Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Streisand had been fighting her mother all of her life. Underneath there was an unseverable cord. She loved Diana, always had. She had clung to her, slept in her bed for years after Manny’s death, had wanted to make things good for her from the time of her first success, needed affirmation of Diana’s approval and love more than any one other person in her life. She had a lot to think about now and was determined to make sure Diana knew she loved her before it was too late.

  With Diana on the road to recovery Streisand took Jason and about 100 members of the cast and crew on location to the small town of Beaufort, South Carolina. Beaufort was where Pat Conroy had spent his teenage years, and where he would later teach English and coach football at his high school like his alter ego Tom Wingo. In the book the town was named Colleton, but Conroy had described it unmistakably. Beaufort was in the Low Country where warm white sands meet the south Atlantic. The town boasts a beautiful natural harbour. Offshore there are dozens of inlets and waterways where small fishing boats troll for sweet gulf shrimp. High bluffs, densely wooded with subtropical growth, rise to the north of town, and some of the surviving older houses are made of crushed oyster shells. Others, built high for coolness, have wide front porches and old-fashioned gardens where jessamine, oleanders, and wisteria mingle with oak trees bearded with Spanish moss. From above came the sound of sea birds, the drone of heat-drawn bugs and in the evening cool, what Streisand called, ‘a quiet, mystical quality’.

  It took time building the required sets and so it was not until 18 June that the film went before the cameras. The first scene to be shot would be one of the last in the picture, with Tom Wingo reunited with his wife and three daughters after his affair in New York with Dr Lowenstein, walking with them on the beach, although fifteen endings would be shot before that one was chosen.

  Nick Nolte had been cast as Tom Wingo, deeply Southern, a man of great outer strength and inner turmoil, born into a dysfunctional family. His twin sister, Savannah, is a famous, gifted, troubled poet, and a suicidal patient of Dr Lowenstein. Caught up in her own difficult family situation– a philandering husband and a difficult teenage son – the middle-aged Lowenstein persuades Wingo to come to New York and help her to fill in the missing information that she hopes will unlock the mystery to Savannah’s deep depression. During these voluntary, non-paying sessions, he reveals the hidden secrets of the Wingo family, which include an abusive father, murder and rape. Dr Lowenstein and Wingo fall in love and enter into a relationship which helps each of them to resolve their personal situations.

  Both Warren Beatty and Robert Redford were previously discussed as possibly playing Tom Wingo, but neither was right for the character, who required a strong macho appearance, sensitivity and the ability to ‘unleash torrents of raw emotion’. Nolte, at six feet one inch, 210 pounds, had a brawny, bruising physique. He was rugged, blond and raspy-voiced and his background had been rough and tumble. Raised in Omaha, Nebraska he had gone to Arizona State College on a football scholarship and transferred to three other schools due to poor grades and a low tolerance for alcohol. He turned to acting, supporting himself in the beginning as an iron worker. Fourteen years later he was still in touring companies, taking college courses whenever he had the time to obtain the credits he lacked for his diploma, and joining in the anti-war demonstrations that proliferated during the Nixon years. He was arrested and placed on five years’ probation for counterfeiting draft cards with false information and married and divorced twice before, in 1976 at the age of forty-two, he made his first breakthrough as the co-star of the Irwin Shaw television mini-series, Rich Man Poor Man. He quickly became a popular Hollywood star known as ‘a tough guy with soul and natural acting ability’.

  Nolte had not fared well in his relationships with women and was at this time caught in a hostile divorce with his third wife. Streisand seriously had to consider if he might have difficulty taking direction from a woman. She decided to chance the risk as Nolte projected just the right blend of grit and tenderness required for the role. ‘In the movie, Wingo would have to come to trust a female therapist, while in real life he was going to have to trust me, a female director,’ Streisand later said. This did not become the problem she anticipated. Nolte had a great respect for her.

  ‘Barbra likes to explore,’ he said. ‘We shot some key scenes in several different ways. We also had long discussions about male-female relationships. It was the first time I had worked with a woman director. In working with male directors I’ve found that the male actor and director have a kind of collusive attitude about the emotional points of scenes. With Barbra, there is a lot of continued exploration.’

  Their love scenes ignited sparks. ‘I don’t find it that easy to bare my soul, to do intimate things in front of a camera,’ she admits. ‘I’d rather do it in private. I had to yell, “Cut!” when things got too hot [with Nolte]. His make-up was all over my hair. You couldn’t see my blonde streaks.’ She had even more difficulty with appearing nude. She wears a scant nightdress in one scene after a great deal of discussion about it with Nolte and Cis Corman. ‘I just find it rather sexier to wear sheer clothes in bed,’ she defends. The love scenes she found most satisfying in the film were those that dealt with deep, mutual affection, Lowenstein cradled in Wingo’s arms in a chair. ‘The woman goes back to the safety of childhood again, being held by the father or someone who loves you,’ she explained.

  The act of touching someone’s face, their hand, or being held, comforted by someone and being in their arms, had great meaning for her. In her direction of the scene where Wingo has his final catharsis she recreated her own visual memory of the time the touch of her therapist’s hand on hers had caused her to open the flood gates of her emotions and weep. In a two-hour documentary laser disk on the making of The Prince ofTides, which she narrates, she illustrated what she wanted Nolte to experience when Lowenstein takes Wingo in her arms, his head on her breast, as he wept after revealing the hidden secrets in his family. ‘Oh, this is interesting, this is what it feels like to be held by your mother.’

  The documentary is all about her directional approach to the making of the film and, while fascinating and insightful as to the reasons behind many of her choices, it also reveals the strikingly egotistical manner in which she thinks of her work, the way she takes total possession of its creative process. ‘I did this to the script,’ ‘I wrote that scene in my mind over and over,’‘I rewrote,’ ‘I improvised,’ are used throughout. One could easily surmise that she was the sole author of the screenplay. Never once does she say that she is working from a script adapted by Becky Johnston and Pat Conroy from his novel.

  Despite their differences on Yentl, she had brought Jack Rosenthal to Beaufort from London to ‘humanise the dialogue’. One evening when they were working over dinner in a Chinese restaurant, he bit down on the thighbone of a roasted duck, smashing his molar to fragments inside his gums. It was, he says, the least painful part of the three weeks he spent ‘working with Barbra on the script’.

  She refused to let things go and would spend hours on the smallest detail, driving her co-workers as hard and as long as herself. Yet, difficult as she is in any work situation as a director Streisand is unquestionably sensitive to mood, to frame, to moment, and she has caught some extraordinary images in the film which she points out in the documentary – the Wingo house rising in morning mist from the marshes, the grace of the land, the view from Lowenstein’s skyscraper terrace looking down on night-time New York City – but Stephen Goldblatt, the picture’s cinematographer is never mentioned.

  Then there is the music by James Newton Howard. Streisand once mentions ‘Jim’ in relation to the music, but clarifies no further of whom she is speaking. She had a brief affair with Howard during the time he was scoring the movie. They had been working closely together. Howard was a sensitive, attractive man and there was a musical union of ideas, a time – placed in musical context – when they were ‘breathing’ together. It is something that an acco
mpanist and a singer can have. With the work done on the scoring, the affair ended simply, no seeming resentments on either side. Howard delivered a lovely score that fully captures the mood of the picture and often helps to define the action – the atonal reverse of a theme to indicate a character’s alienation, the balletic section that takes Wingo and Bernard through their football sessions.

  Film is undeniably a director’s medium. ‘I like to see my visions come to life,’ Streisand says. If a director does not have a vision, he or she should not be one, but without all the glorious technical, artistic and creative talents that contribute to the final film, a director would be paralysed, unable to bring that vision to life, a world of its own. Streisand’s inability to share or give credit to her co-workers has to do with her complete absorption in the movie she is making and her inability to think of it as anyone else’s but her own.

  She does, however, give full credit to the great violinist Pinchas Zuckerman, heard dubbing the solos for Dr Lowenstein’s virtuoso husband, Jeroen Krabbe (who brilliantly managed the difficult fingering). Jason had one scene in which he also had to be seen playing Fritz Kreisler’s difficult violin piece, ‘Präludium und Allegro’, and doing so in a manner that would show a tremendous gift. (‘If I could play the violin like that, I’d never touch a football,’ Wingo tells him.) He had three months to accomplish the fingering and body movements. After three lessons he played ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on the instrument.‘I couldn’t stop laughing,’ Streisand confessed. ‘I know I hurt him and I hate that, but he was so awful. However,’ she added proudly, ‘by the time he had to play it in the scene, he was able to do it like a young prodigy. His hands were so stiff from practising he had to soak them every evening. I knew my son could master it.’

  Directing her son presented some problems. Jason was always prepared, always professional and almost always good-natured. ‘There’s not a bad bone in his body,’ Streisand says. But he is his mother’s son and has strong opinions. They clashed more than once. Streisand had him playing one scene over and over to his irritation. ‘You’ve told me what you want, now tell me what you don’t like!’ he snapped at her. She attempted to do so and finally he did the scene as she envisioned it. In the last scene he has with Wingo, set in Grand Central Station, the script called for him to walk off briskly to catch his train, sadly leaving behind the man who was a father figure to him and had helped him become an acceptable athlete. After several takes, Streisand shouted at him, ‘Walk like a man! Walk like a man!’ meaning this was the moment in the film when he would become an adult, but it sounded like a put-down to members of the company.

  While they were in Beaufort, mother and son came to a deeper understanding and appreciation of each other. Jason acquitted himself well in the part of Bernard, giving a real and sympathetic performance. He is always right on, believable. He bears a close resemblance to his mother although like Elliott, his eyes are dark, his hair brown and curly, but his prominent nose and full mouth mark his Streisand lineage. Slim at the time, fairly small of stature, possessing a winning boyish smile, he never appears to be too old for the role.

  Jon Peters visited Beaufort during the location shooting. He had recently remarried and he and his glamorous blond wife, Christine, an interior decorator, had adopted a little blonde girl they named Caleigh. Streisand was asked to be the child’s godmother and accepted. Marriage and adopting a child herself – preferably a girl, she asserted, seemed a feasible idea to her, although there was no man of any importance in her life. The Prince of Tides, however, had numerous children in the cast and she enjoyed working with them by her own admission more than any of the other actors. Tom Wingo had three young daughters, played by talented children with whom she spent much time. There were also the flashback scenes of the young Tom Wingo, his sister and brother. The three child actors cast in the parts went on to California with the company to shoot in an indoor tank the beautifully choreographed underwater swimming scene that has such a magical look in the picture. Streisand spends over half-an-hour on her documentary on the auditions and screen tests of these children, as proud of their natural acting ability and their attractiveness as she would be if they were her own.

  ‘[I’ve been] thinking about how I want to spend the rest of my life,’ she said at the time. ‘I want to work with children. I feel a lack of children in my life. My son is very grown up. I was thinking of adopting a child, but I’m not too sure I want to do that as a single parent. It wasn’t too hot for me, and I don’t particularly want to do that to another child.’

  It was clear in viewing the rushes of the film that she was getting a spectacular performance out of Nolte and the other performers. It is Dr Lowenstein who does not thoroughly satisfy. There is a strained seriousness to Streisand’s performance that often interferes with believability. She is stiff, mannered, and in many two-shot or group scenes lit too importantly, almost hammering in the point that she is in the shot. This is particularly true of the scene where Nolte sees her across the room at an art exhibition and she appears to be standing in an aureole glow, making it impossible for anyone to miss her presence. ‘I don’t think about acting much,’ she says defensively. ‘It is easier if the part is very much you. And this character I understood very well.’ The dual role of director and actor was a challenge which she had been extremely successful in handling with Yentl, but much less so on The Prince of Tides.

  ‘It’s Barbra’s talent for performing that works against her abilities as an actress,’ Nolte contends. ‘It’s really a lonely job to be a singer, a totally different mentality. As an entertainer, it’s all about me. The lights have to be right for me. [Entertainers] come on the set, and they don’t know how to share. They don’t want to stick around for off-camera work. They have not grown up with a sense of teamsmanship. It makes it very hard for them to be taken seriously in the acting community. Barbra’s much more tolerant as a director. You really don’t have time to focus on yourself, and in that position she works real fine.’

  Streisand acknowledges the difficulty of directing herself. ‘When I direct, I become very patient, very compromising, for a perfectionist,’ she says. ‘There is a certain kind of acceptance of things you cannot change that would be very helpful in life. I live my life when I’m directing the way I would like to live my life when I’m not directing.’

  Photography was completed on The Prince of Tides in late September. Now she spent long hours in the dubbing room and on the editing, like an artist working on a canvas – ‘Finishing a Hat’, ’Putting Things Together’, as Sondheim had written. It would be fifteen months before it was released, her work done and judgment made. She always said she liked the times between projects to potchkee around, shop, redo her houses, read, read and read and plan her next adventure in movie making. She was redecorating both the Carolwood Drive house and the New York apartment with Frank Lloyd Wright and Gustav Stickley furniture. New paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele hung on the walls. She was restless.

  She saw Caleigh whenever she could in California, keeping her overnight. The little girl with her sunny smile and golden hair had fully won her affection. Caleigh was in some way the winning child she would have liked to have been and the daughter she would have wanted to have. Caleigh was so pretty, so feminine, so receptive to and giving of love. She cared deeply for this outgoing youngster and was concerned for her happiness because Peters and Christine were already having serious difficulties in their marriage. Her instinct was to protect Caleigh from the insecurities a child of divorce might suffer. She wanted to be there for her, remembering that she herself had had no such support. Thus, on the days and nights, usually once or twice a week, that Caleigh was with her, she made sure that her calendar was clear of other appointments. In the evening she would read to Caleigh and stay with her until it was time for the child to go to sleep.

  Her relationship with Caleigh was curious. After all, the child was the adopted daughter of her ex-lover. But through Caleigh
a solid link with Peters, who was a caring father, was maintained. Also, Jason’s homosexuality left little hope that she would ever have a grandchild. ‘I don’t know,’ one of her close friends offered, ‘I think Barbra feels somehow she can relive her life through Caleigh – that is, the life she would have liked to have had. She’s become with Caleigh a part of a fairy tale. Caleigh’s world is all pink and beautiful – or at least Barbra is trying to make it so. You know she is always reliving the so-called pain of her childhood. And yet, that is exactly what has made her strong. Pain does that for people. Cuts the chaff from the wheat. Separates the people with guts from those who are weak. Barbra had to make it – and she did. And one thing – she has never been ashamed that she was once poor and has always been proud of her heritage.’

  Streisand has always strongly felt the connection between herself and her Jewish roots. Her work on Yentl further strengthened them, along with her pride in the heritage of the Jewish people. Perhaps the only Hollywood star in its history who has been so publicly proud of being a Jew, she has never been given enough respect for her decision to portray Jewish women who could be admired – Fanny Brice, Katie Morosky, Yentl, all seminal roles, and soon in The Prince ofTides, Dr Susan Lowenstein. Culturally, it has meant that whatever the public does not accept about Streisand, it has had no problem with her Jewishness and implicit in that acceptance is respect for her ethnic pride. It is a great part of what has made her the enormous icon that she is. The other quality that endears her to the public is her vulnerability. She can make all the tough statements in the world, but she fools nobody. Beneath the sometimes rigorous façade is a soft-hearted, emotional woman.