Barbra Streisand has a lot to dish about in the more than 900 pages of her new memoir, “My Name is Barbra,” including all the good and bad men she dealt with as she navigated treacherous, sexist workplaces in Hollywood.
The EGOT winner’s famous male friends and lovers include Marlon Brando, a friend who wanted to sleep with her, and Jon Peters, the one-time hairdresser who became her boyfriend and enjoyed a short reign as one Hollywood’s most powerful and toxic producers.
To Streisand’s fans, sexism is the reason she became notorious for being “demanding” when she simply had a drive for control and perfection. The 81-year-old star also said she had to combat chauvinism while trying to do her best work, the New York Times said in a story about Streisand’s memoir. For example, Sydney Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s son who was her co-star in the Broadway version of “Funny Girl,” took revenge when she rejected his advances by verbally abusing her onstage to the point that she developed stage fright.
But another hurtful moment, Streisand said, came years later when she signed up to co-star with Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro in “Meet the Fockers,” the 2004 sequel to the 2000 hit comedy “Meet the Parents.” In “Fockers,” Streisand and Hoffman play the free-spirted, hippie-ish parents of Stiller, who wants to introduce them to his fiancee’s conservative father, a retired-CIA operative played by De Niro.
For the most part, Streisand said she had a positive experience on “Meet the Fockers,” the Daily Beast reported about her book. She had always wanted to work with Hoffman—whom she’d known since before either were famous—and had always liked De Niro, who continues to send her flowers every year on her birthday.
But Streisand said she was aggravated to learn about the huge pay discrepancy between her and Hoffman, according to the Daily Beast.
“This was the first time I felt the effect of Hollywood’s unequal pay scale for men and women,” she wrote.
“I didn’t ask what the other actors were making, but I was definitely hurt when I found out that Dustin was getting three times as much as me, plus a tiny percentage, which is significant on a movie that made $520 million,” Streisand said, the Daily Beast reported. “I was given some excuse about how I had been the last to sign, but the only thing that made me feel better was when my dear friend Ron Meyer, who was the head of Universal, gave me a bonus… the first and only time I ever got one. I guess he, too, thought it was unfair.”
Again, Streisand said the “Fockers” experience was mostly positive and she probably would count Hoffman as one of the good men she dealt with during her long career. She and the “Tootsie” star certainly looked like old friends when they appeared together onstage at the 2005 Academy Awards to present the best picture award to Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby.”
But Streisand’s mention of being unfairly compensated for her work — compared to Hoffman — could remind people that the actor, who won best actor Oscars for “Kramer vs Kramer” and “Rain Man,” was accused of being one of Hollywood’s toxic men in 2017, in the months after sexual abuse allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein launched the #MeToo movement.
A total of seven women came forward in late 2017 to accuse Hoffman of sexual misconduct or assault in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when he was at the height of his career. According to Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and other publications, two of the women said they were teenage girls when Hoffman exposed himself to them, while a third said the actor forced her to have oral sex with him in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., where he was staying while filming “All the President’s Men” in 1975.
Hoffman apologized to one of the women, a writer who said Hoffman harassed her when she was a 17-year-old intern working on Hoffman’s 1985 TV version of “Death of a Salesman,” the Los Angeles Times reported. However, he denied any wrongdoing, saying: “I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. … It is not reflective of who I am.”
