Streisand: Her Life (61 page)

O
N A CLEAR DAY
sounded a death knell for the MGM Golden Era-inspired musical, and for Streisand movie musicals as well, at least for the next five years. Barbra had professed her determination not only to contemporize her image but to prove that she could be effective in movies without singing a line. With the release of
The Owl and the Pussycat
on October 30 she did both.

That Barbra’s new movie nearly got an X rating proved it was as “very today” as Barbra felt, and she expressed delight that the film deserved the MPAA’s most restrictive rating. But Ray Stark knew that many theaters refused to show X-rated films, even if they were not truly pornographic, and many newspapers refused to carry ads for them. Somehow he was able to persuade the ratings board to give the film an R rating without removing Doris’s four-letter put-down. Some newspapers did refuse to run the
Pussycat
ads, though, because they showed Barbra wearing her “modelling outfit” with two hands and a heart sewn over strategic spots, so Columbia prepared a G-rated campaign without them.

The Owl and the Pussycat
won wide critical approval, especially for the comic teamwork of Barbra and George Segal. Most critics, especially New Yorkers, considered the movie a homecoming for Streisand. “There she comes, right where she belongs, in a real New York street,” wrote Jack Kroll in
Newsweek
, “ducking through the sleazy rain in a fake-fur minicoat, white boots scrambling, tote bag swinging, cussing out a departing bus in her inter-borough voice and with a shrug and a chomp on her Juicyfruit, flopping into a passing car... Streisand [displays] the most amazing comic energy seen on the screen in a very long time.”

Pauline Kael added, “She may never again look as smashing as she did in that high-style champagne bit [in
On a Clear Day
], but if the price of that glamour is the paralysis of talent, it isn’t worth it. Streisand, who is easily the best comedienne working in American movies, is better when she isn’t carrying all that deadweight. She can be trusted when she cuts loose, because she has the instinct and the discipline to control her phenomenal vitality. She is like thousands of girls one sees in the subway, but more so; she is both the archetype and an original, and that’s what makes a star.”

The Owl and the Pussycat
grossed $29 million in the United States, which placed it among the top-grossing pictures of the year. Its success, along with the grosses of
Funny Girl
and
Hello
,
Dolly!,
put Barbra on the male-dominated Top Ten Box-Office Attractions list for the first time. She had made the transformation from dinosaur Dolly to dirty-mouthed Doris, and for Barbra there would be no looking back.

W
HILE SHE RESTED
from filmmaking during the summer of 1970, Barbra’s thoughts turned again to the legitimate stage. The prior April 19 she had been voted an honorary Tony award as Broadway’s star of the Decade, finally completely fulfilling Marty Erlichman’s prediction, and the recognition started her fantasies whirring. She mulled over an opportunity to appear in a repertory production of
Romeo and Juliet
. “I’d like to play Juliet while I’m still young enough,” she told the columnist Radie Harris.

“And whom would you like as your Romeo?” Harris asked.

“Robert Redford,” Barbra replied without missing a beat. “He’s one of the best young American actors around.”

She fantasized about playing Medea, just as she and Elliott had dreamed of doing when they first met, and Hamlet—Sarah Bernhardt had done it, why couldn’t she? But her stage fright and her inclination toward laziness won out over her ambition, and she never did return to live theater. “That’s why I love being in movies,” she said at the time. “I’m performing all over the world—while I’m home taking a bath.”

H
ER RECORDING CAREER
presented an entirely different problem. She hadn’t had an original studio album in release since
What About Today?
a year earlier. The
Hello, Dolly!
sound track and the compilation album
Barbra Streisand’s Greatest Hits
, despite their release during the holiday season, had sold anemically, and the sound track to
On a Clear Day
bombed: it never even entered
Billboard’s
Top 100 Albums list. Even considering the failure of the picture, it was shocking that an album containing six lovely new Streisand performances of songs by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner would chart so poorly. Where were her fans?

Apparently she had fewer of them now. Unlikely as it might have seemed even two years earlier—the
Funny Girl
sound track had risen to number twelve, after all—Barbra was the latest victim of a revolution in mainstream pop musical tastes that was now complete. If most young people regarded her musical films as quaint relics of a past age, they considered her records scarcely more modern. Clearly she would have to update her musical image or risk losing forever her position as a pop music force.

Surprisingly, considering Streisand’s career savvy, she resisted. Perhaps she feared a repeat of the failure of
What About Today?
Even more to the point was that Barbra didn’t feel comfortable with or understand most of the pop-rock music she had heard. She related to classic ballads or new material in the standards mold. Thus despite renewed pressure from Clive Davis to do another contemporary album, Barbra had begun work earlier in the year on
The Singer
, a collection of what she called “good music,” written mostly by Michel Legrand and her friends Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

She recorded “The Best Thing You’ve Ever Done,” which she had refused to sing for
The Owl and the Pussycat
, and two Legrand-Bergman compositions, “Summer Me, Winter Me,” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” The first two were released as a single, which went nowhere. Undeterred, Barbra proceeded with plans for
The Singer.

Then Clive Davis stepped up the pressure. Barbra, he felt, would be making a big mistake if she released the album. He requested a meeting with Marty Erlichman. “I was aware of her resistance to change,” Davis said. “She was against the composers of the day because she did not understand their music.” Davis sensed that the material was more frightening to Barbra in the abstract, so he promised Erlichman that he would come back to Barbra with specific material he thought would be right for her.

Davis got in touch with Richard Perry, a staff producer at Warner Brothers Records who had recently struck out on his own and produced a record of Ella Fitzgerald singing songs from the Beatles and Smokey Robinson. The thought of working with Streisand excited Perry; he hadn’t thought much of
What About Today?
but felt Barbra could make a successful transition to pop with the right material and the right approach. “Here was the greatest vocal instrument of our generation,” he said, “not at all relating to popular contemporary music.”

When Perry and Barbra got together, he saw that she “wasn’t into any of the contemporary figures around. She didn’t have a really good stereo in her home or anything like that.” Perry played a few songs for her, including Harry Nilsson’s “Maybe,” which she liked.

“You really think I can do this?” she asked.

“Sure,” Perry replied. “Why not?”

Over the next few months, Barbra would call Perry late at night to say, “I want the new Van Morrison, the new Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Marvin Gaye...” To Perry, this was a sure sign that Streisand had “totally immersed herself in the pop culture.”

Finally she agreed to lay down enough tracks for an album, but she reserved the right to have them destroyed if she didn’t like them. The night before the session, Perry recalled, “she called me up, freaking out. She said, ‘I can’t do it. This isn’t me. I don’t feel it.
’”
Perry tried to soothe her. ‘ You’ve come this far, you’ve gotta do it,” he told her. “Trust me that you’re gonna love it. It’s gonna blow your mind as soon as we get into it a little bit.”

The first session on July 30, during which Barbra recorded five songs, lasted from seven in the evening until five-thirty in the morning, the longest in the history of the Los Angeles branch of the American Federation of Musicians. Barbra recorded “Maybe,” Joni Mitchell’s “I Don’t Know Where I Stand,” Randy Newman’s “I’ll Be Home,” Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann’s “Just a Little Lovin
’
”—all rather gentle pop songs—and Laura Nyro’s rocker “Stoney End.” As she listened to a playback of that last number, Barbra smiled, turned to Perry, and whispered, “You were right and I
was
wrong. But it’s nice to be wrong.”

Barbra “was going through a metamorphosis,” Perry said, “not just musically but in a lot of ways.” But she still had a long way to go, evidently. When Perry, in Los Angeles, sent a mix of “Stoney End” to Barbra at her apartment in New York, she called him to say that the tape had no background vocals. “That’s impossible,” Perry replied. “They’re there.”

“I don’t hear any,” Barbra said.

“Look, I’m coming to New York tomorrow,” Perry told her. “I’ll come over and we’ll listen.”