Barbra Streisand: Sacred Cow

The tragedy of all this is that it could have been different. K- mart talents such as Sylvester Stallone and Julio Iglesias appeal to the same general, culturally petrified audiences as Streisand, but even if they had tried being something other than what they are, they would have failed. Kenny Rogers didn't become Kenny Rogers because the Mick Jagger role was already filled; he became Kenny Rogers because he's a two-bit lounge lizard who's lucky he's not lounging with an even worse class of lizards. Streisand, on the other hand, started out with talent, panache, and even a certain bohemian charm, then worked her way down to the over-night rental bin. The Streisand of Funny Girl, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Owl and the Pussycat, What's Up, Doc? and even For Pete's Sake, the Streisand who had not yet succumbed to her own self-delusions, could have been-- in fact, was--a terrific comedienne, could have made a whole string of intelligent, entertaining, commercially viable comedies that would have won her the grudging esteem of the Woody Allen crowd, the revival house crowd, the post-collegiate artsy crowd. And yes, even the critics. Well, maybe.

But, as Shaun Considine makes clear in his encyclopedic and highly entertaining Barbra Streisand: The Woman, the Myth, the Music (which isn't nearly as pretentious as the title would suggest), Streisand didn't even like What's Up, Doc? She thought it was small. She thought it was beneath her. In fact, it was one of the last great screwball comedies made in this country. Released just a few years before the film industry would single-handedly be nuked by the cheeseball, adolescent comedy of Murray, Chase, Aykroyd, Belushi, Candy, Moranis, Ramis & Waterhouse. What's Up, Doc? is still a hilarious motion picture. "It really holds up," as those of us born less recently than Sting say. Directed by the young and still gifted Peter Bogdanovich, and featuring the young and still gifted Madeline Kahn (her debut role, in fact), the young and still gifted (however briefly) Ryan O'Neal, and assorted other young and still gifted actors and actresses (Randy Quaid, Michael Murphy), the movie had a clever plot, snappy dialogue, a sprightly and civilized soundtrack, a terrific car chase, and a sympathetic, winning Barbra Streisand, who had somehow been cajoled into acting, and not turning into a one-woman wrecking crew. But Streisand never made another movie like that. She wanted to do important work. Important work like...A Star Is Born.

A Star Is Born is the most explicitly autobiographical of Streisand's films, her ham-fisted attempt to abolish the 1960s, an era she was in, but manifestly not of. The ludicrous premise of this, one of her most commercially successful films, is that a good-looking, talented, yet self-destructive rock singer not unlike Jim Morrison would have fallen head over heels in love with an insipid cabaret singer not unlike Melissa Manchester. In the history of idiotic movies--and, indeed, in the history of idiotic movies entitled A Star Is Born--there are very few scenes more shamefacedly self-adulatory than the moment when Streisand, attending a benefit concert for American Indians, captivates a roomful of hard rock fans with her schlocky ballads. Such an occurrence does not square with my recollection of what was known in both the late 1960s and middle 1970s as Reality. If Barbra Streisand had appeared at, say, the concert for Bangladesh, and tried to upstage George Harrison or Bob Dylan, the fans might very well have used the money raised for the starving children of Bangladesh to buy up the world's remaining food supplies and starve her instead. In a stadium filled with real-live, hard-core, rock 'n' roll fans, Barbra Streisand would have had a hard time upstaging Badfinger, much less Ringo Starr. Unless, of course, Streisand had sent all their bodies to heaven, and their minds south.

But I digress.

If Barbra Streisand is an artist who really and truly wanted to be taken seriously, how do we explain such odd career moves as the hopelessly retro Funny Lady of 1975, in which she tries to breathe life back into a form--the big-budget musical--that was already on its last legs when she was making Funny Girl nearly a decade earlier? How do we explain doomed salvage jobs such as All Night Long, in which Streisand, having turned down They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and Cabaret, gamely subbed for then-rising star Lisa Eichhorn in a lame comedy starring that all-purpose cut-up Gene Hackman? Is the lure of easy money that powerful? Apparently.

Since this article is being written by a man, a legitimate argument can be made that the author has a genetic indisposition toward Streisand the Emasculator. Indeed, Streisand's most enduring contribution to our civilization could be as a feminist role model: the Ugly Duckling who makes it big by chewing up and spitting out men. In this sense, she has much in common with Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi, certified ballbusters all, who didn't get where they got by being kewpie dolls. Conversely, they would have probably chosen better roles than The Main Event and A Star Is Born. And avoided unflattering scenes involving leotards.

Continuing this thought, let us recall that, while blazing her way across the silver screen, Streisand has had the help of an extraordinarily docile group of male and maleish co-stars who apparently did not mind getting bent, torn, folded and mutilated by their leading lady. Her list of victims includes such professional pretty boys as Omar Sharif and Ryan O'Neal, a pair of post-Watergate sensitive guys (Kris Kristofferson, Robert Redford|, and even a few would-be mensches (Richard Dreyfuss, George Segal, Mandy Patinkin) who simply don't have the firepower to compete with what is less a living, breathing human being than a force of nature. With the exception of Walter Matthau, who apparently loathed working with her on Hello Dolly! (as he gamely told anyone who would listen), Streisand makes mincemeat out of this gang. This is particularly true in the case of Kristofferson, who caps off his desecration of Jim Morrison's memory by climbing into his sportscar, putting the pedal to the metal, replacing one of his dreary tapes with one of hers, and then committing suicide. Faced with a choice between suicide and having to listen to "Evergreen" again, I think he made the right decision. (For an even more monumental hoot, catch the lighter sequence at the end of A Star Is Born, as well as the scene where Kristofferson tells Streisand that hearing her sing was like "hooking a marlin." Which, in many ways, it was.)

Moreover, in what has to be depressing news for plain-looking women trying to make it big in Hollywood, Streisand's success does not seem to have spawned a subsequent generation of Streisands. (One Bette Midler does not a generation make.) Unlike Dustin Hoffman, whose success opened the door for a lot of other short guys who don't look like Charlton Heston or Leslie Howard, Streisand has not institutionalized her success. While the ranks of male movie stars abound with actors sporting unconventional looks, the female stars of the 1970s and the 1980s are still pretty much the same as female stars of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s: babes. Plus, of course, Meryl Streep.

When all is said and done, Streisand's is one of the truly weird careers in the history of show business. Much of her appeal lies in the very fact that she embodies everything that is tacky and cheap and hopelessly corny and unsophisticated about Middle America. Consider the memorable scene in A Star Is Born when Streisand, deftly fingering a "serious" piece of classical music on Kristofferson's piano, tells him that the composition is an original piece that "people think will be a sonata when it grows up." In fact, the treacly composition is a rip-off of the "Moonlight Sonata" by Ludwig van Beethoven, who, though deaf, was never dumb. The piece Streisand plays is Beethoven after he's been put through the Muzak meat grinder. It's high art the way low rollers imagine it.

This is, in fact, the key to all of Streisand's work. A Star Is Born is the 1960s the way the Hello Dolly! crowd imagined it. The Way We Were is the McCarthy Era the way the Funny Girl crowd imagined it (bear in mind that the folks lefty Streisand was handing out leaflets for included Josef Stalin). Yentl is Eastern Europe, circa 1904, the way Western Hollywood, circa 1983, imagined it: more songs, fewer pogroms (the educationally deficient Barbra, according to Shaun Considine, was not aware that the Nazis had destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto, a fact which, we might add, made it all but impossible to shoot "Papa, Can You Hear Me?" there). All of these films are stupid, crass and false, an insult to anyone who ever grew up in any of these places, or lived through any of these eras. Or died in any of them. Obviously, all of them made money.

Let's face it: Streisand should have stuck to comedies, where she had the knack. She could have been hilarious. Instead, in seeking to carve out what she imagined would be an even larger place for herself, she made herself into a figure of mirth. By the time she blew her wad on Nuts, with the scenes of her flashing her money maker at a perplexed and perhaps even terrified Richard Dreyfuss, offering to autograph cheesecake photos, and slugging her attorney, Streisand had completely lost touch with reality. Her mind had gone south.

My favorite moment in any of Streisand's films is the hilarious scene in The Way We Were where Streisand tries to talk Redford out of selling his novel to a Hollywood studio because he's "too good" to work in the movie business. Barbra Streisand trying to talk Robert Redford out of going to Hollywood because it would com-promise his artistic integrity7. What planet did this conversation take place on?

Beam me up, Scotty.

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Joe Queenan wrote about Woody Allen in our May issue.

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