Streisand: Her Life (45 page)

U
nder an enormous tent covering Ray and Fran Stark’s sprawling Holmby Hills backyard, three hundred guests, including dozens of America’s biggest movie stars, listened to an all-girl band, chomped on Polynesian canapés, drank mai tais, and waited impatiently for Barbra Streisand. It was May 14, 1967, and Barbra, just turned twenty-five, had been in Hollywood for four days. The Starks were throwing her a welcome party to befit the woman who was there to re-create her role in
Funny Girl
for Columbia Pictures and who had already signed contracts with Twentieth Century-Fox and Paramount Pictures to star in two other big-budget movie musicals based on Broadway shows,
Hello
,
Dolly!
and
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
She was the only performer in history to have signed for three movies (with combined initial budgets of over $30 million) without ever having faced a movie camera.

All of Hollywood wanted to meet its heiress apparent, and close to five o’clock in the afternoon, the appointed hour, its
haute société
jammed into Ray Stark’s backyard lanai and garden. John and Pilar Wayne were there, and Marlon Brando with Mrs. Louis Jourdan. The legendary beauties Merle Oberon and Jennifer Jones kibbitzed with funny lady Bea Lillie. Veteran stars Rosalind Russell, Janet Leigh, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, and Jimmy Stewart mingled with Hollywood’s young royalty, including Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood.

“Where’s Barbra?” the guests kept asking their hosts. She was half an hour, then an hour, then an hour and forty-five minutes late. “She’ll be here any minute,” Stark assured them hopefully. “She must have gotten stuck in traffic or something.” Unlikely on a Sunday, and Barbra had to travel less than a mile from the eighteen-room, six-bathroom mansion on Chevy Chase Drive, a former home of Greta Garbo, that she had rented for $3,250 a month.

While Hollywood’s elite waited for her, Barbra, just about shaking with fear, couldn’t decide what to wear. She tried on dozens of outfits and accessory combinations while Marty Erlichman and Elliott kept reminding her how late it was getting. As Marilyn Monroe had often done before attending a party, Barbra was stalling, frightened to meet these important people, unwilling to have them size up her nose and compare her looks to Merle Oberon’s or Natalie Wood’s.

Finally, already hopelessly late, she decided on a short strapless silver-sequined dress with matching sequined jacket and shoes and wore her hair piled high atop her head. Elliott and Marty practically pushed her out the door. “When I’m performing I’m not afraid of anything or anybody,” she said. “But when I’m just me I have this fright of being a disappointment to people.... I can’t shake the feeling they’re going to look at me and think, ‘What’s so special about her?
’”
When she arrived at the Starks’ at seven o’clock, she tried to camouflage her nervousness with humor, complaining about the unflattering early-evening sun. “What’s the idea of starting me off in this terrible lighting?” she joked.

Things went downhill from there. Barbra felt overwhelmed by the mega-wattage of star power that surrounded her, even though as the guest of honor she should have been the brightest light there. “I was frightened,” she said years later. “Everybody in Hollywood was there, all these people I’d never met. I was never a very gregarious kind of person. I was always shy.” She sat at her table under the tent for just a few minutes, during which Gary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Natalie Wood came over to say hello. Rather than make small talk, Barbra picked their brains about film technique. When a photographer for
Women’s Wear Daily
aimed his camera at her and started snapping, she stiffened up. “I didn’t know any pictures would be taken,” she muttered. Then she retreated inside to the Starks’ library, where she remained for the rest of the evening. She didn’t mingle; anyone who wanted to meet Barbra Streisand that night had to go to her. Someone nudged William Wyler, set to direct Barbra in
Funny Girl
, and said, “That will give you an idea of what you’re in for.”

The next day’s press reports were devastating. This arrogant, untested newcomer, they said, had kept some of America’s greatest film legends waiting for
two hours.
Then she had snubbed them. How dare she? Perhaps the kindest comment came from Judy Jacobs of
Women’s Wear Daily:
“Hollywood loves Barbra. But is the feeling mutual?”

Barbra had too much pride to explain how frightened she felt, so the perception of Streisand as an aloof prima donna stood. Even after the bad press, she made no effort to play the Hollywood game. Rock Hudson invited her to a party for Carol Burnett at his home, attended by four hundred celebrities. She and Elliott arrived late, said a few words to Carol, and left. “It was revolting,” Barbra told a reporter. “All those photographers. I didn’t know people invited photographers to parties in their own homes. Elliott and I went to a drive-in and ate hamburgers, then went home and played bridge.”

Hollywood denizens shook their heads over comments like that, but during the ensuing months “ingrate” and “hypocrite” were added to the litany of complaints about Barbra when she made a series of derisive comments about Tinseltown. “People are so self-centered [here],” she told the reporter Norma Lee Browning. “Such utter self-concentration. It’s very boring. Here performers are images and commodities.... [Hollywood] is like a small town. It has its own set of values, narrow and small.... I wouldn’t want to raise my son here, in a town where people are judged by the size of their swimming pools.” She said she had rented the Greta Garbo house because “it has class, style. Something very unusual for Hollywood.”

“How
dare
she?” Hollywood’s elite muttered. Self-centered? She could make Narcissus look modest. Narrow values? What was she using the eighteen rooms for, her pets? Class and style? She had shown little of either at Ray Stark’s party. It seemed clear to many that Barbra Streisand felt disdain for the town that had been ready to embrace her. She had little interest in courting insiders and less interest in pleasing the press. Interviewer Glenna Syse reported that when she visited the
Funny Girl
set to interview Barbra a few days after filming began, Streisand “slumped into her white canvas chair, sighed, scrutinized her long catlike fingernails, gave me a desultory glance, and asked, ‘Whaddayawannaknow?’... So in my best Brooklyn accent I replied, ‘Whaddayawannatellme?’

“
‘Nuttin,’ said La Streisand.... She looks the other way when you talk to her, and she often answers with a shrug or a monosyllable. Another interview? What a drag.”

Barbra had said that, to her, “being a star means being a movie star.” She couldn’t have made a much worse impression on the industry she hoped would make her that star, or on the press that would be so important in shaping her new silver-screen image for the American public. Now the knives were out for her. And the bad feelings Barbra stirred up during her first few months in Hollywood would haunt her for the rest of her career.

B
ARBRA HAD SIGNED
a four-picture deal with Ray Stark in 1965, guaranteeing her the movie version of
Funny Girl
for a salary of $250,000 and a small percentage of the box-office take and subsidiary-rights income. Stark formed a production company, Rastar, and shopped the project around Hollywood.

The same old story ensued. Columbia Pictures expressed interest, but they weren’t sure about Streisand. They didn’t think she’d look good on-screen. She was too kooky, too Brooklyn. Her television triumph with
My Name Is Barbra
wouldn’t necessarily translate to the big screen, and most of the great Broadway stars—Mary Martin and Ethel Merman came immediately to mind—hadn’t been able to make a successful transition to motion pictures. The Columbia brass told Stark they’d be interested if Shirley MacLaine played Fanny.

Stark refused, not only because he had a contract with Barbra but also because he was certain she was the only woman who could do the role justice. In his own mind, he told the writer Pete Hamill, “There was no question about who would do the movie. I just felt she was too much a part of Fanny, and Fanny was too much a part of Barbra to have it go to someone else.” Stark stuck to his guns and finally was able to persuade Columbia to take the project, and Barbra with it, by agreeing to a comparatively small budget for a musical, $8.5 million. On December 17, 1965, Columbia announced that they had acquired the movie rights to
Funny Girl.

Barbra told Stark that she wanted a nonmusical director for the film. “I’m confident about the singing, Ray,” she explained, “but I’m not so confident about the acting. I want a strong director.” Stark agreed, especially since the plotline of
Funny Girl
had always been its weakest element. After considering Mike Nichols and George Roy Hill, Stark signed Sidney Lumet, who had impressed critics with his direction of
The Pawnbroker,
but within six months Lumet had departed, blaming “artistic differences.”

An executive at Columbia suggested William Wyler, who had directed
The Collector
for the studio two years earlier. Barbra, who had very little knowledge of Hollywood history, didn’t know who Wyler was. Told he had won the Academy Award as best director of 1959 for
Ben-Hur,
Barbra reportedly said, “Chariots! How is he with people, like women? Is he any good with actresses?”

Wyler, sixty-five and deaf in one ear, had directed some of Hollywood’s greatest actresses to Oscars, Barbra was told, including Bette Davis in
Jezebel
in 1938 and Audrey Hepburn in her first American film,
Roman Holiday
, in 1953. “Yeah, but that was years ago,” Barbra said. “Give me someone recent.” Samantha Eggar had been nominated as Best Actress for
The Collector.
“Okay,” Barbra finally agreed. “I guess he’ll be all right.” Wyler accepted the assignment, he said, mainly because of Streisand. “I wouldn’t have done the picture without her. She’s an interesting performer and represented a challenge for me because she’s never been in films, and she’s not the usual glamour girl.”

Herb Ross, who had staged the musical sequences for
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
and for the films
Inside Daisy Clover
in 1965 and
Doctor Doolittle
in 1967, came aboard to direct and choreograph a dozen full-scale musical numbers and four shorter musical interludes that constituted more than one-third of
Funny Girl’s
running time. Wyler welcomed Ross’s uncredited directorial help: “I’m no choreographer, that’s not my business.” With the signing of the sixty-five-year-old Academy Award-winning cinematographer Harry Stradling
(My Fair Lady),
an MGM alumnus renowned for making actresses look their best on film,
Funny Girl’s
behind-the-scenes creative team jelled.