Huge movie lights illuminated the banquet hall of the magnificently baroque Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England, built in the early eighteenth century as a seaside playground for King George IV. Dozens of extras, dressed in sumptuous Regency period costumes designed by Sir Cecil Beaton, sat around an enormous table set with gold decanters, fine cut glass, silver bowls overflowing with fruit, and place settings that cost a total of $75,000. Capons, lobsters, and suckling pigs dotted the table, and dozens more were kept at the ready in the wings for retakes. Actors dressed as waiters in black uniforms with gold braid and white gloves waited for the director to yell “Action!” In the meantime, all eyes were on her.

Barbra looked breathtaking, a vision in white, dressed in a resplendent low-cut pure white crepe gown sprinkled with thousands of tiny beads and diamonds. She wore a diamond-studded choker and a white turban festooned with cameos and strings of pearls that dangled across her forehead and down the sides of her neck.

Her director, Vincente Minnelli, waited for her to signal that she was ready to begin the scene for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever in which Melinda Winifred Waine Moorepark, a buxom, sensual courtesan, seduces Robert Tentrees, a dazzling young aristocrat, across the banquet table with her eyes, her wineglass, and her sexual allure while she sings “Love with All the Trimmings” as an interior monologue.

The handsome blond English actor John Richardson played Tentrees, and he sat across the table from thirty-seven-year-old Barbra, waiting along with everyone else for her to be ready. Suddenly she signaled to Minnelli that she needed to talk with him. The sixty-year-old creator of some of the most joyful and elegant MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s came down from his loft next to the camera boom and huddled with his leading lady. They whispered for a few moments, then Minnelli walked over to the producer, Howard Koch, and conveyed a message.

Koch approached Richardson, who got up from the table and left. Several crew members scurried around and erected a black screen across the spot where Richardson had been sitting. “Barbra didn’t want to do this highly sexual emoting while she looked at John Richardson,” Koch recalled. “She didn’t think Richardson was masculine enough, so she wanted to think of somebody else. We set the black up so that she wouldn’t be distracted by anything, and I took Richardson out onto the street and told him, ‘Come on, it’s a close-up of Barbra; you don’t have to be there.’ He wasn’t upset or anything, he was a hell of a nice guy.”

Minnelli filmed the scene in adoring close-up, and Barbra brought to it a steamy sensuality that nearly melted the film stock. “She imagined her own man that she was playing it to,” Koch said. “Later on I said to her, ‘Tell me who you were thinking of!’ She said, ‘I’ll never tell!’ And she never did.”

ON A CLEAR DAY had been a financial failure on Broadway during the 1966 season. With lyrics and script by Alan Jay Lerner (My Fair Lady, Camelot) and music by Burton Lane, the show starred Barbara Harris as Daisy Gamble, a college student from Mahwah, New Jersey, who asks a psychology professor who specializes in hypnosis to cure her addiction to cigarettes. While under hypnosis she reveals a prior incarnation as Melinda Tentrees. The professor, although annoyed by Daisy’s chatty, vapid personality and “Joisey” inflections, finds himself falling in love with the elegant, sexy, willful, and soignee Melinda.

When Daisy, who is attracted to the professor, finds out about his feelings for “the previous me” she is furious and refuses to be hypnotized again. He persuades her to go under one more time, during which she reveals prior and future incarnations as his wife. He’s not sure he wants to hear more and lets her leave. “So long, Doctor,” she says. “See ya later.”

Despite the failure of the stage version, Paramount Pictures bought the film rights for $750,000 in the Hollywood frenzy for musical properties that followed the blockbuster success of The Sound of Music. The studio’s vice president in charge of production, Howard Koch, decided to personally produce the film, with a budget of $10 million. He knew immediately who should play Daisy. “I’d seen Barbra on Broadway,” he said, “and thought she was stunning. She’d already been signed for the movie version of Funny Girl so it was pretty clear that she was going to be a success in Hollywood. We figured she’d be great in Clear Day.”

Koch approached Barbra while she was in London doing Funny Girl. She had liked the show on Broadway, but she was so preoccupied with the impending birth of Jason that the last thing she wanted to think about was work, and she turned him down. Koch then offered the role to Audrey Hepburn, but she declined as well because she felt that the Regency sequences were too close to her role in My Fair Lady. Unwilling to give up on Barbra, Koch came back to her in 1967, and in addition to a salary of $350,000, he offered her the chance to choose or approve the film’s entire creative team. She agreed to make the movie.

Koch had been close to signing the Irish actor Richard Harris, who had made a strong impression as King Arthur in the 1967 screen version of Camelot, to play the professor when the actor “walked out on it because he got a better deal or something,” Koch said. When Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck turned the part down, Koch turned to the romantic French balladeer Yves Montand. Montand was a huge star in France, but he had failed to make much of an impact on American audiences, most notably opposite Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love in 1960. Still, he seemed perfect for the part, which had originally been written as a Frenchman. Koch brought him to meet Barbra.

Montand, like Omar Sharif, turned on his charm for Barbra. He kissed her hand and told her he considered her “incomparable.” She had listened to some of his French recordings and liked his warm, masculine singing. She told Koch that Montand would be just fine. Rounding out the cast were Larry Blyden as Daisy’s stuffy fiance and the struggling thirty-one-year-old Jack Nicholson in the small role of Tad Pringle, her free-spirited former stepbrother.

Vincente Minnelli, famous for his exquisite taste and an Oscar winner as director of the elegant 1958 Best Picture, Gigi, also seemed to Koch a natural for the film, especially the sequences in Regency England. “I had worked with him at Metro when I was an assistant director, and I knew that if anybody could do a picture with that kind of style it would be him.” For the same reasons Barbra asked that the period costumes be created by Cecil Beaton, who had won Oscars for his designs for Gigi and My Fair Lady. The contemporary outfits would be designed by Arnold Scaasi.

The regression sequences of On a Clear Day offered Barbra the kind of movie glamour she had always dreamed about. One of the reasons she hadn’t been eager to play Dolly Levi was that she considered the character too plain. “I’d really like to play very exciting women,” she had said. “Nineteenth-century courtesans who had ten lovers, that sort of thing. That’s my fantasy.”

Melinda was exactly that, and Barbra worked excitedly with Cecil Beaton to create the most gorgeous gowns for her character to wear. The flamboyantly stylish sixty-three-year-old royal photographer and confidant of Greta Garbo came to respect and adore Streisand. “She was charming to work with,” he said. “Almost literally, like a hypnotist. Barbra and I talked our way into everything, and I trusted her judgment.... I’ve never met anyone so young who had such an awareness and knowledge of herself. Pleasing her was very difficult, but it pleased me inwardly because I myself am extremely hard to please.... She is an ideal mannequin and compelling actress in elegant period costumes. Her face is a painting from several historical eras. She is a self-willed creation.”

When Barbra arrived on the set for the banquet sequence swathed in white and “looking like an Arabian princess,” she had clipped a diamond to one of her nostrils. No one liked it. “I was careful not to draw attention to her nose,” Beaton said. “The diamond got vetoed. But I admired her very much for having wanted it. I always admire people daring to be different and individual. It isn’t the easiest way to go about life, but it is the most interesting.”

Barbra and Vincente Minnelli liked each other immediately. That his accomplishments commanded respect and admiration went without saying, but he was also the ex-husband of Judy Garland, who had touched Barbra so deeply when she appeared on her show in 1963, and the father of her friend Liza Minnelli. Like Beaton, the MGM veteran much admired Barbra’s instincts. “You have to work with people who respect your opinion,” Barbra said. “Now, Vincente is terrific that way. Even before he saw Funny Girl I guess he must have liked my work or something. He didn’t come in as the old-time director of many hits and you’re just a little girl with one picture, two pictures. He’s so open and he trusts my instincts.”

ON A CLEAR DAY proceeded as Barbra’s least troubled production to date. There were no blowups between her and Yves Montand, no walk-offs, no standoffs between star and director. Part of the reason, of course, was that with the release of Funny Girl Barbra had proven herself as a movie star; she won her Oscar during Clear Day filming. No longer could anyone wonder, “Who does she think she is?” By now everyone knew exactly who she was—the biggest female star in Hollywood—and they treated her accordingly.

That Barbra had mellowed a good deal helped as well. No longer was she so insecure that she refused to back down from an argument. “I have to compromise,” she said. “A little. I know that now. I’ve even come to understand that a little bit of compromise is part of the perfection. Know what I mean? A little bit of imperfection is part of the perfect, because perfection is lifeless and dull.

“I used to have just the instinctive reaction—this is right, or this is wrong—and I couldn’t tell why. Now I can tell why. And I’m in a position where I can easily say, ‘No, not this way.’ But I hate to. It’s much more satisfying to work with someone who gets it. You know, someone who sees it my way or can prove me wrong.”

The Clear Day company spent ten days in Brighton for the sequences at the Royal Pavilion. Barbra was fascinated by the ornate, eclectic architecture of the beach palace, reminiscent of the Taj Mahal. “It’s a combination of the grotesque and the beautiful,” she said. “And it’s grotesquely beautiful.”

Barbra had decided not to bring Jason with her such a long way from home, creating their first prolonged separation. “I miss him terribly,” she said, and she ran up enormous phone bills listening to his baby talk from five thousand miles away.

During the Brighton filming Barbra developed a crush on the dashing thirty-year-old Australian actor George Lazenby, a former model who was starring as James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. “He would come down on his motorcycle just to see her,” Howard Koch recalled. When the day’s work was finished, Barbra—dressed in bell-bottoms and a halter top—would hop up on the seat behind him and they would roar off along the seacoast to have dinner. After a few days of this Barbra invited him up to her hotel suite. They chatted for a while, Lazenby said, then “I took her in my arms. But something stopped me from going much further. I didn’t want her to think little of me... But she was very disappointed.”

The next time he was alone with Streisand, Lazenby said, it was Barbra who stopped him when he began to kiss her. “She wasn’t interested, she said, in a casual affair,” he recalled. “She wanted me to be her one and only.” Although Lazenby found Barbra “beautiful,” he did not want to commit himself “body and soul” to anyone, and he left.

A few months later, Lazenby ran into Elliott at a party. “Gould went red in the face,” Lazenby said, and threatened him with a kitchen knife. One of the other guests grabbed Elliott and pushed him away. Lazenby never saw Barbra again.

THE CLEAR DAY company returned to New York in the middle of May 1969 to film a campus demonstration scene at Fordham University. But the school balked at the last minute because actual student demonstrations against President Nixon and the Vietnam War had broken out on campuses across the country; administrators didn’t want to risk inciting their students to riot. When Columbia also refused to lend its facilities, Koch shut down filming while he scurried to find a college that would. Finally the University of Southern California agreed, but the company would have to move back to Los Angeles to film the scenes, extending the production schedule.

This created a problem, because Barbra had been guaranteed a finish date in May so that she could begin rehearsals for her return to Las Vegas at the International Hotel early in July. With Clear Day behind schedule, her contract expired, and the movie legally had no star. There were rumors that Barbra would hold out for a huge additional salary, but that wasn’t what she wanted. “She asked for certain things that were not in the contract,” Koch recalled, “like items on the set that she wanted to become her possessions.” Unlike their counterparts at Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount executives were receptive to the idea. “We didn’t want to pay her more money, so we made a deal with her,” Koch explained. “It was strange. One of the things she wanted was a trailer... and all the furniture in it. All the wardrobe that she wore. Some stained-glass windows we used on the set. I think she probably took seventy to eighty thousand dollars’ worth of stuff to her home. It was good for us because those things were expendable anyway.”

“I made some real money on those windows,” Barbra later boasted. “The studio rented them back from me for five hundred dollars to use in The Great White Hope.”

WHILE BARBRA WAS in New York working on Clear Day, the Friars, the exclusive all-male theatrical club founded in 1904, paid tribute to her as its entertainer of the year with its annual roast. She was only the second woman so honored; Sophie Tucker had been the first. The star-studded event at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on May 16, 1969, attracted hundreds of Barbra’s friends, family members, business associates, and colleagues including Ed Sullivan, Ray Stark, Marty Erlichman, Leo Jaffe, Charles Bluhdorn, Howard Koch, Danny Thomas, Ethel Merman, Julie Budd, Steve Lawrence, and Eydie Gormé.

The evening’s souvenir program featured written tributes to Barbra, some serious, some tongue-in-cheek, from Erlichman (who signed his name “Maarty”), Alan Jay Lerner (“She happens to be a miracle”), Jackie Gleason, Joe E. Lewis (“Time magazine ran her nose on the cover, and Newsweek ran the rest of her”), Jule Styne (“She scares and overpowers you with the magic of her talent”), and Ernest Lehman.

Lehman’s tongue-in-cheek essay poked fun at Barbra’s penchant for perfection. “To her, midnight isn’t too late to phone the screenwriter and discuss lines. If he happens to be the producer, too, even one o’clock in the morning is all right. But to talk to him for an hour?... Two hours?... Just to make a few scenes better.... Just to make the whole picture better? What kind of nonsense is that?... She’ll stay up till four in the morning figuring out how to make it better while she’s doing her nails and eating too much chocolate ice cream. But who needs all that passion for excellence? Who needs thrills? Who needs fun? Who needs memorable experiences? I mean, after all, it’s only a movie. Who needs Barbra Streisand!”

A highlight of the evening’s entertainment program was the serenade to Barbra by seven legendary composers who sang parody lyrics, written by Sammy Cahn, to some of their most famous tunes. Richard Rodgers concluded the musical tributes with his own touchingly re-crafted lyrics to “The Sweetest Sounds.”

“This was an incredible evening,” Barbra later said. “To get a sense of what that meant to me, just think about the sweep of those seven careers [that] have given us some of America’s most beautiful, moving, and enduring popular music. For them to sing me their songs... was an unforgettable honor... what fun it was!”

The evening came to a hilarious close when Don Rickies delivered a lengthy monologue of his patented insult humor, liberally sprinkled with Yiddish. “I’m so fed up with this feckuckteh affair,” he began. (Feckuckteh is an all-purpose put-down meaning “silly,” “useless,” or “screwed up.”) “Barbra, I say this publicly: I never liked you. Omar Sharif has been my whole life.... When I first met Barbra [in 1963] I was at the Riviera Hotel and she kept asking me, ‘Is Liberace queer?’... As soon as the career slips, she’ll be back to her old job on Coney Island going, ‘Psst, sailor!’... But really, Barbra, God made you a great star. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé kept leaning over to me saying, ‘We sing better,’ but unfortunately they’re failures.... As Ed Sullivan has said many times, ‘Let’s really hear it for Barbra Straysang... Straymancraitz... Barbra Straymaynan!’”

SIX WEEKS LATER Barbra stood in the wings of the concert theater of the spanking-new International Hotel in Las Vegas, waiting to go on. She felt nearly paralyzed with fear. One of the hotel’s talent coordinators tried to help. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

“Nothing, thanks,” she replied, her eyes fixed in a vacant stare.

“Look, Miss Streisand. You started in nightclubs. You were a hit on the Broadway stage. You won an Emmy. You won an Oscar your first time out in a movie. Who else ever did all that?”

This was probably the worst thing the man could have said to her at that moment. For it was the audience’s exalted expectations that most frightened her. “All I kept thinking about was, What am I supposed to be? My God, all these people are going to watch me sing. What about what they’ve read in the papers and what they believe and think... the envy and the kind of pedestal they put you on and the negative things they’ve read about you. The moment I stepped out onstage I was in shock. It was like, What am I doing here?”

What she was doing was fulfilling a five-year multimillion-dollar contract with the International, entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian’s $60 million, thirty-floor, 1,500-room hotel and casino, the largest in the world. Kerkorian wanted the country’s biggest star to open this lavish playground in style, and he first approached Elvis Presley. Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, turned the offer down, unwilling to let his client take the risk of appearing at a brand-new facility before all the inevitable problems with sound, lighting, acoustics, and logistics had been ironed out. “Let somebody else stick his neck out,” Parker said, then agreed that Elvis would follow whoever opened the hotel. When Kerkorian offered Barbra $100,000 a week and enough stock in the hotel to make her four-week engagement worth $1 million, she decided to stick her neck out.

Barbra liked the idea of being the first act at the heralded new showplace as much as Elvis hadn’t. “We wouldn’t have played the hotel,” Marty Erlichman said, “if she weren’t the opening act.”

For some time Marty had been urging Barbra to go back to live performing. She wouldn’t consider a tour, with its backbreaking travel schedule, different problems at every stop, weather uncertainties, and likely security lapses. Las Vegas, as much as Barbra loathed it, offered a far more predictable, secure, and comfortable environment. Or at least she thought it would.

When she began rehearsals in June, the hotel was so far from completion that Barbra had to wear a hard hat to protect herself against falling plaster and welders’ sparks. The drummer Don Lamond was a part of Barbra’s thirty-seven-piece orchestra, and he recalled that “a few days before we opened they hadn’t even finished laying the carpets. They were hammering, and things were dropping, and electric drills were humming—all the sounds of a construction site. And Barbra didn’t squawk one bit about that. She just went ahead with rehearsal. I know a lot of people I’ve worked for who would have flipped over that, but she didn’t.”

According to Dennis Ritz, the advertising director for the International, when Barbara arrived “the showroom wasn’t ready, and the penthouse she was supposed to stay in definitely wasn’t ready, so they got her a little house on the golf course. Marty Erlichman was a wreck. He kept running around going, ‘She’s gonna blow her stack!’ But she got here and she was wonderful. She never complained a bit.”

“There were no chairs, tables, or booths in the theater,” Marty recalled. “She was rehearsing in a totally empty room.” So that Barbra could “get the feel of things” in Vegas, Erlichman took her to some of the other shows around town. At a Dean Martin performance, a heckler got tossed out by two burly security guards. “If they do that to him,” Barbra said, “what’ll they do to me?”

Such icy fear gripped Barbra as she prepared to go onstage on her opening night, July 2, that she considered lying on a chaise longue as the curtain went up in case her knees gave way. She nixed that idea, and as the orchestra completed the overture, she summoned up the courage to stride out in front of an anticipatory audience that included Gary Grant, Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Williams, Joe Louis and Sonny Liston, Tony Bennett, Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, and Peggy Lee, who was appearing in the hotel’s lounge. Barbra had no opening acts, and would not perform while the audience ate dinner. Most of the patrons, seated for dinner at eight-thirty, had grown impatient by the time she appeared at half past ten.

The curtain rose. There was no set, no glitter, no dancing girls. Just Streisand—in denim overalls and a wrinkled shirt. The columnist May Mann described the audience’s reaction as “shock and cold disbelief.” Barbra had meant to make fun of the unfinished condition of the hotel, but because she didn’t explain that before she began her first song—“I Got Plenty of Nothin’,” also meant to be a joke—many patrons wondered whether she meant to insult them. “There was some noise in the audience,” Dennis Ritz recalled. “I wouldn’t say [there were] boos exactly, but it was clear a lot of people thought she was being rude and got offended.”

The audience reaction worsened when Barbra still said nothing to them before she began her second number, the exquisite but languid Rodgers and Hart tune “My Funny Valentine.” Then she sang four more numbers without saying a word between songs. Muted, almost grudging applause followed each number. Barbra sang to perfection, but she didn’t seem to care that there was anyone else in the room. There was no kibitzing, no self-effacement, no warmth. And as she felt the lack of response—her worst fear realized—she froze up even more.

“I wanted to be with my audience,” Barbra said, “and what did I do? I turned them off! I felt hostility coming up on the stage in waves. I worked, but it was total fear time. Of course it showed. They thought I was a snob, but I was really just scared.” By the time Barbra began to talk and joke, she had lost most of the patrons’ goodwill. “The jokes she cracked at the unfinished condition of the hotel,” May Mann wrote, “rather than making the audience laugh, alienated them. They settled into a cold resentful disgust. If Dean Martin had said the things she had, everyone would have laughed.... It was embarrassing all the way around. Many people began to walk out as soon as she stole off for a brief intermission to change her costume. She came back wearing a rose pleated chiffon, about which she said, ‘This was my bed spread. I just thought I’d put it on and make a costume!’ Again silence, not laughter. The harder Barbra tried for sympathy with her audience, the more reserved they became.”

The show ended with a thud, and Barbra, devastated, cried in her dressing room afterward. “I was in a state of shock. I could feel the hostility of that audience.” She didn’t need reviews to tell her that she had just flopped more completely than she had since the Town & Country debacle in Winnipeg nine years earlier, but the next day the critiques appeared anyway. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times summed up the general reaction: “Even allowing for the opening-night tension, Miss Streisand’s appearance was a curious, cold, and intensely disappointing eighty minutes’ worth. As her admirers know, she has a superb voice, and a spiky directness of manner. The trouble was that manners had become mannerisms. Her performance had been finely calculated, but that magic rapport which Sinatra, Tony Bennett—and [Peggy] Lee—can establish with their audiences never really got going for Barbra.... Miss Streisand seemed a dazzlingly efficient but chillingly impersonal machine... who still has some lessons to learn.”

Barbra knew she had to do something. As Don Lamond recalled, “One of the critics wrote that Barbra could pick up some pointers from Peggy Lee. Well, don’t you know, the next night she went to listen to Peggy. She’s never too big to learn something. I really respected her for that.... And the critics said she laid a big egg because she started the show with ‘My Funny Valentine’ and in Vegas people aren’t used to that kind of opening. They like the slam-bang stuff. So she said to us, ‘I know we got a bad write-up after the opening. Don’t let it get to you. We’re just going to have to change the opening number.’ So we changed it to a real roaring start, and then she changed the whole show.”

The next night Barbra began with “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” The rousing anthem excited the audience and put them on Barbra’s side immediately, reminding them as it did of her wonderful performance in Funny Girl. She followed that with “People” and “My Honey’s Lovin’ Arms” before she got to “My Funny Valentine.”

She still offered no patter between the first few songs, but this time it didn’t matter: the audience burst into wild applause after each number. The chemistry between a performer and an audience is a fragile thread, as Barbra had learned to her chagrin the night before. Put an audience off, and it may be impossible to win them back, no matter what. Put them in the palm of your hand and everything that didn’t work the night before will leave them laughing and cheering.

Now they laughed at her jokes. “This is an absolutely feckuckteh place, you know?” she said. “There are no clocks here. They want everybody out in the casino, so the television sets in your rooms don’t work, right? There are no Bibles in the rooms. Even the rooms that have Bibles there’s only five commandments. The Jewish Bible, six tops!”

The laughter loosened Barbra up. Before long she had established a warm rapport with her audience. “And now for your yentatainment pleasure!” she called out at one point. She described her friends Marilyn and Alan Bergman as a “nice Jewish couple” before she sang their song “Ask Yourself Why.” Then she described “Punky’s Dilemma” as “a song by Simon and Garfunkel, another nice Jewish couple.” She said she thought it would be “the ultimate in chic” to use just a performer’s initials on a marquee. “Of course, that might not be such a good idea for me—or for Tony Bennett.”

The crowd loved it; Barbra had turned everything around. Over the ensuing weeks, Charles Champlin heard such persistent reports that Barbra’s show had improved he went back and reviewed it again. This time he found the concert “a scintillating display of her gifts... she seemed to be having a ball, relaxed, amiable and in charge.” The Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber agreed: “I discovered a very improved show. La Streisand got a standing ovation. It was a concert to remember.”

Now Barbra could relax and have fun. “She had a custom ’57 Thunderbird she brought with her, and she used to drive it around town,” Don Lamond recalled. “She’d wave to people. She was having a ball, once she got settled in.” The bass player Milt Hinton recalled that after her shows Barbra would say, “Let’s go around to the jazz joints,” and they would hop in her car. “We’d go hear Cannonball Adderley and Joe Williams. She’d sit in the back so no one would recognize her and she could just enjoy the musicians. Joe Williams came to see her show, and she introduced him from the audience. He was one of the few she did that with—she wasn’t into that Hollywood thing of lots of back-slapping at all.”

DURING BARBRA’S INTERNATIONAL engagement, an issue of Ladies’ Home Journal appeared on newsstands containing an interview in which Elliott Gould spoke freely, frankly, and often bitterly about his relationship with her. “Barbra is really fourteen years old,” the article quoted Gould. “Here is a girl who is a major star, who makes a fortune, but who is unhappy. It is a pain to hear her complain constantly.” The interview continued at length in a similar vein, and when Barbra read it she became red-faced with fury. According to her hairdresser Fredrick Glaser, she threw everyone out of her dressing room and “proceeded to tear the place apart.”

ALSO DURING HER Vegas stint, Barbra’s twelfth solo album was released. What About Today? proved an unsuccessful attempt to move Streisand into the rock genre that had revolutionized popular music. When she was asked about rock ’n’ roll in 1965, Barbra had replied, “Musically, I love it, but there’s nothing in it for me to sing.” This album came close to proving her right.

In 1966 a funky new era had dawned at Columbia Records when Clive Davis took over many responsibilities from Goddard Lieberson. Davis wanted to make the label more of a competitor in the pop and rock scene that had exploded in the wake of the “British invasion” spearheaded by the Beatles in 1964. At the close of 1967, with the relative failure of Simply Streisand fresh in his mind, Davis felt it was time the company’s top female artist considered singing, if not rock ’n’ roll, at least more contemporary pop music. The sales slump Barbra was in, although minor compared to the career-threatening drop-offs suffered by other artists, indicated to Davis that even staunch Streisand fans would be pleased to have their idol take her recording career in a new direction.

Davis was thus delighted when he learned that Barbra had cut some pop singles that were unlike any of her prior efforts. Unfortunately the songs Barbra chose provided little indication that she could make such a transition successfully. The single “Our Corner of the Night,” backed with “He Could Show Me,” was released in February 1968 and received scant radio attention, sold abysmally, and confused Barbra’s admirers.

Although this first contemporary pop effort of Barbra’s failed, Clive Davis was impressed by her willingness to go along with the requirements of the song, no matter how alien they might have seemed to her. She sounded legitimate on the record, not at all like a Broadway diva doing a bit of slumming. It was clear that with the proper material, the Streisand voice and talent could produce a successful contemporary sound.

While the Hello, Dolly! company was stationed in Garrison, Davis had paid Barbra a visit, ostensibly to get her approval of photographs to be used in the packaging for the Funny Girl sound-track album. He suggested that she continue her efforts to update her musical profile because she was too young and too vital an artist to allow her recording career to stagnate.

Barbra argued with Davis at first, unsure that she should or could make such a dramatic switch in her musical style, but her instincts told her he was right. Aside from the financial rewards that broadening her fan base would surely bring, singing contemporary music would give her a chance to prove to the public that she wasn’t just a singer of sound tracks from old-fashioned musicals.

The release of What About Today? while Barbra performed at the International symbolized the uneasy mix of old and new on the album, which contains no cut that could in any way be called rock. In brief liner notes, Barbra dedicates What About Today? to “young people who push against indifference, shout down mediocrity, demand a better future and write and sing the songs of today.” Oddly, the songs she chose from Lennon and McCartney, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Paul Simon had nothing to do with relevant issues of the day, while most of the timid protest cuts on the album were from the pens of such establishment composers as Harold Arlen, Michel Legrand, David Shire, and Richard Maltby. Only “Little Tin Soldier,” a grim antiwar statement by Jimmy Webb, could qualify as any kind of a message from a young artist.

Reviews for What About Today? were mixed. “Because she has adapted these lyrics without altering her distinctive pop style,” Variety enthused, “she retains her vast adult appeal and delivers the young message to rock-deaf ears.” Others felt either that Barbra seemed uncommitted to the material or that the songs weren’t up to her usual standards. “A powerhouse singer like Barbra Streisand thrives best with powerhouse programs,” Greer Johnson wrote in Cue. “She tends to overwhelm flaccid and semi-professional ephemera.”

Commercially, What About Today? was a bust. It managed only to reach an unimpressive thirty-one on Billboard’s, chart, making it Barbra’s poorest selling studio album to that date. To Clive Davis’s chagrin, What About Today? did nothing to help what he hoped would be Streisand’s transition to contemporary pop idol. It would be two more years before the right mix of material and talent would come together to ensure Barbra’s placement among that hierarchy.

ON JULY 30, 1969, Barbra gave her last performance at the International. Both Don Lamond and Milt Hinton adored Barbra and knew they would miss her. “I was lucky to work with her,” Hinton said. “It was amazing to watch her work. If she didn’t like an arrangement, she would tear it apart. The arrangers wouldn’t like it, but she knew what she was talking about. I was very grateful that she thought enough of me to introduce me during the show. Once she told me that whenever I went into the bar and ordered a drink, I should put it on her tab. ‘Don’t give them your money,’ she said.”

Don Lamond considered Barbra “a wonderful person. There were a lot of rumors going around that she was very hard to work for and all that, but to me she wasn’t. She just knew what she wanted. She meant no harm to anybody. That engagement in Vegas was one of the best times I ever had in my life.”

Of course, not everyone reacted so positively to Barbra. Joy Simmons, a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas for twenty years, found Streisand “rude,” “demanding,” and with “no respect” for the hotel staff. “You get to know who is nice and who isn’t,” Simmons said. “The word gets spread around town like wildfire. There are four people who waiters, bartenders, and service people of all kinds hate in Vegas, and they are Bill Cosby, Liza Minnelli, Jerry Lewis, and Barbra Streisand. Ask anyone—they are universally bad tippers, rude, and inconsiderate. Barbra is rude and will pretend like she is deaf rather than wave to and acknowledge someone who calls to her or asks for an autograph. She would have a drink once in a while but would never ever tip. She never tipped for room service. No one wanted to take food up to her because the toast might be too cool, too hot, or too light and she’d have you fired, especially if she suspected the least bit of sarcasm in your tone when you delivered something to her. She’s had a lot of people fired from their jobs. Sinatra gets moody and may get mad at you, but later he’ll feel guilty and has been known to tip a hundred dollars even if you’ve spilled a drink on him by accident. Barbra wouldn’t even give us a dollar or a free album when we asked for one.”

ELVIS PRESLEY WAS scheduled to follow Barbra at the International—an engagement that would be a triumphant comeback—and he caught her next-to-last show. She introduced him to the audience, and afterward he went backstage to meet her. Don Lamond passed him in the hallway and was impressed by how good the thirty-four-year-old Presley, who had been out of the public eye for a while, looked. “I think he was the handsomest guy I ever saw. This was before he got bloated and all that stuff. My wife said she couldn’t believe how fantastic he looked. He went into Barbra’s dressing room, and they got together.”

Years later Barbra’s longtime lover, Jon Peters, revealed in an unpublished interview the extraordinary scene that followed, recounted to him by Barbra. She was alone, sitting at her dressing table. After Elvis closed the door behind him, he said simply, “Hi,” and an awkward silence followed. Suddenly he reached over and picked up a bottle of red nail polish from the vanity table. Without a word, he fell to one knee, took Barbra’s hand in his and began, slowly and painstakingly, to apply the bright crimson varnish to Barbra’s tapering fingernails.

The intimacy of the gesture, the supplication of it, stunned Barbra, who stared in fascination as Elvis worked, and when he finished, she mumbled “Thank you.” An associate of Presley’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, revealed that the intimacy between Barbra and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll didn’t end there. “Elvis told me that he spent the night with Streisand in her suite. I guess he was kind of bragging. There was that kind of wink-and-a-poke-in-the-ribs way he talked about it.

“Elvis didn’t say how long he and Barbra stayed involved, and I made it a policy never to press him for details about anything. But I have the feeling it was a pretty fleeting thing. Not necessarily just a one-night stand, but probably no longer than two or three. One of the books about him said that when he saw her show he said, ‘She sucks,’ but that’s bull. He talked as though he worshiped her.

“I was absolutely amazed by what he told me. Barbra Streisand and the King! Wow. I wish I’d been a fly on the wall.”