Streisand: Her Life (10 page)

According to the manager of the theater, whenever Barbara left a movie starring Jerry Lewis, she would hang around the lobby and imitate the goofy, rubber-faced comedian to the delight of the other patrons.

The glittery movie worlds that entranced her so made her own life in that small apartment with no telephone and no room of her own seem all the worse. “My mother used to hate it when I went to the movies, because I was always grouchy for a couple of days afterward. All I remember of those Saturday afternoons was walking out into the grim reality of a hot New York summer and not having enough money to [take the bus] back home.” She would approach a policeman, put on her most forlorn face, and ask, “Could you tell me how I could walk to Nostrand and Newkirk?” The patrolman would invariably tell her to wait rather than embark on such a long trek on foot. When the bus came he would tell the driver to let her on for free and give her a transfer. “It was really great,” Barbra recalled. “I would save the ten cents.”

D
URING THE SECOND
half of her sophomore year, Barbara learned about the Malden Bridge Playhouse in Malden Bridge, New York. Its artistic director, John Hale, was on the lookout for young apprentices to spend the summer toiling in all aspects of the theater. Applicants had to be over seventeen and would be judged on the basis of a letter explaining their desire to be involved in summer stock. Those accepted would be charged $300 the season for room and board.

Lying about her age, Barbara wrote to Hale about her ambition to become an actress, about how much she wanted to learn everything she could about the theater. The letter persuaded Hale to meet with Barbara when he visited New York City. During the interview, her fervor—or perhaps it was her chutzpah—led him to take her on, and he told her to be in Malden Bridge as soon as school let out early in June.

Diana balked. Barbara was too young, she insisted, to go so far away by herself. She’d be gone too long. She’d never fit in with the company, all of whom would be older than she. Barbara, of course, wouldn’t take no for an answer. She begged, she flew into a rage, she cried, and Diana realized that if she didn’t let Barbara go, there would be no living with her that summer. But there was another problem: money. Diana didn’t have $300, but she did have the modest legacy of $150 that Grandfather Rosen had left Barbara in his will. Diana had set that money aside for her daughter’s college education. She told Barbara that in order to go to Malden Bridge, she would have to use the money earmarked for college, as well as money she’d saved from working at Choy’s. She strongly advised her not to do that.

Without a second thought, Barbara decided to let college be damned, and Diana resigned herself to the inevitable. “As long as she’ll be happier there and doing something she wants to do,” she sighed to a friend.

B
ARBARA ARRIVED AT
Malden Bridge the second week of June 1957. Her first sight of the rustic wooden three-hundred-seat playhouse, a converted barn, thrilled her: this was where she would be
working
for the next three months! She settled happily into her living arrangements at the Lodge, a two-story barnlike building with rough-hewn wooden beams overhead, wooden tables and benches for meals, and a family of raccoons under the floor.

Upstairs, the six female apprentices s
l
ept in a dormlike bedroom that the boys referred to as the Cherry Orchard. One of the apprentices was Ingrid Meighan, and her memories of her first encounter with Barbara have remained fresh. “I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. She walked over and without saying ‘Excuse me, can I get in here?’ she shoved her elbow into me and pushed me aside. It was like, ‘Shove over, kid!’ And that’s the kind of person she was. I’m sorry to say that she was a little Brooklyn brat.”

Barbara rarely joined in with the other girls to talk about boys and family and personal problems. “When she did open up,” Ingrid said, “she had the attitude, ‘Me first! I’m gonna get where I’m going no matter what. And nobody’s gonna get in my way.
’”
Whenever dinner was served, especially spaghetti, Ingrid noticed that Barbara “would always edge toward the front of the line in hopes that the food wouldn’t give out before she was served. She wasn’t a popular person. But she was very determined.”

The apprentices worked hard, but acted very little. “We literally worked from eight in the morning until after the performance at night,” Ingrid recalled. The kids swept out the theater, scrubbed the toilets, hammered scenery, scrubbed flats, took tickets, and ushered the patrons to their seats. For every production, they’d tumble into an old De Soto hearse with questionable brakes and rattle across the countryside in search of cheap props. Dress rehearsals usually went until three in the morning, and after every performance the cast would hop around to a local nightspot to drink and eat sandwiches. “We would get awfully punchy,” Ingrid said.

Emily Cobb, a leading lady in the regular company, recalled Barbara singing “Tammy” late one night outside the dormitory while she scrubbed down a scenery flat. “Finally I stuck my head out the window and screamed, ‘Barbara, will you
shut up!
’”

Barbara’s fascination with the work of the lighting man led him to take her under his wing and teach her all he knew. Finally, toward the end of the summer, he allowed her to do the lighting for one of the plays; she made copious notes about cues and colors and coordination.

The only job Barbara groused about, Ingrid said, was scrubbing flats. “It was a very messy job. You had to use a hose and wet down these flats laid across two sawhorses, then scrub them with a brush. All this horrible scummy paint would come off and you’d be into it up to your elbows. I remember Barbara going ‘Ecch!,’ throwing her hands up in the air and whining, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore!
’”

B
ARBARA STAYED BEHIND
the scenes for the first two plays that summer. She watched the experienced actors in the company and studied every nuance of their technique. Her eyes and ears missed no aspect of John Hale’s direction. Finally, after three weeks of manual labor, she got her chance to act, in John Patrick’s
Teahouse of the August Moon.
She had begged Hale to let her play the pivotal role of Sakini, the young male narrator of the piece, essayed the year before on screen by her idol Marlon Brando, but this time Barbara’s chutzpah wasn’t enough. Instead Hale gave her a small role as one of the Japanese children, and she turned out to be an audien
c
e pleaser when she led a goat across the stage to delighted laughter and applause. The bit warranted a mention in the local newspaper’s review of the show—her first critical notice. After the final curtain, Barbara cleaned up the goat’s droppings with a dustpan and broom.

The playhouse’s next production,
The Desk Set,
presented July 16 through 21, gave Barbara her first meaty role: Elsa, a man-crazy secretary. She gave it her all, recalling every flirtatious move she had ever seen any woman make, in or out of the movies. “Can’t you just see me at fifteen,” she later said with a laugh, “coming on the stage, sitting down on a desk, swinging my leg and playing sexy?” A local reviewer thought she pulled it off quite well. “Barbara Streisand,” he wrote, “turns in a fine performance as the office vamp.
Down boys
.” The
Chatham Courier
critic called her “a fine young comedienne” and added, “We hope [Mr. Hale] gives this young lady more of an opportunity in future productions.”

He didn’t, but Barbara’s delight carried her through the following five weeks even though she didn’t have another speaking part in the next four productions. So immersed had she become in her greasepaint heaven that she never thought to write her mother. “I had to contact the director,” Diana said, “to find out how she was.” When Barbara finally did write early in August, she gave her mother the alarming news that the playhouse cook had left in a huff because he hadn’t been paid. Diana was certain her daughter was near starvation. “Can you imagine how I felt hearing such news, when what she needed most was good food and rest to go on with her studies in the fall?”

Perhaps it was Mrs. Kind who spilled the beans about Barbara’s age during one of her phone calls to John Hale. “John was very upset,” Ingrid Meighan recalled. “He got very nervous because the work was so hard and the hours so long that the playhouse had to be in violation of child labor laws.”

D
URING THE LAST
week of the season, John Hale made good on a promise to the apprentices and gave them a matinee production all their own,
Picnic,
William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning romantic drama set in a small Kansas town. Stanley Beck, a good-looking, muscular twenty-four-year-old member of the regular company, directed the show, to be performed outdoors. Earlier Ingrid had noticed that Beck seemed to have taken a shine to Barbara. “There was definitely something there. He used to stare at her a lot. But at that point she was just too young, you know.” (Three years later, when Barbara was of age, Beck would make his move. ) Beck gave Barbara the choice part of the teenage tomboy Millie Owens, played by Susan Strasberg in the film version, who wants to be more like her beautiful older sister. Ingrid Meighan, five years older than Barbara, played her mother. “Barbara was quite good,” Ingrid felt. “She wore a baseball cap and chewed gum and whined a lot.”