Streisand: Her Life (94 page)

Barbra’s euphoria didn’t last long, however. On February 8 the Academy Award nominations were announced, and
Yentl
was shut out of all the top nominations but one. No Best Picture. No Best Actress. No Best Actor. No Best Director. No Best Cinematography. It got three nominations for its music, however, and one for its art direction, plus a Best Supporting Actress nod for Amy Irving.

Most observers found the snubs outrageous. Gregg Kilday wrote in the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
, “One needn’t be a rabid fan of
Yentl
or a Streisand fanatic to accuse the Academy of a serious sin of omission in banning
Yentl
from all the top award categories.... Instead, as if it were telling Streisand to stay in her place, the Academy awarded a token nomination to Amy Irving who, tellingly, played a conventional Jewish woman in the movie.”

People
magazine ran an article that attempted to explain the slight. Among the theories put forth: Hollywood hated Barbra; Hollywood was jealous of Barbra’s success, especially after the project had been ridiculed for so many years; Hollywood was sexist (of the 224 members of the directors’ branch of the academy, who did the nominating for Best Director, only “a couple” were women); and Hollywood just didn’t think the movie was good enough.

The movie was clearly good enough; what worked against Barbra was a complex cocktail of feelings and prejudices in Hollywood, some that had to do with her and some that didn’t. “We’re still very primitive male chauvinists,” Nehemiah Persoff said. “If Warren Beatty had done this movie, they would have worshiped him again.”

Only one woman had been nominated as Best Director in the forty-six-year history of the academy, the Italian Lina Wertmuller, so a female would always face an uphill battle being accepted by one of the oldest old-boy networks in America. When that female happened to be Barbra Streisand, with all the ill will many Hollywood insiders still felt toward her, the chances of getting an Oscar nomination would be very slim.

On the evening of the Academy Awards ceremony, a large and noisy protest against the shutout of Streisand, called by the group Principles, Equality and Professionalism in Film, distracted the stars and industry executives as they made their way into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The protesters waved signs that read, “Oscar at 56—Is he still a closet chauvinist?” and “Oscar, Can You Hear Me?” Inside,
Yentl
did manage to win one statuette, for Best Original Film Score.

Whatever the extent of the recognition she received for the movie, Barbra fairly burst with pride that she had made
Yentl
at all, and made it so well. More than anything else in her professional life, the years she had spent toiling on the film had changed her. “It was a beautiful experience,” she said. “It was a feeling where all the parts of myself, the feminine parts, the masculine parts, the part of me that is a mother, that is nurturing, that is loving, is combined with having to become my own father—that was normally the director, you know? I was always trying to please ‘Papa’ [her director], and now I had to please myself. Just like Yentl dressed in the clothes of her father, in a sense I became my father.”

A
T THE END
of
Yentl
, the following dedication appears: “To my father... and to all our fathers.”

When Diana Kind saw this, she said, “Why didn’t you dedicate the movie to me too?”

“Because you’re
alive
,
Mama,” Barbra replied. “You have the gift of
life
.”

When Mrs. Kind didn’t seem placated, Barbra added,
“Do
n’t worry, Mama. I’ll dedicate my next movie to you.”

I’
m not thinking of men now,” Barbra had said while she prepared
Yentl
for release. “There is no one. I’m married to
Yentl
.” During the more than eighteen months that Barbra spent in Europe, her relationship with Jon Peters had unraveled. They had been moving apart for several years, of course, and the prolonged separation destroyed any possibility that they might be able to iron out their problems.

“I don’t think she chose between me and the film,” Jon said. “She chose the film, and then it was time for us to separate.”

While she worked, reports had filtered back to Barbra that Jon was bringing women to the ranch in her absence. He was seen holding hands with the model Lisa Taylor at a New York nightclub. When Barbra returned to Malibu in the fall of 1983 after editing and scoring the picture in London, she and Jon kept very much to their own houses on the property. Then she heard a new rumor: that Jon was involved with a local real estate saleswoman. Barbra was reportedly so angry that when Jon parked his car on her side of the property late one night she had it towed away.

In Fe
bruary 1984, although Jon would still act as Barbra’s manager for several more years, he sold all of his Malibu acreage to her, which formalized their breakup. The decision had been Barbra’s, and Jon was stunned by the awful finality of it. “It’s a hard one for me to talk abo
ut because I love her and feel so close to her,” he said at the time. “I’m still not exactly sure why we broke up.”

Barbra spoke guardedly about the end of the relationship to European journalists. “Before, I was afraid to be alone. There was a void inside me. Now I have myself. I feel fulfilled from within. Jon and I are not living together, but we’re better friends now. We’re less competitive, much more respectful.... We’d been taking each other for granted, the way people do when they live together for a long time. We don’t do that anymore.”

Early in her relationship with Jon, Barbra had marveled at how wonderful it was to love someone who was so much like her. Now she seemed to have changed her mind. “Elliott was sweet and gentle, whereas Jon was aggressive and unpredictable. Maybe I need someone in between.... Maybe someone has to have a mate with a different personality.”

Barbra wasted little time before looking for a new beau. She cozily chatted with Richard Gere over dinner in an intimate Los Angeles restaurant, then showed up on his arm at a party in Brentwood. An observer breathlessly described them as “necking up a storm” at the soiree, but that seems unlikely for so publicly circumspect a person as Barbra. What attraction there may have been between the two stars apparently didn’t last long; Barbra soon was seen dating Tina Sinatra’s ex-husband, the m
illionaire businessman Richard Cohen, and the Arab playboy-producer Dodi Fayed. She re
newed her acquaintance with the producer Arnon Milchan, and Pierre Trudeau escorted her to a reception in her honor in New York thrown by the United Jewish Appeal.

A Christmas party in 1983 provided the setting for Barbra to meet the man who would become her next lover, and very nearly her husband. She couldn’t help but notice him. He was very tall—six feet three inches—very good-looking, and solidly built; he had bedroom eyes, a cute smile
, and a wild shock of dark curly hair that seemed to extend him into the stratosphere. He see
med like a mensch to Barbra, a sweet guy like Elliott, but he was aggressive enough to approach her toward the end of the evening. “Most men are so intimidated by me,” Barbra said, “that if I meet one who has the guts to say hello he’s way ahead of the game.”

His name was Richard Baskin, he told her. “I just wanted to say how much I loved
Yentl
.
You should be very proud.”

“Thank you,” Barbra replied. “Hey, you any relation to Baskin-Robbins ice cream.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Richard replied. “That’s my family.”

“Wow,” Barbra said. “I love your coffee ice cream.”

Baskin, who stood to inherit part of his family’s vast fortune, had forged a career in Hollywood as a musical director on such films as
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
,
Honeysuckle Rose
,
and Robert Altman’s satire of the world of country music,
Nashville
.
He wrote several of the songs in
Nashville
and performed one of them on
Saturday Night Live
in 1975, accompanying himself on guitar.

Barbra began dating Baskin casually in the early spring of 1984, after she returned from a European tour to promote
Yentl
. S
he loved how protected he made her feel by dint of his sheer size, she enjoyed his sense of humor, and she admired his taste in music. They could speak in musical shorthand, and their sensibilities were finely attuned to each other. By the summer of 1984, they were seriously enough involved that she characteristically made him a part of her latest project, a new pop album entitled
Emotion
.
It was her first new studio album since
Guilty
(a 1981 package called
Memories
,
containing only two news songs, one of which was her stunning version of “Memory” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Cats
,
had sold three million copies), and she wanted to make a sharp departure from the highly traditional music of
Yentl.
Apparently ignoring the lesson offered by the Bee Gees’ cohesive production of
Guilty
,
Barbra this time put together another mishmash of songs by contemporary songwriters who had been in vogue about two years earlier. T
he albu
m had
nine
credited producers, including Barbra and Baskin, and eleven arrangers.

Perhaps because Barbra was distracted by Baskin’s presence, or perhaps because her heart wasn’t in this record, she apparently lost her legendary ear during these recording sessions. Late one evening she, Baskin, and the recording engineer, John Arrias, were trying to choose between two vocals. Arrias would play one, then the other, then the first again. He and Barbra finally agreed they preferred one over the other. They asked Baskin to listen. He agreed with them. Then Arrias, who was curious about some technical aspects of the tapes, played them simultaneously, and then he realized they were both the same vocal. The three of them giggled themselves helpless and decided it was time to go home and get some sleep.

Critics blasted
Emotion
for its uneven quality and lack of cohesion, familiar problems with many of Streisand’s pop efforts. The album peaked at number nineteen, Barbra’s lowest charting for a studio album since
What About Today?
,
but it did manage to sell two million copies. The first single, “Left in the Dark,” stalled at number fifty, unassisted by Barbra’s first music video, a stylish six-minute mini-film noir in black-and-white and color that MTV premiered to great fanfare.

Music Television had revolutionized pop music in the early 1980s with its lightning-paced music videos. Now video images were as important to a song’s sales success as its melody and lyrics; looks could make or break a new singer more quickly than ever before. Within a few years MTV would not play any middle-of-the-road material at all, but it aired “Left in the Dark” for a while along with its more colorful and suitable follow-up, co-directed in London by Barbra and Richard Baskin and featuring Roger Daltry, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Barbra wearing half a dozen wild outfits while she sang “Emotion.”

Joel Selvin of the
San Francisco Chronicle
didn’t mince words when he reviewed
Emotion.
“There are people out there who actually respect Streisand as an artist,” he wrote, “but this could cure them.” John Milward in
USA Today
added,
“
Emotion
is Streisand’s latest attempt to appear hip, and one must wonder why she bothers. Her talent was nurtured in the world of Broadway and Hollywood. Her art is rooted in a voice whose beauty transcends hip.”

With her next album, Barbra would show that she agreed.

D
RESSED IN A
rumpled gray sports jacket and skintight jeans tucked into low-heeled black boots, Barbra stood in the recording booth with her arms folded over her chest, swaying absentmindedly. To accommodate the headphones, her hair was pulled back into an untidy knot. Chewing discontentedly on her lower lip, she stared with intense concentration at the floor. Suddenly her face, free of makeup, twisted into a scowl. She shook her head, yanked the headphones off, and moaned, “I hate it. I
hate
it!”

She had been listening to a playback of “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” the classic lament from
Showboat
,
that she had just recorded against a bluesy, brass-heavy orchestration. “I thought the trumpet made it feel a little too jazzy,” Barbra said. “It didn’t feel right.” She recalled seeing the 1951 MGM movie of
Showboat
and being moved by Ava Gardner’s languid rendition of the song, and she wanted to re-create “this magnificent arrangement... so simple, the most gorgeous harmonies.”

It was the spring of 1985 and Barbra was recording tracks for a collection of songs from the American musical theater, which she would call
The Broadway Album.
After the disappointment of
Emotion
,
Barbra had decided it was time to return to her musical roots and sing show tunes. She had considered this project off and on since the mid-seventies, and it was precisely the kind of recording venture many of Barbra’s critics and admirers had suggested she do for years.

“Anybody could have done the songs on
Emotion
as well as or better than I could have done them,” Barbra admitted. “It was time to do something I truly believed in.” Columbia at first strongly opposed the new album, which they were certain would appeal only to a relatively small audience of Broadway aficionados. As they had with
Classical Barbra
,
Streisand’s 1976 collection of lieder, Columbia exercised an option in her contract which stated that any album she wanted to record that they considered risky would satisfy her contractual requirements only if it ultimately sold over two and a half million copies. Characteristically, her label’s lack of belief in the project only heightened Barbra’s determination to prove the naysayers wrong.