Streisand: Her Life (123 page)

On December 19, 2012 Paramount Studios will release Barbra’s nineteenth film,
The Guilt Trip
, costarring Seth Rogen. All early indications are that the film will be a big Christmas hit. The story concerns Andy Brewster (Rogen) who is about to embark on the road trip of a lifetime. He starts his adventure with a quick visit to his mom Joyce (Streisand), who uses all her Jewish mother wiles to persuade him to bring her along for the ride. Across three thousand miles he is driven to distraction by her antics, but over time he comes to realize that they have more in common than he thought.

The screenwriter Dan Fogelman told
The Jewish Journal
that the movie is “completely about my mom.” Fogelman’s mother, also named Joyce, died at age sixty several years ago. “I took a cross-country road trip with my mother four years ago, before she got sick, as research for a film I wanted to do about a mother and son going on [such a] trip together,” Fogelman said. “We drove from New Jersey to Vegas, so it was basically being locked in a car with your mom for two weeks.

“The autobiographical parts of the movie are two-fold: One, the character Barbra plays—not her story, but her character type—is very much based on my mom. She collects frogs almost religiously (my mom had always collected frogs); she’s obsessive about drinking six bottles of water a day and about Weight Watchers; and she’s got a group of yenta friends that she relies on heavily—that kind of stuff. And then the road trip itself is very much modeled after things that happened to my mom and I on the road. Like, we didn’t think that it would snow in Tennessee, but it did and we got stuck in a blizzard.

“The movie’s theme is basically when you discover that your parent isn’t just a parent but is actually a human being who had a life before you, and the same goes for a mother or a father. It’s the point in their lives when they realize their child is actually a grownup and they have got to let go a little bit. My mom and I were exceptionally close and I really, really dug her. But I couldn’t necessarily start in that place at the beginning of the movie, or the characters would have nowhere to go. So creative liberties were taken with the relationships, as in any movie.”

Originally titled
My Mother’s Curse
, the movie was filmed in Los Angeles and Las Vegas between May 2 and July 14, 2011. Paramount originally planned to release the film, directed by Anne Fletcher (
The Proposal
) around Mother’s Day of 2012, but after seeing the finished product and getting highly favorable screening reactions, they moved it back, first to November and then to the Christmas season, which is usually reserved for pictures that are expected to do very well at the box-office.

Anne Fletcher pursued Streisand for a year before she agreed to play Joyce. “Barbra has a very full life,” Fletcher explained. “But I didn’t want to do this with anyone else. Not only did I need her as a director, but her fans needed to see her in something like this.”

Fletcher told Barbra, “There isn’t going to be a magic lens for you.’” Explaining, she said, “She is breathtakingly beautiful with a gorgeous body. But she had to wear schleppy mom clothes. Moms of this generation still style their hair and wear makeup, but they want comfort. We had to erase Barbra out of it.”

Despite this, photographs from the movie show Barbra actually looking quite lovely. The poster, with the great tag line “Get ready for the Mother of all road trips,” shows Barbra in profile, and she looks forty.

“Barbra was one of the reasons I was interested,” Rogen said. “If she wasn’t in it, I probably wouldn’t have done it with someone else. She is going to kill me for saying this, but when you meet her, she acts like a lot of Jewish mothers. I think she is the blueprint for every Jewish mother I’ve met over the last 30 years.”

O
ver two hundred people contributed their recollections of Barbra Streisand to this book. Most have been quoted in the text; the others were extremely helpful in providing background and insight. Half a dozen people spoke only on the condition of anonymity, and they are thus not listed here. Interviews were conducted by the author of this book and by Chris Nickens and Mike Szymanski between 1992 and 1995:

Charlie Abruzzo, Joe Albertson, Walter Alford, Irvin Arthur, Annabelle Atkins, Tom Atkins, Jonathon Axelrod, Alan Bagenski, Lansing Bailey, Kevin Bannon, Joseph Battaglia, Adrienne Behr, Ron Bergey, Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Gerry Blumenfeld, Abba Bogin, Laura Borenstein, Gary Bornstein, Irving Borokow, Ronnie Brahms, Carolyn Bernstein Brostoff, Robert Brown, Shawn Burns, Artie Butler, Albert Callin Jr., Howard Cates, Cliff Chappell, Emily Cobb, Anita Cohen, Cee Cee Cohen, Ron Col
e
man,
Shanna Coleman, Trude Coleman, Frank Comstock, Anita Miller Cooper, Gordon Cornish, William Corride, John Cotter, Alexander Courage,
Wilm
a Curley, Bill Dager, Joe Darconte, Chico Day, Mrs. Roger De Koven, Jim Dickson.

Bradford Dillman, Bob DiNardi, Marion
Disanto
, Mark Discowitz, Phyllis Dorroshow, Michael Druxman, Maurice Tei Dunn, Maxine Eddleson, Minnie Eddleson, Fred Farber, Walter Finley, Iris Fisher, Ed Fishman, Connie Forslund, Anne Francis, David Frankel, Larry Fuller, Myer Galpern, Sam Galpern, Dick Gautier, George Gaynes, James Geller, Linda Gerard, Stefan Gierasch, Ron Girsch, Richard Gordon, Stewart Gorelick, Billy Gorson, Nancy Grashow, Peter Greenleaf, Eva Greenstein, Michael Greer, Paul Grein, Simon Gribben, Joyce Hannes, Maureen Harmon, Jim Hauser, Marta H
eflin, Richard Heinrich, Milt Hinton, Arno Hirsch, Diane Hirschfeld, Gerald Hockberg,
Alice Blacksin Horevitz, Ben Indick, Jan Ippolito, Ed Isseks, Debbie Iwrey, Steve Jaffe, Judi James, Mike Johnson, Roberta Johnson, Marcia Mae Jones.

Dave Kapralik, Lainie Kazan, Herb Kessner, Guratma Khlasa, Merwyn Saul Kind, Raya King, Robert Klein, Bill Kling, Sylvia Kling, Howard Koch, Leonard Kohn, Ed Kramer, Bernie Kukoff, Don Lamond, Jay Landesman, Marie Lawrence, Phil Leeds, Ernest Lehman, Terry Leong, Jacqueline Goldstein Levine, Natalie Turner Levy, Richard Lewine, Viveca Lindfors, Anna Lopatton, Mike Lubell, Moss Mabry, Ceil
Mack, Mary Manford, Jack Manning, Bob McDonald, Loya McDonald, Michael McGarry, Allyn Ann McLerie, Matt Michaels, Allan Miller, Carol Morgan, Harry Myers, David Newman, Victor Nikaido, Henya Novick, Richard O’Brien, Barbara Sgroi Oishi, David Parker, Debbie Parrish, Austin Pendleton, Bob Perry, Jerry Pomerantz, Dr. Peter Reddick, George Reeder, Eli Rill, Dennis Ritz.

Joan Rivers, Jack Roe, Eleanor Rosenbaum, Stan Rosenberg, Robert Rosenthal, Cynthia Roth, Helen Rothstein, Ted Rozar, Mary Ryan, Nick Salerno, Bob Samuels, Ralph Sandler, Rich Sandler, Arnold Scaasi, Hal Schaefer, Jerry Schatzberg, Robert Scheerer, Norm Schimmel, Ed Schreyer, Bob Schu
lenber
g, Mike Schuman, Bob Scott, Roy Scott, Joseph Seley, Harriet Gellin Selverstone, Howard Senor, Bob Sherman, David Shire, Scott Siegel, Stanley Simmonds,Joy Simmons, Ron Simone, Whitey Snyder, Elaine Sobel, Jane Soifer, Warren Spencer, Judith Jacobsen Sperling, Arnold Stark, Marvin Stein, Adele Lowinson Stern, Emily Schottenfeld Stoper, Harry Stradling Jr.

Bess Streisand, Molly Streisand, Anita Sussman, Todd Sussman, Rochelle Taboh, Linda Mantel Teischer, Gene Telpner, Jerry Vale, Terry Silver Vogel, Ingrid Meighan Waldron, Trudy Wallace, Glenn Walte
r, Ken Wannberg, Henry Warshaw, David Watkin, Esther Waxman, Ruth White, Harvey Wielstein, Les Wielstein, Vance Wilson, Neil Wolfe, James Wright.

M
ANY OF THE
quotes from Barbra, Jon Peters, and Elliott Gould in this book have been culled from numerous interviews they have done over the years with Canadian, British, and European newspaper and television journalists. All three are much franker when talking to reporters in foreign countries, and the material is a treasure trove never utilized by a Streisand biographer before. The interviews are specified in the notes that follow.

PART 1

Major interviews conducted for this section, in order of their quotes, were with Barbra’s aunts Molly Streisand Parker and Beth Streisand, Irving Borokow, Louis Kind’s son Merwyn Saul Kind, Barbra’s Brooklyn neighbors and classmates Maxine Eddleson, Carolyn Bernstein, Diane Hirschfeld, Trudy Wallace, Anita Sussman, Esther Waxman, Marvin Stein, and Cee Cee Cohen; Emily Cobb, Allan Miller, Anita Miller Cooper, Roy Scott, Maurice Tei Dunn, Eli Rill, Bob Schulenberg, Michael Greer, Ted Rozar, Matt Michaels, Elaine Sobel, and Abba Bogin.

Details
of life in Isaac Streisand’s hometown in Galicia came from two articles, one in the July-D
e
cem
ber 1899 issue of
Menorah
entitled “What Can Be Done for the Galician Jews?” and the other in vol. 104 of the
Fortnightly Review
,
1915, “Life in Eastern Galicia.” Th
e N
ew York City Municipal Archives provided birth and marriage certificates for Barbra’s parents and grandparents. Peter Carucci of the State of New York Department of Health provided specifics of the date and time of Emanuel Streisand’s death. The 1910 and 1920 census records of the Department of Commerce were helpful in tracing the
birt
hs, immigration dates, ages, and addresses of Barbra’s forebears, as were the ship manifests held in the New York Public Library.

The biographical listing for Emanuel Streisand in the 1941 directory
Leaders in Education
provided information on his schooling, degrees, and professional achievements.

The separation papers of Diana Kind and Louis Kind, including depositions from both parties, were obtained from the a
rchives of
the Supreme Court of the State of New York in Brooklyn. Some of the quotes from Diana Kind in this section are from an interview with Rebecca Hardy published in the
London Daily Mail
.
Barbra revealed her thoughts as a teenager about losing her father to Geraldo Rivera in an interview televised on November 17, 1983.

Some of the quotes from people who knew Barbra in Detroit are contained in an article in the March 27, 1966,
Detroit Free Press
entitled “Looking Back at the Compleat Detroit Streisand,” and in an article in the October 24, 1968,
Detroit News
,
“Barbra, when.”

Karen Swenson’s five-part article “One More Look at the First Decade” in the British fan magazine
All About Barbra
provided information about Barbra’s early years and about her career through 1972.

Jeff Harris’s quotes are from a 1980 interview with the author of this book.

PART 2

Major interviews for this section were conducted with Wilma Curley, Elaine Sobel, Dav
e Kapralik, Marvin Stein, Lainie Kazan, Allan Miller, George Reeder, Larry Fuller, and Linda Gerard.

Most of the quotes from Arthur Laurents about
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
and from Garson Kanin about
Funny Girl
are from 1980 interviews with the author of this book. Jerome Weidman wrote his reminiscences of Barbra in the November 1963 issue of
Holiday
.
Milton Rosenstock shared his recollections at a symposium conducted by the New York Sheet Music Society on September 8, 1990.

Some of Barbra’s quotes about her life during this period came from an article in the October 1963 issue of
Men’s Digest
.
Elliott Gould’s quotes were gleaned from a number of interviews h
e has given over the years in the U
nited States and in Great Britain. Among them are interviews by Diana Lurie, published in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
in August 1969; Judith Michaelson, the
New York Post
,
May 23, 1970; Trudi Pacter, the London
Sunday Mirror
, J
anuary 22, 1984; Jack Hicks,
TV Guide
,
December 1, 1984; Corinna Horan, the
Courier Mail
,
October 1, 1994; and
Playboy
,
November 1970.

Rafe Chase’s article, “Barbra Streisand at the hungry i,” in
All About Barbra
provided information about that stop on Barbra’s 1963 tour.

Major articles published around this time that contributed information and/or quotes include those in
Time
on April 10, 1964; the New York
Daily News
on April 26, 1964;
Life
on May 22, 1964; and
The New York Times Magazine
on July 4, 1965.

Karen Swenson’s article “Her Special Charms” in the fan magazine
Barbra Quarterly
provided information about Barbra’s television specials. Marty Erlichman reminisced with the author of this book for a special
Billboard
issue, “The Legend of Barbra Streisand,” published on December 10, 1983.

Some of Barbra’s quotes about her pregnancy and Jason’s birth are from
Ladies’ Home Journal
,
August 1966;
Cameo Baby Magazine,
January-February 1967; and
Look
,
July 25, 1967.

Michel Legrand’s quotes are from the book
Barbra Streisand: Une Femme Libre
by Guy Abitan. They were translated by Michel Parenteau.

Rex Reed’s article “Color Barbra
Very
Bright” was published in
The New York Times
on March 27, 1966. Some details of the taping of
Color Me Barbra
were gleaned from an article in
Look
, March 18, 1966.

PART 3

Major interviews contributing to this section were with Jack Roe, David Shire, Robert Scheerer, Anne Francis, Harry Stradling Jr., Ernest Lehman, Arnold Scaasi, Howard Koch, Don Lamond, Milt Hinton, Robert Klein, and Ed Schreyer.