Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  ‘That character he played in Miami Vice was an extension of things Don had done,’ his longtime media consultant, Elliott Mintz, confided. ‘He drove fancy cars when he was broke and wore fancy clothes when he couldn’t afford them ... and he always had a strong effect on people. When he walked into a room, women – especially – reacted and sometimes in the most unabashed way ... and I’m talking long before Miami Vice.’

  Johnson was a very sexy man who appealed to both men and women in the same way that movie idols like Tyrone Power and Tony Curtis had before him. The actor Sal Mineo once said of Don Johnson, ‘I discovered him, put him in a play set in prison with a gay theme (Fortune and Men’s Eyes). I lived with both Don and his sister, and people imagined all sorts of things ... I’ll put it like this: Yes, I’m bisexual and blond guys are my favourite type, and I did enjoy seeing Don nude on the stage [in the play), and [bare-chested] on the silver screen, for that matter. Who wouldn’t?’

  Streisand and Johnson were immediately drawn to each other. Guests at the Aspen party say she was standing talking to someone and he came across the room, took her by the arm – without her objection – led her to a quiet corner and that they eventually left together. Johnson had an aura of invincibility, a vitality that was instantly appealing to her. He glowed with good health and his looks, the tousled gold hair streaked almost platinum in places by the sun and his strong, handsome well-proportioned features, were distinctive. Whatever the camera made of his appearance, in person there was something of the Fitzgerald anti-hero, a Gatsby of sorts, in his looks, the once-rough diamond polished to a shine but still showing small, giveaway imperfections.

  Like Baskin, Johnson was eight years Streisand’s junior, but his life had been anything but privileged. Born Don Wayne in Galena, Missouri, he was a rebellious youth from a working-class family who, as a teenager, landed in a detention school for car theft where he learned how to defend himself and work the system to his advantage. Shortly after his release, eighteen months later, he hustled his way into a drama course after being thrown out of his high school class for obstreperous behaviour. Bright and street-smart, he possessed incorrigible charm. Encouraged by a teacher, he went on to achieve a scholarship to the University of Kansas followed by a stint at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. His theatre career was nearly throttled when he got hooked on drugs, alcohol and ‘enough partying and casual sex to fuel the most hedonistic episode of Miami Vice’. Before he was thirty-two he had been married and divorced three times (actress Melanie Griffith, then only sixteen was his third wife), and in 1982 he fathered a son Jesse with his former mistress, Patti D’Arbanville, a tall, well-built comedic actress who had a small role with Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in The Main Event (1979) as O’Neal’s gum-chewing, earthy girlfriend.

  Fame had not come as suddenly or as early to Johnson as it had to Streisand, but his hard-knock years had not suppressed his natural exuberance. He talked easily, laughed heartily, exuded the same kind of appeal as Jon Peters, who had held Streisand in thrall for seven years. By New Year her new lover, blond, gorgeous, gentile, was standing by her side as co-host at a party she gave. They had more in common than first appearances might reveal. He was outspoken, tough, yet sensitive, and knowledgeable musically, in fact he had been singing all his life, and had recently cut a successful single ‘Heartbeat’ which had hit the charts. ‘I have this persona as an actor and as a person of being this sort of street-smart tough guy. Tough guys don’t sing or dance, do they?’ he told Playboy Magazine. ‘So here was a chance [to make a record] and say “Fuck you!”’

  A perfectionist in his work, a workaholic by his own admission, a serious actor who wanted to direct, Johnson was not afraid to say what he felt or to go after what he wanted. He spoke with a candour that ranged ‘from downright dangerous to outright playful’, and he was going through a period in his life when he was trying to make some sense of his past.

  ‘Nobody got higher than I did for longer than I did,’ he admitted. ‘I look back now and say, “What the fuck was I doing?” – waking up in a joint with a bunch of people lying around with needles in their arms.’ Off drugs, in control of his addictions, Johnson was hell-bent for international success, but he had not lost his lust for life.

  For Streisand, at that moment, Johnson was just the right man. He made her feel younger, more alive and self-confident as once Jon Peters had done.

  ‘I don’t think Barbra ever got over being a wallflower as a kid,’ a member of her family confided. ‘Until she left Brooklyn when she was seventeen or so, she didn’t date much. I remember that she didn’t go to her senior prom. It’s always been important to her to be seen with a good-looking guy, a man other women also find attractive. Barbra always had to prove her own worth to herself, both in her work and the men she chose to love.’ She looked like a woman in love. She and Johnson exchanged intimate glances in public, held hands, laughed at each other’s jokes.

  They were a good fit, able to mix sex, work and enthusiasms. Johnson wasted no time. He was in love with Streisand and believed he had ‘run into the woman who could be it’. Three weeks later they were in New York together and it was apparent to Streisand’s associates and the media alike, that she reciprocated his passion. In public they seemed unable to keep their hands off each other.

  Johnson had gained twenty-five pounds to play a small-town building contractor who’s depressed about the state of his marriage and growing old in Sweet Hearts Dance, the movie he had just completed, and was on a physical fitness regime to lose it and Streisand joined in. He played a competitive game of tennis. ‘He has a killer instinct,’ one of his opponents in a tournament in Aspen said. ‘He can slam a ball with ferocious power.’ He was less fierce when hitting the ball with Streisand, who was not anywhere in his league, but she worked hard to improve her game. She even responded to his enthusiasm for boating – he had won several major races – in fighting sea-sickness to ride the waves in a small craft with him.

  No sooner had Johnson lost his excess weight than he was called in to reshoot the end of Sweet Hearts Dance and had to regain some of it. Streisand went on an eating spree with him, somehow managing to stay slim while he ballooned once again. They talked about his role, his interpretation, what he would do if he was directing the movie. Robert Greenhut was the director of the film but Johnson had directed several episodes of Miami Vice and hoped to do a feature as soon as possible. ‘One day,’ Greenhut remembers, ‘Don said to me, “You know, Barbra may come out while we’re shooting; is that OK?” And I said, “Sure, it’s fine.” But she never came.’ When later he asked Streisand why she hadn’t come. ‘She looked at me, smiled and said, “Well, I decided there were enough directors on the set as it is!”’ She viewed the rough cut of the film with Johnson and made ‘some very, very good suggestions’, Greenhut added.

  They retained separate residences. Streisand was not yet ready to bring a man into her home again, although she spent all the time she could with Johnson, discussed her work with him and greatly respected his opinion. They were a couple but held on to their individual identities. She looked truly happy, laughed and clowned a lot, her eyes shone, her skin glowed. Wherever she went and there were photographers, Johnson was right there with her. He supported her dedication to getting Prince of Tides into production, not an easy task because she wanted to produce, direct and star in the film and the budget was high. ‘Barbra not only makes me laugh, she makes me think,’ he told an interviewer, adding, ‘the possibilities are limitless!’

  ‘Don makes me feel very feminine,’ she told a member of her close circle. ‘I have to be so strong for everyone – Mom, Jason, my staff – that it’s nice to have someone be strong for me.’ Her skin was bronzed from the sun and she wore clothes that showed her trim body off to its best advantage. Suddenly she seemed to have shed ten years. Dining out, going to the movies, shopping with Richard Baskin had been painful, for he had not been someone who was accustomed to the stares and atten
tion that celebrity attracts. With Johnson it was entirely different. He was at the height of his fame, a raunchy sex symbol. Female fans went wild whenever they caught sight of him. Streisand, who had never been co-operative about signing autographs in public, now did. She was able to enjoy her fame, the attention of fans when she was in Johnson’s company, because he received as much adulation as she did.

  The ranch he owned in Colorado gave them time to be together out of the limelight. The house was on a large spread of land that looked out on a breathtaking vista of mountain and plain. Dawn was spectacular, night chillingly beautiful. There was something magical about the place. Johnson liked to mingle with his neighbours and fellow ranchers and so they spent considerable time in Colorado riding horseback, spending quiet evenings together at his ranch house before a roaring fire or relaxed in the company of his cronies. Johnson’s six-year-old son, Jesse, sometimes rode with them and played golf at the local club alongside his father with a set of specially made small irons. Streisand could relive some of her happiest days when Jason was a small boy and she and Elliott took time out to be with him. Those times had not been often enough, she realised now.

  For the first time in four presidential campaigns, she was not an active Democratic campaigner. Reagan had served his two terms. The battle for the White House would be fought by Massachusetts’ Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis and George Bush. Despite the entreaties of the Bergmans, Streisand did not enter into the fray. She remained close to Johnson, sharing the sun sports he enjoyed. By the end of the golden summer of 1988 he looked like a Greek god and she was glowing with health and the kind of beauty that shines when a woman is in love. The intimacy between them was such that she was able to talk about her past, to explore her feelings. As she did, The Prince of Tides began to take on more meaning for her.

  The character she wished to play, Dr Lowenstein, was described in Pat Conroy’s book as ‘one of those go-to-hell New York women with the incorruptible carriage of lionesses’. Conroy’s Dr Lowenstein was a fictional blood cousin to Kramer’s Dr Brookner in The Normal Heart. With childhood abuse and murder at its centre, The Prince of Tides contained overtones of Nuts. Streisand was searching through her work for answers to her own nagging psychological problems, carry-overs from childhood that neither success nor a loving relationship could obliterate. Several studios rejected the project, which only steeled her determination to make it. As the rejections mounted, she grew frantic and turned to Jon Peters, now a powerful studio head at Columbia, who took it under their auspices. ‘It helps to have an influential ex-boyfriend,’ she joked. But her ties to Peters were not really severed. It was one more relationship with which she had to make peace, not easy for despite her attachment to Johnson she felt tied to Peters emotionally and she would come away from a meeting with him feeling unnerved, perhaps just a little less sure of her commitment to Johnson.

  ‘When I first read The Prince of Tides I knew I had to make it. [It] was about coming to terms with the people in our lives ... our parents ... our children ... our mates ... and even more important than that,’ she said, ‘as I am learning myself, it’s about coming to terms with ourselves by accepting, loving and being in harmony with the child who still lives inside us.’

  Barbra Streisand was ready, perhaps for the first time, to go back to the beginning, to try to make some sense of it all, to hold her life in her arms and learn to give it the love she thought she had never had. And yet, could she ever let go of the anger she felt for the bruises she bore? ‘My mother could never make up for the part in my childhood that I never got,’ she said bitterly at the time. The journey back would contain great emotional highs, unprecedented fame, and the love of several of the world’s most desirable men. It would also be fraught with conflict as well as pain, but if she wanted to heal her wounds there was no other way to go. Once again, she returned to therapy.

  Roots

  ‘It’d take a lifetime to know Brooklyn

  t’roo and t’roo. An even den, yuh

  wouldn’t know it at all.’

  THOMAS WOLFE Only the Dead Know

  Brooklyn’, 1935

  ‘Terribly funny, yes, but Brooklyn is also a sad brutal provincial lonesome human silent sprawling innocent perverse tender mysterious place, a place where Crane and Whitman found poems, a mythical dominion against whose shores the Coney Island sea laps a wintry lament.’

  TRUMAN CAPOTE, 1946

  ‘I always wanted to get out of Brooklyn and be someone.’

  BARBRA STREISAND, 1970

  3

  BROOKLYN WAS HER universe for the first fifteen years of her life. She was born Barbara Joan Streisand on 24 April 1942, the second child of Emanuel and Diana Ida Rosen Streisand. America had entered the war only five months earlier and already one of Diana’s two brothers had been inducted. Several young men in the modest apartment building at 457 Schnectady Avenue where the Streisands lived, had eagerly enlisted in the service. Boys in Emanuel’s English classes at Brooklyn High School for Specialty Trades (later called George Westinghouse Vocational High School) where he taught, were already dropping out to join the forces. Aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers were being built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with 75,000 workers the largest of its kind in the world. Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn’s staging area for the army, was equipped to handle 8,000 men at a time. At night, a blackout was enforced over the entire borough, which was considered a strategic area. Security was diligent. No one was going to forget Pearl Harbor.

  At the carefully guarded North River pier, silent lines of men in khaki waited to file aboard transport ships that would take them to Europe to meet the Nazi foe. The last view they would have of their country would be the murky dark waters that bordered the Brooklyn mainland. Wherever you were in Brooklyn, you had a sense of the sea, from the shorefront communities to the many bridges that linked Brooklyn to Manhattan, to the bustling ports, the names of the avenues and parkways – Atlantic, Ocean, Sea Gate, Pacific – to the 197-acre Brooklyn Navy Yard which skirted Wallabout Bay, a semi-circular elbow of the East River.

  When it was first proposed in 1833 that the village of Brooklyn become incorporated into the city of New York, the idea was scoffed at. But geographically and hence commercially, Brooklyn was bound to the island of Manhattan and in 1898, fifteen years after the completion of the mighty Brooklyn Bridge, incorporation finally took place. Integration was another matter, slower to progress and perhaps never to be achieved. Brooklynites are a people unto themselves. Those raised there speak their own dialect and at the time of Barbara Joan Streisand’s birth the tremendous number of foreign-born, over 900,000, and the majority of ethnic groups (over 1,000,000 of whom were Jewish) in the population of 2,800,000 made it quite different from any of New York City’s boroughs and uniquely set it apart from other cities in America.

  When war was declared, Brooklyn was one of the greatest maritime and industrial centres in the world. Forty per cent of the foreign commerce that moved out of the port of New York cleared through its thirty-three miles of developed waterfront. There were seventy steamship freight lines, fourteen trunk railways, and a series of huge shipping terminals. Brooklyn was the fifth largest manufacturing centre in the country. Industry, however, was largely concentrated within a few blocks of the waterfront. The rest of Brooklyn was one mammoth residential area, divided into sections by ethnic make-up more than boundaries. There were twenty distinct and separate Jewish communities. Several might have been classified as ghettos where many of the foreign-born Jews lived and where pushcarts still crowded the streets and there was a heady scent of sour rye bread fresh from the oven, fish – cooked and stuffed – and the sweet odour of honey cakes. Yiddish was the language between the older residents, while the youngsters mostly spoke English. Saturdays the streets were empty, sombre as the Sabbath was observed. But the majority of Jewish communities were middle class and upwardly mobile first- and second-generation Americans.

  Barbara’s parents
were both raised in ghettos but, with time, their families had become just slightly removed from these more congested, unrelieved slum areas. Named Ida Rosen at her birth on 10 December 1908 (Diana was a teenage affectation), Barbara’s mother was the third child of Louis Rosen, a tailor, and his wife Esther Etlin Rosen who emigrated to America during the pogroms in Russia shortly after the turn of the century. Louis was a religious Jew whose joy derived from his position as a part-time cantor in his shul.1 Had his voice and interpretation been more inspired, his prospects might have been brighter for this was the era of cantonal glory, when great cantors would appear at different shuls as superstars in their field. A synagogue’s ability to attract the most famous of these singers drew great respect from other shuls. Jews would walk miles to hear a celebrated cantor.

  Louis lacked the vocal talent that was demanded for such a career. His failure embittered him, but it did not stop him from praying or singing. Four times a day he would walk around the Rosens’ small, crowded apartment, his tallis draped around his sloping shoulders and daven in a sing-song voice. Sometimes he would sing Yiddish songs that came from the old country. The family spoke Yiddish, but among the younger members, English was preferred. ‘Speak to me in English,’ Diana was always telling her mother. And she and her sister Molly, who was next to her in age, seldom spoke Yiddish between themselves. There was the need to integrate, to become Americanised, and the sooner the better. Diana grew up to the sound of Yiddish music. She had a sweet, untrained soprano voice and liked to listen to operetta on the gramophone that was her father’s great pride. At seventeen, pretty, petite, round-faced and with shining blue eyes, she tried out for the Metropolitan Opera chorus and was rejected. Three years later she went to work in an office filing and doing light book-keeping. She met Manny Streisand at a Purim celebration at the home of a friend whose father was the cantor for their shul.