Streisand: Her Life (53 page)

Elliott might have been able to live with the inequality of his professional success and that of his wife, he said, if Barbra had been more attentive to him. “She was so in love with her work and the image of herself she was creating, there was no time for me,” he told Trudi Pacter of the London
Sunday Mirror.

Years later Elliott intimated that the failure of his marriage had more to do with Barbra’s deep-seated psychological problems than with her success. “I don’t think she knew how to love me back,” he told another British reporter, Corinna Horan. “She was incapable of real love because she never had it from her father.” He said he had once told her, “Your mother thinks affection is something people use to get something,” and she had replied, “That’s why I am the way I am.”

His love for Barbra was “pure” and “never exploitative,” Elliott insisted, but he felt he had been “taken in” by the “trap” of believing Barbra was vulnerable. “She uses her vulnerability and insecurities as a seduction,” he told Horan. “But she’s not vulnerable... She is very cold, smart and acutely business-oriented and she keeps herself isolated to maintain the status quo of her situation.... She must be the most miserable person I’ve ever known. She keeps herself occupied with so many things because she’s so afraid to fail, so afraid of the truth.”

To Diana Lurie of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
Gould said, “One side of Barbra needed me. The other was disdainful of men—and competitive toward them. Barbra has ambivalent feelings about men.... She has a problem that she can’t reconcile—[she feels] that men are no good and can’t be trusted. My adoration of her caused her to lose respect for me, to think less of me. She wondered how I could like her when she didn’t really like herself.”

Elliott revealed his bitterness when he was asked about a comment he had made years earlier, that being married to Barbra was like “a bath of lava.”

“It was never that hot,” he said.

Over the years, Barbra has been as silent on the reasons for the breakup as Elliott has been talkative. Her only comment was that she was “so deeply wounded” during her marriage that “I thought I would never give myself to any man again.... We did nothing but battle day and night.”

One can certainly speculate about the difficulties Barbra faced being married to Elliott, above and beyond the problems created by her success. There was his gambling, which had grown worse with every passing year. “I lost a great deal,” Elliott said, most of it on football games. “I bet on every game on the boards, thousands on a game,” he told
Playboy.
“I wasn’t very successful. I lost close to $50,000 on the football season before last.” What Elliott didn’t mention is the fact that for the most part the money he was losing was Barbra’s.

A close friend of Elliott’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Gould’s gambling “had to affect his marriage to Barbra; I’m a recovering gambler myself, so I know how it can affect one’s personal life. And I bet it didn’t help their sex life, either. If you know anything about gamblers, sex is the last thing on their minds. Gambling was kind of an escape for him because it must have been awful frustrating for him to be Mr. Streisand. Some guys turn to drugs and booze; other guys turn to gambling.”

Elliott did turn to drugs as well. The mid-sixties marked the beginning of a social revolution in America: drugs like marijuana and amphetamines—earlier found only among jazz-club denizens, the ultrasophisticated, and hardcore addicts—had by 1968 made their way to most college campuses, where students considered drug experimentation a badge of honor. Fearful, Barbra shied away from any mind-altering substances at this juncture, but Elliott developed a heavy pot and upper habit. He admitted that he sometimes smoked while he worked but would abstain when he needed to be sharper.

In his
Playboy
interview he described taking mescaline, a hallucinogen, and then going to Disneyland, where he watched for hours as Indian dancers did the same act every twenty minutes. On the way home he “put on a fantastic demonstration” of driving over winding canyon roads, feeling that his senses and reflexes were incredibly sharp. But he became paranoid, he said, and grew convinced that there was a monster in the back seat of his car. “I scared the shit out of myself. I had to really assure myself that I didn’t want to do me any harm and that what was going on was something promoted by my subconscious.”

It could not have been easy for Barbra to be married to Elliott at this time.

D
ESPITE THE BREAKUP,
Barbra asked Elliott to escort her to the forty-first annual Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 14, 1969.
Funny Girl
had been nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress. Barbra desperately wanted the award, yet another facet of her lifelong dream and, as Marty Erlichman had told her in the kitchen of the Bon Soir nine years earlier, “the biggest one of all.” She wasn’t at all confident that she would win because the competition that year was unusually strong. The other nominees were Katharine Hepburn in
The Lion in Winter
, Patricia Neal in
The Subject Was Roses,
Joanne Woodward in
Rachel, Rachel,
and Vanessa Redgrave in
Isadora.

Unquestionably, 1968 felt like “Streisand’s year,” but there was animosity toward Barbra among many of the 2,900 Academy voters, and that surely would hurt her chances, since the Oscars have often been based as much on popularity as on merit. For all these reasons, the Oscar derby in 1968 proved extremely difficult to handicap. Streisand and Hepburn were considered the front-runners, but who could be sure? Hepburn had won the Golden Globe in the drama category, Barbra in the musical or comedy category. Barbra had, in fact, convinced herself she wouldn’t win, and she tried not to think about the awards. “I’m very Jewish,” she said. “I always think negative. You never think about things like that—bad luck.”

At the event, Barbra sat nervously for over two hours—the Best Actress award was the second-to-last, before Best Picture.
Funny Girl
hadn’t won a single award all evening, and Barbra grew surer than ever that she wouldn’t either. She was also nervous about Elliott. He had arrived to pick her up high on marijuana, and she hoped no one would notice. Elliott needed to get stoned, he said, because “I was terribly self-conscious about being with a woman from whom I had just separated and about being among people I felt weird about, people who thrive on the dramatic implications of that kind of situation,” he told
Playboy.
“It was a difficult night for me, a trauma.” No one noticed Elliott’s condition, except a friend whom he had told to watch for a signal: if he was stoned, he’d tug on his ear twice when the camera first panned to him and Barbra. He did so.

Finally the elegant Ingrid Bergman began to read the Best Actress nominees. Barbra stared numbly straight ahead. Bergman opened the envelope and gasped. “It’s a... It’s a tie! The winners are Katharine Hepburn... and Barbra Streisand!” It was the first Oscar tie since 1932. Barbra turned joyfully to Elliott and ran up to the stage, tripping briefly over the hem of her sequined see-through black net pantsuit.

Jack Brodsky, Columbia’s head publicist, had suggested her opening line—the same one she had used in the film. “Hello, gorgeous!” she exclaimed as she held the gold-plated statuette aloft. “I’m very honored to be in such magnificent company as Katharine Hepburn. Gee whiz, it’s kind of a wild feeling. Sitting there tonight I was thinking that the first script of
Funny Girl
was written when I was only eleven years old. Thank God it took so long to get it right, you know? I would like to thank my co-producer, Ray Stark, for waiting until I grew up.” She thanked the film’s creative team, then concluded, “Somebody once said to me—asked me if I was happy, and I said, ‘Are you kidding? I’d be miserable if I was happy!’ And I’d like to thank all the members of the Academy for making me really miserable. Thank you.”

At the Governors Ball following the ceremony, Barbra seemed a little stunned. She sat quietly at her table, showing no emotion but repeatedly running her long-nailed fingers up and down the Oscar. Elliott sat uneasily next to her and remained silent, drawing little circles and squares with his fork on the tablecloth, answering yes or no and then clamming up whenever a reporter asked him a question. Barbra didn’t eat any of her dinner, but she picked cherry tomatoes off the plate of everyone else at her table.

Controversy marred Barbra’s triumph the next day when many commentators roundly criticized her outfit, designed for the Oscar ceremonies by Arnold Scaasi. “Inappropriate,” they called it, “a monumental salute to bad taste.” Barbra looked “like a fugitive from a harem,” sniffed one fashion maven, and another expressed horror that “Miss Streisand was naked as a jay bird, the ‘loincloth’ having narrowed to the width of a garter belt in back, leaving her plump bare rear exposed to the audience who had to witness her ascent to the stage.”

Scaasi considers the criticism unjustified. “The outfit seemed see-through, but it wasn’t really,” he said. “It was underlined with nude-colored georgette crepe. There were pockets over the bosom with double and triple fabric—if you look closely at the outfit there’s nothing indecent about it at all. But none of us considered what would happen under glaring lights, or when the flashbulbs went off. The lights eliminated the black net covering [and] made it seem that you were seeing Barbra’s skin.”

Before the ceremonies, Barbra and Scaasi had attended a small party at the Starks’. “Fran Stark was a very elegant woman, on the best-dressed list,” Scaasi said, “and when she saw Barbra walk in wearing this pantsuit with little white kid gloves and a black satin bag, she said to me, ‘You’ve just made her look spectacular. She looks like a great model! She reminds me of Jean Shrimpton.’ What I tried to do was present Barbra as the modern young woman she was. Young girls were wearing things like that all over the world. Barbra had an older image because of
Funny Girl,
but this night she could be herself, her own person, youthful and current. We just never realized what would happen when those flashbulbs went off.”

O
N APRIL
21, 1969, Louis Kind died of congestive heart failure at the age of seventy-six in the Veterans Administration Hospital on First Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan. He had been barely well enough the week before to watch the stepdaughter he had treated so cruelly win her profession’s highest accolade.