Streisand: Her Life (13 page)

T
HAT SUMMER OF 1958,
Allan and Anita Miller asked Barbara to accompany them to Charlotte Harmon’s Clinton Playhouse in Clinton, Connecticut, so that she could baby-sit for them. Although Barbara later claimed on her resume that she was part of the company, both Allan and Anita insist she came along only to take care of their sons and did no work of any kind at the theater.

But while she was there she befriended another aspiring young actor, the handsome twenty-year-old Warren Beatty, who had been cast in major roles in most of the productions and stood poised on the verge of Broadway and television stardom. Occasionally Warren would join her while she baby-sat; they’d eat spaghetti and laugh and talk about the theater. “She seemed to be a person of strong moral convictions,” he said. “One of her convictions seemed to be that with the recent loss of my virginity, I might be experiencing too much of a good thing.”

Beatty also found her “critical, encouraging... she had energy, she was funny, she was uninhibited by convention or tradition, she was sexy, she was honest.”

Beatty’s remark about Barbara’s saying he was having “too much of a good thing” sexually might indicate that she rejected a pass from him. If she did, it wasn’t because she didn’t find him devastatingly attractive. Thirteen years would pass, however, before she and Warren did anything about their mutual attraction.

S
HORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS,
as Barbara prepared for her final exams and graduation fro
m
Erasmus, she answered a casting ad in
Show Business
for a new play to be presented quite far off Broadway in an attic space called the Garret Theater. She got the role—her first “real” acting assignment.

Joan Rivers, then Joan Molinsky, was also in the cast, and she wrote about the experience at length in her 1986 autobiography
Enter Talking.
The play, she said, was called
Seawood
and was written by Ar
m
and de Beauchamp, a pretentious, flamboyant man who boasted that its 1954 Chicago production had launched the careers of Ralph Meeker and Geraldine Page. The characters had no names, but were called things like Man from the Sea and Lorna of the Dunes. After the few people who had turned up for the audition were cast except for her, Joan went on, there remained just one unfilled role—the one originally played by Ralph Meeker. Thinking on her feet, Joan piped up, “Why couldn’t we make Man in Black into Woman in Black? She could be a lesbian.” The author loved the idea, Joan wrote, and as the Woman in Black, she went on to play “a big love scene where I told Barbara I loved her very much and she rejected me and I had a knife in my hand and tried to kill her and then myself.”

All this made for entertaining reading, but almost none of it is true. In fact the play was entitled
Driftwood
and was written by Maurice Tei Dunn. Geraldine Page had starred in a Chicago production in 1954, but while Ralph Meeker had tried out, he had lost the costarring role to Edward Fielding Nicholls.

More important, according to Dunn, “There was no lesbianism in my play. I can’t imagine where Joan got that. In those days it would have been suicide in the theater. Barbara and Joan never had a single exchange together. They were never even onstage at the same time. That picture of them together in Joan’s book was posed during rehearsals.”

The script of
Driftwood
bears Dunn out. The story revolved around Gregg Williams, an ex-con-turned-beachcomber along the shores of Lake Michigan in northern Indiana in 1924. Gregg is in love with Anne Carey, who has escaped from the clutches of a Chicago millionaire by pretending to be dead and now lives as Diana of the Dunes. A free spirit, she swims in the nude and, in the words of another character—the outraged Miss Blake, an uptight property owner who wants to run Diana out of the community—“goes in for pagan dancing in the light of the full moon.”

Joan played Miss Blake, and she did brandish a knife—but at Diana, not at Barbara’s character, Lorna. Lorna’s a tough cookie, a hard-bitten thirty-five-year-old who hangs out at Bob White’s saloon. As one unsophisticated character puts it, “She make men bad.” Lorna has had a mysterious prior relationship with Gregg Williams, who may or may not now be involved in a series of truck hijackings along the interstate. In the course of the play’s three acts, Miss Blake tries to stab Diana (but not herself as well); Gregg shoots dead Chuck, a luckless visitor he thinks is a stool pigeon; and Diana stabs Gregg to death.

There are oblique references to an enigmatic Woman in Black who helped Gregg make a second escape from prison, where he had been sent for shooting Chuck, and ominous whispers about the Chief, said to be the mastermind behind the hijackings.

Driftwood
, as Maurice Tei Dunn freely admits, won’t stand among the great plays, but it must have been fun to watch Barbara Streisand, at sixteen, play a character like Lorna. She had only one short scene in the first act, none in the second, and she didn’t reappear until the last ten minutes of the play. But during those ten minutes the audience learns that Lorna is the key to everything when she reveals that she is not only the
W
oman in Black but also the Chief!

“Yer forgettin’ yer in a tough spot,” Lorna hisses at Gregg. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for yer chances if they was to pick you up now and take you back to the Pen.” A few moments later, speaking of Diana, she says, “You and I were pretty thick until she came along. You pulled a boner in that Chuck business. You shoulda used yer head and not let your feelings get mixed up in it.... I’m gettin’ fed up with yer takin’ her part. I’m the one that got you outta jail. She’d let you rot there.... Such dam’ fools—if you’da listened to me you wouldn’t have been sent up at all. You and yer moon-struck Diana.”

Dunn didn’t consider it at all inappropriate to cast the teenage Barbara Streisand as Lorna. “There was something, shall we say, sinister about Barbara, mysterious. Even at that age she seemed a lot older than she was. She seemed to have a history, a past.” He felt that Barbara’s performances were “credible and occasionally remarkable. She was
acting.
Joan was effective, although she really was just being herself. Barbara was more professional than Joan, and she was only a schoolgirl! I saw Barbara and Joan work on scenes together and they looked like friends, but I wonder if Barbara didn’t think Joan was a nuisance.”

What Dunn called the Garret Theater was in fact the rickety unheated attic of his fifth-floor walk-up railroad flat on Forty-ninth Street in the shadow of the Third Avenue El. According to him, when rehearsals began on January 2, Barbara “confiscated the star dressing room,” a closet with a sink and a large mirror, by always arriving before everyone else. “She doted on herself in there and mouthed out her lines. Sometimes she stood in the doorway and shouted her lines out to me or someone else, and they’d answer. She carried her own makeup kit around with her, and always came in carrying a big bag of books because she was studying for her finals.”

Directed by a seventeen-year-old, Jim McDowall,
Driftwood
opened on Thursday, January 15, on a one-step-up platform stage that faced forty seats, most of which Dunn had purchased from a defunct shoe store. Admission was $1. 50, but the box-office receipts barely covered expenses and didn’t allow for pay to the actors. Nor was there a crew, paid or unpaid. Barbara offered to work the curtain during her extended periods offstage, but Dunn did that himsel
f
and told her, “An actress is an actress, and you don’t have to do anything here except worry about what you’re doing onstage.”

Although the play didn’t garner a single review, it remained open for six weeks, primarily on the strength of ticket sales to the cast’s family and friends. Barbara’s mother attended one performance, but her reaction remains unrecorded. Dunn’s main reason for closing the show was that his attic became a fire hazard when audience members started putting their cigarettes out in the cracks in the wooden floor. “When I shut down the show it was a terrible blow to the cast. Barbara just packed her stuff and walked away and never came back. She took it hard.”

D
URING THE RUN
of
Driftwood
, Barbara graduated from Erasmus Hall, receiving her diploma along with 136 others in a ceremony on January 26, 1959. She was three months shy of her seventeenth birthday. She was the fourth best student in the graduating class, with a final three-and-a-half-year grade-point average of 91. 016.

Finally she was free. Within weeks of her graduation she moved to Manhattan, her mother’s protests ringing in her ears along with her tinnitus. She and Susan Dwaorkowitz rented a tiny walk-up at 339 West Forty-eighth Street, next door to Allan Miller’s workshop, for $80 a month, and Barbara could barely contain her excitement as she prepared to look for work as an actress. She was sure she’d get a part straightaway, but if it took a little longer than she expected, she had a few hundred dollars left from what she had saved over the years from her pay at Choy’s Chinese. The nest egg, which she put into her first savings account, at the Seaman’s Bank, would provide her with the luxury of free time to make the rounds of auditions.

She typed up a resume that listed her height at five feet five, her weight at
1
10 pounds, and her type as either ingenue or character ingenue. She listed her schooling with Allan Miller, her summer stock work at Malden Bridge, and
Driftwood.
She fibbed that she had played Ellie May in
Tobacco Road
at the Clinton Playhouse and lied again that she has been the assistant stage manager at the Cherry Lane and had understudied Avril in
Purple Dust.
Then she set out on her rounds—after stuffing socks into her bra and toilet paper along her hips to give the illusion of a more voluptuous figure.