Between You and Me (30 page)

Revolutionary Party; its ultimate goal was to destroy capitalism throughout the world and transfer all political power to the working class. Whenasked how Redgrave an

d her fellow revolution

aries

hoped to achieve that objective, she acknowledged that the road to their utopia would not be a peaceful journey. “The working class is going to have to take power through armed insurrection,” she told me.

Later on, after observing her in action on the campaign trail and at various protest demonstrations, I asked her, “Do you never stop? I mean it, do you never stop politics?”

“No,” she replied, “I never do.”

Yet as I happily discovered, there was another, warmer side to Vanessa Redgrave. When she wasn’t preaching from her soapbox about the need for a Marxist revolution, she came across as kind and thoughtful and quite charming. Somewhat to my surprise, I truly liked her.

As the years passed, her career continued to flourish. Among other achievements, she received two more Oscar nominations for

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her work in films that, like Julia, had strong literary origins: one in 1984 for The Bostonians, adapted from a Henry James novel; and the other in 1992 for Howards End, based on a novel by E. M. Forster.

What many Redgrave aficionados regard as her crowning triumph came in the spring of 2003, when she conquered Broadway with her portrayal of Mary Tyrone in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night. For that performance, she won a Tony to go along with her other laurels.

The casting of Redgrave in that production of Long Day’s Journey provoked a lively buzz of anticipation in New York’s cultural circles.

Partly inresponse to that, I suggested that we do anupdate of our 1979 profile of her, inmuch the same way we had done anupdate of the story onShirley MacLaine. Redgrave was still deeply engaged in left-wing politics (her primary passionin2003 was Chechnya and its struggle for independence from Russia), and I thought the combina-tionmade her a worthy subject to revisit. But the proposal was nixed by my superiors at 60 Minutes onthe grounds that anupdate onRed-grave “wasn’t right” for our audience. I replied, with some irritation, that I found it hard to imagine an audience that would not be interested inseeing a story onhow one of the most accomplished actresses of our time chose to play a classic role inwhat is widely considered to be the greatest play ever writtenby anAmericandramatist.

My earnest pitch fell on deaf ears. I soon realized that there was nothing I could say that would persuade my betters to give their stamp of approval to another story on Vanessa Redgrave. I thought their negative reaction was wrong at the time, and for whatever it’s worth, I still think it was a mistake.

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B a r b r a S t r e i s a n d

A N O T H E R M O V I E S T A R W H O H A S used her glamour and power to advance political causes dear to her liberal heart is Barbra Streisand, who was the subject of a profile I did in 1991. Unlike MacLaine and Redgrave, whom I met for the first time in the context of assignments for 60 Minutes, Streisand was someone I had known for many years. You could even say that I knew her before she became Barbra Streisand; or, to put it more accurately, I knew her when she was an obscure nineteen-year-old bohemian from Brooklyn who was just making her start in show business.

I’m talking here about the early 1960s, a time when my own career was going through an uncertain period of transition. In the interval between The Mike Wallace Interview and CBS News, one of my chores was to host a show for Westinghouse called PM East, a combination talk-and-entertainment program similar in format to what Jack Paar was doing on The Tonight Show at NBC.

Streisand was one of our guests on PM East. At the time—the summer of 1961—she was known only to a small coterie of fans who were plugged into the cabaret scene in New York and had seen her perform at a small club in Greenwich Village called Bon Soir. Among them, happily, was a member of our PM East staff, and on his recommendation, we invited her in for an audition. The moment she opened her mouth and we heard that magnificent voice, we all recognized she was something special.

The number Streisand chose to perform was “A Sleepin’ Bee”

from the Broadway show House of Flowers, a song that became one of her early hits. The reaction to her debut on PM East was so en-

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thusiastic that she became one of our regular guests, appearing on the show more than a dozen times over the next several months. I recall a night in November 1961 when she sang a duet with Mickey Rooney (“I Wish I Were in Love Again”) and another later that fall, when she sang “A Taste of Honey,” another early hit. Even more memorable was the time in early 1962 when she sang “Moon River,”

“Lover, Come Back to Me,” and “Cry Me a River,” all on the same night.

I described Streisand as a bohemian a few paragraphs back because that was how I thought of her in those days. She always played it straight when she was singing, but when she joined me and our other guests for the “talk” portion of the show, the more quirky side of her nature bubbled to the surface. She strove to be unconventional in word and deed, and enjoyed being perceived as an eccentric. In at least one respect, she did live like a gypsy. One night, when I happened to notice that she was carrying a large key ring with lots of keys, I asked what they were all for. “Oh,” she replied with a shrug, “I sleep around.”

I thought such a comment required some explanation. She proceeded to tell me and our viewers that she didn’t like to go home to Brooklyn every night, so she had keys to the apartments of various friends in Manhattan who let her crash on their sofas or whatever.

“They trust me and I trust them, and that’s what the keys are for,” she said. She also made a point of insisting that the manifold sleeping arrangements were all quite innocent.

Streisand often came across as feisty and argumentative. In particular, she seemed to get a kick out of provoking me, and in ways that I did not always find amusing. There was, for example, her reaction to an embarrassing incident I had to endure on the night when Burt Lancaster was one of our guests.

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From time to time, I would veer away from the upbeat patter that set the general tone on PM East and revert to the more confrontational style that had defined my presence on Night Beat and The Mike Wallace Interview. My exchange with Lancaster was one such occasion. I had read somewhere that he had a ferocious temper, so I asked him if that was true and, if so, what made him prone to such angry outbursts. Lancaster didn’t care for that line of questioning; he had come on the show to plug his latest movie, Birdman of Alcatraz, and that was all he wanted to talk about. When I continued to press him about his temper, he accused me of being “self-consciously sensational.” I thoroughly enjoyed his testy response; it was fun to be back in my natural element. Then I made a tactical mistake that left me wide open for a cutting rejoinder. After noting that I had a reputation for asking direct questions in television interviews, I capped the point with this smug remark: “I daresay that you have a certain familiarity with my work.”

“Very little,” Lancaster replied with a steely grin. That was bad enough, but the put-down became even more humiliating a few moments later, when he stood up and walked off the show, the only time that has ever happened to me.

After he left, other guests on the set were kind enough to offer me commiseration, but Streisand took a different tack. “Well, I don’t blame him,” she said. “You kept asking him about his temper, and he showed it.” She refrained from adding “so there,” but the point of her comment was clearly that I had gotten my comeuppance or just deserts.

What I found so striking about Streisand in those days (aside from her singing) was her attitude of supreme self-assurance. I had to keep reminding myself that she was still a kid, a teenager, for she projected the aura of a woman who knew for certain that she was on her

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way toward becoming not just a star but the kind of superstar who becomes a legend. In some ways, she already had the demeanor of a diva who believes it’s only fitting that the rest of the world revolve around her. I couldn’t fault Streisand for having such self-esteem, because I figured that given her extraordinary talent, it was probably impossible for her not to foresee a glorious career.

Nor did it take long for her to arrive there. In 1962 she made her Broadway debut in a musical called I Can Get It for You Wholesale.

The leap to stardom came two years later, when, at the age of twenty-two, she created the part of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. To this day it remains her signature role. Then it was off to Hollywood to make the film version of Funny Girl, for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress. She went on to star in two more movie adaptations of Broadway musicals, Hello, Dolly! and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

Streisand then set out to prove that she was not just a singing actress, and she did so with her work in the 1970 nonmusical comedy The Owl and the Pussycat, and with her portrayal of a left-wing activist in The Way We Were. Through it all, she kept on singing. Over a span of four decades, starting with her first album in 1963, she put together a string of hit recordings.

Streisand had long been on my A list of entertainers I wanted to profile on 60 Minutes. But after all her success, she became rather reclusive and generally avoided direct contact with the media. Once she achieved superstardom, she felt she no longer needed the aggra-vation of being questioned by reporters. So I patiently waited for the right opportunity, and it finally came in 1991, a year when there were two major events in her career. One was a musical retrospective called Just for the Record . . . , a four-album boxed set that looked back over thirty years of her singing career. The other was

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The Prince of Tides, a movie in which she not only starred but directed. (It was the second time she took on the role behind the camera as well as in front of it. She had made her directorial debut in 1983 with Yentl.) As I had hoped, Streisand’s desire to generate buzz for the new movie and album overcame her reluctance to have her privacy invaded, and so she agreed, at last, to be interviewed by me for 60 Minutes.

Since I hadn’t forgotten what an irritant she had been on occasion back in the PM East days, I was hardly surprised to learn that Streisand had not been popular with some of the people she had worked with over the years. She had often been accused of being a control freak who always had to have her own way. In our interview, I put it to her, point-blank.

W A L L A C E : Why are you so attackable?

S T R E I S A N D : You tell me.

W A L L A C E : Because you’re so versatile, so successful, and you have the reputation for bitchery. You know that.

S T R E I S A N D : No, for being difficult, I would say. . . .

W A L L A C E : You would love to control this piece.

S T R E I S A N D : Absolutely. What, are you kidding? Of course. I don’t trust you.

W A L L A C E : When are you going to be fifty?

S T R E I S A N D : Uugghh!

Her response made me laugh, and I confessed that the only reason I had asked her the question was because I was curious to see how she’d answer. After informing our viewers that Streisand would turn fifty in about five months, I gallantly averred that she still looked almost as young as she did in her television appearances from the

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early 1960s, some clips of which we included in the 1991 profile. In fact, much of the 60 Minutes piece dealt with our shared recollections of the years when we first knew each other. Our trip down memory lane included a visit to her old apartment, a third-floor walk-up above a popular seafood restaurant on Third Avenue, which she rented for sixty bucks a month. (Moving into that apartment presum-ably brought an end to her “sleeping around” habit.) As we stood on Third Avenue and looked up at the digs she had inhabited in those days, I asked her a question that had come to mind during our nostalgic stroll through her old neighborhood.

W A L L A C E : Did you believe thirty years ago, when you slept there, that you were going to be Barbra Streisand?

S T R E I S A N D : I knew that ever since I was seven years old.

W A L L A C E : You really did?

S T R E I S A N D : It just had to be. Yeah, there was no other way for me to be.

Later, when the conversation turned to PM East, we talked about our early impressions of each other.

W A L L A C E : You know something? I really didn’t like you back thirty years ago.

S T R E I S A N D : How come?

W A L L A C E : And I don’t think you liked me, either.

S T R E I S A N D : I thought you were mean. I thought you were very mean.

W A L L A C E : I didn’t— I didn’t think that you paid much attention to me, because you were totally self-absorbed back thirty years ago, when we worked together.

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S T R E I S A N D : I resent this. You invite me as a guest on your show, and you liked— We would talk about all kinds of subjects that interested me, right?

W A L L A C E : Right.

S T R E I S A N D : So you were using me as a guest on your show to talk.

W A L L A C E : Yeah.

S T R E I S A N D : Now, how do you dare call me self-involved?

W A L L A C E : Self-involved is one thing. Self-absorbed is— You know something? Twenty or thirty years of psychoanalysis, I say to myself, “What is it that she’s trying to find out that takes twenty to thirty years?”