![]() ![]() Barbra's house actually seems more modest than most, hidden as it is by a wall and high trees. It's a swell neighborhood, every house a castle, every lawn a sculpture. ![]() If only she could interview herself!Īt dusk, I press the intercom buzzer outside Barbra's Holmby Hills estate. The morning after her last concert, she's in the studio editing footage for the TV special and mixing tracks for the inevitable concert album. But she's given herself no time to do it. Nor is she uninterested in how the tour has affected her, what seems more important now and what matters less. Why introduce a rogue cell of uncertainty into your biosphere when you've sold out Madison Square Garden in 20 minutes flat without it?īut the tour has gone so well - even by Barbra's standards-that perhaps she can't help thinking, though she won't quite say it, that a small celebration might be in order: a bit of rumination on a job well done, a sort of setting things to rest. She hates surrendering control to writers who can shape their stories as they please, pulling quotes out of context, slipping in inaccuracies. Through this spangled year, which has seen her rise again, with a flick of her will, to the very top of the entertainment business, Barbra has shunned nearly all interview requests. "I'm proud of you."īarbra, a woman of 52 for whom her mother's approval remains a complex issue, looks vulnerable again. "You did good," her mother says, a bit grudgingly it seems to me, in not much more than a whisper. Streisand leans toward her, one legendarily slim-fingered, long-nailed hand keeping her blond pageboy from her face. Mercifully, Streisand's mother, in a wheelchair, is pushed to the fore. "One hundred cities, a million dollars a city! How can they say that? I've done six cities! Six! And do you know what it costs to stage a production like this?" "They wrote I'm making $100 million from this tour," she begins without preamble. Painfully thin-skinned, she remembers every journalistic slight, and the name of the journalist who rendered it her mental blacklist goes back decades. "Barbra," says her friend Ellen Gilbert, "this is The Journalist."īarbra makes an effort not to grimace, but isn't entirely successful. Smaller than she looks onstage, Barbra seems to take in each compliment as if it were the first: pleased, but not entirely believing. Still, the hour is late.Īt last, a chosen few of the backstage contingent are ushered into the adjoining white-carpeted, meticulously organized dressing room. Which is why shows sold out at record-breaking ticket prices of up to $350, and why a sense of show-business history hung over the tour. The thrill of hearing that voice live has been matched only by the thrill audiences have felt in pulling Barbra through the tour after 27 years of paralyzing stage fright. They watch Barbra on the monitor, and hear again that crystalline voice rising, rising-and then, at the break where almost every other singer goes reedy, blazing higher so that you feel, as her conductor Marvin Hamlisch puts it, that she's pulled you through. In the airless room, the well-wishers grow restless. Barbra can never leave well enough alone. The concert has been filmed, and the cameras hired for the evening-so why not get a few extra songs out of it? Maybe she'll use them for the video-cassette, maybe for the HBO special. Here is a very pregnant Annette Bening, exhausted from the standing ovations that began when Barbra Streisand walked out onstage.īut Barbra is still out singing. In an airless, white-walled room, friends wait to pay homage. In Holmby Hills, MICHAEL SHNAYERSON tries to set the record straight with the woman who only wants everything to be perfect A STAR IS REBORN by Michael Shnayerson Photographs by Annie Leibovitzīackstage, last night of the tour, Anaheim, California. Vanity Fair November 1994 After the sold-out concerts, the million-dollar auctions, the nights in the Lincoln Bedroom, and the whispers about Andre Agasasi and Peter Jennings, Barbra Streisand still feels that, for all that has been written about her, no one has ever gotten the story quite right. ![]()
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