Streisand: Her Life (29 page)

The Second Barbra Streisand Album
crammed all of the most dramatic and emotional of Streisand’s nightclub arias into one startling package. Barbra gave even the quieter numbers a raw emotional intensity that often stunned her listeners on first hearing and left them knowing they had not just listened to a record, they had had a theatrical experience. Compared to Barbra Streisand, most of the other pop stars of the day—Patti Page, Doris Day, Julie London—seemed somnambulant.

The album, released late in August as the Streisand juggernaut built up more and more steam, jumped into the Top 10 in a matter of weeks and spent three weeks in the number two position. It was certified gold five months before Barbra’s first album. Now Barbra Streisand wasn’t just a sensation in nightclubs and on Broadway; she was a phenomenon on records as well. The music industry trade publication
Cashbox
said what many were already thinking: “The Streisand name could be the biggest to hit show business since Elvis Presley.”

By now observers had begun to call 1963 “The Year of Barbra Streisand.” After another appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
on June 9, she took off for Chicago for a three-week gig at the popular nightspot Mr. Kelly’s. In the middle of the stand, on June 25, Barbra again basked in the national spotlight with a previously taped appearance on
The Keefe Brasselle Show,
a highly touted summer replacement series. The show wasn’t a hit, but Barbra was.
Variety
noted, “Miss Streisand was remarkably effective. She looked like a misplaced teenager in a long, would-be sexy tubular gown, but this strangely aided her performance.”

The day after her closing in Chicago, Barbra—accompanied by Elliott, who had returned from London quickly as expected—flew halfway across the country in the hope of conquering a strange and challenging new milieu: Las Vegas.

O
H, GOD,
THIS
is going to be another Eden Roc, Barbra thought as she stood on the stage of the Riviera Hotel and faced an audience of well-heeled middle-aged couples who had come to see Liberace. She was the opening act for the flamboyant pianist, a glamour-and-glitz Vegas favorite. The crowd didn’t know what to make of her. After her first song she announced that she had made her gingham dress herself out of a tablecloth for four dollars. Murmurs abounded. “That was a joke, right, Harry?” a woman asked her husband. Liberace’s fans couldn’t relate. As he put it, “Everything I had on cost more than four dollars, including my shoelaces.”

As Barbra’s accompanist, Peter Daniels, recalled, “We went out and did twenty-five minutes. No response. It was very upsetting. The second show, the same thing, and the same thing the next night. So on the fourth day, Liberace called a meeting and said, ‘I think maybe she’s too much for my audience at this particular point. Here’s what we’re gonna do: I’ll go out and open the show, do about ten or fifteen minutes, and then I’ll introduce Barbra as my discovery. Give it the old schmaltz.
’”
The gambit worked, according to Daniels. “That fourth night, after he gave her that stamp of approval, she came out and did the same exact show she’d done before and got a standing ovation.”

Barbra ended her month-long stand at the Riviera on August 4. The engagement had turned out to be so successful that the management offered her an open-ended contract for as many return engagements as she cared to make at $10,000 a week (she had been getting $7, 500). She signed the contract, but she put the commitment off for seven years.

On August 5, Elliott and Barbra returned to New York, where she did two one-night stands, one at the Lido Country Club on Long Island on August 9 and the other at the Concord Hotel at Kiamesha Lake in the Catskills on the tenth. They used a week-and-a-half hiatus from her tour to move into their new home, a two-story penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor of a posh building on Central Park West.

This sumptuous duplex, which had once belonged to Lorenz Hart, contrasted spectacularly with the Third Avenue flat. The monthly rent of $450 brought Barbra and Elliott six sprawling rooms with high ceilings and crown moldings, chandeliers, and a grand staircase winding down from the master bedroom, which was located in a tower. “I can make an entrance,” Barbra said, “you know what
I
mean?” There was an office, a huge rooftop terrace off the bedroom, and another fifty-five feet of terraces circling the apartment’s lower level. The view of a brick wall on Third Avenue had been replaced by panoramic vistas of Central Park, upper and lower Manhattan, and the Hudson and East rivers.

Another of Barbra’s dreams had come true. This was the kind of home that glamorous women in the movies always seemed to have. What a far cry from apartment 4G! Barbra
l
onged to decorate every room in a different classic style, to wallpaper and drape and furnish the apartment until it became her own Xanadu. But there was no time; she would be on the road for most of the rest of the year. She did buy one extravagant piece of furniture: a “fabulous” three-hundred-year-old carved-wood French canopy bed, which she installed on a two-step-high marble platform. Next to it she placed a small refrigerator covered with black patent leather. “So I can lie in bed all day and eat coffee ice cream.”

Such leisure would be a rarity for the rest of the year. On August 20, Barbra, Elliott, Marty Erlichman, and Peter Daniels flew to Los Angeles for her most important engagement to date: a two-week stand at “the legendary Cocoanut Grove.”

I
F YOU WERE
a hit at the Grove, all of America sat up and took notice. Over the years, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Rudolph Valentino, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe had all come to hear hundreds of other superstars perform there. With six months of raves behind her, Barbra was the club’s most anticipated headliner since Judy Garland’s comeback in 1958. Newsreel cameras recorded the excitement (Barbra covered her face and tried to shoo the cameramen away) as Hollywood’s creme de la creme turned out for Streisand’s opening night: Henry Fonda, Natalie Wood, Danny Thomas, John Huston, Kirk Douglas, Ray Milland, Edward G. Robinson. Barbra could barely believe it. “It wasn’t that long ago when I was sitting in a candy store in Brooklyn eating ice cream and reading movie magazines. Now all of a sudden I’m appearing before those very stars—and I’m now one of them.”

She acted
l
ike a star, too. She kept the audience waiting a full hour before she appeared, dressed in a white satin midshipman’s blouse and black skirt. She looked out at the record-breaking, standing-room-only crowd of fifteen hundred people that nearly surrounded her as she stood on a stage that jutted out into the audience, and quipped, “If I’da known you were going to be on both sides of me I’d have gotten my nose fixed.”

Then she started to sing, and one of the most jaded audiences in the world realized they were witnessing the birth of an extraordinary new star. Over the course of her engagement, just about every celebrity in Hollywood came to see Barbra. Jack and Mary Benny sent her a telegram: “You were magnificent Friday night. We love you.” Danny Thomas threw her a pizza party in his home and offered her a guest spot on his television sitcom, as did Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on their planned specials. Judy Garland—who turned to her companion after Barbra’s first song and muttered, “I’m never going to open my mouth again”—asked her to appear on her variety show, set to premiere that fall.

Her commitments allowed Barbra to accept only the Hope and Garland offers and forced her to turn down what would have been her first movie. The producer Sam Goldwyn Jr. offered her the lead in his film
The Young Lovers.
She longed to say yes—the starring role in a movie!—but she couldn’t. Her tour wouldn’t be over until December 7, and she would have to begin rehearsals for
Funny Girl
immediately thereafter. “There’ll be time for the movies,” Marty told her. “Don’t worry about that.” As if to underscore the point, while Barbra was in Hollywood she acquired new agents: the team of David Begelman and Freddie Fields, who had just formed Creative Management Associates, which would evolve into International Creative Management. Unlike Barbra’s former representatives, CMA had a thriving division devoted to motion pictures.

B
ARBRA HAD CHEATED
on him, Elliott was convinced. While he was in London, reports had filtered over to him that Barbra wasn’t being faithful. While they were in Las Vegas, he had confronted her with the rumors, and to his shock she not only made no attempt to deny them but told him that if he insisted on monogamy he couldn’t remain her lover. “I really can’t stay with you,” he recalled her saying. “It’s not comfortable. I have to sow my oats. What if I was with you and I wanted to be with Marlon Brando?”

Stunned, Elliott had decided that the best way to have Barbra all to himself would be to marry her. He began to apply pressure; she hemmed and hawed and told him maybe. Perhaps her cavalier comments about monogamy had been an act, designed to test how much Elliott truly wanted her? If so, she discovered he wanted her very much indeed.

Barbra closed at the Grove on September 8; the next day she was in Lake Tahoe to begin a two-week gig at Bill Harrah’s hotel-casino, again opening for Liberace. On Friday the thirteenth she said yes to Elliott’s latest proposal of marriage, and the two of them drove twenty-five miles to Carson City on the spur of the moment, accompanied by Marty Erlichman and Marty Bregman, Barbra’s new business manager, hired to help handle all the money she was raking in. (Barbra’s handlers had advised her to marry Elliott in Nevada, which has no community property laws. ) They exchanged vows in front of Justice of the Peace Pete Supina. After Barbra changed
“
Love, honor, and obey” to “Love, honor, and feed,” she kissed Elliott and then it was back to Harrah’s to complete her engagement.