Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Streisand was devastated over Elliott’s condition and his fall from grace. ‘Oh, my God,’ she sobbed to a friend, ‘not Elly.’

  Adding to the strangeness of the situation, Streisand had a financial interest in A Glimpse of Tiger. John Calley, President of Warner Brothers, called Raucher (whose adaptation of his own novel The Summer of ’42 was also a Warner Brothers film) to tell him that Streisand liked the story and that he thought the project could be salvaged if he could reverse the roles and write an upbeat ending. Raucher went to see her. ‘She made chicken soup and was extremely helpful,’ he recalls. ‘But after two meetings and several dry starts on the new approach I decided it wouldn’t work.’ Warner, whose investment had been considerable in the failed project, did not agree and turned to other writers.

  Meanwhile, Streisand had been taken by Anne Richardson Roiphe’s novel, Up the Sandbox, and optioned it for development. But there was no film in her immediate future. She was at odds with herself, having to cope with the impact Elliott’s breakdown and illness might have on her son’s life and her own. Elliott had been more than her lover and mate, he had been her friend and protector.

  In October 1970, much saddened and concerned, she moved into her New York town house. The tree-lined street glowed autumnal red. Light glimmered brilliantly through the deep red stain-glassed window panes she had put in some of the ground-floor windows. Sliding glass doors led from the kitchen to the walled-in garden where Jason did tumblesaults on the grass and learned how to catch a ball. Yet the house depressed her. New York brought back too many memories. She decided to sell the East Side townhouse and return to the Ardsley, having not yet given up her lease.

  She was scheduled in late November and December to undertake two concurrent engagements at the Riviera and International Hilton Hotels in Las Vegas. First, however, she was committed to the fund-raising, vote-rallying evening concert for Bella Abzug being held just two days before the November election. A lot of mud had stuck to Abzug from the bitter campaign she had fought with Farbstein and she was not a shoo-in by any means. About four or five weeks before the concert, Streisand announced that she could not take on an entire evening. ‘It seemed as though she really wanted to back out,’ Madeline Lee, the producer of the concert recalled. ‘Marty Erlichman met with me, the director, Stanley Prager, Hal Prince who was guiding the event and the rest of the executive staff, all of us doing our jobs without compensation. He said Barbra now wanted to do the second half of the programme and only then if for the first act we could get three performers – specifically Zero Mostel, Godfrey Cambridge and Woody Allen. (They had to be of that calibre and not singers.) I think that Marty was hoping that the whole thing would go away and that these conditions would let Barbra off the hook. Tickets had already been sold for a concert of Barbra Streisand for Bella Abzug. This was a terrible set-back. I tried but none of the three men were available on that night. When I reported this back to Marty he seemed very happy because it would free Streisand of her obligation.

  ‘We just couldn’t afford to lose Streisand’s name value. Bella had been under vitriolic attack. Rocks were thrown through the windows of her campaign headquarters by militant supporters of Israel who thought she was anti-Israel. We were rather desperate. I came up with an idea called Broadway for Bella, where in the first half top Broadway stars would sing and perform numbers from current hit shows. Most theatres were dark on Sunday night and I thought I had a good chance of getting the stars. Marty was not too enthusiastic, but he agreed to have Barbra wait for a week to see if it could be accomplished.’

  At week’s end, Lee had signed up Joel Grey, Jack Gilford [Lee’s husband], Lauren Bacall, James Coca, Rita Moreno, Phyllis Newman, Donna McKechnie, Alan Alda, George Segal, Tammy Grimes and the entire cast of Hair. Erlichman agreed to go forward, but all advertisements and the programme itself had to read Broadway for Bella starring BARBRA STREISAND. An unflattering caricature of her as Fanny Brice by Al Hirshfield was chosen for the programme. She hated it, but in the end allowed it to be used.

  ‘The place was jammed – I don’t know – maybe 20,000 people,’ Lee continued. ‘Lauren Bacall was one of the guest hosts. She was starring in Applause at the time. She came out and in a husky, cigarette voice (about two notes deeper than Bella’s), said, “I guess you don’t know why I’m here tonight. Well, I’m Bella Abzug’s vocal coach!”’ The first half was sensational. Then Barbra appeared in a slim-lined, black evening gown with spaghetti shoulder straps. Her hair was simple and back in a plain little chignon and she had a red chiffon scarf. She looked stunning. This was during a period when they were dressing her up in films and in Las Vegas with wigs and costumes and ongepotchket [overly decorated] evening outfits. We had a twenty-three piece orchestra and she sang seven songs and an encore, I believe. A beautiful Russian lullaby that had been cut out of Funny Girl (she tied the scarf under her chin like a babushka for that one), ‘People’ and numbers that she was planning to use in Las Vegas. She was so good she was chilling. She never sang better, she never looked better. Much to our horror people ran up the aisles wanting to touch her. She looked terrified. I think it was Alan Alda who came out on stage and helped her off.’ The coverage was enormous and Abzug was duly elected to Congress two days later.

  The Owl and the Pussycat opened the following week. ‘Barbra Streisand’s delicate snarl is the voice of New York tuned to a parodist’s sensibility,’ Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker. ‘It’s the sound of urban character armor; she rattles it for a finely modulated raucousness ... She is a living, talking cliff-hanger ... Though she doesn’t sing in this picture, she’s still a singing actress; she makes her lines funny musically, and she can ring more changes on a line than anybody since W.C. Fields, who was also a master of inflection.’ The film was a huge success at the box office and was in the black within a few weeks of its release. Streisand had proved that she did not have to sing in a movie for it to be profitable. She pressed forward on the non-singing stories she was developing – Up the Sandbox, Yentl and What’s Up, Doc?

  She no longer enjoyed performing live and her return to Las Vegas was fraught with dissatisfaction. Stage fright plagued her. The late hours, gaudy ambiance of the hotels and of Las Vegas annoyed her. She could not wait to honour her contracts and return to California. Her impatience and irritation did not affect her performance. The rooms she played were packed and there were standing ovations after each show which ended with ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’ and ‘When You Gotta Go’. ‘The lyrics,’ she claimed, ‘with their “Auld Lang Syne” sentiment, seemed like a fitting way to bid farewell to a decade full of dreams, challenges and adventures.’

  Her last performance was on New Year’s Eve. It was 1971, a year into a new decade, destined to be the most tempestuous time in her life.

  Footnotes

  1 Forty years earlier film stars Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and William Hart formed United Artists to distribute their own independent productions. Hart dropped out two weeks later but United Artists became a major film distributor in Hollywood and earned sizeable profits from the release of its movies for its founders. The precedent, therefore, had been set for Streisand, her star partners, and First Artists.

  2 Harry Stradling died on 14 February 1970, shortly after completion of photography on The Owl and the Pussycat; cinematographer Andrew Laszlo took over to supervise all retakes and second unit work.

  3 Ten years later the magazine High Sodety somehow got hold of either the original negative frames or pirated copies of Streisand’s discarded topless scene and published several stills. Streisand attempted to block publication and sued for $5 million in damages. The judge ruled against her, although he ordered the publisher to notify wholesalers to tear the offending pages from the magazine before putting them on news stands. There is no way of knowing how many wholesalers obliged.

  4 On a Clear Day would later recoup its losses when it was released to television and sold as a video
cassette.

  Making Movies, Making Love

  'One of the reasons I care about being a movie

  actress is to be remembered, to be slightly

  immortal; because I think life is so short that

  by the time we get to see things with some sense

  of reality and truth, it's all over. I'm sure

  that's why I care so much about making movies: It

  prolongs your life.'

  BARBRA STREISAND, 1977

  'People say I got this strange hold over Barbra.

  I do. It's called love.'

  ]ON PETERS, 1977

  21

  BEING A MOVIE star was no longer enough. Life was incomplete without a man by her side. Her closest friends – Cis Corman and lyricist Marilyn Bergman, whom she had met since coming to California – seemed to be happily married. Streisand was sensitive to their supportive, loving relationships. Every man she dated was viewed by her as a prospective life-partner. They all failed her standard. She wanted poifect, nothing less.

  ‘Actually, I believe women are superior to men, I don’t even think we’re equal,’ she professed. ‘Among other things, women are stronger than men. They have more heart attacks, ulcers, nervous breakdowns and suicides. Their façade is killing them.’ Thoughtfully, she added, ‘I have enormous compassion for men, which really came into focus with the birth of my own son. This little boy who wanted to be held and comforted and soothed has to grow up in a world where he cannot cry because it is “unmanly”.’

  Tender sentiments, yet it is doubtful that she would have welcomed a man in her life who would not be able to control such emotions. She had only recently confided to friends that she was tired of being ‘the man around the house, of making the money and all the decisions’. Ambiguity, thy name is Barbra.

  The house in New York was put up for sale and sold swiftly. After all these years of renting, she bought the Central Park West penthouse and set about redecorating it, removing all the former Louis XVI influences, the red flocked wallpaper and large mirrors in highly decorated gold frames. ‘Look, this was my first real home,’ she told an interviewer for Architectural Digest. ‘Let me tell you. I wanted Louis, Louis, Louis – as much as I could lay my hands on. And I got it: chandeliers, bronzes, porcelains, satin. Now I’ve become far more sophisticated.’

  She was in what she called, ‘my burgundy era ... Art Nouveau, Art Déco – all those rusts, mauves and greens, and those swooning fin-de-siède colors and sinuous shapes!’ She had become so knowledgeable about these two early twentieth-century design periods that she could have given a concise lecture on their roots and differences. Her tastes had changed but not her penchant for setting fashion trends. Hot pants, platform shoes, polyester and Day-Glo colours were the current vogue. The young seemed determined to express themselves in what they wore. Their clothes had a certain tackiness to them that Streisand disliked. She led the way with designer blue jeans and tie-dyed shirts for relaxation, long slinky gowns in black, grey or white for evening. The elaborate coiffures she had endorsed after On a Clear Day were replaced by long, straightened, flaxen-bleached hair. Motivated by a desire for youth and some of the fun she might have missed earlier in her life, she strove to keep fit. Her ice-cream binges occurred less often, her passion for delicatessen food was disciplined. She jogged on the beach in the mornings and played tennis with Burt Bacharach, who was working with her on a proposed album. On 14 March 1971, she made her first television appearance in three years (when the much delayed concert in Central Park taped just after she had made Funny Girl, was shown) on Bacharach’s CBS special, joining him at the piano to sing ‘Close to Me’ and several other Bacharach/David songs.

  Her old albums continued to sell at a steady rate. American record sales had tripled in the last decade. To the shock of their millions of horrified fans, the Beatles, rock music’s reigning superstars, went their separate ways. But the Rolling Stones, Temptations, Fifth Dimension, Blood, Sweat and Tears and the Doors were all in the Top Forty and Streisand was one of the few solo singers with them. The Turtles and the Temptations played the Nixon White House. (‘Me? Never!’ she had commented.) In England, an LP called EmptySky introduced a young Elton John. Elvis Presley, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were a force, but new sounds were emerging – Marvin Gaye, James Taylor, Carole King. At the height of their fame Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died tragic deaths – victims of living in the fast lane. The music world was going through a transitional time with great contrasts. Streisand was determined to keep up with the changing market and explore material she had not sung before with the same deep scrutiny she had given to Arlen, Styne, Merrill, Lerner and Lane.

  Afraid the public might not want a ‘different’ Barbra Streisand, she recorded eight songs for an album titled The Singer,1 which was to combine old and new music. When Clive Davis, the president of Columbia Records, heard these tracks he was concerned that she was walking the line too cautiously and asked her to consider putting work on The Singer aside to collaborate with a new producer (she had been working with Wally Gold), Richard Perry, on a more contemporary album. When she and Perry met he played her some of the songs he wanted her to sing if she agreed to do the replacement album with him. One of them was Laura Nyro’s ‘Stoney End’; others were Randy Newman’s ‘I’ll Be Home’, Harry Nilssen’s ‘Maybe’ and Joni Mitchell’s ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’. She agreed to go ahead with the album which would become Stoney End.

  The venture was to be one of the few times she would not have Peter Matz as her musical arranger and/or conductor, the first time that she would have a back-up group (three female singers) and the first time, as well, that the musicians and technicians were either her age or younger. ‘Richard was always trying to get me to sing on the beat,’ she recalls, ‘which I found very hard to do.’ She was sceptical about the album’s acceptance. Although not yet thirty, she considered herself part of the old guard of singers, her sound more Broadway than rock. Now she proved that she was a singer for any day. Each number is sung beautifully, with tremendous energy and with lyric attitudes that brought the songs to a brilliant polish. She happily lost a bet to Perry that the record would not be a hit. Released only a week before her Broadway for Bella concert, it was Number One on several national charts by the time she returned to Los Angeles after her Las Vegas engagements.

  Suddenly she felt younger, gayer, more energised. She made a second album with Perry, Barbra Joan Streisand, designed to appeal to a wider audience with the inclusion of some rock and roll numbers. At best the album is a mixed bag. She tried hard to pump drama and give some stature to the lyrics of ‘Space Captain’ and belted out a grating primal shriek in John Lennon’s ‘Mother’, failing in both cases to add anything to the original material. Yet, a Burt Bacharach–Hal David medley, and a fugue-like duet with herself, both vintage Streisand, vindicate the less successful numbers. The album wavered at the bottom of the charts, but it did reveal that she was not afraid of new music trends.

  Making movies, her own movies, remained her top priority. Yentl was at a complete halt, Up the Sandbox was taking time to develop. Her contract with Ray Stark for two more movies would bring her a tenth of what she would have been paid elsewhere. She had a genuine fear of doing concerts. Records were her greatest source of income.

  In Hollywood, where money is more highly valued than anything else, it is earnestly believed that the larger the budget of a picture the more successful it will be. How the money is consumed – on the highest paid stars, expensive writers, super-lavish settings – does not much matter. Streisand did not subscribe to that philosophy. She had been overwhelmed with the amounts of money lavished on the sets and costumes for On a Clear Day. She saw nothing inherently bad or wrong about artists making millions of dollars. She was, however, wary of sacrificing creativity for money – they were not interchangeable.

  By nature frugal, a tough bargainer, during the early days of her success she had been extravagant, spending quantities
of money on furs and furnishings. Still, she was never wasteful. ‘I can’t throw away a half a yard of material or four inches of satin ribbon or a button or ... or a left-over slice of roast beef or a spoonful of peas!’ she once said. She still had the clothes she had bought when she was appearing at The Lion and the Bon Soir. The most exotic hung on padded hangers decorating her dressing room. Others, she had remade or used the fabric elsewhere for throw pillows or to decorate container boxes for her dressing room. Left-over food was recycled or frozen. She still delighted in getting something free, being taken out to dinner or given special perks such as a chauffeured car paid for by the studio. Yet, her funds were, as they had been for years, handled by others. Although doing well, she was not making the great sums of money from films that were reported in the press. She insisted that ‘the things you read in the paper about million-dollar this and million-dollar that, that’s all bullshit. That’s not true. I have never made as big a salary as many secondary male stars do today.’ She was referring to the pictures she had made under her Raystar contract. She had, of course, drawn a high salary for her two Fox pictures.

  Managers, agents and financial advisers took a considerable percentage of her earnings (at least 25 per cent) and the investments on her behalf in the stock market had not proved successful. She claims she ‘never knew what was really going on ... never really read the contracts – understood the deals. I didn’t care!’ What she wanted now was to feel responsible for her own actions.