Streisand: Her Life (38 page)

On the set of
Hello, Dolly!
with her eighteen-month-old son Jason, summer 1968. One of Jason’s first words was “hat.”
(Richard Giammanco collection)

Streisand opens the International Hotel in Las Vegas, July 1969. She had to wear a hard hat during rehearsals because the showroom wasn
’t
completed.

Posing with her Best Actress Oscar for
Funny Girl,
April 1969. With her are Jack Albertson (right), and Anthony Harvey (left),
w
ho
accepted for Barbra’s co-winner, Katharine Hepburn.
(Richard Giammanco collection)

Barbra’s grandparents Anna and Isaac, whom she hadn’t seen for years, came to see the show a few weeks into the run and proudly posed for a picture with her in her dressing room. Later that year Isaac died at the age of eighty-five; Anna lived another ten years. Barbra didn’t attend either funeral. Other, more distant, members of her family clamored to get free passes to
Funny Girl.
“Oh, God,” she said to Ceil Mack, “I’ve got more cousins than I ever dreamed. They’re coming out of the woodwork.”

Her sister, Roslyn, now thirteen and totally starstruck by Barbra’s success, saw forty Saturday matinees of
Funny Girl
in a row. After each show she would hang around outside the stage door like all the other Streisand fans in the hope of seeing Barbra. “Roz was a little shy,” her mother explained, “and she didn’t know how to approach a big sister who had gotten so famous.” Roslyn, timid, awkward, very fat—192 pounds on a five-foot-two-inch frame—fit right in with the hangers-on. She appeared so matronly that when the others found out she was related to Barbra, one of them asked, “Are you her aunt?”

When she told them who she was, the fans were skeptical. “If you’re really her sister,” someone asked, “why don’t you go inside instead of hanging around here with the rest of us.”

“I would like to,” she replied softly, “but I don’t want to impose.”

Her obesity caused Roslyn deep unhappiness. “I was encased in fat,” she said, “wrapped up in it. You get in a shell and after a while you want to stay there. Total disaster. Kids at school called me Fatso. I had no boyfriends.” At the
Funny Girl
opening night Barbra, who hadn’t seen her sister for months, looked at her and said, “Gee, you really look like a
big
girl now.”

“That hit me right in the heart,” Roslyn said. Still, she worshiped her celebrated sister.

“At home,” Mrs. Kind said, “Roslyn would play the
Funny Girl
album day and night and imitate Barbra. She was really her best imitator.”

A
ND THEN THERE
was Elliott. Barbra’s phenomenal success had swept him up in its tide, and often now he felt adrift on the crest. He could laugh, he professed, about being called Mr. Streisand, but her total professiona
l
dominance over him was harder to accept. “To have a relationship with someone as successful as Barbra made it difficult for me to face or find myself,” he said.

Their world revolved around Barbra now. Everything seemed to be in her service, including Elliott. He waited for her in their car every night after the show, ready to drive her home. “I felt sorry for him,” Ceil Mack said. “I remember thinking, What is he, her chauffeur now?”

When Barbra bought a used Rolls-Royce, Elliott actually put on a chauffeur’s cap and drove her around town. It was meant as a goof, but there was more symbolism inherent in the gesture than either of them probably realized, because Elliott had allowed himself to buy into Barbra’s fantasies. “A person with the romantic emotions of an actor can be unduly impressed by limousines and living in big places,” he said.

Later he added, “I hated Barbra supporting me. It is essential for a man to support his woman.” But how was he to do that without work? He had wanted the role of Nick Arnstein but “couldn’t get the job. I’m more talented than all the guys who played Nicky Arnstein put together.” Barbra could have insisted that Elliott be given the part, but she didn’t. Asked if she wanted him to play the role, Elliott replied, “I don’t know.”

He had a lot of time on his hands, time he often spent playing three-man pickup basketball games in Manhattan school yards. He also became deeply involved in gambling on sporting events. “I bet on every game on the boards, thousands on a game,” he told
Playboy.
“I wasn’t very successful.” Eventually he would lose $50,000 on one football season. And every night on Broadway his wife played a woman whose success overshadowed that of her husband, an inveterate gambler on a losing streak. Art was imitating Fanny and Nick’s life onstage, and Barbra and Elliott’s life was imitating art offstage. Elliott told himself that his idleness was in service to his love, that he needed to attend to his marriage. “Possibly that gave me an excuse not to look for work,” he admitted. “I was afraid I wouldn’t get it, afraid to go out on my own.”

As if to complete this sorry syndrome, Elliott’s few efforts to strike out on his own failed. Less than a month after Barbra opened in
Funny Girl
, he flew to Jamaica to appear in a film,
The Confession
, along with Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland. The budget was low, his part as a deaf mute who is miraculously cured at the end of the story was small, and the picture was shelved for seven years until it came and soon went under the title
Quick, Let’s Get Married.
It later turned up on television renamed yet again as
Seven Different Ways.
Later, Elliott did not list it among his credits.

In June
1
964,
Once Upon a Mattress,
a television version of the Princess and the Pea legend which Elliott had taped in March, was aired over CBS. It was a ratings success, but Elliott’s role as the Prince was largely forgotten in the glow of Carol Burnett’s hilarious comic performance as the princess.
W
hile Barbra negotiated a $5 million dollar deal with the same network for a series of specials of her own, Elliott received no other offers of television work.

B
ARBRA WAS JUST
about to reach the moment in “People” when she would look at Nick Arnstein and turn the song from a generalized statement to a personal expression of her feelings for Nick. Just then her eyes fell on Sydney Chaplin’s face and she lost her concentration, and very nearly her place in the song. Chaplin, his back to the audience, was grunting and mumbling obscenities at her, loudly enough so that she feared the audience would hear him. Shocked and disconcerted, she barely got through the song. “He would actually be talking to try to upstage her while she was singing ‘People,
’”
cast member Linda Gerard recalled. “He would be doing things that were so ridiculous and so amateur-night-in-Dixie.”

A few days earlier, Barbra had ended her affair with Chaplin, and the gentleman was highly displeased. He reacted with a year of contentious behavior that culminated in Barbra’s bringing him up on charges before Actors’ Equity and, finally, his early departure from the show. “It was a scorned affair,” Chaplin’s understudy George Reeder recalled, “and they were at each other’s throats.”

Nearly every night Chaplin muttered sotto voce obscenities at Barbra during their intimate scenes. He changed bits of business and dialogue on her, throwing her off stride. When they passed each other leaving or entering the stage, George Reeder recalled, Chaplin would purposely brush up close to her. “Not a big, obvious thing, but enough to knock her off balance.”

According to Larry Fuller, “Sydney was extremely angry at her. He’d grumble and say things behind the set about her as she waited to go on. I never spoke to her at those moments out of respect for her preparation as an actress. But Chaplin would complain to me about her loud enough for her to hear. I could quite often feel the tension onstage between them because his anger was so voluminous.”

In August, Chaplin gave an interview to the New York
Daily News
that revealed some clues to his state of mind. His words tinged with bitterness, Chaplin said of his role as Nick Arnstein, “I’m sort of nobody—a straight man for Barbra Streisand. I’m a guy in white tails, a snob—the audience doesn’t root for me. At the end of the play, I kick the dog, slap the baby—I leave Fanny. I’m lucky the audience doesn’t wait outside the theater to lynch me.”

Chaplin continued to vex Barbra, and in September Ray Stark called the two stars into a meeting. Barbra pleaded with Chaplin to tell her what she was doing wrong. All he would say was that the writing of the show was terrible. But, George Reeder recalled, he had refused to accept any new dialogue in rehearsal, saying, “I don’t have to learn these lines—my uncle just gave me one million dollars.” He also would no longer accept notes criticizing his performance, notes he knew originated with Barbra. “I’m tired of doing the show her way!” he barked. “I’m going to do things
my
way!”

Backstage at one performance, Chaplin shouted, “Christ, what a vulgar audience!” loud enough for a good portion of that audience to hear him. Furious, Barbra picked up a prop and threw it on the floor. “Just shut up and follow the script,” she hissed.

During intimate scenes, George Reeder recalled, Chaplin took to whispering “
nose
” in Barbra’s ear. At one intermission, she ran back to her dressing room in tears, and the stage manager, Tom Stone, had to use all his powers of persuasion to get her to take the stage again for the second act.

The battles escalated. “We would actually hear shouting in the halls,” George Reeder said. “Yelling and slamming of doors, that kind of thing,” Lainie Kazan recalled that Chaplin “had a foul mouth. Every other word was a four-letter word. I’m sure he couldn’t understand this young girl usurping him and his position in the theater or his position with the producers... I heard Sydney saying some things that were not very kind about Barbra.”

Larry Fuller added, “I never saw him do anything threatening to her. I just saw him be extremely angry.”