That’s the most disgusting idea I’ve ever heard!” Barbra shouted at Ray Stark. “You can’t capitalize on something that has worked before. You’ll have to drag me into court to do that picture!”

The picture Barbra refused to do was Funny Lady, a sequel to Funny Girl, which would take Fanny Brice from just before her divorce from Nick Arnstein through a second marriage and into the 1940s. Many observers joined Streisand in the opinion that Stark would be foolish to attempt to re-create her greatest film triumph, but Stark saw the sequel as a guaranteed box-office blockbuster. Still, Barbra hadn’t appeared in a musical in five years, and many moviegoers hungered to see her sing onscreen again. She would be returning to her Oscar-winning Fanny Brice characterization, under the aegis of a producer who would spare no expense to package the film with the most lavish production values. How could it lose?

Barbra kept telling Stark “There is no way I will do this movie”—until she read a witty, insightful script rewrite by Jay Presson Allen, the scenarist of Cabaret. “There was wonderful material available,” Allen said. “Fanny Brice did an oral history two years before she died that was just a mine, an embarrassment of riches.” Allen also admitted he had tailored some of the dialogue to fit Barbra’s “powerful personality and singular pattern of speech and pace.” Allen’s partly fictionalized account began in the early days of the Depression and focused on Fanny’s life following her painful divorce and on her second marriage to producer-hustler-songwriter Billy Rose. Though Brice and Rose start off as bickering antagonists, they eventually marry after developing an affection for each other that is rooted in companionship, a shared sense of humor, and mutual business interests rather than in romantic passion.

The marriage runs smoothly until their careers impose a lengthy separation. On the road with an aquacade, Billy takes up with his star swimmer Eleanor Holm while Fanny, in Hollywood to begin her stint as radio’s Baby Snooks, unexpectedly encounters Nick Arnstein. Ultimately, Brice and Rose part, leaving Fanny sadder but free of romantic illusions about men.

Barbra felt an empathy for the older Fanny Brice. “I understand her whole thing with Billy Rose,” Barbra said, “and what it means to fall in love with somebody who is like you. You can only do that when you accept yourself and feel yourself worthy of being loved.... Otherwise it’s always your fantasies—like hers with Nicky Arnstein.... In the second part of Fanny’s life, I feel she starts to discover herself... and finally lets go of her illusions and fantasies about men. She grows up.” Barbra could, of course, have been describing herself since she met Jon Peters.

Along with her admiration for the script, Barbra agreed to make Funny Lady mainly to put an end to her obligation to Ray Stark, to whom she owed one final film on the contract they had drawn up nearly a decade earlier. She also saw the project as an opportunity to play a grown-up Fanny who was tougher, wiser, and truer to the original than the one portrayed in the first film. “The Fanny Brice of Funny Lady is a marvelous character that I didn’t play in Funny Girl,” she admitted. “That Fanny Brice was more like me. Even the numbers were written for me. Now I’m more of an actress and less of an ego. It’s more of a real acting job for me in this picture.”

VINTAGE PHOTOGRAPHS SHOW that Fanny Brice, even in low heels, towered over the four-foot-eleven-inch Billy Rose. With this height discrepancy in mind, the first actor to read for the part was short, stocky, pugnacious Robert Blake, who had played a television gumshoe in Baretta. Invited to read a scene with Barbra at Carolwood, Blake asked instead if they could run through the entire script. Barbra complied, and she was impressed with his reading. But contrary to press reports, Blake was not offered the role on the spot. Al Pacino’s name surfaced briefly in some columns as a likely candidate, but it was his The Godfather co-star, James Caan, who was signed to play Billy at the end of 1973. Tall, athletic, and ruggedly handsome, Caan seemed the polar opposite of Rose. With an eye to the box-office potential of a Caan-Streisand teaming, Ray Stark went on the defensive about the casting. “If Arnstein could be played by an Arab,” he offered, “then Billy Rose didn’t have to be short.”

Barbra rationalized the choice from another angle. “It comes down to whom the audience wants me to kiss. Robert Blake, no. James Caan, yes.”

Omar Sharif, whose box-office appeal had slipped considerably since Funny Girl with missteps like Che!, The Tamarind Seed, and The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo, agreed to return as Nick Arnstein in three brief but pivotal scenes.

To no one’s surprise, Herb Ross was signed to direct Funny Lady, and his suggestion of Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe and Mrs. Miller) for cinematographer met with everyone’s approval. Bob Mackie, highly publicized for the glitzy, sometimes outlandish designs he whipped up for Cher’s and Carol Burnett’s television shows, was engaged to create the film’s costumes in tandem with his partner Ray Aghayan. Funny Lady’s musical score would consist of old standards, some penned by Billy Rose, and new songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, who were at the peak of their careers following the success of their razor-sharp score for Cabaret.

Ray Stark budgeted Funny Lady at $7.5 million (less than the original). In an unusual move, all fourteen of the film’s musical numbers were rehearsed one after the other and filmed in sixteen days in the early spring of 1974 at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s theater soundstage, which featured a fully rendered proscenium, theater seats, and backstage space equal to that of a typical Broadway theater. The first number shot, “Great Day,” was given an elaborate design that placed a sequin-draped Barbra at the top of a stylized altar, where she belted out the Song, gospel-like, as black dancers writhed below her.

When Ray Stark viewed the footage of the number the next day, he was shocked at Vilmos Zsigmond’s approach to the cinematography. Zsigmond had opted for a dark, realistic, almost gritty look to a scene that cried out for glossy Hollywood glamour. According to the film’s assistant director, Jack Roe, “Vilmos did a terrible job. When I saw the rushes, all I could see was the one dancer right in front of the camera. Vilmos blamed it on the lab, but it was a joke. I don’t know why they hired him anyway. He wasn’t the right person for the movie.”

Sensing disaster, Stark fired Zsigmond, to the surprise of his star. Gossips claimed that the firing was instigated by Streisand because she didn’t feel Zsigmond’s photography had flattered her looks, but Barbra was apparently not told of Zsigmond’s dismissal until after the fact. Zsigmond, who went on to win an Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, later defended himself: “I wanted the movie to look less like Funny Girl and more like Cabaret.... They wanted the old concept of musicals. They were not interested in art, but in making it safe.”

Stark then begged the two-time Oscar-winner James Wong Howe, seventy-six and five years into retirement, to take over the photography of Funny Lady. Intrigued by the idea of shooting his first musical since Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1941, Howe agreed to the job, even as he learned that he would have to begin the following morning at seven-thirty without any preparation. “I’m sure if I hadn’t had fifty-seven years of experience in the film industry, I wouldn’t have been able to jump into such a big project on twenty-four hours’ notice,” he said.

Funny Lady production progressed smoothly except for one incident that might have proved tragic. “The second day of filming,” remembered the second assistant director Stu Fleming, “a sandbag fell from up high and missed Jason by that much. It was so close. Barbra didn’t know about it. We’ve never talked about it. I doubt she knows about it today. Nothing was ever said, because that would have freaked her out. She would have been gone.”

After several weeks at MGM the company moved on to the Columbia soundstages in Burbank for the majority of the interior shots. It was soon obvious to bystanders that James Caan and Barbra were developing a pleasant, even playful, working relationship. Their first important scene together proved to be tough sledding only because the two stars couldn’t keep from breaking up.

Wayne Warga, on the set for the Los Angeles Times, observed, “Everything on [the sixth take] is going perfectly. Streisand, disdainfully smoking while Caan promotes [his song], is solidly in character and remains so as a piece of tobacco gets stuck on the tip of her tongue. She carefully reaches up to pick it off just as Caan, in the passion of promotion, grabs her hand to emphasize his point—and shoves her hand into his mouth. The entire company—several dozen extras in the club, the crew and various supporting people—explodes in laughter, and from then on, neither Caan nor Streisand can look at one another without giggling. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll get it right this time,’ she says.

“‘Time is money, time is money—and no, you won’t,’ Caan replies.”

“From that day on,” Caan later said, “I was yelling at her, putting her down, and calling her a spoiled rotten thing, and she would call me [names] and we’d carry on and we’d laugh.... I just remember giggling quite a bit.” In a later scene, Fanny, looking flawless in an elegant shimmering gown topped with cock feathers, has words with Billy in her dressing room. As the argument escalates, Rose picks up a full carton of loose dusting powder and threatens to throw it in Fanny’s face. Barbra told Herb Ross, “I don’t think that Jimmy should hit me... with this powder; [it’s] toxic, you know, and I’ll get it in my lungs.”

Caan winked at Ross and said, “I think you’re right.... I’ll go to hit you with it and then I won’t.” Of course he ended up hitting Barbra full in the face with the chalky powder, and she was stunned. “I really felt bad for a minute because she was so shocked,” Caan said. “She called me names. She said, ‘You lied to me!’ I was hysterical. And then she laughed too.” As good a sport as Barbra turned out to be about the incident, she would not agree to a second take.

When Omar Sharif played his scenes with Barbra, there was less levity, but in its place came an easy rapport shared by the older and wiser ex-lovers and co-stars. “For the first two days,” the now gray-haired Sharif recalled, “she seemed a little different to me. But then, I’m sure I appeared somewhat different to her, which is natural. [In 1967] she was married and had led a somewhat sheltered personal life. She has broadened considerably in the intervening years. I think it shows in her performing as well.”

Jon’s presence on the set as an uncredited creative consultant kept Barbra on a fairly even keel, and Ray Stark was happy to have him there, principally because Jon pushed her to be more punctual. “Her lateness drove Jimmy Caan nuts,” Jack Roe recalled. “One day he yelled at me about it, and I said, ‘What am I supposed to do? Sleep with her to make sure she gets here every morning?’ She would be anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour late for each setup. I don’t ever recall her being on time once.”

BARBRA HAD TO film a scene at the Santa Monica airport in which Fanny, after realizing she is through with Nick Arnstein for good, impulsively hires a 1937 biplane to fly her to Cleveland, where she plans to surprise Billy, who is on the road with his aquacade. For the shot, she was required to run to the plane, climb into it, and ride in the open cockpit as the pilot guided it off the ground and into the air for several minutes. “It took Herb Ross almost the entire picture to talk Barbra into doing it,” Jack Roe recalled. “She was obviously frightened.” Ross finally convinced her that if a double was used in the air, it would be obvious to the audience.

“Herb was wonderful,” Roe recalled. “He could really finesse actors. She had a right to be scared; it was, after all, only a two-seater plane. But he talked her into the shot. I had set it up with the airport for the plane to take off and turn around and then land; she wasn’t supposed to be up in the air very long. But it got messed up and the control tower couldn’t let it land. It was bizarre. She was up there for almost half an hour, scared to death, and you could hear her screaming bloody murder from the minute the plane touched down until it taxied to a stop. She said she thought she was being kidnapped. It was terrible. But amazingly, Herb was able to talk her into doing it again!”

Funny Lady wound up production in the second week of July 1974. At a lavish wrap party, Barbra dispensed close to two hundred parting gifts, each with a handwritten note of gratitude, to the cast and crew. She gave James Caan a sterling silver rodeo belt buckle and James Wong Howe, who would die within a year, an antique camera with a plaque that read, “Thank you for your talents, generosity and cha siu bao”—Barbra’s favorite Chinese dish.

Barbra gave Ray Stark a gift that perfectly symbolized the conflicting dynamics of their relationship. Across the face of an antique mirror, she scrawled “Paid in Full” in vivid red lipstick. Yet on the accompanying plaque she had had this sentiment engraved: “Even though I sometimes forget to say it, thank you, Ray. Love, Barbra.”

SCHEDULED AS COLUMBIA’S major release for Easter 1975, Funny Lady began previews in January, and it became apparent that there were problems with the ending. As originally written, Fanny, after arriving unannounced in Cleveland to reaffirm her marriage to Billy, discovers him in bed with Eleanor Holm. Rose accompanies her to the train station and admits that his love for Eleanor is genuine and reciprocated: “To her... I’m Nick.” Understanding, Fanny asks to be left alone while she awaits her train back to California. The film ends as the camera pulls back from a forlorn Fanny sitting in a darkened station as her vocal of “Am I Blue” plays on the sound track.

Audiences found the scene too downbeat, so Stark called Streisand and Caan back to the studio to shoot an alternate ending, set a decade later, when Fanny and Billy are reunited after many years. Rose, it turns out, wants Fanny to appear in a revival of a Ziegfeld-type revue he is planning. She promises to let him know, and while the film ends on an ambiguous note, it’s clear that Fanny is at last her own secure grown-up person. This second ending, though hardly memorable and marred by silly aging makeup on the stars, proved more popular with test audiences. Its inclusion in an already long movie, however, forced Ross to trim some of Barbra’s musical numbers.

Perhaps because they were hungry for a Streisand musical, most critics greeted the film with lavish praise. “Funny Lady wins over its predecessor, Funny Girl, on all counts,” raved Judith Crist. “You have to be crazy not to love Funny Lady,” said Rex Reed, while Richard Cuskelly, writing for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, added, “Funny Lady... defies the laws of gravity to prove that you can still move upward from the top.” Many of the critics were even more enthusiastic about Barbra’s performance. John Barbour, reviewing for KNBC television, said, “Barbra Streisand’s incredible artistry as an actress and singer deserves more than an Oscar; it deserves a Nobel Prize.” James Caan’s notices were nearly on a par with Barbra’s, and the opening week’s box-office receipts matched the reviews. Funny Lady was a hit, and went on to gross over $48 million.

There were, of course, dissenters. Pauline Kael, the doyenne of American film critics, used her review of Funny Lady to launch into an elaborate critique of Barbra’s entire career that ran seven pages in The New Yorker. “Streisand’s performance,” Kael wrote, “is like the most spectacular, hard-edged female impersonator’s imitation of Barbra Streisand.... It’s a performance calculated to make people yell without feeling a thing—except adoration.”

Why so many critics went so far overboard in their praise of the picture is hard to fathom. In truth, the movie is cumbersome and often flat; it lacks two of the most exciting elements in Funny Girl—the struggle of a young performer to reach the top against all odds and the compelling romance between Nick and Fanny. While Barbra and James Caan have a sparkling comic chemistry, their mild love story never gives off much heat. Worst of all, the new songs were not nearly on a par with those of Cabaret, and there are only sporadic moments of genuine electricity in the musical productions, several of which are frustratingly truncated.

Almost a year after Funny Lady opened, Herb Ross said, “Up until Funny Lady, I thought Barbra’s possibilities were limitless, but that film was a curious experience. She was in love at the time, and she didn’t seem to want to make the picture or play the part. It was a movie that was made virtually without her. She simply wasn’t there in terms of commitment, and one of her greatest qualities is to make a thousand percent commitment.”

In a Columbia Studios publicity interview, Barbra admitted as much. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but not a whole one. I’d say to Herb, ‘Look, that’s good enough,’ and he’d say, ‘No, it’s not.’ I’m very changed.... When I had a lack in my private life I cared more about my work. It was like a fill-in, sublimation. Now I don’t. Now it’s only a movie.”

Still, there is no evidence on screen that Barbra wasn’t as committed as always. Her performance is believably consistent, and for better or worse she was unafraid to show Fanny Brice’s harder edges. “I don’t try to be liked,” she said. “I don’t know if she’s likable, this character.”

BARBRA DIDN’T WANT to rehearse. It was Sunday, March 9, 1975, the afternoon of a planned live, nationally-televised concert in front of President Gerald R. Ford, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and hundreds of other government dignitaries at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to promote Funny Lady and to benefit the Special Olympics. Barbra was nervous and cranky; she had a sore throat and didn’t want Ray Stark telling her what to do.

At first Barbra had refused to promote the picture at all. In the nine months since filming wrapped she had done little but supervise the construction and decoration of the ranch, tend to her garden, and enjoy her life unfettered by professional responsibilities. Stark had planned an ambitious international promotion tour that included a premiere in New York, a royal command performance in London, and a reception with the president of France in Paris. Streisand, of course, was the key to the whole thing, but she told Stark no. The last thing she wanted to do was perform live in front of millions of people, face another potentially dangerous mob of New York fans, then travel all the way to London and Paris for more of the same. According to her publicist Steve Jaffe, “She was terrified of getting crushed by these fans who were full of adulation but could squeeze the life out of her.”

Nevertheless, Stark told Barbra her participation in these promotional activities was vital to the success of the movie. He offered her $100,000 to sing five songs at the Kennedy Center event. She wouldn’t budge. Stark pleaded with Jon to reason with her. Jon told Barbra she had to do it, if not for herself and the movie then for him. He was in the middle of negotiations with Stark to produce a film, and if he could deliver Streisand for this publicity blitz, his stock would surely rise with the producer. She at last agreed, but she didn’t like it.

“Barbra had celebrated the end of her contract with Ray Stark,” Steve Jaffe offered, “and here she was now having to do this grueling tour for him. She wasn’t happy. There was this kind of one-upmanship between them. She would do something to get at him, and he would follow it up. They were like two prizefighters—one gets a jab in here, the other lands a punch there.”

Jaffe recalled that when Barbra told Stark from her Watergate Hotel suite that she had a scratchy throat and wanted to rest her voice rather than rehearse the songs she was scheduled to sing that night, a “heated argument” ensued. “Ray was pissed off with her. He said, ‘Listen, this is really serious. This is the meat of the whole tour. You have to be there for rehearsal!’ But she wasn’t gonna do it. I thought, Boy, Streisand’s the one in charge here.”

Later, as the rehearsal got under way, Jaffe stood and chatted with several Secret Service men who were there to scope out the Kennedy Center in anticipation of President Ford’s arrival. “Barbra’s not going to rehearse,” Jaffe told the men. But within moments Streisand appeared. “She walked out, looking casual but very elegant in jeans and a beautiful silk shirt, and started to rehearse two or three of the numbers,” Jaffe recalled. “I thought, That’s very interesting. Here it had seemed that she was in charge, and now it was clear that Ray Stark was calling the shots.”

Peter Matz, who was conducting the orchestra, recalled that “Barbra was very upset by the time we started rehearsals. She had agreed to do [the show] only because it was for the Special Olympics—she had vowed never to do any more television. Then, when it was too late, she realized that it was really a Ray Stark promo for the movie, a hype. Barbra gets crazy when she feels she’s been hyped. It was a bad situation.”

Funny Girl to Funny Lady, broadcast live over ABC, proved a triumph for Barbra despite her anger at Stark and a case of nerves that left her retching in the bathroom moments before she took the stage. She had expected the audience of government officials to be stuffy, but when she strode out in a low-cut black gown, her straight blond hair flowing to mid-back, the officials jumped to their feet for a two-minute ovation. “Men in tuxedos and women in high-fashion gowns stood up and carried on like bobby-soxers of old,” a UPI reporter wrote, “shrieking and screaming above the thunderous applause. When Streisand started crooning ‘The Way We Were,’ it all started again.’”

“If you applaud too much we’ll run out of time,” Barbra told the audience, but to no avail. The frequent and lengthy interruptions put the show behind schedule, and at the end of the hour there was no time left for Barbra to sing “People,” which she had planned to do in tribute to the children and volunteers of the Special Olympics. “Oh, that’s it?” she asked when she was told she had to wrap things up. “That’s a live show for you.”

The event, a promotional masterstroke, prompted grumbling from some critics. Frank Swertlow of UPI was incensed. “If this show was for charity, why was Miss Streisand paid $100,000 for her appearance? Wasn’t an hour of prime time advertising enough?... People who tuned in to see Barbra Streisand were cheated. They sought entertainment, but what they received was plugola. There is something very wrong about this, very wrong indeed.”

BARBRA AND Jon traveled by train to New York on Monday morning; on Tuesday afternoon she and James Caan met the press at the Hotel Pierre. She hadn’t wanted to do that either. “Barbra hated talking to reporters,” Steve Jaffe said. “She felt that they’d only twist what she had to say, or write bad things about her no matter what she said. She felt that it wouldn’t help her career any, because her work basically sold itself.” But once again Ray Stark had prevailed.

At the premiere that evening, just as she had feared, Barbra and Jon were mobbed by fans outside the Loew’s Astor Plaza. Once again it took fifty policemen and a phalanx of burly bodyguards to inch them through the screaming, madding crowd, Barbra looking stricken and Jon hovering protectively nearby.

A friend of Barbra’s mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, escorted Diana to the screening. “It was strange,” he recalled. “No one seemed to want to come over and talk to Diana. Barbra didn’t, and I went up to Marvin Hamlisch and asked him to say hello, and he hesitated but finally did. Ray Stark did come over, and he said to her, ‘Your daughter and I have had ten good years. If only someone would talk to her, we could have ten more.’

“After the screening, an announcement was made that people with yellow roses on their chairs should board the bus and go to the party. Diana didn’t have a yellow rose on her chair. I guess she wasn’t invited.”

FRIGHTENED ANEW BY the New York mob scene, Barbra ordered Steve Jaffe to tell Ray Stark that she would not go on to London. Stark, understandably, hit the roof. “I’m not going to talk to her,” he shouted at Jaffe. “You talk to her! Get Jon to mediate. Just make sure she’s there, goddammit!”

Jaffe telephoned Barbra with Stark’s message. “Ray! I hate him,” she cried. Jaffe told her she had to do this, that the queen of England and the president of France were expecting her, and that she owed it to Stark. “She felt such bitterness toward him,” Jaffe recalled. “She felt as though she’d been an indentured servant to Stark for ten years, and she was sick of having to do what he wanted her to do.”

Jaffe pleaded with Barbra to go on to London as planned. “Ray’s been responsible, at least in part, for your career, Barbra,” he told her. “Maybe he didn’t pay you what you wanted to be paid, but if you got paid what you wanted to be paid, there wouldn’t be any gold in Fort Knox.”

Jaffe found that “I could actually talk to her like that, and she would laugh. She handled the truth as well as any of the major egos that I’ve encountered. She finally said she’d go to London, but she and Stark still weren’t talking. I thought, This is going to spell trouble for the rest of the trip.”

In London, although all of the others, including James Caan, registered at the Dorchester Hotel under their own names, Barbra and Jon signed in as “Mrs. B. Gould and party.” On the evening of March 18, Barbra met Queen Elizabeth for the first time, and the encounter went par for the Streisand-and-royalty course. Upset that Jon hadn’t been allowed to stand next to her in the receiving line to meet the queen, Streisand asked Elizabeth, “Why do women have to wear gloves and not men?”

Taken aback, the queen muttered, “I’ll have to think about that. I suppose it’s a tradition.” Then she quickly moved on.

After the command performance, Ray Stark hosted a celebratory dinner at a posh London restaurant. Just as Steve Jaffe sat down to eat, the maître d’ told him he was wanted on the phone. It was Jon. “Barbra’s not feeling well,” he said. “Tell Ray we’re not going to Paris.”

In the background Jaffe could hear Barbra calling out, “I’m tired. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Jaffe swallowed hard and went over to Stark. “Ray, I just got a call from Jon. Barbra’s not feeling well.”

“That’s okay,” Stark replied. “Tell her to rest up a bit, and she can join us later. We’ll still be here.”

Jaffe couldn’t bring himself to relay Barbra’s actual message, so he got Peters back on the phone. “Jon, I think Ray would react very badly if I told him you weren’t going to Paris. Why don’t you just rest up tonight.”

“No, Steve, she’s not going,” Peters replied.

Then Barbra grabbed the phone: “Tell him I don’t feel well. I’m sick, and I’m not going.”

Jon took the phone back. “You got that?”

“Yeah, I got it,” Jaffe sighed.

When he gave the message to Stark, the producer said quietly, “Tell her she’s going.”

Jaffe called Barbra back. “No way,” she insisted.

Stark then told Jaffe, “Tell Barbra that I will provide her with a hospital plane if I have to, and I’ll send doctors to the hotel. But she is going to Paris tomorrow.”

“There isn’t a way in the world, Steve,” Jon thundered at his hapless publicist.

When Jaffe relayed this latest message to Stark, the producer stood up and left his own party. “He was real pissed off,” Jaffe recalled.

The next morning Jaffe found out that Stark had somehow persuaded Barbra to go to Paris. “I think Ray owed her one last payment or something, and he threatened to withhold it unless she got herself to France.” When Jaffe arrived at the Plaza Athénée Hotel, he learned that Barbra and Jon had stopped at an Italian restaurant on their way to Paris from the airport. “They ate everything in the place,” he marveled. “They just stuffed themselves. A quarterback would have been sick eating all the food they did. They made sure that by the time they got to the Athénée Barbra was sick as a dog.”

When Stark heard about Barbra’s distress, he came to her suite. As she ran back and forth to the bathroom, Stark yelled, “She’s coming tonight! She’s going to show up tonight. The president of France is going to be there and he expects to see her.”

“But you can see she’s sick,” Peters pleaded.

“I’ve got two doctors on the way right now. They’ll examine her. If they report to me that she’s too ill to appear, then she doesn’t have to appear.”

As far as Jaffe was concerned, “Barbra’s one of the greatest actresses on the planet. I figured all she had to do was act sick and she’d be in the clear.”

When the doctors arrived, they examined Barbra in her room for a few minutes as Stark, Jaffe, Jon, and Marty Erlichman waited. When they came back out, one of the physicians announced, “She has zee stomach problem.” As the doctor spoke, Jaffe noticed Barbra peering around the edge of the bedroom door, trying to hear what he was saying.

“How serious is it,” Stark wanted to know.

“It weel go away. She weel be okay.”

“Are you going to give her any medication?”

“Ah, oui, I can geeve her zee medication.”

Finally Ray lost his patience. “Well, what’s wrong with her.”

“As you Americans say,” the doctor replied, “she has zee gas.”

Marty and Jon shifted their feet uncomfortably. Steve Jaffe put his head in his hands. “The limo will be here at seven,” Stark said softly as he left. “The screening starts at eight. She should be there by seven-thirty.”

Barbra never did go to the gala. “She found out the French president had canceled his own appearance due to pressing business,” Jaffe said, “and she figured that let her off the hook. But there were hundreds of people from the highest levels of French society who were disappointed. They expected to see Barbra Streisand, and all they got was Jimmy Caan, Ray Stark, and David Begelman.

“Stark never stopped steaming, and Barbra decided she was never going to talk to Ray again. He felt she had let him down. She resented being forced to go on this grueling tour to promote a movie she didn’t even have any profit participation in. As we were at the airport getting ready to leave, there was ice-cold silence between Barbra and Ray. But finally he went over to her. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it was obviously some sort of apology. Barbra seemed to be saying, ‘I wasn’t so easy to deal with myself.’ It was like the end of a movie.

“A cynic might say that Stark didn’t want to burn his bridges with the biggest box-office star in the country,” Jaffe concluded. “And Barbra knew that Stark had all the financing power in the world. If she wanted to make a deal with Columbia, it was Ray who was in charge. She’s really smart when it comes to money. So she patched things up.”

BARBRA WOULD NEVER be able to patch things up with Johnny Carson, though. The host of Tonight had been after her for years to appear on the program; her last stint had been in March of 1963. Finally, when Ray Stark, Jon, and Steve Jaffe all told her she should do it, Barbra agreed.

“Barbra was afraid to do live television interviews,” Steve Jaffe said. “She never wanted to put herself in a position where she wasn’t in control. She was afraid of losing the public’s admiration by saying something she couldn’t cut out later. And she wanted to control how she looked. She kept trying to redesign the show, do the lights herself. She kept changing the musical arrangements, and here you’re dealing with some of the finest musicians in the country. They just aren’t used to putting up with someone making tremendous demands on them because it’s a very well produced show.”

Still, Carson’s producer Fred deCordova was so eager to have Streisand that he capitulated to all her demands, and the appearance was scheduled for Wednesday evening, July 9. On Monday the show began a publicity blitz to promote the appearance, even though no one could reach Barbra to make last-minute preparations. On Tuesday Marty Erlichman called the show to say that Barbra had changed her mind and would not appear. Ray Stark called deCordova to apologize: “You know what she’s like. There’s nothing I can do.”

Johnny Carson was livid. During the Tuesday night show, he told his millions of viewers, “I was informed prior to going on the air that we’ll have a cancellation tomorrow night. Barbra Streisand will not be with us. We don’t know why. Nobody has been able to reach her.... Although she doesn’t owe the show anything in particular, we thought it only fair to tell you, so when you tune in, you don’t get mad at us. I would rather you get mad at her. Streisand will not be here Wednesday night, nor will she be here in the future.”

The next night Carson’s audience was surprised to hear him introduce Barbra. “I got Madlyn Rhue,” Carson later recalled, “and we dressed her up in a Streisand getup, and she started to do ‘People.’ For a moment you couldn’t tell if it was Streisand or not because she was lip-synching. I walked over and said, ‘Thank you, but we don’t need you.’ And she walked back to the curtain and it was wonderful.”

Twelve years earlier, Johnny had said to Barbra, “I suppose when you get to be a big star we’ll never see you again.”

“No,” Barbra had replied. “Never.”

“You know, she probably means it, too!” Johnny had exclaimed. Apparently she did.

JON WAS STILL after Barbra to create a more youthful public image. “You can’t spend the rest of your life playing Ray Stark’s mother-in-law,” he had told her in exasperation. He had seen a script he liked, a rock remake of the classic Hollywood romantic tearjerker A Star Is Born.

Barbra laughed when he told her about it. “You idiot! That’s been made three times already.”

But this will be different, Jon argued. “You’ll play a sexy young girl, an aspiring singer. It’s exactly the kind of thing you should be doing in movies.”

“Well, maybe,” Barbra replied. Her decision to go ahead with the project would nearly destroy her relationship with Jon and nearly break her, body and soul. It would also make her a more popular star than she had ever been before.