Free Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand by William J. Mann Page B

Avenue, the kind of place that never saw its shows listed in the calendar section of the
Times.
McHugh still populated his stage with people he considered stars, such as Dawn Hampton, whose hot jazz regularly burned up the back room. The Streisand kid—the one who’d been winning his contests for the last few weeks—also had potential. She was back again tonight, handing her music to pianist Pat McElligott, telling him that she’d added a couple of new numbers. If she won again tonight, McHugh had decided, he’d have to retire her from the contest so somebody else could have a chance. He regretted having to put an end to Barbara’s run, however, since the little waif had been good for business. Word had gotten around that she was special. “Talented in a waynobody else is,” patrons were saying. And what showman didn’t love discovering someone like that?
    She was a sharp cookie, that Streisand. After winning her second contest, she’d told McHugh that she wanted three pictures of herself, not just one, on the sign promoting the Saturday night show. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had a look, McHugh thought. He would know. With his classicall-American handsomeness, he’d been one of the nation’s top male models. For several years he’d been the man shaving his face in the Gillette razor television commercials. He’d also managed his own modeling agency, where he’d learned that beautiful people weren’t always the best salespeople. “Perfect” models didn’t have the same appeal, McHugh believed, as those who looked “real,” who were “believable,” and thus “saleable.”
    Barbara was as real as they got, and the Lion’s regulars had taken to her. She’d been hired to work the coat-check room during the week. The offbeat characters who patronized the club all adored her. Barbara had quickly figured out that the clientele was largely gay, but had nonetheless been surprised to learn just
how
gay. That first Saturday she’d performed, Cis had come to cheer her on, and Barbara had pointed out that they were the only women in the house, as if Cis couldn’t have seen that herself.
    For tonight’s competition, Barbara was adding “Why Try to Change Me Now?” and “Long Ago (and Far Away),” both Sinatra standards, to her set. She and Barré had been practicing them all week, giving the songs as many unusual touches as possible. It was Barbara’s offbeat personality as much as her gorgeous voice that drew other performers to the Lionto check her out. Popular stage and television actor Orson Bean was brought by some friends one night, and he’d thought she was “simply fabulous.” Paul Dooley, who’d recently made a splash in
Fallout,
a revue at the Renata Theater on Bleecker Street, was another who’d heard about this “crazy girl with the beautiful voice” and came by the Lion to see for himself. Dooley was struck by the fact that Barbara “had the poise of a forty-year-old saloon singer” when she was only eighteen years old. Of her audience she seemed to demand, “Look at me!”—and, indeed, Dooley found that he couldn’t look away. “Young people don’t usually have that kind of confidence,” he said. “They don’t usually trust their talent.”
    Yet Barbara was so unusual that not everyone responded to her in the same way. While Bean and Dooley saw her as fabulous and confident, Walter Clemons, who played piano for Mabel Mercer and, like the others, had slipped in to see what all the fuss was about, perceived her as “terribly nervous.”In Clemons’s view, Barbara was “hostile” to her audience, with none of Mercer’s legendary generosity. Her eccentric syntax seemed to him “convoluted and interior,” leaving him confused as to what she was talking about. All he could feel coming from her was the “terrible resentment of an ugly girl.”
    But Clemons was in the minority. That night Barbara won the contest once again, and Burke McHugh made much hoopla over the fact