Happy Days Are Here Again Barbra Streisand Judy Garland
Barbra Streisand Sets the Record Straight
At 74, as she embarks on a memoir, an album and a rare bout, the megastar is intent on correcting (the tiniest) errors and on defining her ain legacy.
Credit... Emily Berl for The New York Times
MALIBU, Calif. — Barbra Streisand — whose coming album of duets, "Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway," features a stellar supporting cast that includes Melissa McCarthy and Jamie Foxx — is talking about another duet with some other celebrated singer, now long dead.
That would exist Judy Garland, whose goggle box show Ms. Streisand visited in 1963 in what feels like a watershed moment in the history of fabled American vocalists. In the course of my recent afternoon-long visit with Ms. Streisand at her cloistral estate here, she says several times that she doesn't like revisiting her past.
Only since she's been researching a memoir, she'south in a more retrospective country of mind than usual. And before the afternoon is over, she volition accept me on a circuitous tour of her long life in the spotlight, with frequent side trips into the persistent bug of beingness Barbra.
Ms. Streisand, you see, has e'er been in charge — of her image, of her career and, whenever possible, of her immediate environment — always since she started singing in Greenwich Village nightclubs as a gawky teenager in thrift-shop clothes in the early 1960s. Information technology is a determination that has made her one of the nigh enduring — and adored and disliked — of all American stars.
It is besides why she seems unlikely to retreat entirely backside the iron gates of the estate she says is the one place she is entirely comfortable. She needs to make sure that the version of Barbra that the globe knows — onscreen, in recordings, in biographies — is the version she sees, as exactly equally possible. Unlike many female person stars of her generation and stature, she has rarely ceded control to whatsoever manager, or mate, or Svengali.
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Which brings us dorsum to the subject of Garland, a singer with whom Ms. Streisand has been tellingly compared and contrasted over the years. Ms. Streisand was barely into her 20s when they met, just already on the cusp of astronomical stardom; Garland, 41, would be expressionless six years later, i of Hollywood's most notorious casualties of devouring fame. However when they sang two American standards in counterpoint — "Happy Days Are Here Again" (Ms. Streisand) and "Get Happy" (Garland) — they seemed like a matched set.
Each interpreted an upbeat song with a big, trumpeting voice that nonetheless hinted at a pocket-size, alone figure inside. Happiness, as hymned in these renditions, would never exist won easily. Yous can find that video on YouTube, and it is impossible to watch information technology without shivering.
"Afterward, she used to visit me and give me communication," Ms. Streisand says. "She came to my apartment in New York, and she said to me, 'Don't let them do to y'all what they did to me.' I didn't know what she meant then. I was merely getting started."
Whoever "they" were — studio moguls, a voyeuristic press, parasitic hangers-on, cannibalistic fans — information technology was never likely that they could practise to Ms. Streisand what they did to Garland. From the earliest days of her career, Ms. Streisand exuded a Garlandesque fragility and emotional openness. Simply her long nails and close-set eyes, both quizzical and confrontational, spoke of the toughness of someone singularly capable of protecting herself.
Both sides of that dichotomy are however very much in evidence when I visit Ms. Streisand at her manor here, a compound of 3 main buildings that evoke a fantasy New England, incongruously situated to a higher place the glittering area of the Pacific Ocean. To pace backside its gates after experiencing the brown and smoke shades of the adjoining highway on a hazy summer's solar day is to feel like Garland's Dorothy stepping from sepia-toned Kansas into the Technicolor of Oz.
Ms. Streisand — who is promoting both her album, due Aug. 26, and her 9-city concert tour this month (called "The Music … the Mem'ries … the Magic!") — is waiting at the open door of the house she lives in. That's as opposed to the one she works in — chosen "Grandma's Business firm" — or "the Barn," which she describes as "an art project." That'due south the ane with a subterranean mall of quondam-fourth dimension shops, a jaw-dropping curiosity of themed décor and room later room of impeccably arranged artifacts.
Prototype
At 74, she looks like, well, Barbra Streisand, admitting a softer, more than subdued version than the one you know from six decades of movies, from her Oscar winning-debut in the musical "Funny Girl" (1968), in which she recreated her Broadway performance every bit the Ziegfeld entertainer Fanny Brice, to the one-act "The Guilt Trip" (2012), with Seth Rogen. Though the rooms backside her beckon in carefully coordinated shades of pale, Ms. Streisand is wearing the compatible black of an East Coast urban dweller.
"I am a New Yorker!" she exclaims, when I bespeak out the discrepancy. "A Brooklynite. That ways it'due south an earthy place to come up from. It's reality, every bit compared to reality TV."
In conversation, she is a paradoxical mix of wide-open spontaneity and preoccupied vigilance. She may shoot from the hip when she talks about herself, but she also backtracks a lot, as if to retrace the bullet's trajectory and brand certain it hit its target. It's when she's guiding me through her homes — gleefully annotating their contents (while noshing from the plates of garden-fresh snacks that continue materializing, courtesy of her longtime housekeeper) — that she seems most at ease.
Ms. Streisand has created her own sui generis alternative reality hither, one she shares with her husband, the actor James Brolin. (On this afternoon, the solar day before their 18th wedding anniversary, he is filming a movie in Canada, but he has sent her "four beautiful arrangements of flowers.")
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This world is arranged and maintained according to her highly exacting standards, though even here there are annoying signs of imperfection. "Vicky, whose truck is that?" she calls out to an banana, equally she's showing me her rose-thick gardens. "Information technology's in the shot. Whenever I bear witness my house, I never want a car in information technology. As well, tell somebody there'south a mop in the lavender room in Grandma's Firm."
Ms. Streisand has written a book near the cosmos of this private Xanadu, "My Passion for Design," which became the unlikely basis for a play about her, Jonathan Tolins's "Buyer & Cellar." No, she hasn't seen it. 1 of the outset things she says to me, chummily, is "I empathise you've seen 'Buyer & Cellar'; well, now yous can encounter the real affair."
Ms. Streisand says she hates to get out her Malibu property, the place where she tin be in control. Well-nigh as soon as she set foot onstage, during rehearsals for her showtime Broadway show, "I Can Go It for Yous Wholesale," she has known, she says, that she was born to exist a director, in all senses of that give-and-take.
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She has become ane backside the photographic camera, as the pioneering female person managing director, star and producer of "Yentl," "The Prince of Tides" and "The Mirror Has Two Faces." Being that kind of manager, though, means waiting — and waiting — for green-lights and money and rights to textile. Though it had been appear a few weeks earlier that she would exist making her long-anticipated version of the musical "Gypsy" — in which she would portray the ultimate stage mother, Mama Rose — that project is over again in limbo.
"I'm at their mercy," she says. "One day you're going to practise 'Gypsy,' the next day it'south off. And then this is the only place — writing a book, making a record or doing a tour — where I can exercise what I have to exercise, my work."
The record is "Encore," the 35th of Ms. Streisand'south studio albums. (To date, her records take sold about 245 million copies worldwide; and with "Partners," her 2014 compilation of duets, she became the but singer to land a No. 1 album in six successive decades.)
She says that working on the numbers with the other singers — performers known principally for moving picture work, and including Antonio Banderas, Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway and Seth MacFarlane — was rather like producing a series of mini-movies. She added dialogue and, in some cases, altered lyrics from Broadway classics.
For her interpretation of Irving Berlin's "Anything Yous Can Practice," from "Annie Get Your Gun," she devised a prologue in which she and Ms. McCarthy sparred later learning they were up for the same movie function. This allowed Ms. Streisand to interject a joke about how to say her name: Information technology's Streisand, as in "sand on the beach," non "Strize-and," a mispronunciation that has plagued her at to the lowest degree since she first appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in the early 1960s.
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Recently, she heard John Mayer (with whom she sang on "Partners") beingness interviewed past the producer and Tv host Andy Cohen, and to her dismay, "they both called me Barbra Strize-and." She says she tin't expect for them to hear the duet with Ms. McCarthy. "Maybe they'll get information technology at present," she says, managing to sound both amused and annoyed.
The earth is riddled with such exasperating errors, and Ms. Streisand sees herself as burdened with the Sisyphean task of uprooting them. Working on her memoir — scheduled for publication in 2017 (although she says, "Don't concur your jiff") — she has become more than agonizingly aware than ever of misrepresentations in the many, many accounts of her life that already exist.
Writing about herself is not a procedure she enjoys. She says if she can speak fluently these days about long-past events, it is "only because I've had to look it up." She is grateful to have discovered the beingness of the superfan Matt Howe's online annal of all things Streisand.
Not that she looks at it herself. "Because, again, it's similar the play ["Buyer & Cellar"]," she says. "How do I look at myself? I can't do it. Only my researcher tells me what's on that thing, like Marvin Hamlisch singing 'The Way We Were' [the theme song of her 1973 hit picture show with Robert Redford] before I changed the melody and some of the lyrics."
For someone similar me, who came of age watching and listening to Ms. Streisand in the early years of her career, her forced focus on the way she was is a godsend. It means that I get to see, in the screening room in the Barn, Ms. Streisand'south uncut sequence of herself as Fanny Brice performing "Swan Lake" in "Funny Girl." (She supplies a running note as we lookout, which includes speaking, in character, the unrecorded dialogue that Fanny was saying onscreen.)
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I also get to hear about the Rialto of yore, where, every bit a immature woman just a few years out of Erasmus Hall High Schoolhouse in Brooklyn, Ms. Streisand became a star in ii musicals, "I Can Go It for Y'all Wholesale" (1962) and "Funny Girl" (1964), the starting time and last Broadway shows in which she has appeared.
When Ms. Streisand showed upward at the Tony Awards in June (to nowadays the award for best musical to "Hamilton"), it was her first appearance at the ceremony in 46 years. She never intended to make her career in alive theater, she says. For one matter, she hated making the rounds of casting offices ("I've never wanted the humiliation of having to enquire people for jobs").
At that place'south something, she says, about being judged — live and on the spot — that unnerves her, especially since her appearance in Cardinal Park in 1967, when 150,000 people showed upward and she forgot lyrics onstage. Since then, "I always got frightened when I had to perform alive." She was absent-minded from commercial concert stages for the following 27 years.
"I'm killing myself for this tour, because there'south a painting I want," she says. She is a self-described "sale freak," and the covetable paintings in her house include works by Munch and Modigliani, as well as a portrait of George Washington past Gilbert Stuart. (She performs at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Aug. 11 and 13.)
She says she never sings a vocal the aforementioned way twice, which presented problems when she worked on Broadway. Her habit of continually tweaking her role as Miss Marmelstein, the overworked secretary in "Wholesale," provoked its manager, Arthur Laurents, into criticism that stings her to this day. "He said: 'You're never gonna make it in showbiz. You're too undisciplined. You never do it exactly the same manner.'"
Paradigm
Ms. Streisand says she visited Laurents — who too wrote the screenplay for "The Mode We Were" — not long before he died in 2011. "And I said: 'Arthur, what do you feel now nearly the way I work? Do you lot understand why I change things, or had a hard fourth dimension freezing the aforementioned affair?' He said, 'I absolutely practice understand.' That was very rewarding for me."
Though she had no previous Broadway feel at the fourth dimension of "Wholesale," Ms. Streisand had her own specific notions about the staging of it. And for the record, she says, the thought of performing her character'south big solo in an office chair on wheels was hers, not the choreographer Herbert Ross's.
She seems to look back on her younger cocky with a sure wonder. "I don't know that I would have the chutzpah now," she says.
But where did that original immense confidence — and hunger — come up from? Much has been written about Ms. Streisand'south Brooklyn childhood: the gap left past the decease of her begetter, a scholar and schoolteacher, when she was a toddler; the female parent who never complimented her and thought she should become a secretary. (For the record, that's how the signature nails came nigh, since they kept Ms. Streisand from existence able to blazon.)
"She had talent," she says of her mother, who worked as a secretarial assistant but who Ms. Streisand describes as also having had "a beautiful voice." "She didn't take the drive. I said, "Why didn't y'all do this, why didn't y'all get later your dream?' You know what I'm saying? Y'all can have a dream, but how practice you manifest it, how do you lot make it happen? Hard work, centre, taking chances — that was ever my philosophy."
Information technology's all the more than surprising, and so, when Ms. Streisand says: "The affair is, I was always kind of lazy. On the one hand, I am — or I was — ambitious. On the other hand, if I was having a great dearest matter or something, I'd say, I don't want to do anything else. I mean, searching for personal happiness was more than important."
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That is why, she says, she turned downwardly a number of plum roles in her offset decade in Hollywood, including the starring roles in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Klute" and "Julia." Those all went, memorably, to some other actress. Equally Ms. Streisand says, in a deadpan aside, "I fabricated Jane Fonda's career."
Then volition we e'er become to encounter her as Mama Rose in "Gypsy"? Ms. Streisand is at present several decades older than that grapheme, modeled after the female parent of the celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. But when you hear her talk about "Gypsy" — and to run into the project-pitching "sizzle tape" she fabricated, which ends with a concert operation of her defiantly singing the climactic number "Rose's Plough" — the oral fissure even so waters.
Ms. Streisand has given much thought to Rose. She has talked to her friend Stephen Sondheim, the show's lyricist, about potential revisions to the songs. She has an ace idea for the commitment of the broken words "mama, mama" in "Rose's Turn," based on her belief that the key to Rose'southward blind ambition to brand a star of her girl can be found in the mother who walked out on her.
Some other description Ms. Streisand offers of Rose seems closer to cocky-portraiture: "I think she's tough as nails, simply a tough person who's vulnerable inside, you know? It's like a crab, something that'due south jelly inside. What makes for anger is also hurt, and that gives you the depth of playing somebody like that."
The Malibu residence, as tailored to her tastes and needs equally a couture dress might exist, would seem to offer a place where a person might shed her vanquish. I ask her if she feels serene here. She doesn't respond immediately. Then I ask: "Do you ever feel serene?" "That's a practiced question," she says.
So I ask it once again. Her muttered response: "No, not really, sad to say."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/theater/barbra-streisand-sets-the-record-straight.html
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