by Anne Edwards
The two duets with Barry Gibb, ‘Highway to the Sky’ and ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ were the least successful of the evening’s programme. Then came an especially moving rendition of ‘Papa Can you Hear Me?’ from the score of Yentl, sung as the darkness of night encroached, in the flickering light of a single candle: ‘in memory of all those great father figures – Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Gandhi, Sadat’. This was followed by ‘The Way We Were’ which had a much more contemporary sound than any previous arrangement along with numerous mellismatic sections. For an encore she ended the evening with a stirring interpretation of ‘America the Beautiful’, beginning acappella, and eventually asking the audience to join in. As they did, they clasped hands and swayed as though moved by the night wind.
Streisand was visibly affected by the emotion generated by her audience. Tears filled her eyes as she left the stage after her final bow. Much as she had grown to fear public appearances, she had missed the instant gratification and the outpouring of love she received from a live audience.
The dinner-concert raise $1.5, an amount that exceeded by $500,000 the proceeds from a Republican fund-raising dinner for President Reagan the following night, a fact that caused much jubilation among HWPC members and a certain pride to Streisand. There was no doubt that the large sum garnered from Streisand’s concert helped the Democrats regain the Senate, for five of the six senators who received funds for their campaigns from the event won their seats.
With the concert, Streisand had crossed over into becoming an active member of HWPC, which was composed mainly of women ‘rising steadily through the Hollywood power structure, to establish themselves as forces within the industry’. Her political consciousness had been fully awakened (her social consciousness had always been apparent), and there would be no back-stepping. From this point she would be frank and forthright in speaking out for what she believed in and supported, so much so that there would often be unfounded rumours that she planned to run for the Senate.
On 1 October Streisand was rudely awakened at 7:42 a.m. by a violent earthquake that struck California and that measured 6.1 on the Richter scale. It took six lives and sent upward of 100 injured people to hospital. Houses were severely damaged, cars crushed beneath fallen concrete. It had hit with enormous force. Shaken but unharmed, she rang Diana right away to make sure she was all right and then, once that was ascertained, checked the house for damage, which turned out to be minor. But she was left fearing for the time when the ‘big one’ would hit. Apart from that, the earthquake seemed symbolic of the sudden shifting changes in her life.
Her affair with Richard Baskin ended and he moved out of the Carolwood Drive house. ‘One day he was there, the next he was gone,’ a friend said. ‘I was surprised. She really like him a lot.’ His departure should have been more traumatic, perhaps, than it was considering they had lived together for three years. The key reason might well have been that during most of that time she had been off the screen. Making movies, the thing she loved most to do, had always created heavy scenes between her and the important men in her life. As soon as she became mired in the all-consuming work on the filming of Nuts, trouble had brewed between her and Baskin, who was not involved in the production and found himself an outsider in her life as she devoted herself day and night to the filming process.
Nuts was premièred on 20 November 1987 to mostly favourable, although not wildly enthusiastic reviews. She had given one of the finest performances of her career, one that should have lifted her prestige as an actress into the same category as Meryl Streep, but it never happened and despite her bravado acting, Nuts did not do well at the box office. Audiences appeared to be sending Streisand the message that they did not want to see her in non-musical movies, especially one with such a heavy subject. Depressed by the public’s verdict on Nuts, and with Jason in New York and planning to remain there for the holidays, she went off to Aspen, Colorado for Christmas and New Year with the Bergmans. And it was there that she picked up her brief acquaintance, a former superficial meeting at that year’s Grammy Awards, with Miami Vice star Don Johnson, who wasted no time reeling her into a fast-paced courtship. In less than a week it became a passionate affair.
‘If I want to meet people, I have to talk to them first because so many are intimidated by me,’ she said. ‘So if a guy does make the first move [as had Jon Peters and Johnson], he is already a step ahead.’
He had grabbed hold of her arm at a party shortly after her arrival, pulled her off into a private corner and then left early with her. Seven years her junior, he had lived his life fast and claimed he had no regrets. ‘I have done everything I’ve ever taken a fancy to. The only things I haven’t done are things I haven’t thought of.’
Johnson could be called tough but, as friends and co-workers avouch, ‘he could have charmed Hitler’. He was the natural fantasy man for any Jewish woman with Streisand’s background – the blond, bronzed, macho gentile man with the physique of a beach lifeguard and a smile that could light up a funeral. By New Year they were a pair, by February a couple.
‘I’m happy, very happy,’ Streisand declared to the press. ‘And I have never been very happy, so it’s something I’m learning. It’s as if I were a child again.’ She had expressed similar sentiments in the early days of her affair with Peters. In truth, the two men could stand comparison. Both were younger, cocky, streetwise, had spent time in juvenile reformatories, and were aggressive both in business and sex. Johnson was also a good athlete, bordering on the professional in golf, tennis, skiing and powerboat racing. There was another side, however, to his swaggering, macho, womanising reputation. He was intelligent, sensitive and – having suffered a great sense of loss with his parents’ divorce when he was a youngster – wanted to settle into a close family situation so that his son, with his former lover, Patti D’Arbanville, would have a real home with him. Although Streisand enthusiastically helped to decorate his recently purchased million-dollar ranch house in Aspen and spent all her free time with him, they did not actually take up double occupancy of any of their individual residences. In fact, Elliott, separated from Jenny, and having a particularly tough patch at this time, was living at Streisand’s Malibu ranch, a gesture Streisand made to help him out, for she would always have a protective and close feeling for the man who was the father to her son.
Named the ‘Female Star of the Decade’, at the ShoWest Convention in Las Vegas on 25 February 1988, she arrived late to acknowledge the tribute accompanied by Johnson. Jon Peters was seated on the dais and he leaped up from his chair and embraced both of them as they were being seated.
Never able to cut connections with the former men in her life, she let Peters host a party for her forty-sixth birthday on 24 April while Johnson was on location in Calgary making Dead-Bang, an action film. Shortly after this celebration, lonely and seemingly head-over-heels in love again, she flew to Ireland to be with him. She believed she had at last found a man with whom she could be happy ever after. They were photographed arms entwined, gazing with hungry eyes at each other.
In mid-September, she and Johnson recorded a single, ‘Till I Loved You’, together. It turned out to be their farewell song. Ten weeks later, Johnson and Melanie Griffith (one of his four ex-wives) announced, to Streisand’s shocked disbelief, that they were going to be remarried. Griffith had spent several months in a rehabilitation centre for alcoholism after completing her acclaimed performance in Working Girl. Streisand knew that Johnson had been seeing Griffith but solemnly believed it was out of concern for Griffith’s health and her struggle against her addiction, a situation with which she was in great sympathy. The world suddenly came crashing down on her.
She had somehow failed once again to sustain a meaningful relationship. This time she was the spurned woman and she was furious at Johnson for ending their affair in such a brutal, public manner. For weeks she brooded about him and the cruel press coverage that made her out to look a fool.
Media interest in Johnson’s
defection finally waned and she was able to press all her energy into a new project, a film adaptation of Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. It would be another monumental undertaking as she would produce, direct and star in the movie. More than that, The Prince of Tides was about family and forgiveness and she was at a place in her life where she thought she could forgive her mother for what she called in her first interviews on the prospective project – ‘emotional abuse’. It would bring Jon Peters back into her life as a protector, the one who would, when every studio turned her down on the project, talk Columbia into financing it for her. It would also create a new deeper relationship between her and Jason, whom she would cast in the picture as her son, and with it, the realisation and acceptance of the fact that Jason was homosexual.
Footnotes
1 Richard Baskin ended up producing two of the cuts, ‘Not While I’m Around’ and ‘Something’s Coming’.
2 In Washington, Marilyn Bergman met Senator George J. Mitchell, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who proposed that all the proceeds from the ticket sales be turned over to the DSCC. Bergman was insistent that HWPC control the profits to ensure that none of the money went to Democrats whose views her organisation did not approve. A middle road was chosen. The funds would be split among its own political action committee and the DSCC to be dispersed to California Democratic Senator Alan Cranston, who faced a tough re-election, four liberal Democratic challengers, and one incumbent, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont.
28
As JASON’S PARENTS, Elliott and Streisand now had something they had to face together. In 1989, when Jason was twenty-three, neither he nor they had discussed the matter of his homosexuality in public or, it seems, in private. Elliott has admitted having had a total block on the subject and it was not until five years later, after Jason himself went public, that his father told English journalist Corinna Honan, ‘Yes, [Jason] is gay. That’s his preference, his business. It’s something that’s new to me and it’s an acutely delicate subject. But I’m more than just empathetic. Whether it has been a problem for Barbra, I don’t know. It’s really important not to be prejudiced and both of us are devoted to him.
‘I just want Jason to be comfortable with himself and happy and find his way of expressing love. He could be a polar bear for all I’m concerned; he’s as precious to me as anyone can be. I told Jason a couple of years ago that I feel fortunate and grateful that we have one another. I told him I love him. He said, “I didn’t always know that. I know that now.”’
During the time Streisand was readying The Prince of Tides for the cameras, she and Elliott were privately and understandably concerned. AIDS was spreading wildly, cases doubling, then tripling each year. His parents suffered guilt, Was I to blame? ‘I think Jason’s being gay is deeply psychological,’ Elliott responded. ‘It’s a result of conditioning, I think . . .[I blame myself] for not being a more visible father. Barbra won custody when we were divorced. I wasn’t fair to him. I left him in that environment without me. I think he was affected by not having love at a vital stage of his life, though the affection and love developed later. Barbra was consumed with her business and career and I just wasn’t there.
‘I can’t fault Barbra for being something she can’t be. I can only fault me. I know my intentions were positive, but it has been a great trial for Jason to overcome this lack of love. He’s a very worthy, decent guy. I think he and Barbra have a bit more of an adult relationship now. She loves her son and he’s as loyal to his mother as he can be.’
One thing that brought Streisand and Jason closer was his seemingly dedicated wish to become an actor which had surfaced in the past few years. She had seen him in several local non-professional productions and thought that he possessed a true gift. He had also played bit parts in three unreleased movies that year. When Streisand first read The Prince of Tides about the Wingos, a South Carolina family whose children grow up repressing nightmarish traumas, she recalled thinking: ‘Jesus, I’m perfect for this part [as the middle-aged Jewish psychiatrist, Dr Susan Lowenstein, who falls in love with her suiddal patient’s brother, Tom Wingo]. I identify with the woman completely, even to the line in the book that says she is in the middle of ageing extraordinarily well.’ She also saw part of herself in the traumatised Wingo children and in the relationship between Dr Lowenstein and her sullen, teenage son, Bernard. When she started to cast, Jason was living away from home in a small West Hollywood apartment, pursuing his acting career.
‘Jason has never asked me for anything. He has never been ambitious,’ she later said. ‘He doesn’t have a desire to be famous or anything like that, because, you know, it’s complicated being my son and Elliott’s son, problems of competition and all that. But here my kid calls up one day and he says, “Mom, about that role, I hear you’re getting ready to cast someone else. I thought you thought I’d be good for it.”’
Streisand had decided upon a young actor, Chris O’Donnell (later to make a name for himself in Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino), who was a star quarterback of his high-school football team. ‘Barbra showed me this kid that she had cast for the role of her son,’ Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides, remembers, ‘a very handsome blond kid. Of course everyone looks wonderful in Hollywood, but I said, “That ain’t the kid,” so she said, “I already hired him.” I still said, “That still ain’t him. This kid Bernard is not a good athlete, that’s the point.” So she sort of flipped through other kids she’d auditioned. She finally came to this one kid. I didn’t know it was her son. But he showed a snarling, wonderful teenage quality [and looked like Streisand, which had to have some bearing on the casting]. I said, “That’s the kid, right there.”’ Streisand recalls this happened when Conroy saw a picture of Jason on the piano in her living room. Memory is like that, often elusive, finding its place in other than original surroundings. Whoever is correct, the main point is that Conroy saw Jason as Bernard before Streisand and when she was resisting what to others seemed both logical and right. Even when Jason was finally signed to play the role, the news was kept from the media and not announced until months later when the film was already in production and on location. ‘I thought, deep down, “Well, it’s dangerous. We could both get attacked for this,”’ she confessed.
‘Every film she directs involves a working out of a part of her own life,’ Marilyn Bergman added.
‘I think she read The Prince ofTides seven times,’ says Cis Corman who was to be executive producer on the film. ‘She knew the book so well she would tell Pat what he had written on page 376. I mean after Yentl, she could have become a rabbi. Look, it’s a painful process for her but with moments of joy.’
Making a film with Streisand meant feeding her insecurities. ‘You have to keep saying “You’re beautiful, you’re wonderful,”’ Corman admits. None the less, most of the actors who have worked under her direction will tell you how sensitive she is to their problems, perhaps because she is so conscious of her own.
Streisand said at the time, ‘A lot of this movie is very meaningful to me because it’s about not blaming your parents. We’ve all come from some type of painful childhood. But if you blame your parents, it keeps you the victim. The mother in me makes me possibly a better director. Women can bring a certain kind of nurturing quality to a film,’ a point Amy Irving had affirmed about Streisand as a director during the making of Yentl.
Three weeks before leaving for South Carolina, where the film was to begin shooting and only days before 24 April1990, Streisand’s forty-eighth birthday, Diana, now eight-two, was rushed to the hospital with severe chest pains and underwent by-pass heart surgery. Streisand was in a panic. Work was put aside as she stayed with Roslyn by her mother’s side. ‘It changed my whole perspective of the importance of the film,’ Streisand confessed. ‘The film became non-important. The relationships with people I love began to matter more than the movie.’
Diana was now an elderly woman. She had been much maligned publicly by
her elder daughter and had never had any means of refuting or ameliorating Streisand’s constant barbed statements about the emotional abuse she had suffered at her mother’s hands. She had not been a demonstrative or, at times, a supportive parent, but she had done what she thought was best. She was not equipped to handle either the situation she found herself in after her husband’s death or to nurture a daughter’s ‘fancies’. But neither had Diana ever turned her back on her daughter no matter how bitter and cutting Streisand’s statements were about her to a press eager to exploit celebrity-revealing comments to sell their publications. Diana had inherited her own pain, an unsympathetic mother, the fear that she could not make it on her own. She had been born into a time when women had much less chance of achievement unless they were beautiful, which she was not, and she had lost the husband she loved and been humiliated by the man she believed would make a home for her children and herself. She was a victim of her era and her inadequacies.