Streisand: Her Life (95 page)

For this project, which harked back to her earliest musical efforts, Barbra turned, appropriately, to the man who had arranged and conducted her very first album. Peter Matz hadn’t worked with Streisand for over a decade, and he recalled that she attacked this project with typical enthusiasm. “Barbra had already gone through a tremendous amount of material trying to find the right songs before I came in,” he said. “There was a stack of records and sheet music a mile high in the [Carolwood] house—all of the music from all of the shows as far back as you could think.” Matz also pulled together a fifty-piece orchestra made up of the most talented studio musicians. Performing amid a full orchestra was a luxury for Barbra, who had become accustomed to singing against a prerecorded orchestral track for the majority of her pop efforts.

Hoping that Columbia would agree to release
The Broadway Album
as a two-disc set, Barbra recorded close to twenty-five songs, including an elaborate medley from
The King and I
that would have taken up an entire side of one disc. (It was later considerably shortened.) Then the project seemed to be shaping up as a tribute to Stephen Sondheim after Barbra decided to include eight of his songs.

Streisand and Sondheim spent hours on the telephone discussing the singular approach Barbra wanted to take with his compositions. Barbra asked the composer if he would rearrange the lyrics to his most famous song, “Send in the Clowns”; devise a connecting bridge for a medley of the lilting “Pretty Women” from
Sweeney Todd
and “The Ladies Who Lunch” from
Company
;
and write new lyrics to “Putting It Together” from
Sunday in the Park with George
, to comment on the never-ending battle between creativity and commerce within the record business rather than in the world of fine art.

Sondheim agreed to most of Streisand’s requests and actually enjoyed the fact that Barbra wanted to
“play
around” with his melody lines. He did, however, have one condition: he asked her always to retain the original notes in the first chorus so that the melody could be established. Then she could feel free to change notes or embellish the melody.

“It turned into a process that was so exhilarating,” recalled Barbra, who had known Sondheim only casually prior to their collaboration. “There were moments when I was screaming with joy over the phone.”

In spite of both artists’ legendary accomplishments, Sondheim and Streisand acted like teenage fans around each other. Sondheim timidly asked if he could join Barbra in the recording studio. “To my exultant surprise,” he said, “she welcomed the prospect of my being present. I was thrilled!”

“Can you imagine?” Barbra marveled. “He rewrote lyrics for
me
.”

Just prior to the release of the album, Barbra filmed a video of “Somewhere” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Although David Foster’s arrangement of the song gave it an eerie space-age setting, the video couldn’t have been more traditional: Barbra onstage wearing an ankle-length black dress embellished only with a delicate white lace collar.

The Broadway Album
was released as a single disc in November 1985 to ecstatic reviews (“Streisand’s back where she belongs!”) and record-breaking sales: the package hit number one on the
Billboard
album chart in a matter of weeks. “Customers are scooping up three and four of these records at a time,” one record store manager exulted. Eager to launch her latest baby successfully, Streisand gave interviews to Stephen Holden of
The New York Tunes
and to Rod McKuen, who was reviewing the album for
Digital Audio
magazine. Holden’s piece centered on Barbra’s return to her “roots” and how youthfully vibrant her voice remained.

The Broadway Album
eventually sold three million copies and received three Grammy nominations. Although Barbra lost the Album of the Year award, she received her eighth miniature gramophone for Best Female Pop Vocal. When she accepted the award, Barbra noted that it had been exactly twenty-four years since she won her first Grammy. “So, with a little luck and your continued support,” she told the cheering audience at the Shrine Auditorium, “I’ll see you in another twenty-four years.”

B
Y NOW RICHARD
Baskin had moved in with Barbra, becoming the third important man in her life after Elliott and Jon. In fact, Peters told friends he fully expected Barbra to marry Baskin; soon after that, Peters wed
his
live-in girlfriend. But as she had with Jon, Barbra seemed content with the romantic status quo. Whenever they went out, Baskin served as Barbra’s bodyguard as much as her escort, and occasionally he’d get carried away. While they were in London to shoot the “Emotion” video, the British press reported that Baskin “blew his cool as the couple emerged from a restaurant,” tossed a pint of ale at Fleet Street’s finest, and “appeared to offer them a knuckle sandwich.”

Baskin was reacting to Barbra’s fear and annoyance, of course; when she was more sanguine, so was he. On her forty-fourth birthday in 1986, he took her to Splash, a restaurant in Malibu. As they left, Bill Moore, an illustrator and fervid Streisand fan, approached her with some sketches he had done of her. “Richard Baskin rolled his eyes toward heaven when he first saw me, as if to say, ‘Here we go again,
’”
Moore recalled, “and he seemed real protective of her. Barbra was in a good mood, but she was leery of me at first and wanted to know how I knew she was there. I told her a friend had called me. Barbra lightened up and admired my work. She signed both sketches. Once Baskin saw that Barbra wasn’t threatened by me, he kind of stood off to the side shyly until she signed the drawings; then he took her arm gently and they left.”

W
HILE BARBRA WAS
in Aspen over the Christmas holidays in 1985
, she learne
d that Marty Erlichman was also vacationing there. She and Marty had drifted apart since he stopped managing her in 1977, and she felt it was time to rekindle their relationship. A contract she had with Jon had expired, and she wasn’t of a mind to renew it.
The Broadway Album
had made her appreciate her musical roots, and no one was more rooted in Barbra’s beginnings than Marty Erlichman.

He had become a mini-mogul over the years, producing the successful motion pictures
Coma
and
Breathless
, among others. But his deepest loyalty was to Barbra, and when she broached the idea of his managing her again, he leaped at the chance. “It’s like we were married for sixteen years and then split,” he said. “When you get back together you kind of know each other. Age has worked well for both of us in the sense that we can talk more shorthand than we used to.”

One of Marty’s first suggestions was that Barbra consider a concert tour. She owed it to her fans, he argued; it would help boost her record sales and generate greater interest in the film project she was preparing,
Nuts
.
It would be a way to
really
get back to her roots.

Barbra said no. She was too frightened of performing live, and a tour required too much work. Marty kept at her to do
something
—her live appearances over the past decade had been few, brief, anti far between.

Barbra singing live was now such a rare event that even her performance of a single song became an event. Her claims of paralyzing stage fright, scoffed at in some quarters, were in fact quite genuine. Rusty Lemorande recalled that she was so nervous backstage at the 1980 Grammy Awards as she waited to go on with Neil Diamond that she almost drew blood when she dug her nails into his hand.

In the nine years since she performed “Evergreen” at the 1977 Academy Awards, Barbra had performed in public only twice in addition to the televised duet with Diamond. On May 8, 1978, she closed the ABC-TV special
The Stars Salute Israel at 30
by shmoozing with Golda Meir via satellite from Tel Aviv and singing four songs including “Hativka,” the Israeli national anthem.

On June 1, 1980, the American Civil Liberties Union held a fund-raising concert honoring Marilyn and Alan Bergman at the L.A. Music Center. Barbra sang, to Michel Legrand’s accompaniment, an all-Bergman program: “Summer Me, Winter Me,” “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life,” “After the Rain,” and “The Way We Were.” She also included the different version of the last song, discarded
in 1973, which she christened “The Way We Weren’t.” Afterward Neil Diamond made a
surprise entrance from the audience and joined Streisand for a relaxed version of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Barbra admitted later that she’d had a yogi backstage to “help calm me down.”

At the beginning of one song, a noisy claque of fans in the balcony shouted, “We love you, Barbra!”

“I love you too,” she replied, “but I can’t hear my intro.”

For many years Barbra had difficulty accepting such public adoration. “I just don’t know what that love means,” she mused. “I’m tremendously grateful for their support. [But] it’s a funny kind of love you get—all that applause. I’d rather be loved by a few people, you know, real love. This other love is a kind of crazy love—the love of a voice, the love of a star.” Following the Bergman tribute, and despite rumors that she would do concert tours to promote
Yentl
and later
The Broadway Album
, Barbra didn’t sing a note in a public setting for over six years.

Thus shock and delight were the predominant reactions of many of the top names in the worlds of politics, movies, and music in August 1986 when they received elaborately packaged audiotaped invitations from Barbra to a fund-raising concert at the ranch. “I could never imagine myself wanting to sing in public again,” she said on the tape. “But then I could never imagine Star Wars, Contras, apartheid and nuclear winters.” The recipients were urged to “come join me at my ranch under the stars.” The concert, scheduled for the following month, would be sponsored by the newly formed Hollywood Women’s Political Committee to raise money for the campaigns of five Democratic senatorial candidates. As noteworthy as the fact that Barbra would be singing live again was the cost of attendance: $5,000 per couple, with a seating limit of four hundred people for the event.