genre pop

There are certain things you never forget: your first kiss, wrecking your dad’s new car, the birth of a child and, definitely, that time you slept with Warren Beatty. Barbra Streisand might have some of those memories, but when it comes to bedding down with Beatty, well, things are a bit fuzzy for the Hollywood legend.
Speaking to the New Yorker about her upcoming duets album, The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two, the 83-year-old star of stage and screen said she definitely remembered being propositioned by Marlon Brando back in the day, but, as she wrote in her 2023 memoir My Name Is Barbra, she just can’t remember is she and legendarily Casanova Beatty did the deed.

“I know I slept in the bed with him, but I can’t remember if we actually had penetration,” she said in answer to a question — more of a statement, really — about how no one in the “history of sex, or Hollywood, or anything” has ever written that line. “I swear to God, I can’t. There are certain things I block out,” Streisand said.

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Respectfully, New Yorker editor David Remnick couldn’t help calling b.s. on Streisand’s memory lapse, even as she doubled-down on saying she has no recollection of sex with Beatty. “But I know we’re still friends. Every year on my birthday, he calls me and we have a wonderful talk about our lives, our children, and so forth,” she said. “So we’re still friends. I met him when I was fifteen years old, and he was twenty-one, I think.”

In the memoir, Streisand first revealed that her memory is foggy about any intimate time with Beatty, who has been married to actress Annette Bening since 1992; Streisand married actor James Brolin in 1998. “Warren and I go back a long way (back to summer stock) and there’s some water under that bridge,” she wrote. “Recently, we were on the phone talking politics and who knows what else when he said, ‘I remember why we broke up.’ I said, ‘When were we together?’ Then I hung up and asked myself, Did I sleep with Warren? I kind of remember. I guess I did. Probably once.”

The book features details on the first time she met Beatty, when he was starring in a production of A Hatful of Rain in Connecticut. “He asked me to cue him on his lines. If that was a come-on, I missed it entirely,” she wrote. “He also played the piano. I was impressed. We used to eat together occasionally and talk about life. He was twenty-one, tall with movie-star looks, and women were already falling at his feet. I was sixteen.”

Streisand also chatted with Remnick about Bob Dylan after the New Yorker editor noted that in 1971 Dylan wrote a letter to one of his friends revealing that he’d written “Lay Lady Lay” about Babs, which was followed in 1978 by a letter/flowers exchange. Now, they are reconnecting on the Partners album, where they trade lines on the 1934 Ray Noble pop standard “The Very Thought of You.”

“The fun thing is that we were both nineteen years old, in Greenwich Village, never met each other. I was at the Bon Soir, and he was playing the guitar somewhere else,” she said. “I remember him sending me flowers and writing me a card in different-color pencils, like a child’s writing: ‘Would you sing with me?’ I thought, What would I sing with him? How could we get together on this? I couldn’t understand it at that time.”

But now that they’ve recorded “The Very Thought of You” she is delighted by the song choice that they both love. “He’s very shy, like I am. But he was wonderful to work with. I was told that he didn’t want any direction,” she recalled. “But when I talked to him about things that I suggested, he was so pliable — he was so open to suggestions. Everything I heard about him just went out the window. He stood on his feet for three hours with me.”

Also, for the record, when asked if she would ever tour or perform live on stage again after battling stage fright for much of her career, Streisand gave a clear answer: “Oh, my God! No!” The singer said that aside from when she was a teenager on her way up, she never really enjoyed live performance.

“I never wanted to be a singer; I wanted to be an actress. So I looked for material that I could act from Broadway plays — to be silly, you know, singing ‘Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,’” she said. “I was open to the audience, and talking to them. Whatever I was doing was just about being in the moment, things that I was experiencing in acting class. It was never to be a singer; it was to be an actress.” That, and the fact that she’s had a lifelong battle with a bad back. “I’ve always had a bad back. So it’s not just age,” she said.

The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two is due out on June 27 and features a duet with Sir Paul McCartney on “My Valentine,” as well as guest spots from Hozier (the previously released “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”), James Taylor (“Secret O’ Life”), Tim McGraw (“I Love Us”) and Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande (“One Heart, One Voice”).

On June 11, leader of The Beach Boys legendary pop composer Brian Wilson died at the age of 82. Below, Grammy-winning producer and performer Don Was remembers Wilson, who he cites as “the Claude Monet of rock and roll.”
I bought the 7” single of “I Get Around” in 1964 when I was just 12 years old. Back then, if you spent your whole allowance on one record, you played the A & B sides over and over and over. It wasn’t long before I came to prefer the romanticism of the flip side, “Don’t Worry Baby.” I tried really hard to figure out the chords on the guitar and it blew my mind when he modulated from E to F# in the middle of the bridge—not just because it was such a cool thing to do, but because it ripped your heart out.

It was my first glimpse into the notion that if you put some soul and imagination into your chord choices and voicings, you’d have a bunch of new colors to paint with. In that respect, Brian [Wilson] was the Claude Monet of rock and roll.

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He was considered to be a genius, but I think it’s deeper and much more mystical than that. Brian was plugged into some source that enabled him to see and hear things that most of us don’t. The downside of that is the profound inner turbulence it can cause. The upside is that it enabled him to explore creative territory where no musicians had gone before — pushing and dramatically expanding the harmonic and textural boundaries of popular music.

A great example is his song “Till I Die.” I worked it out on the piano: it’s quite complex, not in any one key. There’s no real pattern to the changes. The movement of the chords vividly evokes the feeling of being forever adrift on an ocean of uncontrollable emotions. Yet, despite the intricacy, a 10-year-old can easily sing along with the melody that Brian put on top. It’s extremely difficult and rare to be able to walk that line between experimentalism and universal accessibility. Nobody’s done it with more seamless grace than Brian Wilson.

In 1996, I directed a documentary about him called I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times. The intended purpose of the film was to explain to non-musicians why he was considered to be a genius. It took a whole film to spell it out, but one thing became evident — everything Brian originally envisioned has now become ingrained in the fabric of contemporary music. I hope that future generations realize how radical it is that he came up with these things before anyone else and without a roadmap or digital electronics to lean on.

Despite his much-publicized inner-turmoil, Brian was a very strong, sweet, innocent guy with a heart full of love and music. He was on a mission to create songs that would bring comfort and understanding to the whole world. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Below is Was’s playlist with some of his favorite Wilson/Beach Boy tunes.