Streisand: Her Life (64 page)

O
N THE FIRST
day of rehearsals Barbra
really
started to worry. Bogdanovich had assembled a sterling cast of mostly New York-based theater comic actors to complement his two stars: the droopy-faced Austin Pendleton as Frederick Larrabee, the veteran Mabel Albertson as Mrs. Van Hoskins, the histrionic Kenneth Mars as Hugh Simon, and the brilliant comic actress Madeline Kahn, a Broadway star who had never before appeared in a film, as Howard’s fiancee, Eunice Burns.

Buck Henry recalled that “these guys were really hot” at the first reading of the script around a huge table on a soundstage at the Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank. Madeline Kahn gave Eunice a hilarious whine, Austin Pendleton’s Frederick Larrabee had a sublime obliviousness, and Kenneth Mars brought to Hugh Simon a delicious dollop of malice. “Ken got ahold of some old tapes of John Simon on television,” Pendleton recalled. “He watched them over and over again until he got the accent and behavior down pat. John Simon never forgave anyone involved in the movie for that.” At one point, as she listened to Mars impersonate Simon, Barbra called out with delight, “Meaner! Make him meaner!”

Buck Henry felt that “Barbra and Ryan were already nervous, and I think Barbra really got twitchy about it because all those other people were going to be very good.” But Ryan thought Barbra was the funniest of the lot: “God, she was wonderful,” he said. Among this group Ryan, not a comedian and an actor of limited range, clearly had his work cut out for him. Steve Jaffe recalled seeing Ryan “dancing around like Muhammad Ali before a fight, just getting ready for a scene with Barbra. He was trying to act at his absolute peak. Not only because Barbra’s so great and such a perfectionist but because he was in love with her. He wanted her to respect him. He wanted to be as good as he could be.”

Filming of
What’s Up, Doc?
began on location in San Francisco on August 16. Barbra adopted a look for the picture that wasn’t far different from the way she looked in everyday life in this period. She was thinner than she had been in nearly ten years, and deeply tanned; both the weight loss and the color in her face heightened her cheekbones and gave her face a lovely chiseled quality. She wore light makeup; her long blond-streaked hair, parted in the middle, tumbled past her shoulders. She wore tight slacks and little halter tops that revealed her smooth, creamy shoulders. Unlike Daisy Gamble, and much more than Doris Wilgus, Judy Maxwell was a child of the seventies.

The cast and crew stayed in sixty rooms at the San Francisco Hilton, which Bogdanovich used for the numerous hotel scenes in the film. But Barbra and Ryan shared a suite of rooms at the far posher Huntington Hotel on Nob Hill. They were so discreet about their affair, and Barbra and Bogdanovich were so affectionate with each other, that observers wondered whether Barbra had thrown over her leading man in favor of her director. The writer Pat Rogalla, a visitor to the set, watched Bogdanovich discuss an upcoming scene with Streisand. “Bogdanovich frequently calls her ‘gorgeous,’ holds her hand, kisses her cheek, and once patted her fanny. Barbra responded to him with warm smiles and hugs.”

There was no romance, but the director took good care of his star. During a scene where she picks up a telephone immediately after an extra has used it, Bogdanovich called “Cut!” in the middle of take after take just after the man hung up the receiver. Each time a crew member would rush over and spray the telephone with disinfectant, and only then would Barbra pick it up.

Barbra seems to have gotten along well with everyone in the cast. Between takes they would all sit around in a circle and talk about themselves, almost as though they were in group therapy. “I’ve never been on a film where there was such a group feeling,” Austin Pendleton said. “We’d talk about acting, mostly. I think Barbra was a little in awe of us because we were New York stage actors. She talked about how impressed she’d been with Bibi Andersson’s performance in
The Touch
, the Ingmar Bergman film Elliott had just done. She said she wanted to attain that kind of simplicity, which was incredibly complex without being acted out or demonstrated.

“Barbra talked about things in her life, about seeing Pierre Trudeau, that kind of thing. I got the impression they still saw each other occasionally. And it was funny because she was so famous most of us had already read about the things she was telling us. We wanted to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, Barbra, we know all about that.’ But she wasn’t like some superstars who get bored the minute the subject isn’t them. Barbra was interested in our lives and ideas and problems, too.”

One of the reasons the cast couldn’t wait to take breaks and continue their discussions was the extreme stress of acting in
What’s Up, Doc?
“I have never been in a more difficult film,” Pendleton asserted. “The intricacy of the line cueing was exhausting. Peter would do everything in master shots, and he wanted everybody to talk fast, fast, fast. We couldn’t do it fast enough for him. And we had overlapping dialogue. The pressure was tremendous, because if you blew a line, the entire shot would be ruined and everybody—not just you—would have to do the whole scene again.”

It may have been this difficulty that made Barbra doubt that anything in
What’s Up, Doc?
was funny. As Pat Rogalla put it, “Barbra appeared to be working with gritted teeth.” After nearly every scene, she would nudge O’Neal and say, “We’re in a piece of shit, Ryan!” She never let up. Again and again she told O’Neal, “This is not funny, Ryan. I know what’s funny, and I’m telling you this movie isn’t funny.”

P
ETER
BOGDANOVICH HAD
a tendency to play out every scene himself in order to show his cast exactly what he wanted them to do. This approach worked well with O’Neal. “He let Peter place him, his body and his voice,” said Buck Henry. “Ryan was playing Peter.” But the first time Bogdanovich showed Barbra how he wanted her to recite some dialogue, she looked at him as though he had lost his mind. “Are
you
giving
me
line readings,” she asked.

Bogdanovich might have been the strongest, and certainly the most hands-on, director Barbra had ever worked with. That she put herself as much in his hands as she did is quite remarkable. “He was opinionated and autocratic,” she said. “He knows how he wants to do things, and he doesn’t waste a lot of time.” While Bogdanovich coddled Barbra in many ways, he didn’t take any nonsense from her. He always won their battles over a line reading or the arc of a scene. “She tried to direct me, but we put a stop to that real quick,” he said. Sometimes he seemed to take a particular course just to keep her in her place. After a dozen takes on one scene she said to him, “You should print that last take, Peter. It never will get better.” Bogdanovich demanded one more go, and after that take he shouted, “Print it.”

One day, out of the blue, for no apparent reason, Bogdanovich demanded of Barbra, “Sing something!” She responded with about four bars of “People.”

T
HE COMPLICATED FARCICAL
chase that takes up a large portion of the film’s second half posed physical dangers to the cast and crew. For everything but the close-ups, Bogdanovich used stunt doubles for both Barbra and Ryan. Ray Gosnell, one of the film’s assistant directors, recalled that “The first double for Barbra broke her ankle, so we had to use a man as a double for Barbra in the scene where she and Ryan ride the cart down those steep streets. But for the close-ups we needed Barbra, and the cart had to be moving as fast as it was in the long shots. She wasn’t happy about it—it was a little cart going down a steep hill, and it was stressful for her, and a bit frightening.”

Later in the chase, as Barbra and Ryan ran through an alley after changing into costumes to disguise themselves, Ryan wrenched his back. In the finished film he can be seen at the moment of injury as he nearly loses his balance and then hops on one foot for a few moments before the camera switches to pursuing cars. His injury was serious enough that several months after filming ended he needed spinal surgery.

By then he and Barbra were no longer an item. “Ryan had a very highly attuned libido,” Steve Jaffe said. “Barbra and everyone else knew it.”

Ryan’s roving eye likely doomed his relationship with Barbra. Neither has ever spoken about the reason for their breakup, but she was reportedly miffed when Peggy Lipton, the exquisite young star of television’s
Mod Squad
, visited him on the
Doc
set. Later he wooed the Playboy bunny and actress Joyce Williams as well as Lana Wood and Bogdanovich’s estranged wife, Polly Platt. Barbra dated the Czech director Milos Forman and Steve McQueen—in retaliation, some conjectured.

Still, Barbra and Ryan remained good friends. While he recovered from his surgery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica in December, Barbra was appearing in Las Vegas, and she flew down twice to visit him. “Poor Ryan,” she said at the time. “I feel so terrible for him; you know they’ve removed two disks from his spine.” During her visits, Barbra said, “Ryan’s spirits were good. He was in a lot of pain, but he was very valiant about it all. He was lying in bed, and you know, he has that terribly irresistible little-boy quality about him. I have that terrible Brooklyn Jewish need to mother. Maybe that’s why we get along so well.”

“I found Barbra very sexy,” Ryan said somewhat later. “A terrific girl.” Then he added, in mock dismay, “but I think she
used
me.”

T
OWARD THE END
of 1971 Barbra met with the director Jerry Schatzberg to discuss his directing her next film,
Up the Sandbox
. They never came to an agreement on that, but Schatzberg did spend a memorable evening with Streisand. “We were at this party,” he recalled, “and Mae West was there. Barbra was all excited to see her and went over to talk to her. Everyone in our group was dying of curiosity about what these two Hollywood giants of their generations would say to each other. A few minutes later Barbra came back, laughing. She said she had asked Mae what she felt the difference was between the Hollywood of Mae’s heyday and today. Mae gave her one of those looks and in her inimitable way said, ‘Well, honey, the biggest difference is, today there are no stars.
’”