by Anne Edwards
She sat in the visitors’ gallery of the imposing Canadian House of Commons and listened intently as he brilliantly parried questions from his colleagues while stealing glances up at her. At one point he appeared not to have heard a question. ‘If the Prime Minister can take his eyes and his mind off the visitors’ gallery ...’ the MP who had the floor remonstrated. Trudeau smiled sheepishly as the Members laughed. After the session he was detained, and then ran to her car as she was leaving, helped her inside and held her hand for a long moment before pulling away and returning to his job.
She believed she was in love. At least, she confided to others that this was the case. There was a strong physical attraction, a great exdtement when they were together. She was proud that so prominent and intelligent a man found her attractive, and she was in awe of his mind, his grasp of world situations. Still, she was unsure how they would ever make it as a couple. There were so many things she had still to prove to herself. She now wanted to produce her own movies, to establish her place as a dramatic actress, and Hollywood was the best place for those ambitions. Then, too, she would have trouble taking a back seat to such a powerful husband. And there was Jason. How would such a marriage affect him? Would Elliott remain a strong presence in their son’s life as she wanted him to be? There were their religious differences. Then, too, Trudeau had not proposed marriage; she had no guarantee that he would, that he wanted any more from her than a brief affair might offer.
On Manitoba Night, a yearly Canadian celebration, he escorted her to a gala celebration at the National Arts Center. She looked especially lovely, very dramatic with a tallish white mink hat, her hair again parted in the centre and drawn back from her face, her ensemble trimmed in white mink on the collar, cuff and.hem, her long, angular hands with their polished extensions plunged deep in a muff of the same fur, in a kind of ‘Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina’ look. All through the evening Trudeau gazed lovingly at her while she remained restrained, cool, somewhat diffident. Doubts had continued to assail her during the day and Trudeau’s public recognition of them as a couple made her situation difficult.
The following evening they dined alone at the Prime Minister’s residence. She was ushered into an austere reception room, ‘heavy Victorian ornaments, dour, unsmiling family portraits, gray everywhere’, and told, ‘The Prime Minister will be down shortly.’ This sober introduction into his private lifestyle was in direct contrast to the man she thought she knew and whose informal approach to politics, which included wearing sandals in Parliament on humid summer days, was debated with lively enthusiasm in the press.
For two years before becoming Prime Minister, Trudeau had been Minister of Justice in the Lester Pearson government and had brought sweeping reforms to Canada’s judicial system. As a champion for human rights, he became ‘the beloved black sheep of the Liberal Party’, but there was also the private man with a reputation as a heart-breaker. In the words of Margaret Sinclair, with whom he was soon to be romantically involved, Trudeau ‘had a silky, warm, charming manner that eased any initial awkwardness a woman might be feeling’. It has been said that ‘Charm is the power to please by force of personality and intellect, an instinct for the persuasiveness of sympathy, the indefinable effect of an enchantment.’ Trudeau possessed these things and Streisand was moved and captivated by him at turns.
He joined her almost immediately upon her arrival. According to a servant’s report, they dined by candlelight at a table set up before a roaring fire. The food was bland but the conversation was spirited. Trudeau possessed a gentle, teasing way of speaking, ‘a sort of old-fashioned gallantry’. After dinner they took a walk in the garden. The air was cutting cold as they wandered briskly by the river that bordered the property, the lights of the city reflected on its surface. Then they returned to the residence. Backstairs’ reporting went no further. The servant left the two alone in the house to retire to her own quarters.
For all his phenomenal success, Trudeau was a solitary man who had never lived with any woman very long, but he had reached an age when he wanted children, a family. Exactly how Streisand fitted in with his scheme for his future is cloudy. Known to be attracted to women in the public eye, his affairs were invariably short-lived. Reason overcame passion and he would move on rather than become inextricably entangled in a relationship that was not to his liking or that might be injurious to his political career.
She left the next day for New York, where she was to begin shooting TheOwl and the Pussycat, her first non-musical movie, confused, not sure what she should do, break it off before she was too deeply involved or continue to see him.
‘Yeah, sure, I thought about being first lady of Canada,’ she later acknowledged. ‘I thought it would be fantastic. I’d have to learn how to speak French. I would do only movies made in Canada. I had it all figured out. I would campaign for him and become totally politically involved in all the causes, abortion and whatever,’ obviously forgetting in her enthusiasm that as a Catholic, Trudeau could not covenant abortion and that her status as a divorced woman, if marriage was ever proposed, would become an almost insurmountable obstacle.
Still, the old self-doubts prevailed. ‘I was concerned with being looked down upon as an actress,’ she admitted. ‘I felt that certain people thought, oh, you’re an actress, ah. Cheap. Vulgar. Loose. Immoral. Amoral ... People want to be friendly with actresses, they’re so charming, so amusing. It’s all so condescending, like having a clown, having this toy.’
‘Is it love?’ a reporter asked Diana Kind, a most unlikely person to know her daughter’s heart as Streisand discussed nothing of a personal nature with her mother. ‘Who knows?’ Diana replied, offering her customary platitudes. ‘Barbra has a lot of interesting friends.’
In late February her relationship with Trudeau came to a sudden end. He had fallen in love with Margaret Sinclair, a nineteen-year-old Canadian whom, Streisand learned, he was seeing when she was visiting him in Ottawa.4 She was hurt and confused. For years she had turned to Elliott in troubled times. He was in Sweden making The Touch with one of the world’s greatest directors, Ingmar Bergman, and had been nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Maybe the time when they had first met and married had just been too premature. Now, with both of them enjoying fame, they could do fantastic things together. She had always believed in him as he had believed in her. She had a short break in her shooting schedule. Taking a wild chance, she flew to Stockholm to talk with him.
‘Barbra wanted us to get back together immediately,’ Elliott recalled. She brought up jason, their history together, her continuing feeling for him, her sense of loss without him. ‘I didn’t know that was my last opportunity, and I don’t know if it would have made a difference if I had,’ he said. ‘I told her, “If that’s what you want, then that’s what I want, but I can’t just disregard Jenny.”’ He suggested that they wait before moving back together so that he could have a chance to see that jenny did not feel deserted, that she had someone to help her make the transition to being on her own again. ‘But Barbra needed immediate validation,’ and he could not give it to her. Nursing her injured feelings, she returned to New York.
Although unable to surrender all her ties to Elliott, she knew now that their marriage was really over. She suspected she would never want to remarry. ‘Jason already has a father,’ she told a close friend, ‘I have a special destiny to fulfil.’ She had felt that way since childhood. Then, she believed it meant she would one day be a great Hollywood star. Having achieved that wish she set her goal higher.
‘After she schlepped through Hello, Dolly!,’ Barry Dennen said, ‘I wrote her a telegram with just three words, “What a pity.” But I never did send it.’
He did not have to. Streisand agreed. She had caught her second wind and was ready for the onset of a different phase in her career – to succeed as a dramatic actress, to direct and produce her own movies – and then? Her life was like an ocean, wave lapping against wave – and always t
here was deeper water to tread beyond.
Footnotes
1 Hepburn and Streisand were the first co-winners of an Academy Award since 1932 when Fredric March (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) shared the honour with Wallace Beery (The Champ.)
2 Elsewhere it has been written that Elvis made a sexual overture to Streisand at the time and, picking up a bottle of nail varnish from her dressing-room table, knelt before her to paint her famous finger talons. Streisand has told friends, ‘When have you ever heard of a man painting a woman’s finger nails as an ode to seduction? It would stick to everything!’
3 Asked the same question by this author, Matthau replied, ‘I take the Fifth [Amendment]!’
4 In her memoirs, Margaret Sinclair Trudeau wrote: ‘He flew Barbra Streisand up to Ottawa to accompany him to a gala at the Arts Center ... It was a romance. Every paper carried it. For the next few days my pique and jealousy was such that each time Pierre rang I slammed down the phone: “Go back to your American actress!” I yelled at him.’ The future Mrs Trudeau converted to Catholicism and married the Prime Minister eighteen months later. Despite her religious conversion, she eventually divorced Trudeau.
20
STREISAND ENTERED FILMS at a time when strong women with powerful screen personalities were an endangered species. The industry was male dominated, with a profusion of macho stars and adventure films. Good female roles were almost non-existent and women in executive positions unwelcome. Welcomed or not, she intended to break through the male bastion that controlled Hollywood. Look out world, here I come! was her attitude. That world was making movies, now her world, her life and she intended to make of it what she wanted.
The days of gutsy actresses such as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Susan Hayward, Carole Lombard and Rosalind Russell were over. Marilyn Monroe was dead and with her had died the Hollywood sex queen. In 1970 there were only two major female American film stars – Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda. Streisand was offered, and refused, two roles – that of the marathon dancer in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), and the brittle New York call-girl in Klute (1971) – both went to Fonda, the latter winning her an Academy Award. Neither role appealed to Streisand. Too downbeat.
Shortly after Klute, Fonda plunged into a plethora of anti-Establishment causes, championing the Black Panthers and a campaign to end the war in southeast Asia – activities unacceptable to Hollywood film backers. This put an end, temporarily, to her film career and left Streisand virtually alone in the field without contenders. She had the power, now she must decide how to use it.
Possessing a strong screen presence even when miscast, as she had been in Hello, Dolly!, finding a role to fulfil her potential was a rough and tumble struggle. If she wanted good roles in interesting films, Streisand would have to become her own producer. In Hollywood, however, the more a woman used her energy, her brains, and her talent, the more she was resented. A woman like Streisand, who fought for every inch she gained, was a threat.
Although called a castrating, hard-driving bitch by some of the men she worked with, a man in the same circumstances would have been respected for his drive and ambition. All around her she saw male stars – Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, Jack Lemmon – organising their own production companies, receiving the profits that had hitherto gone to their employers. She decided that was what she must do and was also smart enough to know that she could not go it alone.
Marty Erlichman still functioned as her personal manager, overseeing her career, but her agent at this time was the high-powered, super-salesman Freddie Fields who in 1961, with his ex-partner David Begelman, had started a talent agency, then called Creative Management Associates (later to become International Creative Management). Streisand had signed with CMA during her 1963 engagement at the Coconut Grove, realising that to make it in movies she had to have a knowledgeable and established Hollywood agency behind her. Fields, a man with a ready smile, sharp wit and a penchant for grand gestures – extravagant gifts, chauffeured Rolls-Royces to take his stars to their public engagements – had renegotiated, with attorney Bella Linden’s considerable help, Streisand’s original Funny Girl contract.
Freddie Fields was a genius at putting together package deals – star, property, director – but Streisand was the agency’s only bankable star. Determined to overtake William Morris, then the top Hollywood talent agency, Fields came up with an idea that he felt certain would attract other talents of her calibre (necessarily men – there were no female stars in her orbit) to his agency list. Sue Mengers was his prime talent-acquisition agent. Fields put together the idea of a company that would be owned partially by the stars who would be partners in the company and partially by the public. He needed Streisand as bait to bring in performers in her strata and promised her the world – artistic freedom, here’s your chance to do your own projects, whatever you want to do, virtually no strings attached. She would get 10 per cent of the gross and would agree to deliver three pictures to this company. Streisand, feeling this was just the opportunity she was looking for to have control over her films, agreed. Mengers then went all out to woo other candidates away from their current agents. It did not take long before she had convinced Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier of the viability and advantage of such a company. On the surface the three stars seemed a good match as they were serious performers each with a strong social conscience.
Her agents, Fields and Mengers, a formidable duo, set up a press conference on 11 June 1969, in New York at the Plaza Hotel where, at a table in one of the ballrooms, the three stars signed incorporation papers for The First Artists Production Company, Ltd in front of over 300 press photographers, reporters and television news cameramen. Each of the three stars had made an initial commitment to produce and appear in three films. Additionally, the company planned to engage in television production, music publishing, recording and other ancillary activities.1
Speaking first, Streisand said in a clear, authoritative voice she saw the new company as ‘a natural development, a logical progression. I have always had to be free to play the roles and sing the songs I felt strongly and instinctively were right for me. We’ll be making many diverse films and we’re determined that every one of them – drama or comedy or musical – will reach the very high standards we demand of ourselves.’
Newman added that the purpose of their company was ‘not necessarily to economise, but to put film production on a more efficient basis’. Poitier spoke more about the new era of the motion picture industry. ‘You either lead it, or move with it, or follow it. We have opted for leadership.’
After the announcement the stellar triumvirate adjourned to a private suite where they drank champagne and talked glibly among themselves and their representatives, but there was a curious lack of chemistry between them. On Streisand’s part, ‘a cool suspicion of the others’, a staff member who was present at the gathering recalled. She was the lone woman in a company with two powerful men who were both as valuable at the box office as she was. Although they parted amiably, a competitive spirit was unleashed. Plans for the company moved forward, guided in these early months by Fields and by Mengers who managed not long after to snag Steve McQueen from William Morris as a fourth member of First Artists. Warner Brothers was to supply the financing along with a British merchant bank, Arbuthnot Latham & Co Ltd.
One of Streisand’s prime reasons for becoming a partner in First Artists was to choose her own projects. The one closest to her heart was an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, ‘Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy’, which had been sent to her by producer Valentine Sherry in 1968 just after she had completed Funny Girl. Having read it, she called Fields to tell him that she wanted to do it as her next movie. Fields tried to convince her that she should not do another ethnic role so soon after playing Fanny Brice. Streisand was persistent and took an option on the property.
Set in nineteenth-century Poland, the story centred on Yentl, only child of a widowed Talmudic scholar who had instilled in his daug
hter a love of learning. After his death, and as girls were denied an education in Talmudic law at that time, the teenaged Yentl disguises herself as a boy, cuts off her hair, straps down her breasts, adopts male clothing, renames herself Anshel, and runs away to another town. There, accepted as a boy, she attends a yeshivah and falls in love with an older male student, Avigdor, to whom she does not dare to confide the truth. Finally she is pressured into a marriage to the beautiful young woman, Hadass, whom Avigdor loves but cannot marry. Yentl eventually reveals her true identity and embarks for America, where to continue her education she will no longer have to pretend to be male.
The story appealed to Streisand on several levels. It was about a girl who had lost her father, a man of learning; it dealt with equal opportunity and education for women, and it was rooted in the history of the Jewish people. She approached the Czechoslovakian director, Ivan Passer, the son of wealthy Jewish parents who had survived the Holocaust. He seemed exactly the right choice to develop Yentl. He struggled with the story for a while and then backed out, telling Streisand that she was too old and too famous to play the part. Also, women masquerading as men had never been accepted on the screen. He reminded her of Katharine Hepburn’s disastrous film, Christopher Strong (1933) in which she donned masculine attire, a movie that was a failure at the box office and earned Hepburn the wrath of critics. Apart from that, he could see no way to overcome the climatic wedding night scene between two women – Hadass and Yentl. Nor, for that matter, had Paramount when she approached them originally seeking financing.
‘I would think, “I can never make this movie. Maybe Ivan was right; I’m too old. Maybe I’m too famous.” I was so scared that I would talk to everyone about it and after a while I began to really hear myself, and hear this person talking about this dream they had, but being too frightened to go after the dream.’ She continued to talk about it but she went on with her commitment to star in the film adaptation of Bill Manhoff’s The Owl and the Pussycat, a whimsical version of the Pygmalion myth that had been more successful as a play on Broadway than the West End. She played Doris, a luckless prostitute, brassy, fast-talking, an overbearing character who was, none the less, vulnerable and likeable – a sort of ethnic, apolitical Billie Dawn from Born Yesterday. Doris was Streisand’s first straight comedy role and she began shooting on location in New York with great enthusiasm.