Streisand: Her Life (103 page)

“I’m not an exhibitionist in any way,” Barbra explained. “I do not like scenes like that.” She also refused to allow nudity in the film because of her belief that it distracts the audience from the story. In Tom and Susan’s first love scene, she decided to “leave our clothes on and do it against the wall.” In a later amorous moment in bed, she didn’t remove her nightgown, but her sheer top ended up showing more than she expected of her breasts. “I showed [that scene] in a preview,” she said. “I got a feeling that it took people out of the scene. It was like,
all of
a sudden, there’s Barbra Streisand’s breasts, instead of the emotion of the scene. So I cut it differently. I made it into a two-shot in close-ups.”

B
ARBRA’S LEGENDARY ATTENTION
to detail is evident throughout
The Prince of Tides
,
beginning with her own onscreen wardrobe and hairstyles. Streisand wanted Lowenstein to slowly blossom after meeting Tom; her wardrobe, which mirrored that personal renewal, grows less somber and studied as the relationship grows more romantic. We initially see Lowenstein in dark severely tailored suits, sleek, straight hair and perfectly applied makeup. But as she emerges from her shell, we see her in white, pink, and floral-patterned ensembles, with curly windswept hair and minimal cosmetics.

In Tom and Lila’s emotional confrontation scene, Streisand commissioned a portrait of Lila to hang behind Tom, so that when he turned away from her in the heat of their argument, he would still be confronted with her stern, omnipresent face. For the spectacularly beautiful underwater sequence that opens the film, shot in a huge water tank at MGM, Barbra spent two weeks getting the color of the water exactly right, and had real seaweed and ocean grasses sent in for authenticity.

Barbra carefully designed the film’s emotional climax—the crucial catharsis scene that follows Tom’s childhood rape revelation to Lowenstein—for maximum effect. Streisand made certain that this very difficult scene, heightened by dramatic close-ups and tension-filled dialogue, was the final one Nolte shot. To prepare the actor fully for the intensely vulnerable moment, she also showed him the full sequence of Tom’s rape.

Tom’s breakdown in Lowenstein’s arms, of course, proved a particularly demanding moment for Nolte, and for Streisand. An enormous amount of trust and understanding were involved, especially on Nolte’s part. With a lesser director, the scene could have been an embarrassment. But Nolte’s inner emotions were summoned to the surface so brilliantly by Streisand’s patient direction that many critics felt this was the moment in which he was guaranteed an Oscar nomination.

The scene struck a deep chord in Barbra. “That happened to me in therapy,” she recalled. “My therapist touched my hand and I just broke down. I thought at the time, This must be what it feels like to be held by your mother.”

O
N AUGUST
13, with most of
The Prince of Tides
in the can, Barbra said good-bye to hot, humid Beaufort and flew to New York to film outdoor location scenes. She was in a far less anxious state than she had been three months earlier. Although she was still consumed with work, the initial terror she had felt after not having directed a film in eight years had lessened. When she arrived in Manhattan, she acted as though she had fallen in love with the city and its singular electricity all over again.

She stopped traffic while filming scenes in Central Park; hundreds of fans stood and watched Barbra direct Jason and Nick in the football-coaching sequences. A fan’s videotape of the Central Park shoot shows Barbra playing delightedly with Nolte’s toddler son, lying on her back and balancing him in the air on the bottoms of her feet. The video camera also caught her sitting in her director’s chair, watching the action. When she notices the fan’s camera, her expression turns sour and she points at someone to make him stop.

Streisand wasn’t above using her enormous fame when a Greenwich Village shot needed more background traffic: she simply approached unsuspecting motorists and requested that they appear in the scene. “So I walk down the street—which is great because as Barbra Streisand the actress I would’ve been so shy, but now as Barbra Streisand the director I can
use
being known as an actress—and I walk over to some guy’s car and go, ‘Hi, I’m Barbra Streisand; I’m directing a movie here. Would you mind being in the shot?
’”
Most motorists complied with delight.

The complexities of the personal and professional relationship between Barbra and her son became clear during one scene between Jason and Nick. Barbra was unsatisfied with a certain line reading Jason gave, and she later admitted, “Jason got mad. He said, ‘What’s wrong, you don’t like it?’ I said, ‘Jason, you have to separate here. I’m saying everything you’re doing is wonderful, but I don’t believe this partic
ular line r
eading, and I can’t lie to you, so let’s work on it, and don’t be mad at me as your goddamned mother.
’”
Despite that moment of tension, mother and son usually worked together very effectively, most notably during a two-day shoot of one of the film’s most difficult scenes, Bernard’s violin solo in the midst of bustling Grand Central Station. Streisand, instead of being nervous, relished the pressure. “Those were the hottest days, the most spontaneous,” she said. “It was so much fun. It was so alive.”

Jason saw things differently. “Oh, God, that was the worst part of it. When you have hundreds of people watching you, it’s terrifying,” he said. “Actually, practically all my scenes were outside in parks and public places where there were crowds of people.”

The company went to upstate New York to film the love montage that details the growing romantic relationship between Tom and Susan. Detractors later scoffed that the footage resembled a “soft-focus coffee ad.” Streisand disagreed, and explained that the gauzy, ultra-romantic outdoor moments were a technical accident: mist had formed on the camera lens, creating a “pastoral, impressionistic” look.

A
FTER THE PRINCE OF TIDES
wrapped in September 1990, Barbra went to work on editing and scoring the picture as well as planning the marketing for its release a year later. For John Barry, initially hired to compose the score, the experience proved traumatic. Barry and Streisand locked horns from day one; his unwillingness to incorporate her ideas into his score was a nightmare for both of them. He left the project in a storm of bitter recriminations.

“She is the worst person I have
ever
had to work with,” he told a reporter in the spring of 1991. “Everyone told me I must be crazy working with her, but I thought it would probably work out. But she had to be involved with everything that I and everyone else on the film was doing. She would never leave you alone. She was a complete control freak, very bossy and into the superstar bit.”

Barry’s replacement, thirty-nine-year-old James Newton Howard, was far more open to Barbra’s all-encompassing involvement in the scoring process. So receptive was he, in fact, that they became romantically involved shortly after the 1990 holiday season, and their relationship made the papers after he escorted her to a star-studded January 13 tribute to Quincy Jones at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

Howard had in fact known Barbra for years; a former keyboard player for Elton John, he had worked on
Songbird
and
Emotion
with Streisand prior to getting reacquainted with her late in 1990. Tall, good looking, and talented, the ex-husband of Rosanna Arquette, he had scored
Pretty Woman
and
Flatliners,
but working with Barbra was a career highlight for him. “Barbra is a sweetheart,” he said, “but she can be quite blunt. If you’re not thick-skinned, then she’s not easy to take. I happen to think she’s a genius. The process of working with her is a difficult one because her perfectionism is unequaled. She’s incredibly demanding, but I can truthfully say that working with her has elevated my own work.”

In addition to the score, Howard also composed “Places That Belong to You,” the film’s love theme, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Barbra recorded the song as a possible end-credit vocal, but she wavered on whether or not to include it in the film, mainly because she didn’t want to take the emphasis away from Tom’s character at the end of the picture. More importantly, Barbra felt she would be taken more seriously as a director without it. Although 86 percent of the film’s preview audiences wanted the song to be included in the final version, Streisand, calling its presence “just wrong,” said no.

When Columbia first previewed
The Prince of Tides
in June 1991, Barbra was overjoyed with the positive audience reaction, and the studio was so pleased that they pushed back the film’s previously announced September launch date to December so that
Tides
could be its major holiday release. Barbra objected. After years of work on the project, she said, “I would rather it be released earlier. The angst is awful, you know? It’s like, get this thing out already.”

As happens so often to Barbra, a pall was cast over
The Prince of Tides
even before its release when Caryn James of
The New York Times
, in a preview of fall films, compared
The Prince of Tides
to the ignominious Bruce Willis bomb
Hudson Hawk
and called it “a vanity production.” Two weeks later the paper published a letter from Columbia Pictures Chairman Frank Yablans, taking issue: “No Hollywood studio screens a movie four months before opening unless it knows one thing: the picture is outstanding.... We were particularly incensed to see this film labeled a vanity production. It is not unusual for talented people—among them Woody Allen, Kevin Costner and Warren Beatty—to direct and star in pictures. Why is Barbra Streisand, when she chooses to do the same, singled out for such criticism?”