Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  They were lunching at Café des Artistes, little more than a mile’s drive from the Ardsley straight down Central Park West. The energy of the city was mightier on such cold, windswept days. People walked faster, the upper half of their body breaking through the layers of cold. Even the skyscrapers that faced the park seemed to be in violent motion as the wind whipped around their pyramidical, ziggurat towers. It was two o’clock, an hour chosen because they expected the chic West Side restaurant would be emptying out. She had thought their meeting place had been kept a secret, but photographers accosted her the moment the driver helped her out of the car.

  ‘Go to hell!’ she shouted at New York Post photographer, Martha Cooper, who was snapping away close to her face as she headed for the front door, which swung open the moment she approached and then closed immediately after she was inside, two employees now barring the press from entering. Peters stood to greet her from a table off to one side, standing beneath one of the restaurant’s famous, colourful art nouveau murals. Once her fur coat was removed, the contrast between them was glaring: Peters – post-Beatle haircut and rabbinical beard impeccably groomed, recently custom-made Savile Row suit, white shirt and Sulka tie with a perfect Windsor knot; Streisand, hair flying, California casual.

  They talked for about an hour. Neither ate very much. When they rose to leave, Peters had a wistful look in his unusually dense dark eyes. Both of them wanted to make their parting as amicable as possible. Neither was actually sure why it was ending. For Streisand, it had been the most consuming relationship of her life, for Peters certainly the most important. Their impact on each other had been immense. They had had – as Stephen Sondheim wrote in a lyric – a good thing going. Sure, it had been a bumpy ride, but never dull and both of them had moved forward, grown. She looked at him now and she was proud. He had made it into the big time, the very big time. ’Look at you,’ her expression said. ’You’re a mensch, a real mensch!’ They reached the front door and made a decision to get into her car and dismiss his. She dropped him at his New York offices and rode back home alone. She had succeeded without much struggle in reclaiming the rights to Yentl. She would now be on her own producing, directing and starring in the film if she could raise the required capital, which she estimated at this stage as $13 million. And she would not have Peters to help her.

  A power conflict had overwhelmed the great passion they had shared. They were terribly competitive and she seemed to fear that Peters’s rise to power in the industry diminished her own. Peters had evolved from film apprentice to studio mogul. He no longer needed Streisand to lead him down the corridors of power, nor did he want her presence to lessen his own accomplishment. He also could not resist the attention of a beautiful woman and Streisand was too proud, too liberated, too much her own woman to deal with a lover’s adultery, especially one who was no longer under her thumb.

  This last year, 1979, she had taken an emotional journey back to her roots. Never a fully practising Jew, she none the less strongly felt her Jewishness. To understand more thoroughly the culture and motivations in Yentl, she had painstakingly researched the period, the history of the Eastern European Jews and the laws and social structure that formed their world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She sought out specialists in the field, rabbis from the three factions of the faith – Orthodox, Conservative and Reform.1 At the same time, Jason was to celebrate his thirteenth birthday in December and was studying for his bar mitzvah. The ceremony, held in a synagogue or temple, is not a sacrament, nor a sacramental ritual. It simply signals the arrival of a Jewish boy at the age when, presumably, adult reason and responsibility commence. It is usually held on the Saturday closest to the boy’s birthday, in Jason’s case 5 January 1980.

  Both Streisand and Elliott, who was separated from Jenny at the time, had met Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the Pacific Jewish Center. ‘I explained to her,’ the Rabbi recalled, ‘that in order for the bar mitzvah to have any meaning, in a deeper sense, for her son, he would have to know and see that it meant something to her, too.’ Rabbi Lapin recommended that she study Judaism along with Jason. This coincided beautifully with her research for Yentl. Once a week she would meet the Rabbi and discuss what she had learned and pose tough theological questions.

  The intense study of their faith and heritage brought her close to Jason, who had developed into an intelligent young man with a sense of humour and curiosity about many things. He liked to write and his school essays showed that he had a flair. He seemed pleased to be sharing more private times with his mother, engaging in a project with her. During her seven years with Peters they had not been able to manage as much time together as either one of them would have wanted.

  The impending bar mitzvah also brought her into closer contact with Elliott, although not in a romantic sense. That had been over for many years, but there was a strong feeling of family as Elliott and his father, as was the custom, stood on the bima with Jason, and she, in her front-row seat in the small synagogue, watched the passing of ancient tradition from father to son as Elliott and the ageing Bernard Gould read with Jason from the Torah. The bar mitzvah is a ceremony of joyous celebration, and therefore a party following the ritual is appropriate. Three tents were erected at the Malibu compound. Kosher and Chinese caterers were hired. Streisand danced with Jason and a nimble Bernard and managed a turn around the floor with Elliott, who also danced with Diana. Later her mother got up on the bandstand and sang ‘One Kiss’. There was exultant Jewish, Russian and popular music, the last so that Jason and his friends could dance, although most of the young people were too shy.

  With Jason’s bar mitzvah behind her, and her business arrangements with Peters settled, she began the ignominious task of pitching Yentl yet again, this time along with film taken of the location sites in Czechoslovakia that she wanted to use and a screenplay by Ted Allen. Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures passed. She went to United Artists, the budget at this point up to $14.5 million. They said they might consider the project if she was to sing in the film. Ted Allen claims he had suggested this from the outset and, as Streisand did not want to do a ‘Ray Stark-Herbert Ross musical’, that Yentl sing her thoughts. Streisand saw this as a viable compromise. Yentl could be ‘a realistic fantasy ... a film with music’. Late evenings were spent in her living room with Michel Legrand at the piano, Streisand jumping up from her cross-legged position on the floor and going over to the piano as a thought came to her, and the Bergmans nearby scratching out words to proposed songs by Legrand.

  She was now working on the screenplay with help from the venerable author Isaac Bashevis Singer. Ted Allen mused that the script he wrote and she discarded ‘gave indications of the anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe that drove the Jews to America and I don’t think that Barbra liked that. She had another concept.’ What she had always seen in the story was Yentl’s burning need to study the Talmud,2 and perhaps become a talmid chachem, a learned scholar, an expert on Talmud. The talmid chachem is the most honoured figure in the life and culture of traditional Jewry, but women were denied access to the Talmud and its learning. Yentl did what she did because she believed women should be equal to men and that equality could only be achieved through education. It was also a story of unrequited love, of a young woman who loses her father, the one kindred spirit she has in life, and how she must come to terms with this terrible loss.

  As soon as Legrand and the Bergmans had a number of the songs that would express Yentl’s feelings, Streisand recorded them on tape and made another attempt to interest the studios. This time around, United Artists came forward. A film with Streisand singing was quite another matter, but they fought to get a deal that would protect them if Streisand the director should fail. What they wanted her to do was to give them the right to approve the final cut. Streisand struggled to retain her power.

  While these negotiations were in progress, Sue Mengers brought her a lucrative proposition. Mengers was married to Belgian director Jean-Claude Tramont who,
four weeks into production on the film All Night Long for MCA/Universal, had fired Gene Hackman’s co-star, Lisa Eichhorn, an intelligent American-born actress who had attended London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. The role of Cheryl Gibbons, the neglected wife who finds her sexuality with the night-manager of an Ultra-Save Drugstore, an establishment with a particularly weird clientèle, called for an earthiness that Eichhorn did not exhibit in the rushes. Production was halted and Mengers asked Streisand to replace the fired actress.

  The film was really about Hackman’s character, the frustrated George Dopler, who hates his job, is in an unhappy marriage, and finds himself in love with a married woman (Gibbons) who is having an affair with his son, whose ambition is to write Country and Western songs. Cheryl Gibbons originally had only five or six scenes, but the chance to stretch herself and play a Marilyn Monroe, waiflike blonde temptress appealed to Streisand. An added inducement was the $4 million fee plus 15 per cent of the gross that she was offered. For this stipend – the highest Hollywood had ever paid to a performer at this time – she would only have to take six weeks from her work on the screenplay of Yentl, and the money would help her finance the film.

  After a four-week hiatus while her role was being developed, production on All Night Long was restarted on 9 June 1980 and remained on location in and round Los Angeles for the next six weeks in a heatwave that brought temperatures over 100 degrees and in the last week, a major strike by the Screen Actors Guild involving residuals on video, cable and pay television. Streisand had only one more scene to shoot in which she was to slide down a fire pole (her husband in the film was a fireman). It was not until late October, the strike settled, that she returned to do the remaining shot. ‘Uh-uh,’ she said, terrified as she stood on the edge of the second-floor perch where she was to grab the pole for her descent, ‘I don’t think I can do it. I have a weak stomach.’ After several of the crew and Hackman himself slid down it to prove to her that she would be all right, she did the slide in one take.

  All Night Long was not a film that Streisand fans would shout about. She played her blowsy, sexually awakened housewife exactly on key, in character, without any razzle-dazzle or Streisand mannerisms and she supported Hackman in several of his strongest scenes. Although not for everyone, the gritty American working-class world it portrays (as seen by Tramont’s unique foreign eye) is gripping, Hackman gives an indelible, moving performance and Streisand proves how good an actress she really is. But all her energies were now turned to Yentl.

  ‘I constantly had to give up everything,’ Streisand recalled of her dealings on Yentl with United Artists. ‘I didn’t get paid for writing, I got paid Directors’ Guild scale for directing, which I think is something like $80,000, and I got paid much less [$1 million] as an actress than I did in All Night Long. And then I had to give back half my salary if we went over budget [now $16.5 million]. But it didn’t matter to me. Nothing mattered to me except getting this movie made.’

  There had, by this time, been numerous rewrites of the screenplay, including Singer’s, one by Elaine May and several by Streisand. Finally, English television writer Jack Rosenthal, author of The Bar-Mitzvah Boy which Jule Styne had transformed into an unsuccessful musical, was hired. Streisand and Rosenthal worked together. Unaware that the financing of the film largely depended on her soundtrack album, Rosenthal kept trying to cut Streisand’s numerous songs, mostly ballads which seemed to stop the flow of the story. They had ‘great rows’ over this and Streisand always won out in the end.

  Yentl took her on a long journey and during this odyssey she had been forced to face many of the demons in her life – her sense of desertion, of being a woman in a man’s world, of perceiving herself as ugly, guilt at not being the daughter she believed would have pleased Diana. ‘I’ve lived so many years feeling guilty,’ she said. ‘Jewish guilt. And I’m finding out about life, talking to people, hearing what they feel and think. They’ve got the same mishigas as I do ... People are afraid of their own feelings. Their own sexuality. The other day while I was driving to my [group therapy session], I was having an anxiety attack. Couldn’t breathe. I was in a rage, feeling miserable, upset, like I was going insane. Like maybe I am insane, I’m such a terrible person and maybe I really am these awful things you read about and how do I deal with that and live with myself?

  ‘But when I got to the session the therapist said, “Look, you’re all mad, and so am I; there’s only one difference: I respect my madness.” He stripped half of my anxiety away. Because it was OK to be crazy, we’re all crazy, and if you can respect your own madness – far out.’

  Her ‘craziness’ manifested itself in her intensity about things that mattered to her. She was in a state of constant tumult. She wore people down, desperate to endow them with her sense of urgency, and Yentl had become her raison d’être. Although finally forced by United Artists to surrender control over the final cut, she was rigid in her determination to maintain control over all the major elements of the film.

  She had won her battle to film Yentl in Czechoslovakia and at Lee International Studios just outside London, where she arrived in February 1982, two months before the start of principal photography. One major issue with United Artists remained unresolved. Her original contract had not included an agreement that she supply a completion bond, a form of Hollywood insurance in which a private company agrees to pay an amount over the budget that the producer spends on the film.

  ‘The day before we were going to start shooting,’ she recalled, ‘United Artists said they would close down the production if I didn’t give in and take on the completion bond. It was ridiculous, because they paid the company $700,000 which I needed in making the movie [which meant she would have to supply the deficit out of private funds or raise it elsewhere]. They didn’t trust me. Not in that way, I suppose.

  ‘The night before the first scene was shot, I prayed to my father. “Tell me what to do.” I didn’t know what to do. I felt as though I had too much power. You want it desperately for so long and then you want to give it away.’ Actually she did not retain the control she wanted. There had been the last word on the final cut that she had been forced to forfeit, and she had desperately wanted to hire the brilliant Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Reds), and could not because his $250,000 fee was beyond the budget allowed by United Artists.

  ‘I had to tell Storaro that I couldn’t afford him, and three days later I woke up in my insanity ... My insanity. I had just given away a half a million dollars to set up a chair in my father’s name for cardiovascular research at UCLA. I thought to myself, “I just gave away $500,000 but I didn’t treat myself to a $250,000 gift of Storaro?” It taught me a lesson about my own lack of love for myself. And Yentl is really about that, too. Yentl finally learns to appreciate herself, too.’

  On 14 April 1982, just ten days short of her fortieth birthday, Streisand walked terrified on to the sound stage where she would shoot Yentl’s opening shot. Cast and crew applauded and she was presented with a director’s chair, her name printed on it. She made the rounds, shook hands with everyone. A prop man was embarrassed by his sweaty palms. ‘Believe me, there’s no one more nervous than me. We’re all going to make mistakes, especially me. I will make most of them. So I need you,’ she assured him.

  Not long before filming began, her old friend William Wyler died. His wife Tally sent her a note – ‘You never got a chance to talk to Willie about Yentl. But I know there were things he would have liked to have told you. So when you’re on the set and there’s a moment when you don’t know what to do – just be very quiet and maybe you’ll hear Willie whisper in your ear.’ Often Streisand would go off to one side and seem as though she was silently communing with either Willie or her father.

  Her need to get things right led her to expect the cast and crew to research their respective areas. Just prior to production she had given Mandy Patinkin, who was playing Avigdor the man Yentl loves but to whom she can’t reveal her true identity,
a seven-volume set of books entitled The Legends of the Jews; and to Amy Irving, cast as Hadass, the young woman Avigdor loves but who marries Yentl disguised as a boy, several books on keeping a kosher kitchen.

  ‘To get the feel of the music, movement and crowds, and also because of the wedding scene in the film, Barbra would try to attend as many Hassidic weddings as she could possibly find,’ Jeanette Kupferman, the film’s historical consultant, remembered. ‘“Can you find me a wedding?” became a familiar request ... Needless to say, Barbra was a great hit with all the gorgeously attired Hassidic matrons, who were greatly flattered by her interest in them ... “Is that really a sheitel?” she would inquire, sticking one finger under the elastic of a magnificent upswept coiffure. “You must give me your wig-maker’s name,” or “Say, could you tell me about Havdala candles?”’

  She claimed she was sick every day on her way to work because it was all so overwhelming. ‘I kept remembering that a friend of mine, Irvin Kershner, said, “One day at a time.” I don’t know how I survived it but I’m proud I did. I didn’t think I would at times.’

  At one point the English tabloid papers claimed she was having trouble with her cast and crew, who resented her arrogant and autocratic style of direction. To quash these allegations the crew sent a letter with the signatures of all involved to the newspapers calling the accusations lies. ‘She has captivated us all with her dedicated professionalism,’ the letter stated.

  ‘She’d fix my hair ribbons, brush an eyelash off my cheek, paint my lips to match the colour of the fruit on the table. I was like her little doll that she could dress up,’ asserted Amy Irving, barely five foot four, her physical delicacy accentuated by the gauntness of her face and the startling contrast of her pale skin and of her vivid blue eyes and dark hair. ‘For the scenes where I had to laugh,’ Irving added, ‘she’d stand behind the camera pulling the strings of an imaginary Hadass doll, making it burp and cry until I’d completely crack up.’