Streisand: Her Life (59 page)

Afraid to leave the limo, Barbra stayed put until the police had cleared the way into the theater. When she finally stepped out onto the red carpet, people screamed and shoved and surged toward her. Flashbulbs popped in her face. Fans screamed her name, threw flowers, waved their autograph books at her. A flying wedge of burly police and private security guards surrounded her and Marty and inched them from the curb toward the theater. Streisand looked petrified. It took another fifteen minutes to get her through the Rivoli’s doors, and as soon as she was inside, the barricades collapsed and a sea of humanity lunged against the theater entrance.

In the lobby crush, frenzied photographers jostled so viciously for advantage that scuffles broke out. One photographer had his camera smashed by several fans who had shoved past the ushers and cops behind Barbra. Marty Erlichman and a photographer collided, fell to the floor, and scrambled back up punching and kicking each other. The man’s camera knocked Erlichman in the head, opening a gash that splashed blood all over his shirt collar. “Oh, my God, what’s
happening
,” Barbra screamed. “Marty! Marty! Are you okay? What did they do to you, Marty?”

The film’s publicist Pat Newcomb later said, “I was with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor at premieres, but this was the worst.”

Afterward, at a party at the Pierre Hotel, a badly shaken Barbra vowed to the columnist Earl Wilson that she would never attend another premiere. “It’s inhumane,” she said. “I was devastated by what happened to Marty.” Wilson asked her how she had liked the movie. “I’m not sure I even saw it,” she replied.

Although frightening, the pandemonium seemed to indicate tremendous interest in the film and its star, and the reviews further heartened studio executives. “It is grand, it is spectacular, it is lavish, it is sentimental, it is buoyant, it is swift,” Charles Champlin raved in the
Los Angeles Times.
“Walter Matthau, baying like a dyspeptic elk, is a figure of infinite charm and interest.... The principal attraction is, of course, Barbra Streisand. And I presume no one will be shocked to hear that she is superb.... The parade, and indeed the ‘Hello, Dolly!’ orgy amidst the splendors of the Harmonia Gardens, are unqualified triumphs of the several arts of make-believe. Not to be awed by them is not to be awed by the motion picture as an art form.”

“Hello, Dolly!
is not invulnerable to criticism,” Vincent Canby wrote in
The New York Times
, “but I suspect that Barbra Streisand is. At the age of twenty-seven, and for the very good reason that she is one of the few mysteriously natural, unique performing talents of our time, she has become a national treasure.”

There were dissenters, both to the movie and to Barbra, but they were in the minority. At first it seemed that
Hello
,
Dolly!
would more than live up to Fox’s lofty expectations for it. The first two weeks’ box-office receipts surpassed those of
The Sound of Music,
a fact that was trumpeted by the studio in double-page advertisements in the Hollywood trade papers.

But then attendance dropped off. Seven Oscar nominations in February, including Best Picture, but not Best Actress, didn’t help much, and neither did the three technical awards the film won in April, for Art Direction, Sound, and Score. It soon became clear that
Hello, Dolly!
would not earn the blockbuster grosses necessary to compensate for its enormous budget. The picture took in $38 million at the box office domestically, enough to make it the fourth-highest grossing film of the year, and another $20 million worldwide, but that simply wasn’t enough. In order for Fox to recoup its initial investment and the money it had spent on promotion,
Hello, Dolly!
would have had to gross over $60 million. By that yardstick, the movie was a flop.

What had happened? Why had a film with so much going for it failed to reach the audience that had flocked to
Funny Girl?
The answer lay mainly within the rapidly changing American culture itself. Just as the Vietnam War and the youthful counterculture had revolutionized popular music, by 1969 the movie industry largely reflected the profound changes taking place in American society.
Midnight Cowboy,
John Schlesinger’s gritty portrait of a bisexual hustler, became the only X-rated film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar. Sydney Pollack’s
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
offered a nihilistic view of life’s futility.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
satirized the trendy practice of wife-swapping. And
Easy Rider
, the archetypal sixties protest film, celebrated drug use and galvanized many young people against bigotry and mindless savagery.

In this climate
Hello, Dolly!
seemed to many like so much idiotic fluff, and most young moviegoers—always the backbone of box office—preferred to buy tickets to more relevant films. Other old-fashioned musicals released around the same time met with even less success than
Hello, Dolly!
Pundits declared the movie musical dead, and for a time they were right.

No one blamed Barbra for the financial failure of
Hello, Dolly!
On the contrary, her popularity likely pulled in most of the people who did buy tickets. Had a lesser draw starred in the picture, it surely would have fared far worse. Ernest Lehman, in fact, feels that the film failed because there wasn’t enough of Barbra in it. “At the premiere in New York it was so clear that all those people had come out to see no one but Barbra. And I thought, My God, they’re expecting this to be a Barbra Streisand picture. And it really wasn’t. There were long stretches when she wasn’t on the screen, when all you saw was those idiot clerks and their idiot girls. I firmly believe a lot of people were disappointed that there wasn’t more Barbra, and that hurt the film.”

Unquestionably Streisand provides the most enjoyable elements of the movie. Her Dolly Levi is funny, vibrant, compelling, a comic locomotive barreling through scene after scene. Yes, her characterization meanders wildly, from Mae West to Lena Horne to Fanny Brice, but that’s part of the fun and the humor of the performance. Barbra may have been miscast, but she turned it into a very entertaining miscasting.

There’s sparkling comic chemistry between Barbra and Walter Matthau in spite of all the unpleasantness during filming. What they lack, however, is romantic chemistry. Harry Stradling’s camera makes Streisand look so lovely—with her peaches-and-cream complexion, her vivid blue eyes, her upswept auburn Gibson Girl hairdo, and her hourglass figure—that it’s hard to believe she couldn’t snare a more attractive “half a millionaire” than the ill-tempered, sour-faced Horace Vandergelder.

Hello, Dolly!
finally prevails as a comic and musical triumph for Barbra. It is a film that is remembered primarily because she starred in it, just as its composer, Jerry Herman, had predicted. As Richard Cohen observed in his review of the film for
Women’s Wear Daily
, “There she stands at the head of the great ornate stairway, her glorious merry-widow figure draped in a ton of jeweled gold, a spray of feathers in her belle époque topknot. She is smiling her sly, secret, Brooklyn-Jewish-girl-who-made-it-big smile. The film is at its climax, she is the champion female movie star of her time and she is poised for the most played, the most familiar, the most parodied song of the decade. We are expectant. Will she bring it off? Will she top all the toppers? Boys, the kid’s a winner. The whole thing is a triumph. She was smiling that sly smile because she knew all along she was going to kill us.”

B
arbra tapped her feet, clapped her hands, and called out encouragement as she watched the man with the fiddle dance the Red River jig, a traditional Canadian folk dance. She was at the National Arts Center in Manitoba, Canada, attending a celebration of the province’s centennial on January 28, 1970. Few people in the audience were watching the performance, however. Most eyes were on Barbra and her escort: the country’s prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Trudeau—tall, attractive, erudite, unmarried, a youthful and unconventional fifty years old—had been the head of the Liberal Party and Canada’s head of state for two years. He had first charmed Barbra when they met in London at the
Funny Girl
premiere, and a year later he had flown to New York for a series of weekend dates with her. On Friday night they shared an intimate dinner at Casa Brasil on Manhattan’s East Side, then danced until the early-morning hours at Raffles, a private discotheque on Fifth Avenue. After spending Saturday night in seclusion, they attended a play on Sunday. When a reporter asked Trudeau how long he had known Barbra, he replied, “Not long enough.”

Gossips had a field day. “What is more fitting for a superstar,” Joyce Haber declared in her
Los Angeles Times
column, “than to cotton to a handsome, swinging super-politician? Barbra plays the Matchmaker in
Dolly.
In real life she’s given us a match to watch.”

Two months later, a week after she completed principal photography on
The Owl and the Pussycat,
Barbra flew to Canada’s capital city of Ottawa, accompanied by three huge trunks, two of them crammed full of fur coats, stoles, and hats to protect her from the wintry chill. The prime minister escorted his glamorously bedecked paramour to the ballet, and at a party afterward they held hands. Then Trudeau invited a few close friends to meet Barbra at a cozy candlelit dinner in the executive mansion.

A few days later Barbra attended a session of Parliament, during which she and Trudeau exchanged waves and glances. George Hees, a frustrated member of the Tory opposition, stopped at one point and said, “I should like to ask a question of the prime minister—if he can take his eyes and mind off the visitors’ gallery long enough to answer it.” Trudeau blushed; Barbra laughed and tapped the railing in front of her seat with her umbrella.

Then Barbra moved on to Manitoba, where she and Trudeau were driven separately to the National Arts Center for the centennial gala. When Barbra arrived, Trudeau bounded out of his limousine, pushed past some Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and opened Barbra’s car door with a flourish. They entered the concert hall amid much buzz from the crowd.

Ed Schreyer, the governor general of Winnipeg and a political rival of Trudeau’s, recalled Barbra’s delight as she watched the show. “The guest list was crammed with prominent Manitobans,” he said, “and I remember it struck me what an honor it was to have her there. We exchanged pleasantries for just a short period of time when some of the entertainment started and she became fascinated. She kept exclaiming enthusiastically as the fiddler danced the Red River jig, which I explained to her was like the Virginia reel. Everyone was watching her reaction because it was quite funny and quite genuine.”

Schreyer felt that Trudeau “certainly took a political risk in dating Barbra Streisand. Some people were impressed, but they weren’t the majority. He was seen with Barbra in coffee shops and taverns, and it was quite the topic of conversation.”

Many Canadians were concerned. Where would their prime minister’s obvious affection for this glamorous movie star lead? Would she be willing to give up her career and become Canada’s first lady? If so, what kind of first lady would she be? Or would Trudeau renounce his position, as Britain’s King Edward VIII had done in 1936, for the woman he loved? During a nationally televised interview, a reporter confronted Trudeau with the question of the day: “I think everybody is interested in the fact that you have seen Miss Streisand not just once as a casual encounter but three or four times while she has been in the city. I think the public is entitled to know whether you are developing a serious relationship with her.”

“It’s none of your business or the public’s business,” Trudeau replied.

Barbra probably didn’t know it, but Trudeau had been seeing another young woman, twenty-one-year-old Margaret Sinclair, before Barbra arrived in Canada. In an attempt not to have the whirlwind of publicity surrounding his dates with Barbra upset
that
apple cart in case things with Streisand didn’t work out, Trudeau called Margaret several times while Barbra was in town. Each time Sinclair shouted “Go back to your American actress!” and slammed the phone down.

Trudeau married Margaret Sinclair in March of 1971; the tempestuous union ended in 1977. In her 1977
Playboy
interview, after responding “I don’t want to answer that” when asked if Trudeau had proposed to her, Barbra made it clear that she had seriously contemplated life as Canada’s first lady. “I thought it would be fantastic. I’d have to learn how to speak French. I would do only movies in Canada. I had it all figured out. I would campaign for him and become totally politically involved in all the causes, abortion and whatever.”

But “certain realities” kept her from marrying Trudeau, Barbra said—most likely Trudeau’s Catholicism and the impossibility of maintaining her career while performing the duties of a first lady. She had never considered asking Trudeau to give up his career, she said, because “His life was too important to a whole country, to a world. I don’t feel mine is that significant. It’s significant in that it gives people a fantasy life or some pleasure, but it’s not like being the prime minister of a country.” Barbra and Trudeau remained close friends through his marriage and beyond.

B
EFORE SHE LEFT
for Canada, Barbra had attended the New York nightclub singing debut of her not-quite-nineteen-year-old sister, Roslyn, in the elegant Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel. Throughout 1969 Roslyn had been on a fourteen-city tour sponsored by RCA Records to promote the release of her first album,
Give Me You
, late in 1968. RCA executives told the press that they were giving Roslyn “the biggest push any artist has received in years.”

Roslyn had nurtured her own singing ambitions for years as she imitated Barbra and sang along to her albums. But the closest she had gotten to show business before this was her position as president of the Barbra Streisand Fan Club and editor of its newsletter,
The Streizette.
It was an angle played up in the press by Barbra’s public relations people: Adoring Kid Sister Runs Fan Club for Superstar.

“I didn’t actually
run
it,” Roslyn later said. “Barbra started getting so much mail that they gave it to a fan club service [to answer]. Then I was voted into the position [of president of the fan club]. I was
told
that I’d be doing it, by my sister, I think. I had no idea. I said, You mean somebody else is signing my signature on these letters? How dare they!’ I take things seriously, so I actually went to work on it. I used to do it one day a week after school.”

As much as Mrs. Kind had discouraged Barbra’s show business ambitions she encouraged Roslyn’s. Barbra had proven nothing if not that lightning could strike in the most unlikely places, and Diana felt Roslyn had a far better chance to succeed than Barbra had at her age. Roslyn was more conventionally pretty—she had dropped sixty pounds and was now just “pleasingly plump,” as she put it—she wasn’t the least bit kooky, and she had a pleasant voice that brought Barbra’s to mind without any of the histrionics that put some people off.

Barbra, busy with her career, still bitter toward her mother, rarely kept in contact with her or Roslyn; both of them practically had to make an appointment with her secretary to talk to her on the phone. “There hasn’t been too much communication between us,” Roslyn said. “She really didn’t know I had a career going.” Barbra rarely sent the family any money. Her daughter was a multimillionaire by now, but Diana Kind wasn’t much better off for it. Roslyn, though, was a devoted daughter who still lived at home, which was now an apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street; she and her mother had moved to Manhattan from Brooklyn in 1967 so that Diana could be near her job as a school clerk. If it didn’t seem probable that Barbra would support Diana in her old age, Roslyn more likely would. Mrs. Kind was willing to let her younger daughter do anything she needed to in order to earn even a fraction of the income Barbra did.

Roslyn’s career, launched with great optimism, never amounted to much. Her first album sold poorly, and after a second effort did even worse, RCA dropped her. The main problem for Roslyn was, unsurprisingly, Barbra. Try as she might not to, she sounded like Streisand. Only she wasn’t as good, and the comparisons were always to her detriment.

A few years later Roslyn spoke bitterly about what she saw as Barbra’s lack of help with her career. “If only Barbra would say something nice about me when she’s asked. I feel she’s hurting my chances with her silence.” When Barbra did put in a word to get Roslyn booked into a club in Las Vegas, Roslyn said, “It was the worst place you’ve ever seen... absolutely nobody knew it existed.”

Some felt that Barbra resented how easy it had been for Roslyn to get her start—a recording contract right out of high school! All Barbra would say was “The trouble with Roslyn is that when she’s not invited back to a place she thinks I’m somehow behind it. That’s nonsense; that’s sad.”

Roslyn considered quitting the business altogether. “I don’t want to, singing is my life, but without my sister’s endorsement I cannot see my getting much further.”