Streisand: Her Life (17 page)

“She told me my taste was awful,” Barbra recalled. “She bought me two woolen dresses. But she doesn’t know that I brought ’em back, got the money for them, and made myself some outfits out of upholstery material.”

Traditional dress or no, night after night the Bon Soir audiences thrilled to Barbra Streisand. She had added two numbers to her repertoire: “Who Can I Turn to Now?” and the 1920s Helen Kane number “I Want to Be Bad.” Her two-week engagement stretched to four, then six, then eight, then ten as the word about this “wild girl with an incredible voice” spread far beyond Greenwich Village and New York’s gay community. As Michael Greer remembered it, “The buzz was on about her. It just kept increasing. I vividly remember everything she did. She giggled and waved her arms. We just couldn’t keep our eyes off her. Man, everything she said or did we went ‘
Oh!
’ It was like she was an angel. She was spellbinding.”

At the Bon Soir Barbra discovered that she liked making her audiences laugh. She used the chewing-gum-on-the-microphone gambit at every performance, and she increasingly told jokes and kibbitzed between songs. Her audiences loved it, and Barbra realized that humor helped her put on a good show.

Every night Barry Dennen brought his Ampex recorder to the club to tape her set. Afterward he and Barbra would sit up until three or four in the morning and listen to her breathing, analyze her phrasing, study how much e
m
otion she had put into the lyric. Barry made suggestions, gave her examples of how other singers did the same things. Barbra sponged up every bit of it, and every night her act got a little better.

B
Y NOW BARBRA
had fallen in love with Barry and had moved into his apartment. The serious turn their relationship took surprised Bob Schulenberg. “One night I went over to their place,” he said, “and they were on the floor, and Barbra was resting her head on Barry’s lap, and it was very romantic. They had that kind of glow that says that two people have just been intimate. They started talking about getting married. I said, ‘Are you serious?’ And they said. ‘Yeah, we’re going to get married.’ It was sort of a sacred, hallowed moment. It was very
intense.
Barbra was enthralled with Barry. He has a brilliant mind. He was the first man who would ever trade jokes from Mae West or Groucho Marx movies with her and in the next moment enlighten her on art, theater, music. His influence on Barbra was tremendous. And he was thrilled with his creation.”

So too were the most hard-bitten critics. One of Barbra’s first reviews appeared in the New York
World Telegram and Sun
on September 16, and Perry Rebell’s comments were typical: “The Bon Soir has swung into the new nightclub season with the find of the year. She is Barbra Streisand, a Brooklynite whose voice and poise belie her scant eighteen years. Vocally, there’s range and power; stylewise, there appears to be a natural gift for musical comedy, but she handles with aplomb the most meaningful of ballads.”

The day before, she had received her first New York column mention, from Dorothy Kilgallen: “The pros are talking about a rising new star on the local scene—eighteen-year-old Barbra Streisand, currently at the Bon Soir.” Shortly after this item appeared, Barbra did have a singing lesson. Her mother had come to see her act, and Mrs. Kind thought the seventy-year-old white lace combing jacket Barbra wore looked like a nightgown. She also told her daughter that while her voice was good, it was a little thin, and she suggested she take lessons to build it up. This was the first time Mrs. Kind had urged Barbra to do something that could further her show business ambitions, and she took the advice.

When she stepped into the voice coach’s small studio with its one piano, a middle-aged woman with her hair pulled up into a severe bun greeted her and asked if she had something prepared. She did—“A Sleepin’ Bee”—and she handed the sheet music to the piano player. The teacher waited for her to begin.

“When a bee lies sleeping in the palm of your hand.”

The woman rapped her pointer on the edge of a nearby table. Startled, Barbra stopped cold. “No. No. No. Your pronunciation is all wrong. The vowels must be
shorter.
It’s ‘When a
beh
lies sleeping.
’”

“But, but,” Barbra stammered.

“It is beh... beh...
beh
,” the coach insisted.

“But the word is ‘bee
’
,” Barbra protested. “Whoever heard anyone say ‘beh
’
?”

The teacher was losing her patience. “Singing is not the same as talking, my dear.”

Barbra swallowed hard, finished the song her way, and walked out. She never took another voice lesson. “I knew that singing had to be an extension of speaking. I felt, I’m an actress and I have to make the song real, you know? So that was the end of my singing lessons. It just felt all wrong.”

T
HE BON SOIR
gig brought Barbra her first manager, Ted Rozar, and her first agent, Irvin Arthur. After seeing her two nights before her engagement was to end on November 20, the twenty-two-year-old Rozar went to her tiny dressing room, told her he was “the only gentile manager in the business,” exclaimed “I love you,” and asked if she had representation. The following Wednesday she signed a three-year contract with Rozar that gave him 10 percent of her salary if she earned less than $350 a week and 20 percent if she earned more, with an additional 5 percent to anyone who assisted him with out-of-town negotiations.

Barbra’s success at the Bon Soir should have assured her a rash of bookings, but much to his chagrin Rozar could not get anyone else to hire her. He sent her picture and tapes to agents, Broadway producers, the bigger clubs in Manhattan, and local television shows, but Barbra was just too unlike the vast majority of successful vocalists of the late fifties and early sixties. Agent after agent told Rozar, “Well, yes, she’s got a nice voice, but her fingers are too long, she uses her hands too much, her nose is too big, her hairstyle, her clothes...” There were a million excuses.

Clearly, Barbra was ahead of her time. She wou
l
d anticipate the freewheeling fashions of the sixties; she would bring jazz elements into popular singing; she would change many people’s attitudes about what constituted female beauty. And she was in the vanguard of the women’s movement, taking responsibility for her own career and standing up firmly for what she believed before most performers did so. But along the way she had to struggle for everything she got. For every agent or club owner who loved her there were two dozen who didn’t get her at all.

Finally, after every other agent in New York had turned her down, Rozar persuaded Irvin Arthur of Associated Booking Corporation to take Streisand on. Associated Booking at the time handled only personal appearances, and at first Arthur had no more luck than Rozar in landing Barbra a job. As the weeks wore on toward the end of 1960, Barbra, hurting for money, called Arthur every night at eleven-thirty to see if he had anything for her. The answer was always no. She went back to odd jobs, waiting on tables for a few weeks, clerking at a law firm for a few months. Now that she had tasted some measure of success, working in an office galled her.

That New Year’s Eve, Barbra had no date because Barry Dennen was out of town. She called a girlfriend, and the two of them hopped on the Staten Island Ferry. Her friend knew of a club called the Townhouse on the island, and they headed there. When they arrived, Barbra asked to speak to the owner, Joe Darconte. According to Darconte, “She told me her name was Angelina Scarangella and she was from
N
aples. She said she was a singing star over in Italy and she’d get up and sing if I paid her fifty dollars.

“I looked at her and said, ‘Yeah, right. You’re a Jew from Brooklyn!’ Then I asked if she really could sing, because it so happened I was short an act that night. So I told her, ‘Sure, get up there and show me what you can do.’

“She sang about four songs, and of course she was great, but I had a problem. The girl she had come in with was black. This was a time when there was a lot of racial tension, and I could feel rumblings among the crowd. So I got Barbra’s attention in the middle of the fourth song and made a cutting gesture across my throat—eight bars and off!

“She didn’t think I was gonna pay her, but I gave her the fifty dollars and the two of them took off.”

T
he taxi carrying Barbra and Bob Schulenberg barreled toward Pennsylvania Station. It was February 19, 1961, and she was late to catch the Empire State Express train that would take her out of the Northeast for the first time. Irvin Arthur had gotten her a booking, sight unseen and mostly on his own reputation, at the Back Room at the elegant Caucus Club restaurant-nightclub in Detroit. She’d been a nervous wreck, one moment exhilarated by the prospect of repeating her Bon Soir triumph, the next moment terrified of being alone in a strange city so far from home.

Suddenly, with only minutes to spare, she told Schulenberg they’d have to stop at a drugstore. “Barbra, we
c
an’t stop, you’ll miss the train,” Bob protested. “What could you possibly have to get now?”

“Do you think they have toothpaste in Detroit,” she asked.

Thirty hours later, and just four hours before she was to begin her performance, Barbra showed up at the office of Ross Chapman, the booking agent for the club. “She had a big stack of dog-eared music under her arm,” Chapman recalled, “and she looked—weird is the best word. Her hair needed combing, and her clothes I can’t describe.”

Chapman asked Barbra how old she was. “I’ll be nineteen in April,” she replied. Chapman flinched. Under Michigan law, performers in cabarets had to be twenty-one.
“
You’ll have to lie about your age,” Chapman told her. Then he asked her to step into a side room and go over her material with Matt Michaels, the Back Room’s pianist. About ten minutes later Michaels returned, his face ashen. “My God, Ross,” he whispered. “That broad only knows
four songs
.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl who looked more unqualified to be a singer in an intimate room,” Michaels recalled. “All she needed was a broomstick. She told us she’d worked eleven weeks at the Bon Soir in New York. I didn’t believe it. When we asked her what she’d done with only four songs, she said she’d done the same songs every show.” Ross Chapman reminded Barbra that she had four sets to do every night, and told her she’d need at least eleven songs. “How are you going to learn all those songs by nine tonight?” he asked.

“I’m a fast learner,” Barbra replied.

Over the next three hours Michaels taught her seven tunes. “Because she didn’t read music, I’d simply play the songs over and over... and she’d learn ’em. So she knew the songs, but it took another two or three weeks for her to put her own stamp on them.”

Barbra checked into her room at the Henrose Hotel, changed for the show, and turned up at the Caucus Club a few minutes before she was due to perform. Sam Gruber, the co-owner of the club with his brother Les, looked at her in horror. “She showed up for that first show wearing a turtleneck sweater and black pants. We had to send her home to put on a dress.” When she began her performance, Ross Chapman was certain he had made a big mistake. “She had no poise whatever,” he recalled. “She sat on a bar stool to sing, with her legs spread out like a cello player.” But of course she had that voice, and by the end of the evening Barbra had won over the audience.

She was habitually late for her shows; her usual excuse was that she couldn’t get a cab, even though her hotel was two blocks from the club. One night she scrambled in so late she had no time to change, so she sang in snow boots and a monkey fur coat. She told her audiences that she was born in Turkey and had taken belly dancing lessons. After her shows, whenever anyone offered to buy her a drink, she’d say she preferred to have a pastrami and Swiss cheese sandwich. She flirted shamelessly with an obviously married man, the handsome, six-foot-three-inch Stan Rosenberg. One night she joined Max Fisher, a wealthy steel magnate, at his table, and during the course of the conversation she asked him, “Why don’t you give me ten thousand dollars to help my career?” Fisher just laughed.

As kooky and offhand as Barbra could seem, Matt Michaels was impressed by her capacity for work. “She worked harder than any girl I’ve ever met. People would comment on the innate grace of her hands. A lot of it was instinct, but I saw her work in front of a mirror four and five hours a day perfecting her gestures.” Despite her dedication, Michaels doubted Barbra would go very far “because of her attitude, her belligerence. If she didn’t like the way the audience was listening, she’d walk out. One time, when people were too noisy for her, she told them, ‘Goddammit, shut up!
’”

The process of working with Barbra on her material often angered Michaels. “She’d always want to change things after we’d set them. She was never satisfied. I worked with her three or four hours a day three or four times a week for six weeks. And she would insist on her way, whether it was right or wrong. She didn’t really know very much, but she had opinions like she did. She was tough to get along with.”

And yet, Michaels discovered, she had a thi
n
skin when confronted. “There was a bass player who used to come in and play for us once in a while if he happened to be in town, just for kicks. One night he came in and she was late, and he chewed her out. He said, ‘You know, I’m comin’ in to play for nothing, and the least you can do is be on time.’ Well, Barbra started to
cry.
She was tough in many ways, but very sensitive, too.”

A
T THE END
of her first week in Detroit, Barbra made her radio singing debut on a local program,
The Jack Harris Show.
She giggled nervously throughout the broadcast and later said she thought she’d made “a first class fool of myself.” Four days later she appeared on another local radio show,
Guest House
, hosted by Bud Guest. She didn’t sing, but she did tell Guest that her dress was “a little sofa number” she had made from the upholstery off a couch her mother had discarded. When Guest misspelled her name Strysand, she told him she liked it that way.

Betty Paysner was the publicist for the Caucus Club, and she recalled that Barbra “talked about changing her name. She wanted to spell it Strysand.” For a time, in fact, she did spell it that way; when she made her network television debut soon thereafter,
TV Guide
listed her as Barbra Strysand.

As often happens in show business, Barbra had to go all the way to Detroit before she got booked on her first television show in New York. Ted Rozar had persuaded Orson Bean, who had seen Barbra at the Bon Soir, to book her on the late-night Jack Paar program while Bean was doing a one-week stint as substitute host. Barbra didn’t have the money to fly back east, so Les Gruber, eager for the publicity the TV appearance would give his club, took up a collection among the regular customers in order to send her off.

The Paar show was the premier late night showcase at the time. Broadcast nationwide, it was quite an auspicious place to make one’s television debut—which Barbra did on Wednesday night, April 5, 1961. Wearing a simple black cocktail dress and appearing as thin as a sylph even with the illusion of extra weight television cameras create, Barbra sang “A Sleepin’ Bee” and “When the Sun Comes Out,” then she joined Phyllis Diller, Gore Vidal, Albert Dekker, and Hugh Downs on the panel. “This is so
exciting
,” she gushed, her arms flailing, her eyes sweeping across the studio. “I just can’t tell you. All these people and cameras and lights—and people! Oh!”

She then plugged both the Caucus Club and the Grubers’ other place, the London Chop House (“I was so delighted,” said Les Gruber, “that when she came back I gave her a big kiss and a hundred dollars”), and added that she had been “clothed by the Robinson Furniture Company in Detroit. I’m the original Castro Convertible—movable parts.”

S
AM AND LES
Gruber had extended Barbra’s gig at the Caucus Club from two weeks to eight and increased her salary to $200 a week, and during her sojourn in Detroit she had made friends. Neil Wolfe, the pianist in the Caucus Club’s front room, took her horseback riding and golfing. Arno Hirsch, a critic for the
Detroit Times,
helped her get her first driver’s license, from the state of Michigan. Doris Gershenson also took Barbra under her wing. “She would come to our house quite often. She was the biggest eater I ever saw. One time we were baking cookies. She ran in and ate the whole batch before they were cool from the oven.”

Barbra cadged cookies and stuffed herself whenever food was offered her because she still had very little money to buy food of her own. Her hotel room rent, commissions, and personal expenses used up most of her salary every week. One day Fred Sweet, the manager of the Telenews Theater, looked out his window and saw Barbra, whom he recognized from the Caucus Club, standing along Woodward Street thumbing a ride. He went downstairs, and she told him she didn’t have cab fare to get to the Art Institute. “Why don’t you take the bus.”

“I don’t have enough money to take a bus either,” Barbra replied. Sweet gave her a few dollars, and when he told the story to Ross Chapman, he added, “Ross, she looked like she needed a bath.”