Streisand: Her Life (98 page)

On the final day, Richard Dreyfuss joined the interview and waxed philosophic about Streisand’s much-dissected personality. “Barbra is a case,” he said. “She’s very specific. I think if there is one thing that you can say is a common denominator to all movie stars, especially female movie stars, from the time of the beginning of the motion picture business, [it’s] that they are—as opposed to the other actresses—they are definite. You can see a clear line around Katharine Hepburn’s personality and Bette Davis’s personality and Joan Crawford and Jean Arthur and Barbra Streisand. That is what sets them apart and makes them compelling for us to watch.... People might argue with facets of Barbra’s personality, but what Barbra is is
definite
.

“And because she’s a woman, we take issue with that to a greater degree than if she were a man. If she were a producer, star, director of the male gender, we would accept all of her eccentricities in a much more forgiving, normal, unquestioning way. The fact that she is a woman brings all of those things out in very sharp relief, and that’s why we’re here in a sense discussing Barbra’s personality. That doesn’t mean that I forgive her eccentricities, by the way, it just means that’s the phenomenon we’re discussing, okay?”

Despite the film’s positive preview responses, reviews were mixed. Many critics felt Barbra had created a surprisingly hard-edged, gritty character who was light-years away from Yentl, and had finally proved her dramatic mettle. Others accused her of chewing up the scenery, of performing rather than acting.
People
magazine’s reviewer wrote, “Her wicked zest keeps you riveted. Whether she’s punching out the family lawyer or shocking the court with her sex-for-sale rates, Streisand shows a robust comic toughness... with disarming candor and wit, she has actually made a hymn to herself as a pain in the butt.” Still others felt the film was a pain, period.
Newsweek
’s David Ansen called
Nuts
“a classic example of A-list liberal Hollywood turning out what it thinks is Important Entertainment.”

Warner Brothers, encouraged by opening-day research figures stating that
Nuts
had a 96 percent chance of being enjoyed, believed that excellent word of mouth could override the critical objections. But a series of problems hurt the film’s box-office receipts, beginning with the pulse of the country. In recessionary times, few wanted to see what they perceived to be a depressing story about a crazy prostitute, especially during the holidays. Although the film had a huge opening ten-day take of nearly $12 million on a mere 536 screens, the abysmal ad campaign, featuring a photo of a sour-faced Streisand that called to mind the beast in television’s
Beauty and the Beast
, proved to be a turnoff to many potential moviegoers.
None of
the film’s humor, or its ultimate happiness and hope, was explored in the marketing, and
Nuts
suffered because of it.

The box office on
Nuts
dwindled rapidly, and it ended up grossing only $35 million domestically—barely enough to cover its production budget, not to mention the millions spent on promotion. The film was a washout in the year-end New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Awards. It was nominated for Golden Globe Awards in two categories, but it failed to win either Best Picture or Best Actress. The only hope left for its resuscitation revolved around the Oscar nominations. Would the Academy members finally give Streisand some recognition? Most observers agreed that her performance deserved a nomination.

Indeed, for months
Nuts
had been touted by many Hollywood insiders as a front-runner in the Oscar sweepstakes, and some articles even predicted that Streisand would win her third statuette. But when the nominations were announced,
Nuts
was ignored in every category. Cher went on to win the Best Actress Award, for an accomplished but less multilayered performance.

T
HE CATHARSIS OF
Nuts
brou
ght Bar
bra only marginally closer to her mother. “I love her more now than I ever have in my life,” she said. “I think she also loves me. I understand even her jealousy. Why shouldn’t she be jealous? Here’s a woman who wanted a career for herself, but she was too frightened, too shy.”

Diana has defended herself against the charge that she never gave Barbra any encouragement as a little girl. Speaking of all three of her children she said, “Whatever they tried to do, I tried to support, and I was being supportive.” But she admitted, “They might not have thought I was totally supportive.”

Barbra and her mother were rarely in contact. “I don’t hear from her very often,” Mrs. Kind said. “There’s no rift, I love my daughter very much, but Barbra’s a very busy girl and I’m a busy mother taking care of myself and trying to do the best I can with my life.” On special occasions Barbra will take Diana out to dinner “if it’s convenient,” Mrs. Kind said; on Mother’s Day and her birthday Barbra’s secretary usually would send Diana flowers, but some years she didn’t remember to.

But, Diana freely admitted, “My daughter sure looks after me.” In the early eighties Barbra bought her a $1 million, two-bedroom Beverly Hills condominium, which Diana often shares with Roslyn, who married the producer Randy Stone, then a casting agent, briefly in 1983 but has been single ever since. Barbra also paid all her mother’s bills and sent her $1,000 a month, and for a simple woman in her eighties this was virtually the lap of luxury. Her biggest problem, Diana said, was a lack of privacy because of her daughter’s fame: “I never knew that being the mother of someone like this would be such hard work.”

I
n the ring at the Atlantic City Convention Center in January 1988, world heavyweight champ Mike Tyson was pounding his challenger, Larry Holmes, into mincemeat, but the real show was just north of ringside. As though they were at a Ping-Pong match rather than a prizefight, the spectators kept shifting their gaze between the bloodbath in the ring and a stylishly dressed blond couple sitting knee to knee a few rows back. In a crowd that included Jack Nicholson, Kirk Douglas, Barbara Walters, Bruce Willis, Norman Mailer, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Muhammad Ali, the sight of Barbra Streisand and Don Johnson holding hands riveted everyone in the crowd who could see them. Whispers rippled around the arena as more and more people spotted Barbra with one of America’s hottest male sex symbols: “Isn’t that Barbra Streisand with
Don Johnson?
Wow! Are those two a
couple
now?”

Following the brief fight—Tyson knocked Holmes out in the fourth round, just as he had predicted he would—the celebrity guests adjourned to the Imperial Ballroom of the Trump Plaza Hotel for a lavish soiree. “Don and Barbra walked into the party hand in hand,” recalled one of the guests. “They mingled, together and separately. Everyone was thrilled to see Barbra there, but to see her with Don Johnson really surprised everyone. They were really cute. Even while talking with other people, they would smile at each other from across the room.”

To a press corps ever salivating for a new superstar pairing, even the hint of a Streisand-Johnson romance proved irresistible. “It’s Barbra & Don & don’t say it isn’t!” screamed the headline of Liz Smith’s column the following Monday. “They are supposedly giving each other those looks you could pour on waffles,” Smith wrote. In a follow-up report, Smith described a dinner date the two had had at Manhattan’s Mayflower Hotel: “They... were seen getting so cozy [in their banquette] that eventually they all but slid down out of sight of the few other diners. [The romance] is something big and electric.”

Within days columnists all over the country were running whatever tidbits they could unearth about “Hollywood’s newest odd couple.” The pair even ended up as the subject of a
Bloom County
comic strip that dubbed Johnson, thirty-eight, “Streisand’s Toy Boy Goy.” Longtime Streisand watchers noted that Barbra, who always professed to crave privacy, had once again chosen to publicly unveil a new lover at a highly ballyhooed prizefight, just as she had done fourteen years earlier with Jon Peters, a man to whom Don Johnson bore several important similarities. Barbra’s desire for privacy, it seemed, is less important to her when she wants to show off a new male bauble.

Barbra had met the rakishly handsome star of the flashy, innovative television cop drama
Miami Vice
ten months earlier backstage at the 1987 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Johnson and Whoopi Goldberg had announced that year’s nominees—including
The Broadway Album
—for the Album of the Year Award. The camera focused on Barbra in the audience as Johnson read the names of the nominees, and when he pronounced her name “Streizund,” a close-up showed her mouthing the correct pronunciation. Their encounter at the ceremonies was brief; Johnson barely had time to tell Barbra, who was with Richard Baskin, how much he enjoyed her work. She responded with a cheerful thank-you.

Barbra’s romance with Richard Baskin had, over the years, cooled to a friendship—one that continues to this day—and thus she spent a 1987 Christmas holiday in Aspen on her own. It was then that she ran into Johnson again, at a party thrown by friends. Johnson had also come alone, and when he noticed Barbra sitting quietly amid a group of chattering guests, he reintroduced himself to her. After a few moments he led her by the hand out to a cozy balcony where the couple talked and laughed intimately in the moonlight for the rest of the evening as the other party guests tried not to be too obvious in their fascination.

A few days later Johnson was a conspicuous guest at a party Barbra threw at her rented chalet in Aspen’s exclusive Red Mountain enclave. The couple also dined privately at Johnson’s hotel. Because of the demands of his series, Johnson was based in Miami, and after he and Barbra returned to their respective coasts, they spent hours on the phone getting better acquainted. Although well known in the press as a slick womanizer, Johnson was also intelligent, funny, ambitious, and a caring father to his five-year-old son, qualities that drew Barbra to him. That he had recently been chosen “The Sexiest Man Alive” by
People
magazine couldn’t have escaped her notice either.

A
SELF-DESCRIBED
hell-raiser as a kid in Missouri who lost his virginity at age twelve to a seventeen-year-old baby-sitter, Don Johnson first came to public attention in the late sixties when the former teen idol Sal Mineo cast him in a Los Angeles stage production of the controversial prison drama,
Fortune and Men’s Eyes
.
As a pretty-boy rape victim, the teenaged actor received rave reviews and keen interest from the movie industry. But he made only a handful of films in the seventies, including the 1973 cult favorite
The Harrad Experiment
,
in which he appeared frontally nude. During filming, Johnson fell in love with Melanie Griffith, the precocious, flaxen-haired fourteen-year-old daughter of his co-star, Tippi Hedren. They married three years later.

It was the twenty-six-year-old Johnson’s third attempt at matrimony, and lasted only two years. After the divorce he settled into a long affair with Barbra’s
Main Event
co-star Patti D’Arbanville, who became the mother of his son, Jesse, in 1982. By the early eighties, Johnson found himself mired in made-for-television movies such as
Elvis and the Beauty Queen
(in which he played Presley) and
Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold
.

It was well known in Hollywood that Johnson’s career problems had for years been exacerbated by drug and alcohol dependency. On any given day, he admitted in one interview, his intake of alcohol “included a case of beer, a few martinis, several bottles of the best wine, and some good Napoleon brandy after dinner.” In 1982, shortly after Jesse’s birth, Johnson joined Alcoholics Anonymous. The following year he was cast as Sonny Crockett in
Miami Vice
.

Set in the Art Deco world of Miami Beach, against a sound track of surging techno-rock, the vividly photographed show became an instant hit for NBC and by its second season had grown into a pop culture phenomenon. With their wardrobe of silk Armani suits and loosely fitted pastel sports jackets worn over snug T-shirts, Johnson and his co-star Philip Michael Thomas became the epitome of hip, unshaven masculine sex appeal. In a matter of months the full-fledged stardom that had eluded Don Johnson for fifteen years was now heaped upon him, and he reveled in it.

Johnson’s high-profile celebrity status coincided with the dissolution of his relationship with D’Arbanville, and since maturity had only enhanced his sexual allure, it surprised no one that “Don Juan-son,” as he was tagged in the fan magazines, reportedly took full advantage of the
Miami Vice
groupies who followed his every move.

Johnson was the most famous, glamorous, and unlikely man Barbra had been linked to romantically for many years, and the tabloid press in particular went into a feeding frenzy over the couple. During the first months of 1988, hardly a week went by without the supermarket rags running some new “inside” scoop about Barbra and Don.

She had “dragged him to Brooklyn” to meet her family, the tabloid writers claimed—although none of them still lived there! He had commissioned Gianni Versace to whip up a wedding gown for her. She “desperately” wanted Don’s baby. She insisted Johnson be circumcised prior to their marriage. He had put a down payment on a four-bedroom love nest for her in Aspen. She had lost fifteen pounds because she was too much in love to eat regularly. He had given her an engagement ring of clustered diamonds and emeralds. They planned to buy their own private island off the coast of Mexico. They would co-star in a remake of
The Thin Man
.
They intended to record a duet of the Rolling Stones’ classic “Get Off My Cloud” and an album of Christmas songs written by Stevie Wonder and Lionel Richie.

The gossip got sillier and sillier, in part because the couple remained largely mute about their affair. When Barbra and Don did speak about their romance, it was to British reporters, with whom Barbra has always been franker than she is with American journalists. “I’ve been with thousands of women,” Johnson told
London Today
magazine, “but Streisand is supreme, unequaled in all the ways that count. I love her strengths, her direct approach to music, acting, people, and, yes, making love. To me she is beautiful. I know some people make fun of her nose, but let me tell you, she can smell a phony with it a mile away. She makes me laugh, and she makes me think.”

“I like sharing my life with a male counterpart,” Barbra told the
Daily Mail
while she was in London to promote
Nuts
.
“I have found one now, Don Johnson, and it is going very well. Like me, he is often misinterpreted and called a tough guy and difficult—and it is not true. That is one of our common bonds. He is very gentle, sensitive, and nurturing. He has wonderful manners and he can make me laugh. Will it last? How do I know? All I know is this moment. Would I marry again? Yes. But don’t ask if I would marry him. I don’t know. He makes me happy. I have never been so happy before, so it’s something I am learning as if I am a child again. It is a new thing and I have to get used to it.”

To another writer she said, “When I’m with Don, I can enjoy my celebrity, because I don’t have to apologize to the man I’m with for getting all the attention. Don gets as much attention as I do.”

Eager to wring as much “news” as possible out of the Streisand-Johnson affair, the weekly London tabloid
Chat
ran an interview with Elliott Gould in which he “warned” Johnson against marrying Barbra and aired his grievances about his ex-wife. “I don’t know why I’m loyal to you,” Elliott claimed to have told Barbra weeks before. “You’re not nice to me. You don’t like me. You’re mean to me. You don’t help me. You’re rude to me.”