Streisand: Her Life (50 page)

W
HILE BARBRA REMAINED
narrowly focused on her career, the outside world reeled toward turmoil. After his inauguration, despite having run in part as an antiwar candidate, President Johnson had dramatically increased American troop and artillery support for South Vietnam in its effort to avoid a takeover by Communist North Vietnam. As more and more American boys died for a cause many of their countrymen did not support, Johnson’s popularity plummeted. Peaceful antiwar demonstrations on college campuses across the country grew increasingly more violent. In October 1967 thousands marched on the Pentagon; hundreds were injured and arrested. Many carried “Dump Johnson” banners.

On January 21, back in New York, Barbra participated in a “Broadway for Peace 1968” rally at the New York Philharmonic, a fund-raiser for members of Congress who opposed the war and were up for re-election. Co-hosted by Leonard Bernstein and Paul Newman, the event raised $50,000. Alaska’s Democratic Senator Ernest Gruening gave the keynote address, in which he said, “If the American people only knew the facts, they would end this unconstitutional, illegal, indefensible, and monstrous war.” Dressed in an unattractive gingham smock and fisherman’s hat and accompanied by Leonard Bernstein, Barbra sang “So Pretty,” an antiwar ballad by Bernstein with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

After little-known Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, challenging Johnson as an antiwar candidate, won a startling 40 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, the president’s vulnerability led New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, also an opponent of the war, to challenge him for the nomination as well. On March 31, 1968, the president announced in a nationally televised speech that he would not run for re-election. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, then threw his hat into the ring.

Both the McCarthy and the Kennedy camps wooed Barbra in an effort to get her to publicly support their candidate, but she admired both men and couldn’t make up her mind. Her friends Marilyn and Alan Bergman, staunch McCarthy supporters, arranged a private meeting between the senator and the singer in the hope that meeting McCarthy would help Barbra make up her mind. It worked. Later the Bergmans told friends, “We don’t know what he said to her in that room, but she’s willing to do anything in the world for him now.”

In May, Barbra—dressed in a jejune gingham outfit with a bow at the neck and a matching hat—attended a cocktail party fund-raiser for McCarthy at Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s home and afterward was photographed driving away with the candidate. The Robert Kennedy camp wasn’t pleased, but in spite of McCarthy’s big-name Hollywood support, Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey were considered by most pundits the front-runners for the nomination.

F
UNNY GIRL WOULD
not be released until September 1968, plenty of time for the Hollywood rumor mill to spew out reports of Barbra the Monster before anyone could see whether all the grief she had apparently caused so many people had been worth it. The film had barely wrapped when Doris Klein reported in the
Hollywood Reporter
that Anne Francis had asked that her name be removed from the picture because her part had been whittled down from “three very good scenes and a lot of other ones to two minutes of voice-over in a railroad station.”

Klein quoted Francis at length: “I had only one unpleasant meeting with Barbra Streisand during the entire five months of
Funny Girl,
but the way I was treated was a nightmare.... Every day Barbra would see the rushes, and the next day my part would be cut. Barbra ran the whole show.... She had the Ziegfeld Girls’ scenes changed—one day she told Wyler to move a girl standing next to her because she was too pretty, and the girl wound up in the background. Eventually the Ziegfeld Girl scenes were eliminated altogether.”

Klein’s column, read or discussed by almost everyone in Hollywood, cast a pall over the film and further sullied Streisand’s budding stardom. That a respected actress like Anne Francis would speak out so forcefully against Barbra, many felt, proved that Streisand must truly be the arrogant, egomaniacal ogre that rumor had it. It is an image that Barbra hasn’t been able to entirely shake to this day.

For years Anne Francis refused to comment about the sentiments attributed to her in Klein’s column, but she revealed for this book that she never said, nor did she believe, anything of the kind. “I had no reason to think that Barbra had anything to do with my scenes being cut,” she said. “I think that was entirely Wyler’s decision. He didn’t like the character I was playing, didn’t think she added anything to the picture. There were a lot of scenes that were cut on the very day I was to shoot them. I would sit in my dressing room, all ready to be called, and then a note would be slipped under the door saying, ‘Omit scene such and such.’ It was
very
strange.”

So where did the published quotes come from? Francis’s public relations woman, Peggy McNaught. “Peggy was infuriated by the whole thing,” Anne explained, “and she felt it was all Barbra’s fault. She talked to Doris Klein and said it was okay for Klein to attribute her sentiments to me. When I read it I thought,
Oh, God,
but what could I do? Peggy was an old, dear friend. I couldn’t very well go public and say, ‘I didn’t say those things; my publicist did.’ It was just a very awkward situation all around.”

A few months later Joyce Haber’s article in the fledgling magazine
New York
appeared. Entitled
“
Barbra’s Directing Her First Movie,” it further cemented Streisand’s reputation as a terror. Haber wrote that “Barbra Streisand is working quite energetically... at becoming a monster,” that people in Hollywood were “terrified” of her, and that Ray Stark had presented her with a ten-minute trailer for the movie with the credits,
“
Written, Produced and Directed by Barbra Streisand.”

Barbra suspected that Stark, who was cozy with Haber, had orchestrated much of the bad press on the theory that any publicity would bolster interest in the film. “Everything in the papers was such an out-and-out lie,” Barbra protested. “Even my producer of that film was out to get as much publicity as he could, even if it was negative or cruel.”

Omar Sharif spoke up in Barbra’s defense. “She wasn’t bad to work with at all when you understood her. She didn’t just think she was plain—she thought she was ugly. So no wonder that insecurity. There
was
trouble—in wardrobe, in makeup, and so on. But when you play important parts like these, when the whole film sinks or swims on you, you have to be a little bit selfish.”

Barbra’s next leading man wouldn’t be so gallant. If the $10 million
Funny Girl
production had been a frying pan of seething resentment against Streisand, the making of the $24 million film version of the Broadway smash
Hello, Dolly
!—begun a scant two months after
Funny Girl
wrapped—proved to be a hellish fire.

T
he sweltering heat at the
Hello, Dolly!
location in Garrison, New York, threatened to undo everyone. Whenever she wasn’t before the camera, Barbra tried to keep cool and protect her makeup by pointing a small portable electric fan at her face. Tensions had been rife throughout the shoot, which had begun in April after two months of rehearsals. But on Thursday, June 6, 1968, tempers reached the exploding point after a national tragedy stunned America: in the early morning hours of June 5, shortly after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary, Senator Robert Kennedy had been shot, and twenty-five hours later, early Thursday morning, he died.

Although Barbra had supported Eugene McCarthy, she sympathized with most of Kennedy’s positions and would very likely have campaigned for him had he won the nomination to run against the Republican standard-bearer, former vice president Richard Nixon. When she heard the news of the shooting, she felt nearly as devastated as she had when the senator’s brother, President Kennedy, had been killed.

Barbra’s co-star, the hangdog comic actor Walter Matthau, was appalled by the latest instance of rampant violence in America. “I was in a mean, foul mood. I took it hard,” he said. “I was knocked out. It was one hundred degrees. Giant brutes [lights with tremendous wattage] surrounded us in a complicated outdoor scene. My head felt as though it was being smashed.”

The fi
l
m’s director, the former MGM musical star Gene Kelly, brought Barbra, Matthau, several extras, and the crew together to shoot a scene in which Barbra’s character, Dolly Levi, and Matthau’s character, Horace Vandergelder, are sitting in a wagon outside Vandergelder’s hay-and-feed store. As Kelly explained what he wanted everyone to do, Barbra made a suggestion. She had an idea for a humorous exchange between the characters. “Why don’t we say something like this?” she piped up, and recited some lines of dialogue. She remembered that most of the crew laughed with appreciation.

Walter Matthau, however, blew his top. “Who does she think she is?” he bellowed. “I’ve been in thirty movies, and this is only her second—the first one hasn’t even come out yet—and she thinks she’s
directing
?!”

Gene Kelly grabbed Matthau’s arm and tried to pull him away. “I went into a wild, furious, incoherent tirade about her,” Matthau recalled. Barbra stood speechless as her co-star railed on. “Why don’t you let
him
direct?” Matthau shouted, waving in Kelly’s direction. “You don’t have to be great
all
the time.”

Barbra fought back tears. “Why don’t you learn your lines?” she shot back. “You’re just jealous because you’re not as good as I am!”

“You might be the singer in this picture,” Matthau roared, “but I’m the
actor!
You haven’t got the talent of a butterfly’s fart!”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Barbra said of Matthau’s harangue. “I had no defense. I stood there and I was so humiliated I started to cry, and then I ran away.”

“Everybody in this company hates you!” Matthau shouted after her. “Go ahead, walk off! But just remember, Betty Hutton thought she was indispensable, too.”

Barbra ran to her dressing room and telephoned the film’s writer-producer, Ernest Lehman. “She was sobbing,” Lehman recalled, “and she said, ‘Please come over right away.’ I came rushing down, and she poured out all of her sorrow at the way Walter talked to her and the things he said about her. I did my best to soothe her.”

“Barbra cried for a long time,” Gene Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Cut the lights,’ stopped everything. We went into a little store and straightened it out.” Three hours later the still-seething stars completed the scene.

F
ROM THE VERY
outset, Barbra’s participation in the film version of
Hello, Dolly!
had stirred up resentment. When Ernest Lehman announced her casting on May 8, 1967, Streisand faced a wave of outrage from fans of the show, who felt that Carol Channing, who had played Dolly Gallagher Levi on Broadway for over two years, then had taken the show on the road and helped make it the highest-grossing touring musical in history, should have been given the chance to immortalize her performance on film. In 1967 Carol Channing was as much identified with the character of Dolly Levi as Barbra was with Fanny Brice.

What made Channing’s slight all the worse was that the twenty-five-year-old Barbra seemed so clearly wrong for the part of the irrepressible middle-aged Irish widow trying to get back into the swing of life fourteen years after the death of her husband, Ephraim. The fact that Barbra was a totally untried commodity in movies added insult to injury, especially when Twentieth Century-Fox trumpeted the fact that her signing—at a salary of $600,000, Lehman recalled—was “the largest single film deal in history with a performer who has never before appeared in a motion picture.” In the past, when a Broadway star was denied a chance to re-create a role on screen, the rationale had usually been that the project required a proven movie box-office draw to guarantee its commercial success.

Channing desperately wanted the movie version of
Dolly
, and in the hope that a successful film performance would boost her chances, she took the supporting role of a zany heiress-aviator in George Roy Hill’s comedy
Thoroughly Modern Millie,
which starred Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore. “I really wanted to use Carol Channing in the picture,” Lehman recalled. “I mean, who else would you use? But then I saw a rough cut of
Thoroughly Modern Millie.
I thought she looked a little grotesque, cartoonish. I felt very guilty because Carol is a lovely woman and she and her husband had been so nice to me and my wife. But I honestly felt I couldn’t take a whole movie in which Carol was in practically every scene. Her personality is just too much for the cameras to contain.”

Lehman then considered Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he had just worked as the writer and producer of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
but Richard Zanuck, Twentieth Century-Fox’s head of production, had called that notion “the single worst casting idea I’ve ever heard.” Zanuck felt similarly about Julie Andrews, to whom Lehman had sent the
Dolly
script. Lehman had run out of ideas when he had dinner with Mike Nichols, the director of
Virginia Woolf.
According to Lehman, “Mike said to me, ‘Why don’t you cast Barbra Streisand as Dolly? She’d be great.’ I said, ‘Gee, I don’t know. What is she, twenty-four?’ But the more I thought about what her voice could do with that score... Then I’d think, ‘But she’s not right for it.’ Then I’d tell myself, ‘Forget that she’s not right for it. Just forget that.
’”
Richard Zanuck, who loved the idea of Barbra as Dolly, arranged a meeting for himself, Barbra, her agent Freddie Fields, and Lehman at Hollywood’s Bistro restaurant a few days after Barbra arrived in town in May 1967. “It was the first time I’d seen the Hollywood Miss Streisand,” Lehman recalled. “She wore a broad-brimmed hat, and I kept peeking under it and saying, ‘Do you mind if I look at you?’ And all she kept saying was, ‘Why me? Why me? I’m too young for the role.’

“I kept coming up with all the reasons she should do it: she was such a vivid personality, her voice was one of the all-time greats, she was going to be a tremendous star in pictures. I gave her every reason I could think of. I never had any doubt that she could do it, or that she would be a huge movie star. We never even tested her. She was a known quantity as one of the greats of all time. Making the transition to movies was only a formality. Finally she said yes, and I was ecstatic.”

When the announcement was made, Carol Channing sent Barbra flowers and a gracious note of congratulations. When the bouquet arrived, Barbra told a reporter, “I called Elliott right away and told him about it, very excited. He said, ‘Yes, I already read about it in the paper.
’”

The press came down firmly on Carol’s side. The
Washington Post
called Barbra’s casting “knuckle-headed.” Other observers called it “cynical,” “mercenary,” “unfathomable.” Lehman defended his choice and pointed out that Thornton Wilder, who wrote
The Matchmaker
, the play on which
Hello
,
Dolly!
was based, had described Dolly as a woman of “uncertain” age. “She could well be in her thirties,” Lehman suggested.

Barbra attempted to defend her selection as well, but her customary bluntness redounded to her further detriment. “It’s so ridiculous and boring,” she said of the controversy. “They can cast anyone they want in a picture. I can’t help it if I get the part. I don’t know whether I’m right for it or not. I haven’t even read the script. If they pick the wrong person for a part, that’s their problem. Everybody wants to be a casting director.”

To round out the cast, Lehman hired Michael Crawford and Danny Lockin to play Vandergelder’s clerks, and Marianne McAndrew and E. J. Peaker as Irene Molloy and Minnie Fay, the milliners they take out on the town in New York. Lehman had tested a number of actresses to play Irene Molloy, among them Phyllis Newman, Yvette Mimieux, and Ann-Margret, before deciding on the unknown McAndrew. “One reason we didn’t hire Ann-Margret was that she had too sexy an image for such a sweetness-and-light character as Irene Molloy,” Lehman said.

E
VEN AFTER SHE
signed for the part, Barbra harbored deep reservations about her casting. When she saw the show on Broadway she had considered it “a piece of fluff” and felt the audience sat through it waiting to hear the title tune, which had become a number one hit for Louis Armstrong in 1964. “I wasn’t gonna do it. I tried to convince them that it would be more emotional if it were the story of an older woman whose time is running out and she has to make the most of it. I thought Elizabeth Taylor should play it.” Taylor was thirty-five at the time.