Streisand
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Jason and Elliott and Caleigh, on Jon Peters’s lap, were seated near to the stage. An entire page of photographs of herself with the little girl was featured in the programme and she spoke directly to her from the stage about the bedtime stories they read together and then dedicated ‘Caleigh’s favourite song, “Someday My Prince Will Come”, to her, pictures of the two of them together projected on the giant screen behind her. This was followed by a moving rendition of Sondheim’s song of loving protection, ‘Not While I’m Around’ from Sweeney Todd, sung to Jason, and also accompanied by images from their past. At the end she blew him a kiss and said, ‘I love you.’
‘I love you, too,’ he called back. She nodded her head and her eyes misted. Never before had she so publicly revealed her innermost feelings towards her son and both Jason, seated beside Elliott, and the audience reacted to this. From this moment on, there was the rare sense that the performer and the audience had touched each other, shared private time together. Their cheers and their silence were personal gestures of their love for her. She sipped tea between songs, fidgeted with her hair, brushed it back from her face. But every word she spoke and sang was being projected on huge closed-circuit video screens placed strategically and visible from almost any angle to the members of the audience as well as to herself. At one point, a startled look gripped her face as she realised she had mixed up the lyrics to ‘Evergreen’. She had been mis-cued. Momentarily she froze while Hamlisch and the orchestra vamped behind her. Then she smiled sheepishly and joked, ‘And it’s my own song!’ She continued on, the orchestra making a seamless continuum under Hamlisch’s baton.
After intermission she appeared in another Donna Karan ensemble– a white tuxedo jacket worn over a floor-length skirt, split hip high on one side. It was modelled after the pin-striped outfit she had worn at the pre-inaugural gala and which had caused one woman critic to write snidely that ‘even a strong, successful woman has to play the femme fatale role’.
As soon as she told this anecdote, Mike Myers, a comedian from the popular satirical television show Saturday Night Live came running up on stage cross-dressed hilariously as his ‘wickedly funny alter ego’, a Long Island housewife with a Streisand obsession, and shouted in a deep, affected, feminine New York-eese accent, ‘Barbra, don’t listen to that woman!’ The act was well-rehearsed and Streisand laughed naturally and mocked Myers as he described her skin as being like ‘buttah’ and her nose as ‘something to die for’.
In the closing segment, she was highly successful with the optimistic philosophies in the final three songs, ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, sung while historic clips were shown on the screen, ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever’, with its affirmation of a positive and bright future, and the poignant Bernstein–Sondheim classic, ‘There’s a Place for Us’. Streisand had made the programme feel as if it were custom-made, as though the lyrics had been written for her. This was true, of course, in the case of ‘As If We Never Said Goodbye’ and in Sondheim’s ‘I’m Still Here’ (‘sometimes a kick in the rear, but I’m here ... One day you’re hailed for blazing trails, next day you’re nailed for fingernails ... Producing, who does she think she is – a man? ... I kept my toes and kept my space, I kept my nose to spite my face ...’).
One could carp at the interpretation of some of the songs. She seemed unable to project the deeper meaning of the ‘doormat’ or ‘victim’ songs. ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ fell a bit short of total sacrifice and ‘Lover Man’ missed a young girl’s yearning. And even ‘The Man that Got Away’, which was superbly sung, eclipsing Garland’s notorious mis-accents, seemed none the less to slip through her grasp. She had greater success with ‘My Man’. The audience went wild when she finally left the stage after many bows. Once she was gone, the huge amphitheatre previously filled with the vibrancy of her voice and the power of her personality, seemed suddenly silent despite the sounds of the milling crowds as they departed.
They called her ‘divine’, claimed there was ‘not one wrong note’ in her performance; in fact, she had hit a flat top note in ‘The Man Who Got Away’. There was something historic about being one of those present at this first concert in Las Vegas. People had flown in from all over the world. ‘You came all the way from Sydney just for this concert?’ one woman was asked. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘She hasn’t sung in public in – what is it? – twenty-four or twenty-seven years? What if this is it and she never appears again? She is the greatest singer born in my lifetime. There’s no one to equal her and never has been.’
Seldom before had she interacted with her audience with such immediacy. Pauline Kael had once written in the New Yorker, ‘When Streisand sings, her command of the audience is in her regal stillness; she distills her own emotions. You feel that she doesn’t need the audience – that she could close her eyes and sing with the same magnetic power. Streisand’s voice is her own instrument.’ This was true. Yet this one time she had exposed herself to an audience while at the same time keeping her distance, an ability that great politidans like Roosevelt and Churchill possessed but is not apparent in many entertainers.
After the show, she bombarded Erlichman, Hamlisch, Henion, the Bergmans and Cis Corman with questions about the sound system, the tele-prompter, the visuals, the lighting – all the technical angles that she feared might have been flawed. But to a close friend who came backstage, she asked: ‘Was the neckline of my dress too revealing? My mother will have a conniption.’
The next night, she looked radiant. For this performance the audience included such celebrities as Michael Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Gregory Peck, Mel Gibson and television host, Jay Leno. If anything, the audience response was even more zealous than the previous evening. ‘Tonight was the way I hoped it would be,’ she said later at a reception she gave in her massive hotel suite. ‘Everything felt right.’
The high she received from the concerts was apparent in her attitude. The financial rewards were awesome. The two shows had grossed over $12 million, topping her expectations, and more than twice the gross of any previous pop or rock concerts which sometimes attracted up to 90,000 fans. Of course, no star had ever charged such ticket prices. Then there had been the concert souvenir merchandise, ranging from $100-bottles of Streisand-signature champagne to $25 T-shirts which had already generated more than $1.5 million.
Having dealt head-on with her stage fright and found a viable way to secure herself financially so that she could, without too much concern for the future, proceed with the projects close to her, both commercial and charitable, she told Erlichman she was ready to go out on the road. He was to solidify plans for the proposed tour which would kick off at the Wembley Arena in London that coming April, 1994, and travel to Washington DC, Detroit, two appearances in California – Anaheim and San Jose – and end at Madison Square Garden in New York City. She would be on the road for several exacting months and there would still be many anxieties, pressures and demands outside of, and because of, the tour to be confronted – the films she wanted to make, her recording contracts and her private concerns for her mother who was nearly crippled from arthritis, Jason, Caleigh, and ‘the age thing’. She was in her fifties and had become that show business cliché – the great star without a man in her life who could not bring her cheering audiences home with her at night.
She wanted to simplify her life, to ‘move on’. ‘I like the idea of evolution and change,’ she explained. Between ever-escalating costs and devastating bush and forest fires in the Malibu region she had decided to rid herself of the responsibility of the ranch and before leaving for Las Vegas negotiations were instigated for her to donate it in its entirety to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for a conservation institute. This would benefit her tax status as well as relieving her of the burden the ranch now represented. Next, she decided to sell off most of the contents of the five-ranch houses. The time before leaving for England allowed her to select what she wanted to put up for sale at Christie’s in Manhattan. The choices were o
ften difficult. She was attached by memory to many of the pieces. ‘Sometimes when it’s been hard to relate to people, I could relate to inanimate objects,’ she said about her vast collection. ‘They didn’t give me an argument, they didn’t think I was crazy. And therefore we had a good relationship. I also love to be surrounded by beautiful things. But I’m at a more whole place now. I can relate to people, have relationships, and have objects. Now they are less precious to me. It has to do with one’s growth psychologically and a shifting of priorities.
‘I feel like letting go of things. I don’t want to have things in storage. I don’t want to have them in boxes and in the basement. I want other people to enjoy them if I don’t have room for them any more. It’s a good feeling to use these things for a while and pass them on during your own lifetime,’ she added.
But Streisand’s relentless need to create environments for herself was symptomatic of her entire personality. Everything had to be a perfect setting. She saw things as a complete vision.
‘I don’t put a black vase in a gray-and-burgundy room,’ she said. She chose monochromatic rooms, did not wear prints. She liked ‘black and white movies, and the family photographs on the living room piano are black and white – colour photos would disturb the harmony.’ Even the wrappers on the candy in her candy dishes had to be colour-coordinated.
The two-day Christie’s sale was set for 3 and 4 March, 535 lots, some containing several items. Every piece had to be appraised and the lowest acceptable bid agreed upon. Streisand had kept careful records on what each item had cost. If withdrawn or unsold, Christie’s would still charge her a fee which had to be taken into consideration. On the other hand, it was a star auction for the company, a coup worth a fortune in publicity, and they traded this off to Streisand’s advantage when working out the cost details of the sale. Celebrity sales always brought higher prices for certain objects due to the nature of their provenance.
She gained widely circulated, free publicity in an unprecedented arrangement with Architectural Digest, whose usual policy was not to feature a photo article on houses or furnishings up for sale. On this occasion they agreed to show the part of the ranch collection that was to be auctioned, and at Streisand’s insistence, what she considered her prize piece in the sale, the magnificent Tamara De Lempicka painting, Adam et Eve, was highlighted with her on the cover. The magazine photographers descended on the property directly following her return from Las Vegas and spent nearly a week on the shoot from early in the morning until nightfall. Shortly after they were dispatched, Christie’s packers arrived. Both operations were closely monitored by Streisand.
Included in the sale with the De Lempicka (estimated sale price $800,000–$1 million), were her cherished ‘Peony’ ($300,000–$400,000) and ‘Cobweb’ ($800,000–1 million) leaded glass Tiffany lamps that she had bought and paid for on the lay-away plan when she was first appearing on Broadway, the two antique cars ($50,000–$65,000), an exquisite diamond and jade Cartier clock ($100,000–$150,000), an amazing assortment of art nouveau glass and furniture, art deco bronzes, silver and furniture, along with a host of memorabilia and less important items.
She remained in Los Angeles during the sale, which received international coverage. When notified of the amount her collection had brought – nearly $6 million – she was stunned. The more valuable pieces went for near what they had been appraised at, but the items in the second day of the sale – the memorabilia whose worth depended upon how much the public was willing to pay for something that belonged to Streisand – sold in some lots for ten to fifteen times what was expected.
With this good news, she left for London and the first leg of her tour. Before she even arrived, the English press ran banner headlines about ‘The selling of Barbra Streisand’. Never had there been a concert appearance with as much pre-performance publicity, most of it centred around the astronomical ticket sales for the four shows she was to do (the 12,000-seat arena was already sold out for all performances) and the fact that a week before the first concert many had changed hands at ten times their face value.1 Selfridges, the Oxford Street department store, constructed a Barbra Streisand Boutique with everything from a £10 coffee mug to a £300 wool-and-leather embroidered jacket; in between there were watches, mugs, posters, scarves, purses, totes, T-shirts, polo shirts, baseball caps – almost all with her picture and the concert logo which she helped to design with graphic arts representatives from Sony Music, her merchandising agent. To add to these obvious money-makers, stores stocked reissues of most of her albums. Wembley Arena would also have several boutiques with the same merchandise and the programme for the concert, composed with her help, would cost £13 ($20), of which she received a 45 per cent royalty.
Marty Erlichman, Cis Corman (Marvin Hamlisch had arrived earlier to rehearse the orchestra) and several members of her staff – secretary, hair-stylist, make-up artist, dresser and a bodyguard, accompanied her to London on Concorde, arriving late Sunday evening, 17 April 1994, a momentous date for her as she had never before appeared in concert in Great Britain. Dressed comfortably but in less-than-elegant fashion in a brown-leather jacket, baggy pants, wedgee scuffs and a wool beret, she emerged sleepy-eyed behind her tinted glasses and was met by an entourage of police, senior airport officials, airline VIP representatives and concert promoters, as well as over fifty members of the press and a host of fans. With her hefty guard in front of her, Erlichman at her side, she munched an apple as they made their way through the crowds to a waiting Daimler limousine that would take them to the Dorchester Hotel, where she had a £1,000 a day suite filled with the white and yellow flowers she so loved (especially tulips) and pre-stocked with the Queen’s and her own favourite bottled water, Malvern, boxes of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup chocolates and Hershey mint bars.
On early morning television the following day she told her interviewer, ‘I don’t like to be famous. I don’t like the press to follow me. I don’t like to talk about myself and I want to be remembered for the work I do, not the articles about me or what people think about me. It’s just not a thing I get off on – the applause, the roaring applause of the crowd. It doesn’t affect my being. I want to please people, I want to give them what they want, but I feel I’m doing that now through the movies and the albums I make.’ She had, however, been greatly affected by her reception in Las Vegas, which had left her on a high for several days thereafter.
Nothing, even her previous stays in London, had prepared her for the British media. It was not so much the considerable numbers of them that stalked her every move – she was used to that – but their derisive, scornful attitude. She was front-page news in almost all the many daily papers except the Financial Times, and the articles featured every possible negative – she was pampered, difficult, money-hungry, ‘the most steely woman on earth’, dressed ‘decidedly down-market’, and had the Wembley Arena fully carpeted because she thought it would be ‘too draughty’ (no member of the press having thought to ask the real reason for the last ‘idiosyncrasy’). She took it as good-naturedly as she could.
‘You have got to get this right,’ she admonished one journalist gently. ‘The British always say Strei-sunned. My name is pronounced with a soft “s”, like the stuff on the beach. Stry-sand.’ On Tuesday afternoon, between rehearsals at Wembley, she took time out to appear in the car park for a charity event, to hand over the keys to one of fifty Variety Club Sunshine coaches (her personal donation) to be used to transport disabled children to holidays and events they otherwise could not afford to attend. She accepted flowers from a lovely dark-eyed child. ‘Flowers, oh, flowers,’ she exclaimed with tears in her eyes. She would, in fact, contribute $10.2 million from her tour revenues to charity.2
She was too busy rehearsing, making sure there were no glitches in the first concert, Wednesday night, April 20, just twenty-four hours away, to nurse her usual pre-show jitters. Whenever she did have a moment free she would meditate alone. She feared the British critics would be hard on her
, that there was some kind of general group response to her American brashness, her feminist positions and her money. They would come to hear her, bringing their ‘attitude’ with them. She could not change, nor did she care to do so. She was who she was and what she was and that was that. Take it or leave it. But she could do everything at top form – sing, perform, look her best. She rehearsed until the orchestra was too exhausted to go on. Relentless activity kept her from thinking about the moment she would step out on stage for the first concert. Stage fright once again assailed her. She listened to meditation tapes, trying, as she said, ‘to have a positive attitude because I easily get sidetracked into this abyss of fear and I have to get myself out of it’. The scathing pre-concert articles in the press had greatly upset her.
What she perhaps did not realise was that the more vilified by the media – both American and British – the more her grip on the public strengthened. ‘She is not just a singer,’ a fan who had bought tickets for all four Wembley concerts insisted. ‘She is a role model – the living proof that if you believe in yourself, you can do anything you want. She had a terrible childhood, but she was determined to succeed. She is an inspiration to us all.’ Another added, ‘Her mother told her she was ugly and couldn’t sing. The press always criticise, but she is a born survivor.’
She represented a woman’s triumph over adversity and her constant tales of her unhappy childhood, her perception of being homely, her unstable love affairs, the media abuse, made her seem vulnerable and reduced the distance between her and her fans. ‘She is living proof that you can do anything,’ one said of her. ‘She would have been a secretary if she had listened to her mother,’ Giles Coren of The Times concurred. ‘That early rejection is of great importance to English fans and [Wembley] will be as much a show of solidarity as an entertainment. They will come in their droves to show Barbra’s mother just how wrong she was.’