CHAPTER SIXTEEN
All over the city of Boston on the night of January 8, residents double locked their doors, still on edge. The latest victim of the infamous Strangler had been found in an apartment on Charles Street. There was no moon this night, and temperatures hovered just above freezing. And in the quiet, carpeted corridors of a luxurious Back Bay hotel, Sydney Chaplin, convinced that most everyone was sound asleep, decided it was time to make his move.
They’d all arrived that afternoon for two days of rehearsals at the Shubert Theatre on Tremont Street. Ray Stark, still on crutches, conducted a series of meet and greets with the local press, sharing his optimism about the show, especially the music. Despite his earlier arguments to the contrary, Stark now insisted he was glad that none of “the old things” that Fanny Brice used to sing, such as “My Man,” were in the show because they “wouldn’t stand up to the Styne-Merrill score.” Stark seemed to truly believe that all the show’s problems had been solved, or maybe he’d simply instructed everyone to give that impression ahead of Funny Girl’s first preview, a benefit for the Boston Lying-in Hospital on January 11. Indeed, when columnist Marjorie Mills spotted Garson Kanin, he was “trying his best not to look jubilant.”
In the still of the night, Sydney rapped lightly on Barbra’s door.
She was twenty-one years old. He was thirty-seven. She was a kid from Brooklyn; he was Hollywood royalty. She was always being reminded of her unconventional looks; he was equally celebrated for being matinee-idol handsome. She was the leading lady; he was her leading man. Barbra would have needed to be made of stone not to let him in.
Whether their affair began that night, as Sydney’s friends believed, or on a night not long before or after, it began nonetheless. Back in New York, Elliott was helping the vivacious Italian actress Anna Maria Alberghetti stage a new nightclub act with song-and-dance man John W. Bubbles. Alberghetti was beautiful and single, and Elliott worked with her late into the night. There was talk, as of course there would be. Barbra may have heard the talk, which may have been one more reason why she opened the door when Sydney knocked.
Barbra’s trysts with Sydney were conducted in the privacy of hotel rooms, always in secret. The company couldn’t know; the press certainly couldn’t know. Unlike the exuberant couple of Wholesale, whose affair had started the same way and who hadn’t minded if the occupants of adjoining rooms could hear them, Barbra and Sydney were both married to other people. So this had to be discreet. But there was no question that it also had to be.
The attraction had been impossible to resist. Barbra had become a young woman who unapologetically liked sex, even if the sex was often about “playing games with men—that image game,” as she explained in her own words. Here she and Sydney were, astride their world, the queen and her king. In theatrical companies, said Sydney’s friend Orson Bean, “the leading man and the leading lady often fell in love,” finding only in each other a worthy companion.
It was true, too, that Sydney filled a need that Elliott hadn’t satisfied in some time. Barbra was attracted to confident, successful men. Sydney was a Tony winner; Elliott was still unemployed. Sydney seemed to know exactly who he was; Elliott, Barbra believed, “really didn’t have a sense of himself.” Barbra had tried telling him he was a brilliant comedian, a fine actor, and a smart businessman. But Elliott never seemed to listen.
He was also gambling again. Elliott admitted there was something within himself that was “very self-destructive.” He gambled in large part because “winning or losing a bet seemed to represent a hard-edged reality” that offset the artificiality of show business. He really was not so different from the Nick Arnstein of the play, whose gambling destroys his marriage to Fanny. And like Arnstein, Elliott gambled out of a deep lack of self-worth. He’d had more respect for himself, Elliott said, when he was a teenager “operating the night elevator in the Park Royal Hotel.” Certainly it had offered steadier work; certainly he’d felt more needed. By now, Elliott was deeper than ever into analysis. “I’m just finding myself,” he explained—a laudable goal, but to Barbra, he might have been speaking a foreign language.
In his quest for greater self-awareness, Elliott was also still smoking a lot of grass and experimenting with other drugs. Some of the “trips” he’d been on had given him an “inner understanding” of himself that he might not have achieved otherwise. Barbra, of course, was far too single-minded, far too self-controlled to participate in such trips. And so the experiences of husband and wife grew even more separate.
Meanwhile, there was Sydney, waiting for her every day at rehearsals. He had begun whispering in her ear, “Kid, you’re gorgeous” or “Baby, you’re brilliant.” Sydney couldn’t flatter her enough. Bean thought that such flattery, at least in part, stemmed from Sydney’s worries that Barbra’s self-confidence might flag as they approached the opening, and he knew that without the force of her strong personality, the show would sink. But he was also, his friend said, as dazzled with her as she was with him.
Alone in their Boston hotel room, their spouses far away, a debonair Sydney was winning over a tough, driven Barbra in much the same way their characters were doing on the stage. Elliott wasn’t the only one who resembled Nick Arnstein; Sydney was as much the smooth operator as the man he played on stage. If she felt any guilt, Barbra kept it as private as she kept the affair. “Sydney was giving Barbra the confidence to be great,” Bean said. Such encouragement, so necessary at that point, could never have come from her depressed husband. It could only come from Barbra’s very own real-life Nicky Arnstein.
The snow started falling early on the morning of January 13. By noon, there were already several inches on the ground, and weather forecasters were telling the city to batten down the hatches for an “old fashioned nor’easter.” By late in the afternoon, the winds were hitting sixty miles per hour, the temperature had dropped to zero, and the beaches were flooded. Trains and buses were thrown off schedule. Logan Airport was closed. A citywide parking ban was instituted. By the time it was all over, forecasters warned, Beantown would be covered in a foot of snow.
Inside the Shubert Theatre, the decision was made that the show would go on.
They couldn’t cancel their first official preview. The house was sold out. To try to refund and reschedule now would produce a disaster worse than the blizzard. And so the company proceeded to makeup and then to wardrobe. The lighting men and engineers climbed into the booth. Everyone hoped for the best.
Their unofficial preview, two nights earlier, had gone well. The Shubert had been packed with a fashionable audience dressed in glittering gowns and tuxedos. To support the Lying-in Hospital, the crème of Boston society had turned out: the Harborne Stuarts, the John Marshalls, the Bayard Henrys, and so many others, weighted down with jewelry and social connections. They were all there to see Barbra Streisand, a young woman who’d grown up rather far away from Beacon Hill and Harvard Square. And even though the show had run until after midnight, all the socialites were still in their seats cheering when the curtain finally came down. As agreed, none of the press in attendance published a word about the show itself, leaving that for the official preview, though one writer from the Globe couldn’t resist commenting on “the handsome Irene Sharaff costumes” and how the legendary designer herself watched the show from a box.
Now, as the snow piled up outside and the wind whistled through the eaves of the fifty-year-old theater, Sharaff made last-minute inspections of the show’s seven glamorous showgirls as they stepped into and zipped up their extraordinary Ziegfeldian costumes. Lainie Kazan’s hat needed to come down a little more over her eyes. Boas were fluffed, hems were straightened, and bustiers tightened to push up more cleavage. Sharaff had won a Tony for The King and I, Oscars for West Side Story and Cleopatra. She had dressed Gertrude Lawrence, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ingrid Bergman. Now she added Barbra Streisand to that list.
From outside, they could probably hear the plows, busy removing snow from the streets, a thankless job since half an hour later they had to do it again. The heavy winds created drifts that were higher than a man’s head. The storm was forecast to continue straight through to morning without letting up. All Boston-area schools were closed until further notice. Shubert house manager M. D. “Doc” Howe told Ray Stark to expect quite a few unfilled seats at tonight’s performance.
What was it about this show that brought a new crisis every few months? Now, at the moment when it was finally ready to present to the world, when they could finally brace themselves for critical reaction, they were being stalled yet again. And right at the point where everything finally seemed set. Kanin had acquiesced to many of the changes Barbra had insisted on, and Lennart had dashed out yet another script in time for the Boston premiere. With the part of Nora eliminated, the plot seemed to flow more seamlessly. What was left of Nora’s dialogue was given to the character of Mimsey, played by Sharon Vaughn, a recent addition to the cast. A number of songs were also sliced out, disappointing chorus girls like Diana Lee Nielsen, who now had no songs of their own. Nielsen was told “The songs were unimportant to the story”—Fanny’s story.
Now it was the critics’ turn to tell them what else, if anything, needed to be changed. This was the cast’s chance to get much-needed outside feedback before they froze the show for Broadway. It was a vital part of the process. Richard Rodgers said he “wouldn’t open a can of sardines without taking it first to Boston.”
Stark kept an eye out front. A few hardy souls, shaking the snow from their boots in the lobby, had arrived. Stark was a wreck. The show needed a good response in Boston if they were going to roll into New York with the kind of word of mouth that would win over Broadway. Of course, if the critics hated the show, maybe it would be better if there wasn’t much of an audience to confirm their opinions. But a good house could also fire up the actors; empty houses were dispiriting.
Then, from backstage, came word that one of the dancers had just broken her foot. Would the curse never end?
But in the end, their worries were for naught. As the eight o’clock showtime neared, all but two of the auditorium’s 1,600 seats were filled. William Sarmento, reviewer for the nearby Lowell Sun, quipped that “every Barbra Streisand fan in existence showed up via dogsled, skis and snowshoes.” Indeed, as columnist Herb Michelson, not always such a fan himself, pointed out, Barbra was “pre-sold” to the audience, “a personality the crowds love before even seeing her.”
Whether Barbra felt that love backstage is unknown. She was, however, getting some from Sydney, who whispered in her ear that she was wonderful. The overture was playing. Barbra waited for her cue, and when it came, she walked out onto the stage to generous applause.
“Hello, gorgeous,” she said into the onstage mirror, her Brooklyn twang echoing through the old Boston theater. The line received the titter of laughter it was supposed to generate. Maybe, despite all the worry, things would go okay after all.
They didn’t.
Nearly three weeks after the premiere, Garson Kanin was still trying to fix all the things the critics had said were wrong. With much of the cast assembled on the Shubert stage, the director was running them through scene after scene, while his wife sat fifth row center, flipping through the script. Whenever she’d call, “Oh, Gar . . . ,” Kanin would stop whatever he was doing and hurry over to hear her thoughts.
Those first-night reviews still hung heavy over all of them. “What begins with bright, cheeky promise ends, I’m afraid, close to the edge of disaster,” Kevin Kelly had written in the Boston Globe. During the first act, the show had seemed “like a winner,” Kelly wrote, but then “a downpour of dullness”—a pun on the “Don’t Rain on My Parade” number—had overcome the second act. It was a common refrain, and none of the criticism could have come as much of a surprise: the problem, as always, boiled down to the script. “The music almost has enough force to make the book unimportant,” Kelly wrote, “but not quite.” Cameron DeWar in Billboard thought Lennart had written “more of a movie scenario than a stage piece,” and that the second act was “tedious and inept.” All the reviews said a variant of the same thing.
They had something else in common as well: They all thought Barbra was fantastic. As with Wholesale, the critics were largely sour on the show but sweet on her: Was it even possible for Barbra to get a bad review? Kelly thought she was “very nearly perfect.” DeWar said she “scored a bull’s eye.” William Sarmento in the Lowell Sun suggested the producers of Funny Girl might have been better off “to sell the costumes and scenery, disband the supporting players, and give the audience a three-hour concert of Miss Streisand.” Elinor Hughes in the Boston Herald thought Barbra had “a quality that makes you want her on the stage every minute and leaves you thinking about her when she is in the wings.”
That was the problem with the second act: Barbra wasn’t front and center enough. “The second act becomes Nick’s act more than it becomes Fanny’s,” Hughes wrote in a second review of the show a few nights later, “and though Sydney Chaplin is personable and charming, the figure that he creates isn’t really alive and interesting, and what happens to him doesn’t matter, except that we see less of Barbra-Fanny.” Hughes was actually kind in her assessment of Sydney. Elliot Norton, in the Boston Evening American, declared Sydney made “the weakness of the libretto glaringly apparent.” Kelly, in the Globe, thought Sydney played Nick Arnstein in “a heavy, oracular style” and “sung in a voice resonant with nothing whatever musical.” He placed the blame clearly: “Arnstein botches the show.”
For Sydney, it was a tremendous blow to his ego, especially as his ladylove was being lauded to the skies. He wasn’t just embarrassed; he was angry. When Dorothy Kilgallen read the Evening American review, she thought Norton was “auditioning for a punch in the nose from the terrible-tempered Sydney.” Chaplin didn’t think his performance was the problem; the problem was Lennart’s book, he believed, which gave him so little to work with. Barbra was sympathetic. But she also started giving Sydney tips about how he might improve his performance, much to his chagrin. It was all terribly similar to what had happened during Wholesale.
Loud, boisterous, often chaotic rehearsals followed, with everyone—Stark, Styne, Merrill, Lennart, and certainly Barbra—offering their ideas to Kanin about how the show could be fixed. Much of the revisions did, indeed, center around Sydney. Tireless choreographer Carol Haney had despaired of ever teaching him to dance. With her pixie face, shaggy hair, and throaty voice, Haney had proven to be a regular dynamo during rehearsals. Every other day, it seemed, she’d had to conceive and orchestrate a new dance number to go along with the new songs being added, which were just as frequently taken out. Buzz Miller, like many of the dancers in the show, had a long history with Haney; they’d danced together in the famous “Steam Heat” number in Pajama Game, the role that had made Haney an overnight sensation. In the last few weeks, as he’d watched Haney work, Miller had worried that “she was driving herself to death.” But nothing seemed to slow her down—until Sydney Chaplin. Haney, who struggled to keep a drinking problem under control, was sorely tested in working with Sydney. His soft-shoe number, “Temporary Arrangement,” was switched with another, “Come Along with Me,” in which he didn’t have to move, just sing.
As changes such as these were made, new scripts were prepared and handed out to the cast, who sometimes had less than a day to learn new lines, new steps, and new entrances. The critics, of course, came back to see how they were doing, and the prognosis was not good. “I regret to report Funny Girl is little better than it was the first time,” Sarmento reported, questioning the wisdom of giving another number to Sydney, “who makes every note sound like he needed to gargle.” Elinor Hughes still wasn’t happy with the second act; she still found it too depressing. She thought Fanny Brice would be advising them: “Leave ’em laughing!” The Globe’s “Stage Today” column ran a daily capsule review of the show that pretty much said it all—and no doubt left Sydney steaming: “The first half is a delight, the second is a drag, but Barbra Streisand is magnetic. The cast also includes Sydney Chaplin, who’s not very good.”
What made it worse were the national columnists, who were getting wind of the situation. Kilgallen told her readers that “they still haven’t decided whether it’s supposed to be a funny musical or a dramatic ‘plot’ musical.” Walter Winchell gushed about Barbra: “She excels . . . in every dept. . . . her second year in showbiz!” He added, “Three years ago she lived in a Brooklyn cold-water flat” (not so, it was in Manhattan and she had hot water) and “her entire wardrobe was draped over a chair” (it was more like crammed into a shopping bag). Hedda Hopper reported that Barbra was “a sensation . . . but the book will be overhauled before the New York opening” because “the writers devoted too much attention to Fanny’s husband.”
Of course, at the same time, they were still selling out nearly every night in Boston, so the reviews hadn’t hurt them very much. Barbra was a powerful drawing card. As William Sarmento had pointed out in the Lowell Sun, Barbra, like Judy Garland, brought in “a cult of worshippers” to everything she did, who cheered and whistled at her every move.” Because of Barbra, Funny Girl was still the show to be seen and to be seen at. Promoting her film Strait-Jacket at local theaters, Joan Crawford made sure to attend a performance, being welcomed with a standing ovation from the audience when she was spotted and recognized. So there was no danger of them going under. As Elinor Hughes had pointed out, “If a musical comedy with only the public’s advance confidence can open to a sold-out and enthusiastic house on the night of Boston’s worst snow storm in some time, then its future should be a prosperous one.”
But they couldn’t roll into New York with good notices for only their leading lady. “The hard fact,” Kevin Kelly had written in the Globe, “is that Funny Girl is meant to be more than the exploitation of a single talent.”
Barbra could have coasted; the reviews hadn’t blamed her. She could have sat around pointing fingers. But she didn’t. She was at every rehearsal, every meeting, wolfing down greasy take-out Chinese food with everyone else—eating so much, in fact, that her costumes were getting tight. Barbra was there to try out new numbers and observe the ones (very few) that she was not in. She worked just as hard as everyone else in trying to make the show better.
And maybe even a little harder. Few knew that the “cousin” who’d dropped by to watch Barbra during rehearsals was actually Allan Miller. Barbra had come a long way since her days at the Theatre Studio, much further than Miller had ever expected, even if Fanny Brice was hardly the Medea he’d guided her through in acting class. As a starry-eyed teenager, Barbra had thought no one was smarter or understood theater better than Miller, who was now teaching at the Circle in the Square Theatre School. It was natural that she would turn to him now, absent a director she trusted. Miller had first come around while they’d been rehearsing in New York, watching Barbra and giving her pointers at night. Barbra had insisted to Stark that she needed Miller’s continued assistance, so Stark had hired him as her coach, provided that Kanin never find out. Now, with the show in trouble, Barbra had summoned Miller to Boston, where she hoped he might offer some advice on what they could do to save it.
But Kanin grew suspicious of the eagle-eyed “cousin” watching them rehearse. When he ascertained Miller’s true identity, he threw a fit and, uncharacteristically aggressive, ordered him out of the theater. “Biggest screaming scene of the season,” Walter Winchell reported. “When director Garson Kanin discovered star Barbra Streisand’s drama coach in the balcony during a run-through, everything stopt [sic] until he was escorted out by the elbows with both feet four inches off terra firma.” Whether it was really that dramatic or not, Miller was no longer permitted to come around, though Barbra still sought his advice on her own.
Kanin had his own ideas about how to fix the show. With his cast assembled on stage, his wife finally silent behind him, he was running through a new comedy number for Act Two. If the critics had thought the second act was too depressing, then he’d give them something to laugh at. It was February 1, the last night of their Boston run. From here it was on to Philadelphia. Kanin hoped that this new number, written by Styne and Merrill, would allow them to go out with a bang.
The song was called “Something About Me.” Lainie Kazan and half a dozen others were dressed as babies, wearing swaddling clothes and seated in cribs. Barbra came on stage, singing about the ways to tell little boy babies from little girl babies. It was a strange number, and they might have all been more inclined to laugh about it had there not been so much backstage drama of late.
Kazan was at the center of the conflict. She had started dating Peter Daniels, who was working, thanks to Barbra, as an assistant conductor in the orchestra. When Garson Kanin suggested Kazan practice her numbers with Daniels, the spark between the two had been lit. Peter had insisted they keep their romance secret from Barbra, though Kazan couldn’t understand why. But such secrets, as Barbra and Sydney were also discovering, were very hard to keep in such close proximity. When word of the Daniels-Kazan affair leaked, Barbra was furious. Peter, in response, got angry right back, allowing some long-simmering tensions to finally boil over. It had been Peter’s arrangements that had made Barbra famous, after all, dating all the way back to the Bon Soir, and he felt that she had given him very little recognition. A wound was opened between the two old friends that never healed. Kazan came to realize that Barbra “didn’t like to share,” whether it be a role or a longtime arranger. Probably the fact that it was Kazan—Ray Stark’s protégée and fellow Erasmus Hall alumna—made her anger even worse.
Yet everyone was professional enough not to crack the eggshells on which they walked, and so they got through rehearsals. On that last night in Boston, they headed out onto the stage to give the show one more try. All of them remained committed to making this show a hit.
So was their producer, sitting out in the audience. While Barbra had gone around the director and placed a call for help to Allan Miller, Ray Stark had made his own surreptitious appeal, and to a very unlikely person. He sat with this potential savior now, watching the “Something About Me” number, with the cast all dressed as babies. Even as she performed it, Lainie Kazan knew the number was terrible, and if they weren’t literally “booed off the stage,” that would be how she’d remember the audience’s unenthusiastic reaction to the number.
No doubt, watching his cast make fools of themselves on the stage, Ray Stark was very glad to be sitting next to Jerome Robbins. The show’s original director had come up to Boston, and he was going on with them to Philadelphia. He was the only man on earth, Stark had come to realize, who could save Funny Girl.
What made it particularly awkward for Jerry Robbins was that he and Garson Kanin were staying at the same hotel in Philadelphia. Barbra and Sydney were over at the Warwick, while Robbins, Kanin, Ray Stark, Isobel Lennart, and Jule Styne were all at the Barclay, running into one another on the elevators, in the cozy Chinese Chippendale corner bar, or at the ornate Victorian filigreed front desk. Except not for much longer. After the little meeting Ray Stark had just called between the principals, no one expected Kanin to still be around in the morning.
That was why Robbins was writing to him tonight. “Dear Gar,” he penned. “I want you to know that I consider Funny Girl your show. I was hoping to work on it with you but Ray, in deciding to take advantage of the little time left out of town, felt it could only proceed this way. I am very sorry indeed, believe me. I just hope I fulfill the very wonderful job you’ve already left here.”
He called a bellhop to deliver the note to Kanin’s room. Then he began planning how to undo much of Kanin’s “wonderful job.”
Robbins and Stark had indeed hoped to work with Kanin, and with Carol Haney. Robbins had tentatively agreed not to take a credit. He’d come, he told everyone, only to advise. And they had plenty of time to rehearse now; Stark had managed to get the New York premiere pushed back from February 27 to March 17, which gave them almost seven weeks to work. But then the show had opened at the Forrest Theatre on Walnut Street, and the first reviews had come in, and they weren’t that much different from those in Boston. “The first triumph belongs to Barbra Streisand,” wrote Henry T. Murdock in the Philadelphia Inquirer. That much was no doubt expected. But Murdock also saw scenes that went on past their logical conclusions, and songs whose potential would only be realized “as the run progresses.” In his second review of the show, Murdock concluded succinctly: “The funny girl should be funnier.”
Robbins’s attempts to make that happen had been thwarted at every turn by objections from a deeply affronted Kanin, or from his equally aggrieved wife. It became clear that Robbins needed a free hand to whip the show into shape. Their seven weeks were now down to four. That meant Kanin had to go. Haney, too, as Robbins needed complete control over the choreography as well.
Clearly Barbra was pushing for Robbins to take over; the director was exchanging notes with her about her performance almost daily, and it was common knowledge that she had lost faith in Kanin. But some wondered why Robbins had come back to a project that had given him so much aggravation in the past—and to a producer he frankly couldn’t stand and didn’t respect. No doubt Stark had concluded that if he was going to be paying Robbins royalties anyway for the use of his material, he might as well have him back on the job. Asking Robbins to return, however, must have been very difficult for the proud Stark. Humbling himself before a man he’d tried to outmaneuver legally less than a year before showed the desperation the producer was feeling—as well as his determination not to give up. For Robbins, it may have been the satisfaction of being told that he had been right all along that brought him back—that and a hefty financial agreement, the details of which were still being worked out. There may also have been a personal consideration: Buzz Miller, one of the lead dancers, was Robbins’s former lover and someone who still held a piece of his heart.
And so, the next day, Kanin and his wife were gone. There were no good-byes made to the company. “He just kind of disappeared,” Sharon Vaughn said of their director. Kanin would keep his credit on the show, but soon everyone in Broadway circles knew he had been fired. As consolation, Stark sent him a set of antique china.
Lainie Kazan felt sorry about Kanin’s departure, but she felt far worse for Carol Haney, who many in the company believed had been treated cavalierly. She had worked so hard and was willing to keep working hard, but Robbins wanted complete control. Haney, too, would keep her credit, even if the new director-choreographer was already reworking her steps and routines as he saw fit. Soon the company was hearing reports that Haney, stunned and depressed by her dismissal, was drinking again.
Had Barbra switched on the television set in her room at the Warwick on the night of February 9, she would have seen that group of four Liverpool lads she’d heard while in London perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show. Almost from out of nowhere, the Beatles had exploded onto the American scene that winter, enjoying a meteoric ride to the top that made even Barbra’s ascent seem like a long time coming. They sang four songs on the Sullivan show, all of which were nearly drowned out by screaming teenaged fans in the audience, especially the last, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Sullivan declared, “This city has never witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters.”
As they headed out on their first stateside tour, the Beatles were suddenly everywhere. “The British group, something like Presley quadruplets, have taken over the American record market,” one columnist observed. Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press complained it was “impossible to get a radio weather bulletin or time signal without running into ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’” Meanwhile, the Beatles’ first album had skyrocketed up the charts and managed to accomplish what Barbra hadn’t: knock the Singing Nun from the top spot. Along the way, the quartet had also passed Barbra’s second and first albums, now at numbers 9 and 14 respectively.
The change at the top couldn’t have been more dramatic. Sister Smile’s simple, soothing sounds had been replaced by the Beatles’ vivacious, rule-breaking rock and roll—a sign that Americans, at least young Americans, were ready to start living again after the horrors of the fall. If Barbra, cloistered at the Forrest Theatre, hadn’t been paying much attention to what was happening in the music world, she would soon have to, for she had a new album on the way—and a new single as well.
Arriving backstage a few hours before curtain time, one member of the company was still singing along to the Beatles tune she’d been playing in her hotel room. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” she warbled as she headed up the stairs to the dressing rooms. That was when she heard Barbra singing, too—only she quickly realized it wasn’t Barbra singing live, but on a record, and she was singing a song from the show, “You Are Woman,” the humorous love song she shared with Nick. But it sounded different somehow. Listening closely, the company member realized that Barbra was singing it solo, and the words had been changed to “I Am Woman.” When she got into the dressing room she shared with the other girls, she saw Marty Erlichman. He had just brought the single over and was playing it for them. The record had just been released to radio stations all across the country. The company member looked down at the disk spinning on the turntable and thought, “This sure ain’t the Beatles.”
Indeed, it was suddenly a very different market. Although “I Am Woman”—with its flipside, “People”—earned some positive reviews and inclusion in Dick Kleiner’s top picks in his syndicated record column, it didn’t really stand a chance on a Top Ten list now dominated by Beatles hits (that week it was “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”) and other rock-pop singers such as Lesley Gore and the Four Seasons. Probably no one expected “I Am Woman” to chart very high. Recorded before Barbra left New York, the single was intended mostly as radio promotion for the show. But getting airplay was going to be very tough in this new market.
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!”
These sessions with Barbra showed just how completely the two personas, Barbra’s and Fanny’s, had merged. Robbins explained to her that Nick needed Fanny so he could “feel needed and strong,” while Fanny needed Nick “to feel worthy and feminine.” One couldn’t get much closer to a description of Barbra and Elliott, but there was still more to come. Robbins put together a list of Fanny’s beliefs about herself: “I’m a dog. I get reaction through making people react to me. I can make them laugh or cry. I get even this way [Robbins’s emphasis]. I win their love. I must feel wanted. There is a large sensitive hole that needs filling up.” That last one, in particular, must have resonated with Barbra, echoing the line from Medea that she’d carried around with her for so long.
Whether Robbins knew how closely he was delineating Barbra’s own life isn’t clear. But the best directors, and that would certainly describe Robbins, always knew their actors inside and out. With so much focus over the last six months on conflating star and subject, Robbins must have been aware that he was asking Barbra not so much to create a character but to play herself—or at least to play the self that had seeped into the public consciousness by now. Yet Robbins’s descriptions went to the core of who Barbra was, to parts of herself that she kept hidden from her public and even from her friends. “Fanny has made out well with all the boys,” Robbins told Barbra, after believing for so long that she could never accomplish such a feat. She has even won “the best-looking” of them. But “then, having had them, finding she could get them, she threw them over with contempt because she thought them fools for wanting her.”
Was that what Barbra was doing with Elliott? Was it what Robbins thought she was doing with him? Certainly the dynamic was there in the show, layered into the character of Fanny, and it didn’t take long to find other comparisons. Nick, like Elliott, had “the seeds of self-destruction in him.” His attraction to Fanny “will either cure him or kill him.” At its core, Robbins argued, this was the “story of a strong woman who, to feel like a woman, picks an elegant, loving but weak man—and her own strength corrupts and kills his love and manliness.” That seemed to be precisely what was happening with Elliott. And with Sydney, too, as his selfish, masculine pride was wounded by the greater acclaim given to Barbra.
That dynamic between the lovers wasn’t helped by what Robbins did next. Despite the decent reviews Sydney had gotten in Philadelphia, it was clear that Lennart had never solved the essential problem of Nick’s character. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? Was he noble or weak? He may have been all of those, but there simply wasn’t enough material in the book to show him in any complexity. Since it was too late to rewrite very much, the answer was simply to cut. Sydney had a major number in the second act, “Sleep Now, Baby Bunting,” in which he sang a lullaby to his newborn daughter, bitterly calling himself “Mr. Fanny Brice.” The number was key to his character, explaining his resentment at being married to a woman who was more successful than he was. But Robbins cut it. His decision may have saved Elliott from squirming in his seat when he saw the show, but it also left Sydney with just two songs, both of which were duets with Barbra. He was not pleased.
But Ray Stark was. Back in New York, at a cost of ten thousand dollars, he’d erected an enormous, block-long sign announcing Funny Girl over the Winter Garden Theatre, giving it “several extra coats of paint,” Dorothy Kilgallen reported, “because he’s confident of a long, long run.” He was telling Robbins he was a genius and that “for the first time since the show started, he was able to have two dinners and go to the movies over the weekend.” He couldn’t believe what Robbins had done “for the morale of the company.” Stark had to put all of this in letters to Robbins’s secretary and ask that it be conveyed to him, however, because Robbins made it a point to spend as little time with Stark as possible.
But the combative producer could afford to be generous in his praise for his old adversary. Advance ticket sales for Funny Girl were averaging twenty thousand dollars a day. That was a very good thing, too, as the newspapers pointed out: given how much Stark had had to pay Merrick, plus “the top figure deal with the high-priced Jerome Robbins,” plus whatever deal had been worked out with Kanin, plus all the delays, Funny Girl was likely to arrive on Broadway as “the highest budgeted musical on record.” Some were estimating Stark’s costs to be in excess of half a million dollars.
And to think it all depended on one small, now slightly chubby, twenty-one-year-old kid.
In her dressing room at the Erlanger, Barbra took the call from Earl Wilson herself. No, she told him firmly, denying yet again the story that she was pregnant. This was getting tedious. Wilson promised he’d print her denial.
Barbra’s new album had just been released, but all these newspapermen wanted to talk about was whether or not she was expecting a baby. Even the record columns weren’t giving her much ink, at least not compared to the last time she’d released a record. Maybe that was because her third album was fated to go head-to-head with the Beatles, which were all anybody seemed to want to talk about. But Barbra knew the album was good, maybe her best yet. Among the tracks she’d chosen this time were more traditional standards, giving in to those who complained her “standards” were usually too offbeat. So she sang “My Melancholy Baby,” “As Time Goes By,” “It Had to Be You,” and, of course, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” She worked with Peter Matz again, and her voice was pristine and supremely confident. It was the work of an artist who had found her groove and enjoyed an easy, smooth mastery over her many gifts. The songs together took the listener on a journey from longing to joy, from grief to hope. The gift for conveying a depth of emotion far greater than her years, displayed early on in Barbra’s career, had clearly never left her and, in fact, had deepened.
She called it, naturally, The Third Album. Kilgallen had reported that someone from Barbra’s team, maybe Solters or Marty, had told her they were planning on calling it The Fourth Barbra Streisand Album. That way, the fans would be “dashing into the record stores asking for the third Barbra Streisand album, which doesn’t exist,” Kilgallen said, calling it a “great gimmick.” But if anyone ever really considered such an idea, sanity prevailed. It was a class act all the way. Barbra even gave Peter Daniels credit on “Bewitched.” Roddy McDowall’s adorable shot of Barbra in her midshipman’s blouse from the Garland show was used as the cover. Sammy Cahn, following in the tradition of Arlen and Styne, wrote the liner notes.
Once again, Barbra had insisted on complete control of the production, getting her fingers into everything from “the arrangements, the cover, the copy, the editing.” This time, there were fewer complaints about her involvement. The early reviews, once again, seemed to justify all her efforts. “Every moment in the album is an exciting musical experience,” Billboard wrote. Syndicated record reviewer Al Price, in his “Platter Chatter” column, thought it possessed a “spellbinding effect . . . that is hard to describe.” The Third Album had landed on the charts at number 110, but by the next week, it was at 53. Maybe not Beatles-style velocity, but it was still quite respectable.
Barbra knew she had a good product, especially when she compared it to her first album, which now embarrassed her, she said. For all its freshness and youthful vitality, the first album was not as polished or as emotionally deep as her second and third outings. Barbra cringed remembering how she’d ended “Happy Days” on that first disk, wailing “oooooo, aaaaaay,” and her voice cracking. She’d been “yearning for just so much” back then, she said, that she could hear it in her voice, “very young, very high, very thin, like a bird.”
Of course, she’d never felt much a part of the music industry and that was even more the case now, competing with the likes of the Beatles, and Joan Baez, and even fourteen-year-old Stevie Wonder, who all wrote their own music or played their own instruments. Barbra admitted to feeling a little bit “inadequate [about] singing other people’s songs.” There was also the generational conflict. The teenagers who were buying millions of copies of Meet the Beatles! weren’t also buying The Third Album. That was left up to a rather eclectic group of housewives, gay men, theater aficionados, and artistic types, of which only a small percentage were likely teenagers. And yet Barbra was the same age as Paul McCartney, and two years younger than John Lennon and Ringo Starr. She might indeed be “a mixture of old and new,” as she called herself in one interview, but her newness didn’t seem to have the same impact on the youth market as Baez or the Beatles did.
That was significant because the success of those acts had demonstrated there was a huge, untapped slice of the market out there. Teenagers had always been a subset of the record-buying audience, driving the sales of Elvis Presley and other rock-and-rollers. But they had not been the major force of sales. Now, as the “baby boomers”—those born in the decade after the end of World War II—reached their teens, it was becoming increasingly clear that the future of the music industry lay with young people. Barbra’s age and her iconoclasm should have made her a natural favorite for this group. But her music—chosen for her by her theater and nightclub handlers—was their parents’ music.
A poll taken of teenagers at the end of the previous year—before the Beatles’ breakout—showed that their favorite female singers were Connie Francis, Joan Baez, Brenda Lee, Connie Stevens, and Lesley Gore. Only Lee and Gore were younger than Barbra. And only when teenagers were asked about stars of the future did Barbra turn up at all: the kids predicted Gore, Peggy March, and Barbra, in that order. Folk music was their favorite genre, beating out rock and pop. If taken in March 1964, the poll likely would have showed a different result, given the unprecedented success of the Beatles. But the point remained: Barbra was no folk singer, and she was even less a rock-and-roller. Exactly where and how could she compete in an industry dominated by teenagers? As her third album made its way up the charts, only time would tell.
Such speculation, however, was better left to her managers and publicists. For Barbra, one goal predominated: getting Funny Girl to Broadway in one piece. As she headed out of her dressing room, she may have run into Sydney, as she often did, on her way to the stage. He still liked to tell her that she was brilliant and gorgeous. He may have whispered it again in her ear. But the truth was, with all the glowing reviews, she didn’t really need to hear it anymore. Her confidence didn’t need that extra boost. And Sydney realized that. It made him feel “less necessary, less important,” Orson Bean understood. It was a feeling Elliott Gould could have empathized with.
To Bean, Sydney would share his suspicions on why his amorous relationship with Barbra had suddenly cooled in those last few days in Philadelphia. “Once his numbers were cut and the show didn’t need him as much,” Bean said, “Sydney felt Barbra wasn’t in love with him anymore.”
He may have been right. Besides, they were going back to New York. And Barbra had a husband waiting for her there.
The block-long sign announcing Funny Girl above the Winter Garden on Broadway had been weathering in the rain, snow, sun, and city soot for the past several weeks as the premiere was delayed yet again, from March 24 to March 26. The show still wasn’t ready. At least the company was now back in New York under the Winter Garden’s roof, and curious theatergoers were flocking to the previews in order to get a peek at the show in development before Jerry Robbins froze it on opening night.
Backstage, Barbra greeted the well-wishers who thronged the hallway and pushed their way into her dressing room, many bearing flowers. No one seemed to be waiting for the official premiere. Already there was buzz that Barbra was a hit. Word was spreading about the elaborate way she took her curtain calls, “like rituals performed in a Buddhist temple,” Dorothy Kilgallen said. Most of the columnists had come to see the show; it seemed there wasn’t anyone of any standing or influence in the theatrical community who hadn’t been by. “The craze to get in ahead of time” made fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard nostalgic for “the old days when any kind of opening was a big thrill.” Now, she said, the official opening night was “for squares.”
Of course, no newspaper would publish a review quite yet, but they did send reporters to check things out. On this night, Joanne Stang of the New York Times observed the procession of people trooping into Barbra’s dressing room to tell her how magnificent she’d been out on the stage. Shouldering his way through them came Jule Styne, who told Barbra he was concerned that the show still ran too long. In his opinion, they “should cut at least twenty-eight minutes.” While all this was going on, Barbra was being fussed over by “a press agent, a personal manager, a photographer, a maid, a dressmaker, and two costume assistants waving swatches of fabrics.” Each one received her attention in turn, and she dealt with each issue they raised in a quiet manner. Then the new script for the next day was delivered to her, with requests from Robbins and Lennart that she “go over the new changes right away.”
As the crowd dispersed from the room, Stang watched as Barbra stretched out on an army cot covered in pink sheets in the corner of the room. She began flipping through the script. “We had three new scenes in the second act tonight,” she told Stang, “so I’m a little tired.” But she was loving it. She loved getting new scripts with different things to say and do and sing every night. Robbins was still scribbling notes during each and every performance and going over them with the cast and crew the next day. Sometimes the changes were big—a whole new scene—and sometimes they were small—a rewrite of a line. But Barbra loved the challenge of something new every night.
There had been new lyrics to “I’m the Greatest Star” that had come and gone. There had been a new version of “Cornet Man” that had stuck. “Downtown Rag” had been replaced with an entirely new number, “Henry Street.” Robbins had even asked Carol Haney to come in and fix the ending of “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” and put a finish on “Find Yourself a Man,” Mrs. Brice’s humorous number in the second act, yet another attempt to liven up the show’s last hour, though whether Haney came is unclear.
And every morning Robbins arrived at Barbra’s dressing room with a handful of notes just for her. He had reversed his earlier objections and come to the conclusion that Barbra should sing “People” alone. No longer, apparently, did he find it “too strong a come-on.” After the performance on March 2, Robbins had also cautioned his leading lady against seeming “too desperate” at the ending of “Greatest Star.” After the performance on the fifth, Robbins had asked Barbra for more concentration in the mirror before she said, “Hello, gorgeous.” A few days later, he was telling her to wait longer for the laugh after Nick’s line, “I’m minding them for a friend.” And sometimes, Robbins said, there was just “too much Mae West” in her Fanny Brice.
After they had started the New York previews on the tenth, Robbins’s criticism had gotten sharper. He told Barbra to stand up straight during “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” and to let the curtain hit the floor before she exited. She needed to be less harsh on the line “Whatever he tells me to do, I’ll do,” and at the end of the bride blackout, where Fanny shocks the audience by showing up pregnant in a wedding dress, Robbins wanted Barbra to hold her pose longer. She should shrug before the line “I would have ordered roast beef and potatoes” and laugh after the line “I’m not bossy,” because she knew she was. Lines such as “Oy, what a day I had” the director wanted to be more Jewish, and Barbra “should be more elegant, like a showgirl” during “Sadie.” And after watching Barbra play Fanny’s farewell scene with Eddie, an exhausted Robbins handed her a note with just one short bit of feedback: “Barbra—class!”
But the biggest problem in Barbra’s performance, it seemed, was how she related to Sydney. “What are you playing while Sydney sings ‘You Are Woman’?” Robbins asked her with some befuddlement. The scene just didn’t work; Ray Stark even sent Robbins a memo complaining that it was no longer “getting the laughs it used to,” that the “small laughs” were “killing the big laughs.” The chemistry between the two players seemed suddenly off. A week later, Robbins was still asking the same question: “What are you playing?” Taking both his leads aside, Robbins rehearsed them extra hard, just the three of them in the room. The problems weren’t confined to “You Are Woman.” The railroad scene, where Fanny and Nick part and the audience is supposed to feel their heartache, wasn’t working either. Robbins encouraged Barbra and Sydney to rehearse all their scenes together on their own. No longer was he complaining about too much kissing. Now he wanted more passion, a quality that had seemed to evaporate in the past couple of weeks.
Very possibly, what the director was picking up on was the cooling of the affair between his two leads. Barbra had begun to distance herself from Sydney, and he was both hurt and angry. No doubt, too, he was frustrated by the fact that Robbins kept singling him out for criticism. The essential problem of Nick as a character had never been solved. Robbins was still trying to figure out “how to make Nick a wheeler-dealer and still make him sympathetic.” One idea was to make him funnier with the addition of some new dialogue on the twentieth: “Whose oil well?” Fanny asks. “Our oil well,” Nick replies. “When does our oil well start producing?” Fanny wants to know. “As soon as we dig it,” Nick tells her. Robbins worried what the critics would say about Sydney after the official opening night.
Barbra, however, didn’t need to wait that long to know what her reviews would be. The audience’s reaction at every preview told her all she needed to know. Joanne Stang of the Times had been struck at how some people had stood on their seats to applaud Barbra at the end. Indeed, starting on the seventeenth, the notes Robbins sent to Barbra were more compliments than critiques. Even Bob Merrill had come around. The lyricist had been impressed with Barbra’s progress in the show, “astounded by the way she had refined all the rough edges,” his wife said. Merrill believed Barbra had “metamorphosed from an angry, rebellious kid to an elegant, polished, powerful performer with the ability to transmit great emotion—maybe even more than he and Jule had written,” his wife thought.
Outside the theater, however, things weren’t quite so sanguine. The five delays Funny Girl had endured had left ticket agents and theatergoers unhappy. Stark couldn’t deny they faced “the wrath of the public.” Notifying customers of changed dates meant considerable extra costs and clerical work; so far, the show’s delays were estimated to have added close to one hundred thousand dollars to its costs, bringing total production expenses to more than six hundred thousand. They were still in the black, since about nine hundred thousand dollars in advance sales had already been made. But it was a very small cushion of comfort.
No doubt the numbers made Ray Stark anxious. That could explain the night he made a beeline for Barbra’s dressing room after one preview—he had gotten surprisingly fast on those crutches—and began shouting at her in a “shrill and high-pitched” voice, as one company member overheard. On the twentieth, he had complained to Robbins about a lack of depth in Barbra’s performance of certain scenes; maybe he was frustrated that he hadn’t seen an improvement. Whatever his reasons, he was unhappy, and let Barbra know it in no uncertain terms.
Barbra had her own grievances with the producer. While she was pleased that Stark and Seven Arts had decided that she should play Fanny in the inevitable movie version of Funny Girl, she wasn’t happy about the terms of the deal, and neither were Begelman and Fields. True, it was reportedly “one of the biggest deals ever given an actress for her first film role”—one million dollars was the figure being bandied about—but it came with a catch: Barbra would be, in effect, Stark’s personal property for the next eight years. Most actresses just starting out in pictures would have been thrilled by the job security; but Barbra, of course, was not most actresses. She knew that the four pictures she’d be required to make for Stark would be, “in essence,” his choices; Barbra would only get to make films that Stark green-lighted, and she’d already discovered how often they failed to see eye to eye on things.
Just as he had with the contract for the show, Stark had played hardball. If Barbra didn’t want to sign the long-term contract, then she wouldn’t play Fanny Brice in the movie version of Funny Girl. There was precedent. When Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had been made into a film, Howard Hawks hadn’t used Carol Channing, who’d been a smash as Lorelei Lee on Broadway. Instead, he’d hired Marilyn Monroe. When, just this past year, George Cukor had cast My Fair Lady, he hadn’t gone with Julie Andrews, even though she’d been such a hit in the part on the stage. He’d hired Audrey Hepburn. There were plenty of big Hollywood names who would jump at playing Fanny Brice in the movie version—Anne Bancroft, perhaps?—and Barbra knew it.
She resented being backed into a corner like that. It was one of the things she disliked most about show business. Ray Stark had become both benefactor and bête noire. To Barbra, he was “a real character, an original.” Without his early championship, she would not have been sitting in that dressing room at the Winter Garden Theatre. But ever since the contract battles of the previous fall, the relationship between producer and leading lady had turned into what she called a “love-hate” tug-of-war. Stark could be a bully, Barbra admitted. For all his charm, for all his patrician good manners, there were those who remembered how he’d shoved and kicked a photographer at Idlewild Airport who’d tried to take his and Fran’s photograph. For all his graciousness, there were those who thought he behaved terribly to his own son, Peter, a dreamy, artistic boy whom Stark was always trying to toughen up by browbeating him in public. No doubt that Ray Stark could be a bully, and Barbra felt she was being bullied over the movie contract.
She appealed to Fields for help. “Look, if you’re prepared to lose it,” her agent told her, “then we can say sorry, we’ll sign only one picture at a time.” But Barbra was “not prepared to lose it.” She knew the risks. She didn’t want to be Carol Channing or Julie Andrews. So she signed the four-picture deal with Stark and had been resentful about it ever since.
That could explain why, when Stark started shouting at her in her dressing room, Barbra had a simple reply: “Fuck you.” She’d cursed similarly at Kanin, but directing the words at Stark was a much bigger deal.
“You can’t say that to me,” the producer sputtered.
“This is my dressing room,” Barbra said, “and I’m saying it to you.”
Later, she’d express amazement with herself for her words, but she didn’t have to worry about any real repercussions. She was untouchable, at least until the show premiered.
At last, Elliott had a job. He would play the Jester in Carol Burnett’s television adaptation of her hit Broadway show Once Upon a Mattress. Joe Layton was set to direct, which was probably how Elliott had gotten the part. It might be just a supporting role, but it was a job. With a paycheck.
Three months ago, a job for Elliott would have been cause for joyous celebration between Barbra and him, and maybe they did celebrate now. But there was a good deal of other emotion weighing them down at the moment that may have kept the corks from popping. Elliott had heard the stories about Barbra’s affair with Sydney. There had been some blind items in the columns that could only have meant the two of them. And when Elliott had confronted Barbra with the rumors, she hadn’t denied them.
On March 17, Mike Connolly wrote, “The stories about the domestic status of Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould are sad,” but just what those sad stories were, he didn’t elaborate. Whatever his feelings about the affair, Elliott obviously didn’t think it warranted the end of the marriage. In public, no matter their “sad domestic status,” the Goulds put on happy faces. Elliott was frequently present at the Winter Garden, especially as opening night drew closer, posing for pictures with Barbra. It was from observing Elliott during this difficult period that Jerry Robbins formed some lasting impressions of Barbra’s husband. “He handles it all very, very well,” Robbins said. “Elliott is a gentleman.”
On March 26, Funny Girl finally opened on Broadway.
Tenacious radio reporter Fred Robbins kept thrusting his mike in Barbra’s face as she prepared to go on stage. “So how do you feel?” he asked her.
“Nervous,” she replied, pronouncing it in heavy Brooklynese—“noivous.” Already she was in character.
“Just nervous?” Robbins pressed.
“Yeah, not much more. We’ve had many openings already.”
For Barbra, it was all rather anticlimactic. In some ways she felt that the show had “been open about two years.” The only real difference tonight was all the press swarming around the place, and the knowledge that there would be no more rewrites, no new scenes to rehearse. They’d frozen the show into place last night.
“You’ve been projected to the highest echelon of performers,” Fred Robbins was saying. “How have you been able to adjust to it?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” Barbra replied. “I mean, I’m the same person. Things don’t change me. I’m not impressed by things. With added success comes added problems.”
“In your wildest dreams did you think this would happen?”
The look Barbra must have shot him was undoubtedly classic. “Of course,” she said, and went off to do the show.
In her dressing room sat telegrams from the famous. “Dear Barbra,” Natalie Wood had cabled. “All the best tonight because you are.” Ed Sullivan had wired, “Barb, I brought you up to Fifty-third Street, now you’ve slipped back to Fiftieth Street, so we are not making progress. Every wonderful wish.” The place was filled with flowers from Jack Benny, Harold Arlen, Ethel Merman, and so many others that the vases were lined out into the hall. Barbra could never keep them all. She’d have to give some away to the stagehands.
Out in the theater, the audience was filling up, and despite the presence of some high-profile celebrities—Merman, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards, Lee Radziwill, Jacob Javits, diplomat and civil rights activist Ralph Bunche—Eugenia Sheppard thought that “fashion wise,” the opening was a “flop . . . compared with the glamorous previews that had gone before.” But this was the show that really counted, and the house was packed with those who wanted to witness Barbra’s big night. Such crowds would be the norm for the foreseeable future: the Winter Garden was back to making between fifteen and eighteen thousand dollars a day in advance ticketing.
As people took their seats, they were handed their Playbills, Barbra and Sydney on the cover, as themselves, not in character, in a serene pose, Barbra wearing pearls. She looked quite pretty and extraordinarily young. Yet inside, her biography reflected her new maturity. There were no mentions of Madagascar or Turkey, though she did claim to play field hockey and string crystal beads for sale in a Vermont general store. “For more personal information,” the reader was told, “write to her mother.”
The program also reflected the compromise that had been reached between Stark, Robbins, Kanin, and Haney. The show was still “directed by” Kanin and “musical staging” was still by Haney, but the special billing—“production supervised by Jerome Robbins,” in the same point size as the other credits—told Broadway insiders all they needed to know.
Backstage, Robbins had left a note for the cast. “You can be my bagel on a plateful of onion rolls anytime! Love, luck, and many thanks, Jerry.”
The overture was playing. Barbra had done this first scene many times now, in rehearsals, in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York previews. But tonight there were people out there with little pencils writing in critics’ notebooks.
Sitting in the audience was Ray Kennedy, a thirty-year-old writer for Time magazine. “Barbra Streisand crosses the stage,” he wrote, “stopping in the center to gaze out over the audience, her look preoccupied. She gives a shrug and goes off. In the moment’s pause before she disappears as quickly as she came, she leaves an image in the eye—of a carelessly stacked girl with a long nose and bones awry, wearing a lumpy brown leopard-trimmed coat and looking like the star of nothing. But there is something in her clear, elliptical gaze that is beyond resistance. It invites too much sympathy to be as aggressive as it seems. People watching it can almost hear the last few ticks before Barbra Streisand explodes.”
Sympathy and aggression—perhaps the two elemental components of Barbra’s success. And explode, of course, was exactly what she was about to do.
“Hello, gorgeous,” Barbra said into the mirror when she returned to the stage.
The show was underway.
Even from just a night or two before, it was different. The last half hour of the show Barbra would carry almost entirely on her own. She had three solo numbers in a row, right up to the last reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” just before the curtain. With the exception of Kay Medford, who still had a song about her character (“Find Yourself a Man”), all the other parts and musical numbers now existed solely in service to Fanny’s character. The show would hit or miss because of Barbra and Barbra alone.
It hit. The laughs came in all the right places, the songs reached every note perfectly. Kennedy thought Barbra turned “the air around her into a cloud of tired ions.” As she sang the last lines of the night—“Nobody, no, nobody is gonna rain on my parade!”—the audience seemed unable to restrain themselves, applauding even before she was done, jumping to their feet, shouting and yelling as the curtain came down. This time Barbra made sure to wait until it touched the floor before she moved from the spot.
Then, suddenly, chaos. It was impossible to move backstage. Barbra’s dressing room swarmed with press and well-wishers. Ethel Merman bounded in to pose for a photo with the new star. But Barbra had to get over to the big extravaganza Ray Stark was hosting at the Rainbow Room, at the top of the RCA Building, sixty-five floors high above Rockefeller Center. Already Lainie Kazan and Sharon Vaughn had made their way there, greeted by an army of photographers, flashbulbs popping, people shouting. Hundreds of invited guests were being treated to dinner and dancing with a live orchestra, all on Stark’s dime.
Fred Robbins was weaving in and out of the crowd with his microphone, corraling the famous, drinks in hand, to comment for his radio show about what they had seen and heard that night.
“She has everything that I will call a star,” declared Sophie Tucker. “From now on, nothing will stop Barbra Streisand.”
Jason Robards was “stunned” by her performance. “I felt, you know, what am I doing? This twenty-one-year-old girl has all this talent and class.”
Robards’s wife, Lauren Bacall, agreed. “I saw the best thing I ever saw in my life in that girl. She can act, she can sing, she has an electric personality, which is what makes a star.”
The principals were arriving, and the radio interviewer hurried over to them. “We’ve written some songs,” Jule Styne said as he came in with Bob Merrill, “and we heard them really sung tonight by Barbra Streisand. She’s one of the greatest singers of my time, and I’ve heard them all.”
Merrill added, “She’s going to be in the theater for a long, long time. The theater needs Barbra Streisand and she needs the theater.”
Then came Stark, walking with a cane. “The show seems to have gone very, very well,” he said, in that soft-spoken, measured voice of his. “I think Barbra was brilliant.”
Someone pointed out to Robbins a small woman looking a bit lost. “Well, Mama Streisand,” the radioman asked, approaching Diana with his microphone, “what do you think of this whole thing?”
“Well, I’m terribly elated,” she replied.
“Where does the spark come from?”
“Actually,” Diana said, holding nothing back, “her singing would come from her mother and her acting ability would also come from her mother. Her intelligence, however”—she laughed—“stems from her dear father, who was a PhD who helped many pupils on the road to gain self-respect.”
Robbins commented that if only Barbra’s father had lived to see this night.
Diana seemed uncomfortable with the sentiment. “Oh, he . . . ,” she said. “Well, he’s just with us right now.”
Earl Wilson also grabbed the star’s mother, whom he described as “overlooking the lights of the city her twenty-one-year-old daughter had just captured.” He asked her if she’d taken the “a” out of Barbra’s name. Diana seemed to bristle at the question. “She left it out, I didn’t. She’s a riot. Always was. She had a ninety-three average in school but always seemed to do the wrong things.” She paused. “Till now.”
A commotion at the entrance signaled the star had arrived. Barbra came into the room on Elliott’s arm, “her face stiff, her backbone stiffer,” one reporter thought. When she spotted someone she knew in the crowd, Barbra’s features “contorted with relief for a moment.” But then she was led away by Elliott into the crush of television lights and cameras. Some assistants ran on ahead, clearing a path so she could walk, while others surged in behind her. Barbra no longer seemed to be moving on her own accord. Rather, she seemed “swept and lifted into the ballroom.”
“You tired, honey?” Fred Robbins asked her, his microphone back in her face.
“Yeah, I’m exhausted.” Her voice sounded it. “I hate opening nights. Just horrible.”
What she hated was the judging, she told Robbins, and the fact that the pressures of opening night “cut off” people’s “emotional reaction” to the show. That was what she wanted—emotional reaction—not a microphone in her face. Elliott saw his wife’s discomfort, saw the way “people were pawing her, sticking mikes down her bosom, telling her things she couldn’t believe.” This—all the cameras and the lights and the crush of people—hadn’t been part of the dream. The show, yes, and the creation of the character and the applause and the good reviews and the declarations that she was great, very much yes. But not this. “All those cameras and lights” scared her, she said. The Rainbow Room’s guest of honor just wanted to go home.
Then Barbra spotted her mother and rushed up to her. “Mama!” she said. “You didn’t bring chicken soup.”
“To the Rockefellers’ nice building?” Diana replied.
They embraced. For all Barbra’s problems with her mother, Diana was at least familiar to her. She was at least real.