Streisand: Her Life (111 page)

Barbra’s concert commitments forced her to decline an invitation to attend the inauguration in Pretoria of Nelson Mandela as the president of South Africa. The former New York mayor David Dinkins hand-delivered a message from Barbra to Mandela: “Your election stands as one of the great moments in our lifetime, the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream.... I cherish our friendship and look forward to greeting you soon as Mr. President.”

O
N MAY
10, Barbra launched her American tour at the USAir Arena in Washington, D.C., where she had sung for Clinton’s inaugural a year earlier. The president and Mrs. Clinton were there again, along with hundreds of other Washington power brokers from both parties. Barbra reminded the crowd that her first trip to Washington had been in 1963 when she sang for John F. Kennedy, and she couldn’t resist complaining about her recent treatment by the press. She got a big laugh when she told the audience, “I once confessed in an article that I used to steal bubble gum when I was a kid from this candy store. So I could never run for office... even if I wanted to, which I don’t—get this right guys, I
don’t!
—[because] I know this would come out. I can just see the headlines now, ‘Bubblegate!
’”

Always tinkering with the song format of her show, Barbra now included a show-stopping medley of songs from
Yentl
and added a rousing “Somewhere” for her last encore, replacing the more downbeat “For All We Know.” Reviews for the concerts were uniformly excellent.
Newsweek
said, “For two hours of video recollections, thirty songs, and a liberal dose of liberal politicking, the First Voice ruled a senate’s worth of congressmen, cabinet members, and judges.”

T
HE STREISAND CARAVAN
moved on to Michigan, where Barbra played three dates at the Palace in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills. She won over the locals when she announced early in her first concert on May 15 that her decision to perform in Detroit was “a sentimental journey” because her engagement at the Caucus Club in 1961 had been her first nightclub gig outside New York. “I remember all the friends I made here,” she said, “and how nice everyone was to me. I remember my friends who used to come to every show and take me into their homes and feed me... and I
never
forget people who feed me.” As she recalled the old days, Barbra mentioned from the stage that she was trying to locate her Caucus Club pianist, “Mike Matthews.” Columnist Mitch Albom reported the next day that “some guys in Streisand’s orchestra” had dined after the show at a restaurant where they ran into Matt Michaels and told him that Barbra wanted to give him a couple of tickets to the show.

Streisand’s staff left tickets for him at the box office for the next evening.

This time Streisand got his name right when she introduced him from the audience, and she greeted him warmly backstage. “She hugged me,” Michaels said. “She said it was good to see me and that she still uses some of my arrangements.”

In Detroit, the physical challenge of performing live for two-plus hours every other night got to Barbra. “I thought, I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next fifteen shows,” she later admitted. “It’s a lot of breathing; you have to be in pretty good shape. And I don’t work out vocally, I don’t practice. It’s the most boring thing you can imagine, doing scales. So I just said, ‘Fuck it, I can’t.’ I’m just too tired the next day after a concert.”

Finally the rigors of the tour affected her health. Although it wasn’t apparent to her audience, Barbra performed her final Detroit concert with a 102-degree fever. After her doctor diagnosed her ailment as viral laryngitis, she announced the postponement of the first four of the six dates of her next stand, in Anaheim, scheduled for May 25-31. “She feels lousy,” a spokesman for Barbra, Ken Sunshine, said. “She’s been ordered not to talk at all. Barbra feels terrible about any inconvenience this has caused fans. People have flown in from all over the world.” As Barbra lay bedridden at Carolwood, communicating by scribbling on a notepad, the four canceled shows were rescheduled for
July 18-24.

Less than two weeks later, although she wasn’t completely recovered, Barbra opened at Anaheim’s Arrowhead Pond to rapturous fan reaction and rave reviews. “In a dazzling multimedia tour de force, La Streisand showed the opening-night audience why she is so worthy of all the hoopla,” said the
Orange County Register.
“In this realm,” wrote the
Hollywood Reporter
,
“no one can touch Barbra Streisand.” During the concert, to jokingly confront rumors that she hadn’t really been ill but just wanted to take a break, Barbra borrowed a comedy st
ap
le of David
Letterman’s and read a Top Ten List of the
real
reasons she had interrupted her tour. The list, which garnered big laughs and reams of publicity the next day, included these items: “Number eight, I didn’t know it would take a whole week to dust all this furniture. Number seven, I was at home waiting for the cable guy. Number five, I wanted to get Barbra Streisand tongue depressors into the boutiques. Number three, I thought my concert tour needed more publicity. Number two, it took me three days to read Dan Quayle’s new book—and four days to correct the spelling. And number one, there was a shoe sale at Nordstrom’s.”

O
N THE NEXT
stop of the tour, San Jose, Barbra stayed in nearby San Francisco at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. She leased an entire floor, rented all of the rooms on the floor below for security reasons, and had the hotel lay white carpeting over the gray rugs in her rooms at a cost to her of $50,000. Apparently because of a sudden (and short-lived) fear of flying, Barbra motored from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a Winnebago. The concerts at the San Jose Arena went typically well, in spite of a truly scathing review from the right-wing
San Francisco Chronicle
, a longtime Streisand nemesis.

F
OLLOWING A JUNE
13 state dinner at the White House, to which she was escorted amid tremendous publicity (and romance rumors) by the television news anchorman Peter Jennings, Barbra moved on to New York, where she opened at Madison Square Garden on June 20 for four dates. Although the Anaheim makeup concerts in July had spoiled her plan to conclude the tour in her hometown, she approached the Manhattan dates as the highlight of the tour, and they proved to be just that. Her opening night brought out the usual coterie of celebrities, including Liza Minnelli, Barbara Walters, and Peter Jennings, and most notably the frail eighty-eight-year-old Jule Styne, in his last public appearance before his death three months to the day after the concert. Styne, teary-eyed, received an ovation when Barbra dedicated “People” to him. “This is beyond excitement,” he told
USA Today
.
“I have no doubt she’s the greatest singer ever in my lifetime.”

Although she had savored nightly doses of adoration since the start of the tour, Barbra was overwhelmed by the reaction of the New York fans. “I knew she would probably be very nervous,” said Ellen Silver, who was in charge of VIP seating for Madison Square Garden, “and she was. But she was so happy when she was so well received. The audience went berserk and there was just such an outpouring of love that she was
fahrklempt
at one point herself! You could see she was close to crying. It was that overwhelming.”

Liz Smith called the concert “Sublime and utter perfection.... Age has, if anything, improved Barbra’s astonishing voice. As [she] hit the final soul-searching notes of the evening’s last song, I thought the top of my head—and the roof of the Garden—would come off! All about her were hysterical, but Barbra was in total, brilliant control—the calm glittering eye of her own self-created hurricane.”

Under a tongue-in-cheek headline—“Local Girl Makes Good, Sings”—
The New York Times
noted that “The concert wasn’t exactly a song recital. It was kind of a state visit with a woman who has proved herself as singer, actress, director and producer, who is now returning in triumph to her most uncontroversial calling: the Tin Pan Alley songbird.” The most derisive notice Barbra received in New York came from Rex Reed, who spent most of his review complaining that Streisand wasn’t Judy Garland. “Great singing comes from the soul,” Reed proclaimed, “but she’d rather have her press-on nails (read talons) ripped off than reveal her inner self. This is why I prefer Judy on a bad day to Barbra in peak form. Babs puts up a wall. Judy kicked it down so the audience could touch her, and they jumped out of balconies to do it.” (Apparently Reed would have preferred Barbra to forget lyrics, ramble incoherently in the middle of songs, perform with barely a voice to call on, and pass out onstage the way Judy did on some of her bad days.)

During Barbra’s stay in New York, which was extended to accommodate two more shows “for fans only,” the local press covered her every move.
New York
magazine featured a pull-out illustrated map that pinpointed the various addresses in Barbra’s Brooklyn and Manhattan history; the
Daily News
ran a series of biographical articles; and the
Post
held a daily “Barbra Watch,” with reporters and photographers camped outside her Central Park West building for weeks to catch her, which they finally did toward the end of the stand. Streisand hadn’t received so much newspaper space in New York since the fevered first days of
Funny Girl
on Broadway.