Barbra Streisand: A Person Who Needs (Hollywood) People

For Barbra Streisand, this may be the best of times and the worst of times. At age 74, she’s just kicked off a new national tour with an acclaimed performance at L.A.’s Staples Center. The tour, modestly named “Barbra: The Music . . . the Mem’ries . . . The Magic!”, is designed to showcase a new duets album that goes on sale August 28. At the same time, the long-gestating new Barry Levinson film project, a reworking of the Broadway musical Gypsy, has once again lost its financing, and will not be starting production in fall as planned. Which means it’s more unlikely than ever that we’ll see Streisand play the iconic role of Mama Rose.

Gypsy, the 1959 Broadway hit that combined the talents of Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Jules Styne, and Stephen Sondheim, originally featured Ethel Merman as the indomitable mother of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s a role for a powerhouse singer as well as a great actress. The Hollywood “geniuses” behind the 1962 film version chose to cast Rosalind Russell, a Hollywood legend but not someone exactly known for her musical chops. (That’s one of many reasons the movie is barely remembered today.)  In major stage and TV revivals, the part has gone to Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bette Midler, and Bernadette Peters. From what I’ve learned from Neal Gabler’s respectful new biography, Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power, Mama Rose would be an ideal fit for Streisand. She certainly has the pipes for the job, as well as the combination of vulnerability and strength that the role demands.

 According to Gabler, Streisand’s goal was always to be an actress. She diligently studied the craft (fellow acting student Dustin Hoffman remembered her as “a hungry baby bird”), but of course it was singing that provided her with a breakthrough moment. It came with Broadway’s Funny Girl, the musicalized story of Ziegfeld Follies entertainer Fanny Brice. I learned from Gabler that director Jerome Robbins lobbied for Anne Bancroft to play the leading role. Others in contention included Broadway stalwart Mary Martin and comedienne Carol Burnett. Gabler describes Funny Girl as “a Jewish story of an outsider trying to win acceptance in a world of beauty and glamour wrapped around the story of romance doomed by a driven Jewish woman’s success.” Which made it the perfect role for Streisand, who shared both Brice’s ethnicity and her profound discomfort with her less-than-All-American looks. Writes Gabler, “Certainly others could have played Brice. But only Streisand had lived Brice.” 

The Broadway success of Funny Girl took Streisand to Hollywood, where she promptly became an Oscar winner. Thereafter she appeared in some not-entirely-suitable roles, like that of the middle-aged lead in Hello, Dolly! Gabler himself is most partial to The Way We Were, which he sees as revealing Streisand’s own personal strengths and weaknesses. The film’s failed romance with the character played by Robert Redford shows Streisand’s Katie  paying a price “for her moralizing, for her perfectionism, for her gutsiness, for her ardency,  for her stridency, for her lack of conformity—for all the things her fans had come to love about her and about her characters. She pays a price to be Barbra Streisand.”

Of course Streisand has played many other movie roles, and has been gutsy enough to defy the Hollywood system by directing herself in Yentl, The Prince of Tides, and The Mirror Has Two Faces. All have suffered critical slings and arrows, but the lady marches on. Who can forget the way she was? And we have high hopes for what she is yet to be.

A Live Interview Turns Deadly: Seeking Stardom in Roanoke

We’ve all heard by now about the bloody doings in Roanoke, Virginia: of how a disgruntled ex-reporter at WBDJ-TV shot and killed two of his former colleagues while they were in the midst of an on-air interview. My first thought, other than profound sympathy for the victims and their loved ones, was that this sounded like one more reminder that Paddy Chayefsky’s Network – which predicts on-air death as a ratings draw – is alive and well.

But my thinking evolved as I learned more about the behavior of Vester Lee Flanagan II, who went by the professional name of Bryce Williams. This was a man who was determined to be noticed. Not only did he fax to ABC News a lengthy diatribe spelling out his grievances but he also managed to videotape the actual shootings, then posted them on Facebook and Twitter, where they were seen by thousands before the accounts were taken down.

All of which reminds me of a book published by biographer and film historian Neal Gabler back in 1998. Gabler’s Life: The Movie begins by focusing on a movement he calls the Entertainment Revolution. Says Gabler, “the desire for entertainment—as an instinct, as a rebellion, as a form of empowerment, as a way of filling increased leisure time or simply as a means of enjoying pure pleasure—was already so insatiable in the nineteenth century that Americans rapidly began devising new methods to satisfy it.” If nineteenth-century Americans craved entertainment, how much more did it appeal to their mid-twentieth-century descendants, who could flick on their radios and television sets whenever they took the notion. And one of the century’s most popular political figures, Ronald Reagan, succeeded with the public because – as a professional movie actor – he knew just how to tap in to America’s love of stories with good-guy heroes and happy endings.

Though Reagan’s appeal was that of a man in a white hat, some seriously flawed human beings have also sought public attention as the leading actors in big public dramas. And, to a certain extent at least, the mass media have helped them make their case. Gabler points out that Timothy McVeigh, later to be convicted for the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, was actively courted by news sources to tell his story. The result was a soulful photo on the cover of Newsweek; he also negotiated for the right to choose among such celebrity interviewers as Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw, with the program to be aired during a ratings-sweeps week.

Gabler informs us that “John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, had left a tableau in his hotel room—a photo of Judy Garland with the Cowardly Lion, a Bible inscribed to Holden Caulfield (the protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye), a photo of himself with refugee children—that he thought would suggest a motive behind his crime. In short, he was providing a theme as well as an act.” And we learn that Arthur Bremer, who in 1972 would shoot and paralyze presidential candidate George Wallace, explicitly viewed himself as an actor in a film, “so much so that while stalking President Nixon, his initial target, he missed the chance to kill him when he raced back to his hotel to change into a black suit.”    

Social media, of course, makes it all the easier to become an overnight celebrity. Now Vester Flanagan is just that. But of course he’s dead . . . and so are two journalists who were unlucky enough to cross his path.