Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (8 page)

By this point, Mabel Mercer was an old crust
of a chanteuse, sitting like a dowager queen on a throne before her audience, her voice croaky and tattered from decades of singing in smoky rooms like this one. Barbara watched closely as Mercer came out onto the stage wearing a brocade gown. A soft pink light picked her out in the dark mahogany room. At sixty, she looked much older. Her cinnamon skin had turned to leather. With perfect posture Mercer sat down in her chair, barely moving at all as she started to sing. The most she did was occasionally lift a shaky hand toward the audience.

Mercer began her first song, and Barbara wasn’t impressed. “She can’t sing,” she whispered to Barré.

Barré understood that Mercer was “an acquired taste, like certain ripe cheeses.” So he tried explaining to Barbara that the old pro was a “song stylist” and that she should concentrate on her phrasing, not her voice.

Barbara complied. She listened to Mercer rasp her way through a couple of ballads, a storyteller as much as a singer. “I can do this,” she whispered to Barré at last. It was the same conviction that made her sure that she could play Liesl or Hamlet or Juliet—the belief that she could do anything if just given the chance.

Mercer ended with Bart Howard’s “Would You Believe It?” Looking out over the audience with half-lidded eyes, she suddenly snapped her fingers, just once, as she was finishing the song. Barré had never seen Mabel Mercer snap her fingers before, and he was overjoyed, leading the applause with enthusiasm.

Barbara was less enthusiastic. But Barré had seen how she’d observed the old pro, taking note of the way Mercer had turned her head, the way she’d sung her songs with beginnings, middles, and ends. It was exactly the way Barré had been coaching Barbara to do. He hoped she’d picked up enough bits and pieces to make into her own.

Barbara, however, when she was asked, insisted that watching other performers taught her absolutely nothing—except “what not to do.”

The first time they’d tried to make love Barré had stopped midway through because he didn’t have protection. He’d made that mistake before, and he told Barbara they should plan their first time carefully. They should pick a night, he said, and he’d buy some rubbers, and she’d bring some baby oil. Barbara complained that this didn’t feel very spontaneous, but she went out and bought the baby oil.

Now, watching Barré lather his face
in the bathroom mirror, wrapped only in a towel, she told him she’d never seen a man shave before. Sheldon had been out of the house by the time she was paying attention, and she’d certainly never looked at Lou Kind for any longer than she absolutely had to. That Barré’s beard was so heavy intrigued her. Barbara found it “very masculine,” she said, so much so that she couldn’t resist lifting a corner of Barré’s towel and purring like Mae West, “Whaddya got under there, big boy?”

Barré had told her that he was bisexual. While other girls might have been taken aback by such an admission from a boyfriend, Barbara had seemed to view it as a challenge. In the last few weeks she’d become increasingly sexually aggressive, quite a step for a girl whose mother had done her best to instill in her a fear of sex. “You don’t screw anybody
until you get married,” Barbara remembered her mother saying, or words to that effect. And Barbara was hearing such admonitions from her mother more frequently these days. Her lack of funds had forced her into the once-unimaginable scenario of retreating back to Brooklyn several nights a week.

Making love to Barré was the logical next step, and a little bisexuality shouldn’t prove to be an obstacle. They were always flirting, throwing around Mae West double entendres
that they had picked up from late-night movie viewings. And so Barbara kissed the back of Barré’s neck and played with the towel around his waist. “What’s the matter with your animal?”
she cooed, using their favorite West line. But Barré once again begged off, arguing he’d be late for rehearsals. Barbara wanted to know when they’d finally make love. He promised her soon.

He kept that promise. On a night after Barbara had wowed them yet again at the Lion and agreed to defend her title once more the following Tuesday, Barré took out a canister of marijuana, rolled a couple of joints, and taught Barbara how to smoke. Soon they were both high, and naked, and making love. Nothing the matter with the animal now.

Barré believed that he was Barbara’s first lover. She told him he was, and that she was giving herself to him. Holding her in his arms, he felt her tremulous vulnerability. During daylight hours she might believe fervently that she could do anything and be anyone. But at night—naked in Barré’s arms—the little voice that insisted she wasn’t good enough, or beautiful enough, was as real as anything else. In these more vulnerable moments, Barbara needed reassurance, and Barré did his best to give it to her. Lying there with Barbara in his arms, he felt the enormous weight of the trust she had placed in him, and he hoped he would never hurt her.

Of course, she wasn’t entirely vulnerable. With sensuous strokes of her long fingernails, Barbara caressed Barré’s back, a sensation both relaxing and arousing, but occasionally painful, too. Barré realized that Barbara’s nails—by now three inches long, forcing her to use a pencil eraser to dial a phone—would forever “prohibit a certain degree of intimacy” between them, or between Barbara and anyone else. Never could she fully touch another human being with her hands. And if her nails symbolized her own reluctance to get too familiar, they were also ever-present reminders that if anyone trespassed too closely, she could, and would, fight back.

Burke McHugh ran the Lion
like his own little Vegas showplace. It didn’t matter that the club was just a cubbyhole in a brownstone on West Ninth Street near Sixth Avenue, the kind of place that never saw its shows listed in the calendar section of the
Times.
McHugh still populated his stage with people he considered stars, such as Dawn Hampton, whose hot jazz regularly burned up the back room. The Streisand kid—the one who’d been winning his contests for the last few weeks—also had potential. She was back again tonight, handing her music to pianist Pat McElligott, telling him that she’d added a couple of new numbers. If she won again tonight, McHugh had decided, he’d have to retire her from the contest so somebody else could have a chance. He regretted having to put an end to Barbara’s run, however, since the little waif had been good for business. Word had gotten around that she was special. “Talented in a way
nobody else is,” patrons were saying. And what showman didn’t love discovering someone like that?

She was a sharp cookie, that Streisand. After winning her second contest, she’d told McHugh that she wanted three pictures of herself, not just one, on the sign promoting the Saturday night show. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had a look, McHugh thought. He would know. With his classic
all-American handsomeness, he’d been one of the nation’s top male models. For several years he’d been the man shaving his face in the Gillette razor television commercials. He’d also managed his own modeling agency, where he’d learned that beautiful people weren’t always the best salespeople. “Perfect” models didn’t have the same appeal, McHugh believed, as those who looked “real,” who were “believable,” and thus “saleable.”

Barbara was as real as they got, and the Lion’s regulars had taken to her. She’d been hired to work the coat-check room during the week. The offbeat characters who patronized the club all adored her. Barbara had quickly figured out that the clientele was largely gay, but had nonetheless been surprised to learn just
how
gay. That first Saturday she’d performed, Cis had come to cheer her on, and Barbara had pointed out that they were the only women in the house, as if Cis couldn’t have seen that herself.

For tonight’s competition, Barbara was adding “Why Try to Change Me Now?” and “Long Ago (and Far Away),” both Sinatra standards, to her set. She and Barré had been practicing them all week, giving the songs as many unusual touches as possible. It was Barbara’s offbeat personality as much as her gorgeous voice that drew other performers to the Lion
to check her out. Popular stage and television actor Orson Bean was brought by some friends one night, and he’d thought she was “simply fabulous.” Paul Dooley, who’d recently made a splash in
Fallout,
a revue at the Renata Theater on Bleecker Street, was another who’d heard about this “crazy girl with the beautiful voice” and came by the Lion to see for himself. Dooley was struck by the fact that Barbara “had the poise of a forty-year-old saloon singer” when she was only eighteen years old. Of her audience she seemed to demand, “Look at me!”—and, indeed, Dooley found that he couldn’t look away. “Young people don’t usually have that kind of confidence,” he said. “They don’t usually trust their talent.”

Yet Barbara was so unusual that not everyone responded to her in the same way. While Bean and Dooley saw her as fabulous and confident, Walter Clemons, who played piano for Mabel Mercer and, like the others, had slipped in to see what all the fuss was about, perceived her as “terribly nervous.”
In Clemons’s view, Barbara was “hostile” to her audience, with none of Mercer’s legendary generosity. Her eccentric syntax seemed to him “convoluted and interior,” leaving him confused as to what she was talking about. All he could feel coming from her was the “terrible resentment of an ugly girl.”

But Clemons was in the minority. That night Barbara won the contest once again, and Burke McHugh made much hoopla over the fact that he was retiring her as the Lion’s “undefeated champion,” which, of course, only prompted more hoots and hollers and whistles from the crowd. Barbara would perform one more week as the winner, then it had to be someone else’s turn.

Standing off to the side, Barré noticed the look in Barbara’s eyes. He’d seen it every time she’d been declared the winner, the champion, the best. Her face would come alive as if she’d been “plugged into the wall,” an “electric” look generated by the power of the applause. Barbara had been so hungry for attention, so desperate for praise and affirmation, Barré thought—and “now she was getting it.” And the look in her eyes told him that she believed “she could
go on
getting it for the rest of her life.”

In the cab on the way
over to one of her final performances at the Lion, Barbara told Terry Leong that she was changing her name. He was surprised. He didn’t think she’d ever do such a thing.

Not her last name, Barbara told him. Her first.

Terry had always known his friend wanted to be unique. But he also knew that she didn’t want some made-up stage name such as Joanie Sands, which some people had been suggesting, “because that was too false.”
The name Barbara had never thrilled her—in fact, she said that she “hated” it
—but ditching it entirely seemed too drastic, an indication that she was “losing touch with reality.”
So she told Terry that she had come up with a different idea.

When they got to the club, she strode over to Burke McHugh
and instructed him to change the spelling of her name on her posters. “I wanna take an ‘a’ out of Barbara,” she said. An “a,” he repeated, not understanding. “Yeah,” she said. “The second one.” From now on, she insisted, her name would be spelled
B-A-R-B-R-A
.

There were millions of Barbaras out there, she reasoned. But by dropping one little vowel, she would become “the only Barbra in the world.”

It was time to get serious again. That’s what Barbra was telling her new friend Bob Schulenberg as they strolled through Times Square. She was pointing up at the marquees—Anne Bancroft in
The Miracle Worker
at the Playhouse Theatre and Chita Rivera and Dick Van Dyke in
Bye Bye Birdie
at the Martin Beck—and wishing her name was up in those lights. This was where she wanted to be, not in some little club on the first floor of a brownstone in the Village.

Bob seemed to understand her like no one else did. He was so different from Barré, who in his push for Barbra to sing seemed to have forgotten that what she really wanted to do was act. In fact, Barré had seemed to forget her entirely of late. He’d been spending most of his time up in Central Park, where
Henry V
had opened on June 29. Barbra felt his absence keenly, especially since most nights she had to trek back to Brooklyn and stay with her mother if she wanted a roof over her head. She had never been very good at playing second fiddle, even to William Shakespeare.

That summer day, she was lonely and feeling not a little bit insecure, her friends believed. Here she had given herself to a man she thought truly loved her, and now suddenly he was gone for long stretches at a time. Her fears weren’t difficult to understand. The knowledge of Barré’s bisexuality “was always there in the back of her mind,” said one friend. When he wasn’t with her, Barbra wondered, where was he?

One friend also believed that a certain amount of professional jealousy had bubbled to the surface. When the
Times
review came out the day after
Henry V
opened, Barré had been ecstatic to see he’d gotten a mention. Critic Arthur Gelb had felt that Barré’s scene was “as funny as Shakespeare
intended.” Getting his name in the
New York Times
was thrilling—and even the omission of the
accent aigu
hadn’t dampened his excitement. Of course Barbra was happy for him. But it wasn’t long after this that she resolved “to once again get serious about her own acting career,” her friend observed.

And no one seemed to encourage her as much as Bob did. He was an old friend of Barré’s whom Barbra had met late one night just after he’d arrived in New York from Los Angeles. Bob was staying with Barré until he could find a place of his own. He was a good-looking young man who, when Barbra first met him, was wearing a conservative suit and glasses. But when he’d looked at Barbra’s outfit, he’d revealed a rather eclectic interest in fashion. “Are those authentic T-strap shoes?” he had asked with excitement.

Barbra had smiled and told him that they were indeed. Bob adored the shoes, as well as Barbra’s knee-length velvet skirt of mulberry violet and her pink nylons. “Who knew there were pink nylons!” Bob exclaimed. Heading over to the Pam Pam, an all-night diner on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, the three of them had talked until nearly dawn about clothes, theater, and ambition. Bob was an artist; his tattered sketchbook was rarely out of his hands. He’d come to New York to be an illustrator, though in the interim he was paying his bills by working for the advertising agency Ellington & Co. at their Fifth Avenue offices. Like Terry, Bob was an artist stuck, for the moment anyway, in a nine-to-five job.