Barbra sat at the huge oak table in the Columbia Records conference room. It was Monday, October 1, 1962, and as a photographer’s flashbulbs popped, she and Goddard Lieberson scrawled their names at the bottom of her contract. She was wearing a simple black wool dress set off by a string of pearls, her hair perfectly bouffant. She had been groomed by Columbia’s hair and makeup specialists, and she looked precisely the way so many people had told her she needed to look in order to succeed in show business.

It was one of the few concessions she had been willing to make to Columbia. The document she signed that day would have been the envy of many an established star, much less a newcomer with questionable commercial potential, for Barbra’s contract granted her full creative control. The label could not dictate what she would record or could not record, and it guaranteed that anything she recorded would be released. Further, the company had to release at least two Streisand albums in the first year.

How did Marty Erlichman win such concessions from a label that not much earlier hadn’t wanted to sign Barbra to any contract at all? “You give up something for that,” he explained in 1983. “You give up the front money. We were offered a lot more of a guarantee from several of the other companies. But they weren’t willing to give us creative control. When you break the mold, you have to make sure you have creative control because they’ll try to make you into what they think you should be. That’s how you show whether you believe in yourself or not. Only if her records sold would she make any money, and she had the final say about what went on her albums, so she was taking all the responsibility for that.”

Dave Kapralik recalled that once the label agreed to sign Barbra, Columbia decided to sink or swim with what it had. “We realized she had created a very successful nightclub career with material of her own.” The one-year contract (with four annual renewal options at Columbia’s discretion) gave Barbra a $20,000 advance per album (small by industry standards but a fortune to her) and a 5 percent royalty against 98 percent of records sold after all recording expenses were earned back.

Although few expected Barbra to be a strong singles seller, such success could be so important to album sales that the label rushed her into the recording studio to cut two sides for release as a single. Two weeks after she signed her contract, Barbra stood in front of thirty musicians in Columbia’s Thirtieth Street studio, shaking with nervousness, and performed “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “When the Sun Comes Out.”

“Happy Days Are Here Again” would become one of Barbra’s signature songs, but the Columbia sales department so lacked faith in its sales potential that they ordered only a minuscule five hundred discs be pressed. They distributed the record only in New York and didn’t even send any demo copies to disc jockeys.

To some observers it seemed that certain people within the Columbia hierarchy actually wanted the record to fail, as certification of their lack of faith in Barbra’s commercial appeal. The head of the label’s sales department, Bill Gallagher, preferred Anita Bryant’s bland white-bread warbling to Streisand’s hyperemotionalism, and most of his staff agreed. To many of them, Barbra and Bob Dylan were “the two the fags and radicals brought in.” Whenever Barbra’s name came up, they most often asked, “Why doesn’t someone give her a bath, wash her hair, and buy her a new dress?”

With no demos mailed to radio stations, rhythm-and-blues DJs across the country—including Sly Stone, who was then a disc jockey in San Francisco—had to discover “Happy Days” on their own. When they did, they played it. “Barbra’s singing really reached the black DJs,” Dave Kapralik said, “because it was real. Her emotion came from an authentic place within her, which is where the most soulful music always comes from.” But when listeners went out to their local stores to buy the record, there were no copies available. “Happy Days” bombed.

Barbra and Marty fumed, and Erlichman put pressure on Columbia to release another Streisand single as soon as possible. A month later they did—“My Coloring Book,” Fred Ebb and John Kander’s downbeat torch ballad. This time the company put more resources behind the record, mainly because of widespread positive reaction to the song. They pressed twenty thousand first-run copies and mailed demos to DJs across the country.

Still, Marty was livid that the label did not advertise or promote the record, especially when he saw a full-page ad in Billboard for another Columbia single, “Shake Me I Rattle, Squeeze Me I Cry.” He stormed into the Chinese restaurant off Columbia’s lobby and threw the magazine down in front of Bill Gallagher. “You take out an ad for this cockamamie song and not for Barbra!” he thundered. “I’ll match her career against anybody’s. I’d bet my year’s commission that she’ll outsell, outlast, any of the people you’re pushing.” He stopped, red-faced, to catch his breath.

“Marty, take it easy,” Gallagher said, laughing. “You’ll give yourself a coronary.”

Barbra’s second single went on to sell 60,000 copies, helped along by her performance on Ed Sullivan’s popular Sunday-night television variety show in December. “This was an impressive number for an unknown at that time,” Dave Kapralik said. Still, “My Coloring Book” hadn’t dashed up the pop charts, so Columbia abandoned its halfhearted efforts to build Streisand singles momentum. All thought now focused on how best to present Barbra on an album. Everyone agreed that since her singing success had been in nightclubs, the LP should capture the excitement and spontaneity of a live performance. With Barbra in the middle of a one-month stand at the Bon Soir, the pieces fell neatly into place.

GOD HIMSELF INTRODUCED her: Goddard Lieberson stood before a raucous crowd of Streisand fans and Columbia employees at the Bon Soir on November 5 and explained that the evening’s performance, and the next two nights’ as well, would be live recording sessions for Barbra’s first Columbia album. The somewhat boozy throng, sitting at tables specially decorated with flowers and gingham tablecloths, cheered and hooted. “For me and everyone at Columbia, she’s a singular artist. You can’t put her in any category,” Lieberson said, touting as a virtue what he had long considered a Streisand vice.

She rushed down to the Village by taxi as soon as the night’s Wholesale performance ended and hopped onstage to cheers and stomps and whistles. She sang Leonard Bernstein’s “My Name Is Barbara,” then “Much More.” A fuse in a microphone blew out. “You’re kidding!” she exclaimed. Lieberson apologized. Barbra asked the photographer to stop snapping pictures of her because “it really distracts me and I can’t concentrate.” The fuse was replaced. “Can you hear now?” Barbra asked the crowd. “We can hear you, babe!” someone called out.

After Harold Arlen’s “Napoleon,” Leonard Bernstein’s “I Hate Music (But I like to Sing),” and “Right as the Rain,” Barbra told the audience she was wearing “my boyfriend’s old suit.” Then “Cry Me a River,” “Value” from Harry Stoones, “Lover Come Back to Me,” and an announcement that she wanted to pay tribute to her favorite singer, the spectacularly untalented Florence Foster Jenkins. The session ended with “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” “Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking,” “When the Sun Comes Out,” and “Happy Days.”

The audience—and the next two nights’ crowds as well—left happy and satisfied, but Barbra, Marty, and Lieberson were far less pleased. When they listened to the tapes, they realized that Barbra Streisand Live at the Bon Soir!, while a great idea in theory, wasn’t going to work. The sound quality of the tapes proved far inferior to what could be achieved in the studio. The rowdy audience reactions distracted from rather than augmented the intimacy Barbra wanted to convey. Worst of all, her voice didn’t sound as good as it could under the quality controls of studio recording. Barbra Streisand’s first solo album would have to wait.

On November 18 Barbra completed the Bon Soir gig, her fourth and last. The critic Leonard Harris’s comments in the New York World Telegram & Sun echoed the prevailing wisdom now about Streisand: “The star of I Can Get It for You Wholesale is the best—no maybes, no ‘young’ or ‘old’ or other qualifiers needed. She’s twenty; by the time she’s thirty she will have rewritten the record books. Her voice has sweetness, range, color, and variety. Pick the best singer of any style, and Barbra can challenge her on her home ground. And Barbra’s own style—elfin, humorous, but packing a real punch—is original and unforgettable.”

Now it was time to crank up the Streisand juggernaut. Marty knew the best way to sell Barbra’s first album would be for her to perform live in as many venues as possible around the country. He immersed himself in plans for a tour that would result in a triumphal Streisand musical march through seventeen cities and make Barbra a nightclub superstar within a year.

The about-to-explode Streisand career had dissipated some very different plans of Barbra’s that one New York newspaper had published back in August: “Barbra Streisand has applied to all-male Dartmouth College in Hanover, N. H.,” the item said, “to become one of the first women to be admitted in the summer of 1963. Barbra wants to major in economics and languages at the college which, for the first time in its history, will be accepting female students next year.”

ALSO THAT AUGUST, Barbra had been desperate to appear on Tonight. The show’s casting director, Bob Garland, recalled in 1968 that he didn’t think she was right for it, and had repeatedly turned her down. Finally Barbra telephoned Garland and pleaded with him to see her in his office. “Everybody in the business says you’re so sensitive and understanding,” she cajoled, “and I need your advice. It’s terribly important.”

When she showed up, she was visibly upset. She wrung her hands in anguish as she explained why she had asked to see him. “You really don’t know much about me,” she began haltingly. “I’m from Cleveland and, well, my mother is back there and she’s not well. As a matter of fact, she’s dying, Bob.” She choked back a sob. “It would mean so much to her to be able to see me on Tonight. If you could please just give me one chance...”

“Well,” Garland sighed as he summed up the story, “she got her Tonight booking and went on from there.”

Barbra made her debut on Tonight with guest host Groucho Marx on August 21. The first thing she did was complain that the announcer had pronounced her name “Streesand.” Just as she had on PM East, she quickly established herself as an audience favorite, and she was brought back roughly once a month between October 4, 1962, and March 5, 1963.

The October 4 show was her first with Johnny Carson, the regular host. Carson asked her if she planned to marry someday. “Of course,” Barbra replied.

“But not until you fulfill your career? Or does it make any difference?”

“No, that doesn’t matter at all. I might give up my career, if my husband wants me to.”

“You’re not that dedicated to the theater, then.”

“No.”

“You’d give it up if you got married. I think that’s a smart move.”

“Yeah.”

During her appearance on February 1, 1963, Johnny mentioned that Time magazine had done an article on Barbra the week before. Then he added, “I suppose when you get to be a big star we’ll never see you again.”

“No,” Barbra replied with a laugh. “Never.”

“That will be it, huh?”

“Never. I will never come here again.”

“You know,” Johnny concluded, “she probably means it, too.”

ELLIOTT PACED BACK and forth in front of the open door to Barbra’s dressing room after a performance of Wholesale. Whenever one of the chorus girls passed by, he whistled and patted her fanny and asked, very loudly, whether she had any plans for later in the evening. Barbra ignored him while she dabbed off her makeup in front of her mirror and chatted with Bob Schulenberg, who had come backstage to pay her a visit. Bob listened to Elliott for a while, then had to ask: “What on earth is he doing.”

Barbra peeled off a false eyelash. “Getting back at me, I suppose.”

“What for?”

“I told him he was flat on his last note tonight.”

Finally Elliott huffed off. Barbra and Bob went out to eat, and afterward Barbra invited Bob up to her apartment for coffee. When she opened the door, they saw Elliott sitting alone in the darkened living room, illuminated only by the rose light filtering through a red glass lampshade. He didn’t move or say hello. Barbra turned to Schulenberg. “I think we’d better not have that coffee,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

Working together and living together often put a strain on Barbra and Elliott’s relationship. “We fought all the time,” he said. “I wasn’t always sure about what.” After one disagreement, Barbra locked Elliott out of the apartment and refused to answer the door or pick up the phone to talk to him. He went home to Brooklyn. Another time he locked her out in the rain until four in the morning before he opened the door to a wet, cold Barbra, her face awash with tears.

But always they would kiss and hug and make up, and later they’d laugh about it all. “I was madly in love with her,” Elliott said.

BY THE FALL of 1962 I Can Get It for You Wholesale had been running for six months, mostly on half-price twofers (the musical ultimately lost money). Barbra couldn’t wait for the show to close. She hated the interpretive strait-jacket that tied her into the same performance as Miss Marmelstein every night. Only three months into the run she had said, “I see the part differently now from the way it was written and directed, and I’d like to do it differently, but I can’t.” She missed the wild improvisation she had done in acting class, longed for the delicious chance to surprise even herself.

Her boredom, the sameness of it all, caused her performance occasionally to flag. “Every time she did ‘Miss Marmelstein’ I’d go to the back of the theater and watch her,” said her dresser, Ceil Mack. “Once in a while she wasn’t so good. Her performance wasn’t big enough, it lacked that ruff! she gave it on a good night. But the audiences never knew the difference. She stopped the show cold every night.”

That was part of the problem for Barbra, too. She had proven herself in Wholesale. She knew she could wow an audience even on an off night. She wanted fresh challenges, wanted to conquer unknown worlds. So many opportunities lay before her as 1962 drew to a close. She longed to begin new journeys.

In October a tremendous challenge and a nearly unprecedented opportunity were laid at Barbra’s feet when she was chosen over far more established actresses to star as the legendary Ziegfeld Follies comedienne and singer Fanny Brice in a major new Broadway musical, Funny Girl. It seemed a perfect part for her: Fanny Brice was Jewish, had a prominent nose, struggled up from poverty, and combined humor with pathos to make her audiences laugh and cry and adore her.

Marty had lobbied for her to get the part for over a year, and Barbra wanted it so badly that when she learned she had it, standing in Broadway’s Shubert Alley, she felt almost numb. “Because I cared so much,” she said, “I didn’t care at all. Deep down I knew the part belonged to me, but for that reason I made myself think nothing of it.... I always think the worst. Actually, it’s a combination of positive and negative thinking, superego and complete insecurity. Things come to me... if I think of the worst.”

THE LAST PERFORMANCE of I Can Get It for You Wholesale fell Sunday, December 9, and when the curtain came down, Barbra ran backstage yelling, “I’m free! I’m free.” The next morning she met with Marty Erlichman to discuss her appearance one week later on The Ed Sullivan Show, plan her nationwide concert tour, go over the songs for her first album, and figure out when she would have the time to start rehearsals for Funny Girl. Marty told the show’s producers that she probably wouldn’t be available full-time until the end of 1963. They didn’t see that as a problem, since the show’s score and book needed a great deal of work. Besides, they reasoned, if Marty’s plans for Barbra panned out, they might be getting a big star to play Fanny Brice after all.

Elliott had pressing business too that Monday morning. He walked down to East Fifty-eighth Street, took his place in line, and applied for fifty dollars a week in unemployment benefits.

OVER THREE DAYS late in January 1963, Barbra laid down the eleven tracks that would make up her first album, essentially a studio version of her nightclub act. For weeks she had rehearsed in the West End Avenue apartment of Peter Matz, a gifted young arranger-conductor whom Harold Arlen had recommended to her, and the two of them hit it off well. Every day she rushed over to Matz’s place, her lunch in a brown paper bag. (One day she was so late she ran out of her apartment wearing only blue jeans and a bra under her raincoat. )

“It was a delight to work with her,” Matz recalled. “She didn’t know how to read music, but she could follow it up and down on paper. With her instincts she didn’t have to read. People credit me for those early arrangements, but really most of the ideas and the songs came from Barbra and Peter Daniels. They made my job very easy.”

Barbra found studio recording far less satisfying than live performing. “The exciting thing about being a performer, the really creative thing,” she said, “is going onstage or stepping in front of a microphone in a nightclub and creating something just for the people who are there. You may be great or you may be lousy that night, but that’s the exciting thing about creating it all over again each time. But when you go into a recording studio, you’ve got three hours.... You can never do your best under those conditions. The way I’d like to record would be to have an indefinite closing time on the session.”

Barbra decided to include three songs on this album that she hadn’t sung during the three nights of taping at the Bon Soir, including “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf.” That song caused Columbia executives some consternation. Peter Matz recalled that the album’s producer, Mike Berniker, “was walking a tightrope between the upstairs guys, me, and Barbra. He would go upstairs and tell them, ‘She’s doing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf.”’ They would say, ‘What!’ and he would come down to me and say, ‘Do you have to do that?’ And she’d say, ‘Yes, goddammit, it’s on the album!’”

Still unsure of Streisand’s commercial potential, Columbia had budgeted the album at a paltry $18,000, which forced Matz to use very small combinations of musicians. For one session he had just a rhythm section and four trombones, for another only a small string section. Whenever Barbra wanted more, Mike Berniker would tell Matz, “Look, we can’t spend a lot of money on this! We don’t know if this woman is going to sell records.”

At first she didn’t. Columbia released The Barbra Streisand Album on February 25, after toying with titles like Hello! I’m Barbra Streisand; From Brooklyn to Broadway... Barbra Streisand!; and Sweet and Saucy Streisand. “They loved that alliteration—Sweet and Saucy Streisand,” Marty Erlichman recalled. “When I suggested it to Barbra, she got nauseous.”

The album provided listeners with nothing less than a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows. Anyone who had heard Barbra only on the Wholesale cast album or Pins and Needles would have been astounded by the richness and maturity her voice had gained in less than a year. The reviews were largely ecstatic, typified by Stanley Green’s comments in Hi Fi/Stereo Review: “The eagerly awaited Barbra Streisand album turns out to be a fascinating package. Miss Streisand is a compelling stylist with a full, rich vocal quality that may give you goose bumps when you hear her more dramatic arias.”

Despite such fulsome praise, sales of the album languished through March, and it looked as though Columbia’s fear that Barbra would appeal only to gays and “hip urbanites” might be well founded. Barbra wrung her hands, but Marty soothed her with the assurance that her national tour and the television appearances he had begun to line up for her would, surely if slowly, put the album over the top.

FOR THE REST of 1963, Barbra barely stopped for a deep breath. The year had begun with two appearances on Tonight, on January 2 and February 1, and a triumphant three-week return engagement at the Blue Angel that began January 8. On February 5, with Elliott in tow, she kicked off her tour in the Boston area with a five-night stand at the Frolic, a nightclub in Revere Beach. Then she and Elliott schlepped on the train to Cleveland, where Mike Douglas welcomed her as his co-host for the week of February 11 on his nationally syndicated afternoon variety show.

Over the five days Barbra sang every song from her album, and kibbitzed and clowned with Douglas. “She was brilliant,” he recalled. “We kidded around, doing Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald duets in costume. We got down on the floor and played a game she’d played as a child—kind of tiddlywinks with bottle caps. Those shows were classics.” They no longer exist, however, because a few years later a technician at the station erased them to tape commercials.

Demand for Barbra’s album skyrocketed after her appearances on Douglas’s show, but hopeful record buyers couldn’t find it. Columbia’s initial pressing of just a few thousand had sold out quickly, and the company lagged behind in getting out new ones. Again, Marty hit the roof. He called Bill Gallagher and started to yell. “How dare you do this to us? After we went out on a limb, taking less money, building a following, and you guys don’t have records out there?!” Gallagher apologized and explained that the company’s printing plant in Pitman, New Jersey, was on overtime pressing new albums, and he promised to have all back orders filled within five days. Gallagher also said that the company would send several sales representatives to San Francisco to “work the album” in anticipation of Barbra’s opening there at the trendy hungry i nightclub. Placated, Marty hung up.

After she completed her week with Mike Douglas and a simultaneous stint at the Chateau in Lakewood, Ohio, Barbra and Elliott returned to New York, where she did two more Tonight appearances. At home they were able to relax for a few weeks, perhaps for the last time for months to come, because Elliott had been cast in a London revival of the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden and Adolph Green Broadway and movie hit On the Town, and if the show was a success, he’d likely remain in England for the better part of a year. Barbra had had to decide whether to embark on her tour as planned or accompany Elliott to England. When she chose to go with her man, he told her she shouldn’t derail her career at this critical juncture and insisted that she stay in America.

The lovers said a tearful good-bye as Barbra hopped a plane to Florida for the next stop on her national tour, the Cafe Pompeii in the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach. The engagement proved inauspicious. She shared the bill with the romantic Italian singer Sergio Franchi, and as Jack Anderson pointed out in the Miami Herald, “It’s unfortunate that two such disparate talents should have to share the same bill. It’s debatable whether the same audience can respond with the appreciation they equally deserve.” Barbra didn’t appeal to the Eden Roc’s well-heeled older Jewish clientele—“the rocks and lox crowd,” she called them. She was too strange, her emotions too raw, her material “cockamamie.” They stayed away in droves.

Larry King, then a Miami radio interviewer, got a frantic call from the owner of the hotel. “Look,” he said, “you gotta help me. I’ve got this wonderful singer, and nobody’s coming. Honest, the place is empty. The waiters are standing on the tables applauding, and there’s nobody here. Would you interview her?” King did, and he recalled asking her to describe how she sang. “I’m not Ella Fitzgerald,” she replied, “but you’re going to hear from me. You’re going to know about me.”

On Sunday morning, March 24, Barbra flew back up to New York for an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, then returned to Miami Monday morning. Business picked up considerably after the Sullivan appearance, but it was too late to turn the engagement around, because Barbra was set to open at the hungry i in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 27. She finished her last two shows at the Eden Roc on Tuesday night; on Wednesday morning she rushed to the airport to catch a plane for the West Coast. She arrived in San Francisco with scant hours to spare before she had to take the stage again.

Barbra came into the hungry i with a bit of history with its owner, Enrico Banducci. She had first met him early in 1962 in the office of her agent, Irvin Arthur. Upset that Arthur had nothing for her, and aware that Banducci had turned her down, Barbra vented her spleen. “Look, why don’t you give me a job?” she asked the startled Banducci. “I hear that you’re supposed to give unknowns jobs. I don’t really wanna work for you in your dirty old nightclub anyway. But actually I’m gonna be a big star, so you might as well grab me now and get me cheaper.”

Barbra so hated asking for work that the only way she had been able to pull this off was to pretend to be a character in a play asking for a job. “It worked,” she marveled. “Twenty minutes later we signed a contract. He’s the only one that would have done that, though. Everybody else would have thought I was nuts. But he’s such a nut. He’s a delightful guy. I love him.”

With her commitment to Wholesale, Barbra hadn’t been able to fulfill her contract with the hungry i for over a year. The wait was expensive for Banducci—her salary jumped from $350 a week to $2,500—but ultimately proved worth it. Her four-week engagement as the club’s headliner “set this town on its ear,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Hal Schaefer. The Bay Area’s hippest audiences, led by the city’s fast-growing population of gay men, flocked to see her shows at eight and eleven o’clock nightly. On opening night, Marty Erlichman pulled a publicity stunt that would have made a studio flack from the 1940s proud. With the club already jammed and crowds milling around outside on Jackson Street waiting to get in, Marty called the police and the fire department, and the ensuing excitement made the newspapers the next morning.

The critics were effusive in their praise. One told his readers, “Don’t miss Barbra Streisand at the hungry i. You’ll regret it if you do.” But as usual Barbra’s performances were her best publicity. As word of mouth about “this phenomenal girl” spread, Banducci had to turn the customers away.

BARBRA HADN’T SEEN Elliott in nearly a month, and she missed him terribly. They spoke at least once a day by transatlantic hookup; he would call her from his hotel after his show around midnight or so—late afternoon Pacific Standard Time, and they’d talk for hours, running up enormous bills. Sometimes, though, Elliott would telephone much later than usual, or not at all. Barbra would call him and discover that he had not yet returned to his room. When she asked him about it, he made jokes. Barbra found herself wondering, What is Elliott doing over there? Perhaps to bolster her confidence in the relationship, Barbra told a Chronicle reporter, Joan McKinney, that she and Elliott had just gotten married.

Her vocal cords presented an even more pressing worry for Barbra. The strain of the tour had begun to affect her voice, which sometimes failed her as she sought to reach a high note. Her audiences rarely noticed it, but she did. Barbra couldn’t abide this inability to deliver as much as she wanted to, and she feared her singing would continue to deteriorate until only a hoarse croak remained. She went to a throat specialist, who told her she had nodules on her vocal cords and would have to rest them.

That diagnosis turned out to be wrong, but when Barbra got to San Francisco a psychological problem took the place of her physical concerns. “I was in trouble,” she recalled to People magazine. “People [had been] asking me, ‘How do you hold your notes so long?’ I told them it was my will—that I just wanted to hold them. Subsequently I started to consciously think, How do I hold these notes so long? And voilà! One night I just couldn’t hold them anymore. My consciousness of an unconscious thing had made me impotent.”

Barbra went to see a voice teacher, Judy Davis. Apprehensive after her last go-round with a coach, Barbra was pleasantly surprised by Davis. “I was frightened and she reassured me that I was doing everything right, but I was like a person who was paralyzed in their legs having to relearn how to walk. Judy showed me pictures of the area, showed me physiologically what the process was.” In her sessions with Davis, Barbra learned how to achieve through conscious effort what before she had just left to chance. “I will always remain grateful to her,” Barbra said.

ON APRIL 13 The Barbra Streisand Album broke into Billboard magazine’s Top 100 Albums chart, bolstered by Barbra’s March 24 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and by huge sales in San Francisco. A week later her hungry i gig ended. Enrico Banducci hated to see her go, but he couldn’t extend her engagement because he had earlier booked another act to follow her. “In another year,” he told a columnist, “no one will be able to afford her at all.”

After Barbra’s last show, Banducci bounded onstage, his violin in hand, and joined her in a parody of an Italian opera in which the characters are dying but continually manage to summon up one last ounce of strength to continue singing. As Barbra coughed and wheezed, prone on the floor, Banducci floridly sang to her in flawless Italian. She gamely responded with a mixture of Italianate gibberish and Yiddish. The audience loved it, and Barbra left San Francisco on April 21 awash in applause, laughter, and love.