The taxi carrying Barbra and Bob Schulenberg barreled toward Pennsylvania Station. It was February 19, 1961, and she was late to catch the Empire State Express train that would take her out of the Northeast for the first time. Irvin Arthur had gotten her a booking, sight unseen and mostly on his own reputation, at the Back Room at the elegant Caucus Club restaurant-nightclub in Detroit. She’d been a nervous wreck, one moment exhilarated by the prospect of repeating her Bon Soir triumph, the next moment terrified of being alone in a strange city so far from home.

Suddenly, with only minutes to spare, she told Schulenberg they’d have to stop at a drugstore. “Barbra, we can’t stop, you’ll miss the train,” Bob protested. “What could you possibly have to get now?”

“Do you think they have toothpaste in Detroit,” she asked.

Thirty hours later, and just four hours before she was to begin her performance, Barbra showed up at the office of Ross Chapman, the booking agent for the club. “She had a big stack of dog-eared music under her arm,” Chapman recalled, “and she looked—weird is the best word. Her hair needed combing, and her clothes I can’t describe.”

Chapman asked Barbra how old she was. “I’ll be nineteen in April,” she replied. Chapman flinched. Under Michigan law, performers in cabarets had to be twenty-one. “You’ll have to lie about your age,” Chapman told her. Then he asked her to step into a side room and go over her material with Matt Michaels, the Back Room’s pianist. About ten minutes later Michaels returned, his face ashen. “My God, Ross,” he whispered. “That broad only knows four songs.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl who looked more unqualified to be a singer in an intimate room,” Michaels recalled. “All she needed was a broomstick. She told us she’d worked eleven weeks at the Bon Soir in New York. I didn’t believe it. When we asked her what she’d done with only four songs, she said she’d done the same songs every show.” Ross Chapman reminded Barbra that she had four sets to do every night, and told her she’d need at least eleven songs. “How are you going to learn all those songs by nine tonight?” he asked.

“I’m a fast learner,” Barbra replied.

Over the next three hours Michaels taught her seven tunes. “Because she didn’t read music, I’d simply play the songs over and over... and she’d learn ’em. So she knew the songs, but it took another two or three weeks for her to put her own stamp on them.”

Barbra checked into her room at the Henrose Hotel, changed for the show, and turned up at the Caucus Club a few minutes before she was due to perform. Sam Gruber, the co-owner of the club with his brother Les, looked at her in horror. “She showed up for that first show wearing a turtleneck sweater and black pants. We had to send her home to put on a dress.” When she began her performance, Ross Chapman was certain he had made a big mistake. “She had no poise whatever,” he recalled. “She sat on a bar stool to sing, with her legs spread out like a cello player.” But of course she had that voice, and by the end of the evening Barbra had won over the audience.

She was habitually late for her shows; her usual excuse was that she couldn’t get a cab, even though her hotel was two blocks from the club. One night she scrambled in so late she had no time to change, so she sang in snow boots and a monkey fur coat. She told her audiences that she was born in Turkey and had taken belly dancing lessons. After her shows, whenever anyone offered to buy her a drink, she’d say she preferred to have a pastrami and Swiss cheese sandwich. She flirted shamelessly with an obviously married man, the handsome, six-foot-three-inch Stan Rosenberg. One night she joined Max Fisher, a wealthy steel magnate, at his table, and during the course of the conversation she asked him, “Why don’t you give me ten thousand dollars to help my career?” Fisher just laughed.

As kooky and offhand as Barbra could seem, Matt Michaels was impressed by her capacity for work. “She worked harder than any girl I’ve ever met. People would comment on the innate grace of her hands. A lot of it was instinct, but I saw her work in front of a mirror four and five hours a day perfecting her gestures.” Despite her dedication, Michaels doubted Barbra would go very far “because of her attitude, her belligerence. If she didn’t like the way the audience was listening, she’d walk out. One time, when people were too noisy for her, she told them, ‘Goddammit, shut up!’”

The process of working with Barbra on her material often angered Michaels. “She’d always want to change things after we’d set them. She was never satisfied. I worked with her three or four hours a day three or four times a week for six weeks. And she would insist on her way, whether it was right or wrong. She didn’t really know very much, but she had opinions like she did. She was tough to get along with.”

And yet, Michaels discovered, she had a thin skin when confronted. “There was a bass player who used to come in and play for us once in a while if he happened to be in town, just for kicks. One night he came in and she was late, and he chewed her out. He said, ‘You know, I’m comin’ in to play for nothing, and the least you can do is be on time.’ Well, Barbra started to cry. She was tough in many ways, but very sensitive, too.”

AT THE END of her first week in Detroit, Barbra made her radio singing debut on a local program, The Jack Harris Show. She giggled nervously throughout the broadcast and later said she thought she’d made “a first class fool of myself.” Four days later she appeared on another local radio show, Guest House, hosted by Bud Guest. She didn’t sing, but she did tell Guest that her dress was “a little sofa number” she had made from the upholstery off a couch her mother had discarded. When Guest misspelled her name Strysand, she told him she liked it that way.

Betty Paysner was the publicist for the Caucus Club, and she recalled that Barbra “talked about changing her name. She wanted to spell it Strysand.” For a time, in fact, she did spell it that way; when she made her network television debut soon thereafter, TV Guide listed her as Barbra Strysand.

As often happens in show business, Barbra had to go all the way to Detroit before she got booked on her first television show in New York. Ted Rozar had persuaded Orson Bean, who had seen Barbra at the Bon Soir, to book her on the late-night Jack Paar program while Bean was doing a one-week stint as substitute host. Barbra didn’t have the money to fly back east, so Les Gruber, eager for the publicity the TV appearance would give his club, took up a collection among the regular customers in order to send her off.

The Paar show was the premier late night showcase at the time. Broadcast nationwide, it was quite an auspicious place to make one’s television debut—which Barbra did on Wednesday night, April 5, 1961. Wearing a simple black cocktail dress and appearing as thin as a sylph even with the illusion of extra weight television cameras create, Barbra sang “A Sleepin’ Bee” and “When the Sun Comes Out,” then she joined Phyllis Diller, Gore Vidal, Albert Dekker, and Hugh Downs on the panel. “This is so exciting,” she gushed, her arms flailing, her eyes sweeping across the studio. “I just can’t tell you. All these people and cameras and lights—and people! Oh!”

She then plugged both the Caucus Club and the Grubers’ other place, the London Chop House (“I was so delighted,” said Les Gruber, “that when she came back I gave her a big kiss and a hundred dollars”), and added that she had been “clothed by the Robinson Furniture Company in Detroit. I’m the original Castro Convertible—movable parts.”

SAM AND LES Gruber had extended Barbra’s gig at the Caucus Club from two weeks to eight and increased her salary to $200 a week, and during her sojourn in Detroit she had made friends. Neil Wolfe, the pianist in the Caucus Club’s front room, took her horseback riding and golfing. Arno Hirsch, a critic for the Detroit Times, helped her get her first driver’s license, from the state of Michigan. Doris Gershenson also took Barbra under her wing. “She would come to our house quite often. She was the biggest eater I ever saw. One time we were baking cookies. She ran in and ate the whole batch before they were cool from the oven.”

Barbra cadged cookies and stuffed herself whenever food was offered her because she still had very little money to buy food of her own. Her hotel room rent, commissions, and personal expenses used up most of her salary every week. One day Fred Sweet, the manager of the Telenews Theater, looked out his window and saw Barbra, whom he recognized from the Caucus Club, standing along Woodward Street thumbing a ride. He went downstairs, and she told him she didn’t have cab fare to get to the Art Institute. “Why don’t you take the bus.”

“I don’t have enough money to take a bus either,” Barbra replied. Sweet gave her a few dollars, and when he told the story to Ross Chapman, he added, “Ross, she looked like she needed a bath.”

BARBRA COMPLETED HER Caucus Club engagement on April 15; two days later she opened at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, where she shared the bill with a comedy team called the Smothers Brothers. “They became her surrogate family on the road,” Bob Schulenberg recalled, and before long Barbra and Tommy, the silly one, began a brief romance. According to Jay Landesman, owner of the Crystal Palace, “Barbra lost her cherry to Tommy Smothers, of all people.” (Landesman apparently didn’t know about Roy Scott or Barry Dennen. )

During Barbra’s engagement, Landesman recalled, “I created a little revue-type format for the brothers, and Barbra began to do their sort of patter between her numbers. Her raps went on as long as my introductions. I thought her heavy Jewish material distracted from the mood and delivery of the subtle songs that followed.” Landesman called Barbra into his office and told her to cut the patter. “But I get so bored doing the same thing every night,” she replied.

“You’ve been in the business two weeks and you’re bored already!” an astonished Landesman replied.

By now Barbra was not only bored but homesick. Being away from New York, she wrote Schulenberg, was “strange. I’m sort of depressed. Forgive me.” Bob called her, and the two of them talked for nine hours. “She had such a vulnerability. She could seem hard, but she was really just trying to protect herself. She was just trying to keep things going.”

On that score, Barbra was doing all right. She gave her last performance in St. Louis on Monday, May 8, and the next day flew back to New York. That night she opened her second stint at the Bon Soir, this time behind two comedians, Renee Taylor and Phil Leeds. Barbra shared a tiny dressing room with Taylor, and one pair of stockings. Barbra would slip into them, do her act, come back to the dressing room, slip them off, and return them to Renee. They reversed the procedure for the second set.

On opening night, Phil Leeds invited a friend of his to see his act. Marty Erlichman was a dark-haired, Bronx-born, boxily built, quintessentially New York personal manager who represented the Irish folk singers the Clancy Brothers. Erlichman never got to see his friend perform. “I was just mesmerized by Barbra,” Erlichman recalled. “She sang five songs, and I got chills on all five of them. And everyone in the place was enchanted too, except for the rest of the people at my table, who were industry people. They started talking to each other in the middle of her first song. And one of them, an agent, said to me after the first number, ‘Boy, that girl has a lot to learn—you don’t open with a ballad.’ That was a problem in Barbra’s life. When you initiate, when you’re different, most of the world is frightened of it and doesn’t understand it.”

When Barbra completed her set, Erlichman rushed backstage and found her next to the coffee urn in the Bon Soir’s kitchen. He told her how wonderful he thought she was and wound up talking with her until she had to go on again. He missed Phil Leeds’s act in the process. “I told her, ‘Barbra, the first time out of the box, you’re going to win every award that this business has to offer—the Tony, the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar.’ She looked at me and said, ‘The Oscar?’ and I said, ‘That’s going to be the biggest one, because you’re going to be the biggest movie star of them all.’ She giggled and said, ‘I think I’m going to be a star, too.’”

Barbra liked Erlichman’s direct—some would say gruff—manner, so akin to hers. He asked her if she had a manager. She told him she was unhappy with Ted Rozar, who wouldn’t accompany her on the road because he had a wife and young children, but that she had a contract with him. Her agency was always telling her, Marty later said, “to change your nose, change your clothes, and stop singing those cockamamie songs.” She asked Erlichman if he would suggest she change anything about herself. He replied, “Not a thing,” then offered to work for her for a year without commission in order to prove himself. Barbra liked that, and she told Erlichman that if she could wrangle out of her contract with Rozar, he could be her manager.

BARBRA CONTINUED TO give a lot of thought to her act, and to her audiences. She wondered whether she needed to explain where a new song came from in order for the audience to enjoy it fully. She plotted to vex the customers by whispering something to just one side of the audience. She told Jimmy Daniels she wanted to be introduced as “the ugly, untalented, lousy Barbra Streisand.” She came up with a withering put-down for a heckler: “I’d tell you to shut your mouth but it might ruin your sex life.”

She talked to Barry about singing songs as theater characters she wanted to play—Juliet, Ophelia, the young girl in The Rose Tattoo—and about putting together an act in which she would begin the set as a little girl and end it as a jaded woman. She worried, though, that she wouldn’t be able to pull off the older woman because of her youth.

As it turned out, Barbra was soon able to sing torch songs with hard-earned personal conviction—thanks to Barry Dennen. According to Bob Schulenberg, while Barbra lived with Barry he treated her “like a second-class citizen.” Dennen told her not to answer the phone because he didn’t want anyone in his family to know they were living together, and the doorman thought Barbra was Barry’s cousin.

The relationship began to unravel in May of 1961 when Dennen went back to California to visit his family. Barbra hadn’t been able to speak with him for the entire time he was away, and she missed him badly. The night he was due to return, she and Bob planned an elaborate welcome-home celebration. They bought champagne and all of his favorite foods, and left a note for him: “Eat up, we’ll be back after the show.”

When Barbra finished her last set at the Bon Soir she rushed home, thrilled that she would see Barry again after so long. He wasn’t there. “She worried that he’d missed the plane.” Bob recalled, “but she couldn’t call his family.” They sat up until three in the morning, but there was no call from Barry. “This had to be so hard on her,” Schulenberg said. “She planned this joyous welcome, and then nothing.”

Dennen’s absence, and his silence, continued for a week, during which Bob felt “Barbra ate up all her emotion for Barry.” When he finally returned, she adopted a defensive coolness toward him. A few weeks later Schulenberg figured the romance was really over when Barry had a group of male friends over to the apartment while Barbra visited her mother. One of the men riffled through a closet, put on some of Barbra’s clothes, and started to imitate her singing “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.”

“Barry was laughing,” Schulenberg recalled, “and I thought, You schmuck! Those are her clothes! I thought Barry should have gotten up and punched the guy in the nose. So I wondered, Can this relationship survive? And the answer I came up with was no.” In his memoir of his time with Barbra, Barry offers another reason for their break-up: she found him in bed with another man.

Barbra carried bitterness toward Barry for some time, and she used it for her biting rendition of “Cry Me a River.” Schulenberg could tell the minute he heard it that “Barbra was singing about Barry—all that bitterness and anger—‘Now you say you’re sorry!’ I mean, she’s not acting in that song, she’s feeling it.”

BARBRA’S BON SOIR engagement extended through June 6, but once the gig lapsed, she got no new job offers. Most of the booking agents approached on her behalf had never seen her perform, and they repeated the usual litany of complaints about her. Her income had dried up, and after the breakup with Barry she had no place to live. She went back home to Brooklyn for a few weeks, but she couldn’t stand her mother’s harping about how she should get a steady job, something she could count on, not this on-again-off-again nightclub nonsense.

She fled back to Manhattan and spent the night wherever she could, most often in friends’ apartments, where she usually slept on the couch. Sometimes, if someone else had beaten her to the available bed, she slept on the floor or in the bathtub. Finally she paid $12.95 at a Whelan Drug Store for a cot, which she lugged around with her everywhere she went. That way, no matter where she crashed, she could sleep on a bed of her own. For a time a friend let her sleep in his office, but she had to wait until the place was closed before she could come in and had to be out again by eight in the morning.

At last Irvin Arthur got her another sight-unseen booking, this one July 3-16 at the Town & Country Club in Winnipeg, Ontario, and a one-month return booking at the Caucus Club to begin on July 17. Meanwhile she needed money so badly she took a job as a switchboard operator at Ben Sackheim, an advertising agency where her brother, Sheldon, worked in the art department. “The regular switchboard operator was away on vacation and Barbra was supposed to take her place,” Sheldon recalled. “Well, for those two weeks none of us could get a call either in or out. Barbra was so bored with the work that she’d talk in these made-up foreign languages to everyone who called.”

Joe Battaglia, the vice president in charge of broadcast advertising for the agency, recalled Barbra as “a moody kid. If she felt like saying good morning, she would. If she didn’t, she’d ignore you. She was a little bit slovenly in her appearance. You looked at her and wondered whether she had bathed that day.”

One morning Sheldon went to Battaglia’s office with a kinescope of Barbra’s appearance on the Paar show, which had cost him $125 to obtain, and asked if he could help Barbra get work. “I’ve had a lot of trouble with her,” Shelly told Battaglia. “She has no home. She’s almost uncontrollable. I can’t make her do anything.” Battaglia said he’d see what he could do. He sent the kinescope to writers he knew at The Steve Allen Show in Hollywood. After a long delay, the response came: They thought Barbra’s voice was “great,” but they considered her “too undisciplined” for prime-time network television.

Battaglia talked Barbra up to a few other people he knew in the business but had no success. Although the results had been disappointing, Battaglia expected that Barbra would express some gratitude for his efforts. She did not. “She was aware that I had made efforts on her behalf with Steve Allen, but she would never thank me. She never so much as came up to me and said, ‘Listen, Joe, thanks for trying.’ Nothing like that at all.”

WHILE SHE PLUGGED calls into the switchboard at Ben Sackheim, Barbra got herself another permanent living situation. She had stayed briefly at a seedy single-room occupancy hotel near the Bon Soir, but now her acting school classmate Elaine Sobel came to the rescue. Elaine had a one-bedroom walk-up on Thirty-fourth Street near Second Avenue, and she offered Barbra her couch in exchange for help with the rent. “It was a lot better than the street or bathtubs,” Elaine said.

Living together created a deep intimacy between Barbra and Elaine. “We spent hours talking about our problems, until early in the morning,” Elaine reminisced. “We were both trying to escape our past. We shared a core of pain that was nonpareil. I would cry, but Barbra wasn’t a crier. Usually we talked about Barbra’s problems. She never took much interest in mine.”

They talked a lot about men. “She’d ask me about guys, but I wasn’t any more sophisticated than she was, fellas-wise. She’d tell me about some guy she liked and she’d ask, ‘Do you think he’s cute?’ It was always more ‘Do you think he’s cute?’ than ‘Do you think he’s talented?’ Barbra used to moan, ‘Will I ever get a guy? Do you think anyone could ever love this face?’” The roommates went to see Jean Genet’s controversial play The Balcony, and Barbra recognized the Executioner as Stanley Beck, who had found her so interesting when they were both at Malden Bridge. She went backstage to see him, and the two began to date. “Barbra told me she couldn’t believe how well built Stanley was,” Elaine recalled, “but she had rather ambivalent feelings toward him. When he was around, she felt she could take him or leave him. But when he was away, she missed him. At any rate, she told me he was so well built that she had bought herself a diaphragm just in case she gave in to temptation.”

Barbra was impressed, too, by an insight into her character that Stanley had shared with her. “Stanley told her that she didn’t like herself,” Elaine recalled, “and that she thus couldn’t accept it when someone else liked her. He said that was why she was attracted to guys who paid no attention to her, because they confirmed that she was nothing. She said to me, ‘Maybe he’s right. I don’t know.’”

Elaine soon discovered that she and Barbra shared an odd phobia, one that might explain why so many people felt Barbra often looked as if she hadn’t bathed. “We both were frightened of taking showers. I found out later that mine came from the Holocaust, from what I’d heard about the gas chambers. Barbra’s fear was of water falling on her head. I don’t know where that came from.”

Elaine’s biggest problems with Barbra revolved around the housekeeping. “Barbra was just not a balebosteh—she wasn’t neat around the house. No domestic talents. She never did any cooking, no, sir. It was always other people’s food and drink.” Elaine also found that Barbra could be “ruthless—in the sense that nothing would stop her. She could be thoughtless toward innocent people. She could be inconsiderate—like not returning calls, or not paying her share of the phone bill on time or not returning my coat that she borrowed. But when she wanted something, it was ‘Pack it, do it, move it, now!”

Barbra and Elaine spent long spells in front of the mirror. “She’d call herself mieskeit and say, ‘Who the hell wants me?’ She’d look at me and say, ‘You’re beautiful, Elaine. Look at your nose!’ I was one of the first people to tell her, ‘Don’t change your nose!’ Barbra was very insecure about who she was. She kept repeating, ‘Ya think this is right? Ya think this is good? Whaddya think?’ Over and over again. I told her that when something touches me deeply I get tingles on my left side. I call it ‘the truth chill.’ And when I heard her hit some notes in the bathroom my left side started to go crazy. I shouted to her, ‘It’s happening, it’s happening!’”

Whenever Barbra sang after that, she would ask Elaine, “Ya gettin’ any tingles?”

BARBRA’S ENGAGEMENT AT Auby Galpern’s Town & Country Club in Winnipeg turned into a disaster. Perhaps because she was so far away from home, Barbra apparently decided to be as outrageous and experimental as possible in Canada. According to Marie Lawrence, a waitress at the club, Barbra came out on opening night in a brashly colored outfit that looked like a sarong, with thongs on her feet, carrying a bongo drum. “She started playing the bongos and was chanting and singing in a foreign language. She would bend her body forward all the way to the floor, with her hair flying up and down with her movements.

“Mr. Galpern went into a frenzy. He could hardly wait for the show to finish. The people just sat there staring at her, almost hypnotized. They were an older Jewish crowd and they didn’t know what to make of her. Mr. Galpern told her that if she didn’t change her style of dress and singing she could take the first transportation back to where she came from. She changed her style after that—sometimes she’d sing Yiddish songs—but Mr. Galpern hardly stayed around to watch any of her performances.”

Gene Telpner, a critic for the Winnipeg Sun, recalled that Galpern “didn’t like the way she dressed, that’s for sure. She wore things that you’d wear when you were cleaning up the house. It was astonishing. That turned a lot of people off. She was poor, she was staying at the YWCA, but Galpern wasn’t a very forgiving type. He kept telling her to get decent clothes, and she just ignored him.”

According to Auby Galpern’s brother Myer, there was more to it than that. “He was being polite later when he said it was her clothes, but really it was her slip. She wore this slip that you could see and it was dirty. She wore it day after day and never cleaned it. He didn’t know how to tell her. Finally he did and she was insulted.”

All might have been forgiven if Barbra had been a bigger hit with her audiences. She told Elaine Sobel that she found Canadians “a sour lot—emotionless and dull.” Still, she envied the girls she met, all of whom seemed to have good relationships with their parents. “I wish I was like that,” she said. “I’m getting very depressed.”

Auby Galpern was eager for an excuse to fire Barbra, and he got it a week into her engagement when she stalked offstage after four songs because the audience wouldn’t quiet down. Galpern told her to pack up her things and leave. Barbra couldn’t believe it. The next day she told Elaine Sobel, “I don’t know if I’m really fired, but I think I am.” She was. This would stand as the only time in her life that Barbra Streisand was dismissed from an entertainment job.

Nine years later, when Barbra was in Ottawa as the guest of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, whom she was dating, a reporter from Winnipeg asked her about her stay there.

“I’ve never been to Winnipeg,” Barbra replied.

“Yes, you have. You sang at Auby Galpern’s Town & Country Club.”

“I’ve never met anyone named Auby Galpern,” she insisted, and turned away.

BARBRA’S THIRD AND last sojourn in Detroit was far more successful; after Winnipeg, the Caucus Club must have seemed to her like a family bosom. She stayed at the Hotel Wolverine, quite a step up from the YWCA, and was welcomed with enthusiasm by old friends and by new fans during her four-week stint between July 17 and August 12.

Barbra wrote to Elaine Sobel from Detroit to ask about something that had left her troubled: she wasn’t sure what was expected of her when a man took her out after the show. Should she invite him to her room? Let him kiss her? Sleep with him? When she did invite a man up, she confessed she didn’t know how to tell him to leave if she decided he wasn’t quite right for her: “I never know when to say when.”

While she was in Detroit, Barbra managed to extricate herself from her contract with Ted Rozar when her agency lent her $700 to “buy him off,” as she put it, although Rozar insists Barbra owed him the money in commissions. Their main problem, Rozar said, was that “she wanted someone who would always be there and act more as a personal assistant than a manager. With Barbra, there was a lot of hand-holding.” She telephoned Marty Erlichman, who was in San Francisco, and told him he had a client. They never signed a contract, and more than fifty years later, with a ten-year separation between 1977 and 1986, Erlichman is still Barbra’s manager.

One sticking point remained with Rozar, however. Barbra had left several suitcases of clothes in his office, and she told friends he was holding them as ransom until he got paid. Rozar insists she was free to pick them up whenever she wanted to: “Her wardrobe wasn’t worth anything at that point!”

Still, Barbra showed up at Rozar’s door, he said, accompanied by “a big fat guy” and told him, “I want my stuff.”

“I guess I was supposed to be intimidated by this goon,” Rozar said. “I just said, ‘Fine, it’s right there.’ I told the guy, ‘I oughta kick your butt outta here.’ And he said, ‘I’m a lawyer, and if you lay a hand on me I’m gonna sue you for five hundred dollars for every time you hit me.’ I just laughed. I could have shot the son of a bitch for trespassing. I don’t know why she felt she had to bring this henchman with her. I’d already been paid.”

TRY AS SHE might, Barbra couldn’t persuade Mike Wallace not to eat smoked foods. It was December 1, and she was making her fifth appearance on P. M. East, Wallace’s late-night East Coast talk-variety show. Since her first guest stint on the show in June, Barbra had become its resident eccentric, spouting off amusingly on everything from the evils of milk to the benefits of Zen Buddhism. That she could also stagger the audience with the purity and power of her voice quickly made her one of Wallace’s most popular guests. In New York, gay bars offered two-for-one drink nights whenever she appeared on the show, and Wallace’s ratings swelled nationwide as well. Between June 1961 and June 1962 she appeared on the show thirteen times—five times in one five-week period. On various shows she sang a duet with Mickey Rooney (“I Wish I Were in Love Again”); confronted David Susskind, who had been an agent, over the fact that he had kept her waiting in his office and never granted her an interview; debated the merits of fallout shelters; sang “Ding-Dong, the Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz; and kibbitzed with Eartha Kitt and Katharine Anne Porter.

The smoked foods controversy erupted during a party-themed show on which Woody Allen, the actor Paul Dooley, and the trombone-playing nightclub singer Lillian Briggs were also guests. Wallace’s co-host, Joyce Davidson, had prepared an elaborate spread of food, most of which, Barbra protested, could kill you. She knew the health food pioneer Robert Rodale and sometimes slept in his office. She had taken to heart many of his warnings about the health risks posed by much of the food Americans ate. One Streisand fan’s audiotape of the show preserves the dialogue for posterity:

BARBRA: I’ll tell you, I’m very hungry.... Oh, wait a minute! Wait a minute! Don’t you understand? They’re all smoked foods. You’re not allowed to eat that stuff! [Laughter from the others.] Don’t eat it, I’m telling you!

MIKE WALLACE: Aw, c’mon, you used to buy it all the time. It looks wonderful.

BARBRA: No, you wanna hear something? The highest cancer rate is in Iceland. [More laughs] No, wait a minute. People think there’s nothing doing up in Iceland. Did you know there was a big medical university in Iceland?

JOYCE DAVIDSON: Eat the sandwich.

BARBRA: It’s a fact. Up in Iceland there’s a big medical university, and they made tests on these things.... A lot of people in Iceland don’t have refrigerators, so they have to smoke the food. They can’t eat raw meat. They gotta smoke—

PAUL DOOLEY: No cigarettes?

BARBRA: Cut it out! Don’t you care if you die or not?

WOODY ALLEN: Streisand’s a little sick, folks.

BARBRA: You know what happens? They get a lot of cancer up there in Iceland.

LILLIAN BRIGGS: From what?

BARBRA: Smoked foods!

WALLACE: Barbra, why don’t you sing?

MARTY ERLICHMAN DIDN’T take long to prove himself to Barbra. From the outset it was clear that he was willing to devote all his energies to the care and feeding of the Streisand career and to hold her hand as much as necessary to keep her on an even keel. And he took no guff from anybody about Barbra. When Abel Greene, the influential owner of the show business bible Variety, wrote that Streisand should consider “a schnoz bob,” Marty hit the roof. Against all advice, he called Greene. “Would you do that to your own daughter?” he railed at the startled publisher. “You can say nose job or have the nose fixed, but where do you come off saying ‘schnoz bob’? It’s vulgar and tasteless.” Greene apologized, but not in print.

Erlichman had very little money and no office. Barbra later said that his headquarters was a phone booth on Fifty-third Street and his capital was a pocketful of dimes. She was only half joking. What Erlichman did have in abundance was belief in Streisand and a willingness to pound the pavement day and night to get the word out about her. Perhaps an even more important contribution of Marty’s to Barbra’s career was his insistence that she deserved only the best. “I always treated Barbra like a star,” he recalled, “not by giving her limousines but by making decisions for her as if she were a star, not settling, but demanding the best treatment for her by everyone.”

Erlichman felt Barbra was overdue to move up from the Bon Soir to one of the classier uptown Manhattan nightspots. One of the poshest was Herbert Jacoby’s Blue Angel on Fifty-fifth Street near Third Avenue, a gleaming den of sophistication with a red-carpeted entrance where celebrities like Tallulah Bankhead, Beatrice Lillie, and Truman Capote came to hear Pearl Bailey, Eartha Kitt, Johnny Mathis, and other top-notch performers.

Barbra had already auditioned for Jacoby on March 27, but he had found her “too weird” for his tastes. Late in August Marty started to badger him to give Barbra another look, and finally he relented. In September she auditioned again, with toned-down material and a dressed-up look. This time Jacoby liked what he saw, and he scheduled Barbra for a two-week engagement beginning that November.

STILL, WHAT SHE really wanted was to get back on a theater stage. After several rejections, Marty got her an audition for Another Evening with Harry Stoones, an irreverent, wacky off-Broadway revue with music written by Jeff Harris, a brash twenty-five-year-old newcomer, and partially backed by Guys and Dolls composer Frank Loesser. Harris already had as his star Diana Sands, the beautiful actress who had scored a major hit on Broadway as the feisty daughter in A Raisin in the Sun. “It was an anti-revue,” Harris recalled. “All the sketches kind of made fun of everything.”

Harris and his director, G. Adam Jordan, asked Barbra to audition twice. “Both times she came in with Marty Erlichman,” Harris recalled. “Marty wore the same suit to both auditions; it had a hole in the left sleeve.” Barbra’s singing greatly impressed Harris. “She certainly was hot, clearly talented, and very different.” Abba Bogin, the show’s musical director, found Barbra’s voice “startling” and her personality “funny, kooky. You asked her something and she answered funny. It was perfect for the show.”

Still, Harris and Jordan turned her down at first. They saw her as a singer, not as an actress, and the show had a limited number of songs, most of them earmarked for Susan Belink, who went on to renown as the opera singer Susan Belling. The rest of the cast—Dom DeLuise, Sheila Copelan, Virgil Curry, Kenny Adams, and Ben Keller in addition to Diana Sands—were all primarily straight or comic actors.

The auditions continued for a fourth girl to round out the cast, but Harris and Jordan found they couldn’t keep the memory of Barbra Streisand from gnawing at their minds. Finally they called her in for a second audition, and she impressed them so much once again that Harris decided that if his show didn’t have enough songs for Barbra Streisand to sing, he’d just have to write a few more. Abba Bogin recalled that they told Marty Erlichman on the spot that they wanted Barbra, “and we told him what the deal was. The deal was terrible. This was off Broadway. There was practically no money involved. [Barbra would be paid $37.50 a week.] But it was a chance for her to do something in an important revue, a chance to be seen.”

When Barbra arrived for the first day of rehearsals at the Gramercy Arts Theater on East Twenty-seventh Street the second week of September, she was so nervous she vomited in the ladies’ room. As rehearsals got under way, Bogin discovered that Barbra “had no theatrical discipline at all. She always showed up late. The stage manager would admonish her, and she’d say, ‘I couldn’t get here’ or ‘I overslept’ or something like that. But she’d also say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be ready,’ and she always was.”

Harry Stoones featured thirty-eight sketches, songs, and comic blackouts that ran the gamut from sophomoric to brilliant. Fourteen featured Barbra, including three solo numbers, two of which (“Jersey” and “Value”) Harris wrote specifically for her. In “Jersey” she lamented the fact that her boyfriend had left New York and moved to the deep, dark wilds of the Garden State. “It was a full-blast jungle number right from a movie,” Harris explained. “She worries about all the dangers that can befall you in Jersey, and there are native jungle rhythms. She resolves to go after him—even though she may die—and bring him out.” At the end of the song, Barbra sang, “I won’t yell, I won’t scream, I won’t squawk—because it’s better to die together in Jersey than be single in New Yawk.”

In “Value” she comically compares the finances and automobiles of her two rich boyfriends, Harold Mengert and Arnie Fleischer. Another tune had her singing nothing but “I’ve got the blues, I’ve got the blues, boy, do I have the blues” over and over again for three minutes until finally she announces, “Now I feel better.”

In her comic sketches, Barbra played a klutzy ballet-dancing Wendy in a Peter Pan spoof, an Indian maiden during Columbus’s discovery of America, and a mousy secretary sitting through boring dictation until she stands up, looks amorously at her boss, played by Dom DeLuise, and drops her skirt. Another sketch, “Big Barry,” takes place in the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms of a high school. Ace, a macho jock, is bragging to his friend Jimbo and a nerdy little fellow, Barry, about his conquest of the night before. In the girls’ room, Tina and Jo Jo are waxing poetic about their romances while mousy Nancy, played by Barbra, listens quietly. Finally mousy Nancy and nerdy Barry meet in the hallway. “Barry,” Nancy whispers, “I’m pregnant.”

Another Evening with Hairy Stoones opened on Sunday evening, October 21, 1961, after five weeks of rehearsals and two weeks of previews. For the opening sketch, “Carnival in Capri,” the entire cast rushed onstage, called out “Hello, Good-bye, and Thanks,” and rushed off again as the lights went out. It was an unfortunately appropriate bit, because the show never had another performance. The Monday morning reviews in The New York Times (“not exactly unbearable if nonetheless none too stimulating”) and the Herald Tribune (“callow... too predictable to be inspired”) were enough to kill the precariously financed show before later positive reviews appeared in The New Yorker, Women’s Wear Daily, and elsewhere.

Barbra’s reviews were uniformly good. “Barbra Streisand is a slim, offbeat, deadpan comedienne with an excellent flair for dropping a dour blackout gag,” Variety’s reviewer wrote. Michael Smith in the Village Voice felt that “Barbra Streisand can put across a lyric melody and make fine fun of herself at the same time.”

After the show, Jeff Harris had scheduled a potluck party for the company in his Riverside Drive apartment. “Everybody came except Barbra. It was a real downer because of the notices. Everybody left and I got ready for bed. The doorbell rang, and it was Barbra. She brought a loaf of rye bread, and she was so proud because it had been freshly baked and sliced. That was the level of affluence we all shared at that point. I had to explain to her that the party was over—in more ways than one.”

ON NOVEMBER 16, Barbra opened fourth on the bill at the Blue Angel. When she arrived at the club that Thursday night, Herbert Jacoby stressed to her that she needed to be sophisticated—she wasn’t in Greenwich Village any longer. “Don’t worry, I’m sophisticated,” Barbra told him. “I’m gonna close with a Cole Porter number.”

Decked out in a simple black cocktail dress, Barbra certainly looked more sophisticated than she had at the Bon Soir. But the Cole Porter number, it turned out, was the outrageous ditty “Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking” from Aladdin, a show written for television’s DuPont Show of the Month. Barbra sang frenetically of that weird emporium where one could buy “gizzard cakes, lizard cakes, pickled eels, pickled snakes, almost anything.”

As ever, her beautiful voice and her kooky material captivated her audiences. Barbra was a smash hit at the Blue Angel, and Jacoby extended her two-week engagement to four. Her success there proved that Streisand could appeal to chic audiences as much as she had to largely gay crowds and those in the vanguard of hip.

Pleased as she was by her latest breakthrough on the nitery circuit, Barbra still had her sights securely focused on the stage. On the morning of the day she opened at the Blue Angel, she walked into an audition for I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a Broadway musical to be presented by David Merrick, the red-hot producer of Gypsy and many other smash hits.

That audition would make its way into theatrical legend and result not only in Barbra’s first Broadway show but in her marriage as well. It would also mark the beginning of one of the most phenomenal rises to superstardom in show business history.