Totally Phony Barbra Streisand

Babs Rises to the Level of Her Incompetence

Barbra Streisand has a gorgeous talent for belting out show tunes. She has a gift for middlebrow humor; she was perfectly cast as the gawky Fanny Brice in the ‘62 Broadway musical Funny Girl. Six years later she won an Academy Award for playing Brice in William Wylers’s adaptation of Funny Girl. It was Streisand’s first film role.

The Oscar ceremonies were on April 14, 1969 and were the first to be telecast to a world-wide audience in more than 35 countries. Streisand wore an Arnold Scaase-designed see-through ensemble that gave millions of viewers a glimpse of her pink behind. In that dress, Streisand started the trend for female immodesty at the Oscars.

Also, for the first time in Oscar history, two actresses, Streisand and Katherine Hepburn had tied for the best actress award. Here’s the weird part: Streisand had only recently been admitted to Academy membership and we can assume that she voted for herself. If she had not been admitted as a voting member of the Academy, then she would have lost the award by one vote, her own!

Barbra used her popular albums as stepping stones to television specials that showcased her voice and the sort of songs that made her sound her best. She was in her prime; it was the golden moment of the sappy ballad. She was the queen of schmaltz.

By the mid 1970s Streisand was an ascendant star rising toward the threshold of her own, as yet unrealized, incompetence. That’s when she was recklessly cast in a remake of William Wellman’s A Star Is Born (1937). George Cukor had reworked Wellman’s story as a musical in 1954. In the 70’s John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion got the idea of resetting this story amid the funk and glitz of rock music stardom.

Streisand and her erstwhile boy friend, Jon Peters, (he had been her hair dresser) rolled onto the set just as Dunne and Didion were making their getaway: things were falling apart and the A-Team was wisely heading for the exit. Who actually wrote or directed the film is anyone’s guess; Frank Pierson got the on-screen directing credit.

In the film Streisand is supposed to be playing an over-night rock sensation, but the result is grotesque. Her roots are in musical theater; she’s a brassy dame in the Ethyl Merman tradition; she couldn’t sing convincing rock if her life depended on it. In fact, there is no recognizable rock music anywhere in the film. Streisand gave herself a screen credit for something called “Musical Concepts,” a platter-full of homogenized harmonics that tried to pass for rock in this 1976 film. Writing for Newsweek, film critic Jay Cocks lamented that “not a single song is good enough even to be counterfeit. There are wimpy ballads and, on occasion, an up-tempo number that might make the Peter Duchin Orchestra restless.” Since Streisand had the creative clout, it was her film to screw up. The critic noted: “A concert sequence, where the debuting Barbra brings a hostile rocker audience to their feet with the wonder of her funkiness, is a milestone of piquant absurdity, equivalent, perhaps, to having Kate Smith conquer Woodstock.”

Babs was clearly blind to the limits of her talent; it takes more than vocal virtuosity to sing rock or country or the blues; if it were otherwise, classically- trained opera divas would blow the rockers off the charts just for drill. Streisand couldn’t muster the needed essence for the job, so she tried to fake it; the result was unintended absurdity. And yet . . ., she wanted to be a maker of great art, a thinker of deep thoughts, and so she plodded on.

Today Babs is sixty-three years old and a generous contributor to Democrat candidates, which makes her something of a party muckamuck, at least among the party’s professional fund raisers. They all listen respectfully to her opinions.

Babs generously shares her insights on her website. Her “Truth Alerts” often reveal more truths than Streisand intended: her appalling sentence structures, her misspellings of even her friends’ names (Dick “Gebhardt”), her belief that Sadam (sic) Hussein is the bossman of Iran and weird non-historical nonsense about “black battalions” liberating German concentration camps. Nonetheless, those whacky editors at Los Angeles magazine chose Streisand’s website as “Web Site of the Month” for February 2003, as Streisand’s website itself reports. Babs responded with this run-on sentence: “We wish to share this honor with our visitors who have made BarbraStreisand.com one of the most frequented sites offering a meeting place for the examination of social and political issues which sometimes receive meager coverage in general media outlets.” Whew!

Yentl Goes Environmental

Certainly, California’s energy crisis has received lots of attention. That state’s governor, Gray Davis, made the crisis inevitable by pandering to the anti-development crowd and by obligating California to purchase out-of-state energy at above-market prices. That earned him a recall election. Madam Streisand, a self-described environmental activist, responded to this mess by contributing money to a counter-movement to block the recall. She also told her website readers how they could save valuable energy: use more clotheslines. All the laundering masses needed was more rope. When asked if Babs has a clothesline of her own, a spokesperson for La Streisand responded that Ms. S wasn’t necessarily referring to herself. Translation: you won’t be seeing Barbra’s designer duds flapping in the breeze any time soon; the nearest she’ll ever come to a line of clothes is Versace. The joke making the rounds was that Streisand saves energy at laundry time by discarding her clothes and shopping for new ones. A spokeswoman for Citizens Repulsed by Actors’ and Singers’ Stances (CRASS) suggested that Streisand’s many fans could save lots of energy by not playing her albums.

What the energy guzzling Ms. Streisand is really saying is that lots of energy would be saved if other people followed her guidelines; this from the woman who reportedly kept the 16 unoccupied rooms of her Central Park West triplex so cold that meat wouldn’t spoil there, even as she was admonishing you to set your air conditioner at 78 degrees. You can’t reason with minds like hers; it would be like trying to reason with Rosie O’Donnell about her stance on gun control. You couldn’t do it. If you were brash enough to attempt it, her big gun-toting bodyguards would get in your face. Rosie deserves armed protection and you don’t. That’s her position. End of argument and get lost, if you know what’s good for you.

Babs Meets Her Match

In 1996 Kenneth Adelman sold a company he had co-founded to Cisco Systems for 115 million dollars. Four years later, he sold his next company, Network Alchemy, to Nokia for another 335 million dollars. Then he retired at age 37. But did Ken kick back, pop a brew, put his feet up and enjoy the sunset? Not on your life! Ken was gripped by a sudden desire to photograph every inch of the California coastline. He wanted his photo album to be a pictorial record against which future photos could be compared for indications of environmental degradation.

So, in 1996, Ken and his wife Gabrielle fired up the family Robinson R44 helicopter (25 gallons of fuel per hour and no pollution controls) and flew off to take some snaps.

With Gabrielle flying the chopper and a Global Positioning System recording the latitude and longitude of each shot, Ken would lean out into the clear air and take a photo every three seconds with a Nikon digital camera. They photographed every nook and crag of the California coast, with the exception of Vandenberg Air Force Base near Point Conception, from which the government launches defense satellites into Earth orbit. The Adelmans claim to have recorded about 1,100 miles of shoreline, which exceeds the state’s “official” 840 miles.

Their final album includes about 12,700 images, which the Adelmans have posted on their website at www.californiacoastline.org. It’s an impressive collection. It’s called the California Coastal Records Project.

The Adelmans were enjoying the warm glow of congratulation when word came that pop diva and sometime environmental dilettante Barbra Streisand was suing them for 50 million dollars for being so insolent as to include in their vast photo collection a single pic of Streisand’s sprawling Malibu mansion perched high atop Point Dume. Streisand’s legal papers branded Mr. Adelman as a “self-appointed vigilante of the skies” who “might next want to swoop down and. . .take pictures of homes. . .all under the pretext that he is documenting the environment. No one would be spared.”

Ah, yes, he might swoop down like a bat and frighten little Babs, who has a long history of fearing flying machines. The papers report that, to avoid flying, she gratefully accepted the loan of a van and driver from Whoopi Goldberg and endured two long trips to Canada to visit actor James Brolin who was on location pretending, against all odds, to be Ronald Reagan.

In any case, Adelman had shot all his photos from a respectful altitude of 500 feet and from a great enough distance to include a generous sweep of the shoreline. He used a standard lens (50mm?), not a telephoto lens.

Streisand demanded that the photo of her mansion be removed from the collection. The Adelmans refused to do so, arguing that the photos were an historic document. Ken Adelman explained: “The biggest reason not to comply is that what we do for Barbra we would have to do for everyone else. If we took down her photo and caption, we’d eventually have to take down the whole thing. We don’t feel we can make exceptions for the people who are wealthy enough to sue us.” He says that his personal wealth gives him the clout to stand up to Streisand and her estimated 100-million-dollar bank account (People magazine). To date the Streisand suit has cost Adelman $250,000; that’s five times what it cost him to photograph the California coastline.

Just for fun, Ken Adelman posted on his website every letter, legal document and flaming rant that Streisand fired at him. Together, these letters form a portrait of Streisand as a hyperventilating ninny. Adelman says that prior to the wave of publicity that her lawsuit provoked, the photo of Streisand’s rambling hilltop hideout was downloaded only six times in three months. After Streisand shot her mouth off, an average of 108,000 people viewed the photo each day. So mama was right, the shrieky schlemiel gets the most ogle! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one.)

Streisand claimed that the photo invaded her privacy. She said the crude map next to the photo would encourage stalkers. Here’s the photo. Stalkers will please refrain from visiting the world-famous Ms. Streisand’s sprawling California compound perched atop Point Dume, in the snooty Mahou Riviera section of Malibu, at the end of Wildlife Road.

Thomas Clough
Copyright 2003
September 18, 2003