Streisand: Her Life (42 page)

E
LLIOTT WAS DETERMINED
to make love to Barbra. She had returned to their Savoy Hotel suite anxious and wound up after a
Funny Girl
rehearsal at the Prince of Wales Theater in London. She had been jittery for weeks, worrying before they arrived in England about the impending broadcast of
Color Me Barbra
, and now that they were there she had become even more frantic about the play, fretting about lighting and sound problems at the theater, the inadequacy of her dressing room, and a conductor she found incompetent and would soon have fired.

“By then the star thing was really going hard,” Elliott told the authors Donald Zec and Anthony Fowles. Barbra’s frazzled state made it nearly impossible for her to relax, and the Goulds hadn’t had sex in weeks. But this night Elliott set his mind to it. “I really had to talk her down” in order to get her to relax, he said. “I talked her all the way down through the whole encounter.”

Elliott used no contraceptive protection that night because he wanted Barbra to get pregnant. He felt “it would be the best thing” for Barbra to have a baby and “[bring] her mind back down to life.” And his baby was the one thing Elliott could give Barbra that she couldn’t get by herself, that no audience could give her, no amount of money could buy her, and no other man could give her. It was his way of reclaiming some of his self-respect—and reclaiming his wife and his marriage, too. But to his way of thinking, it was a selfless act. “I was thinking of Barbra, not thinking of [the baby] or myself. The best thing I could give her was a child.”

Barbra seems not to have had any say in the decision. When Elliott found out from her doctor that she had indeed conceived, he asked the man not to tell her, because he didn’t want her to know until she had successfully opened her show. In the meantime he tried to hide his Cheshire Cat grin. That night of lovemaking in an elegant suite overlooking the Thames River, he felt, “was the best bit of talking I have ever done.”

S
TREISAND HAD ARRIVED
in England on March 20, 1966, accompanied by her hairdresser, her secretary, and Marty Erlichman. Elliott had arrived a week earlier to find a place to live. He could have been a part of the production, because at Barbra’s behest he was offered the role of Nick Arnstein. But after having wanted the role so badly he turned it down out of pride. He feared it would be said that he’d been hired only because of the power his wife wielded, and he couldn’t have that.

Such talk wouldn’t have been much worse, however, than the slings and arrows he now suffered at the hands of Fleet Street’s journalistic archers, always eager to find a soft underbelly and stick it with barbs. They dubbed Elliott “Mr. Streisand” and “the guy who came to London with Barbra.” Whatever his position, the shadow Barbra cast over him would have been unavoidable, because her arrival generated the biggest wave of publicity England had seen since Marilyn Monroe set foot on its shores in 1956. The newspapers followed Barbra everywhere, took pictures incessantly, asked endless questions. Front-page articles heralded her as the most talented American performer in a generation and the highest-paid entertainer in the world. A
Daily Mirror
article began, “Rarely in the whole bedazzled history of live and lusty entertainment has one box of assorted vocal cords been awaited with such pent-up, electrifying excitement.” All of this generated such a lather of anticipation of
Funny Girl’s
April 13 opening that the show was already sold out for the entire fourteen weeks Barbra had agreed to appear in it.

Barbra adored the gentility of English customs. Serving as hostess in the plush town house flat at 48 Ennismore Gardens that Elliott had found at a rent of $1,600 a month, she would ask visitors, with just a hint of a British accent, “Shall we go into the drawing room?” Then she would grandly offer them tea and avocado sandwiches.

At the Prince of Wales Theater, though, things weren’t so hunky-dory. She really didn’t want to do
Funny Girl
again, but if she had to do it, everything would be exactly the way
she
wanted it to be. The columnist Sheilah Graham reported that the moment Barbra entered her dressing room she walked right back out. Marty Erlichman called the theater to say Barbra wouldn’t return until she had a suite worthy of “a star of her stature.” The management tore down a wall to make the room larger, put up new wallpaper, and brought in some antique furniture to make the place more to Barbra’s liking.

When she returned, she struggled with the sound problems, that unsatisfactory conductor, who was replaced by Milton Rosenstock, and her own lack of excitement. The English actor Michael Craig, cast as Nick Arnstein, recalled seeing Barbra outside her dressing room standing still and looking forlorn after a problem-plagued out-of-town performance. He asked her what was wrong. “Two and a half years ago when I started this show in Philadelphia,” she replied, “it was such fun and everything was marvelous. Now it’s all so difficult and I don’t get any fun out of it anymore.”

She continued to accentuate the negative and take little joy in the positive. She was disappointed with what she perceived as a lackluster reaction from the first-night crowd. “I remember worrying opening night, ‘I don’t think it’s electric out there,
’”
she said. “They were so quiet I only felt the things that were going wrong.” But that silence was just typical British reserve; the audience loved the show and gave Barbra six curtain calls. Even at that she wasn’t sure they really liked her: “Maybe they were only being polite.” She fixated on the few negative reactions to her in the next day’s newspapers, most of which joined in a rhapsody of praise.

One critic wrote “A star is a girl whose voice, face and talent are all familiar and who can still set the blood tingling by the impact of her personality. A star is a girl who can hush a thousand people into silence and a second later make them explode with joy. By these tests and any other you can think of, Barbra Streisand is a star, and
Funny Girl
, which had its official opening after the biggest build-up since D-Day, is her show.”

A second critic weighed in with “Miss Streisand is a miracle. Energy spurts out of every inch of her like electric sparks. She is hardly ever still, but she never makes a conventional movement; every gesture is new and original and unexpected.... How glad I am that I never saw her until now; to have all this talent unleashed on one at the very moment that one has been brought to the highest pitch of expectation is something to remember all one’s life.”

The London audiences never did rouse themselves to the level of ecstasy that her New York audiences had, but Barbra got used to that. Then Princess Margaret and the earl of Snowden came to see the show, and their presence further dampened the proceedings. In keeping with custom, no one in the audience laughed or applauded until the royals did so, and few in Britain are less prone to outbursts of enthusiasm than the Windsors. For Barbra, whose performances tended to ebb and flow with her audience’s reactions, the occasional laughter and mild applause proved disheartening.

After the performance, still dressed in the fringed suede dress she wore in the final scene, Barbra stood in a receiving line to be introduced to the princess and Lord Snowden. When Margaret told Barbra how much she had enjoyed the show, Streisand replied, “You should come back some night when you’re not here.”

I
MMEDIATELY AFTER THE
opening-night performance, Elliott told Barbra that she was pregnant. Her first reaction was horror: how could she have a baby now? She was committed to a twenty-city American concert tour of one-night stands, scheduled to commence in a few months, that would guarantee her $50,000 a performance—one million dollars. She had planned a television special built around the Parisian world of haute couture. And how could she continue to perform such a strenuous role every night? She’d put the baby in danger!

Once again Elliott “talked her down.” Being pregnant didn’t mean she’d have to stay in bed twenty-four hours a day. She could do the “short” version of the show and have some of the livelier numbers like “Cornet Man” and “Rat-a-Tat-Tat” rechoreographed to save her energy. She could keep the early concert dates; she would just have to cancel the others. She didn’t need the money. And she could do the special anytime.

The more she thought about it, the more Barbra liked the idea of motherhood and of taking a break from show business. She had been hurtling forward on a nonstop career express for nearly six years now, working herself close to exhaustion to achieve goal after goal. But there was an unreality about it all, and at times she must have wondered whether her thirst for more, more, more wasn’t her way of avoiding real life. “I was beginning to feel like a slave to a schedule,” she said. “I had to
schedule
in my free time!” As Elliott had put it, it was high time that Barbra brought “her mind back down to life.”

The announcement made news on two continents. The New York
Daily News
gave the story its entire front page with the headline, “Barbra Awaits Million $ Baby.” The emphasis on the lost income her pregnancy would cost her appalled Barbra. “Why do they have to measure everything in money?” she complained. “Is that important? I’ll tell you what’s important. Having a healthy baby, that’s what’s important. For that matter, what’s success? A million dollars doesn’t automatically give you happiness. I used to live well on twenty dollars a week.”