Barbara sat on the living room floor of her apartment early in 1960, singing along to the guitar strums of a friend from acting class, Carl Esser. As her roommate, Marilyn Fried, prepared for bed in the next room she heard “this remarkable voice” waft in from what she assumed was the radio. Who is that marvelous singer? she wondered. She peeked into the living room to investigate.

The radio wasn’t on. Marilyn looked at Barbara and asked, “Who was that singing?” Her eyes widened in surprise at the answer. “Your voice is wonderful!” she blurted. “Why aren’t you singing.”

“I don’t know.... I don’t think I’m that good,” Barbara said.

“Out came the sensitivity, the insecurity, the shyness,” Marilyn recalled to the author René Jordan in 1974. When she and Carl both begged to differ, Barbara got caught up in their excitement and pulled the demo record she had made at thirteen out of a closet and played it for them. Marilyn loved it and told Barbara she reminded her of Fanny Brice.

“Who’s Fanny Brice?” Barbara asked.

“Barbara didn’t think the record sounded very good,” Marilyn recalled. “She could not believe she could sing. It was amazing.”

But the next day, unusually cheerful, Barbara flitted around the apartment singing. “Do I sound okay?” she wanted to know.

“You sound great,” Marilyn replied.

“Should I go for a singing audition?”

“Absolutely.”

“But I’m an actress, not a singer.”

“If it gets you a job, who cares? You’re broke.”

Barbara remained unsure. Standing up and singing seemed like so much silliness to her, compared to playing Medea or Juliet. And she later admitted that she wasn’t immune to the Victorian notion that singers were floozies. No, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she got a job as an usher at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater on West Forty-sixth Street, home of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein phenomenon The Sound of Music, starring Mary Martin. As she led people to their seats Barbara would turn her face away from them so that “when I became a star nobody would remember I’d been an usher.”

Night after night she stood in the back of the theater and watched. She memorized every line and all of the songs. She studied Mary Martin’s every move, learning from—and sometimes faulting—one of America’s great musical comedy stars. She came to realize that acting in a musical could be artistically valid too. Now, just as she had when she saw The Diary of Anne Frank, Barbara told herself, I could do that.

Within a few weeks she heard that Eddie Blum, the show’s casting director, would soon hold auditions for the choruses of several touring companies of The Sound of Music. She rushed home that night and put her resume together with one of the photographs the students at a photography school had taken of her; the pictures had been given to her in exchange for the modeling. “The results were awful,” she said, “but I didn’t have any money for pictures, and they were all I had.” The photo Barbara sent Blum showed her wearing a Japanese kimono, long dangling earrings, and a hairpiece bun on top of her head. She looked about forty years old.

She got no response from Blum until several months later. “He told me he hadn’t called earlier because of the terrible picture. He couldn’t imagine what kind of actress would submit such a thing. Finally he decided to call me in ‘to see what this creep is like.”

Accompanied by Blum’s pianist Peter Daniels, who would become her accompanist and friend, Barbara sang the popular radio hit “Allegheny Moon,” and when she finished, Blum asked her if she could sing something else. She sang “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi,” which she had memorized by watching the show every night. Blum then asked if she wanted to have lunch with him, and while they ate, he asked about her background and her dreams for her future. Her responses so captivated him that their conversation stretched through dinner and beyond. As Marilyn Fried recalled it, “He spent the whole day talking to her. He was fascinated by her talent and her intelligence. Around ten-thirty that night he brought Barbara back to our apartment and gave her a lot of encouragement.”

She was all wrong for The Sound of Music, of course, so despite how much she had impressed Blum, he couldn’t hire her. “But for heaven’s sake use that voice!” he told her. “Get yourself a job singing in a nightclub or something.” Barbara fairly floated on air for the next few days, incredulous that someone as savvy as Eddie Blum had thought so highly of her talent. But she wasn’t thrilled about his suggestion that she sing in clubs. She still feared that singing was a trifle, not important like drama. But just in case another musical should need an actress-singer, she added “Voice” to her resume under “Training.”

In one of the more fortuitous twists of show business fate, it was during her next foray into legitimate acting that Barbara met a young man who finally persuaded her to sing for a living.

SHE FIRST SAW Barry Dennen on the stage of the Jan Hus Theater on East Seventy-fourth Street late in April while she and a raggle-taggle group of young performers who called themselves the Actors’ Co-Op (“A Nonprofit Group”) bustled around rehearsing their first and last show, a production of Karel and Josef Čapek’s The Insect Comedy, billed as “a parable of the human condition.” Barbara had been cast in three roles in the three-act play with prologue and epilogue: Apatura Clythia, one of the two main butterflies in Act I; the messenger in Act III; and the second moth in the epilogue.

Dennen, a twenty-two-year-old UCLA graduate from a wealthy Los Angeles family, played a cricket and a snail. Handsome in a gaunt, somber way, obsessive in his love for every aspect of show business, he would set his alarm clock for 3: 00 A. M. in order to tape-record the soundtracks of old Mae West or Bette Davis movies from television. The shelves in his apartment on Ninth Street in Greenwich Village groaned under thousands of vintage records he had collected since childhood. He had all the greats: Ruth Etting, Al Jolson, Helen Kane, Lee Wiley, Ethel Waters, Edith Piaf, Fanny Brice, Fred Astaire, Mabel Mercer, Helen Morgan.

That he was also wonderfully pretentious, as “men of the theatuh” can be, is suggested by the fact that he billed himself as Barré Dennen in the show’s program. This was all guaranteed to attract and fascinate the impressionable Barbara, and Dennen returned the compliment. He considered the production they were in “slapped together, unspeakable, tacky, awful,” but he found Barbara’s performance “hysterically funny” as she chased after a boy butterfly crying, “Oh, you great, strong, handsome thing!” while her diaphanous pink wings fluttered and her wire antennae flopped wildly atop her head.

The Insect Comedy lasted only three days, Sunday through Tuesday, May 8, 9, and 10. On Monday morning the New York World Telegram and Sun critic, Frank Aston, gave the show a good-natured pan, pointing out that “no one in it claimed to be anything like a pro.” He also gave Barbara her first Manhattan newspaper notice when he listed her as one of the residents of “Butterflyland, where the girls assail men but get nowhere because everyone dies too soon.”

The cast reassembled a few weeks later to do an audio version of the play for Radio Free Europe. The show had closed, but Barbara and Barry’s friendship had just begun. They started to date, first talking for hours in the nearby Pam Pam coffee shop, then watching late-show movies in his small, eclectically furnished eleventh-floor apartment stuffed with feathers and fans, Tiffany-style lamps, and candles. Soon the two were virtually inseparable. “We went everywhere together,” he recalled. “She was very young, endearing, and exceptionally serious about becoming a great actress.” Just as she had Allan Miller before him, Barbara asked Barry endless questions about acting and music and literature and art. He loved that she hung on his every word; she loved that she had met another man from whom she could learn.

Dennen owned a top-of-the-line Ampex stereo tape recorder with two microphones, so it followed naturally that when a prospective agent asked Barbara for a tape of her singing, she asked Barry to make it. She arrived at his apartment with Carl Esser in tow as an accompanist, and as Barry recalled it in 1974, “We spent the afternoon taping, and the moment I heard the first playback I went insane—I knew here was something special, a voice the microphone loved.” And Dennen could tell that Barbara, although completely untrained, had an inherent musicality, the same instincts that had led her to improvise on “You’ll Never Know” when she was thirteen. Excited, Barry joined those who had advised Barbara to become a singer. She gave him her standard reply: “I’m an ehktress.”

“Look,” he countered, “you can continue your acting classes and still do this. You’ll get seen, and you’ll make money.” Then he stressed that singing was a form of acting, that songs—especially the classic ballads—could be treated as three-act plays. He told her that a singer could create a character just as vibrant as any actress could in a play. Barbara’s eyes narrowed as she absorbed this argument. Later she said Barry had made her see that “Singing could be like acting, except I played all the parts myself.”

Barry caught the waver in her skepticism and threw down a gauntlet: a bar directly across the street from his apartment had a weekly talent contest on Monday nights, and he challenged her to enter it. She studied him. He said he would help her learn some new songs. She twisted her mouth. When he added that the winner would receive fifty dollars, a week’s engagement at the club, and free dinners, he saw the first real spark of interest flicker across Barbara’s face. “Mmm,” she murmured.

ON A HOT Monday morning a few weeks later Barbara, skeptical and scared, walked into the Lion, the dark, slightly seedy neighborhood watering hole on the ground floor of a brownstone at 62 West Ninth Street. Hopefuls for the talent show had to audition for the club’s manager, Burke McHugh, on the morning of the contest, and the best four were invited back for the competition. McHugh was used to dealing with some very questionable characters at these cattle calls, and when he saw Barbara he muttered to his pianist, “Oh, boy, here comes a winner.”

With her hair unwashed and uncombed, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, she looked, McHugh told the author Randall Reiss in 1992, like “a kid off the street who hadn’t been home to change her clothes.” He asked her if she had come to audition. Self-protectively, she feigned ignorance. “Audition for what?” McHugh explained about the talent contest, and Barbara said, “Well, I’ve never sung in public before, but I’ll give it a try.”

She told him her name was Barbara Strinberg, and then she sang the haunting Harold Arlen-Truman Capote ballad “A Sleepin’ Bee” for him. McHugh and his piano player, a young man named Patty, felt goose bumps rise on their arms. When she finished, McHugh exclaimed, “Oh, my God, Barbara, that was really magnificent!” He told her to come back for the contest and asked how to spell Strinberg.

Now that she had been accepted, there was no reason to hide her identity, but she didn’t want to admit she’d lied. “I’ve gotta change the name. I can’t stand it.... It sounds too Jewish.” According to McHugh, at that moment “Footsteps in the Sand” blared from a radio in the next room. “Sand,” Barbara said. “I like that, that’s a good last syllable. I’ll call myself Barbara Streisand.”

When she came back at eight that evening, Barbara looked around the dark, smoky room and wondered, Where are all the women? Barry had neglected to tell her that the Lion was a predominantly gay bar. With her liberal leanings, Barbara had no problem with homosexuals; she had first encountered gay men during her summer at Malden Bridge and in her acting classes. But she had never seen them behave so openly before, and she watched them with fascination as she waited for the contest to begin.

They were arguably the toughest audience Barbara could have faced. Like Barry Dennen, most of them were immersed in show business history. They adored Judy Garland and Ethel Merman; they would trek miles to catch a performance by Mabel Mercer or Julie Wilson or Hildegarde; they bought the original cast album of every Broadway musical. For a young girl singer to excite these men, she’d have to be awfully good.

The Lion’s talent night was popular for contradictory reasons. On the one hand, one never knew when a truly funny comic or a really fine singer would step up to the mike and make the evening special. On the other, there was always the delicious chance that some poor deluded soul would rock the room with unintended hilarity through sheer ineptitude. Burke McHugh preferred to have several different styles of singer and a comedian on the bill, and this night was no exception. Barbara’s competitors were a comedian, a light opera singer, and Dawn Hampton, the niece of Lionel Hampton, a “jazz belter” who “sang like there was no tomorrow,” McHugh recalled.

Last on the bill, Barbara stepped timorously onto the parquet “stage” next to Patty’s piano, the lusty applause for Dawn Hampton ringing in her ears. She took what looked like a briefcase from under her arm, put it on top of the piano, opened it, pulled out her sheet music, and gave it to Patty. “Tonight,” she said softly, “I am going to sing ‘A Sleepin’ Bee.’”

If she heard the titters, she didn’t let on. By now most of the audience suspected McHugh was having fun again. They looked at this gawky, skinny girl with her distractingly large nose and crooked teeth and eyes that seemed to watch each other, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or groan. Her getup hardly helped. On top of her head she had bobby-pinned a Dynel hairpiece that looked, in the words of a friend, “like a cheese Danish.” From under it her real hair fell stringily to her shoulders. She wore a short purple sheath and a jacket festooned with purple ostrich feathers, which the thrift shop clerk told her had once belonged to a countess. With feathers wisping around her shoulders and the audience ready to pounce, Barbara stood stock still under the spotlight, closed her eyes, and dramatically drew back her head as Patty tinkled out her introduction. Someone in the audience muttered “Oh, boy.”

Then this eccentric, clearly misguided creature, her head still back, her eyes still closed, opened her mouth and sang “A Sleepin’ Bee,” and the voice that emerged from her grabbed the men’s breath away. The titters and the talking stopped. She began that languid ballad of young love softly, her voice youthful but clear as a bell, her high notes enthrallingly pure. Then she gathered steam, took on more force as her voice built to “Broadway belter” proportions. Finally she began a breathtaking swoop up the scale, leaping a full octave in one word, “love,” and her first song in front of a paying audience came to an end.

For a few moments the seventy or so men sat in stunned silence. Then they burst into wild applause and cheers, shouting “More! More!” as Barbara laughed nervously and looked around the room. She glanced at Burke McHugh and mouthed, “Should I do another one?” He nodded, and she went back to her briefcase for another chart, pulling out “When Sunny Gets Blue.” Again the voice was mesmerizing, and again that was only part of the magic spell she wove. She didn’t sing these songs in the la-di-da style of so many pop vocalists, she seemed to have lived them, seemed to be making up the lyrics on the spot from her own experience. This jaded audience knew immediately that they had just seen someone very special, a girl with a beautiful voice who could bring drama and shading and vibrancy to a lyric. The “applause meter” gave Barbara the contest by a wide margin, and Burke McHugh told her to come back on Saturday night.

She and Barry ran over to the Pam Pam coffee shop on Sixth Avenue, Barbara floating on air, suffused with the approval she had just won. Barry let her fly awhile, then began to criticize her performance, pointing out areas where she could have given more or where she should have pulled back. “Yeah, yeah,” Barbara replied, her eyes narrowing. “You’re right, you’re right.”

Saturday night, on a bill with three other performers, she sang the same two songs plus “Lullaby of Birdland” and again wowed the audience, many of whom had come expressly to see her after hearing the buzz about her Monday night performance. The following Monday she defended her title, adding “Why Try to Change Me Now?” and “Long Ago and Far Away” to her brief set. The gay comedian Michael Greer, who then called himself Mal James, was one of the contestants that night. The falsetto singer Tiny Tim was another.

“I had already heard rumblings about this strange girl with a lot of talent,” Greer recalled, “so I knew she’d be tough competition. She looked like she had dressed herself from a garage sale. As I remember she wore a tiny high-heeled shoe in her hair because she liked the rhinestones in it. She sang something totally off-the-wall like ‘Happy Birthday’ and it was a mind blower. When I heard her sing I thought, My God, who is she? The voice was so beautiful it captivated everyone there.”

Barbara won again—Greer came in second—and on the following three Mondays as well. By now word of “this strange, incredible girl” had spread throughout New York’s hippest audiences, and lines of people trailed down Ninth Street to Sixth Avenue on Monday and Saturday nights. During the second week Barbara told Burke McHugh she wanted three pictures of herself, not just one, on the signboard outside the club. And she wanted to change the spelling of her name. “Back to Strinberg?” McHugh asked.

“No,” Barbara replied. “I wanna take an a out of ‘Barbara.’ Who needs it? The name’s pronounced Bar-bra. So that’s how I want you to spell it: B-a-r-b-r-a.”

Boy, this one really is a nut, McHugh thought. But he did as he was asked, and Barbra Streisand was born. It was her answer to all those agents who had advised her to change her name to Barbara Sands because Streisand was too ethnic or too hard to pronounce. This way, she had changed her name and she hadn’t. What she had done was become, among all the thousands and thousands of Barbaras in the world, the one and only Barbra.

AFTER A MONTH of weekends and Mondays at the Lion, Barbra was forced to retire from the competition as an undefeated champion when Burke McHugh and his partner, Ernie Sgroi Jr., told her they wanted to give somebody else a chance. Without the fifty dollars a week and free meals she had grown used to, Barbra faced dire financial straits again, and she asked McHugh if there was something else she could do at the club. He said he needed a replacement coat-check girl for a couple of weeks, but she wouldn’t want to do that, would she? “Sure I would,” she replied. “Why not?”

Every night she arrived at the club at eight o’clock, sloppily dressed, went into the coat room, closed the door, and reopened it a few moments later wearing a flashy cocktail dress. After a week of this, one of the regulars, a costume designer who called himself Peaches, noticed that she never cleaned the dress. “Hey, Barbra,” he teased her, “don’t you think you should send that dress to the dry cleaners? It’s gonna start to walk on its own pretty soon.” As he and his friends giggled, Barbra snapped back, “Go ahead and laugh. When I’m a big star on Broadway, you’ll still be just a bunch of drunken cackling hens!”

Broadway was pretty far off, but another nightclub engagement was not. Ernie Sgroi told Barbra that his father owned the nearby Bon Soir, a larger, classier, more mainstream joint on Eighth Street, and he had persuaded Ernie Senior to let her audition for his club. An engagement at the Bon Soir meant more money than she’d been paid at the Lion, more prestige, and a more influential audience.

It also meant that Barbra would have to come up with some new material, and quickly. She worked excitedly with Barry over the next few weeks, sitting on the floor of his living room listening to dozens of hours of tapes of the great singers who had gone before her. Dennen hammered home his idea that Barbra should approach each lyric as an acting exercise. “I would work with her phrase by phrase,” he said, “trying this, trying that, shaping gestures, timing, the kind of effect Barbra and I wanted.” He played only the musical creme de la creme for her, zeroing in on songs that best showcased her voice.

Barbra had never learned to read music, just as she had never taken a singing lesson. But she needed to listen to a song only once or twice to master it. She would hear a stylized vocal, imitate it, then give it her own special twist and make it her own. Barry knew he was in the presence of one of that mysterious, singular breed—a musical natural.

Perhaps Barry Dennen’s greatest contribution to Barbra Streisand’s musical vocabulary was his concept of reviving “unusual, forgotten, or outrageous” material rather than regurgitating the old chestnuts that were a staple of every nightclub act. Barbra was all for it. “The Bon Soir was a sophisticated little nightclub,” she said. “That annoys me, anything that’s supposed to be posh and sophisticated, you know. So I wanted to do something that was completely wrong.” Barbra told Barry she’d like to do “a nursery rhyme or something,” and he suggested she sing the unlikely “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” in order to surprise, delight—maybe even shock?—the blase New York audiences. Barbara soaked up this sensibility, one that would serve her well as her career took off.

Barbra needed new clothes for her Bon Soir act, too, so she asked Terry Leong, a friend of Marilyn Fried’s who had designed for Seventh Avenue’s garment district, to help her put together some outfits. He and Barbra scoured the thrift shops, picking up a pure silk beaded vest for five dollars, a pair of shoes for three dollars, or a hat for two dollars. Barbra would spend hours rummaging around in a dusty Ninth Avenue thrift shop to find the perfect dress to go with a vest she’d discovered on Second Avenue, then traipse back to Third Avenue on a quest for the right bag.

“She was so enthusiastic,” Leong recalled. “We found beautiful things, like a 1920s leopard coat. We found bodices from 1900 and skirts to go with them. She loved to find things she could wear in her hair, like jewels and bows and ribbons.” Leong also made dresses from scratch for Barbra, using material she’d found. “We devised the designs together,” he said. “We bought these beautiful lace doilies, and I made an Empire dress around one of them, using it across her back. I found a pale green chiffon material, and I made a full-skirted dress with it, with a Chinese top and a Mandarin collar.

“She liked styles that were very fluid—things that moved with her,” Leong went on. “She was very graceful and she moved well. She had a wonderful body to costume—thin, trim, long, lean. She experimented with a lot of different clothes, and it was exciting to watch the transformations that would come over her as she switched from one look to another.” Barbra’s enthusiasm about all this caused Leong endless fitting problems. “She wouldn’t stop moving. She was just all over the place and jumping up and down. Very difficult to do a hem.”

AS THOUGH BY some cosmic design, the malleable Galatea that was Barbra Streisand met yet another Pygmalion when Bob Schulenberg, an artist and designer friend of Barry Dennen’s from UCLA, moved to New York in July of 1960, in the midst of Barbra’s preparations for her Bon Soir audition. He will never forget his first sight of her, running toward him, yelling “Barry! Barry!” as he and Dennen left Barry’s apartment late one night.

“She was carrying two shopping bags in each hand, overflowing with feather boas and sequined fabric,” Schulenberg recalled. “And she had everything on. She had on a new cherry-red velvet skirt that stopped about an inch above her knees, which was very unusual in 1960. She had on chocolate-brown nylon stockings and gold lamé and red satin strap 1927 shoes. Her top was a gold, silver, and cherry-red brocade with big square-cut Elizabethan sleeves. She had on two Venetian glass beaded necklaces, six glass bracelets, and drop earrings made of glass. She looked like a weird Vogue illustration from the twenties. I was fascinated.”

What Barbra hadn’t done so well, Schulenberg thought, was her face. She had attempted the style of eye makeup popular at the time, an extended eyelash line to make the eyes seem larger, but Bob felt “she really didn’t know what she was doing. She had very little color on her skin and bright red lipstick. She had these wispy little bangs that fell down over her forehead to hide a bit of teenage skin. It just wasn’t a good look, and I could tell she wanted to be glamorous by what she was wearing.”

Schulenberg found himself analyzing this odd creature as he sat across from her and Barry at the Pam Pam coffee shop that first night. He didn’t think she was very good-looking, but he saw something in her. She had brilliant blue eyes, a long, sleek neck, and a face that from certain angles seemed to acquire a surprisingly classic beauty. “Barbra was like undeveloped territory. I was looking at her and abstractly thinking, Well, she’s got no structure in her cheeks, but that we can paint in. Somehow I thought she could be made to look like one of those Richard Avedon fashion models.”

Schulenberg burned to make Barbra over, but he hesitated to suggest that she needed it. “When you see a young woman who wants to look a certain way, and you know how she could look, but she’s doing it all wrong, you have to broach the subject nicely. You can’t just say, ‘You look like shit!’”

But Schulenberg got his chance to “play with Barbra’s look” the day they were scheduled to see Barry play a messenger in Shakespeare’s Henry V in Central Park. Bob suggested they surprise Dennen. “Let’s make you up like a Vogue model—like Audrey Hepburn or somebody. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Barbra was all for it—“She was willing to do anything”—and the two of them spent an hour and a half on the transformation while Barbra chomped on rye bread and herring and mumbled questions with her mouth full: “Why are you doing that? How did you make it look that way?”

Schulenberg applied false eyelashes, in an era when no one wore them on the street. He contoured her cheeks with deep flesh-colored greasepaint. He extended her eyes with liner that made her look “like Marlene Dietrich in Morocco.” He dusted her face with white translucent powder. He pulled her hair back and used her “cheese Danish” hairpiece under her own hair to give it height.

Barbra finished off her makeover with black leotards under black slacks, black ballet slippers, a black leotard top, and a black cardigan sweater. “Now, this is a 120-degree night in New York City,” Schulenberg said with a laugh. “We had to use a lot of powder to keep her looking as cool as a cucumber. And she just looked sensational, like Martha Graham. People’s heads turned when she walked by. They were wondering, Who is she? Barbra loved it.”

Once this striking twosome got to Central Park, however, they discovered they were so late that Barry’s house seats had been sold. They went back to Dennen’s place on the subway, and when he got home he was livid. “How could you miss my performance?” he demanded.

“But, Barry,” Bob pleaded, “doesn’t Barbra look great?”

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, August 7, Barbra bounced down the thirty-one steps into the cavernous darkness that was the Bon Soir Club at 40 West Eighth Street and auditioned for Ernie Sgroi Sr.; his partner, Phil Pagano; and his emcee, Jimmy Daniels. She had brought Barry, Bob Schulenberg, and Burke McHugh with her, and after her two numbers McHugh murmured, “It looks good,” and left. But Sgroi and his colleagues weren’t sure. Yes, she had a wonderful voice, but she looked so strange. Yes, she’d been a hit at the Lion, but how would their mainstream audience react to her? There was only one way to find out. Sgroi told her to come back that night and do her songs again in front of the regular customers. If they liked her, he would give her a two-week booking.

That night Jimmy Daniels introduced her as “a little extra surprise, a young singer who’s been causing quite a stir over at the Lion.” She stepped onto the small stage and realized that she still had chewing gum in her mouth. She took it out and stuck it on the microphone. The audience laughed and wondered, Who’s this kook? But when she began to sing “A Sleepin’ Bee,” Sgroi and Pagano looked around the room and noticed that everyone had stopped laughing. Then they noticed that everyone had stopped drinking, and by the time she came to the end of the song the waiters had stopped serving. Barbra had mesmerized the entire room.

When she completed the song, her head down, her eyes closed, her arms limp at her sides, the audience remained silent for what seemed an eternity. Then the patrons burst into applause and cheers. Before the clamor stopped, Barbra launched into “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” She flailed her arms, she let out whoops, she giggled, she seemed to become a totally different person. When she ended the song with “Who’s afraid of the big, big, big, big, big, bad, wooo-oooo-oooo-lf,” the audience rose to its feet with cheering, laughing, stomping delight.

When she stepped down off the small stage, that night’s headliner, the comedian Larry Storch, looked at her and said, “Kid, you’re gonna be a star.”

Ernie Sgroi pulled her into his office and said, “You start September ninth. Two weeks. Two shows a night. One hundred twenty-five dollars a week.”

“Just like in the movies!” Barbra later exclaimed.

She had one month to prepare for her first major nightclub engagement, but first she had to go back up to the Cecilwood Theater in Fishkill, where she had been asked to fill in for an indisposed actress and play Hortense, the French maid in The Boy Friend for two weeks. She was a hit in the show, cavorting on stage in her maid’s outfit complete with ankle-strap high heels, fish-net stockings, frilly apron, and a huge hair bow.

While she twirled an enormous feather duster on stage in Fishkill, the first newspaper article about Barbra appeared in the August 21, 1960, edition of Flatbush Life, accompanied by the exotic, “terrible” photograph she had sent to Eddie Blum. Under the headline “Flatbush Actress Heads for Stardom,” the piece began, “Barbra Streisand, who as a child was determined to become a dramatic actress, now finds herself in the rather enviable position of being considered for her singing ability as well.” After recounting her summer stock appearances, The Insect Comedy, and her audition for Blum, the article described her success at the Lion and concluded, “Word of her splendid reception got around to the sharp ears of Bon Soir personnel, and she was given an audition... again Miss Streisand knocked’ em dead, and she was signed for a two-week shot, beginning September 9.”

ON THAT SULTRY Friday night, Barbra appeared third on a bill with the comic pantomimists Tony and Eddie and comedienne Phyllis Diller. Diller vividly recalled the moment, as she patted on her makeup and prepared to go on, that she first heard Barbra Streisand sing: “On her third note, every hair on my body stood up! I am basically a musician, and when I heard that voice—and that heart—I knew this is a star!” Diller took Barbra under her wing, gently suggesting that she wear more traditional clothes while performing.

“She told me my taste was awful,” Barbra recalled. “She bought me two woolen dresses. But she doesn’t know that I brought ’em back, got the money for them, and made myself some outfits out of upholstery material.”

Traditional dress or no, night after night the Bon Soir audiences thrilled to Barbra Streisand. She had added two numbers to her repertoire: “Who Can I Turn to Now?” and the 1920s Helen Kane number “I Want to Be Bad.” Her two-week engagement stretched to four, then six, then eight, then ten as the word about this “wild girl with an incredible voice” spread far beyond Greenwich Village and New York’s gay community. As Michael Greer remembered it, “The buzz was on about her. It just kept increasing. I vividly remember everything she did. She giggled and waved her arms. We just couldn’t keep our eyes off her. Man, everything she said or did we went ‘Oh!’ It was like she was an angel. She was spellbinding.”

At the Bon Soir Barbra discovered that she liked making her audiences laugh. She used the chewing-gum-on-the-microphone gambit at every performance, and she increasingly told jokes and kibbitzed between songs. Her audiences loved it, and Barbra realized that humor helped her put on a good show.

Every night Barry Dennen brought his Ampex recorder to the club to tape her set. Afterward he and Barbra would sit up until three or four in the morning and listen to her breathing, analyze her phrasing, study how much emotion she had put into the lyric. Barry made suggestions, gave her examples of how other singers did the same things. Barbra sponged up every bit of it, and every night her act got a little better.

BY NOW BARBRA had fallen in love with Barry and had moved into his apartment. The serious turn their relationship took surprised Bob Schulenberg. “One night I went over to their place,” he said, “and they were on the floor, and Barbra was resting her head on Barry’s lap, and it was very romantic. They had that kind of glow that says that two people have just been intimate. They started talking about getting married. I said, ‘Are you serious?’ And they said. ‘Yeah, we’re going to get married.’ It was sort of a sacred, hallowed moment. It was very intense. Barbra was enthralled with Barry. He has a brilliant mind. He was the first man who would ever trade jokes from Mae West or Groucho Marx movies with her and in the next moment enlighten her on art, theater, music. His influence on Barbra was tremendous. And he was thrilled with his creation.”

So too were the most hard-bitten critics. One of Barbra’s first reviews appeared in the New York World Telegram and Sun on September 16, and Perry Rebell’s comments were typical: “The Bon Soir has swung into the new nightclub season with the find of the year. She is Barbra Streisand, a Brooklynite whose voice and poise belie her scant eighteen years. Vocally, there’s range and power; stylewise, there appears to be a natural gift for musical comedy, but she handles with aplomb the most meaningful of ballads.”

The day before, she had received her first New York column mention, from Dorothy Kilgallen: “The pros are talking about a rising new star on the local scene—eighteen-year-old Barbra Streisand, currently at the Bon Soir.” Shortly after this item appeared, Barbra did have a singing lesson. Her mother had come to see her act, and Mrs. Kind thought the seventy-year-old white lace combing jacket Barbra wore looked like a nightgown. She also told her daughter that while her voice was good, it was a little thin, and she suggested she take lessons to build it up. This was the first time Mrs. Kind had urged Barbra to do something that could further her show business ambitions, and she took the advice.

When she stepped into the voice coach’s small studio with its one piano, a middle-aged woman with her hair pulled up into a severe bun greeted her and asked if she had something prepared. She did—“A Sleepin’ Bee”—and she handed the sheet music to the piano player. The teacher waited for her to begin.

“When a bee lies sleeping in the palm of your hand.”

The woman rapped her pointer on the edge of a nearby table. Startled, Barbra stopped cold. “No. No. No. Your pronunciation is all wrong. The vowels must be shorter. It’s ‘When a beh lies sleeping.’”

“But, but,” Barbra stammered.

“It is beh... beh... beh,” the coach insisted.

“But the word is ‘bee’,” Barbra protested. “Whoever heard anyone say ‘beh’?”

The teacher was losing her patience. “Singing is not the same as talking, my dear.”

Barbra swallowed hard, finished the song her way, and walked out. She never took another voice lesson. “I knew that singing had to be an extension of speaking. I felt, I’m an actress and I have to make the song real, you know? So that was the end of my singing lessons. It just felt all wrong.”

THE BON SOIR gig brought Barbra her first manager, Ted Rozar, and her first agent, Irvin Arthur. After seeing her two nights before her engagement was to end on November 20, the twenty-two-year-old Rozar went to her tiny dressing room, told her he was “the only gentile manager in the business,” exclaimed “I love you,” and asked if she had representation. The following Wednesday she signed a three-year contract with Rozar that gave him 10 percent of her salary if she earned less than $350 a week and 20 percent if she earned more, with an additional 5 percent to anyone who assisted him with out-of-town negotiations.

Barbra’s success at the Bon Soir should have assured her a rash of bookings, but much to his chagrin Rozar could not get anyone else to hire her. He sent her picture and tapes to agents, Broadway producers, the bigger clubs in Manhattan, and local television shows, but Barbra was just too unlike the vast majority of successful vocalists of the late fifties and early sixties. Agent after agent told Rozar, “Well, yes, she’s got a nice voice, but her fingers are too long, she uses her hands too much, her nose is too big, her hairstyle, her clothes...” There were a million excuses.

Clearly, Barbra was ahead of her time. She would anticipate the freewheeling fashions of the sixties; she would bring jazz elements into popular singing; she would change many people’s attitudes about what constituted female beauty. And she was in the vanguard of the women’s movement, taking responsibility for her own career and standing up firmly for what she believed before most performers did so. But along the way she had to struggle for everything she got. For every agent or club owner who loved her there were two dozen who didn’t get her at all.

Finally, after every other agent in New York had turned her down, Rozar persuaded Irvin Arthur of Associated Booking Corporation to take Streisand on. Associated Booking at the time handled only personal appearances, and at first Arthur had no more luck than Rozar in landing Barbra a job. As the weeks wore on toward the end of 1960, Barbra, hurting for money, called Arthur every night at eleven-thirty to see if he had anything for her. The answer was always no. She went back to odd jobs, waiting on tables for a few weeks, clerking at a law firm for a few months. Now that she had tasted some measure of success, working in an office galled her.

That New Year’s Eve, Barbra had no date because Barry Dennen was out of town. She called a girlfriend, and the two of them hopped on the Staten Island Ferry. Her friend knew of a club called the Townhouse on the island, and they headed there. When they arrived, Barbra asked to speak to the owner, Joe Darconte. According to Darconte, “She told me her name was Angelina Scarangella and she was from Naples. She said she was a singing star over in Italy and she’d get up and sing if I paid her fifty dollars.

“I looked at her and said, ‘Yeah, right. You’re a Jew from Brooklyn!’ Then I asked if she really could sing, because it so happened I was short an act that night. So I told her, ‘Sure, get up there and show me what you can do.’

“She sang about four songs, and of course she was great, but I had a problem. The girl she had come in with was black. This was a time when there was a lot of racial tension, and I could feel rumblings among the crowd. So I got Barbra’s attention in the middle of the fourth song and made a cutting gesture across my throat—eight bars and off!

“She didn’t think I was gonna pay her, but I gave her the fifty dollars and the two of them took off.”