Streisand: Her Life (46 page)

Barbra’s concern about looking good on the silver screen bordered on the obsessive. When she first met with Stradling, she came armed with slides of herself to show how much better her face photographed from certain angles, and particularly from the left side. She also had
Color Me Barbra
blown up to motion-picture proportions to see how she would look. She was particularly concerned about scars on her cheeks caused by her teenage acne, but Stradling assured her that he would use a sliding diffusion lens—a device usually used to make aging stars look younger—over his camera to camouflage any imperfections. “Barbra has youth,” Stradling said, “but she’s a difficult girl to photograph.” He noticed that when she grew fatigued her lazy left eye would wander toward her nose and make her appear cross-eyed. Whenever that happened during filming he would call out, “Barbra, you’re tired. Let’s take a break.”

Despite—or perhaps because of—her concern about her appearance, Barbra had refused to submit to a screen test. When Ray Stark had tried to persuade the studios to finance the picture with Barbra as star, they asked that she test for them, and Stark begged her to do so. He went so far as to offer her $25,000 as an incentive. She wouldn’t budge.

But when Stradling told her he wanted to shoot some footage so that he could better judge how to light and photograph her, she agreed. Herb Ross directed the tests. “We spent hours shooting her to test her in different lights, different makeups, different hairdos,” Ross said in 1983. “I was with her the day she saw the first set of dailies. She was terrified—it was the first time she’d ever seen herself on film. Well, onscreen she looked a miracle. How could anyone have known that her skin was going to have that brilliant reflective surface, that she was going to look radiant—that was just a wonderful
plus.
She was holding my hand real tightly, and as the tests unreeled, I could feel her relax and start to enjoy herself. Then she turned to me and said, ‘This is just like going to the movies, isn’t it?
’”

A
NOTHER DEEP CONCERN
for Barbra was her clothes. Irene Sharaff, who had designed the costumes for the Broadway production, did the same for the movie, and many of the outfits remained the same except for minor changes. Barbra would turn up for fittings, Sharaff recalled, decked out like various movie stars from the twenties. “The best was when she imagined herself as Garbo, dressed like and giving a full performance of that unique star. She adored clothes and wore them with a flair.” For the most part, Sharaff found Barbra’s “brazen assurance” to be “tiresome,” but she was amused by one of Streisand’s quirks: “She liked to vary the size of the padding in her bras... [which] was maddening to the fitters.”

A
S LATE AS
the spring of 1967, with
Funny Girl
scheduled to go into production within weeks, Barbra still had no leading man. None of the actors who had played Nick Arnstein on the stage had been considered for the picture, and the names of some of Hollywood’s handsomest leading men had been bandied about—Tony Curtis, Sean Connery, Gregory Peck, David Janssen, James Garner. Barbra fantasized about Marlon Brando playing the part, but Ray Stark convinced her he would be all wrong.

The main problem with each of these possibilities was that none of them could sing, and Jule Styne had a fantasy of his own: Frank Sinatra as Nick Arnstein. “What a powerhouse bill that would be!” he exclaimed. “Streisand and Sinatra together!” Styne called Frank in Las Vegas, and he expressed tentative interest if the composer would write a few new songs for him to sing, if his part could be beefed up, and if he received top billing. Barbra balked at the billing, and Ray Stark balked at Sinatra’s price tag—reportedly $750,000—which he thought was too big a chunk of his tight budget. He also felt that Sinatra, at fifty-two, was too old to play Nick Arnstein and wrong for the role. “We need a big, attractive man, someone with Cary Grant class,” Stark told Styne.

As a joke, someone suggested Omar Sharif, an Egyptian of Lebanese descent who was under contract to Columbia. This was during the height of the tension between Israel and Egypt, which would soon erupt into war, and the idea was clearly ridiculous. But Wyler saw Sharif every day in the studio commissary, and started to think about it. Sharif, thirty-five and swarthily handsome, had set hearts aflutter in the romantic melodrama
Doctor Zhivago
two years earlier. A gambler himself, completely at home in a tuxedo, he cut the same dashing figure Nick Arnstein had. Soon Sharif joined in the joke, asking Wyler every day at lunchtime, “When do I sign the contract?” Within a few weeks, at his wit’s end for a leading man, Wyler looked at Sharif while he ate his lunch and asked him, “How would you like to play Arnstein?”

It turned out that Sharif could sing well enough to be presentable in a musical, and Ray Stark liked the idea that under the terms of Sharif’s contract with the studio his services would cost barely $20,000. Everyone agreed that Sharif would be an unlikely but fine Arnstein, but Barbra wasn’t sure. She wanted to meet him first. Arthur Laurents, the director of
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
, heard about the encounter from Ray Stark. “Stark told me that Sharif came in, oozing Continental charm,” he recalled. “Then Omar bowed elegantly, kissed Barbra’s hand, and told her, ‘In America you are the woman I have most wanted to meet.’ Naturally he got the part.”

Within days, the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War erupted, and suddenly Sharif was on shaky ground. “All the investors in the production were Jewish,” Sharif said in his autobiography. “The atmosphere of the studio was pro-Israeli.... A wave of panic swept over the set.... Ray Stark spoke of breaking my contract.” William Wyler, a Jew, reacted strenuously: “We’re in America, the land of freedom, and you’re ready to make yourselves guilty of the same things we’re against? Not hiring an actor because he’s Egyptian is outrageous. If Omar doesn’t make the film, I don’t make it either.”

Barbra weighed in with her own opinion of the controversy to the columnist Dorothy Manners: “We people of the theater don’t think of ourselves by race or creed. We have our own little world, our own standards of judging each other—and that’s by talent! I just somehow feel ashamed that I have to say these things—anything else is so ridiculous, so unfair, so hateful.”

Sharif stayed, and Stark decided to make the most of the publicity value this odd pairing generated. A rehearsal photo of Omar nuzzling Barbra’s neck turned up on the wire services and nearly created an international incident. The Egyptian press, smarting from their country’s quick defeat in the war, condemned Sharif for kissing Barbra—who had recently participated in a fund-raiser for Israel’s defense, pledging all the proceeds of her next album—and began a campaign to strip him of his citizenship. A reporter called Sharif to ask his opinion of the controversy. “I don’t make a point of asking a girl her nationality, her occupation, or her religion before kissing her—either on the screen or off,” Sharif said.

Ray Stark, who subscribed to the theory that any publicity was good publicity, rubbed his hands with glee, but the controversy cost him in the end because from that point on, all of Barbra’s films were banned throughout the Arab world.

“I
HATE ANYTHING
that could lead one group of people to have contempt for another group of people,” Omar Sharif wrote. “How do we overcome this religious, patriotic, and racist conditioning?... By love.”

Sharif practiced what he preached, and widely. As Anne Francis, cast in the film as a Ziegfeld girl put it, “He had quite a reputation for chasing women around the studio. He was considered something more than a womanizer in those days.” Sharif had been married to the Egyptian movie star Faten Hamema for twelve years, and they had one son, but their marriage had evolved into a convenience. They agreed to lead separate lives but would not divorce unless one of them wanted to marry someone else. This gave Sharif a wide berth. “The truth is, I worship women... the kind who can use both her intelligence and her femininity.... The woman must give the impression that she needs a man.”

Barbra Streisand might have been tailor-made for this self-confessed male chauvinist who said, “A woman mustn’t contradict me openly.” Because as independent and opinionated as Barbra could be, when she felt attracted to a man she could revert to a seemingly helpless femininity. Given her growing reputation as a barracuda, this side of Streisand usually surprised and delighted any man who saw it.

Initially Sharif had not found Barbra attractive. After he first met her, he called his agent and asked, “How is this girl going to be a leading lady?” The next day, he recalled, “I looked at her again and I found her not bad. I thought she looked quite nice from certain angles. The third day of rehearsals I started to find her more and more attractive. About a week from the moment I met her, I was madly in love with her. I thought she was the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen in my life.... I was
lusting
after her.”

Barbra proved ripe for Sharif’s picking, because her marriage had become rockier than ever. She and Elliott had already separated once for several months, and now he had gone back to New York to appear in the Jules Feiffer play
Little Murders
and then to play a supporting role in the film
The Night They Raided Minsky’s.
His departure left Barbra alone in that eighteen-room mansion—and alone with another handsome actor to play love scenes opposite, just as she had with Sydney Chaplin. It was a classic Hollywood setup, and history repeated itself.

“It got so I couldn’t wait to get on the set in the morning,” Barbra told a reporter shortly afterward. “The days I knew I was going to work with Omar were happy days. The days he didn’t have to work were miserable. I know Omar knew I was going gaga over him, but he was too much of a gentleman to make a play for a married woman. I would read in the columns where he took this girl and that girl out. It used to make me feel actually sick. I fell hopelessly—madly—in love with my leading man. It sounds like the old Hollywood story—a B-movie script—but it actually happened. And I don’t care who knows it. I loved every second of it.”