Streisand: Her Life (117 page)

In November 2002, Barbra learned that aerial photographs had been taken of her Malibu compound and were appearing on the website californiacoastline.org. On May 20, 2003, she filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking an order barring photographer Kenneth Adelman from continuing to distribute the images of her home. Adelman operates the California Coastal Records Project, which specializes in aerial photographs of the California coast, images supposedly intended for use by scientists and researchers.

In the complaint, Barbra’s attorneys Alschuler, Grossman, Stein, and Kahan asked for a Cease and Desist order and damaged of $10 million and wrote, “The clarity with which details of her private residences are paraded on the world wide web for all to see has caused Plaintiff (Barbra) considerable anxiety. In light of [her] past experiences with stalkers, threats to her safety, and undesirable personalities’ proven propensity for prying into every aspect of her private life, [she] is justly concerned that the photographs of her property provide a road map into her residence for anyone who would be inclined to attempt to gain access to the grounds.”

The complaint goes on to describe the reaction of Adelman when Barbra’s lawyers asked him to remove the photograph. “Adelman refused, and through his website, has promised that he will continue to take pictures of the California coastline (including Plaintiff’s property) with his high-tech equipment in his harassing helicopter flybys.”

Ten days after the suit was filed, news of it reached the media. Unsurprisingly, most accounts were not kind to Barbra, since reporters and photographers think of any invasion of privacy suit as potentially affecting their right to earn a living. The website
The Smoking Gun
opined, “With Streisand in the suing mood, perhaps she’ll consider slapping a complaint on the Mapquest folks, because--if any miscreants are armed with the address of her Malibu pad--they can get a grainy satellite photo of her oceanfront estate.” The piece included a link to an image of Barbra’s property that was snapped by a satellite orbiting 22,000 miles above her backyard. “ TSG also recommends a lawsuit against L.A.’s Office of the Assessor, which had the nerve to include Streisand’s estate on a county property assessment map. And while she’s at it, Streisand might as well sue the U.S. Geological Survey for its satellite spying.”

On December 3, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Allan J. Goodman threw out the suit. In a forty-six-page decision, the judge declared that publication of the aerial photographs was protected by the First Amendment and was not “highly offensive to a reasonable person.” Dismissing Barbra’s claim that her privacy was violated, Goodman stated, “As a matter of law, there is nothing private or personal” about the photo. Goodman added insult to injury by ordering that Barbra pay Adelman’s legal expenses.

Needless to say, Barbra was very displeased with the ruling, and refused to pay legal fees that Adelman said amounted to $200,000. Thus on March 5, 2004 Adelman asked the court to compel Barbra to pay him. Her attorneys retorted that the amount Adelman sought was unreasonably high. On May 21, Judge Goodman issued an order directing Barbra to pay $177, 107.54. Barbra did not appeal, and the matter was finally resolved after nearly two years.

The entire episode resulted in a phenomenon that Mike Masnick of Techdirt dubbed “The Streisand Effect.” It describes a situation where someone’s attempt to suppress information results directly in its being more widely disseminated. Before the lawsuit, californiacoastline.org’s “Image 3850” of Barbra’s home had been viewed only six times, and two had been by Barbra’s lawyers. After the publicity generated by the suit, more than 420,000 people visited the site during the following month alone.

During her “One Voice” concert in 1986, just before she sang “Over the Rainbow” from
The Wizard of Oz
, Barbra told the audience that she was planning an album devoted to songs from movies. It took her seventeen years to put together
The Movie Album
, but all that time she was making mental notes about songs she’d like to sing on it. “As I heard a song from a movie, I’d say to Jay [Landers], ‘Where’s the list I’ve been giving you? I’d call him up and say, ‘Just get me the sheet music and put it away for when I say I’m going to make this album.’”

To an extent she never has before, Barbra explained her reasons for including each of the album’s eleven songs to Steven M. Housman in
Genre Magazine
. She loved the “poignant” melody of “Smile,” written by Charlie Chaplin for his 1936 film
Modern Times
, and the lyrics (added eighteen years later by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons) touched her deeply for a very personal reason. Two nights before the recording session,. Sammy, her nine-year-old Bison-Frise, had to be put to sleep. “When I stepped into the vocal booth, his brave and loyal face was very much on my mind. ‘Smile, though your heart is aching...’ Dog lovers will understand.”

One of Barbra’s favorite actresses as a girl was Audrey Hepburn, and she was captivated when Hepburn, as Holly Golightly, sang ‘Moon River’ in the 1961 film
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. “I was a teenager when I first sang “Moon River,” with just a piano. It was 1961, on ‘P.M. East/P.M.West.’”

“I’m in the Mood for Love,” Barbra points out, is much more famous than the 1935 movie it came from, “Every Night at Eight,” in which it is sung as a ballad. “I always imagined this as a gentle, rhythmic bossa nova,” which is how she sings it on this album.

Another actress the young Barbra loved was earthy Italian star Anna Magnani, whom she first saw in
Wild is the Wind
. The title tune “left a deep impression on me when I was about fifteen years old. When I saw the movie I developed a little crush on Anthony Franciosa... I associate movie songs with a kind of orchestral lushness, and I was delighted to use arranger Jorge Calandrelli’s wonderful chart for this one... emotional and romantic.”

Barbra wanted to sing the lilting “Emily,” from
The Americanization of Emily
, composed by Johnny Mandel. But the lyrics, written by Johnny Mercer, where clearly meant for a man to sing. She asked the Mercer Foundation for permission to have the Bergman write a new verse. “I thought if the song had a new verse—with the idea of Emily longing to hear her lover speak her name—it would be possible for me to perform it,” Barbra explained.

Barbra so loved the music Andre Previn wrote for the 1962 film
The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse
(“the most magnificent movie theme I think I’ve ever heard!”) that she walked down the aisle to it at her wedding to James Brolin. “It’s such a beautiful melody that I desperately wanted to sing it.” Previn agreed when Barbra asked him to let the Bergmans write lyrics to his music. The result was “More in Love with You,” the sixth song on the album. “With the Bergmans’ heartfelt words, I’m really pleased with the results.”

Barbra had recorded Michel Legrand and the Bergmans’ “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” from
Best Friends
in the nineteen eighties, but she wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement, so she never released it. For this album, Robbie Buchanan and Jeremy Lubbock wrote an arrangement Barbra liked. “[Legrand’s] melodies are always so passionate and such and joy to sing, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s lyric eloquently address the challenges couples can face, keeping the flames of love alive.”

A teenage Barbra bought Billie Holiday’s ‘Lady in Satin’ off the rack in a supermarket for $1.98. “It was extraordinary.” She particularly liked Billie’s version of “But Beautiful,” which Bing Crosby had first sung in one of his road pictures with Bob Hope,
Road to Rio
, in 1947.

Barbra loved the 1988 movie
Bagdad Café
and Bob Telseson’s song for it, “Calling You.” Barbra felt “the words and music perfectly capture the essence of the film—mysterious and magical. Robbie Buchanan’s distant, hypnotic arrangement evokes the wide-open, lonely landscapes I was imagining while I was singing.”

“The Second Time Around” was originally sung by Bing Crosby in the 1960 film
High Time
, and turned into a standard by Frank Sinatra. “Anyone who’s been through a failed relationship,” Barbra said, “then is lucky enough to find love again in their life, can appreciate these lyrics.”

Barbra liked the theme music in Warren Beatty’s 1981 film
Reds
, which was composed by Stephen Sondheim. She later learned that Sondheim had written words to the melody which hadn’t been used in the film. “I love singing Stephen’s songs because they tell a story. They give the actor a chance to play a character.”

And finally Barbra chose a song from an early Robert Redford film she had liked,
Inside Daisy Clover
, starring Natalie Wood in the title role as a young girl aching for stardom. Comparisons to “I’m the Greatest Star” are inevitable. “I remember liking this Hollywood rags-to-riches-to-nervous-breakdown movie,” Barbra said. “Every actor who’s ever gone into an isolated looping booth, repeating their lines over and over again in order to lip-sync with their screen image can relate to the scene where Daisy goes nuts!”

The Movie Album
met with a good critical reception upon its release on October 14, 2003. Music critic Jerry McCulley wrote, “It’s a given that Barbra Streisand loves being a movie star. But this collection of pop songs culled from 60+ years of Hollywood history displays a love and understanding of movie song craft whose depth is surprising, even coming from the legendary diva….It’s in the album’s smaller, more unexpected surprises (an exotica-tinged “Wild is the Wind,” the slinky, electro production of
Bagdad Café
’s “Calling You,” “Moon River”’s faithful evocation of Hepburn strumming her guitar in the film) that it reveals its true heart and soul--and that of Barbra Streisand, unabashed Hollywood movie lover.”

The Movie Album
peaked on the
Billboard
chart at Number five. It was certified Gold, and nominated for a Grammy as Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.

T
he 2000 box-office smash
Meet the Parents
starred Ben Stiller as Gaylord “Greg” Focker, an easy-going Jewish hospital nurse who wants to marry a lovely blond Gentile woman, Pam Byrnes, played by Teri Polo. He seeks the approval of her father Jack, an uptight, super-macho, super suspicious former CIA agent played by Robert DeNiro, who spies on him, belittles him and generally gives him a hard time. As Greg struggles to win Jack over, just about everything that can go wrong hilariously does so.

Meet the Parents
grossed over $330 million worldwide, so a sequel was inevitable. We had met Pam’s parents, so how about we meet Greg’s? Screenwriters Tim Rasmussen, John Hamburg, and Vince DiMeglio came up with the only logical characters for comic tension—Roz and Bernie Focker, former hippies who believe in free love, frequent hugs and kisses, and unabashed sexuality. Roz, in fact, is a sex therapist for seniors. When Barbra read an early script, she loved the character of Roz Focker. But she was reluctant to come out of her self-imposed movie retirement. “All I could think of was, Can I really do it?’ Barbra said. “Because I like to sleep late, and stay in bed. For this movie I would have to get up at five. That is not cute.”

As director Jay Roach recalled to Rebecca Murray of About.com, “She has a good life, a great husband. James Brolin’s such a cool guy and she has this beautiful house – and she loves working on her house. That was actually the hard part. I had to compete with the houseplants. It took a year of phone calls and drafts of scripts. We finally came up with this one scene she really loved where she got to throw Robert DeNiro down on a massage table and jump on top of him and rub oil all over him. Once we got that, that was it.” After reading an early draft, Barbra had suggested the writers put in a scene between her and DeNiro. “Because there was no contact between my character and De Niro’s character in that [early] script, so I suggested what if I was somehow sexually massaging him or…I had to have some interaction. If you have me and DeNiro in a movie, you have to have something, so they wrote the massage scene.”

Producer Jane Rosenthal added that persuading Barbra to play Roz was only a dream at first. “But then as the script and the character evolved, there was only one person to play [Gregg’s] mother. And Ben really wanted her. He called her and said, ‘I want you to play my mother.’” Another major reason Barbra agreed was the chance to act with her long-time friend Dustin Hoffman, who signed up for the film two months before she did. Jay Roach revealed a third reason: “She’s never done a movie where she wasn’t the star. She was grateful to be in an ensemble.” And, Barbra added, “I’m happy not to have to be worried about every single little thing. If it screws up, it’s your fault!”

One of the screenplay writers, John Hamburg, told the New Jersey
Star Ledger
that once Barbra had been signed, he rewrote sections of the script expressly for her in addition to the massage scene. He also did some research. “I looked back at all these old movies of hers like
Owl and the Pussycat
and
What’s Up, Doc?
She’s funny, and she’s got great comic timing. So this is a callback to that era of Barbra Streisand.”

Barbra decided to take her cue for Roz’s look in the film from Ben Stiller’s. “He has dark, curly hair [in the movie] so I thought that I wanted to look like him. I have a 6 year-old goddaughter, she has very curly, longer hair and I just thought that they [the Fockers] were stuck in the seventies, so I guess instinctively I started to dress like her and look like her. Then when the movie was done and I was looking at the poster, I was thinking that looks so familiar to me. Then I thought, that’s how I looked in
A Star in Born
and that was in the seventies but I didn’t think about it consciously before the movie started.”

Barbra based her characterization of Roz’s interaction with her son Greg in her own relationship with her new poodle, called Sammy after her late predecessor. “I’m in love with my dog Samantha [and] there is a way I speak to her--‘You, the poodle, good morning!’ She petted and baby-talked to Ben, who was sitting next to her for the interview. “So I thought that’s the way I would love my son.”

Once the casting was set, Roach was a little concerned about having so many big stars in his movie, especially since DeNiro and Hoffman are Method actors, and Barbra is not. “They all come at it very differently. Most of the time it’s okay because, as an ensemble sitting around the dinner table, especially when there’s all six of them, they start to pick up on the flow and the energy level. They’re like great theater actors. I mean, we did some takes that were eight minutes long and they were amazing. When they work individually, then I really have to adjust how I direct them and how they work in the scene and as the character. Ben Stiller knows every line and has got it all down. He knows the structure of the scene and then he riffs off of that. Dustin Hoffman will come in and he’s in a play mode from the get-go, so the lines are already different and completely malleable. The other actors have to keep up with him because he’s on the scene, but he might not be on the same lines as everybody else. But that’s a great magic because accidents happen, really great, hilarious accidents. A lot of what’s great about the film actually is Dustin just going off in some weird direction.”

Meet the Fockers
filmed in Los Angeles between April and August of 2004, and Barbra felt quite secure in director Roach’s hands. “I really love to be wanted and a lot of people are intimidated by me, especially directors. And Jay wasn’t at all, he’s just so collaborative and open to ideas. I think that’s a sign of true talent; when you are not afraid of other peoples’ opinions. You want to take from them.”

Robert DeNiro said he’d had a “good time” working with Barbra, even though “we have different ways of working. I think this was good for the dynamics of our relationship in the movie. She’s not a Method actor. It’s more than Method. She was very sensible in her approach. She had good ideas about stuff, and in that [massage] scene, I was concerned that it build up to a crescendo. I wanted it to build to a kind of climax, no pun intended, but... yes, pun intended!”

Barbra said she “choreographed” the massage scene with her masseuse the night before it was scheduled to be shot. Even so, the shooting proved difficult for her. “I was doing this thing with my elbow on Bobby and he kept saying press harder, press harder.’” The scene took sixteen hours to get right. “My thumbs gave out a bit. I got tendonitis and I had to wear a brace. But it was fun. Bobby’s just so good to work with.”

Ben Stiller also loved working with Barbra, and found himself a little in awe of her. “She was very outgoing from the beginning. She invited all the cast over to her house for dinner a couple of times. Going to her house is this incredible crazy thing where you try to pretend like it’s normal to hear all these incredible names, from Brando to Clinton. She has little stories about everybody. [But] there are no airs about it.

“As I was getting to the point where I felt comfortable with her, there was a fundraiser for John Kerry where she was going to sing. We all went to watch her at the Disney Concert Hall. This was after we’d been shooting for four or five week and I was so used to just seeing her as Barbra, my mom in the movie, and then I go to this thing. A full-on diva comes out and she gets a two-minute standing ovation before she even does anything. She looks and sings like
Barbra Streisand
and she’s not wearing the curly wig from the movie.”

But on-set Barbra was just one of the guys. Teri Polo told the story of a gift that Barbra had given her at the start of filming to “break the ice”: “She gave me a white chocolate lollipop in the shape of a breast.” (One ersatz mammary gland is a running joke throughout the film.) Barbra’s gift, Polo felt, was her way of showing her fellow cast mates she was OK with what Polo called “the film’s naughty scenes.” Polo started calling Streisand “boob” on the set. “She answers to it too—just ask her.”

When we first see Barbra in
Meet the Fockers
, she is facing away from us, moving her derriere back and forth as she leads a limbering-up routine for elderly Romeos and Juliets. The film’s co-producer and editor Jon Poll said that he and director Roach were a little worried that Streisand would think the introduction undignified. “[She came into] the cutting room and Jay just wanted to make sure [the shot] was okay. She was great about it. She said, ‘Sure, it’s funny, go for it!’” A relieved Jay Roach added, “People had high expectations about what Barbra Streisand would do in her first film in a long time. She loved the idea of teasing them and having a specific reveal of her face after she’d been waving her hips around for a few minutes.”

Roach told
USA Today
, “Dustin and Barbra should have been a comedy team. They have great comic timing. They could have done vaudeville or
I Love Lucy
or even Tracy-Hepburn stuff.” When the Fockers and Byrneses get together for cocktails, Barbra improvised some funny business, according to Roach. “Dustin is giving a toast, and Barbra starts to sip,” Roach explained. “He tells her, ‘You can’t drink yet,’ so she spits out the drink, ice cubes and all, into her glass and says, ‘Oh, sorry.’ It was a little bit of controlled chaos but in the most delicious way.”

Upon its release on December 22, 2004,
Meet the Fockers
became that rare sequel that out-performs its predecessor at the box office. It took in over $516 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing non-animated comedy of all time. (A record surpassed in 2011 by
The Hangover Pt. II.
) A lot of that success was credited to Barbra and Dustin, who had marvelous chemistry on screen and shared many of the movie’s funniest scenes. The film’s level of hilarity rises considerably the minute they appear and rarely lets down after that.Many expected Barbra, Dustin, and the film to be nominated for (and probably win) Golden Globes in the Musical or Comedy category. But because of a scheduling glitch, the film wasn’t submitted to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in time for consideration.

Although Barbra’s seventeenth film was the first in which she had truly been part of an ensemble,
Meet the Fockers
proved another triumphant example of her box-office clout. And it won her many new young movie-going fans who had never seen her on screen before.