by Anne Edwards
Elliott has said, ‘She uses her vulnerability and insecurities as a seduction, like a laser beam. It’s very attractive, and that’s part of her art. [However] her vulnerability is like one of those snowstorms in a globe that you shake; it’s behind glass. She plays vulnerability and has always played it really masterfully.’ But then Elliott himself also exudes a pervading aura of vulnerability and since his breakdown, shortly after their divorce, of someone who has suffered a damaged life.
While she waited for the 11 December 1991 première of The Prince of Tides she put together a four-disc autobiographical album Just for the Record ..., a compilation of previously recorded released and unreleased songs that allowed her briefly to tell her life story in the liner notes, giving her reasons for their inclusion and explanations about how they came to be made. The design divided her career into three decades: the sixties (‘dedicated to the memory of Peter Daniels, who became my first accompanist’), the seventies (‘to my beloved Gracie [Davison, her late dedicated housekeeper who had been with her since the time Jason was a youngster] whose laughter I still miss and to Howard Jeffries (sic), who would have liked this record)1 and the eighties (‘to my mother who is 82 years old and still has a beautiful voice. And to Cis Corman who’s been my best friend through the 60s, 70s and 80s’).
Putting together this album was a highly emotional experience. It begins with that first private recording she made of ‘You’ll Never Know’ at the age of thirteen and includes numerous previously unreleased recordings of songs that she felt best told the story of her career as a singer. During the process of making it she had Marty Erlichman contact Barry Dennen to see if he would give her the tapes over which they had fought so bitterly thirty years earlier. Dennen remained reluctant, but might have capitulated had Erlichman not come back to say that Streisand had changed her mind about including them.
Just for the Record ... has been deemed by several critics as an egotistical trip down Streisand’s memory lane. It is, in fact, a remarkable album giving the listener a rare chance to listen to the development, changes, maturing and tastes of one of the world’s greatest contemporary song stylists. It also allowed – via the lengthy written notes interlarded with over 150 pictures from her own private collection – Streisand to tell things from her point of view.
’She throws a lot of stories around,’ reporter Hilary de Vries wrote of an interview with her shortly before the première of The Prince of Tides. ‘[Most of them] designed to portray Streisand as the victim triumphant, one who creates art in the face of a deprived childhood, dictatorial directors and an anti-woman industry. The effect, however, is of someone anthologizing her life as she lives it, studying herself from a slight remove, with the lighting just so.’
‘I’m just interested in the truth,’ she told de Vries, who was interviewing her for the Los Angeles Times. It is, of course, a question about whose truth. Streisand’s? Elliott’s? Diana’s? Jason’s? Peters’s? The men and women who worked with her during her long career, who shared her early years? She has told the same stories frequently to the media – fictionalising, embellishing, replaying the memories over and over in her mind to react anew, analyse, free herself of guilt or in some cases learn to take it. Then, the truth has often been obfuscated, distorted or dramatised, not an unusual occurrence for the creative, self-involved or for those people who simply want to charm, impress or shock to gain attention. If you tell a story enough times it begins to have its own truth and that is how it was with Streisand. By constantly repeating stories about her deprived childhood, her unhappiness as a child became a solid foundation on which she, and the public, could understand where she came from, why she did some of the things she has done. It also allowed her audiences their own vision of the woman they were watching, which added another dimension to her performance, as it had done with two of her vocal predecessors, Billie Holiday and Judy Garland.
She has the habit of telling stories when she does not want to talk or answer questions. ‘The other day I went to the theater to see the trailer of The Prince of Tides. And when I’m in New York, I, like, take a cab,’ she began the de Vries interview. ‘I don’t have a 24-hour-a-day-limousine. I grew up in a poor family, and you don’t think of hiring cars, but [I suddenly found myself terribly late]. And in a sweat suit – schlocky – the way I’m dressed most of the time, to tell you the truth. Well, not schlocky ... So I started to run, and could not get a cab. And it reminded me of when I first started on Broadway and the nights when I couldn’t get a cab to my own show [Funny Giril], and I would plead with people on Central Park West – tears running down my face – to take me to Broadway ... ’ Always with such stories there were references to the past and never to the amazing highs in her astounding life – always to the pathos, the defenceless experiences that were a part of her history.
The Prince of Tides met with good reviews upon its general release on Christmas Day, almost all the critics extolled her talent as a director able to draw superb performances from her cast. Her own performance was consistently panned, a great disappointment to her. She had, perhaps, taken on too much. The Prince of Tides would have been even better had she directed another woman in the role of Dr Lowenstein.
Her fiftieth birthday on 24 April 1992 found her impatient with herself. The redecorating was completed and there was no one special man in her life. She was beginning to feel her age although she still looked a decade younger. And the men she was attracted to grew younger as she aged. ‘Poor baby is miserable,’ Elliott said. ‘She makes herself occupied with so many things because she’s so afraid to fail. So afraid of the truth.’
One of her closest old friends sighs deeply as he adds, ‘It’s the mirror that she has to face each morning, unadorned, make-up free, no flattering pink spots, no chance to cut and edit. That’s at the core of Barbra’s great sadness. She can only be what she wants to be – that Hollywood image of glamour – by artificial means. She is not a great beauty. I don’t think she is able, or ever will be able, to accept that. She sees the homely Jewish girl from Brooklyn, crazy Barbara, the girl with the big beak, looking back at her. She does not, and cannot see what we see – the rare beauty that is under her public disguise. She’s an original species, a one-and-only, and she has no way to judge. Barbra’s greatest tragedy and her greatest blessing – is that she was not born beautiful. That is something with which she may never come to terms.’
Footnote
1 Howard Jeffrey became a ‘working buddy’ of Streisand’s during the filming of FunnyGirl when he was assistant choreographer to Herbert Ross. They became friends. He also worked with her on most of her subsequent musical films. He died of AIDS in 1988. His name is misspelled in the dedication.
29
PEOPLE WERE TALKING. Streisand was smitten with a young man, a 22-year-old tennis star, several years younger than Jason, and twenty-eight years her junior. Even blasé Hollywood was in a fit about the news. His name was André Agassi, styled the ‘King of Grunge’ and that same year, 1992, he would earn $11 million. On the courts, his dark ponytail falling below the back of a black cap, wearing scruffy clothes, black socks scrunched down over his tennis shoes, gold hoop dangling from his ears, a Ché Guevara beard framing his striking face with its sharp features, bushy brows and quick-shifting eyes, he looked and was a shaggy anti-hero to the young people who came to see his showman style and killer skill. Adult tennis buffs often greeted him with sneers, treating him like a bad Las Vegas lounge act. He had broken the ‘Mr Clean’, all-white tennis dress code. He was a maverick and a valuable commodity in a sport where adult participation and viewership were on the decline. ‘Agassi is tennis’s marketing tool for its next generation of fans,’ Harvey Araton of the New York Times wrote. ‘He comes MTV-ready, and if he turns the stomachs of a few parents, he also induces their kids to ask, “Can we get tickets for the Agassi match?”’
‘He’s very intelligent,’ Streisand said in his defence (or perhaps her own), ‘very, very sensitive, ve
ry evolved – more than his linear years. And he’s an extraordinary human being. He plays like a Zen master. It’s very in the moment.’
Agassi was today, tomorrow – and that is where she wanted to be. She was fifty, middle-aged, but she thought of Agassi as being older than his given age and herself as being younger. That narrowed the gap. He was vital, strong, moved like a gale wind, talked up a storm, was cocky, self-assured and utterly irrepressible.
They had met briefly at Aspen during the Christmas holidays, shortly after the release of The Prince of Tides, and began seriously dating in the spring of 1992. ‘I’ve been learning about the sweet mysteries of life and this is one of them,’ Agassi confessed to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times when asked about his relationship with Streisand. ‘I’m not sure I can fully explain. Maybe she can’t either. But it doesn’t matter. We came from completely different worlds, and we collided, and we knew we wanted to be in each other’s company right then.’
Streisand appeared happy, animated. Her close friends respected her right to live her life as she chose. Jason was supportive. She was accustomed to Diana’s disapproval and she cared little for what Hollywood thought. The relationship was not as all-consuming as her more serious affairs in the past had been and while Agassi was off on the tennis circuit she involved herself intently in ‘minding the store’.
The Prince of Tides was doing exceptionally well at the box office, already having made back triple its cost, and promised to be one of her biggest money-making movies yet. Although it was one of the five films nominated for Best Picture, she felt she was personally snubbed at the 64th Annual Academy Awards, her successful directorial efforts not included as one of the five nominated directors in that category.1 She complained that it was because she was who she was, that she was a woman, that Hollywood would never open their minds to her.
Her rejection by the industry raised a good deal of controversy. ‘Barbra was the first woman to really wield power,’ said Lynda Obst, producer of The Fisher King which was nominated for five Academy Awards (it received one – Best Supporting Actress, Mercedes Ruehl). ‘Barbra raised too much confusion in the beginning of her career. She threw her weight around. People are grudging in their admiration. There’s so much commercial respect for her, but they also withhold a certain kind of embrace.’
Considering that the film was nominated for Best Picture and seven other nominations (including Nolte’s performance and that of Kate Nelligan as his mother but not Streisand’s portrayal of Dr Lowenstein), it is surprising that she was entirely overlooked. But there are just five directors nominated and as one Academy voter ventured, ‘she was sixth good’. None the less, she took it as a personal rejection and went public with her feelings. The final five directors chosen were all men, a point that she stressed. They were also worthy nominees. The Prince of Tides, though beautifully photographed and well acted was a flawed film, Streisand’s directorial hand is sure in all scenes in which she did not appear but, as her role was major, she was in a good percentage of the picture.
The awards and the controversy over Streisand not being nominated bolstered the box-office receipts on The Prince of Tides. She remained bitter even when in June, just two months after the Academy Awards, Sony (who now owned Columbia Pictures), finalised a $60 million multimedia entertainment contract with her, one of the largest deals yet to be made in the industry. Recent record contracts, with equally high figures, were made by Michael Jackson and Madonna with Time Warner, but Streisand’s involved both records and movies and included gross percentages, which greatly increased the base amount.2 Sony was also to continue to maintain distribution rights to her lucrative thirty-seven-album catalogue, which had accounted for more than sixty million album sales since 1964, the largest number for any recording artist during that period.
‘An artist like Barbra Streisand comes along once in a generation, so you hold on to her,’ said Al Teller, former president of CBS Records (now Sony Records). Mega entertainment attorney Peter Dekom added, ‘Few artists have a proven track record that they can sing, act, write, direct and produce. Barbra is a multiple threat in every category.’ And Irving Azoff, then chairman of Time Warner’s record business, chimed in, ‘There are few entertainers who ever create an audience demand across both the music and film entertainment spectrum the way that Barbra does. She typifies taste and elegance, not only commercial success.’
The industry believed that she was being recognised and acknowledged for her achievements. Streisand did not see it that way. She would never forgive the Academy and she remembered too well how hard she had to fight for stories she believed in, how record executives always made her feel like she was auditioning the songs she wanted to include in her albums. Power was complete autonomy and it was doubtful that she would ever be able to command that. She had been the most powerful woman in Hollywood for years, but the industry remained an exclusive men’s club. It was a barrier she was unable to break.
‘Language gives us an insight into the way women are viewed in a male dominated society,’ she said on 12 June when she accepted the Dorothy Arzner Award, named after the mould-breaking director/film-maker. She went on to illustrate:
‘A man is commanding – a woman demanding.
‘A man is forceful – a woman is pushy.
‘A man is uncompromising – a woman a ball-breaker.
‘A man is a perfectionist – a woman’s a pain in the ass.
‘He’s assertive – she’s aggressive.
‘He strategises – she manipulates.
‘He shows leadership – she’s controlling.
‘He’s committed – she’s obsessed...
‘If he acts, produces and directs, he’s called a multi-talented hyphenate. She’s called vain and egotistical.
‘It’s been said that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Why can’t the same be said for a woman?'
She ended by telling the group of professional women in film, ‘We are a remarkable breed. We are the girls in the hood – sisterhood, that is ... Nature designed us to be creators – to give life ... Let’s create images that show life, not only as it is, but how it could be. Let’s use our collective female energy to make films that reflect our nurturing instincts and put that out into the world. Because the world surely needs it.’
Never a company- or a studio-owned artist, her independent behaviour, her seeming feminist activism, made her a continual target for criticism by the Hollywood ‘boys’ club’. She was accused by the establishment of being a perfectionist in a business that necessitates compromise. She hated such accusations. ‘Perfection is ... a child when it’s born,’ she once snapped back. ‘Perfect is too small a word for it, it’s a miracle. It’s God. It’s mind-blowing. It’s more than perfect. And yet it shits and pisses. There’s no such thing as perfection, because everything seems to fall apart sooner or later.’ What she wanted was to be allowed to follow her own convictions, to do the best job she was capable of performing, of turning out a movie in which she had pride. In order to accomplish that it had to be done her way. Hollywood had a company mentality. It was loath to invest in something not yet proven to succeed at the box office. If it could have done so it would have made her into an ethnic Doris Day, appearing in the same formulaic musical until time forced her to retire. Streisand had refused to let herself be packaged, frozen and sold like an ice-cream bar by a studio and she certainly would not allow the films she chose to direct, or produce, or both, be devoured by the system.
Headstrong and as unstoppable now as she had been as a child, she pressed on choosing subjects as future projects that were controversial and could only create difficulty for her in obtaining full studio backing to augment the development funds given to her by Sony. She purchased with Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Films rights for the book, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock by Jeff Potter, published in 1985, about the tumultuous relationship between the famed abstract artist and his wife/manager, Lee Krasner. De Niro’s
late father was a painter and the project had two strong co-starring roles for him and Streisand. She optioned a story about Lieutenant-Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, who was forced to resign from the Washington National Guard when she acknowledged that she was a lesbian. She was given a screenplay, The Mirror Has Two Faces, written by Richard LaGravenese, who had been responsible for the script of The Fisher King, and became immediately involved.
A Tri-Star project, The Mirror Has Two Faces, was very loosely based on a 1959 French film starring Michelle Morgan about a plain, unattractive woman who starts life over again after plastic surgery. LaGravenese had given the story a deeper interpretation. In his script a plain woman with low self-esteem is transmogrified when she finds her own inner beauty – the theme thus having become: self-love physically changes people’s looks. The story-line and characters still required much work, but it was a project that brought into focus some of her own experience.
Her wish to make The Normal Heart remained strong. She saw the Kramer play (and the story of Colonel Cammermeyer) as being about people’s right to love whomever they choose – of tolerance, of acceptance of other people’s lifestyles, and of not being penalised for being who and what they are.
Within the activist gay community there were rumblings that she, as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, had not done enough for AIDS. Elizabeth Taylor had already stepped forward and become the AIDS spokesperson for liberal Hollywood. Where was Streisand, they asked? They complained that she had given only $350,000 in 1991 for AIDS research and treatment and most of that delegated for children afflicted with the disease. But this is an unjustified and uncharitable criticism. Streisand had endowed academic chairs in women’s studies at the University of California, cardiovascular research at UCLA, and another at the Environmental Defense Fund. Her Streisand Foundation continues to grant over $1 million a year to civil liberties, environmental causes and AIDS. And she often was moved to add large sums for other causes and catastrophes like the Valdez oil spill as they came along. She believed she could accomplish more as an advocate for the gay community by being able to make a commercial film that would reach a large audience and show them as being like everyone else in their need for and their right to love. She also had personal motivations. Jason’s homosexuality, of course, but Stan Kamen, a close friend and her agent at William Morris, since she and Sue Mengers had parted, had recently died from AIDS and she had been intensely upset by his death, and the frustration of knowing there was no medical cure for the plague and that resources for research were limited.