Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (57 page)

Barbra was now a married lady. One of the songs Styne and Merrill had written for
Funny Girl
was called “Sadie, Sadie, Married Lady,” in which Fanny Brice gushed over finally landing a man, swearing she’d do her “wifely job” and “sit at home, become a slob.” But where Barbra might have shared some of Fanny’s thrill that the man she loved had slipped a ring on her finger, she no doubt also saw the irony in the rest of the song’s lyrics. It wasn’t Barbra who’d be sitting around doing her nails, as Fanny imagined for herself, while her husband supported her in style. It would be, in fact, the very opposite. It would be Elliott for whom “all day the records play.” And despite the kisses, hugs, and congratulations they all surely bestowed on each other, that little fact was almost certainly on their minds as they returned to that hot, sweaty car and headed back to Tahoe so Barbra could make her eight o’clock curtain.

The aroma of chlorine on her skin and in her hair, Barbra leaped onto Elliott’s back, producing a great splash of water. Around them enormous palm trees shot up against a startlingly blue sky, ringing the sun-dappled swimming pool nestled inside the pink walls of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Barbra, in a bikini, her hair tied up on top of her head, was clinging to Elliott’s torso as he hoisted her onto his right shoulder. They were standing in the shallow end of the pool.

On the deck, photographer Bob Willoughby was focusing his camera. Willoughby had made a name for himself photographing Judy Garland, and Begelman and Fields had arranged a shoot for him with their newest client. At some point, Willoughby suggested that Barbra climb up on Elliott’s shoulders. But once she was up there, surely it was her idea to do what she did next.

Just as Willoughby snapped the picture, Barbra reached her left hand around to cover Elliott’s face. The resulting photo revealed a small Mona Lisa smile on Barbra’s face.

It was all in jest, of course. They were having fun. Lots of photos were taken that day. Lots of splashing went on in the pool, lots of lounging was enjoyed poolside. At least for now, it was the closest to a honeymoon that Barbra and Elliott were going to get. They told reporters they hoped to escape to Italy
before Barbra started rehearsals for
Funny Girl
—but at the moment the big question was if those rehearsals would happen at all. Yet again, there had been a major setback for the show, and
Funny Girl
faced the possibility of being postponed once more. As everyone knew, whenever a show was postponed, there was a chance it would never start up again.

Bob Fosse had resigned from the show. The press called it an “unexpected change,”
but Barbra likely saw it coming since Fosse had confided in her his continuing distrust of Stark. When Feuer and Martin, his producers on
How to Succeed,
asked him to direct their forthcoming musical,
I Picked a Daisy,
with a score by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, Fosse bolted. Stark, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, supervising the start of filming on
The
Night of the Iguana,
was furious. “Cannot believe that [a] professional
like you would attempt to quit show at this late date,” he wired Fosse, demanding that the director fulfill his agreement or face an injunction. Stark warned of “losses running into the thousands of dollars” for which he insisted Fosse would be held liable.

The erstwhile director was not intimidated. Writing to Barbra, Lennart, Styne, and Merrill, Fosse expressed his desire to “just withdraw and leave to you
any and all ideas” he had contributed so far. But the threatened lawsuit from Stark, he explained, precluded him from being “so generous at the moment.” That left them exactly where they’d been when Robbins left: potentially starting over from scratch.

The restrictions placed on the script by Robbins had exacerbated Fosse’s problems at the helm of
Funny Girl.
Shortly before he resigned, an itemized list of contributions made by his predecessor had been received from Robbins’s lawyer, who was finally parrying Stark’s legal maneuvers. Since Stark hadn’t attended creative meetings, Robbins’s lawyer had insisted, not only could he not say what Robbins’s creative contributions were, he could also not say for sure that he “didn’t make contributions.”
An “upset and angry”
Robbins had tape-recorded an hour-long recitation
of every single scene, line of dialogue, song change, and character suggestion he’d ever made during his time with the project. The “only practical resolution,” Robbins’s lawyer said, would be to pay his client royalties if even one word or one idea of his was used in the show.

With such an exhaustive catalog of contributions, it was clear that nearly every page of the script owed something to Robbins—an idea Isobel Lennart couldn’t honestly challenge. Fosse may have felt the show was doomed, since the book was now in such drastic need of overhaul, though he couldn’t admit that as a reason for wanting out. It was more strategic to pin the blame on Stark’s backstabbing. “Mr. Stark imposed an atmosphere of distrust that I found too difficult to overcome,” Fosse wrote to Barbra and his other collaborators, never mentioning that the contract he left unsigned contained precisely the kind of language he’d insisted upon as self-protection.

The show was once again without a director, and for all intents and purposes, given Robbins’s threats, without a book. Just how rehearsals could begin in a matter of months was anybody’s guess.

Barbra knew that her contract with David Merrick meant they’d have to pay her a pretty penny if they postponed the show. Not for nothing did Barbra’s camp keep reminding the columnists—and through them, Stark and Merrick—that she was forfeiting a hundred grand in club dates by signing on for
Funny Girl.
But as much as she enjoyed having it, money was secondary to Barbra; it was the possibility of seeing this—her best and quite possibly only chance to star in a Broadway show—slip through her fingers that no doubt truly distressed her. Finishing her Lake Tahoe gig, Barbra likely found the few days of lounging around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel very welcome indeed.

She still planned to head back to New York, however; no one had yet called off rehearsals. In fact, Carol Haney was still on the job as choreographer, already auditioning dancers. The deal that Fosse eventually struck with Stark had allowed them to use his ideas and contributions if the threat of a lawsuit was dropped and if they kept Haney on board. So, at least to the outside world, the show was proceeding apace. The columns continued to buzz over who might be Barbra’s costar. Hedda Hopper reported that Hugh O’Brian was “ready to sign,”
then reversed herself and said Tony Martin was in as Nick.
Mike Connolly claimed Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.,
was in the running; Walter Winchell declared Nick was going to be played by Richard Kiley.

The one name no one ever mentioned was Elliott. He was clearly not viewed as a big enough name. But Elliott wasn’t likely all that eager to play second fiddle to his wife, either. Indeed, he’d recognized that he needed to establish himself independent of Barbra, and so he had decided to stick around on the West Coast even after Barbra went back East, staying “long enough to make
one serious Hollywood bid,” he told columnist Barney Glazer. It would mean another separation from Barbra, but Elliott had to find a way to start bringing in some money to their household. Besides, Barbra wasn’t leaving California for a while: she had the Garland show to do in a couple of weeks, plus the concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Hansel and Gretel could frolic in the pool a while longer—even if Gretel did tend to cover Hansel’s face in photographs.

Meanwhile, Diana had sent them a wedding gift. She’d been saving
for this day, a little bit from her paycheck over the years whenever she could afford it. She’d managed to accumulate $750. To Diana, that was a substantial sum with which to start married life. If her own mother had given her that much money when she married Emanuel, she would have been overjoyed and overwhelmed. Barbra expressed her thanks, of course, but her mother’s gift hardly registered among the multiple savings and investment accounts now being managed by Marty Bregman. The truth was, Barbra didn’t need any money from Diana. What she needed from her mother was something else entirely, but she had long ago stopped hoping to get it.

As she’d been doing for the last few weeks, Judy Garland was playing
The Barbra Streisand Album,
becoming familiar with the young singer—twenty years her junior—who’d be appearing on her show. It was the first day of rehearsals, and Barbra would be arriving at the CBS Television City studios at Fairfax and Beverly within moments, if she wasn’t already there. When musical director Mel Tormé walked into Garland’s dressing room, he found the star singing along to “Happy Days Are Here Again”—except that she was singing her own song “Get Happy” from the movie
Summer Stock.
Tormé thought the combination
sounded “electrifying” and decided on the spot that Judy and Barbra should sing the two songs in counterpoint on the show. Garland smiled. That had been her plan all along. She had just wanted it to be somebody else’s idea, in case Barbra didn’t like it.

At forty-one, Garland looked a decade older. Pills, alcohol, heartache, illness, roller-coaster dieting—and the recent ongoing battles with her husband over their children—had all taken their toll. This television show, for which she’d now taped eight episodes, was supposed to make her rich. That was what Begelman and Fields had promised. Garland was always broke, due to bad financial management and overspending. She envied male contemporaries such as Bing Crosby and Bob Hope who were rolling in the dough, much of it earned in television. This show, she hoped, would change all that. Her agents had never been wrong before.

But problems had arisen almost from the start. Garland’s first producer was fired after six weeks, and another crew was brought in. The format of the show went through several changes before it made it on the air. CBS President James T. Aubrey, Jr.—known as “the Smiling Cobra”—never liked the program. The network was spending a great deal of money on Garland: $100,000 to refurbish the stage alone. In addition, Garland’s dressing room was an elaborate one-hundred-ten-foot-long trailer decorated to resemble the star’s Brentwood home, and the hallway leading from the dressing room to the stage was a replica of the Yellow Brick Road from
The Wizard of Oz.
Only if the show turned out to be a huge ratings hit would Aubrey feel the expense had been worth it.

The first episode had just aired on September 29. Although the official ratings weren’t in, overnight projections had showed Garland coming in second to NBC’s western drama,
Bonanza.
Still, supporters pointed out that in certain markets,
such as Philadelphia, Garland had been number one, and nearly everywhere she’d left all other rivals in the dust, including the crime drama
Arrest and Trial
on ABC. That wasn’t a bad start at all. The reviews, however, had been decidedly mixed. Most seemed to feel Garland herself was “in fine fettle,”
but no one seemed to like her comic foil, Jerry Van Dyke. The writing and pacing of the show came under fire.

Perhaps there were those at Television City who recalled the reviews for
The Keefe Brasselle Show
that had described Barbra as “a one-woman recovery operation.” Certainly Barbra had always been a standout guest on all her previous television spots. So it was with tremendous enthusiasm that Tormé and Norman Jewison, Garland’s producer, welcomed Barbra to the show. With the possible exception of Lena Horne, with whom they’d taped an episode in July, Barbra was the most exciting, most talked-about guest they’d had on their brand-new revolving stage since they’d started production. Everyone was hoping Barbra could bring a little of the razzle-dazzle she’d bestowed upon Brasselle and Garry Moore and Dinah Shore—and the ratings and the reviews as well.

In her trailer at the end of the mock Yellow Brick Road, Garland wasn’t unaware of the excitement being generated by the arrival of this Streisand kid. She was “nervous and anxious and jealous,” one friend, Tucker Fleming, observed. Looking at her face in the mirror, Garland ran her fingers down the wrinkles and creases she saw there, clearly aware of the youthful features of the singer she would soon be rehearsing with. It was one thing to perform alongside her own seventeen-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli, as Garland had done on a previous show, taped and waiting to be broadcast. But the only other female guests she’d had on the show so far had been Horne and June Allyson. Garland was “very aware of how she looked” as compared to the twenty-one-year-old Streisand, and “it made her very insecure and anxious,” Fleming said.

To Garland, Barbra wasn’t ugly or funny-looking. She was young, fresh-faced, her eyes undamaged by the battle between insomnia and sleeping pills. David Begelman had introduced his two
clients in Lake Tahoe, where he’d brought Garland to see Barbra perform at Harrah’s. So the old pro had witnessed firsthand the confident, youthful energy Barbra exuded onstage. No wonder she was insecure. While Garland still conjured an exquisite alchemy in front of an audience, youth and confidence were two attributes she definitely did not possess.

Barbra also had a voice that everyone was raving about, in ways Garland “could only remember people raving about her,” said Fleming. That was why she’d come up with the idea of singing in counterpoint. Her “competitive nature had been fired up,” Fleming observed; she wasn’t going to just passively hand the show over to this young whippersnapper. She’d arrived on the set sharp and sober and ready to roll, her makeup done perfectly, her hair coiffed expertly, even if her hands did tremble as she lifted Barbra’s album from the turntable, pleased that Tormé had taken her hint.

The truth was that the unanimous chorus of voices that were shouting
brava!
for the Streisand kid was “daunting” to Judy, as Fleming could plainly see. Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn, and Jule Styne adored Garland, but even in all her years of glory, never had such a group of heavyweights ever coalesced behind her to deliberately boost her career in the way they were doing now for Barbra. There were “plenty of times when Judy could have used” such support, observed Fleming, “but she didn’t always have the backing of the musical-theater ‘establishment,’ so to speak, the way Streisand did.” Garland held no personal animosity toward the youngster. She was just anxious to prove she could hold her own against her.