Streisand: Her Life (18 page)

B
ARBRA COMPLETED HER
Caucus Club engagement on April 15; two days later she opened at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, where she shared the bill with a comedy team called the Smothers Brothers. “They became her surrogate family on the road,” Bob Schulenberg recalled, and before long Barbra and Tommy, the silly one, began a brief romance. According to Jay Landesman, owner of the Crystal Palace, “Barbra lost her cherry to Tommy Smothers, of a
l
l people.” (Landesman apparently didn’t know about Roy Scott or Barry Dennen. )

During Barbra’s engagement, Landesman recalled, “I created a little revue-type format for the brothers, and Barbra began to do their sort of patter between her numbers. Her raps went on as long as my introductions. I thought her heavy Jewish material distracted from the mood and delivery of the subtle songs that followed.” Landesman called Barbra into his office and told her to cut the patter. “But I get so bored doing the same thing every night,” she replied.

“You’ve been in the business two weeks and you’re bored already!” an astonished Landesman replied.

By now Barbra was not only bored but homesick. Being away from New York, she wrote Schulenberg, was “strange. I’m sort of depressed. Forgive me.” Bob called her, and the two of them talked for nine hours. “She had such a vulnerability. She could seem hard, but she was really just trying to protect herself. She was just trying to keep things going.”

On that score, Barbra was doing all right. She gave her last performance in St. Louis on Monday, May 8, and the next day flew back to New York. That night she opened her second stint at the Bon Soir, this time behind two comedians, Renee Taylor and Phil Leeds. Barbra shared a tiny dressing room with Taylor, and one pair of stockings. Barbra would slip into them, do her act, come back to the dressing room, slip them off, and return them to Renee. They reversed the procedure for the second set.

On opening night, Phil Leeds invited a friend of his to see his act. Marty Erlichman was a dark-haired, Bronx-born, boxily built, quintessentially New York personal manager who represented the Irish folk singers the Clancy Brothers. Erlichman never got to see his friend perform. “I was just mesmerized by Barbra,” Erlichman recalled. “She sang five songs, and I got chills on all five of them. And everyone in the place was enchanted too, except for the rest of the people at my table, who were industry people. They started talking to each other in the middle of her first song. And one of them, an agent, said to me after the first number, ‘Boy, that girl has a lot to learn—you don’t
open
with a ballad.’ That was a problem in Barbra’s life. When you initiate, when you’re different, most of the world is frightened of it and doesn’t understand it.”

When Barbra completed her set, Erlichman rushed backstage and found her next to the coffee urn in the Bon Soir’s kitchen. He told her how wonderful he thought she was and wound up talking with her until she had to go on again. He missed Phil Leeds’s act in the process. “I told her, ‘Barbra, the first time out of the box, you’re going to win every award that this business has to offer—the Tony, the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar.’ She looked at me and said, ‘The Oscar?’ and I said, ‘That’s going to be the biggest one, because you’re going to be the biggest movie star of them all.’ She giggled and said, ‘I think I’m going to be a star, too.
’”

Barbra liked Erlichman’s direct—some would say gruff—manner, so akin to hers. He asked her if she had a manager. She told him she was unhappy with Ted Rozar, who wouldn’t accompany her on the road because he had a wife and young children, but that she had a contract with him. Her agency was always telling her, Marty later said, “to change your nose, change your clothes, and stop singing those cockamamie songs.” She asked Erlichman if he would suggest she change anything about herself. He replied, “Not a thing,” then offered to work for her for a year without commission in order to prove himself. Barbra liked that, and she told Erlichman that if she could wrangle out of her contract with Rozar, he could be her manager.

B
ARBRA CONTINUED TO
give a lot of thought to her act, and to her audiences. She wondered whether she needed to explain where a new song came from in order for the audience to enjoy it fully. She plotted to vex the customers by whispering something to just one side of the audience. She told Jimmy Daniels she wanted to be introduced as “the ugly, untalented, lousy Barbra Streisand.” She came up with a withering put-down for a heckler:
“
I’d tell you to shut your mouth but it might ruin your sex life.”

She talked to Barry about singing songs as theater characters she wanted to play—Juliet, Ophelia, the young girl in
The Rose Tattoo
—and about putting together an act in which she would begin the set as a little girl and end it as a jaded woman. She worried, though, that she wouldn’t be able to pull off the older woman because of her youth.

As it turned out, Barbra was soon able to sing torch songs with hard-earned personal conviction—thanks to Barry Dennen. According to Bob Schulenberg, while Barbra lived with Barry he treated her “like a second-class citizen.” Dennen told her not to answer the phone because he didn’t want anyone in his family to know they were living together, and the doorman thought Barbra was Barry’s cousin.

The relationship began to unravel in May of 1961 when Dennen went back to California to visit his family. Barbra hadn’t been able to speak with him for the entire time he was away, and she missed him badly. The night he was due to return, she and Bob planned an elaborate welcome-home celebration. They bought champagne and all of his favorite foods, and left a note for him: “Eat up, we’ll be back after the show.”

When Barbra finished her last set at the Bon Soir she rushed home, thrilled that she would see Barry again after so long. He wasn’t there. “She worried that he’d missed the plane.” Bob recalled, “but she couldn’t call his family.” They sat up until three in the morning, but there was no call from Barry. “This had to be so hard on her,” Schulenberg said. “She planned this joyous welcome, and then nothing.”

Dennen’s absence, and his silence, continued for a week, during which Bob felt “Barbra ate up all her emotion for Barry.”
W
hen he finally returned, she adopted a defensive coolness toward him. A few weeks later Schulenberg figured the romance was really over when Barry had a group of male friends over to the apartment while Barbra visited her mother. One of the men riffled through a closet, put on some of Barbra’s clothes, and started to imitate her singing “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.”

“Barry was laughing,” Schulenberg recalled, “and I thought, You schmuck! Those are her clothes! I thought Barry should have gotten up and punched the guy in the nose. So I wondered, Can this relationship survive? And the answer I came up with was no.” In his memoir of his time with Barbra, Barry offers another reason for their break-up: she found him in bed with another man.

Barbra carried bitterness toward Barry for some time, and she used it for her biting rendition of “Cry Me a River.” Schulenberg could tell the minute he heard it that “Barbra was singing about Barry—all that bitterness and anger—‘Now you say you’re
sorry!’
I mean, she’s not acting in that song,
she’s feeling
it.”

B
ARBRA’S BON SOIR
engagement extended through June 6, but once the gig lapsed, she got no new job offers. Most of the booking agents approached on her behalf had never seen her perform, and they repeated the usual litany of complaints about her. Her income had dried up, and after the breakup with Barry she had no place to live. She went back home to Brooklyn for a few weeks, but she couldn’t stand her mother’s harping about how she should get a
steady
job, something she could
count
on, not this on-again-off-again nightclub nonsense.

She fled back to Manhattan and spent the night wherever she could, most often in friends’ apartments, where she usually slept on the couch. Sometimes, if someone else had beaten her to the available bed, she slept on the floor or in the bathtub. Finally she paid $12.95 at a Whelan Drug Store for a cot, which she lugged around with her everywhere she went. That way, no matter where she crashed, she could sleep on a bed of her own. For a time a friend let her sleep in his office, but she had to wait until the place was closed before she could come in and had to be out again by eight in the morning.

At last Irvin Arthur got her another sight-unseen booking, this one July 3-16 at the Town & Country Club in Winnipeg, Ontario, and a one-month return booking at the Caucus Club to begin on July 17. Meanwhile she needed money so badly she took a job as a switchboard operator at Ben Sackheim, an advertising agency where her brother, Sheldon, worked in the art department. “The regular switchboard operator was away on vacation and Barbra was supposed to take her place,” Sheldon recalled. “Well, for those two weeks none of us could get a call either in or out. Barbra was so bored with the work that she’d talk in these made-up foreign languages to everyone who called.”

Joe Battaglia, the vice president in charge of broadcast advertising for the agency, recalled Barbra as “a moody kid. If she felt like saying good morning, she would. If she didn’t, she’d ignore you. She was a little bit slovenly in her appearance. You looked at her and wondered whether she had bathed that day.”

One morning Sheldon went to Battaglia’s office with a kinescope of Barbra’s appearance on the Paar show, which had cost him $125 to obtain, and asked if he could help Barbra get work. “I’ve had a lot of trouble with her,” Shelly told Battaglia. “She has no home. She’s almost uncontrollable. I can’t make her do anything.” Battaglia said he’d see what he could do. He sent the kinescope to writers he knew at
The Steve Allen Show
in Hollywood. After a long delay, the response came: They thought Barbra’s voice was “great,” but they considered her “too undisciplined” for prime-time network television.

Battaglia talked Barbra up to a few other people he knew in the business but had no success. Although the results had been disappointing, Battaglia expected that Barbra would express some gratitude for his efforts. She did not. “She was aware that I had made efforts on her behalf with Steve Allen, but she would never thank me. She never so much as came up to me and said, ‘Listen, Joe, thanks for trying.’ Nothing like that at all.”