Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  She bristled at Reed’s first question – what had fame cost her?

  ‘Listen, all my life I wanted to be famous,’ she replied, a note of hostility in her voice. ‘I knew nothing about music. I never had a victrola ‘til I was eighteen. I used to buy clothes in thrift shops. Now I don’t go there any more ‘cause people bother me. Besides, they’ve gone up. I always dreamed of a penthouse, right? So now I’m a big star I got one and it’s not much fun. I used to dream about terraces, now I gotta spend $500 just to convert mine from summer to winter. Let me tell you, it’s just as dirty with soot up there on the 22nd floor as it is down there on the bottom.’ Reed was surprised by her defensive attitude, but with the suddenness of fame had also come some disenchantment. Nothing was ever as perfect as she had fantasised it would be.

  Shooting began at 5 p.m. when the museum closed. The doors were locked and manned by security guards. Outside the local branch of her fast-growing fan club, some forty members, peered through the beaded glass windows carrying a sign that read, ‘Welcome Barb’. ‘Barbra even has a fan club in a prison,’ a woman press agent told Reed. Streisand was ready for the cameras at 7.30. Elliott arrived at about 11.30 p.m. carrying a large brown paper bag and stood on the sidelines as she ran past twelve pillars and up thirty-five stone stairs in the massive front room of the museum singing ‘Yesterday’. She sighted him and they both went over to some chairs and sat down as she hungrily dug into the bag and pulled out a hot pastrami sandwich and a container of sour green tomatoes while Sadie danced around her feet and was fed the meat from half a sandwich. At 2 a.m., after a dozen costume changes and scenes played up and down the stone stairs, past walls filled with Cèzannes, Picassos and Matisses, the session ended, to be continued the next day.

  Her energy was intimidating to even the hardest workers in the crew. She arrived in the morning for the second part of the shooting fresh and with a sheaf of notes for everyone from Peter Matz to the property man. ‘She’s not dumb,’ a CBS official told Reed. ‘She heads two corporations – one packages her specials, pays her everything, then the profit she makes is the difference between her expenses and what CBS pays her. This includes her salary. It’s a one-woman show, so it would be very weird if she was not the boss.’ She was, of course, but she never permitted herself any liberties. She worked harder than anyone else and never showed exhaustion. ‘If the star gives up, everybody gives up,’ she told Reed. ‘I gotta keep smiling.’2

  That evening, at 7 p.m., she began an eight-hour recording siege with Matz and a 33-piece orchestra. An exhausted Elliott, who had not left her side, warned her against fatigue hoarseness.

  ‘Hoarse?’ she growled, and waved her hands. ‘Hoarse! I don’t get hoarse! What’s hoarse?’ Elliott rubbed her back and held her hands as she listened to the playbacks and selected the ones she wanted to use. She complained only once. Her feet hurt.

  She slept until noon the next day when Diana arrived from New York at her invitation to watch as sequences of the show were being filmed before a live audience. Streisand was singing a camped-up version of ‘One Kiss’. ‘I made a record of “One Kiss” once,’ Diana wistfully told a reporter (who noted that she was ‘a round-faced, round woman who wears her hair piled youthfully high on her head’). ‘Of course I sang it my own way,’ she added and proceeded to sing a few bars in a thin, trilly soprano.

  It was midnight when the audience sections were finished. Streisand then called for a meeting with a press agent and looked over colour slides of publicity photographs with a professional magnifying flashlight while she dictated marking for each picture according to its merits as a reflection of herself.

  ‘Somebody else could do this,’ she told one of the last lingering reporters, ‘if only I didn’t care so much.’

  In Color Me Barbra she was the only human figure on view. She did acrobatic jumps on the trampoline, sang ‘Animal Crackers’ to an anteater (and had the camera superimpose her profile at one point over his), appeared as the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti whose bust was one of the treasures of the museum, as Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, as a Modigliani lady singing at a café table, ‘Non C’est Rien’, serenaded Sadie (in her television debut) with ‘C’est Si Bon’, swung from a trapeze and danced with a chorus line of penguins.

  ‘For Barbra Streisand’s second spec of the season,’ the Variety critic wrote, ‘CBS delivered a true one-woman turn – not another biped in sight the whole hour distance. As it turned out, the exercise in conceit was justified.’

  Directly after Color Me Barbra was shot, Streisand prepared to leave for the London West End production of Funny Girl. Elliott preceded her to find somewhere suitable to live. He had been offered the role of Nicky Arnstein and they had lengthy discussions about it before he turned it down. ‘I’m more talented than all the guys who played Nicky put together,’ he later said. ‘I’m not being immodest. Nicky Arnstein was not played. He was never written.’ However, he rejected the chance, which would have given a great boost to his career at the time, because he did not want to put further strain on their marriage. Jule Styne believed that a husband and wife playing opposite each other did not generate sexual excitement as everyone knew they shared a bed. In the end, English actor Michael Craig was signed to play Nicky Arnstein.

  In Hollywood, Columbia Studios remained reluctant to approve her in the film version of Funny Girl. They were demanding tests be shot in London to see how she looked on a film screen. Television was one thing, they said, but film close-ups would magnify every fault she had. It mattered not that her skin was now near to flawless, all the old signs of acne miraculously gone, that her hair was groomed and shiny, that the costume department could take care of her figure if help was needed, that her talent was never in question. The bone of contention was her nose. The studio thought she should have it reconstructed. Streisand would not hear of it.

  Footnotes

  1 Leonard Bernstein’s ‘My Name is Barbara’ was previously introduced by mezzo-soprano Jennie Teurel, a noted concert artist of the 1950s and 1960s.

  2 Streisand was furious with Reed after the publication of his article because of his stress on her cryptic comments and on her eating habits. ‘She never spoke to me again,’ he said in 1977. Several years later, Streisand’s anger subsided and they double-dated – Streisand and Jon Peters, Reed and Streisand’s then current agent Sue Mengers – to the première of Streisand’s production of A Star Is Born.

  15

  STREISAND’S PLANE LANDED at Heathrow Airport in the early morning, the sky still too dark to see more than a flickering of lights as London awakened from the night. Under a mink coat she wore pants and a big sweater. A travel representative met her at passport control. She had not had much sleep but the activity in the customs hall energised her and she insisted on helping the agent locate her thirty-five suitcases monogrammed BSG. Sighting Elliott, who had arrived ten days earlier, behind the barrier in the waiting area outside the customs hall, she waved frantically and ran towards him. Suddenly, she became aware of the crush of press photographers as flash cameras exploded. She slowed her gait, put on her big sunglasses and pulled down the wide brim of her fur hat to conceal the disappointment on her face. She and Elliott were not going to be allowed a private reunion. They hugged tentatively and then Elliott, his arm protectively about her, bustled her through the pressing crowds led by an airport official and the agent, past a door marked ‘private’ that led to a guarded exit. Not having expected such a large turnout so early in the morning, she was stunned and her face reflected her fear as she clung to Elliott’s arm.

  He had rented an elegant townhouse at 48 Ennismore Gardens behind the Brompton Oratory and facing a lovely private green oasis with patches of bright, early spring flowers. The weather was mild for February, winter greyness dispelled by short bursts of sun. But with three records in the British charts and the publicity accompanying her arrival, she was unable to go anywhere without being gaped at and besieged for autographs. As she
and Elliott were to have two weeks together before rehearsals began and Chemstrand, her television sponsor, was paying the bills, they flew first to Paris, where Vogue was to do a photo article on her. She had just been placed eighth in the list of America’s Best Dressed Women (topped by Jacqueline Kennedy), an honour that thrilled her.

  In one year she had managed to turn her image around, to prove that her taste for the outlandish was avant garde and not bizarre. ‘Now I hope people will stop calling me “kooky,”’ she said, and admitted that she still bought some of her shoes and other accessories second-hand at thrift shops and occasionally drove her Bentley up to Loman’s in the Bronx to buy cut-rate originals minus the designer’s label. This did not turn off Parisian haute couture. She had been invited to all the major collections. Designer Marc Bohan gave a luncheon for her with some of the most prestigious fashion figures present–Dior, Grés, Cardin, Balmain. She was seated at Bohan’s right and never stopped talking. ‘My husband and I went to Grand Vefour [a four-star restaurant] for dinner,’ she told him. ‘I always judge the cooking by the chocolate soufflé. The cream was sour.’ She had apparently never had crème fraîche, that classic staple of fine French cuisine.

  ’I hope you will approve the one my chef has prepared,’ Bohan smiled drily.

  As Bohan’s butler went to fill her glass with wine, she asked for a Coca-Cola with a perfect French accent. ‘I have a good ear,’ she leaned over to tell Bohan when he complimented her. Actually, she had been studying French with a tutor and had recently recorded a French album Je M’appelle Barbra with Michel Legrand which included ‘Ma Première Chanson’, a striking song of her own composition. Although a lamentably pretentious album, many of the songs were sung in excellent French and it sold well if not as well as her previous records, her fans not quite sure what to make of a Streisand à la Piaf.

  She had something provocative to say about each designer. After the Cardin show in which the clothes all had a look of the twenty-first century, short and angular, she commented, ‘Those girls didn’t have a thing on under their dresses. I could see right through. I was embarrassed.’ At Grés, watching a large tent dress sway past, she stage-whispered, ‘You’d never be able to tell what was going on under there!’ Her only purchases were made at Dior, where she bought day dresses, suits, evening gowns, sports clothes, hats, shoes and coats at a cost of $20,000. Dior was a very today designer, she said. And, indeed, he was.

  She posed for the Vogue fashion layout in her ocelot coat and a glamorous, body-clinging evening dress and visited the Louvre and several antique shops before Elliott whisked her off to Rome, Florence and Venice where, as her records were not yet well known, she could travel with anonymity. The short tour gave the couple a chance to share things without too much outside interference. It was a highly romantic time and Streisand arrived at the Prince of Wales Theatre (where Elliott had appeared in On the Town) on the first day of rehearsals of Funny Girl in an exhilarated mood. By day’s end her spirits were low. The production would not be up to the standards she had expected.

  Kay Medford was the only other member of the original American cast in the London production. The director, Lawrence Kasha, was also American, only thirty-three – and considered to be a bright, new theatre talent. Having played over 800 performances out of town and on Broadway, Streisand felt she was the only one who knew how the show should go and what worked for her. The auditorium at the Prince of Wales had dead spots, which meant that however well-miked, unless the orchestra could be masked, voices from the stage would be difficult to hear from certain seats. There was also the problem of the British members of the cast who were playing New York and Broadway types with forced accents. Michael Craig, then best known as a British light-romantic film actor – good-looking and capable though he was – seemed fatally miscast as Nicky Arnstein. This was going to be an up-hill struggle and at the end, whatever the outcome, she would bear the consequence.

  She remained, as in New York, stand-offish with members of the company. She became increasingly testy with the British press, whom she found even more forward and invasive in their questions than their counterparts in the States. Ray Stark, battened down for the duration of the rehearsals in a regal suite at the Dorchester, soothed as many of the targets of her verbal assaults as he could by telling everyone what a wonderful performer she was. ‘The only thing she has not learned is tact,’ he was quoted as saying.

  To a reporter’s question as to why she thought she was so successful, she replied: ‘The only way I can account for it is that whatever ability other performers have, I must have it plus. On stage I am a cross between a washer-woman and a princess. I am a bit coarse, a bit low, a bit vulgar and a bit ignorant. But I am also part princess – sophisticated, elegant and controlled. I can appeal to everybody.’ With this hard-eyed self-perception came her ever-present self-doubt. ‘When I am not performing, however,’ she added, ‘I don’t think I have that definite a personality. I think maybe I have nothing.’

  In the first week of April, she learned that she was pregnant. The news was both exciting and frightening. Neither Elliott nor Barbra knew if they were ready to become parents, but soon got used to the idea. Streisand shopped at Harrods, which was not far from her house, for skeins of fine wool, all in different shades of pink. She knitted like mad for a week on a baby blanket and then realised the child might be a boy and stopped because she wasn’t too fond of the colour blue. She bought a book by the Englishman who pioneered the natural-childbirth movement, Dr Grantly Dick-Read, and became a dedicated follower. Elliott, wanting to share the experience of their baby’s birth, agreed to go to natural childbirth classes with her as soon as they returned to New York.

  ‘To say I love Barbra,’ he told a reporter, ‘that’s obvious. Otherwise I couldn’t have stood it. I know the traps. I know the wounds, and I’ve decided it’s worth it in the end to wage the battle. People say theatrical marriages don’t work. Our battle is especially difficult because we’re real people, not just two profiles on a magazine cover. We really love one another.’

  They did not anticipate that her condition would interfere with her fourteen-week commitment to the London production of Funny Girl. But with the baby due on 15 December, it was generally assumed that she would cancel her upcoming million-dollar concert tour of the States from August through October. Following the announcement the press soon referred to the unborn child as the ‘Million Dollar Baby’.

  ’I can’t suddenly get poor,’ Streisand told the American feminist writer Gloria Steinem. ‘But I don’t want a kid who has nothing but toys from F.A.O. Schwartz. Kids like simple things to play with: a piece of paper, a walnut shell, I had a hot-water bottle for a doll,’ a surprising comment in view of her painful public recall of her own toyless childhood and how she felt at not having a selection of toys. She went on to say, ‘The most important thing is that she feels loved and has both parents,’ obviously still leaning towards the idea that she would have a girl. Filming of Funny Girl was almost a year away, time enough for her to get her figure back. Still of concern, however, were these constant demands that she seriously consider having cosmetic nose surgery prior to making her movie debut.

  The subject of her nose had come up frequently during the year. Fanny Brice, she was told, had bobbed her nose before going to Hollywood. A list of other famous stars who had ‘constructive’ surgery or cosmetic assistance was rattled off to her. It was said that Marilyn Monroe had breast implants. Rita Hayworth had extreme electrolysis to raise her hairline. Clark Gable had all his teeth pulled and wore a false set to give him a better smile. She consulted noted eye, ear and nose specialists whose opinions were that nose surgery either might or might not affect her voice. She would be taking a chance. The nasality that so identified her singing voice could be lost. Pictures were drawn to show her what she would look like with the alterations that would be made – the bump removed, the nose narrowed and slightly clipped. She hated it. It simply wasn’t her. If anything wa
s done, she wanted only the bump smoothed. She was afraid she would regret the results and she was terrified of pain. And certainly she could not have surgery done while she was pregnant.

  Under tremendous pressure, none the less she pushed on energetically. The English production of Funny Girl was beginning to shape up as it went into dress rehearsals. The week before opening night she was frantic. Her nerves frayed, she and Elliott began to fight and the rows grew in intensity. She was, he claims, afraid to trust his love or his judgment.

  ’She loves from the point of view of a materialist,’ he has said. ‘If she doesn’t commit to true love she won’t lose anything. She doesn’t really give. I told her: “You destroy what you don’t understand and can’t control.”’ He was determined she would not destroy him. He was trying to gain leverage, to get her to turn to him for certain decisions, to lean on his strength and save hers. Streisand was that contradictory woman who wanted a strong man whom she could control, itself a paradox. Things had to be her way, her word final. Able only to respect a man who could stand up to her, she was compelled to test her power against his. It became a kind of emotional hand-wrestling that could spill over into violence if not controlled, a situation both were aware of as fists had flown from time to time, stopped by sheer force of will before any serious damage was done.

  One night, neither could govern their anger. An argument had started over Streisand’s need to control the people around her, Elliott included. The fact that she could not stop him from gambling infuriated her. Her attacks on his habit only angered him more, making him feel that she was castrating and robbing him of his independence. They were screaming at each other. Streisand said some harsh things framed in expletives, and slammed and locked the bedroom door after herself.