by Anne Edwards
She went ahead with her plans even though she did not think Broadway songs were mainstream any longer. Originally she had wanted to make a double record, and agreed to a single slip LP under pressure from the record company. Never too proud to eat crow, she called Peter Matz, with whom she also had not worked in a long while, and asked him if he would agree to co-produce, arrange and conduct the orchestra. Matz, who had done the orchestrations for most of her early albums and certainly was at least partially responsible for their success, agreed. They would produce the majority of the songs. Baskin, with David Foster, would handle the production on the other cuts.1 The four of them (Streisand immediately and totally immersed) began ‘marathon listening sessions to find a blend of obscure songs and standards’.
After weeks of listening to show scores by Kern, Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Bernstein, Berlin, the Gershwins and other legendary Broadway tunesmiths, she centred on the one composer she had all but completely ignored throughout her early recording and concert career – Stephen Sondheim. ‘It’s like growing into a part like Medea or Hedda Gabler,’ she remarked. ‘It’s not good when you’re twenty. You need to be older.’ For an unreleased cut in 1974 from the Butterfly album, she had recorded Sondheim’s ‘There Won’t Be Trumpets’ from Anyone Can Whistle and then changed her mind as Columbia had wanted her to do more contemporary songs with simpler lyrics. Now she appreciated their complexity and was drawn to Sondheim’s sophistication and intellectualism.
The song that particularly attracted her was ‘Putting It Together’ from Sondheim’s then current show, the 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in theParkwithGeorge. She called him at his home in New York although they hardly knew one another. ‘I told him of my conversation with my record company ... that I wanted to do an album of Broadway songs. And they were very resistant and unhappy, and they said, “Barbra, you can’t do a record like this. It’s not commercial. This is like your old records. Nobody’s going to buy it.” Every word they said only encouraged me. I wanted to put all their comments into this song. And I thought, “What a great way to open this album.”’
The actual lyrics of the song related to the art world, as the French painter George Seurat was the main character in the show. ‘She wanted to make [the song] relevant to the music business,’ Sondheim remembered, ‘so she asked me if she could fix one word to replace “lasers”, and I said, "“Why not use ‘vinyl’ instead?” and she leaped at it and thought that was wonderful. And I said, “Let me look at the rest of the lyric, if you want to personalize it. I’m sure I can make it more record-oriented and less art-related,” which is what it was in the context of the show. Once you get into it, then it becomes fun to do, and that’s why I did it.’
‘I would talk to him for hours,’ Streisand added. ‘I felt I couldn’t ignore the truth ... you don’t hide it; you use it. So I told him, “Here I am, a very successful recording star and yet I have to fight for everything I believe in. I’m still auditioning after twenty-three years.” I asked him if he could encompass that thought and he wrote, “Even though you get the recognition/Everything you do you still audition.” You see what I mean?’
Sondheim had never been known to custom tailor a song for a singer. ‘Barbra Streisand has one of the two or three best voices in the world for singing songs,’ he explained. ‘It’s not just her voice but her intensity, her passion and control. She has the meticulous attention to detail that makes a good artist ... Although every moment has been thought out, you don’t see all the sweat and decisions that went into the work. It is as though she just stepped out of the shower and began singing at you.’
‘He believes as I do,’ Streisand says about Sondheim, ‘that art is a living process, that it’s not set in stone, that it breathes and it grows and it changes. It blew my mind when I said things to him like “I never understood ‘Send in the Clowns’. What would you think about writing a second bridge that would kind of tell us more about this relationship?” And no problem. I’ve asked him to make a lot of changes like that, and at first we’ll be on the phone and he’ll say, “Wait a minute. You can’t do that.” And then he says, “Let me call you back” and in two hours he calls me back and it’s done. I don’t know quite how he does these things. He’s very, very organized.’
The Broadway Album became a predominantly Streisand-sings-Sondheim album as she added to ‘Putting It Together’, ‘Send in the Clowns’ (A Little Night Music), ‘Somewhere’ and ‘Something’s Coming’ (West Side Story, music by Bernstein), ‘Not While I’m Around’ and ‘Pretty Woman’ (Sweeney Todd), and ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ and ‘Being Alive’ (Company).
Working with Sondheim was, she asserts, ‘one of the most exciting collaborations I’ve ever had, because we both talk fast, we think fast; so it was like shorthand half the time ... we practically didn’t have to finish sentences. It was so exhilarating, there were moments I was screaming with joy over the phone.’
Sondheim came out to the Coast and worked along with her in the recording sessions. Here were two of the truly towering talents in the music world, both intense personalities, both perfectionists. Sondheim in sweatshirt and sneakers, sitting on one chair, his feet up on another, would pull at his close-cropped pepper and salt beard as he laboured over each word he scratched out on a pad of music paper. Streisand, comfortably dressed in a jogging suit hovered nervously nearby. Much in awe of Sondheim, she considered him one of the twentieth century’s greatest theatre composers. His mind was as quick as hers, and there was an instinctive knowledge of how to adapt his lyrics and music for her needs.
‘Everyone in the studio knew that they were part of something important,’ claimed Alan Bergman, who with Marilyn attended most of the three-week session. ‘The musicians, rather than escaping to the halls, stayed in their chairs and listened to the playbacks. Every take was different – a fresh meaning to a phrase, a new bend to a note.’
The album was released in early November 1985, and shot right up to Number One on the Billboard chart (there had been an amazing 800,000 advance sale). Streisand had always believed in it but she had not expected it to be such a big hit, and it renewed her faith in the public’s taste for good music. She had the conviction that if she followed her intuition on what was best for her that she would succeed and she had proved, once again, this was right.
‘The Broadway Album soars with full-bodie, tender bel canto renditions of ballads by Stephen Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and a Porgy and Bess medley that stand among the most thrilling performances of [Streisand’s] 23-year career,’ Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times.
This same instinct for doing what she believed in with a passion pressed her to take on a film adaptation of Tom Topor’s play, Nuts, about a high-class prostitute who kills one of her clients, in self-defence. Deeper than that, it asked the question, ‘What is normal?’ Numerous writers attempted to write a script that would please her and failed. Finally, she recalled two of them, Darryl Ponicsan and Alvin Sargent, who were now working on a screenplay. While she was waiting for the results of their collaboration, she saw Richard Dreyfuss in the Los Angeles Company’s production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, certain that she had grasped a new vision to her. The supporting character of the wheelchair-bound Dr Brookner (a part she would develop and enlarge) grabbed at both her intellect and her emotions, and was one she was sure she could play, not just well but with real understanding.
She believed the play to be about everyone having the right to love, something that she felt had universal appeal. It was also about the shocking lack of government assistance in researching a cure for AIDS and she wanted to do something positive to get the world to wake up to the appalling devastation of the disease. The two weeks she had spent with Kramer in their tense, emotional, volatile story conferences in the study of the Carolwood Drive house, had convinced her that The Normal Heart could be one of the most important films she would ever make.
They had talked hours on end about homosexu
ality, mothers and sons, about AIDS, and how the story could be told more from the view of Dr Brookner the AIDS specialist. They concentrated on her frustration, her fight for more research money, and the bond that exists between her and Ned, actually the central character in the play, a gay activist very much like Kramer.
‘I felt great warmth toward her,’ Kramer says, his keen brown eyes focused on a past memory. ‘I went away believing we were in agreement.’ He assumed that he was to be responsible for the final screenplay of The Normal Heart, which was semi-autobiographical and a raw piece of his life. When he returned to New York his lawyer greeted him with the news that Streisand was demanding the right to employ another writer on the script if she felt it was required. She was adamant on this point. She had to have control of the final script. Kramer, who had an impressive history in films having had his own production company and produced and adapted for the screen D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969) for which he had been nominated for an Academy Award, refused to bow to this demand and the deal collapsed.
Streisand was crushed. Losing the rights was a great disappointment and yet, somehow, she refused to let go of her belief that she would one day make The Normal Heart, a credo strengthened by the fast multiplying deaths from AIDS of many of her former close associates, Liberace among them. She knew that she could never relinquish what she saw as her vision, the only thing she truly trusted, and she could not produce and direct a film where she did not have control of the script. Some might interpret that as a need for power. It went deeper. Making a movie where she was so completely involved meant her mortality was at stake, her ability to create an art that would last. ‘It’s like the lyric of Steve Sondheim’s “Finishing the Hat”,’ she has said. ‘Look, I made a hat where there never was a hat.’
Once again she was deeply involved in her first love – making movies – and it was a world to which Richard Baskin was an outsider, as he had suddenly seemed to have become in her home. She had surrounded herself with a female staff, feeling more comfortable and better able to relate to women. With her secretary Kim Skalecki living in the guest house, a team of women assistants working on the premises every day, she was seldom alone, and work carried over into the evening hours. She also had to make time for the running of her vast business enterprises, the overseeing of the Barbra Streisand Foundation – which distributed over $1 million yearly to various causes that ranged from AIDS to abused children, battered women, university medical chairs (in her father’s name), environmental and civil rights groups to supplying musical instruments to lower grade schools so that the young students could play in a band – and, added to all this was her pre-production work on Nuts. Her relationship with Baskin, although not explosive in the way that she and Peters had been (and not as passionate either), was under tremendous stress. Then along came the catastrophic explosion of the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl to thrust her actively back into two more rings of activity – live concerts and politics – that she had shied away from for over a decade.
‘It was April26, 1986,’ Marilyn Bergman recalled. ‘(Barbra and I] were talking about the disaster at Chernobyl. She called me that morning, and she was absolutely horrified at what happened. The question was, “What can be done about this?” And the answer was, “The only thing that I know to do about it is to take back the Senate for the Democrats.”’
Bergman was a founding member of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, formed two years earlier, spawned from strong anti-Reagan presidential sentiment. HWPC aimed to influence the vote by raising large sums of campaign money for the candidates of their choice through gala dinners and balls, and operated ‘on the explicit conviction that politicians could learn from listening to their Hollywood donors’. The movie industry had proven to be a vital campaign aid. At the time of the Chernobyl disaster, there were six Democratic senatorial candidates in close races.
Streisand was not a member of HWPC, although she would soon join. Bergman was suggesting she do a concert to help raise funds so that the Democratic anti-nuclear candidates would be elected. Streisand was reluctant. ‘I’m still not comfortable singing in public in front of a large audience,’ she countered.
‘It became a discussion of what is more frightening: performing in front of an audience, or nuclear annihilation,’ Bergman explained.
The months that followed might be called ‘the political awakening of Barbra Streisand’. A few days after Bergman’s conversation with Streisand, Bergman had lunch with Stanley Sheinbaum, an ardent liberal activist, and told him that her friend wanted to learn more about nuclear issues. Sheinbaum accepted the challenge. Dinners were arranged at his home and at Carolwood Drive where she could meet policy experts who would brief her on the subject. Leading scientists such as Marvin L. Goldberger, then President of the California Institute of Technology, and Sidney Drell, from Stanford, were drafted as tutors.
Sheinbaum provided Streisand with literature, books and articles on the Reagan administration’s nuclear politics. She was an avid student. ‘She started with very little knowledge,’ Goldberger recalled, ‘and a great deal of suddenly awakened concern ... I had two roles: one was that of someone who knows a great deal about nuclear power, nuclear reactors, and has also spent an awful lot of time worrying about strategic weapons and international security. So in a sense I was a resource person that tried, when necessary, to separate for her fact from fiction. Secondly, both I and my wife tried to think about what was the appropriate vehicle for her to make the maximum contribution in this area about which she was greatly concerned.’
Marilyn Bergman took over from there. ‘Marilyn realised the way Barbra Streisand could help win back the Senate [for the Democrats] was to raise money,’ HWPC’s treasurer, attorney Bonnie Reiss, said, ‘and the way she could do that was to sing.’
Streisand was not easily convinced. The many years she had absented herself from concert work had increased her trepidation. Finally, in mid-summer, with the election only three months away, she agreed to do a concert but the event would have to be limited to invited guests and presented in the safe and comfortable setting of her secluded, well-protected Malibu ranch. Tents were to be raised over tables set for formal outdoor dining. To transform the grounds of the ranch to a professional outdoor auditorium necessitated the logistical task of carving out an amphitheatre from a stretch of flat lawn and wiring it for sound and lights in three weeks’ time. None the less everyone at the HWPC was enthusiastic, for not only would Streisand be performing live for the first time in many years, she would be doing so in her own home, a great enticement to potential ticket buyers who were being asked to pay $5,000 to see the concert.
No one was more excited about the event than Streisand. ‘After all of my insistence that I didn’t want to sing in public any more, I sang,’ she said. ‘Chernobyl had erupted in lethal radiation. The arms race was bankrupting the nation and the world. And I wanted to add my one voice to demands for action.’ The dinner-concert was called One Voice, which had a double-edged meaning: a solo concert (although Barry Gibb sang two songs with her) and the message that each person could make a difference in the fight against the proliferation of nuclear energy. Baskin joined forces with her as musical producer, Randy Kerber was the musical director, Streisand and Marty Erlichman, executive producers and Gary Smith and Dwight Hennion, who had presented most of her television shows, were to produce the live concert for Home Box Office with those proceeds going to the Barbra Streisand Foundation to distribute.
Despite the pressing demands of her work on Nuts, which was moving closer to the start of production, Streisand oversaw the transformation of her property into a professional outdoor arena, wrote the script with Marilyn and Alan Bergman, prepared and rehearsed seventeen songs, and recorded on audio cassette hundreds of individual, personalised invitations, ‘which,’ one observer wrote, ‘landed on the decks of Hollywood’s most powerful men and women like a summons’. Within a few days, over 300 people, the capacity audience, s
ent in their cheques.2
The night of the concert, 6 September 1986 – a warm evening tempered by a soft Pacific breeze – Streisand was flushed with nervous excitement as she waited for her entrance music in the newly constructed, temporary dressing-room area behind the stage. Robin Williams, seemingly awed by the star-studded audience, opened the concert with some humorous patter. Seated on impeccable white chairs set up in semi-circular rows on the grass skirt facing the stage were some of Hollywood’s greatest stars (and liberal Democrats): Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty, Sally Field, Bette Midler, Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, Jack Nicholson and Chevy Chase among others, and in a grand show of solidarity, ex-husband Elliott Gould, ex-lover Jon Peters and Jason. Streisand would be judged by her peers but they were also her friends, people who held the same political views as she did. They were here to support a cause they all believed in so she was guaranteed a receptive audience, not that she would ever give anything but her very best.
Her entrance in a flattering white, beaded, turtleneck sweater, white evening skirt slit to the knee, was met with thunderous applause. ‘You'’re nice. You'’re all friends. Thank you for being here,’ she smiled and waved and threw kisses. The sheltering sky was star lit. A soft breeze made wisps of her frizzy blonde hair, worn loose and to her shoulders. Rather than the usual thirty-five man orchestra she was accustomed to in the past, she had engaged a versatile group of mostly synthesiser instrumentalists – ‘Eight guys and some big electric bill!’ she told her audience. Randy Kerber conducted from his position at the keyboards.
Her songs were geared to the theme of the evening – helping to save and protect the environment, our love for others, our pride in our country – which gave the concert a soft, often sentimental edge, although there were some satirical jabs at the Republicans in specially written lyrics by the Bergmans. She made a beautiful segue from a short speech about non-proliferation of nuclear energy into ‘People’, sung with more wisdom than passion, and imparting new meaning to the lyrics. ‘Over the Rainbow’, which she proclaimed ‘the greatest movie song ever written’, was dedicated to Judy Garland who was so identified with it. Streisand sang it against an exquisite piano backing by Kerber as a song of great hope. The bridge was especially youthful and carefree. She could easily have been Dorothy on the road to Oz, a young girl touched with wonder, her dreams still intact. Garland’s underlying plea for love and protection, the vulnerable voice and misty eyes that had mirrored severe human suffering, were stifled. Streisand had made the song her own and it was a tour de force. She even improved Yip Harburg’s somewhat saccharine coda by changing ‘if happy little bluebirds fly’ to the more universal ‘if all those little bluebirds fly’.