Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand Read online

  Carl knew—everyone in their acting class knew—how intensely Barbara wanted to be great. She wanted to be Duse, she said, though she’d never seen Duse act, only read about her in books on theater in her acting teacher’s library. That didn’t matter. Duse had been a great artist, perhaps the greatest, and that’s what Barbara wanted. There were others in the class who claimed they wanted to be great, but what they really wanted was fame and applause. That wasn’t what fired Barbara up. She didn’t sit around idolizing movie stars or the latest Broadway sensation du jour. She wanted to be remembered for being great, for making art.

  Taxicabs bleated their horns as Barbara and Carl crossed Times Square. Policemen blew high-pitched whistles as tiny brand-new Ford Falcons scooted past sleek Chevrolet Impalas with their sweeping tail fins. Steam from the Seventh Avenue subway rose through the grates like fog from an underground river. On every block hung the fragrance of roasting chestnuts, while tourists in fur coats gaped up at the news ticker on the New York Times Building, its 14,800 bulbs spelling out the latest in the U.S.-Soviet space race.

  Barbara and Carl headed west on Forty-eighth Street. At Barbara’s apartment, number 339, the friends bid each other good-bye, and if Barbara was hoping there might be a kiss, she didn’t wait for it. It was clear that Carl, like all the others, wasn’t interested in her that way. If anyone had asked, she would’ve insisted it didn’t matter. With all her big dreams, she would’ve said that she didn’t have time for romance.

  That day, or one very much like it, Barbara walked up the stairs to her apartment to the smell of boiled chicken. On the stove bubbled a pot of her mother’s chicken soup. Barbara’s roommate, Marilyn, told her that her mother had just walked in, dropped off the soup, and left. No message, no note. But the chicken soup, as always, was welcome because that fried fish and coleslaw would last only so long.

  2.

  Striding into her acting class, Barbara was boiling with all the ferocity of her mother’s soup. Who did this Susskind guy think he was?

  Word around the Theatre Studio had been that the producer David Susskind was always looking for new talent. It might be only for television, not the stage, but Susskind’s production of Lullaby for Channel 13’s Play of the Week had recently won approving notices for Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, and next up was The Devil and Daniel Webster for NBC Sunday Showcase. The guy was making something worthwhile out of the boob tube. And since Susskind had been an agent, Barbara no doubt figured stopping by his office on Columbus Circle couldn’t hurt, to drop off some headshots if nothing else.

  But rarely had she encountered such rudeness. Carl, who’d gotten an earful on the way to class, was trying to calm her down, but Barbara was on a roll. Susskind had agreed to see her, but then Barbara had sat in his office for hours to no avail. Finally she’d stormed out, and the storm had yet to subside. People such as Susskind, she raged, were refusing to let new talent emerge, almost as if they had a “duty to squelch” it. That was the problem with this business, Barbara carped. Whenever she tried to sign up with agents, she was told they only represented people who were working. But you couldn’t get work without an agent! Talk about double binds! Barbara took it all very personally.

  The others in her class looked on with a mixture of amusement and weariness. To them, Barbara was that nutty kid who was always stumbling in late eating yogurt and wearing “a coat of some immense plaid,” as one of them described. When she spoke, Barbara reminded some people of a Jules Feiffer cartoon from the Village Voice—cynical, ironic, sometimes angry, and always quintessentially New York. When asked why she talked so much, often to the point where other students closed their eyes in exhaustion, she was apt to blame it on her tinnitus, a condition that had plagued her since she was eight. “I never hear the silence,” she said. Neither, her classmates might have replied, did they.

  The Theatre Studio was located at 353 West Forty-eighth Street, just a few doors from Barbara’s apartment, precisely the reason she’d chosen to live there. The school was one of about a hundred such institutions in a twenty-block radius of Times Square. In the previous decade acting schools had proliferated in New York. With the elite “big three”—the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the American Theatre Wing, and the Neighborhood Playhouse—only being able to accommodate about six hundred aspiring actors, newer schools quickly formed to fill the need. Celebrated coaches like Herbert Berghof and Stella Adler established their own ateliers. The Theatre Studio was part of this same tradition, having been founded in 1952 by Curt Conway, a member of the groundbreaking Group Theatre and a major proponent of Method acting. In addition to the classrooms on Forty-eighth Street, Conway had acquired the Cecilwood Playhouse in Fishkill, New York, for summer productions, and a weekly radio program on station WEVD where his students interpreted new and classical work. The school offered three levels of courses, from fundamental to advanced acting, and special workshops conducted by some of the greats Conway had worked with, including Joseph Anthony, Howard Da Silva, Paddy Chayefsky, and Harold Clurman.

  Not that Barbara, a neophyte, had gotten to study with any of them. Her primary teacher was Allan Miller, a young up-and-comer who’d studied under Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen and who was best known for playing the second lead (behind Warren Beatty) in a summer tour of A Hatful of Rain. Under Miller’s tutelage, Barbara was beginning to blossom. Finally she was in an environment where people believed in her potential as much as she did. Any student with enough “appetite,” Miller believed, could be trained to act. With such a philosophy, it was no surprise that Barbara responded well to Miller’s instruction. “We all have deep, secret feelings,” he told his students—and that was certainly true enough of Barbara. With enough craft and discipline, Miller said, she could use those feelings to hone and express her acting talent.

  Barbara had enrolled at the Theatre Studio when she was not quite sixteen, younger than most people who were admitted. Her only real acting experience came from a summer internship with the Malden Bridge Playhouse in upstate New York between her sophomore and junior years, where she’d gotten to act in Picnic and won a nice review in the local newspaper. Her acceptance into the Theatre Studio had come about only through the intercession of Miller’s wife, Anita, whom Barbara had met at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where she’d secured herself yet another internship. As soon as Barbara had realized that her new friend’s husband taught at the Theatre Studio, she’d bombarded her with questions, coming across to Anita “like someone who had been starved.” Impressed by her passion, Anita had prevailed upon her husband to accept Barbara into his class. Instead of paying tuition ($180 for a fifteen-week course ), Barbara babysat the Millers’ two young sons. It wasn’t unheard of for students to barter their tuition in this way; another young hopeful, an enterprising kid from California named Dustin Hoffman, swept the floors and emptied the trash at night. Barbara told her mother she’d received a “scholarship.”

  Although she took classes with other teachers, it was Allan Miller who became Barbara’s mentor. Handsome, intelligent, passionate, Miller offered Barbara a glimpse of what her life might have been like if her father had still been around. In the days before she got her apartment, Barbara would sometimes sleep on the Millers’ couch instead of schlepping back to Brooklyn. She’d fall asleep with books about theater, art, or literature resting on her chest. These were the kind of treatises she believed her father would have kept around the house: Socrates, Euripides, French farces, and Russian literature. Anna Karenina “changed her life,” she said. During this same period Barbara also heard her first classical music: Respighi’s Pines of Rome and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. “Can you imagine what that’s like?” she asked, looking back. “To hear that music for the first time?”

  At the Millers’ house, Barbara soaked up more culture than she “ever did in high school.” She viewed the Millers’ life with a sort of wonder. They were happy; their kids were happy; they were smart and curious and engaged
with the world. It was as if she were peering through a looking glass into another world.

  During Barbara’s first semester at the Theatre Studio, she took Miller’s Fundamentals course, which met twice weekly and included an hour of body training and seventy-five minutes of voice and speech instruction. “Acting is the only art in which the actor is both the piano and the pianist,” Miller wrote. Her teacher found Barbara “very awkward, emotionally and physically, in her expression of herself,” so in the beginning he insisted she perform her scenes in class using sounds instead of words.

  Gradually, Barbara shed some of her awkwardness and developed some effective techniques, though she seemed, to some at least, to be surprisingly ungrateful to those who helped her. To her, it was as if her new skills were her accomplishments and hers alone. One teacher, Eli Rill, thought Barbara eschewed “the political niceties . . . the brownnosing” that most students practiced. There was no “thank you very much,” Rill said—no card, no phone call, even after he took a chance on her and cast her in a production he was directing. Rill didn’t mind,though he found Barbara’s behavior different enough to comment on it.

  Barbara then advanced to Miller’s Intermediate Acting class. Here a “sensory approach” was taught to perfect “concentration, relaxation, and emotion.” Barbara was fascinated by this forceful man who taught her how to breathe, how to move, how to delve deeply into a whole range of emotions. She was a girl who knew very little about men. She’d never known her father, and her mother’s second husband, a crass used-car salesman who’d barely ever spoken to her, had been gone by the time she was thirteen. Her brother, Sheldon, seven years older than she was, had left when Barbara was ten to study at the Pratt Institute. By the time Barbara moved out of the apartment, the household consisted of her, her mother, and her younger sister, Rosalind, who was now an overweight child of nine.

  Her encounters with the opposite sex had been fleeting—though intense enough to leave her extremely curious. The longest lasting one had been her fling with her fellow student Roy Scott the previous year. Roy was Barbara’s brother’s age, twenty-four, a grown man—even if he still poured ketchup on his macaroni and drank cheap wine. She had spent many late nights at Roy’s place, the two of them talking about acting, the theater, and life. Barbara thought Roy was the best-looking guy in Miller’s class, and she couldn’t fathom why he paid so much attention to a girl like her.

  That such a brash, outspoken girl harbored such self-doubt surprised many people. When she wasn’t striving to become the great Method actor who could believe herself to be anything, including beautiful, Barbara would inevitably remember the “real ugly kid” she’d been in Brooklyn, “the kind who looks ridiculous with a ribbon in her hair,” as she described herself. When someone avoided her eyes, she felt certain they “couldn’t bear to look” at her. But Roy assured her that all this was nonsense. She was “very pretty and attractive.” It may have been the first time Barbara had ever heard those words.

  Barbara’s mother, however, hadn’t been pleased with the relationship. Barbara rarely spoke of her mother; her roommate, Marilyn, only knew she existed from the chicken soup she’d drop off at the apartment. To her daughter’s friends, Diana Streisand Kind seemed “somebody far removed from Barbara, somebody she preferred not to even think about.” But she would be heard. “My daughter’s too young to be involved with your son,” Diana told Roy’s mother after tracking her down through the school. Barbara’s mother was adamant about such things. Even holding hands was frowned upon in Barbara’s household. “You’ll get a disease,” Diana warned. Thereafter, Roy kept his distance.

  The breakup with Roy hadn’t helped Barbara’s confidence or her faith in her own appeal. But Allan Miller identified a raw sexuality in her work in class. Acting out a scene from The Rose Tattoo, Barbara was embarrassed to play the seductress, so Miller advised her to find a way to convey the girl’s desire without thinking about sex. What followed astonished him. Barbara pretended she was blind, and as she spoke, she touched her partner’s face. At one point, she stood on his feet; at another, she jumped on his back. Miller thought it was “the sexiest scene” he’d ever witnessed in his life.

  Yet toward men, Barbara seemed skeptical and wary. She was content to bask in the lectures of her intense, impassioned teacher and to pal around with platonic friends such as Carl Esser, heedless of the game of musical beds being played by other Theatre Studio students. Those who watched Barbara as she sauntered in and out of class wearing her fringed jackets and oversized boots, projecting that fragile pretense of superiority so peculiar to misfit teenagers, had the sense that she was somehow frozen in midbloom.

  3.

  The flyer tacked to the wall contained only the barest of details, but Allan Miller suggested that his students give it a read.

  Barbara, Carl, and the others gathered around. A group called the Actors Co-op was holding auditions for a play called The Insect Comedy, written by the Czech playwrights Josef and Karel Ĉapek and set to be staged at a little playhouse on East Seventy-fourth Street. The director was a man named Vasek Simek, who, according to word around the Theatre Studio, was “a big deal,” a Czech who’d once worked for Radio Free Europe. The Insect Comedy, therefore, would be a “very significant play.”

  Both she and Carl decided to audition. This, Barbara hoped, could be her big break. True, she had a rather sparse résumé, but challenge was what Barbara thrived on. She’d gotten herself to Manhattan to make something of herself, and to show her mother and everyone back in Brooklyn that they just hadn’t known how special she was. When Barbara was nine, a gang of girls had formed a circle around her, making fun of her until she cried. Although Barbara wasn’t crying anymore, she still tried to understand what she had done to elicit such cruelty. What exactly did she “vibrate,” she wondered, that brought out such hostility from people, even in her acting class?

  One friend thought part of the answer was that people were threatened by her. Barbara had a way, this friend said, of “letting you know that she thought she was better than you were, and that she’d be a big success and you wouldn’t.” Barbara wasn’t being hostile, or even necessarily conscious of the attitude she was projecting. But the impression came through nonetheless. Her sense of superiority masked her self-doubt; Barbara had to believe that she was special since no one else did. Whether that specialness was good or just different, she had yet to fully discover. But she knew one thing clearly: She was not like anyone else.

  Her tinnitus, for example, was evidence of “supersonic hearing,” Barbara believed, an ability that enabled her to hear sounds beyond the range of normal people. It frightened her; she wore scarves “to try to cut out the noise.” And it wasn’t just sounds. She experienced colors in a way no one else did. When she’d look at a white wall, she’d see textures. Her sensory perception seemed “an overemphasizing on the processes of being alive,” she thought. In some very real sense, Barbara existed outside the realm of ordinary people. Of course a girl with such extrasensory powers was going to have certain advantages over mere mortals. She felt as if she were “chosen,” that only she could “see the truth.” A girl like that was either going to go crazy or succeed beyond anyone’s imagination—except, of course, hers.

  To Carl, Barbara insisted that if she got a part in The Insect Comedy, it could catapult her to the kind of success she’d always dreamed about. The show was bound to inflame her ambition. It would be her first real play in New York, because Driftwood, the little thing she’d done the previous year in the attic of its playwright’s fifth-floor walk-up on East Forty-ninth Street, didn’t count, at least not in her mind. She needed a part that would get her noticed. She’d already wasted too much time in the trenches, she believed. For Barbara, there was no patience for the chorus line. For her, it was “right to the top,” she insisted, “or nowhere at all.”

  So all her laserlike focus was brought to bear on winning a part in The Insect Comedy.

  4.

/>   Never had Barbara known a friend quite like Terry.

  It was Terry to whom she turned for help in her quest. For her Insect Comedy audition, she needed an especially impressive outfit, and Terry had a way of finding things. Not long ago, he had given her a scarf of sheer silk netting, over which Barbara had gushed, “Where did you ever find it?” Terry had replied mysteriously that it just “turned up” somewhere, and when Barbara asked him what she owed him for it, he shrugged and said, “Never mind about that.”

  Terry Leong was an absolute doll. Barely taller than Barbara’s five-five, he was twenty-one, finely boned, soft-spoken, and, according to one friend, as “delicately attenuated as a Chinese rod puppet carved of linden wood.” Terry’s father had been born in China, his mother in Boston, and the young man lived with them on Chrystie Street in Chinatown, though he was hankering to move uptown. Weekdays Terry toiled for McGregor-Doniger, the men’s sportswear company, designing golf shirts at their offices in the Tishman Building at 666 Fifth Avenue. Golf was far from Terry’s passion, however; he wasn’t happy with his job at all. He had studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and what he really wanted to do was design for the theater—which was why he jumped at the chance when his friend Marilyn Fried asked him to help her roommate Barbara put together outfits for Theatre Studio shows.