Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  ‘You fight like hell with Jon, you fight like hell with everyone you lean on,’ he told her.

  ‘I know,’ she answered. ‘But Jon is so strong! I never had a father; I was always in charge of myself. I came and went as I pleased. I can’t stand for someone to tell me what to do.’ Then, her voice grew strident with sudden venom. ‘Ray Stark always used to bully me, the son of a bitch. You’ll pay for every lousy thing Ray Stark ever did to me!’

  One of the most important locations in the film – the retreat in the desert that John Norman Howard, the fictional rock star builds – became a bitter struggle between the director and his star. Streisand did not want to spend so much time in such bleak, unfriendly open spaces. She had convinced Peters that they should use the Barn as a location – the rock star’s fatal accident could occur on the Pacific Coast Highway. Finally, she gave in and an area near Tucson, Arizona was chosen and, as they waited to move the crew and cast there, Peters flew with her to New York for a TV telecast of a Muhammad Ali fight in Madison Square Gardens. As they came down the aisle of the packed arena to take their front-row seats, a man broke through their protective entourage and reached out to grab Streisand by the arm. Peters took a swing and connected.

  This was the reality of her life, the cost of fame. She was viewed by some as a public possession to be grabbed at and touched at will, an invasion of her privacy that infuriated and disgusted her. Why her? Other celebrities were not subject to such bruising attention. Top singers were almost always singled out – Garland, Sinatra, the Beatles. Music made a connection, incited people where straight drama did not. The incident with the over-enthusiastic fan brought the role of Esther Hoffman closer into focus.

  ‘Pow! I let him have it!’ Peters told Pierson on their return. ‘He made a motion like he’s gonna touch, maybe he’s gonna hit Barbra: He’s gonna hit my woman! I go crazy! Bam! Pow! They’re pullin’ me off him. The cops come take him away. You can’t go anywhere with her! That’s the meaning of “star”! We gotta get that in the picture!’

  Peters had a streak of inner violence that while it could be used to protect her, could also be turned against her. Ugly fights between Paul Williams and Peters, where the two men came close to blows, caused Williams to walk out on a live recording session. Tensions did not ease as the picture got under way. Pierson reported a fierce fight between Streisand and Peters over a scene she had just played to his disapproval. When Pierson went for his car, Barbra darted out of the hedges where he was parked, ‘For God’s sake, take me home!’ he claimed she cried, jumping inside and huddling in a dark corner of the vehicle. ‘He gets so furious. I don’t know what to do!’ She sat huddled up and silent as they drove out to Malibu. When they arrived at the Barn, Peters was already there, lights illuminating the entire property. He stood hulking in the doorway as she got out of the car. There were an awkward few minutes in which neither moved towards the other. Then Peters went inside and Streisand followed. Pierson remained parked there for a short time. Hearing nothing, he left.

  The two stars worked in different ways. Kristofferson had a more direct approach to acting. To play drunk, he got drunk. When he was to be high in a scene he got stoned. She hated that. He was also slower than she was in getting a scene down, and required more time to rehearse. However, one time, when the script called for them both to cry, Kristofferson was able to do so, while Streisand needed menthol blown in her eyes to cause them to water.

  ‘Jesus, Barbra,’ Kristofferson apologised, ‘I wish I could do something to help you. It’s my fault, I’m not giving you what you need.’

  Streisand fumed as she walked away and drew Pierson to one side. ‘Did you hear what he said – the ego? He thinks what he does controls what I do!’ she sneered.

  Kristofferson, realising he was in an undeclared sparring match with Streisand, tried to duck the wild blows. (Later he was to say that making the film was ‘an experience worse than boot camp!’) A man of great personal strength and sexual appeal, there was about him the legendary aura of the lonely, wandering American, rootless, searching. He had that hungry, sensitive look that had made Gary Cooper a star, and in his music and lyrics the particularity and intellect that had brought Bob Dylan to the front. The son of an army general, he was born in Brownsville, Texas, a border town where Mexican-American feelings were rife. It was a tough background and he wanted to be able to write about the injustices he had witnessed. He majored in creative writing at Pomona College, then went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. To please his father he joined the army, went through officer’s training, served in Germany and ended as a major teaching English at West Point. All the while, he wrote songs and sang them to his own guitar accompaniment, bursting on to the music scene in the late 1960s to become a top Country and Western concert and recording star – singing his own message-filled lyrics, which he also did in several early films.

  The enigma of A Star Is Born is that Kristofferson was playing a singer-composer, which he was, and yet someone else was writing his music. This became a grating matter, one over which he was at odds with Peters. There was also concern that his performance as a music star on his way down might seem too realistic to the public, a fear that was not without substance.

  The bathtub love scene between Kristofferson and Streisand became another cause of dispute. Kristofferson came on the set nude under his bathrobe. Peters insisted he wear flesh-coloured shorts. ‘What the hell are they afraid of?’ Kristofferson shouted, but he acquiesced and when they rehearsed the intimate scene, the doors to the rehearsal room were kept open, by Peters’s orders, so that Kristofferson would not be alone with Streisand. Peters ran around the set screaming obscenities, yelling that that ‘fucking bastard is going to pee all over Barbra!’ Pierson tried to calm him down as Streisand kept shouting, ‘It’s OK! It’s OK!’ Finally the scene was shot and Peters dashed over to the tub and helped Barbra out.

  All their differences became news events reported in Time, People and the tabloid press. A massive live concert with 55,000 people was a major scene in the movie. It was shot at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona and even though the concert was being used for the company’s purpose, the audience had to purchase tickets at $3.50 a piece. The crowd waited for over two hours in blazing 90-degree heat as the cameras and stars got ready. Shouts and jeers became insistent and Streisand, in the outfit she wears in the filmed sequence, a crocheted hat and coat over some tight pants, took over the microphone, working to calm the audience, amazingly getting them to laugh, telling them what was going to happen when the cameras began to roll, singing a song from the movie to appease them as the technicians worked madly behind the cameras preparing for the shot.

  ‘Look at her directing the crowd!’ Peters told Village Voice reporter Arthur Bell as they stood on the sidelines. ‘Seventy thousand people [somewhat of an exaggeration], they’d do anything she’d say. It’s like Brooklyn, you know what I mean? She’s got balls. She’s telling that crowd what she wants. I give to you, you give to me. See her working that crowd? See that?’

  ‘If this film goes down the drain,’ Streisand told Pierson later when they watched the rushes which she felt had missed what she wanted captured, ‘it’s all over for Jon and me. We’ll never work again.’

  Her love for him was obvious to all. The big question was whether they would get married when the film was completed. ‘Perhaps,’ she told one interviewer. ‘I hope so – but marriage is not the most vital issue in our lives right now. He talks about it. I talk about it, but not at the same time. I’m all for women’s liberation: do it because you feel it. All women should call their own shots, not in a militant manner but with the conviction that they’ve got a helluva lot to offer other than looking pretty and passive.’

  None the less, looking sexy for Peters was one of her high priorities. On screen and privately she had never dressed more provocatively, tight pants showing her well-rounded buttocks, clinging fabrics and deep cleavage revealing her shapeliness. And for the first tim
e in her life someone else’s success meant as much to her as her own. Their fights and vehement disagreements contributed to the power of their mutual attraction. Streisand firmly believed Peters’s promise to make her the greatest star in the world.

  But Peters also kept his keen, brown eyes set on his own future and a time when his star might eventually outshine hers. His hunger for power in the industry was insatiable, equal to Streisand’s. Maybe, after all, he was the one, the poifect match she had sought for years to find, the man to be the masculine to her feminine.

  Footnotes

  1 The original story upon which all four versions of A Star Is Born were based was written by Adela Rogers St John. What Price Hollywood? (1932), directed by George Cukor, starred Lowell Sherman as an alcoholic movie director who helps waitress Constance Bennett achieve film stardom while he sinks into drunken ruin. A Star Is Born (1938), directed by William Wellman, has Fredric March as an alcoholic actor and Janet Gaynor as the movie hopeful he grooms into stardom as he self-destructs. A Star Is Born (1954), with George Cukor back at the helm, presented Judy Garland and James Mason in a musical version of the same story.

  2 Warner would now get the distribution rights, reimbursing First Artists for two-thirds of the film’s negative cost upon delivery of a finished film. Streisand would receive 25 per cent of the gross returns.

  3 As it was organised, each of First Artists founders agreed to make three films for the company. In 1971 Steve McQueen had joined the company. A year later Dustin Hoffman agreed to produce films independently through First Artists but never exercised his option to buy stock and had been feuding with them from that time (although he was later to make Agatha and Straight Time under their aegis). Paul Newman produced and starred in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Pocket Money and The Drowning Pool which were not successful at the box office. Sidney Poitier made low-key and limited interest ghetto movies with all-black casts (First Artists had expected him to replicate highly commercial movies like In the Heat of the Night). Streisand’s Up the Sandbox had lost money. First Artists’ only successful film at this time was Steve McQueen’s The Getaway.

  4 No less than thirteen writers, including Streisand and Peters, had worked on the screenplay leading up to Pierson’s involvement. They were Joan Didion, John Dunne, Jonathan Axelrod, Bob and Laura Dillon, Jay Presson Allen, Buck Henry, Arthur Laurents, Renée Taylor, Joseph Bologna and Alvin Sargent.

  5 In the end Paul Williams wrote the lyrics for ‘Evergreen’ (music Streisand), ‘With One More Look at You’, ‘Watch Closely Now’ and ‘Spanish Eyes’ (music Kenny Asher), and ‘Everything’ (music Rupert Holmes). Additional songs were ‘Queen Bee’ (words and music Rupert Holmes), ‘Crippled Crow’ (words and music Donna Weiss), ‘I Believe in Love’ (Alan and Marilyn Bergman) and ‘Lost Inside of You’ (words and music Barbra Streisand and Leon Russell).

  25

  SHE WAS AT Frank Pierson’s shoulder every inch of the way. No decision was made without her. She made sure of that. There was hell to pay if she was not consulted. She was executive producer and Peters the producer, a step below. They could not be ignored. No matter what she, as an actress, contributed to her films, the end result was a reflection of the director, his or her vision and ability to see it through. That is where the ultimate control is – for film is a director’s medium. That was what she wanted – to direct her own films. She could taste the power, the ability to fulfil her personal visions, the scenes she saw so clearly in her head. But studios were resistant to give women the opportunity to direct, another example of Hollywood’s ‘boys’ room’ mentality, and she was going to need ammunition.

  ‘You lay it out and it’s shit,’ she told Pierson as they were setting up a scene towards the last week of production on A Star Is Born.

  He led her away from members of the crew with whom they had been working. ‘You’re rude,’ he told her. ‘There’s no reason to talk that way to me, so don’t do it any more. You’re in a rage. What’s that about?’

  ‘Because I should have co-director credit,’ she replied. ‘I’ve directed at least half of this movie. I think I should have the credit for it, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Pierson answered, after fielding his surprise, ‘I’ve contributed a lot to your performance. So it’s a deal. I’ll split my director’s credit with you and you can share co-starring credits with me.’

  She stared at him with cold appraisal.

  ‘Why didn’t you fight to direct it from the start?’ he asked.

  ‘I wanted someone to be a buffer between Jon and me.’ Her ice-blue eyes scrutinised his face for a reaction. ‘What about the credit?’ she persisted. ‘I don’t think I can insist on it. People criticise me enough as it is; they’re always waiting to attack. I think it’s something you have to give of your own free will.’

  This was mid-April. That week Pierson won the Oscar for his screenplay of Dog Day Afternoon. Neither Streisand nor Peters congratulated him. About midnight, Peters came to his hotel room. ‘You don’t listen,’ he shouted at Pierson and went over a long list of things he (and presumably Streisand) saw as infractions. Pierson went into the bathroom to urinate. Peters kept yelling at him. Pierson suspected that Peters wanted him to resign but he never came to the point and suddenly he blurted out: ‘I’m not afraid of your Oscar!’ and departed.

  Their battle with Pierson continued straight through to the end of production. As soon as Streisand received the tape copy of his cut of the film, she set up a $500,000 editing room in the pool house at the ranch where the editor, Peter Zimmer, and a group of assistants worked under her constant and critical eye as she had them cut Kristofferson’s footage. ‘Primarily, she felt that her character needed more time on screen,’ Zimmer recalled. ‘She felt that some of the sequences were too heavy with Kristofferson. I would say that she made major changes, not so much with the story line, but as far as the characters were concerned. Her character became much more pertinent.’

  No scenes were to be left of Kristofferson’s character before his decline when his great strengths as a performer, his emotionality, the sensitivity, the intimacy he created with an audience explained his stardom and Esther’s respect for him. This remains a major flaw in the movie, one Streisand refused to recognise in her determination to focus the story on Esther, to make it a Streisand film despite Kristofferson’s co-star billing.

  Fourteen-hour days, seven-day weeks, she sat on a hard, high stool labouring with complete concentration as she studied the strips of film on the small eight-inch wide Moviola screen. She had learned how to operate the KEM editing equipment which allowed her to fast-forward, reverse and freeze-frame the footage. She was alone at last with her image, able to inject her vision on Pierson’s cut, not an easy task, for as director Sidney Lumet insists, ‘no movie editor ever put anything up on the screen that hadn’t been shot’. During the scoring process she fiddled incessantly with an electronic control board, bringing the drums up, the guitars down, her voice out. She would stop the film and have it run backward. She would hear things no one else could, finding fault with a certain beat, a missed stress. She remained after all the engineers had left and worked until exhaustion overtook her. With Cis Corman, Sue Mengers and Marilyn Bergman and some other close friends as advisors, she supervised the editing for five months on a final cut ‘like a crazy person’, one of her staff said.

  Streisand was too involved with her career and the fate of A Star Is Born to devote much time to her role as mother. Plans had been made for Jason to join Elliott, Jenny and their three young children for the summer in Holland where Elliott was filming. But for the time she had Jason, nine, and Christopher, seven, both in her care and was finding the responsibility of two active boys difficult. Television producer Bob Shanks, the man who had given her the chance early in her life to appear on national television with Orson Bean, and his wife Ann, vividly recall the day they spent at the Malibu complex filming an interview between Streisand and Barbara Wa
lters. They arrived early in the morning with Cis Corman, Walters and the crew. Streisand told Jason and Christopher to play outside. About 2 p.m. in the afternoon, Peters asked Streisand, ‘Where are the boys?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Did they have lunch?’ he prodded. She said she hadn’t seen them since morning. ‘That’s fucking great!’ Peters exclaimed and went out in search of the boys.

  ‘By that time,’ Ann Shanks reconstructed, ‘we thought we had about two-thirds of the interview done. Barbra has a propensity for drawing people into what seems at the time to be minor decisions. She picks someone outside her closest circle. On this day it was me.’ Shanks, a former actress, talented photographer and theatre producer, has a distinct style – chic Bohemia, you might call it. She is outgoing, very, very funny, a natural comic and an irrepressible mimic. Streisand immediately appeared to bond with her.

  ‘Barbra had chosen a pink sweater for the interview. “Whaddaya think?” she asked me. “Good, good,” I said. “Pink is good.”

  ‘“For me?”

  ‘“Yeah. Especially for you.”’

  Sue Mengers had joined the group earlier and she turned to her. ‘See, Ann says pink is good for me.’ (Apparently, Mengers had not approved of the choice.)

  ‘So she wore the pink sweater in the interview section Bob and the crew had already finished. Now, suddenly, she wanted to look at what had been shot. “Ya still think pink is good for me?” she asked in this kinda half-quetchie, half-coy voice. “Yes, I still do,” I replied.

  ‘“Naaaw,” she drawled. “I don’t think so.”’ She changed the sweater and there was nothing that could be done but scrap four hours of work and reshoot. Walters was not too happy, but gamely went through the interview a second time.