Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  She also fought with her opinionated leading man. ‘I’d yell at her,’ Caan recalled, ‘put her down and call her a spoiled rotten thing, and she would call me this or that and we’d carry on ... I remember for some reason, it was very important to Herb Ross to get a shot where we both got covered in talcum powder. Barbra [was wearing] this beautiful green-spangled dress and made up just right. She said, “I don’t think that Jimmy should hit me in the face with this powder. That powder is toxic, you know, and I’ll get it in my lungs.”’ Caan, sensing that a big argument was brewing, took matters in his hands. ‘Barbra, I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘“Maybe I shouldn’t hit you with the thing. Maybe you’ll hit me and then I’ll pick it up and I’ll go to hit you with it and then I won’t.” She said, “Oh, that’s terrific. That’ll be great!” I said, “Now, mind you – if you blink or back off when I start to raise my hand, I’m gonna whack you with it ... ‘cause it’s only the idea that you’re ready to accept it that’ll stop me.” She said, “OK. I won’t blink.”

  ‘So we set the scene up and did it. She hit me in the face with the powder. I picked it up and drew my hand back and she just stood there. She did not blink. I hit her square in the face with it. I’m telling you I went to the floor laughing, I couldn’t stop, and she looked at me ... I mean, I really felt bad ... She called me names. She said, “You lied to me!”’ Caan couldn’t stop laughing and finally Streisand saw the humour in it and laughed with him. ‘He had his fingers crossed so God shouldn’t strike him dead, and then he let me have it,’ Streisand added good-naturedly.

  Ross, of course, had worked with Streisand before and he found her quite a different person than previously. ‘Her commitment was not 100 per cent to the film. Funny Lady was virtually a movie that was made without her – she simply wasn’t there in terms of commitment.’ Her main concern was always Peters, where he was, what he thought of what she was doing. The crew was often kept waiting while she located him by telephone. There is no doubt that her relationship with Peters was more important to her than the film she was making. It was as simple as that, but she never gave less than was required of her.

  Peters, watching from the sidelines, felt that Streisand should ‘be playing hotter, sexier, younger roles’. And, of course, she was making the movie because of her old contract with Stark and for far less than she would be paid elsewhere. Streisand was tom. She had truly liked the script, had even enjoyed being able to play in scenes with Sharif and show him how little their affair now meant to her. Her mind, however, was on Peters and a project that they had dedded they would do together for First Artists with Jon producing – a modern version of A Star is Born. One day Peters arrived on the set of Funny Lady with a jewellery box containing a diamond and sapphire butterfly. A week later it was announced in the press that, as well, he would produce her next album, Butterfly.

  Columbia Records balked. There was no way they were going to allow her lover, who had no musical experience, to produce an album. Streisand persisted. ‘Do they think I would let Jon produce a record if I wasn’t absolutely sure he could do it?’ she defended. ‘I believe in imagination. I believe in taste. These are the important ingredients, and they’re all things he has.’ Despite Columbia’s displeasure, Peters began work on the Butterfly album before shooting ended on Funny Lady and Streisand did double time, recording for Butterfly the contemporary sounds he had chosen for her and performing for the cameras the old-time tunes of Funny Lady.

  The executives from Columbia Records were unhappy from the first playback session. Peters had chosen the title Butterfly to reflect the many moods Streisand could effect in her music. He had wanted her to sing ‘God Bless the Child’, the Billie Holiday standard and a medley of ‘A Quiet Thing’ from the Kander and Ebb score of Flora, The Red Menace and a song dropped from Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle – ‘There Won’t Be Trumpets’ (‘Recording that medley is what first got me thinking about doing a Broadway album,’ Streisand later claimed.) The record company did not think they were contemporary enough and they were cut, not without a fight on Streisand’s part.

  Most of the songs that Peters had chosen and she had approved presented her in a different aspect. This was going to be a whole new Barbra. Gone was the romance, the nostalgia of The Way We Were. Gone was the funny girl, the funny lady. She was into woman – not just woman but avant-garde woman, always liberated (well, almost) and with very little sense of morality and absolutely no remorse for blatant promiscuity. The songs were delivered in a gospel-rock, either with a back-up group or with Streisand over-dubbing herself, two selections, ‘Love in the Afternoon’ and ‘Guava jelly’ (which would eventually be released as a single as well) with fairly explicit sexual lyrics. ‘Love in the Afternoon’ is prescient of The Bridges of Madison County in that the lyrics tell the story of a country woman, bedded once so memorably by a man just passing through – oral sex is implied – that she never forgets him.

  The effect of ‘Guava Jelly’ is even more startling. The lyric concerns a woman’s desire to have ‘it’ rubbed on her belly. The comparison is to guava jelly, and the metaphor pulls no punches as Streisand, over and over, more and more breathlessly, pleads, ‘rub it, rub it’. Tom Scott, who had worked with Joni Mitchell, arranged and conducted. Columbia Records insisted on some more staple cuts. The finished album is eclectic in a way that none of her albums had been before. Side one reflects more of what Peters and Streisand were trying to accomplish. At one point in ‘Jubilation’ she achieves a true revival-meeting style that equals Mahalia jackson in full gospel voice. Side two presents some of the old Barbra with ‘I Won’t Last a Day Without You’, which qualifies as one of those ‘doormat’ songs – women who can only be strong with and through their men – that she has always professed to hate. Then, with ‘Let the Good Times Roll’, she winds up back where she began – raunchy – no longer talking about good times but gratifying, orgasmic sex.

  Before the album’s release the press warned that it was going to be a disaster and that Peters was the culprit. ‘This is possibly the best singing I’ve ever done,’ she replied. ‘For the first time in my life ... my work [referring to recording] has become fun for me, and it used to be a drag. My attitude has changed towards people. I’m less afraid. That’s Jon. It kills me to have him put down more than to have me put down.’

  The album sleeve was a photo collage of Streisand and Peters, she looking at him worshipfully, playful shots of them touching, clowning, embracing. His dark, piercing eyes and black beard gave rise to sinister press descriptions of him as ‘Streisand’s Svengali’ and ‘Film Empress’ Rasputin’. The lovers, now turned musical partners, waited anxiously for the critics to speak. To their own jubilation the New York Times review was a rave. ‘Beyond the fashionable cracks at Peters’ profession [as a hair-stylist] – and there have been many these past months – his role as record producer certainly has enhanced this album. Butterfly is one of Streisand’s finest albums in years.’ Not all the critics agreed, but most thought it was her most daring and Columbia was not displeased when Butterfly hit the charts at a lucky thirteen and remained in the top twenty for the next five months.

  The final weeks of shooting on Funny Lady in early August was a time when everyone on the set, along with the rest of the nation, was gripped by the Watergate break-in, the impeachment articles, and Nixon’s resignation on 9 August. Streisand sat in her dressing room between takes watching as the House Judiciary Committee solemnly and cautiously went about the business of trying to remove a President from office. ‘Expletive deleted’ became a joke on the set as committee members kept everyone in suspense about the infamous eighteen-minute gap in Nixon’s White House tapes.

  Her gift to Stark when filming ended was an antique mirror upon which she had scrawled ‘Paid in Full’ in blood-red lipstick. A few days later she sent him a plaque engraved with the words, ‘Even though I sometimes forget to say it, thank you, Ray. Love, Barbra.’

  However unhappy she m
ight have been working for Stark or displeased Peters was that she was playing an older woman out of touch with the now generation, Funny Lady was warm and funny and gorgeous. She looked sexy, sang at her top form and brought a mature freshness to the role of Fanny Brice. Her reviews were raves, the picture a huge success, but she was less interested in Funny Lady’s triumph at the box office than she was with the projects she was working on with Peters. Her ambitions for him were sky-high. Instinctively she understood his gnawing hunger for fame and riches. He talked about becoming one of Hollywood’s top producers. He could see himself quite clearly as the head of a great studio. She took him seriously, believed in his visions, became furious when members of the press referred to him in a derogatory manner as ‘a hairdresser’. ’He’s not using me,’ she defended him to friends. ‘He gives much more than he takes.’ Her drive for his success was as strong as for her own – maybe at this moment – even more, for the lady was in love and she wanted the world to know how wisely she had chosen.

  Footnotes

  1 Lesley Anne Warren made a stunning ‘comeback’ in Victor/Victoria (1982) in the comedic role of James Garner’s Chicago showgirl mistress, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.

  2 This album was later retitled Barbra Streisand Featuring ‘The Way We Were’ and ‘All in Love Is Fair’, when Rastar Productions, producers of the Columbia film, filed suit against Columbia Records charging breach of contract as it was in direct competition with the soundtrack album, and maintained that record buyers would be misled into buying Streisand’s solo album under a false premise. The suit was settled out of court and the album title changed.

  3 Hamlisch was the first individual ever to win three Oscars in one night – Best Song and Best Original Score – The Way We Were; Best Score Adaptation – The Sting, arranged from music by Scott Joplin.

  4 The major songs recorded were ‘So Long, Honey Lamb’, ‘Blind Date’, ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby’, ‘Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie’, ‘Am I Blue?’, ‘How Lucky Can You Get?’ and the ‘Crazy Quilt’ sequence (the last a series of show scenes where the sets deconstruct as Streisand and the chorus perform).

  5 Marvin Hamlisch also contributed a couple of ‘thematic’ musical cues linking Funny Girl with Funny Lady. However, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, whose music had been incorporated, were not given screen credit, although Hamlisch was.

  24

  ON CHRISTMAS MORNING 1974, Streisand rose at dawn and made bagels and hot chocolate in the kitchen of the Barn for Jason and Christopher to eat when they came down to the living room to open their gifts, stacked under a towering nine-foot tree decorated with pine cones and candy canes. It was the first time she had ever celebrated the Christian holiday. The bagels were her bid for inter-denomination. She viewed this as a time for family. She and Peters were now on such good terms with Lesley Anne Warren that the three of them attended Gestalt therapy sessions together in which the analyst encouraged them to release their emotions, and to recognise them in response to each other. To those close to her, Streisand appeared less tense, more open. She laughed more easily, luxuriated in her maternal role and domestic responsibilities.

  The boys became friends, collaborating on monster movies with an 8mm camera that was a present to Jason from Elliott. Streisand was supremely happy. She oversaw the selection of every flowering bush, tree, and stone for the path that led to the stable, which was being converted into a multi-level villa eventually to contain guest quarters, a gym and a projection room. With time to indulge her passion for collecting, the Barn was quickly filling with newly found pieces. As a couple, Peters with his platform saddle shoes and hip-hugging corduroys worn without underwear – Streisand in tight jeans tucked into high boots, her hair bleached blonde and worn straight and loose – looked cool, sexy, with it.

  He made her feel young, she made him a movie producer. He had gone from no status as ‘a kid with dirty underwear going to beauty school’ to millionaire Emperor of Hair to the producer of Barbra Streisand’s next movie, a $5 million musical, the fourth version of A Star Is Born.1 And in January 1975, with Butterfly still in the charts, Streisand and Peters were trying to convince Warner Brothers, who were putting up the money for First Artists, to hand him the directorial reins of the movie as well.

  The original concept, conceived by husband and wife novelists John Gregory Dunne (Dominic Dunne’s brother) and Joan Didion in the fall of 1973, had only a fleeting connection with the earlier versions of A Star Is Born. It was a love story about two rock singers, one on the way up, one on the way down. The background was the contemporary, rat-packed world of groupies, rock concerts and tours, drugs and psychedelic flip-outs – far from the artificial, unhip glory of Hollywood in its golden years. Still, the up and down professional careers of the two lead characters bore enough similarity to the much-reprised Warner’s classic that Dunne and Didion went to their ex-agent, Dick Shepherd, now head of Warner Brothers Studios to see if they could do it under the studio’s aegis. Shepherd liked the idea and agreed to their writing a contemporary rock version of the film, the rights of all three previous films being owned by his studio. Dunne and Didion were not aficionados of the A Star Is Born movies, but they were avid rock enthusiasts and had just returned from travelling around with rock stars Jethro Tull and Uriah Heep. They were also highly respected literary authors of the contemporary scene. By the following spring a script was completed and submitted to director Peter Bogdanovich for consideration. Bogdanovich thought it was awful.

  The script passed next to actor/director Mark Rydell, who loved the screenplay, which he called ‘a savage look at the rock world’. Refusing to pay Rydell anything near the price he was asking for his services, Warner instead agreed to let him develop the project without payment and gave him three months to work with Didion and Dunne on the script, line up two stars, ’and get some of those spectacular concert scenes off the drawing board’. If he succeeded, Warner would then sign a lucrative contract for him to direct the film. At the end of this time the heavy-handed screenplay – glaringly raw-boned and with two characters who were not sympathetic – was in deep trouble. Liza Minnelli, Elvis Presley, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Cher and Diana Ross all turned down one or the other of the two leading roles. Rydell went to Kris Kristofferson, a top Country and Western star who had become an increasingly popular film personality after playing Billy in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, following it as the romantic star of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, a sleeper movie that became a cult film. Kristofferson possessed a commanding presence – tall, lean, crusty, wary-eyed, a macho-man who could become surprisingly tender and vulnerable. He liked the script and committed himself to the project, but without a female star Warner would not bank it. When Rydell’s three-month free period elapsed, Warner took him off the project and handed it to director Jerry Schatzberg. In June 1974, Sue Mengers received the script as a submission for Streisand. First Peters read it.

  ‘I discovered this project,’ he later insisted. ‘I was the one who found it for Barbra, and convinced her to do it.’ He neglected to add that he let her know how much he wanted to produce it. Later he was to say, ‘The character in my movie is a guy who’s fighting all the time and hitting all the time. And he can’t relate. It’s the macho guy, which is very much like me.’

  He saw the story from a personal angle and offered changes before Warner, Schatzberg, Dunne or Didion even realised he was to be involved if Streisand accepted the female role. ‘Two people fall in love,’ he explained. ‘She becomes a super superstar by realising what the most important thing to both of them is: communicating. Wanting to have children. Not the thousands of agents and press agents and all that stuff that control their life. He’s a guy who spent the first thirty years of his life fighting – very aggressive – and then met this woman and fell very much in love and realised that this was his chance to live. But he accidentally dies. For us [he and Streisand] the understanding of it �
� through film – was a very heavy thing. Do you know what I mean? That’s why the script had to be perfect. Because it has to be right for us.’

  The press treated Peters’s bid through Streisand to produce as a joke. She was devastated by their jibes and sarcasm – ‘Hair today and gone tomorrow!’

  ‘Anyone who wonders how a first-time producer can make a $5 million film with the top female star in the country just has to take a look at the way I produced Barbra’s album. Or how I run my beauty salons. I employ three hundred people. I’m a businessman, man, that’s all,’ Peters defended.

  As a First Artists film,2 Streisand had creative control. She was unhappy at this stage with Kristofferson, with whom she had once had a brief affair (‘one of her flings’ as she called them). This had been after her divorce and the end of her romance with Trudeau. After a few dates, Kristofferson had essentially dropped her. She was too demanding, too needy for where he was at that time in his life. Except for her respect for his musicianship Streisand had not given him much thought since then, but when she was told he had been cast as the declining rock star in the film she agreed he was a good choice. No innuendo was meant. Kristofferson was at the height of his popularity.

  In the one truly farcical time before Kristofferson signed on, Streisand called Schatzberg and suggested that Peters play opposite her. The director dismissed it as a gag but quickly found out she was serious. ‘Can you sing?’ Schatzberg asked Peters sensibly. After all, the male lead as written was a famous rock singer. ‘No,’ Peters told him, ‘but you can shoot around me and dub.’ Schatzberg refused to cast him. Dunne and Didion were off the script after finalising a deal that gave them 10 per cent of the film, and Jonathan Axelrod, a bright, young scenarist was rewriting. By this time Dick Shepherd had been replaced at Warner by John Calley.