Some people can't really deal with rejection — Barbra Streisand knows this from firsthand experience. In her memoir, she wrote about how she and Sydney Chaplin, silent movie star Charlie Chaplin's son, were interested in each other when working together on the 1964 Broadway production of Funny Girl.
"When you’re playing a character who falls in love with another character onstage or on-screen, you have to find all the ways you could really love that person," she explained in her new memoir, My Name Is Barbra.
Though this doesn't necessarily cause actors to truly fall in love with one another, she went on, it can lead to some level of infatuation, which is what happened between her and Sydney.
At the time, they were both married. Barbra realized she could not continue being flirty with her Funny Girl costar, so she "ended" their (non-)relationship. What happened after that changed her life, contributing to her anxiety and stage fright.
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"When I said to him, 'I don't want to be involved with you,' he turned on me in such a way that was very cruel," Barbra told the BBC. It's an experience that she still doesn't like to talk about, and one that "scarred [her] for life."
She wrote in her book that Sydney began to "mumble under his breath" on stage, saying "mean, hostile things." Speaking to the BBC, Barbra said that he also wouldn't even look her in the eyes after she rejected him.
“He started muttering under his breath while I was talking on stage. Terrible words. Curse words. And he wouldn’t look into my eyes anymore. And you know, when you’re acting, it’s really important to look at the other person, and react to them," she told the BBC.
Her experience with Sydney contributed to her decision to not perform live for years. She explained on CBS Mornings that Sydney's strange behavior made it harder for her to remember her lines, and even after the experience ended, her stage fright didn't go away. "That threw me so off that I thought, 'What, what am I, what is my next line?'" she said. "I never lost that, that fear of performing, fear of forgetting my lines."
Even when she stopped working with Sydney, the harassment didn't end. She also had to deal with criticism from Walter Matthau when working on Hello Dolly! Once, when she improvised, she was met with harsh criticism from Walter.
“He looked at me with the purest venom and said, ‘You may be the singer in this picture, but I’m the actor! I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body!'" she explained in her memoir. She didn't know what inspired him to be so rude to her but later found out that the whole issue was also related to Sydney Chaplin.
Apparently Walter was friends with Sydney, and decided it was appropriate to be cruel toward Barbra because of what happened between them.
Barbra had a lot to say in her book — it's 970 pages long. The memoir is available now.
