Streisand: Her Life (54 page)

Roslyn attended her father’s funeral with Diana, who had legally remained Lou Kind’s wife. Barbra stayed away. Months later Kind’s will was made public. He left an estate worth about $93,000, which he divided among Roslyn—“my world, my beloved daughter”—and his three children from his first marriage. He expressly excluded Diana from the will and made no mention of Barbra.

A few days after his death, the
New York Post
ran a prominent obituary of Louis Kind. They did so, of course, only because of his relationship to Barbra Streisand.

H
uge movie lights illuminated the banquet hall of the magnificently baroque Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England, built in the early eighteenth century as a seaside playground for King George IV. Dozens of extras, dressed in sumptuous Regency period costumes designed by Sir Cecil Beaton, sat around an enormous table set with gold decanters, fine cut glass, silver bowls overflowing with fruit, and place settings that cost a total of $75,000. Capons, lobsters, and suckling pigs dotted the table, and dozens more were kept at the ready in the wings for retakes. Actors dressed as waiters in black uniforms with gold braid and white gloves waited for the director to yell “Action!” In the meantime, all eyes were on
her.

Barbra looked breathtaking, a vision in white, dressed in a resplendent low-cut pure white crepe gown sprinkled with thousands of tiny beads and diamonds. She wore a diamond-studded choker and a white turban festooned with cameos and strings of pearls that dangled across her forehead and down the sides of her neck.

Her director, Vincente Minnelli, waited for her to signal that she was ready to begin the scene for
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
in which Melinda Winifred Waine Moorepark, a buxom, sensual courtesan, seduces Robert Tentrees, a dazzling young aristocrat, across the banquet table with her eyes, her wineglass, and her sexual allure while she sings “Love with All the Trimmings” as an interior monologue.

The handsome blond English actor John Richardson played Tentrees, and he sat across the table from thirty-seven-year-old Barbra, waiting along with everyone else for her to be ready. Suddenly she signaled to Minnelli that she needed to talk with him. The sixty-year-old creator of some of the most joyful and elegant MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s came down from his loft next to the camera boom and huddled with his leading lady. They whispered for a few moments, then Minnelli walked over to the producer, Howard Koch, and conveyed a message.

Koch approached Richardson, who got up from the table and left. Several crew members scurried around and erected a black screen across the spot where Richardson had been sitting. “Barbra didn’t want to do this highly sexual emoting while she looked at John Richardson,” Koch recalled. “She didn’t think Richardson was masculine enough, so she wanted to think of somebody else. We set the black up so that she wouldn’t be distracted by anything, and I took Richardson out onto the street and told him, ‘Come on, it’s a close-up of Barbra; you don’t have to be there.’ He wasn’t upset or anything, he was a hell of a nice guy.”

Minnelli filmed the scene in adoring close-up, and Barbra brought to it a steamy sensuality that nearly melted the film stock. “She imagined her own man that she was playing it to,” Koch said. “Later on I said to her, ‘Tell me who you were thinking of!’ She said, ‘I’ll never tell!’ And she never did.”

O
N A CLEAR DAY
had been a financial failure on Broadway during the 1966 season. With lyrics and script by Alan Jay Lerner
(My Fair Lady, Camelot)
and music by Burton Lane, the show starred Barbara Harris as Daisy Gamble, a college student from Mahwah, New Jersey, who asks a psychology professor who specializes in hypnosis to cure her addiction to cigarettes. While under hypnosis she reveals a prior incarnation as Melinda Tentrees. The professor, although annoyed by Daisy’s chatty, vapid personality and “Joisey” inflections, finds himself falling in love with the elegant, sexy, willful, and soignee Melinda.

When Daisy, who is attracted to the professor, finds out about his feelings for “the previous me” she is furious and refuses to be hypnotized again. He persuades her to go under one more time, during which she reveals prior and future incarnations as his wife. He’s not sure he wants to hear more and lets her leave. “So long, Doctor,” she says. “See ya later.”

Despite the failure of the stage version, Paramount Pictures bought the film rights for $750,000 in the Hollywood frenzy for musical properties that followed the blockbuster success of
The Sound of Music.
The studio’s vice president in charge of production, Howard Koch, decided to personally produce the film, with a budget of $10 million. He knew immediately who should play Daisy. “I’d seen Barbra on Broadway,” he said, “and thought she was stunning. She’d already been signed for the movie version of
Funny Girl
so it was pretty clear that she was going to be a success in Hollywood. We figured she’d be great in
Clear Day
.”

Koch approached Barbra while she was in London doing
Funny Girl.
She had liked the show on Broadway, but she was so preoccupied with the impending birth of Jason that the last thing she wanted to think about was work, and she turned him down. Koch then offered the role to Audrey Hepburn, but she declined as well because she felt that the Regency sequences were too close to her role in
My Fair Lady.
Unwilling to give up on Barbra, Koch came back to her in 1967, and in addition to a salary of $350,000, he offered her the chance to choose or approve the film’s entire creative team. She agreed to make the movie.

Koch had been close to signing the Irish actor Richard Harris, who had made a strong impression as King Arthur in the 1967 screen version of
Camelot
, to play the professor when the actor “walked out on it because he got a better deal or something,” Koch said. When Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck turned the part down, Koch turned to the romantic French balladeer Yves Montand. Montand was a huge star in France, but he had failed to make much of an impact on American audiences, most notably opposite Marilyn Monroe in
Let’s Make Love
in 1960. Still, he seemed perfect for the part, which had originally been written as a Frenchman. Koch brought him to meet Barbra.

Montand, like Omar Sharif, turned on his charm for Barbra. He kissed her hand and told her he considered her “incomparable.” She had listened to some of his French recordings and liked his warm, masculine singing. She told Koch that Montand would be just fine. Rounding out the cast were Larry Blyden as Daisy’s stuffy fiance and the struggling thirty-one-year-old Jack Nicholson in the small role of Tad Pringle, her free-spirited former stepbrother.

Vincente Minnelli, famous for his exquisite taste and an Oscar winner as director of the elegant 1958 Best Picture,
Gigi
, also seemed to Koch a natural for the film, especially the sequences in Regency England. “I had worked with him at Metro when I was an assistant director, and I knew that if anybody could do a picture with that kind of style it would be him.” For the same reasons Barbra asked that the period costumes be created by Cecil Beaton, who had won Oscars for his designs for
Gigi
and
My Fair Lady.
The contemporary outfits would be designed by Arnold Scaasi.

The regression sequences of
On a Clear Day
offered Barbra the kind of movie glamour she had always dreamed about. One of the reasons she hadn’t been eager to play Dolly Levi was that she considered the character too plain. “I’d really like to play very exciting women,” she had said. “Nineteenth-century courtesans who had ten lovers, that sort of thing. That’s my fantasy.”

Melinda was exactly that, and Barbra worked excitedly with Cecil Beaton to create the most gorgeous gowns for her character to wear. The flamboyantly stylish sixty-three-year-old royal photographer and confidant of Greta Garbo came to respect and adore Streisand. “She was charming to work with,” he said. “Almost literally, like a hypnotist. Barbra and I talked our way into everything, and I trusted her judgment.... I’ve never met anyone so young who had such an awareness and knowledge of herself. Pleasing her was very difficult, but it pleased me inwardly because I myself am extremely hard to please.... She is an ideal mannequin and compelling actress in elegant period costumes. Her face is a painting from several historical eras. She is a self-willed creation.”

When Barbra arrived on the set for the banquet sequence swathed in white and “looking like an Arabian princess,” she had clipped a diamond to one of her nostrils. No one liked it. “I was careful not to draw attention to her nose,” Beaton said. “The diamond got vetoed. But I admired her very much for having wanted it. I always admire people daring to be different and individual. It isn’t the easiest way to go about life, but it is the most interesting.”

Barbra and Vincente Minnelli liked each other immediately. That his accomplishments commanded respect and admiration went without saying, but he was also the ex-husband of Judy Garland, who had touched Barbra so deeply when she appeared on her show in 1963, and the father of her friend Liza Minnelli. Like Beaton, the MGM veteran much admired Barbra’s instincts. “You have to work with people who respect your opinion,” Barbra said. “Now, Vincente is terrific that way. Even before he saw
Funny Girl
I guess he must have liked my work or something. He didn’t come in as the old-time director of many hits and you’re just a little girl with one picture, two pictures. He’s so open and he trusts my instincts.”

O
N A CLEAR DAY
proceeded as Barbra’s least troubled production to date. There were no blowups between her and Yves Montand, no walk-offs, no standoffs between star and director. Part of the reason, of course, was that with the release of
Funny Girl
Barbra had proven herself as a movie star; she won her Oscar during
Clear Day
filming. No longer could anyone wonder, “Who does she think she is?” By now everyone knew exactly who she was—the biggest female star in Hollywood—and they treated her accordingly.

That Barbra had mellowed a good deal helped as well. No longer was she so insecure that she refused to back down from an argument. “I have to compromise,” she said. “A little. I know that now. I’ve even come to understand that a little bit of compromise is part of the perfection. Know what I mean? A little bit of imperfection is part of the perfect, because perfection is lifeless and dull.