Streisand: Her Life (19 page)

W
HILE SHE PLUGGED
calls into the switchboard at Ben Sackheim, Barbra got herself another permanent living situation. She had stayed briefly at a seedy single-room occupancy hotel near the Bon Soir, but now her acting school classmate Elaine Sobel came to the rescue. Elaine had a one-bedroom walk-up on Thirty-fourth Street near Second Avenue, and she offered Barbra her couch in exchange for help with the rent. “It was a lot better than the street or bathtubs,” Elaine said.

Living together created a deep intimacy between Barbra and Elaine. “We spent hours talking about our problems, until early in the morning,” Elaine reminisced. “We were both trying to escape our past. We shared a core of pain that was nonpareil. I would cry, but Barbra wasn’t a crier. Usually we talked about Barbra’s problems. She never took much interest in mine.”

They talked a lot about men.
“
She’d ask me about guys, but I wasn’t any more sophisticated than she was, fellas-wise. She’d tell me about some guy she liked and she’d ask, ‘Do you think he’s cute?’ It was always more ‘Do you think he’s cute?’ than ‘Do you think he’s talented?’ Barbra used to moan, ‘Will I ever get a guy? Do you think anyone could ever love this face?
’”
The roommates went to see Jean Genet’s controversial play
The Balcony
, and Barbra recognized the Executioner as Stanley Beck, who had found her so interesting when they were both at Malden Bridge. She went backstage to see him, and the two began to date. “Barbra told me she couldn’t believe how well built Stanley was,” Elaine recalled, “but she had rather ambivalent feelings toward him. When he was around, she felt she could take him or leave him. But when he was away, she missed him. At any rate, she told me he was
so
well built that she had bought herself a diaphragm just in case she gave in to temptation.”

Barbra was impressed, too, by an insight into her character that Stanley had shared with her. “Stanley told her that she didn’t like herself,” Elaine recalled, “and that she thus couldn’t accept it when someone else liked her. He said that was why she was attracted to guys who paid no attention to her, because they confirmed that she was nothing. She said to me, ‘Maybe he’s right. I don’t know.
’”

Elaine soon discovered that she and Barbra shared an odd phobia, one that might explain why so many people felt Barbra often looked as if she hadn’t bathed. “We both were frightened of taking showers. I found out later that mine came from the Holocaust, from what I’d heard about the gas chambers. Barbra’s fear was of water falling on her head. I don’t know where that came from.”

Elaine’s biggest problems with Barbra revolved around the housekeeping. “Barbra was just not a
balebosteh
—she wasn’t neat around the house.
N
o domestic talents. She never did any cooking, no, sir. It was always other people’s food and drink.” Elaine also found that Barbra could be “ruthless—in the sense that nothing would stop her. She could be thoughtless toward innocent people. She could be inconsiderate—like not returning calls, or not paying her share of the phone bill on time or not returning my coat that she borrowed. But when she wanted something, it was ‘Pack it, do it, move it,
now!
”

Barbra and Elaine spent long spells in front of the mirror. “She’d call herself
mieskeit
and say, ‘Who the hell wants me?’ She’d look at me and say, ‘You’re beautiful, Elaine. Look at your nose!’ I was one of the first people to tell her, ‘Don’t change your nose!’ Barbra was very insecure about who she was. She kept repeating, ‘Ya think this is right? Ya think this is good? Whaddya think?’ Over and over again. I told her that when something touches me deeply I get tingles on my left side. I call it ‘the truth chill.’ And when I heard her hit some notes in the bathroom my left side started to go crazy. I shouted to her, ‘It’s happening, it’s happening!
’”

Whenever Barbra sang after that, she would ask Elaine, “Ya gettin’ any tingles?”

B
ARBRA’S ENGAGEMENT AT
Auby Galpern’s Town & Country Club in Winnipeg turned into a disaster. Perhaps because she was so far away from home, Barbra apparently decided to be as outrageous and experimental as possible in Canada. According to Marie Lawrence, a waitress at the club, Barbra came out on opening night in a brashly colored outfit that looked like a sarong, with thongs on her feet, carrying a bongo drum. “She started playing the bongos and was chanting and singing in a foreign language. She would bend her body forward all the way to the floor, with her hair flying up and down with her movements.

“Mr. Galpern went into a frenzy. He could hardly wait for the show to finish. The people just sat there staring at her, almost hypnotized. They were an older Jewish crowd and they didn’t know what to make of her. Mr. Galpern told her that if she didn’t change her style of dress and singing she could take the first transportation back to where she came from. She changed her style after that—sometimes she’d sing Yiddish songs—but Mr. Galpern hardly stayed around to watch any of her performances.”

Gene Telpner, a critic for the
Winnipeg Sun,
recalled that Galpern “didn’t
l
ike the way she dressed, that’s for sure. She wore things that you’d wear when you were cleaning up the house. It was astonishing. That turned a lot of people off. She was poor, she was staying at the YWCA, but Galpern wasn’t a very forgiving type. He kept telling her to get decent clothes, and she just ignored him.”

According to Auby Galpern’s brother Myer, there was more to it than that. “He was being polite later when he said it was her clothes, but really it was her slip. She wore this slip that you could see and it was dirty. She wore it day after day and never cleaned it. He didn’t know how to tell her. Finally he did and she was insulted.”

All might have been forgiven if Barbra had been a bigger hit with her audiences. She told Elaine Sobel that she found Canadians “a sour lot—emotionless and dull.” Still, she envied the girls she met, all of whom seemed to have good relationships with their parents. “I wish I was like that,” she said. “I’m getting very depressed.”

Auby Galpern was eager for an excuse to fire Barbra, and he got it a week into her engagement when she stalked offstage after four songs because the audience wouldn’t quiet down. Galpern told her to pack up her things and leave. Barbra couldn’t believe it. The next day she told Elaine Sobel, “I don’t know if I’m really fired, but I think I am.” She was. This would stand as the only time in her life that Barbra Streisand was dismissed from an entertainment job.

Nine years later, when Barbra was in Ottawa as the guest of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, whom she was dating, a reporter from Winnipeg asked her about her stay there.

“I’ve never been to Winnipeg,” Barbra replied.

“Yes, you have. You sang at Auby Galpern’s Town & Country Club.”

“
I
’ve never met anyone named Auby Galpern,” she insisted, and turned away.

B
ARBRA’S THIRD AND
last sojourn in Detroit was far more successful; after Winnipeg, the Caucus Club must have seemed to her like a family bosom. She stayed at the Hotel Wolverine, quite a step up from the YWCA, and was welcomed with enthusiasm by old friends and by new fans during her four-week stint between July 17 and August
1
2.

Barbra wrote to Elaine Sobel from Detroit to ask about something that had left her troubled: she wasn’t sure what was expected of her when a man took her out after the show. Should she invite him to her room? Let him kiss her? Sleep with him? When she did invite a man up, she confessed she didn’t know how to tell him to leave if she decided he wasn’t quite right for her: “I never know when to say when.”

While she was in Detroit, Barbra managed to extricate herself from her contract with Ted Rozar when her agency lent her $700 to “buy him off,” as she put it, although Rozar insists Barbra owed him the money in commissions. Their main problem, Rozar said, was that “she wanted someone who would always be there and act more as a personal assistant than a manager. With Barbra, there was a lot of hand-holding.” She telephoned Marty Erlichman, who was in San Francisco, and told him he had a client. They never signed a contract, and more than fifty years later, with a ten-year separation between
1
977 and 1986, Erlichman is still Barbra’s manager.

One sticking point remained with Rozar, however. Barbra had left several suitcases of clothes in his office, and she told friends he was holding them as ransom until he got paid. Rozar insists she was free to pick them up whenever she wanted to: “Her wardrobe wasn’t worth
anything
at that point!”

Still, Barbra showed up at Rozar’s door, he said, accompanied by “a big fat guy” and told him, “I want my stuff.”

“I guess I was supposed to be intimidated by this goon,” Rozar said. “I just said, ‘Fine, it’s right there.’ I told the guy, ‘I oughta kick your butt outta here.’ And he said, ‘I’m a lawyer, and if you lay a hand on me I’m gonna sue you for five hundred dollars for every time you hit me.’ I just laughed. I could have shot the son of a bitch for trespassing. I don’t know why she felt she had to bring this henchman with her. I’d already been paid.”

T
RY AS SHE
might, Barbra couldn’t persuade Mike Wallace not to eat smoked foods. It was December 1, and she was making her fifth appearance on
P. M. East
,
W
allace’s late-night East Coast talk-variety show. Since her first guest stint on the show in June, Barbra had become its resident eccentric, spouting off amusingly on everything from the evils of milk to the benefits of Zen Buddhism. That she could also stagger the audience with the purity and power of her voice quickly made her one of Wallace’s most popular guests. In New York, gay bars offered two-for-one drink nights whenever she appeared on the show, and Wallace’s ratings swelled nationwide as well. Between June 1961 and June 1962 she appeared on the show thirteen times—five times in one five-week period. On various shows she sang a duet with Mickey Rooney (“I Wish I Were in Love Again”); confronted David Susskind, who had been an agent, over the fact that he had kept her waiting in his office and never granted her an interview; debated the merits of fallout shelters; sang “Ding-Dong, the Witch Is Dead” from
The Wizard of Oz;
and kibbitzed with Eartha Kitt and Katharine Anne Porter.