Streisand: Her Life (120 page)

The house on the cul-de-sac sold to a couple who became aware of how much Barbra loved it and a few years later offered it to her for four times what they had paid for it. Barbra countered with an offer three times what they had paid for it. They turned her down. Over the ensuing years Barbra keep her eye on the property and purchased a run-down house two doors down, which she planned to raze, then one next door to her dream house, also a “teardown” in real estate parlance.

In 1995, to Barbra’s joy, the house she coveted became available at a reduced rate because its owners were divorcing. She snapped it up. She now had several acres of prime Malibu Cliffs real estate upon which to create her dream compound. She kept “the main house,” which she said “didn’t cause me any pain,” exactly as it was. “It took me only three days to move everything in and it looked as if I’d been living here for years... it needed very little. It was a gift.”

In 2010, Viking Penguin published Barbra’s sumptuous 296-page coffee table book
My Passion for Design
. In it she takes readers on an intimate tour of the main house and the three other extraordinary structures that she built on the property over the preceding fifteen years. In many ways the compound is Barbra’s greatest production. As though she were planning a movie, she envisioned buildings and rooms and gardens and worked with artisans to achieve her vision—many of them borrowed from film studios

The first structure Barbra describes in the book is the mill house. On an antique-hunting jaunt through Vermont in 1989, Barbra bought a hooked rug with picture of a mill house and a waterwheel, and years later it gave her the inspiration to build one for her property. The logistics of building the barn, installing the water wheel, and creating a pond for the mill to send ripples through were daunting, but Barbra saw it through with loving attention to every detail. (The fish in the pond were chosen because their colors complemented the roses in the garden, which contains a huge variety of flowers and one thousand roses.)

The biggest project, however, was The Barn, which is more sprawling and sumptuous than any barn anyone’s ever seen, Barbra wanted a barn to be the inspiration for the structure because she wanted the height of a barn for the “great room.” It has a 28-foot ceiling, a huge picture window facing the Pacific, and a gallery wrapped around the second floor. The structure has at least twelve rooms on three levels, each one different from the other.

There’s a screening room, with a seventeen-foot screen that comes down from the ceiling, furnished with overstuffed sofas and chairs, an 1880 Sultanabad rug and dark mahogany trim, beams, and furniture. (Nothing like the usual screening room, of course.) The top floor houses a loft and a gym which is more like a gorgeous room in a beach house with some exercise equipment here and there. Then there’s the Federal Lounge, with a portrait of George Washington over the marble and blue-washed wood fireplace. It could be part of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing.

Then Barbra turns to the Art Deco and Art Nouveau periods, with a Mackintosh hall, a Greene & Greene library and bathroom, a Stickley office, and a napping room. Back to early Americana for the Master Suite. There’s a Blue Bathroom, a Black Bathroom, and a kitchen any cook would kill for.

The basement may be the most extraordinary area of The Barn. Using as her inspiration something she had seen at the Winterthur Museum Garden and Library in Delaware, Barbra created a “Street of Shops,” fully stocked and available, in some cases, to family and friends. There’s Bee’s Doll Shop, with antique dolls and doll houses on display; a Sweet Shop with licorice, jelly beans, frozen yogurt and a popcorn machine; an Antique Shop “for leftover things I couldn’t part with;” a Gift Shoppe; a Root Cellar for the numerous fruits, flowers, and vegetables picked from the gardens; a Georgian Display Room; and the Art Nouveau rooms. “At the end of the street of shops,” Barbra wrote, “you go through a door and suddenly you’re in Paris in 1904.”

The Antique Clothes Shop would probably be the most interesting to Barbra’s fans. It displays the shimmery white dress she wore in the banquet scene in
On a Clear Day
; the lavender velvet cape she wore when introduced to Queen Elizabeth in 1975; the black dress and white feathered muff she wore in one of the the courtroom scenes in
Clear Day
, the Empire dress she designed to wear when she sang for President Kennedy at the White House Correspondents Dinner; the middy blouse she wore on
The Judy Garland Show
; the caracul fur she wore to her
I Can Get it for You Wholesale
audition; the Irene Sharaff-designed green chiffon over pink silk dress she wore during the Henry Street party on stage in
Funny Girl
; and other clothes and costumes fans will quickly recognize.

Another building on the property is Grandma’s House, which Barbra redid using the original structure next door to the main house that she once considered tearing down. “I didn’t need to make it bigger, just better, and the idea was to work with what was already there.” The house is aptly named. Nearly every surface in the living room is covered with an antique quilt. There’s a rocking chair and a settee, and a collection of clown figures made by Schoenhut at the turn of the 20
^th
century. One of the bedrooms has rose-patterned wallpaper on the walls, doors, and ceiling, and a four-poster bed covered with a crocheted canopy and matching coverlet Barbra found on the Internet.

“I love it! I love it!” Barbra says of the Main House, which she waited so long to buy and felt comfortable in immediately. It features more sumptuous period rooms, color-coordinated flawlessly, and early American folk art paintings on the walls.

What might be called the Barbra Streisand Museum and Gardens is unquestionably a testament to Barbra’s taste, her minute attention to detail, her love for and knowledge of varied periods of furniture design, and the joy she feels at collecting and displaying beautiful antiques. But while many observers were thrilled with the peek into Barbra’s world that
My Passion for Design
provides us, others found it off-putting, a case of conspicuous consumption run rampant. They looked at the compound as Barbra Land, a self-indulgent paean to herself and what her money has been able to buy for her. Alan W. Petrucelli at examiner.com summed up the latter opinion. “[The book] is an exercise in excess, of self-indulgent pleasure, a glossy and slick photographic smear against the unemployed, the working class, the ordinary Joe. Streisand has more money than you and I ever will have, and she makes sure you and I know it. Most of the photos were taken by Babs... of a zillion-dollar home that looks uncomfortable and actually resides only in the pages of [
Architectural Digest
]. She offers a tour of her basement which is more of a strip mall, complete with stores that have only one customer.”

That’s harsh, but Barbra herself wonders in the book, “Why did I build this whole house in the first place? All I needed was a screening room and this gym, which I hardly use. I still work out in my makeshift gym in a spare bedroom in the main house. It’s closer.” Elsewhere in the book she says that she started this project after financing for a film fell through and she needed an outlet for her creative energies. Her fans might have hoped that she’d found other movie projects instead, rather than making just two films in fourteen years.

The final judgment may be that it’s Barbra’s money and she can spend it as she pleases. She’s worked hard throughout her life to acquire it, and she has certainly been generous in donating a chunk of it to charitable and other causes.

I
t is the rare second sequel that matches or surpasses its predecessor’s success, and Barbra’s eighteenth film
Little Fockers
proved no exception. The movie was widely bashed by critics (“A Focking Shame” said one) and scored just 10% on the
Rotten Tomatoes
website. The general consensus was that the film simply rehashed jokes and situations from the first two films. How many times can audiences laugh at Robert DeNiro giving Ben Stiller the “I’m watching you” sign? There was also, most agreed, too little of the little Fockers.
Meet the Fockers
did a better job wringing laughs out of situations involving a baby with Little Jack.

The worst transgression of the script, however, was how criminally underused Streisand and Hoffman were. They appear in only a few scenes. Roz and Bernie had garnered some of the biggest laughs in
Meet the Fockers
, and were widely thought to have greatly helped the film become the enormous hit it was. Fans wondered whose bright idea was it to truncate their roles in this film.

There might have been even less of the old Fockers had the studio not convinced a reluctant Dustin Hoffman to come on board. The producers balked at paying him the $5 million paycheck he was asking, but when the director, Paul Weitz, brought the film in under budget, money was freed up to pay Hoffman. His part in the film, producer Jay Roach said, was “not dissimilar to what we [had been] pitching him, including the final scene, which brings together the entire cast, as did
Meet the Fockers
”

Hoffman’s first scene, in which we see him learning the flamenco in Spain, was clearly an afterthought to explain his absence from most of the rest of the picture, and because the
shtick
is so similar to his doing martial arts moves when we first see him in
Meet the Fockers
, it’s far less funny.

Barbra appears thinner in this film, and her hairdo is neater, probably because Roz now has a television sex advice show. She has precious few scenes, but one toward the end of the film has her in a party tent with Owen Wilson’s Kevin, who misinterprets Roz’s empathy and tongue kisses her. Speaking later about the scene, Wilson sounded a little infatuated with his costar: “We got to do it again and again, and she seemed startled every single time. I was tilting left during the kiss. Aside from being very kissable, she also has a great figure... It was kind of an exciting scene. To be able to say you kissed Barbra Streisand, that’s pretty major. That’s one you can check off the to-do list.”

Despite the terrible reviews,
Little Fockers
fared well enough at the box office, taking the top spot its first week of release over Christmas 2010 with over $30 million, and earning a world-wide total of $148,438,600—far less than its predecessor, but a hit. Still, there can be little doubt that DeNiro, Stiller, Teri Polo, Wilson, Blythe Danner, Hoffman, and Streisand have checked off the Fockers franchise on their to-do lists.

Barbra has been friends with the lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman since the early nineteen-sixties. Their careers have often been closely intertwined, with Barbra singing dozens of their songs over the years. Their closest associations are through “The Way We Were,” which won the Bergmans a Best Song Oscar (along with Marvin Hamlisch) in 1974, and tens years later their collaboration with Michel Legrand to create the entire song score for
Yentl
, which also won them an Academy Award.

For years, Barbra had thought of recording an album of songs containing the Bergmans’ lyrics that she had never or rarely sung. In 2011, she felt the time was right, and the resulting album is called
What Matters Most—Barbra Streisand Sings The Lyrics of Alan And Marilyn Bergman
.

“Alan and Marilyn Bergman have a remarkable gift for expressing affairs of the heart,” Barbra said, and the Bergmans returned the love. “When we write a song, we hear Barbra. She makes the connection from the heart to the mind, and it emerges through her voice.”

One of Barbra’s best albums in years,
What Matters Most
is remarkable for its cohesion and the comfort Barbra clearly has with all these songs. The arrangements by William A. Ross (and Patrick Williams for “Nice ‘n’ Easy” and “That Face”) are lush and gorgeous. The album begins with a haunting version of “The Windmills of Your Mind,” the only song on the album that had appeared in its entirety on a previous Streisand disk (
The Way We Were
), sung very differently by Barbra here; “Something New in My Life”; “Solitary Moon”; a sexy “ Nice ‘n’ Easy” (made famous by Frank Sinatra); “Alone In The World” a Bossa-Nova tinged “So Many Stars”; “The Same Hello, The Same Goodbye”; “That Face” (which she sang a snippet from during a medley on
Color Me Barbra
); “I’ll Never Say Goodbye,” and “What Matters Most.”

Barbra’s version here of “That Face” is uptempo and full of joy; one can imagine her looking at her dog Sammy or her husband as she sings it. Alan wrote the song to entice Marilyn to marry him. He and composer Lew Spence took the song to Fred Astaire, and Alan recalled that, “He listened and said, ‘I’m going to record this song!’ He owned a record label, Ava, named for his daughter. And he recorded it! So, I took the dub home to Marilyn, and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ Luckily she did.”

The Deluxe Edition of
What Matters Most
contains a second CD of ten Bergman songs that Barbra has performed on earlier albums, from “The Way We Were” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life” to “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and “A Piece of Sky.”

Released on August 23, 2011, the album was a big success and hit number four on Billboard’s chart.

In July of 2011,
The Hollywood Reporter
revealed what they called “heated talks” between Columbia and Marty Erlichman for an extension of Barbra’s contract with the label. “I’m not peddling Barbra,” Marty said. “I will stay with Columbia unless I can’t make a deal, then I will go elsewhere.” That was unlikely to happen, and on February 22, 2011, the label announced that Barbra would stay with them.

“From the day Goddard Lieberson signed me almost fifty years ago,” Barbra said, “Columbia Records has been my recording home, and I am thrilled to continue the partnership for many years to come.” Steve Barnett, the Chairman and COO of Columbia, added, “There are stars and there are superstars, and then there’s Barbra Streisand. Columbia Records is proud to play a vital role in her extraordinary career.”

So many labels had turned Barbra down for a recording contract, but Columbia stepped up, and gave her full creative control in the bargain. The move is now, of course, seen as genius: Barbra has sold over seventy million albums worldwide for the label.

On August 6, 2012, at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood, Barbra’s longtime friend and colleague Marvin Hamlisch died at 68 of lung failure after an illness. Hamlisch lived an extraordinary life. Accepted into the Juilliard Music School at the unprecedented age of seven, he went on to win a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for
A Chorus Line
, Oscars for scoring
The Sting
and writing “The Way We Were,” and many other awards.

Barbra brought together other friends and associates of Marvin’s for a musical tribute at the Juilliard on September 18. She, Liza Minnelli and Aretha Franklin sang some of Marvin’s best songs before an appreciative and at times tearful audience. Before she sang “The Way We Were,” Marvin’s most famous song and one of Barbra’s biggest hits, she recalled that they met during rehearsals of
Funny Girl
on Broadway when Marvin was the accompanying pianist. “Because I didn’t drink coffee, he was assigned to get me a chocolate doughnut,” Barbra recalled. “But instead of just one, he always brought me two and so our love affair began.”

It was a shared passion for music, film, and food that cemented their friendship, Barbra added. And “without explaining why or how, we understood each other’s anxieties.”

Liza Minnelli spoke of meeting Hamlisch “when I was fourteen and a half and he was fifteen and three-quarters.” They soon became best friends. “He was one of the few constants I had in my life.” She then sang “If You Really Knew Me,” from
They’re Playing Our Song
. Aretha Franklin contributed a stirring version of “Nobody Does It Better,” the hit theme song from the 1977 James Bond film
The Spy Who Loved Me
.

Other performers included British stage singer Maria Friedman, trumpeter Chris Botti, and Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who performed songs from
A Chorus Line
. Others who spoke included Hamlisch’s widow Terre, who thanked Barbra for organizing the tribute, and former President Clinton. Among those in attendance were Sarah Jessica Parker, Richard Gere, Ann-Margret, Robert Klein, Leslie Uggams, Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols.