Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Jason was enrolled at Dalton, a private day school on the East Side, Peters moved into the Central Park West penthouse in the Ardsley with them as he worked on the film and the Dunaway threat was dispelled. Then she was faced with another problem. First Artists, saved by the finandal success of A Star Is Born, was pressing Streisand to honour her contract and make the third film owing to them very soon so that the momentum would not be lost.

  ‘There was a script that was originally meant for Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw,’ Blossom Kahn, who was director of new projects recalled. ‘Neither one of them wanted to do it and I was sent to New York with the express purpose of convincing Barbra to do the film. It was set in the midwest and was about a young farm gal who lived near a small town and – and this city man comes through and sweeps her off her feet (an early Madison County). Straight romantic drama. I thought it was not right for her. I was there doing something I did not believe in, but I was determined to give it a good try.

  ‘For about two weeks I was at her apartment day and night. Jon was there almost every evening. They were at each other all the time. Terrible fighting. Love-hate. It embarrassed me but it didn’t seem to bother them that I was there. I’d take a scotch and sit it out until things cooled or they were suddenly lovers again. She was terribly worried about the possibility of someone kidnapping Jason. She didn’t want the car to take him through Central Park when he was driven to and from school. She was afraid of everything. Neurotic to the enth degree. One day she asked me to accompany her to the doctor for a tooth extraction. She had an abscess that had kept her up all night. When we got to the dentist’s office she kept insisting that I come inside with her while the deed was being done. Thank God, the dentist and nurse finally cajoled her into letting me stay in the reception room.

  ‘Phil Feldman, then the President of First Artists, called me every day –“How’re you doing?” he’d ask. I’d repeat: “I’m not getting anywhere.” Then towards the end of the second week she told me, “There’s no use in your wasting your time here, Blossom. I’m not going to do it.” I liked Barbra but was intimidated by her. She has a tremendous presence. It’s an attitude, but there’s also something mesmerising about her eyes – so blue, and when she talks to you, often unblinking. Jon was shrewd. He wanted to be Svengali. And [with her] there is that little girl who wants to come out and be loved, who uses her vulnerability. I’ll never forget the scene in the dentist’s office. She was so childlike, terrified. You felt you wanted to hold her hand to keep her from being scared.’

  Capitalising on First Artists’ eagerness for her to make a film, Streisand pressured them into advancing $200,000 for story costs to develop Yentl. ‘We all were doing everything we could to get Barbra to work and Yentl was all she wanted to do,’ Ed Holly said. ‘We did not feel the project would be commercial. Even the Jewish community would be upset [because of Yentl’s cross-dressing and wedding night scenes].’

  At about this time Sue Mengers received a script entitled The Main Event, written by two TV-comedy writers, Gail Parent and Andrew Smith, to be submitted to her client, Ryan O’Neal. He liked the battle-of-the-sexes 1940s-style story – about a perfume executive who loses all her money to an embezzler, but left with the contract of a washed-up fighter is determined to tum him into a money-making champion. The real battle is a sexual one between the woman manager and the male fighter, reminiscent of old Tracy-Hepburn movies.

  Ryan suggested Mengers send the treatment to Diana Ross, who was Ryan’s Malibu beachfront neighbour and lover. ‘Ryan used to jog in the nude,’ Ross recalled. ‘He wasn’t easy to ignore.’ Mengers decided it would be better to reunite the team that had made What’s Up, Doc? so successful at the box office, and she sent the script to Streisand. Peters read it first and with his background in boxing he decided it would be a good picture for him to produce with Streisand as the star. She was reluctant. Yentl remained her top priority and The Main Event did not immediately appeal to her, so she wavered for several weeks.

  ‘Why am I not working?’ she rhetorically asked Sydney Pollack, who remained a good friend. ‘What am I saving myself for? This is stupid. I should be out there, Sydney. So, every picture won’t be great. I mean, I haven’t done a picture in so long [just over a year]. I sit here and wait and wait and wait – for what? For Chekhov to come along? For Shakespeare to come along? I’m getting older, and there are a million things I want to do,’ she rationalised. ‘What am I saving myself for? And yet I say to myself, why would I want to go and do something that I’m not really stimulated by? And then I argue with myself. I talked to Truffaut once, who said, “You do your work and at the end you have a body of work. Some of it is good and some of it is not good, but the stuff that’s good will override what isn’t good – that’s what a body of work is. You can’t just sit and wait for the perfect script.”’

  Although it was a superficial project, she did have enormous trust in Peters’s instinct that The Main Event would be a commercial success and it would also fulfil her contract with First Artists. And so her sabbatical was ended and after numerous rewrites on the script, on 2 October 1978, the film went into production at the Main Street Gym in downtown Los Angeles under the direction of Howard Zieff, who had recently had a box-office hit with the Walter Matthau–Glenda Jackson comedy House Calls. Zieff signed on with much the same restrictions as Pierson had in his contract. Streisand was to have the final word. Once again, a director would be cast as middle man between her and Peters.

  One time Peters and Zieff were watching the Muhammad Ali–Leon Spinks fight on television. Around the fifth round, Streisand suddenly jumped up and began to do vigorous exercises dancing back and forth in front of the screen. Peters demanded she sit down. ‘I just can’t sit and watch Muhammad Ali, who’s always been a winner, lose,’ she said.

  ‘Then leave the room,’ Peters ordered. She did after the next disastrous round for Ali, who after fifteen rounds lost his champion heavyweight title to Spinks. For Streisand, losing was never an option for herself or for those whom she considered winners.

  Seven years had passed since Ryan and Streisand had worked together and been lovers. They had remained friends. ‘You like the fights?’ she asked him one afternoon at the Barn reflecting on the recent match, adding mistily, ‘My stepfather liked the fights. I always wanted his approval. He never liked me. He used to sit in his undershirt, drinking beer and watching the fights on television. And, you know, one time I crawled underneath the TV picture when I went by so I wouldn’t interfere with his view. He never even noticed. He would never see me. He just stared at the fights.

  ‘When he went off, I thought it was my fault and so did my mother,’ she continued, Ryan recalled that her glance was somewhere off in the distance. ‘Then one day, when I was in Funny Girl on Broadway, I scratched the cornea of my eye and my understudy [Lainie Kazan but not the same incident that had caused her to be fired] was getting ready to go on in my place. Everyone was telling me not to go on because I might hurt my eye. Then I got this card and a little dish of candy from my stepfather – he was out in front, in the audience. So I said, “I’m going on.” The doctor anaesthetised my eye so it wouldn’t tear. I never did a show like that. It was the best performance I ever gave. After the show, I waited in my dressing room for him but he never came back.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I still have the candy dish. I’ve never been able to part with it,’ she added quietly, suddenly giving a new insight into her relationship to the man she always claimed she hated but whom she wanted desperately to love her and whom she appears to have been more willing to forgive than she has ever admitted.

  ‘Am I cool about Barbra and Ryan playing love scenes? Hell, no!’ Peters admitted to a Los Angeles Times reporter. The two men had gone three rounds in the ring together, presumably for publicity and fun, but Peters was seen as the better boxer and twice let go a couple of hard punches that caught Ryan unprepared and sent him reeling.

  As she had done with A Star Is Born,
at the end of principal photography, Streisand took over the editing of Zieff’s final version and ‘cut the film to her own purpose’. She had worked out fastidiously for all the road work and exercise scenes and there is an over-abundance of close-ups of her body parts, particularly her rear, that smack of self-indulgence, but the movie scoots merrily along, the jokes are funny and Streisand and Ryan – although they are not Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant – are engaging. Made on a comfortable $7 million budget and with an extraordinary $8 million advertising budget,3 The Main Event would gross over $80 million of which Streisand would receive $1 million as her fee and 10 per cent of the gross – a whopping additional $8 million (she would make upwards of $15 million on A Star Is Born).

  The most surprising thing about Streisand’s association with The Main Event was the compromise the script made to her avowed principles. The character she played was a woman of stubborn independence and liberated individuality. Yet, in the end, she surrenders her fighter/lover’s championship and the money that will save her from financial collapse in order to get her man. This was not the message of a woman who spoke so high-mindedly about women’s need to be treated as equals and to be given the same opportunities as men. Peters was later to say, ‘The Main Event was my fault. I pushed Barbra into that. It was time to do a movie and I wanted her to do a comedy. But it was material she really didn’t like.’ It appeared that passion had won over conviction.

  She recorded the title song as part of her The Main Event – A Glove Story album, and it hit the charts within two weeks of release in June 1979. Shortly thereafter she became embroiled in the problems at First Artists. She had no more pictures to deliver under the terms of her contract, but she owned a large number of stock shares in the company. The foundation upon which First Artists had been formed had been shaky from the start. None of the stars had worked to make the whole as good as the parts or even the parts as good as they should have been. And by the time Streisand had completed her last commitment to the company, so had the other partners and it was obvious that none of them cared to continue their involvement.

  Ed Holly had replaced Phil Feldman as President and it was his thankless job to try to work out a sale of the company’s assets.4 When this was completed, Streisand was suddenly free to make whatever film she chose as long as she could get backing and distribution. There was no doubt in her mind that the film she must do was Yentl and that now no one would stop her from directing it even if she had to finance the project entirely with her own money. She began work on the script, seen then as a straight dramatic film. The story took possession of her. The relationship of Yentl and her father filled her with envy, his death brought her renewed pain over the loss of her own father.

  On a trip to New York in the fall of 1979, she accompanied Shelley to their father’s grave in a Jewish cemetery in Queens. She had been seven the last time she had been there. Upon her father’s tombstone were written the words ‘Beloved Teacher and Scholar’. Shelley took a photograph of her standing beside it. When it was developed the following day she was surprised to observe that the name ANSHEL was carved on the tombstone of the grave adjoining the grave of Manny Streisand. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘That’s a very unusual name. Not like Irving. And right there next to my father’s grave was a man named Anshel, who was Yentl’s dead brother whose name she takes when she disguises herself as a boy. To me it was a sign, you know, a sign from my father that I should make this movie.’

  This discovery had such an impact that she asked Shelley to go with her to visit a medium, ‘a nice, ordinary-looking Jewish lady’, Streisand recalled. ‘We sat around a table with all the lights on and put our hands on it. And then it began. The table began to spell out letters with its legs. Pounding away. Bang, bang, bang! Very fast, counting out letters. Spelling M-A-N-N-Y, my father’s name, and then B-A-R-B-A-R-A. I got so frightened I ran away. Because I could feel the presence of my father in that room. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. When I finally came out, the medium asked, “What message do you have?” and the table spelled out S-O-R-R-Y. Then the medium asked, “What else do you want to tell her?” And it spelled S-I-N-G and P-R-O-U-D. It sounds crazy, but I knew it was my father who was telling me to be brave, to have the courage of my convictions to sing proud! And for that word S-O-R-R-Y to come out ... I mean, God! It was his answer to all that deep anger I had felt about his dying ... And I thought ... life is going by so fast. I have to stand up for what I believe in. I can’t be frightened any more. I don’t want to be some old lady saying, “I shoulda made that movie Yentl.”’

  She and Peters had bought back the rights from First Artists just before the company was sold. Her plan was to direct and star in the film while he produced it. Peters tried all means possible to talk her out of going forward, especially since every major studio in Hollywood had turned it down. Not only was he certain that if filmed, Yentl would be a dismal failure at the box office, he was not convinced that she could be persuasive as a young boy. One night he was greeted as he entered their home by a slim young man. ‘She came out dressed as a yeshivah boy with a pipe and a hat and I thought it was a guy robbing the house,’ he said. ‘I was going to punch him in the mouth.’

  Directly following The Main Event and the dissolution of First Artists, Peters had formed PolyGram Pictures with Peter Guber, who had been the head of worldwide production for Columbia and they were preparing An American Werewolf in London for production. Peters, now flying on his own and seeing his star rising, did not have the time to devote to Streisand or her projects that she would have liked.

  They fought bitterly. She was determined to go forward with Yentl. ‘It was a time in my life when I needed to be really independent, both personally and professionally,’ she said. ‘I thought to myself: I have to make this picture, and I have to also be the producer.’

  It was a scary time for Streisand. She was nearing her fortieth birthday. Peters was away a good deal of the time, surrounded by some of the most beautiful young women in the business. She drew her small circle of close friends more tightly to her and joined in efforts to raise funds through celebrity galas to help re-elect President Carter and defeat Ronald Reagan. She was back in therapy, but prime in her mind was Yentl.

  After many weeks of trying to discourage her, Peters reluctantly placed an announcement in Daily Variety that Streisand would direct Yentl for his company. Rusty Lemorande, Peters’s executive in charge of creative development, was sent to Eastern Europe to photograph authentic locations in Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Yugoslavia. When he returned, Peters had another change of heart.

  ‘You’re not going to do it!’ he recalled telling her. ‘“We’re going to do something else together.” I was a little domineering, I guess, and I remember her looking at me and saying, “Just because you said that, I’m going to do the movie no matter what.”’

  Whether Peters was involved or not was no longer important to her. She was determined to make Yentl, and when she left the room, eyes brimming with angry tears and determination, she knew the end of their affair was imminent. There could be no room in her life for a lover who, despite the passion she still felt for him, did not support her 100 per cent.

  Footnotes

  1 The final credit for film editor was Peter Zimmer, ACE; for wardrobe: Shirley Strahm, Seth Banks.

  2 Some conversations are quoted in this chapter.

  3 Advertising budgets for films are usually set at no more than 20 per cent of the total production cost.

  4 ‘An Australian firm got interested and offered a full price for the company and there was general agreement that this would be a reasonable price and everybody at that point sort of wanted to get their money and run,’ Ed Holly remembered. ‘The Australians, sensing that they had a good chance of getting 40 per cent of the stock just with stars’ shares went to them individually and got agreements with three of them, Barbra being one, to sell t
heir stock. Newman would not sell. I decided to fight the Australians, who – if they owned 100 per cent of the company was fine – they could do what they wanted, but I wasn’t going to let three of the star stockholders sell control of the company. I simply was not going to let this happen when there would be 2,000 small public stockholders who would then be out on their investment. ‘So I filed lawsuits in both federal and state courts against the Australian company under the loophole law and the three star stockholders – Barbra, Sidney Poitier and the estate of Steve McQueen who had just recently died. This forced the hand of the Australians, who came back and bought the whole company and that was how it was resolved. But it is a strong indication of how little First Artists meant to the stars themselves. They were willing to sacrifice their autonomy – their ideal – for financial gain.’

  26

  A MINK COAT HELD closed over a plaid wool shirt tucked into belted designer jeans, her head down, Streisand slipped out of her building on Central Park West and into the waiting limousine before the two reporters stationed outside her door reached her side. The day was grey, one of damp, penetrating cold and intermittent spells of freezing rain. Her hair was frizzy, falling in corkscrew ringlets on her forehead. She looked preoccupied, perhaps in pain. She was meeting Jon for lunch. It was over. Had been for a month, since New Year’s Eve – the turn of the decade, 1980 – the first in seven years that they had not spent together. She was going to try to be civil about it, but it was no less painful than her divorce from Elliott and just as complicated, for they had mutual business interests and owned property together. Peters still had a stake in Yentl. They did not see eye to eye about its future and although he had been persuaded to go on with the project, he was fighting hard to have the film shot on location in the New York/Lake Placid area and not in London and Czechoslovakia where costs could accelerate without his supervision. Streisand wanted all rights, which meant she would have to find other financing.