part of the answer was that people were threatened by her. Barbara had a way, this friend said, of “letting you know that she thought she was better than you were, and that she’d be a big success and you wouldn’t.” Barbara wasn’t being hostile, or even necessarily conscious of the attitude she was projecting. But the impression came through nonetheless. Her sense of superiority masked her self-doubt; Barbara had to believe that she was special since no one else did. Whether that specialness was good or just different, she had yet to fully discover. But she knew one thing clearly: She was not like anyone else.

Her tinnitus, for example, was evidence of “supersonic hearing,”
Barbara believed, an ability that enabled her to hear sounds beyond the range of normal people. It frightened her; she wore scarves “to try to cut out the noise.” And it wasn’t just sounds. She experienced colors in a way no one else did. When she’d look at a white wall, she’d see textures. Her sensory perception seemed “an overemphasizing on the processes of being alive,” she thought. In some very real sense, Barbara existed outside the realm of ordinary people. Of course a girl with such extrasensory powers was going to have certain advantages over mere mortals. She felt as if she were “chosen,” that only she could “see the truth.” A girl like that was either going to go crazy or succeed beyond anyone’s imagination—except, of course, hers.

To Carl, Barbara insisted that if she got a part in
The Insect Comedy,
it could catapult her to the kind of success she’d always dreamed about. The show was bound to inflame her ambition. It would be her first real play in New York, because
Driftwood,
the little thing she’d done the previous year in the attic of its playwright’s fifth-floor walk-up on East Forty-ninth Street, didn’t count, at least not in her mind. She needed a part that would get her noticed. She’d already wasted too much time in the trenches, she believed. For Barbara, there was no patience for the chorus line. For her, it was “right to the top,”
she insisted, “or nowhere at all.”

So all her laserlike focus was brought to bear on winning a part in
The Insect Comedy
.

Never had Barbara known a friend quite like Terry.

It was Terry to whom she turned for help in her quest. For her
Insect Comedy
audition, she needed an especially impressive outfit, and Terry had a way of finding things. Not long ago, he had given her a scarf of sheer silk netting, over which Barbara had gushed, “Where did you
ever
find it?” Terry had replied mysteriously that it just “turned up” somewhere, and when Barbara asked him what she owed him for it, he shrugged and said, “Never mind about that.”

Terry Leong was an absolute doll. Barely taller than Barbara’s five-five, he was twenty-one, finely boned, soft-spoken, and, according to one friend, as “delicately attenuated
as a Chinese rod puppet carved of linden wood.” Terry’s father had been born in China, his mother in Boston, and the young man lived with them on Chrystie Street in Chinatown, though he was hankering to move uptown. Weekdays Terry toiled for McGregor-Doniger, the men’s sportswear company, designing golf shirts at their offices in the Tishman Building at 666 Fifth Avenue. Golf was far from Terry’s passion, however; he wasn’t happy with his job at all. He had studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and what he really wanted to do was design for the theater—which was why he jumped at the chance when his friend Marilyn Fried asked him to help her roommate Barbara put together outfits for Theatre Studio shows.

Barbara protested; she had no money. She was barely making her rent with the pittance she took home from ushering at the Lunt-Fontanne. But Terry told her not to worry about that. Where he was taking her, he explained, you could get treasures for pennies.

As they emerged from the Fifty-ninth Street subway, Terry explained to Barbara all about the thrift shops that lined Third Avenue. Here was the source of his fabulous finds. The rich people of the Upper East Side, he explained, were forever tossing out such treasures as original Lalique jewelry and Pauline Trigère jackets. They just boxed them up and sent them over to the little boutiques on Third Avenue that sold used goods to benefit charity. An alert shopper could snatch up these precious items for a fraction of their original prices. Terry was astonished that so few people had caught on to this, but he was loath to let the secret out. Then every fashion acolyte from Jersey and the boroughs would be arriving via bridge and tunnel to plunder all this bounty.

Barbara and Terry headed into Stuart’s, just south of Sixty-second Street. In the window, tall white ceramic obelisks of uncertain function stood beside a cluster of delicate porcelain tulips. Inside, one wall was covered in panels of gold, emerald, and tangerine felt—an attention to color that was carried throughout the shop, where all the accessories were arranged by hue. This way, the discerning shopper could ensure instantly that her earrings complemented her belt. Barbara was enchanted.

From Stuart’s, it was onward to other places such as Lots for Little, at Seventy-seventh Street, which benefited Catholic missionaries, and Bargains Unlimited, at Eighty-second Street, where proceeds went to Bellevue Hospital. On one of their shopping ventures, either this one or one very much like it, Terry discovered a Fabiani dress hanging on the rack and breathlessly insisted Barbara get it. When she admitted, a little shamefacedly, that she didn’t know who all these designers were, Terry sat her down
and patiently explained that she needed to learn such things. If Barbara was going to stand out among all the other hopefuls looking for parts, she needed to develop her own particular style, Terry declared. Barbara latched on to his advice with conviction.

She was a fast learner. Even if she didn’t know the names of designers, Barbara had an instinctive understanding of what worked for her. She could pick up a skirt and know, without even trying it on, whether the color and the fit would suit her. Terry had been right to take her under his wing. He might need to help her decide which choker was best, but it was Barbara who knew, in her gut, that a choker would be the perfect finishing touch for the outfit they were putting together.

That day, strolling in and out of the boutiques on Third Avenue, Barbara was a happy girl, laughing and joking, trying on funny sunglasses and hats. The determination that frequently kept her face tight, hard, and unsmiling was missing. To see Barbara and Terry together, giggling, rummaging through a table of beaded blouses from the 1900s, was to spy something very special between them. They were like a brother and sister with “secrets, and codes,
and a language of shared experience,” as one observer described it. And yet there was never a thought of romance.

Surely, at some point, Barbara must have wondered why. It was obvious that Terry, like no other man in her life, found her beautiful, even exquisite. He rhapsodized about her swan neck and long, graceful fingers. He adored the way fabric draped over her lithe, elegant, slender body. Yet standing next to him never produced the kind of charge she felt when standing that close to another man. It wasn’t because Terry was Chinese. Barbara had worked in a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn where she’d become close with the family who ran the place. Muriel Choy, the proprietor, had been like a surrogate mother, teaching her “about love and life and sex.”
So Barbara never had hang-ups about race. At Erasmus Hall, she’d even dated a black boy—nothing serious, mostly just hanging out and talking, but she’d liked him in the way a girl likes a boy. Not so with Terry. This was different.

Eventually Terry told Barbara that he was gay. She accepted the news
with nonchalance. This was why she loved Manhattan, after all. Here was every kind of person, coming and going. She was glad she’d been born in Brooklyn, she said, because it gave her a certain character. But she was also very glad she no longer lived there. “You know, once
you cross the bridge, everything changes,” she’d say—and for the better, she believed.