by Anne Edwards
The day of the concert Streisand took precious minutes out to call Diana. ‘She said she hoped I’d be able to see the show when it comes to Los Angeles,’ Diana told reporters. ‘I said I hoped so, too.’ These were not the words her daughter sought to hear. Her drive to succeed, her insatiable ambition, her need to be famous, recognised as somebody had always gone hand in hand with her hunger for her mother’s applause, a show of maternal hubris. She would never feel she had succeeded until she received it. The irony was that Diana’s apathy had driven her to become a star of the greatest magnitude and it was why she was never satisfied with what she achieved and always feared that with one mis-step everything she had accomplished would vanish.
Footnotes
1 London tickets were £48.50, £105, and £208.
2 In the United States Streisand’s charitable contributions from the tour included $25,000 each for musical education – instruments, equipment and teaching staff – to schools across the country, including her old high school, Erasmus Hall. Sony Music matched each school donation.
32
BEFORE SHE SANG a single note she was given a standing ovation that lasted for five minutes. In a rare public display of emotion, she brushed tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. Finally, the audience sat down again and she sang her opening number. The show was almost identical to the Las Vegas concerts, although she inserted some chit-chat about England and the English, not spontaneous – every word projected in clear view of the audience on the autocue.
As she said, ‘This is a very special night, very special to me,’ the words rolled across the prompt screens. ‘People ask me why I’m on the road for the first time in twenty-seven years,’ she began. ‘Hey if you came from California with the earthquakes, mudslides and the fires, you would hit the road too.’ She took a sip of the herbal tea she preferred. ‘I love England, especially cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off,’ she exclaimed to a few titters. Some video footage was shown of Princess Margaret at the opening twenty-eight years earlier of Funny Girl as well as additional clips of Prince Charles greeting her backstage, all of them looking incredibly young. ‘Who knows, if I had been nicer to him I might have been the first real Jewish princess . . . Princess Babs,’ she joked. ‘I can imagine what the newspaper headlines might have been. “Blintzes Princess Plays the Palace” and “Barbra Digs Nails into Prince of Wales!”’ This time, there was the sound of genuine laughter.
An ardent, spirited audience, they seemed not to mind the autocue as she told them at every performance, ‘I could never be here otherwise. I have a fear of forgetting the words, which I once did in front of 135,000 people [the Central Park concert in 1968], and it’s a fear.’
She was welcomed back to London with great emotion. The audience kept rooting her on. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she repeated over and over. At the close of her last song, a curiously chosen anti-climactic interpretation of ‘For All We Know’, they watched her go off-stage and jumped to their feet applauding for her to return. When she did, they grew silent, expecting her to sing an encore. With disarming hesitancy, she said, ‘I didn’t think you’d get all my jokes and stuff,’ bowed and to audible gasps of disappointment, did not return. None the less, as people filed out, the general feeling was that this had been an experience of a lifetime and worth every penny.
A stellar list of British celebrities had attended – Elton John, Michael Caine and Shirley Bassey among them. Don Black was there at her spedal invitation. ‘What did you really think?’ she asked.
‘You were wonderful,’ he replied. ‘But all that psychiatrist thing doesn’t work. Over here we don’t go to psychiatrists so much. What we do is sit down and have a nice cup of tea and a chat with somebody and we sort ourselves out that way.’ After the concert she entertained her personal guests at the small, exclusive Blake’s hotel. Streisand appeared almost giddy at the lively celebration which did not end until 4 a.m. The reviews the next morning were mixed, many of the critics still deploring the price of the tickets, the psychobabble of the script, the autocue, even the cost of a bottle of champagne during the interval, £28 (which had not seemed to bother the general audience). None the less, there were only glowing accolades for the greatness of her voice.
‘She is the supreme communicator,’ wrote Tony Parsons in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Streisand has an ability to talk directly to an audience’s heart that is surpassed only by Sinatra. When [she] takes flight, she makes music that is full of memories and a sense of loss ... she is unquestionably the last of the great romantics.’
London hailed her as ‘the ultimate pop diva’. It was difficult to tum on a radio music station that was not playing her records. Almost every newspaper edition carried some story about her; Elton John was giving her a £200,000 party (a figure much inflated, but it did cost almost half that) on Sunday, 24 April, her fifty-second birthday at his country estate; she had refused to attend the ‘celebrity-packed’ publidty party Sony had planned (and cancelled) for the previous night, to her record company’s chagrin, because she was not given control of the guest list which would have allowed her to exclude much of the media. Prince Charles was attending the concert on Monday, the 24th; Diana gave an interview from California; a full-page colour layout of Streisand and Caleigh appeared in one daily, and there were a constant barrage of stories with similar banners to ‘Barbra Streisand strikes up the band’s anger’, (Daily Mail, 22 April), an example of the English penchant for using a play on words. Hamlisch had only brought twelve of his key musicians with him to London. The remainder of the orchestra were local and were furious when they were asked to sign, the day before the first concert, an agreement of confidentiality binding them not to discuss anything having to do with Streisand’s appearance to the press. In fact, such letters were distributed to the employees of the Wembley Arena, as they were to those at the MGM Grand, and would be at every place that she would appear.
The stage crew was barred from watching rehearsals. One person said, ‘I was told by my boss that I must look away if I see Streisand because she doesn’t like people staring.’ A member of the orchestra complained, ‘It’s the prindple I object to – the assumption that we are going to leak material about her. I have played for some of the finest opera singers in the world but I have never come across anything so reminiscent of a prima donna.’
Still, no one in the orchestra refused to sign the agreement, which bore a great similarity to the ones the Queen’s staff were required to sign. Had they not signed, they were warned that they would be replaced. This was all part of Streisand’s driving need for both privacy and control, most difficult to obtain when she placed herself so prominently in the public eye. She hated not being in control of what was written about her, certain the truth would not make its way into print. She wanted it all – the power, the glory, the fame and the privacy accorded non-public figures. Times had changed since her early years as a star, the media was in command. Gone were the days when studios and publicity representatives fed the press at their will. The press were voracious for stories about the famous and for a time Streisand became a competitor to Princess Diana, pictures and stories about her, however insignificant, in overwhelming demand. It was as though the media thought she was just too talented, too famous, too rich, too outspoken not to take her down for it.
But there is something in her demand of employees to sign papers binding them to silence, to threaten the loss of their jobs if they discuss their work with her, that is at extreme odds with all her professed liberalism. There is nothing unconstitutional about such tactics, but they are a gagging order, an infringement on the right of the free speech of others, while she enjoys a platform for all her comments, ideas and positions on various issues. The double standard here is both shocking and disappointing. One expects more of a woman like Streisand who is always out there fighting for her own personal rights.
Monday night’s concert was also a fund-raiser, a percentage of the revenues estimated at £150,000,
to be donated to the Prince’s Trust. Streisand had last seen Charles in 1974 during his visit to Hollywood. He had arrived at the studio where she was filming Funny Lady as she was recording the song ‘So Long, Honey Lamb’. During the twenty minutes they chatted, Streisand had shared her mug of tea with him.
Charles is a great fan of hers and he seemed truly taken with her as a person. Members of the recording orchestra remembered observing the intense eye-contact between the two. ‘Sparks flew,’ one musician (who did not want his name revealed) observed. They met again at a champagne reception before the concert and she warmly clasped his hand in hers twice during their five minutes of conversation, neither seeming inhibited by the others present (Marvin Hamlisch, Marty Erlichman, Charles’s equerries, members of the management staff of Wembley Arena, and several photographers). During her performance Charles, dressed conservatively in a dark-blue suit, sat rapt with attention in a reserved balcony area thirty yards from the stage with celebrities including Joan Collins and Priscilla Presley. In the section of the programme where Streisand usually showed video filmage of Caleigh and herself and then sang ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ for the child, she introduced the Disney song and remarked on her fondness for songs featuring imaginary princes. ‘What makes this song extra spedal is that there’s a real one in the audience tonight,’ she announced.
When she had finished singing, Charles rose to his feet with the rest of the audience and joined in a two-minute ovation which ended with the crowd stamping their feet and demanding more. She returned to sing ‘Somewhere’. Charles jumped to his feet again and applauded vigorously when she was done. Smiling broadly, Streisand waved at him and made a gesture of a bow.
The sound of applause did not appease her great sense of loneliness at being away from Caleigh. ‘I am devoted to my goddaughter,’ she told anyone who asked about the inclusion of Caleigh’s photographs in the printed programme. She called California often to speak to her. Although only on the first engagement of her tour, Streisand was already missing the child, and after the fourth and last show in London (each separated by several days as she did not like to give concerts back to back) she returned to Los Angeles expressly to see her. Then, after a joyful but short reunion, she and Erlichman rejoined Harnlisch, the orchestra and her technicians in Washington DC, where the President and the First Lady attended her first-night concert there. She was fighting the beginnings of a cold, but after her Washington concerts continued on to Detroit for two concerts at the Palace of Auburn Hills arena. ‘In Detroit,’ she says, ‘I thought, I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next fifteen shows. It’s very exhausting physically. It’s a lot of breathing; you have to be in pretty good shape. And I don’t work out vocally. I don’t practise. It’s the most boring thing you can imagine, doing scales. So I just said, “Fuck it, I can’t [do scales]. I’m too tired the day after a concert.”’
Her next venue was to be the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, the home of the Mighty Ducks hockey team and with 19,200 capacity the largest of all the arenas in which she had performed. By the time she arrived in Los Angeles her cold had worsened. She was suffering from viral tracheolaryngitis, placed on antibiotics and told by her doctor that she must rest her voice.
Originally scheduled for Wednesday, 25 May the first of the six Southern California concerts was postponed to Thursday, 2 June to give her a chance to recover sufficiently. The show was also scheduled to go to San Jose in northern California. A glittering array of celebrities (Michael Jackson, Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau among them) attended opening night along with some of the most important people in her life – Elliott and Jason, Jon Peters and Caleigh, André Agassi, Don Johnson, Ray and Fran Stark, and in the front row Diana and Roslyn. As she ended her first number and came down the steps from the balcony set and walked across the front rim of the stage, she glanced down over the footlights to the front row. Diana, eighty-five and severely arthritic was on her feet applauding with the rest of the delirious crowd. Streisand leaned forward.
‘Mom, you stood up. Take it easy, Mom. Sit down. I’m glad you’re here. I love you,’ she said, straightened, stood still for a moment and then motioned with her hands for the audience to be seated.
There was no sign of laryngitis as she launched into her programme, which now included a ten-minute Yentl sequence – ‘a masterly staged affair that proved to be the most crowd-pleasing sequence of the show’. She received even greater acclamation at the finish. ‘One sensed it was for more than the music,’ Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times wrote, ‘It was also in admiration of the independence and determination Streisand has shown over the years in such pursuits as film directing.’
Since London she had also changed the ending of the concert, which had been the melancholy song ‘For All We Know’ about the possibility of two people never meeting again, to the brighter more uplifting ‘Somewhere’, from West Side Story.
‘If there’s such a thing as a concert ticket that’s worth the money, this might be the one,’ Daily Variety declared. She played the second concert on 4 June, but – her throat still giving her problems – the last four shows were cancelled. As the Arrowhead Pond was booked ahead for several weeks, it was dedded she would return to Anaheim after San Jose and New York to end the tour with concerts there, on 10, 18, 22 and 24 July.
Her throat problems were cured by the time she opened at Madison Square Garden on Monday night, June 20 for the first of five concerts. The majority of theatres are dark on Monday and almost all Broadway’s current performers turned out to welcome her home. She was, after all, a Brooklyn girl, one of their own. Attending her triumphant return were Liza Minnelli, Chita Rivera and the casts from almost every show along the Great White Way. She seemed relaxed, looked marvellous (she had fresh copies of her two gowns made for each dty on the tour) and was in magnificent voice. She had returned to the New York concert stage the same week that the city played host to the Gay Games. ‘One of the best things about the games’, she told her enthusiastic audience, ‘is that I can walk down the street and not be recognised because there are so many impersonators.’
After singing ‘The Man Who Got Away’, she told Liza over the microphone, ‘Your mom sang that great.’ Rex Reed commented that it was the ultimate in chutzpah, but Liza laughed and did not appear to take the remark as an affront.
Reed was not completely won over as the cheering, stamping aggregation in the Gardens indicated they all were. ‘There’s no denying her talent,’ he says, ‘but it’s always the voice that gets to you, not the interpretation. Every inflection, every modulation, every supersonic high note seems canned on vinyl. You could be home listening to records. She doesn’t have the vulnerability of Garland or Piaf, or the kind of moment-to-moment self-discovery that breeds the art of spontaneity. She’s such a perfectionist ... she’s not about to open the doors and let you in.’
Reed was in the minority. It is almost impossible to compare Streisand with Garland and Piaf. They are cut from a different cloth: both victims, exposing their bruised, fragile selves to their audiences who listened to them in quite a different way than Streisand’s audiences listen to her. Streisand’s fans are not sharing her pain, they are celebrating her strength to overcome all the obstacles that they perceive she has overcome – turning homely into beautiful, ethnic into mainstream, daring to cross over into a man’s world as director, producer and business executive. She is a dignified feminist, a liberal proud of the word and never afraid to voice her opinion. And she has maintained uninterrupted stardom and popularity for more years than any other entertainment figure except perhaps Sinatra. She is far more intelligent than either Garland or Piaf and approaches her work in a more intellectual way. They were unique, most certainly, and they could move you to chills and tears, make you want to run up on stage and hold them in your arms, to save them. And especially in Garland’s case, forgive anything and everything – even when she could not hit the notes or remember the lyrics. Much more is e
xpected of Streisand and she makes sure that, to the best of her ability, she will live up to her own, high expectations.
The tour, coupled with her multimedia projects, had given her more star power than anyone, rock star or opera diva, on the concert circuit. And by the time she completed all the performances, with two shows added to her Madison Square Gardens appearances, it would be the biggest money-making turn in entertainment history. The previous December, before appearing in Las Vegas, she had told Barbara Walters, ‘Let me say this, I have a long way to go. I have a lot to learn. I’m still sensitive to criticism. I go through periods when I can just laugh at it, you know? And periods when I think it’s just plain mean. You have to accept life for what it is. The pain and the joy; the hate, the love. My musical director [Hamlisch] came to see me and he gave me a book called Life Is the Message, about changing the world. Well, we cannot change the world. It’s such an overwhelming feat, but yet by changing ourselves each of us in a very small way can change the world.’
The tour had helped her battle with her fear of appearing before a live audience, although the demons remained, if less active, but had she changed the world even a little by doing it? Hardly, although throughout her long career she had changed public tastes, their view of beauty, the idea that without a formal education you could not walk as an equal with intellectuals, the concept that women were not emotionally equipped to stand toe to toe with male power brokers. The tour, including Las Vegas, had grossed over $64 million by doing things her way.1 All the final decisions were hers – from music to script to performance, set, sound, merchandising and road arrangements. There was a totality in her efforts, the only way she knew how to work. She dealt always from strength to strength. This had not been a ‘comeback’ tour as so many of Garland’s had been. Streisand was a great star for having been unavailable to the public for so many years.