A voice boomed out “Miss Barbra Streisand” as she walked across the stage of the St. James Theater under the harsh glow of a bare-bulb work light. She wore a mottled honey-colored 1920s caracul coat trimmed with thick fox fur at the knees and neck, which she had bought for ten dollars. Her feet were adorned by smudged tennis shoes; her unwashed hair spilled out in tangles from beneath her wool knit cap. Vigorously she smacked on her chewing gum.

She carried a bright red plastic case stuffed with sheet music, and as she approached the piano she dropped the briefcase. It landed with a thud and burst open, spilling sheet music at the feet of Peter Daniels, her accompanist. “Oh, dear!” she exclaimed, and pounced on the mess. When she swooped down, her bag fell off her shoulder, and the strap got tangled up in the sleeve of the coat. Finally she got it together and turned to the amused audience—the show’s director, Arthur Laurents; its author, Jerome Weidman; and its composer, Harold Rome. As Weidman recalled the scene in 1963, Barbra told them, “Listen, my name’s Barbra Streisand. With only two a’s. In the first name, I mean. I figure that third a in the middle, who needs it. What would ya like me to do?”

At first they had thought, Oh, God, here comes another loser, but by now they were laughing out loud. This girl was captivating, a real character. “Whaddaya, dead or something? I said, what would you like me to do?”

“Can you sing?” Laurents asked.

“Can I sing?” She rolled her eyes toward the work light and back again. “If I couldn’t sing, would I have the nerve to come out here in a thing like this coat?”

“Okay, then, sing.”

“Sing!” She turned to the work light as if to say, Can you believe this? “Even a jukebox you don’t just say ‘Sing.’ You gotta first punch a button with the name of a song on it! What should I sing?”

“Sing anything.”

Barbra turned to Peter Daniels. “Play that one on top.” Then she turned back to the seats, where assorted assistants watched along with the principals, and Marty Erlichman sat alone, eight rows back. “Listen,” she called out. “I’m real tired. I got ta bed real late last night. Can I do this sittin’ on that chair over there.” She pointed to a secretarial chair on wheels.

“Sure, whatever you want,” Laurents replied.

“Great!” She plopped herself onto the chair, took off her shoes, pulled the wad of gum out of her mouth, and stuck it underneath the seat. By now everyone was fairly helpless with laughter. Then she launched into “Value,” comparing the cars and bankbooks of Harold Mengert and Arnie Fleischer while she careened across the stage on casters. When she was done, Laurents, Weidman, and Rome burst into applause. “It may not have been the funniest song ever written,” Weidman recalled, “but it certainly came out that way when filtered through Miss Streisand’s squint, fur coat, gestures, and vocal cords.”

Still laughing, Laurents asked her, “Do you have a ballad?”

“Do I have a ballad.” By the time she finished the haunting, plaintive “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair,” the I Can Get It for You Wholesale creative team’s jaws were slack. Harold Rome leaned over to Arthur Laurents and whispered, “Isn’t she something?”

“She’s terrific,” Laurents agreed. “But what can we do with her? She’s not right for the ingenue, and Miss Marmelstein’s fifty years old.”

“Maybe Miss Marmelstein doesn’t have to be fifty years old,” Rome mused. “The way this girl looks, people would believe her as a spinster. She could be any age.”

Laurents thought a few moments. “Let’s have her back for Merrick to take a look.” He asked Barbra if she could return that afternoon.

“Gee, I don’t know.” She shielded her eyes and sought out Marty Erlichman. “Marty, what time’s my hair appointment?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Ya see, I gotta get my hair done because I’m opening tonight at the Blue Angel. I’m singing there. Maybe you’ll come and see me.”

Finally she promised to be back at four, and after she left, Arthur Laurents asked his assistant, Ashley Feinstein, to check under Barbra’s chair for the wad of gum. As he had suspected, there was none. “She had the gift of thinking something out and then, when she did it, making it look spontaneous,” Laurents said.

When Barbra returned, the first thing she asked was how everyone liked her hair. All agreed it looked smashing. This time David Merrick was in the audience, and Barbra sang five songs. Afterward she said to Marty, “I don’t think they liked me.” Everyone had liked her just fine, except Merrick. He thought she was ugly, he told Laurents, and “too weird.”

Laurents, Rome, and Weidman did go to the Blue Angel that night, without Merrick, and they asked Barbra to audition four more times, all the while trying to convince Merrick she was right for the part. Finally, the producer yielded to the judgment of his creative team, and on the day after Thanksgiving they told her she would be their Miss Marmelstein. Barbra Streisand, at last, would make her Broadway debut in a top-flight production at a salary of $150 a week. “Oh, goody!” she exclaimed. “Now I can get a telephone.”

BASED ON JEROME WEIDMAN’S 1937 novel, I Can Get It for You Wholesale tells the story of brash, opportunistic Harry Bogen and his rise to the top of the garment industry in the late 1930s. Along the way he strains his relationships with his mother, his partner, and his girlfriend. As a new David Merrick musical, the show was virtually assured of success—in 1960 Merrick had six hit shows running simultaneously. Arthur Laurents had written the librettos for two of Broadway’s biggest recent hits, Gypsy and West Side Story; this show would mark his debut as a director. Harold Rome, a twenty-five-year Broadway veteran, had more than doubled the existing record for the longest-running Broadway show in 1937 with the 1, 108 performances of his sprightly paean to unions in the garment trade, Pins and Needles.

Cast in the pivotal role of Harry Bogen was twenty-three-year-old Elliott Gould, whose previous career height had been kicks in the choruses of Rumple, Say, Darling, and Irma la Douce. Rounding out the cast were Lillian Roth as Bogen’s mother, Jack Kruschen as his boss, Marilyn Cooper as his girlfriend, and Sheree North as a hooker he keeps on the side.

On the first day of rehearsals, as Barbra sat in a half circle with the other actors for the initial reading of the play, Jerome Weidman noticed that she seemed preoccupied with something she was writing. When the reading ended, she rushed over to David Powers, the show’s press agent, thrust a piece of paper at him, and began an animated discussion of her effort. Weidman ambled over, and Powers handed it to him. “Look what this dame gives me.”

Powers had asked the cast members to compose their biographical notes for Playbill, the theater program magazine, and what Barbra wrote left him skeptical: “Barbra Streisand is nineteen, was born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon, educated at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and appeared off Broadway in a one-nighter called Another Evening with Harry Stoones.... She is not a member of Actors’ Studio.”

“Was it hot in Madagascar?” Weidman recalled he asked Barbra.

“How the hell should I know,” she replied. “I’ve never been to the damn place.”

“That’s my point,” Powers sputtered. “It’s a phony. Nobody reading that will believe you.”

“What the hell do I care? I’m so sick and tired of being born in Brooklyn, I could plotz. Whad I do? Sign a contract I gotta be born in Brooklyn? Every day the same thing? No change? No variety? Why get born? Every day the same thing, you might as well be dead.”

After a protracted struggle, Barbra got her bogus bio published in Playbill. It made a little piece of theater history and added to Streisand’s growing reputation as a kook. As with most of her apparent madnesses, though, there was method behind it. “I figured the audience would read it before I came on and notice me more,” she had reasoned. “I played the part of a Brooklyn girl. How boring it would have been to say I was from Brooklyn.”

As rehearsals progressed, the Wholesale company learned that Barbra Streisand was anything but boring. At times she drove Arthur Laurents to distraction with her behavior, often the opposite of what one would expect from a young actress getting her first big break. For one thing, she repeatedly arrived late for rehearsals and out-of-town performances, and harsh admonishments from the stage manager and Laurents didn’t solve the problem. Finally, during the Broadway run, after she had been officially late thirty-eight times, Merrick filed a complaint against her with Actors’ Equity. The newspaper columnist Sidney Fields reported that as Barbra prepared to appear before the Equity board she asked him what he thought of “an elaborate set of alibis she’d prepared to excuse her tardiness.” Fields advised her not to lie but to apologize and promise never to do it again. And that, presumably, is what she did.

Elaine Sobel recalled the reason for at least one of Barbra’s latenesses. “She had a meeting with David Merrick. She was sitting at our dressing table staring into the mirror. I said, ‘Barbra, you’re gonna be late. You can’t keep a man like David Merrick waiting.’ She just said, ‘Yeah, I know. He’ll wait.’”

BARBRA WAS DETERMINED to create her Miss Marmelstein entirely on her own. “I listened to what they wanted me to do,” she recalled, “and I argued. I almost got fired, but I did it the way I wanted to, finally. I didn’t want help.”

A serious disagreement between Arthur Laurents and Barbra arose around her one solo musical number, “Miss Marmelstein,” the comic lament of a drudge whom no one ever calls “bubelah” or “passion pie.” Barbra wanted to do it sitting in a secretarial chair, just as she had when she sang “Value” at her audition. Laurents preferred that she stand while she delivered the number, but when she rehearsed it for the first time she grabbed the chair, settled herself into it, and started to sing before Laurents could stop her. When she finished, he told her to do it again—on her feet this time.

Her second performance was perfunctory, and Laurents exploded in anger. He dressed her down in front of the cast, and Jerome Weidman recalled that his heart went out to her. “There she sat, head down, her face concealed by that curtain of tumbled hair, her hands making small twitching motions in her lap. The sight of Miss Streisand’s suffering filled me with so much pity and horror that I could neither speak nor move.”

Finally it was over, and after Laurents left, Weidman recalled he walked over to Barbra and said, “I’m sorry, kid.”

“Listen, Jerry,” she said, “whaddaya think of this?” Her hands had been twitching while she scratched a pencil across a diagram of a new apartment she had just rented. “Here’s where I wanna put the couch,” she said without looking up, “but the fireplace is all the way over here on this wall. Where the hell would you put the couch.”

At that moment Weidman decided that Barbra possessed the vital ingredient for success: “She was made of copper tubing.”

She wasn’t, of course, but she’d be damned if she’d let anybody see her uncertainty, her vulnerability, her fear. And no matter what, she had made up her mind that if she felt something was right for her, she wouldn’t let anyone talk her out of it. Not a producer, not a director. No one. She was too afraid of failure to do something that went against her instincts. “The reason I talked back to the director was that I sincerely felt I’d be better off walking out of the show if I couldn’t play the character my own way. I just didn’t care what happened. I could go out and work in a nightclub again.”

As the rehearsal came to an end, Barbra ran around handing out slips of paper to anyone who would take one. “I just got a phone installed in my new apartment,” she announced. “Call me.” That night the telephone rang just once. A male voice on the other end of the line said, “You asked for somebody to call, so I called. I just wanted to say you were brilliant today. This is Elliott Gould.” Before Barbra could say anything, he had hung up. Later Gould would say that when he watched her perform “Miss Marmelstein,” she had reminded him of his mother.

IT WAS DURING out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia that the company first noticed something was going on between Barbra and the show’s tall, dark, handsome, and teddy-bearish leading man. Wilma Curley, a dancer in the chorus, recalled that Barbra frequently made her entrance from the wrong side of the stage, which would put the other actors off kilter. “Harold Lang [a cast member] would go to a door and call for Miss Marmelstein, and she’d come in from the opposite side. He got pretty annoyed because it would throw his timing and staging off.”

After a while the company realized that Barbra’s errant entrances were always made from the direction of Elliott Gould’s dressing room, the side of the stage opposite hers. “It was like, ‘Ah, she’s in Elliott’s dressing room,’” Wilma recalled. “We were a little surprised, because he had been dating Marilyn Cooper. Marilyn wasn’t very pleased when Barbra stepped in. She said to me, ‘I really like this guy, but Barbra’s out to get him.’ And of course she did get him.”

Barbra hadn’t liked Elliott initially, and he had been too shy to ask her out at first. But he would sometimes walk her to the subway after rehearsals. When he finally asked for a date, Barbra recalled, “I thought he was being funny because he was always joking around and doing nutty things.” Their evening out consisted of dinner and coffee in a diner after a late rehearsal. “I found myself always laughing when Elliott was close by,” Barbra said. They talked until the small hours of the morning, and as they spent more and more time together, Elliott opened up his heart to her. She was amazed at how much alike they turned out to be, far beyond the surface similarities of their profession, their Jewish faith, and their Brooklyn upbringing.

Insecure about his appearance, Elliott had spent his childhood thinking that he had “a fat ass” and wishing he looked like Robert Wagner. He had always had difficulty being on time. He had adored Jerry Lewis and pantomimed to his records. He had escaped from hot Brooklyn summers inside movie houses. They were, he said, “my sanctuary.”

He had needed sanctuary from the stifling two-and-a-half-room apartment he shared with his parents, Bernard and Lucille Goldstein, in the Bensonhurst section southwest of Flatbush, where he had slept in the same room with them for eleven years, listening to their ever-worsening battles. “That’s the place where I was most vulnerable, where I began to withdraw and become self-conscious,” he told Playboy in 1970. “I would have loved to have taken a bat and just destroyed every wall and every shelf and everything else in it.”

He could have been talking about Barbra and Louis Kind and apartment 4G. But as much as their commonalities captured Barbra’s imagination, it was the one major difference between them that fascinated her the most: from the age of nine, Elliott Goldstein had spent his childhood singing and dancing, pushed into lessons and auditions and recitals by his ambitious mother. He had appeared on television—an assignment for which his mother changed his name without telling him “because it sounded better”—and at thirteen had been part of a vaudeville bill on the stage of New York’s fabled Palace Theater, playing a singing bellboy.

“Oh, that must have been wonderful,” Barbra burbled.

“I hated every minute of it,” he replied.

“But why,” Barbra couldn’t imagine how anyone could have hated doing what she had so longed to do as a girl.

He explained that he’d had no choice, that he was constantly pushed, pushed, pushed. He had never harbored a deep ambition to be a performer. Yet here he was, the leading man in a Broadway show at twenty-three, and it amazed Barbra that she and Elliott had arrived at this point via such different avenues.

The more she saw him and the more they talked, the more enamored she became. The feeling was mutual. “I was fascinated with her,” Elliott recalled in 1964. “She needs to be protected. She is a very fragile little girl. She doesn’t commit easily, but she liked me.” Just as Roy Scott had four years earlier, Elliott found Barbra “absolutely exquisite. She was the most innocent thing I’d ever seen, like a beautiful flower that hadn’t blossomed yet.”

“I was beginning to feel something for the guy, and it scared me half to death,” Barbra recalled. “I found myself talking gibberish.... One night I even went onstage with half my face made up.... I guess I was in love.”

Their romance took on the trappings of a Manhattan fairy tale. They’d walk around the city in the night cold, duck into Forty-second Street theaters for midnight showings of low-budget horror movies about giant ants and caterpillars that ate cars, seek out all-night diners on Ninth Avenue for rice pudding and coffee ice cream, play Pokerino in penny arcades off Times Square.

One night, Barbra recalled, “we were walking around the skating rink at Rockefeller Center when he chased me and we had a snowball fight. He never held me around or anything, but he put snow on my face and kissed me, very lightly.... It was great. Like out of a movie.”

On the opening night of Wholesale in Philadelphia, Barbra sent Elliott a note: “To my clandestine lover.” They had not yet been intimate, but that would change a few days later. Was Elliott still a virgin? That depends on which of his stories one chooses to believe. In one interview he said that he had “become a man” at fourteen with a very fat girl wearing a girdle who fell asleep on top of him. In another interview he said his first sexual experience was in a Boston hotel room in 1958, when he was nineteen.

But in a proposal for his autobiography that made the rounds of publishers in New York, Elliott claimed he had “surrendered” his virginity to Barbra in a room at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. “Barbra was the one I chose,” he wrote. “I was excited, but I was frightened.” Just as he and Barbra were reaching heights of ecstasy, Elliott said, a bunch of his pals showed up. “I was trying to become a man, and these guys were pounding on the door. I wouldn’t open it. This was my moment, and I wasn’t about to let anyone take it from me.”

If Elliott was a sexual neophyte, he and Barbra evidently made up for lost time. They spent most of their free hours in his room, and their activity disturbed Wilma Curley, who had the room next door. “I’d be trying to get to sleep and their bed would start bouncing,” she recalled. “One time I had to go over, rap on the door, and tell them to keep it down. One night I heard Barbra pounding on the door and screaming at him to let her back in. I peeked out and there she was, stark naked. Finally he let her back in.

“They were like high school kids. They’d have food fights in restaurants, they giggled all the time, he’d lock her out of the room. None of us thought of them as having an affair—it wasn’t mature enough to be an affair.”

ARTHUR LAURENTS HAD come to doubt that Barbra Streisand was mature enough to be an actress on Broadway. He had given in to her on the issue of the chair, and when she stopped the show on opening night in Philadelphia by whirling on casters across the stage while she sang “Miss Marmelstein,” he was glad to concede she’d been right. But the next night she altered her inflections, her movements, her timing, and Laurents was furious. “I gave the director a bad time,” Barbra later admitted. “He insisted on blueprinting exactly how I should do everything. I can’t work that way.... I find it very difficult to do anything twice in exactly the same way.”

Consistency, of course, is the essence of the theater—without it there’s anarchy—and Laurents put his foot down. “She didn’t know very much about the stage,” he recalled. “She was very undisciplined. She’s inventive, but it never occurred to her that the invention should be for rehearsals and not for onstage. She would throw the other actors off cue. I had to be rather sharp with her just before we opened in New York, and from that point on, the performance was solid and stable.”

From David Merrick’s standpoint, Barbra’s employment was far from stable—and so was Elliott’s. “I had a battle every night with Merrick,” Laurents said. “He wanted to fire them because he thought they were both unattractive, and he didn’t think Barbra was funny.”

Laurents thought Barbra was funny. “We kept giving her more to do in the musical numbers, taking what was a group number and highlighting her. Merrick wasn’t that concerned with Barbra after a while because she wasn’t the lead. But Elliott was, and he wanted me to fire him.” Elliott’s out-of town reviews didn’t help his cause; most of them criticized his singing and his character’s unlikability. “I was terribly green, and I was trying too hard,” Elliott admitted. Merrick kept up the pressure on Laurents to dismiss Gould. “In Philly and Boston, Merrick kept bringing in every leading man in town” to find a replacement for him, Laurents said, but the director held his ground. “I thought he was fine in the role. When Merrick finally said he was going to fire Elliott, I threatened to quit. Elliott stayed.”

ELEVEN WEEKS AFTER its first rehearsal, I Can Get It for You Wholesale opened on Thursday, March 22, 1962, at the Shubert Theater on West Forty-fourth Street. Barbra made her greatest impression about ten minutes into the second act. She had had just a few lines and had sung just snippets in two musical numbers in the first act. But now out of the wings she rolled, whizzing across the floorboards on her swivel chair, arms and legs aflail, pencil stuck in her beehive hairdo, her face framed by a huge white collar like the subject of a portrait by Holbein the Younger.

She stopped the chair in the middle of the stage by planting her feet squarely in front of her. She lowered her head into her hands, then looked up imploringly at the audience as the music began. “Oh, why is it always Miss Marmelstein,” she fairly sobbed, her Brooklyn accent unrestrained.

The girl who hadn’t wanted to be laughed at put her audience into hysterics. She was hilarious. She was touching. She whined, she mugged, she belted. The audience laughed with her, rooted for her, adored her. When she finally came to a defeated conclusion and fairly spat out, “Ooooh, I could bust,” they jumped to their feet to cheer and applaud her for a solid three minutes—an eternity in the theater. She had stopped the show cold. At that moment—9: 35 P. M. on the fourth Thursday in March 1962—Barbra Streisand became a Broadway star.

Friday morning’s reviews of the show ran the gamut from raves to pans. The majority of the critics found the story and its hero too unpleasant to be enjoyable, but Barbra’s performance garnered unanimous raves. “Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School should call a holiday to celebrate the success of its spectacular alumna, Barbra Streisand.” Norman Nadel wrote in the World Telegram & Sun. “As a secretary, she sets the show in motion and hypos it all the way.”

Theatre Arts critic John Simon, who would later write witheringly of Barbra’s looks and personality, praised her “Chekhovian brand of heartbreaking merriment. Gifted with a face that shuttles between those of a tremulous young borzoi and a fatigued Talmudic scholar... she can also sing the lament of the unreconstructed drudge with the clarion peal of an Unliberty Bell.” The critic for The Nation likened Barbra to “an innocent Modigliani model. Her Miss Marmelstein—a screaming, hysterical, efficient, harassed, nervously giggling secretary—is a delightful comic miniature.”

Overnight, Barbra became the toast of Broadway. On April 4 she appeared on Today, hosted by John Chancellor. After she sang “Much More” and “Right as the Rain,” Chancellor asked her whether she missed the a in her name and what she was made of—“sugar and spice and everything nice.” Barbra winced slightly and replied, “No.”

“What, then?” Chancellor pressed. “Songs?”

“Flesh and bones,” she said weakly.

Within weeks Life magazine had featured her prominently as one of that season’s “Broadway Showstoppers.” Mademoiselle chose her, along with Barbara Lang, Barbara Harris, and Sue Lyon, “Most Likely to Succeed.” The New Yorker called her a “coming star” and ran an interview in which she bragged about finding a hundred-dollar dress marked down to twelve-fifty in Filene’s Basement in Boston.

She spoke of her mother too, and frankly. “She did come to the opening night of Wholesale, but I don’t think she understood what I was trying to do in it. Why should she? The things that interest her about me are whether I’m eating enough and whether I am warmly enough dressed. She’s a very simple, nonintellectual, nontheatrical person who lives and breathes.”

Elaine Sobel had walked with Barbra’s mother from the theater to the opening-night party at Sardi’s. Along the way she turned to Diana and said, “You must be thrilled—your daughter’s a Broadway star.”

“Yes, that’s nice,” Diana replied. “But I still think she’d be more secure working in a school as a real secretary.”

THE SWORD OF her new success, as it often does, had two edges for Barbra. “I was the most hated girl on Broadway,” she said. “Elliott was the only one in the show who liked me. No one could understand how a girl like me could suddenly come off with all those raves. Everyone expects you to slave in seventy plays before you make it.”

Barbra’s unpopularity had less to do with her raves, in fact, than with her behavior. Her lateness and unpredictable entrances annoyed the company, and her occasional childishness grated on them. Wilma Curley recalled finding some makeup missing from her dressing room. “Who has my stuff,” she yelled into the hallway.

“Oh, I do,” Barbra called out. “I needed it.”

“She wanted it, she needed it, she took it,” Wilma said. “It wasn’t a gigantic problem, but it annoyed me because she had gotten someone to open my dressing room door. And she’d never return anything unless I asked for it. She was self-engrossed. Everything was just me, me, me.”

Already Barbra had become the subject of bitchy repartee. At a cocktail party Elliott and Barbra attended, one young lady told anyone who would listen, “Barbra Streisand thinks she’s flat-chested so she’s got the front of her dress stuffed with tissue paper. You can hear it crackling! Go look.”

Any animosity that existed toward Barbra among the Wholesale company surely deepened when she became the only member of the cast or crew to win a nomination for the coveted Antoinette Perry Award (the Tony). At the April 29 ceremonies in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, she vied for Best Featured or Supporting Actress in a Musical with Elizabeth Allen in The Gay Life, Barbara Harris in the revue From the Second City, and Phyllis Newman in David Merrick’s other new show that season, Subways Are for Sleeping.

Merrick managed to insult both of his young nominees that night. He sat at Newman’s table rather than Barbra’s, but as the list of nominees was read, he turned to Newman and said, “Streisand’s going to win, and I voted for her.”

In fact the winner was Newman, and Marty Erlichman’s prediction that Barbra would win every major award would have to wait. Why didn’t Barbra, who had clearly made the biggest impact among Broadway neophytes that year, win the Tony? That Wholesale was her first show hurt rather than helped; she was correct that many people prefer to honor someone who has paid some dues. And word of Barbra’s reprimand by Actors’ Equity for her repeated latenesses surely didn’t help.

Barbra did collect the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the lion’s share of that Broadway season’s acclaim and publicity. She also won the leading man. Shortly after Wholesale opened, Elliott moved into Barbra’s apartment above a seafood restaurant on Third Avenue.

IT WAS A tiny one-bedroom cold-water flat. The only window in the living room looked smack out onto a brick wall. The bathtub sat in the middle of the kitchen, the floor was so uneven that visitors felt they were listing, and there were no closets. Barbra didn’t mind, though: the rent was only $67. 20 a month, and for the first time she had an apartment all her own.

By all accounts, the place was a wonder. “The smell of fish!” Elaine Sobel exclaimed. “And the shmattehs hanging everywhere!” (Shmattehs are rags, or inexpensive clothes. ) A close friend of Barbra and Elliott’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was “the filthiest apartment I’ve ever seen. Awfully, awfully dirty. I’d go over there to play cards with Elliott and I used to kid him and say, ‘Where the hell are you fucking this girl?’ Because they slept on a folding cot. For two people! And Elliott’s a big guy. No mattress cover or anything like that. God! And her idea of art was a toilet seat hung on the wall.”

Whenever she or Elliott bathed, they had to boil four large pots of water on the stove for hours to keep the water hot. The rest of the time they covered the claw-footed tub with a piece of plywood and piled stacks of dirty dishes on top of it to free up counter space.

In the living room, feather boas hung from Tiffany-style lampshades, and an old wooden sewing machine cabinet doubled as the dinner table. Beaded bags hung from gilt picture frames with nothing in them. Harry Stoones creator Jeff Harris recalled that “she had this one amazing thing that looked like a World War II oxygen mask—but to this day I’m not sure what it was.” In the bedroom, dozens of shallow drawers in an old wooden dentist’s cabinet held sheet music, costume jewelry, belt buckles, fabric swatches. An apothecary jar housed Barbra’s collection of paste-on beauty spots. She plastered the bathroom walls with a collage of photos, articles, ads, and words or phrases she’d cut from newspapers and magazines, then shellacked it to a burnished sheen. Her guests tended to spend inordinate amounts of time in the room—reading.

Such decor would not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but Elliott loved it. When he moved in, he said, he thought of himself and Barbra as Hansel and Gretel, ensconced in an enchanted cottage. “The happiest memories I have of Barbra are when we were living together before we were married. We were having a really romantic time.” They worked together, lived together, played together “like kids in a treehouse,” one friend said. They watched late-night horror movies on a temperamental old television set. Seated at Barbra’s sewing machine, they gobbled Swanson’s frozen fried chicken dinners and bricks of Breyers coffee ice cream. Late at night they’d munch on kosher salami, fried matzos, and pickled herring.

They read scenes together from Greek dramas—Barbra as Medea, Elliott as Jason. They made up their own language, a variation on pidgin English, so that no one else could understand what they were saying to each other. It was Hansel and Gretel against the world.

“I wanted to take care of Barbra,” Elliott recalled in 1964. “Every morning I’d wake her up, saying, ‘Barbra, come get your chicken soup.’” One evening, as the two slept on their cot, Elliott heard “a gruesome squealing and scratching. It sounded like a rat the size of an elephant. I looked under the tub and I saw a tail about a yard long.... I closed the door and called the fire department.” There was nothing the firemen could do, and after spending the rest of the night in a hotel, the couple learned to live with their uninvited guest, which they named Gonzola.

“We used to laugh about that a lot,” Elliott has said. “I look back to Third Avenue with sublime affection.”

NO MATTER HOW hard he tried, Marty Erlichman couldn’t get Barbra a recording contract. Since the fall of 1961 he had been badgering every record industry executive in New York to listen to her. He never sent a tape; he insisted on live auditions. Barbra would schlep to the offices of Columbia or RCA or Capitol Records with a trio Marty would quickly patch together—Peter Daniels on piano, Barbra’s bass player from the Bon Soir, Bobby Short’s drummer—and she would sing two or three numbers, usually “A Sleepin’ Bee,” “I Stayed Too Long at the Fair,” and “When the Sun Comes Out.”

The responses were uniform. “She has a beautiful voice,” Marty recalled the bigwigs telling him, “but it’s more Broadway than records, and certainly the voice and the material are not what’s being bought right now. We don’t think she’ll sell records.” The main problem was that in this era a new singer was expected to have three or four hit singles in release before the label would get behind an album. Because her looks and her sound were so different—she wasn’t likely to be booked on American Bandstand—no one could foresee Barbra Streisand as a singles seller.

Precisely the elements that made Barbra so unforgettable in a nightclub—her esoteric material, her jazzy playfulness, her histrionics—worked against her in the minds of the recording industry decision-makers. The popular vocalists of this era were bland, unthreatening, homogeneous balladeers. The biggest-selling non-rock ’n’ roll singles were prettily sung melodic ballads like “Moon River” and “A Taste of Honey.” And auditioning live actually may have hurt more than it helped. Barbra didn’t look like Patti Page or Julie London or Doris Day, and her sometimes overwrought performing style tended to turn off hidebound traditionalists, which included most record executives.

Marty had his heart set on signing Barbra with Columbia, the Cadillac of record labels, and after her live audition for the company’s president, Goddard Lieberson, he played a tape he’d made of his client at the Bon Soir. “Listen to the applause,” he urged. “They loved her. They gave her standing ovations, flowers, the works.” He asked Lieberson to hold on to the tape and “listen to it when the phone ain’t ringing.”

Lieberson listened and then played the tapes for others in the company. They agreed with his opinion that Barbra was too special. Sure, the Bon Soir audience loved her, but they were sophisticated New Yorkers, and many of them were gay at that. To sell records in numbers that mattered, Barbra would have to appeal to mainstream America, and Lieberson didn’t think she would. He sent her a note to say she had a beautiful voice but he didn’t see the kind of commercial potential for her that the economic realities of the music marketplace required.

Shortly after Barbra’s Wholesale audition, Arthur Laurents sent Lieberson a note, unbeknownst to Barbra or Marty, urging him to sign her. Lieberson asked Marty to bring Barbra in again, and this time he recorded her audition at Columbia’s Studio B at 799 Seventh Avenue in order to see how she would sound when her voice was professionally taped. But he still felt she was too eccentric.

Barbra soon appeared on two Columbia albums anyway. The label specialized in original-cast Broadway recordings, and on Sunday, April 1, Barbra joined the rest of the Wholesale cast to commit the score to vinyl. She arrived late, as usual, dressed in jeans, a tatty sweater, and dirty sneakers, and made a beeline for Lieberson the minute she saw him. “Goddard! Goddard,” she called out. “I got a great idea for the album!”

According to the album’s musical director and vocal arranger, Lehman Engel, Barbra stopped singing in the middle of “Miss Marmelstein” and complained that she didn’t like the orchestration. “Goddard could have spoken to her over the intercom,” Lehman wrote in his memoirs. “Instead, he left the control room and walked over to her. He put his arm around her shoulders and gently led her away to the sidelines. Out of earshot of the orchestra and the rest of the cast he spoke to her. I don’t know what he said to her, but when she came back, she sang the song as it was charted, straight through, in one amazing take.”

Marty and Barbra hoped that the Wholesale album would change Lieberson’s mind about signing Barbra, but Harold Rome’s score did little to enhance the unique qualities of the Streisand voice. And while “Miss Marmelstein” amply demonstrated her comic talents and her ability to belt, it didn’t showcase the beauty, purity, and range that made her voice so special.

Barbra’s appearance on a second album—a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Rome’s first big success, Pins and Needles—came about in spite of Lieberson’s opposition to using her. Rome felt so strongly that she was right for it that he threatened not to do the record at all unless Barbra participated. Lieberson relented, and Rome’s instincts proved unassailable. The cheery, lilting score celebrating the joys of union membership in the garment trade gave Barbra some marvelously funny turns that left the listener wishing the show had been revived on Broadway as well. Arguably, it would have been more successful than Wholesale and made Barbra an even bigger sensation.

After Pins and Needles and the publicity barrage that had attended Barbra’s triumph in Wholesale, both Capitol and Atlantic came back to Marty with contracts in hand. He turned them down. “The first company that wanted to sign her was Atlantic,” he recalled to Billboard in 1983, “but that label was basically jazz. I told them that I thought she had great potential as an album seller, and since Columbia was the best album-producing company, I had my heart set on them. I told Capitol the same thing. It was a difficult thing to do, turning down offers after we’d waited so long, because neither of us had any money. But we both thought it would be better to hold out for the best than to jump at the first offer just because we were hungry.”

To keep the Streisand buzz hot and to ensure that “Miss Marmelstein” wouldn’t typecast her as an ethnic comedienne, Erlichman booked her into a two-week return engagement at the Bon Soir beginning May 22. This time she was the headliner, billed as “Barbra (I Can Get It for You Wholesale) Streisand.” Every night after the show, Marty had a taxi ready outside the theater at eleven-thirty to whisk her downtown.

On May 29 she appeared on the popular TV prime-time variety hour The Garry Moore Show. She stepped out onto a balcony set, dressed in an elegant black cocktail dress, and sang a highly charged, thrilling rendition of “When the Sun Comes Out.” Later in the show, during a “That Wonderful Year” segment set in 1929, she sang a slowed-down, ironic version of the traditionally uptempo Democratic Party theme song “Happy Days Are Here Again” as a wealthy woman who has lost all her money in the stock market crash of that year. With forced gaiety, she sat in a deserted barroom, paying for each successive glass of champagne with her earrings, rings, and bracelets.

Barbra also appeared on PM East five times between April and June, and one of those appearances finally turned the tide for her at Columbia. For months Marty Erlichman had urged David Kapralik, the sprightly director of Columbia’s artists and repertoire department, to catch Barbra’s act in the hope that Kapralik would report back favorably to Lieberson. Kapralik never got around to it, but late one night he returned to his apartment and switched on PM East. A girl was singing, Kapralik recalled, “and I was knocked off my feet. When she finished and Mike Wallace said her name, I made the connection: this was the girl Marty had been bugging me about! She was in command of the full spectrum of human emotion from comedic to tragic, and she just blew me away.”

As Marty had hoped, Kapralik relayed his enthusiasm to Lieberson, whose opposition to Streisand had already begun to soften. Everywhere he turned, it seemed, people were talking about “this girl.” At cocktail parties he would listen to Harold Arlen rave about the way she sang his songs, “A Sleepin’ Bee” and “Right as the Rain.” Whenever Lieberson spoke to Harold Rome or Arthur Laurents, they’d marvel, “You haven’t signed her yet?” Even within the hallowed halls of Columbia Records, Barbra converts were becoming legion. Kapralik, by now a self-described “Streisand groupie,” dragged his co-workers to the Blue Angel nearly every night. Few remained unmoved by her, and Kapralik made sure the word always got back to his boss.

Finally Lieberson, who was referred to in hushed tones by his employees as “God,” deigned to descend to the Blue Angel for Barbra’s closing performance on Friday, August 17. He left impressed. Not only had her voice become richer and more mature in just a few months but there was a new elegance to her look and style that boded well for mainstream acceptance. As if to underscore that, Lieberson noticed that the audience around him, cheering and stomping after Barbra’s every number, encompassed a far wider range of ages and types than he had imagined it would. The following Monday, Lieberson called Marty Erlichman. “It takes a big man to admit a mistake,” he said, “and I made a mistake. I would like to record Barbra.”

And so, after more than a year of struggle, of auditions, of campaigning and cajoling, the most prestigious record company in the world asked Barbra Streisand to join its roster of artists. Any other young hopeful would have jumped for joy and exclaimed, “Where do I sign?” Not Barbra. To her and Marty, Lieberson’s green light only signaled the beginning of negotiations. Several more months would pass before the details could be hammered out, because an issue of paramount importance to Barbra, of course, was the little matter of creative control.