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The Queens And I
submitted by: Lisa (webmaster)
date: December 1999/January 2000
source: Mirabella Magazine
Barbra, Cher, Mariah who's next? In the future every woman will have her fifteen minutes of divadom. Gerri Hirshey surveys the prima donnas of the past, sings the praises of today's grandes dames, and charts the stars of the future.
In late spring, Barbra Streisand was in Italy, on one of the languorous vacations she has been enjoying with her new husband, when she got the news: RIAA, the record sales certification organization confirmed that she has finally surpassed the Beatles in the number of gold albums, with forty certified. Only Elvis had more (sixty-two). And, as one of Streisand's publicists pointed out, the King is gone, but "she's still going."
Is she ever. The gawky naïf of 1965's "My Name Is Barbra" is now the powerful fifty-seven -year-old director/producer/politico Barbra in Love. In late June, this diva di tutti divas released a single, "I've Dreamed of You," a love song she commissioned, then sang to actor James Brolin at their wedding reception last summer. Shrink-wrapping and selling this billet-doux is just the opening salvo in an escalating campaign: Streisand's record company, Columbia, is hoping the nuptial-specific ballad ("Now here we stand/ Hand in hand/ This blessed day") will catch tile fancy of brides in much the way that Celine Dion's Titanic weeper "My Heart Will Go On" has become the top song requested at funerals.
Riding this anticipated romantic swell, Streisand launched her album "A Love Like Ours" this fall with liner notes that coo: "I've usually thought of love as a private matter.... Yet once you've found love... you somehow want to share that joy." Additional sales heat should come from her aggressively publicized event on New Year's Eve. That night, Streisand will perform one show in the 13,000-seat MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Her deal took nearly a year to negotiate, resulting in a payday between $15 and $20 million. Capping a decade that has seen the unparalleled rise of the pop diva as entertainment goddess, with mammoth record and box office sales from the likes of Madonna, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Tina Turner, Janet Jackson, and the tiny, leather-lunged Canadienne Celine Dion, this one mad Diva Moment should be weighed for its startling economic gravitas.
Streisand's MGM ticket prices range from $500 to $2,500 (with the majority at the $1,500-and-up level). When tickets went on sale May 2, the show set a one-day, single-performance record in dollar sales for any sports or entertainment event ever handled by the thirty-three-year-old brokerage Ticketmaster. And as Streisand devotees are funneled through MGM's high-impulse maze, the casino-hotel take will also include special room packages (starting at $3,999), restaurant and souvenir sales, and what may be record-breaking fin de siecle gambling revenues. For their investment, revelers are offered this reassuring guarantee: When time clock strikes midnight, Ms. Streisand will still be onstage.
It takes an uberdiva to stand up to the expectations of New Year's Eve 2000. Only Sinatra or Elvis would have been an equal draw. And so far Streisand has taken a drama queen's approach to promoting the event. Just before tickets went on sale, her spokesman announced that this may be the last live concert by the woman with a voice "like buttah." Evah.
Injecting personal drama into the performance arena has long been a diva trait, from Maria Callas' Hellenic hissy firs to Madonna's visiting her mother's grave with cameras in tow in her documentary, "Truth or Dare." But Streisand's millennial chutzpah and her decision to get so personal on CD indicate a deep understanding of the cultural forces that have made these such Diva Days. The ageless appeal of the diva -- talent, emotional delivery, flamboyance -- has now crossed streams the newer, more intense cult celebrity and its powerful delivery system. Lifestyles of the female and fabulous, in book, TV bio, and CD formats, have created an infotainment juggernaut. Even men of letters have fallen hard for the pop diva: Elmore Leonard's "Be Cool" revolves around a headstrong female rocker. Salman Rushdie's "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is a hymn to the galvanic powers of the pop siren. Vina, its heroine, has a compulsion to publicly dissect every aspect of her bodice-ripping life. Rushdie says he wrote her that way because "She's a kind of confessional creature -- somewhere between Princess Diana arid Germaine Greer -- people who make the kind of narcissistic assumption everything that happens in their lives defines them the culture they live in. I've been noticing just in the last decade this incredible growth of our need for confession. We seem to have a culture of confession."
And in this relentlessly full-disclosure culture, women are historically more willing and able to talk - witness the female-dominated memoir boom. The women's movement itself took a confessional route to self-knowledge via consciousness-raising groups and cauterizing tracts like "My Mother/My Self." All of this helped set the stage for the best-seller reception of the landmark diva confessional "I, Tina," Tina Turner's 1986 saga of domestic abuse and triumph. In the wake of its success (and a 1998 film version) book editors continue to toss fat advances at the likes of Cher, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight Grace Slick, Patti LaBelle. And on record, women's songwriting has become far more autobiographical and purgative-from Tori Amos' tale of her own teenage rape ("Me and a Gun") to "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill," a deeply personal odyssey that broke the record this year for the most Grammys ever won by a female (five).
Add this inherent frankness to the pop diva's immense economic clout (Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston have sold more than 200 million records between them) and the fiery, larger-than-life aspects of her character, and it's clear why she has become the perfect '9Os meld of commerce and art. Surely Barbra Streisand is a happy woman in love. And just as surely, in these days of Ya-Ya sisterhoods and Oprah-inspired book clubs, packaging the fairy-tale romantic triumph of a fifty-plus divorcee "who thought love had passed me by" is a marketing no-brainer.
More than a century and a half into its usage, the appellation diva has as many shadings as Madonna has video selves. Diva began as an Italian word, first applied in the mid-nineteenth century to female operatic stars. But since that time, it has been broadened into a loaded, contradictory term, overused and much abused. In this age of extremes, diva can be used as a verb, an accolade or an insult. Usage needn't even be music-related, nor does it distinguish between "high" and "low" art. Thus modern diva-hood can take in Dame Judi Dench and Roseanne, Toni Morrison and Jacqueline Susann. We can, all of us, claim our own diva moment, be it the triumphant walkout on a stinky job or the soaring aria of childbirth.
What any divaship requires is a mouth -- a strong female voice that, by dint of talent and/or will, makes itself heard. A diva is unafraid to express herself in song, word, deed, and choice of foundation garment. A diva understands the role of passion in human life; in performance, she channels it for us more reserved mortals. Her powerful mystique is neatly summed up in the experience of a man I know in his thirties who screamed -- involuntarily, amid his own deep shock -- at a Madonna concert. "I don't know how she did that," he said. "But I'm so glad she did."
Though she is versatile enough to rock or croon, the biggest hit maker in the modern diva's oeuvre is often the big, lush ballad. Thirty-five years after Streisand's "People," torchers still hold their own against the harsher, clipped realities of rap and hard rock. And just as there is a bull market now in inspirational tracts, record buyers are opting for the gooiest of vocal epoxies to make a fractured world whole: Whitney Houston's CD from "The Bodyguard" anchored by "I Will Always Love You" has surpassed "Saturday Night Fever" to become the biggest-selling soundtrack of all time. Celine Dion's "Titanic" effusions got her Oscar-night exposure and that diva-certifying Barbara Walters interview.
True divaship is conferred by one other essential: durability. Americans have long held a soft spot for the unsinkable gal, from Molly Brown up through Alice Kramden. And feminism heightened our thrall with women possessed of staying power and the moxie for inspired transformations. Young women cheer the I'll-get-my-own puissance of Madonna's passage from Boy Toy to sexual provocateur to Cabala-studying single mom. For generations of women who have waited to exhale, the post-Ike Tina Turner is a heroine -- while Mick Jagger is just a likable old roué. And as their constituencies increase, diva activism is on the rise: Madonna with AMFAR, Lauryn Hill with imperiled children, Streisand as a primo Democratic fund-raiser. Socially, politically, culturally, there is a lively cult of You Go, Girl -- and the diva can stand and deliver.
What does become a legend most? The diva who dares -- like Aretha Franklin, who stood in for Pavarotti on last year's Grammys with less than an hour's notice and delivered her own powerhouse "Nessun Dorma" live and unrehearsed. Bette Midler, wisely chosen as Johnny Carson's last guest, reduced the affectless Nebraskan to tears with a chair, a mike, and one quiet song.
For a close-up look into the crucible -- that defining Diva Moment -- let us revisit 1999's other much-ballyhooed Diva Event, backstage at Manhattan's Beacon Theater. We are peeking at rehearsal fuss and fabulousness you didn't see on VH-1's Divas Live/99, which aired April 13 and, owing to its success, is being planned again for next April.
Outside the theater, the D-zone boasts a full block of double-parked "talent" trailers and semis rumbling serious entitlement on West 75th Street. Here, anxious men bearing small Kate Spade makeup bags are heard to bark at much bigger security men: "Let me through now -- her lipliner is ragged!" Over the three days of rehearsal, even the air suffers diva buildup: free-floating marabou fluff and hair extension fuzz in the wake of Whitney Houston's dancers has one guard hitting his asthma inhaler.
Onstage we have a quiet, off-mike game of Diva Double Dare. Cher and Tina Turner stand arm in arm as the band tunes up. An hour earlier, Cher held a press conference announcing that her surprise dance hit, "Believe," has made her the only artist in pop history to have hits spanning four decades. She outlined bold plans for an extravaganza "very '70s, very Cher" summer tour. But right now, the queen of over-the-top is looking a trifle . . . tentative:
"Cher, are you sure you want to do this?"
"Yes, Tina."
"Because I can bring the moves down some."
It is one thing to share a verse of "Proud Mary" with Tina Turner - but quite another to dance with a woman whose tilt-a-whirl choreography has sent a couple of generations of spent Ikettes limping home to Mama.
"Am I insane to do this, Tina?"
Cher has dressed down for such strenuous work: a black jumpsuit with strappy bustier top, clunky boots, and a black wig with silvery baubles woven into the top. Tina is in a slim Armani suit. "You want to work it?" she asks again, a touch wickedly. Cher looks straight into her eyes and says evenly. "You know I do. Gimme a chance. l'll get it."
The band vamps, and Cher tries Tina's trademark backward stutter step into a forward crouch. She flies out prematurely once, twice. On the third attempt, the women fold out into perfect twin forward flops. They rise out of them simultaneously with eyes locked, arms up, and the duet ends in full frontal shake 'n' bake. Breasts, hips, thighs, chins -- nothing's jiggling that shouldn't be, despite their combined age of 114. Badoooom! On the last drumbeat they fall into a victory hug. "There's your million-dollar shot," says a cameraman. "Divas ascending." Backstage, Cher is hiking up her bustier. When congratulated on her fortitude, she grins and cites the Diva Credo, a mantra I've heard chorused, amplified, and shoop-shooped over nearly two decades of interviewing pop stars: "Hey, you've gotta go for it. No matter what."
When the marabou settled and the numbers came in, it was clear that the divas had delivered. The week after the broadcast, Cher's album "Believe" won Billboard's Greatest Gainer award, jumping from number twelve to five, its highest position; a compilation of her greatest hits rose fifty-seven spots. And Whitney Houston, who had folks sobbing in the aisles with a take-no-prisoners version of "I Will Always Love You," scored a thirteen-place jump for her current album, "My Love Is Your Love." Divas Live '99 got ratings higher than anything in VH1's fourteen-year history -- nearly double the viewership for last year's first record-shattering diva event (starring Aretha Franklin and Celine Dion, among others) -- and enough to give that network its first showing ever in the number one spot for a prime-time cable program.
According to VH-1 president John Sykes, his network and the music industry in general are simply playing catch-up to the seismic changes feminism has brought to other fields: "I think the entertainment business was the last men's-club holdout. It's finally responded to the power women have in the marketplace. There have always been powerful women artists, but it seemed they were coming one every few years, or they were women who were supposed to act like men -- those tough female rockers of the '70s or '80s. These divas are women who are worshiped for being women, not for being guitar goddesses or grunge queens."
This prerogative to be uncompromisingly female in a hitherto male-dominated genre is clearly one of the victories of the women's movement. It's also a key element of the pop divas broad-based, democratic appeal. By virtue of her sex, she comes from a historic underclass. And just as with rock-anointed mongrel male rebels - the poor boy Elvis, the Jersey guttersnipe Springsteen -- diva worship finds its idols in the least exalted neighborhoods. From coal miner's daughter Loretta Lynn to project dweller Diana Ross, most pop divas have populist, if not downright poor, roots.
At the beginning of the recording industry, the very first divas emerged from the nation's least entitled class: poor, black southern women. In the 1920s and '30s, record men discovered a huge market among southern blacks. The earliest best-sellers were blues-women such as Bessie Smith, who could command session fees nearly fifteen times those of the average male singer. Their freedom of expression may have come from having nothing to lose, but their frank, confessional girl talk ("I need a little sugar in my bowl!") made stars of the women who had been working black vaudeville and tent shows. And blueswomen were divas; Ma Rainey was a vision in horsehair wigs, diamonds, tiaras, gold teeth, and necklaces made of gold coins.
More sophisticated ladies -- the Billie Holidays, Lena Hornes, and Ella Fitzgeralds -- would find their places in front of the big male bands that defined jazz and swing. Their genius was unquestioned, but their market share was limited by both racism and cultural snobbery; artistically and socially, the black diva has always been a bit ahead of her times. It was rock, with its massive corporate airplay and crossover opportunity, that set the black diva at the glowing center of packed stadiums and Pepsi sponsorships. In the '60s, the Supremes vied with the Beatles for the number one chart spot; the Rolling Stones' early tours were with the Ronettes, three tough-looking mixed-race girls from Harlem. Class began to take on an inverse cool: For the first time, being able to get down seemed preferable to movin' on up. Madonna has said she always wanted to look like lead Ronette Ronnie Spector sounded: "sexy, hungry, and totally trashy."
These voices from the wrong side of the tracks have delivered resonant diva anthems: Aretha Franklin's "Respect" thundering atop the tumultuous '60s, Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It?" eulogizing the desperately swinging Me Decade. Madonna's "Express Yourself" for the postfeminist '90s woman. Their wry truths, sung over steady bass lines, helped us navigate roaring social rapids.
Diva democracy - the ethic that anyone can be fabulous - fueled disco, the most egalitarian of dance crazes. The music was synthetic and overwrought, and so were its queens. Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, and those space vixens LaBelle. As drag culture flourished, from "La Cage aux Folles" to vogueing, to RuPaul, every smart pop diva maintained a good-humored relationship with her loyal impersonators. It is no surprise that gay men should choose to burlesque their outsider position by preening in the gaudy plumage and haute mien of a Miss Ross -- or a Barbra. Female, outrageous, loudmouthed, and very often black, the pop diva is the ultimate upstart heroine. And by virtue of that, she is deeply, contrarily American.
"Is diva just a nice term for 'bitch'? Is that what we are?" asks Whitney Houston, having folded her leggy self into a seat in the back rows of the Beacon. The lovely face is without makeup. Houston's nails are short and unpainted, and her manner, despite worse press than Attila's, is relaxed and direct. "Isn't diva a frame of mind, though?" she says. "This title worries me sometimes. My friend Lauryn [Hill] doesn't like diva. We've had this conversation. She is the antidiva. It's the stigma that's put on diva that's not . . . cute."
If the stigma comes from without -- the public, the press, "this trip they've laid on us" - Houston would like it known that there is such a thing as "diva DNA," a natural woman gene, if you will. And no one has better bloodlines than Whitney Houston, whose mother, Cissy, is still most sublime of backup singers, whose cousin Dionne Warwick was always around the Houstons' Newark home - along with the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin.
"Diva means either a goddess, a prima donna, or a very strangely insensitive, overly bitchy person," Houston says. "I saw all these aspects." Thank heaven, she says, that the divas who raised her had one foot in the spotlight and the other in front of the stove. "Growing up with my mom and Dionne and with Aretha and Gladys [Knight] … it gave me the opportunity to see them at home, in the kitchen, with the children. And onstage."
For the most soulful divas, the circle is unbroken and wide. Lauryn Hill was twenty-three when she took fifty-six-year-old Aretha Franklin into the studio to produce "A Rose Is Still a Rose" in Detroit. Hill told me that when she was in the recording booth with Lady Soul, "it smelled like church, paper fans with wooden sticks."
Houston blames industry pressures for interfering with such sisterly spirit. Before they met to record a duet, she and Mariah Carey were rumored to dislike one another, when in fact, they had never met. At industry functions they traded glances over the icy perimeters of their entourages. "It keeps you alienated from people you might like to know, " Houston says of the pomp and posse that can attend '90s divaship.
Is today's ultra-managed, stylist-dependent diva an impossibly pampered creature of whim? Conducting my own admittedly unscientific study of some artists' backstage-perks requirements did yield some surprises. Yes, Mariah Carey must have Guiltless Gourmet "Baked Not Fried" chips and honey "in plastic-bear squeeze bottles." But on closer look, comparing male and female artists' lists compiled by Behind the Scenes, Inc., a Los Angeles catering company, the men are by far the most finicky and outrageous. Aerosmith's huge hospitality list runs from live wheat grass to Double Bubble gum. The metal group Jackyl requires Fat Free Newtons, Chips Ahoy!, and "one shaved gerbil (rodent)." By comparison, the diva lists are short and tame: herbal teas, Snapple, broiled chicken breasts. But woe to the backstage provider who doesn't understand presentation. Whitney Houston's advance team once brought catering up short upon discovering that the dressing-room fruit basket arrived naked. The walkie-talkie crackled with urgent dispatches and indignation: "We need plastic wrap in Whitney's room now! Is anyone listening to me?" Twenty minutes of frantic calls culminated in "Catering, come in, are you understanding that this plastic wrap is a priority?"
Laughing, Houston says that she has since cut her entourage in half - except for the hair and makeup people. ("They're the real divas.") And she is enjoying visits and girl talk with Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, and, yes, Mariah Carey: "When Mariah and I finally met each other, we laughed so hard. We don't have to fight, we don't have to punch each other in the face - like some divas I know. I've seen attitudes, major attitudes. I just laugh, though. I just figure, Girl, you have no idea."
Diva arrivistes - very young women with very big sales - may find themselves still longing for a certain R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Last spring, when Mariah Carey went before a Central Park West co-op board - she was trying to buy Barbra Streisand's 16-room, $7.5 million apartment - she certainly had the numbers. She has amassed thirteen number one hits in less than a decade. (It took Elvis sixteen years to earn his sixteen number ones.) But it's possible that Carey's unassailable wealth could not overcome her constant appearance in the gossip columns; out in the wee hours on Puffy Combs' arm, photographed wearing tiny tube tops and flanked by big male rappers like Q-Tip and Da Brat. "Sometimes," Carey told me, "I'm in the paper every other day in New York. It's not cute when you're trying to get approved by a board."
After her divorce from her boss, Sony Records chief Tommy Mottola, Carey says she treated herself to a makeover, from that "nonthreatening girl on the swing with the curls" to a video vamp flashing miles of thigh and long, straight tresses. The new pop-and-sizzle Mariah is selling well, but Carey will have to keep reading the real estate section; the board in Streisand's building turned her down.
Image is now the currency; its fluctuations determine a diva's fortunes. And in an age of such rapid and rampant disinformation, defending one's perimeter is paramount. To that end, Streisand has launched a new official Web site (www.barbrastreisand.com) armed with a flashing "Truth Alert" feature "to directly correct tabloid misinformation." If much of the '90s diva's power rests with her uncanny ability to offer a full menu of iconic selves via video, her thorniest dilemma is this: How much of the real self should she unveil to a global market of inquiring minds?
It can be a perilous fan dance, according to Cher: "I'm a tabloid person's dream," she says. "Because I haven't lived a really nice, neat, tidy life. And because I seem so outrageous that anything you write about me seems like it could be true. If someone said, 'Whitney Houston had her ribs removed,' you'd go, 'That's ridiculous!' But if someone said, 'Cher's had her ribs removed,' everybody would go, 'Oh, you know, I heard that, too.'"
Cher has tried to be practical about the media-driven meld of public and private lives that now confronts the pop diva; to outfox celebrity garbologists, she even shreds grocery lists. And she has a healthy sense of humor. Acknowledging that both her mutations and her persistence may also give stand-up comics a reason to live, she is given to quoting a cartoon that asked what forms of life would be left after a nuclear holocaust: cockroaches and Cher. But even Cher gets the blues. "I still get really hurt by things," she says. "A couple of times I thought about stopping. And leaving this country. Just stopping completely."
But "here I am," she says in a small voice. "I'll stay as long as I'm wanted."
Tina Turner chose to pack up and leave. Having been through the fire during the Ike years, she has opted for life on the Mediterranean, "lying in the grass," chanting and meditating - and having more closets built. "Someone said to me, 'Why isn't there ever stuff about you in the papers?'" Turner says. "And I said, 'Well, I haven't done anything. My life is not very public.' After 'I, Tina,' everybody found out how my life had been. I think they were shocked. But I'm very private now. I enjoy it."
The fact that she did survive, and so spectacularly, has made her an unwitting poster girl for wistful women of a certain age. I tell her about a conversation I overheard waiting in line outside the Radio City Music Hall ladies' room during her last tour: " I told my husband," one fortyish woman said to another, "'Before I die I want to see the Pacific Ocean and Tina Turner.'" Tina erupts into her deep "Thunderdome" laugh. I wonder aloud if she's aware that fans - especially women - regard her as somewhat of an Eighth Wonder.
Her smile suggests that we keep the analysis simple. Tina Turner is a fantasy, darling. And that's perfectly okay: "Sometimes I laugh and I talk to myself. I say, 'Tina, you're doing all right.'"
Greater fortunes may rest with future divahood; bold innovators like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott will take the franchise further by owning their song publishing and record labels, writing for an producing their own female protégés. Streisand is investing in Starbucks. While Madonna's film and record companies sign acts and buy up properties, academia will continue to hold seminars on her demicup semiotics. But amid all the fancy deconstructions, Turner finds it wiser to rest Sphinx-like and leave things to timeless diva iconography. "Sometimes I feel like I'm this little doll with the short dress on and the red lips. I know when I was a little girl. I loved those women with the hair and the lips. I do read the fan letters. They say, 'I love your high-heel shoes with the red soles. I love your red lips. I'm eight years old.'"
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