Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  She began this metamorphosis by influencing the design, by Irene Sharaff, of Dolly’s famous Harmonia Gardens costume. The film’s key scene is when Dolly struts down the grand, red-carpeted staircase of that establishment and sings the title song with the waiters who are welcoming her back after fourteen years’ absence (which means she could not very well have been much younger than thirty-five). Sharaff had designed a startling red gown. Michael Stewart, the librettist of the Broadway show, asserted that Dolly’s scarlet gown was symbolic of life returning to her. Photographs of Channing in the plush, vivid, figure-moulding crimson gown she had worn in that descent had proliferated in the media and she had appeared several times as a television variety special guest in the costume singing the title song. Streisand refused to wear a gown of that colour and fought onerous battles with Sharaff and Lehman over the design. One day she refused to leave her dressing room unless it was agreed that a new design in gold would be forthcoming. Sharaff compromised and designed a richly beaded topaz dress which pleased Streisand. The stand-off was to be a harbinger of bitter conflicts to come.

  Gene Kelly, one of Hollywood’s most beloved and admired musical stars, fresh from his success as a director with A Guide for the Married Man,4 was signed as the director. ‘Like Barbra, Gene was a hot property and it seemed a smart move. Was a smart move,’ Lehman recalled. ‘There was no one else around whose knowledge of musicals was as wide and varied as his. He had exactly the qualities we needed on the picture. Tremendous energy, vitality, and a maddening cheerfulness. But Barbra and Gene – they were just not meant to communicate on this earth.’

  ‘I’d heard that she was a difficult lady,’ Kelly said, ‘so as soon as I agreed to do the picture, I flew to New York [where she had gone to look for a new apartment] and met her for lunch at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel, and I came straight out with it and said, “Barbra, is there any truth to all these stories that you don’t want to rehearse and that you’re difficult?”

  ‘Me?’ she replied. ‘I’m a nervous chalaria maybe, but I’m not difficult.’ All she needed, she told him, was a director to guide her.

  ‘She also said she was dying to do the role, and that I could count on her,’ Kelly added. She had actually agreed conditionally, wanting first to be assured that Jerry Herman would write more songs for her, as the original score gave Dolly Levi only three solos.5

  By the time she returned to California, she had changed her mind. She had read and reread the screenplay and was convinced she was far too young to play Dolly and, equally serious, the story was not all that much about the title character. ‘It devotes as much time to Cornelius and Barnaby and their two young women – all of whom are naïve and childish,’ Lehman explained, ‘and there was nothing I could do about it ... It was the nature of the beast. Hello, Dolly! is a pretty infantile story. Barbra would telephone me in the middle of the night. “What the hell am I doing in this picture?” she demanded to know. “There is no way I can play Dolly Levi in a way that makes sense of the woman!” She wanted out. I assured her that Gene would be able to mould Dolly’s excesses into a workable characterisation.’

  ‘If only there’d been more time,’ Kelly defended, ‘I’d have tried to help her work out a clear-cut characterisation, but we had a tight schedule and I left it up to her. With the result that she was being Mae West one minute, Fanny Brice the other, and Barbra Streisand the next. Her accent varied as much as her mannerisms. She kept experimenting with new things out of sheer desperation, none of which really worked to her satisfaction. And as she’s such a perfectionist, she became terribly neurotic and insecure.’

  The major interior set constructed for Hello, Dolly! on the Twentieth lot was the Harmonia Gardens, a combination bar, restaurant and night club popular in the 1890s. Its decor was suggested by combining elements of Tony Pastor’s in New York, Maxime’s in Paris and London’s Crystal Palace. Built on four levels, it was filled with fountains, candelabra, chandeliers, statues and greenery; marble, gold and crystal appointments and furnishings in mutations of red from scarlet to salmon. ‘I’d say you’ve built one hell of a saloon,’ Lehman told production designer John DeCuir, who had created much of Rome and Alexandria for Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra.

  Streisand made an electrifying entrance in her topaz gown, shimmering beneath the blinding lights and then descending the wide red carpeted staircase. ‘What I needed was Rhett Butler to sweep me back up again,’ she told her stand-in Marie Rhodes. ‘What I got was Walter Matthau.’ Rhodes had been Marlon Brando’s stand-in for years – the only woman of her profession known to have doubled for both a great male and female star. (‘I rather like the change,’ she said. ‘At least I don’t have to wear pants every day.’) Streisand never tired of hearing from Rhodes about her idol.

  The topaz gown weighed over twenty pounds and the length of the skirt presented the danger of tripping. The scene had to be reshot several times and took two days to complete. The gown did not have the dramatic impact it might have had in red, but it gave Streisand a marvellously voluptuous figure and the colour was a strong contrast against all the red used in the decor. She wore the gown for nearly two weeks as other scenes in the Harmonia Gardens were shot, the most memorable being the sequence in which Dolly, wolfing turkey, dumplings and beets, rejects, as a ploy, a proposal of marriage from Horace Vandergelder, the widower she has been pursuing. At the same time as she ate heartily, Streisand had to maintain delicacy and attractiveness. By the third take, the dumplings, which were made of egg whites, were hard for her to swallow, and by the fifth she almost choked while downing a piece of turkey.

  She also wore the unwieldy gown as she made a 360 degree tour of the Gardens accompanied by the elaborately capering, acrobatic, singing waiters and sang a duet with Louis Armstrong, making a cameo appearance in the film. Never satisfied with a take, she insisted that scenes be shot over and over, with everyone else seeming to tire but herself. She was grateful that Harry Stradling was manning the camera as he had for Funny Girl. He was her one ally.

  Her chemistry with Kelly was explosive. He expected a certain respect for his position as her director and because of his many years’ experience in films. She thought he had an attitude problem. Politeness was not her strong suit. She said what she felt, when she felt it. Kelly was not the only one who had trouble dealing with her. Her leading man, Walter Matthau, found it ‘painful to adjust to her personality, particularly as she made no attempt to adjust to mine’.

  Matthau was the complete professional. At the age of forty-eight, he had been in show business for thirty-seven years, having made his debut at eleven in the Yiddish theatre. As a respected supporting player, he had shuttled between Broadway and Hollywood for years when in 1965 he soared to sudden Broadway stardom in The Odd Couple in a role that Neil Simon had written especially for him. He had just co-starred with Jack Lemmon in the film adaptation and had won the Academy Award for Supporting Actor in 1966 for his role in The Fortune Cookie, also with Lemmon. The same slouching posture, the craggy face and growling voice that had kept him for years from becoming a leading man, now proved to be his best assets. He was, and would remain for two decades, Hollywood’s favourite lead comedian.

  ‘The trouble with Barbra,’ he contended, ‘is she became a star long before she became an actress. Which is a pity, because if she learned her trade properly she might become a competent actress instead of a freak attraction – like a boa constrictor – I was appalled at every move she made ... The thing about working with her was that you never knew what she was going to do next and were afraid she’d do it. I found it a most unpleasant picture to work on and, as most of my scenes were with her, extremely distasteful. I developed all kinds of symptoms. Pains in the lower abdomen, severe headaches, palpitations: I was in agony most of the time, every move she made.

  ‘Once I heard her tell Lennie Hayton, our musical director, that the flutes were coming in too soon, and that the violins were too fast. Then she started telling Gene how
she thought I should feed her lines. He should have told her to mind her own business and do as she was told and not pay so much attention to other people as she had a lot to learn herself. And when she had twenty years’ more experience, then she should still shut up because she wasn’t the director. The poor girl was corrupted by power in her second movie!’

  Streisand and Matthau nearly came to blows the day after Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The company was sweltering in 98-degree heat on location in Garrison, a small town near West Point in upstate New York, fighting mosquitos, and suffering beneath the weight of heavy costumes. Emotions ran high. Another assassination, another Kennedy dead. Streisand was distressed, as everyone was. Kelly considered ending the day early but for the cost in money and time. The co-stars were shooting an exterior for ‘Before the Parade passes By’ which involved 2,500 extras and the entire cast, the chorus and dancers. Streisand was determined to ‘get it right’. When she had recorded the song, her final note had been a C-sharp at the top of her range and she held it for ten bars and a beat, longer than she had ever previously done. There was no way she was going to let the scene be less than the song. Streisand wanted to do the scene over. Reshooting such a complicated musical number with all those people was an enormous task, and everyone was tense. Kelly, after a sharp exchange with Streisand, made the decision to reshoot.

  She upstaged her own rousing rendition of ‘Hello, Dolly!’ with ‘Before the Parade passes By’ which starts quietly with Dolly seated alone on a park bench, reminiscing about her late husband Ephraim, and proceeds into an extravagant street parade with several full marching bands, floats, and cavalry troops carrying large flags. In the midst of all this, Dolly struts and weaves through the lines of brightly costumed people and high-stepping horses as she sings her final note, said to be the longest note held by a singer in any movie musical including Judy Garland’s legendary rendition of ‘Johnny One-note’, in Words and Music.

  ‘As if contending with [all these problems] were not enough,’ Matthau said, ‘Barbra kept asking Gene whether he didn’t think it would be better if I did this on this line, and that on the other, etc., etc. – and I told her to stop directing the fucking picture, which she took exception to, and there was a blow-up in which I also told her she was a pip-squeak who didn’t have the talent of a butterfly’s fart. To which she replied that I was jealous because I wasn’t as good as she was. We began a slanging match like a couple of kids from the ghetto. I think Gene thought one of us was going to die of apoplexy or something [in fact, Matthau had recently recovered from a serious heart attack and Kelly was right to be concerned], or that I’d belt her, or that maybe she’d scratch my eyes out – or worse, that we’d just walk off leaving twenty million dollars’ worth of movie go down the drain.’

  Things did not get better. ‘It was not, in retrospect,’ Lehman recalled, ‘a happy film. There were things going on that were terrible. The intrigues, the bitterness, the backbiting, the deceits, the misery, the gloom. Most unpleasant. It’s quite amazing what people go through to make something entertaining for others.’

  Matthau’s outburst had hurt Streisand more than she wanted anyone in the film to suspect. He had since shouted at her that ‘Everyone in the cast hates you!’ She was fearful that it was the truth. No one appeared friendly. Michael Crawford, who would gain fame years later – first as Barnum in the original British stage production, then in the title role in both Britain and the United States of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Phantom of the Opera – who played Cornelius Hackl, the juvenile lead, hardly spoke to her off-camera. The same was true of the other young players, who were in some cases actually older than Streisand. Lehman walked around with a dour face. Kelly was cool in his attitude, although he appeared to try harder to appease her than the others and did listen to what she had to say, even if in the end he ignored her advice. This was not the experience she had on Funny Girl with Wyler. Suddenly she had been thrown into a hostile world where she felt like the outsider.

  Never able to get Dolly Levi’s character in one piece, she none the less brought a tremendous vitality to the role and fresh insight into Herman’s score (which was not as tailored for her voice as the songs from Funny Girl). Her key changes in the ‘Sunday Clothes’ number are remarkable and she added a delightful comic note to ‘So Long Dearie’ – despite Kelly’s arguments with her over a few lines in the bridge of the song where she imitates Mae West. ‘It’s anachronistic!’ he insisted rightly. ‘Mae West wasn’t even born in 1890.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ she retorted, shifting into her Westian voice, ‘I saw My Little Chickadee [one of West’s most famous movies] last night and it stuck.’

  Two multi-million dollar musicals had been constructed around her. Yet, since neither had been released, she did not know if they would succeed and if she would become a bonafide movie star. Her marriage was in eggshell-thin condition and her mother was pressing her from New York to do something to help Rosalind, recently graduated from high school. The young woman had changed her first name from Rosalind to Roslyn and decided she, too, wanted to become a singer. Diana would fault her again and Roslyn would hate her for telling the truth – that first she had to prove to herself that she had the talent before anyone, even a famous sister, could help her.

  Despite her fame, Streisand was insecure, frightened and there was no way she could let anyone but her therapist know it. She took Jason and the nanny to the studio with her as often as she could once the Hello, Dolly! unit had returned from location. And when she wasn’t needed on the set she would lock the door of her enormous dressing-room trailer and she would read to Jason and hold him in her arms. At such moments, her loneliness seemed less acute. Once she was back on the set she was as feisty as ever, the restless champ fighting all comers and bravely defending her title. ‘I’m the star of this damned picture,’ she shouted at Matthau during one of their skirmishes.

  ‘Betty Hutton once said the same thing,’ he shot back, ‘and she’s just filed for bankruptcy.’

  Footnotes

  1 Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie was to be a musical remake of a film of that title made in 1952. Two for the Seesaw was adapted as a stage musical retitled Seesaw (1973), with a score by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields. Neither of these projects reached the screen.

  2 After five years, Hello, Dolly! was still on Broadway, now restaged by Gower Champion (the original director) with an all-black cast headed by Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. Before the glorious Miss Bailey, Dolly had been played by Ginger Rogers. Other Broadway Dollys were: Martha Raye, Phyllis Diller, Betty Grable, Eve Arden, Dorothy Lam our, Ethel Merman and in London, Mary Martin. The title song was adapted as ‘Hello, Lyndon!’ to become President Johnson’s campaign theme music in 1964.

  3 Thornton Wilder had himself adapted The Merchant of Yonkers from A Day Well Spent, written in 1835 by John Oxenford and produced in London. A German adaptation of the same play by John Nestroy appeared in Vienna in 1842 under the title Einen jux Will es Nochen. First produced on Broadway in 1938, Wilder’s version, which starred Jane Cowl, was not a success. Fifteen years later he rewrote the play, which he now called The Matchmaker. It opened in London in 1954 starring Ruth Gordon and was a great success. The following year David Merrick optioned the rights and Ruth Gordon repeated her performance on Broadway for 486 performances. The play was made into a film by Paramount in 1958 starring Shirley Booth as Dolly Levi.

  4 Gene Kelly made his directorial debut as co-director with Stanley Donen for On the Town (1948). The two men also took co-directorial credit for Singin’ in the Rain (1952). His solo directorial effort was Invitation to the Dance (1956).

  5 Herman negotiated a new contract for the additional material and quickly supplied ‘Just Leave Everything to Me’ and a ballad, ‘Love Is Only Love’. When Lehman learned the latter song was originally written, although not used, for Herman’s Mame he was furious but helpless to do anything about it. The lyrics, however, were new and Str
eisand approved the songs.

  18

  KLEIG LIGHTS SCRAPED the sky, eerily turning night into day as an unwelcome October chill nipped the air. Streisand, arriving late as usual, stepped out of a limousine and on to a red carpet that extended from the kerb to the entrance of the Egyptian Theater, for the West Coast première of Funny Girl. She looked startled as she walked the narrow gauntlet between the cordons of curious, shrieking fans, many of whom had gathered early that morning with their camp stools and lunch bags to ensure themselves a position where they could see the stars up close. Elliott held her arm securely, the two of them flanked by some twenty bodyguards while press cameramen jumped into their path several times to get their picture. Streisand appeared unnerved and Elliott increasingly agitated as they fended off these interruptions with their accompanying flashes of blinding light.

  Wearing eye-catching, shocking pink evening pants, a floor-length lamb’s wool embroidered evening coat lined in pink, and a matching pillbox hat, all rather Russian-Cossack in appearance, Streisand covered her face protectively, a gesture immediately hostile to Ray Stark’s planned media blitz. The photographers complained loudly as she and Elliott pressed forward, the security men having to quicken their step to keep up with them as they crossed the cement forecourt.

  On entering the grand foyer, she was greeted by Fran and Ray Stark, who were hosting a benefit post-film supper party for over 1,000 guests under a giant tent in the parking lot adjacent to the theatre. Everyone connected with the film already knew that Barbra Streisand was to be a megastar, even Streisand herself, for the movie had been premièred in New York at the Criterion Theater on 19 September 1968, some two weeks earlier, and her personal reviews had been spectacular. Streisand first saw the final cut of Funny Girl in a private screening room, then at the New York première. Tonight would be her third viewing of the finished product. Always the perfectionist, she still wished she could reshoot some sequences. Despite her optimism for the film’s and her own success, she could not calm her nerves. New York had somehow lost its excitement for her. Hollywood had replaced it and it was here that she felt she must be recognised.