Streisand: Her Life (56 page)

When she began rehearsals in June, the hotel was so far from completion that Barbra had to wear a hard hat to protect herself against falling plaster and welders’ sparks. The drummer Don Lamond was a part of Barbra’s thirty-seven-piece orchestra, and he recalled that “a few days before we opened they hadn’t even finished laying the carpets. They were hammering, and things were dropping, and electric drills were humming—all the sounds of a construction site. And Barbra didn’t squawk one bit about that. She just went ahead with rehearsal. I know a lot of people I’ve worked for who would have flipped over that, but she didn’t.”

According to Dennis Ritz, the advertising director for the International, when Barbara arrived “the showroom wasn’t ready, and the penthouse she was supposed to stay in definitely wasn’t ready, so they got her a little house on the golf course. Marty Erlichman was a wreck. He kept running around going, ‘She’s gonna blow her stack!’ But she got here and she was
wonderful.
She never complained a bit.”

“There were no chairs, tables, or booths in the theater,” Marty recalled. “She was rehearsing in a totally empty room.” So that Barbra could “get the feel of things” in Vegas, Erlichman took her to some of the other shows around town. At a Dean Martin performance, a heckler got tossed out by two burly security guards. “If they do that to
him
,” Barbra said, “what’ll they do to
me?”

Such icy fear gripped Barbra as she prepared to go onstage on her opening night, July 2, that she considered lying on a chaise longue as the curtain went up in case her knees gave way. She nixed that idea, and as the orchestra completed the overture, she summoned up the courage to stride out in front of an anticipatory audience that included Gary Grant, Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Williams, Joe Louis and Sonny Liston, Tony Bennett, Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, and Peggy Lee, who was appearing in the hotel’s lounge. Barbra had no opening acts, and would not perform while the audience ate dinner. Most of the patrons, seated for dinner at eight-thirty, had grown impatient by the time she appeared at half past ten.

The curtain rose. There was no set, no glitter, no dancing girls. Just Streisand—in denim overalls and a wrinkled shirt. The columnist May Mann described the audience’s reaction as “shock and cold disbelief.” Barbra had meant to make fun of the unfinished condition of the hotel, but because she didn’t explain that before she began her first song—“I Got Plenty of Nothin’,” also meant to be a joke—many patrons wondered whether she meant to insult them. “There was some noise in the audience,” Dennis Ritz recalled. “I wouldn’t say [there were] boos exactly, but it was clear a lot of people thought she was being rude and got offended.”

The audience reaction worsened when Barbra still said nothing to them before she began her second number, the exquisite but languid Rodgers and Hart tune “My Funny Valentine.” Then she sang four
more
numbers without saying a word between songs. Muted, almost grudging applause followed each number. Barbra sang to perfection, but she didn’t seem to care that there was anyone else in the room. There was no kibitzing, no self-effacement, no warmth. And as she felt the lack of response—her worst fear realized—she froze up even more.

“I wanted to be with my audience,” Barbra said, “and what did I do? I turned them off! I felt hostility coming up on the stage in waves. I worked, but it was total fear time. Of course it showed. They thought I was a snob, but I was really just scared.” By the time Barbra began to talk and joke, she had lost most of the patrons’ goodwill. “The jokes she cracked at the unfinished condition of the hotel,” May Mann wrote, “rather than making the audience laugh, alienated them. They settled into a cold resentful disgust. If Dean Martin had said the things she had, everyone would have laughed.... It was embarrassing all the way around. Many people began to walk out as soon as she stole off for a brief intermission to change her costume. She came back wearing a rose pleated chiffon, about which she said, ‘This was my bed spread. I just thought I’d put it on and make a costume!’ Again silence, not laughter. The harder Barbra tried for sympathy with her audience, the more reserved they became.”

The show ended with a thud, and Barbra, devastated, cried in her dressing room afterward. “I was in a state of shock. I could feel the hostility of that audience.” She didn’t need reviews to tell her that she had just flopped more completely than she had since the Town & Country debacle in Winnipeg nine years earlier, but the next day the critiques appeared anyway. Charles Champlin of the
Los Angeles Times
summed up the general reaction: “Even allowing for the opening-night tension, Miss Streisand’s appearance was a curious, cold, and intensely disappointing eighty minutes’ worth. As her admirers know, she has a superb voice, and a spiky directness of manner. The trouble was that manners had become mannerisms. Her performance had been finely calculated, but that magic rapport which Sinatra, Tony Bennett—and [Peggy] Lee—can establish with their audiences never really got going for Barbra.... Miss Streisand seemed a dazzlingly efficient but chillingly impersonal machine... who still has some lessons to learn.”

Barbra knew she had to do something. As Don Lamond recalled, “One of the critics wrote that Barbra could pick up some pointers from Peggy Lee. Well, don’t you know, the next night she went to listen to Peggy. She’s never too big to learn something. I really respected her for that.... And the critics said she laid a big egg because she started the show with ‘My Funny Valentine’ and in Vegas people aren’t used to that kind of opening. They like the slam-bang stuff. So she said to us, ‘I know we got a bad write-up after the opening. Don’t let it get to you. We’re just going to have to change the opening number.’ So we changed it to a real roaring start, and then she changed the whole show.”

The next night Barbra began with “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” The rousing anthem excited the audience and put them on Barbra’s side immediately, reminding them as it did of her wonderful performance in
Funny Girl.
She followed that with “People” and “My Honey’s Lovin’ Arms” before she got to “My Funny Valentine.”

She still offered no patter between the first few songs, but this time it didn’t matter: the audience burst into wild applause after each number. The chemistry between a performer and an audience is a fragile thread, as Barbra had learned to her chagrin the night before. Put an audience off, and it may be impossible to win them back, no matter what. Put them in the palm of your hand and everything that didn’t work the night before will leave them laughing and cheering.

Now they laughed at her jokes. “This is an absolutely
feckuckteh
place, you know?” she said. “There are no clocks here. They want everybody out in the casino, so the television sets in your rooms don’t work, right? There are no Bibles in the rooms. Even the rooms that have Bibles there’s only five commandments. The Jewish Bible, six tops!”

The laughter loosened Barbra up. Before long she had established a warm rapport with her audience. “And now for your yentatainment pleasure!” she called out at one point. She described her friends Marilyn and Alan Bergman as a “nice Jewish couple” before she sang their song “Ask Yourself Why.” Then she described “Punky’s Dilemma” as “a song by Simon and Garfunkel, another nice Jewish couple.” She said she thought it would be “the ultimate in chic” to use just a performer’s initials on a marquee. “Of course, that might not be such a good idea for me—or for Tony Bennett.”

The crowd loved it; Barbra had turned everything around. Over the ensuing weeks, Charles Champlin heard such persistent reports that Barbra’s show had improved he went back and reviewed it again. This time he found the concert “a scintillating display of her gifts... she seemed to be having a ball, relaxed, amiable and in charge.” The
Los Angeles Times
columnist Joyce Haber agreed: “I discovered a very improved show. La Streisand got a standing ovation. It was a concert to remember.”

Now Barbra could relax and have fun. “She had a custom ’57 Thunderbird she brought with her, and she used to drive it around town,” Don Lamond recalled. “She’d wave to people. She was having a ball, once she got settled in.” The bass player Milt Hinton recalled that after her shows Barbra would say, “Let’s go around to the jazz joints,” and they would hop in her car. “We’d go hear Cannonball Adderley and Joe Williams. She’d sit in the back so no one would recognize her and she could just enjoy the musicians. Joe Williams came to see her show, and she introduced him from the audience. He was one of the few she did that with—she wasn’t into that Hollywood thing of lots of back-slapping at all.”

D
URING BARBRA’S INTERNATIONAL
engagement, an issue of
Ladies
’
Home Journal
appeared on newsstands containing an interview in which Elliott Gould spoke freely, frankly, and often bitterly about his relationship with her. “Barbra is really fourteen years old,” the article quoted Gould. “Here is a girl who is a major star, who makes a fortune, but who is unhappy. It is a pain to hear her complain constantly.” The interview continued at length in a similar vein, and when Barbra read it she became red-faced with fury. According to her hairdresser Fredrick Glaser, she threw everyone out of her dressing room and “proceeded to tear the place apart.”

A
LSO DURING HER
Vegas stint, Barbra’s twelfth solo album was released.
What About Today?
proved an unsuccessful attempt to move Streisand into the rock genre that had revolutionized popular music. When she was asked about rock ’n’ roll in 1965, Barbra had replied, “Musically, I love it, but there’s nothing in it for me to sing.” This album came close to proving her right.

In 1966 a funky new era had dawned at Columbia Records when Clive Davis took over many responsibilities from Goddard Lieberson. Davis wanted to make the label more of a competitor in the pop and rock scene that had exploded in the wake of the “British invasion” spearheaded by the Beatles in 1964. At the close of 1967, with the relative failure
of Simply Streisand
fresh in his mind, Davis felt it was time the company’s top female artist considered singing, if not rock ’n’ roll, at least more contemporary pop music. The sales slump Barbra was in, although minor compared to the career-threatening drop-offs suffered by other artists, indicated to Davis that even staunch Streisand fans would be pleased to have their idol take her recording career in a new direction.

Davis was thus delighted when he learned that Barbra had cut some pop singles that were unlike any of her prior efforts. Unfortunately the songs Barbra chose provided little indication that she could make such a transition successfully. The single “Our Corner of the Night,” backed with “He Could Show Me,” was released in February 1968 and received scant radio attention, sold abysmally, and confused Barbra’s admirers.