Streisand: Her Life (49 page)

Barbra’s inability to perform satisfactorily the following day resulted in even more overtime. Marty and Joe Layton tried to persuade her to postpone the show, but she insisted that she was feeling the first stirrings of recovery. Over the next two days—until 5:00
A.M.
the first day and 2:00
A.M.
the second—Barbra managed to deliver some passable performances with the help of vocal coach Maurice Jampol. Most often she just mouthed the lyrics to songs she would have to record again later when her full vocal power returned. The taping took so much longer than planned that Barbra had to cancel an appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
scheduled for Sunday, April 30.

When Marty Erlichman viewed a rough cut of
Belle
culled from over fifty hours of exposed tape, his heart sank. Barbra’s illness wasn’t the show’s only problem. What had seemed like a smashing idea on paper didn’t come across on the screen with the impact he had expected. He reportedly told one CBS executive that they should shelve the show. But after Barbra went back into the recording studio a few days later, fully recovered, and laid in some superlative vocal tracks, the network decided the show was fine.

The Belle of 14th Street
won decent ratings but confused most viewers and left critics grumbling. The vaudeville theme had been done to death on television variety shows, and for all of the attention to period detail, including an audience made up mostly of Monsanto employees in 1900s costumes, the entire enterprise had a flat, uninspired look and feel.

The first number, set in an Art Nouveau theater, had Jason Robards and a “bevy of beefy beauties”—each weighing two hundred or more pounds—singing an overlong “You Are the Apple of My Eye” while the overstuffed chorines threw apples into the audience.

Barbra then took the stage for a coy version of “Alice Blue Gown,” which developed into a comic striptease as wires gradually pulled off her frilly dress to leave her in a Merry Widow and tights, hiding behind a twirling parasol.

John Bubbles then strode out wearing, for unexplained reasons, black rooster feathers and chicken feet to perform an uninspired “I’m Goin’ South.” Then Barbra came back with Robards, Lee Allen, and eleven-year-old Susan Alpern to sing, in a thick Irish brogue, an ode to patriotism, “We’re Four Americans.” Barbra’s vocal problems were noticeable in this number, especially during the spoken bits when her voice cracked more than once.

The second act of the show opened with Barbra as a formidable prima donna, Madame Schmausen-Schmidt. In the hand-wringing style of the period, Barbra comically sang “Leibestraum” with a surprisingly strong operatic voice. A clever challenge-duet of “Mother Machree” followed, between Schmausen-Schmidt and a wide-eyed youth in the audience, also played by Barbra.

The scene from
The Tempest
came next with “the quick-change artistes, the Mungers” (Streisand and Robards) playing, respectively, both Prospero and Caliban and Miranda and Ariel. Even fans of Shakespeare found the scene tiresome. At the conclusion of the skit, the Mungers take a curtain call, and Barbra, wearing a tacky backstage kimono and a huge bouffant wig, got some of the few laughs in the show as the southern-accented Roberta Lee Booth-Munger: “Thank you very kindly.... Why, ah’d just like to throw y’all a big honeykiss. Y’all been such a captivated audience. I ’specially want to thank all those big strong stagehands back there who give me such assistance.... Now, after a refreshin’ intermission there’s a young lady goin’ to come out here and sing for y’all... so y’all hurry back here, hear?”

Barbra concluded the show with a mini-concert, one of the few format holdovers from the first two specials. This time all of the songs were germane to the vaudeville period. Barbra sang while standing on a brightly colored bandstand next to her accompanist, David Shire. With hand on hip, wearing an elegant black velvet gown and a matching picture hat trimmed with white ostrich feathers, she leaned on a jeweled walking stick and toyed with a feather boa in the best tradition of Lillian Russell.

Critics were not forgiving.
Newsday
called the special “a jarring, stylistic jumble,” and
The New York Times
labeled it “an embarrassing outing, a concoction of deranged productions.” Two weeks later Ben Gross, writing in the New York
Daily News,
said, “Barbra Streisand, the cult idol, did herself tremendous damage by appearing in that recent ill-advised special.”

A year later Barbra spoke defensively about
The Belle of 14th Street,
“My third [TV special] wasn’t as good as the other two. But if it had been my first it would have been [considered] damn good, you know.” Because of the poor reaction, plans for a sound-track album were scrapped.

As Barbra’s first big professional misstep,
The Belle of 14th Street
proved to some that she was at her best when unfettered. To others it suggested that her talent and taste had been grossly overpraised. Most of her fans yearned for Barbra to return to the one-woman format, where she would simply sing and clown over the course of an hour. With her next television special, the tape of her Central Park concert aired in
1
968, she would regain their admiration by doing precisely that. But CBS would not air another Streisand television special for six years. She was too busy becoming a movie star.

A
FTER A WEEK
of filming on
Funny Girl
Harry Stradling threatened to quit unless Barbra stopped telling him how to photograph her. “She argued with Harry about how to light her,” Jack Roe recalled. “She wanted the key light on one side and not the other. It wasn’t so much whether she was right or wrong, but she was just starting in the business and she was very pigheaded about things that she really didn’t know anything about.”

It wasn’t just her appearance that concerned Barbra. She thought that parts of the film should have the grainy look that cheaper film stock brought to European films like the ones she used to watch back in Flatbush. Stradling disagreed, but Barbra wouldn’t let up. Finally he told her, “Okay, Barbra, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll go ahead and shoot the picture like we usually do, and afterward we’ll scratch up the film for your grainy look.”

Barbra’s stubbornness was rooted in both her fear that she would fail on film and her certainty that she knew what was best for her. She couldn’t allow anyone, no matter how talented or accomplished, to present her in anything less than the best light—literally and figuratively. Just as she had in the stage version of
Funny Girl
, she wanted to be great, not just good, on the screen. She’d had the chutzpah to tell a reporter shortly after she arrived in Hollywood, “I’ll be the brightest star there ever was.” Now she had to put up or shut up—many would have welcomed the latter—and she certainly wasn’t going to fail because of someone else’s shortcomings, rea
l
or perceived.

“When I came out here,” Barbra said, “everybody thought, Oh, she’s got to be a bitch and have temper tantrums, be demanding and nasty. I had no intention of being that. But it’s funny. Circumstances make you behave like they expect you to sometimes. Like, on the morning of a scene, my dress isn’t here yet, my hair isn’t fixed properly, and they want me to go out anyway and film it.
For posterity!
Listen, once it’s on film, that’s it. It’s got to be perfect when the cameras are turned on you.”

Stradling came to accept the fact that Barbra Streisand considered herself a collaborator on every aspect of
Funny Girl,
and, like Wyler, he welcomed some of her suggestions and ignored others. He found himself agreeing with her more and more often when he realized that she had nearly unerring instincts about the best light and the best angles for her. “I
feel
things like lights,” Barbra said. “I
know
a light should be two inches to the left and so on.”

Harry Stradling Jr. recalled that his father “could never stop raving about what a smart woman Streisand was, about how she would notice if he changed the lights, if he didn’t quite do it the same way as he had. She would bring it to his attention. He liked her, and he said that she was very, very right about a lot of things.”

Unsurprisingly, Barbra was most often right about the film’s music; while some might have questioned her filmmaking expertise, no one doubted her musical instincts. Still, Walter Scharf, the film’s musical supervisor and conductor, had his share of problems with Streisand. “They warned me that she was temperamental and stubborn,” he said. “She was. As an artist Barbra is very sensitive, terribly, terribly sensitive. But she has a remarkable intuition about the sound of music. It was a challenge to adapt the music from the Broadway
Funny Girl.
I wanted to keep the mood of Fanny Brice’s time alive and yet contemporize the music. Barbra and I developed a healthy and lasting respect for each other’s contributions to the job we set out to do. It wasn’t always easy or peaceful.”

Barbra’s perfectionism, her desire to do things “just one more time,” extended beyond the final day’s filming on December 1. That afternoon she completed the movie’s last scene, a heart-wrenching version of “My Man” sung after Nick Arnstein has come back from prison and told Fanny he wants a divorce. The next day, while most of the cast and crew dispersed, Marty, Barbra, Ray Stark, William Wyler, Herb Ross, Columbia Pictures president Leo Jaffe, production chief Mike Frankovich, and half a dozen other studio executives gathered to watch the dailies of
Funny Girl’s
final musical number.

When the song ended everyone burst into applause. The performance was brilliant, they told Barbra, and it made for a killer ending to a picture they all knew would be a smash. But Barbra wasn’t pleased. “I know everybody in this room is going to be angry except Marty,” she said, “but I really would like to redo that scene.” Silence fell. All eyes turned to Ray Stark. “But, Barbra,” he sputtered, “everybody’s gone home. It would be very difficult. Besides, the number is great! What’s the problem.”

“Ray, I recorded that song three months ago, before we even started the movie. Now I’m lip-synching to it on film and it just doesn’t look right. My whole life is pouring out and the audience is going to be distracted by the lip-synching. It isn’t
real.

“And you know what else?” she concluded. “The whole song should start in close up and
then
pull back, not the other way around.”

Stark swallowed hard and said, “Okay, Barbra, you’re probably right.” He spent the next three days rounding up the cast and crew, including Omar Sharif, whom Barbra wanted on hand so that just before she came out to sing “My Man” she could perform the heartbreaking scene that leads into it, in which Nick tells Fanny he’s leaving her for good.

The scene aroused strong emotions in Barbra, both for her character and herself. It was not only Fanny Brice saying good-bye to Nick Arnstein but Barbra Streisand saying good-bye to Omar Sharif—and possibly to Elliott Gould as well, for by now she feared that their marriage might be unsalvageable.

“My Man”—or rather the first half of it—became the first movie musical number to be recorded live since the early talkies. When Barbra tentatively talk-sings the lyrics at the beginning of the song in dramatic close-up, she is singing live. But when she rips full-throttle into the remainder of the song, she is lip-synching, and that nearly destroys the intimacy Barbra has created. One wonders why she didn’t do the entire song live after going to all that trouble.