Streisand: Her Life (107 page)

“So here they come, traipsing down the Yellow Brick Road: La Barbra and her legions. Not since Coxey’s Army has so bizarre an invading power launched so quixotic an assault on Washington.”

Yardley’s column, reprinted in a number of newspapers across the country, touched off a storm of criticism. A letter to the editor in the
Los Angeles Times
stated, “What Yardley’s ‘perspective’ most sings of is sour grapes: the Democrats are in power and Hollywood’s heavyweights helped put them there. But could there be a more sinister motive in his singling out of Streisand? It’s telling that he chose to resurrect a relatively unknown stage character Barbra created thirty-two years ago as the centerpiece for his essay. Could the reason be that the name Marmelstein is so resoundingly Jewish? I’d like to think not.”

In an interview with Robert Scheer published in the
Los Angeles Times
on May 23, Barbra fought back. “This is so unfair,” she said. “And it’s smearing the main industry in our community. It’s saying there isn’t a brain around. Did the entertainment industry create the national debt? How come nobody attacked the Republican White House for their involvement with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlton Heston, and Bruce Willis? Remember when actor John Gavin was appointed ambassador to Mexico? I understand why the conservatives attack us—they deem us a very dangerous crowd, especially because of the kind of money some of us can raise for the Democrats.”

T
HE FOLLOWING MONTH
, publicity of a different kind swirled around Barbra’s comely shoulders when she went to England to attend the Wimbledon tennis championships. She wasn’t there as a tennis fan; she had come to cheer on the defending champion Andre Agassi, the sport’s latest longhaired pinup boy. Agassi, the London press breathlessly reported, was Barbra’s “special friend.”

Her relationship with the twenty-three-year-old athlete had come to light the previous September when she rooted for him from the stands at the U.S. Open match. They had met shortly after Agassi saw
The Prince of Tides
,
when he telephoned Barbra to tell her how much the film had moved him. They talked for two hours, and not long afterward they went on a dinner date.

At the U.S. Open, television cameras spent nearly as much time on Streisand as they did on the match. One commentator noted that Barbra seemed to look at the handsome Agassi as though he were “an ice cream cone with a cherry on the top.” To reporters who asked about the friendship, Barbra said that Agassi “is very intelligent, very, very sensitive, very evolved—more than his linear years. And he’s an extraordinary human being. He plays like a Zen master. It’s very in the moment.”

The “Zen master” comment prompted widespread ridicule, as did the twenty-eight-year age difference between the two. Barbra attended another match of Andre’s in Los Angeles, and he reportedly gave her several private tennis lessons.

At Wimbledon in June 1993, the Fleet Street press went into a frenzy at Barbra’s presence. Pictures of her biting her nails with worry or waving her arms and cheering Agassi along as he battled his challenger, Pete Sampras, made the front page of nearly every paper in the country. Wearing a sailor cap and a navy-and-white sailor jacket, which she removed to reveal a white tank top, Barbra jumped up and down and called out Agassi’s name. When he lost the match, the
Daily Mirror
headlined its front-page photo of a crestfallen Streisand, “Barbra Cry-Sand.” The
Sun
chose a picture of Barbra biting her nails for its front page, with the headline “Chew Love! Barbra bites nails as her friend Agassi is beaten.”

Even
The New York Times
jumped into the act, reporting at length on the excitement created by Barbra’s presence at the match. “Not since Chris Evert dated Burt Reynolds in the mid-seventies,” Maureen Dowd wrote, “has there been such a closely watched duet of tennis and Hollywood r
oyalty.
... Asked whether the relationship was platonic, Agassi replied in a valley-girl, handkerchief-dropping manner: ‘You know? To say we are, like, just friends, you know, I know what everybody’s definition of friend is. They use it so loosely. So I like to say she’s my version of a friend.
’”

To
London Today
he sounded more Zen-like: “I’ve been learning about the sweet mysteries of life, and this is one of them. I’m not sure I can fully explain. Maybe she can’t either. But it doesn’t matter. We came from completely different worlds, and we collided, and we knew we wanted to be in each other’s company right then.”

Judging from Agassi’s apparent history with women, it is unlikely that his friendship with Barbra ever moved beyond the platonic. His longtime girlfriend Wendi Stewart was reportedly angry enough at his attentions to Barbra to throw some Streisand CDs out of Agassi’s limousine window and cry, “That woman is old enough to be your mother!” But the London
Sunday Mirror
reported that Andre and Wendi had never had sex during their years-long “romance” because of “their strong Christian religious convictions,” and that the couple slept in separate bedrooms when she traveled with him.

In 1987 Wendi apparently stood by the sidelines as Andre conducted another “friendship,” this one with Amy Moss, a courtesy driver at an American tennis tournament. Moss told the
Mirror
,
“If you want to know about Andre’s sex life, go by the Bible. Having sex is wrong in the Bible, and that is what he follows.”

Whatever the extent of Barbra’s relationship with Andre Agassi, it didn’t last very long, perhaps because this “very in
telligent,
very, very sensitive, very evolved” young man turned out to be a homophobe. The
Village Voice
reported that after he won a match in 1991, Agassi
had told r
eporters, “I’m as happy as a faggot in a submarine.” And the New York
Daily News
ran an item reporting that after Pete Sampras received a good-luck bouquet from Elton John prior to a match, Agassi told him, “You can’t go around getting flowers from a fag like that.”

So much for Zen masterhood.

O
N JUNE
29, 1993, Columbia Records released Barbra’s fiftieth album,
Back to Broadway
.
The prior December she had signed a new contract with Sony Corporation, Columbia’s parent company, and the details of the deal made front-page news. Since March 1991 the recording industry had offered the hottest musical stars a series of contracts that staggered the imagination: $40 million to Janet Jackson, $60 million to Michael Jackson, $60 million apiece to Madonna and Prince.

In the 1960s Marty Erlichman had always demanded more money for Barbra than the highest-paid artist was getting at the time, even if the difference amounted to only one dollar. In 1992 he wasn’t about to let Barbra settle for less than the other top artists of the day were getting. On December 14, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that Barbra’s new contract, covering both records and films, was worth $60 million.

The
Times
report added that the deal guaranteed Barbra a $4 million advance against 10 percent of gross revenues for every movie in which she acted; $3 million in advance against an undetermined percentage of the gross for every movie she directed; and a $5 million advance for every album, against a top-of-the-line royalty rate of 42 percent of the wholesale price—nearly $3.00 per CD sold. It was an extraordinary pact for any entertainer, but for a fifty-one-year-old woman who had made her first album thirty years earlier, made her film debut twenty-five years earlier, and had directed only two movies, it moved into the realm of fantasy.

Back to Broadway
,
Barbra’s first effort under the new pact, proved that Sony’s faith in her was well placed. The disc, propelled by strong public interest after the success of
The Broadway Album
,
debuted at number one on the
Billboard
chart, the first Streisand album ever to achieve that rare status.

Reviews were mixed, however. Stephen Holden of
The New York Times
felt that, “While the record includes some of the most thrilling singing of Ms. Streisand’s career, it also has some of the most overbearing.” David Patrick Stearns in
USA Today
criticized Barbra’s voice on the disc: “Though Streisand again proves that she sings Broadway music better than just about anyone, the vocal decline hinted at on
One Voice
five years ago is now undeniable. Her high notes are thin, her vibrato nervous, and her voice doesn’t bloom as much at high volume.”

Ultimately
Back to Broadway
didn’t have the staying power of its predecessor; it sold only one-third as many copies as
The Broadway Album.
But its position at the top of the charts made Barbra the only singer in history to have a number one album in four consecutive decades.

A few months later, Barbra returned to the recording studio to work on an unusual project: a duet of
“I’ve G
ot a Crush on You” with Frank Sinatra, to be included on his latest album,
Duets,
in which he would also sing with Bono, Liza Minnelli, Kenny G, and Gloria Estefan, among others. What was singular about the Sinatra album was that the seventy-eight-year-old crooner refused to record in person with any of his partners. Instead he laid down his tracks alone, and the other artists were expected to record theirs at another time and place.

Amazingly, Barbra agreed to this bizarre arrangement, and even more surprisingly, she brought such warmth and intimacy to the duet that no one would have guessed the two singers had never been in a recording studio together. She is in fine voice on the song (better than for most of
Back to Broadway
),
which helps make Sinatra’s tentative and scratchy vocal more palatable.

In her patented way, Barbra improvised a little by using Sinatra’s name in the song; he responded by overdubbing a new line at the last m
inute: “’Ca
use I have got a crush, my Barbra, on you.” Although the album received mixed reviews and garnered criticism for the poor quality of Sinatra’s vocals and the impersonal dual recordings, its novelty and big star names propelled it to debut at number two on the
Billboard
chart.