Streisand: Her Life (85 page)

Streisand confers with Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving
on
location for
Yentl,
her first directorial effort, 1982.
“
I don’t know how I survived it,” Barbra admitted.

Amy Irving as Hadass and Barbra as Yentl masquerading as Anshel in
Yentl,
released in 1983 to critical acclaim. Of the three stars, only Amy received an Oscar nomination, which created an uproar.
(Richard Giammanco)

Madonna visits Barbra and her costar Richard Dreyfuss on the set of
Nuts,
1986. Streisand played a prostitute accused of murder.
(Chris Nickens collection)

Barbra’s affair with
Miami Vice
hunk Don Johnson sent press and fans into a tizzy. Here, they attend the Los Angeles premiere of Johnso
n’s f
ilm
Sweethearts Dance,
September 1988.
(Bob Scott)

As the director
of
The Prince of Tides,
Barbra led her costar Nick Nolte to his first Oscar nomination, 1991.
(Author’s collections)

Jason Gould escorts his mother to the Academy Awards ceremonies in 1992. Although
The Prince of Tides
was nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture, Streisand was again overlooked in the best director category.
(Bob Scott)

Klein suggested an eclectic mix of songs, from Billy Joel’s bluesy “New York State of Mind” and Kim Carnes and Dave Ellington’s “Love Comes from Unexpected Places” to the hard-rocking “Cabin Fever” and
“
Don’t Believe What You Read.” Barbra composed the latter tune’s lyrics when she became incensed by a
Los Angeles
magazine gossip item that reported the contradictory news that she had a germ fetish and that she had pet birds flying free around her home, leaving their droppings everywhere.

The cover and inside packaging of
Streisand Superman
featured Barbra clad in skimpy white shorts and a T-shirt with the Superman logo emblazoned across the front, an outfit she had worn briefly in
A Star Is Born.
The
Stereo Review
critic Peter Reilly wrote: “Streisand’s newest features, among other goodies, several rearview photographs of her in an abbreviated track suit that permits an ample display of tushie. And a very pretty and appealing tushie it is, too.
And
also probably aimed directly, for bussing purposes, at the critics.”

Those critics were kind to
Streisand Superman
upon its release in June of 1977; Stephen Holden considered it “among the finest of Streisand’s thirty-plus LPs.” The album shot up to number three, and a single, “My Heart Belongs to Me,” hit number four on the pop charts.

The playfully sexy photographs of Barbra published in the album led
Playboy
magazine to feature her on its cover in October to accompany an extended interview. She had posed in a bunny outfit, but the picture chosen had her wearing the Superman outfit with the
Playboy
logo across her chest. She was the first female movie star pictured on the magazine’s cover since Marilyn Monroe more than twenty years earlier.

Larry Grobel spent months interviewing Streisand, and the experience, he said, left him drained. “Barbra Streisand is the most intense woman I’ve ever met. Whenever I’d ask her a question that had even the nuance of being critical, she would take the question apart to see if it was fair to have asked it.... [S]he carefully dissected the words ‘power’ and ‘control’ each time I used them... she felt ‘control’ had ‘negative implications’ and was too broad a term. She narrowed it to ‘artistic responsibility,’ elaborating, ‘If you mean that I am completely dedicated and care deeply about carrying out a total vision of a project—yes, that’s true.
’”

I
N OCTOBER
1977 Barbra signed a new five-year contract with Columbia Records. Negotiated by Jon, the pact called for five albums over the next five years plus a “Greatest Hits” package, and guaranteed Barbra an advance of $1.5 million for each album against a royalty rate of approximately 20 percent of the retail price, about $1.50 per album. The budget for each record was set at $250,000, a considerable improvement over the $18,000 spent on Barbra’s first effort for Columbia. The label’s president, Bruce Lundvall, found Jon “very smart,” with “a good street sense. I never found him to be an adversary.” Although other labels had expressed interest in wooing Barbra away from Columbia, Lundvall doubted that Jon had spoken seriously to any of them. “It became one of those things where she said, ‘Hey, this is family,
’”
Lundvall recalled. “There was a lot of loyalty on her part.”

On December 22 Barbra attended a lavish party at La Premiere restaurant in Manhattan, thrown by Columbia to celebrate its new contract with her and a production-talent acquisition deal with Jon Peters. Celebrities ranging from Shirley MacLaine to Bella Abzug attended, and so did dozens of Barbra’s relatives. She took it upon herself to make sure the kinfolk were all well fed. “This is the only way I get to meet my family,” she said as cousins and aunts and nieces lined up to have their pictures taken with the star. She kidded her brother—“Sheldon thinks he’s the star of the family”—and told a group of relatives, “You wait, I’ll be back, okay,” as she moved off with Shirley and Bella for a private tete-a-tete in a corner.

Jon had the flu and couldn’t attend, Barbra told the columnist Earl Wilson. “Is he running a temperature?” Wilson asked.

“You used to ask Jon questions about me,” Barbra said with a laugh. “Now you ask me questions about him. He must be making out very good.”

He was. Since October Jon had been in New York filming
Eyes of Laura Mars
,
a thriller starring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones that he was producing for Columbia. After
A Star Is Born
,
which Jon and Barbra had brought in on time and under budget, Peters had become a hot property in Hollywood. And he was determined to prove, both to the public and to her, that he wasn’t just Barbra Streisand’s boyfriend. “There is tremendous competition between us,” Jon admitted.

When he had decided to strike out on his own, Jon had met over lunch with Warren Beatty.
“Don’t b
e a schmuck,” Beatty had told him. “Develop a couple of things at once. Because movies can take a lot of time to get going and you never know when one will be ready to go.”

By 1978 Jon, working seven days a week and sixteen hours a day, had fifteen films in various stages of development, was scouting the country for musical acts for Columbia Records, and was acting as Geraldo Rivera’s manager as well as Barbra’s. After fifteen years, Marty Erlichman had surrendered to the all-encompassing influence of Jon in Barbra’s life and had left the Streisand circle—and he apparently felt some rancor toward Jon. “Maybe she needed new direction,” Marty said. “Barbra and I are still close. We speak on the phone once a week. As for Jon Peters? Even before I left, he was calling himself her manager. My thoughts on what he does and how he does it, well, they’re not for publication.”

B
ARBRA’S FIRST ALBUM
for Columbia under her new contract was
Songbird
,
a disappointing 1978 collection of “mainly second-rate songs,” Stephen Holden felt, “that she rides herd over with some of the most shrilly indifferent interpretations of her career.” Still, the album managed to reach number twelve on the charts.

One of the best tracks on
Songbird
was Barbra’s rendition of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” by Neil Diamond with lyrics by the Bergmans. When Gary Guthrie, a disc jockey in Louisville, Kentucky, heard Diamond’s own version of the song and realized that both were in the same key, he used some editing legerdemain to create a duet and played it over the air that night. To the consternation of record-store owners, hundreds of customers started asking for the record, which didn’t exist. The phone calls to the station asking Guthrie to play the song again grew so heavy that he added it to his regular Top 40 rotation.

Guthrie sent a copy of the tape to Columbia, and after they slapped a cease-and-desist order on him to keep him from playing what was in fact an illegal tape, Bruce Lundvall persuaded Diamond and Streisand to get together and record a duet for real. When the single was released late in October, it created a sensation across the country. Some 85 percent of radio stations added it to their playlist within the first ten days, an unprecedented acceptance for a Streisand single. A programmer’s newsletter said that “females go berserko and will wait all day to hear this.”

“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” went to number one within six weeks and became Barbra’s biggest hit single. The popularity of the song helped propel her next album,
Barbra Streisand’s Greatest Hits, Volume II
,
to the top of the charts as well when it was included in that package, which sold over four million copies. Under the terms of her new contract, this album, for which she had recorded nothing new, brought Streisand over $6 million in royalties.

“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” was nominated for Grammy Awards as Record of the Year and for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus. On February 27, 1980, Barbra and Neil performed the song during the live television broadcast of the Grammy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles; it was the first time in her career that Barbra had agreed to sing at the Grammy ceremony. She and Diamond appeared suddenly, unannounced, in dramatic pools of light on opposite sides of the stage and walked slowly toward each other as they sang the song, creating near havoc in the audience as they finally met in an embrace at center stage. A wobbly voice betrayed Barbra’s nervousness early in the song, but as she moved closer to Neil, she regained control and ended the performance flawlessly. Although their duet didn’t win Record of the Year or the performance award, the Streisand-Diamond performance received a prolonged standing ovation and was chosen as one of the highlights of the entire TV season by the producers of a year-end retrospective television special.