Streisand: Her Life (51 page)

But Barbra got over her concern that Dolly Levi had traditionally been played as middle-aged. “This woman is a widow, but this doesn’t mean she has to be old,” she said. “After all, she could be a widow of nineteen, married a year, who’d lost her husband in a war.” But some of the meddlesome Dolly’s characteristics made Barbra uncomfortable because they hit a little too close to home. “I was reluctant to show the part of me that is very Dolly Levi—ish,” she admitted, like “searching for bargains and all that.”

Still, the excitement of the opportunity to star in the film versions of both the two biggest Broadway hits of 1964, not to mention her salary and a percentage of the box-office take, had finally convinced Barbra that she should accept the role. “It was fun thinking about the jewelry I’d wear, stuff that I had and loved that I thought would be good for Dolly. And I liked the idea of being able to laugh and smile a lot, which I usually don’t do—I mean, I’m not much of a laugher.”

I
T WAS SYDNEY
Chaplin who had poisoned his friend Walter Matthau’s mind against Barbra. Chaplin had given Matthau such an earful of his complaints about her during the
Funny Girl
run that by the time Matthau met Barbra, at a Broadway revival of
The Glass Menagerie
in 1965, he felt he had to avenge his friend’s agony. He walked up to Streisand at intermission and said, “Oh, you’re Barbara Harris. I see you’ve had your nose done.”

“I was so shocked I couldn’t even answer him,” Barbra later said.

When he was cast as the grumpy Yonkers hay-and-feed merchant Horace Vandergelder, the “well-known unmarried half a millionaire” on whom Dolly sets her sights, the forty-seven-year-old Matthau felt “a strange kind of attraction to the fact that I was going to work with Streisand. I almost knew that I was going to blow up at her.”

As soon as the rehearsals got under way, Matthau started to seethe. “I tried very, very hard to be civil, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to be civil to her. When she ‘acts’—and I say that in quotes—she likes to tell the director when the other actors should come in. She pretends as though she’s asking, but she’s overstepping her boundaries. She should simply be the instrument of the director, and not be the conductor, the composer, the scene designer, the acting coach, et cetera.”

Matthau became furious with Barbra when he recorded the title tune, which Horace sings to Dolly at the end of the film. “She laughed,” he said. “She would break up every time I sang a line in the recording booth. I had to re-record everything.”

“I was laughing at Vandergelder the character,” Barbra explained later. “I
wasn’t
laughing at Walter. Actually, I like the way he sings very much.”

Less than a week before filming began on April 15, 1968, Barbra appeared at the Academy Awards ceremony to present the Best Song Oscar. She wore the high, tightly curled “Colette” hairstyle she had been partial to for a while. The next day Matthau asked her, “That hairdo you wore—was that supposed to make the audience laugh?”

“Why are you so cruel?” Barbra responded. “That hairdo is the latest fashion.”

“I just wondered if you meant it to be funny.”

“You are a very hostile person,” Barbra told him and walked away.

Once filming began, Matthau’s antagonism grew with every suggestion Barbra made, every one of her requests for a retake. “The thing about working with her was that you never knew what she was going to do next and were afraid she’d do it. I found it a most unpleasant picture to work on and, as most of my scenes were with her, extremely distasteful.... I was appalled by every move she made.”

Ernest Lehman took Barbra’s side in almost all of her disputes with Matthau, and still does today. “Walter’s a grump. He’s a great guy, but he’s a grump, a complainer. He scowls a lot. He resented that she would speak up and make suggestions to the director, which was something that he wouldn’t do. And he felt kind of shunted off to the side. He was an old pro and he thought, ‘Who’s this upstart kid who’s getting all this attention?’ And boy did she get attention. When she was around, you knew she was around. I couldn’t very well ignore her and say, ‘Yes, Walter, what can we do for you, Walter?’

“Barbra wasn’t full of herself; she didn’t have an ego. I think just the opposite. If she were full of herself she wouldn’t have been so concerned about everything being just right. She’s never been a person who feels her own perfection. She was a very insecure person, doubting her own worth, especially interpersonally. She dabbled in everything. Her opinion was ‘We’re all in this together, and it’s the result that’s gonna count, not how we got there.
’”

Matthau thought Barbra should keep her own counsel, but when he went to Richard Zanuck to complain about her (“Do I need a heart attack? Do I need an ulcer?”), Zanuck replied, “I’d like to help you, but the film isn’t called
Hello
,
Walter
.”

Lehman seems to have been somewhat infatuated with his star. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. There’s something very beautiful about her as a woman,” he said. “Elizabeth Taylor was a very beautiful woman when I made
Virginia Woolf
with her, but I never had the same feeling about her.” During the first meeting in his office with Barbra, Matthau, and Gene Kelly, Barbra said to Lehman, “Ernie, why do you keep looking at me.”

“I don’t know,” Lehman replied, flustered.

“Well, please stop looking at me all the time.”

“I can’t help it,” he said sheepishly.

“When she was in a room with other people,” Lehman said, “you wanted to look at her. It was the same way when she was on screen.”

Lehman found charming a habit of Barbra’s that grated on those who were less kindly disposed to her. “Barbra used to eat food off my plate. I’d be hungry, and she’d eat the food right out from under my mouth. She has all kinds of little things that she does. She doesn’t say to herself, ‘Oh, I mustn’t do that, that wouldn’t be proper.’ She does whatever she feels like doing, whatever comes to her mind. I found it sort of friendly; there’s an intimacy to someone eating off your plate. I liked Barbra a lot.”

Doubtless this affection led Lehman to welcome—and to miss, on the rare occasions when they didn’t come—the dozens of late-night telephone calls from Barbra during the filming, calls that most other producers would have considered a nuisance. “She used to call me every night for hours,” Lehman recalled. “She’d talk to me about the day’s events. She’d say, ‘Walter did this to me, Gene did that to me.’ ‘Why doesn’t Dolly say so-and-so instead of so-and-so?’ ‘Will you please tell Gene to do so-and-so?’ ‘I wish he wouldn’t do so-and-so all the time.’ The calls didn’t annoy me because I stay up real late anyway. When she
didn’t
call I’d think, Call and harass
me, please
.”

W
HILE BARBRA AND
Walter Matthau worked in an atmosphere of mutual distaste, she and Gene Kelly got along only marginally better. “Who would get along with Gene Kelly?” Ernest Lehman asked. “He’s a tough guy. He would grin and smile and laugh and all that, but he was no pussycat. Once I made a suggestion to Michael Crawford about how he should play a close-up, and Kelly said to me, ‘If you ever talk to another one of my actors on the set I’ll kick your fucking teeth in.’

“Kelly didn’t like Barbra.... They were not meant to communicate on this earth. They didn’t even like being around each other. She complained a lot to me about Kelly in those late-night telephone calls. She didn’t like him. She didn’t like the fact that he didn’t care enough about directing her.

“Barbra was a frightened woman. She had had William Wyler and Herb Ross to guide her through her insecurities on
Funny Girl,
and she was familiar with that role. She was unsure how to play Dolly, and Gene Kelly wasn’t helping her any.”

Kelly has admitted that he let Barbra down. “If there had been more time,” he said, “I’d have tried to help her work out a clear-cut characterization, but we had a tight schedule, and I left it up to her. With the result that she was being Mae West one minute, Fanny Brice the other, and Barbra Streisand the next. Her accent varied as much as her mannerisms. She kept experimenting with new things out of sheer desperation, none of which really worked. And as she’s such a perfectionist, she became terribly neurotic and insecure.”

Kelly resented most of Barbra’s suggestions, and usually ignored them. At the end of the huge “Before the Parade Passes By” number, which utilized nearly 3,800 extras, Lehman’s script called for a rolling shot that would leave Barbra in the center of the screen and then go wide to show most of the parade around her. Kelly shot it differently. Barbra complained. He would not reshoot the number, Kelly told her—that was the way he liked it. Barbra started to argue. Kelly walked away.

Barbra called Lehman that night and told him, “Ernie, I think you should know that Gene didn’t shoot the last part of the parade number the way you wrote it. He shot straight down so all you could see are a few people marching by the camera. It would be much better the way you originally intended it.”

Lehman immediately telephoned Kelly. “He was very angry,” Lehman recalled. “But I told him that he’d better shoot it the way I wrote it—I thought that was understood. He gave me all the reasons why he did it his way. I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Okay, you know what, you direct it! Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock you be out there. I’m calling back all the extras and you’re gonna direct the shot!’

“I had never directed traffic! But I went out there and Kelly called out over the bullhorn, ‘We’re ready for you, Mr. Lehman,’ and I shlumped into my jacket and walked over and climbed up on the boom and did the shot. It’s that fabulous shot of Barbra holding that last note seemingly forever while the parade marches on. And I did it!

“The next day Gene and I were watching the dailies. His shot came on and he didn’t say a word. Later he told me, ‘Jesus, my shot was awful. I’m glad you redid it.
’”