Streisand: Her Life (47 page)

Like many of Barbra’s public statements, this one hid a deception amid seemingly remarkable candor. Sharif did in fact make a play for this married woman, and she responded. “She was so fresh and zestful and full of life, like a little kid who was told she could do whatever she wanted,” Sharif said. “I was married, and so was she—which made the glamour more intense.”

Their affair began in Sharif’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel suite with script conferences that he turned into seduction dinners complete with Dom Pérignon champagne, oysters, and imported caviar. To Barbra’s horror, the Hollywood gossip columnist Jim Bacon began reporting these cozy tête-à-têtes, even down to the brand names of the wines. “Barbra always wondered how I knew those things,” Bacon said. “Next time when getting room service in a man’s room, ask the waiter if he knows Jim Bacon, Barbra.”

To better ensure their privacy, the lovebirds moved the center of the action to Barbra’s place. “We were not having an affair,” Sharif said. “It was a romance, really.... We would go [to her house] and have dinner in the evening and maybe have a glass of wine and we would just sit around; she would cook something that she liked, and I would cook sometimes.” Sharif would prepare Italian specialties, particularly pasta, but Barbra could muster only TV dinners. “We led the very simple life of people in love,” Sharif said. “We seldom went anywhere for supper.”

Perhaps bored with such discreet domesticity, Barbra and Omar ventured out after a few months, first attending a fashion party at a Hollywood discotheque, then dining out together at one of Los Angeles’s trendiest restaurants. Inevitably word got back to Elliott, and this time the reports were more difficult for Barbra to laugh off as nonsense than Jim Bacon’s column items had been. Sheilah Graham telephoned Elliott for his reaction. “I’m furious with Barbra and told her that,” he said. “I’m a very secure person, but as a man I have certain reactions.” He said that when he had asked Barbra, “Why in hell did you go to that fashion show with Omar?” she replied, “Because the ticket would have cost me two hundred and fifty dollars.”

It may have been Elliott’s anger that prompted Barbra to end the affair; despite all their problems she wanted to keep the marriage together. Or perhaps the reason was, as Omar put it, that their romance was “one-sided. I was in love with her. She had a lot of affection for me, but it didn’t go beyond that.”

Like Sydney Chaplin before him, Sharif was infuriated by Barbra’s rejection. Suddenly her incessant questions and suggestions on the set and the shortcomings of his role as Nick Arnstein, which he had tolerated while enmeshed in the affair, became prickly thorns. After the filming ended, Sharif told Rex Reed, “She’s a monster. I had nothing to do but stand around.... Sometimes I just stood on the sidelines and watched her. I think her biggest problem is that she wants to be a woman and she wants to be beautiful, and she is neither.”

A
S THE SUN
came up over Manhattan on Saturday, June 17, the crowds began to stream into Central Park, carrying pillows and blankets and picnic baskets and thermos bottles. They were ready to camp out for more than fourteen hours to be as close to the stage as possible for a free Barbra Streisand concert scheduled to begin at nine that evening in the ninety-three-acre Sheep Meadow.

Ray Stark had agreed to give Barbra a three-day weekend off from
Funny Girl
filming so that she could fly back to New York for this much-heralded “Happening in Central Park.” She took an overnight flight from Los Angeles on Thursday, arrived early in the morning, slept for a few hours in her apartment, then prepared for a full dress rehearsal, which was set to begin at eight-thirty Friday night.

The logistics were nightmarish, made worse by the fact that CBS was taping the concert as a television special. There were seven cameras, miles of cable, huge lights, and twenty-eight microphones scattered around near Barbra, the orchestra, and the crowd, which was expected to exceed sixty thousand, most of them in “festival seating,” which meant no seating at all, hence the pillows and blankets.

As she prepared to begin the dress rehearsal, Barbra still hadn’t decided what to wear for the concert. The show’s director, Robert Scheerer, pleaded with her not to change outfits between the two acts, so that if he needed to he could rearrange numbers for the television special. But Barbra felt that it would be visually boring for her to wear the same dress for over two hours. The journalist Martha Weinman Lear attended the rehearsal and recorded what she saw for a profile of Streisand in
Redbook
magazine. Barbra wore a pink copy of a red pleated gown Irene Sharaff had designed for
Funny Girl
, covered with a chiffon cape that fluttered like giant butterfly wings in the breeze when she spread her arms, as she began the first strains of her opening number, “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home.”

“Close your eyes and she was totally immersed in the song,” Lear observed. “Open them and she was totally preoccupied with the gown, playing with it, studying the effect in two television monitors. The orchestra moved into ‘Cry Me a River.’ She sang it with heart and gut, and with her eyes fixed on the monitor, holding a sparkling lavaliere at her waist, at her bosom, at her shoulder, pondering each effect intently. Then she retired to her trailer to choose a gown for the second half of the show.

“
‘
What am I going to wear?’ she said, glumly eyeing two gowns.... ‘Marty, they’ve got to give me another light—up here. I can’t see the top of my head in the monitor. My face loses proportion. Fred [to her hairdresser, Fredrick Glaser, who stood with several hairpieces at the ready], my hair isn’t right this way. Let’s try it with the part in the middle, huh? Marty, I saw a new angle on the monitor we never used before. It’s this way, three-quarters to the left [assuming the angle in front of the mirror]. It’s
good,
huh?... Listen, what the hell am I going to
wear?
”

The rehearsal lasted until midnight, when the orchestra had to quit by order of New York City so as not to disturb the residents along Central Park West. “There was only enough time for us to block out maybe six to eight songs of a program of twenty-eight numbers,” Robert Scheerer recalled. “The rest I would just have to wing the next night when we taped. I really had little idea of what Barbra would be doing at any given time, what movements she’d make. It was tremendously scary. Nobody had to remind me of how much could go wrong.” Indeed, during the rehearsal Barbra’s audio “conked out,” Scheerer said, “and we all panicked.”

Marty Erlichman fretted about the weather. “It had rained lightly on Friday,” Scheerer recollected, “and Marty was terrified that if it rained any more heavily there’d be so much mud in the park that nobody would want to come to the concert. He got insurance for the rain itself [Lloyd’s of London and GoodWeather, Inc., covered the concert for a four-hour period on Saturday night], but he couldn’t get mud insurance. All we could do was pray.”

B
Y EIGHT O’CLOCK
the largest crowd ever assembled for a single performer—135,000 people—had streamed into the Sheep Meadow, overflowing into the Sixty-seventh Street entrance to the park. The concert was scheduled to begin at nine, but the skies were still too light for the television cameras. While they waited, the crowd danced to radios, played baseball, kicked soccer balls, and flew kites. Overnight, some furtive hippies had painted “Flower Power” on the rocks beneath the huge Plexiglas stage constructed by the set designer Tom John.

Robert Scheerer feared that if the crowd were kept waiting any longer they might riot. “I couldn’t bring myself to think about it.” At nine forty-five, under a hazy moon, with a warm breeze stirring, the overture began. The restless throng quieted. Fredrick Glaser bit his nails, worried that if the fans tried to get too close to Barbra they might go out of control and trample her to death.

Sheer terror swept over Barbra as she waited in the wings, and it wasn’t just her usual stage fright. A few hours earlier someone had telephoned a death threat against her because of her support of Israel in the Six-Day War, which had ended the week before. Barbra felt a very real fear that a bullet would rip through her as she stood in front of this enormous crowd.

As the overture swelled, Robert Scheerer’s wife had to push Barbra onto the runway that led up to the stage. As she appeared the audience rose to its feet in a thunderous ovation, and Barbra shrank away in mock horror: “I didn’t do nothin’ yet!” She ripped into “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” then sang “The Nearness of You,” “My Honey’s Lovin’ Arms,” “I’ll Tell the Man in the Street,” and “Cry Me a River.” As she sang, residents of Central Park West on one side of the park and Fifth Avenue on the other hung out their windows to hear her, and motorists slowed down for blocks.

“That opening portion was no good,” Robert Scheerer said. “Barbra was too tight, still nervous. It took four or five songs to get her warmed up.” During her sixth number, “Value” from
Harry Stoones,
she stumbled over the lyrics. “Wait a minute,” she cried. “I forgot the goddamn song.” She began again, but soon stopped and looked at her conductor, Mort Lindsay, for help.

Lindsay called out the next line of the lyric:
“
‘A car is just a car!
’”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Barbra said and finished the song.

Barbra has said that she tried to keep moving during the concert on the theory that by darting around she would make a more difficult target for a gunman. But the tape of the show indicates otherwise; her movements seem entirely appropriate for each song. “How much could she move?” Robert Scheerer confirmed. “She’s too much of a pro to do that.”

As the concert progressed, she relaxed and warmed to the audience, performing nine more numbers, including “I Wish You Love,” “What Now My Love?” and “Free Again.” She ended Act One with “When the Sun Comes Out.”

A limousine then whisked her a quarter mile to her house trailer, where she had about seven minutes to put on a towering new wig, freshen her makeup, and change into another diaphanous chiffon gown, this one mostly red with a large multicolored pattern. She did her own makeup while Fredrick Glaser frantically adjusted, teased, and sprayed the wig. She was angry with herself for forgetting lyrics and for the less-than-perfect early performances. “She was in a foul mood during the break,” Glaser said. “She began cursing and swearing at people in her trailer. Everyone fled and left me with her.... I got her out of the trailer and we drove back in a golf cart to the back of the stage. She continued to rant and rave. She said the crowd had moved too close to the stage.”