Streisand: Her Life (105 page)

Barbra agreed. “I went through a hard time with Jason when he was a teenager, when he was belligerent and angry,” she admitted. Working on the film “deepened our relationship because
we
had to deal as mother-son, director-actor, and it was pretty intense.
When
he came to a screening, he leaned over and said ‘I’m very proud of you, Mom.’ It was a thrill because he had never said that to me.”

R
ECALLING THE TIME
he spent with Barbra Streisand, Pat Conroy, in his patented poetic fashion, defined her special brand of personal and professional charisma: “When Barbra enters a room, the whole atmosphere changes. stars appear in the east. Magi begin moving toward the room like camels. Women will follow her to the rest room. Besides, since Barbra has come into my life I can name-drop in a way I never could before. And people just love listening to it. I can say, ‘And Barbra said...’ and, like an E. F. Hutton ad, I can feel them all lean in.”

For Barbra, the most meaningful accolade she won for her direction of
The Prince of Tides
arrived after Pat Conroy saw the film. He sent her a copy of his book with this inscription:

To Barbra Streisand: You’re many things, Barbra, but you’re also a great teacher... one of the greatest to come into my life. I honor the great teachers and they live in my work and dance invisibly in the margins of my prose. You’ve made me a better writer, you rescued my sweet book, and you’ve honored me by taking it with such seriousness and love. Great love and great thanks and I’ll never forget that you gave
The Prince of Tides
back to me, as a gift. Pat Conroy.

“There seems to be a need for
this Diva thing.”

—Barbra in 1991

O
n Saturday, April 25, 1992, three hundred high-powered guests and one hundred of their children streamed into Jon Peters’s twelve-acre Beverly Hills estate for a lavish party to celebrate Barbra’s fiftieth birthday, which had fallen on the day before. Frank Sinatra was there, and so were Nick Nolte, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening with their new baby, among many others. Mrs. Kind, Roslyn, Jason, Elliott, and Richard Baskin attended, as of course did the Bergmans and Cis and Harvey Corman.

At an expense of $200,000, Jon had transformed his property into “Barbra’s Magic Castle.” Clowns, jugglers, fortune-tellers, and stilt-walkers roamed the grounds while magicians and fire-eaters performed their tricks. Thrilled children posed for photographs with Beauty and the Beast, stroked a pony and other small animals in the petting zoo, and marveled at the circus elephant. Other kids romped inside a giant inflatable structure and donned Velcro pantsuits to climb a Velcro wall.

Barbra, dressed in an off-white off-the-shoulder peasant dress, spent most of her time inside a huge tent, where she ate from a sumptuous spread of food and watched marionettes and a magic show with her three-and-a-half-year-old godchild, Caleigh, Jon’s adopted daughter.

She was surrounded by children, by friends, by love. And at fifty, Barbra stood astride the pinnacle of her career after three decades of unprecedentedly diverse success. Her fifty albums had sold over one hundred million copies worldwide. Her fifteen movies had grossed over one billion dollars worldwide. She had won Oscars for acting and songwriting; Emmys for her television shows; a Tony as star of the Decade; ten Golden Globes for acting, directing, producing, songwriting and as World Film Favorite; and eight Grammys for singing. She had been awarded more gold, platinum, and multi-platinum albums than any other artist. And, of course, her most recent directing effort had been nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Hers was a career unparalleled in show business history, and in February the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences had named her the recipient of its Grammy Legend Award. In September 1991 she had released a four-disc retrospective of her musical career,
Just for the Record
,
which contained ninety-five tracks, sixty-seven of them previously unreleased, beginning with the acetate recording o
f “You’ll N
ever Know” that she had made at thirteen in the Nola Recording Studio. The collection, although priced around sixty dollars on sale, sold over a million copies.

The retrospective served as the centerpiece of Stephen Sondheim’s tribute to Barbra when he introduced her at the Grammy Awards ceremony. “The lady we’re honoring tonight recently released a remarkable recording. It covered in one extraordinary musical package a career that might well be the envy of any performer who ever stood in front of a microphone and made music.... She’s the delight of every writer who hopes for a performance of his song better than what he heard in his head.... She’s as good as they come.”

“I don’t feel like a legend,” Barbra said as she accepted the trophy. “I feel like a work in progress.”

I
N MANY WAYS
she was very much a work in progress, especially when it came to politics and the world’s social problems. She had always been concerned with various issues as a private citizen, and occasionally she would speak out to raise money for the causes she believed in. But in 1992 Barbra truly came into her own as a social and political activist. What more was there for her to prove as an entertainer? Only that she had the courage—and retained the drawing power—to stage a successful concert tour. That would come.

But now she felt she must speak out against discrimination of all stripes, and the neglect of so many social problems by the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Her first opportunity came when she was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Women in Film organization in June 1992. Her feminist speech was hard-hitting but not devoid of humor:

We’ve come a long way. Not too long ago we were referred to as dolls, tomatoes, chicks, babes, broads. We’ve graduated to being called tough cookies, foxes, bitches, and witches. I guess that’s progress. Language gives us an insight into the way women are viewed in a male-dominated society.... A man is commanding—a woman is demanding.

A man is forceful—a woman is pushy. A man is uncompromising—a woman is a ball breaker. A man is a perfectionist—a woman’s a pain in the ass....

I’m angry about the way they treated Anita Hill. I’m angry about what happened to Rodney King. I’m angry that the right of a woman to control her own body is even being questioned.... I look forward to a society that is color- and gender-blind, that judges us by the value of our work, not the length of our legs. That accepts the fact that a woman can be many, many things: strong
and
vulnerable, intelligent
and
sexy, opinionated
and
flexible, angry
and
forgiving.... Of course, all this applies to men as well.

On
Larry King Live
in February, Barbra had said that she hadn’t yet made up her mind whom to support for the Democratic presidential nomination. “Maybe Harkin,” she said, naming the most liberal of the candidates, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. Her first choice had been the liberal lion Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York. But he had declined to run, just as he had several times in the past.

By June, after Harkin faltered in the Democratic primaries, Barbra had decided to back, as she put it, “the only viable candidate”—Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. On September 16, 1992, she headlined a $1.5 million Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Clinton, now the party’s nominee, and his running mate, Tennessee Senator Al Gore. The two Democratic women running for the U.S. Senate from California, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, also benefited from the money raised.

Attended by twelve hundred people and broadcast via satellite to fundraisers in New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlantic City, and San Francisco, the event featured performances by Dionne Warwick, Tammy Wynette, and the reunited comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Then Barbra, dressed in black and appearing relaxed, came onstage to the strains of “People” for a twenty-four-minute song set that included “People,” “On a Clear Day,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “It’s a New World,” “Children Will Listen,” “It Had to Be You,” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and “God Bless America.”

Between songs, she bantered. “I used to be a director and now I’ve become a backyard singer,” she quipped. “Did you notice?... The last time I sang live was six years ago to help elect a Democratic Senate. What motivated me was the disaster at Chernobyl. And what motivates me now is another kind of disaster: the possibility of four more years of George Bush and Dan Quayle.”

In a fascinating three-way race on November 3, the country agreed: William Jefferson Clinton was elected president with 43 percent of the vote. President Bush received 38 percent, and the independent candidate Ross Perot garnered 19 percent. And as icing on the cake for Barbra and her fellow liberals, both Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer won their races, making California the first state in history to send two female senators to Washington at the same time.

H
AVING HELPED ELECT
a Democratic president for the first time in sixteen years, Barbra wasted no time resting on her laurels. On November 18 she accepted the AIDS Project Los Angeles Commitment to Life Award as a co-honoree with the recording mogul David Geffen. In many ways it was her own coming-out to the AIDS crisis. She had been criticized for not doing nearly as much to fight the disease that had afflicted mostly gay men in America since 1981 as had Bette Midler, Madonna, and especially Elizabeth Taylor.

In the September 1991 issue of
Vanity Fair
, Barbra had addressed that criticism. “That’s their opinion,” she said of those who faulted her lack of fervent AIDS activism. “I give loads of money. I’ve given a lot to pediatric AIDS... and all the proceeds from the single ‘Somewhere’ from my Broadway album went to AmFAR [the American Foundation for AIDS Research], I don’t give public appearances; Madonna and Bette Midler like to perform. Elizabeth Taylor has this as her
one
cause.”

But within a year Barbra had jumped into the battle to find a cure for AIDS. She quietly joined the board of directors of Hollywood Supports, an organization founded by industry bigwigs Barry Diller and Sid Sheinberg, and contributed $350,000 to various AIDS causes.

But it was at AIDS Project L.A.’s Commitment to Life Awards ceremony at the Universal Amphitheater that she went public on the issue in a big way. After a show built around a
West Side Story
theme that featured performances of the Bernstein-Sondheim score by Natalie Cole, Patti LaBelle, Sheila E., Wynonna Judd, Kenny Loggins, and Elton John offering a campy “I Feel Pretty” while wearing pearls and fluttering a fan, Barbra provided an electric finale as she joined Johnny Mathis for a duet medley of “One Hand, One Heart” and “I Have a Love.” Then Streisand really grabbed the audience. After Warren Beatty introduced her with a warm, personal, and effusive tribute, she delivered a fiery oration that had the audience cheering “Barbra for President!”

“Few of us have responded with enough urgency to meet this crisis of catastrophic proportions.... And a disease that has infected far more heterosexuals than homosexuals throughout the world was dismissed as a gay disease with that official, homophobic wink—implying that those deaths didn’t really matter.