The sweltering heat at the Hello, Dolly! location in Garrison, New York, threatened to undo everyone. Whenever she wasn’t before the camera, Barbra tried to keep cool and protect her makeup by pointing a small portable electric fan at her face. Tensions had been rife throughout the shoot, which had begun in April after two months of rehearsals. But on Thursday, June 6, 1968, tempers reached the exploding point after a national tragedy stunned America: in the early morning hours of June 5, shortly after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary, Senator Robert Kennedy had been shot, and twenty-five hours later, early Thursday morning, he died.

Although Barbra had supported Eugene McCarthy, she sympathized with most of Kennedy’s positions and would very likely have campaigned for him had he won the nomination to run against the Republican standard-bearer, former vice president Richard Nixon. When she heard the news of the shooting, she felt nearly as devastated as she had when the senator’s brother, President Kennedy, had been killed.

Barbra’s co-star, the hangdog comic actor Walter Matthau, was appalled by the latest instance of rampant violence in America. “I was in a mean, foul mood. I took it hard,” he said. “I was knocked out. It was one hundred degrees. Giant brutes [lights with tremendous wattage] surrounded us in a complicated outdoor scene. My head felt as though it was being smashed.”

The film’s director, the former MGM musical star Gene Kelly, brought Barbra, Matthau, several extras, and the crew together to shoot a scene in which Barbra’s character, Dolly Levi, and Matthau’s character, Horace Vandergelder, are sitting in a wagon outside Vandergelder’s hay-and-feed store. As Kelly explained what he wanted everyone to do, Barbra made a suggestion. She had an idea for a humorous exchange between the characters. “Why don’t we say something like this?” she piped up, and recited some lines of dialogue. She remembered that most of the crew laughed with appreciation.

Walter Matthau, however, blew his top. “Who does she think she is?” he bellowed. “I’ve been in thirty movies, and this is only her second—the first one hasn’t even come out yet—and she thinks she’s directing?!”

Gene Kelly grabbed Matthau’s arm and tried to pull him away. “I went into a wild, furious, incoherent tirade about her,” Matthau recalled. Barbra stood speechless as her co-star railed on. “Why don’t you let him direct?” Matthau shouted, waving in Kelly’s direction. “You don’t have to be great all the time.”

Barbra fought back tears. “Why don’t you learn your lines?” she shot back. “You’re just jealous because you’re not as good as I am!”

“You might be the singer in this picture,” Matthau roared, “but I’m the actor! You haven’t got the talent of a butterfly’s fart!”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Barbra said of Matthau’s harangue. “I had no defense. I stood there and I was so humiliated I started to cry, and then I ran away.”

“Everybody in this company hates you!” Matthau shouted after her. “Go ahead, walk off! But just remember, Betty Hutton thought she was indispensable, too.”

Barbra ran to her dressing room and telephoned the film’s writer-producer, Ernest Lehman. “She was sobbing,” Lehman recalled, “and she said, ‘Please come over right away.’ I came rushing down, and she poured out all of her sorrow at the way Walter talked to her and the things he said about her. I did my best to soothe her.”

“Barbra cried for a long time,” Gene Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Cut the lights,’ stopped everything. We went into a little store and straightened it out.” Three hours later the still-seething stars completed the scene.

FROM THE VERY outset, Barbra’s participation in the film version of Hello, Dolly! had stirred up resentment. When Ernest Lehman announced her casting on May 8, 1967, Streisand faced a wave of outrage from fans of the show, who felt that Carol Channing, who had played Dolly Gallagher Levi on Broadway for over two years, then had taken the show on the road and helped make it the highest-grossing touring musical in history, should have been given the chance to immortalize her performance on film. In 1967 Carol Channing was as much identified with the character of Dolly Levi as Barbra was with Fanny Brice.

What made Channing’s slight all the worse was that the twenty-five-year-old Barbra seemed so clearly wrong for the part of the irrepressible middle-aged Irish widow trying to get back into the swing of life fourteen years after the death of her husband, Ephraim. The fact that Barbra was a totally untried commodity in movies added insult to injury, especially when Twentieth Century-Fox trumpeted the fact that her signing—at a salary of $600,000, Lehman recalled—was “the largest single film deal in history with a performer who has never before appeared in a motion picture.” In the past, when a Broadway star was denied a chance to re-create a role on screen, the rationale had usually been that the project required a proven movie box-office draw to guarantee its commercial success.

Channing desperately wanted the movie version of Dolly, and in the hope that a successful film performance would boost her chances, she took the supporting role of a zany heiress-aviator in George Roy Hill’s comedy Thoroughly Modern Millie, which starred Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore. “I really wanted to use Carol Channing in the picture,” Lehman recalled. “I mean, who else would you use? But then I saw a rough cut of Thoroughly Modern Millie. I thought she looked a little grotesque, cartoonish. I felt very guilty because Carol is a lovely woman and she and her husband had been so nice to me and my wife. But I honestly felt I couldn’t take a whole movie in which Carol was in practically every scene. Her personality is just too much for the cameras to contain.”

Lehman then considered Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he had just worked as the writer and producer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but Richard Zanuck, Twentieth Century-Fox’s head of production, had called that notion “the single worst casting idea I’ve ever heard.” Zanuck felt similarly about Julie Andrews, to whom Lehman had sent the Dolly script. Lehman had run out of ideas when he had dinner with Mike Nichols, the director of Virginia Woolf. According to Lehman, “Mike said to me, ‘Why don’t you cast Barbra Streisand as Dolly? She’d be great.’ I said, ‘Gee, I don’t know. What is she, twenty-four?’ But the more I thought about what her voice could do with that score... Then I’d think, ‘But she’s not right for it.’ Then I’d tell myself, ‘Forget that she’s not right for it. Just forget that.’” Richard Zanuck, who loved the idea of Barbra as Dolly, arranged a meeting for himself, Barbra, her agent Freddie Fields, and Lehman at Hollywood’s Bistro restaurant a few days after Barbra arrived in town in May 1967. “It was the first time I’d seen the Hollywood Miss Streisand,” Lehman recalled. “She wore a broad-brimmed hat, and I kept peeking under it and saying, ‘Do you mind if I look at you?’ And all she kept saying was, ‘Why me? Why me? I’m too young for the role.’

“I kept coming up with all the reasons she should do it: she was such a vivid personality, her voice was one of the all-time greats, she was going to be a tremendous star in pictures. I gave her every reason I could think of. I never had any doubt that she could do it, or that she would be a huge movie star. We never even tested her. She was a known quantity as one of the greats of all time. Making the transition to movies was only a formality. Finally she said yes, and I was ecstatic.”

When the announcement was made, Carol Channing sent Barbra flowers and a gracious note of congratulations. When the bouquet arrived, Barbra told a reporter, “I called Elliott right away and told him about it, very excited. He said, ‘Yes, I already read about it in the paper.’”

The press came down firmly on Carol’s side. The Washington Post called Barbra’s casting “knuckle-headed.” Other observers called it “cynical,” “mercenary,” “unfathomable.” Lehman defended his choice and pointed out that Thornton Wilder, who wrote The Matchmaker, the play on which Hello, Dolly! was based, had described Dolly as a woman of “uncertain” age. “She could well be in her thirties,” Lehman suggested.

Barbra attempted to defend her selection as well, but her customary bluntness redounded to her further detriment. “It’s so ridiculous and boring,” she said of the controversy. “They can cast anyone they want in a picture. I can’t help it if I get the part. I don’t know whether I’m right for it or not. I haven’t even read the script. If they pick the wrong person for a part, that’s their problem. Everybody wants to be a casting director.”

To round out the cast, Lehman hired Michael Crawford and Danny Lockin to play Vandergelder’s clerks, and Marianne McAndrew and E. J. Peaker as Irene Molloy and Minnie Fay, the milliners they take out on the town in New York. Lehman had tested a number of actresses to play Irene Molloy, among them Phyllis Newman, Yvette Mimieux, and Ann-Margret, before deciding on the unknown McAndrew. “One reason we didn’t hire Ann-Margret was that she had too sexy an image for such a sweetness-and-light character as Irene Molloy,” Lehman said.

EVEN AFTER SHE signed for the part, Barbra harbored deep reservations about her casting. When she saw the show on Broadway she had considered it “a piece of fluff” and felt the audience sat through it waiting to hear the title tune, which had become a number one hit for Louis Armstrong in 1964. “I wasn’t gonna do it. I tried to convince them that it would be more emotional if it were the story of an older woman whose time is running out and she has to make the most of it. I thought Elizabeth Taylor should play it.” Taylor was thirty-five at the time.

But Barbra got over her concern that Dolly Levi had traditionally been played as middle-aged. “This woman is a widow, but this doesn’t mean she has to be old,” she said. “After all, she could be a widow of nineteen, married a year, who’d lost her husband in a war.” But some of the meddlesome Dolly’s characteristics made Barbra uncomfortable because they hit a little too close to home. “I was reluctant to show the part of me that is very Dolly Levi—ish,” she admitted, like “searching for bargains and all that.”

Still, the excitement of the opportunity to star in the film versions of both the two biggest Broadway hits of 1964, not to mention her salary and a percentage of the box-office take, had finally convinced Barbra that she should accept the role. “It was fun thinking about the jewelry I’d wear, stuff that I had and loved that I thought would be good for Dolly. And I liked the idea of being able to laugh and smile a lot, which I usually don’t do—I mean, I’m not much of a laugher.”

IT WAS SYDNEY Chaplin who had poisoned his friend Walter Matthau’s mind against Barbra. Chaplin had given Matthau such an earful of his complaints about her during the Funny Girl run that by the time Matthau met Barbra, at a Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie in 1965, he felt he had to avenge his friend’s agony. He walked up to Streisand at intermission and said, “Oh, you’re Barbara Harris. I see you’ve had your nose done.”

“I was so shocked I couldn’t even answer him,” Barbra later said.

When he was cast as the grumpy Yonkers hay-and-feed merchant Horace Vandergelder, the “well-known unmarried half a millionaire” on whom Dolly sets her sights, the forty-seven-year-old Matthau felt “a strange kind of attraction to the fact that I was going to work with Streisand. I almost knew that I was going to blow up at her.”

As soon as the rehearsals got under way, Matthau started to seethe. “I tried very, very hard to be civil, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to be civil to her. When she ‘acts’—and I say that in quotes—she likes to tell the director when the other actors should come in. She pretends as though she’s asking, but she’s overstepping her boundaries. She should simply be the instrument of the director, and not be the conductor, the composer, the scene designer, the acting coach, et cetera.”

Matthau became furious with Barbra when he recorded the title tune, which Horace sings to Dolly at the end of the film. “She laughed,” he said. “She would break up every time I sang a line in the recording booth. I had to re-record everything.”

“I was laughing at Vandergelder the character,” Barbra explained later. “I wasn’t laughing at Walter. Actually, I like the way he sings very much.”

Less than a week before filming began on April 15, 1968, Barbra appeared at the Academy Awards ceremony to present the Best Song Oscar. She wore the high, tightly curled “Colette” hairstyle she had been partial to for a while. The next day Matthau asked her, “That hairdo you wore—was that supposed to make the audience laugh?”

“Why are you so cruel?” Barbra responded. “That hairdo is the latest fashion.”

“I just wondered if you meant it to be funny.”

“You are a very hostile person,” Barbra told him and walked away.

Once filming began, Matthau’s antagonism grew with every suggestion Barbra made, every one of her requests for a retake. “The thing about working with her was that you never knew what she was going to do next and were afraid she’d do it. I found it a most unpleasant picture to work on and, as most of my scenes were with her, extremely distasteful.... I was appalled by every move she made.”

Ernest Lehman took Barbra’s side in almost all of her disputes with Matthau, and still does today. “Walter’s a grump. He’s a great guy, but he’s a grump, a complainer. He scowls a lot. He resented that she would speak up and make suggestions to the director, which was something that he wouldn’t do. And he felt kind of shunted off to the side. He was an old pro and he thought, ‘Who’s this upstart kid who’s getting all this attention?’ And boy did she get attention. When she was around, you knew she was around. I couldn’t very well ignore her and say, ‘Yes, Walter, what can we do for you, Walter?’

“Barbra wasn’t full of herself; she didn’t have an ego. I think just the opposite. If she were full of herself she wouldn’t have been so concerned about everything being just right. She’s never been a person who feels her own perfection. She was a very insecure person, doubting her own worth, especially interpersonally. She dabbled in everything. Her opinion was ‘We’re all in this together, and it’s the result that’s gonna count, not how we got there.’”

Matthau thought Barbra should keep her own counsel, but when he went to Richard Zanuck to complain about her (“Do I need a heart attack? Do I need an ulcer?”), Zanuck replied, “I’d like to help you, but the film isn’t called Hello, Walter.”

Lehman seems to have been somewhat infatuated with his star. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. There’s something very beautiful about her as a woman,” he said. “Elizabeth Taylor was a very beautiful woman when I made Virginia Woolf with her, but I never had the same feeling about her.” During the first meeting in his office with Barbra, Matthau, and Gene Kelly, Barbra said to Lehman, “Ernie, why do you keep looking at me.”

“I don’t know,” Lehman replied, flustered.

“Well, please stop looking at me all the time.”

“I can’t help it,” he said sheepishly.

“When she was in a room with other people,” Lehman said, “you wanted to look at her. It was the same way when she was on screen.”

Lehman found charming a habit of Barbra’s that grated on those who were less kindly disposed to her. “Barbra used to eat food off my plate. I’d be hungry, and she’d eat the food right out from under my mouth. She has all kinds of little things that she does. She doesn’t say to herself, ‘Oh, I mustn’t do that, that wouldn’t be proper.’ She does whatever she feels like doing, whatever comes to her mind. I found it sort of friendly; there’s an intimacy to someone eating off your plate. I liked Barbra a lot.”

Doubtless this affection led Lehman to welcome—and to miss, on the rare occasions when they didn’t come—the dozens of late-night telephone calls from Barbra during the filming, calls that most other producers would have considered a nuisance. “She used to call me every night for hours,” Lehman recalled. “She’d talk to me about the day’s events. She’d say, ‘Walter did this to me, Gene did that to me.’ ‘Why doesn’t Dolly say so-and-so instead of so-and-so?’ ‘Will you please tell Gene to do so-and-so?’ ‘I wish he wouldn’t do so-and-so all the time.’ The calls didn’t annoy me because I stay up real late anyway. When she didn’t call I’d think, Call and harass me, please.”

WHILE BARBRA AND Walter Matthau worked in an atmosphere of mutual distaste, she and Gene Kelly got along only marginally better. “Who would get along with Gene Kelly?” Ernest Lehman asked. “He’s a tough guy. He would grin and smile and laugh and all that, but he was no pussycat. Once I made a suggestion to Michael Crawford about how he should play a close-up, and Kelly said to me, ‘If you ever talk to another one of my actors on the set I’ll kick your fucking teeth in.’

“Kelly didn’t like Barbra.... They were not meant to communicate on this earth. They didn’t even like being around each other. She complained a lot to me about Kelly in those late-night telephone calls. She didn’t like him. She didn’t like the fact that he didn’t care enough about directing her.

“Barbra was a frightened woman. She had had William Wyler and Herb Ross to guide her through her insecurities on Funny Girl, and she was familiar with that role. She was unsure how to play Dolly, and Gene Kelly wasn’t helping her any.”

Kelly has admitted that he let Barbra down. “If there had been more time,” he said, “I’d have tried to help her work out a clear-cut characterization, but we had a tight schedule, and I left it up to her. With the result that she was being Mae West one minute, Fanny Brice the other, and Barbra Streisand the next. Her accent varied as much as her mannerisms. She kept experimenting with new things out of sheer desperation, none of which really worked. And as she’s such a perfectionist, she became terribly neurotic and insecure.”

Kelly resented most of Barbra’s suggestions, and usually ignored them. At the end of the huge “Before the Parade Passes By” number, which utilized nearly 3,800 extras, Lehman’s script called for a rolling shot that would leave Barbra in the center of the screen and then go wide to show most of the parade around her. Kelly shot it differently. Barbra complained. He would not reshoot the number, Kelly told her—that was the way he liked it. Barbra started to argue. Kelly walked away.

Barbra called Lehman that night and told him, “Ernie, I think you should know that Gene didn’t shoot the last part of the parade number the way you wrote it. He shot straight down so all you could see are a few people marching by the camera. It would be much better the way you originally intended it.”

Lehman immediately telephoned Kelly. “He was very angry,” Lehman recalled. “But I told him that he’d better shoot it the way I wrote it—I thought that was understood. He gave me all the reasons why he did it his way. I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Okay, you know what, you direct it! Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock you be out there. I’m calling back all the extras and you’re gonna direct the shot!’

“I had never directed traffic! But I went out there and Kelly called out over the bullhorn, ‘We’re ready for you, Mr. Lehman,’ and I shlumped into my jacket and walked over and climbed up on the boom and did the shot. It’s that fabulous shot of Barbra holding that last note seemingly forever while the parade marches on. And I did it!

“The next day Gene and I were watching the dailies. His shot came on and he didn’t say a word. Later he told me, ‘Jesus, my shot was awful. I’m glad you redid it.’”

BARBRA BROUGHT JASON to the set often, and the eighteen-month-old toddler watched wide-eyed as his mother cavorted around in enormous hats and glittery dresses. “He came when we were doing the ‘Hello, Dolly!’ number,” Barbra recalled. “There I was, his mother, in a red wig and a gold dress, with a strange man on each side of her, and he got upset. He didn’t like it. I got embarrassed with him watching me. It was like having my mother watch me—because she knows I’m just pretending and it’s not really me at all.”

Jason got used to his mother as Dolly Levi, though, so much so that one of his first words was “hat.” For Mother’s Day in May, Elliott decided to surprise Barbra by having Jason sing to her. He rehearsed the boy and then coached him from the sidelines as he sang “Hello, Dolly,” to his delighted mother.

Walter Matthau didn’t act very kindly toward Jason—largely, it seems, to annoy Barbra. He insisted on talking baby talk to the child, even after Barbra explained that she didn’t approve of that sort of thing. “The only way to bring up kids,” Matthau announced, “is to talk baby talk to ’em and beat ’em.” Barbra grabbed Jason and said she was taking him for a ride. “Gonna make poo-poo in the car, Jason?” Matthau taunted. Mother and son hurried off.

Matthau seemed to take great delight in harassing Barbra. With his sweat suit soaking wet one day after a jog, he said to her, “I don’t have anything on under this. Doesn’t that excite you?”

THE FILMING OF Hello, Dolly! grew more and more nightmarish. Twentieth Century-Fox’s original budget projection of $10 million had already ballooned to $15 million and would wind up in excess of $24 million, expensive today but staggering in 1968. Lehman walked around the set looking morose, worried about everything. Egos slammed into each other like prizefighters’ fists. Irene Sharaff designed Dolly’s 1890s wardrobe, including the sparkling gold gown she wears for her return to the Harmonia Gardens and the “Hello, Dolly!” number. As Barbra rehearsed her dance steps for the scene while wearing the gown, she and the film’s choreographer, Michael Kidd, realized that the dress’s lengthy train hindered her ability to dance.

Lehman called Sharaff down to the set. Kidd explained the problem. Sharaff said she didn’t see why there should be a problem. Kidd asked Barbra and the waiters to go through the number. As before, both she and the other dancers tripped on the train at several points. Sharaff puffed on a cigarette and suggested that Kidd change the choreography. Kidd said he couldn’t do that. Barbra agreed that he shouldn’t do that. Lehman took Barbra’s side.

Ultimately, the train went, and so did Sharaff. “Irene announced to me and Barbra,” Lehman said, “that she never again would make another picture with either of us. She won three Oscars on pictures of mine, and here she was never gonna work with me again because of that infernal gown.”

The only time Ernest Lehman challenged Barbra was during a recording session. He listened to her sing one of the show’s tunes, then said, “To hell with all this being polite stuff. You didn’t sing the melody on that final word in the second chorus.”

Barbra looked at him coldly. “Do you realize, Mr. Lehman, how much people pay me not to sing the melody?”

ONE POTENTIAL PERSONALITY clash never occurred. It was Lehman’s idea to use the legendary sixty-eight-year-old trumpeter and vocalist Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong in the “Hello, Dolly!” number. “Satchmo had such a huge hit with that song,” he recalled. “He was more associated with it than Carol Channing was. I thought it would be great to have him join Barbra in the middle of it—a real audience-pleaser. Barbra didn’t like the idea.”

Barbra has said that she felt using Armstrong in the film smacked of exploitation, but Lehman suspects her reasoning was more selfish. “I’m sure she was afraid that this guy was gonna take her big moment away. She didn’t get to sing two of the best songs in the score [“Ribbons Down My Back” and “It Only Takes a Moment”], but this one number made up for that. And here I wanted her to share it with Louis Armstrong. She never dug in her heels and refused to work with him or anything. She just said she didn’t think it was a good idea. But she loved Satchmo, and they got along great. And of course his appearance just makes an incredible number even more incredible. It’s great to have the two of them onscreen together.”

Finally, in July, after eighty-nine grueling days, Hello, Dolly! was in the can. Everyone dispersed, and Ernest Lehman waited nervously for Gene Kelly to show him his cut.

Barbra called late one night and asked Lehman if she could keep the expensive Victorian antiques that the studio had bought to grace her dressing room during the shoot. “The studio said absolutely not,” Lehman recalled, “so I had to say to Barbra that I couldn’t do it. She said, ‘What do you mean you can’t do it? You’re the producer.’ She didn’t understand that it didn’t matter that I was the producer. It was the studio that owned what she wanted, and they didn’t want to give it to her.

“As a result, she was no longer friendly toward me. I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because you never gave me what I wanted. The most valuable possession I own is my friendship, and therefore I’m withholding it from you.’” Several years later Lehman ran into Barbra at a play. “She greeted me warmly,” he recalled. Apparently she hadn’t held a grudge.

WHEN LEHMAN SAW Kelly’s cut, he was thrilled with both Barbra’s and Matthau’s performances but thought the movie, filled as it was with Michael Kidd’s brilliant, obligatory dance numbers, was too long. Knowing the next-to-impossibility of making any drastic cuts, Lehman decided to defer to the creative decisions of studio heads Richard Zanuck and David Brown. The film, they felt, should be released exactly as it was.

The big question was when. In 1965, when Fox purchased the movie rights from David Merrick for $2.1 million and a large percentage of the gross, Merrick had insisted on a contract clause that said the film could not be released until the show had closed on Broadway. At the time studio executives didn’t think that would present a problem. But here it was nearly four years later, the film would soon be ready for release, and Hello, Dolly! was still going strong on Broadway even after Channing left it, thanks to Merrick’s showmanship in casting stars like Ethel Merman, Ginger Rogers, and Pearl Bailey (in an all-black version) to replace her. There was no end in sight to the Broadway run, the studio wanted to start recouping its enormous investment as soon as possible, and the only way they could do that was for Brown to persuade David Merrick to alter the deal. While the two men negotiated, the movie version of Hello, Dolly! stayed on the shelf.