Then and Now (15 page)

I was beginning to gain weight at this time, and I turned down a lot of the scripts that came to me. I did, however, appear in a 1967 production of
Funny Girl
, and one of the best things about doing
that show was having George Hamilton opposite me as Nicky Arnstein. He had recently received a lot of bad press when he was dating President Lyndon Johnson's daughter, Lynda Bird, and I didn't know what to expect when we started rehearsals.

Well, let me tell you—he is so bright, so funny, so generous, and one of the best raconteurs I've ever known.

He had a very healthy view of what he had to offer as an actor and was one of the hardest workers I've ever encountered. I admired him and loved working with him. He recently came to one of my performances and it was great to see him again. I made the mistake of admiring a bracelet he was wearing. “Oh,” he said, “I want you to have it,” and he put it on my arm. So generous.

Funny Girl
also brought me one of my favorite comments I ever received from a fan. Mark Rosen, who had entered my life during
She Loves Me
, was a very devoted fan, and would come see me in anything I did. We became friends and remain so to this day. Now, if there is any role for which I don't seem terribly well suited, it would have to be Fanny Brice in
Funny Girl
. Fanny was a fast-talking Jewish New Yorker from Brooklyn—I was a Protestant girl from Atlanta, Georgia, who loved Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Mark, of course, came to see me in the role, and when the film version came out in the fall of 1968 Mark rushed off to see it. He'd never seen Streisand onstage as Fanny. He called me after he saw the film. I was quite curious: “How was it?” I asked. “How was Streisand?” Mark didn't miss a beat: “Too thin, and too Jewish.”

I also appeared on Broadway in Jules Feiffer's play
Little Murders
in 1967, which I remember as my first experience with the newly emerging freedom regarding sex and language. I can still remember the first time I heard the word “shit” onstage. It was in
the play
J.B.
by Archibald MacLeish, and in 1959 it was shocking to hear that word uttered on the stage. Now, a mere eight years later, when I appeared in
Little Murders
, the “shits” were flying left and right. I felt very uncomfortable speaking that way onstage. My character, Patsy Newquist, was also a smoker, and I'd never smoked in my life, so I was very concerned about looking like a real smoker. I found that in order to be comfortable with a cigarette onstage, I had to learn how to handle a cigarette offstage, and also how to curse like a sailor. Hmmm . . . that may have been the beginning of what I have become: a dirty-mouthed old lady.

Unfortunately our production didn't work and we closed after seven performances, but Jules's play is a fascinating one and I'm so glad that a later production did very well.

By the late sixties and early seventies, rock and roll had permanently altered the musical landscape, dominating the music charts, taking over television, and even trickling down to Broadway, the last remaining stronghold of the Great American Songbook.
Hair
and
Jesus Christ Superstar
had opened on Broadway, and everyone talked about
Hair
as a game-changer in the Broadway musical-theater landscape. The truth is, at the time I was only vaguely aware of this talk because I did not see many of the shows—I had started to drink heavily and my interest in theater had waned, both as an actress and as an audience member.

After
Little Murders
I did appear in one more Broadway musical,
The Grass Harp
, but it ran for only four days in November of 1971. The show was based on Truman Capote's novel of the same name, and centered on an orphaned boy and two elderly ladies who observe life from a tree. Even though the show was a flop, I remain grateful that I had the chance to meet and work with Truman. He was very nice to me, very much the Southern gentleman: I met him
at his apartment and we talked about furniture and literature. On that same afternoon he even introduced me to the joys of Blackwing pencils, the soft lead pencils that Stephen Sondheim uses while composing. When our meeting was through, he insisted on walking me to the elevator.

While I know that Truman could be difficult with others, he was always very kind to me. I was happy that he liked my performance, short-lived though it was. I actually enjoyed performing in the show, a lot of which took place in the tree where the three leading characters took refuge. The truth is, I fell in love with that great tree. When we closed, as much as anything, I hated to lose that tree.

Our director was theater veteran Ellis Rabb, and it was Ellis's idea that none of us would be miked. Carol Brice, Karen Morrow, Rusty Thacker, and I all had big voices, and we filled the theater. It was fun for all of us, but the audiences did not respond. I think it was just too rarified, too precious for a general audience. Although I couldn't have foreseen it at the time, this show was to be my last appearance in a Broadway musical until
Sondheim on Sondheim
in 2010.

I did, however, appear onstage in one other drama, a 1972 production of Maxim Gorky's
Enemies
, at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater; it ran for its allotted time of two months, but there was never any talk of an extension. My reputation, of course, is based on my work in musicals, and I'm glad the cast recordings preserve my work not just in hit shows like
The Music Man
but also in studio versions of classic shows like
Show Boat, Carousel
, and
The King and I
. At the same time, however, I wanted to prove that I was an actress, and appearing in
Any Wednesday, Little Murders
, and
Enemies
not only challenged me as an artist but also reinforced my acting credentials.

The problem lay in the fact that during most of my time in those plays I was unhappy because of the turmoil in my personal life. In the beginning of this period, when my drinking problem wasn't quite as severe and work was still a possibility, I would find something wrong with every script I was sent. When I later saw the plays I had been offered, I realized that they were respectable and I could have made something of them, but at the time I was not thinking rationally. George Abbott—Mr. Broadway—the most important musical director of the time, had one particular show he was interested in me doing, but I put him off, over and over again. I wouldn't give an answer, so of course he eventually looked elsewhere. Compounding the problem was the fact that I was also now entering the time in an actress's career that I call “middle-lescence”—too old to play the ingénue, too young to play the wise, feisty older woman. I was nowhere.

I was no longer appearing in long-running musicals, and
Little Murders
and
Enemies
had closed quickly, a state of affairs that led to a financial crunch. With no money coming in I didn't say to myself, “I have to stop drinking or my career will vanish.” No—in my mind, less money simply meant that I should give up fancy liquor and begin drinking Gallo Mountain Chablis, by the half-gallon. I'd drink almost all of that big jug, pour out whatever was left, and vow I would not do that “tomorrow.” Come four or five in the afternoon, I would order another half gallon and off I'd go, day after day after day.

Adam and I were living in a beautiful three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a penthouse with a wrap-around terrace, working fireplace, major ceilings, large dining room, maid's room, and good-sized kitchen. It was fantastic. I was penniless when it went co-op, but a friend loaned me the money to
buy it; this was 1968, and the apartment cost $15,000. Fifteen thousand dollars wouldn't even buy a closet now. This apartment was in one of the first co-op buildings in Manhattan, and hard as it is to believe, you could not get a loan on a co-op because banks didn't give loans for co-ops in 1968. I also had no credit as Barbara Cook, only as Mrs. LeGrant. I couldn't get a credit card from Bloomingdale's because I was an unmarried woman.

I was also unemployed and a drunk—not a nice, ladylike drinker, but a drunk. I just stayed home and got drunk every night by myself. In the kitchen, dirty dishes were piled everywhere. There was a wastebasket underneath the basin in the bathroom that Adam and I shared, and at some point the wastebasket got filled and didn't get emptied. Next, the floor around the wastebasket got covered and didn't get cleaned up until the Kleenex was all the way up to the bottom of the basin—the whole corner of the room was filled with Kleenex. I would say to myself, “Why can't you clean this up?” And then I would think, “Why don't you just try to move three pieces? Just three.” I just couldn't do it. I was paralyzed, and that paralysis was both physically and emotionally painful.

Weekends were the worst because that's when Adam would stay with his father. The left side of my king-size bed would be piled with books and weeks-old newspapers. As soon as Adam left I would walk to the library to return the previous weekend's books, and take out as many new books as I could cradle in my arms. I was terrified of running out of reading material because if I could keep my attention focused on a written page—of almost anything—I figured I could get through another weekend.

My life was a complete mess. I didn't shower or brush my teeth for days at a time. I couldn't imagine cooking a meal, or writing
out checks, or going to sleep without liquor. It never occurred to me that alcohol was the problem. I thought if I could just work out some of my difficulties I wouldn't have to drink. I could not and would not accept the fact that I couldn't fix anything until I stopped drinking. In this regard I was no different from any other heavy drinker; there is a complete and total nonrecognition that alcohol is the problem.

Most of the people close to me drank. That's not surprising because I think when you have that problem you tend to surround yourself with people who drink. Alcoholism ran in my family—four of my mother's siblings were alcoholics—and when, in addition, you have an addictive personality, the desire to take a drink when you get in trouble is that much stronger. There is no one moment to which I can point and say, “Ah-ha—this is when I became an alcoholic.” It was a gradual process. I don't remember anybody around me, besides my mother, talking to me seriously and saying, “You really ought to see if you can cut this out.”

My mother was very upset about my drinking, but by this time she had zero credibility with me. Always trying to fix things and run my life, she even called a man I used to date in Atlanta and talked to him about my problem; I think he was the man my mother had always wanted me to marry, a fellow I liked as a person, but to whom I had no physical attraction. He was an acquaintance, nothing more. She called him up and said: “Barbara is in terrible trouble, she's an alcoholic. Can you help her do something about it?” He called me, and of course I replied, “Don't be silly. Sure, I drink, but I'm not an alcoholic.” What I didn't know at the time was that although he was a successful attorney, he was a major alcoholic himself and subsequently died from the disease.

I was very angry with my mother at what I considered a terrible
invasion of my privacy. I didn't even think I was in deep trouble, but of course I was. In hindsight I realize that, clumsy as my mother's attempt at help was, she was acting out of genuine concern. The problem was that I wasn't listening—she could have told me anything and I simply wouldn't have heard it.

This brings up the question of therapists and why they didn't help me with my drinking. I saw my first therapist when my marriage began disintegrating, before I became an alcoholic, but he soon moved his practice to North Carolina. My next therapist was concerned about my drinking, but he gave me Stelazine, a very potent antianxiety drug that they give to people who are institutionalized. I was now on a major tranquilizer but still drinking, a combination that could have led to disaster. I was supposed to take Stelazine twice a day, but I reasoned that if I took half of the first dose and skipped the second, I could still drink. I was really playing with fire. Compounding the problem was the fact that although I was depressed, I didn't necessarily see it as depression; I thought I was just neurotic. In reality, I was deeply depressed, and of course alcohol just depresses you further.

Deep depression became the norm of my daily existence. I wasn't working, and I slept a lot. I would get up and get Adam off to school and then go back to bed and sleep the day away. I would set the alarm so that I'd be sure to be awake when Adam came home from school. I didn't want him to think I'd been in bed all day, but I wasn't capable of doing much of anything. I was running out of money, but I also could not push myself or muster the energy necessary to obtain work, let alone deliver the goods onstage. This state of affairs is hard for people to understand and now when I talk about it it's even hard for
me
to absorb, but that's who I was in the early 1970s.

I sold the co-op apartment fairly quickly for $45,000. After the lawyer obtained his percentage, and by the time I had paid all of the closing costs as well as my very large stack of bills, I ended up with about $15,000 to my name. I can still remember the awful sinking feeling of not bringing in any money and watching that $15,000 dribble away, week by week, month after month. Terrifying.

I moved to a rental apartment, and, with no work, I borrowed whatever I could from friends. One awful afternoon there was a strong, repeated knocking at the door. I knew what the knocking signaled: I was months behind on my rent, and the super and the owner were at my door. I asked Adam to be very quiet. I told myself that if they thought I wasn't in they would go away. There was a moment's silence and then I heard their key in the lock. The door opened and there I stood. It was horrible and humiliating.

Adam, age thirteen, decided he had had enough of me and wanted to live full-time with his father. I was devastated. It was absolutely the right thing for Adam to do, but of course I didn't see it that way at the time. On one level it was obvious even to me that my life was a complete mess, but Adam was the only steady thing in my life, and I couldn't bear the thought of losing him. I was horrible to him: “How can you? How can you desert me? Did you know I have something in my mouth and it could be cancer?” This was terrible of me—there is no other word for it—but I couldn't stop. I was desperate. When he left I remember sitting on the edge of my bed, holding myself and rocking. Crying endlessly. The tears just wouldn't stop. I was utterly adrift and drowning in an alcoholic depression.