Barbra returned to New York in time to celebrate her twenty-first birthday on April 24 with Marty Erlichman and a few close friends. As thrilled as she was by her success so far, she desperately missed Elliott and longed to fly to London to see him. She could have—her engagement at New York’s top supper club, Basin Street East, wouldn’t begin until May 13—but Elliott asked her not to. “The show needs a lot of work, Barb,” he told her. “I have to concentrate. You’d be a distraction.” She understood, sort of. When she next spoke to him, she told him she wanted to start looking for a new apartment—“Something big, like a duplex, and nice, like on Central Park West or something.” Elliott said he didn’t think he’d be able to afford that. “That’s okay,” Barbra replied. “I’m making enough for both of us now.”

ON MAY 13, the night after her appearance on Dinah Shore’s NBC variety show, Barbra began a triumphant three-week stand at the posh Basin Street East in the Shelton Towers Hotel on East Forty-eighth Street, a booking that signaled like a clarion peal that she had arrived. She opened for the legendary swing man Benny Goodman, whose All star Sextet joined Peter Daniels behind her. As the New York Daily Mirror columnist Jack Thompson pointed out, “It takes an immensely courageous girl to allow herself to be booked on the same bill with Benny Goodman, and even expect to be noticed. To appear on the same program with the great clarinetist and to run away with the show reveals something akin to show business supremacy.”

In many ways this was a homecoming for Barbra, and her fans descended on the club to welcome back the local girl who was making the big time. The lines stretched a block down Forty-eighth Street to Third Avenue. Astounded by Barbra’s drawing power, Barney Ward, the manager of the club, reportedly offered her a five-year contract to appear there exclusively. She turned him down.

Barbra’s more demonstrative fans caused Benny Goodman some chagrin when they chanted “We want Barbra! We want Barbra,” during his set. Barney Ward told an employee of the hotel, “I’ve got a real problem with her. When Benny Goodman comes on, there’s no interest, they can’t wait for him to get off and for her to come back. They’re unruly. They heckle him. They heckle Benny Goodman.”

Marvin Stein, Barbra’s former Flatbush neighbor, worked in the Shelton Towers health club, and he recalled that Barbra asked him if she could use the steam room “because I have nodules on my vocal cords and the doctor says steam will help.” Stein told her to be his guest. A few days into Barbra’s engagement, Mrs. Kind came into the hotel and ran into Stein. “Marvin, you have to do me a favor,” she said. “Barbra won’t tell me what she’s earning for her appearance here, and I really want to know. Could you find out for me?” Stein asked Ward, who told him that Barbra’s salary was $2, 500 a week. “Mrs. Kind was flabbergasted,” Stein recalled. “That was an awful lot of money, and obviously Barbra wasn’t giving any of it to her mother. The woman was in that lobby every day, trying to hustle Barbra.”

BARBRA TOOK FOUR days off in the middle of her Basin Street East stand to fulfill some commitments. The first took her to Washington, where she sang for President John F. Kennedy at the annual Press Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton Hotel, the closest thing America has to a royal command performance, on Friday, May 24. She had tingled with excitement over the invitation for weeks; in San Francisco early in April she told a reporter that she couldn’t decide what to wear. “Something Empire? Something Napoleonic? Something—Caligula.” She decided on the Empire, accessorized with long white gloves and a feather boa and topped off with the new pageboy-and-bangs hairstyle fashioned for her by the popular stylist Fredrick Glaser.

She stole the show that night with five numbers, including “Happy Days Are Here Again,” during which she rarely took her eyes off the handsome young president. Afterward she stood in a reception line to meet Kennedy, and emcee Merv Griffin told her that protocol didn’t allow the president to be “detained” as he made his way down the line. There were to be no requests for autographs.

When Kennedy wended his way down to Barbra, he stopped and asked her how long she’d been singing. “About as long as you’ve been president,” she replied. Then she blurted, “Mr. President, my mother in Brooklyn is a big fan of yours, and if I don’t get your autograph she’ll kill me.”

Several people winced, but Kennedy just laughed. He asked to borrow Peter Daniels’s back for support and signed the program Barbra had handed him. “Thanks,” Barbra purred. “You’re a doll.” The next morning at breakfast Merv Griffin admonished her. “They specifically asked us not to stop the president.”

“But I wanted his autograph,” Barbra replied. “How many times would I get the chance to have the president sign an autograph?”

In his autobiography, Griffin says that when he asked Barbra if Kennedy had written an inscription, she said that he had scribbled “Fuck you. The President.” Barbra of course was joking. Years later she admitted that JFK had actually penned, “Best wishes—John F. Kennedy.” She also confessed that she misplaced the signature before she had a chance to give it to her mother.

Later that Saturday, Barbra hied herself off to London to catch Elliott’s opening in On the Town the next night. He was worried about the show, he had told her, and she wanted to be there to lend him moral support. As matters turned out, he needed it. Although Barbra led boisterous cheers at the opening, the reviews on Monday morning were lukewarm at best and full of insidious comparisons to the movie version that had featured Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin. Clearly On the Town wouldn’t last very long, and that prospect fell over Barbra’s reunion with Elliott like a soggy mantle. She had to leave on Tuesday to resume her Basin Street East engagement, so there was little time to discuss their future. Barbra tried to keep things light as they drove through picturesque villages north of London, stopping at tiny antique stores where she burbled with excitement about the treasures she found.

In the few days she was in England, Barbra learned what Elliott had been doing those nights when he called her later than scheduled, or not at all: he had been gambling. The news didn’t faze her much, as long as he didn’t overdo it.

WHEN BARBRA RETURNED to New York, Marty gave her the thrilling news that her album had jumped into the top twenty nationally. Within a few weeks it peaked at number eight, and at that point Barbra became the bestselling female vocalist in the country. Marty resisted the urge to call everyone at Columbia and bray “I told you so,” but he did roll his eyes whenever one of the label’s salesmen insisted he had known all along that Streisand would be a sensation.

The Barbra Streisand Album ended up the most successful debut album in history released without singles support. The disc remained in the Top 40 for a phenomenal seventy-four weeks and, eighteen months after its release, received the coveted gold certification from the Record Industry Association of America, signaling that it had achieved $1 million in sales at the manufacturer’s wholesale price (33⅓ percent of the retail list price). Thus, Barbra’s first album sold approximately 700,000 units in both monaural at $3. 98 and stereo at $4. 98; in 1963 sales of the two formats were about equal.

The album for which Barbra had been paid a $20,000 advance earned her royalties of approximately $140,000 in a year and a half and enriched Columbia’s coffers by more than $750,000. Now the company wanted Barbra back in the recording studio. With her schedule virtually nonstop for the next six months, the only time she had to spare was the first week of June. She had hoped to rejoin Elliott in London, but this was pressing. He would be home soon anyway, she told herself.

Barbra recorded eleven tracks over four days in early June. The record’s sound engineer, Frank Laico, saw a difference in Streisand from her previous sessions. “It’s like she got her feet wet with that first album,” he said, “and now she was ready to take over. She came into the control room and started asking, ‘Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that?’ I listened and then said, ‘Hey, Barbra, you didn’t know anything with that first album, and look how successful it’s become. I’m still the same person. I have the same ears. I’m not going to let you down.’”

After the first session, Laico found himself flanked at the control board by Barbra on one side and Marty on the other, each giving him advice on how to mix the tracks. Laico went to Mike Berniker, who was again producing, and threatened to quit unless they let him do his job as he saw fit. Berniker replied, “We’ve got to be careful. We don’t want to upset them.”

The Second Barbra Streisand Album crammed all of the most dramatic and emotional of Streisand’s nightclub arias into one startling package. Barbra gave even the quieter numbers a raw emotional intensity that often stunned her listeners on first hearing and left them knowing they had not just listened to a record, they had had a theatrical experience. Compared to Barbra Streisand, most of the other pop stars of the day—Patti Page, Doris Day, Julie London—seemed somnambulant.

The album, released late in August as the Streisand juggernaut built up more and more steam, jumped into the Top 10 in a matter of weeks and spent three weeks in the number two position. It was certified gold five months before Barbra’s first album. Now Barbra Streisand wasn’t just a sensation in nightclubs and on Broadway; she was a phenomenon on records as well. The music industry trade publication Cashbox said what many were already thinking: “The Streisand name could be the biggest to hit show business since Elvis Presley.”

By now observers had begun to call 1963 “The Year of Barbra Streisand.” After another appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on June 9, she took off for Chicago for a three-week gig at the popular nightspot Mr. Kelly’s. In the middle of the stand, on June 25, Barbra again basked in the national spotlight with a previously taped appearance on The Keefe Brasselle Show, a highly touted summer replacement series. The show wasn’t a hit, but Barbra was. Variety noted, “Miss Streisand was remarkably effective. She looked like a misplaced teenager in a long, would-be sexy tubular gown, but this strangely aided her performance.”

The day after her closing in Chicago, Barbra—accompanied by Elliott, who had returned from London quickly as expected—flew halfway across the country in the hope of conquering a strange and challenging new milieu: Las Vegas.

OH, GOD, THIS is going to be another Eden Roc, Barbra thought as she stood on the stage of the Riviera Hotel and faced an audience of well-heeled middle-aged couples who had come to see Liberace. She was the opening act for the flamboyant pianist, a glamour-and-glitz Vegas favorite. The crowd didn’t know what to make of her. After her first song she announced that she had made her gingham dress herself out of a tablecloth for four dollars. Murmurs abounded. “That was a joke, right, Harry?” a woman asked her husband. Liberace’s fans couldn’t relate. As he put it, “Everything I had on cost more than four dollars, including my shoelaces.”

As Barbra’s accompanist, Peter Daniels, recalled, “We went out and did twenty-five minutes. No response. It was very upsetting. The second show, the same thing, and the same thing the next night. So on the fourth day, Liberace called a meeting and said, ‘I think maybe she’s too much for my audience at this particular point. Here’s what we’re gonna do: I’ll go out and open the show, do about ten or fifteen minutes, and then I’ll introduce Barbra as my discovery. Give it the old schmaltz.’” The gambit worked, according to Daniels. “That fourth night, after he gave her that stamp of approval, she came out and did the same exact show she’d done before and got a standing ovation.”

Barbra ended her month-long stand at the Riviera on August 4. The engagement had turned out to be so successful that the management offered her an open-ended contract for as many return engagements as she cared to make at $10,000 a week (she had been getting $7, 500). She signed the contract, but she put the commitment off for seven years.

On August 5, Elliott and Barbra returned to New York, where she did two one-night stands, one at the Lido Country Club on Long Island on August 9 and the other at the Concord Hotel at Kiamesha Lake in the Catskills on the tenth. They used a week-and-a-half hiatus from her tour to move into their new home, a two-story penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor of a posh building on Central Park West.

This sumptuous duplex, which had once belonged to Lorenz Hart, contrasted spectacularly with the Third Avenue flat. The monthly rent of $450 brought Barbra and Elliott six sprawling rooms with high ceilings and crown moldings, chandeliers, and a grand staircase winding down from the master bedroom, which was located in a tower. “I can make an entrance,” Barbra said, “you know what I mean?” There was an office, a huge rooftop terrace off the bedroom, and another fifty-five feet of terraces circling the apartment’s lower level. The view of a brick wall on Third Avenue had been replaced by panoramic vistas of Central Park, upper and lower Manhattan, and the Hudson and East rivers.

Another of Barbra’s dreams had come true. This was the kind of home that glamorous women in the movies always seemed to have. What a far cry from apartment 4G! Barbra longed to decorate every room in a different classic style, to wallpaper and drape and furnish the apartment until it became her own Xanadu. But there was no time; she would be on the road for most of the rest of the year. She did buy one extravagant piece of furniture: a “fabulous” three-hundred-year-old carved-wood French canopy bed, which she installed on a two-step-high marble platform. Next to it she placed a small refrigerator covered with black patent leather. “So I can lie in bed all day and eat coffee ice cream.”

Such leisure would be a rarity for the rest of the year. On August 20, Barbra, Elliott, Marty Erlichman, and Peter Daniels flew to Los Angeles for her most important engagement to date: a two-week stand at “the legendary Cocoanut Grove.”

IF YOU WERE a hit at the Grove, all of America sat up and took notice. Over the years, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Rudolph Valentino, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe had all come to hear hundreds of other superstars perform there. With six months of raves behind her, Barbra was the club’s most anticipated headliner since Judy Garland’s comeback in 1958. Newsreel cameras recorded the excitement (Barbra covered her face and tried to shoo the cameramen away) as Hollywood’s creme de la creme turned out for Streisand’s opening night: Henry Fonda, Natalie Wood, Danny Thomas, John Huston, Kirk Douglas, Ray Milland, Edward G. Robinson. Barbra could barely believe it. “It wasn’t that long ago when I was sitting in a candy store in Brooklyn eating ice cream and reading movie magazines. Now all of a sudden I’m appearing before those very stars—and I’m now one of them.”

She acted like a star, too. She kept the audience waiting a full hour before she appeared, dressed in a white satin midshipman’s blouse and black skirt. She looked out at the record-breaking, standing-room-only crowd of fifteen hundred people that nearly surrounded her as she stood on a stage that jutted out into the audience, and quipped, “If I’da known you were going to be on both sides of me I’d have gotten my nose fixed.”

Then she started to sing, and one of the most jaded audiences in the world realized they were witnessing the birth of an extraordinary new star. Over the course of her engagement, just about every celebrity in Hollywood came to see Barbra. Jack and Mary Benny sent her a telegram: “You were magnificent Friday night. We love you.” Danny Thomas threw her a pizza party in his home and offered her a guest spot on his television sitcom, as did Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on their planned specials. Judy Garland—who turned to her companion after Barbra’s first song and muttered, “I’m never going to open my mouth again”—asked her to appear on her variety show, set to premiere that fall.

Her commitments allowed Barbra to accept only the Hope and Garland offers and forced her to turn down what would have been her first movie. The producer Sam Goldwyn Jr. offered her the lead in his film The Young Lovers. She longed to say yes—the starring role in a movie!—but she couldn’t. Her tour wouldn’t be over until December 7, and she would have to begin rehearsals for Funny Girl immediately thereafter. “There’ll be time for the movies,” Marty told her. “Don’t worry about that.” As if to underscore the point, while Barbra was in Hollywood she acquired new agents: the team of David Begelman and Freddie Fields, who had just formed Creative Management Associates, which would evolve into International Creative Management. Unlike Barbra’s former representatives, CMA had a thriving division devoted to motion pictures.

BARBRA HAD CHEATED on him, Elliott was convinced. While he was in London, reports had filtered over to him that Barbra wasn’t being faithful. While they were in Las Vegas, he had confronted her with the rumors, and to his shock she not only made no attempt to deny them but told him that if he insisted on monogamy he couldn’t remain her lover. “I really can’t stay with you,” he recalled her saying. “It’s not comfortable. I have to sow my oats. What if I was with you and I wanted to be with Marlon Brando?”

Stunned, Elliott had decided that the best way to have Barbra all to himself would be to marry her. He began to apply pressure; she hemmed and hawed and told him maybe. Perhaps her cavalier comments about monogamy had been an act, designed to test how much Elliott truly wanted her? If so, she discovered he wanted her very much indeed.

Barbra closed at the Grove on September 8; the next day she was in Lake Tahoe to begin a two-week gig at Bill Harrah’s hotel-casino, again opening for Liberace. On Friday the thirteenth she said yes to Elliott’s latest proposal of marriage, and the two of them drove twenty-five miles to Carson City on the spur of the moment, accompanied by Marty Erlichman and Marty Bregman, Barbra’s new business manager, hired to help handle all the money she was raking in. (Barbra’s handlers had advised her to marry Elliott in Nevada, which has no community property laws. ) They exchanged vows in front of Justice of the Peace Pete Supina. After Barbra changed “Love, honor, and obey” to “Love, honor, and feed,” she kissed Elliott and then it was back to Harrah’s to complete her engagement.

A few days later Barbra decided to throw a party in the grand house that Bill Harrah had provided the Goulds for the duration of their stay. Her new status as a wife must have brought her a sense of domesticity, because she decided to bake a cake for her guests, who included Liberace. Throughout the dinner, Barbra kept saying, “Wait’ll you taste this cake. It’s gonna be great.”

Finally, Liberace recalled in his memoirs, she brought out a separate full-sized cake for every one of her twelve guests. “I used the Betty Crocker recipe,” she explained, “and I didn’t know how to adjust all the ingredients for a real big cake. So I made lots of regular-sized ones.”

Everyone dug in. Brows furrowed. Mouths twisted. No one said anything. “Well,” Barbra pressed, “how is it?” Elliott spoke up first. “Barb, there’s something wrong with the frosting,” he ventured. “It’s sort of... tough.”

“Oh, yeah, well, I guess that’s because I had a little problem. I ran out of confectioner’s sugar, so I used flour instead.”

“Well,” Liberace wrote, “we all peeled the frosting off and ate the cake—a little of it, because she’d obviously done some substitution on that, too. We took the rest home with us, saying we’d eat it after the show.... It makes a great doorstop.”

BARBRA AND ELLIOTT repaired to Los Angeles, where they had the closest thing to a honeymoon they were likely to get. Ensconced in the posh Beverly Hills Hotel—the “Pink Palace”—they frolicked in the pool, went out on the town, and lolled about in their luxurious suite phoning for room service at all hours. The photographer Bob Willoughby captured them in the pool as Elliott hoisted the bikini-clad Barbra onto his shoulders. At one point Barbra put her hand over Elliott’s face, obscuring it, as Willoughby snapped their picture.

For Barbra it was a working honeymoon. She taped The Bob Hope Comedy Special along with Dean Martin, James Garner, and Tuesday Weld, which aired September 27. Wearing a simple black scoop-necked dress, she sang a rousing “When the Sun Comes Out” and a feverish “Gotta Move.” Then she, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin did a funny bit in which they played a trio of country bumpkin musicians. Barbra, wearing a frilly print dress and a floppy ribbon in her hair, strummed a washboard.

On Friday, October 4, Barbra arrived at the CBS studios at Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles to tape her appearance on The Judy Garland Show. The variety series had debuted the week before to positive reviews and strong ratings. But with eight shows in the can, CBS worried about the program’s future. The writing was uneven, the humor often strained. Worse, Judy had proved typically unreliable at times, her singing strong and vibrant on one show, weak and wavery the next.

Streisand’s appearance created a surge of excitement that ran all the way from the show’s dancers up through the top management at CBS. William S. Paley, the network’s founder and chairman of the board, and James Aubrey, its president, both planned to attend the taping.

No one was more excited, or more nervous, than Judy. On the one hand, she sensed that her teaming with Streisand had the potential to set off fireworks. On the other hand, Barbra abounded in youthful high spirits, possessed the loveliest voice Judy had ever heard, and was frequently heralded as “the new Garland”—which implied that the old Garland was on her way to superannuation. As much as Judy admired Barbra’s talents, she’d be damned if she’d let this newcomer upstage her. She would match Barbra Streisand every step of the way or fall over trying.

The minute Judy walked into rehearsal, the crew knew something was up. Often she had dragged herself into the studio after a night of booze and pills and insomnia, barely able to function. This morning she strode in crisply, her hair done, totally pulled together. Barbra was a different story. The show’s pianist, Jack Elliott, recalled to the author Coyne Steven Sanders that during rehearsal “in walk[ed] this very unattractive, dirty, scruffy, barefoot girl with stringy hair. We were surprised that she would get a spot on the Garland show.... But when Barbra started to sing, it was an electrifying moment, and instantly, everybody realized we were listening to a star.”

Barbra’s nonchalance stemmed from her growing self-confidence as a performer. She seemed to be riding an inexorable wave of adulation to super-stardom, so much so that gushing praise failed to impress her much anymore. When a crew member told Barbra how magnificent he thought she was, she replied, “You too, huh.”

“I was feeling all full of myself,” she later admitted. “You know, like ‘Wait’ll they see me!’” As she and Judy rehearsed one of their duets, Barbra couldn’t understand why Garland was so frightened. “My heart went out to her. She was holding on to me, tight. She was scared. Somehow you get more scared as you get older, maybe. When you’re young, you have nothing to lose.”

AS BILL PALEY and Jim Aubrey watched the taping, they knew they were witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime show business pairing. Two great singers, a thirty-five-year veteran and the greenest of newcomers, were performing at their peak, and the electricity in the air was palpable. As soon as the taping ended, Paley ordered that the show be aired the next Sunday, just two days hence, instead of an earlier show that had already been announced. Editors worked around the clock until 5:00 A.M. on Sunday to make it happen.

The show opened with Judy’s customary “Be My Guest” introductions. When she told Barbra, “You can have anything you want, dear,” Barbra replied, “Can I replace you?” Judy did a comic double take, then sang, “Be my guest, be my guest.” One writer later suggested that Barbra had ad-libbed the line as a dig at Judy, but of course the whole bit was written, rehearsed, and meant to be a joke.

Barbra then sang “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Never before or since has her voice sounded so pure, so bell-like. Her vocal cords could have been a Stradivarius as she caressed them into the highest, cleanest, sweetest notes imaginable. She then wasted barely a moment before she ripped into a scathing, sardonic, raucous version of “Down with Love” with grimaces and bitter laughter and clenched fists and ironic smiles that grabbed viewers anew not only with its intensity but by its complete departure from what Barbra had just sung.

The performances left Judy ecstatic. “You’re thrilling,” she told Barbra when she finished the second number, “so absolutely thrilling! You’re so good that I hate you.”

“Oh, Judy,” Barbra replied, “that’s so sweet of you, thank you. You’re so great I’ve been hating you for years. In fact, it’s my ambition to be great enough to be hated by as many singers as you.”

Next came an exciting duet in which these two talents spurred each other on to a superlative performance. It had been Judy’s idea to combine “Happy Days Are Here Again” with one of her own theme songs, “Get Happy,” and the result was grand. They matched each other note for note, emotion for emotion, belt for belt.

During Judy’s regular “Tea Time” segment, she and Barbra were engaged in chitchat when a huge voice boomed out of the audience singing “You’re Just in Love.” It was the queen of the belters, Ethel Merman. She bounded onstage and exclaimed, “How about this Barbra? Isn’t this great? The new belter! There aren’t that many of us left.”

Judy told Ethel she couldn’t go away without singing a song with her and Barbra. Ethel burst into “There’s No Business like Show Business,” and her companions followed suit. But no one could compete with Merman, who drowned out both women so thoroughly that Barbra slapped her forehead in feigned despair. As the song came to an end, Barbra pumped her arms at her sides as if to summon up more volume. But the contest went to Merman, vocal cords down.

Another Streisand-Garland medley topped off the hour in exuberant high style. The two women were so clearly out to knock ’em dead that their performance still stands as one of TV’s most memorable moments.

Barbra was so impressive, in fact, that for the first time, a guest star was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Variety Performance, in competition with four stars of their own weekly shows: Andy Williams, Perry Como, Danny Kaye, and Judy Garland. Barbra, unhappy to be competing with Garland, told the press she thought it was silly not to put her in a different category. The point became moot when Danny Kaye won the award.

Prize or no, Barbra had put a remarkable cap on her career as a television guest star. She wouldn’t make another such appearance for six years. “Once she did The Judy Garland Show,” Marty Erlichman said, “I told her, ‘There’s no more reason to be a guest artist on these cockamamie television shows. You just couldn’t top that.’”

BARBRA HAD JUST paid for a brooch in an antique shop in Manhattan when the news came over a radio: President Kennedy had been shot and killed as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. It was early afternoon, November 22, 1963. At first, like everyone else, she couldn’t believe it. “It must be some kind of Orson Welles hoax,” she whispered to her companion, recalling Welles’s 1938 radio presentation of Jules Verne’s Martian-invasion novel The War of the Worlds, so realistic it set off panic. “It just can’t be true.”

It was true, and Barbra was devastated. John F. Kennedy was not only an inspirational leader, he was also a man she had met and liked. She had been looking forward excitedly to singing for him again at the White House on December 5. Now he was gone, shot to death, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson had succeeded him. What kind of president would Johnson be? Barbra, like many Americans, knew little about him. What would happen to this country? she wondered.

Rushing home in a cab, Barbra spotted Elliott in another taxi. They hopped out of the cars and embraced each other, then spent the rest of the afternoon at home with a few friends, reminiscing, wondering, worrying about the state of America. That night Barbra went to a rehearsal with Peter Daniels to try out several new arrangements. One of them was “Happy Days Are Here Again.” A few phrases into the song, she started to cry and couldn’t go on.

BARBRA CLOSED OUT her phenomenal year in a rush. She had appeared with Sammy Davis Jr. at the Hollywood Bowl the night after she taped the Garland show, and between November 29 and December 7 she did a series of one- and two-night stands in Chicago, Indianapolis, San Jose, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

On December 28, New York’s Cue magazine chose Barbra as its Entertainer of the Year. It was the perfect end to a remarkable year, but Barbra had no time to bask in the glory. She was now deeply enmeshed in rehearsals for Funny Girl, the most eagerly awaited Broadway musical in years. The ensuing months of backstage tribulations, personality conflicts, script problems, and creative struggles would test Barbra’s talent, her mettle, even her health. And the hard-won results would make it clear that the Year of Barbra Streisand had been a mere warm-up.