Streisand: Her Life (21 page)

O
N NOVEMBER
16, Barbra opened fourth on the bill at the Blue Angel. When she arrived at the club that Thursday night, Herbert Jacoby stressed to her that she needed to be
sophisticated
—she wasn’t in Greenwich Village any longer. “Don’t worry, I’m sophisticated,” Barbra told him. “I’m gonna close with a Cole Porter number.”

Decked out in a simple black cocktail dress, Barbra certainly
looked
more sophisticated than she had at the Bon Soir. But the Cole Porter number, it turned out, was the outrageous ditty “Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking” from
Aladdin
, a show written for television’s
DuPont Show of the Month.
Barbra sang frenetically of that weird emporium where one could buy “gizzard cakes, lizard cakes, pickled eels, pickled snakes, almost anything.”

As ever, her beautiful voice and her kooky material captivated her audiences. Barbra was a smash hit at the Blue Angel, and Jacoby extended her two-week engagement to four. Her success there proved that Streisand could appeal to chic audiences as much as she had to largely gay crowds and those in the vanguard of hip.

Pleased as she was by her latest breakthrough on the nitery circuit, Barbra still had her sights securely focused on the stage. On the morning of the day she opened at the Blue Angel, she walked into an audition for
I Can Get It for You Wholesale,
a Broadway musical to be presented by David Merrick, the red-hot producer of
Gypsy
and many other smash hits.

That audition would make its way into theatrical legend and result not only in Barbra’s first Broadway show but in her marriage as well. It would also mark the beginning of one of the most phenomenal rises to superstardom in show business history.

“Some ain’t got it, not a lump,
I’m a great big clump of talent.”

—Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in
Funny Girl

A
voice boomed out “Miss Barbra Streisand” as she walked across the stage of the St. James Theater under the harsh glow of a bare-bulb work light. She wore a mottled honey-colored 1920s caracul coat trimmed with thick fox fur at the knees and neck, which she had bought for ten dollars. Her feet were adorned by smudged tennis shoes; her unwashed hair spilled out in tangles from beneath her wool knit cap. Vigorously she smacked on her chewing gum.

She carried a bright red plastic case stuffed with sheet music, and as she approached the piano she dropped the briefcase. It landed with a thud and burst open, spilling sheet music at the feet of Peter Daniels, her accompanist. “Oh, dear!” she exclaimed, and pounced on the mess. When she swooped down, her bag fell off her shoulder, and the strap got tangled up in the sleeve of the coat. Finally she got it together and turned to the amused audience—the show’s director, Arthur Laurents; its author, Jerome Weidman; and its composer, Harold Rome. As Weidman recalled the scene in 1963, Barbra told them, “Listen, my name’s Barbra Streisand. With only two a’s. In the first name, I mean. I figure that third a in the middle, who needs it. What would ya like me to do?”

At first they had thought, Oh, God, here comes another loser, but by now they were laughing out loud. This girl was captivating, a real character. “Whaddaya, dead or something? I said, what would you like me to do?”

“Can you sing?” Laurents asked.

“Can I sing?” She rolled her eyes toward the work light and back again. “If I couldn’t sing, would I have the nerve to come out here in a thing like this coat?”

“Okay, then, sing.”

“Sing!” She turned to the work light as if to say, Can you believe this? “Even a jukebox you don’t just say ‘Sing.’ You gotta first punch a button with the name of a song on it! What should I sing?”

“Sing anything.”

Barbra turned to Peter Daniels. “Play that one on top.” Then she turned back to the seats, where assorted assistants watched along with the principals, and Marty Erlichman sat alone, eight rows back.
“
Listen,” she called out. “I’m real tired. I got ta bed real late last night. Can I do this sittin’ on that chair over there.” She pointed to a secretarial chair on wheels.

“Sure, whatever you want,” Laurents replied.

“Great!” She plopped herself onto the chair, took off her shoes, pulled the wad of gum out of her mouth, and stuck it underneath the seat. By now everyone was fairly helpless with laughter. Then she launched into
“
Value,” comparing the cars and bankbooks of Harold Mengert and Arnie Fleischer while she careened across the stage on casters. When she was done, Laurents, Weidman, and Rome burst into applause. “It may not have been the funniest song ever written,” Weidman recalled, “but it certainly came out that way when filtered through Miss Streisand’s squint, fur coat, gestures, and vocal cords.”

Still laughing, Laurents asked her, “Do you have a ballad?”

“Do I have a ballad.” By the time she finished the haunting, plaintive “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair,” the
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
creative team’s jaws were slack. Harold Rome leaned over to Arthur Laurents and whispered, “Isn’t she
something?
”

“She’s terrific,” Laurents agreed. “But what can we do with her? She’s not right for the ingenue, and Miss Marmelstein’s fifty years old.”

“Maybe Miss Marmelstein doesn’t have to be fifty years old,” Rome mused. “The way this girl looks, people would believe her as a spinster. She could be any age.”

Laurents thought a few moments. “Let’s have her back for Merrick to take a look.” He asked Barbra if she could return that afternoon.

“Gee, I don’t know.” She shielded her eyes and sought out Marty Erlichman. “Marty, what time’s my hair appointment?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Ya see, I gotta get my hair done because I’m opening tonight at the Blue Angel. I’m singing there. Maybe you’ll come and see me.”

Finally she promised to be back at four, and after she left, Arthur Laurents asked his assistant, Ashley Feinstein, to check under Barbra’s chair for the wad of gum. As he had suspected, there was none. “She had the gift of thinking something out and then, when she did it, making it look spontaneous,” Laurents said.

When Barbra returned, the first thing she asked was how everyone liked her hair. All agreed it looked smashing. This time David Merrick was in the audience, and Barbra sang five songs. Afterward she said to Marty, “I don’t think they liked me.” Everyone had liked her just fine, except Merrick. He thought she was ugly, he told Laurents, and “too weird.”

Laurents, Rome, and Weidman did go to the Blue Angel that night, without Merrick, and they asked Barbra to audition four more times, all the while trying to convince Merrick she was right for the part. Finally, the producer yielded to the judgment of his creative team, and on the day after Thanksgiving they told her she would be their Miss Marmelstein. Barbra Streisand, at last, would make her Broadway debut in a top-flight production at a salary of $150 a week. “Oh, goody!” she exclaimed. “Now I can get a telephone.”

B
ASED ON JEROME WEIDMAN’S
1937 novel,
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
tells the story of brash, opportunistic Harry Bogen and his rise to the top of the garment industry in the late 1930s. Along the way he strains his relationships with his mother, his partner, and his girlfriend. As a new David Merrick musical, the show was virtually assured of success—in 1960 Merrick had six hit shows running simultaneously. Arthur Laurents had written the librettos for two of Broadway’s biggest recent hits,
Gypsy
and
West Side Story;
this show would mark his debut as a director. Harold Rome, a twenty-five-year Broadway veteran, had more than doubled the existing record for the longest-running Broadway show in 1937 with the 1, 108 performances of his sprightly paean to unions in the garment trade,
Pins and Needles.

Cast in the pivotal role of Harry Bogen was twenty-three-year-old Elliott Gould, whose previous career height had been kicks in the choruses of
Rumple, Say, Darling,
and
Irma la Douce.
Rounding out the cast were Lillian Roth as Bogen’s mother, Jack Kruschen as his boss, Marilyn Cooper as his girlfriend, and Sheree North as a hooker he keeps on the side.

On the first day of rehearsals, as Barbra sat in a half circle with the other actors for the initial reading of the play, Jerome Weidman noticed that she seemed preoccupied with something she was writing. When the reading ended, she rushed over to David Powers, the show’s press agent, thrust a piece of paper at him, and began an animated discussion of her effort. Weidman ambled over, and Powers handed it to him. “Look what this dame gives me.”

Powers had asked the cast members to compose their biographical notes for
Playbill,
the theater program magazine, and what Barbra wrote left him skeptical: “Barbra Streisand is nineteen, was born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon, educated at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and appeared off Broadway in a one-nighter called
Another Evening with Harry Stoones....
She is not a member of Actors’ Studio.”

“Was it hot in Madagascar?” Weidman re
c
alled he asked Barbra.

“How the hell should I know,” she replied. “I’ve never been to the damn place.”

“That’s my point,” Powers sputtered. “It’s a phony. Nobody reading that will believe you.”

“What the hell do I care? I’m so sick and tired of being born in Brooklyn, I could plotz. Whad I do? Sign a contract I gotta be born in Brooklyn? Every day the same thing? No change? No variety? Why get born? Every day the same thing, you might as well be dead.”

After a protracted struggle, Barbra got her bogus bio published in
Playbill.
It made a little piece of theater history and added to Streisand’s growing reputation as a kook. As with most of her apparent madnesses, though, there was method behind it. “I figured the audience would read it before I came on and notice me more,” she had reasoned. “I played the part of a Brooklyn girl. How boring it would have been to say I was from Brooklyn.”

As rehearsals progressed, the
Wholesale
company learned that Barbra Streisand was anything but boring. At times she drove Arthur Laurents to distraction with her behavior, often the opposite of what one would expect from a young actress getting her first big break. For one thing, she repeatedly arrived late for rehearsals and out-of-town performances, and harsh admonishments from the stage manager and Laurents didn’t solve the problem. Finally, during the Broadway run, after she had been officially late thirty-eight times, Merrick filed a complaint against her with Actors’ Equity. The newspaper columnist Sidney Fields reported that as Barbra prepared to appear before the Equity board she asked him what he thought of “an elaborate set of alibis she’d prepared to excuse her tardiness.” Fields advised her not to lie but to apologize and promise never to do it again. And that, presumably, is what she did.

Elaine Sobel recalled the reason for at least one of Barbra’s latenesses. “She had a meeting with David Merrick. She was sitting at our dressing table staring into the mirror. I said, ‘Barbra, you’re gonna be late. You can’t keep a man like David Merrick waiting.’ She just said, ‘Yeah, I know. He’ll wait.
’”