Streisand: Her Life (32 page)

Bancroft, a brilliant actress, possessed little more than a fair singing voice. Jule Styne and his new lyricist, Bob Merrill, played her four songs they had written for the show, including “I’m the Greatest Star” and “Don’t Rain on my Parade,” which Styne had composed with Barbra’s voice in mind. Anne Bancroft blanched. “You’ll never get
anyone
to sing those songs,” she protested, and bowed out.

Styne conveyed his excitement about Barbra to Ray Stark, but Stark wanted to cast a name star who would guarantee the show a solid initial box-office take. While the producer sent out feelers to Carol Burnett, Eydie Gormé, Kaye Ballard, Shirley MacLaine, and others, Styne began a public-relations campaign to win the role for Barbra. Column items popped up in the New York papers naming Streisand as the front-runner for the part. When Barbra made her first appearance on
Tonight
on August 21, 1962, Groucho Marx mentioned that Jule Styne had told him Barbra would be “great for that show he’s doing... the Fanny Brice story.” A few days later an item appeared in a New York paper announcing that Barbra had been “chosen” to play Fanny Brice.

At last, the following October, Ray and Fran Stark went down to the Village to see Barbra at the Bon Soir. Styne was sure that would do the trick. It didn’t. Both Starks thought Barbra “too sloppy,” “not chic,” too undisciplined, to play the refined older Fanny Brice they best remembered. “That girl will never play my mother,” Fran said. “My mother was something special.”

But after Jerry Robbins saw Barbra’s act, he too began to argue for her, and he persuaded Stark to have Barbra come in for an audition. It did not go well. “I can’t tell you how horrible she looked,” Jule Styne recalled. “She wore a Cossack uniform kind of thing she’d picked up at a thrift shop.... In the scene she read, she was supposed to get emotional and weep. She didn’t. Robbins said, ‘Barbra, that’s not what we worked on.’ She sighed and shrank in her chair. Marty Erlichman heard Stark say, ‘She’s terrible. Look at that chin. She’ll never play my mother-in-law.
’”

Still, like Allan Miller before him, Robbins found Barbra fascinating despite her apparent dramatic deficiencies, and he understood when she explained that she couldn’t weep where he wanted her to because the words as written hadn’t touched her. With that kind of emotional honesty, he felt, Barbra had the potential to achieve
anything
with the proper direction. He called her back to read seven times, and with some outside coaching from Allan Miller that helped her convey more maturity in one of the play’s later scenes, she won Robbins over. “As far as I’m concerned,” he told her, “you
are
Fanny Brice.”

Ray Stark finally saw her potential, too. Despite the enormous risk of casting a relative unknown in such a pivotal role, Barbra clearly had to play Fanny. When her signing was announced in July 1963, her comments to the press gave a clue to why:
“
We’re very much alike,” she said. “It’s like me ta
l
king. Like Miss Brice, I find it hard to take advice from anyone. [She] was a woman who refused to heed her mother, or Florenz Ziegfeld.”

Stark knew that if the Streisand gamble worked, the rewards could be phenomenal. With Anne Bancroft, he had told Marty Erlichman, the show would be guaranteed one million dollars in advance sales. With Carol Burnett, two million. With Barbra, next to nothing. But if the show made Streisand a Broadway sensation—which Stark strongly suspected it would—she could bring in five million over the course of the run. And so, Stark decided, “We go with the kid.”

B
Y THE TIME
Funny Girl
went into rehearsals, Barbra’s meteoric rise to stardom as a singer over the prior year had brought the public’s interest in her and the show to a keen pitch, and advance bookings were already in the millions of dollars. Casting had been completed with Sydney Chaplin, the handsome thirty-eight-year-old son of the screen legend Charlie Chaplin, set to play Nick Arnstein, and Kay Medford cast as Fanny’s mother, Rose. By then, too, the show had a new director in Garson Kanin—who stepped in after Jerome Robbins quit over book problems and Bob Fosse had come and gone—and just one producer when David Merrick sold his share of the show to Ray Stark after a bitter disagreement between the two men. “It was a serious falling-out,” Garson Kanin recalled. “They quarreled, had a big row. I don’t know if it was about percentages or the movie rights or what. But David called me one day and said, ‘Just talk to him. Don’t talk to me anymore because I’m out.
’”

Merrick’s departure created a potentially disastrous problem because Barbra had signed her contract with him, not with Ray Stark. Without Merrick,
Funny Girl
had no Streisand, and Stark likely had no show. David Begelman and Freddie Fields, Barbra’s agents, smelled an opportunity, and they upped the ante for her to re-sign with Stark on the theory that she was a far more valuable commodity now than she had been six months earlier when she signed her contract. They told Stark that Barbra wanted an increase in her weekly salary from $1,500 to $7,500, a chauffeured limousine to take her to and from the theater, a personal hairdresser, and free daily meals for her and Elliott.

The demands insulted Stark. “Ray was terribly angry about the whole thing,” Kanin remembered. “He was a very proud man and a shrewd businessman, and he wasn’t going to give in to a lot of pressure. There was a period when we didn’t know what was going to happen, and I was desperately attempting to hold this thing together and not let everything go down the drain.”

Stark final
l
y agreed to raise Barbra’s salary to $5,000, largely because of the huge advance ticket sales, which were attributable mainly to her. But he agreed to none of her other demands, and the sometimes acrimonious negotiations
l
eft each wary of the other. Stark resented what he saw as Barbra’s agents’ hardball tactics; Barbra thought him niggardly in light of how important she clearly could be to the success of his long-he
l
d dream to bring his mother-in-law’s story to life. The volatile love-hate relationship between Barbra and Stark, which would extend from Broadway to Hollywood and cover more than twelve years and seven productions, had begun.

O
N JANUARY
13, 1964,
Funny Girl
had its first out-of-town tryout at the Shubert Theater in Boston. The performance started an hour late because of a snowstorm, and the audience was restless and unresponsive. By twelve-thirty in the morning, the curtain still had not fallen, and half of the audience had left the theater. The show finally ended at
1
:00
A.M.
, and in the early-morning hours, the dispirited cast read the reviews in a deserted tavern. The notices made Isobe
l
Lennart weep.

Clearly
Funny Girl,
as it stood, was a fiasco. Just about everything that could be wrong with the show, was. It was too long (the next night, twenty minutes of songs and scenes were cut out). It was unfocused, loose, rambling. Many of the musical numbers didn’t work. The book didn’t seem sure whether Nick Arnstein should be portrayed as the reprehensible ne’er-do-well he was or fictiona
l
ized beyond recognition as a charmer forced into an embezz
l
ement scheme only because of his embarrassment at being considered Mr. Fanny Brice. The former concept gave the show a richer, more multidimensional leading man, but the latter elicited more audience sympathy. Jule Styne and Garson Kanin argued for Arnstein as he really was, but Ray Stark was unwilling either to offend his wife’s memories of her father or to stir any litigious anger in the eighty-three-year-old Arnstein. He held out for what Styne called Nick’s “candyization.”

Audiences might have forgiven ai
l
of this if Barbra’s performan
c
e had been better. There were flashes of brilliance, to be sure, but on the whole she seemed ill at ease. Her performance was often flat and one-dimensional; she behaved essentially the same with her friends and family onstage as she did with Arnstein. And Barbra was trying too hard with the comedy.

The Boston reviews terrified her. She had given up nearly one million dollars in cabaret and television bookings to do this show, and now she feared the whole thing would be a disaster. She had never had to carry a hugely budgeted Broadway show on her shoulders. For the first time in her career, she doubted her abilities. Her stomach twisted into knots; she couldn’t keep food down. Her doctor put her on Donnatal, a prescription drug to control her stomach.

Her employment was still tenuous and she knew it. Erasmus Hall High School alumna Lainie Kazan, Barbra’s understudy, confirmed that Ray Stark interviewed actresses to replace Streisand at this point. Kazan was privy to that, she said, “because I was one of the people they talked to.” For Lainie, a Broadway novice, the experience of working on
Funny Girl
was an eye-opener. “It was like going to war. There were hirings and firings and accidents. There were a lot of power struggles. I was in shock. And it must have been overwhelming for Barbra. But she got through it because she was a strong-willed, feisty little thing.”

Fearful of being dismissed, Barbra became more obsessive than ever about being “great.” After one of the Boston matinees, Kanin returned to the theater and was surprised to find Barbra kneeling on the apron of the stage, singing “Don’t Rain on My Parade” at full throttle. He went down to the footlights and called out, “Barbra, wait a minute.” She stopped, startled. “Barbra,” Kanin said, “you’ve just played a whole tough, long matinee. And in about an hour and a half you’ll have to be back here again starting to get ready. You should be in your hotel room, resting.”

“Goddammit!” Barbra shouted. “I gotta get this fucking thing right! Jesus Christ.”

Kanin backed off. “All right. It’s your life and your career. Do what you want.”

That evening, Kanin recalled, Barbra apologized for blowing up at him. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said. “But that whole number was getting so fucked up. And the tempo! Jesus, I thought it was my fault. But it was that goddamned asshole in the pit. Jesus Christ!”