Streisand: Her Life (27 page)

Barbra decided to include three songs on this album that she hadn’t sung during the three nights of taping at the Bon Soir, inc
l
uding “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf.” That song caused Columbia executives some consternation. Peter Matz recalled that the album’s producer, Mike Berniker, “was walking a tightrope between the upstairs guys, me, and Barbra. He would go upstairs and tell them, ‘She’s doing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf.”’ They would say, ‘What!’ and he would come down to me and say, ‘Do you have to do that?’ And she’d say, ‘Yes, goddammit, it’s on the album!
’”

Still unsure of Streisand’s commercial potential, Columbia had budgeted the album at a paltry $18,000, which forced Matz to use very small combinations of musicians. For one session he had just a rhythm section and four trombones, for another only a small string section. Whenever Barbra wanted more, Mike Berniker would tell Matz, “Look, we can’t spend a lot of money on this! We don’t know if this woman is going to sell records.”

At first she didn’t. Columbia released
The Barbra Streisand Album
on February 25, after toying with titles like
Hello! I’m Barbra Streisand; From Brooklyn to Broadway... Barbra Streisand!
;
and
Sweet and Saucy Streisand.
“They loved that alliteration—
Sweet and Saucy Streisand,
” Marty Erlichman recalled. “When I suggested it to Barbra, she got nauseous.”

The album provided listeners with nothing less than a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows. Anyone who had heard Barbra only on the
Wholesale
cast album or
Pins and Needles
would have been astounded by the richness and maturity her voice had gained in less than a year. The reviews were largely ecstatic, typified by Stanley Green’s comments in
Hi Fi/Stereo Review:
“The eagerly awaited Barbra Streisand album turns out to be a fascinating package. Miss Streisand is a compelling stylist with a full, rich vocal quality that may give you goose bumps when you hear her more dramatic arias.”

Despite such fulsome praise, sales of the album languished through March, and it looked as though Columbia’s fear that Barbra would appeal only to gays and “hip urbanites” might be well founded. Barbra wrung her hands, but Marty soothed her with the assurance that her national tour and the television appearances he had begun to line up for her would, surely if slowly, put the album over the top.

F
OR THE REST
of 1963, Barbra barely stopped for a deep breath. The year had begun with two appearances on
Tonight,
on January 2 and February 1, and a triumphant three-week return engagement at the Blue Angel that began January 8. On February 5, with Elliott in tow, she kicked off her tour in the Boston area with a five-night stand at the Frolic, a nightclub in Revere Beach. Then she and Elliott schlepped on the train to Cleveland, where Mike Douglas welcomed her as his co-host for the week of February 11 on his nationally syndicated afternoon variety show.

Over the five days Barbra sang every song from her album, and kibbitzed and clowned with Douglas. “She was brilliant,” he recalled. “We kidded around, doing Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald duets in costume. We got down on the floor and played a game she’d played as a child—kind of tiddlywinks with bottle caps. Those shows were classics.” They no longer exist, however, because a few years later a technician at the station erased the
m
to tape commercials.

Demand for Barbra’s album skyrocketed after her appearances on Douglas’s show, but hopeful record buyers couldn’t find it. Columbia’s initial pressing of just a few thousand had sold out quickly, and the company lagged behind in getting out new ones. Again, Marty hit the roof. He called Bill Gallagher and started to yell. “How dare you do this to us? After we went out on a limb, taking less money, building a following, and you guys don’t have records out there?!” Gallagher apologized and explained that the company’s printing plant in Pitman, New Jersey, was on overtime pressing new albums, and he promised to have all back orders filled within five days. Gallagher also said that the company would send several sales representatives to San Francisco to “work the album” in anticipation of Barbra’s opening there at the trendy hungry i nightclub. Placated, Marty hung up.

After she completed her week with Mike Douglas and a simultaneous stint at the Chateau in Lakewood, Ohio, Barbra and Elliott returned to New York, where she did two more
Tonight
appearances. At home they were able to relax for a few weeks, perhaps for the last time for months to come, because Elliott had been cast in a London revival of the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden and Adolph Green Broadway and movie hit
On the Town,
and if the show was a success, he’d likely remain in England for the better part of a year. Barbra had had to decide whether to embark on her tour as planned or accompany Elliott to England. When she chose to go with her man, he told her she shouldn’t derail her career at this critical juncture and insisted that she stay in America.

The lovers said a tearful good-bye as Barbra hopped a plane to Florida for the next stop on her national tour, the Cafe Pompeii in the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach. The engagement proved inauspicious. She shared the bill with the ro
m
antic Italian singer Sergio Franchi, and as Jack Anderson pointed out in the
Miami Herald,
“It’s unfortunate that two such disparate talents should have to share the same bill. It’s debatable whether the same audience can respond with the appreciation they equally deserve.” Barbra didn’t appea
l
to the Eden Roc’s wel
l
-heeled older Jewish clientele—“the rocks and lox crowd,” she called them. She was too strange, her emotions too raw, her material “cockamamie.” They stayed away in droves.

Larry King, then a Miami radio interviewer, got a frantic call from the owner of the hotel. “Look,” he said, “you gotta help me. I’ve got this wonderful singer, and nobody’s coming. Honest, the place is empty. The waiters are standing on the tables applauding, and there’s nobody here. Would you interview her?” King did, and he recalled asking her to describe how she sang. “I’m not Ella Fitzgerald,” she replied, “but you’re going to hear from me. You’re going to know about me.”

On Sunday morning, March 24, Barbra flew back up to New York for an appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
then returned to Miami Monday morning. Business picked up considerably after the Sullivan appearance, but it was too late to turn the engagement around, because Barbra was set to open at the hungry i in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 27. She finished her last two shows at the Eden Roc on Tuesday night; on Wednesday morning she rushed to the airport to catch a plane for the West Coast. She arrived in San Francisco with scant hours to spare before she had to take the stage again.

Barbra came into the hungry i with a bit of history with its owner, Enrico Banducci. She had first met him early in 1962 in the office of her agent, Irvin Arthur. Upset that Arthur had nothing for her, and aware that Banducci had turned her down, Barbra vented her spleen. “Look, why don’t you give me a job?” she asked the startled Banducci. “I hear that you’re supposed to give unknowns jobs. I don’t really wanna work for you in your dirty old nightclub anyway. But actually I’m gonna be a big star, so you might as well grab me now and get me cheaper.”

Barbra so hated asking for work that the only way she had been able to pull this off was to pretend to be a character in a play asking for a job. “It worked,” she marveled. “Twenty minutes later we signed a contract. He’s the only one that would have done that, though. Everybody else would have thought I was nuts. But
he’s
such a nut. He’s a delightful guy. I love him.”

With her commitment to
Wholesale
, Barbra hadn’t been able to fulfill her contract with the hungry i for over a year. The wait was expensive for Banducci—her salary jumped from $350 a week to $2,500—but ultimately proved worth it. Her four-week engagement as the club’s headliner “set this town on its ear,” according to the
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Hal Schaefer. The Bay Area’s hippest audiences, led by the city’s fast-growing population of gay men, flocked to see her shows at eight and eleven o’clock nightly. On opening night, Marty Erlichman pulled a publicity stunt that would have made a studio flack from the 1940s proud. With the club already jammed and crowds milling around outside on Jackson Street waiting to get in, Marty called the police and the fire department, and the ensuing excitement made the newspapers the next morning.

The critics were effusive in their praise. One told his readers, “Don’t miss Barbra Streisand at the hungry i. You’ll regret it if you do.” But as usual Barbra’s performances were her best publicity. As word of mouth about “this phenomenal girl” spread, Banducci had to turn the customers away.

B
ARBRA HADN’T SEEN
Elliott in nearly a month, and she missed him terribly. They spoke at least once a day by transatlantic hookup; he would call her from his hotel after his show around midnight or so—late afternoon Pacific Standard Time, and they’d talk for hours, running up enormous bills. Sometimes, though, Elliott would telephone much later than usual, or not at all. Barbra would call him and discover that he had not yet returned to his room. When she asked him about it, he made jokes. Barbra found herself wondering, What is Elliott doing over there? Perhaps to bolster her confidence in the relationship, Barbra told a
Chronicle
reporter, Joan McKinney, that she and Elliott had just gotten married.

Her vocal cords presented an even more pressing worry for Barbra. The strain of the tour had begun to affect her voice, which sometimes failed her as she sought to reach a high note. Her audiences rarely noticed it, but she did. Barbra couldn’t abide this inability to deliver as much as she wanted to, and she feared her singing would continue to deteriorate until only a hoarse croak remained. She went to a throat specialist, who told her she had nodules on her vocal cords and would have to rest them.

That diagnosis turned out to be wrong, but when Barbra got to San Francisco a psychological problem took the place of her physical concerns. “I was in trouble,” she recalled to
People
magazine. “People [had been] asking me, ‘How do you hold your notes so long?’ I told them it was my will—that I just
wanted
to hold them. Subsequently I started to consciously think, How
do
I hold these notes so long? And voilà! One night I just couldn’t hold them anymore. My consciousness of an unconscious thing had made me impotent.”