Streisand: Her Life (57 page)

Although this first contemporary pop effort of Barbra’s failed, Clive Davis was impressed by her willingness to go along with the requirements of the song, no matter how alien they might have seemed to her. She sounded legitimate on the record, not at all like a Broadway diva doing a bit of slumming. It was clear that with the proper material, the Streisand voice and talent could produce a successful contemporary sound.

While the
Hello
,
Dolly!
company was stationed in Garrison, Davis had paid Barbra a visit, ostensibly to get her approval of photographs to be used in the packaging for the
Funny Girl
sound-track album. He suggested that she continue her efforts to update her musical profile because she was too young and too vital an artist to allow her recording career to stagnate.

Barbra argued with Davis at first, unsure that she should or could make such a dramatic switch in her musical style, but her instincts told her he was right. Aside from the financial rewards that broadening her fan base would surely bring, singing contemporary music would give her a chance to prove to the public that she wasn’t just a singer of sound tracks from old-fashioned musicals.

The release of
What About Today?
while Barbra performed at the International symbolized the uneasy mix of old and new on the album, which contains no cut that could in any way be called rock. In brief liner notes, Barbra dedicates
What About Today?
to “young people who push against indifference, shout down mediocrity, demand a better future and write and sing the songs of today.” Oddly, the songs she chose from Lennon and McCartney, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Paul Simon had nothing to do with relevant issues of the day, while most of the timid protest cuts on the album were from the pens of such establishment composers as Harold Arlen, Michel Legrand, David Shire, and Richard Maltby. Only “Little Tin Soldier,” a grim antiwar statement by Jimmy Webb, could qualify as any kind of a message from a young artist.

Reviews for
What About Today?
were mixed. “Because she has adapted these lyrics without altering her distinctive pop style,”
Variety
enthused, “she retains her vast adult appeal and delivers the young message to rock-deaf ears.” Others felt either that Barbra seemed uncommitted to the material or that the songs weren’t up to her usual standards. “A powerhouse singer like Barbra Streisand thrives best with powerhouse programs,” Greer Johnson wrote in
Cue.
“She tends to overwhelm flaccid and semi-professional ephemera.”

Commercially,
What About Today?
was a bust. It managed only to reach an unimpressive thirty-one on
Billboard’s,
chart, making it Barbra’s poorest selling studio album to that date. To Clive Davis’s chagrin,
What About Today?
did nothing to help what he hoped would be Streisand’s transition to contemporary pop idol. It would be two more years before the right mix of material and talent would come together to ensure Barbra’s placement among that hierarchy.

O
N JULY
30, 1969, Barbra gave her last performance at the International. Both Don Lamond and Milt Hinton adored Barbra and knew they would miss her. “I was lucky to work with her,” Hinton said. “It was amazing to watch her work. If she didn’t like an arrangement, she would tear it apart. The arrangers wouldn’t like it, but she knew what she was talking about. I was very grateful that she thought enough of me to introduce me during the show. Once she told me that whenever I went into the bar and ordered a drink, I should put it on her tab. ‘Don’t give them your money,’ she said.”

Don Lamond considered Barbra “a wonderful person. There were a lot of rumors going around that she was very hard to work for and all that, but to me she wasn’t. She just knew what she wanted. She meant no harm to anybody. That engagement in Vegas was one of the best times I ever had in my life.”

Of course, not everyone reacted so positively to Barbra. Joy Simmons, a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas for twenty years, found Streisand “rude,” “demanding,” and with “no respect” for the hotel staff. “You get to know who is nice and who isn’t,” Simmons said. “The word gets spread around town like wildfire. There are four people who waiters, bartenders, and service people of all kinds hate in Vegas, and they are Bill Cosby, Liza Minnelli, Jerry Lewis, and Barbra Streisand. Ask anyone—they are universally bad tippers, rude, and inconsiderate. Barbra is rude and will pretend like she is deaf rather than wave to and acknowledge someone who calls to her or asks for an autograph. She would have a drink once in a while but would never ever tip. She never tipped for room service. No one wanted to take food up to her because the toast might be too cool, too hot, or too light and she’d have you fired, especially if she suspected the least bit of sarcasm in your tone when you delivered something to her. She’s had a lot of people fired from their jobs. Sinatra gets moody and may get mad at you, but later he’ll feel guilty and has been known to tip a hundred dollars even if you’ve spilled a drink on him by accident. Barbra wouldn’t even give us a dollar or a free album when we asked for one.”

E
LVIS PRESLEY WAS
scheduled to follow Barbra at the International—an engagement that would be a triumphant comeback—and he caught her next-to-last show. She introduced him to the audience, and afterward he went backstage to meet her. Don Lamond passed him in the hallway and was impressed by how good the thirty-four-year-old Presley, who had been out of the public eye for a while, looked. “I think he was the handsomest guy I ever saw. This was before he got bloated and all that stuff. My wife said she couldn’t believe how fantastic he looked. He went into Barbra’s dressing room, and they got together.”

Years later Barbra’s longtime lover, Jon Peters, revealed in an unpublished interview the extraordinary scene that followed, recounted to him by Barbra. She was alone, sitting at her dressing table. After Elvis closed the door behind him, he said simply, “Hi,” and an awkward silence followed. Suddenly he reached over and picked up a bottle of red nail polish from the vanity table. Without a word, he fell to one knee, took Barbra’s hand in his and began, slowly and painstakingly, to apply the bright crimson varnish to Barbra’s tapering fingernails.

The intimacy of the gesture, the supplication of it, stunned Barbra, who stared in fascination as Elvis worked, and when he finished, she mumbled “Thank you.” An associate of Presley’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, revealed that the intimacy between Barbra and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll didn’t end there. “Elvis told me that he spent the night with Streisand in her suite. I guess he was kind of bragging. There was that kind of wink-and-a-poke-in-the-ribs way he talked about it.

“Elvis didn’t say how long he and Barbra stayed involved, and I made it a policy never to press him for details about anything. But I have the feeling it was a pretty fleeting thing. Not necessarily just a one-night stand, but probably no longer than two or three. One of the books about him said that when he saw her show he said, ‘She sucks,’ but that’s bull. He talked as though he worshiped her.

“I was absolutely amazed by what he told me. Barbra Streisand and the King! Wow. I wish I’d been a fly on the wall.”

“No I can make a movie [with] no
songs, like a normal person....
It’s just going to be me,
the me that’s natural and very today.”

—Barbra in 1970

B
arbra squiggled her bare toes into the deep white carpeting, pulled the collar of the plush terry-cloth robe up around her neck, and shivered as she stared anxiously at her reflection in the full-length mirror. She turned and sank into a vinyl beanbag chair that along with a melange of chrome-and-glass furnishings made up the modish decor of her small dressing room. A few steps away was the bedroom set where her co-star, George Segal, her director, Herb Ross, and a minimal crew waited impatiently for her to shoot the one scene in
The Owl and the Pussycat
she had been dreading: a sexual tumble with Segal that she had agreed to film topless.

Just days earlier she had told a reporter that her non-singing, contemporary role as Doris, a “hopeless, hapless hustler” who fancies herself “a model and an actress,” would allow her to shed the elaborate trappings of her first three films and appear on screen for the first time as “the me that’s natural and very today.” Now she was faced with just how natural the script demanded that she be. When she finally emerged from her dressing room, bundled up in her robe, Barbra took Herb Ross aside and admitted that she had cold feet, among other things, about shooting the scene.

“Herbie, I can’t,” she whispered, “I’ve got goose bumps and they’ll show. What will my mother think of this?”

Ross responded patiently, “But, Barbra, it
is
a story about sexual passion.”

“Yeah,” Barbra said, “but I don’t think I have that great a body. My mother will be unhappy. I don’t think I’m ready for it.”

Buck Henry, the film’s scenarist, recalled that “Ross told her not to worry, she had a great body. They went into a closet and she showed him why she thought she didn’t have what it takes. Well, it happens that Barbra has a great figure. And Ross laughed and said, ‘Well, you’re nuts. You’ve got to trust me.
’”
For nearly an hour, while George Segal catnapped, Ross pleaded with Barbra to go through with the brief scene as planned. He assured her that the nudity was appropriate for the uninhibited Doris. Besides, he cajoled, didn’t she want to make a dramatic break from her current screen image as queen of the old-fashioned musicals? Wasn’t she serious about moving into the new decade as a hip, daring young actress?

Worn down by the wheedling and reassured by Ross’s promise that he would delete the scene in the editing room if she wasn’t happy with it, Barbra finally muttered, “Oh, what the hell, I’ll try it once.” As Harry Stradling’s camera rolled, Streisand dropped her robe to reveal her pert breasts, crossed the room, and climbed into bed alongside a now completely alert George Segal.

“It was perfect,” Ross recalled. “I yelled, ‘Cut and print. Beautiful!’ But Barbra
is
the perfectionist. She wanted a retake! I think we were all shocked, because everybody burst into laughter, including Barbra. We did the retake.” When Barbra’s mother visited the set a few days later, she took one look at Doris’s X-rated pajamas and sighed, “I’m shocked by all those things actresses have to do today. But I guess it’s part of the job.”

I
N ITS MOVIE
version,
The Owl and the Pussycat
is a raucous romantic comedy about two self-deluded opposites who, after a series of verbal confrontations, sexual escapades, and role reversals, discard their pretensions and form an unlikely love match. Felix Sherman is an uptight, snobbish, pseudointellectual would-be writer who clerks in a bookstore. Doris is a street-wise, loud-mouthed, defensive prostitute who changes her last name on a whim to Washington or Waverly or Wellington. She claims she only hooks part-time and that she is, in fact, a model and an actress who has “been in a movie”—which turns out to be a pornographic S&M epic entitled
Cycle Sluts.
By story’s end, he admits that his real name is Fred and she reveals that her real last name is Wilgus. As they cast aside his writing aspirations and her vices, the couple set out to share an apartment and a new life together, both now based firmly in reality.

The Bill Manhoff play
The Owl and the Pussycat
had opened on Broadway in November 1964. Starring Alan Alda and Diana Sands, the gifted African-American actress who had played in
Harry Stoones
with Barbra, the show ran for over four hundred performances before moving to London’s West End, where Barbra caught it while she was there in
Funny Girl.
As one of the backers of the play through his Seven Arts production company, Ray Stark easily acquired the movie rights for $100,000 and in 1965 announced plans to cast the most expensive, publicized, and sought-after movie stars in the world at that time, Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Richard Burton, in the film version. Burton rejected the idea almost immediately, and Stark turned to beefy, rough-hewn Rod Taylor as his replacement. But Rod soon backed out, and finally so did Liz.

Stark then thought of Streisand, who owed him three pictures. The prospect excited her; she longed to do a non-singing contemporary role and thought that playing Doris would be a perfect way to make the transition. Stark announced Barbra’s signing for the film on November 25, 1968, after reportedly agreeing to pay her $1 million, plus 7 percent of the net profits—a dramatic raise from their original contract agreement.

After some thought was given to casting Sidney Poitier, George Segal was signed to play Felix. Segal’s Oscar-nominated supporting performance in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
in 1966 had established him as one of Hollywood’s most talented young dramatic actors, but he had a lesser-known knack for comedy as well. In 1960 he had garnered laughs in the off-Broadway satirical revue,
The Premise
, in tandem with the comedy actor and writer Buck Henry, who remained a pal. When Henry signed on to write the
Pussycat
screenplay, he suggested Segal to play Felix.

One of the first decisions Henry made in refashioning
Pussycat
for the screen was to change the story’s locale from San Francisco to Manhattan in order to better showcase the unique personality of the leading lady. Of his script Henry said, “Lots of stuff in it was written for Barbra’s rhythms, and for that ingenious New York ear and accent which lends itself to certain patterns of speech that other actresses wouldn’t sound good doing.”

With the screenplay in Henry’s capable hands, Stark turned to Herbert Ross to direct. Ross had made his full-scale directorial debut in 1969 with the well-received musical remake of
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
and had guided Peter O’Toole to an Oscar-nominated performance. Because of their long history together, Barbra trusted Ross completely, as she did her “beloved” Harry Stradling, whom she insisted she wanted for the fourth straight time. The small supporting cast was completed with Robert Klein, a swarthy, cerebral young stand-up comic who would play Felix’s friend Barney, and Roz Kelly as Eleanor, Doris’s gum-chewing platinum-tressed cohort.

Discord between Barbra and Ray Stark over the film’s music erupted during preproduction. When Barbra signed for the film, Stark had issued statements to the press that Doris would be portrayed as a “folk hooker” and that Barbra would sing two songs. To his chagrin, she flatly refused to do so, determined as she was to prove that she could carry a picture without a song. Hoping for a compromise, Stark commissioned Martin Charnin to compose “The Best Thing You’ve Ever Done,” a dramatic ballad for Barbra to sing over a montage of scenes depicting an estrangement between Doris and Felix. But Barbra held firm. “When the showdown came,” she recalled, “I said there was no way I would sing. I was pushed around, made to feel like I was a bad girl or something. There was no reason for that.”

P
RODUCTION ON
The Owl and the Pussycat
began on October 6, 1969, on soundstages leased by Columbia Pictures just north of Manhattan’s theater district. George Segal, who like everyone else had heard the stories of Barbra’s temperament, was surprised to find her nothing like the ogre he had been told about. “She’s the easiest person to work with,” Segal said. “She’s warm and even and a real professional. She knows exactly what she’s doing. I was the troublemaker on that set. One time I got upset over working late hours. Ray Stark and I had a big screaming fight in my dressing room.” Barbra liked Segal, too, and loved it when he said, “I think there’s Brando and then there’s Barbra.”

According to Robert Klein, Segal had all he could do to keep up with Streisand’s performance pace. “The comedy came naturally to Barbra,” Klein recalled. “She was much more adept at how to be funny, she seemed more sure of herself.... her virtuosity really forced George to work hard at being funny. She was thinking
all the time
about how to do a particular thing, and she was completely thorough. Ultimately, though, I think George was quite effective with her. And like him I never, ever saw that side to her that I had heard a lot about. She was not only thoroughly professional, but she was very accommodating in making me feel at home.”