by Anne Edwards
‘I feel like a boxer in the ring,’ she said. ‘In Hollywood they have people for everything. If there is a stain on my dress, I’m not supposed to clean it. Then I’m criticised if I stand up and shout, “Stain person!” until someone from the wardrobe department finally comes. If I didn’t shout, a whole half-hour could go by before the stain person got there!’
‘People were saying she was paranoid,’ a dancer in the film said, ‘but I want to be fair. That’s a lie. She is, in her own way, the sanest person in the world. A paranoid person is someone who imagines he has enemies. She did not have to invent them. She had enemies.’
She also had strong supporters. As with the play, Funny Girl the movie was fast becoming Streisand’s vehicle, the rushes revealing a new, totally original movie personality was blazing into incandescent existence and she so lit up the film that its success seemed as assured as had her own. The studio was pleased, Wyler was satisfied and Ray Stark, to whom she was contracted to do three more pictures, was ecstatic. ‘Sure, she’s tough,’ Stradling commented, ‘but she has an unerring eye.’
‘You have to understand,’ Sharif told the Los Angeles Times, ‘she’s a kid from Brooklyn. She had a terrible background. She didn’t just think she was plain – she thought she was ugly. So no wonder that insecurity. No wonder, when people suddenly start to make a fuss over you, you don’t know whether it’s for you, or who you are. Those weren’t rumors that she caused trouble during the filming of Funny Girl. There was trouble – in wardrobe, in make-up and so on. But when the whole film sinks or swims on you, you’re in trouble.’
What Sharif did not understand was that Streisand thrived on trouble and often was its instigator. Trouble fed her churning mind, gave impetus to her determination, and reason for some of her otherwise unconscionable actions.
Footnotes
1 Songs cut from the movie of Funny Girl were: ‘The Music that Makes Me Dance’ and ‘Coronet Man’, ‘I Want to Be Seen With You’, ‘Rat-a-tat-tat’ (Private Schwartz from Rockaway), ‘Who Taught Her Everything She Knows’, and the chorus number ‘Henry Street’. Four songs were added: ‘Roller Skate Rag’ (which had its roots in an earlier, similar song) and ‘Funny Girl’ by Styne and Merrill, and ‘I’d Rather Be Blue over You’ (written in the 1920s by Fred Fisher) and ‘My Man’.
2 Isobel Lennart would receive the final screenplay credit.
17
WITH ELLIOTT IN New York, Streisand’s affair with Sharif intensified. She had become the woman she was portraying, madly in love with the gorgeous Nicky Arnstein. From the days that she saw movies from a balcony seat she had fantasised herself as the woman in the story, not the movie star playing her. ‘I never wanted to be Vivien Leigh,’ she had said. ‘I desperately wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara.’ She had believed that Scarlett and Rhett were real people and the love scenes in the film had an aura of cinéma vérité, real people in moments of true passion. Wyler saw what was happening and said nothing as the rushes were incendiary and just what he wanted. She glowed on screen and off. The set buzzed with gossip – Would she leave Elliott? Would Sharif leave his wife? The lovers remained discreet off the set until near the end of filming when they appeared at various social gatherings together and these ‘sightings’ were reported in the press. After they were photographed together at an exclusive charity fashion show at the Factory Discothèque in Hollywood, Elliott telephoned her hurt and angry from New York.
‘Why in hell did you go to the fashion show with Omar?’ he screamed across the telephone lines.
‘Because the ticket would have cost me $250,’ he said she replied. Elliott apparently embraced that response at face value, unable to accept the role of the cuckolded husband. Also, it did not sound that unreasonable as Streisand had hung on to many of her old money-pinching habits and was always pleased when someone picked up the tab for her. Then, the following Sunday night she dined alone with Sharif at Matteo’s, one of Hollywood’s ‘in’ restaurants.
Wanting to avoid a scandal, Elliott told columnist Irv Kupcinet, ‘Barbra’s always been a cheapskate. She accepted those dates with Sharif because she doesn’t like buying her own dinners.’ Cornered by Sheilah Graham, he told her, ‘I’m furious with Barbra and told her that. She should have known that she is in a very difficult position out there, where the press doesn’t like her because she has been uncooperative. I’m just furious with her for putting herself in this kind of position. I’m a very secure person but as a man I have certain reactions.’
By down-playing the relationship, he was telegraphing to the public the message that Streisand had done nothing overtly wrong, that she was simply terribly naïve. The situation darkened when Sharif told a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, ‘It’s true, I lusted after Barbra.’
Such a passionate declaration from a lover, who was a handsome leading man known to have had affairs with some of the world’s most beautiful women, fed Streisand’s ego. Critical remarks about her nose, her looks, were always appearing in print and despite her ability to laugh at them in public, they hurt – deeply. She wanted desperately to be seen as being a desirable, attractive woman, but perhaps, even more, she longed to feel that way about herself. She saw herself as the great love of two men – her husband and her lover. In such a scenario Elliott would be expected to fly to her side and fight for her.
His reaction to the affair was far different from what she anticipated. Elliott treated it as if it was an invention of the press and not true, and remained in New York. Streisand, incensed at his cool attitude, was more outspoken about the significance of her relationship with Sharif. ‘I know Elliott thinks it’s just another Hollywood fantasy,’ she told a reporter, ‘but it’s not – Omar has told me many times that he loves me.’
She learned quickly that Sharif had his own interpretation of love. To him, it was something that could be collected and then left on a shelf. His scenes completed before Streisand’s, he departed Hollywood for Europe a few days later to star with Catherine Deneuve, James Mason and Ava Gardner in Mayerling. Within a few weeks, rumours came back that he was having a torrid affair with Ava. Both Streisand and Elliott looked the naïve fools in this typically tawdry Hollywood love triangle. When Elliott returned to California they acted – at least in public – as if nothing had happened between them. Elliott, who was already having difficulty with being the less successful husband of a star, was acutely injured by Streisand’s actions. Streisand, for her part, no longer was sure of her feelings for Elliott.
They were still living together, but seeing separate lawyers in an attempt to work out an amicable trial separation. An announcement was prepared for the press, then yanked back, brought out again, then yanked back again. Their mutual business interests, since Elliott was a partner in both her companies, were complicated, and Jason’s custody presented problems. Elliott wanted to have the child with him for a fair amount of time, Streisand was not willing to compromise. She planned to stay in Hollywood while Elliott was in New York, which would have made joint custody difficult with a child so young.
This was not simply the classic story of the price of stardom. Streisand and Elliott both had deep-seated emotional difficulties that pre-dated her rise to fame. Elliott’s love and devotion had apparently not been enough to build her self-confidence as a woman. No matter how successful she was, self-doubt remained. Winning the love of her handsome leading man had helped – but just for a time. She needed more freedom to find herself, to experience more in her personal life. Still, she was not sure she wanted to let go of Elliott, or that she should. She began therapy sessions anew. Her long investigation into her past and the reasons for her actions, fears, and insecurities began again. She would spend years speaking about the loss of her father and her painful childhood.
‘I don’t believe in psychoanalysis per se,’ she was to say, ‘but that’s what makes up our personality. Only when you get older can you look at things [that happened in childhood] with some distance, and if you have the courage y
ou can feel the pain.’ She laid much of the guilt for that pain on Diana and Louis Kind. ‘Even though you – complain – about your parents,’ she added in a tone of gingerly forgiveness, ‘you find you’re like them in many ways.’ Fascinated with tales of herself and her past, she would talk to interviewers freely about them, dogmatically certain she was telling the truth. She was binding her own life into a book of her invention, no doubt based on honest remembrance, but it was her truth, a story told from only one point of view – her own. She portrayed herself as a victim of any unhappy childhood, a sexist world. To an extent, this was true. Life, however, is seldom so black and white. A case can be put forward that she made herself a victim by believing it was so, and that despite the many injustices worldwide towards women, she had suffered fewer than most.
Nothing was done at this time to start proceedings for divorce. Elliott still occupied a place in her life. He was a true friend, the father of her child. The one thing of which she was sure was her deep commitment to making movies. She loved the medium, felt ‘at home’ in it, was endlessly intrigued by the camera and the possibilities that film presented. On the last day of production on Funny Girl, she gave Wyler an eighteenth-century gold watch inscribed: ‘To make up for lost time’. Wyler presented her with a megaphone engraved Barbra Streisand – Director. It meant a lot to her. She now dreamed of one day producing and directing her own film, one that had a theme that she wanted to present, something so good she could feel that it came from her kiskhes, her gut. In whatever free time she had, she would read – books, manuscripts, playscripts, articles – always looking for the story that she could believe in and embrace.
News travels fast in the powerful front offices of studio executives and long before filming of Funny Girl ended, Hollywood knew Barbra Streisand was on her way to superstardom. Academy Award producer/writer Ernest Lehman wanted her to star in the movie version of Hello, Dolly! scheduled to go before the cameras almost immediately upon the completion of Funny Girl. She had great trepidation about accepting the offer even though the money, $750,000, was enticing and as an outside picture, not involving Ray Stark, she would be the sole financial beneficiary of the fee. She thought, quite rightly, that she was too young for the role of Dolly Levi, the widowed marriage broker who tricks the ageing, crotchety Horace Vandergelder into marriage. The press agreed with her. When Streisand finally announced she had accepted the part, the press called her a ‘role stealer’. A divided camp was rooting for either Lucille Ball or Carol Channing to be cast as Dolly.
Stark filed suit and asked for an injunction to prevent her from appearing in a movie for another company as she was contractually tied to his. He submitted two scripts to her, Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie and a musical version of William Gibson’s stage hit, Two for the Seesaw.1 Streisand hated both projects and threatened to go to court to avoid making them. After several fiery meetings between their representatives, their differences were settled. She would do three more films for his company, but they were to follow two pictures for Twentieth – Hello, Dolly! and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the adaptation of the Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane Broadway musical. She claimed she signed for Hello, Dolly! partly out of pique and partly because it presented a challenge to take a familiar character and make it her own. It was to be a greater test than she anticipated.
In the few weeks between the end of production on Funny Girl and the recording sessions on Hello, Dolly!, which were to be done first then dubbed into the film after the numbers were shot, she returned to New York to appear at a charity concert at Carnegie Hall. She came on stage in a black dress made memorable by the yards of black lace she had wound into a ruff around her neck, and peered at Leonard Bernstein, the conductor, through a diamond lorgnette ‘like a diva soprano looking for her pianist’. She seemed gentler, less acerbic. She did a small parody of herself, twitching her long gown into place with an exaggerated simper and rolling the whites of her eyes like a tum-of-the-century tragedienne. She sang two songs, Bernstein’s ‘Lucky to Be Me’ from On the Town, and ‘People’.
While in New York, she engaged a researcher to ferret out information on Yonkers and Manhattan in the 1890s, the two major locations of the film, and information about well-known people of that era, what they wore, ate and where they went. She bought antique dresses of the period and wore them during the day to get the feel and look of the period and with the help of her hairdresser, Ara Gallant, and a pair of curling tongs she recreated a nineteenth-century hairstyle, with tight curls framing her face, that was most becoming.
Elliott had moved into a small apartment in the Village and she occupied the penthouse. He had withdrawn from his involvement in Streisand’s career and business interests and was concentrating on his own career and was fast slipping away from her. But she still did not know what she wanted to do about their marriage. She returned to Jason and California alone.
The talk in Hollywood was that Elliott had exhibited star potential in the yet-to-be-released The Night They Raided Minsky’s. Elliott was being viewed in a different light. He was funny, irreverent and almost acceptably anti-social. Minsky’s was a period film and yet due to the burlesque background it scored a wickedly comic punch. Elliott had somehow upstaged the rest of the older, highly professional cast. He was offered a leading role in the profane contemporary comedy, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, about sexual freedom and open relationships, in which he was to play Ted, a young man with a confused identity in a neurotic urban world. The prospects for such a film seemed limited and his pay cheque reflected this, but he liked his role of the less sophisticated of the two men, and felt a great kinship to the character. More important, he was pleased to be carving out a career for himself and harboured hopes that it would help to resurrect his failing marriage.
Streisand had always seen Elliott as a very funny, special person, a nonconformist who had not found his niche. But had she held him back because she demanded so much attention herself? Did he gamble because he was screaming for her help? And was he now heavily into smoking marijuana to avoid the nowhere reality of their relationship? All these questions pointed to a yes answer, triggering emotions of guilt. And there was Jason to consider. She knew how terribly painful it could be to grow up without your father in the house, and she decided to give their marriage another try. Since Elliott so disliked Hollywood, she agreed to compromise and work out a schedule where they could live a comfortable bi-coastal life.
On 13 February 1968, with Funny Girl not ready for release for another six or seven months, she reported to Twentieth Century-Fox for her first costume fittings for Hello, Dolly! Her role was that of a woman old enough to be ‘Funny Girl’s Yiddisher Mama. Not only was she too young for the part, this time she would not be playing a character created in large part for her specific talents and personality. Carol Channing, who appeared as Dolly on Broadway for eighteen months,2 had been Ernest Lehman’s first choice. But Channing did not photograph well. Lehman had also considered Elizabeth Taylor.
‘I talked to Elizabeth and asked her whether she’d ever thought of doing a musical. She got quite excited at the prospect,’ Lehman said. ‘When I came to cast the picture, her agent rang me up and told me Elizabeth really wanted to play Dolly. And I must admit I felt very guilty at having mentioned it to her, because it was a thoroughly rotten notion of mine. At least I think it was. In this business you can never, ever, tell until after the event.’
A slender man in his early fifties with long, greying sideburns and thinning hair arranged artfully across the top of his balding head, Lehman was one of Hollywood’s top screen writers, responsible for three of the highest-grossing movie musicals ever produced: The Sound of Music, West Side Story and The King and I, the last considered by critics to be a landmark film musical. These three, with two of his straight dramas: the original screenplay for the great Hitchcock film North by Northwest and the Academy Award-winning Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, had brought him five Academy nominations. Lehman wore a
persistent look of pain on his narrow face and on his wrist a thin gold watch with the letters of his name replacing the numbers. ‘You’ve got to have twelve letters in your name or it won’t work,’ he’d tell anyone who asked about it, ‘and it helps if there are six in the first and the last.’
Lehman had been working on the filmscript of Hello, Dolly! over a period of three years, having seen Jerry Herman’s Broadway musical adaptation of the 1938 Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers,3 when Carol Channing was still in the cast, and had found himself, ‘strangely moved, suddenly filled with nostalgia for a New York I never knew – a kind of gay and charming world in which even the wicked were innocent’. He saw Dolly Levi as a countrified cousin to the materialistic Lorelei (also played on Broadway by Channing) in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Streisand’s struggle would be to make Dolly believable. Dolly Levi was a dreadnought, triumphantly sailing the perilous seas of widowhood, using wits, guts and a surface of supreme confidence. In an age of anti-heroes, she was the ultimate heroine. Her victory – over the past, over loneliness, over despondency – radiated hope and much good cheer. And whatever else she was, she could never be dull. Bringing Dolly to full-blooded life on screen was not going to be Streisand’s only problem. Three stars had already recorded cast albums, Carol Channing, Mary Martin, and Pearl Bailey. Louis Armstrong had made an outstanding hit record of the title song. Not only would she be on screen for less than two-thirds of the film, there would be another character, the beautiful, young Irene Molloy (Marianne McAndrew) integral to the plot, who had two lovely ballads. She had to move the spotlight directly on herself and tailor Dolly’s character to her own concept.