Demanding diva ... or shy songbird?
On movie sets men found her controlling and difficult – but many more, from Brando and Sinatra to Clinton, thought she was simply irresistible. Barbra Streisand’s memoir, by turns arrogant and modest, reveals exactly how a star was born
I‘On stage I was in control. I’m not rushed. The audience had to adjust to my pace’
n her 80-plus years, Barbra Streisand has had much to put up with. The press has called her a furious hamster, a myopic gazelle, a seasick ferret and an amiable anteater. A typical joke used to be, ‘My wife went to the hairdresser, requesting the Barbra Streisand look. So he smacked her on the nose’.
According to her own testimony in My Name Is Barbra, her artistic vision has been thwarted at every turn. Arthur Laurents, the Broadway director who wrote the screenplay for The Way We Were, told her early on, ‘You’re never going to make it, you know. Never! You’re too undisciplined’.
Walter Matthau, Barbra’s co-star in Hello, Dolly!, felt the need to say: ‘You may be the singer in this picture, but I’m the actor. I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body.’
It’s the same story wherever Barbra goes, work-wise. Producers, agents, cinematographers, lyricists, even chauffeurs – Barbra has to put it on record in her near-1,000-page tome that, regarding such-and-such an antagonist, ‘I couldn’t figure out how to communicate with him. And he wouldn’t communicate with me.’
Of Gene Kelly: ‘Communication was going to be a problem.’ Of the director of A Star Is Born: ‘We had problems with each other from the beginning… Every day turned into a power struggle’. Of Isaac Bashevis Singer, author of Yentl: ‘He wasn’t very welcoming… He looked like an angry imp’. Of Garson Kanin, another director with whom Barbra didn’t hit it off: he was ‘like a Jew who didn’t want to be Jewish’.
Though everyone at the studios seems against her, hampering her genius, Barbra has nevertheless come through, establishing herself as ‘the greatest singing actress since Maria Callas’. Barbra certainly can’t be accused of false modesty, quoting lines like that without blushing.
Indeed, she boastfully dots her text with fan letters from the likes of Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman and Robert Redford – who all tell her: ‘If you’re as good an actress as you are a singer then there’s no stopping you’, or: ‘I absolutely saw the best thing I ever saw in my life in that girl’, etc.
The timbre of this indexless autobiography (an epic of self-justification) is breathtakingly arrogant – and paradoxically also innocent, perhaps because underneath she is shy? ‘I just happened to be born with a good voice,’ she says.
Barbra never bothered to train as a singer. Nor does she like rehearsals or lots of takes. Everything must be spontaneous and done on her terms: ‘On stage, I was in control. When I’m performing, I’m not rushed… The audience had to adjust to my pace’.
Barbra was born in Brooklyn in 1942. Childhood was unpleasant. When she was 15 months old, her father, who was 35, died of a cerebral haemorrhage. ‘I won
der if people who have fathers know how lucky they are,’ Barbra muses. Her relationship with her mother was difficult, as she never seemed proud of her daughter’s achievements. There were psychosomatic illnesses and trouble with her teeth. At one point school authorities dumped Barbra in a disinfectant bath and combed her hair for lice.
Though ‘I was a misfit in high school’, Barbra achieved high grades. A classmate was Bobby Fischer, the chess prodigy. Qualified for university, Barbra was told by her mother to set her sights no higher than being a typist. Barbra, however, yearned to be ‘a serious actress’ – Juliet, Cleopatra and Anna Karenina were roles she coveted. ‘Movies were my escape.’
Barbra took acting lessons, where she met Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, the latter ‘kind of cute, in a funny-looking way.’ I laughed to learn that she auditioned for the role of Liesl in The Sound Of Music. ‘Obviously I didn’t fit the part of a young blonde Austrian girl. I suppose I looked too Jewish,’ Barbra says with hindsight.
By 1960, she was engaged to appear in a Greenwich Village nightclub. ‘I had never even been in a nightclub until I sang in one,’ she insists. The two-week gig was extended to 11 weeks, with additional hit shows in Chicago and San Francisco. Barbra made television spots, singing with Bob Hope, Dean Martin and Judy Garland. Already she had the courage to say to doubters and critics, ‘You’ll be begging me for a contract, because I’m going to be a big star’.
Which she certainly did become, starting with Funny Girl, the Fanny Brice story, first on stage, then on film. One night in the theatre, the microphone taped to her chest ‘started picking up police calls,’ loud enough for patrons in the stalls to hear.
Less amusing was the boorish behaviour of Barbra’s co-star, Sydney Chaplin, who was infuriated she wouldn’t sleep with him. He deliberately muffed his cues, trod on Barbra’s lines, sabotaging her performance – a traumatising experience she went through again in 1984, with Mandy
Patinkin during Yentl. ‘I thought we were going to have an affair,’ bleated the future Homeland star, pathetically justifying why he was suddenly rude to everybody. Mandy would fall asleep, says Barbra, ‘when the subject moved off him’.
Regarding Barbra’s actual sex life, let’s say she’s coy. ‘My mother made it sound as if kissing was dangerous until you were married.’ Omar Sharif, Marlon Brando and Pierre Trudeau are mentioned as potential bed-mates, but maybe it was only dinner. ‘He loved the child in me,’ says Barbra about Anthony Newley, ‘but he didn’t take care of the woman in me’. I honestly have no idea what that may mean.
In 1963, despite Brando’s warning ‘He’s not good-looking enough for you,’ Barbra married Elliott Gould. ‘He had a sweet smile and warm brown eyes’, yet he also sweated profusely, gambled prodigiously, and was bothered by his wife’s superior earning power – which allowed Barbra to invest in Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele paintings and Art Deco furniture. Barry Humphries told me Barbra had Munch’s The Scream reproduced as place mats. She and Gould divorced in 1971, and since 1998 Barbra has been married to James Brolin, having met him ‘at a point in my life when I had given up on finding someone’.
On the professional front, Barbra soon went from cabaret venues to huge arenas: ‘I was operating on a whole new scale, singing to an audience of thousands’. At Cologne she sang 22 songs and received 22 standing ovations. Her albums were outsold only by The Beatles and Elvis, who was her original choice for A Star is Born. (She ended up with Kris Kristofferson.)
In the cinema, however, the conflicts intensified. ‘I was trying to make it in a man’s world as a director,’ says Barbra, who believes she was snubbed by the boards and guilds handing out prizes, after she’d directed Yentl, The Prince Of Tides and The Mirror Has Two Faces. Barbra resented Stephen Sondheim because he’d blocked her plans to direct and star as Mama Rose in a big-screen adaptation of Gypsy.
Apart from silly comedies like Meet The Fockers, Barbra’s energy in recent years has tended towards politics and philanthropy. She made a state visit to Israel, where she was told by Shimon Peres: ‘You promoted the heart of our people. It was a new spirit, a new mood, a new hope.’ She taught Bill Clinton how to play the board game Rummikub.
When describing herself as the intimate of royalty and presidents, and when rabbiting on about The Barbra Streisand Center at UCLA and her other charities and foundations, I was put in mind of Dame Edna Everage. Unashamed, frank and strident, Barbra can easily be pictured flinging gladdies at her possums. With this one difference: I honestly don’t think Barbra, on the evidence of this book, has a clue how camp she is.
Postscript: Critics are not on the whole subject to industrial accidents. Nevertheless, when I dropped this massive book on my foot, the bruise required medical attention. Whom can I sue?
‘Barry Humphries told me Barbra had Munch’s The Scream made into place mats’