Streisand: Her Life (66 page)

B
EFORE SHE LEFT
Los Angeles for location shooting in New York, Barbra fulfilled a promise that she had reportedly made to Warren Beatty months earlier in his Beverly Hills bedroom. Perhaps partly because she hoped to land Beatty as her co-star for her next movie,
The Way We Were
, she had indulged in “one of my flings” with the sensuously handsome actor, whom she had known since they had met in summer stock when she was sixteen.

Beatty’s renowned passion for women and filmmaking was matched by his love of politics. Avowed liberal Democrats, he and his activist sister, Shirley MacLaine, had strongly supported the presidential aspirations of Robert Kennedy in 1968. When George McGovern, running on a fierce antiwar platform, became the Democratic front-runner in 1972, Beatty and MacLaine threw their considerable clout behind the soft-spoken senator from South Dakota and his effort to defeat Richard Nixon, whose duplicitous stand on the Vietnam War and on many domestic issues had divided the nation.

When Beatty learned that Barbra supported McGovern as well, he approached her about headlining a concert to benefit the campaign. The Streisand-Beatty romantic liaisons took place in Warren’s notorious suite of rooms, El Escondido (“The Hideaway”), at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Barbra and Warren reportedly spent most of their time in bed negotiating for him to co-star in
The Way We Were
and for her to sing for McGovern. The author Shaun Considine claimed that an unidentified “studio production executive” gave him details of the coupling. The account is a hilariously unlikely scenario laden with crude double entendres: “Warren was relentless. He worked on her head. And on her hands, feet, and shoulders. Barbra matched him stroke for stroke. He’d get her into bed and he’d turn on the famous Beatty charm and he’d slip in a plug for the concert. He’d whisper, ‘Barbra, you
should
do it. You
have
to do it. It’s your civic duty. For me, baby, come on, come on.’ And Barbra would moan and sigh and say, ‘Oh, I know, Warren, I know. I
am
considering it. Now let’s read some more of the script.’ And he’d say, ‘Okay, Barbra. You want to take it from the top or the bottom this time?
’”

Barbra never was able to persuade Beatty to make
The Way We Were
, but she did agree to join pop superstars Carole King and James Taylor for the George McGovern fund-raiser at the Forum, an 18,000-seat stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. Although she had just begun work on
Sandbox
, Barbra was able to pull a show together quickly with the same musical charts she had used three months earlier in her final Vegas appearances.

Barbra soon began to have second thoughts. Although her forays into pop rock had been welcomed by all but the most hardened rock critics, and in spite of the fact that she had included four of King’s songs on her last two albums, Barbra convinced herself that she would be booed off the stage of the Forum by irate rock fans, as though she were Ethel Merman facing a mob of Led Zeppelin fanatics. “They’re coming to hear James Taylor and Carole King,” she fretted to Beatty. “They won’t stay and listen to me.”

As the concert date approached Carole King’s representatives said they wanted King to close the show, a spot traditionally held by the headliner. But Marty Erlichman wouldn’t budge: Barbra would close the show or would not appear at all. King backed down, but Barbra, more frightened than ever, vacillated. “Maybe I should just go on first,” she mused, “and then get outta there.”

The myth that Streisand was the musical odd man out for this concert is based almost entirely on her own publicly expressed insecurities. Her participation had been advertised from the outset, and she hadn’t appeared in a full concert in the Los Angeles area since she became a movie star. Many of the ticket buyers would be there specifically to see her.

Barbra’s performance anxiety led to excruciatingly tough last-minute rehearsals. “She was very uptight during those final run-throughs,” recalled Marty Erlichman. “She kept yelling at me during rehearsals, ‘I shouldn’t be here!
’”
Barbra’s intense rehearsals took up so much time that King and Taylor were forced to cram their onstage run-throughs into only thirty minutes. By the night of the concert, Saturday, April 15, Quincy Jones and his orchestra had been added to the lineup. Tickets ranged in price from $5.50 to $100, and ushers on the ground floor included Julie Christie (with Warren Beatty), Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Goldie Hawn, Jon Voight, Carly Simon, and James Earl Jones. The audience was no less star-studded for what was later called “the most glamorous pop concert in recent history.”

King and Taylor each performed to enthusiastic response and brought down the house with a spine-tingling duet of “You’ve Got a Friend,” with King on piano and Taylor on guitar. Following intermission, Quincy Jones conducted his orchestra in a jazz-flavored set. Backstage, Barbra practically bolted for the door when someone in the audience yelled “Rock ’n’ roll,” during one of Jones’s quieter numbers. Although otherwise politely received, the thirty-minute Jones segment slowed the pace of the show, and didn’t allow Barbra to begin her set until well after 11:00
P.M.

She strode onstage in a simple black pants outfit, her hair streaming to mid-back, and she established an immediate rapport with the roaring crowd when she launched into a disarming medley of “Sing” from
Sesame Street
coupled with “Make Your Own Kind of Music.” Calmer as she realized that she wouldn’t be hooted off the stage, she delivered powerful versions of many of her standards. The crowd cheered the pot monologue, which took on new meaning in a venue where marijuana smoke had wafted noticeably through the air all evening.

Barbra cemented her bond with the audience when she let them decide whether she should sing “Second Hand Rose” or “Stoney End.” When their applause indicated they preferred the latter, Barbra admitted that she hadn’t sung it in a while so she had had the lyrics written on the floor of the stage. By the time she finished her one encore, “People,” the audience had accorded her seven standing ovations in the course of a forty-minute performance. George McGovern then joined Barbra, King, Taylor, and Quincy Jones onstage and greeted the crowd with brief remarks. Barbra announced that the evening had raised more than $320,000 to further the senator’s campaign, though it was later reported that after all of the expenses of promoting and staging the concert were paid, the campaign received just $18,000.

The evening turned out to be a triumph for Barbra.
Rolling Stone
magazine, which a year earlier had ridiculed her attempts to modernize her image, now praised her “jolting rock ’n’ roll voice on ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music.
’
... Streisand is a star and, on this night,
the
star.”

When George McGovern lost the presidential race in a landslide to Richard Nixon—even as the Watergate scandal that would bring Nixon down unfolded—Barbra said, “I thought me and my friends were for the right things, and it’s very disappointing that we turned out to be such a small bunch. In terms of lower- and middle-class groups, McGovern would have been much better for them. But I guess they just couldn’t see he was really their man.”

B
ARBRA RELAXED FOR
a few days after the concert, then flew to New York to resume filming
Up the Sandbox
. In Manhattan, crowds of gawkers gathered at Broadway and 125th Street in Harlem to watch Barbra-as-Margaret shop at an open-air grocery. Another location shot placed Barbra near the corner of Madison Avenue and Eighty-third Street. “It was quite close to the school where her mother worked,” recalled a friend of Diana’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We were watching the filming, and the principal asked if she could have her picture taken with Barbra and Diana. I asked Barbra, and she said, ‘My mother works here?’ She didn’t even know where her mother was working.”

As a production assistant on the film, Howard Koch Jr. was responsible for making sure Barbra’s well-known penchant for tardiness didn’t slow down the tightly budgeted production. “I would go to her trailer, knock, and say, ‘Barbra, they’re ready for you,’ and she’d stall and say, ‘Just a minute.’ And then I would remind her that she was one of the producers on the film and that it was her money that was being wasted. ‘You’re right!’ she’d say and fly out of the dressing room.”

B
ARBRA SAT UNDER
a giant tree on a small hill overlooking the dry terrain of Archer’s Post in Kenya. Draped in a vivid blue sarong with matching turban and colorful beaded earrings, she closed her eyes as a young local woman from the Samburu tribe carefully applied homemade color to her eyelids. “She broke a twig from a tree,” Barbra recalled, “took a long thread from her husband’s skirt, made like a Q-Tip, broke off a piece of soft blue rock, spit on it, and put that on my eye with the Q-Tip.”

In June, shortly after she completed location filming in New York, Barbra had flown to equatorial Africa to shoot one of the movie’s most complicated fantasies: Margaret has returned to her apartment after attending a noisy cocktail party in honor of Dr. Beineke, an eccentric anthropologist newly arrived from the Dark Continent. Suddenly knocked unconscious by a would-be mugger in the laundry room of her building, Margaret imagines that she and Beineke are schlepping through the plains of Kenya in search of a painless method of childbirth practiced by the Samburu natives. The segment as written and filmed was elaborate and overlong; what little remains of it in the finished film is practically indecipherable.

To capture what turned out to be less than eight minutes of screen time, the
Sandbox
company was based outside of Nairobi for close to a month. Barbra found the natives fascinating, and they found her intriguing as well. “At first, we were suspicious of them and they were suspicious of us,” she said. “Do you know that these women are not permitted to show pain? They can’t even scream when they have a baby. They seem happy, but wow! Who am I to say anything... to preach.”

Barbra’s looks, of course, contrasted greatly with those of the Samburu women, and many of the male warriors were drawn to her. Their method of showing appreciation caused Streisand some embarrassment. When a tribesman found a woman attractive, he would smile broadly, pull aside his wraparound skirt, and expose his excitement. After a week of this, Barbra claimed with a giggle that she found it easy to measure which of the men liked her best.

Actor Paul Benedict, who was playing Dr. Beineke, recalled one of the numerous times when he and Barbra were killing time between scenes. “Kershner and the camera crew were stationed about one hundred and fifty yards off, and Barbra and I were just sitting around waiting. The native women grew restless and started chanting in the Samburu dialect. Barbra really got into the melody and began humming it. Then she picked up the words and sang along with the tribeswomen. During this performance, Kershner came up to us to discuss something, and Barbra stopped singing. When he left, she began again. I was so impressed with that because you knew she wasn’t showing off; she just really appreciated the music and wanted to be a part of it.”