Streisand: Her Life (109 page)

Inside, the impatient crowd burst into rhythmi
c clapping several times, and amused themselves by gawking at and cheering for the Who’s Who o
f celebrities filing into front-row seats over the two nights: Michael Jackson, Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin, Gregory Peck, Coretta Scott King, Prince, Michael Crawford, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, Jay Leno, Steven Spielberg, Kathie Lee Gifford, Michael Douglas, Andre Agassi, Jon Peters, and Elliott Gould, among others.

As the overture began to swell, the crowd roared and the excitement peaked. It was finally about to happen—Barbra Streisand live in concert! For the vast majority of the people in the audience, this was the first time—and, they knew, probably the last time—they would see Streisand perform in person.

The first thing the audience noticed as Barbra emerged from the wings was how lovely she looked. Slim, glowing, her blond hair falling softly about her shoulders, she looked closer to thirty-five than fifty-one.

As her breathy nervousness gave way to growing confidence, Streisand’s voice grew stronger. By the second act she was in voice nearly as pure and as powerful as she had ever been. Ten times, the audience leaped to their feet for standing ovations. At one point during a prolonged ovation fans in the back rows began to stomp their feet, rock-concert style. As the rest of the audience picked up the cue, a palpable wave of noise and reverberation swept from the periphery of the arena down to the stage. The cacophony startled Barbra. “Wow! You’re incredible,” she called out above the din.

Although she adhered faithfully to the script—all of the lines, including “ad-libs” and most of her reactions, were flashed on TelePrompTers in front of her—Barbra the actress left her audience convinced that each word had just sprung to mind and popped out. And the autobiog
raphical ele
ments of the show were tailor-made to appeal to Streisand fans, many of whom cared about her every triumph and trial nearly as much as their own.

Pictures of Barbra as a baby and as a young girl flashed on a huge screen above the set as she spoke of her early dreams of acting. Seeing
The Diary of Anne Frank
on Broadway, she said, changed her life. She had adored Ava Gardner in
Show Boat
, the first movie musical she had ever seen. And when, at thirteen, she saw Marlon Brando in
Guys and Dolls
, she fell in love. “This man was beautiful! I imagined myself up there on the screen with him.” At that a clip from the film of Brando singing “I’ll Know” appeared on the screen—and Barbra sang a “duet” with him. When the scene widened to include Jean Simmons, a photo of the teenage Barbra was superimposed over Brando’s co-star. “What a mieskeit!” Barbra said of her young self. The audience laughed, cheere
d, appla
uded. Now, unquestionably, Barbra had them.

No matter how successful, rich, and powerful she has become, Barbra has always had a genius for casting herself in the role of underdog. During the show she reminded the audience of her early struggle for success despite her narrow-minded mother and an unremitting procession of naysayers, and she sang spirited renditions of “Everybody Says Don’t” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Then she moved on to wistful early love (“Will He Like Me?” and “He Touched Me”) and, later, lost romance (“The Way We Were,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”).

After clips from two films in which she played a psychiatric patient
(On a
Clear Day You Can See Forever
and
Nuts)
and one in which she played a therapist
(The Prince of Tides)
,
Barbra telescoped her own three decades of psychoanalysis into a running exchange with two doctors, both of whom mispronounced her name “Streizund.” “It’s Strei
sand
,” Barbra wailed. “Like sand on a beach!” (One of her pet peeves, the frequent mispronunciation of her name has led Barbra to exclaim, “How famous do you have to be?!”)

After all this therapy, Barbra announced, she finally felt she could sing “On a Clear Day” with authority. And she did, her voice every bit as strong as it was in the 1970 movie, to end Act One on a rousing high note.

For the second act, Barbra changed into a white suit top with a long skirt slit up the side, a variation on the outfit she had worn at Clinton’s inaugural gala. She reminded the audience of the criticism the outfit had elicited from Anne Taylor Fleming. As Streisand began to sputter her disagreement, a voice rose from the audience. “Don’t listen to that woman, Barbra! You look sensational! You’re like
buttah
.”

The comedian Mike Myers, dressed as Linda Richman, ran up to the stage. “I can’t believe I’m here with
Barbra
,” Myers-as-Richman exclaimed.
“I
’
m fahrklempt
.”

“
You’re fahrklempt?
I’ve got
shpilkes
in my
genecktegezoink
,” Barbra responded, continuing to mimic Myers’s regular
Saturday Night Live
shtick as she turned to the audience: “I need a moment. Talk amongst yourselves. I
’ll gi
ve you a topic:
The Prince of Tides
was neither about tides nor princes. Discuss.”

The audience loved it.

As the concert wound to a close, Barbra drew close the cloak of family and friends. She dedicated a medley of Disney songs to her five-year-old goddaughter, Caleigh, who was sitting on the lap of her father, Jon Peters. As she began to sing “Evergreen” she looked down at Peters and asked, “Remember, Jon?” Then she added, “And there’s Elliott, sitting right behind him.” When she returned to the song, she repeated the first verse rather than picking up the second. “I forgot the words to my own song,” she exclaimed. She recovered immediately, but it was the fear of precisely that kind of miscue that had most worried her about performing live. To the audience it was a touching slipup amid seemingly superhuman perfection, and it brought them closer to her. Finally she dedicated a rendition of “Not While I’m Around” to Jason.

Before she sang “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the final song of the second act, she introduced Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and President Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley. The second night, she also introduced her own mother. As Mrs. Kind, eighty-four and sitting in a wheelchair, rose in response to the crowd’s cheers, Barbra told her, “I love you, Mama.” It was the most intimate moment of the two evenings.

To introduce “Happy Days,” images of the Great Depression flashed across the video screen, followed by a review of President Clinton’s successes in his first year in office. Barbra sang the song not as a dirge, as she had for thirty years, but in the more traditional up-tempo version: for the first time since Lyndon Johnson in 1965, there was a Democrat in th
e Whit
e House whom Barbra could support.

Standing, stomping ovations brought Barbra back for two encores, a thrilling “My Man” and a touching “For All We Know.” As she drank in the crowd’s adulation, the most exciting concert comeback since Judy Garland’s 1961 triumph at Carnegie Hall behind her, she turned to Marvin Hamlisch and exclaimed, “I did it! I did it! I did it!”

The fans chattered with excitement and awe as they left the Grand Garden. For them the evening had lived up to the most inflated hype and expectations. But would the critics agree? Robert Hilburn, the rock reviewer for the
Los Angeles Times
who had dogged Barbra with testy reviews for a quarter of a century, was won over. “Streisand combined in these two hours all that she has learned as an artist,” Hilburn wrote. “Drawing upon her experience in movies and music, Streisand injected the production with a director’s sense of atmosphere and occasion, an actress’s feel for character and intimacy, and a singer’s vocal beauty and command.”

Streisand’s New Year’s concerts crystallized her long metamorphosis from gawky Brooklyn urchin through kooky nightclub act to international trendsetter and movie superstar, through comedienne to sex symbol to controversial auteur, from traditional balladeer to disco queen and back again, from the butt of journalistic jokes to Hollywood powerhouse and White House intimate.

Now she was more than ever the diva. A pop diva, a movie diva, even a political diva. Now only one question remained: would she keep her act together and take it on the road?

O
N JANUARY
17, 1994 the early-morning calm of Greater Los Angeles was shattered by a 6.7 earthquake. The temblor, which killed fifty-seven people, injured 8,700, and caused $2.8 billion in damage, “freaked Barbra out,” an associate recalled. Her first thought after the deafening rumble and terrifying shaking had subsided was for the new puppy she had purchased two days earlier. She rushed down to the Carolwood kitchen, carrying a flashlight because the electricity had gone out, and found the puppy unhurt.

When the sun rose, the full extent of the damage to Barbra’s house became clear. Three of her chimneys had collapsed, and large surface cracks ran through the ceilings and walls. There was no major structural damage, but one of her Grammys and many of her treasured tchotchkes had shattered, including ten rare pottery jugs that smashed to the floor when a mirror above them came crashing down.

Within weeks of the earthquake a memorabilia shop in Hollywood was offering for sale sm
all plastic
bags full of Barbra’s rubble that they had collected from her trash. Bits of plaster sold for $10, while an 1870s tintype photograph scratched by its broken glass commanded $500. Bus
iness i
n the items was apparently brisk.

S
TREISAND’S UNDAMAGED COLLECTIBLES
moved even more briskly at Christie’s New York auction house in March, when she put up for sale 535 magnificent artworks, furniture pieces, cars, clothing items, and tchotchkes. Among the treasures were Tiffany lamps, Gustav Stickley sideboards, a Jacques Lipchitz sculpture, leaded glass casement windows by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Lalique crystal pieces. “It’s so hard to let go of these beautiful things that I have loved for so many years,” she said, “but I want to simplify my life.... Sometimes when it’s been hard to relate to people, I could relate to inanimate objects. They didn’t give me an argument, they didn’t think I was crazy. And therefore we had a good relationship.... The earthquake put things in proper perspective... while I love to be surrounded by beautiful things, they’re still things.”