by Anne Edwards
‘I’d never met Peters before,’ Calley recalled. ‘He came in and said that in his and Barbra’s view, the screenplay was moving away from being suitable for Barbra. I agreed with them. Forget about whether the screenplay was good or not, the issue was “Is it right for Barbra?” Peters said, in effect, “It’s very simple, either we get to take over the screenplay and make it work for Barbra or we take a walk. It’s entirely up to you. Do whatever you like.”’ Calley had no alternative. Warner did not want to lose a Streisand musical. Axelrod became a casualty and Schatzberg soon followed.
Peters, flying in the face of his detractors, was determined that he was going to direct. ‘Why not?’ he shouted at one reporter who ignited his temper. ‘Directing is a thing I’ve done my whole life! It’s getting people to do what I want them to do!’ He was showing the press around his Malibu ranch, kicking rocks out of his path as he went with the hard-stub toe of his expensive boots. ‘When I started this place it was all dirt. Look at it now,’ he said with a sweep of his hand that indicated his domain.
The week before Christmas 1974 Peters gave a party for the employees of his hairdressing empire to tell them that Jon Peters, Inc. would soon be in other hands. His interest was now fully focused on the movie he was about to produce. He walked out of his offices without a second glance. That part of his life was over. For the next month he and Streisand spent their evenings in front of the fireplace at the Barn tearing the script apart. ‘We’re going to make this a love story,’ he told Marie Brenner of the New Times. ‘They’re the most beautiful people and the love they have for each other is the same feeling as Barbra and I have for each other ... we’re going to make it much closer to the 1936 version, the one with Janet Gaynor. That was magic. That’s what we want to achieve.’
Streisand agreed. They were a team, but it appeared that Peters had taken the lead. ‘She was ecstatic, really,’ one friend said. ‘Very proud of him, strongly believing in his ability, gaining a new kind of strength, more womanly, through his.’ Brenner was prescient in observing that ‘What Jon Peters appreciates very well is that he is living with a large entertainment corporation and that the merger looks permanent ... [but] that kind of power is rarely benign. It is not enough for Jon Peters to mastermind the career of his private conglomerate. He is not satisfied with a minor role as Barbra’s shield, giving her the privacy she says she now wants. Yes, he sees himself as the take-charge guy in her business life ... but even more, he sees himself as the lead in their larger-than-life real life movie. He believes he is on the way up, all the way up. The only question now is the quality of ascent.’
Streisand, Newman, Poitier and McQueen had come into First Artists giving the impression to outsiders and the press that they were all big buddies and were going to work together and do these great projects. This was not the reality. Streisand harboured resentment that her partners would be participating in the profits from her film. ‘That became sort of the attitude,’ recalled Ed Holly, who had joined the company as Senior Vice-President in Charge of Finance, and would in two years become President. ‘When Barbra and Jon were preparing the picture, the company was at the poorhouse steps. All the partners were behind in their pictures.3 Barbra had delivered only one, Up the Sandbox, which was not a commercial movie but it showed the kind of thing she wanted to do. It expressed a new spirit, a new thinking. Warner literally forced her not to drag her feet on A Star Is Born as they were at the court-house steps [with First Artists]. They agreed to an expanded budget of $6 million. It created problems. This was a higher budget than the other partners could expect and would also lower profits or raise losses, whichever was the case. The stars just could not be in bed together. The egos were too big. Even those nice, easy to deal with people – Sidney and Paul – could not work with Barbra.
‘Jon came on the Board of Directors of First Artists. From a business standpoint the execs of the company did not deal directly with the stars. We dealt with whomever they put on the board and in Barbra’s case it was Jon. We had some pretty hard fights along the way. Jon could only see things from Barbra’s standpoint so we were in conflict in that what might be best for Barbra might not necessarily be best for the company and the stockholders. So immediately we had a fight on our hands. He was a tough fighter, a hard negotiator, and not always fair. But that’s Jon. Barbra used him as a buffer and a go-between. She did not like to deal with people except on a creative basis.’
The script remained a difficult problem and Streisand called Arthur Laurents and asked his help. She had four different scripts and sent them to him. ‘After I read them,’ he recalled, ‘I told her she should play the other part [the role of the star on the way down], which was much more interesting, and that only one of the scripts was really good. “Which?” she wanted to know. The one written by Joan Didion and John Dunne. And I added, “But you’re not going to do that one.” And she asked, “Why not?” and I said, “Because it’s tough.” Barbra wanted, what I guess all insecure women want – to be romantic princesses.’
By the summer of 1975, with Streisand and Peters still working on the screenplay, Warner issued an ultimatum that A Star Is Born would have to go before the cameras by 2 January 1976. They had at this point, due to conflicting commitments, lost Kristofferson and Warner had refused to go along with Peters replacing him. ‘What about Brando?’ Streisand proposed during one meeting. ‘I always wanted to play with Brando. Why does it have to be a musical?’
Peters leaped up from his chair exclaiming that they had recently talked to Brando at the studio. ‘The son of a bitch, he wanted to fuck Barbra! I was ready to kill him! I take him off, and I kiss him! He’s beautiful! I love him, the bastard! They’d make a great pair. Imagine. Streisand and Brando!’
Eventually, Kristofferson – upon winning a co-above-the-title credit shared with Streisand – came back on the project. What was now needed was a deft writer who could take the forty pounds of script and revisions and turn it into a workable screenplay with a believable, strong role for Streisand. ‘It would be nice if the picture was good,’ one Warner executive said when Frank Pierson was asked to work on yet another revision, ‘but the bottom line is to get her to the studio. Shoot her singing six numbers, and we’ll make $60 million.’4
Pierson had written the screenplays for Cat Ballou, The Anderson Tapes and Dog Day Afternoon and directed one film, John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War (1969). He was keen on directing and played his cards carefully. He presented Streisand and Peters with a fresh approach to the story which they both liked. But he did not wish to rewrite the script unless he was also hired as director. Peters nodded his agreement. He had decided he would not direct after all, he told Pierson. ‘Why?’ Pierson asked.
‘How could I direct Barbra and keep our relationship? I had to decide which was more important, our love or the movie.’ One sensed this had been an issue that they had chewed over for a long time. Streisand had, in fact, grown fearful that if Peters were to direct the stress would be too much for her. What if they fought bitterly? ‘You and Barbra make the picture,’ he told Pierson. ‘I’m here [as producer] to expedite. You need somethin’, I’ll kick ass to get it.’
Pierson, a benevolent-looking bespectacled man, prematurely grey (he was thirty-eight), his broad chin hidden by a neatly clipped beard, planned to keep the basic story line: the man going steadily downhill and self-destructing as the woman keeps ascending. The real change that he envisioned was in the relationship between the lead characters. In earlier film versions of A Star Is Born and in the Dunne–Didion progenitor, her success and his failure were seen in terms of a competition which he lost, because she won. Pierson dropped that approach on the basis that in the 1970s working women contributed a large share of the family income and husbands no longer found this humiliating. In Pierson’s screenplay the tragedy was that the woman’s deep love was not enough to keep alive an artist whose career – which was the measure of his manhood – comes crashing down around him.
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nbsp; Next came the issue of the ending. ‘I hate him if he kills himself and leaves her all alone, this little girl,’ Peters told Pierson, who reminded him that Garbo threw herself under a railroad car in Anna Karenina, Ronald Colman had his head lopped off in A Tale of Two Cities and Ali MacGraw died of a sudden illness in Love Story – all phenomenally successful pictures. None the less, Pierson compromised, revising the script to have the man die in an auto accident – although, as he is drinking beer while driving at over 140 miles an hour in blinding sunlight, his death still evokes suicide.
Weekly conferences were held with Pierson as Streisand and Peters contributed to the creation of the characters. More and more Pierson realised how autobiographical the fictional lovers were becoming. ‘People are curious,’ Streisand told him, ‘they want to know about us. But I don’t want you to use too much. I don’t know if I should tell you this or not, because someday they’ll want to do my life story, and I don’t want to use it up.’ She then shared some of her Brooklyn childhood memories with him along with stories of the passion and growing violence in their relationship. She was confident that no two people had ever loved as ardently as they had. Theirs was an historic affair. They were each contributing a greatness to the other’s development. There had been no other show-business couple to compare with them. Maybe, Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd if he had lived. They were unique and their experiences were profound.
Peters was anxious to incorporate details of their life together, ‘how we make love, fight and love again. A fight can be an intimate thing between two lovers, can really strip them naked, lead to an ultimate sexual experience. Hate and love are the two most passionate emotions we feel. Put them together and – wham!’ The scene where the rock star, now named John Norman Howard, and Esther Hoffman meet, ended with the line ‘You’ve got a great ass,’ one of the first things Peters said to Streisand. And Esther snaps at the press who dog her trail, ‘When is it ever enough, goddamn it!’ – words she shouted at reporters who would not leave them alone.
‘It’s not our life,’ Streisand interjected. ‘You don’t want to make it too real.’ However, a love scene in a bathtub encircled with burning candles, the only light in the room, was taken from their personal experience, as was the romp in the open field on the fictional anti-hero’s ranchland. And when it was time to create the sets, Streisand had the fictitious Esther’s apartment decorated as though it were hers, bringing furniture, fabrics, carloads of things from her attic and cellar storerooms (many of these items from the walk-up over the fish restaurant that she and Elliott had once shared) to make the set feel as though it was once someplace where she had lived.
While Pierson was working on the script Streisand was supervising the Barn’s transformation from its rustic past into an Architectural Digest vision of country life. The mattress that doubled as the living-room couch was now covered in fur and antique Victorian pillows, the bathtub in the master bedroom was rebuilt from natural stones cemented together. The house was all earth tones, and the wood artfully aged. Every wall, nook and cranny was overflowing with objects – art deco statuary, collections of startling variety, antique throws and shawls, Tiffany lamps, mammoth tropical plants, objets d’art of every description and ‘in such profusion only an impression of magnificence is generated ... It is like a magical attic, in which every trunk and old discarded hat rack or moose head has a sentimental history, printed on a card.’ Hats and boas were draped on hangers for display on the backs of doors. Period shoes with marcasite buckles and satin bows were lined up on open shelves.
Outside you could barely walk without tripping over building materials as a natural rock swimming pool – a large version of the bathtub – was in the throes of construction, a double tennis court under way, and two houses on adjoining property, which they had just bought as additional guest houses were being rebuilt and redecorated, one in art deco style, the other in art nouveau for her to furnish and decorate as authentically as possible. Streisand was relishing her time away from the cameras potchkehing, as she called it. Peters had gained ten pounds and strutted around ‘like Nixon eyeing improvements at San Clamente’. With revisions still being made on the script of A Star Is Born, he joined forces with Marty Erlichman to produce a film for Harwood, Streisand’s company, based on the life of Bruce Lee, the diminutive Chinese-American martial arts expert who had died a sudden and mysterious death two years earlier.
Streisand was learning to play the guitar for a scene in the film and ‘drove everybody crazy playing it morning, noon and night’. She also wanted to write a song and plucked away on the melody trying to get the right chords. She cried in the bathroom after a guitar lesson because her teacher wrote songs and she thought she could not. Peters followed her into the john. ‘You can do it,’ he insisted, ‘you can do anything you set your mind to. Try to write a song! Go on try!’ One day when Paul Williams, who with Kenny Asher (also the musical conductor) had been signed to write the score for the film,5 drove up to the Barn for a conference, Streisand played the melody she had been working on. Williams was knocked over. It was ‘wonderful’ he said. ‘She was like a little girl ... kind of shy. She had been taking guitar lessons, and she was watching her fingers to make sure that she got the chords right.’
Williams jubilantly told her that she had composed the love theme and promised shortly to have words for the song. To her irritation, these were the last lyrics he wrote before they went into the pre-recording sessions, but she felt newly confident when she played and sang the song, now titled ‘Evergreen’, for Marty Erlichman, who was certain it would be a big hit – as big as ‘The Way We Were’.
Despite Streisand’s optimism, all did not go well on the scoring stage the day they recorded ‘Evergreen’. Ed Holly recalled that when Phil Feldman, who preceded him as President of First Artists, ‘a very strong, hard-hitting man whose main function at the time was as a trouble shooter’, got the word mid-morning that the conductor was quitting, they both hurried down there. ‘Barbra was yelling and screaming – really out of control – but she couldn’t define anything. We decided to send everyone out for a long lunch break. An hour later she returned and spoke to Howard Klein, the Vice-President in Charge of Production. By three o’clock, when I return to the scoring stage, she ordered, “I want this many violins, etcetera”. She had figured out in her head during lunch what was wrong. So immediately the call went out to get the additional musicians that she wanted. At three o’clock she was back – highly energised – additional musicians on board and within an hour they were recording. The difference from the morning session was dramatic. She had whipped the musicians into a frenzy and the final effect had been good. The orchestra had not been full. She is such a perfectionist. She can’t stand things not coming out exactly right and not being terribly articulate, it frustrates her. She hears things that no one else hears, has terrible fights with everyone she works with. She doesn’t seem able to discuss and reason. She is a yeller – and it grates on people with whom she is working. Perfect usually means doing things her way.’
After legally extending the start date by one month, A Star Is Born went before the cameras on 2 February 1976. Peters was getting his feet wet in the picture business and loving every bit of exposure to it. ‘He was just like a feisty sponge,’ Holly says. ‘He could absorb anything that was going on and was a quick study, but his attention span for anything other than the picture was zilch. None of us knew how to handle him other than to just accept the fact that he and Barbra were a couple, and that he was there and if you accepted Barbra, you had to accept Jon and we formed ways of working with him. He was sort of adopted by Howard Klein who really taught him what picture making is all about. Jon’s ambition exceeded even Barbra’s.
‘I know I’m not an easy person to work with,’ Peters admitted. ‘I know what I want and I’m going to get it. I was terrified, but I couldn’t show them that, could I? I had to get things done. I was the producer ... so I walked through people. I had to.’
Seldom did a day go by without reports appearing in the press on their affair and the problems on A Star Is Born. The Streisand–Peters merger was the Jackie Kennedy–Onassis love story of that time – everyone seemed tuned in, espousing opinions, predicting the outcome (mostly negative, the affair would end with shooting on A Star Is Born). The media, fans and the just plain curious had made their way up the narrow mountain road, overhung with great oaks and eucalyptus, to the gates that led to the front gardens of the Barn. Streisand and Peters hired private guards and bought two attack dogs.
The scenes with fans and press in the picture took on a greater sense of reality, emulating her own experiences as flashbulbs exploded in her face as she drove out of her own driveway, the way people grabbed at her, tore at her clothes, tugged at her hair as she tried to pass them to go into a restaurant or attend a public affair. All of them wanted a piece of her, believed they were entitled to it and grew angry if she yelled obscenities at them. Her affair with Peters had tossed her into an arena of pit bulls. She could no longer go to the beach with the boys and count on not being recognised, even though she now employed wigs and disguises – big glasses, Garbo hats that shaded her face. She was the now woman newly found by the young twenty-somethings. She hated it all and when she was not at the studio, she remained cloistered behind the gates at the Barn with her gun-toting guards and attack animals.
Frank Pierson was finding his task as director fraught with dangers. He was a man caught in the middle between the producers of the film and the studio whose money he was over-spending.
‘I don’t feel you want to love me,’ Streisand told him one day when shooting was not going well. ‘All my directors have wanted to make me beautiful. But I feel you hold something back; there’s something you don’t tell me. You never talk to me.’ Pierson apologised and added that he was just not the demonstrative type.