Streisand: Her Life (24 page)

Whenever she or Elliott bathed, they had to boil four large pots of water on the stove for hours to keep the water hot. The rest of the time they covered the claw-footed tub with a piece of plywood and piled stacks of dirty dishes on top of it to free up counter space.

In the living room, feather boas hung from Tiffany-style lampshades, and an old wooden sewing machine cabinet doubled as the dinner table. Beaded bags hung from gilt picture frames with nothing in them.
Harry Stoones
creator Jeff Harris recalled that “she had this one amazing thing that looked like a World War II oxygen mask—but to this day I’m not sure what it was.” In the bedroom, dozens of shallow drawers in an old wooden dentist’s cabinet held sheet music, costume jewelry, belt buckles, fabric swatches. An apothecary jar housed Barbra’s collection of paste-on beauty spots. She plastered the bathroom walls with a collage of photos, articles, ads, and words or phrases she’d cut from newspapers and magazines, then shellacked it to a burnished sheen. Her guests tended to spend inordinate amounts of time in the room—reading.

Such decor would not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but Elliott loved it. When he moved in, he said, he thought of himself and Barbra as Hansel and Gretel, ensconced in an enchanted cottage. “The happiest memories I have of Barbra are when we were living together before we were married. We were having a really romantic time.” They worked together, lived together, played together “like kids in a treehouse,” one friend said. They watched late-night horror movies on a temperamental old television set. Seated at Barbra’s sewing machine, they gobbled Swanson’s frozen fried chicken dinners and bricks of Breyers coffee ice cream. Late at night they’d munch on kosher salami, fried matzos, and pickled herring.

They read scenes together from Greek dramas—Barbra as Medea, Elliott as Jason. They made up their own language, a variation on pidgin English, so that no one else could understand what they were saying to each other. It was Hansel and Gretel against the world.

“I wanted to take care of Barbra,” Elliott recalled in 1964. “Every morning I’d wake her up, saying, ‘Barbra, come get your chicken soup.
’”
One evening, as the two slept on their cot, Elliott heard “a gruesome squealing and scratching. It sounded like a rat the size of an elephant. I looked under the tub and I saw a tail about a yard long.... I closed the door and called the fire department.” There was nothing the firemen cou
l
d do, and after spending the rest of the night in a hotel, the couple learned to live with their uninvited guest, which they named Gonzola.

“We used to laugh about that a lot,” Elliott has said. “I look back to Third Avenue with sublime affection.”

N
O MATTER HOW
hard he tried, Marty Erlichman couldn’t get Barbra a recording contract. Since the fall of 1961 he had been badgering every record industry executive in New York to listen to her. He never sent a tape; he insisted on
l
ive auditions. Barbra wou
l
d schlep to the offices of Columbia or RCA or Capitol Records with a trio Marty would quickly patch together—Peter Daniels on piano, Barbra’s bass player from the Bon Soir, Bobby Short’s drummer—and she wou
l
d sing two or three numbers, usually “A Sleepin’ Bee,” “I Stayed Too Long at the Fair,” and “When the Sun Comes Out.”

The responses were uniform. “She has a beautiful voice,” Marty recalled the bigwigs telling him, “but it’s more Broadway than records, and certainly the voice and the material are not what’s being bought right now. We don’t think she’ll sell records.” The main problem was that in this era a new singer was expected to have three or four hit singles in release before the label would get behind an album. Because her looks and her sound were so different—she wasn’t likely to be booked on
American Bandstand
—no one could foresee Barbra Streisand as a singles seller.

Precisely the elements that made Barbra so unforgettable in a nightclub—her esoteric material, her jazzy play
f
ulness, her histrionics—worked against her in the minds of the recording industry decision-makers. The popular vocalists of this era were bland, unthreatening, homogeneous balladeers. The biggest-selling non-rock ’n’ roll singles were prettily sung melodic ballads like “Moon River” and “A Taste of Honey.” And auditioning live actually may have hurt more than it helped. Barbra didn’t look like Patti Page or Julie London or Doris Day, and her sometimes overwrought performing style tended to turn off hidebound traditionalists, which included most record executives.

Marty had his heart set on signing Barbra with Columbia, the Cadillac of record labels, and after her live audition for the company’s president, Goddard Lieberson, he played a tape he’d made of his client at the Bon Soir. “Listen to the applause,” he urged. “They loved her. They gave her standing ovations, flowers, the works.” He asked Lieberson to hold on to the tape and “listen to it when the phone ain’t ringing.”

Lieberson listened and then played the tapes for others in the company. They agreed with his opinion that Barbra was too special. Sure, the Bon Soir audience loved her, but they were sophisticated New Yorkers, and many of them were gay at that. To sell records in numbers that mattered, Barbra would have to appeal to mainstream America, and Lieberson didn’t think she would. He sent her a note to say she had a beautiful voice but he didn’t see the kind of commercial potential for her that the economic realities of the music marketplace required.

Shortly after Barbra’s
Wholesale
audition, Arthur Laurents sent Lieberson a note, unbeknownst to Barbra or Marty, urging him to sign her. Lieberson asked Marty to bring Barbra in again, and this time he recorded her audition at Columbia’s Studio B at 799 Seventh Avenue in order to see how she would sound when her voice was professionally taped. But he still felt she was too eccentric.

Barbra soon appeared on two Columbia albums anyway. The label specialized in original-cast Broadway recordings, and on Sunday, April 1, Barbra joined the rest of the
Wholesale
cast to commit the score to vinyl. She arrived late, as usual, dressed in jeans, a tatty sweater, and dirty sneakers, and made a beeline for Lieberson the minute she saw him. “Goddard! Goddard,” she called out. “I got a great idea for the album!”

According to the album’s musical director and vocal arranger, Lehman Engel, Barbra stopped singing in the middle of “Miss Marmelstein” and complained that she didn’t like the orchestration. “Goddard could have spoken to her over the intercom,” Lehman wrote in his memoirs. “Instead, he left the control room and walked over to her. He put his arm around her shoulders and gently led her away to the sidelines. Out of earshot of the orchestra and the rest of the cast he spoke to her. I don’t know what he said to her, but when she came back, she sang the song as it was charted, straight through, in one amazing take.”

Marty and Barbra hoped that the
Wholesale
album would change Lieberson’s mind about signing Barbra, but Harold Rome’s score did little to enhance the unique qualities of the Streisand voice. And while “Miss Marmelstein” amply demonstrated her comic talents and her ability to belt, it didn’t showcase the beauty, purity, and range that made her voice so special.

Barbra’s appearance on a second album—a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Rome’s first big success,
Pins and Needles
—came about in spite of Lieberson’s opposition to using her. Rome felt so strongly that she was right for it that he threatened not to do the record at all unless Barbra participated. Lieberson relented, and Rome’s instincts proved unassailable. The cheery, lilting score celebrating the joys of union membership in the garment trade gave Barbra some marvelously funny turns that left the listener wishing the show had been revived on Broadway as well. Arguably, it would have been more successful than
Wholesale
and made Barbra an even bigger sensation.

After
Pins and Needles
and the publicity barrage that had attended Barbra’s triumph in
Wholesale,
both Capitol and Atlantic came back to Marty with contracts in hand. He turned them down. “The first company that wanted to sign her was Atlantic,” he recalled to
Billboard
in 1983, “but that label was basically jazz. I told them that I thought she had great potential as an album seller, and since Columbia was the best album-producing company, I had my heart set on them. I told Capitol the same thing. It was a difficult thing to do, turning down offers after we’d waited so long, because neither of us had any money. But we both thought it would be better to hold out for the best than to jump at the first offer just because we were hungry.”

To keep the Streisand buzz hot and to ensure that “Miss Marmelstein” wouldn’t typecast her as an ethnic comedienne, Erlichman booked her into a two-week return engagement at the Bon Soir beginning May 22. This time she was the headliner, billed as “Barbra
(I Can Get It for You Wholesale)
Streisand.” Every night after the show, Marty had a taxi ready outside the theater at eleven-thirty to whisk her downtown.

On May 29 she appeared on the popular TV prime-time variety hour
The Garry Moore Show.
She stepped out onto a balcony set, dressed in an elegant black cocktail dress, and sang a highly charged, thrilling rendition of “When the Sun Comes Out.” Later in the show, during a “That Wonderful Year” segment set in 1929, she sang a slowed-down, ironic version of the traditionally uptempo Democratic Party theme song “Happy Days Are Here Again” as a wealthy woman who has lost all her money in the stock market crash of that year. With forced gaiety, she sat in a deserted barroom, paying for each successive glass of champagne with her earrings, rings, and bracelets.

Barbra also appeared on
PM East
five times between April and June, and one of those appearances finally turned the tide for her at Columbia. For months Marty Erlichman had urged David Kapralik, the sprightly director of Columbia’s artists and repertoire department, to catch Barbra’s act in the hope that Kapralik would report back favorably to Lieberson. Kapralik never got around to it, but late one night he returned to his apartment and switched on
PM East.
A girl was singing, Kapralik recalled, “and I was knocked off my feet. When she finished and Mike Wallace said her name, I made the connection: this was the girl Marty had been bugging me about! She was in command of the full spectrum of human emotion from comedic to tragic, and she just blew me away.”

As Marty had hoped, Kapralik relayed his enthusiasm to Lieberson, whose oppositio
n
to Streisand had already begun to soften. Everywhere he turned, it seemed, people were talking about “this girl.” At cocktail parties he would listen to Harold Arlen rave about the way she sang his songs, “A Sleepin’ Bee” and “Right as the Rain.” Whenever Lieberson spoke to Harold Rome or Arthur Laurents, they’d marvel, “You haven’t signed her yet?” Even within the hallowed halls of Columbia Records, Barbra converts were becoming
l
egion. Kapralik, by now a self-described “Streisand groupie,” dragged his co-workers to the Blue Angel nearly every night. Few remained unmoved by her, and Kapralik made sure the word always got back to his boss.

Finally Lieberson, who was referred to in hushed tones by his employees as “God,” deigned to descend to the Blue Angel for Barbra’s closing performance on Friday, August 17. He left impressed.
N
ot only had her voice become richer and more mature in just a few months but there was a new elegance to her look and style that boded well for mainstream acceptance. As if to underscore that, Lieberson noticed that the audience around him, cheering and stomping after Barbra’s every number, encompassed a far wider range of ages and types than he had imagined it would. The following Monday, Lieberson called Marty Erlichman. “It takes a big man to admit a mistake,” he said, “and I made a mistake. I would like to record Barbra.”