Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (46 page)

And that was a problem. Goddard Lieberson had said that Barbra couldn’t be categorized—and while he’d used that as a compliment when he’d introduced her at the Bon Soir, he had also worried about that fact right from the start. The question remained how to position Barbra and her album, which contained a mix of up- and down-tempo songs, offbeat standards, and performance pieces such as “Come to the Supermarket” and “Big Bad Wolf.” For the predominately youthful record-buying market, these weren’t draws, and no amount of accolades from Harold Arlen was going to persuade a young fan of Elvis Presley or Lesley Gore to give Barbra’s album a shot.

By the middle part of March, while Barbra was languishing in Miami, there was a terrible feeling among everyone involved that the album was sinking like a rock. It had now been out for a month, and it still hadn’t caught fire. Maybe Lieberson had been right: Barbra was simply too special for records. The lack of enthusiasm at the Chateau and the Eden Roc seemed to prove that her audience of gay men, urban hipsters, and theater aficionados was just too small for major commercial success. After all the trouble of the contract and the tour, it would be a terrible admission for Barbra and Marty to have to make.

As Barbra walked offstage and headed back to her room, the depression she was feeling was as much personal as it was professional. Elliott had been with her for the start of the tour in Boston and Cleveland. But during a brief interim in New York before she’d flown to Florida, Barbra had bid her boyfriend farewell as he headed off to London to start rehearsals for
On the Town.
Earl Wilson reported that Barbra had been “talked out of going
to London” with Elliott by her managers, who “feared she would stop her career right when it [was] starting.” In return for Barbra’s agreement to stay in the U.S., Wilson revealed, her managers promised to get her three television shows in England “so she could visit three times” in the course of the next year.

Still, it was hard for some to believe that she ever truly considered going to London without a job just so she could cling to Elliott’s side. Barbra was hardly “the backstage kind of girlfriend,” Bob said. Besides, with the possibility of the Brice show still out there—or
The Student Gypsy,
or
Anyone Can Whistle,
or David Merrick’s musical revival of
The Rainmaker,
for which her name had also been mentioned—Barbra wasn’t likely to go anywhere that made it difficult for her to get in to audition.

And maybe a bit of a break from Elliott wasn’t all that terrible to contemplate. Barbra was still in love with him and still committed to making the relationship work. No one doubted that. In fact, as friends had heard, there had even been a brief consideration of marriage before he left, to seal the deal between them and provide a veneer of protection while they were apart. But Elliott had a dim view of the institution of marriage. He thought it imposed “something technical on
an otherwise viable relationship,” and he worried it could change things “dramatically.” That Barbra didn’t push it suggested that she, too, wasn’t quite ready, and that maybe she saw some benefit in having a bit of a breather. They had been arguing more than ever after all, and Barbra had found herself increasingly impatient with Elliott’s career insecurities, especially as she was going through her own anxieties.

So she retreated alone to her room at the Eden Roc. After this, it was off to San Francisco to fulfill her long-ago contract with Enrico Banducci at the hungry i, then back to New York for a gig at Basin Street East at the Shelton Towers Hotel. There were more clubs after that if she could bear to look at the list. And after that—who knew? All Barbra could have known at that point was that the winter of 1963 looked an awful lot like the winter of 1961. Whatever had happened to going straight to the top?

The crowds had returned to hear her, but now the problem was something else. Barbra couldn’t sing. Or she didn’t
think
she could sing.

With Marty at her side, she found the little studio opposite the Safeway grocery store on Oakland’s busy College Avenue, about half an hour’s walk from the Berkeley campus. This was where she’d been told she could find the woman who might help her. Anxious and frightened, Barbra made her way inside a small room with all the curtains drawn to keep out the light.

A few nights earlier, she’d opened at the hungry i across the bay in San Francisco. Banducci had done a good job of talking her up: “This town will go crazy for her,” he quoted himself on the posters announcing her opening night. To the press, he also told the story of their first meeting back in New York, reframing it with the buzzwords of Barbra’s current publicity: “She was easily the kookiest,
most arresting-looking kid I’d ever seen.” In building up her offbeat appeal, Banducci had Barbra calling him a “moron” and an “idiot” in Irvin Arthur’s office, and instead of being offended, he said he’d replied, “Sign that girl for me right away.” Certainly Barbra had been calculatingly direct in that first meeting, but she wasn’t the type to call someone names, especially someone she’d just met. But the theatrical Banducci knew how to plant the seeds of a legend.

Meanwhile, Columbia, responding to Marty’s calls to do more to promote the album, had sent out invitations to some of San Francisco’s better-known critics to a special preshow concert at six
PM.
That meant Barbra had to go on stage
three
times that first evening, since she performed two shows a night, at eight and eleven. (The two shows were distinct from each other, and some people from the first show stayed for the second.) But the preshow event proved to be a smart move because it created a real buzz about her, and the tough-to-please critics, feeling catered to, had responded enthusiastically, ensuring sizeable crowds every night since.

“Barbra Streisand is unquestionably
one of the most successful performers ever to appear at the hungry i,” Ralph J. Gleason wrote in the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “People went away talking about her and three hours later, I heard two couples on Broadway singing one of the songs she did. Barbra Streisand has that kind of impact.” The
Chronicle
ran photos of Barbra making all sorts of faces as she sang—pouting, serious, comical—next to the headline:
A SPECIAL KIND OF MAGIC.

But all that singing was getting to her. Barbra was finding that she was having trouble holding her notes. When she had arrived in San Francisco, her voice had been somewhat hoarse. Certainly all the leapfrogging from climate to climate couldn’t have helped: mid-twenties in Cleveland; teens and icy rain in New York; eighties in Miami; forties and rainy when she’d made a quick flight back to New York to make another appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show;
then the low fifties, cloudy and damp, when she’d arrived in San Francisco. After all that, who wouldn’t catch a cold? But clearly Barbra worried that her voice troubles were the result of more than just a passing bug. That’s why Marty had asked Banducci if he might recommend a vocal coach with whom Barbra could do some work. The club owner had known exactly the woman to send them to. And so they made their way to this dark little studio on College Avenue.

Judy Davis called herself “a vocal plumber.”
What she did was simple: “I fix pipes,” she said. She was a brassy, grandiloquent lady who dressed in colorful clothes and reminded at least one student of Auntie Mame. “Well, my dear,”
she’d say, after listening to a prospective student sing and examining his or her throat and diaphragm, “I must tell you, this is exactly what you’re doing wrong. We’re going to have to rearrange some of these things, break this habit.” Singers had many bad habits, Davis believed, like improper breathing or insufficient projection. “Singers are not known
to be bright,” she’d tell a pupil who didn’t regularly perform the exercises she’d prescribed, “but don’t prove it to the world.”

For all her expertise, Davis herself couldn’t sing a note. When she was nineteen, her vocal chords had been injured during a tonsillectomy, leaving her with a raspy voice that prevented a singing career of her own. To understand what had happened to her on the operating table, Davis turned to
Gray’s Anatomy,
thoroughly familiarizing herself with the physiology of the human voice. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from the University of California at Berkeley, she headed to Los Angeles, where she taught movie actors how to lip-synch soundtracks. Now married to professional tennis player Frank Kovacs, Davis attracted a stellar clientele to her voice studio in Oakland. Frank Sinatra had been known to fly her to Las Vegas to help him practice before a show. Much of the talent that came through the hungry i or its sister club across the street, the Purple Onion, had spent time in Davis’s studio. She had pretty much taught the Kingston Trio how to sing. When people asked her to describe her methods, which they often did, Davis found she was unable to do so. She just knew when people were “obstructing the performance
of their vocal chords,” she explained, and through exercises and breathing techniques, she could show them “how not to do that.”

The fear that had brought Barbra to Judy Davis was as much psychological as physical. It was, after all, an extremely low period for her. She felt Elliott’s absence keenly. That may have been why she’d allowed a story to spread that they had gotten married. Earl Wilson was reporting, “Funny singer Barbra Streisand
wanted to keep it a secret that she married actor Elliott Gould just before he left for London, but forgot herself and wore her wedding ring to
The Ed Sullivan Show.
” Whatever ring Barbra had been wearing when she’d made that flying trip from Miami to New York hadn’t been a wedding band, but apparently she was okay with giving that impression. She knew that admitting she’d been living with a man outside of matrimony would have been completely unacceptable to a large swath of the public; surely Lee Solters had pointed out that the bluenoses still hadn’t forgiven Elizabeth Taylor for shacking up with Richard Burton. Unmarried cohabitation simply wasn’t tolerated in the public eye. Even couples clearly not ready to tie the knot, such as Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin, had been forced to do so anyway to ward off impressions that they might be sleeping together.

Yet for Barbra, some friends believed, the lie about being married to Elliott went even deeper than that. She was lonely, feeling untethered to the man she loved. So Barbra may have liked imagining that something was holding her and Elliott together.

For the moment, all she had to sustain her was her voice. If her voice went, she had nothing. And suddenly, in the midst of her depression, she began questioning herself: How
did
she hold her notes so long? How
was
she able to sing without ever having been trained in voice?

In the past, Barbra had just shrugged off such questions. If she willed herself, she believed, she could do anything. But now her self-confidence had plummeted. One night she suspected she wasn’t holding her notes quite as long, and when she tried deliberately to hold them, she found she couldn’t. Her “consciousness of an unconscious
thing,” she realized, had made her “impotent.”

Sitting there in Davis’s dimly lit studio, Barbra felt like, in her own words, “a person who was paralyzed in her legs having to relearn to walk.” She was being dramatic; it was hardly as bad as all that. She was performing two shows every night at the hungry i, and the applause was certainly greater there than it had been in Cleveland or Miami. But what mattered was how Barbra
felt
—and she felt she wasn’t at her best. No doubt she remembered off nights during
Wholesale
when she knew she was less than perfect and the way people had still applauded for her. She felt they’d been conditioned to do so; and she probably felt that way now. She didn’t deserve the applause, she believed, and Barbra could never enjoy acclaim that she hadn’t earned.

And this particular gig was crucial. In some ways, San Francisco was as important as New York to a singer’s career. The city by the bay was a cultural mecca of its own, fiercely independent, producing and nurturing talent like nowhere else—and the hungry i, at 599 Jackson Street in the North Beach neighborhood, was its chief breeding ground. Mort Sahl, the sharp-tongued political comedian, had gotten his start there; so had the Kingston Trio. Both Phyllis Diller and Orson Bean had played the club, and Bill Cosby, folk singer Glenn Yarbrough, jazzman Vince Guaraldi, comedian Shelley Berman, and musical satirist Tom Lehrer had all received career boosts from the i. For the first few nights of Barbra’s run, her opening act had been fellow game changer and rule breaker, comedian Woody Allen.

It was with justification that Howard Taubman of the
New York Times
called the i “the most influential nightclub
west of the Mississippi.” If Barbra could make it there, winning over San Francisco sophisticates, then she’d prove she wasn’t just a New York phenomenon. She needed to generate the kind of buzz on the West Coast that she already enjoyed on the East if her career was ever going to go national.

So there was a great deal riding on the slender shoulders of the scared twenty-year-old who sat looking up at Judy Davis and asking for her help. Davis’s heart went out to the kid. She recognized that Barbra was “being catapulted into
a position” most performers took many years to reach, “almost as if she were shot out of a cannon,” Davis thought. What this “sensitive girl” craved, Davis realized, was “a hand to hold and a pat on the back and somebody to tell her everything was all right.” Certainly that had never been the norm in Barbra’s life; it was precisely what she had given up expecting so many years ago from her mother. But when Davis offered her a hand to hold, Barbra took it eagerly. That day, in the forty-four-year-old nurturing Davis, Barbra found another mother substitute, a parental figure to fill that hole in the middle of herself.

Immediately the two of them got down to work. The little studio was a safe haven for Barbra; its simple piano and soft, diffused light—and the frolicking of Davis’s black poodle Poupette—made Barbra feel at home. Davis was under no illusions that she needed to teach Barbra to sing, even if that was what her client suddenly believed she needed to learn. “No singing teacher can teach anyone to sing,” she explained. A singer was born a singer, she said, and all she could do was teach “what tones are right and what techniques are best.” She found Barbra to be “a curious, searching girl” who wanted to understand how “this instrument of hers” worked. Davis produced photographs and diagrams of the lungs, esophagus, and diaphragm, explaining to Barbra the physical process of singing. That alone seemed to ease some of Barbra’s fears.