Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (48 page)

After almost a year, Barbra and Bob were enjoying a happy reunion. This afternoon they were hunched down in a movie theater, popping handfuls of Raisinets, watching Dolores Hart jet around the world as a stewardess in
Come Fly with Me.
As Frankie Avalon crooned the title tune, panoramic shots of London, Paris, and the Mediterranean filled the screen, and Barbra let out a sigh. “Wouldn’t it be great to go there someday?” she mused.

“But, Barbra,” Bob said, “we’re already here.”

That was the odd thing. They were in Oxford, England, watching the film, not New York. A couple of weeks earlier, Bob, whose extended Paris vacation had turned into a residency when he started contributing to magazines there, had gotten a wire from Barbra. She was flying to London to see Elliott. But since Elliott had rehearsals during the day, could Bob pop over from Paris to keep her company? Barbra’s old pal had happily obliged, but now that he was there, he could barely get her out of her hotel room. Barbra preferred staying put, “steaming her clothes, folding and organizing them, then folding and organizing them again,” Bob observed. The movie theater was the farthest she’d strayed so far.

But Barbra hadn’t come to England for sightseeing. She’d come with one purpose and one purpose only: to reconnect with Elliott. The separation had been weighing heavily on her. If she hadn’t come now, she wouldn’t have had another chance to see him until maybe next fall, since she was booked solid through the summer. At the moment, she had a bit of a break before her next obligation, a two-week engagement at the New York nightclub Basin Street East that started on May 13. And besides, hadn’t she and Elliott made a vow to always be together on their birthdays? So, very soon after leaving San Francisco, Barbra, her new passport in hand, had boarded a flight for her first transcontinental trip. On April 24, she had turned twenty-one in England, Elliott at her side. Which was the way it was supposed to be.

Not that it had been all honey pie and happiness between them. Barbra found that Elliott had been gambling quite a bit, and he seemed to want to believe that she’d been cheating on him in New York or San Francisco. He was also consumed with rehearsals most of the time, which were being held at a small theater in the town of Oxford. The cast was lodged at a local hotel, where Barbra had settled in as well. As much as Oxford might be, in the words of the poet Matthew Arnold, the “sweet city with her dreaming spires,” and home to a magnificent medieval university, it was hardly swinging London. Barbra quickly grew bored with Elliott gone all day and often into the evenings. She’d been thrilled when Bob had showed up—though she still wouldn’t risk venturing too far afield with him just in case Elliott got out of rehearsals early.

Wandering the streets of Oxford with Bob, daffodils growing everywhere, Barbra wore a heavy fur coat, bell-bottomed jeans, and tennis shoes. In the United States, thanks to all her TV appearances, she was beginning to be recognized as she strolled through New York or other cities. But here she was still anonymous. She and Bob often ate at a Chinese restaurant near the hotel, where Barbra enjoyed paying with the colorful British money. In her head, however, she was always converting pounds into dollars, keeping track of how much she was spending on this trip.

Despite her frugality, money was no longer really an issue for her. Not only were there the increased revenues from nightclubs, but at last report, Barbra’s album was finally on the move. On April 18, the disk had made it on to
Billboard
’s chart of the Top 150 Albums (at number 118). This reflected sales from the week before, and Barbra could thank San Francisco record buyers for much of her surge, as well as her March 24 appearance on
Ed Sullivan,
on which she’d sung “Cry Me a River.” The following week the album had raced up the chart to number 83 and won
Billboard
’s coveted red star that indicated an album markedly on the rise. By the following week, April 27,
The Barbra Streisand Album
had reached number 41. The momentum was clear.

Barbra’s impressive rise on the charts was also fueled by a sudden explosion of reviews, which Solters had finally managed to secure a month and a half after the album’s release. No doubt he’d been working the phones and calling in as many favors as he could. Record critic Dick Van Patten admitted that he’d overlooked the album the previous month, rectifying the situation by calling Barbra “a potentially great new stylist
[who] sounds like a veteran already.” Dick Kleiner, who’d already been an advocate for Barbra, now listed her ahead of Judy Garland in his syndicated roundup of the best new albums for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, saying that with this disk, Barbra “shows herself to be one
of the greatest.” Walter Winchell also weighed in, raving about the album and especially the way Barbra put “the silk in ‘Happy Days
Are Here Again.’” The columnist added that she reminded him of “Judy, Lena, and Peggy.”

After they left the movie theater, or on a night very similar, Barbra brought Bob to dinner with Elliott and Elspeth March, who was playing Madam Dilly, the music teacher, in
On the Town
. March, once married to the movie actor Stewart Granger, had made a number of films in the past year—
Playboy of the Western World
and
Dr. Crippen,
among others—and was about to go into production on
The Three Lives of Thomasina,
in which she would provide the voice of the cat. Barbra peppered the older actress with questions about moviemaking. She seemed to like how March had been able to play so many different characters in the course of a year.

To the distinguished British actress, Barbra must have seemed like a wide-eyed young novice. Not to March was Barbra anything noteworthy. She didn’t know about the nightclub appearances, or the kooky guest spots with Carson and Sullivan, or the album that was climbing the charts. Elliott may have tried telling his castmates about Barbra, but since they were so far away from it all, none of it would have really sunk in. Here, in Oxford, Barbra was just the girlfriend of the star of the show. For the moment, the situation between her and Elliott had reverted to what it had been back in the very beginning. He was the star; she was his girlfriend. But they both must have known, deep down, that the moment was fleeting. Elliott, raising his pint of ale in a toast to the success of
On the Town,
made sure to enjoy it while he could.

That spring, Ray Stark was a busy man. He’d had to fly to Dublin, where problems had arisen on the set of Seven Arts’s remake of
Of Human Bondage.
Kim Novak was having trouble with the part of the Cockney waitress, Mildred, and the situation wasn’t helped when kidnap threats were made against her and costar Laurence Harvey. After dealing with all of that, Stark had needed to swoop down to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to scout locations for Seven Arts’s upcoming production of
The Night of the Iguana.
Then it was back across the Atlantic to London, where he’d courted Elizabeth Taylor as a possible replacement for Novak in
Bondage.