Streisand: Her Life (60 page)

“I
LOOK FORWARD
to working less and simplifying my life, to fulfilling some of my potential as an individual and as a woman,” Barbra told
Life
magazine late in 1969. “My little-girl fantasy of being a recording star, a theater star, a concert star, and a movie star is impossible to maintain; each of them suffers. There is so much else to learn, so much more to do. What I’d like is more time—time not only to read the stacks of political journals that have been piling up, but also time to read
Good Housekeeping
to find out different ways to decorate my son’s sandwiches.”

She was exhausted after she finished
The Owl and the Pussycat,
and with good reason. In the last two and a half years she had made four movies, three of them elephantine musicals; produced two television specials, one of them a live concert before 135,000 people; and put out seven studio and sound-track albums. She
needed
a rest, and she was determined to take one. Scheduled to return to the Riviera in Las Vegas in August to fulfill her 1963 contract with the hotel, Barbra asked to postpone the date until November. She already had an obligation to return to the International (now the Hilton) in December; that way, she reasoned, she could kill two Vegas birds with one stone. The Riviera agreed, and Barbra settled back and tried to return to a private life.

She read those political journals, listened to classical music, worked at improving her questionable culinary skills. “I think cooking is so fascinating,” she said. “It’s like chemistry or math, and I love math because it’s based on logic. It’s not like life. I like anything that’s tangible—you follow the recipe carefully for baking a cake and it comes out right; that’s terrific.”

Whenever possible she shopped, usually for antiques. “I love art glass,” she said. “My day is made when I find a piece of mold-blown Gallé. I love the flowing, unending line of Art Nouveau furniture. It makes me cry it’s so beautiful.” She spent time with her best friends, the lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman, playing bridge, singing around the piano, walking on the beach, staying up late into the night talking and giggling.

Mostly, of course, her newfound free time allowed her to dote on three-year-old Jason, who brought her no end of joy. She delighted in his every move, his every word. She proudly told a reporter that when Jason bit into a grapefruit he complained, “Oooh, sour,” and that he always said “Okay” with a questioning inflection—
“Okay?”
—just like his mother. And Jason was learning how to deal with fans. When Barbra brought him to a matinee performance of the Joffrey Ballet, autograph seekers approached Barbra at intermission. She sank into her seat and tried to discourage them. Jason stood up and declared, “No autographs today.”

S
HE SPENT TIME
house-hunting, too. In California she had found a 9,600-square-foot, two-story Mediterranean-style villa with five bedrooms and seven baths on Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, just west of the Beverly Hills Hotel. She first rented it, then purchased it for $295,000 in July of 1969.

She didn’t have such good luck in New York. She started looking for another apartment when she was denied permission to break through the walls separating her two apartments on Central Park West and make them one. Unless she moved, she said, “Jason will have to sleep in a separate apartment. Can you imagine him telling his analyst about
that
twenty years from now?”

She found an elegant twenty-room place she liked near Eighty-sixth Street on Park Avenue, and applied to the building’s board for permission to purchase it for $240,000. She was turned down. The reason, the wife of a board member said, was that “we don’t want flamboyant Hollywood types” in the building. She denied that the turndown had anything to do with Barbra’s being Jewish. “We have three or four Jewish families in the building,” she said.

It was the second time in a year that Barbra had been denied the chance to buy a co-op. After a story about the rejection appeared in
The New York Times
, the New York State attorney general launched an investigation into the practices of the city’s co-op boards. “It’s an unbelievable experience to be discriminated against,” Barbra said. “You know, the board didn’t even give me an interview. They apparently think theatrical people are noisy. Let me tell you, it’s the society people who are swinging from the chandeliers. I happen to lead a very quiet, conservative life. I hardly ever entertain.”

Barbra gave up on a co-op and bought instead a five-story, seventeen-room Art Deco town house on East Eightieth Street, built in 1929, for $420,000. She needed all that room, she explained, because “I have so much stuff that I’ve been collecting for years. Most of it is in storage because our apartment is so small. I want to give all those things a home.” The “things” included a collection of cranberry glass, an ice-cream-parlor bar, a gum machine, and penny candy and spool cabinets.

On June 9, 1970, before she had moved in a stick of furniture, Barbra invited three thousand guests to the house for a political fund-raiser to benefit the primary campaign of the liberal Democratic congressional hopeful Bella Abzug. A handwritten note from Barbra invited all those who wished to contribute $25 or more to the cause of supporting “that very special lady running for Congress who is dedicated to peace” to “drop in” between five and eight in the evening. “There will be stars of stage, screen and radio!—drinks—canapes—but no furniture! You must
abzug
lutely come.”

An army of young “Bella Boosters” mopped the floors and washed the windows in preparation for the event, which was a smashing success and raised more than $50,000 for the candidate. A week later Streisand joined Abzug to campaign on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, startling passersby as she orated through a bullhorn from the back of a flatbed truck.

Bella Abzug won the primary, and on November 1, two days before the general election, which Abzug also won, Barbra headlined a “Broadway for Bella” benefit at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden. That show featured performances from
Cabaret, Purlie, Fiddler on the Roof, 1776, Company
, and
Hair
, and Barbra’s performance of “People” brought the house down. A Streisand fan who crashed the party recalled, “She was so great she had everybody in tears. Even the stagehands were crying, and they must have seen everything ever to go onstage. The crowd got kind of hysterical and they started to storm the stage, and she yelled into the microphone, ‘Who do you think I am? Tom Jones?’ It was okay, though. Nothing got out of hand. Afterward people sneaked into her dressing room and took things like wire hangers and bits of soap to save as souvenirs.”

Barbra soon became disenchanted with the town house, which she discovered needed a new roof and heating system and which she was unable to sell. At a dinner party a few months later, she met Steve Ross, the head of Warner Communications. As she complained about the place Ross asked, “How much do you want for it?”

“Four hundred and fifty thousand,” Barbra replied. Ross agreed to buy it on the spot.

O
N JUNE
17, 1970,
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
opened. Quietly. There was no premiere, no road-show engagement, no souvenir booklet. Paramount, nervous about the decline in audience interest in big old-fashioned musicals, had decided to cut its expected losses on the film and forced Vincente Minnelli to snip nearly fifteen minutes from it, including two complete musical numbers—one of them a Streisand duet with Jack Nicholson! Few of the cut scenes involved Yves Montand, but he still expressed unhappiness with his share of the screen time after the film’s release. “It was to have been a more equitable sharing of the movie,” he said. “That was what I thought. There was very little give [from Streisand]. I worked with Monroe, and she knew she was beloved of the public, but she didn’t bring it with her on the set. They gave Streisand everything she wanted, and more. It was eventually decided to change it from a movie version of the play into a picture for her: a Barbra Streisand picture.”

Paramount spent as little as possible on publicity and promotion. This lack of studio belief in the film’s box-office potential, as it almost always does, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. With decidedly mixed reviews—Montand’s stiffness and sometimes unintelligible English prompted particularly harsh assessments—
On a Clear Day
brought in only $13.4 million at box offices around the country. But because Minnelli had provided the film’s lavish production values without going over his $10 million budget,
On a Clear Day
was able to break even with foreign receipts and its sale to television.

Just as
What About Today?
reflected Barbra’s uneasy transition to pop music,
On a Clear Day
proved an equally uncomfortable segue to contemporary characterization for her onscreen. How to play Daisy Gamble, the first present-day role she had acted since summer stock, clearly puzzled Streisand; her Daisy resembles no known species of late 1960s college girl. In her early scenes she seems, in the words of
Time
magazine, like “Jerry Lewis in drag.” She makes actressy, “indicating” decisions, like turning her feet toward each other when she sits down, that make Daisy seem buffoonish.

Her haute couture contemporary wardrobe, designed by Arnold Scaasi, doesn’t help. With her huge white hats, short Empire-style dresses with matching half coats, cute little pinafores with Peter Pan collars, and a nightgown in paisley material that matches her bedroom wallpaper, Daisy Gamble was the most precious coed who never lived. “That’s where Minnelli’s love of beauty occasionally fails him,” wrote the critic Joel E. Siegel. “If the contrast between her present and past lives had been even sharper, I think it would have solved most of what was wrong with the film.”

If Barbra should have played Daisy more like the entirely believable college girl she played in
What’s Up
,
Doc?
two years later, her Melinda Tentrees in
Clear Day
emerged as her most exquisite cinematic creation. Modeling Cecil Beaton’s sumptuous Regency costumes to stunning effect, she’s gorgeous, sexy, funny, imperious, coy, beguiling, and compelling as this willful, irresistible courtesan. Her performance and Minnelli’s presentation of it provide some of the most enchanting Streisand moments ever captured on film, particularly the banquet scene, during which Barbra’s seductiveness often proved literally arousing to those who appreciated her sex appeal.