Streisand: Her Life (16 page)

“She was so enthusiastic,” Leong recalled. “We found beautiful things, like a 1920s leopard coat. We found bodices from 1900 and skirts to go with them. She loved to find things she could wear in her hair, like jewels and bows and ribbons.” Leong also made dresses from scratch for Barbra, using material she’d found. “We devised the designs together,” he said. “We bought these beautiful lace doilies, and I made an Empire dress around one of them, using it across her back. I found a pale green chiffon material, and I made a full-skirted dress with it, with a Chinese top and a Mandarin collar.

“She liked styles that were very fluid—things that moved with her,” Leong went on. “She was very graceful and she moved well. She had a wonderful body to costume—thin, trim, long, lean. She experimented with a lot of different clothes, and it was exciting to watch the transformations that would come over her as she switched from one look to another.” Barbra’s enthusiasm about all this caused Leong endless fitting problems. “She wouldn’t stop moving. She was just all over the place and jumping up and down. Very difficult to do a hem.”

A
S THOUGH BY
some cosmic design, the malleable Galatea that was Barbra Streisand met yet another Pygmalion when Bob Schulenberg, an artist and designer friend of Barry Dennen’s from UCLA, moved to New York in July of 1960, in the midst of Barbra’s preparations for her Bon Soir audition. He will never forget his first sight of her, running toward him, yelling “Barry! Barry!” as he and Dennen left Barry’s apartment late one night.

“She was carrying two shopping bags in each hand, overflowing with feather boas and sequined fabric,” Schulenberg recalled. “And she had
everything
on. She had on a new cherry-red velvet skirt that stopped about an inch above her knees, which was very unusual in 1960. She had on chocolate-brown nylon stockings and gold lamé and red satin strap 1927 shoes. Her top was a gold, silver, and cherry-red brocade with big square-cut Elizabethan sleeves. She had on two Venetian glass beaded necklaces, six glass bracelets, and drop earrings made of glass. She looked like a weird
Vogue
illustration from the twenties. I was
fascinated
.”

What Barbra hadn’t done so well, Schulenberg thought, was her face. She had attempted the style of eye makeup popular at the time, an extended eyelash line to make the eyes seem larger, but Bob felt “she really didn’t know what she was doing. She had very little color on her skin and bright red lipstick. She had these wispy little bangs that fell down over her forehead to hide a bit of teenage skin. It just wasn’t a good look, and I could tell she wanted to be glamorous by what she was wearing.”

Schulenberg found himself analyzing this odd creature as he sat across from her and Barry at the Pam Pam coffee shop that first night. He didn’t think she was very good-looking, but he saw something in her. She had brilliant blue eyes, a long, sleek neck, and a face that from certain angles seemed to acquire a surprisingly classic beauty. “Barbra was like undeveloped territory. I was looking at her and abstractly thinking, Well, she’s got no structure in her cheeks, but that we can paint in. Somehow I thought she could be made to look like one of those Richard Avedon fashion models.”

Schulenberg burned to make Barbra over, but he hesitated to suggest that she needed it. “When you see a young woman who wants to look a certain way, and you know how she could look, but she’s doing it all wrong, you have to broach the subject nicely. You can’t just say, ‘You look like shit!
’”

But Schulenberg got his chance to “play with Barbra’s look” the day they were scheduled to see Barry play a messenger in Shakespeare’s
Henry V
in Central Park. Bob suggested they surprise Dennen. “Let’s make you up like a
Vogue
model—like Audrey Hepburn or somebody. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Barbra was all for it—“She was willing to do anything”—and the two of them spent an hour and a half on the transformation while Barbra chomped on rye bread and herring and mumbled questions with her mouth full: “Why are you doing that? How did you make it look that way?”

Schulenberg applied false eyelashes, in an era when no one wore them on the street. He contoured her cheeks with deep flesh-colored greasepaint. He extended her eyes with liner that made her look “like Marlene Dietrich in
Morocco
.” He dusted her face with white translucent powder. He pulled her hair back and used her “cheese Danish” hairpiece
under
her own hair to give it height.

Barbra finished off her makeover with black leotards under black slacks, black ballet slippers, a black leotard top, and a black cardigan sweater. “Now, this is a
1
20-degree night in New York City,” Schulenberg said with a laugh. “We had to use a lot of powder to keep her looking as cool as a cucumber. And she just looked sensational, like Martha Graham. People’s heads turned when she walked by. They were wondering, Who
is
she? Barbra
loved
it.”

Once this striking twosome got to Central Park, however, they discovered they were so late that Barry’s house seats had been sold. They went back to Dennen’s place on the subway, and when he got home he was livid. “How could you miss my performance?” he demanded.

“But, Barry,” Bob pleaded, “doesn’t Barbra look
great?
”

O
N SUNDAY AFTERNOON,
August 7, Barbra bounced down the thirty-one steps into the cavernous darkness that was the Bon Soir Club at 40 West Eighth Street and auditioned for Ernie Sgroi Sr.; his partner, Phil Pagano; and his emcee, Jimmy Daniels. She had brought Barry, Bob Schulenberg, and Burke McHugh with her, and after her two numbers McHugh murmured, “It looks good,” and left. But Sgroi and his colleagues weren’t sure. Yes, she had a wonderful voice, but she
looked
so strange. Yes, she’d been a hit at the Lion, but how would their mainstream audience react to her? There was only one way to find out. Sgroi told her to come back that night and do her songs again in front of the regular customers. If they liked her, he would give her a two-week booking.

That night Jimmy Daniels introduced her as “a little extra surprise, a young singer who’s been causing quite a stir over at the Lion.” She stepped onto the small stage and realized that she still had chewing gum in her mouth. She took it out and stuck it on the microphone. The audience laughed and wondered, Who’s this kook? But when she began to sing “A Sleepin’ Bee,” Sgroi and Pagano looked around the room and noticed that everyone had stopped laughing. Then they noticed that everyone had stopped drinking, and by the time she came to the end of the song the waiters had stopped serving. Barbra had mesmerized the entire room.

When she completed the song, her head down, her eyes closed, her arms limp at her sides, the audience remained silent for what seemed an eternity. Then the patrons burst into applause and cheers. Before the clamor stopped, Barbra launched into “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” She flailed her arms, she
l
et out whoops, she giggled, she see
m
ed to become a totally different person. When she ended the song with “Who’s afraid of the big, big, big, big, big, bad,
wooo-oooo-oooo-lf
,” the audience rose to its feet with cheering, laughing, stomping delight.

When she stepped down off the small stage, that night’s headliner, the comedian Larry Storch, looked at her and said, “Kid, you’re gonna be a star.”

Ernie Sgroi pulled her into his office and said, “You start September ninth. Two weeks. Two shows a night. One hundred twenty-five dollars a week.”

“Just like in the movies!” Barbra later exclaimed.

She had one month to prepare for her first major nightclub engagement, but first she had to go back up to the Cecilwood Theater in Fishkill, where she had been asked to fill in for an indisposed actress and play Hortense, the French maid in
The Boy Friend
for two weeks. She was a hit in the show, cavorting on stage in her maid’s outfit complete with ankle-strap high heels, fish-net stockings, frilly apron, and a huge hair bow.

While she twirled an enormous feather duster on stage in Fishkill, the first newspaper article about Barbra appeared in the August 21, 1960, edition of
Flatbush Life,
accompanied by the exotic, “terrible” photograph she had sent to Eddie Blum. Under the headline “Flatbush Actress Heads for Stardom,” the piece began, “Barbra Streisand, who as a child was determined to become a dramatic actress, now finds herself in the rather enviable position of being considered for her singing ability as well.” After recounting her summer stock appearances,
The Insect Comedy,
and her audition for Blum, the article described her success at the Lion and concluded, “Word of her splendid reception got around to the sharp ears of Bon Soir personnel, and she was given an audition... again Miss Streisand knocked’ em dead, and she was signed for a two-week shot, beginning September 9.”

O
N THAT SULTRY
Friday night, Barbra appeared third on a bill with the comic pantomimists Tony and Eddie and comedienne Phyllis Diller. Diller vividly recalled the moment, as she patted on her makeup and prepared to go on, that she first heard Barbra Streisand sing: “On her third note, every hair on my body stood up! I am basically a musician, and when I heard that voice—and that heart—I knew this is a
star!
” Diller took Barbra under her wing, gently suggesting that she wear more traditional clothes while performing.