Streisand: Her Life (114 page)

B
arbra was busy editing
The Mirror Has Two Faces
in the summer of 1996, and she didn’t think she’d have time to attend a dinner party that her friend Christine Peters, Jon’s ex-wife, had asked her to. Christine had mentioned there would be about twenty guests, and that she had invited a man she thought Barbra would like. “Who? Who?” Barbra had responded. When Christine mentioned the name James Brolin, Barbra had to think a moment, then she remembered the actor from his TV series
Marcus Welby M.D
., and movies like
The Amityville Horror
and
Gable and Lombard
. “
Nice looking guy
,” she thought, and she told Christine she would come. But when the day arrived, she found herself very busy in the editing bay. “I hate being distracted,” she said. “This was a real imposition, to have to leave my work and go to a dinner party, which I never like to do anyway.” But she had said she would go, so she decided just to put in an appearance. “I told my editors to wait for me. I left around 7:30 and said I’d be back by ten.”

For Brolin’s part, he was initially excited about meeting Barbra, someone he had admired for years. “I was impressed the first time I saw Barbra in 1967 in concert in Central Park. It was more what she said that anything else. A few years later, I was intrigued by her sexy beauty and vulnerability in
The Way We Were.
” Brolin had almost met Barbra several times. They once looked at the same New York apartment, which Brolin leased shortly after Barbra looked at it, and they were both on the Fox lot when Barbra was making
Hello Dolly!
“I can just imagine it,” Brolin said after they met. “She walks past my dressing room, I grab her and pull her in there…It could have been wonderful.” Brolin also recalled driving past Barbra’s place as busloads of people were being taken to hear her
One Voice
concert and wishing he had been invited. Even so, Brolin got cold feet about going to the dinner party in spite of the intriguing notion of being “fixed up” with Barbra Streisand. “I was going to call and cancel. I needed this like a hole in the head. I had so many disappointments in my life, I saw no future in romance.”

Brolin, a Los Angeles native born July 18, 1940, was encouraged to try acting by his friend Ryan O’Neal when both were at University High School in West Los Angeles. 6’4” tall, masculine and handsome, Brolin won his first television acting role in 1961 on the series
Bus Stop
. That led to guest spots on numerous series throughout the sixties, and a recurring role on the show
The Monroes
. He scored a big success as Marcus Welby’s assistant Dr. Steven Kiley. The show ran eight years and won Brolin an Emmy as Best Supporting Actor in a drama, in 1970. By the early seventies, he was starring in major films, playing Clark Gable in
Gable and Lombard
, a husband battling an evil house in
The Amityville Horror
, and other leading roles in some of the most popular films of the era. In 1983 he starred in another hit TV series,
Hotel
, a prime-time soap in which he played the titular establishment’s manager. Connie Sellecca, one of his costars, said of Brolin, “I remember instantly feeling comfortable with Jim, and that’s the thing that Jim has [with] women, they need to feel safe, and Jim gets that.” They remained friends and Brolin was the best man at Connie’s wedding to John Tesh.

Brolin had been less lucky in love than in his career. In 1966, he met the
Batman
television series casting director, Jane Cameron Agee, and married her twelve days later. They had two children, Josh and Jess. Jane was instrumental in getting her husband cast as Dr. Kiley on
Marcus Welby
. But after sixteen years the marriage floundered. “We started going our own ways,” Jane explained. “I think he was running around a lot.” Jane accepted that as one of the pitfalls of being married to a handsome movie star. “I would never have left him just because he had an affair,” she says. But in December of 1983, Brolin met the actress Jan Smithers while working opposite her in an episode of
Hotel
called “Encores.” She was thirty-three, petite and pretty. She had gained renown at sixteen when she was featured on the cover of
Newsweek
as a “typical teen.” Later she played Bailey Quarters on the popular TV series
WKRP in Cincinnati
.

They began to see each other, but Jan refused to continue dating if he remained married, so he moved out of the house he and Jane shared in Montecito. “I thought we’d be together forever,” says Jane. “But I guess if someone is telling him he’s wonderful and I’m telling him to take out the garbage, he’ll end up with the one who’s telling him he’s wonderful.” On the eve of the New Year 1985, Jane heard on the radio that Brolin was filing for divorce. “I felt terrible, she said. “The least he could have done was call.” When Jane heard soon afterwards that Jim and Jan Smithers had staged a mock wedding in Nova Scotia, she grew furious. “I was embarrassed to death,” she said. She hired famed celebrity lawyer Marvin Michelson, and that in turn angered James. He refused to speak to his wife except through his attorney, Howard Weitzman, also a top Hollywood attorney. Mitchelson said that Brolin was worth $5 million, and in California a wife is entitled to 50% of her husband’s assets. Details of the settlement were never revealed, but the divorce was final by the summer of 1984. James and Jan Smithers were married two years later, and in 1987 had a daughter, Molly. But that marriage too dissipated, and Jan filed for divorce in February 1995—just weeks after Jim had learned that his first wife had been killed in an automobile accident. Despite this unfortunate timing, Jan and Jim remained friends and shared custody of Molly.

After two divorces, Brolin felt twice-bitten by love and marriage, and that was the main reason that he hesitated to go on a blind date, even with Barbra Streisand, whom he had found attractive on screen over the years. Finally, though, he did go. At first Barbra didn’t recognize him. She had expected his trademark mane of hair, but he had a military haircut for his role as a Marine Lt. Colonel in the new series
Pensacola: Wings of Gold
. Barbra later said, “It wasn’t that beautiful white hair he has now. He looked like a bullet with stubble.” But as a woman who arranges things, Christine had seated them next to each other, and once they sat down and Barbra had gotten over the tonsorial shock, the other guests noticed something extraordinary happening. The two of them became lost in each other, and it was like the other eighteen guests weren’t there. “They didn’t look up, they didn’t talk to anyone else, I don’t even think they ate,” recalled Brolin’s manager Jeff Wald.

“Once we sat down and started to speak, that was it,” Barbra said. “The whole evening was a blur. Once Jim and I got into conversation, we just sort of locked spirits and forgot everyone else was there.” Brolin felt the same: “Within two minutes I was totally infatuated. We talked all night about flying, computers, music.” As the evening drew to a close, and Barbra abandoned her plans to return to her editing, Brolin offered to drive her home. She demurred, but he insisted until she agreed. They continued their conversation in the car, and when they got to her place, they talked until three in the morning. “God, no, nothing happened!” Barbra said with a laugh. “We were shy. But I went to sleep that night with a smile. I was amazed—that you could actually want to see someone again!”

A few days later, she invited James to her goddaughter Caleigh’s ninth birthday party on October 23. (Caleigh is the daughter of Christine and Jon Peters). They never had a chance to interact much. “Lots of people came between us, and we barely had a chance to speak. At the end of the day, he said, ‘I’ll call you.’ So I expected him to call that night, but he didn’t.” She didn’t feel too badly. “I was into a mode of just being by myself…I thought, this relationship stuff is not for me; it’s too difficult.”

A few days later Jim faxed her: “Respond or I’ll start faxing smut.” He added his phone number and ‘Tonight, yes?’” Barbra thought that was “so cute,” so she agreed to a real date. They took in a movie and talked mostly about how awkward dating can be. Several days later Brolin flew to Manila for two weeks to act in a movie, and he and Barbra burned up the long-distance phone lines. “Sometimes we spoke for hours,” Brolin revealed. “I almost spent my entire salary on the phone bill.” (The bill came to about $10,000!) Barbra recalled once falling asleep with the receiver in her hand. When Brolin returned from the Philippines they both threw caution to the winds and the relationship gained steam. By the end of 1996, Brolin had left his Pacific Palisades condo and moved into Barbra’s three-house compound atop an ocean bluff in Malibu.

To Brolin’s way of thinking, the next step was marriage. He proposed to Barbra repeatedly, but she kept laughing the notion off. “Then one day I realized he was serious.
This
was serious. I think true love comes when the infatuation period wears off and you commit yourselves to each other’s personal growth.” It wasn’t until her fifty-fifth birthday on April 24, 1997 that Barbra said yes to James. He bought her a 9-carat diamond engagement ring, but she felt it impractical to wear all the time. So she exchanged it for a solitaire, 1.16-carat diamond from Tiffany. James didn’t seem to mind, but he did buy another ring a year later, a 3.5 carat oval diamond surrounded by smaller diamonds. The engagement proved a long one—they didn’t marry until July 1998.

On November 11, Barbra released her twenty-seventh studio album,
Higher Ground
, a collection of spiritually uplifting songs including “I Believe/You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the title song, and “On Holy Ground.” It was the last tune that inspired Barbra to make this album when she heard it at the funeral of President Clinton’s mother Virginia Kelley in 1994. Barbra was moved by the young singer of the song and described it as an “electrifying moment.” In her liner notes for the album, Barbra wrote, “I love the sound of a gospel choir, with all its earthly passion...The lyric says that whenever we stand in the presence of God, we’re on holy ground.”

Arif Mardin produced four tracks on
Higher Ground
(“I Believe/You’ll Never Walk Alone”, “Higher Ground”, “If I Could” and “The Water is Wide/Deep River”). He said, “Working on a [Neve Capricorn digital audio console] a few years ago on a Barbra Streisand project, she was in LA and we were in New York and we would mix the song, play it to her over the fiber-optic telephone line, she would critique it, we’d do the changes, and then she would say ‘Oh, what about yesterday’s mix?’ If it wasn’t a Capricorn, the assistant would have [had] to set the mix up, look at his notes, set the [equalizers] and everything. With the Capricorn you press one button and everything is recalled. So with Barbra Streisand, who’s known to be very particular, we mixed five songs in seven days. Would you believe that? She was very happy. So in that domain, it was important that we worked on a digital desk.”