Streisand: Her Life (62 page)

When Perry listened, he turned to Barbra and said, “No wonder there’s no background vocals—one of your speakers is out.” Three months later, Perry paid a visit to Barbra’s house on Carolwood Drive and found that she had had state-of-the-art audio equipment installed, including a complete professional tape deck with huge stereo monitors built into the walls. “When she goes,” Perry said, “she goes all the way.”

When Clive Davis heard “Stoney End,” he felt it had hit potential, but he encountered opposition to the idea, beginning with his own staff. Three versions of the song had been released, sung by Darlene Love, Peggy Lipton, and Nyro herself, and none had done all that well. Barbra hadn’t had a hit single since “People” six years earlier, and radio stations rarely played her songs. Many within the company felt they should wait to see how the album did before releasing a single. Others found Barbra’s voice unrecognizable on the record and suggested a radio contest: “Guess who this singer is?”

Undaunted, Davis authorized the single release of “Stoney End,” backed by “I’ll Be Home,” in mid-September. Marty Erlichman went on the road with two of Columbia’s promotion men to push it. They traveled to seven cities in ten days, visiting the major radio stations and key record stores in each city. The stores featured a life-sized cardboard cutout of Barbra next to a telephone—an idea of Marty’s. When customers picked up the phone, they would hear a greeting from Barbra and a few snippets of “Stoney End.”

In spite of the promotion, disc jockeys resisted the song; by the end of October no major radio station had included it on its playlist. Doggedly, Columbia persisted. They “reserviced” the record, shipping it again to stations around the country. Barbra made rare personal appeals. She wrote letters to disc jockeys, placed several phone calls in selected cities, and hosted a reception for DJs at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

Finally “Stoney End” started to get airplay, and when it did, the public responded. The record inched its way up the charts through December and January until it reached number six nationally, a startling turnaround for the commercially moribund Streisand. In some cities it fared even better. Richard Perry recalled driving in his car with Barbra down Sunset Boulevard one night. “The guy on the radio says, ‘And now the number one record in L.A. this week: “Stoney End.”’ It was such a thrill for us, like a fantasy.”

The success of “Stoney End” convinced Barbra that she should scrap
The Singer
and proceed with plans for a contemporary album. In February, Columbia released
Stoney End,
which featured the songs she had initially recorded in July, plus six others. Columbia’s print ads confronted the issue of Barbra’s transformation head on: “A new album by a young singer” blared the headlines, and the copy read: “It’s easy to forget how young Barbra Streisand is. After all, most people in their twenties haven’t made two plays, four TV specials, four movies, and sixteen albums. Now on her new album... Barbra sings the songs of today’s best young composers.” Lest Barbra’s longtime fans worry, the ad reassured them that “while other performers her age sing the songs of young composers to people even younger, Barbra sings them for everyone.”

Stoney End
won nearly uniformly favorable reviews and rose to number ten on the pop charts. One critic felt that “this album is going to impress a whole lot of people who were never very much impressed by Miss Streisand and her attitudes.... Streisand doesn’t sound like Streisand here. She sounds like one hell of a singer belting her guts out, and the effect is immediately appealing.”

With the success of
Stoney End
, Barbra Streisand was back on top of a radically changed musical world. Not everyone was pleased, though. Some of her earliest fans felt she had betrayed them; they hated pop and rock music and thought she should continue to interpret Harold Arlen and Richard Rodgers. Others felt she still hadn’t made the grade with this album. One of these was Peter Matz, who had arranged and conducted
What About Today?
“They were all good songs,” he said, “and the album was consistent—
What About Today?
wasn’t consistent. But I was bothered by the fact that many of those songs were just duplicates of other people’s versions.”

Five months later Barbra released another album of music by contemporary songwriters, and this one proved, as Stephen Holden put it in
Rolling Stone
, an “uneasy mix.” The album commingled the hard rock primal scream of John Lennon’s “Mother” with the traditional sound of Michel Legrand and Marilyn and Alan Bergman’s “The Summer Knows.” Richard Perry felt that the album’s eclecticism reflected “the fact that we were, on the one hand, experimenting further into the rock idiom, and on the other, there were still other songs Barbra liked. ‘The Summer Knows’ didn’t work with the other material, but it was like, ‘What the hell?
’”

Barbra Joan Streisand
equaled the success of
Stoney End
, and seemed to show that although Streisand was still finding her way with pop and rock, she had established a new, youthful fan base strong enough to support any number of future rock efforts. But Barbra, having proved she could do it, wouldn’t release another album of pop-rock music for three years. And in an ironic twist, two years later she would release a more traditional collection that would become her first number one album in nine years.

O
NSTAGE AT THE
Las Vegas Hilton, Barbra got stoned on marijuana. She had done a comic “pot bit” in the show from the beginning of her triumphant return engagement, which had started at the Riviera on November 27, in fulfillment of her 1963 contract with the hotel, then moved over to the Hilton on December 13. Smoking pot had become so commonplace by 1970 that even though it was illegal, more and more people made little effort to hide their use of the drug. Elliott Gould had, in fact, freely smoked a joint during his
Playboy
interview. For the most part, authorities looked the other way, especially for celebrities.

Barbra had decided to use a fake marijuana cigarette as part of a comic monologue about confronting one’s anxieties. “Last year I was so nervous about working in this town,” she would tell the audience. “I went to see Dean Martin, and I couldn’t believe how calm he was, how relaxed. Of course, he drinks. And there are performers, I’m told, who take pills. I can barely swallow aspirin, so that’s out. Besides, I don’t think people should use any kind of crutch for their nervousness. I believe we should be strong”—here she would stop and take a long, theatrical drag on the “joint”—“and face our nervousness head on, you know.”

It was a funny bit, and everyone knew that Barbra was only kidding. But during her last show, late on the Saturday night of January 2, she wasn’t kidding. “I started lighting live joints, passing them around to the band, you know?” Barbra said later. “It was
great
. It relieved all my tensions.” It also came close to sending her act right down the drain, as a tape of the performance made by a fan indicates.

As soon as Barbra took her first drag that night, after she had sung three songs, the Borscht Belt comedian Shecky Greene came onstage and announced that he had been sent by the Las Vegas narco squad to arrest Barbra. She pushed a joint at him and told him, “You’ll love it, Shecky.” They kibitzed for a while, and then Barbra told him, “I want to see you work this room.” For the next fifteen minutes Greene took over the show while Barbra stood idly by, occasionally interjecting a comment or two.

Once Greene left the stage, Barbra sang three more songs, but then she began to ramble, her mind wandering all over the place while she laughed and giggled a lot.

“What am I doing?” she asked after about fifteen minutes of this. “Oh, my God... This is the same show that I started about an hour ago.... Where were... What do... What do I usually do here? Oh, yeah. I talk about some
feckuckteh
thing here.... I’m so bored with it.”

A few minutes later she apparently thought her stool was someplace it wasn’t. “There are evil spirits among us,” she said to the band. “You didn’t do that? What is this? That was spook time. This moved by itself. Did it move by itself? Did you see it? Who moved that? Who moved it? Howard Hughes moved it. Oh, my God.”

Then she began a monologue she had delivered in every show, essentially the silly story about Pearl from Istanbul’s lost button, which she had told on her first television special, but with a lengthy new introduction about searching for artifacts in the desert near Las Vegas. This evening she spent four minutes on the introduction, building to the gist of the story. Then she completely lost her train of thought and never mentioned Pearl from Istanbul again. Instead she started offering her observations about Shecky Greene’s act, leaving her audience completely mystified about why she had started the monologue in the first place.

Some considered this a surprising lapse in Streisand’s usual professionalism, but the frat house atmosphere she had created didn’t end with her. As she introduced the members of the band, the one female musician, a harpist, stood up and took her bow. As she did so the front of her dress fell down, revealing her naked breasts.

According to the hotel’s advertising director, Dennis Ritz, the whole thing had been planned as a practical joke by Marty Erlichman. Marty had asked Ritz to pay a showgirl $500 to replace the actual harpist at the last minute and bare all as Barbra introduced her. When Barbra saw this, all her joviality left her. She gasped and asked the woman, for all the audience to hear, “Why would you do that to yourself?”

“Barbra was
pissed
,” Ritz recalled. “I had never seen her react that way before. Afterward there was a reception, and I came into the party with the girl. Barbra said to her, ‘I don’t even want to look at you. How could you
do
that?
’”

After her own performance that night, it was a question many in Barbra’s audience wanted to ask her, too.

F
rom all appearances, Elliott Gould had flipped out. In February 1971 he turned up at the Manhattan location of his new comic fantasy film,
A Glimpse of Tiger
, with a six-day growth of beard, chomping an old cigar butt and wearing a knee-length navy pea coat with an American flag where the belt should have been. Elliott was producing the picture with his partner, the former publicist Jack Brodsky. The esteemed director Anthony Harvey
(The Lion in Winter)
was at the helm, and the twenty-four-year-old actress Kim Darby had been cast as the teenage sidekick to Elliott’s con man.

By the end of the day, depending on which report one believes, Elliott had either threatened to or had actually struck either Harvey or Darby or both of them. He fired Harvey in midafternoon, and his violent, irrational outbursts left Darby trembling in fear. Word got back to Warner Brothers that Elliott probably had a drug problem, and if he didn’t, he must be losing his mind. “I was very unstable, but it wasn’t drugs,” Elliott later insisted. “Sure, I smoked grass and did psychedelics a little, but I was
not
a druggie or a crazy. Gimme a break. I was a
lamb
, unaware of the laws of the jungle.”

A frantic Brodsky called Barbra, hoping she could settle Elliott down. She talked to him for thirty minutes; he calmed down and apologized to everyone. An hour later Brodsky called Barbra again with some new horror story.

Sometimes Elliott would blow a shrill whistle while other actors were performing, ruining take after take. He fired Brodsky, then rehired him. By the third day of filming, the location resembled an armed camp as uniformed security guards encircled the set. Explained Paul Heller, the Warner executive assigned to watch the
Tiger
set, “Kim Darby was quite afraid of Elliott, so we hired several [security people] to calm her.”

“I was threatened by men with weapons on my own movie set,” Elliott said years later. “I was forced to stay away.” Warner executives had decided that if Elliott didn’t have his act together by the next day they would shut down production. The following morning Elliott failed to show up, and Heller informed his bosses. They told him to call them back if Elliott didn’t turn up in an hour, and the movie would be off. When Heller tried to make the call, he found that “every phone booth in the area had had the wires cut.”

Warner Brothers canceled the film and sued Elliott for its production costs. In order to recoup some of its expenses from an insurance company, the studio compiled a dossier on Elliott’s behavior and sent it to several psychiatrists. “Without even examining me,” Elliott said, “they came to the conclusion the person in that dossier must be mad. That way the producers were able to collect insurance on the film.”

Gould has admitted, “It was a difficult time.... To be considered mad was an unnerving experience.... Even Elvis Presley, who’d said he was an admirer of mine, sat down in front of me, a gold forty-five in his belt, and told me, ‘You’re crazy.
’”

Elliott agreed to repay Warner Brothers for a large portion of its loss. He didn’t have much money, though, because in the two years following the
Glimpse of Tiger
debacle no producer would touch him, and he didn’t work at all.

It was a spectacular crash landing to one of the most meteoric rises to stardom in movie history. In the year and a half following the announcement of his separation from Barbra early in 1969, Elliott’s career had skyrocketed until he was a bona fide movie star and an antihero to the youthful counterculture. He received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor in 1969 for
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
, his third film, and made the cover of
Time
after his next picture, the smash hit antiwar black comedy
M*A*S*H
. Proclaiming him a “star for an uptight age,” the magazine predicted that Elliott would have a bigger and longer-lasting career than his estranged wife. The National Association of Theater Owners named him star of the Year for 1970. “Sometimes I think I must have sold my soul to the devil,” he said of his success at the time, “and that he’s going to be around soon to collect.”

A
CCORDING TO ELLIOTT,
in the summer of 1970, about sixth months after they entered into a legal separation, Barbra decided she wanted him back. Perhaps she felt that his success would put their relationship on a more even footing. Perhaps, as he said, “She didn’t want to be alone.” Or perhaps she realized how much she loved him after all. Elliott was in Sweden, where he had been cast as the first non-Swedish star of an Ingmar Bergman film,
The Touch
. Barbra flew to Stockholm and told Elliott she wanted to give their marriage another try.

But Elliott was now deeply involved with Jenny Bogart, the lovely eighteen-year-old flower-child daughter of the director Paul Bogart, whom he had met in Dustin Hoffman’s apartment. Unambitious, yielding, Jenny represented the polar opposite of Barbra. “I’d like to marry a beautiful woman who isn’t in show business,” Elliott said. “That would be the double opposite of Barbra.” Jenny, he felt, had a certain “hopelessness,” and he felt he “could be of help.”

“Barbra wanted us to get back together immediately,” Elliott said, but he told her that he couldn’t leave Jenny. “I didn’t know that was my last opportunity [with Barbra], and I don’t know if it would have made a difference if I had known.”

Barbra came home, and on June 30, 1971, she and Elliott jointly filed for divorce in the Dominican Republic, where the matter was finalized quickly and with a minimum of publicity. There were no recriminations, no requests for alimony on either side. Barbra was granted custody of Jason and allowed Elliott liberal visitation rights. Still, the most difficult aspect of the divorce for Elliott was his separation from Jason. “It’s unnatural to
visit
your son,” he said. “God, it’s hard.”

To make things worse for him, he didn’t approve of the way Barbra was raising Jason. Despite her statement while she was pregnant that children should be allowed to be “dirty and basic when they want to be.” Elliott was appalled to find that Barbra had hired someone to teach Jason etiquette—at two years old. He also didn’t like the fact that his son was cared for primarily by a nanny and was surrounded only by females. “I like getting Jason away from Barbra’s house,” he said. “He’s got so many women around him, I feel like I’ve done a service to take him away for an hour.”

A
FTER THE
Glimpse of Tiger
fiasco, Barbra worried about Elliott. During a meeting with Warner executive John Galley, whom she had dated over the prior year, Barbra asked if there was anything she could do to dissuade the studio from suing Gould for punitive damages. Calley suggested that
A Glimpse of Tiger
be rewritten so that Barbra could take over Elliott’s role and play a female con artist with a young male sidekick.

The idea intrigued her, and she told Calley she had the perfect director: Peter Bogdanovich. She had seen a preview screening of his first major film,
The Last Picture Show
, a stark character study set in a small Texas town in the 1950s, which went on to garner eight Oscar nominations. Barbra considered it brilliant and felt that Bogdanovich could help her turn
A Glimpse of Tiger
from a lightweight comic fantasy into a serious exploration of relationships and social issues.

Bogdanovich had other ideas. The intense thirty-one-year-old wunderkind had gotten his start as an uncredited second-unit director and screenwriter on Roger Corman’s
The Wild Angels
in 1966, then had directed some sequences of a cheap Russian import,
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.
In 1968 he won acclaim for
Targets,
a cult cheapie with Boris Karloff, and was given the opportunity to make
The Last Picture Show.
An inveterate movie fan, Bogdanovich adored the screwball comedies of the 1930s, especially those by Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, and he wanted his next picture to be an homage to them and a light change of pace for him.

Suddenly he was presented with the chance to work with Barbra Streisand, arguably the best film comedienne of the day.
A Glimpse of Tiger
didn’t interest him, however. “It was kind of a comedy-drama with a lot of social overtones,” he said, “and I didn’t like it at all.” But he very much wanted to work with Streisand. He told her he wanted to do a slapstick comedy and would have his friends David Newman and Robert Benton, who had written the brilliant Oscar-nominated script for
Bonnie and Clyde,
write it.

“It’ll be just like
Bringing Up Baby
,” Bogdanovich told her. “You know, the Howard Hawks picture with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. You’ll play this free-spirited zany girl who meets this stuffy scientific-type guy and turns his life upside down. It’ll be great.”

“Well, I guess so,” Barbra had replied. “As long as Ryan O’Neal plays the guy.”