Streisand: Her Life (75 page)

Jaffe recalled that when Barbra told Stark from her Watergate Hotel suite that she had a scratchy throat and wanted to rest her voice rather than rehearse the songs she was scheduled to sing that night, a “heated argument” ensued. “Ray was
pissed off
with her. He said, ‘Listen, this is really serious. This is the meat of the whole tour. You have to be there for rehearsal!’ But she wasn’t gonna do it. I thought, Boy, Streisand’s the one in charge here.”

Later, as the rehearsal got under way, Jaffe stood and chatted with several Secret Service men who were there to scope out the Kennedy Center in anticipation of President Ford’s arrival. “Barbra’s not going to rehearse,” Jaffe told the men. But within moments Streisand appeared. “She walked out, looking casual but very elegant in jeans and a beautiful silk shirt, and started to rehearse two or three of the numbers,” Jaffe recalled. “I thought, That’s very interesting. Here it had seemed that she was in charge, and now it was clear that Ray Stark was calling the shots.”

Peter Matz, who was conducting the orchestra, recalled that “Barbra was very upset by the time we started rehearsals. She had agreed to do [the show] only because it was for the Special Olympics—she had vowed never to do any more television. Then, when it was too late, she realized that it was really a Ray Stark promo for the movie, a hype. Barbra gets crazy when she feels she’s been hyped. It was a bad situation.”

Funny Girl to Funny Lady
, broadcast live over ABC, proved a triumph for Barbra despite her anger at Stark and a case of nerves that left her retching in the bathroom moments before she took the stage. She had expected the audience of government officials to be stuffy, but when she strode out in a low-cut black gown, her straight blond hair flowing to mid-back, the officials jumped to their feet for a two-minute ovation. “Men in tuxedos and women in high-fashion gowns stood up and carried on like bobby-soxers of old,” a UPI reporter wrote, “shrieking and screaming above the thunderous applause. When Streisand started crooning ‘The Way We Were,’ it all started again.
’”

“If you applaud too much we’ll run out of time,” Barbra told the audience, but to no avail. The frequent and lengthy interruptions put the show behind schedule, and at the end of the hour there was no time left for Barbra to sing “People,” which she had planned to do in tribute to the children and volunteers of the Special Olympics. “Oh, that’s it?” she asked when she was told she had to wrap things up. “That’s a live show for you.”

The event, a promotional masterstroke, prompted grumbling from some critics. Frank Swertlow of UPI was incensed. “If this show was for charity, why was Miss Streisand paid $100,000 for her appearance? Wasn’t an hour of prime time advertising enough?... People who tuned in to see Barbra Streisand were cheated. They sought entertainment, but what they received was plugola. There is something very wrong about this, very wrong indeed.”

B
ARBRA AND
Jon traveled by train to New York on Monday morning; on Tuesday afternoon she and James Caan met the press at the Hotel Pierre. She hadn’t wanted to do that either. “Barbra hated talking to reporters,” Steve Jaffe said. “She felt that they’d only twist what she had to say, or write bad things about her no matter what she said. She felt that it wouldn’t help her career any, because her work basically sold itself.” But once again Ray Stark had prevailed.

At the premiere that evening, just as she had feared, Barbra and Jon were mobbed by fans outside the Loew’s Astor Plaza. Once again it took fifty policemen and a phalanx of burly bodyguards to inch them through the screaming, madding crowd, Barbra looking stricken and Jon hovering protectively nearby.

A friend of Barbra’s mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, escorted Diana to the screening. “It was strange,” he recalled. “No one seemed to want to come over and talk to Diana. Barbra didn’t, and I went up to Marvin Hamlisch and asked him to say hello, and he hesitated but finally did. Ray Stark did come over, and he said to her, ‘Your daughter and I have had ten good years. If only someone would talk to her, we could have ten more.’

“After the screening, an announcement was made that people with yellow roses on their chairs should board the bus and go to the party. Diana didn’t have a yellow rose on her chair. I guess she wasn’t invited.”

F
RIGHTENED ANEW BY
the New York mob scene, Barbra ordered Steve Jaffe to tell Ray Stark that she would not go on to London. Stark, understandably, hit the roof. “I’m not going to talk to her,” he shouted at Jaffe. “
You
talk to her! Get Jon to mediate. Just make sure she’s
there,
goddammit!”

Jaffe telephoned Barbra with Stark’s message. “Ray! I
hate
him,” she cried. Jaffe told her she had to do this, that the queen of England and the president of France were expecting her, and that she owed it to Stark. “She felt such bitterness toward him,” Jaffe recalled. “She felt as though she’d been an indentured servant to Stark for ten years, and she was sick of having to do what he wanted her to do.”

Jaffe pleaded with Barbra to go on to London as planned. “Ray’s been responsible, at least in part, for your career, Barbra,” he told her. “Maybe he didn’t pay you what you wanted to be paid, but if you got paid what you wanted to be paid, there wouldn’t be any gold in Fort Knox.”

Jaffe found that “I could actually talk to her like that, and she would laugh. She handled the truth as well as any of the major egos that I’ve encountered. She finally said she’d go to London, but she and Stark still weren’t talking. I thought, This is going to spell trouble for the rest of the trip.”

In London, although all of the others, including James Caan, registered at the Dorchester Hotel under their own names, Barbra and Jon signed in as “Mrs. B. Gould and party.” On the evening of March 18, Barbra met Queen Elizabeth for the first time, and the encounter went par for the Streisand-and-royalty course. Upset that Jon hadn’t been allowed to stand next to her in the receiving line to meet the queen, Streisand asked Elizabeth, “Why do women have to wear gloves and not men?”

Taken aback, the queen muttered, “I’ll have to think about that. I suppose it’s a tradition.” Then she quickly moved on.

After the command performance, Ray Stark hosted a celebratory dinner at a posh London restaurant. Just as Steve Jaffe sat down to eat, the maître d’ told him he was wanted on the phone. It was Jon. “Barbra’s not feeling well,” he said. “Tell Ray we’re not going to Paris.”

In the background Jaffe could hear Barbra calling out, “I’m tired. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Jaffe swallowed hard and went over to Stark. “Ray, I just got a call from Jon. Barbra’s not feeling well.”

“That’s okay,” Stark replied. “Tell her to rest up a bit, and she can join us later. We’ll still be here.”

Jaffe couldn’t bring himself to relay Barbra’s actual message, so he got Peters back on the phone. “Jon, I think Ray would react very badly if I told him you weren’t going to Paris. Why don’t you just rest up tonight.”

“No, Steve, she’s not going,” Peters replied.

Then Barbra grabbed the phone: “Tell him I don’t feel well. I’m sick, and I’m not going.”

Jon took the phone back. “You got that?”

“Yeah, I got it,” Jaffe sighed.

When he gave the message to Stark, the producer said quietly, “Tell her she’s going.”

Jaffe called Barbra back. “No way,” she insisted.

Stark then told Jaffe, “Tell Barbra that I will provide her with a hospital plane if I have to, and I’ll send doctors to the hotel.
But she is going to Paris tomorrow
.”

“There isn’t a way in the world, Steve,” Jon thundered at his hapless publicist.

When Jaffe relayed this latest message to Stark, the producer stood up and left his own party. “He was
real
pissed off,” Jaffe recalled.

The next morning Jaffe found out that Stark had somehow persuaded Barbra to go to Paris. “I think Ray owed her one last payment or something, and he threatened to withhold it unless she got herself to France.” When Jaffe arrived at the Plaza Athénée Hotel, he learned that Barbra and Jon had stopped at an Italian restaurant on their way to Paris from the airport. “They ate everything in the place,” he marveled. “They just
stuffed
themselves. A quarterback would have been sick eating all the food they did. They made sure that by the time they got to the Athénée Barbra was sick as a dog.”

When Stark heard about Barbra’s distress, he came to her suite. As she ran back and forth to the bathroom, Stark yelled, “She’s coming tonight! She’s going to show up tonight. The president of France is going to be there and he expects to see her.”

“But you can see she’s sick,” Peters pleaded.

“I’ve got two doctors on the way right now. They’ll examine her. If they report to me that she’s too ill to appear, then she doesn’t have to appear.”

As far as Jaffe was concerned, “Barbra’s one of the greatest actresses on the planet. I figured all she had to do was act sick and she’d be in the clear.”

When the doctors arrived, they examined Barbra in her room for a few minutes as Stark, Jaffe, Jon, and Marty Erlichman waited. When they came back out, one of the physicians announced, “She has zee stomach problem.” As the doctor spoke, Jaffe noticed Barbra peering around the edge of the bedroom door, trying to hear what he was saying.

“How serious is it,” Stark wanted to know.

“It weel go away. She weel be okay.”

“Are you going to give her any medication?”

“Ah,
oui
, I can geeve her zee medication.”

Finally Ray lost his patience.
“Well, what’s wrong with her
.”