by Anne Edwards
Valiantly she tried to keep up with the stacks of political journals to which she subscribed. ‘There is so much more to learn, so much more to do,’ she said excitedly. ‘I love the movies – life is so tentative and short that I want something to remain as proof that I existed. I think that’s why I like antiques – because they have proven their immortality. They know something I don’t.’ Antiques were survivors like herself.
The insistent buzzing in her ears that made her so sensitive to sound remained a constant source of distraction. Maybe sometimes, she said, it made her walk around ‘like a farbissiner – which means kind of depressed [more literally – soured]. I get these letters from kids telling me that I am “different” just like them. I write back. “Do you have a buzzing in your ears?”’
Her success did not ease her acute insecurity. She suffered immense fear that she could – if not protective – lose her status. She wanted, and sought, greater control in the movies she would make in the future. There was a strong indication that the musical as a popular art form was in crisis. The common Hollywood practice of adapting a hit musical for the screen might soon be obsolete and her hold could loosen with it if she did not make the transition, which she had always yearned for anyway, into a straight dramatic actress. This was easier said than done since studio executives were doubtful that the movie-going public would accept her in a new image. To her, this left only one alternative. She must form her own film production company, a costly and perilous adventure for the possibility had to be considered that she might fall flat on her face.
At that time the greater part of her income came from records and concerts not from movies. Her last five albums, the soundtrack of Funny Girl, A Happening in Central Park, Simply Streisand, A Christmas Album and Je M’Appelle Barbra, may not have reached the top of the charts, but her immense earnings on all her records, which included her previous album hits, were estimated as being over $3 million annually. Her albums, released twice a year, kept her constantly before the public, the records played consistently over radio. She more than realised how important it was for her to keep in step with the changes in the music world. The music she sang in movies, the Broadway sound, was fast losing its hold on young people and she did not want to become set in the concrete past.
Just after the Academy Awards, she recorded a new album, her sixteenth, What About Today?, her first pop album. The songs on it – from Jim Webb’s anti-war elegy ‘Little Tin Soldier’ to other compositions by Paul Simon, Paul McCartney/John Lennon, and Buffy Saint-Marie – were mostly protest songs. She had accomplished an amazing feat and made the cross-over on record to a contemporary sound without losing the dramatic, distinctive quality for which she was famous. It would be this remarkable ability she had to move vocally with the times while still maintaining her skill with a show tune or classic, that would sustain her recording career and win her throngs of new, young fans with each release.
Flower children and student violence were the mark of the two last years of the 1960s. In the summer of 1968, American students had fought a pitched battle with 11,900 of the Chicago police force, 7,500 of the National Guard, and 1,000 FBI and Secret Service Men. There had been over 200 university demonstrations since then. American participation in the Vietnam War was dividing a nation. Draft-card burning, flag-burning, bra-burning and the woman’s movement all gripped the nation. Student radicals had been a powerful force in Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the presidency, which Streisand supported. They won the media contest but they could not get McCarthy the nomination, nor could they prevent the man Streisand hated most, Richard Nixon, from becoming President.
She was in a time warp, trying desperately to break loose. She celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday on 24 April 1969. For nearly a decade she had lived and worked in a world comprised of much older people. She had few young friends and now thought she was in love with a man, Pierre Trudeau, over twenty years her senior, an affair that must, because of the seriousness of his purpose and her marital status, be kept hidden from the public. It meant catching a day or a weekend together in a secret liaison. Trudeau was fascinated by her. Her fame was a potent attraction, but she also brought something fresh into his life. He confided to friends that he thought she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever known, that she possessed innate majesty. He was amazed at the sharpness of her mind. They were a curious match – a Jewess and a devout Catholic, a movie star and the Canadian Prime Minister. Yet a strong sexual attraction was fuelled by these very differences. Always paradoxical, she fantasised about marrying the older and more conservative Trudeau at the same time as she explored youth-oriented music, smoked marijuana and contracted to appear at the new International Hotel in Las Vegas, an establishment whose primary objective was to attract customers to the hotel’s gambling tables. Returning to Las Vegas, where she had been so unhappy, had more to do with money than morals. Despite the high sums she earned, she always feared that one day she might not have enough.
The International Hotel was two and a half times the size of the splashy reigning favourite, Caesar’s Palace. Every feature of the hotel was elephantine; its height of thirty storeys (‘the tallest building in the state of Nevada’); its pool (‘second only to Lake Mead’); its casino (the largest in the world with over a thousand slot machines); and its three enormous entertainment facilities- a lounge, a legitimate theatre and the Showroom – each starring a well-known personality in productions to rival, in glitz at least, whatever Paris or New York could offer. Streisand’s engagement began on 2 July, and in the summer the desert heat could reach over 120 degrees. But there was no need for a hotel guest ever to leave the air-conditioned gilded palace, where there were no clocks in the gambling rooms to remind players of the lateness of the hour.
However, the International was still under final construction when Streisand arrived and it appeared, from its unfinished state, that it would not be complete in time to open the Showroom. While she was rehearsing, curtains were being draped, light fixtures installed, and plaster fell like snow over a stage large enough to accommodate both the Ziegfeld and Goldwyn Girls as well as the Rockerfeller Rockettes. In addition to her fee, her contract included 20,000 shares of stock in the hotel, each worth $50 by opening night. Expectations of her twice-nightly, four-week stint were high. She had just won the Academy Award and Funny Girl was now breaking movie-house records across the country.
For her much-heralded Vegas opening she wore a gauzy, gold creation of Scaasi’s, her hair coiffed into a chic upswept, and sang into a hand-held jewelled microphone. Backed by a sixteen-piece band conducted by Peter Matz, sometimes she stood centre stage, sometimes near the piano, or perched on a high, shocking-pink stool. Unlike other Vegas cabaret shows, there was no opening act, no beautiful, pony-legged showgirls in scanty, colourful costumes, no back-up singers, no lavish sets – none of the things Las Vegas audiences expected. At the top of her form, her programme was almost identical to her Central Park appearance the previous year, with two new numbers: ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’ and ‘When You Gotta Go’ in a ‘stunning exhibition of stylistic and vocal virtuosity’. Yet, as word of the lack of production values in her act spread, reservations dwindled. Her instincts – that audiences would want to see and hear her not showgirls in a flashy show – had betrayed her.
She became restive. Fear plagued her. She would forget her lyrics. When columnist Joyce Haber visited her dressing room during her engagement, she showed her a calendar with each day she had already appeared crossed out. ‘Only thirty-nine performances to go,’ she sighed. She hated the repetitive nature of the show, any show – having to do the same thing twice a night. Accustomed now to the business of making films, a staff to cater to her every need, the absence of a live audience who could boo as well as cheer her, and the ability to perfect her performance in a cutting room, she felt trapped. On screen she could sell her image; on stage she had to sell herself.
Elvis Presley was to follow her into t
he Showroom. He slipped into the back of the balcony to watch her work during the first week of her engagement. ‘He pointed mutely to all the empty seats around him,’ one of his biographers, Albert Goldman, wrote. ‘Then, he settled down to listen to the program. He gave no signs of pleasure. When it was all over, he turned to [an assistant] and said two words: “She sucks!” Then, he went downstairs to her dressing room to tell Barbra how much he had enjoyed her performance. When he was admitted ... he was astonished to find the great star alone. Elvis had never been alone for one moment in his entire life. Two or three men always accompanied him even to the bathroom. Streisand made no bones about her disgust with the audience and the hotel. “This place isn’t even built yet!” she fumed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some night while I’m out there working some schmuck doesn’t walk by with a ladder on his shoulder!”’
She vowed to him that she would never work Vegas again. (Later she admitted, ‘I really didn’t enjoy performing live any more.’) The two shook hands, she wished him more luck than she’d had, and they parted.2
In order to ease her nerves at other times in Las Vegas, she took several drags of marijuana just before she stepped out on stage and stowed several joints in the pocket of the black jewelled jacket of one of her gowns. At one point she took out a joint to light it. ‘First, just faking it,’ she later told Rolling Stone magazine. ‘Then I started lighting live joints, passing them around to the band – you know. It was great. It relieved all my tensions. I ended up with the greatest supply of grass ever. Other acts started sending me the best dope in the world. I never ran out.’ However true or exaggerated that claim was, drugs were not a part of her life. She smoked a joint to relax, a habit she had shared with Elliott.
Many of the Vegas performers who were paid huge salaries lost most at the gaming tables. Gambling never intrigued her, it brought Elliott to her mind and she desperately wanted not to think about him. Elliott had suddenly become a huge star in his own right. The bang-up acting job he had done as the square, bumbling lawyer who succumbs to an affair in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a satire of southern California sex, sensitivity and spouse-swapping, was talked about as the best of the year, a shoe-in for an Oscar. He was natural, unmanicured, good-looking, but nothing like a movie star, all of which made him a new kind of sensation, ‘a hero for an uptight generation’, Time said. By October 1969, he had made three more movies in which he played a lead: M*A*S*H (as Trapper John), Getting Straight and Move. And he was contracted to star in three more films the following year – I Love My Wife, The Touch and Little Murders. He had been steam-rolled into stardom. ‘I always knew there were things going on in me, that I had something to express,’ he told Judy Klemsrud of the New York Times. ‘However, I don’t take success seriously. But I’m pleased for my friends. There are a lot of people I want to be able to help – actors, writers, and directors. And now I’m in a position to do so.’
Streisand was happy for his success, to validate her early belief in Elliott and for what it would mean to Jason. It also set her to wonder if she had done the right thing in splitting up. Then reality would set in. Fame, she knew, did not change the basic person. She was still carrying around her bag of insecurities and Elliott his. What had brought them together had also driven them apart. Streisand had believed that with success in her career and Elliott’s love and support she would overcome her insecurities. When that had not occurred, she turned away from him, searching elsewhere for an elusive panacea to happiness.
Elliott, for his part, wanted success and was uncomfortable with his own as well as Streisand’s, at the same time. Success meant responsibilities that he feared he could not carry through. He felt that he had failed in his marriage, that they both had let Jason down, and he was unsure of what he wanted from life. He was ‘something of a paradox’, one interviewer wrote. ‘At times you detect flashes of shyness and vulnerability. But mostly, he comes across as just plain tense ... When he’s not pacing the floor, he sits on a couch cracking his knuckles, gulping water and chain-smoking cigarettes.’ He was also using large amounts of uppers and downers, had lost almost all he had earned in the past year gambling and was seeing a psychiatrist five days a week. He was willing to admit in print that he still cared earnestly for Barbra. ‘We have a very deep personal relationship. I chose Barbra and Barbra chose me because we fell in love ... we have a great son. He’s like a little tiger – beautiful. He looks like both of us. He is the best thing that either of us could ever hope to do. I want Jason to have the kind of mother Barbra wants to be, and she wants for him what I want for him.
‘Maybe we’ll get back together again, maybe we won’t. I know that I’ll never take her out in public again, like I did to the Academy Awards last spring [where he had felt ignored]. When I see her now, we go to little out-of-the-way places where no one sees us.’
They were dating from time to time, private dinners to talk about Jason or discuss their current problems, things they found they could not talk about with others – their families, their fears, their self-doubts. One subject, however, not discussed was her attraction for Trudeau.
She was living a dual life, dating Trudeau secretly and being seen at grand openings and galas amidst a crush of the curious and admiring. Hello, Dolly! premièred at the Rivoli in New York on 16 December before a black-tie socialite audience. Marty Erlichman accompanied her, Streisand exotically dressed in a fox-fur-trimmed embroidered coat, high boots and a pillbox hat, her hair drawn back smoothly from her face, ‘looking like an elegant Nefertiti’. Two blocks from the theatre they were trapped inside their black Rolls-Royce limousine by about fifty over-enthusiastic fans who ran alongside the vehicle, slowed it to a crawl and then started rocking it. Streisand, terrified, let out an ear-splitting scream. The zealots drew back, allowing the driver to reach the theatre. Frightened to get out, fearing she might be attacked, Streisand remained inside the vehicle for several minutes. When she finally emerged, Erlichman, the driver and several security and police officers (the premiere was ironically for the benefit of the Police Athletic League), formed a semi-circle around her, but the fans broke through and she was swept up in a shoving, elbowing crowd that converged from all directions. She was in a panic when she reached the lobby. Erlichman had been hit in the head by a camera, punched and knocked to the ground in the mêlée.
‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ Streisand cried as he was helped inside, spurting blood. A doctor among the invited guests took Erlichman, Streisand refusing to leave his side, into a private office to clean the wound which looked more serious than it was. The showing of the film was delayed for half an hour until both of them finally took their seats, Streisand next to Louis Armstrong. After the showing, she was whisked away in a different car, parked at a side entrance. Fans caught sight of her and ran after the vehicle for a few feet, and then fell back.
The after-theatre supper dance was held at the Pierre Hotel and Armstrong sang a lusty chorus of ‘Hello, Dolly!’ with the band and then did some smart hoofing with a dance group to entertain the guests. Streisand looked pale through the entire evening and fretted over Erlichman’s injuries, even though he was well enough to join her.
‘I will never go to another premiere,’ she vowed afterwards. ‘It’s inhumane.’
‘She is one of the few, mysteriously natural, unique performing talents of our time,’ Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times. ‘She has become a National Treasure. Casting her as Dolly Levi, is rather like trying to display Yellowstone National Park in a one-geyser forest preserve.’
But the film did not work and no one knew that better than Streisand. All the problems she had first seen remained. She was too young for Dolly Levi and both she and Matthau were too often off-camera, at which time the movie featured young members of the cast in some truly silly plot devices. The sets were certainly spectacular. Lehman and Kelly had been reverential to history and architecture to the point of idiocy. By preserving a slim and often witless musical on a large mov
ie screen, they had inflated its faults to elephantine proportions. She was critidsed in most of the major reviews for her ‘Mae West’ inclusions, although it did work well for her in what was probably her best number in the picture, ‘Goodbye, Dearie’. But the movie looked good and so did she. Matthau was droll and crusty as required and there were moments of great joy, Louis Armstrong’s appearance being one of them, as was her arrival scene at the Harmonia Gardens.
Despite protestations to the contrary, Streisand, swathed in white mink, did attend the glittering Hollywood premiere of the film and the post-movie supper dance in the huge adjoining tent. Matthau gave her a wild greeting when he caught sight of her, grabbing her up in his arms and kissing her – much to her surprise and that of others who knew how volatile their relationship had been on the set of the film. Later, asked by a reporter how it was to work with her, he replied diplomatically, ‘Barbra had moments of likability.’3 She came down the aisle of the theatre with Erlichman, flanked on all sides by security guards, who took their post outside the ladies’ room during the intermission, allowing no one in until she reappeared.
Her romance with Pierre Trudeau was still very much alive. He had flown to New York shortly after the premiere there and they had ventured out to a restaurant where he was photographed smiling intimately at her across the table. She appeared shy in his company, quieter – but glowing. Once she returned to California they spoke frequently on the telephone. At his invitation, on 25 January she flew to Ottawa where, over the next three days, they spent as much time together as he could spare. It was the first time that she played a supporting role in a relationship.