Streisand: Her Life (67 page)

S
LATED FOR A
Christmas 1972 release,
Up the Sandbox
had its first preview in San Francisco in October. Barbra, on a brief break from filming
The Way We Were
, attended the screening and was distressed at the audience reaction. “There was laughter,” she told a friend, “but it was nervous laughter, often in the wrong places.” She and Kershner set about cutting almost twenty minutes from the film, and they changed the ending. “I had originally shot the ending so that it was a fantasy within a fantasy within a fantasy,” the director said. “It was three fantasies removed from reality, so you didn’t know where you were anymore. Everyone got scared, and at the last minute it was redone so it was clearer.” With these alterations, Kershner felt confident that the film would go over big. “I remember sitting with the agents and producers and we all thought, sixty million dollars!”

Barbra was upset and mystified when the ninety-seven-minute film was rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America, mainly because of the bare-chested Samburu women and the fantasy in which Fidel Castro exposes his breasts to reveal that he is really a woman. Even though actor Jacob Morales wore obviously fake breasts, the rating board was firm. “What kind of morality do you have,” Barbra pondered, “when people would rather have children see blood and gore than a woman’s breasts?”

To promote
Up the Sandbox
, Barbra appeared at press junkets in Los Angeles and New York at which she talked to upwards of sixty reporters from across the country. “I care about
Sandbox
,” she said. “I think it is a provocative film and I want to help it.” She felt it was vital that the public read about the movie before seeing it. “We’re against polarization,” Barbra told writers assembled at Manhattan’s 21 Club. “We’re saying a woman shouldn’t feel guilty about going out into the world or about staying at home. She should feel it’s right to stay wherever she can be fulfilled.” About producing for the first time she said, “As a producer, I had to be above all the on-set situations. If I was late, it wasn’t because I was a prima donna, but because I was late. Sometimes the actress in me fought the producer in me. I was a lax producer and I let the actress in me win out.”

Despite the rare Streisand publicity, when the picture opened, it quickly became clear that the $60 million grosses Irvin Kershner expected would never materialize. Most audiences were disappointed and mystified by
Sandbox
after being misled by a wacky ad campaign to expect a zany comedy like
What’s Up, Doc?
Paul Zindel’s determination to avoid obvious setups left many viewers unsure where the fantasies began and ended. Others seemed to prefer a zanier, larger-than-life Barbra in a comedy. And the ambiguous stand the movie took on the “modern woman’s dilemma” failed to please either the radical feminists, the traditional homemakers, or the millions of other women who fell somewhere in between.

While most critics complained about the film’s shortcomings, many were impressed with Barbra’s work. “It’s a likable, honest performance,” said Alan Howard in the
Hollywood Reporter
, “and in its subtle way, a bold one.” Writing for the New York
Daily News
, Rex Reed said that
Sandbox
“provides her with her finest role to date and she rises to the challenge cunningly. There is a new vulnerability in her work here, a touching sweetness that makes you want to know the character instead of the actress.” Pauline Kael’s thoughtful review offered a pithy tribute, “She’s a complete reason for seeing a movie, as Garbo was.”

For all of its problems,
Up the Sandbox
has a certain appeal that comes not only from Barbra’s restrained performance but also from the distinctive, almost European style in which it is filmed. There are several memorable scenes, especially the family reunion, which Barbra suggested be filmed in black and white with a hand-held camera for the sake of realism—just as her brother, Sheldon, always did at family gatherings.

Up the Sandbox
remains refreshing as the most audacious Streisand film to date, but its message about the plight of contemporary women, somewhat naive even at the time, has dated badly. “It was very discouraging,” Barbra said of the film’s failure. “I remember taking a friend to a theater in Westwood and there were
four people
there. It sure made me feel bad.” A few years later she was more defensive: “I liked
Up the Sandbox
. That was my statement about what it meant to be a woman. It’s what I wanted to say, and I’m glad I said it, even if it didn’t make a nickel.”

Up the Sandbox
grossed $10 million, which nearly returned its original investment, and earned a small profit from television and video sales. “I love the film,” Irvin Kershner said. “I think it’s so unusual for her. She’s wonderful in it, she shows the full range of what she can do.... I’m very glad I made it, even though I couldn’t get another assignment for three years.... I never told Barbra, but I went broke on account of that film.”

Barbra professed not to care if the film made money. She was proud of it, and that was what mattered to her. “
Up the Sandbox
was my tribute to my son, and it exposed me as a real person,” she said. “I’m a serious person, and not just the zany person that people expect me to be because of movie and stage roles.”

R
obert Redford was worried that he’d get too excited lying in bed next to Barbra. They were about to film a scene for their new film,
The Way We Were
, in which Barbra’s character, Katie Morosky, undresses and slides into bed next to Hubbell Gardiner, a former campus golden boy she has lusted after for years and who has just passed out, drunk. She caresses his hair, and he rolls over to her, becomes aroused, and makes love to her quickly before falling back to sleep on top of her. The director, Sydney Pollack, had ordered everyone off the set for the scene except the cinematographer, Harry Stradling Jr.

Barbra was nude from the waist up when she undressed, her back to the camera. The next shot would show her already in bed, and she wore a thin mesh bikini and brassiere under the sheets. With his character supposed to be nude as well, Redford was taking no chances. According to Moss Mabrey, the film’s costume designer, “Redford put
two
jockstraps on for that scene. He’s a very modest man. He was afraid of getting an erection.”

The bulky athletic supporters caused a problem, however, when their outline became visible through the sheets. “Finally,” Redford said, “I took them off under the cover, slid them under the bed, did the scene, picked them up, and put them back on under the cover.”

The look of ecstasy on Barbra’s face in the scene likely reflected reacting more than acting. Because by this time her feelings for Redford were just as strong as Katie’s for Hubbell.

T
HE WAY WE WERE
came into being in 1971 when Ray Stark asked Arthur Laurents, who had directed Barbra in
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
, to write a movie for her. He came up with the story of Katie Morosky, a dowdy, frizzy-haired, politically ardent Jewish coed of the late 1930s who supports communism because she believes it to be a force for peace, and her ill-fated marriage to the handsome, apolitical, golden-haired WASP Hubbell Gardiner amid the backdrop of the Hollywood Blacklist.

The passionate, questioning Katie Morosky has many similarities to Barbra, and the character was written for her to play, but Arthur Laurents did not base her on Streisand. Rather he was inspired by a girl he had known in college and a woman he knew later, and he combined the two of them. “Barbra certainly has been involved slightly politically,” Laurents said, “but she’s unsophisticated politically, unlike Katie. The connecting tissue is Barbra’s passion and her sense of injustice. But I don’t think she’s like that character.”

In preparing for
The Way We Were,
Barbra’s main concern was her leading man, and she immediately thought of the actor she had wanted to play Romeo to her Juliet, Robert Redford. Ray Stark sent a fifty-page treatment of the script to the actor, who turned it down because he considered Hubbell Gardiner a two-dimensional character. Laurents then suggested Ryan O’Neal, but Stark didn’t think audiences would be keen on a re-teaming. Next in line was the big, blond, and good-looking Ken Howard, and Laurents made arrangements for a tennis match to see how Howard and Barbra would get along. Laurents and Nora Kaye, Herb Ross’s wife, played doubles against Ken and Barbra. “You’ve never seen bad tennis playing until you’ve watched Barbra on the court,” Laurents told the authors Donald Zec and Anthony Fowles. “We were wiping Ken and Barbra out, but she was delightful, taking the beating with a great sense of humor. At one time the ball hit one of her breasts and she quipped, ‘Don’t worry, I have another one.
’”

Streisand and Howard seemed to be meshing well, Laurents recalled, “until a very beautiful girl drove down to pick up Ken Howard. Barbra froze. Next day she told me there was no sex appeal between them.... Howard was out.” After rejecting Dennis Cole, and with the supply of blond male stars exhausted, Barbra turned to Warren Beatty, whom she kept after during their affair, constantly badgering him for a commitment to the film. He didn’t feel that the character gave him enough to work with, however, and Barbra’s assurances that the part would be beefed up failed to change his mind.

Barbra and Ray Stark had reached a dead end. When Barbra moaned, “God, if only we could convince Redford,” Stark had an idea. He would try to get Sydney Pollack to direct the picture. Pollack and Redford had been close friends since they appeared together as actors in
War Hunt
in 1962, and Pollack had directed Redford in
This Property Is Condemned,
a Ray Stark production, in 1966 and in
Jeremiah Johnson
in 1972. If anyone could persuade Redford to change his mind, Stark reasoned, it was Pollack.

Stark sent Pollack the galleys of Laurents’s novelization of his screenplay. He liked it and signed to direct the film in April of 1972. “I was very moved by it,” Pollack said, “and I thought right away, This would be great for Bob.” But when he mentioned it, Redford said, “Aw, that piece of junk.”

As Pollack worked on some script revisions, he became more and more convinced that only Redford could do justice to Hubbell. Ray Stark put renewed pressure on the director to deliver Redford, and Pollack sent him the revised script. “No, it doesn’t work, Pollack,” Redford said. They argued for hours, but Redford remained unmoved. “I don’t know what you see in this!” he finally said.

Stark was getting angry. “We have Barbra, and what do we need Redford for?” he told Pollack. “Ryan O’Neal will do it.” Finally, at a meeting with Ray Stark and Arthur Laurents in Stark’s apartment in the Dorchester Hotel in New York, matters came to a head. “I’m going to give Redford one hour and then fuck it!” Stark announced. “I’m just not going to chase my life around Robert Redford. Who the fuck does he think he is?”

Pollack found this “a real vindictive, ego conversation. I said to him, ‘Ray, don’t do it.’ I got Bob on the phone and told him I had to come over to his apartment and settle this.” As Pollack left Stark told him “You’ve got an hour.”

Pollack used every argument he could think of to change Redford’s mind: the picture wouldn’t start filming until the fall, it could be shot mostly in New York so that Redford could stay with his family. Pollack also assured him that the script would be rewritten to give Hubbell a stronger point of view.

“What is this picture
about
, Pollack?” Redford wanted to know. “Who
is
this guy? He’s just an object. A nothing. He runs around saying, ‘Aw, c’mon, Katie, c’mon, Katie.’ He doesn’t want anything. What does this guy
want
, Sydney?
What does he want?!
”

“He’s a very moving guy, Bob,” Pollack replied.

Redford was asking, “What’s moving? What’s moving?” when the phone rang. It was Stark, telling Pollack his hour was up. “Come back. That’s it. We’re hiring Ryan O’Neal.”

“No, you’re not. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.” Pollack slammed the phone down and turned to Redford, who was cradling his head in his hands. “All right, Pollack,” he finally said. “I’ll do it. I’ll
do
it.”

“The reason I finally decided to do the picture,” Redford said, “was that I had faith that Pollack and [the screenwriters] Alvin Sargent and David Rayfiel would make something more out of that character than was in the script. As it was written, he was shallow and one-dimensional. Not very real—more a figment of someone’s imagination of what Prince Charming should be like. What emerged out of the rewrites were glimpses of the darker side of this golden boy character—what his fears were about himself.”

Once Redford signed—at a reported salary of $1.2 million, which was $200,000 more than Streisand received—Barbra eagerly awaited their first meeting, a customary procedure where two co-stars sit down to get to know each other and discuss their roles. Redford wanted no part of it. “He wouldn’t meet with Barbra for the longest time,” Pollack recalled, “until she began to develop a complex: ‘Why can’t I sit and talk with Bob Redford? I’m going to act with him in the movie!’ Finally it started to get destructive. I told him, ‘You’ve got to go, because she’s starting to take it personally.
’”

Redford said he would meet with Barbra, but only if Pollack came along. “So the three of us sat down at her house and we had dinner and talked, and we got together maybe twice more before we started rehearsals. That’s all.” The reason Redford didn’t want to get too familiar with Barbra, Pollack said, was that “he believes very strongly that the strangeness contributes to the chemistry in a movie. And I must agree that the fact that they didn’t know each other inside out worked for what was going on in the college scenes, where she was supposed to be awkward with him.”

At that first dinner, Barbra found Redford dazzling. “She was simply mesmerized by him because she found him so beautiful,” Arthur Laurents said. But there was more to it than that. Redford had a quiet strength, a keen intelligence, and a strong commitment to political and environmental issues. “He always has something going on behind his eyes,” Barbra said. “He’s not just an actor, he’s an intelligent, concerned human being, so that whatever you see has many layers underneath.” Barbra considered Redford well nigh a perfect man and Lola, his wife of nearly fifteen years, a very lucky woman. “Why can’t I find a man like Redford?” she sighed to a friend.

At that first dinner Barbra peppered Redford with questions, as is her wont, and some of them were quite personal. Redford, charming if taciturn up to that point, became a little sharp. “Barbra,” he said, “if we’re going to be able to work together, you have to keep in mind that anything I tell you about myself will be volunteered because I
want
you to know it. Not because you think you have some kind of right to know it.”

With that Redford completely won Barbra over. Not only did she love the fact that he had stood up to her, but she knew he was right. If there was one thing Barbra hated it was people who pried.