Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Kramer went back to New York believing he was to start work on the screenplay. He brought with him a sheaf of notes on changes to be made, scenes to be included, excluded, speeches cut, parts developed and enlarged (the doctor she was planning to play was to be more germane to the story). The contract was waiting for him to sign. There was no mention of his writing the final screenplay. ‘I confronted my agent and told him he had not done what I wanted him to do. That I had to write the screenplay. I called Barbra on the phone and she got very angry with me and I said, “You don’t understand. This is my life story. I have to write the final screenplay. No one else can be brought in.”’

  ‘Well, that is something I can never give up,’ she told Kramer. ‘I simply have to have my power and my control over the story.’

  Kramer broke the deal. Streisand had lost The Normal Heart. Kramer could not have known how difficult this was for her. The play would haunt her for years, become an obsession in the same way that Yentl had. Still, he should have realised with his studio background how impossible it was for her to guarantee him the lone, final credit on a screenplay yet to be written. Control was the operative word. Streisand’s need was to express herself, her views along with those of the author. In the end it would be Barbra Streisand not Larry Kramer who would be judged by the work presented on the screen. The media was always accusing her of being a control freak. The phrase rankled. She did not believe it was truthful, although she easily confessed that she was almost fetishistic about minutiae.

  ‘My mother is a perfectionist in everything she does,’ admitted Jason, who was just emerging from a belligerent and angry teen-age which had made communication difficult between them. ‘She gets criticised for that. But it seems ridiculous that you can get criticised for caring too much about your work.’

  Although Kramer’s The Normal Heart now seemed lost to her, nagging thoughts on what was normal remained and were partially responsible for her decision to proceed immediately with Nuts, a film she would produce but not direct and in which she would play the idiosyncratic, high-priced call-girl who murders a client in self-defence.

  Dim echoes of Streisand’s own childhood permeated the story, how spoken truths can prove more life-threatening than defensive lies. Always striving for a deeper understanding of herself and of her many anxieties and resentments, Streisand had been in some form of therapy since fame came so suddenly to her in the early 1960s when she was just twenty years old. Since that time, she has moved from one therapist to another, ceaselessly engaged in attempts to come to terms with her past and the projects she chose reflected this theme.

  With the approach of summer, Streisand, accompanied by Cis, who was to be the co-executive producer on Nuts, and Martin Ritt, the director with whom she would collaborate, began the strenuous task of researching neuro-psychiatric hospital facilities to help in her interpretation of the tormented, incarcerated, psychotic Claudia Draper. On these field trips, which took her to Bellevue Hospital in New York City and the Mental Health Court in the San Fernando Valley, she spoke to several dozen schizophrenic, seriously disturbed female patients, after which she confessed, ‘I felt totally comfortable with them.’

  ‘I don’t believe any of the women Barbra met with knew who she was,’ Cis observed. ‘She could be herself. It must have been a refreshing feeling.’

  Being herself was no easy matter. She was by now a cultural icon, presented by a good portion of the media as a controlling, vainglorious woman who at the same time just happened to be one of the greatest singers and personalities of the twentieth century. Very few people are able to be natural when confronted with such celebrity. It intimidates them. Streisand also has an abrasive manner and no patience with people whom she does not consider up to her standards in intelligence. She can even make very knowledgeable people feel inadequate. It is not an endearing character trait and it has kept her coterie of close friends rather limited. Most of them, like Cis Corman and lyricist Marilyn Bergman, have known her from the early days of her success. ‘It is fascinating to me that she is so put down by the media,’ Cis Corman criticises. ‘People who know her love her.’

  That was obviously not enough for Barbra Streisand who, after twenty years of therapy, was still trying to find good reason to love herself. Right now, she took a respite from therapy sessions to concentrate fully on the development and production of Nuts. Her top priority was to break through the ‘old boy’ monopoly in Hollywood with a picture that would be praised for its content and her performance as well as its production.

  Martin Ritt, the director she had chosen, had sincere concern over social issues and a skill to elicit strong performances from his actors. From 1948 he had directed over 150 live dramas for the newly emerging television medium and acted in some 100 more until 1951 when he was blacklisted for his past ‘suspected’ Communist affiliations. He had taught at the Actors Studio for the next six years, coaching such future stars as Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick and Rod Steiger. His foothold in films was gained in 1957 with Edge of the City, and since that time he had made many notable films1 and had recently been named Distinguished Director in Residence at UCLA’s College of Fine Arts. Streisand could not help but admire his work. At the same time there was a conflict because Ritt believed there could only be one director on a film and Streisand was not willing to relinquish her control.

  ‘Marty and Barbra didn’t always agree,’ Maureen Stapleton, who gave a shattering performance as Streisand’s mother in Nuts, said. ‘But there weren’t any big scenes between them – no flying off the handle or stomping off the set. I loved Barbra. We had good chemistry. She’s such a professional. Sure, she’s a perfectionist, but that’s swell with me. I’m sure Marty respected her opinions. It’s not a good thing for a director to lose control. I don’t think he ever did. Everyone was very close while we made the picture. Of course Eli [Wallach, who played the court psychiatrist] is an old friend. Karl Malden, too [the fictional stepfather who has sexually abused Streisand’s character]. When I think of it, except for Richard Dreyfuss [the beleaguered court-appointed defence attorney], everyone on the film was ages older than Barbra but somehow she seemed the most serious person around.’

  The role of Claudia Draper was exhausting both emotionally and physically. The script went through numerous revisions with as many writers – six in all – and Streisand was deeply involved in the writing of each. The basic themes of the story – the lack of communication and understanding between a young girl and her mother and the abuse of a stepfather – stirred emotions that ran brutally deep. Her conversations with mental patients, visits to the women’s wings of prisons and mental hospitals were disturbing. There was the realisation of how lucky she was that she had been both talented and ambitious, that she left home as early as she did and won fame so soon after. It was critical to her that the final screenplay by Alvin Sargent and Darryl Ponsican would not only make a statement that was meaningful, but would also explore the myth of accepted mores and what was deemed normal behaviour. She stressed to Martin Ritt the importance of making the film as real as possible, gritty and ugly when necessary. What she did not want was a glossy Spellbound.

  The script, approved by Warner Brothers with a cost budget of $21,584,000, went before the cameras on 20 October 1986. Ritt was not too well and did not have the patience with which Streisand’s first film director, William Wyler (Funny Girl), had been endowed. A stocky, powerful-looking man with a massive and intelligent face that suggested an odd alliance between Charles Laughton and Mister Magoo, at seventy-two Ritt’s knowledge was encyclopedic and unorthodox: he could casually quote Chaucer and Goethe alongside Al Capp and Charles Schultz. He told one intimate that he had ‘learned my own judgment is the only one I can trust’.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked Streisand at one of their early meetings.

  She never blinked an eye. ‘Forty-four,’ she shot back.

  ‘I think you’re too old to play Claudia Draper. She’s a much younger w
oman, still in her twenties. Tough from the vicissitudes of her career as a hooker, but young enough to pull in big bucks for her favours.’ Later Ritt recalled the scene: ‘I had to admire [Streisand]. She took it like a trooper. She could have thrown me off the picture. After all, she was the boss. Her body stiffened. I noticed that. There was fire in her eyes. “You’re wrong,” she said, “and I’m going to prove it to you!”’

  The statement became a challenge and during the shooting a competitive atmosphere often existed between them. Ritt, like Streisand, was a scrupulous craftsman with an exact and exacting sense of place and period and although they were not destined to become friends, they both retained great respect of each other’s ability.

  Production ended on 3 February 1987. Ritt worked for ten weeks on the editing while Streisand hired herself to compose the picture’s score (‘Who else would hire me?’ she has quipped.) As the film was a courtroom drama, it did not require much music and she had dreamed of scoring a movie (Charles Chaplin being perhaps the only other actor, producer, director who had accomplished this formidable task) for a number of years. ‘The end title music,’ she explained, ‘was written to convey a sense of freedom and personal triumph [as Claudia is judged sane and competent to stand trial].’ Later Alan and Marilyn Bergman added lyrics to it and the song became ‘Two People’ recorded for her Till I Loved You album released the following year.

  Ritt, like other directors who had worked with Streisand since she formed her own company,2 had not succeeded in winning approval on the final cut. His hope had been that she would like what she saw when she ran his version and it would stand. He felt confident that this would be the case. He had, in fact, confessed to her that he thought she had done a magnificent job of Claudia. He left believing the picture was finished. To others he confided that he thought she would be nominated for an Academy Award.

  As soon as she received Ritt’s cut of the film Streisand went into virtual seclusion with it in her private editing room at her Malibu ranch estate with its separate editing cottage filled with half-a-million dollars’ worth of the latest and finest editing equipment. For three weeks she worked night and day impressing on the film her own stamp and personality. She cut some of Stapleton’s footage, the courtroom scenes, reworked the flashbacks that led to the murder sequence. Her role was always major. Now it almost overpowered the film and would have but for Dreyfuss’s forceful performance. She worked, shut away, food brought to her, immersed, possessed by her need to achieve as near perfection as seemed possible.

  With such dedication to her labour, there was little time or place in her life for Richard Baskin. He had accompanied her in February to the Grammy Awards where she was presented with an award for The Broadway Album, made early in 1986 and which had been a tremendous success. As she came off-stage, one of the show’s producers touched her on the shoulder. She turned. Beside him was a handsome blond man whom she recognised. ‘I’d like you to meet Don Johnson,’ the producer introduced. Johnson smiled boyishly. ‘Congratulations,’ he offered, his china-blue eyes locked momentarily with hers. ‘Yeah. Thanks,’ she grinned and moved away.

  ‘There’s one damn sexy lady,’ Johnson, currently the reigning American male sex symbol and star of the television series, Miami Vice, murmured as he watched her go.

  Streisand glanced back over her shoulder, catching a fleeting glimpse of Johnson as Baskin and two security men led her to an exit door.

  Footnotes

  1 A partial list of other memorable movies directed by Martin Ritt (1914–90) includes: No Down Payment, 1957; The Long Hot Summer, 1958; The Sound and the Fury, 1959; Hud, 1963; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1965; Hombre, 1967; Sounder, 1972; The Front, 1976; and Norma Rae, 1979.

  2 Streisand had signed a multi-faceted contract with Warner Brothers in June 1984 to develop a full range of motion-picture projects where she would work on all levels – as star, director or producer, or all three under the auspices of her own company, Barwood. Nuts was her initial venture. Cis Corman was named president.

  2

  IN THE FALL of 1987, when she was mired in the final work before the release of Nuts, Richard Baskin moved out of the Carolwood Drive house. Streisand had harboured great hopes for this relationship, seemed desperately to need the stability it brought to her life. Just before the start of photography on Nuts, Baskin had proposed and she had seriously considered marrying him. But the relationship lacked that depth of feeling she had once felt for Elliott Gould, the father of her son Jason, and still nursed for Jon Peters. Let no one be misled. Barbra Streisand is a romantic, and one whose view of love was formed by her early passion for movies and the great cinematic love affairs that she avidly watched unfold on the screen as she, an awkward, unhappy youngster sat in a balcony seat in a darkened theatre in Brooklyn. Being in love still meant that special magnetic pull between two people, the sound of trumpets, the flash of fireworks.

  Her separation from Baskin during the long weeks of discomfort as Nuts went before the cameras had been the breaking point. She had spent her days filming inside a women’s prison, dressed in drab prison clothes, her hair a tangled Medea mass, taking on the terror of the real women dealing with madness and horrors she could only imagine who were trapped in that brutal life and she had not been easy to deal with. Although it was Baskin who made the final decision, the parting was not acrimonious. Still, it hurt all the same. She had failed once again in a relationship – and she was alone, a condition with which she never dealt well. Jason had gone back to New York to study at the NYU Film School to better prepare for his future as a movie maker. She was happy that he had found what it was he wanted to do, but his departure had come at a time when they had not worked through the problems in their relationship. She did not doubt Jason’s love, it was their inability to communicate, to discuss the deeper issues that might be troubling him – his homosexuality, being the son of such famous parents and wanting to follow their careers in films.

  Her impasse with Jason was all the more troubling because of her own struggle as a young woman to relate to her mother and how much pain her inability to do so had given her. She had meant things to be different for Jason. She loved him dearly, wanted only the best for him and was exceptionally proud of the fine person he had become. She had not been a mother in the way a woman without a career of the magnitude of hers might have managed, but she had tried to compensate for these omissions in the quality of the time they spent together.

  With Jason and Baskin gone she fought depression, went back into therapy and held on to the thought that Nuts would be a great success and that she would finally be recognised as a serious actress. The movie opened on 20 November to mixed reviews and strong criticism that she was miscast in the role of Claudia Draper, a prostitute with prodigious seductive powers. In retrospect it can only be assumed that the critics could not overcome their own strong image of Streisand. They viewed the film with a cliché’d idea of women in prostitution and Streisand’s ethnic looks and intellectual approach to the character were not that. They were wrong, for Claudia Draper is one of Streisand’s finest performances; chilling, moving, and especially real. It is shocking that she was overlooked in the Academy Awards for that year, a blow to Streisand, who considered her performance should have been acknowledged and she was not even mentioned. It did not ease her resentment that the film came in at $6 million over budget and did not do well at the box office, a situation she blamed, at least partly, on the press.

  Streisand, the ultimate survivor, now threw all energies into acquiring a new project, The Prince of Tides, a best-selling book by Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini and The Lords of Discipline. A big, sprawling novel about a dysfunctional Southern family with a dark secret of rape and murder at its centre, The Prince of Tides consumed Streisand’s interest. Without doubt it was a filmic story, the characters were all well defined and interesting. Once again it was about a wounded family and those members who were fighting to keep their sanity and survive.
And it had a role she wanted to play, Dr Lowenstein, a dedicated psychiatrist, unhappy in her own private life, who falls in love with her patient, Tom Wingo, whose suicidal twin sister, Savannah, was also her charge. Dr Lowenstein was not the main character in Conroy’s novel but became the catalyst in the filmscript and the feminine half of the movie’s love story.

  As Christmas approached Streisand decided to spend a few weeks at the ski resort at Aspen, Colorado, which had in the past decade become the American Mecca for snow sports for the very rich and the glitterati of the entertainment world. Although not an expert skier, she liked the sport and the relaxed ambience of the resort. Aspen is also breathtakingly beautiful circled as it is by rugged, ice-sheathed peaks but with plenty of gentle, rolling slopes for the intermediate skier. The Bergmans, close friends since the mid-sixties, would be there and numerous other friends. Lyricist Marilyn Bergman, a blonde woman with a lovely face and the girthy look of an opera diva, was an active Democrat and perhaps could be called Streisand’s political guru, she and her soft-spoken, spare-built husband, Alan, had written lyrics to numerous songs that Streisand had recorded and into which she often had much input. Warmth, good music and engaging conversation abounded with the Bergmans, who also had a close circle in Aspen. It seemed like a good place for Streisand to spend the holidays rather than by herself in California. At a Boxing Day party at the Bergmans’, the day after Christmas, she once again saw Don Johnson.