Streisand: Her Life (52 page)

B
ARBRA BROUGHT JASON
to the set often, and the eighteen-month-old toddler watched wide-eyed as his mother cavorted around in enormous hats and glittery dresses. “He came when we were doing the ‘Hello, Dolly!’ number,” Barbra recalled. “There I was, his
mother
, in a red wig and a gold dress, with a strange man on each side of her, and he got upset. He didn’t like it. I got embarrassed with him watching me. It was like having my mother watch me—because she
knows
I’m just pretending and it’s not really me at all.”

Jason got used to his mother as Dolly Levi, though, so much so that one of his first words was “hat.” For Mother’s Day in May, Elliott decided to surprise Barbra by having Jason sing to her. He rehearsed the boy and then coached him from the sidelines as he sang “Hello, Dolly,” to his delighted mother.

Walter Matthau didn’t act very kindly toward Jason—largely, it seems, to annoy Barbra. He insisted on talking baby talk to the child, even after Barbra explained that she didn’t approve of that sort of thing. “The only way to bring up kids,” Matthau announced, “is to talk baby talk to ’em and beat ’em.” Barbra grabbed Jason and said she was taking him for a ride. “Gonna make poo-poo in the car, Jason?” Matthau taunted. Mother and son hurried off.

Matthau seemed to take great delight in harassing Barbra. With his sweat suit soaking wet one day after a jog, he said to her, “I don’t have anything on under this. Doesn’t that excite you?”

T
HE FILMING OF
Hello
,
Dolly!
grew more and more nightmarish. Twentieth Century-Fox’s original budget projection of $10 million had already ballooned to $15 million and would wind up in excess of $24 million, expensive today but staggering in 1968. Lehman walked around the set looking morose, worried about everything. Egos slammed into each other like prizefighters’ fists. Irene Sharaff designed Dolly’s 1890s wardrobe, including the sparkling gold gown she wears for her return to the Harmonia Gardens and the “Hello, Dolly!” number. As Barbra rehearsed her dance steps for the scene while wearing the gown, she and the film’s choreographer, Michael Kidd, realized that the dress’s lengthy train hindered her ability to dance.

Lehman called Sharaff down to the set. Kidd explained the problem. Sharaff said she didn’t see why there should be a problem. Kidd asked Barbra and the waiters to go through the number. As before, both she and the other dancers tripped on the train at several points. Sharaff puffed on a cigarette and suggested that Kidd change the choreography. Kidd said he couldn’t do that. Barbra agreed that he shouldn’t do that. Lehman took Barbra’s side.

Ultimately, the train went, and so did Sharaff. “Irene announced to me and Barbra,” Lehman said, “that she never again would make another picture with either of us. She won three Oscars on pictures of mine, and here she was never gonna work with me again because of that infernal gown.”

The only time Ernest Lehman challenged Barbra was during a recording session. He listened to her sing one of the show’s tunes, then said, “To hell with all this being polite stuff. You didn’t sing the melody on that final word in the second chorus.”

Barbra looked at him coldly. “Do you realize, Mr. Lehman, how much people pay me not to sing the melody?”

O
NE POTENTIAL PERSONALITY
clash never occurred. It was Lehman’s idea to use the legendary sixty-eight-year-old trumpeter and vocalist Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong in the “Hello, Dolly!” number. “Satchmo had such a huge hit with that song,” he recalled. “He was more associated with it than Carol Channing was. I thought it would be great to have him join Barbra in the middle of it—a real audience-pleaser. Barbra didn’t like the idea.”

Barbra has said that she felt using Armstrong in the film smacked of exploitation, but Lehman suspects her reasoning was more selfish. “I’m sure she was afraid that this guy was gonna take her big moment away. She didn’t get to sing two of the best songs in the score [“Ribbons Down My Back” and “It Only Takes a Moment”], but this one number made up for that. And here I wanted her to share it with Louis Armstrong. She never dug in her heels and refused to work with him or anything. She just said she didn’t think it was a good idea. But she loved Satchmo, and they got along great. And of course his appearance just makes an incredible number even more incredible. It’s great to have the two of them onscreen together.”

Finally, in July, after eighty-nine grueling days,
Hello, Dolly!
was in the can. Everyone dispersed, and Ernest Lehman waited nervously for Gene Kelly to show him his cut.

Barbra called late one night and asked Lehman if she could keep the expensive Victorian antiques that the studio had bought to grace her dressing room during the shoot. “The studio said absolutely not,” Lehman recalled, “so I had to say to Barbra that I couldn’t do it. She said, ‘What do you mean you can’t do it? You’re the producer.’ She didn’t understand that it didn’t matter that I was the producer. It was the studio that owned what she wanted, and they didn’t want to give it to her.

“As a result, she was no longer friendly toward me. I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because you never gave me what I wanted. The most valuable possession I own is my friendship, and therefore I’m withholding it from you.
’”
Several years later Lehman ran into Barbra at a play. “She greeted me warmly,” he recalled. Apparently she hadn’t held a grudge.

W
HEN LEHMAN SAW
Kelly’s cut, he was thrilled with both Barbra’s and Matthau’s performances but thought the movie, filled as it was with Michael Kidd’s brilliant, obligatory dance numbers, was too long. Knowing the next-to-impossibility of making any drastic cuts, Lehman decided to defer to the creative decisions of studio heads Richard Zanuck and David Brown. The film, they felt, should be released exactly as it was.

The big question was when. In 1965, when Fox purchased the movie rights from David Merrick for $2.1 million and a large percentage of the gross, Merrick had insisted on a contract clause that said the film could not be released until the show had closed on Broadway. At the time studio executives didn’t think that would present a problem. But here it was nearly four years later, the film would soon be ready for release, and
Hello, Dolly!
was still going strong on Broadway even after Channing left it, thanks to Merrick’s showmanship in casting stars like Ethel Merman, Ginger Rogers, and Pearl Bailey (in an all-black version) to replace her. There was no end in sight to the Broadway run, the studio wanted to start recouping its enormous investment as soon as possible, and the only way they could do that was for Brown to persuade David Merrick to alter the deal. While the two men negotiated, the movie version of
Hello, Dolly!
stayed on the shelf.

I
nside Manhattan’s Criterion Theater, Barbra sat with Ray Stark and Marty Erlichman and fidgeted nervously. It was September 18, 1968, and
Funny Girl
was about to have its world premiere. She had arrived with Elliott looking every inch the movie star in a nude-colored net gown and cape designed by her favorite couturier Arnold Scaasi and a towering wig in the French Directoire style. Surrounded by a dozen burly bodyguards, she made her way regally up the red carpet leading to the theater entrance as fans cheered, flashbulbs popped, and reporters hurled questions.

How would the public like the film? How would they like
her?
Advance word from screenings in the Midwest had been excellent, and Columbia had launched one of the most ambitious publicity and promotion campaigns in Hollywood history to support the picture. The film would be an exclusive “road show” attraction, with advance reservations required for tickets at a sliding price scale topped at a hefty (for 1968) six dollars. Six months before the film opened, it had drawn the largest advance ticket sale in history. There were fashion and merchandising tie-ins, including a
Funny Girl
wristwatch, long before such things were commonplace, and audiences could purchase a slick, colorful, picture-packed forty-eight-page program.

Still Barbra had good reason to be nervous. With all the excitement that surrounded the film, she had never seen it with an audience, and she honestly didn’t know how people would respond to it. It didn’t take long to find out. After her first song, “I’m the Greatest Star,” the Criterion viewers burst into spontaneous, prolonged applause. And they did so again after just about every number. No one had seen anything like it. “Audiences
never
do that!” Ray Stark marveled. “At the
end
of a movie I’ve seen people applaud, but not all through it! This was like an opening night on Broadway.”

Barbra’s motion picture debut turned out to be the most dazzling in show business history. Not only was this $10 million movie built around her diminutive shoulders, but she had thrillingly succeeded at everything the script asked of her. She sang breathtakingly, mugged hilariously, and then broke audiences’ hearts with dramatic scenes in which she never hit a false note.

The public flocked to the picture. It grossed $66 million in the United States alone, an enormous sum for the period, and
Funny Girl
remained among the top twenty all-time moneymaking movies for years.

Many of the reviews criticized the film’s sometimes “irritatingly fake” look, Wyler’s often “ponderous” direction, and the talky letdown of the second half after a thrilling first hour of song and comedy, but almost to a man and woman they praised Streisand. To Martin Knelman of the
Toronto Star,
Barbra’s performance was “one of the greatest events in the history of movie musicals.” Joseph Morgenstern of
Newsweek
felt that “a star is not born in
Funny Girl
... a star comes of age.... Miss Streisand has matured into a complete performer and delivered the most accomplished and enjoyable musical comedy performance that has ever been captured on film.”

“Every age has its Super Lady,” Rex Reed wrote in
Women’s Wear Daily.
“Other ages had Lillian Russell and Sarah Bernhardt and Gertrude Lawrence and Helen Morgan and Judy Garland. Well, we’ve got ours. Her name is Barbra and whether we like it or not, all those monstrous things she keeps doing to people out of fear and insecurity only make her more exciting on screen. When all that talent comes to a boiling, raging, ferocious head of fireball steam, as it does in
Funny Girl,
bad publicity pales in the glow of her extraordinary genius.”

A series of equally successful premieres followed in Hollywood, London, and Paris. In London, Barbra crossed paths again with Princess Margaret following the screening, and she seemed just as ill at ease as she had two years earlier. Omar Sharif lent a hand by chatting charmingly with the princess. Margaret laughed, “I see that your co-star is helping you out again,” she said to Barbra. At a benefit gala at Claridge’s afterward, Barbra conversed with guests rather than heed a musical cue (“People”) to enter the main ballroom. Margaret nudged her: “I think you ought to go in, dear. They’re playing your tune.”

At the gala that evening, Barbra met the attractive, continentally dashing forty-nine-year-old bachelor prime minister of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. As keen observers watched them deep in conversation, they couldn’t help but wonder, Were those
sparks
they saw?

Barbra next moved on to Paris, where the legendary boulevardier Maurice Chevalier escorted her from her suite at the Plaza Athenée Hotel to the Paris Opera. “We set off like two newlyweds in a Rolls-Royce provided by Columbia,” Chevalier wrote in his memoirs. “We had to take an extra turn around the block when we got to the Opera in order not to make our entrance too soon.”

When they arrived, bedlam broke out. As they began to ascend the grand stairs of the opera house, one hundred fifty photographers from nearly every European country crashed through police barricades and pushed Barbra along a wave of humanity up the stairs, flashbulbs bursting, curses flying in five languages. “Finally we made it to the top,” Chevalier recalled. “We’d been hoisted up... almost without touching the ground.”

Barbra had been terrified of being crushed to death in a stampede, and she would remember that fear far more clearly than the accolades and hosannas thrown her way. “I could see that she was a bundle of nerves just barely under control,” Chevalier said. Still, the evening was “a triumph. Paris, the toughest of judges, was enchanted. Judaism’s loveliest flower had captivated the hearts of Paris as completely as young Lindbergh did many years ago.”

T
HE ENORMOUS SUCCESS
of
Funny Girl
propelled the sound-track album from the film to number twelve on
Billboard’s
Top 100 Albums chart for the week of January 25, 1969. The charting was noteworthy in light of the dramatic shift in pop music taste that had occurred by the second half of the 1960s, a phenomenon Barbra would soon have to confront. Hers was the best-selling album of traditional pop music that week; artists charted above her included the Young Rascals, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, Janis Joplin, and Iron Butterfly.

Prior to
Funny Girl,
Barbra had produced two studio albums of varying concept and quality. The first,
Simply Streisand,
allowed her to put her personal stamp on a collection of (mostly) great American standards, but the arrangements were at once too much and not enough. A mellow jazzlike orchestration introduced almost every song, but soon gave way to soaring strings and brass in support of Barbra’s patented vocal crescendos. The background choruses on some of the tracks bring uncomfortably to mind the kind of generic, middle-of-the-road sound Barbra and Marty had fought against when she signed her Columbia contract five years earlier.

Just weeks after the release of
Simply Streisand,
Barbra signed a new contract with Columbia. Clive Davis had taken over most of the label’s business dealings from Goddard Lieberson, and he recalled the Streisand negotiations as “intense.” Marty Erlichman was adamant that Barbra should receive a much larger slice of the financial pie this time. He eventually won a guaranteed advance of $850,000 per album, a royalty of forty cents for each disc sold, and ten cents for every single. The new Streisand contract drew press attention when it was revealed that her per-album royalty exceeded that of the Beatles by one cent.

Released almost simultaneously with
Simply Streisand
was a package that struck many as a surprise:
Barbra Streisand/A Christmas Album.
Holiday albums were almost de rigueur for popular singers, but because of Barbra’s renowned Jewishness, some observers raised an eyebrow, especially since many of Streisand’s song selections were religious rather than secular (“Silent Night,” “Ave Maria”). Columbia rushed the album into release in October 1967, and Barbra’s fans and music critics alike greeted it warmly. As it turned out, there were few objections from either Jewish or Christian organizations. By now Barbra Streisand had become so interwoven into the broad fabric of American popular culture that her religion mattered not a whit when it came to what she sang.

F
UNNY GIRL PLAYED
for over a year at its exclusive-run theaters in the United States before going into wider general release, an unprecedented run. Barbra had achieved her greatest dream: now she was indeed a
movie star.
She had conquered every major realm of show business, and she might have been the happiest woman in the world. But in a sadly real Hollywood cliche, her marriage had come to an end.

The Goulds made a joint announcement of their separation on February 13, 1969. Barbra seemed to hope for an eventual reconciliation. “We are separating not to destroy our marriage but to save it,” she told a reporter. Conventional wisdom had it that the Gould marriage was destroyed by one partner’s career exploding while the other’s languished. Certainly this was part of the problem. “Her success was painful to me,” Elliott admitted to
Playboy
in 1970. “When Barbra became an enormous celebrity, I tried my damnedest not to take seriously the fact that I wasn’t.... But when we went out in public, which was seldom, it was devastating to me. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to go someplace as
me.
And yet I felt an obligation to attend to my wife, no matter who the fuck people thought I was... Mr. Streisand or whatever.”