Streisand: Her Life (44 page)

This proximity between Barbra and Legrand couldn’t have helped the underlying strain in the Gould marriage. Barbra’s pregnancy helped smooth over some of the rough edges, but it didn’t alleviate all of the problems, and Elliott’s jealousy of Legrand was likely one of them. “First we talked about having [the baby],” Elliott said. “Then we had arguments about him—and arguments about many things; arguments that seemed to be about one thing but were really about something else.”

Early in November they had a major blowup; Barbra ran into the bathroom in tears, locked the door, and refused to come out as Elliott pounded on the door. “I don’t want your child!” she sobbed.

At that Elliott lost control. “Barbra is infantile in some ways,” he said, “no matter how brilliant she might be. But it was wrong of me at that point in her pregnancy to kick the door down.”

W
HILE MICHEL LEGRAND’S
initial exposure to Barbra had been nothing but positive, as they got down to the serious work of recording her tracks he saw a different side of her. “I watched her during certain rehearsals becoming incredibly angry because someone had forgotten to put out his cigarette or because she had seen someone in a corner somewhere whose presence she didn’t feel was necessary. It’s unbelievable—Barbra in anger—when we’ve had the pleasure of seeing only the happy and passionate Streisand of other times. An angry Barbra is all of a sudden a usually courteous and delicate woman seized with fury and capable of the most foul vocabulary.... Her tantrums are
torrential!
”

Je m
’
appelle Barbra
, released at the end of October, drew mixed reviews. Some critics felt it was Streisand’s best album to date, showcasing well her new sophistication. Others found it pretentiously arty. The collection featured Barbra’s first musical composition, “Ma Premiere Chanson,” with words in French by Eddy Marnay. The album’s producer Ettore Stratta, however, has claimed to the author Shaun Considine that “I actually co-wrote that song with her, but my name is not on it.” According to Stratta, Barbra whistled a tune for him one day, a melody he found “small and uninteresting. But as she whistled it, I rewrote it, harmonized it. I made it better... I never asked for credit. Today I would.”

The album rose to number five on the pop charts, a solid hit, but it didn’t have the same staying power of her earlier efforts, and it became the first Streisand album not to be certified gold.

A
S HER PREGNANCY
progressed, Barbra decided that her sprawling six-room penthouse wouldn’t be big enough for her family once the baby arrived. She sent Marty Erlichman across the hall to speak to her neighbor Gerry Blumenfeld, who occupied the only other apartment on the floor with her husband, the news picture editor of United Press International. Marty, Blumenfeld recalled, “said that Barbra was pregnant and would we mind moving because she wanted to have the whole top floor for herself. He said Barbra would pay all our moving expenses. Well, there was a bigger place opening up in the building so we decided we would move. A while later she and Elliott came into our house and just started measuring rooms even before we moved out. They were rude and didn’t offer any conversation at all.

“Even though it wasn’t very far, we had a lot of big, expensive furniture, and it cost us ten thousand dollars to move. They didn’t pay us a cent, so we had to sue them. They wanted to settle for five thousand, and we agreed rather than keep dragging it through court.”

Even before this disagreement, Blumenfeld had little use for her famous neighbor. “Barbra treated people at the place very poorly. She would run out and yell ‘Get me a cab!’ without saying please or thank you or anything polite. One day I had a cab hailed for me, and she came running out into the street and grabbed my arm as I was getting in and she practically yanked me out and said, ‘I’m late’ and pulled me out and jumped in to get to her show on time. One day she came over to ask my husband if he could tell his photographers at UPI not to take any pictures of her while she was pregnant. Of course, he couldn’t.

“But the worst thing Barbra did showed how cruel she could be. There was a little girl in our building named Allison who was the daughter of an opera singer. She was a dwarf with a bad heart, and very sensitive and sweet. We didn’t allow soliciting in the building, but we allowed her to collect for the Red Cross every once in a while. She came to our floor one day, and I gave her a couple of bucks and then watched as she knocked on Barbra’s door.

“Well, Barbra opened the door and looked over at me and down at little Allison, who was holding the Red Cross can up in front of her face, and then she slammed the door right in the little girl’s face. The child started crying and I had to take her in and comfort her. You just don’t do that to a child, any child. But it was typical of the way Barbra treated people around the building.”

A
S THE BABY’S
delivery approached, Elliott helped Barbra every morning with her breathing exercises in anticipation of the natural delivery. Barbra turned her cluttered sewing room into a temporary nursery, with a violet-colored tiled floor and pointillist wallpaper. She picked out matching fabric and painted the accessories herself.

Once everything was ready, all that remained to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Although she expected the baby around December 20, Barbra didn’t go into labor—despite two false alarms—until six in the morning on Thursday, December 29. Certain within two hours that this was the real thing, Barbra checked into Mount Sinai Hospital at nine. Nearly six more hours of labor followed. “It was very traumatic,” Elliott said, “but Barbra was very brave. We held hands and talked about a son or daughter.”

When her doctor discovered that the baby was in the breech position (feet first) inside Barbra’s womb, they decided that a cesarean section would be necessary to avoid any possible damage to the child during delivery. The incision through the muscles and walls of Barbra’s abdomen and uterus, of course, dashed her hope of experiencing a natural birth, and she was unconscious when the baby, a healthy seven-pound, three-ounce boy, made his entrance into the world at 2:55
P.M.

When Jason Emanuel Gould was brought to his mother in room 507—with the name Angelina Scarangella on the door—she could barely trust her eyes. “I could not believe he grew inside of me.” She held the child with trepidation and awe, feeling more love flow from within her than she ever had before.

She and Elliott fairly burst with pride. “You know,” he told the press, “my baby didn’t cry. All the other babies were crying and had their eyes closed, and this woman next to me said, ‘Look at that brand-new baby with its eyes wide open,’ and it was
my
baby!”

At home Barbra doted on the boy. “I take his picture every Thursday, on his birthday,” she said. She also tape-recorded his every giggle, gurgle, and hiccup. She hovered over his crib, murmuring, “Who’s that gorgeous thing? What’s his name?” Whenever she fed him, she saved the last spoonful for herself. “I love baby food.”

She opened up easily to reporters whenever the subject was Jason. Did she sing to him?
“
No, I never sing around the house,” she replied. “Silly people say, ‘I hope your son has a good voice.’ Who cares? The last thing I want him to do is go into the theater.”

Having a boy child, Barbra said, taught her a great deal about men. “You realize that they are these little people, and they want to be held, and they cry, and they get hurt, just like women. Unfortunately society has put these pressures on men to be
strong
, and it’s quite unfair. It’s nice to find a man who’s as vulnerable as he is strong.”

Asked whether she found it strange to think that her baby, as the child of vastly wealthy parents, would have an upbringing so different from hers, Barbra smiled and replied, “I can’t suddenly get poor, can I.” Then she went on to say, “I don’t want a child who has nothing but toys from F.A.O. Schwarz. Kids like simple things to play with: a piece of paper, a walnut shell. They should be dirty and basic when they want to be.”

After giving Jason a bottle during an interview for a
Look
magazine photo layout on America’s most famous new mother, Barbra patted his back rhythmically. Soon he let loose with a robust burp, and Barbra laughed with delight. “Isn’t he a
gas
.”

“To me, being a star means
being a movie star.”

—Barbra in 1967