by Anne Edwards
One section, shot late in the day, included Peters. When that was shown to her, Streisand became quite upset. ‘I hate it!’ she protested. ‘I look awful.’
‘You may think you look awful, but I know I look great,’ Peters shot back. There was some sharp bickering between them. Streisand made the crew rerun the film that had been shot. ‘See – stop it! Right there! That’s a bad angle for me.’ It was agreed that the offending shot could be edited out without any problem and she was satisfied.
The discussion now led to the editing of A Star Is Born.
‘I just saw the end credits,’ Mengers announced. ‘I couldn’t believe that you had taken both an editing and a wardrobe credit.’ Mengers is a woman with a strong personality and a strident voice and her tone made it perfectly clear that she was soundly disapproving.
‘Why shouldn’t I have those credits?’ Streisand snapped. ‘I picked out all my clothes. It’s my taste that you see reflected on screen. And I have worked hard on the editing of the picture. I deserve the credits and I’m taking both of them.’
‘You can’t do a thing like that in Hollywood,’ Mengers reprimanded. ‘There are unions. You’ll have an ugly fight on your hands and you’ll be the laughing stock of the town!’
‘Well, I did the work and I want the credit!’ Streisand shouted.
Mengers stormed out. The argument was not settled until shortly before the film was released. Streisand did not receive film credit for either of these categories.1
Peters finally invited Pierson to view Streisand’s cut of the film. Pierson wrote later, ‘All night the film ran over in my head. Kris’s character often seems an unpleasant drunken dangerous bore; she seems silly – why would she love him? I see she has speeded up the film by cutting his establishing scene, moments of boyishness, of feeling the pain of his existence, that makes us feel for him and with him; she has cut his reactions ... the sadness, the wonderful wasted quality Kris brought the part, the exhaustion and the playfulness with which he courts her ... is diminished or gone.’
Streisand had been successful in centring the story entirely on her character. The other players are plastic. Kristofferson’s songs are tuneless, his voice and delivery show no sign of once having been of the calibre to make him a rock idol. One wonders what Esther ever saw in him. She is, in fact, irritated by him from their first encounter, and only after that candlelit bath together, now sexually involved with him, does she change in her attitude. Also, there is an inherent age problem: Streisand – though dressed young appears to have outgrown her clothes and her role.
Then there is the score. Kristofferson’s songs (not of his composition) are painful to the ears and although Streisand is supposed to become a rock star of the magnitude of a Janis Joplin, the songs that make an impression are closer to the old Streisand mould – ‘Evergreen’, ‘The Woman in the Moon’, and ‘Lost Inside of You’. The most puzzling question is how she allowed herself the self-indulgence to sing for nearly eight minutes, as in concert, at the end of the film – completely obfuscating the impact of the climactic scene that follows Kristofferson’s death and the Grammy Awards Ceremony where she is announced as Esther Hoffman Howard, taking on her husband’s name professionally for the first time. In the medley that follows, one assumes the segue from the poignancy of ‘With One More Look at You’ to the hard-rock up-tempo of ‘Watch Closely Now’ is to telegraph the message that Esther is on her own and going to be all right. However, she is just dandy before Kristofferson is killed in the car crash and the audience has no doubt that, after a proper period of mourning, she will be just dandy again, for she has displayed great inner strength and determination for the major portion of the picture.
None the less, Streisand’s performance is commanding. The camera work is extremely good and there are times when the story tugs at your heart. Still, Streisand’s A Star Is Born is not just a flawed film, it is a travesty, turning legend into pulp fiction.
None of these criticisms are meant to diminish Streisand’s elephantine efforts to make what she believed would be a great film. She knew by instinct what was missing from the previous versions of A Star Is Born, both in their statements about female suffering and in their emotional architecture. She did not want to make herself a victim in the same way that Gaynor and Garland had been in their renderings and in that she succeeded. But there are deep flaws in the story structure and character development and weak dialogue that undermine the picture.
‘You have to understand the way she saw it,’ John Gregory Dunne explained. ‘It was her life on the line. If the picture went down, she went down with it. She just had to do what she thought was right.’
‘A Star Is Born was the beginning of Barbra’s examining her own power,’ Peters added. ‘It was a discovery period for her. And she started to realise that she could do it, she could take control of her life. I was the tool, in a way. The halfback. I was the one who ran interference for her – because there were a lot of changes she wanted to make, but she couldn’t always articulate it.’
So consumed was she with getting everything right as she saw it that even when the finished picture was shipped for exhibition, it was accompanied by the following note: ‘In setting your usual level of sound please make sure that Reel 1 and Reel 2 are allowed to play as loud as possible. The color is also at its best at 14-foot candlepower ... Barbra Streisand.’
Premièred on 18 December 1976 at the Village Theatre in West Los Angeles, the first reviews from the Hollywood trades were laudatory. Streisand and Peters basked in glowing optimism, certain A Star Is Born would validate her dedication to the project and diminish any effect from the bad publicity that ran rampant during the making and cutting of the movie, none of which had wounded her so much as a lengthy vitriolic article written by Frank Pierson and published in New West and New York magazines disclosing personal conversations between them.2 Pierson did not attend the preview but did comment that he liked what Streisand had done to the final cut. One thing has to be said regarding Pierson’s position as director: he knew from the outset that Streisand and Peters had the definitive word on all decisions and on the final cut. This was bound to create problems unless he accepted the weakened circumstance in which this placed him. So ardently had he wished to have the credit that he made his pact with the devil and then refused to abide by that compromise.
When the largely negative critical response appeared nationwide in the press, Streisand and Peters were unprepared. ‘A Star Is Born: dead on arrival’, bannered Rolling Stone, which summed up its critique by saying, ‘If only the music had been better, if only Streisand and Kris Kristofferson were rock singers, if only his role had been developed. If only ... it might have been good.’
‘A Star Is Still-Born,’ Rex Reed wrote, adding: ‘They haven’t remade A Star Is Born they have buried it six feet under.’ A Star Is Shorn,’ jibed the New Times.
Streisand was in shock. People she knew who had seen the movie had called it brilliant. Both she and Peters believed the reviews were personal attacks. She felt bitter, and although A Star Is Born was an immediate box-office success, grossing $9.5 million in the first nine days of its release, eventually to earn over $140 million, Streisand’s greatest money-making picture, she never forgot any of the words written by the critics castigating the film. Even the huge five million album sales did not mitigate her resentment. What did please her was having her song ‘Evergreen’ become such a huge commercial hit.
With the success of A Star Is Born, Peters’s career as a producer was now guaranteed. ‘[Most of my life] I’ve fought for what I believe in and was not above using violence. Now, though, I’ve found different ways to communicate emotionally,’ he commented. ‘Since being with Barbra, I have gotten it together. She has shown me things can be different. I’ve evolved as a person. My desires and passions are the same but I don’t feel as threatened,’ he paused and added: ‘You know, James Dean lived my kind of frantic life.’
They were working on anothe
r project about a clown – Streisand was wild about clowns. They did not actually have a story and they brought Arthur Laurents out to the Coast to see if he could offer some help. The project never took off, but they spent a lot of time together and their early closeness was somewhat recaptured. ‘Peters taught her to have fun,’ Laurents says.
One day as Peters walked with Laurents on the grounds of the ranch, he turned to him and asked, ‘Would you speak to your friend for me?’
‘About what?’ Laurents inquired.
‘The kid’s gay. She should face it now.’
‘Jason was only twelve,’ Laurents recalls, ‘and I said, “How do you know?” And he said, “He’s interested in antiques.”’ It was crazy. There is no connection, but he had an instinct and he wanted to save ‘his woman’, as he often called her, any pain that might be waiting for her, oblivious to his own possible contribution to that pain.
Peters was set to produce a second film, The Eyes of Laura Mars, a thriller with voyeurism as its theme, on a one-picture deal for Columbia, which hoped that Streisand would agree to play the lead, a photographer specialising in sex-and-violence compositions. Despite the fact that Irvin Kershner, who had directed Up the Sandbox, would direct, and that she would be working with Peters, Streisand refused to accept the role of the psychic Laura Mars, who could ‘see’ the future murders of some of her friends as well as her own. It was not a role she wanted to play and the trials of A Star Is Born had exhausted her. She needed time to recharge, time to be with Jason, and to have some space for a spell without Peters whom she alternately battled with and passionately loved. To Columbia’s disappointment, Peters did not pressure her to join him in his project for them.
‘The truth was, Jon wanted to make it this time on his own and felt he was perfectly able to do it,’ a friend recalled. ‘I don’t doubt that he led Columbia into believing Barbra would come on board. It helped him close the deal. But Star was a big winner, he had brought it in on budget and Hirschfeld and Begelman [at Columbia] knew he was a helluva lot smarter than the public had been led to believe. Begelman – this was before the shit hit the fan and he was caught up in those embezzlement charges – stood behind him, and he was a strong power at the studio those days. They did insist that he come up with a big star.’
Blonde, cool, green-eyed Faye Dunaway, who had just won the Academy Award for Best Actress in Network, was cast as Laura Mars. Dunaway was one of the most sought-after female stars, having also been nominated for Best Actress twice before, in Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown. Peters was determined to make a stylish thriller. Laura Mars was shot almost entirely on location in New York ‘to capture that disturbing New York contrast between haute couture chic and dangerous street decay that Laura’s photography reflects’, he said.
After the script was completed and pre-production set, Streisand remained in Malibu while Peters went off to New York. She threw herself into the work of designing and decorating the three additional separate houses, making a total of five dwellings (the smallest 3,500 square feet), each self-contained on two acres of land, that were now part of their Malibu complex. They had fought fiercely when the first guest house was under construction. In terms of decorating taste they were decades apart and stylistically at odds. Peters leaned towards either a now or a ranch look; Streisand – to art deco, art nouveau, Victorian and American Primitive. Sometimes their fights ended with them sleeping in different houses for a night. ‘I hate that lamp! Jon bought it,’ she told a reporter, adding: ‘And the glass doors in the dining room, too. I kept threatening to tear them out. They should be stained glass.’
‘They were very competitive with each other,’ a staff member recalled. ’At times it seemed that they enjoyed in a strange way yelling at each other and the drama that went along with this type of behaviour.’
Peters was not a man whom she could control and although that appeared to be what she wanted, it was also most often the reason that they fought. He would not be governed by a woman and she was unable to do anything else. Compromise was simply not a part of her character. ‘Well, I guess you’d say she was hooked on him,’ a close observer noted. ‘I’d say they were obsessed with each other. Jon was turned on by the fights they had. He liked an element of danger, of risk. They were like teenagers sometimes, teasing, daring.’
Peters now had his own team working for him although Streisand was never far in the background. After her experience with Pierson and the publication of his article on the shooting of Star with its vivid uncompromising descriptions of Peters and herself, Streisand became adamant that anyone who worked for them either on their domestic or business staff sign a document vowing never to talk to anyone publicly or otherwise about them. This created a row between Streisand and Peters, who refused to have anyone working for him sign such a paper. Michael Meltzer, a young man and former CPA hired as a general assistant to Peters, recalled that one day, when they were driving to the studio in his employer’s specially built black Mercedes convertible, Peters said to him, ‘Michael, one day soon I’m going to own a studio.’
Meanwhile, Streisand always got what she wanted. Once it was a garage near their offices at the studio which was leased and occupied. Within an hour of her request, it was emptied and the lease turned over to her. ‘You had to handle Barbra and Jon with kid gloves,’ Meltzer recalled, ‘because you couldn’t tell when something would explode in your face. Working for them was a tough environment. Both of their lives were dedicated to work. They argued a lot. His ego was as healthy as hers. The staff knew how to get out of their way when they were on a tirade. Barbra was suspicious, insecure. She worried that Peters was unfaithful. One night she called me at 2 a.m. Jon was to have arrived on a flight earlier that evening from New York and he had not. She wanted to know if I knew where he had gone. She called back in a half an hour to say he had arrived home bearing gifts.’
Although ostensibly Meltzer was working for Peters, it was his job to renegotiate prices for things Streisand wanted to buy. There was one store in Los Angeles where she bought many of her art deco pieces. After she picked them out, Meltzer was sent down to haggle over the price with the owner. ‘No matter what price I got she wasn’t satisfied. I had to try another time to get it cheaper. She had this fetish about money. She was generous in terms of large amounts – big charities, things like that – but absolutely mean and niggardly about the salaries of the working people she hired. I recall once that Jon had hired some young Mexican workers who had no green cards and paid them $3.50 an hour (scale at the time) but the work wasn’t getting done fast enough. Barbra wanted them to work overtime. They asked for an additional 25 cents an hour overtime. She told me to fire them and have them replaced. It killed me, but I did it. Another time I had to fire an older domestic couple who had been with her since she first came to Hollywood. They seemed to have outlasted their usefulness. She gave me orders that the couple had to be out by Saturday of that same week and she and Peters would be away and return then. With Barbra, when she’s done with you, she’s done with you. When your employment was over so was the relationship. It didn’t matter that you were working for Jon. Barbra had to be in control. You had to absorb her passions and lose your own initiative. At the end of the tunnel where does it leave you?
‘I quit after eighteen months. When one works for Barbra you become sucked up into her life, you have no life of your own. I was on call twenty-four hours a day. Because both Barbra and Jon were terribly demanding, the slightest error could result in severe verbal tirades. I found this to be very difficult. One always had to be thinking about the consequences of every act, for you never knew when you could get tripped up. Yet, whatever her failings, I was in awe of Barbra, blown away by being in her presence. Being with both of them was like being in the centre of a high-energy field.’
A Star Is Born received four Academy Award nominations: cinematography, sound, original sound score and its adaptation, and original song – ‘Evergreen’, which Streisand sang to thunder
ous applause at the Awards ceremony on 28 March 1977. After all five nominated songs had been presented, Neil Diamond opened the winning envelope and jubilantly called out, ‘The winner is ... “Evergreen”.’ Paul Williams, the song’s lyricist, accompanied Streisand on stage, whereupon she said teary-eyed into the microphone: ‘In my wildest dreams I never thought I would win an Oscar for writing a song.’
‘I was going to make a comment about, “Isn’t it nice they gave me one too,”’ Williams candidly recalled, ‘but I kept my mouth shut about that. What I did say was, “I’d like to thank all the little people,” then I remembered I am the little people [he is on the short side]. I was far from sober.’ At the Grammys a few weeks later when they won for Best Song of the Year, he thanked ‘Barbra for writing a beautiful melody, and Dr Jack Wallstader for the valium that got me through the whole experience’. Her relationship with Williams had been difficult from the offset, but, as he fully admitted later, he was heavily on drugs and alcohol at the time and not easy to work with.
Since the release of A Star Is Born and the incredible success of the soundtrack recording, the ‘Evergreen’ single and an album, Streisand Superman, that went platinum, more fans than ever made their way up the narrow road leading to the complex. Streisand reached a point of near-paranoia. The property was now encased by an eight-foot metal fence with concealed television scanners and electronic gates. There were three guards who rotated eight-hour shifts. Signs posted on the fence and gates declared: ‘Danger. Beware. Guard Dogs Trained to Attack.’ Twice one of the three Dobermans thus trained bit guests, and one person sued (the case was settled out of court). In attempting to protect herself, to keep the prying and the uninvited out, Streisand had merely placed restraints upon herself. She was, in effect, locked in. She also found herself to be bored and lonely with Peters away, and with Jason flew to New York to join him. Loneliness was not her only impetus. Rumours that Peters and Dunaway were having an affair had filtered back to her.