Streisand: Her Life (30 page)

A few days later Barbra decided to throw a party in the grand house that Bill Harrah had provided the Goulds for the duration of their stay. Her new status as a wife must have brought her a sense of domesticity, because she decided to bake a cake for her guests, who included Liberace. Throughout the dinner, Barbra kept saying, “Wait’ll you taste this cake. It’s gonna be great.”

Finally, Liberace recalled in his memoirs, she brought out a separate full-sized cake for every one of her twelve guests. “I used the Betty Crocker recipe,” she explained, “and I didn’t know how to adjust all the ingredients for a real big cake. So I made lots of regular-sized ones.”

Everyone dug in. Brows furrowed. Mouths twisted. No one said anything. “Well,” Barbra pressed, “how
is
it?” Elliott spoke up first. “Barb, there’s something wrong with the frosting,” he ventured. “It’s sort of... tough.”

“Oh, yeah, well, I guess that’s because I had a little problem. I ran out of confectioner’s sugar, so I used flour instead.”

“Well,” Liberace wrote, “we all peeled the frosting off and ate the cake—a little of it, because she’d obviously done some substitution on that, too. We took the rest home with us, saying we’d eat it after the show.... It makes a great doorstop.”

B
ARBRA AND ELLIOTT
repaired to Los Angeles, where they had the closest thing to a honeymoon they were likely to get. Ensconced in the posh Beverly Hills Hotel—the “Pink Palace”—they frolicked in the pool, went out on the town, and lolled about in their luxurious suite phoning for room service at all hours. The photographer Bob Willoughby captured them in the pool as Elliott hoisted the bikini-clad Barbra onto his shoulders. At one point Barbra put her hand over Elliott’s face, obscuring it, as Willoughby snapped their picture.

For Barbra it was a working honeymoon. She taped
The Bob Hope Comedy Special
along with Dean Martin, James Garner, and Tuesday Weld, which aired September 27. Wearing a simple black scoop-necked dress, she sang a rousing “When the Sun Comes Out” and a feverish “Gotta Move.” Then she, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin did a funny bit in which they played a trio of country bumpkin musicians. Barbra, wearing a frilly print dress and a floppy ribbon in her hair, strummed a washboard.

On Friday, October 4, Barbra arrived at the CBS studios at Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles to tape her appearance on
The Judy Garland Show.
The variety series had debuted the week before to positive reviews and strong ratings. But with eight shows in the can, CBS worried about the program’s future. The writing was uneven, the humor often strained. Worse, Judy had proved typically unreliable at times, her singing strong and vibrant on one show, weak and wavery the next.

Streisand’s appearance created a surge of excitement that ran all the way from the show’s dancers up through the top management at CBS. William S. Paley, the network’s founder and chairman of the board, and James Aubrey, its president, both planned to attend the taping.

No one was more excited, or more nervous, than Judy. On the one hand, she sensed that her teaming with Streisand had the potential to set off fireworks. On the other hand, Barbra abounded in youthful high spirits, possessed the loveliest voice Judy had ever heard, and was frequently heralded as “the new Garland”—which implied that the o
l
d Garland was on her way to superannuation. As much as Judy admired Barbra’s talents, she’d be damned if she’d let this newcomer upstage her. She wou
l
d match Barbra Streisand every step of the way or fall over trying.

The minute Judy walked into rehearsal, the crew knew something was up. Often she had dragged herself into the studio after a night of booze and pills and insomnia, barely able to function. This morning she strode in crisply, her hair done, totally pulled together. Barbra was a different story. The show’s pianist, Jack Elliott, recalled to the author Coyne Steven Sanders that during rehearsal “in walk[ed] this very unattractive, dirty, scruffy, barefoot girl with stringy hair. We were surprised that she would get a spot on the Garland show.... But when Barbra started to sing, it was an electrifying moment, and instantly, everybody realized we were listening to a star.”

Barbra’s nonchalance stemmed from her growing self-confidence as a performer. She seemed to be riding an inexorable wave of adulation to super-stardom, so much so that gushing praise failed to impress her much anymore. When a crew member told Barbra how magnificent he thought she was, she replied, “You too, huh.”

“I was feeling all full of myself,” she later admitted. “You know, like ‘Wait’ll they see
me!
’”
As she and Judy rehearsed one of their duets, Barbra couldn’t understand why Garland was so frightened. “My heart went out to her. She was holding on to me, tight. She was scared. Somehow you get more scared as you get older, maybe. When you’re young, you have nothing to lose.”

A
S BILL PALEY
and Jim Aubrey watched the taping, they knew they were witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime show business pairing. Two great singers, a thirty-five-year veteran and the greenest of newcomers, were performing at their peak, and the electricity in the air was palpable. As soon as the taping ended, Paley ordered that the show be aired the next Sunday, just two days hence, instead of an earlier show that had already been announced. Editors worked around the clock until 5:00
A.M.
on Sunday to make it happen.

The show opened with Judy’s customary “Be My Guest” introductions. When she told Barbra, “You can have anything you want, dear,” Barbra replied, “Can I replace you?” Judy did a comic double take, then sang, “Be my guest, be my guest.” One writer later suggested that Barbra had ad-libbed the line as a dig at Judy, but of course the whole bit was written, rehearsed, and meant to be a joke.

Barbra then sang “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Never before or since has her voice sounded so pure, so bell-like. Her vocal cords could have been a Stradivarius as she caressed them into the highest, cleanest, sweetest notes imaginable. She then wasted barely a moment before she ripped into a scathing, sardonic, raucous version of “Down with Love” with grimaces and bitter laughter and clenched fists and ironic smiles that grabbed viewers anew not only with its intensity but by its complete departure from what Barbra had just sung.

The performances left Judy ecstatic. “You’re
thrilling
,” she told Barbra when she finished the second number, “so absolutely
thrilling!
You’re so good that I
hate
you.”

“Oh, Judy,” Barbra replied, “that’s so sweet of you, thank you. You’re so great I’ve been hating you for years. In fact, it’s my ambition to be great enough to be hated by as many singers as you.”

Next came an exciting duet in which these two talents spurred each other on to a superlative performance. It had been Judy’s idea to combine “Happy Days Are Here Again” with one of her own theme songs, “Get Happy,” and the result was grand. They matched each other note for note, emotion for emotion, belt for belt.

During Judy’s regular “Tea Time” segment, she and Barbra were engaged in chitchat when a huge voice boomed out of the audience singing “You’re Just in Love.” It was the queen of the belters, Ethel Merman. She bounded onstage and exclaimed, “How about this Barbra? Isn’t this great? The new belter! There aren’t that many of us left.”

Judy told Ethel she couldn’t go away without singing a song with her and Barbra. Ethel burst into “There’s No Business like Show Business,” and her companions followed suit. But no one could compete with Merman, who drowned out both women so thoroughly that Barbra slapped her forehead in feigned despair. As the song came to an end, Barbra pumped her arms at her sides as if to summon up more volume. But the contest went to Merman, vocal cords down.

Another Streisand-Garland medley topped off the hour in exuberant high style. The two women were so clearly out to knock ’em dead that their performance still stands as one of TV’s most memorable moments.

Barbra was so impressive, in fact, that for the first time, a guest star was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Variety Performance, in competition with four stars of their own weekly shows: Andy Williams, Perry Como, Danny Kaye, and Judy Garland. Barbra, unhappy to be competing with Garland, told the press she thought it was silly not to put her in a different category. The point became moot when Danny Kaye won the award.

Prize or no, Barbra had put a remarkable cap on her career as a television guest star. She wouldn’t make another such appearance for six years. “Once she did
The Judy Garland Show
,” Marty Erlichman said, “I told her, ‘There’s no more reason to be a guest artist on these cockamamie television shows. You just couldn’t top that.
’”

B
ARBRA HAD JUST
paid for a brooch in an antique shop in Manhattan when the news came over a radio: President Kennedy had been shot and killed as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. It was early afternoon, November 22,
1
963. At first, like everyone else, she couldn’t believe it. “It must be some kind of Orson Welles hoax,” she whispered to her companion, recalling Welles’s 1938 radio presentation of Jules Verne’s Martian-invasion novel
The War of the Worlds,
so realistic it set off panic. “It just can’t be true.”

It was true, and Barbra was devastated. John F. Kennedy was not only an inspirational leader, he was also a man she had met and liked. She had been looking forward excitedly to singing for him again at the White House on December 5. Now he was gone, shot to death, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson had succeeded him. What kind of president would Johnson be? Barbra, like many Americans, knew little about him. What would happen to this country? she wondered.