Barbra by Andersen Christopher

Author:Andersen, Christopher [Andersen, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-23T11:37:09+00:00

A few days after Jason’s bar mitzvah, Barbra flew to New York B A R B R A

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and was soon seen out on the town with a handsome, middle-aged millionaire businessman. Liz Smith referred to Barbra’s new escort only as “Mr. X,” which was enough to send Jon Peters into a frenzy. He called Barbra and begged her to take him back. She did, though only reluctantly. “I missed him,” she told a friend. “We fight like hell, but maybe that’s what love is all about. I just wish he wouldn’t get as mad as he does . . .”

Taking Peters back was easy, since she had never had any interest in pursuing a romance with “Mr. X.” The stranger Barbra had been seen around New York with was aspiring Israeli film producer Arnon Milchan. She had hoped that Milchan would help her raise money for a movie project based on a short story by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. The story was called “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.”

On February 27, 1980, millions of television viewers tuning into the Grammy Awards were stunned when, suddenly and unannounced, Streisand and Neil Diamond appeared on opposite sides of the stage and began singing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” As they walked toward each other and finally met in the center of the stage, pandemonium erupted in L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium. Then, at the song’s conclusion, Diamond took Barbra’s hand and kissed it. The entire scene had been elaborately choreographed by Barbra, who had phoned Diamond up hours before the show and given him his marching orders.

Barbra was genuinely shocked at the excitement she and Diamond had been able to create. “She still lived in a kind of bubble of insecurity,” said a former employee. “She distrusted the public, really, and even though she worked like a Trojan and always seemed to have a hundred projects going at once, Barbra liked to call herself lazy. So these spontaneous outpourings of love always took her by surprise. She used to say, ‘I thought they’d forgotten me.’ Like she was Gloria Swanson or something.”

Indeed, Streisand was already hard at work with another pop act—the biggest in the business at the time. The Bee Gees—

brothers Maurice, Robin, and Barry Gibb—had managed to score an unprecedented six number one singles in a row after the release of their record-smashing Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album.

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C H R I S T O P H E R A N D E R S E N

It would take nearly two years of hard negotiations between Barbra and the Bee Gees’ flamboyant manager, Robert Stigwood, who at first insisted that the royalties on any album be divided equally among Barbra and each of the Brothers Gibb. In the end, Stigwood knuckled under to Barbra’s demand that she get half the proceeds and the brothers share the rest.

Creatively, however, it was Barbra who knuckled under. While she worried that her voice might be overwhelmed by the Bee Gees’

distinctive falsetto harmonies, Barry Gibb feared she would try to push the brothers too far into the background.

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