Streisand: Her Life (31 page)

Rushing home in a cab, Barbra spotted Elliott in another taxi. They hopped out of the cars and embraced each other, then spent the rest of the afternoon at home with a few friends, reminiscing, wondering, worrying about the state of America. That night Barbra went to a rehearsal with Peter Daniels to try out several new arrangements. One of them was “Happy Days Are Here Again.” A few phrases into the song, she started to cry and couldn’t go on.

B
ARBRA CLOSED OUT
her phenomenal year in a rush. She had appeared with Sammy Davis Jr. at the Hollywood Bowl the night after she taped the Garland show, and between November 29 and December 7 she did a series of one- and two-night stands in Chicago, Indianapolis, San Jose, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

On December 28, New York’s
Cue
magazine chose Barbra as its Entertainer of the Year. It was the perfect end to a remarkable year, but Barbra had no time to bask in the glory. She was now deeply enmeshed in rehearsals for
Funny Girl,
the most eagerly awaited Broadway musical in years. The ensuing months of backstage tribulations, personality conflicts, script problems, and creative struggles would test Barbra’s talent, her mettle, even her health. And the hard-won results would make it clear that the Year of Barbra Streisand had been a mere warm-up.

O
n the first day of rehearsals for
Funny Girl,
on the stage of the Winter Garden Theater on December 10, 1963, Barbra came perilously close to being fired. Milton Rosenstock, the show’s musical director, recalled in 1990 that during the initial read-through with the cast a few days earlier, Barbra had sung Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s score so beautifully, “she broke everybody’s heart.” But now, as Barbra struggled with blocking and phrasing and breathing, Rosenstock was amazed at what he saw. Christ, he thought, she can’t even walk across the stage properly. What’s going on with her? And when she sang, Rosenstock felt “it was like some kid out of high school. It was all gone. Something had happened.”

The producer, Ray Stark, and several of his associates watched from a few rows back. Styne and Merrill took notes. The director, Garson Kanin, studied Barbra carefully from beneath furrowed brows as his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, whispered comments into his ear. Barbra was supposed to end a line of a song with a dismissive “Ecch,” but she was overdoing it. “It’s too much,” Kanin called out.

Barbra froze. “What do you want,” she asked.

“Make it more natural.”

She tried again; Ruth Gordon whispered to Garson Kanin; Kanin asked Barbra to do it once more.

“Just tell me what you want and I’ll do it,” she pleaded.

“Well, Miss Streizund.”

“My name is Strei
sand
,” Barbra snapped.

At that Ray Stark stood up and started toward the stage, Barbra seemed near tears. “I’m trying to do everything you say. I’ve lost my confidence. I don’t know how to sing anymore because I’m doing what
you
say, not what I
feel!”

“You’re doing okay,” Ray Stark soothed. “You’re doing good!”

“I didn’t take this to be
good
!” Barbra exploded. “I have to be great or nothing! Either you tell me how to be great—not good,
great
—or don’t tell me
anything
.”

Stark called off the rehearsal, and as everyone said perfunctory good-byes, Milt Rosenstock feared the farewells might be final. “I knew they had someone else lined up to replace her if she didn’t work out,” he recalled. The next morning at eleven, everyone regathered “in dead silence,” according to Rosenstock. “It was like a morgue. Barbra seemed unfazed. I asked her if she was okay, and she said, ‘Yeah.’ Kanin announced we’d pick up with ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade,’ then looked at Barbra and said, ‘Are you ready, Miss Streisand
?
.”

Barbra began to sing, and as Kanin called out directions to her it became clear that nothing had changed. “If she was supposed to stand still, she moved,” Rosenstock said. “If she was supposed to move, she stood still. If she was supposed to breathe this way, she breathed that way.” Finally one of Stark’s partners leaped from his seat and ran toward the stage. “He was going to stop her. That was going to be it. She was out. Jule Styne sees the guy, runs after him, and tackles him. He pushes the guy into a seat and tells him, ‘Leave her alone!’ Streisand’s singing, she doesn’t know any of this is going on. She’s building steam, and the magic is working. Styne whispers to me, ‘She’s on fire! She’s on
fire!’
She was burning up the stage, hitting every glorious note, really cooking.

“When she got to the end of the song, there was a point where she had to take a breath or she wouldn’t be able to hold the final note on that great big finish—‘Nobody, no, nobody is gonna rain on my pa-a-a-rade!’ She didn’t take the breath, and when she got to the note she didn’t make it. She stood there and started to cry. She said ‘I’m sorry’ and walked away. She thought for sure she was through.

“But the performance was so brilliant, and in a way not being able to make the final note added to the intensity of the emotion she was conveying. Everybody just burst into applause and cheers and bravos. She came back onstage and she couldn’t believe it. From that moment on, she
was
the greatest star.”

Well, not quite yet. Over the next three months this roller-coaster ride of Streisand incompetence and near-firing mingled with stunning brilliance would be repeated again and again. And the show itself had so many problems and received such bad reviews out of town that Ray Stark seriously contemplated closing it. The vehicle that Stark had struggled for more than a decade to produce, the show that would make Barbra Streisand an international superstar, almost didn’t come off.

F
ANNY BRICE, THE
beloved Jewish comic and singing star of the Ziegfeld Follies from 1911 to 1923 and a popular radio personality in the 1930s with her Baby Snooks character, was born Fanny Borach on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1891. By her early teens she was appearing in stage shows in Brooklyn. At eighteen she embarked on a short-lived marriage to a much older barber—“Doesn’t he smell good?” she asked a friend—and later married the suave, charming gambler and con man Nick Arnstein, who was born Julius Arndstein. Plain-looking, with a prominent nose and only an average voice, Fanny built her success around low ethnic humor and heart-tugging torch songs like “My Man.”

It was her volatile, unhappy marriage to Arnstein, one of the great Broadway tragic romances, that was most fascinating about her. The two met while Fanny was on the road with the Follies in Baltimore in 1912. She was twenty-one, he thirty-three. She fell in love with his manicured, mustachioed good looks and his dapper style. He, by most accounts, fell in love with her money. The first thing he did when he saw her apartment in New York was decide to redecorate it. He ordered $10,000 worth of new furniture from Gimbel’s and charged it to Fanny. “He was a suave con merchant who talked about millions,” Jimmy Breslin wrote, “but mostly you found him hanging around the parking lot across from the Forrest Hotel on Forty-ninth Street, with Fanny Brice’s money in his pocket and larceny in his head.”

They lived together for six years, and as Fanny’s success mushroomed, Nick got into trouble. Fanny hocked her jewels to pay for his lawyers when he was arrested for embezzlement, but he went to Sing Sing anyway. They married in 1918, after Nick divorced his first wife, and had two children, Frances and William. A new con landed Arnstein in Leavenworth, and Fanny borrowed $80,000 from another gambler, Arnold Rothstein, to pay his legal bills.

“Why do you stay with the guy?” Rothstein asked her.

“Because I love him,” Fanny replied. But it all became too much for love to conquer, and Fanny divorced Nick in 1927. She went on to marry and divorce the Broadway impresario Billy Rose and, later in life, became an interior decorator and art collector of exquisite taste. She died in 1951 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

In the late forties, urged on by her friend Goddard Lieberson, Fanny decided to dictate her memories for an autobiography. The galleys for the ghostwritten book had already been sent to reviewers after her death when her son-in-law, Ray Stark, paid $50,000 to have the plates destroyed. Stark’s wife—Fanny and Nick’s daughter, Frances—didn’t like some of the book’s frankness. (“She sat like a queen,” Katharine Hepburn said in its pages, “and could swear like a truck driver.”)

Ray Stark, strawberry-haired, medium built, a hard-driving businessman, became a Hollywood agent with Marilyn Monroe and Richard Burton among his clients. His original plan was to turn his mother-in-law’s story into a movie, but he couldn’t get financing from any of the Hollywood moguls, who were less impressed than Broadway veterans with Fanny Brice’s long-ago stardom.

By early 1961 Stark had decided to tell the Brice-Arnstein story as a Broadway musical, as a sort of out-of-town tryout for the movie. “It seemed wise to open it halfway as a trial,” he said, “before going the whole way with a film.” Only the best would do. Stark enlisted David Merrick as his co-producer and Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, hot off
Gypsy,
as composer and lyricist. He then sent the script—fashioned by Isobe
l
Lennart from a screenplay she had written—to Mary Martin. The star indicated her interest, but Sondheim balked. “
Mary Martin
is going to play Fanny Brice?” he said to Stark. “You’ve gotta have a
Jewish
girl! And if she’s not Jewish she at least has to have a
nose
.”

“Oh, c’mon, Steve,” Styne answered. “We’re not going to find any girl with a nose.”

Sondheim withdrew, largely because he didn’t want to do another backstage musical after
Gypsy.
Mary Martin departed as well after reconsidering the wisdom of playing a famous ethnic comedienne. She also realized that it would be difficult for her, at nearly fifty, to carry off the play’s early scenes of Fanny as a teenager.

Three months went by without Styne hearing a word from Ray Stark, and it was during this period, the spring of 1962, that Styne found the girl with a nose. When Marty Erlichman became aware that
Funny Girl
was in the works, he began to badger David Merrick to give Barbra the part. “Who would be better as Fanny Brice?” he argued. But Merrick felt that despite her talent, Barbra wasn’t mature or sophisticated enough to play the older, wiser Fanny of the show’s second act. Marty insisted that Merrick catch Barbra’s opening night at the Bon Soir in May, and Merrick sat through both shows. Impressed by her growth as a performer, he turned to Erlichman and said, “Tell Barbra I think she’s aged.”

Merrick urged Styne to catch Barbra’s act, and she excited the composer so much that he attended every night of the engagement save one. Styne had seen Barbra in
Wholesale
but hadn’t thought of her for
Funny Girl:
“She was very funny in that show, but it didn’t look like she had the quality for a romantic story like the one Isobel Lennart had written.” Seeing her at the Bon Soir changed his mind. Now he fantasized about this marvelous voice singing his songs, and he found himself writing new tunes with Barbra in mind, even though there was no guarantee she’d get the role. “I was writing the score for someone with that range, that dynamism, that sense of fun.”

When Styne next heard from Ray Stark, the producer told him that he had a director, Jerome Robbins
(West Side Story, Gypsy),
the most acclaimed director-choreographer on Broadway, and a star, Anne Bancroft, who had created a sensation on Broadway as Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher, in
The Miracle Worker in
1959.