Streisand: Her Life (55 page)

“I used to have just the instinctive reaction—this is right, or this is wrong—and I couldn’t tell why. Now I can tell why. And I’m in a position where I can easily say, ‘No, not this way.’ But I hate to. It’s much more satisfying to work with someone who gets it. You know, someone who sees it my way or can prove me wrong.”

The
Clear Day
company spent ten days in Brighton for the sequences at the Royal Pavilion. Barbra was fascinated by the ornate, eclectic architecture of the beach palace, reminiscent of the Taj Mahal. “It’s a combination of the grotesque and the beautiful,” she said. “And it’s grotesquely beautiful.”

Barbra had decided not to bring Jason with her such a long way from home, creating their first prolonged separation. “I miss him terribly,” she said, and she ran up enormous phone bills listening to his baby talk from five thousand miles away.

During the Brighton filming Barbra developed a crush on the dashing thirty-year-old Australian actor George Lazenby, a former model who was starring as James Bond in
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
“He would come down on his motorcycle just to see her,” Howard Koch recalled. When the day’s work was finished, Barbra—dressed in bell-bottoms and a halter top—would hop up on the seat behind him and they would roar off along the seacoast to have dinner. After a few days of this Barbra invited him up to her hotel suite. They chatted for a while, Lazenby said, then “I took her in my arms. But something stopped me from going much further. I didn’t want her to think little of me... But she was very disappointed.”

The next time he was alone with Streisand, Lazenby said, it was Barbra who stopped him when he began to kiss her. “She wasn’t interested, she said, in a casual affair,” he recalled. “She wanted me to be her one and only.” Although Lazenby found Barbra “beautiful,” he did not want to commit himself “body and soul” to anyone, and he left.

A few months later, Lazenby ran into Elliott at a party. “Gould went red in the face,” Lazenby said, and threatened him with a kitchen knife. One of the other guests grabbed Elliott and pushed him away. Lazenby never saw Barbra again.

T
HE CLEAR DAY
company returned to New York in the middle of May 1969 to film a campus demonstration scene at Fordham University. But the school balked at the last minute because actual student demonstrations against President Nixon and the Vietnam War had broken out on campuses across the country; administrators didn’t want to risk inciting their students to riot. When Columbia also refused to lend its facilities, Koch shut down filming while he scurried to find a college that would. Finally the University of Southern California agreed, but the company would have to move back to Los Angeles to film the scenes, extending the production schedule.

This created a problem, because Barbra had been guaranteed a finish date in May so that she could begin rehearsals for her return to Las Vegas at the International Hotel early in July. With
Clear Day
behind schedule, her contract expired, and the movie legally had no star. There were rumors that Barbra would hold out for a huge additional salary, but that wasn’t what she wanted. “She asked for certain things that were not in the contract,” Koch recalled, “like items on the set that she wanted to become her possessions.” Unlike their counterparts at Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount executives were receptive to the idea. “We didn’t want to pay her more money, so we made a deal with her,” Koch explained. “It was strange. One of the things she wanted was a trailer... and all the furniture in it. All the wardrobe that she wore. Some stained-glass windows we used on the set. I think she probably took seventy to eighty thousand dollars’ worth of stuff to her home. It was good for us because those things were expendable anyway.”

“I made some real money on those windows,” Barbra later boasted. “The studio rented them back from me for five hundred dollars to use in
The Great White Hope.”

W
HILE BARBRA WAS
in New York working on
Clear Day
, the Friars, the exclusive all-male theatrical club founded in 1904, paid tribute to her as its entertainer of the year with its annual roast. She was only the second woman so honored; Sophie Tucker had been the first. The star-studded event at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on May 16, 1969, attracted hundreds of Barbra’s friends, family members, business associates, and colleagues including Ed Sullivan, Ray Stark, Marty Erlichman, Leo Jaffe, Charles Bluhdorn, Howard Koch, Danny Thomas, Ethel Merman, Julie Budd, Steve Lawrence, and Eydie Gormé.

The evening’s souvenir program featured written tributes to Barbra, some serious, some tongue-in-cheek, from Erlichman (who signed his name “Maarty”), Alan Jay Lerner (“She happens to be a miracle”), Jackie Gleason, Joe E. Lewis (“
Time
magazine ran her nose on the cover, and
Newsweek
ran the rest of her”), Jule Styne (“She scares and overpowers you with the magic of her talent”), and Ernest Lehman.

Lehman’s tongue-in-cheek essay poked fun at Barbra’s penchant for perfection. “To her, midnight isn’t too late to phone the screenwriter and discuss lines. If he happens to be the producer, too, even one o’clock in the morning is all right. But to talk to him for an
hour?... Two
hours?... Just to make a few scenes
better....
Just to make the
whole picture
better? What kind of nonsense is that?... She’ll stay up till four in the morning figuring out how to make it better while she’s doing her nails and eating too much chocolate ice cream. But who needs all that passion for excellence? Who needs thrills? Who needs fun? Who needs memorable experiences? I mean, after all, it’s only a
movie. Who needs Barbra Streisand!
”

A highlight of the evening’s entertainment program was the serenade to Barbra by seven legendary composers who sang parody lyrics, written by Sammy Cahn, to some of their most famous tunes. Richard Rodgers concluded the musical tributes with his own touchingly re-crafted lyrics to “The Sweetest Sounds.”

“This was an incredible evening,” Barbra later said. “To get a sense of what that meant to me, just think about the sweep of those seven careers [that] have given us some of America’s most beautiful, moving, and enduring popular music. For them to sing me their songs... was an unforgettable honor... what fun it was!”

The evening came to a hilarious close when Don Rickies delivered a lengthy monologue of his patented insult humor, liberally sprinkled with Yiddish. “I’m so fed up with this
feckuckteh
affair,” he began.
(Feckuckteh
is an all-purpose put-down meaning “silly,” “useless,” or “screwed up.”) “Barbra, I say this publicly: I never liked you. Omar Sharif has been my whole life.... When I first met Barbra [in 1963] I was at the Riviera Hotel and she kept asking me, ‘Is Liberace queer?’... As soon as the career slips, she’ll be back to her old job on Coney Island going, ‘Psst, sailor!’... But really, Barbra, God made you a great star. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé kept leaning over to me saying, ‘We sing better,’ but unfortunately they’re failures.... As Ed Sullivan has said many times, ‘Let’s really hear it for Barbra Straysang... Straymancraitz... Barbra Straymaynan!
’”

S
IX WEEKS LATER
Barbra stood in the wings of the concert theater of the spanking-new International Hotel in Las Vegas, waiting to go on. She felt nearly paralyzed with fear. One of the hotel’s talent coordinators tried to help. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

“Nothing, thanks,” she replied, her eyes fixed in a vacant stare.

“Look, Miss Streisand. You started in nightclubs. You were a hit on the Broadway stage. You won an Emmy. You won an Oscar your first time out in a movie. Who else ever did all that?”

This was probably the worst thing the man could have said to her at that moment. For it was the audience’s exalted expectations that most frightened her. “All I kept thinking about was, What am I supposed to be? My God, all these people are going to watch me sing. What about what they’ve read in the papers and what they believe and think... the envy and the kind of pedestal they put you on and the negative things they’ve read about you. The moment I stepped out onstage I was in shock. It was like, What am I doing here?”

What she was doing was fulfilling a five-year multimillion-dollar contract with the International, entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian’s $60 million, thirty-floor, 1,500-room hotel and casino, the largest in the world. Kerkorian wanted the country’s biggest star to open this lavish playground in style, and he first approached Elvis Presley. Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, turned the offer down, unwilling to let his client take the risk of appearing at a brand-new facility before all the inevitable problems with sound, lighting, acoustics, and logistics had been ironed out. “Let somebody else stick his neck out,” Parker said, then agreed that Elvis would follow whoever opened the hotel. When Kerkorian offered Barbra $100,000 a week and enough stock in the hotel to make her four-week engagement worth $1 million, she decided to stick her neck out.

Barbra liked the idea of being the first act at the heralded new showplace as much as Elvis hadn’t. “We wouldn’t have played the hotel,” Marty Erlichman said, “if she weren’t the opening act.”

For some time Marty had been urging Barbra to go back to live performing. She wouldn’t consider a tour, with its backbreaking travel schedule, different problems at every stop, weather uncertainties, and likely security lapses. Las Vegas, as much as Barbra loathed it, offered a far more predictable, secure, and comfortable environment. Or at least she
thought
it would.