Streisand: Her Life (101 page)

After fruitless discussions with Tom Berenger, Dennis Quaid, and Kevin Costner, Barbra began to narrow down an already slim list of possibilities. Jeff Bridges and his father, Lloyd, were asked to play Tom and his father, an interesting casting concept. Jeff said no—a mistake Lloyd has never let him forget. Finally, after asking to see a videocassette of the
Rich Man, Poor Man
television miniseries, Streisand knew she had found her man: Nick Nolte.

Nolte had caused a sensation in 1976 playing blond bad boy Tom Jordache in producer Jon Epstein’s groundbreaking television production. The press dubbed him the new Redford, but Nolte, never comfortable with that matinee idol label, spent the rest of his checkered career trying to prove them wrong. Moving from one character role to another, he obscured his handsome features in a portfolio of guises, most of them far less dashing than his star-making turn in
Rich Man, Poor Man
.
After Nolte played a filthy bum in
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
,
the director Paul Mazursky noted that “Nick’s got a whole thing going on underneath and inside that he’s not going to say to you.” Streisand recognized this rare quality as well, and she wanted to bring out that duality for the first time onscreen.

Like Streisand, the forty-nine-year-old Nolte believed in fate. “Unlike the common perception, the material doesn’t come to you from studios; it comes to you from other people, and usually by happenstance, circumstances, and usually by luck.” Luck did enter into the scenario, with a secret push from Barbra. While Nolte was filming
Q & A
for Sidney Lumet, the film’s producer, Burt Harris, gave him
The Prince of Tides
to read.

Nolte found it “wonderful” but was puzzled when Harris told him that Barbra wanted to meet with him about playing Tom. “It was peculiar,” he recalled, “[because] at that time I was playing a character in
Q & A
a
nd I weighed maybe 250 pounds. I had a mustache that came over both lips, and black hair. So I don’t know what possessed her to think I could play that character.”

When she met Nolte, Barbra immediately knew her instincts had served her well. “I saw a lot of pain in his work, in his eyes,” she remembered. “And then, in talking to him, he was at a vulnerable place, ready to explore feelings—romantic feelings, sexual feelings, and deep, secretive feelings.”

Nolte concurred. “I’d wanted to work with a female director for maybe five years. I knew you’d get a different kind of insight,” he said. “With a male director, there’s always an agreement about how far a conversation about emotions can go. It’s analytical. You lay out the emotions a character would feel, and the two men sit there and say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. Fine.’ With a female, it’s never ‘it.
’”

Barbra and Nick began extensive discussions about how best to illuminate the bruised and battered boy hidden within the adult Tom Wingo. “Barbra was the perfect person to bring this story to the screen,” Nolte said later. “There are the obvious reasons [such as] the wonderful Jewishness that she shares with the character of Lowenstein... But once we got to talking we realized we both knew a lot about dysfunctional families and co-dependency... [and] that’s a lot of what this film is about.”

Nick and Barbra’s conversations often lasted for hours. “One thing about Barbra, there is not going to be a leaf unturned,” he said. “We spent many days before we shot discussing masculinity, femininity, women, men, relationships, love, mothers, fathers. That’s the process I wanted to get into. I wanted to follow it through and see what the female aspect of it was, because that’s what Tom Wingo’s problem is. He’s trying to figure out the women in his life.”

Although Tom Wingo is a man trying to understand femininity, Streisand wanted Nolte to play him partly because she found the actor to be so utterly masculine on the exterior. As she learned about Nolte’s years of hard drinking and hard living, and a childhood filled with pain, Barbra increasingly felt that Nick’s reality dovetailed with Tom’s fictional story in many ways.

She also felt that he needed a touch of romance. “I looked at all his films,” Barbra said, “and the love scenes were always truncated. There’s never a bedroom scene. He’s much more comfortable in character roles.... I know he’s a man, a physical man, a sensual man, so why not incorporate that in the part?”

Streisand knew, too, that Nolte had the inner strength to get back into shape for the film quickly; he had done it several times before, beginning with
Rich Man, Poor Man
.
Nolte eventu
ally lost over t
hirty pounds for
The Prince of Tides
and, through sheer will, transformed himself into a golden lion once again.

B
ARBRA HAD A
sickening feeling of déjà vu. As had happened with
Yentl
,
she couldn’t persuade anyone to finance
The Prince of Tides
.
After Warner Brothers became the latest studio to turn the picture down, Barbra turned once again to Jon Peters, who was now the co-chairman of Columbia Pictures Entertainment. Jon came through and offered to back the film, but the studio balked at Barbra’s asking price of $7 million for starring, directing, and producing. They offered her $6 million. Barbra refused.

“They wanted me to [accept] almost a million dollars [less] for
[The Prince of Tides]
,” she recalled. “I thought that was too much, and I’d [accept] half a million dollars [less], If they didn’t take that [compromise] I wouldn’t have done the movie.” Again as she had with
Yentl
,
Barbra soon got a sign from another sphere. “I went to bed, where I have a painting of a beautiful lady in pink. There’s a light over the painting. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a click. The light goes on over the painting. I sit up in bed and what came to me was, ‘Light up your art.’ Totally visual and
totally
real. I was cynical anyway, so I turned off the light and went to bed, and a few hours later the light went on again and it was like, ‘You didn’t
believe
me?’ The next morning [Columbia] called back and said I only had to [take] half a million dollars [less]. Who knows? I took it as a sign.”

J
ON PETERS MADE
sure that Barbra was treated with the respect she deserved at Columbia. Because she had helped Jon to become a producer and studio executive—he was now one of the most powerful in the business—cynics dubbed Streisand’s jump to Columbia “payback time for Peters.” Barbra ignored the negative whispers and joked again about the benefits of her relationship with Jon, this time saying that “ex-boyfriends come in handy.”

Barbra resumed her efforts to get Pat Conroy on the phone, still without success. “Finally,” Conroy said, “she caught up to me at a hotel in Los Angeles and asked me why I hadn’t called. It did seem rude on my part. And so after that I agreed to go to New York to work with her for a two-week polish on the script.”

Although much of Conroy’s book concerned Luke Wingo—Luke, not Tom, is “the Prince of Tides”—Barbra felt the drama should revolve around Tom’s inner journey, and each new version reflected that attempt to capture the essence of the story. She also wanted to accentuate the love affair between Tom and Susan Lowenstein because she saw the film as a romance.

By focusing primarily on Tom’s present-day problems, Streisand felt justified in making the Lowenstein role more central to the story. After all, it is Dr. Lowenstein who becomes the savior of the entire Wingo family. It is Lowenstein who changes Tom’s life and saves Savannah’s; it is Lowenstein’s name that Tom speaks in the final lines of the book, and it is his memories of Lowenstein that will sustain him in the years ahead. But none of Streisand’s several
Prince of Tides
scripts ever deviated from placing the overall emphasis on Tom. “The story is not about me,” Streisand said.

T
HE FIRST MEETING
between Barbra and Pat Conroy took place at her Carolwood home in the spring of 1990, and it was a memorable experience for both of them. “When I first met Barbra, she asked me if she looked like the doctor, and I said no. So she said, ‘Does this look like Lowenstein?’ and she flipped this button and this huge image of her came up on her screen. She had not tested for the part, of course, but she dressed for it and she was in character in the scene. I told her ‘Yeah, that’s Lowenstein.
’”

Because Conroy realized that “her determination is the reason this movie is getting made,” he felt an obligation to please Barbra. “She would give me homework, five or six scenes to look at a night,” he said. “I was afraid not to have it done the next day. I couldn’t imagine coming in and saying, ‘Barbra, I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. It didn’t come to me.’

“My favorite part of the whole thing was when we would sit there and she would read the part of the psychiatrist and I would read the part of the coach. I was her co-star for a couple of weeks. How many writers get to live a fantasy life like this?”

Streisand characteristically questioned Conroy incessantly. “The first day I was with her, she asked me question after question about the book. I remember she asked me about this reference to the Carolina shag. I said, ‘Well, that’s how we used to dance in South Carolina when I was a kid.’ So she asked me to teach it to her. I said, ‘Barbra, I feel like a bit of an idiot.’ She said, ‘Just go ahead.
’”
A videotape of the couple shagging to a classic Carolina beach tune shows the student Streisand executing the intricate arm-twisting, body-spinning dance better than her teacher. “You see,” Conroy continued, “what I did not know about her was that she has an incredible sense of fun. Like everyone else, I had read stuff about her. I thought, Holy God, I am going to be working with the Bride of Frankenstein. I thought she would yell at me, hurt my feelings, slap me around. I was completely stunned to find out that she was a delight.”