Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (66 page)

That didn’t mean Barbra wasn’t making news on other fronts. Her weight gain hadn’t gone unnoticed, and that prompted rumors that she was pregnant. No surprise that Dorothy Kilgallen was the one to start the ball rolling. “
Funny Girl
must agree
with Barbra Streisand, despite all the strenuous out-of-town performances and rehearsals,” the columnist insinuated. “She’s actually put on weight and some of her costumes have had to be altered.” That was enough to set tongues wagging, as Kilgallen surely intended. It led to someone—Stark? Marty? Solters? Barbra herself?—calling the ever-reliable Earl Wilson to set the record straight. “Tisn’t so, comes the word,
loud and clear, from Philadelphia,” Wilson dutifully wrote.

What made the rumors especially awkward was the affair going on between Barbra and Sydney. For those in the company who suspected some hanky-panky between their leading man and lady, talk of pregnancy led to all sorts of questions. The same company member who had heard Barbra’s record playing also heard stories of her romance with Sydney. At one point, she worked up the nerve to ask Jule Styne if, therefore, the pregnancy stories might be true. He told her “never to utter anything that crazy ever again.” So she didn’t.

For his part, Sydney was hoping that Robbins could fix things for him along with the rest of the show. Indeed, there were indications that he might no longer be the albatross that the Boston reviews had made him out to be. Critics in the City of Brotherly Love had been much kinder to Sydney: Henry Murdock had found him “graceful, nimble, handsome,
and most vocally able.” No doubt this pleased Barbra and likely kept the relationship between the two of them humming along even as chaos reigned in rehearsals. Now that Carol Haney had departed, Barbra and Sydney were the only ones among the principals to be lodged at the Warwick. That gave them a certain amount of privacy, just in case they wanted to spend any time together late at night after the curtain had been rung down.

Jerry Robbins called them all together under the Erlanger Theatre’s glittery crystal chandelier and told them point-blank that they were running out of time.

Ray Stark had just pulled off the impossible and gotten them yet another reprieve. Their Broadway opening night had been moved from March 17 to March 24. That meant they had exactly twenty-five days to get this thing right.

First order of the day, Robbins announced, as the company scrambled up onto the stage, many of them in socks or ballet shoes, was to rehearse the new “Sadie, Sadie”
number. Originally part of an earlier script, the song was being brought back into the show to replace “Home” and “Who Are You Now?” at the top of the second act. “Home” would be scrapped; “Who Are You Now?” would be moved toward the end of the show. To kick off Act Two, they’d tried using the “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” number, the Ziegfeld Follies tribute to World War I doughboys that served no real plot purpose except to pep things up during the dreary second hour. But a transition was needed after the intermission to show that Fanny was now married, and Robbins didn’t want another duet with Sydney. So out came “Sadie.” He told the orchestra to hit it.

“I’m Sadie, Sadie, married lady,” Barbra sang, as the company followed her across the stage in steps originally worked out by Haney and now finessed by Robbins to contain the number to three minutes.

“She’s Sadie, Sadie, married lady,” the company echoed.

“To tell the truth,” trilled Barbra, “it hurt my pride, the groom was prettier than the bride!”

Yet another reference to her looks, but Barbra went along with it, no complaint, because Robbins liked the song. And at that point, she would have done almost anything Robbins suggested. Star and director were “getting along famously,” Lainie Kazan observed, even if the rest of the cast, used to the easygoing Kanin, wasn’t too happy about the “ferocious taskmaster” who’d showed up one day out of the blue and started making their lives more difficult.

Barbra, however, was having a ball. The more Robbins changed the scenes, the more she liked it. The more she had different songs to try out, the more she loved it. “Forty-one different last
scenes!” she exclaimed, indicating the various versions of the script they were working from. Her castmates wilted under the pressure to keep all the different versions distinct, but Barbra found it “exciting, stimulating.” Anything to keep away the boredom she’d known during
Wholesale
.

Working with Robbins was like putting a different show on every day—which, in a sense, they were. Theatergoers who saw the show on a Wednesday would see a slightly different—or possibly even a radically different—show if they came back on a Friday. Lines were changed, songs were moved around. Not only that, but the production had actually switched theaters, vacating the Forrest for the Erlanger, on the northwest corner of Market and Twenty-first streets. The change had been made necessary by their extended tryout:
Anyone Can Whistle
was scheduled to open at the Forrest, and even though Stark had offered producer Kermit Bloomgarden
ten thousand dollars to switch theaters, he couldn’t make a deal. So that meant packing everything up—props, costumes, equipment—and relearning the layout and sight lines of a brand-new venue. Barbra accepted it as one more adventure.

Settling into a seat in the empty auditorium to watch her cavort on the stage, Robbins marveled at this fascinating creature he’d inherited from Fosse and Kanin. Barbra hadn’t been his first choice for Fanny, of course. But now he couldn’t see anyone else in the part, not even his beloved Anne Bancroft. Barbra’s talent had impressed him, but it was her fierce dedication to the role that had finally won him over. Robbins found Barbra “jet-fueled with the robust,
all-daring energy” of a novice, but “tempered by the taste, instinct and delicacy” of a veteran. She often arrived late to rehearsals, “haphazardly dressed,” but accepted the “twelve pages of new material” Robbins handed her without protest, “schnorring” part of his sandwich and “someone else’s Coke” as she read them. During rehearsals, “in her untidy exploratory meteoric fashion,” Barbra was “never afraid . . . to try anything,” Robbins observed. And as soon as she had figured out how to play a scene, she seemed “a sorceress sailing through every change without hesitation, leaving wallowing fellow players in her wake.”

And she hadn’t even turned twenty-two.

That was what was so uncanny, because the work they had been doing over the last few weeks—and the work they needed to keep doing for the next twenty-five days—might have sapped the creativity of even the most experienced old theater pro. Barbra was like no performer Robbins had ever worked with before. No matter the line in “Sadie,” the director thought she was exquisite. Musing about his leading lady, Robbins wrote, “Her beauty astounds, composed of impossibly unconventional features.” Her movements were both “wildly bizarre and completely elegant,” and her “El Greco hands” seemed to have “studied Siamese dancing and observed the antennae of insects.” It was Barbra’s contradictions he admired most: “Her cool is as strong as her passion. The child is also the woman. The first you want to protect, the second keep. She comes on with defiant independence—yet communicates an urgent need for both admiration and approval. She laughs at sexiness. She is sexy. She tests you with childish stubbornness, impetuosity and conceit, concedes you are right without admission, and balances all with her generous artistry and grace.”

Yet for all his fascination with the show’s leading lady, Robbins never really considered
Funny Girl
his own after he came back. There was a certain detachment, members of the company felt. Too many people had been involved by now for Robbins to ever feel very proprietary about the product. Still, if the show was a hit, he stood to make out pretty well. He’d just signed his contract
with Stark, guaranteeing him five thousand dollars for his services plus two-and-a-half percent of the gross weekly box office, both during previews and after the Broadway opening, and including all performances of any subsequent road tour. He also was paid ten thousand dollars for the movie rights to his material; if the film was not made within seven years, Stark would need to come back to him for another agreement. The contract was a clear recognition of Robbins’s authorship, as well as the fact that previous directors’ imprints were minimal. Indeed, the show was now practically unrecognizable from the one that had premiered in Boston, and would be different still by the time they opened on Broadway.

No matter all the fixing going on, Robbins knew what he was doing was simply patching the holes in the book, not rebuilding a great play. Isobel Lennart admitted her work had fallen far short of the mark. “After twenty years of working
in a field [screenwriting] where I know what am I doing and can do my job very well,” she told a reporter, “I have had the humbling experience of trying to do something I quickly discovered I knew nothing about.” In the little time they had left, Robbins was trying to salvage what he could. One of the first things he’d jettisoned was “Something About Me,” Kanin’s disastrous babies-in-the-cribs number, despite the loss of some ten thousand dollars in discarded costumes and props. He also sliced out “I’d Be Good for Her” and “Eddie’s Fifth Encore,” completely eliminating Eddie Ryan’s subplot. Robbins and Stark might not have agreed on much, but both understood that for
Funny Girl
to have any shot at success, it had to be all about Barbra.

Other changes Robbins wrought were less dramatic, but just as significant. Sitting in the back of the theater every night, he scribbled notes on Barclay Hotel stationery
to present to the cast the next day. After the performance on the twenty-fourth, he’d thought Barbra was “working too hard” during “I’m the Greatest Star,” and she needed to be careful not to break up the lyrics so much during “Who Are You Now?” After the performance on the twenty-fifth, Robbins had switched “Cornet Man” and “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” and told Barbra not to show her face after she sat down in the “You Are Woman” number and for once let Nick take center stage.

He’d also declared, interestingly, that there was entirely “too much kissing” in the show, which, knowing what was going on after hours between Barbra and Sydney, might have had a little more resonance than Robbins indicated in his notes.

Every day, there was something else to be changed. On the twenty-sixth, Robbins had requested new watercolors be done for the sets and an entire redesign of the Henry Street bar where Fanny’s mother held court. On the twenty-seventh, he had submitted a list to Lennart of various cuts and changes. The speeches of Emma, Fanny’s maid, were too long, and Nick’s dialogue with Fanny had to emphasize his intention “to be head of the house.”

There was just so much, so very much, to do between now and opening night. Jule Styne was frequently sending over lists of changes he thought should be made, such as when inner curtains ought to be raised during songs and which lights should be used during different numbers. He’d also come up with an idea to close the show with a line from Fanny, “Hey, gorgeous, here we go
again.” But although Robbins penciled “ok” next to the suggestion, he never used it. Clearly the director thought ending on a reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” was the better way to close.

Not everything he tried worked. At one point, Robbins had brought in a pair of wolfhounds to lead Fanny out onto the stage when she made her first entrance. Nothing says “star” more than a couple of hounds on a diamond-studded leash. But the dogs wouldn’t stop center stage as they were supposed to, so they were sent back to their trainer. Robbins had canned the song “A Helluva Group,” sung by the Henry Street saloon regulars as a lead-in to “People,” and replaced it with “Block Party,” and then “Downtown Rag,” but he still wasn’t happy. He had Styne and Merrill working up something else.

He’d also tried firing Lainie Kazan. His reasons were unclear. Had she been too close to Kanin? Was it a request from Barbra? Did he disapprove of the deal with Stark? From the moment Robbins arrived, Kazan felt he had ignored her. Through the grapevine she heard he was saying she was “too attractive to understudy Fanny Brice.” But when she got her notice to vacate, Kazan decided she wouldn’t go easily. She called Robbins and asked for ten minutes. “I’m going to sing for you and do a scene for you, and if you really don’t like me, you can fire me,” she said. The director agreed, and Kazan sang “I’m the Greatest Star.” In response, Robbins said nothing, which left the anxious actress hanging. But the next day Kazan got a new script at her hotel room, which meant she could stay on. Probably Ray Stark, who had Kazan under contract, had had as much influence as her rendition of “I’m the Greatest Star.”

It was also true that Robbins had difficulty finding anyone else who could understudy Barbra. On the twenty-sixth, he had interviewed several potential understudies, including Louise Lasser, who had the experience, and Carol Arthur, who’d played with Elliott in
On the Town.
But none had seemed to catch fire with him. Robbins also had the idea of publicizing “standbys” for Barbra—celebrities who might step in and do the part when Barbra wanted a night off. He had in mind Eydie Gormé, Edie Adams, and Gisele MacKenzie, among others. But Gormé turned Robbins down quite publicly. Her manager issued a statement saying the job was “not in keeping with the image
of a star of Eydie’s stature.” Apparently, since she’d been up for the part, Gormé wanted to play Fanny Brice full time or not at all.

Of all the changes Robbins brought to the show, nothing was more crucial than the insights he gave to the actors about the characters they were playing, something Kanin, apparently, hadn’t done. This was what Barbra had been craving. “Everything we know of
[Fanny] must be shown,” Robbins told her, in words that could have come straight from her Theatre Studio classes, “not analyzed in talk and thus ‘forgiven’ or ‘understood.’” The trick wasn’t to find a plot device to explain Fanny’s foolishness in choosing (and staying with) Nick, but to make her real enough that the audience sympathized with her without needing any of that. “It must be put into action,” Robbins told Barbra. “Go, move, need, fight, want, fear, love, hate. We love [Fanny] not for her understanding, but from ours of her. Don’t beg off!”