Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Believing Up the Sandbox was a well-made, major movie, she was shocked when it was badly received during its first sneak preview in San Francisco. After re-editing it, the film was released a week before Christmas 1972, to audience apathy and bad reviews.

  ‘Barbra was baffled by the failure of Up the Sandbox,’ Arthur Laurents recalled. ‘She had been told that she was star insurance and she believed it. She could blame the financial fiascos of On a Clear Day and Hello, Dolly! on the mistakes of overproduction combined with a shrinking market for big musicals. But Sandbox was her own little picture. She had thought it would be a fine film and a valuable statement on the theme of women’s liberation. Now her pride and joy was rejected. She was as depressed and belligerent as the mother of a whiz kid who had flunked the spelling bee over p-s-y-c-h-o-1-o-g-y.’

  Arthur Laurents had written a film treatment for Ray Stark that would later evolve into The Way We Were, encompassing all the facets of the Streisand he had seen evolve from feisty Brooklyn girl to somewhat disillusioned Hollywood movie star in her prime and encapsulated them into Katie Morosky, the story’s protagonist. After reading the fifty-page treatment, she called Laurents and shouted into the telephone: ‘That’s me! You’ve got it!’

  Footnotes

  1 The title song of the abandoned album, The Singer, written by Walter Marks and arranged by Peter Matz, had its inspiration in French singer Edith Piaf. The music is very Gallic, the lyrics suited to cabaret. Streisand later released it in Just for the Record.

  2 Ryan O’Neal’s first wife was actress Joanna Moore. Both their children, Griffin and Tatum became actors. Tatum starred in her first movie at the age of ten with her father in Paper Moon (1973), and became the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award.

  22

  HAUNTED BY THE past, unable to shed it, the therapy sessions in California continued. She could not let go of her father’s death, still felt deserted and cheated by it. She always imagined that her childhood would have been much different had he lived, dwelled on it, fantasised about what it would have been like. She viewed her early years in a negative light, the cause of great unhappiness and pain. In one session when her early past was under discussion, the analyst touched her hand and she broke down and sobbed, leaning against the woman’s shoulder. But the ache did not go away, she held it close to her like an injured child. We are often formed from what was missing in our childhood, not what we had, and Manny Streisand’s tragic early death could well have been responsible for her desperate need to achieve, to be someone, to make the name Streisand one to be remembered and respected. Her extraordinary success was a tribute to her father’s too brief life, but it never seemed to satisfy her own needs.

  Things might well have been different had Manny Streisand lived. She might have been content to be daddy’s girl, another man’s wife, a mother to their children, or she might have felt deprived of her independence, of the right to fulfil her own ambitions. She was wise enough, in touch with herself enough, to know that, and still she could not let go. It was not as though Manny Streisand’s death and her personal loss were all that was on her mind. She was caught up in the snares of stardom, surrounded – as Arthur Laurents commented – ‘by those blue-suited men’.

  ‘Ray was looking for a property for Barbra,’ Laurents recalls of this time frame. ‘She wasn’t mad about him and she wanted to get out of their contract and he was getting desperate. He came to see me in New York. He had an idea, a sort of combination of Sound of Music and another movie – you know the way Hollywood producers do. It was impossible but I told him I’d think about a story. I’m very good at whipping up something and I did get a story fixed in my mind. On my way up to see Barbra [at the Ardsley] I thought, “This is terrible.” When I got there I said, “I’m not going to tell it to you. It’s awful.”

  ‘“Well, what are you going to do?” she asked.

  ‘“Oh, I don’t know, if I think of something, I’ll write it.” She then asked me to give her a list of books to read and I wrote out a list which included Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and Cancer Ward [1968]. Later, he got the Nobel Prize [1970] and she called me and said, “Hey! Your guy won!”

  ‘“Did you read any of them?” I asked.

  ‘“No. Too big a mountain to climb,” she replied.

  ‘Anyway, the story that finally came to me was The Way We Were. I knew a girl at Cornell, whose name was – believe it or not – Fanny Price, who was rather like Barbra and she was in the YCL [Young Communist League]. I dabbled in that and I knew a lot about the Hollywood witch-hunts.1 Then I was very attached to Jigee Viertel2 and I combined the two women. I wrote a treatment and gave it to Ray, who was still in New York. He got on a plane and called me when he arrived in Los Angeles. “It’s wonderful. I want to do it!” he said.

  ‘Ray sent it to Barbra to read – she was well under the influence of Cis Corman by then. They were close friends – knew each other from the early sixties. Barbra trusted her judgment, and now Cis was her right hand, reading scripts, helping to develop properties. I think Cis had a great influence in what Barbra chose to do. Anyway, Barbra made a curious remark. There’s something in that treatment that Katie never used four-letter words until she went to Hollywood, and Barbra said, “That’s me!” She can be surprisingly prudish, but that hardly seemed the case. I’ve always thought she sort of invented herself.

  ‘She loved it. I suggested Sydney Pollack as a director, although I didn’t know him at the time, because I had just seen They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which I liked. Pollack was very close to Robert Redford [whom he had directed in the adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s This Property Is Condemned (1966)], and so that was the way they eventually got Redford, but not without a struggle.

  ‘Barbra had changed, become very Hollywood. When I was working on the first draft of the script, instead of discussing the part, she wanted to know how many changes of hairdos and clothes she would go through in the years the script covered. She asked if she could wear jeans at any point in the story. I realised she was indeed the idealistic Katie put through the Hollywood grind, but the early curiosity was no longer there. There was a time when you could talk to Barbra for hours on any subject and be constantly stimulated intellectually. Now she was beginning to bore me.’

  Laurents’s relationship to Streisand was on an entirely new level here – star and screenwriter, the latter a replaceable commodity in Hollywood, whereas a performer of Barbra Streisand’s bankability was not. ‘They were insecure about the first draft and they fired me,’ Laurents recalled. ‘Sydney called me and said that he had bad news, that Ray was firing me. “But, you’re the director,” I replied. Sydney said he could do nothing. A half-hour later Ray called and said Sydney was firing me, and he, the producer, could do nothing.’ They brought in eleven writers in all, including well-known Hollywood scribes Dalton Trumbo, Francis Coppola, Judith Rasco, Alvin Sargent and one of Streisand’s former brief flings from earlier times, David Rayfiel. Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, both from New York, were consulted. ‘They told Ray they wouldn’t touch it, it was wonderful, to leave it alone,’ Laurents added. ‘But Ray and Sydney started to muck around with it. It was really painful because I cared a great deal about that story. Much of it was from my own life and was about the witch-hunt which they knew nothing about. A lot of the rewriting was to make Redford’s part bigger.

  ‘Sydney would never let me meet Redford. It was very odd. He gave me a tape of a conversation they had about the script. Why he gave it to me, I don’t know. People do self-destruct. Atone point on the tape, Redford shouted, “But her part’s bigger!” I told Sydney, “I know how you feel about Redford, but the story is hers. No matter what you do you can’t change that, but you can hurt it.”

  ‘They started shooting and got into trouble and Ray called me. By then I was over the pain, but I was also over the Walter Mitty dream. It wasn’t pleasurable. It was uncomfortable and, of course, I really wasn’t over it. I still cared abou
t it. I asked for a lot of money. I also said, “I’ll come out there and tell you what I think and if you don’t like it, I’ll come right back.” It was an armed truce.’ Laurents returned to the project and received full credit.

  ‘The person who was terrific was Barbra,’ he asserts. ‘She’s like a pack-rat, you know? She saves every line of every script. She kept saying, “What about this? What about that?’ She fought to keep meaningful things in the script – [the political viewpoints, shadings in the relationship between the two main characters]. Redford glared at me the whole time. I thought the reason was because I was not building his part up. He behaved badly, but that goes with the territory. You can’t expect decent behavior from a movie star or anyone else in the industry who stays and lives in Hollywood. They’re too insecure. They’re afraid. You have to make the first move. You’re not saying, “Hello,” I’m not saying, “Hello.”’

  The We of the title are two Cornell University classmates, impassioned radical Katie Morosky, a Jewish activist with the Young Communist League from New York, and a Wasp jock from Virginia, Hubbell Gardiner, who is a writer – two people ill-mated but sexually drawn to each other, Katie more than he. She is attracted to the fairy-tale prince in Hubbell, he is mesmerised by her energy, moral conviction and drive. They marry and Katie pushes Hubbell, who has shown a natural talent for the written word, to become a great writer with a sodal message. They move to Hollywood when he signs a contract to adapt a novel he has written for the screen. Once in glitterland, by Katie’s standards he sells out, writing commerdal trash, while she becomes more deeply involved in left-wing politics. Disillusioned, Katie returns to New York with their infant daughter, divorces him and eventually remarries a nice, Jewish accountant and works for liberal causes while Hubbell goes on to become a successful television writer. They meet one more time and realise that they cannot return to the past.

  Close comparison could be made between the love relationship of Katie and Hubbell and Fanny and Nicky Arnstein; the man being more attractive than the woman, who is the brighter of the two.

  Extremely selective in his acting roles, the bronzed, square-jawed, sky-eyed Redford was Hollywood’s current top heart throb.3 When first approached by Pollack, Redford adamantly refused the part. The character, he claimed quite correctly, was a man lacking conviction or purpose. The film belonged to Katie, and Redford was concerned about this.

  ‘He didn’t like the script, he didn’t like the character, he didn’t like the concept of the film, he didn’t think the politics and love story would mix,’ Sydney Pollack says. ‘There was nothing about it he liked and in fact, he kept saying to me, “Pollack, you’re crazy! What are you doing this for?”’ But Redford’s trust of Pollack’s instincts was strong. ‘Maybe he sees something I don’t see,’ Redford told his wife Lola.

  ‘It had to be those two together [Redford and Streisand],’ Pollack continues. ‘Barbra understood that. They were so prototypical of what the story was about.’

  Pollack had badgered Redford for six months to play Hubbell. He agreed to revise the script to strengthen Hubbell and his role so that it was as germane as Katie’s to the picture. Ray Stark, realising the marquee value of Streisand and Redford, offered Redford a salary that exceeded Streisand’s (the first and only time a co-star would receive more than she did) and a profit percentage of the film. Redford still waffled. Stark finally gave Pollack an ultimatum: If Redford did not agree by midnight 10 June 1972, he was making a deal the following day with Ryan O’Neal, actually Streisand’s first choice for the role and for whom she briefly rekindled her affections. A half-hour before that deadline Pollack was on the telephone with Stark to tell him that Redford had agreed to play opposite Streisand.

  At the end of August, Streisand flew to New York, Jason in tow, and then drove up to the film’s first location, Union College in Schenectady, New York, where they would remain for a month. By the time principal photography began on 18 September, mother and son were settled in a large, comfortably furnished Victorian house near the campus. Redford and Pollack had suites at the local Holiday Inn. Although there was no friction between the stars, Redford is rather laid-back as a personality and was often unnerved by Streisand’s inability just to relax and doit. They had opposite acting styles. She liked to talk about a scene, rehearse it several times before the cameras rolled. Redford, an instinctive actor, prefers to create the scene on camera. Her relationship with O’Neal once again cold, she formed a crush on Redford. He was America the Beautiful and she carried that inner glow with her on to the set and before the camera. But Redford was a dedicated family man, his attitude towards her was reserved. This gave an edge to their performances that resulted in a highly charged sexual chemistry between them.

  ‘I think with any small encouragement from Redford, Barbra would have had an affair with him in those early weeks of shooting in Schenectady,’ a close member of the crew said. ‘When we left Schenectady and set up in New York for the exteriors we shot there, she seemed edgy. Maybe it was her attraction to Redford, maybe just her concern with the progress of the picture. She is a compulsive worrier. By the time the company landed in L.A. for the West Coast and interior scenes, they [Redford and Streisand] seemed more ... connected, I guess. Which didn’t seem to alleviate Barbra’s constant agitation about the rightness or wrongness of a scene that they had just played or were about to play together.’

  ‘She was in awe of Redford,’ Laurents said. ‘She was simply mesmerised because she found him so beautiful, and he was ever so pleasant because he thought he was stealing the movie away from her.’

  This never did happen. Streisand held her ground, memorably in the early scene when Katie, naked, crawls into bed next to a drunk and almost comatose Hubbell, slowly inching near him until she is in his arms. He has sex with her as if on automatic. Then after he climaxes falls back asleep. ‘It’s me, Katie,’ she says in an agonised whisper to the snoring, inert beautiful man whom she adores. The scene has great erotic power. Here is the insecure, unglamorous girl who seduces the golden man of her dreams and then realises he may never know he has made love to her.

  Katie’s character had a sympathetic vulnerability, the feminine part of her nature always betraying her need to stand by her man, the masculine to march with the drummer. This duality of temperament in the character she was playing carried over into Streisand’s own attitude on the set. She was more unsure than usual, calling Pollack late at night in an apprehensive state to discuss the day’s footage: did she play a particular scene right? Should they reshoot it the next morning? The angle of a dose-up was too unflattering. How could Hubbell love such an unattractive woman? At the end of the picture she gave Pollack a gold watch engraved: ‘For all those 11 o’clock phone calls’.

  Pollack admired her insatiable need to understand the character she was playing. Originally intending to become an actor, he had studied with the New York theatre coach, Sandy Meisner, and in the 1950s appeared in several plays and television dramas. His first directorial work had been on television where in five years he directed eighty shows. Then in 1965 he directed The Silver Thread, a feature film starring Anne Bancroft. A traditionalist of sorts, his movies were mostly conventional in form, but not necessarily in point of view. He calls himself a romantic and certainly The Way We Were reflects it. His major film career took off with They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1970) starring Jane Fonda in the role Streisand had not wanted to play – that of a failed actress driven by financial need into a dance marathon and who eventually commits suicide. The picture firmly established Pollack into the front ranks of American directors, but his early acting experience – from time to time he still appears in his own films, most memorably as Dustin Hoffman’s agent in Tootsie – gave him a special knack for eliciting great performances from his actors. Streisand felt comfortable with him and respected his opinion, although it did not stop her from harassing him.

  Pollack had retained much of the political debating that went on bet
ween Katie and Hubbell in Laurents’s script. Then at the sneak preview at the Northpoint Theatre in San Frandsco, Ray Stark dectded the audience was bored during a six-minute scene that Laurents calls ‘the entire motivation for Katie’s leaving Hubbell’, and told Pollack to cut it.

  ‘I didn’t even have the negative with me. I just made the cut with a razor blade on the positive print before previewing it the next night,’ he said. The second preview was more successful. ‘You could just feel it. The chunk that came out was never missed and the audience remained alert,’ Pollack insists.

  Laurents disagrees. ‘It was all wrong. The climax of the picture is absolutely missing. It was cut. What you see now is Streisand and Redford at the beach house [in Malibu] and she has some line about how willy-nilly drcumstances make one come to a dedsion, in her case to get a divorce. The audience seemed to have bought it. But originally there was a scene that preceded it where Hubbell came home from the studio and says, “The studio says they are going to fire me because I have a subversive wife. So unless you inform I’m out of work.” And Katie answers, “Well, what if we get a divorce and you don’t have a subversive wife.” That’s the whole point. He had never been involved with politics as she had and he was willing to ask her to be an informer – to destroy the lives of many innocent people – in order to hang on to his Hollywood career and the money that came with it. Katie was too princtpled for that. She could never betray her friends or her beliefs. Of course, she would leave him after he makes such an unconscionable request of her. They took it out, and nobody noticed. Nobody cared.’