Streisand: Her Life (69 page)

In spite of that,
The Way We Were
proved a runaway hit through the holiday season and beyond—it grossed $56 million domestically—largely because audiences responded to its nostalgic sheen, its star chemistry, and its moving love story. There had been few sentimental, big-star movie romances since the 1950s, and fewer still that had succeeded. The opinion of Norma McLain Stoop, the reviewer for
After Dark
, encapsulated the main reason that the film went on to become Columbia’s second-highest-grossing film of all time to that date, next to
Funny Girl:
“The measure of the success of this brilliant motion picture is that it draws the viewer so deeply into its web of character and plot that one... leaves the theater feeling as one often does when close to a couple who resorts to divorce—wondering ‘Which one was right? Which one should I see in the future?
’”

In a subtler and more profound way than
Up the Sandbox
,
The Way We Were
is a feminist film. Katie is the central, the aggressive, the committed character. Hubbell is the passive, more creative, prettier love object. Katie pursues the relationship, creates the situation that leads to their having sex, and later promises Hubbell, “I won’t touch you.” Katie is the one whose commitment to ideals undermines her marriage in the face of her spouse’s ambivalence. Arthur Laurents had turned the traditional Hollywood notion of male-female roles on its head, and many Americans were ready for the liberation from stereotypes he had thus offered both sexes.

More than ever in
The Way We Were
Barbra Streisand was America’s Everyperson, acting out onscreen what each audience member had at some time experienced: the longing for an unattainable love object. Many women and gay men certainly related to her lust for Hubbell, but millions of others, heterosexual men included, also identified with her. Who at some point hasn’t felt unattractive, been mocked, or been hurt by love?

The film was an unqualified triumph for Barbra and hoisted her to another plateau of movie stardom. She won a Golden Globe as World Film Favorite, and she had now succeeded artistically and commercially in films as a musical comedy star, as a non-singing comedienne, and as a romantic leading lady in a drama. No performer before her had conquered such disparate movie genres so successfully in so short a span of time.

T
HIS LATEST FILM
triumph of Barbra’s, ironically, resulted in her first number one single. Marvin Hamlisch, the erstwhile rehearsal pianist for
Funny Girl,
had achieved success scoring films, and he not only scored
The Way We Were
but also wrote the title tune, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman.

Sydney Pollack and Hamlisch wanted Barbra to sing the song over the credits, but she resisted because she didn’t want to steal any thunder from her acting. She also didn’t much like the melody. “She said it was too simple,” Hamlisch recalled, and she insisted that he write another tune. She liked the new song, and so did Pollack. “We recorded both versions with a piano accompaniment,” said Hamlisch. “Then we took the cassette player into the projection room and played each song against the film.” As Alan Bergman explained it, “The second didn’t work
at all
with the images on the screen. But the original song worked beautifully.... So that was our answer, plain and simple.”

Although one critic called the tune “weak and plaintive,” preview audiences responded so strongly to it that Columbia released it as a single, redone with a more “pop” arrangement, three weeks before the film opened. Radio disc jockeys resisted playing it because Streisand hadn’t had a hit single in three years. But as the film’s popularity grew, more and more stations added the song to their playlists. A month after its release the record climbed into the Top 100, and fourteen weeks later it hit the number one position, where it remained for weeks.
Billboard
named “The Way We Were” the top pop single of the year, and the record was certified gold, signaling that it had sold over one million units, in February 1974.

In January Columbia released, simultaneously, a sound-track album and a new Streisand studio collection also called
The Way We Were
. The sound track did well; it rose to number twenty and was certified gold in September 1975. The studio collection, propelled by the success of the single even though its second side consisted primarily of material left over from
The Belle of 14th Street
and the aborted
The Singer
project, went to number one, the first Streisand album to do so since
People
ten years earlier. For the first time, Barbra was on top of the heap with both her movies and her music.

T
HIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD
David Hirsch wanted Barbra Streisand to sing “People” to him over the telephone during his bar mitzvah celebration. This impossible dream was a fantasy other Streisand fans had harbored without success; she once turned down an offer of $100,000 from a father to sing in person for his son. But David got lucky. His bar mitzvah fell on April 7, 1973, and Barbra was taking requests to sing to people over the phone to raise money for the Pentagon Papers Legal Defense Fund. She had already turned down one request to sing “People” for a donation of $1,000 because she preferred to sing songs that evening that she hadn’t performed live before. But when David’s uncle, Miles Rubin, offered $10,000, Streisand warbled and David got his wish.

The Pentagon Papers case had been a cause célèbre to liberals since 1971, when a former Defense Department analyst and antiwar activist named Daniel Ellsberg leaked a forty-volume study of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War to
The New York Times
. The documents showed, among other things, that the military and the government had misled the American people about their conduct of the war. After two installments of a series based on the papers, the Nixon administration won a restraining order against the newspaper, citing national security concerns. But the Supreme Court reversed the decision and the publication was allowed to proceed.

Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, then went after Ellsberg, indicting him for theft, conspiracy, and espionage. The president’s chief domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, organized a break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in order to gain damaging information about him. Ellsberg’s legal fees were enormous, and Hollywood’s liberals came to his aid.

The April fund-raiser, held in a tent in the backyard of Universal Studios executive Jennings Lang, featured only Barbra, singing for donations to the crowd and to people over the phone. The event drew two hundred guests, including Joni Mitchell, Hugh Hefner and Barbi Benton, Rod Steiger, Burt Lancaster, Yoko Ono, and all of the Beatles except Paul.

Barbra’s agent Freddie Fields offered $5,000 for her to sing “My Melancholy Baby.” Carl Reiner telephoned; he and Barbra sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” A caller asked Barbra to surprise a man called Stanley in New York. When she got him on the line, she said, “Hi, Stanley, this is Vicki Carr.” Stanley hung up.

Another caller asked that Barbra join the three Beatles in attendance on “With a Little Help from My Friends.” John Lennon called out from the audience, “We don’t even know it. That’s why you’re up there and we’re down here.” She sang the tune on her own.

In a magical three hours, Barbra sang twenty songs, including “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Long Ago and Far Away,” “Time after Time,” and “The Very Thought of You.” The event raised over $50,000 for Ellsberg. The following month the charges against him were dropped. John Ehrlichman went to jail in July 1974 for his part in the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and the following month President Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment for his part in the Watergate scandal.

After most of the guests had left the fund-raiser, George Harrison cornered Barbra and told her he wanted to write some songs for her next album. She and Harrison sat at Jennings Lang’s dining room table until five in the morning, chomped on leftover hors d’oeuvres, and discussed song ideas. They never did work together.

T
HE CAMERAMAN DOLLIED
in for a close-up of Barbra. “Dwight!” she yelled to Dwight Hemion, the director in charge of her fifth television special,
Barbra Streisand... and Other Musical Instruments.
“If you close in on my nose I look cross-eyed. If you close in on my eyes my nose looks too big.” A different angle didn’t help. “How many times do I have to say it?” she barked. “That camera is nearly in my teeth.”

It was July 18, 1973, Barbra was in the third day of filming at the Elstree Studios north of London, and her duet with Ray Charles on his song “Cryin’ Time” wasn’t going well. She and the blind jazz great had spent five hours and twelve takes trying to get it right. If Barbra or Dwight Hemion didn’t like anything about her appearance or performance, they’d do it all over again. Charles, sitting patiently at the piano, took it all in stride. “She’s a bitch,” he had said privately of Barbra, but he also felt she was “the greatest living white female singer. She doesn’t just sing notes, she sings feelings.”

Six-year-old Jason, bored, scribbled on a notepad under the watchful eye of Barbra’s personal maid, Grace Davidson. Finally “Cryin’ Time” was in the can, and Barbra went right into “Sweet Inspiration.” After innumerable takes, her temper grew short as a technician struggled to adjust one of the spotlights. “I’m not going to have what happened the other night,” she said, “having to do a complicated song at five to eight.” The tension grew thick. The light still wasn’t ready. Barbra waited a few more minutes, got up, said, “
C’mon
, Dwight,” and started to walk off the set.