ART & POLITICS
SABAR, ARIEL
Art and Politics BLOCK ISLAND DIARY The biggest (non)event of the summer BY ARIEL SABAR August 1 News Flash: Tht: New York Post’s gossip column lets drop that none (other than...
...A news van pulls up 7 and raises its microwave dish ‘ toward the sky...
...We just got a tip that Barbra’s yacht has pulled into Champlin’s Marina,” the editor says...
...News vans continue to roam the island, and I traipse from hotel to hotel, a pen clutched in my fist...
...It’s the city desk, back in Providence...
...One of the Lions hammers it into a patch of soil beside the front gate...
...Camera crews from Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood and reporters from USA Today and the supermarket tabloids descend on the island, all of them hungry for a scoop on exactly where the wedding reception will take place-and what will be on the menu...
...4:45 p.m...
...The waiters and bartenders tell me they can’t believe the story is still alive-and they say they’re getting fed up with all the questions...
...In a short item under the heading, “Press Power,” the column claims that Streisand has nixed her Block Island wedding plans because of the publicity generated by the earlier column...
...Still, the story won’t die...
...DiBiase orders the photographer off the property...
...A photographer and I park near the front gate of the hotel and get out...
...Just to teach them a lesson, she gives an “exclusive” to USA Today’s Ann Oldenburg...
...Suddenly the phone rings...
...4 p.m...
...Other reporters and 7 photographers also begin lining up...
...They say they closed the airport for five hours this morning,” says a giddy Mary Giles, a middle-aged real estate broker from Waltham, Mass., who is here on vacation...
...DiBiase, walks -1 3 p.m...
...5:30 pm I drive back to the newspaper has put me up in and sit down at a laptop computer...
...Wedding guests gather on the hotel’s verandah, after making their way past two burly Lions stationed at the entrance to the hotel’s long driveway...
...They tell me that a friend they trust has given them the low down on the Streisand nuptials: The ceremony, just as the Post had originally reported, will take place tomorrow at the Spring House hotel, a majestic Victorian mansion perched above the waterfront...
...The bride is a Connecticut woman, a non-celebrity, and she’s already told the hotel’s management that she doesn’t want her wedding ruined by a media mob that thinks she’s a front for Streisand...
...4:30 p.m...
...1 p.m...
...August 2 The media vultures have already started circling...
...The voice at the end of the line has a breathless quality Ifind familiar and, by now, faintly irritating...
...A cool wind starts to blow off the water and clouds mass in the sky...
...I head over to the bar at Spring House and order a lemonade...
...I’m just so awed by how out of control it’s gotten.’’ “When we had the 1 August 9 Wedding Day...
...But as the afternoon wears on, it becomes painfully clear that there will be no Babs, no Brolin, and no Bill...
...August 7 Babs is furious at the Post...
...Town officials, taxi drivers, local hotels and area caterers all tell me that there never was any truth to the Streisand rumor...
...That’s a pretty big event for a sleepy resort town off the coast of Rhode Island...
...Hoping to squelch the story once and for all, Spring House’s general manager walks out onto the hotel’s sloping lawn and gives an interview to a Providence TV station...
...Oh, and President Clinton, who everyone knows is an old friend of Barbra’s, will be flown in by Marine helicopter-but he can only stay for a couple of hours...
...The reception will be held at the secluded Lewis Farm, the very same place that islanders say was once guarded by a fierce old man with a shotgun...
...The hotel girds for the worst: It hires members of the Block Island Lions Club to keep reporters at bay...
...That tells me that somebody pretty special is coming...
...Then again, the place has gained some cachet as a fashionable wedding site ever since Edward Kennedy Jr...
...10 a.m...
...You better go check it out...
...Kennedy wedding here a few years back, that was crazy-but not like this,” he tells me after the camera stops rolling...
...ARIEL SABAR is n staff writer at the Providence Journal-Bulletin...
...Art and Politics BLOCK ISLAND DIARY The biggest (non)event of the summer BY ARIEL SABAR August 1 News Flash: Tht: New York Post’s gossip column lets drop that none (other than Barbra Streisand and her fiancC, actor James Brolin, will be getting married this August 9 or1 Block Island...
...Still, the paparazzi are clearly providing these locals with a good chuckle-like the TV reporter who scrambled up the hotel’s front steps in such a frenzy that he tripped and fell backwards into a mud puddle...
...d 3 7 a.m...
...And she blasts the Post for “having the utter gall to say we had canceled our plans because of [its] scoop.’’ August 8 out what’s really going on...
...F DiBiase, wearing blue jeans and champing on a cigar, comes to the gate and insists one more time that the wedding this afternoon is not Barbra’s...
...The town rumor mill also whirs into gear...
...He says there will be a wedding tomorrow, but it absolutely won’t be Barbra’s...
...The crowd of gawkers begins to disperse, and the news crews start paking up their gear...
...As one longtime islander puts it, this is a place where “old timers know what’s going on behind closed curtains before the people behind the curtains do...
...I approach two summer residents returning to their cottage after a day in town, and ask them what the word is on the street...
...In a statement issued through her Beverly Hills publicist, Streisand tells USA Today that she and Brolin NEVER planned to marry on the island...
...Reporters are eager I:O tap locals for the inside dope, the kind of tidbits traded over mugs of black coffee at Bethany’s Airport Diner or while knochng back beers at the Narragansett Inn hotel bar...
...The bride has made a wooden sign that says, “No, Barbra Streisand &James Brolin are not here...
...My newspaper flies me to the island to find 10:45 a.m...
...August 6 The Post’s gossip column retracts its original story...
...Outside the gate, island residents press binoculars and cameras to their faces and continue to titillate reporters with gossip they have picked up in town...
...I have less than two hours to file my story before the last plane leaves the island...
...got hitched there during a four-day blowout a few years ago...
...The owner of Spring House, Frank out of the hotel and stumbles upon a freelance photographer who has camped out in a truck in the parking lot...
Vol. 29 • October 1997 • No. 10
