Streisand: Her Life (110 page)

Prior to the March 3-4 auction, three previews wer
e held, in T
okyo, Paris, and West Hollywood. On February 17, Barbra appeared at the Art Deco-inspired St. James’s Club on Sunset Boulevard, where twenty-five of the choicest items were on display for anyone willing to spend $250 to see them. (The event doubled as a fund-raiser for the UCLA Breast Cancer Center.)

Streisand seemed uncomfortable at the event. “All this for my furniture?” she said with a laugh when she arrived with Richard Baskin to see three hundred people craning their necks to study everything on display in an anteroom off the club’s dining room. But as she entered the main room to introduce Dr. Susan Love of UCLA, Barbra stared straight ahead, unsmiling, and acknowledged no one in the crowd. Atop a few steps that led from the dining room to the lounge, she read a brief tribute to Dr. Love and her work entirely from cue cards, never once raising her gaze to make eye contact with the people watching her. In contrast, Dr. Love spoke entirely off the cuff, exuding a sincerity that Barbra must have felt but did not convey.

As she left, a fan asked her for an autograph. She reluctantly obliged, never looked at the young man, and signed her name without breaking her stride as she moved toward a waiting limousine. Many of the people at the event shook their heads in amazement that Barbra Streisand, after more than thirty years of stardom, still found it so difficult to be gracious to strangers.

T
HE AUCTION PROVED
a sensational success. Barbra’s “furniture” brought $5.3 million, including a record price of $2 million for the Tamara de Lempicka painting
Adam and Eve
,
which had been featured along with Streisand on the cover of
Architectural Digest
in December of 1993 and had been expected to bring a high bid of $800,000. (The anonymous buyer was Madonna.) Another bidder paid a record $717,500 for a Tiffany cobweb lamp that Barbra had bought in the sixties for $55,000.

Barbra listened to the auction by phone from Carolwood, saying that she was “thrilled,” especially since all these items had been saved from damage only because she had shipped them to Christie’s before the earthquake. A few days later, Marty Erlichman brought her a surprise. She had expressed regret at letting an Art Nouveau music stand go, so Marty bid $6,900 for it and returned it to her as a gift.

Three months later, A. N. Abell’s Auction Company in Commerce, California, conducted a bargain-basement version of the Christie’s auction. Hundreds of Streisand fans attended the event and bought dozens of practical items like Barbra’s toaster ($90), her waffle iron ($35), her hot-fudge wa
rmer
($99), and her chrome-and-wood coffee set ($100). Tom Colwell bought the coffee set and waffle iron. “I figured,” Colwell explained, “that now when I make breakfast, I will think of her.”

T
he phone lines were jammed at TicketMaster offices across the country on Sunday, March 27, 1994. Barbra had announced her first concert tour in twenty-eight years, with performances in Washington D.C., Detroit, San Jose, Anaheim, and New York City, and her fans were in a frenzy. Despite top ticket prices of $350,
five million
calls were logged by telephone companies across the country during the first morning of ticket sales. Many die-hard fans redialed the TicketMaster number a hundred times an hour for two days, desperately trying to be one of three hundred thousand Streisand admirers lucky enough to get a seat.

Many of those who couldn’t get through paid scalpers up to $5,000 a ticket. For them, any amount of money was justifiable to hear the woman who was generally acknowledged as the greatest pop voice of the century in what would likely be the last large-scale concert appearances of her career.

E
VEN BEFORE THE
full extent of the financial and critical success of the Las Vegas concerts co
uld be
measured, speculation had run high that Barbra would embark on a full-scale concert tour. The prior January 27
Daily Variety
ran a front-page story headlined “Streisand Eyes April for Tour,” in which Marty Erlichman admitted, “We have lots of [venues on hold], lots of different dates.” But he also insisted that “no decision” to tour had been made. A week later Polar Promotions, based in Glasgow, Scotland, ran ads in eight British newspapers in which they offered tickets for Streisand concerts to be held in November in Glasgow and Manchester—at a top price of $80. British fans went into a tizzy, but it soon became clear that the promotion was a fraud. Just days later Marty Erlichman officially announced that Barbra had decided on a “three-month tour of the United States and Europe” that might commence “as early as April.”

Her concerts in Las Vegas were “such a lovely experience,” Streisand said in a statement that accompanied the announcement, that she decided to do a limited tour “to express my appreciation for the love and support I have received for such a long time.”

Marty revealed no specific d
ates or citi
es on the schedule and cited the bogus British promotion and other rampant speculation as his reaso
n for maki
ng such an early and incomplete announcement. On Valentine’s Day, Streisand’s publicist, Dick Guttman, revealed that Barbra would begin her tour at London’s Wembley Arena with concerts on April 20 and 27. Guttman added that although Marty Erlichman was still in talks with promoters in Paris, Canada, and Tokyo, the London concerts would most likely be the only dates Streisand would play outside the United States.

Barbra hadn’t performed live in England since she closed in
Funny Girl
twenty-eight years earlier, and thousands of her loyal British fans scooped up tickets (at a top price equivalent to almost $400) so furiously that two more dates (April 25 and April 29) were added and sold out in less than an hour.

From the outset, many in the media jumped on the financial aspects of the tour as the easiest to exploit into the controversy that apparently must accompany every Streisand endeavor. Why had Barbra, an advocate of inclusionary multiculturalism, and recently the most vocal Democrat not in politics, charged rates for her concerts that even many well-heeled Republicans would find steep? And why were her ticket prices higher than those for upcoming, much-anticipated tours of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and the reunited Eagles?

Streisand defenders pointed out that Barbra’s show had tremendous overhead. She had to lug an enormous complicated set, an expensively produced video presentation, a huge security staff, and over sixty musicians with her from city to city—to say nothing of the princely salary Marvin Hamlisch commanded as her musical director and conductor. (Barbra later admitted that the two shows in Las Vegas had cost her $4 million to produce.) Had she thrown together a simple presentation to play mid-range auditoriums in dozens of cities, Barbra might have been able to keep the prices down. But her fans understood that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and they didn’t seem to care much about having to pay stratospheric ticket prices to see it.

Even the charitable elements of Barbra’s tour drew fire as some observers grumbled about the way tickets had been turned over to various charities by the Streisand camp. The tickets were sold at face value to organizations ranging from a Michigan homeless shelter to an alliance for children’s rights, and the charities then offered them for sale at inflated prices. Many felt the tickets should have been donated outright rather than sold. The press reported that the charity tickets, priced as high as $1,000, were not selling out, but what wasn’t well known was that Barbra bought back any unsold tickets and turned them over to the box office for general sale.

The sniping did little to lessen the huge excitement created by Barbra’s decision to tour. “She is one of the biggest, if not
the
biggest act in the world,” said promoter John Scher of Metropolitan Concerts. “Her limits—ticket price, dates, venue size—are all whatever she wants them to be. She could get any price she wants.” Another Midwest promoter offered, “She could play for years and still not be able to perform for every fan that wants to hear her.”

W
ITH THE NEWS
that the editors of the
Guinness Book of World Records
might include in their next edition the speed with which Barbra’s Wembley Stadium concerts sold out, the Fleet Street press—as hostile as the British fans were supportive—lay in wait for Streisand’s arrival in London on Saturday, April 16. Amid rumors that she would perform behind huge sheets of bulletproof glass and that the ground floor at Wembley would be carpeted to keep her from catching drafts (the rug actually created better acoustics), Barbra took over an entire floor at the Dorchester Hotel and spent three days organizing and rehearsing her show, set to open the following Wednesday.

That evening, before a crowd that included Elton John, Sean Connery, George Michael, Shirley Bassey, and Michael Caine, Barbra offered a show that varied only slightly from her Vegas concerts. “People have been asking me why I decided to perform in Europe after all this time,” she told the audience. “I live in Los Angeles, and if you’d been through earthquakes, riots, and fires, believe me, you’d hit the road too.” Although the huge crowd leaped to its feet eight times for standing ovations during the course of the show, Barbra’s reviews from the often catty British critics were mixed. The
Daily Telegraph
raved, “Great, a true star. She is the supreme communicator.” But the
Guardian
sniffed, “Stilted and hesitant, the Streisand phenomenon defies logic.” The
Times
felt Barbra had provided “a bravura performance for her fans, magic, a diva who delights.”

A frequent complaint of reviewers was that Barbra’s show was overly scripted and that she had relied too heavily on TelePrompTers. Barbra took the issue by the horns the next night: “I went out and said to the people... ‘Look, I use TelePrompTers! I could never
be
here if I couldn’t use [them]. I have a fear of forgetting the words.’... When I was self-conscious about the [prompters], [the press] mentioned them. When I wasn’t, they didn’t.”

On April 24, Streisand celebrated her fifty-second birthday with pasta and champagne at Mimmo d’Ischia restaurant in the company of Steven Spielberg, Carrie Fisher, Elton John, and Michael Caine and his wife. Elliott Gould was also in London but didn’t make Barbra’s guest list. He complained to the
Sunday Express
that his former wife lived like “an empress who wants to be treated as somebody whose intentions and work are perfect.” Then he added, “Do I still love her? She is the mother of my son, so I have no choice.” The
Express
noted that despite Elliott’s “bitchiness,” he had sent Barbra a telegram: “Happy birthday today and every day. You are not only a success, you are a shining and guiding light.”

For the next evening’s concert, Barbra turned over two hundred tickets to be sold to benefit Prince Charles’s charitable foundation. As a salute to the prince, who was in the audience surrounded by Holly Hunter, Priscilla Presley, and Joan Collins, Barbra sang “Some Day My Prince Will Come” and showed a film clip of a brief public encounter she had had with him in 1974 when he visited the Burbank Studios while she was recording the sound track for
Funny Lady
.
(She mistakenly identified the meeting as having taken place during a
What’s Up, Doc?
recording session.)

Recalling that she was distracted by her work and ungracious to the prince that day, she joked to the audience, “Who knows? If I had been nicer to him, I might have been the First
real
Jewish princess.” Following the concert, Charles broke protocol by going backstage to see Barbra, and as she stepped out of her dressing room to greet him in her low-cut velvet gown, he smiled appreciatively and said, “You look pretty good after all these years.” Barbra laughed and replied, “You look pretty good yourself.” Just days later word leaked out about a soon-to-be-published biography,
The Prince of Wales
,
in which Charles admitted that over the years, Streisand had been “My only pinup... she is devastatingly attractive and with a great deal of sex appeal.”

Fleet Street journalists, hungry for any new angle on the romantically dysfunctional royal family, yearned for a relationship to unfurl between “Hollywood’s Queen and England’s future King,” but before the tabloids could drum anything up, Barbra had completed her concerts and flown to the Tuscany region of Italy for a rest before returning to the States on May 4 to prepare for her first American concert date a week later in Washington.