The exhausted actress sighed resignedly, “But most of the time, I know why,” she amended.

One observer described the taping session as organized confusion. With as many as 150 people in the studio, a maze of cables and wires, lights, cameras and microphones, props, stage children and mothers, actors and actresses, technicians, musical instruments, television monitors, painted scenery, and studio guards, it was difficult to see how order could be maintained.
But by Saturday night all the scheduled taping had been completed and the show was “in the can,” with editing to follow later at a comparatively quiet and peaceful pace.

In the course of the entertainment, the talented 25-year-old singing star does a modified striptease (more comic than sexy, as parts of her carefully wired Alice blue gown fly apart); plays three different roles opposite Jason Robards in a quick-change vaudeville version of The Tempest; impersonates a German opera singer; and in a dramatically costumed “single” (see cover) sings some famous songs – Everybody Loves My Baby, I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, and Some of These Days, among others – in the way no one in the Gay Nineties ever heard them sung. It’s a real virtuoso performance.

This is Barbra Streisand’s third special for Monsanto. The first two, My Name is Barbra and Color Me Barbra, were among TV’s all-time highest rated, both critically and with the public. The former won five Emmy awards, and both garnered rave notices and an ever-increasing audience of fans for the young singer with the haunting face and the moving voice.

In Belle of 14th Street she again has her producer Joe Layton, who staged her earlier specials. Layton, a tall, thin, sad-looking young man with enormous vitality, is as much at home on the stage and in motion pictures as in television. His behind-the scenes counterpart, Director Walter Miller, spent most of his four days back in the control room; but the two of them virtually wore a groove in the floor running back and forth between stage and monitors.

The other top talent in the show is more visible, and thus better known to the public. Jason Robards is a well-known dramatic actor, both on the stage, where he made his name as an interpreter of O’Neill, and on the screen (A Thousand Clowns, Divorce American Style). It’s quite a different Robards to be seen in Belle, however. He sings and dances and generally hams it up with the rest of the cast.

Behind the scenes during the taping, it was often Robards and the ladies of the Beef Trust chorus who kept the troops laughing. These hefty chorines were hand-picked from hundreds of applicants. Producer Layton had specified that they must sing, dance, be under 45 (years) and over 45 (bust), and weigh over 200 pounds.

The six sturdy girls finally chosen are not in every scene – they only seem to be.  Whether garbed in flowing chiffons for the Tempest ballet, or in lacy-pink baby-doll outfits, they are a ubiquitous group of performers, both on and off stage.
One of them, Harriet Gibson, is a concert pianist who likes to eat. Since her “act” included biting into an apple while the TV camera trains on her, she laboriously went through seven separate “takes” just to get everything in proper sequence. It went like this: Enter smiling; remove sign for last act, put up sign for next act; catch apple thrown from orchestra pit; sit down; bite into apple; eat apple.

This is typical of the kind of patient attention to detail that makes taping long and tiresome. Another actress, Nell Theobald, who once won a measure of unwanted fame when she was clawed by a lion during a modeling job, sat with her back to the camera as a member of the theater “audience” and removed her hat 12 times before everything was just right.