February 20, 1988
It's only after you’ve listened and questioned and studied Barbra Streisand for a time that all the complex theories evaporate and it finally sinks in that she is a classic case of self-doubt, a bundle of insecurity, albeit walking around in the well-toned body of arguably the most successful female entertainer in the world today.
It appears that no matter how many “yes” men, women and children she surrounds herself with she can’t bankroll the right answers.
She tumbles, dressed in black mini-skirt, sweater and leather jacket which she shrugs off — into an elegant suite at a Beverly Hills hotel.
Ms Streisand, 45, insists she still does not, after a career stretching nearly 30 years, feel like a star. Today she looks a little lost but when it’s time to deal with the questions she acts and talks like a star.
That she’s talking at all has to do with her new film Nuts, which is arriving in cinemas five years after Yentl for which Streisand did her balancing act as the first woman in history to direct, produce, write and star in a title role.
It was a high-wire exercise and she fell foul of the box office and many critics. This time she abdicated the directing to veteran Martin Ritt but produced the film version of Tom Topor’s stage play as well as providing the music and a show stopper of a performance.
She was so upset by the reaction to Yentl (including an Oscar shutout despite receiving a Golden Globe award as best director) in America that she only agreed to a television interview there to push Nuts. For Europe she was more generous — and revealing.
In fact, Streisand, who keeps hammering on that what she wants is “the truth — to be told it and to speak it”, is as good as those words. And for the sake of “truth” she reveals personal details which reach back — like much of her life and career — to Brooklyn when her delicatessen accent was first beginning to be heard.
First, you must know something about Nuts. Streisand plays high-rent call girl Claudia Draper who is accused of killing one of her clients.
Her mother (Maureen Stapleton) and stepfather (Karl Malden) want her to plead insanity and are supported by a prison psychiatrist (Eli Wallach).
Claudia (from a “good family”) wants to go on trial for manslaughter but her sanity must go on trial first.
The film above all else is a high-flying star vehicle — the superbly accomplished supporting cast provide the safety net — with Streisand in turn strident, sullen and savage in screen-filling close-ups.
This is the Oscar-winning Funny Girl acting funny peculiar and the movie's message is a question: who has the right to decide who is crazy? We might also add: what’s love?
And, for Streisand/Claudia even more importantly: what’s parental love?
With the help of court-appointed lawyer Richard Dreyfuss, Streisand/Claudia fights for the right to be declared competent to stand trial for manslaughter.
Streisand admits there is something of a spoof of her own image about the film. The eccentric stories about her are legion.
She has been called reclusive, anxious, shy, pushy, lonely, spoiled, abrasive, ego-driven, touchy, fastidious and something of a mystical Barbracadabra. “People are always telling silly stories about me — and to this day I still can't understand why.”
It’s because she has been a star from the start. Her father Emmanuel Streisand, the son of an immigrant fishmonger, taught English literature at Brooklyn High School. When she was 15 months old he died at the age of 35. She says that Yentl allowed her to relive her childhood and exorcise the ghost of her father.
In 1950, when Streisand was seven, her mother Diana married used-car salesman Lou Kind, but Streisand and her stepfather didn’t get along. Now, with Nuts, she feels she can deal with more aching memories of the past.
“It’s about the mystery of appearances. Society would look at this mother and father as wonderful loving parents on the surface. He wears a nice tie and she wears a string of pearls on a black dress — on the surface they appear like wonderful parents.
“And this girl, their daughter, is a prostitute and uses foul language and says things without mincing words, without trying to be light.
“One would judge her to be the bad guy and you find out through the film that somebody's inner life is maybe quite different from their outer appearance. One's integrity is not necessarily judged by surface appearances.
“I had a miserable relationship with my stepfather. That's another thing that drew me to this project. I was abused as well — not sexually but emotionally. I don't think I had a conversation with that man.
“I don't think that man asked me how I was in the seven years we lived together. I slept in the living room. Maybe that's why I love beautiful things now.
“When I was in Funny Girl (on Broadway) he finally came to see me. That morning I woke up with a scratched cornea so I almost couldn’t go on. But this was the day my stepfather was coming to see me in this play. So I had a doctor anaesthetise my eye so I could go on.
“And he sent me the only thing he ever sent me — a basket of candies. And after all those years I just threw it out.
“So, I got rid of him. I find these films are kind of cathartic. One is given a chance to express certain feelings and they get easier. They get easier to live with.”
But Streisand still apparently finds it difficult to live with her detractors. She’s a star by the most bottom line of all Hollywood’s bottom lines — she can sell tickets in any film. Could she not do anything she wanted?
“That’s a misconception. People are frightened by me. They think I come with some sort of reputation.
“I mean, it’s really offensive to me. Some of the stories, you know. Some of the arguments that Marty Ritt, the director and I had even over the final cut of the film were where I would say: ‘Take out that close-up of me.’
“But then he would say: ‘That’s a good close-up of you.’ Nobody would know those arguments. They would think an actress wanted close-ups herself. And it’s ridiculous.
“I have a lot of rage about a lot of things that are misinterpreted.
“I believe in telling the truth. I talk to people and they exaggerate the stories about me. Or they make up stories that are so silly.
“They never talk about my own self-doubt, searching for the essence of the truth, of the particular thing.
“I believe in the work. The work is my life. The joy is in the process of the work for me so I don’t understand all this other stuff.
“Somebody will write a very good review of Nuts and then they’ll say they used gauze filters and they heavily made her up to look 10 years younger. And I think: ‘Why don’t they just say I have good skin?’ That they would never do.
“Why do I have to be attacked for something that may be pleasant or good?”
She adds with a shrug: “I guess that is the price of success. And the price of fame. And people have to pull you down in some way to equalise you to their own failures.
“I think some people have a kind of vindictive nature. Like some guy on television saying: ‘Richard Dreyfuss was so wonderful in the film that Barbra Streisand will never do another movie with him.’ And I wrote a letter saying how they underestimate any artist of integrity.
“When you find people that are talented and gifted it is inspirational to me. When I see somebody like Meryl Streep in a wonderful piece of work it just inspires me.
“I don’t dislike her or wish her ill. It just makes me want to do better work. So I don’t understand that part of people’s nature that just wants to put down something.”
There is much talk here at present that she will soon marry Richard Baskin (of the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream dynasty which has more flavors than Heinz) but that seems to have more to do with real estate than emotions.
What got the talk going was Streisand’s decision to sell her house in Malibu. The property includes five homes — the art deco house, the Victorian house, the beach house, the guest house, the old caretaker house, a tennis court, black-tiled swimming pool, a gazebo, a running brook, rose garden and several spas and grottos, a car park within the main gate and sunset views of the Pacific.
But Streisand will not be drawn on romance.
After her drubbing over Yentl and not an Oscar nomination from her peers, the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, she says she finally believes that sexism exists in Hollywood.
“I tell you, I’ve been so naive about it. I never thought that it could possibly be. Really. Even when I was promoting Yentl and people asked me if it was difficult because I was a woman I thought, ‘No, I can’t imagine that’.
“As a woman you are considered an ego problem for some reason. If a man does it he’s just multi-faceted. That is sad. I think we have a long way to go.”
Nuts has won many favorable reviews and the indications are strong that Streisand will get an Oscar nomination for her big performance as Claudia Draper.
Will it finally be Yentl’s revenge‘? Does she think Hollywood will feel guilty and give her the best actress statuette in April?
She brushes the hair away from her creamy complexion and in the best “deli accent” offers: “I wouldn’t go to the bank on that.”
End.
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