It used to be whispered backstage that Barbra Streisand was a monster diva,
and now British audiences will discover just how demanding the singer can
be. The 65-year-old “living legend” is to charge up to £500 a ticket for her
first London concerts in 13 years, eclipsing the top prices of the Rolling
Stones and Madonna.
There are several theories why Streisand puts such a high premium on herself.
One concerns the comic actor Walter Matthau who, cast opposite Streisand in
the 1969 movie Hello Dolly!, told her she had “all the talent of a
butterfly’s fart”. The rest of her career could be viewed as a determined
attempt to prove Matthau wrong. The self-dramatisation involved strikes many
as high camp.
Her spokesman is taking the line that the astronomical ticket prices for her
concerts at the O2 Arena at the Millennium Dome on July 18 and 22 are
justified by “a momentous occasion that ranks with seeing Sinatra or Elvis”.
Indeed, to her fans Streisand is the preeminent female singer of the past 40
years, with 71m albums sold in America alone. The classical pianist Glenn
Gould described the Streisand voice as “one of the natural wonders of the
age”, surpassed only by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s.
Not everyone agrees. Even in the 1970s, when Streisand was the top-grossing
female film actress with hits such as The Way We Were and A Star is Born, a
studio conducted a poll to discover the most popular star. Streisand came
top, but a poll was also taken to identify the least popular star. Streisand
topped that as well.
Some of this polarisation centres on her prominent nose, which she briefly
considered altering by surgery early on. It turned out to be not only the
instrument of her unique sound, but an appealing riposte to the bland
prettiness of Hollywood actresses in the 1960s. “Is a nose with deviation
such a crime against the nation?” she sang in Funny Girl, the musical about
Fanny Brice, the Jewish singing sensation. Since then she has worn her
proboscis and her Jewishness as badges of honour.
The tension between Streisand the ugly duckling and Streisand the captivating
siren was best summed up by the actor Omar Sharif who, finding himself cast
with her in Funny Girl, demanded: “How can she be a leading lady? She’s not
beautiful enough.” At rehearsals he began to concede that she didn’t look
too bad from certain angles. By the end of the week he was convinced she was
“the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen in my life. I was madly in love with
her”.
But then the Egyptian film star might have noticed a nobility about Streisand
that came to light recently – her resemblance to the Egyptian queen
Cleopatra on a rather unflattering Roman coin. It was vindication of the
film director John Huston’s claim that Streisand would have made a much
better Cleopatra than Elizabeth Taylor in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s epic movie.
She is certainly as rich as the Egyptian queen. Her 20-concert tour in America
last year broke records by grossing $92.5m. It was only the fourth tour in
her career. The poor girl has to rake it in while she can.
What on earth does she spend it all on? Some of the proceeds of her imminent
European tour, beginning in Vienna on June 21, are earmarked for the Barbra
Streisand Foundation, which supports causes such as the environment, civil
rights and disadvantaged youngsters. Then there’s her political activism. A
fervent Democrat whose attacks on President George W Bush over Iraq earned
her strong criticism, she has helped to stump up money for both Barack Obama
and Hillary Clinton, the party’s two leading presidential contenders.
Her support for Hillary does not quite match the recent “revelation” of
President Bill Clinton’s obsession with the singer This is set out in an
unauthorised biography of Streisand, in which Christopher Andersen claims
that Clinton was infatuated with her - he says she spent a night at the
White House while Hillary was away tending to her dying father. When the
president appeared later with scratch marks on his neck and face, some saw
the hand of Hillary. After Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Streisand
was quoted as saying: “I don’t care who he’s screwed as long as he doesn’t
screw the country.”
Andersen also claimed that the Prince of Wales fell under her spell at a gala
dinner in November 1994 and within days had cleared their diaries for a
“tea-date” at his Los Angeles hotel and later met at Highgrove. A staff
member alleged Prince Charles and Streisand were “affectionate towards one
another” and were “quite flustered” when he entered a room unexpectedly.
Streisand dismissed the account.
Her conquests are said to have included the Canadian prime minister Pierre
Trudeau, the actors Ryan O’Neal (her co-star in What’s Up Doc?), Kris
Kristofferson (ditto A Star is Born), Warren Beatty, Richard Gere, Jon
Voight, Elvis Presley (who painted her toenails) and Jon Peters, a
hairdresser turned film producer. The tennis star Andre Agassi admitted to
shaving his chest hair for Streisand – he went bald later.
“Why can’t I find a man like Robert Redford?” she sighed to a friend on the
set of The Way We Were. The closest she came to bagging her co-star was on
screen during an seminude scene. According to Harry Stradling, the film’s
cinematographer, the chemistry between them was “very arousing . . . more so
than just actors acting”. But for once, it seems, Streisand’s passion was
not consummated.
She now lives in wedded bliss with James Brolin, the 66-year-old actor best
known for the television series Marcus Welby, MD, and Hotel, who declared
“I’m taking you home” three hours after meeting Streisand. When they tied
the knot in 1998 at her Malibu home it was her second marriage and his
third. He has introduced her to the “joys” of motels and driving around in a
pickup truck. “Now I know what it’s like to have a father,” she has said.
Her own father Emanuel, a high school teacher, died in 1943 when she was 15
months old. Emanuel’s father, a tailor called Isaac, had emigrated in 1898
from the village of Brezany, Galicia, on the Austrian side of the Hungarian
border, to New York’s Lower East Side ghetto where he set up a fish stall.
Streisand’s dead father and Jewish heritage came together in her 1983 film
Yentl, in which she was star, director, co-producer and co-writer. Although
critically acclaimed, it won her no personal Oscar nomination - testimony to
her unpopularity in Hollywood, it was said. However, she did win Oscars for
best actress (Funny Girl) and best original song (Evergreen, from A Star is
Born), as well as multiple Emmy, Grammy and Golden Globe awards.
Brought up in Brooklyn by her distant and unaffectionate mother Diana Ida
Rosen, a school secretary, Streisand had a turbulent relationship with her
stepfather Louis Kind, who loathed her. She was a skinny ugly child with
crossed eyes and a huge nose who suffered from asthma and panic attacks. She
was raised “frightened of everything” and when she demanded love from her
mother “she gave me food”. Diana told her she had too weak a voice to become
a singer and was not pretty enough to act.
Intent on becoming an actress, she attended theatre workshops in New York but
her unique singing voice took precedence. Despite never having received a
singing lesson, at 18 she won a talent competition in a gay bar in Greenwich
Village. According to James Spada, one of her biographers, the audience
thought it was a joke: “They looked at this gawky girl with a large nose and
crooked teeth and eyes that seemed to watch each other and they didn’t know
whether to laugh or groan.” Then she began to sing and they were spellbound.
Regular bookings followed at a fashionable New York nightclub and within two
years she was starring in a Broadway show with Elliott Gould. They were
married the following year. At 21 she was on the cover of Time magazine and
winning ovations in the stage version of Funny Girl every night. After eight
years of marriage, Gould’s career was going badly and by some accounts she
dumped him. When their only child, Jason, outed himself as gay in a 1997
film, Streisand declined to attend the premiere despite being a gay icon and
an advocate of gay rights.
Streisand’s career has been one of peaks and troughs. After an eight-year
absence, in 2004 she returned to the screen for the highly successful comedy
Meet the Fockers, the sequel to Meet the Parents.
For her London concerts she may have greater need than ever of the 120 bath
towels she demanded on her recent US tour. The media are already raining on
her parade over the eyewatering ticket prices. Pop stars are meant to belong
to the people, not price themselves as high culture. And there is something
about the London venue she may not have have factored in - the curse of the
Millennium Dome.
