Barbra Streisand/judy Garland + Happy Days Are Here Again
Barbra Streisand Sets the Tape Straight
At 74, as she embarks on a memoir, an album and a rare tour, the megastar is intent on correcting (the tiniest) errors and on defining her own legacy.
Credit... Emily Berl for The New York Times
MALIBU, Calif. — Barbra Streisand — whose coming album of duets, "Encore: Picture Partners Sing Broadway," features a stellar supporting cast that includes Melissa McCarthy and Jamie Foxx — is talking about another duet with another celebrated vocalist, at present long dead.
That would be Judy Garland, whose telly evidence Ms. Streisand visited in 1963 in what feels like a watershed moment in the history of fabled American vocalists. In the class of my contempo afternoon-long visit with Ms. Streisand at her cloistral manor here, she says several times that she doesn't similar revisiting her past.
But since she'southward been researching a memoir, she's in a more retrospective country of listen than usual. And before the afternoon is over, she will have me on a circuitous tour of her long life in the spotlight, with frequent side trips into the persistent bug of existence Barbra.
Ms. Streisand, you see, has ever been in charge — of her image, of her career and, whenever possible, of her immediate environment — ever 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 most enduring — and adored and disliked — of all American stars.
It is also why she seems unlikely to retreat entirely behind the iron gates of the estate she says is the ane place she is entirely comfortable. She needs to make certain that the version of Barbra that the world knows — onscreen, in recordings, in biographies — is the version she sees, equally exactly as possible. Different many female stars of her generation and stature, she has rarely ceded control to any manager, or mate, or Svengali.
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Which brings u.s.a. back 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, but already on the cusp of astronomical stardom; Garland, 41, would be dead 6 years subsequently, i of Hollywood's well-nigh notorious casualties of devouring fame. Yet when they sang two American standards in counterpoint — "Happy Days Are Here Again" (Ms. Streisand) and "Get Happy" (Garland) — they seemed similar a matched set.
Each interpreted an upbeat song with a big, trumpeting vocalization that notwithstanding hinted at a small, alone effigy within. Happiness, as hymned in these renditions, would never be won hands. You tin discover that video on YouTube, and it is impossible to watch information technology without shivering.
"Afterward, she used to visit me and requite me advice," Ms. Streisand says. "She came to my apartment in New York, and she said to me, 'Don't let them practice to you what they did to me.' I didn't know what she meant and then. I was but getting started."
Whoever "they" were — studio moguls, a voyeuristic press, parasitic hangers-on, cannibalistic fans — it was never likely that they could do to Ms. Streisand what they did to Garland. From the earliest days of her career, Ms. Streisand exuded a Garlandesque fragility and emotional openness. But her long nails and close-set optics, 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 bear witness when I visit Ms. Streisand at her estate here, a compound of iii main buildings that evoke a fantasy New England, incongruously situated to a higher place the glittering expanse of the Pacific Bounding main. To step behind its gates after experiencing the dark-brown and fume shades of the adjoining highway on a hazy summertime'south 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 ix-urban center 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 House" — or "the Barn," which she describes as "an art projection." That's the ane with a subterranean mall of old-time shops, a jaw-dropping marvel of themed décor and room after room of impeccably bundled artifacts.
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At 74, she looks like, well, Barbra Streisand, albeit a softer, more subdued version than the one you lot know from six decades of movies, from her Oscar winning-debut in the musical "Funny Girl" (1968), in which she recreated her Broadway performance as the Ziegfeld entertainer Fanny Brice, to the comedy "The Guilt Trip" (2012), with Seth Rogen. Though the rooms behind her beckon in carefully coordinated shades of pale, Ms. Streisand is wearing the compatible blackness of an East Coast urban dweller.
"I am a New Yorker!" she exclaims, when I bespeak out the discrepancy. "A Brooklynite. That means it's an bawdy place to come from. Information technology's reality, as compared to reality Tv set."
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, merely she also backtracks a lot, as if to retrace the bullet's trajectory and make sure it hit its target. It's when she'south guiding me through her homes — gleefully annotating their contents (while noshing from the plates of garden-fresh snacks that go on materializing, courtesy of her longtime housekeeper) — that she seems almost at ease.
Ms. Streisand has created her own sui generis culling reality hither, one she shares with her husband, the role player James Brolin. (On this afternoon, the solar day before their 18th hymeneals anniversary, he is filming a motion picture in Canada, but he has sent her "iv beautiful arrangements of flowers.")
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This world is arranged and maintained according to her highly exacting standards, though even here in that location are annoying signs of imperfection. "Vicky, whose truck is that?" she calls out to an assistant, as she'southward showing me her rose-thick gardens. "It's in the shot. Whenever I show my house, I never want a car in it. Also, tell somebody at that place's a mop in the lavender room in Grandma's Firm."
Ms. Streisand has written a volume about the creation of this individual Xanadu, "My Passion for Design," which became the unlikely basis for a play nearly her, Jonathan Tolins'southward "Buyer & Cellar." No, she hasn't seen it. I of the beginning things she says to me, chummily, is "I understand yous've seen 'Buyer & Cellar'; well, now you can run into the real affair."
Ms. Streisand says she hates to leave her Malibu property, the place where she can exist in control. Almost equally soon equally she set foot onstage, during rehearsals for her showtime Broadway show, "I Can Get Information technology for You Wholesale," she has known, she says, that she was built-in to be a managing director, in all senses of that word.
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She has get one behind the camera, as the pioneering female manager, star and producer of "Yentl," "The Prince of Tides" and "The Mirror Has Two Faces." Being that kind of managing director, though, means waiting — and waiting — for green-lights and money and rights to material. Though it had been announced a few weeks earlier that she would be making her long-anticipated version of the musical "Gypsy" — in which she would portray the ultimate stage mother, Mama Rose — that project is again in limbo.
"I'thou at their mercy," she says. "One day you're going to do 'Gypsy,' the next day information technology'southward off. And then this is the simply identify — writing a book, making a record or doing a tour — where I can do what I have to do, my work."
The record is "Encore," the 35th of Ms. Streisand's studio albums. (To appointment, her records have sold about 245 million copies worldwide; and with "Partners," her 2014 compilation of duets, she became the only vocaliser to country a No. 1 album in six successive decades.)
She says that working on the numbers with the other singers — performers known principally for film work, and including Antonio Banderas, Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway and Seth MacFarlane — was rather similar producing a serial of mini-movies. She added dialogue and, in some cases, contradistinct lyrics from Broadway classics.
For her interpretation of Irving Berlin's "Anything You Tin Practice," from "Annie Go Your Gun," she devised a prologue in which she and Ms. McCarthy sparred after learning they were up for the aforementioned motion-picture show role. This immune Ms. Streisand to interject a joke almost 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 showtime appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in the early on 1960s.
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Recently, she heard John Mayer (with whom she sang on "Partners") existence interviewed by the producer and Telly host Andy Cohen, and to her dismay, "they both called me Barbra Strize-and." She says she can't wait for them to hear the duet with Ms. McCarthy. "Maybe they'll get it at present," she says, managing to sound both amused and annoyed.
The globe is riddled with such exasperating errors, and Ms. Streisand sees herself equally burdened with the Sisyphean task of uprooting them. Working on her memoir — scheduled for publication in 2017 (although she says, "Don't agree your breath") — she has become more 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 almost long-past events, it is "only because I've had to look information technology upwardly." She is grateful to have discovered the beingness of the superfan Matt Howe's online archive of all things Streisand.
Not that she looks at it herself. "Because, once again, information technology'south like the play ["Heir-apparent & Cellar"]," she says. "How do I expect at myself? I can't exercise it. But my researcher tells me what'south on that matter, like Marvin Hamlisch singing 'The Way We Were' [the theme song of her 1973 hit movie with Robert Redford] earlier I changed the melody and some of the lyrics."
For someone like me, who came of age watching and listening to Ms. Streisand in the early on years of her career, her forced focus on the fashion she was is a godsend. It ways that I become to see, in the screening room in the Befouled, Ms. Streisand'south uncut sequence of herself as Fanny Brice performing "Swan Lake" in "Funny Girl." (She supplies a running annotation as nosotros sentinel, which includes speaking, in character, the unrecorded dialogue that Fanny was saying onscreen.)
Prototype
I besides get to hear about the Rialto of yore, where, as a young adult female merely a few years out of Erasmus Hall Loftier School in Brooklyn, Ms. Streisand became a star in two musicals, "I Tin Get It for You Wholesale" (1962) and "Funny Daughter" (1964), the first and final Broadway shows in which she has appeared.
When Ms. Streisand showed up at the Tony Awards in June (to nowadays the award for best musical to "Hamilton"), it was her first advent at the anniversary in 46 years. She never intended to make her career in live theater, she says. For one thing, she hated making the rounds of casting offices ("I've never wanted the humiliation of having to ask people for jobs").
There'south something, she says, almost being judged — alive and on the spot — that unnerves her, peculiarly since her appearance in Central Park in 1967, when 150,000 people showed up and she forgot lyrics onstage. Since and then, "I always got frightened when I had to perform alive." She was absent from commercial concert stages for the following 27 years.
"I'm killing myself for this tour, because at that place'southward a painting I want," she says. She is a self-described "auction freak," and the covetable paintings in her house include works by Munch and Modigliani, likewise as a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. (She performs at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Aug. 11 and 13.)
She says she never sings a song the same way twice, which presented issues when she worked on Broadway. Her habit of continually tweaking her role as Miss Marmelstein, the overworked secretary in "Wholesale," provoked its director, Arthur Laurents, into criticism that stings her to this twenty-four hour period. "He said: 'You're never gonna brand it in showbiz. You're too undisciplined. You lot never exercise it exactly the same way.'"
Epitome
Ms. Streisand says she visited Laurents — who besides wrote the screenplay for "The Way We Were" — non long before he died in 2011. "And I said: 'Arthur, what do you lot feel at present about the manner I piece of work? Do you lot sympathise why I change things, or had a hard time freezing the same affair?' He said, 'I absolutely do understand.' That was very rewarding for me."
Though she had no previous Broadway experience at the time of "Wholesale," Ms. Streisand had her own specific notions about the staging of it. And for the record, she says, the idea of performing her grapheme's large solo in an part chair on wheels was hers, not the choreographer Herbert Ross's.
She seems to expect dorsum on her younger cocky with a certain wonder. "I don't know that I would have the chutzpah now," she says.
But where did that original immense confidence — and hunger — come from? Much has been written well-nigh Ms. Streisand's Brooklyn childhood: the gap left by the death of her father, a scholar and schoolteacher, when she was a toddler; the female parent who never complimented her and idea she should become a secretarial assistant. (For the tape, that's how the signature nails came about, since they kept Ms. Streisand from being able to blazon.)
"She had talent," she says of her mother, who worked as a secretarial assistant just who Ms. Streisand describes as too having had "a beautiful voice." "She didn't accept the drive. I said, "Why didn't you do this, why didn't you become subsequently your dream?' You know what I'm maxim? You can have a dream, but how practice you manifest information technology, how do you make it happen? Hard piece of work, heart, taking chances — that was always my philosophy."
Information technology'due south all the more than surprising, and so, when Ms. Streisand says: "The thing is, I was always kind of lazy. On the 1 hand, I am — or I was — aggressive. On the other hand, if I was having a nifty love affair or something, I'd say, I don't want to do anything else. I hateful, searching for personal happiness was more of import."
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That is why, she says, she turned down a number of plum roles in her first decade in Hollywood, including the starring roles in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Klute" and "Julia." Those all went, memorably, to another actress. As Ms. Streisand says, in a deadpan bated, "I made Jane Fonda'due south career."
So will we e'er get to see her as Mama Rose in "Gypsy"? Ms. Streisand is now several decades older than that graphic symbol, modeled after the female parent of the celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. But when you lot hear her talk about "Gypsy" — and to meet the projection-pitching "sizzle tape" she made, which ends with a concert performance of her defiantly singing the climactic number "Rose's Plough" — the rima oris still waters.
Ms. Streisand has given much thought to Rose. She has talked to her friend Stephen Sondheim, the show's lyricist, nigh potential revisions to the songs. She has an ace thought for the delivery of the broken words "mama, mama" in "Rose's Plow," based on her belief that the cardinal to Rose's bullheaded ambition to make a star of her daughter can be found in the female parent who walked out on her.
Another description Ms. Streisand offers of Rose seems closer to cocky-portraiture: "I call back she's tough as nails, but a tough person who's vulnerable inside, you know? Information technology'southward like a crab, something that'southward 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 as a couture wearing apparel might be, would seem to offer a place where a person might shed her shell. I enquire her if she feels serene here. She doesn't reply immediately. So I ask: "Practice you always experience serene?" "That's a skilful question," she says.
And then I enquire it 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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