By James B. Stewart
Photographs by Collier Schorr
Styled by Mel Ottenberg
Hollywood was another, altogether tougher industry, where women had long been at the mercy of powerful male studio heads and directors, and where even Streisand, already a major star, struggled to make herself heard. “Don’t let them do to you what they did to me,” Garland famously advised Streisand in the 1960s. Women were typically paid less than their male co-stars and strictly relegated to acting. “Actresses did not direct,” Streisand recalls. But for “Funny Girl,” her first film, she watched the dailies with its Oscar-winning director, William Wyler, offering her opinions along the way and learning the craft from one of its masters.
Later, for “The Way We Were,” Streisand’s co-star, Robert Redford, got $750,000 plus a share of the profits, while Streisand also got profit-sharing but was paid $400,000 less. She wanted to star in and direct a sequel, but requested a $400,000 director’s fee to make up the pay difference. Her producer, Ray Stark, flatly refused. No sequel was made. In those years, male stars negotiated for a percentage of a film’s gross revenue, rather than the often nonexistent net profit. Streisand joined their ranks with 1976’s “A Star Is Born,” and helped begin the still-ongoing fight for gender pay equity in Hollywood. “It wasn’t easy,” recalls Michael Ovitz, the former Hollywood agent who represented her during the ’80s and ’90s. “The business didn’t value women as much as men. Barbra could be tough as nails. She stood up for what she believed in, with enormous integrity.”
It wasn’t until 1983, with “Yentl,” that she finally got the chance to direct. She’d bought the rights to the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” in 1970. Her original vision was for a nonmusical, black-and-white art film, but “the only way I could get ‘Yentl’ made was to sing in it,” she says. The movie eventually emerged as a lavish full-color musical. Streisand starred as a young woman in a Jewish shtetl who poses as a man to pursue an education. She also directed, co-wrote the screenplay and produced it.
“Yentl” grossed over $40 million and won Streisand a Golden Globe for best director, but not even a nomination from the male-dominated Directors Guild of America. “Maybe in the next few years, with more women directing, they’ll get used to us,” Streisand said at that year’s Globes ceremony. Since then, only one woman has won the Oscar for best director — Kathryn Bigelow in 2010 [[and only five women have been nominated). “It’s a disgrace more women haven’t,” Streisand says. She hasn’t directed a film since 1996’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” a romantic comedy in which Streisand — finally — wins and keeps her handsome leading man, played by Jeff Bridges. It proved to be a case of life imitating art: The year the movie was released, Streisand met Brolin.
STREISAND’S INSISTENCE on control and obsession with detail have been criticized for much of her life: She is “difficult,” “demanding,” a “perfectionist,” all of which she readily acknowledges. It’s hard to imagine a comparable male star or director being subjected to the same criticism. In any event, it’s impossible to fault the results. “So she’s a perfectionist,” says Kosarin. “Most geniuses are perfectionists. Look at Steve Jobs.”
While Streisand insists that money is secondary to her, financial security is another form of control. She’s brought the same determination and self-education to stocks as to art, antiques and real estate. Jim Cramer, who discussed the market with her as a hedge fund manager before he became a popular CNBC host, told me she knew more about initial public offerings than most traders. “And she hated to lose,” he adds.
Streisand says she’s earned millions trading stocks — several million between 1998 and 2000 alone. [[“I’d be up at 6:30, light a fire, have a hot chocolate and trade until 1 p.m.”) She admits she’s not the most disciplined investor: She panicked during the crash in 1987 [[“I lost a fortune”), and again in March when the market plunged because of pandemic fears. But her instincts have been sound: She bought Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google shares when her then-financial adviser said they were too speculative. Her adviser steered her into Disney stock in 2011, and she likes to give shares as presents to children in her life. She can get the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, on the phone and recently asked him to correct Siri’s pronunciation of her name from Strei-zand to Strei-sand. He agreed. “People mispronounce my name no matter how famous I am,” she laments.
Apple is now the biggest holding in her charity, the Streisand Foundation, which funds various progressive causes — racial equality, women’s rights, civil rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and voting rights — with a particular focus on climate change and the environment. She helped endow the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, and co-founded the Women’s Heart Alliance to support research on heart disease in women.
She’s also raised money for political candidates, including every Democratic presidential nominee since John F. Kennedy [[she sang for Kennedy at the 1963 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when she was barely in her 20s). And while she has never been an activist in the mold of, say, Jane Fonda, her influence may be more far-reaching. She befriended Nancy Pelosi, the current speaker of the House, in 1986, when Streisand hosted a Congressional fund-raiser at her own Malibu home. “It took real courage back then to get involved because the entertainment industry believed there’d be a backlash,” Pelosi says. “She tended to every detail,” the politician recalls, even serving the black-and-white cookies popular in Baltimore, Pelosi’s hometown. Streisand in fund-raising mode “is dazzling to behold,” Pelosi tells me. “It’s not just because she’s a celebrity. She knows the issues. She’s studied. She can explain why she supports what she does. That’s what’s persuasive.”
Streisand’s early forays into politics faced criticism at the time: “When I first directed a movie,” Streisand told the Los Angeles Times in 1993, “it was as if I was being told how dare I attempt to infiltrate a man’s domain. Now it’s: How dare I be interested in politics.” And yet, because of her, Hollywood activism is now commonplace. “She doesn’t have to do this,” Pelosi adds. “She does it out of patriotism. She loves our country.”
The Trump presidency has summoned a new level of outrage in Streisand. “What do I hate most about Trump? He lies every day,” she says. “He has the compulsion to lie, even when the facts say something different. The worst lie was about the pandemic. Why not face facts? Why not tell the truth? People are stronger than you think — they can handle the truth. It would have saved thousands of lives.” She wrote the song “Don’t Lie to Me” for her most recent album, 2018’s “Walls,” to “express my despair and anger”: “Why can’t you just tell me the truth? / Hard to believe the things you say, / Why can’t you feel the tears I cried today, cried today, cried today? / How do you win if we all lose?” [[Of a Joe Biden presidency, she says, “I’m exhilarated … [He] will bring back dignity, honesty, intelligence and compassion to the Oval Office. I look forward to that.”)
Streisand gave an extended analysis of her politics in an address titled “The Artist as Citizen” in 1995 at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “I am also very proud to be a liberal,” she told the packed auditorium. “Why is that so terrible these days? The liberals were liberators — they fought slavery, fought for women to have the right to vote, fought against Hitler, Stalin, fought to end segregation, fought to end apartheid. Liberals put an end to child labor and they gave us the five-day workweek! What’s to be ashamed of?”
