by Anne Edwards
Divorced from Elliott, a free woman, able to date openly, she met through friends blond, boyishly handsome Ryan O’Neal who had just separated from his second wife, Leigh Taylor-Hunt, with whom he had co-starred for five years on the popular Peyton Place television series. Streisand’s affair with O’Neal was a light-hearted, Californian-oriented relationship – days at the beach where O’Neal had once been a lifeguard, casual parties with friends and, on chill, damp evenings, romantic tête-à-têtes before a roaring fire in the comfortable den in his beach house. O’Neal had two children, Tatum, eight, and Griffin, six, with his first wife and on weekends when he had custody, Jason, who was now five, had companions,2 which pleased her. Her inability to spend much time with her son in these formative years distressed her. With the pressures of her career and her active social life, it was often difficult. And although Jason was now in private day school in Santa Monica, he was an only child surrounded by a large female staff. Elliott objected to this, but his life was in too much turmoil to offer an alternative. Weekends spent with his mother, O’Neal and his two offspring seemed a viable and thoroughly pleasant arrangement.
Ryan was Hollywood’s newest and most promising leading man, having just been nominated for an Academy Award for his first major role in the highly successful film adaptation of Erich Segal’s best-selling novel, Love Story. The idea brewed: why shouldn’t Streisand and O’Neal make a movie together? They met with Sue Mengers, who represented them both. John Calley was still hopeful that Streisand would do A Glimpse of Tiger, Mengers told them. Maybe that was the way to go.
About this time the young writer/director Peter Bogdanovich, who had just made the critically acclaimed The Last Picture Show, entered the scene. Bogdanovich read the script of Glimpse of Tiger and did not think it could work even with a reversal of roles. A movie buff since childhood when, he said, he ‘used to live inside films and act out all the parts all week long’, one of his favourite genres was the ‘screwball comedy’ which had starred the likes of Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn and Jean Arthur. Although Glimpse of Tiger had gone awry, it did have its roots in those madcap movies of the 1930s. Using this as a springboard, borrowing quite blatantly from the classic Hepburn–Cary Grant 1938 picture, Bringing Up Baby, and ‘stealing from everything you could imagine including Feydeau farce, vaudeville, and silent film comedy’, Bogdanovich helped to transform Elliott’s boîte noire into a spirited romp with the help of writers Buck Henry, who had done a superb job of adapting The Owl and the Pussycat, Robert Benton, and David Newman. A Glimpse of Tiger went into production on 16 August 1971, and was immediately renamed What’s Up, Doc?
The story was set in San Francisco, where an absent-minded young music-ologist (O’Neal) has come in pursuit of a grant accompanied by his dominating fiancée (hilariously played by Madeline Kahn). In the hotel drugstore he meets an anarchic and disaster-prone polymath (Streisand). All three are caught up in a wildly complicated sub-plot involving mixed-up suitcases, missing jewels, spies and gangsters, moving far away from the original concept. The verbal and visual gags are fast and funny. There is an inventive chase up and down the switchback streets of San Francisco, ending with a cavalcade of vehicles hurtling like lemmings into the Bay.
With Ryan, Jason and his nanny, Streisand settled into the exclusive Huntington Hotel while they were on location in San Francisco. She was in high spirits, glowing from Ryan’s attention, when an unidentified telephone caller threatened to kidnap Jason. All her old fears returned. Under stress and justifiably concerned, she insisted on tighter security and took the youngster with her to the set every day. Her relationship with Ryan suffered with her nervous agitation and she threw all her energy into the making of the comedy, a genre she was expert at and her co-star a novice, relying on her to set the timing.
She was in her element and the pace of the picture zinged along. Although not a musical, she sang a sizzling version of Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’ behind the titles. She also sang Herbert Hupfield’s classic ‘As Time Goes By’ in the body of the movie in a scene where she seduces Ryan as he accompanies her on the piano upon which she first sits, then slithers across. Warner were confident that they had a hit, and this proved to be the case, but during the filming the relationship between the two stars cooled. Ryan turned out not to be quick enough or bright enough to sustain her interest. By the end of the production he had been reconciled with his wife, although they later divorced.
The break-up of her affair with Ryan did not disrupt her life. She returned to Las Vegas in December for the last of her contracted appearances and swore all over again that she would not do concerts or night-dub work ever again. Fear and anxiety were her excuse, but there was more to it. Film and recordings, where she performed in a professional atmosphere, were her chosen arena of expression. They were immeasurably safer. A song could be recorded over and over and then edited until it was exactly the way she wanted it to sound and there were no outsiders, no one but herself to please. When making a movie, lighting, make-up and the work of some of the industry’s top cameramen assured that not only would she look her best, she could be made to be beautiful or sexy or sophisticated. She had grown up living within the fantasy of the screen, imagining herself as any of the great beauties she had admired. Now that she could be one herself she was mature enough to understand that much of what a movie-goer thinks is real is illusion. Still, she was in love with herself on film, and insecure about her looks in true life, fearful – yes – that a terrorist or a crazy person could bring her harm, or that exuberant fans could injure her or crush her to death as they tore at her clothes or pulled her hair. Just recently, Diana Ross had had a wig painfully yanked from her head in an emotional attack by fans who appeared to have just wanted to touch or take away something that belonged to her. Unfortunately, the wig had been attached for security with a copious amount of hairpins. Streisand, the perfectionist, was equally terrified at the thought of forgetting lyrics, of mild applause or worse, jeers or hecklers.
As soon as she returned from Las Vegas she enthusiastically set to work on Up the Sandbox. The film’s strongest appeal to her was its theme of women’s equality with men. She played Margaret, a woman torn between her needs to strike a blow for female independence and her need to be a good wife and a loving mother to her two small children. She escapes into fantasy – daydreams in which she is the heroine of garish adventures. She has a bizarre affair with Fidel Castro (who turns out to be a lesbian in male attire), attacks her obnoxious mother with a baked meringue, joins a group of black revolutionaries in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty and goes on an African expedition to learn the secret of painless childbirth.
The shooting schedule was to start in Los Angeles in early March then move six weeks later to New York for a month of location work before continuing on to Uganda in East Africa, where – after a recent coup d’état the previous year – the country was in the hands of Major-General Idi Amin and the Ugandan army. Border clashes with Tanzania were being reported, diplomatic arguments with the United States and Israel were heated, and Amin was engaged on a reign of terror that would within a few years take the lives of 250,000 Ugandans. It hardly seemed like an intelligent location for a Hollywood movie, despite the promised savings in location costs in a place where labour was cheap and there were no unions to set a minimum wage.
Up the Sandbox was nominally Streisand’s film, and as her initial venture for First Artists Productions she could have been expected to take full control. Instead, she stepped cautiously into the baptismal waters and let her producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff hold the reins, although she retained artistic authority and supported herself with close associates and friends – Marty Erlichman as Associate Producer, Cis Corman, casting director. She worked on the screenplay with playwright/screenwriter Paul Zindel. Up the Sandbox put her in touch with herself, her feelings, her viewpoints on the difficulty of being a woman in a male-dominated world, and she was able to include these ideas
in the script.
Despite her vows never again to appear before the public in a large concert, she was convinced by Warren Beatty and his sister, Shirley MacLaine, that she should do so one more time to help get the Democratic presidential nominee US Senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, elected, and in so doing remove Sneaky Dick Nixon from the White House. Every move that Nixon made seemed to pull the United States deeper into the Vietnamese War. In 1970, less than a week after Streisand’s twenty-eighth birthday, Nixon had announced that he was sending American soldiers into Cambodia. The Vietcong sanctuaries had to be cleared, Nixon declared, ‘the world’s most powerful nation cannot afford to act like a pitiful, helpless giant’. Something had to be done to stop the madness of supposedly shortening the war by escalating it. Nixon had to be routed from office and Beatty was enlisting all the power stars he could to help.
In the two years since their brief affair, Beatty had emerged as a high-profile political advocate. For all his renown as Hollywood’s Don Juan, Beatty was and is an intelligent man with strong political views. In 1968, following his huge success in Bonnie and Clyde, he campaigned for Robert Kennedy in the presidential race. After Kennedy’s assassination, he stopped filming for two years and devoted his energies to gun control legislation. He had enlisted early in McGovern’s 1972 dark-horse candidacy, as had Shirley MacLaine, who in 1969 gathered Hollywood’s liberal elite at her Encino home to meet Senator McGovern, a spokesman for anti-war and environmental sentiments, women’s activities and civil rights.
McGovern had one fatal flaw for a politician. As a speaker he was so boring ‘he made your skull feel like it was imploding’, and he spoke in a tired whine. MacLaine, ‘who could talk to anybody about anything’, and Beatty, who was a compelling speaker, travelled with the candidate, introduced him, knocked on doors and spoke in living rooms, union halls, and college campuses in attempts to mitigate this shortcoming.
Nixon’s celebrity entourage, made up of ageing luminaries such as Jack Benny, John Wayne, Lawrence Welk, Art Linkletter and Jack Warner, was wryly called ‘The Hollywood Wax Museum’. Beatty helped to surround McGovern with predominantly young, hip, irreverent stars. After the Florida primary, with the campaign low on funds, Beatty proposed to raise money with a series of coast-to-coast rock concerts beginning in Los Angeles in April and concluding two months later in New York. He talked Streisand into appearing in the opening fund-raising concert on 15 April at the Los Angeles Forum, promising her that the security would be tighter than Fort Knox and that she could record the concert for commercial sale.
Although the show was also to feature James Taylor, Carole King and Quincy Jones (though not mentioned nor included on the subsequent album, giving the false impression that it had been a solo Streisand concert), she was to receive star billing. Eighteen thousand people bought tickets that cost up to $100 a seat, raising $300,000 for McGovern’s campaign. As with the concert two years earlier for Bella Abzug, Streisand occupied the entire last half of the programme.
‘If I would have known there would be so many people on the two sides of me I would have had my nose fixed,’ she quipped when the applause finally quieted at her entrance. There were shouts of, ‘Don’t do it, Barbra!’ and she said huskily into the microphone, ‘Never!’
She appeared more relaxed than ever before in concert. She opened with Joe Raposo’s ‘Sing’, one of Jason’s favourite songs from Sesame Street. She was in top form and her renditions of ‘Starting Here, Starting Now’ and Jimmy Webb’s ‘Didn’t We’ displayed her great control in the use of voice dynamics. What distinguished this concert from earlier ones was her tremendous rapport with her audience. In the middle of the first act she took time out to engage in a five-minute monologue. Holding a glass of iced tea (supposedly booze) she took a loud slurp.
‘Ya know – to conquer their fears some performers drink,’ she said, taking another noisy swallow. ‘I really hate the taste of liquor. Some take pills. I can’t even swallow an aspirin. I believe performers should be strong. We should face our problems head on.’ She withdrew from the skirt pocket of a black evening dress what looked like a joint and took a long drag. ‘Is it still illegal?’ she asked, and was answered by a loud ‘Yes!’
’The way to conquer fear is to talk about it freely, get it out in the open and discuss it,’ she went on conversationally, inhaled deeply and turned to David Shire, the conductor, and in a mock stoned voice added, ‘Ya know that wonderful chord you just played? What was it? An F Minor seventh with a demented pinky on the fifth? It was really – high.’ The audience roared their approval. Then, having milked the moment for what it was worth she became sober, although not yet entirely serious. ‘As I spend a lot of time in L.A. I thought I’d dedicate the next song to [smoggy] L.A.’ And she launched into a masterful arrangement of ‘On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)’. Marijuana, although she did smoke it occasionally, was not really part of her lifestyle. Bringing it into her performance in such an open manner was a calculated move to create an immediate rapport with the younger and freer members of the audience. The concert ended in a contemporary rendition of ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, arranged by Don Hannah, complete with a female back-up group, that brought the audience to its feet and raised vociferous cheers.
Nixon placed her on his list of ‘political enemies’ following the concert and doom-sayers claimed that ‘this enforced hollering’ was destroying her voice and that she was relying too much on cannabis and would probably go ‘the Judy Garland way’ in a couple of years. None of this greatly disturbed her. With Jason and his nanny, she flew to New York two days after the concert, happy to be back in the newly refurbished penthouse.
With filming in Manhattan completed on 19 May, she had her staff pack over forty suitcases (supplies, clothes, gifts for the natives) and made the long flight that would take her with shocking swiftness to Africa and a completely alien culture. At first the women of the Samburu tribe in the section where the film company for Up the Sandbox set up their cameras refused to be photographed and had to be cajoled to play bit parts in the movie. They were suspicious, slow and sometimes unknowingly destructive, moving things about, interrupting shooting.
Irvin Kershner, the director, was an urbane, witty man, balding, tall and lean, a student of Zen and a man with some mystery about his early background. His most recent films, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964), A Fine Madness (1966), The Flim Flam Man (UK One Born Every Minute – 1967), and Loving (1970) had established his reputation as a director of great originality and sensitivity, but he was not bankable and although the members of the cast were all competent actors, Streisand was the only star in the movie. Once again, she was carrying a project on her back. This weakened any power Kershner might have had over her performance and the script. Up the Sandbox did not succeed as a film, either critically or commercially, but there is something in her performance – ‘a deeper and warmer presence’, New Yorker critic, Pauline Kael, called it – that for the first time on film revealed a great undeveloped actress. ‘She hasn’t the training to play the classical roles that still define how an actress’s greatness is expressed,’ Kael added. ‘But in movies new ways may be found.’
Streisand was determined that would be the case. She was happier, far more comfortable, making movies than she ever had been appearing on the stage or in concert. Even bad reviews did not sting as sorely as they came so long after the completion of a movie, usually when she was already engaged in another production, hopes soaring – This will be the one – the movie that will say all I want to convey without sacrificing commerciality. She could not imagine herself ever giving up acting to sing in concert. ‘I’m very fragile emotionally,’ she said at the time. ‘I’m not strong; I take it all so seriously, so hard, it becomes painful to me. I get palpitations, I get ill, I get sick to my stomach, I get terrible headaches. I just become a mess. I say, What do I need this aggravation for? It’s much easier just to act.’ By that she meant in movies where there was no aud
ience except herself and a director to please, and an atmosphere that was calculated to help her perform her task to its best advantage in every possible way.
Acting met a deep personality need for her. It was a way of living, and not just a means of earning a living. Having reached the top, she maintained a fierce drive to become better, to improve. That meant never repeating herself. Her great problem was finding suitable roles in a script that excited her interest and in which she saw social overtones, something meaningful. She also needed a gifted director who was not too arrogant to accept her input but who at the same time was strong enough to provide the necessary perspective, experience and professionalism and who fully understood what it was she was after even though she often felt that she held the tail of a tiger who was swinging her into uncharted country.
She also possessed an equal need for a man who could bring to her personal life these same qualities. Streisand could grandstand as often as she liked about women’s independence, sexual freedom and equality with men, but that was not what she really longed for. What she wanted – what she had always wanted – was a man who could stand up to her, who did not feel intimidated by her fame and her strength, who would love her unconditionally with raw sexual passion and not feel threatened by her intelligence and ambition, a man who would be the masculine to her feminine, the feminine to her masculine – a perfect match. But what man in her circle was such a person? So far she had not met one.
She was ready for a relationship, was desperately seeking one. This was a time of sexual freedom, pre-Aids and after the pill liberated woman’s libido. There were flings, short affairs that bored her and fizzled out after only a few meetings. She feared that they went to bed with her just because she was Barbra Streisand, that they might never have been attracted to her otherwise. On 24 April 1972, she celebrated her thirtieth birthday. Diana retired from her job in New York and moved out to California with Roslyn. They were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills. Although Streisand had provided the funds and encouraged it, she suddenly had misgivings. Her mother’s near proximity brought back painful childhood memories.