Streisand: Her Life (41 page)

“B
ARBRA’S FAVORITE SUBJECT
is Barbra,” Elliott said. “It bugs me a lot and I get bored by it sometimes.” She had always been self-centered, but now that she was one of the entertainment industry’s most celebrated women there often seemed to her to be no outside world. The Columbia Records art director John Berg described an evening he spent with Barbra in her apartment going over some photos for an upcoming album. He arrived with color slides and a light box at around five-thirty in the afternoon. Barbra greeted him in a housecoat; she and Elliott were expected for a formal dinner at eight at the home of the composer Richard Rodgers.

“We went into the library to make the final selection,” Berg recalled to the author Shaun Considine. “After a while Elliott came into the room, naked except for his Jockey shorts, and he said, ‘Barbra, we’ve got to get dressed to go out.’ And she said, ‘Elliott, don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of time.’ Then seven
P.M.
comes ’round and we’re still editing.... Elliott comes in dressed in a shirt, his shorts, and socks, and says, ‘Barbra, come on, now.’ She kept looking at her photos—yes to this, no to that, and eight
P.M.
comes around.... Elliott is beginning to rage. Barbra is still looking at the slides and says, ‘Just a minute, hon, just a minute.’ And she means that! She thinks it’s just a minute, but Elliott is completely tuxed up, and it’s nine o’clock. I’m beat, worn out.... And Elliott is thoroughly pissed off. He’s going around the apartment yelling, kicking the furniture. Until finally Barbra holds up one slide and says, ‘John, this is it! This is the one.’

“She’s happy. She has chosen her photo.... She sweeps off to change for dinner.”

A
FTER MORE THAN
a year of professional inactivity, Elliott got another job in the fall of 1965, as the leading man in a Broadway musical,
Drat! The Cat!
Having been put through three months of auditions and uncertainty before he got the part, Elliott later said, “They tried very hard to find someone else, but they couldn’t.” The story concerned the unlikely love affair between a cop, played by Elliott, and a cat burglar, played by the lovely eighteen-year-old newcomer Lesley Ann Warren.

Barbra and Elliott had high expectations that the show would be a hit and finally establish him with a star identity of his own. She reportedly invested $
1
00,000 to help keep the show afloat through its out-of-town tryouts. Elliott denied this, saying they had each invested just $750; others have disputed the denial.

In any event, Elliott’s hopes were dashed yet again.
Drat! The Cat!
opened on Sunday, October 10, in the midst of a New York newspaper strike. The magazine reviews were lukewarm, and the show closed six days later. The production would have been completely forgotten except that Barbra had recorded a song Elliott had sung in it, “She Touched Me,” which was released as the single “He Touched Me” in September in an effort to help the show. Barbra’s impassioned performance of the soaring ballad made it a fan favorite.

Elliott again faced the stinging reality that he had failed while everything Barbra touched seemed to turn to gold. “I cried for a week because I couldn’t bear
Drat! The Cat!
closing,” he said. It left him in a sorry state and drove him into psychoanalysis. “I was terribly confused. I lacked confidence, and I subordinated myself to [Barbra] because I always felt, What did I have to offer her? What I did give Barbra wasn’t healthy for either of us—it was my self-respect.”

O
N SUNDAY, DECEMBER
26, 1965, Barbra gave her last performance on Broadway as Fanny Brice. The show continued to run for another year and a half with Mimi Hines as Fanny, but Ray Stark had let Barbra out of her contract in return for her agreement to reprise the role in London the following spring. The English production had also figured in Barbra’s negotiations with Stark over the film version of
Funny Girl:
she had told him she wouldn’t take the show across the Atlantic unless he guaranteed she could do the movie. Stark refused. Barbra asked Marty Erlichman what she should do. “Stick to your guns if you’re prepared to lose the movie,” he told her.

“I wasn’t prepared to lose the movie,” Barbra said, and she agreed to star in the West End production with no film guarantee from Stark. Of course the producer never seriously considered anyone else for the movie, especially after
My Name Is Barbra
proved how lovely Streisand could look on film. Shortly after the special aired, Stark announced that Barbra would indeed be his silver-screen Fanny and had signed to do three additional movies for Stark as well.

Barbra’s final performance on Broadway turned into a standing-room-only love fest as her most loyal fans packed the theater to the rafters to bid her au revoir. None of them realized they were really bidding her adieu, because she would never return to the Broadway stage.

Her performance that night, one critic felt, was “sublime, one of the more incandescent of Streisand’s career.” When she sang “People,” she recalled, “it was as if I had just discovered the meaning of the song. As I sang it I deliberately looked out into the audience. That used to frighten me before, but this night it was like a farewell, and I sang the song to them. I got very emotional.”

When she finished her reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and the show was over, the audience leaped to their feet in a cheering, stomping, screaming ovation. When her turn came to take a solo bow, Barbra spoke haltingly. “I feel as though tonight signals the end of an era in my life,” she began. “Thank you all so much for your support. I’d like to pay tribute to a great performer, the woman I play in the show. Oddly enough I’m standing on the same stage where she did her last Broadway show. So as a tribute to her I’d like to sing this song that she made so famous.”

Barbra then delivered a rendition of “My Man” that left the audience in a frenzy. “God, did she sing that song!” Larry Fu
l
ler said. “When it was finished she was crying and we were crying and the audience was crying.”

Then strangers held hands with each other as the audience sang “Auld Lang Syne” back to Barbra.

“I was sitting in the front row,” Elliott recalled, “thinking about that line, ‘People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.’... Everybody was with her. Everybody was pulling for her.”

B
arbra rushed to her dressing room in tears and slammed the door. Amid the vividly colored surroundings of a whimsical circus set, she had been rehearsing and taping her second television special,
Color Me Barbra,
for over fifteen uninterrupted hours. The animals had caused upsetting and expensive delays. A baby elephant named Champagne trumpeted so loudly that a young llama panicked and bolted, dragging his trainer after him. A frisky monkey tried to make a meal of three of Barbra’s fingers. A lion broke free and roamed about the set growling menacingly for several tense moments. Worst of all, a penguin, unaccustomed to the hot studio lights, had withered and died. At that point Barbra, tired and stressed out, lost her composure and f
l
ed to the sanctuary of her dressing room.

A year earlier she had found working on her first special a joyful experience, but the punishing demands of this one brought her close to collapse. The death of the penguin seemed to symbolize every unforeseen mishap the production had encountered, and Barbra still had a full concert sequence to shoot two days after she completed the circus segment. Her discomfort was magnified by a battalion of magazine writers, newspaper reporters, and photographers who were there to scrutinize every moment of the taping for profiles in
Life, Look, Newsweek,
and
The New York Times,
among others.

Barbra’s frame of mind didn’t help. The crushing expectations that her fame and her relentless pursuit of excellence had placed on her brought on her most negative mind-set to date. She distrusted the intense devotion of her growing legion of admirers and was convinced that others came to her performances with a “show me” attitude. “It makes me feel that they’re the monster and I’m their victim,” she said. Less guarded around the press than she should have been, Barbra seemed to do nothing but complain. She told Rex Reed, “I always used to dream of a penthouse, right? So now I’m a big star, I got one and it’s not much fun. I used to dream about terraces, now I gotta spend five hundred dollars just to convert mine from summer to winter.... It’s just as dirty with soot up there on the twenty-second floor as it is down there on the bottom.” For many of those who were still “on the bottom,” such comments seemed little short of ungrateful whining.

J
UST DAYS AFTER
she closed in
Funny Girl
, Barbra had reported to the CBS studios to film a short color test. The success of
My Name Is Barbra
had prompted the network to agree to shoot Barbra’s follow-up production in color, still a television rarity in 1966. For this show, which Barbra envisioned as a bookend to the first, most of her collaborators from the previous year regathered.

Filming commenced the third week of January. Once again the show revolved around a three-act blueprint, and the problems had begun almost immediately. Soon after three special Marconi color cameras arrived in Philadelphia, where Barbra was to film Act One in the Philadelphia Museum, two of them broke down. Because they were so new as to be practically experimental, there were no repair technicians available outside New York, so the blocking and choreography of the entire segment had to be redesigned for a single camera. Luckily, a snowstorm hit Philadelphia that weekend and the museum, expecting only minimal attendance, agreed to let the
Color Me Barbra
troupe stay on for an extra day. “I got a kick out of asking them to move a million dollars’ worth of paintings,” Barbra told one writer, “simply to provide an appropriate backdrop for a song. It was fun, but it took so much time. Technicians were falling asleep.”

Many onlookers were astounded by Barbra’s stamina, which often lasted into the smallest hours of the morning. Others noted that her energy was fueled by a gastronomically challenging diet of kosher pickles, stuffed derma, pretzels, potato chips, sour green tomatoes, stuffed gefilte fish, hamburgers, and a variety of sandwiches, all washed down with coffee, orange juice, ginger ale, and cream soda and topped off with coffee ice cream, jelly beans, peppermint sour balls, and petits fours.

The sustenance proved necessary. “Barbra worked almost thirty-two hours straight,” marveled one reporter. “She began Saturday at noon: try on costumes, submit to hairdresser, apply rhinestones to upper eyelids. At 6:00
P.M.
she stepped before the camera. The shooting went on all night [and all day Sunday]. Lights blew out, cables snapped... but nothing fazed Barbra’s remorseless preoccupation with self.”
Look
also duly reported that Elliott was on the set and that he “rubbed her back and held her hand” during breaks.

After less than a day’s rest, Barbra returned to Manhattan to record the songs needed for the circus sequence, and on Tuesday, January 25 she reported to CBS Studio 41 to rehearse and tape the segment. A minute of screen time of Barbra jumping on a trampoline required three hours of intense rehearsal and nine takes before the camera. After a few awkward flops, Barbra finally got the hang of it, although on one landing she crashed heavily to the canvas and bounced uncontrollably as Joe Layton and Marty Erlichman held their breath. “What I won’t do for the television audience,” Barbra gasped as she climbed down from the trampoline.

“It’s not for them,” Layton replied. “It’s for you.”

As the hours dragged by, the animals proved to be a handful, and Barbra grew more and more tense. Horrified when the penguin died, Barbra finally gave in to exhaustion and frustration and stormed off the set. Rex Reed was unaware of the bird’s death and grew resentful, as did the other reporters, at being kept waiting three hours to see Barbra and then have her say, “Okay, ya got twenty minutes. Whaddya wanna know?” Reed characterized Barbra’s behavior in
The New York Times
as typical star temperament, a petulant ego run rampant. Peter Matz felt Reed was unfair. “Sometimes people don’t want to accept a simple explanation for something happening because the person involved is too powerful, too big a star,” he said. “Barbra is intensely vulnerable, and yet people want to go right past that and say, ‘Aw... she’s just being a star.
’”

Back on the set, Barbra dug in her heels and performed the circus medley and a comic monologue flawlessly, though it would ultimately take another thirty-hour workday to complete the taping. Her nerves were shot. At one point, overwrought, she screamed that there were “too many people not connected with the show” milling around the set, “too many people staring at me.”

On Friday evening Barbra returned to the studio, which had been converted from the circus set into an elegant concert stage, to tape the final act of the show. Members of several East Coast Streisand fan clubs were recruited to fill the theater seats, and they applauded wildly in response to the five songs Barbra performed to close the show. But when Dwight Hemion asked her to do two of the numbers again, Barbra demanded that the audience be dismissed.

“Tell them to go away,” she reportedly told Marty Erlichman. “I hate them. I
hate
them.” Marty and Hemion argued with Barbra for half an hour while the fans waited in their seats unaware of what was going on. Finally they convinced her that without the audience the sound quality of the new takes wouldn’t match that of the earlier ones. Returning to the stage to a thunderous ovation, Barbra sang the two songs and, after a brief bow, headed for the control room to watch a playback.

As with many projects that are strife-ridden during production,
Color Me Barbra,
telecast on Wednesday, March 30, 1966, at 9:00
P.M.
showed few signs of its production
meshugass.
Only during the brief concert that closed the special were the tensions of the prior week evident in Barbra’s performance. Despite the enthusiastic audience, she seemed uncomfortable as she attacked the material. The orchestra sometimes had trouble keeping up with Barbra’s tempo, and during the orchestral bridge on “Where Am I Going?” Barbra turned away from the microphone as though she were about to halt the performance. It’s possible that she distrusted the audience’s unrestrained reactions to some of these less-than-perfect performances and that this provoked her desire to repeat the songs in an empty theater.

Reviews for
Color Me Barbra
echoed, for the most part, those of the first special. Although
Time
magazine’s assessment was harsh—“The show proved that one full hour of Streisand’s particularly nasal voice is about forty-five minutes too much”—and there were scattered minor carpings about the show’s “overblown production,” the vast majority of critics raved.
Newsweek
called the special “a one-woman tour de force of song and sex appeal,” and
The New York Times
added, “In color, the museum settings were magnificent, the circus was happy, and Miss Streisand looked gorgeous.”

Indeed, the most important contribution
Color Me Barbra
made to Barbra’s career might well have been the color itself. She had looked interesting and exotic in black and white, but the lighting required for the color camera softened her looks, producing a lavender tint in her eyes and a porcelain glow on her skin.
Color Me Barbra
offered further evidence that Streisand’s unconventional looks would likely prove no barrier to her expected leap to movie stardom.

Color Me Barbra
was another ratings champ, but the Sunday before the show was aired Rex Reed had dampened the glow with a profile of Barbra published in
The New York Times.
The article, “Color Barbra Very Bright,” established Reed as a sharp-witted, incisive celebrity chronicler, but it also single-handedly launched the Barbra-as-monster legend. It was the first high-profile piece to paint Streisand as an unreasonable perfectionist who was demanding, paranoiac, rude, driven, arrogant, and contemptuous of her fans. While no one connected with the production of
Color Me Barbra
would have denied that there were elements of truth in Reed’s article, many felt, as Peter Matz did, that the huge pressures Barbra shouldered—and the vulnerability that her apparent arrogance was meant to conceal—had been grossly ignored.

“Why should I write nice things about Barbra?” Reed protested privately. “She never invites me to any of her parties.” A few years later, when Reed was at the peak of his fame, he sent Barbra an apology for the piece. She spurned the olive branch. “Fuck him,” she snorted. “I had more respect for him when he hated me.”