Sun Magazine

Photo of newspaper interview

Australia

March 13, 1977

Sunday Sun special writer Jim Oram flew to Hollywood for this exclusive interview with superstar Barbra Streisand

At first I thought it was the maid. Maybe she'd come to extinguish the log fire blazing in a vault-like grate, even though the soft Californian sun was pouring warmly through the windows.

The fire had been troubling me for the 20 minutes l’d been waiting in the main room of Barbra Streisand’s home — a vast room like a Hollywood fantasy of a baronial hall.

I suppose I should have dismissed the fire as an eccentricity of the very rich, but it flickered and flared into my psyche, this fire on a warm day in California.

Everything else in the room was normal, or at least normal to those of almost unlimited wealth and hurried taste.

Antiques were scattered around like furniture in a department store. There were exquisite pieces of silverware and fine china on tables and, on a window ledge, framed photographs of a child.

A huge bookcase was packed with volumes from Dylan Thomas to Jacqueline Susann, from The Joys of Yiddish to 20,000 Years of Fashion.

Cushions were piled high around the fireplace and, for one disturbing moment the sun slanted onto the flames.

The maid walked across the huge room and the light caught her face, the impossibly unconventional features, the monument of a nose. And it wasn't the maid. It was Streisand.

My wrong identification could be excused. She was wearing an old jumper, trousers of not-recent vintage and on her feet what looked suspiciously similar to the pair of slippers lying these past five years, battered and unused, in the bottom of my wardrobe back at home in Sydney.

“Do you mind,” she asks, “if I sit close to the fire? I really feel the cold.”

At least it explains the fire on a warm Californian day. God help her if she lived in Melbourne.

She poured coffee from a silver pot into gold cups. It was pleasantly suburban, albeit a suburb of the hedonistically rich.

Streisand is probably the world's greatest female entertainer. She has starred in nine movies, has sold millions of records, has sung around the world.

“Simple”

Yet she sits in her mansion and wonders if she was better off, more content, when she lived in a tiny flat over a Third Ave seafood restaurant, the smell of decaying halibut wafting through the floorboards.

“My life was so simple then,” she says. “I made $45 a week and would divide it into rent, telephone, and I’d usually have $5 left over.

“And that $5 was extraordinary. Like maybe instead of taking the bus, I could take a cab sometime. And that cab was a luxury.

“Or if I had $2 left over. I'd go to the thrift shop and buy a beautiful pair of shoes for 50 cents.

“That was my first apartment, you know, and I loved it. I loved decorating it. And I had my beaded bags up on the . . .”

Her voice trails away as her eyes flicker over the room in the mansion in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles.

“You see, this room l never really finished, because my life is now so complicated. It’s never run right.

“When I was a little kid I had this fantasy of serving tea and fresh scones. But it never seems to come out that way.

“I would like to try and get back that same sort of peace, the same kind of simplicity.

“I try to sort it out all the time, you know, and I can't quite understand why my life doesn’t run as smoothly as I would like it to.

“It’s not like you see in the movies, believe me, the butler coming in with his white gloves and pouring you coffee.

“You know, the roof is leaking and the dogs are peeing in the house because I can't get them housebroken.

“So what are you supposed to do? I don't know.”

She shrugs. She pours more coffee and says: “I’m very lazy. I don't like working that much.

“I like being home organising my house. But I never have time to redecorate my house and get new slip-covers.

Record

“You see I have holes in my slip-covers,” she says, pointing to what to me look like perfectly good pieces of material.

The conversation slips and slides out of control over a multitude of subjects. And now she is back to a day in New York‘s Central Park. On that day in 1967 she sang before 135,000 people — a world record as the single largest audience. It was a traumatic experience, one that affected her so deeply she was to include it years later in A Star Is Born.

“On that day I simply forgot the words to two songs,” she says. “I’d sung the songs 2000 times before. One was When The Sun Comes Out which used to be my opener for years, and other was a little comedy song.

“I went absolutely blank. It was horrible.

“l was frightened by the people. It was like, what do I have to do? What do I have to give? Because at the drop of a pin I'm a has-been.

“In London I was once at the theatre watching Laurence Olivier in Othello. I was knocked over by his performance.

“I was applauding and there was a kid going boo! boo!

“I was furious and went over to him and said: ‘How dare you boo him.’

“The kid said he booed him because he thought Olivier was ‘off’ that night.

“Oh God, I don‘t want to be like what happened to Olivier. I don't want that to be me.”

Films

“That‘s why I chose to do films. If you boo me, I won’t hear you.

“That's what happens, you see. Everyone thinks they personally own you.

“So how much do you have to give? When is it ever enough?

“It's like you're an object, an entertainment machine. If you're off, my God, you're no good. You stink!

“And when I forgot the words at Central Park, I stopped singing in front of people.

“Actually I sang again for McGovern, but I had the lyrics of my 15 songs in my hand the whole time.

“And I did Las Vegas once but I had a plexi-glass stand with the words.

“But the Central Park thing put a bug in my head. It frightened me, you know, really frightened me.”

This insecurity is surprising from a star who has been accused of being arrogant, aloof, narcissistic, conceited, monomaniacal.

“I'm filled with enormous self-doubt,” she confesses.

“I‘m always questioning. I never think I'm doing anything good enough.

“But I've even been put down for being a perfectionist. It’s crazy!

“There's no such thing as perfection. It’s striving for perfection that's important because if it was totally perfect, it would be unreal. It wouldn’t be human.

“I compromise right and left. Every day, when you make a movie, when you make a record, it's all a matter of compromise.

“The question is, how many compromises do you make?”

Streisand firmly and sincerely believes Hollywood hates her. But hold it, because this is more complicated than it sounds

“When you’re off, you stink”

Hollywood, you see, does not exist. It is merely a state of mind through which wander the ghosts of performances past and the fantasies of performances to come.

There is, I admit, a suburb of Los Angeles called Hollywood, but this is no more than a sprawl of ugly stucco houses, shabby apartment blocks, gaudy signs, rootless people and cars going somewhere else.

The people who resent Streisand are those toiling in the studios in the San Fernando Valley, those who live in Beverly Hills, in Malibu, in the canyons thrusting into the mountains surrounding Los Angeles.

They resented her because she came fresh from New York, from her triumph as Funny Girl, as green as young grass and as cocky as all hell.

But let Streisand explain that lingering resentment, hate if you like, in her own words:

“Even before I set foot on a set, the adverse publicity was there.

“I came here signed for three pictures without a screen test — and without changing my name, without capping my teeth, without shortening my nose.

Sweet

"You see, Carol Burnett, for instance, is like a lovely, sweet person and is no threat to a lot of people. But somehow l seem to threaten a lot of people.”

Even alter she established herself as a great star with such huge box office successes as Funny Girl, Hello Dolly, Owl And The Pussycat, Whats Up Doc, The Way We Were, Funny Lady and her latest, A Star Is Born, the resentment lingered on like a bad memory.

Many of the filmland inhabitants resented her with even greater intensity because of her rocketing popularity. The stories spread about her tantrums, her alleged difficult behavior.

“They can't stand it,” she says. “They think, all right, she’s the talented one, but she must be either ugly or a bitch or something.

“She can't have more than being a star. We won't let her.

“But I value myself on being a nice person, a good person, on being kind to people, especially on the set.

“You know, many of the people who work with me have done so for 10 years.

“I believe in loyalty, in relationships. Ask any director with whom I've worked if he would work with me again. Ask any actor if he would work with me again.”

But back to that resentment, that envy Streisand finds among the film colony.

Statuette

Maybe the reason lies partially with a little statuette standing on a shelf in Streisand‘s home.

It's the Oscar, and its placed among the bundle of Golden Globe awards — A Star Is Born picked up five of them— and other recognitions of her talents.

Streisand received the Oscar in the 1968 Academy Awards for her performance in Funny Girl — her screen debut.

She was up against such strong opposition as Katharine Hepburn for Lion in Winter, Patricia Neal for The Subject Was Roses, Vanessa Redgrave for Isadora and Joanne Woodward for Rachel, Rachel.

Streisand made Oscar history by sharing the award with Hepburn as best actress.

“Because it was a tie with Katharine Hepburn, it wasn’t really like winning it myself." she says.

“But you know, I was embarrassed to get that award. There were some fantastic performances and I think we all deserved plaques.”

Streisand spent three years toiling to make A Star Is Born. Three years of arguments, controversy, bitchiness, temperament and an almost microscopic scrutiny by the media.

She starred in the movie, produced it, helped direct it, write it, score it — even lent some of her expensive furniture and reasonably kooky clothes for scenes.

It was a formidable task for the 34-year-old entertainer. It almost destroyed her.

“I finished the movie emotionally, physically and mentally drained," she said.

Insane

“And after I read some of the articles about the movie, it almost drove me into the insane asylum. I thought I was going to have a breakdown.

“Making that movie was the most difficult experience of my life . . Making it was difficult enough. But reading the criticism of reviewers, especially that by the New York critics, was worse.

They gave A Star Is Born the most savage mauling any film's had in the last decade.

Sample: “It is an exercise in unabashed narcissism. It isn’t every day a film offers us a completely uncensored glimpse into the psyche of a monomaniacal phenomenon.”

Sample: “What Miss Streisand does is not acting. She’s a queen condescending to her own court cameramen."

Sample: “A tawdry display of conceit.”

Streisand knew the reviews were bad. But she had not read them in full, did not know how devastating they were, until I, ungallantly I suppose, showed them to her in her home in Los Angeles.

She broke down and wept.

“They're obviously very jealous of anybody who has the power to make a movie,” she said.

“Most critics are either frustrated screenplay writers or producers or something, or else they were just promoted from the sports pages.

“I would have liked critical acclaim. I would have liked that very much.

“But no more. I'll never allow them into my movies. I won't set up special screenings for them. They can pay for them at the box office.”

Talked

But piece by piece, as we talked in the vast main room of her home, she answered the criticism of A Star Is Born.

There was the charge of narcissism. Streisand laughed at that.

“I cut out several scenes of myself in the movie,” she said.

“For instance, I learned to play the guitar for one scene and it took me a year of lessons.

“But I cut it out of the movie because things had to go.”

Another scene bringing caustic Press comment was when Streisand appears in a bath with her co-star Kris Kristofferson.

Streisand and Jon Peters on set

It was common knowledge that Streisand’s boy friend, Jon Peters, made both stars wear underpants for the scene. The cover-up provided much merriment for some reviewers.

But not for Streisand. She believes Peters was right.

“This is the human side of making movies,” she says. “I mean, what happens to actors’ wives when the actor goes on the set and has to make love to different women.

“That’s a very real problem. And Jon is a man and I'm his lady. He doesn’t want a naked man in the bathtub with me.”

Before I went to her home, I was told by a dozen people that she was tough, ruthless and cold. Or, to put it bluntly a bitch.

She was none of these things. She is a woman who strives for perfection, and who is likely to become somewhat annoyed when those around her are not seeking the same goal.

But underneath, a person filled with self doubt. As she admitted: “I could be called insecure, but it’s a complicated word and it musn’t be misinterpreted.

“As a person I'm striving to grow. I have a lot to learn as a human being and as an artist.”

End.

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