Streisand: Her Life (48 page)

None of this trauma was apparent as Barbra swept back onto the Plexiglas stage. “I feel like I’m walking on a coffee table,” she quipped. The thirteen songs in the second act—including “Stouthearted Men” and “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”—proceeded smoothly, ex
c
ept for a false start on “Love Is a Bore.”

In the middle of “Second Hand Rose,” Barbra turned over the second half of the song to the audience, attempting to re-create a magical moment during the sound check when the audience began to sing the song along with her. “It didn’t quite come off,” Robert Scheerer recalled, “because it wasn’t the same kind of thing. It wasn’t spontaneous.” Still, most of the crowd did know the lyrics, and Barbra seemed genuinely to enjoy the interplay with her fans.

The concert ended just before midnight and 135,000 Streisand fans went home happy. They left behind five tons of trash, including a sterling silver champagne bucket, a Scrabble game, someone’s upper plate, a jar of quail eggs, a miniskirt, and a Merry Widow bra.

The evening was a triumph for Barbra and further solidified her legend as America’s most celebrated singer. For all the tension, Robert Scheerer found working with Streisand a pleasure. “I had heard all the stories about Barbra being difficult,” he said, “but I got none of that. She was delightful to work with. I had no problem whatever with her.”

Fifteen months later CBS aired about half of the concert in an hour-long special that nicely captured the excitement of the Happening, won solid ratings, and elicited largely favorable critical response. UPI critic Rick DuBrow wrote, “She is fantastically theatrical, but it is for real, and the countless young persons in the crowd—giving her standing ovations—were the proof of how her genuine, wholly personal talent and demeanor are regarded by the toughest audience of all: youth.... Robert Scheerer’s producing and direction captured the romance in the love between audience and performer. Miss Streisand looked beautiful, as always.... There has never been anybody quite like her.”

D
AVID SHIRE, WHO
had worked in the pit as assistant conductor of
Funny Girl
after Peter Daniels left, performed the same task for Barbra’s Happening. He recalled that it was around this time that Barbra met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian spiritual leader who had gained celebrity as guru to the Beatles.

Marty Erlichman, who arranged the meeting, joined Barbra and Shire on a pilgrimage to see the maharishi late one night after a party, with Barbra still dressed to the nines. As Shire recalled it, “the maharishi, who was supposed to renounce everything material, was staying at the Plaza Hotel! But his room was tiny, barely big enough to hold his bed. When we entered the room, he was sitting in the middle of the bed in the lotus position, holding a single flower under his nose.”

He was a small man dressed in white ceremonial robes, his long hair falling greasy and unkempt around his shoulders. Barbra stood at the foot of the bed, waiting to be enlightened by his words of wisdom. When he spoke, it was in a thin, high-pitched voice interspersed unpredictably with giggles. He spoke of the power of transcendental meditation and proclaimed, “Rejuvenation is here!”

“Whaddaya mean by
that?”
Barbra interrupted him. “Why
is
that?”

“Barbra would question Jesus,” Shire said with a laugh. “Finally she asked him to sum up his philosophy. He held up the flower he was holding and said, ‘If you let de consciousness go where it wants to go, it will go toward its greatest happiness. Like de sap of de tree or de stem of de flower, it goes to its source of greatest happiness.’

“Well,” Shire went on, “Barbra thought a minute and she said, ‘Well, I normally go toward the point of greatest unhappiness, so that must mean that
un
happiness is the source of my greatest happiness.’ I’m sure the maharishi had never heard that one before. He just sat there nodding, holding his flower.”

S
he was a bit obstreperous in the beginning,” said William Wyler. “But things were ironed out when she discovered some of us knew what we were doing.” Back on the Columbia lot in Hollywood to resume
Funny Girl
filming, Barbra argued with Wyler about virtually everything—her interpretation, how she should be photographed, whether or not she could see the results of each day’s filming. Wyler let her, but when Ray Stark told her one afternoon that she couldn’t see the dailies because there wasn’t time, she walked off the set. “Girls like Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, are not easy,” Wyler said. “They’re very demanding.”

Reports from the set painted Barbra, in the words of the writer Joyce Haber, as “a full-fledged girl monster” who treated Wyler like “a butler whose professional skills one respects, up to a point, but who must know his place.” Streisand, of course, had played Fanny Brice nine hundred times and had definite ideas about how to do so. “I think I knew more about
Funny Girl
than Mr. Wyler,” she said. “I remember every line of every script.” Not all of her ideas, however, were as appropriate for film as they had been for the stage. “She’s got ideas on how to perform,” Wyler said. “Some are good, some are not good.”

Wyler admitted that Barbra “frightened me to death” because “who
knew
her? She was twenty-two years old [
sic
], and she was telling everybody how she wanted to be photographed and everything.... when everybody was saying, ‘Don’t let her get away with that! Who the hell does she think she is?’ I had sense enough not to argue [with her], because film is cheap. You can run it and do it her way, then change the lighting or whatever. But, my God, she was
right!
Where she got the knowledge, I don’t know.”

Barbra explained her ideas to Wyler. And explained them and explained them and explained them. As Anne Francis recalled it, “I just loved the way Barbra handled Wyler. She would get him so confused because she intellectualized incredibly about her character and what she thought she should be doing at this moment, and did he feel she should be doing this or what? She would give him so many ideas at one time that he would just roll his eyes and say, ‘Go ahead, Barbra, go ahead.’ It was wonderful. She just knew how to handle him completely. She’s a very smart woman.”

Wyler, known as “ninety-take Willie” because of his tendency to shoot and reshoot until he felt satisfied, came to appreciate Barbra’s determination to be as good as she could possibly be onscreen. “I’d much rather work with someone like Barbra, a perfectionist insisting on giving her best at all times and expecting it of everyone else, than a star who doesn’t give a hoot. I’ve never known an actress so careful of detail. She even checked with me about the color of her nail polish!” As Ray Stark joked,
“
She’s the only dame who ever asked Willie Wyler to do another shot.”

Once Barbra realized that Wyler shared her goals, she relaxed a bit. “What interested me,” Wyler said, “was this girl, this fascinating creature, and how to present her on the screen. My principal job was to present her in the most advantageous manner possible. Not to draw attention to myself, but to draw it to her.”

Barbra couldn’t have agreed more, and when she felt Wyler was straying from this focus, she didn’t hesitate to balk. Over time Wyler grew more sanguine about Barbra’s attitude, but others did not. There is a scene early in
Funny Girl
in which Fanny Brice has just been hired as a Ziegfeld girl and the legendary impresario gives her two important numbers in his new show. Fanny looks over the sheet music for the second number and tells Ziegfeld, “I don’t wanna be in the finale.” A shocked hush falls over everyone onstage behind her: My God, she’s contradicting the great Ziegfeld!

Most of the cast and crew of
Funny Girl
had a similar reaction whenever Barbra Streisand disagreed with William Wyler, a man who had made sixty-seven films that had won forty Academy Awards. Before long the shock turned to resentment. One of the assistant directors, Jack Roe, summed up the prevailing sentiment: “Here was this young whippersnapper telling a very noted director how to do his job.” During one heated exchange between them, one grip said to another, “Willie shouldn’t be so hard on her. After all, this is the first picture she’s ever directed.”

Barbra couldn’t understand the resentment. “I don’t know what other actresses do,” she said. “Do they just sorta stand around like mummies, get dressed, get told what to do, move here, move there? That can be pretty boring for the actress and the director, besides what it does or does not do for the performance.”

Barbra’s co-workers might have been more indulgent of her quest for perfection if they had liked her more. But most of the company found Barbra distant, unfriendly, self-involved, and inconsiderate. Jack Roe recalled that “Barbra was very aloof when she arrived. I picked her and Elliott up at the airport and took them to the studio. He was charming, but she didn’t give me the time of day. And then we were walking down an alleyway between soundstages and Harry Stradling came out of one of the doors. Now, he was gonna shoot the picture, and he was an Oscar winner, one of the best cinematographers in the business. I stopped to introduce her to this wonderful man, and she barely stopped walking long enough to say a little hi. She didn’t shake his hand or anything. I thought it was very rude. But then, I thought she was rude during the whole shoot.... I didn’t like the way she treated people, from Wyler and Stradling all the way to her personal maid, Gracie.”

Anne Francis had an odd experience with Barbra as they shot the scene that leads up to “Don’t Rain on My Parade” when Fanny announces that she’s going to follow Nick Arnstein to Europe, and the Follies girls try to talk her out of it. “I was next to Barbra,” Anne recounted, “and I’m saying ‘Don’t do it’ or something like that, and I touched her on the arm. When the camera stopped rolling she turned to me and said, ‘Don’t touch me.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘Don’t touch me. I’ve been told that a star is never touched in a scene like this.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Oookay, Barbra.
’”

Streisand’s tardiness, Jack Roe recalled, frazzled a great many nerves. “She was late all the time, not just in the morning. When she was through with a scene, she would go to her trailer and a little red light would come on [over her door] that meant she was on the phone and couldn’t be disturbed. Omar Sharif got so tired of waiting for her for every shot that he took it upon himself to teach her how to play cards. That way he could keep her on the set rather than letting her go back to her trailer and get on that phone.”

In the middle of
Funny Girl
filming, on October 11, 1967, CBS-TV aired Barbra’s third special,
The Belle of 14th Street.
She had taped the show in April, just before flying to Los Angeles for the film’s rehearsals.

“O
H, MY GOD,”
a receptionist at Marty Erlichman’s office whispered as she hung up the telephone. “I thought that guy with the deep voice on the phone was Elliott Gould. It was Barbra!” Lying weakly in her Jacobean bed, Barbra hacked and sneezed and sniffled through one of the most miserable colds of her life. Worst of all—considering that in two days she was scheduled to record tracks for
The Belle of 14th Street
—her throat was sore and so severely constricted she could barely speak. Taping of the show was set to commence on Wednesday, April 26, at CBS’s Studio 41 on Fifty-seventh Street, after months of planning and a number of delays.

Barbra couldn’t postpone the special because Ray Stark had threatened to charge her a hefty daily penalty if she didn’t get to Hollywood for
Funny Girl
rehearsals in early May. She had originally hoped to complete the TV show by the end of March, but she found to her distress that her cesarean operation had left her abdominal and diaphragm muscles so weak that she could not project her voice. David Shire, the assistant conductor for the special, recalled his shock at finding that Barbra’s range had fallen a full tone and a half after Jason’s birth. “We had to rewrite dozens of charts for her,” he said.

Now, with the taping pushed back as far as it could be, Barbra found herself unable to sing because of her cold. She considered postponing the special, but its sponsor, Chemstrand/Monsanto (which had invested $580,000 in the program), the network, and Columbia Records all had considerable interest in airing it that fall. Barbra felt a keen responsibility to these corporate giants who had been so instrumental in her unprecedented rise to superstardom and who she felt had treated her exceptionally well. Cold or no cold, she vowed to get
The Belle of 14th Street
in the can before she left for Hollywood.

For this special, Barbra preferred not to reprise the one-woman format that had worked so well on her first two outings. Part of the reason was her desire to try something new, but she also feared that she might reach the point of diminishing returns if she repeated herself. Instead she opted to recreate a turn-of-the-century vaudeville revue with all the songs, skits, and costumes derived from the era. “We weren’t looking to make fun of it or camp it,” Barbra said, “but to do it as they did.”

Almost a year of preparation ensued, during which Barbra sought the reminiscences of vaudeville veteran George Burns for verisimilitude. The revue format was designed to be less demanding for Barbra than her one-woman showcases had been. Although she planned to perform a dozen songs, she would sing one as part of an ensemble and would be offscreen entirely for two long numbers performed by others. She reportedly hoped to land Marlon Brando or Richard Burton as her co-star, but dropped the idea when she realized that both men commanded fees that approached the show’s entire budget. Instead, the respected actor Jason Robards Jr. stepped in, along with Lee Allen, who had played Eddie in the London production of
Funny Girl
and would do so again for the film, and veteran song-and-dance man John Bubbles.

The first day in the recording studio, Barbra was so hoarse she could barely hum in order to set tempos for the orchestral tracks. Two days later, she struggled with her voice again, and showed only minor improvement the next day. A throat specialist examined her and strongly recommended a week of bed rest with absolutely no talking, much less singing. That was impossible, so the doctor offered to drop cortisone on Barbra’s vocal cords to lessen the inflammation. Fearful of the drug’s possible side effects, Barbra rejected the treatment.

When rehearsals began on April 26, Barbra could muster up only a fraction of her usual energy. Flying across the set in a harness for a planned parody of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
nearly did her in. When she smashed against a backdrop during one trial landing, she shot a dirty look at the director, Joe Layton, and said wearily, “At least you could pick me up.” She couldn’t sing or dance, and couldn’t speak above a whisper. Marty Erlichman summoned another doctor, and this time Barbra agreed to the cortisone. She gamely forged ahead, but the treatment helped only a little, and the delays caused by her infirmity added five hours of expensive overtime to the rehearsal.