by Anne Edwards
Barbra Streisand.
There has been no one like her – no one to replace her. And there never will be.
‘Any agent or mother or entrepreneur who believes he has another Barbra Streisand tucked away on a pedestal in the corner, waiting to be unveiled, had better change professions. There is just not going to be another Barbra Streisand, now or ever. What she is, happens once.’
ALAN JAY LERNER
People
‘It is fascinating to me that
she is so put down by the media.
People who know her love her.’
CIS CORMAN
1
‘LISTEN, I CRIED, I was so moved,’ Barbra Streisand bellowed over long-distance telephone to Larry Kramer. It was the spring of 1986. He was in New York; she was in Los Angeles. ‘I gotta make the movie of your play,’ she insisted. ‘AIDS is killing all these beautiful young people and your story will wake up America to the crisis, to the fact that nothing really important is being done about it. I’m still shaken up from the images in the play. Yes! Yes! “We must love one another or die.”’ She paused dramatically. ‘We have to talk. Could you come out here?’
The play that had so aroused her emotions was Kramer’s devastating drama The Normal Heart which had recently opened on the West Coast after a highly lauded run in New York. Kramer agreed to fly to Los Angeles to discuss the adaptation of his work for the screen. Streisand’s enthusiasm, her strong feeling for the play, greatly energised him. He did not know what her background or orientation was to the subject of AIDS and he understood that she wanted to produce, direct and star in the film. The last was worrying because it was not as much Dr Emma Brookner’s story (the only female member of the cast), as it was of the men whose lives were in mortal jeopardy with the advent of the plague.
Damaged lives and a government turned away from its people to its politics were themes that beat an insistent drum in Streisand’s head at this time. She was going through a tremendous period of change in her lifestyle. The flamboyance, the passion of her intense seven-year love affair with film producer and studio head, Jon Peters, now behind her, her volatile life had mellowed with the relatively calm three-year relationship with Richard Baskin, her junior by eight years. Baskin was a lyricist and scion of the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream fortune.
Her ten-month odyssey in Europe directing herself in Yentl, shortly before Baskin entered her life, had strongly affected her attitudes and self-goals. She had a broader view of what she wanted to achieve: to make a statement with her talents; to break through the barriers for women in film. For sixteen years, Yentl had obsessed her. Making the film had been her rite of passage. She felt almost grown up now, although that vulnerable child she was always trying to subdue occasionally gained the upper hand. The wonder was that after twenty-two years of stardom, fame equalled by only a tiny few – Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor – with a notoriety that never dwindled or showed signs of fading, she remained excited about life, people, ideas. Ambition had once possessed her, being someone, being rich. Now it was accomplishing things that mattered, contributing to a better understanding of a few of the world’s problems.
The house on Carolwood Drive, high atop Holmby Hills a short distance from Sunset Boulevard, had become her home and work place in the last few years. Her meeting with Kramer was called for half-past one in her ground-floor study and she was nearly two hours late. Kramer and Cis Corman, her business partner and closest friend, would be waiting anxiously for her to join them. Barbra had first met Cis in an acting class when she was fifteen and Cis, almost a decade older, tall, slim, dark-haired and with a certain panache, was already married to a practising analyst, Dr Harvey Corman. Cis was the sanest thing that ever happened to Streisand. She greatly admired Cis’s ability to ingratiate herself even in the most trying circumstances. A born mediator, a woman of classic understanding, Cis had early on become a substitute maternal figure to Barbra, a totally non-judgmental ‘mommy’ to whom she could reveal her worst feelings and fears, let everything hang out, so to speak, knowing that Cis would not castigate her for her honesty and would instead offer her some guidance.
Her friendship with Cis has remained the one constant in Streisand’s close circle as lovers and business partners have moved in and out of her life with traumatic impact. The simple truth is that she trusts Cis as she does no one else. Cis was the first person to encourage her to sing. They have shared their dreams, gone through much together. Cis is probably the only person who can tell Streisand exactly what she thinks and have her opinion respected. Their relationship transcends ego and the usual built-in power structure endemic to a partnership where one member is a star of tremendous voltage and the other dependent upon that person for his or her career.
Streisand knew Cis would be discussing with Kramer the story problems that they had outlined together and that he would be well occupied. Still, she felt contrite about being so late. She was always suffering Jewish guilt for something or other. Just being late, as often happened and as she was now. Nobody understood. She had to give everything to a meeting like this. She could not talk to a writer about such a personal work as The Normal Heart, a play about AIDS, that she knew was, at least in part, autobiographical, without doing her homework. So she had remained in her upstairs bedroom suite, studying the text of the play, the screenplay that Kramer had adapted from his own work at an earlier time before her involvement in the project, and several scientific articles on the ravaging disease that was decimating the gay community.
The role she hoped to play in The Normal Heart was that of a wheelchair-bound doctor dedicated to help AIDS patients fight for their lives and, when all medical hope was gone, provide some dignity in dying. For her to succeed with the project she needed to understand as much as she could about AIDS. Like Yentl, this was a story with great personal meaning to her as so many men she had known and worked with had died of the disease, but as she started down the staircase in her home that dim, foggy afternoon in early March 1986, she had no idea that she had just taken her first steps to another ten years’-long odyssey.
Her time-consuming obsession with Yentl might well have cost her the great love of her life – Jon Peters. Having a man by her side and sharing her bed eased her insecurity. And so, three years after her break-up with the charismatic Peters, following a short, highly charged period of courting, Baskin moved in. Unlike Peters or her ex-husband Elliott Gould, or herself, Baskin had lived a privileged life. Good-looking, well built and towering over her by nearly a foot, he had a winning, boyish smile, a head of dark, curly hair and impeccable manners. Baskin brought a lightness to her life. They also shared an abiding passion for music and beautiful surroundings. Yet, when you looked around the rooms on the spacious ground floor of the Carolwood Drive house there was no sign of his three-year tenancy, so distinctly was her personality ingrained and so overwhelmingly did his seem to have been ignored.
She continued down the curved staircase and past the living room on the way to her study. With the exquisite pieces of art nouveau that she had been collecting through the years, the house had begun to look like a museum. Maybe it was a museum. Maybe all of her homes had become museums: this one, the five-house complex in Malibu, the West Side penthouse in New York. Bitten by the collector’s bug early in her life, she had an eye for discovering rare and wonderful pieces. ‘I didn’t grow up with a sense of it around me,’ she would tell people with a wide flourish of an elegant hand. ‘My mother used to put newspapers on the floor and plastic covers on the furniture – plastic on the lampshades, plastic everywhere. But it always hurt my eyes in some way. For as long as I can remember I’ve had the desire to surround myself with beautiful objects.’
That was at the heart of her collecting mania, started when she was still in her teens. Ordinary surroundings depressed her. There had to be unique treasures wherever she looked to help block out the ugly images of her childhood environment, a childhood that haunted her, would not lea
ve her in peace, that she hated for its pain and its commonness, whose spell, after years spent in therapy, she had been unable to break.
Her collecting had started with elegant old evening bags and empty antique picture frames that she filled with interesting, inexpensive prints – often bought for only a few dollars and hung on the walls of the small apartment, with its bathtub in the kitchen, that had been her earliest real home in New York City. With the money she had made from her first acting role on Broadway, when she was only nineteen years old, she had acquired the incredible German art nouveau desk that was in her bedroom. Unable to write a cheque for the full amount, $2,800, she paid it off over a six-month period and then let the antiques dealer, Lillian Nassau, keep it in her shop on 57th Street in Manhattan until she had a place to put it. Two years later, Funny Girl a big hit and her albums selling in the hundreds of thousands, she fell in love with a Tiffany lamp with a ‘Peony’ shade and a striking red turtleback base ‘with the mosaics changing colors like the colors of the rainbow’, and bought it for $45,000. It was now the centrepiece of the Carolwood Drive living room which she had designed around it. Even on a dull day like this one, the red glass in the base glowed as if lit by some magic inner fire.
Obsessed with collecting, whenever she saw an object that caught her eye and her imagination, she had to own it. Treasures small and large filled her homes, the overflow contained in giant packing cases with a Manhattan storage company: furniture, stained glass, bronze statues, paintings, china, glass, silver, fine antiques and twenties’ kitsch – everything from a glamour-rating penny arcade game to a penny-a-pack cigarette dispenser. A 1926 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and a 1933 Dodge customised roadster were kept garaged at the Malibu ranch. Clothes of the twenties and thirties, bought in thrift shops and not worn in over twenty years, hung as artefacts on display in special closets that held nothing else. The sheer enormity of her possessions, however, had not vanquished the sense of deprivation that had pervaded her since childhood when her only doll had been a hot-water bottle ‘dressed’ in one of her outgrown sweaters. She often talked to friends about wanting to simplify her life, but her acquisitiveness defeated her.
Kramer, a kinetic, dark-haired man with a winsome smile who wore his fiftysome years with youthful panache, stood when she entered the all-white study decorated in what she called, ‘Hollywood Forties Glamour’. Before her arrival, the room had been dominated by a white grand Steinway and two white overstuffed sofas. In her presence, everything diminished in size. Not that she is large. She is, in fact, a rather small woman, slim and around five feet four inches tall. That day she was dressed in a soft peach-pastel jogging suit, with immaculate white sneakers and clutched in her arms Kramer’s play, a pad of notes and a tape-recorder. Her highlighted ash-blonde hair framed her angular, well-chiseled face in a mass of Medea-like curls. Her nose may be her best-known feature, but it is her startling blue eyes and the delicate translucence of her skin that hold one’s attention and admiration. Not beautiful by accepted non-ethnic standards, she possesses a presence polished to an awesome glow by celebrity. By instinct, Streisand knows where to stand so that the light will be the kindest, how to position her head to lengthen her neck and shorten the image of her nose and when she held out her hand to Kramer it was as if an exotic flower with crimson-tipped petals had unfolded.
The day after she had seen the Los Angeles production of The Normal Heart, which had starred Richard Dreyfuss, who she was considering for the co-starring role in Nuts, her next film, she called Kramer’s agent in New York. The playwright and his agent met for a drink later that afternoon. ‘I have exciting news for you,’ he told his client. ‘Barbra Streisand is interested in The Normal Heart.’ ‘We were in a public place and I laid down on the floor like a nut and began hitting it and shaking my legs,’ Kramer recalled. ‘God knows what people thought. I was just so fucking thrilled. I wanted her to do it because I knew that if she did a lot of people would see it. The play meant a great deal to me. It was my life; at the same time it was a play that I knew could make a difference to the gay community if it were given wide, commercial exposure. Once I contained myself, my lawyer said, “Now, I want you to think what kind of deal you want.”
‘I made it clear that there had to be a proviso that I write the script,’ Kramer continued. ‘We agreed on the financial terms but the contract had not been finalised when I went out to California to discuss the play and its adaptation to the screen. She had a screenplay that I had done earlier, before her involvement, and we were going to talk about it and where we should go from there.’
Kramer was a screenwriter long before his success as a playwright. During Britain’s film renaissance in the 1960s he had been transferred by Columbia Studios from their New York offices to the story department in their London branch. By the end of the decade he had formed his own company and wrote and produced the brilliant adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love, with Glenda Jackson, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. ‘The only reason I did The Normal Heart as a play was that I didn’t think I could get a movie done of the subject and that a play was much faster. It was a story that had a message and had to get out fast. I believed it would change the world and Ronald Reagan would behave [regarding help to inaugurate government research into the AIDS virus].’
While contracts were being drawn, Streisand and Kramer set to work on a revised screenplay the morning after their first meeting. ‘I was so impressed with the way she worked,’ Kramer said, ‘like a Trojan. We would start at 9 a.m. in the study and we would work until midnight. We never stopped to eat. She had food brought in, lots of it, well prepared. She could talk and eat at the same time without any problem. She never lost her train of thought, it was amazing. Kim Skalecki, her secretary/assistant would come in with important papers and things for her to sign, calls that had to be made. She handled it all in a thoroughly professional manner. She had converted a garage [at the Carolwood Drive house] into separate quarters for offices for Kim and three other assistants.
‘She had directed only one film, Yentl, at this time, and we were figuring out the sequence of the scenes mostly, the structure and what would happen within scenes and she would ask me a lot of questions about the characters and she would ask me a lot of questions about homosexuality. I would suspect that she knew about [her son] Jason’s homosexuality, but it was not a subject that we talked about. Jason was still living at home then. He was about twenty. Only later did she try to educate herself about homosexuality. She would talk to various people in the industry who were out of the closet and ask them what made people gay. I gave her a pretty graphic book about gay sex and I’m sure it disturbed her, but I felt if she was going to direct The Normal Heart she had to understand something about the physical side of homosexual love.’
Her other project, Nuts, a compelling drama with a powerful woman’s role, was based on Tom Topor’s play about a prostitute, a victim of childhood abuse, fighting for her right to stand trial for the murder of one of her abusive clients, when both the state and her parents insist she is not mentally capable of doing so. What was of major importance to Streisand was that both Nuts and The Normal Heart had strong social themes, and had quite disparate roles for her to play that would, if she succeeded with them, prove once and for all to the critics who insisted on categorising her as a musical comedy star, that she was an actress first and foremost. People simply did not understand that since her voice was a natural talent, something she felt was God-given and not achieved through training, she derived little satisfaction from her acclaim as a singer. She most desperately wanted to be recognised as an actress and film-maker of merit and conscience.
‘I’m at a place in my life where I’m almost realising my dreams,’ she had told an interviewer a few years earlier. ‘The other day, I was so anxious about it I started to cry when I said the words, “Oh, my God, I’m almost getting everything.” It was a total emotional experience. Because I am so used to complaining, to being n
egative, that to be in a happy place is a whole new way of life for me.’ She had been deeply, deeply in love with Peters, believing that she had found her life’s partner. That dream had evaporated, but she was once again in a happy place. Baskin was a charming, intelligent man, supportive and loving, and he was undemanding of her. Still, he lacked Peters’s charisma, the vital life force. There was no strong conflict of wills and egos, no speedway curves or roller-coaster emotions in their relationship. She was free to concentrate on her career and on developing projects in which she believed. Right now that project was The Normal Heart.
Day after day, for a period of two weeks, spring rain tapping at the windows, she sat with Larry Kramer in her dazzling white study and with him read all the parts in the script out loud and then voiced her comments on changes she thought should be made – a line of dialogue that was too raw, a speech that was over wordy, a point that required more emphasis.
‘What I found difficult was – maybe because I had always loved her as a performer – getting beyond the fact that I was actually sitting with her, Barbra Streisand,’ Kramer confessed. ‘I was in awe of her – the talent, the fame. We all grew up with her. It’s like a member of the older generation being in a one-to-one situation with Judy Garland. It took a while before I felt free to say what I actually thought. It’s not that you edit what you think, but you do in a way. And if she would say something that I didn’t agree with on the script, I would speak out and she would say, “Well, let’s try it this way.” Sometimes she would give in and sometimes she would say, “I want it this way.” How much of a fight can you have? Not much.’
