Streisand: Her Life (39 page)

Finally Barbra decided that she had no recourse but to bring Chaplin up on charges before Actors’ Equity. There was a hearing, but no action was taken against him. According to George Reeder, “Sydney could be such a charming and witty man that he just went in and charmed the pants off the Equity Committee. Barbra was angry, and she came off a little bit aggressive and abrasive, and here was this tall, handsome, ingratiating man giving his side of things. Barbra didn’t have a chance.”

But she got her revenge, Reeder recalled. At the end of the “You Are Woman, I Am Man” number, after Fanny falls back on the chaise longue and Nicky starts to kiss her, a blackout curtain would come down as the set moved upstage to make room for the next scene. “There was a heavy lead pipe sewn into the bottom of the curtain,” Reeder recalled, “and Sydney and I were warned to keep our heads down, because if we lifted them up too soon we risked getting conked on the noggin with this pipe as the curtain fell.

“Well, this one performance, as Sydney was pretending to nuzzle and kiss Barbra’s neck at the end of the scene, he said ‘nose’ to her again. She bit his neck really hard and he reared his head up. The pipe hit him. Everybody was going ‘Are you all right?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ But then when he came down from his dressing room for his next scene, he stopped on the stairs and said, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t think I can do this.’ He felt really dizzy, and it turned out he had a concussion. So I had to go on for him.”

In June 1965 Chaplin left the production. Stark agreed to continue to pay him his $2,100-a-week salary through the end of his contract—a total of $84,000—and told Chaplin he was to say his problems had been with Stark, not Barbra. Chaplin lived up to the agreement and gave his final performance on June 19. Few among the cast were sorry to see him go.

Years later Chaplin remained bitter toward Barbra. In a 1989 interview he said, “It seemed clear to me that Barbra didn’t find herself attractive and was compensating with this enormous drive to succeed. I thought those qualities were rather attractive—until the charm became overbearing. Barbra thought she knew everything. When she started directing me, I told her she should stop mugging like Martha Raye, leave me alone, and concentrate on her own lines.... She’s not a generous person. Whatever niceness may be there is pretty deeply hidden. You’ll see—she’ll end up sad.”

Johnny Desmond, younger and even better looking than Chaplin, stepped into the Arnstein role. Desmond had begun his career as a big-band singer with Glenn Miller and had starred on Broadway in another Jule Styne show,
Say, Darling,
in 1958. Unlike Chaplin, he knew from the beginning exactly what he was getting into playing Nick Arnstein. What he didn’t expect was the flurry of notes on his performance that Barbra kept sending to him through the stage manager. “I asked for a meeting with her to talk things out,” Desmond recalled. “We talked for two hours onstage, and I told her I was happy in my work and I wanted a good working relationship. I couldn’t steal the show from her if I stood on my head and yodeled.... I wanted her to feel secure in my performance.” After things got thrashed out, the two stars got along just fine, and most of the company much preferred Desmond to Chaplin.

M
ONTHS BEFORE CHAPLIN
left, another classic backstage drama had cost Lainie Kazan her job as Barbra’s understudy. On Tuesday, February 2, 1965, Elliott called the theater to say that Barbra had laryngitis, and for the first time she would not be able to go on. The stage manager frantically telephoned Kazan and told her to come in and rehearse with Sydney Chaplin. “I had career ambitions,” Lainie said, “and the people in the press kept saying to me, ‘If you ever go on, let us know.’ So I kept a list of critics and columnists, and when I found out I’d be going on that night, I had a girlfriend call them.”

While Lainie rehearsed the role that afternoon, a reporter for
The New York Times
called Barbra and told her what Kazan was up to. Barbra reportedly replied, “Over my dead body!” and showed up at the theater at seven-thirty ready to give her performance. The next day’s newspapers had a field day with the story of an insecure star who had dragged herself out of a sickbed to keep her understudy from stealing any of her limelight. “Show Goes On, but Lainie Doesn’t,” one headline read.

“I think Barbra was probably upset,” Lainie understated. “She was very protective of that role. I wanted her part, but she didn’t want me to do it.”

By the next day, however, Barbra was even sicker, and Lainie got her chance to go on twice, during the matinee and the evening performance. Reporters for
Time
and
Newsweek
attended. Publicly, Barbra appeared gracious; she sent her fellow Erasman a telegram: “We were told trees grow in Brooklyn. But we know better. Stars do.” Privately, however, she insisted that Ray Stark fire Kazan.

“Ray Stark called the replacement auditions for Barbra’s understudy between the two shows that Lainie did that day,” George Reeder recalled. “That was a really nasty thing to do, because it let Lainie know that that night was the last time she was going to be doing that role.”

For the record, Lainie denied that she was fired. “I got so much publicity that within a week I was swamped with offers,” she said. “I had a record contract and a nightclub offer. So I asked Ray Stark if I could have my release.”

“Lainie likes to say she left, but she was fired,” her replacement, Linda Gerard, said. “Barbra was really upset about what she had done. In fact, when I signed my contract, part of my deal was I could not alert the media if I ever went on.”

Not long after this, Peter Daniels, who had been assistant conductor for the show, was fired by a furious Barbra when she learned that he had given some of the arrangements he had prepared for her to Lainie, whom he later married, for her nightclub act.

B
ARBRA’S RECORDING CAREER
kept pace with her Broadway stardom throughout 1964.
Barbra Streisand/The Third Album,
released in February, rose to number five on the pop charts and went gold within a year. The most cohesive of her first three efforts, the mostly classic songs highlighted the beauty of her voice as much as her second album had showcased its theatricality.

Two months later the original-cast recording of the
Funny Girl
score hit the stores. The excitement the show had generated and Barbra’s growing legion of fans propelled the album to number two. The sales of all four of Barbra’s albums were bolstered considerably in May when
The Barbra Streisand Album
won the Grammy Award as Album of the Year and Barbra was chosen Best Female Vocalist for her work on the album. She remains the youngest recipient of both awards.

One of Marty Erlichman’s predictions had come true, but another would have to wait. Despite the stunning impact Barbra had made on Broadway, the Tony Award eluded her again when the Best Actress citation went to Broadway veteran Carol Channing for her role as Dolly Levi in David Merrick’s production of
Hello, Dolly!
Channing’s win was part of a nearly clean sweep for her show. The only one of its eight nominations
Funny Girl
won was for Kay Medford as Best Supporting Actress. Barbra was sorely disappointed, but she felt better the following night when her audience jumped to their feet upon her first entrance, and her fans in the balcony cheered and shouted, “You’re the best actress to us, Barbra!”

O
N SUNDAY, JULY
12, 1964, Barbra tried out some material for a new album on the concert stage at the Forest Hills Music Festival in Queens. The crowd gave her a thunderous ovation as she stepped out on the stage, and a gathering summer storm gave her some literal thunder just as the music began for her first number. “Quiet down!” she said, looking skyward. “I haven’t done anything yet!”

Between songs, shouts of “Come closer, Barbra!” echoed through the night air. The arena, a tennis stadium, had been set up with a large expanse of grass between the stage and the first row of seats. At intermission Barbra decided to honor the request. And so, as she sang “People” to open the second act, she walked across the grass, which was still wet from an afternoon downpour, trailing the microphone cord behind her. “She had been warned that she could be electrocuted on the wet grass,” Peter Daniels said, “but she did it anyway. She had to win back the crowd. And she did. They jumped to their feet after that number.” The show proved that Barbra hadn’t lost any of her ability to weave concert magic, and she repeated the triumph at the following year’s festival.

Barbra reached a new recording milestone in September when her fourth studio album,
People,
climbed to the number one position on the
Billboard
Top 100 Albums chart, helped along by the sales and airplay of Streisand’s first bona fide hit single, a new recording of the title tune. It was a remarkable accomplishment in an era dominated by the Beatles—Barbra knocked
A Hard Day’s Night
out of the top spot—but understandable both in terms of the excitement surrounding Streisand and the album’s quality. Arguably her best recording to date,
People
featured songs of unusual musical and narrative depth which highlighted the richness that her voice continued to acquire. Had there been any thought that Streisand might be a flash in the pan,
People
put it to rest. The record won Barbra her second consecutive Grammy as Best Female Vocalist.