Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  The most difficult scene in the film – the kiss by Hadass in her seduction of Anshel/Yentl – was done in one take. ‘I had asked Amy to be very maidenly before that scene,’ Streisand explained, ‘and she did it beautifully. But then in the bedroom, where she comes on erotically, I asked her to let all her sexiness out, and wow! did she let it out.’

  Yentl’s cast and crew, led by Streisand, left London in early July for Prague, where they would then travel to the small village of Roztyly, a two-and-a-half hour journey, to begin shooting on the first exterior scenes in Czechoslovakia. Heavy rains had deluged the small village, turning all the roads into rivers of mud. Despite the unexpected weather conditions, Roy Walker, the production designer, with the help of the Czech crew who had joined the company, managed to create Yentl’s village of Yanev out of a section that had formerly been a few wooden houses and a pig farm. The smell of sewerage and urine pervaded the area and there were flies the size of beetles.

  The Soviet-dominated country, once celebrated for its experimental theatre work and its many fine films, had been in a period of heavy-booted repression since the democratically inclined Alexander Dubček was replaced as party leader in 1970. Now, twelve years later, conditions had worsened. Efforts were continually made to stamp out dissent, including mass arrests, union purges, and religious persecution. However, Czechoslovakia’s economy was in serious jeopardy and the Czechs had been wooing Western film companies who needed old-world locations for their projects, offering lower production costs and the use of the film studio in Prague.

  Diana was half-crazy over the idea of her daughter making a movie in an unstable country behind the Iron Curtain where people were being murdered or just disappeared. Then there were the lack of healthy food, the distance from home – or even from a Western hospital should something happen. ‘She was a typical mother crying on the phone,’ Streisand told Canadian talk show host Brian Linehan, a strong sense of pride in her voice as she added: ‘She didn’t want me to go; she was scared.’ That Diana cared that she might be in jeopardy mattered a great deal to her. However much she had felt cheated by the loss of her father’s love, her need to be reassured of her mother’s love was even stronger.

  She flew in vegetables and fruit, two items in severe shortage, to make sure her company remained in good health. Not until she arrived in Roztyly could she have known what faced her. Across from an unlovely square was a small hotel, which she took over to provide rooms for the cast and key people in the company. Czech members boarded with local families. Her room was unprepossessing: a bed up against the wall, in the middle a small table with one chair, next to the bed a table with a mirror, and a cracked washbasin. Threadbare curtains covered the windows which looked out on to some grubby buildings, but in the distance there were gardens filled with flowers and giant poplars, firs, woods, a river with a bridge that was built during Yentl’s time.

  Never before had she made a film outside the embracing paternalism of a studio, a controlled environment in which she knew everything would be weighted to her best advantage. She dug in, nails cut stubby-short, a great sacrifice on her part, and was never heard to complain about the conditions. The scenes that were the most difficult for her to shoot were those in which she was both actress and director. She had to learn how to get the best out of her fellow players and whether the camera was placed right, to splinter her concentration without losing it so that she was aware of what was happening around her.

  ‘I had to make all the decisions,’ she said, a residue of awe in her voice at her own accomplishments. ‘I had a co-producer who handled the day-to-day budget stuff, but I had to make all the other decisions – where we shoot, how long we remain in one place.’ Her intention was to make Yentl a realistic fantasy. ‘Just by having the music you make it a fantasy,’ she explained. ‘Music is not real. People don’t stop to sing ... Yentl was beautiful pictures, fairy-tale images. I wanted it to be a romantic film.

  ‘I trusted my instincts a lot. I had to constantly remember that I was wearing four hats [Director, Producer, Writer and Star]. I found the experience very humbling. I was very moved by it. That power is very humbling. And I found myself being very soft-spoken, feeling even more feminine than I have ever felt. More motherly, more nurturing, more loving. I had patience I never dreamed I would have. I never wanted people to feel that I was so powerful ... I wanted people to be able to come up to me and give me a suggestion. Because if they can make it better, then I’m gonna use anything they can offer me.’

  ‘She was an American woman directing her first film in a European and Eastern European film culture, yet she was able to react as the situation required,’ her co-producer, Rusty Lemorande commented. ‘My respect for her grew enormously.’

  Jon Peters showed up in Roztyly just before the company was to move on to its next location, the old Jewish quarter of Zatec, in Bohemia – the northeast section of Czechoslovakia. Peters still had some business matters with Streisand that needed settling, papers that they had to agree on to sign, but this could have been done through lawyers and the mail. The truth was, he still cared deeply about her and wanted to make sure that she was all right.

  ‘She treated him like any good friend and as such expected him to realise that she was working under stress and did not have time to do much schmoozing,’ a crew member recalled. ‘In Europe shooting ends at 7 p.m. and Barbra had a buffet table loaded with fresh vegetables and other things not easy to obtain in Roztyly. All the townspeople would gather and take things, but they were very polite, careful not to take too much. Jon was terribly impressed with the way Barbra was handling the whole scene, but he didn’t have the stomach for a place like that – the smells, the bugs, the mud roads. He left the next day. I remember seeing her walk with him to the car that was to take him to the nearest railroad station. Her hair was cut in a boy’s bob and she looked gamine, truly young, no more than the sixteen years old she was supposed to be in the film. It was a miracle how young she looked. Jon couldn’t take his eyes off of her. They had a long clinch, bear-hug style. She turned away the moment he was seated in the car and started calling out orders to a member of the crew who was nearest to her. I caught her looking back once – just as his car slipped out of sight around a bend in the road.’

  The exteriors for Bashev, the village where Avigdor and Yentl/Anshel study, were shot in Zatec before the company moved back to Prague. In that ancient city she filmed a scene on the famous Charles Bridge, which had been closed so that the film company could replicate a time when only carts and horses crossed its giant span.

  She preferred to film in long, continuous takes rather than short, choppy scenes that could be put together in the editing room. The camera movements were graceful, rhythmic, inspired by the music. ‘I had only nine days to do the musical rehearsals for this film,’ she recalled. ‘In Funny Girl I had six months. But I had done a lot of my work on tape. And I couldn’t have somebody like Herb Ross stage the musical numbers. I didn’t want Yentl to be that kind of musical.’ She even choreographed the dancing.

  Once back in London, the film almost complete, her problems began. By the time she had dubbed the sound track, both dialogue and music, she had gone $1 million over budget. Completion Bond, the company who had insured the film, gave her an ultimatum. Either she finished dubbing Yentl in six weeks or they would take the movie away from her and hire another film-maker to complete it. ‘I need ten weeks and I’ll put up $1.7 million of my own money,’ she told the United Artists’ representatives, who had flown to London. They insisted that it be handled through their offices for tax purposes.

  ‘It was all about money,’ Streisand said. ‘I kept saying, “Please, we’re going to ruin the movie. I’m going to die from the pressure. This is supposed to be a joyous experience.” I did anything to get it done so that they could never take it away from me. And in the end UA didn’t touch my movie. Not a frame.’

  She likened her directing approach to her natural talent in singing.
’It is very rare when a moment of inspiration hits you. It’s when things come from your unconscious. They pass through your cerebral state, coming from your guts, your soul, the place that’s in the very core of you. You can’t think about it too much – if you do, it’s gone.’

  Making Yentl, and the sixteen years that she had devoted to its development, had had a tremendous impact on her life. She was not a ‘born-again Jew’, but she had gone deeply into her Jewishness. ‘I talked to all the rabbis I could talk to, searching for different points of view from the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox rabbis. It’s a complex thing. It’s men through the centuries who have found a way to use Jewish law to enslave women. That was a fascinating thing for me to find out. Part of me, my whole life, I’ve always been very desperately curious about knowledge . . . I love knowledge . . . What Yentl learns by the end of the film is that if you really care about yourself, then you don’t settle. You go on to find more of what your dreams are about, what you want out of life.’

  Jon Peters returned to Hollywood with a new attitude towards Yentl. He had never felt Yentl was a property Streisand should film. Now, he got behind her 100 per cent. She welcomed his support but it changed little between them. ‘Yentl was Barbra’s way of saying kaddish for her own father,’ he said. ‘She created him on film so she could love him and say goodbye to him. She buried her father in the movie and dedicated it to him. I cried when I saw the movie. I sobbed, actually. I wish I had produced it,’ he confessed later.

  That would have been a great mistake. Yentl is uniquely Streisand’s movie, and until the last half-hour of the film, it is a personal triumph. The musical soliloquies work beautifully, her performance is impeccable. The picture has a lyrical glow to it. She is sixteen in this movie, where she never seemed young in A Star Is Born. She achieved what she set out to do – make a romantic fantasy. It is also a film about human freedom, male as well as female. It fails in the last section – Yentl/Anshel’s marriage to Hadass after the blundering wedding night simply does not ring true, and the last song – when Yentl is on board ship for the United States, breaks the spell that has so marvellously been cast, for suddenly the viewer is faced with exactly the kind of musical number Streisand said she wanted to avoid.

  Yentl was premièred on 16 November 1983, at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. ‘I ran out and bought all the chocolate-covered marzipan and walnut cookies I could carry and sat there and stuffed myself,’ she admitted. ‘That’s how scared I was.’ She was desperate for her child to be accepted and the early trade reviews assured her this was the case.

  ‘To put it succinctly and at once, Barbra Streisand’s Yentl is a triumph – a personal one for Streisand as producer, director, co-author and star, but also a triumphant piece of filmmaking,’ the Hollywood Reporter lauded. ‘At long last ... she has realized her dream. Magnificently.’

  It had cost her a lot and, unlike the lyric from the old Fanny Brice song, there was one thing she hadn’t got, and that was her man. Jon Peters had entered into a new relationship. Jason was almost seventeen and about to leave home for New York where he would be attending New York University Film School which he had chosen over the equally fine film school at the University of Southern California. Sure that he wanted to be involved in some aspect of films – acting, writing, directing – he also had a need to go out on his own, to be his own person and perhaps to place some distance between himself and his mother. She had sacrificed precious time at his expense to make Yentl. There was no new man in her life, at least no one who mattered, and no new project that had exdted her into action.

  She went to the Bergmans’ for Thanksgiving and came home alone to the house on Carolwood Drive. She spent very little time at the Barn any more. ‘She denies her unhappiness,’ Elliott said. ‘But she is so unhappy. She doesn’t have a life – not a real life – and it remains to be seen whether she will ever be capable of love.’

  Vehemently she denied it, but most of her life she had loved a phantom father. And what chance had Elliott or Jon or any man had against one created to perfection by a grieving daughter’s dreams? Like Yentl, wasn’t she now free? She remained hopeful that the right man would enter her life. She had picked up the threads of her relationship with the married man whom she had been seeing before she met Jon, but his situation had not changed. She would concentrate on finding another story that grabbed her by the heart. Meanwhile, she would go back, once again, into therapy.

  She met Richard Baskin, the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream heir, at a small social gathering at Christmas time and they were mutually attracted. A bear-like man over six feet four inches tall, his imposing size, his Samson-like dark curly hair and his protective manner brought out the deeply feminine woman inside her, and her vulnerability was answered by a soft spot in him. He had seen Yentl and told her how good it was, that its ethnic roots had touched him. He played the guitar, wrote songs and had been the musical director on a low-key film, Honeysuckle Rose, about a Country music star that featured Willie Nelson. Like Barry Dennen’s, his had been a privileged childhood and youth. A decade younger than Streisand, a self-contained, cerebral man, proud to become her lover – which he soon was – he moved into the Carolwood Drive house in February. A Streisand whim, friends said. It wouldn’t last. Where were the crashing cymbals, the explosive scenes that so marked her serious love affairs? She would soon get bored with compatibility and trade it in for a more stimulating combative relationship. Two years later they were still together.

  Footnotes

  1 Streisand did much of her research at the Hillel Center at UCLA, where she later bestowed funds for a Jewish performing arts centre. The Pacific Jewish Center, where Jason Gould was bar mitzvahed, had been co-founded by TV critic and writer Michael Medved. In April 1981, following a significant contribution by Streisand, the Center’s grade school in Santa Monica was renamed and rededicated the Emanuel Streisand School.

  2 The Talmud is a massive and monumental compendium of sixty-three books: the learned debates, dialogues, conclusions, commentaries, commentaries upon commentaries, commentaries upon commentaries upon commentaries, of the scholars who for over a thousand years interpreted the Torah (the first five books in the Bible, also known as the Five Books of Moses) and applied its teachings to problems of law, ethics, ceremony and traditions.

  27

  ‘SHE SHOULD ONLY live and be happy,’ Diana said to one of her neighbours who commented harshly on Streisand’s live-in relationship with the much-younger Baskin. The old wounds would not heal but Diana seemed to have mellowed, become less critical. Roslyn, who had moved out of her mother’s apartment but still lived in Los Angeles, was not having much luck in her career. Although she had a pleasant voice and was attractive, she did not have Streisand’s drive or her exceptional talent. The half-sisters had a delicate relationship, their hostilities, resentments and jealousies not yet resolved. Roslyn had thought Streisand would help her in her quest for a career in movies. What she got were non-speaking extra parts in two of her sister’s films – in A Star Is Born she sat at Streisand’s table during the Grammy Awards scene, and in The Main Event she is one of the women working out in the aerobics class with Streisand at the beginning of the picture. Streisand was at a loss at what else she could or should do for Roslyn. But the guilts lingered.

  ‘Everyone wants a small piece of me,’ she complained to an intimate. ‘I have to be protective.’ She worried about Jason. He seemed to be having a difficult time finding himself and they did not communicate well. Telephone conversations were unsatisfactory and when he came home for holidays she seemed always to be involved in a consuming work project. Baskin remained in residence, but friends noted a difference in their relationship. Where once there had been harmony, there was evidence of backbiting, of a crumbling romance. ‘All the men in my life have said, “Can’t you stop working at seven o’clock?” I never understood what they meant,’ she told an interviewer.

  Work filled her life and she was once again following
in her earlier footsteps–bringing the man in her romantic life into her work, placing him in a position of power but having to deal with her as the ultimate authority, setting a standard that he felt he must live up to or his masculinity would be compromised. Baskin understood music and recording techniques and so she teamed up with him in that area of her career.

  In the late summer of 1985, no movie on the horizon, she decided to return to her roots to do an album of Broadway songs. ‘It’s time I did something worthwhile,’ she told Stephen Holden, music critic for the New York Times.

  She felt she had to stop recording songs ‘that any number of other people’ could sing as well if not better than she could. She yearned to do something she truly believed in. ‘Broadway music is the music I love, it is where I come from, it is my roots,’ she stressed. Although she had recorded dozens of songs using rock rhythm sections, she felt out of her ‘element singing music with a strong, regular backbeat ... Because I am a singer who believes in the moment. I do each take of a song differently. You can’t do that with rock and roll because everyone says that you have to sing on the beat, and that’s very hard for me.’

  She joined forces once again with Marty Erlichman from whom she had split during the Jon Peters years as Peters had, in effect, acted as her manager. Erlichman went to Columbia Records with her wish to do a Broadway album. ‘Barbra’s contract with them says she has to deliver X albums,’ he explained, ‘but they have to be approved albums – meaning most of them have to be contemporary. Columbia would not approve this album. It was not considered to be a pop album. Therefore, she didn’t get the advance she was entitled to and it wasn’t going to count as an approved album contract, except if it sold 2.5 million copies, at which point it would automatically become an approved album, whether they okayed it in advance or not.’