Streisand: Her Life (43 page)

B
ARBRA PLUNGED INTO
impending motherhood with the same gusto she had brought to her career. “I went to Harrods and bought skeins of wool, all different shades of pink.” Within a week she met reporters in the Ennismore Gardens house with knitting needles and wool in hand. Her industry didn’t last long. “I knitted like mad for a week, and then I got bored. I think I’ll just have the baby and be done with it.”

Although she claimed that she didn’t care about the sex of her child, it seems clear that Barbra wanted a girl. Not only was there that pink wool, but whenever she referred to the child she almost always used the pronoun “she.” She told Gloria Steinem that if the child was a girl, her name would be Samantha. Should the child be a boy, she and Elliott had agreed on Jason Emanuel, after their friend the artist Jason Monet and Barbra’s father.

Barbra became an adherent of Britain’s Dr. Grantley Dick-Read, a pioneer in the modern natural-childbirth movement. “I can’t understand how some women can just say, ‘Give me an injection,
’”
she explained in an interview with
Cameo Baby Magazine.
“That attitude is based on fear and on a lack of knowledge of the process of birth.... Believe me, I hate pain, but delivering a baby is a natural thing that the body is designed to do.... For me, it’s too important an experience to be uninvolved.”

O
N JUNE
12, showing just a little, Barbra headlined a benefit performance at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square called “A Very Informal History of the American Musical Theater: 1926-1966.” In the two-hundred-seat embassy theater, Barbra sang “Where Am I Going?” accompanied on piano by the tune’s composer, Cy Coleman. Then she told the audience, which included Yehudi Menuhin and Noel Coward, that when it came time for her to choose what songs to sing at the event, “It was a very hard decision because, I don’t mean to brag, but our country really has produced some terrific music. I was looking for one hunk of music that would sort of represent or embody—express, you know—sort of capture America. And so I decided that would be—for me anyway—George Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess.
When you think of it, I mean, in terms of its many facets: being a folk opera, having the influence of the American Negro blues, spirituals, jazz, pop music, and grand opera, also with a little trace of Georgie’s own Russian Jewish background. I think it sort of represents America, which is a beautiful mishmash. That’s it, kid.”

The next day
The New York Times
called the evening “an extraordinary one-night stand. Miss Streisand, looking sleek and a little pregnant in a glittering long evening gown, won the hearts of the audience even before she sang.... [She] made even the familiar numbers from
Porgy and Bess
distinctively her own.”

B
ARBRA GAVE HER
nine hundredth and last stage performance in
Funny Girl
on Saturday, July 16, 1966. And for her, not a moment too soon. By then she was not only thoroughly sick of the show intellectually but barely able to keep up physically with even its reduced demands. New blocking had cut down Fanny’s “running around on stage,” Barbra said, “and you can bet I don’t do a flying leap to the couch in the love scene anymore.” Still, at the completion of every show she was near exhaustion. “I’m so tired all the time,” she said. “All I want to do is sleep.”

She didn’t have much time to rest, however, once she returned to the United States on July 18. After just two days at home, she flew to Las Vegas to appear at a Columbia sales convention and perform several numbers from her upcoming album
Je m’appelle Barbra
, in which she would sing French songs in both English and French. The Columbia brass had prevailed upon her to show up because they were concerned about the sales potential of the esoteric project.

Just over a week later, on July 30, Barbra made the first stop on her concert tour, which had been reduced from twenty cities to six—and then to four—because of her pregnancy. Accompanied by Elliott, Marty Erlichman, her friends Dr. Harvey and Cis Corman, a fifty-foot dressing trailer and her own orchestra, Barbra sang and joked on a cool moonlit night at Festival Field in Newport, Rhode Island, site of the Newport Jazz Festival. Wearing a diaphanous gown—the left side orange, the right side brown—with one orange and one brown shoe and earrings to match, Barbra beguiled the sixteen thousand people in the audience, who had paid a top ticket price of fifteen dollars—expensive in 1966—and listened to her in rapt silence. “You’re so quiet,” she said at one point. “Are there really sixteen thousand of youse out there?”

She sang a selection of her standards, some songs from the French album, and some new special material. As a prelude to a folk song parody, she started to tell an absurd story of a girl from Cambodia who was going to kill herself when she lost her lover to her sister, but the audience didn’t respond as she had hoped they would. Barbra stopped. “You’re not laughing,” she said, “so I’m not singing.”

She saved the night and sent the audience home with a dose of magic by ending the balmy summer evening’s concert with “Silent Night,” sung as a haunting hymn. She left the Boston
Herald American
columnist Bruce McCabe beside himself with admiration. “Listening to Barbra... is something like having your soul massaged. Like being infused with an electric charge.... That’s Barbra. Barbra of the thunder and lightning, wind and rain, spring and fall, darkness and light. One is captured, enslaved by her.”

The one-night stand netted $121,000, which was $41,000 more than Frank Sinatra had attracted in Newport a year earlier. By now Marty Erlichman was on a crusade to make sure that Barbra made more money per gig than any other performer ever had. For her second appearance at Forest Hills the year before, he had gotten Barbra one dollar more than the Beatles had been paid at the same venue. Ticket prices at all of Barbra’s concerts now were calculated to ensure that she would break records wherever she performed.

Barbra repeated her Newport triumph in Philadelphia on August 2, in Atlanta on August 6, and in Chicago on August 9, raking in a total of $406,618 at the four venues and taking home $200,000 for four nights’ work. In Philadelphia, a death threat against her was phoned in to JFK Stadium. Phyllis Dorroshow, who was in the audience, recalled that “Elliott Gould was standing up front with the security guards. He was keeping an eye out, and he looked like he was ready to jump anybody who pulled a gun out. Of all the guards he was the most intent on scanning the crowd.” There were no problems.

Barbra’s performance at Soldier Field in Chicago marked the last time she would appear in public for the next eight months. Now it was time to go home, relax, and turn her attention to becoming a mother.

“W
HEN I WAS
pregnant, at least the last four months,” Barbra said, “I was a woman. No deadlines or curtains to meet. Whenever I thought of what was growing inside me... it’s a miracle, the height of creativity for any woman.”

She had worried about morning sickness, but never experienced it. She sat around a lot eating brownies, and her inactivity caused her to gain weight. “I think I’ve always had a secret desire to be fat. Skinny kids are always being pestered about eating—especially if you have a Jewish mother.” Mrs. Kind was delighted, of course, but Barbra’s pediatrician wasn’t. The weight gain was excessive, he thought, and he told Barbra to watch her calories. “My first diet!” she marveled.

Barbra told Gloria Steinem that when she was a child she couldn’t envision having a normal life. “I would try to imagine my future, like other kids, but I couldn’t. It just stopped. There was a big blank screen, no husband, no children, nothing.” Now, amid all of her achievements, she viewed her impending motherhood as her greatest triumph. As Elliott had hoped, Barbra had come back down to earth. She had stationery printed that put the third a back in her name, as if to say, “Now I’m a wife and mother first and foremost. Barbra is a creation, an image, a show business commodity. Barbara Joan Streisand, the little girl from Brooklyn, is the
real
me.”

Elliott told a reporter that he expected Barbra would give up her career for her family—if not immediately, then before very long. His hope sprang eternal even as she went back to work. Throughout September she spent long hours at Columbia’s recording studios putting the finishing touches on the
Je m’appelle Barbra
album. The idea for Barbra to sing French songs, some of them in the original French, most in English translations, had popped up in the spring of 1965 when she began to work with the gifted thirty-four-year-old French composer Michel Legrand, whose score for
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
had just been nominated for an Academy Award.

Barbra and Legrand had established a special rapport as they worked into the early hours of the morning in the deserted Winter Garden theater after her
Funny Girl
performances. “Some nights we laughed so much together, we had so many amusing moments in common,” Legrand said, “that upon leaving I would suddenly look at my watch and realize that we hadn’t felt the hours pass. It was four
A.M.
, five
A.M.
Time no longer existed. [It was] a euphoric time.”

Barbra learned the songs phonetically, and Legrand was impressed by how good her French accent became after a few months of work to tone down her Brooklyn inflections.

Legrand, a married man, admitted to a fellow Frenchman, the author Guy Abitan, that his relationship with Barbra became “almost intimate,” and there are those who say it indeed evolved into an affair. “We became inseparable,” Legrand said. “I didn’t have time—nor did she, evidently—to understand what was happening all of a sudden to us.” Certainly Elliott felt threatened by his wife’s closeness to this attractive, sophisticated Parisian who shared a musical affinity with her that he could never hope to approach. Legrand wasn’t very sympathetic toward Gould’s plight: “This gawky, bearlike ninny did not seem to take great pleasure in my conversations with Barbra. Nothing must be more boring (for a bear) than the sight of two birds constantly occupied with singing the same tune.”