Streisand: Her Life (108 page)

“B
ARRY, I NEED
money. I’m broke.” Incredibly, this is what Barbra told her old friend Barry Dennen—the man who had helped create her musical style in 1960—during the spring of 1993. She had telephoned Dennen, and during a long catching-up conversation she dropped the bombshell that despite all her success she was having cash-flow problems. “All my money’s tied up in investments and real estate,” she said.

Many of those investments had apparently turned sour, a serious problem because Barbra had tremendous overhead. Her agent and manager each took
10 per
cent of her income. She paid full staffs at the Carolwood house, at the Barwood offices in Hollywood and New York, at the Malibu ranch, and at her Central Park West apartment. (Just watering the Malibu grounds cost Streisand $22,000 a year.) She supported her mother and frequently helped her sister and son financially. She often donated between five hundred thousand and one million dollars a year to various charities through her Streisand Foundation. And her taxes, of course, were huge. She turned over an estimated 30 percent of her income to Uncle Sam after deductions, and the property taxes at Ramirez Canyon were close to $200,000 a year.

For years she had tried to sell the Malibu compound. First, in 1987, she asked $16 million; when she found no buyer she hiked the price to $19 million. Only Barbra! By 1992 she had lowered the price to $11.9 million, but the property remained unsold despite reported interest from Michael Jackson. Finally, unable to afford to keep up the sprawling twenty-two-acre spread, she decided to donate it to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a California state agency, and take a $15 million tax write-off for it.

“How can I raise some money quickly?” Barbra asked Dennen.

“Why don’t you concertize?” Dennen replied. “Do a ten-city, twenty-city tour. You’ll make a fortune.”

“But what about security?”

“What
about
security? You’ll make sure you have whatever security you need.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Then Barbra said, “Well...
maybe
.”

T
he curtains parted, and Barbra stepped tentatively out onto the balcony of her elegant white tearoom set in front of fifteen thousand standing, screaming fans in the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas. At the long stair rail in front of her she hesitated and drew in a deep breath. The crowd quieted to utter silence, and with one hand clutching the rail so tightly her knuckles visibly whitened, Barbra began to sing “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from
Sunset Boulevard
in a tremulous, unsure voice: “I don’t know why I’m frightened.... I know my way around here.”

The audience roared anew, cheering Barbra’s acknowledgment of her fear of performing before such a large audience for the first time in twenty-two years. She seemed to gain confidence as she ambled down the staircase, her full-length black off-the-shoulder gown flowing behind her. By the time she finished her next number, a personalized reworking of Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” (“I kept my nose to spite my face”), everyone in that cavernous hall had relaxed into the certainty that Barbra Streisand’s long-awaited return to the concert stage would be, just as they had anticipated, an unforgettable event.

S
TREISAND FANS HAD
begun to surge into Las Vegas early in the morning of December 31
,
199
3, clutching their oversized green photo tickets to that night’s performance, the next night’s, or both. They came from all fifty states and from Canada, England, France, Holland, Japan, Argentina, and other countries. They streamed through the eighty-eight-foot-high stucco lion’s head entrance to the brand-new $1 billion MGM Grand Hotel. They stood in long lines to have their pictures taken beside a huge poster advertising the Streisand shows, with Barbra’s image smiling coyly out at them. They rushed to the merchandise stands to buy $20 posters, $25 programs, $25 photo T-shirts, $75 sweatshirts, $100 gold key rings, $75 commemorative Streisand postage stamps issued by St. Vincent, West Indies, $85 champagne glasses, and $400 suede-and-wool jackets. Ruth Davidson, a fan from England, spent nearly $5,000 on the concert tickets, airfare to America, and every conceivable piece of Barbra memo
rabilia. “
I would have paid practically
anything
to come,” she said. “What if Barbra decides she doesn’t like it and never performs live again?”

The same thought propelled thousands of fans to spend more than they could afford to attend the concert. “There hasn’t been an event with this type of demand in years, including the championship fights,” said Thomas Wilier, vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Hilton, where Streisand had last performed for pay early in 1972.

Tickets went on sale at eight in the morning of November 7 at prices ranging from $100 to $1,000. Within twenty-four hours over a million calls had been logged by the telephone company. Only a fraction got through; most fans had to call repeatedly for hours. “My phone was literally hot from pressing redial,” one said. Another “carried the portable phone with me everywhere—even the bathtub.”

When the dust settled, the Streisand concerts had grossed over $13 million in ticket sales—double the previous record box-office take for two shows. Streisand’s net personal earnings, minus production costs, were estimated at nearly $8 million, with another $5 million to $10 million possible from concession sales and projected television, record, and video revenues.

E
ARLIER IN THE
year the entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian had worked feverishly to open his MGM Grand Hotel, the largest in the world, by December 18. He knew he needed a blockbuster attraction to draw worldwide publicity to the hotel and enough patrons to fill its 5,005 rooms and its 15,000-seat Grand Garden. He never seriously considered anyone but Streisand, who had opened his International Hotel (now the Las Vegas Hilton) in 1969. But would she do it? He knew that she had turned down millions of dollars in offers for live performing for two decades, but he had also heard rumors that she was considering a concert tour. He thought he could convince her; he would just have to make it worth her while.

He did. First he informed her, without mentioning that he wanted her to perform at the hotel, that his Lincy Foundation would make a $3 million donation to the charities of her choice. “There were no strings attached,” recalled Marty Erlichman, “but Kirk’s generosity made us look very carefully at the MGM Grand proposal when it came in.” (Barbra asked that $2 million of the money be earmarked for various AIDS causes.)

Then the money Kerkorian offered her—90 percent of a take he estimated would be $10 million—took Barbra’s breath away. “Really?” she gasped. “You’d pay me that much?” It seemed folly at first to pay any performer that kind of money for two nights’ work, but Kerkorian knew that the publicity and prestige a Streisand appearance would bring the new hotel would be priceless and would guarantee not only full room bookings but millions of dollars in gambling income as well.

Kerkorian’s largesse, so timely in light of Barbra’s cash flow problems, was only part of the reason she accepted the offer to sing at the MGM Grand. She had vowed never again to perform in a Vegas showroom, where she’d had to fight everything from cigar smoke to clattering cutlery. But the Grand Garden was an arena, not a glorified lounge. Even more important was her desire to fight the demons of fear that had kept her off the concert stage except for sporadic charity and political events.

One step along the way was a birthday party a friend, the clothing designer Donna Karan, threw for her in 1991. “Liza Minnelli got up to sing,” Barbra recalled, “and I’m sitting there thinking, How does she do this? How does anyone get up in front of people and sing? I could never get myself to sing at parties... with people looking at me. I can sing onstage because it is a black curtain out there. I can see just a few people and even that disturbs me.... I didn’t like accepting that fright. I am frightened by a lot of things, but what I hope is good about me is that I go through the fear.”

She had been working at that for twenty-five years, undergoing intensive therapy in an attempt to understand herself and grow as a person and as a performer. She had made great strides in a number of areas. She had tackled her fear of directing, become less suspicious of her fans, grown less rigid in her opinions. The major hurdle remained her overwhelming anxiety at facing a crowd. Kerkorian’s offer—to sing in front of 30,000 people over two days—offered her an unprecedented and lucrative opportunity to get over it.

Still, she remained unsure to the very last minute. The day before the MGM Grand staff needed to make the announcement in order to have the necessary time to work out all the logistics, Barbra still hadn’t signed the contract. When a copy with her signature finally came by fax machine, “There were high fives and hugs all over the place,” said Thomas A. Bruny, the hotel’s director of advertising and public relations.

Once she had made the commitment, Streisand flew into action. She asked an assistant to compile a list of every song she had ever sung, over five hundred of them. Characteristically, she relied on her friends to put the show together with her. She designed two outfits in collaboration with Donna Karan. She asked production designers Marc Brickman and David George to re-create the tearoom from Thomas Jefferson’s magnificent Monticello home, which had so impressed her during her visit to Washington and Virginia earlier in the year. She brought together a sixty-four-piece orchestra to back her up and asked Marvin Hamlisch, the composer of “The Way We Were,” to arrange and conduct.

For three weeks she rehearsed in New York, choosing this song, discarding that one. Marilyn and Alan Bergman wrote the show as a meander through Barbra’s life, weaving her signature songs into a tapestry that included her childhood, her years of therapy, her love affairs, her family, and her political activism.

In the middle of December, rehearsals moved to Los Angeles, at Sound-stage 24 of the Sony Studios on the former MGM lot. A few days before she left for Las Vegas, Barbra invited two hundred people to hear her perform Act One. Robert Osborne, in the next day’s
Hollywood Reporter,
proclaimed the show “nothing short of spectacular.”

But a few days later, on the plane to Las Vegas, Barbra’s nerve started to give out. What have I done? she asked herself. What am I doing?

J
ULIE EDLER
,
A
forty-one-year-old army production assistant from Salt Lake City, arrived at the Grand Garden at three in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve for that night’s eight-o’clock show. As she had hoped, she stood first in line. “Never in my whole life did I think I’d ever see her
live,”
she said. “I
had
to be here.”

Six hours later, an hour after the show’s scheduled start time, hordes of fans were still piling past nine metal detectors set up outside the main doors by hotel security. These extraordinary measures were augmented by a crack Israeli unit trained in counterterrorism and by explosive-sniffing dogs supplied by Streisand’s own security force. Reportedly, concession stands were forbidden to provide straws (they might be used to launch projectiles), and a uniformed guard escorting President Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, was denied admission.