Streisand: Her Life (33 page)

“K
ANIN’S NOT TELLING
me what to do!” Barbra wailed to Marty. “I need direction! A
l
l he ever tells me is everything’s fine!” Erlichman sat down for a drink with the director and relayed Barbra’s concerns. “When are you going to tell her more—like what to do?”

“She doesn’t need to be told what to do,” Kanin replied. “She knows what to do. I’m only gonna tell her what
not
to do.” Kanin’s theory was that once he coupled an actor or actress to a role successfully, the rest would take care of itself. “In forty-five years,” he said in 1980, “I have never read a line for an actor. And I have very seldom given anyone a physical direction about where to go, what to do. I believe that you create an atmosphere in which the creative work can take place, and then the players—if you have the right players—wil
l
respond.”

Although Barbra was clearly the right player, she didn’t have enough experience to call on in the absence of a strong directorial hand. Kanin’s approach might have worked with a veteran like Mary Martin or Ethel Merman, but it wasn’t working with Barbra. Something had to be done, and Barbra knew what it was: she needed Allan Miller to coach her.

Ray Stark gulped when she told him this. “Okay,” he replied, “but you can’t let Garson know. I don’t want to offend him.”

“But Allan will have to come to the theater and watch the performance,” Barbra protested.

“We
l
l, tell everyone he’s your cousin or something.”

M
ASQUERADING AS BARBRA’S
lawyer-cousin from California, Miller watched a performance, and his heart sank. “Sh
e
looked like a rank amateur,” he recalled. “It was pitiful. Nothing had been discovered for her; she didn’t know what her emotions were supposed to be based on. She was just told, ‘Could you do this? Could you move like this?’ She covered up her deficiencies by relying on what we call ‘indicated acting.’ She wasn’t feeling anything, she was just
pretending
to feel something. The scenes between her and Sydney Chaplin were awful. They stood onstage during these supposedly intimate moments and there was a
chasm
between them.”

For one scene, Miller coached Barbra and Sydney in the theater rest room, with Chaplin’s wife, Noelle, standing guard lest Garson Kanin find them out. It was the moment that Fanny first sees Nick, backstage after a performance. Both actors had played the scene awkwardly, stiff
l
y. Miller asked Chaplin to wait outside the bathroom, then told Barbra to put herself in Fanny’s place. “You’ve just done a performance. How long do you think you’ve been in those dancing shoes?” he asked her. Barbra picked up his train of thought immediately. “Oh, God! My feet are probably swollen.”

“That’s right. And so what are you gonna do the minute you get back to your dressing room?”

“Take off my shoes.” Barbra sat on one of the toilets, undid her shoelaces, and started to massage her feet.

“That’s good,” Miller told her. “Your feet are killing you, they’re swollen, so how are you gonna get out of the theater?”

“On my hands and knees!” Barbra exclaimed as she fell to the floor and started crawling.

Miller then left the room to talk to Sydney. “When you come in, you like what you see,” he told Chaplin. “This is a young girl, she’s uninhibited, you’re drawn to her. So you want to join her. When you go in there and see what she’s doing, let’s see what you do.”

Chaplin came upon Barbra crawling around on all fours, her shoes tied by their laces around her neck. First she saw his legs, and she let out three woofs. Then she looked up and said the famous line from the script, “Gorgeous.”

“I beg your pardon,” Chaplin said, reciting the dialogue.

“Your shirt. It’s gorgeous.” At that point Chaplin got into the spirit of things. “This?” he said, and pulled the shirt out of his pants and took it off. Then he sat down on the floor with Barbra for the rest of the scene. “It was a wonderful moment,” Miller recalled. “You could see why she’d fall instantly in love with the guy.”

According to Miller, another major problem was that audiences weren’t responding to Barbra’s rendition of “People.” There was a real risk that the song, which Jule Styne expected would top the pop charts, might be dropped from the show. “Barbra was singing it the same way all the way through, with no connection at all to the lyrics,” Miller said. “And she was singing it out to the audience, rather than to Sydney. We worked on all that, and the next night—al
l
of this exploration had to be done before live audiences in Boston—she sang the song very differently. Sydney Chaplin looked at her like ‘What the hell’s going on?’ And Mi
l
ton Rosenstock didn’t know what she was going to do. She was so halting in the beginning—which was right for the song—that Rosenstock didn’t know how to keep the orchestra in sync with her. He just had them stop playing and she sang a cappel
l
a.

“When she got to the phrase, ‘two people, two very special people,’ she turned to Sydney and sang the rest of the song only to him. It was magical, touching,
real.
I could see Sydney smiling; he really got caught up in what this girl was doing. At the end of the number, the audience was on their feet. It stopped the show.”

Although Barbra’s performance improved,
Funny Girl
remained in chaos around her. The book still presented a major problem; Isobel Lennart would sit in the wings during rehearsals, type new pages of dialogue, and hand them to the cast. Whole scenes were added, then discarded. Musical numbers came and went with alarming speed. Most of the abandoned songs had belonged to Sydney Chaplin, and as Barbra’s performance gained steam, it became clear that more and more of
Funny Girl
would have to revolve around her. Jule Styne wasn’t happy about that. “This is turning into An Evening with Barbra Streisand,” he groused. But Ray Stark and Garson Kanin knew that if Barbra continued to grow into the role, her star quality would propel the show’s box-office grosses into the stratosphere. Thus, anything that didn’t serve Barbra was expendable.

“She was the whole show,” said Chaplin’s understudy, George Reeder. “It didn’t matter who else was in it. Finally they told Sydney, ‘You look great. Just come on in your tuxedo, walk around, and look nice. Let Barbra do the show.
’”

S
YDNEY CHAPLIN MAY
have been so sanguine about Barbra taking over
Funny Girl
because by the time the show got to Philadelphia early in February, the two of them were enmeshed in an affair. Barbra had said to Elliott six months earlier, arguing against marriage, “I have to sow my oats,” and Sydney Chaplin—handsome, dapper, charming, a ladies’ man—proved too attractive for her to resist. With Noelle Chaplin back in France and Elliott at home in New York a good deal of the time, Chaplin and Barbra began a discreet romance, dining alone after the show and having rendezvous in each other’s hotel rooms.

Garson Kanin recalled that “They were extremely chummy.... He was a very waggish fellow. He always made a lot of jokes and talked dirty, and she used to laugh and respond to that.”

Ceil Mack, Barbra’s wardrobe lady, said, “I was aware of it, their little affair. They weren’t obvious about it, but if you already knew about it you could pick up on things, like the way he looked at her.”

Rumors of the affair rippled through the company in Philadelphia, and George Reeder recalled that one night after the show he and several other male cast members were sitting around a table in a restaurant with Chaplin when someone mentioned “a rumor going around.”

“What rumor?” Chaplin asked.

“Nobody wanted to tell him,” Reeder recalled. “So I piped up and said, ‘Well, the rumor is that you and Barbra are having an affair.’ None of us really believed it, so we were pretty surprised when he laughed and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ in a way that told us ‘Yeah, it’s true.
’”

Years later Elliott said that when he first heard of the liaison he confronted Barbra, and she readily admitted that she and Chaplin were involved. Barbra’s infidelity, needless to say, put a strain on the Goulds’ barely five-month-old marriage. George Reeder recalled that Barbra and Elliott “didn’t act like a happily married couple. He wasn’t around very much.”

Another rumor that emanated from Philadelphia said that Barbra was expecting a baby. Had she been, it would have spelled disaster for the show. “She really did look like she was three months pregnant,” Larry Fuller, a dancer in the cast, recalled.

The first press mention of the rumor appeared in Earl Wilson’s
New York Post
column on February 8: “Producer Ray Stark, denying his
Funny Girl
star, Barbra Streisand, is expecting, says he’ll give $1,000 to charity if he’s wrong.”

On March 2, Barbra herself denied the rumor to Wilson. On March 11, Wilson reported that “Barbra Streisand lost five pounds last week, helping squash rumors she’s expecting.” That news, of course, pro
m
pted fresh speculation that Barbra had had an abortion.

Ceil Mack, involved in the day-to-day fittings of Barbra’s costumes, denied Streisand ever was pregnant. “What made her look that way was her posture. When she stood, her belly protruded. Irene Sharaff, the costume designer, had to design loose-fitting outfits and Empire dresses for her to disguise it. I would have known if she was pregnant and then got an abortion. She looked the same from the beginning of rehearsals. She didn’t gain any weight. The rumors weren’t true.”

Still another rumor came out of
Funny Girl
’s Philadelphia tryout—that Barbra Streisand’s performance had evolved into a stunner. The reviews were good, and word of mouth was now so positive that by the third week, when the company moved from the Forrest Theater to the Erlanger,
Variety
reported that the show was making “big news” with $30,000 in ticket sales the first day on sale at the Erlanger “despite a snowstorm.” For the next two weeks in Philadelphia, the show was a sellout.