Streisand: Her Life (68 page)

B
ARBRA WAS AS
comfortable with her character as Redford had been uncomfortable with his, which is probably why she seemed to Laurents far less concerned with how to play Katie Morosky than with how she would look in the film. When they first discussed the script, Laurents was stunned to discover that Barbra’s main concern revolved around how many costume and hairdo changes the script provided her.

While Barbra didn’t discuss her characterization with Laurents, she did with Pollack, and she was pleased to discover that they saw eye to eye on nearly every detail. “I wanted Barbra in this picture to really act,” Pollack told Zec and Fowles. “I did not want her to rely on any of the Streisand mannerisms.... I really wanted to get her back to a kind of simple truth in her performance that I knew she was capable of. It wasn’t a problem because Barbra is like any other enormously talented person. They are never a problem if you can create an atmosphere of trust.”

Apparently Barbra got along far better with her director than she did with her costume designer. She was so concerned about her appearance in the picture that Dorothy Jeakins, a three-time Oscar winner, quit in frustration with Streisand after designing three-quarters of her thirty costumes. Barbra would approve a design, then change her mind, approve another design, then change her mind again. Jeakins told her replacement, Moss Mabry, that she left the picture because “I can’t stand all this confusion and indecision.”

Barbra asked Mabry to design outfits that accentuated her bust and behind. “She loves her derriere,” he recalled. “She’s got wonderful buns. And one of the most beautiful busts in Hollywood. And beautiful skin.” At Barbra’s behest, Mabry designed a backless halter-top pantsuit that revealed and accentuated these attributes very nicely.

One of the reasons Barbra had to be so concerned with her wardrobe, according to Mabry, was that Sydney Pollack didn’t seem to care very much. “A lot of people got the impression that Pollack really favored Redford,” Mabry said. “I would go to his office with sketches and swatches, and he couldn’t have cared less what she wore. It surprised me, because I hadn’t run into that kind of attitude before.”

In fairness to Pollack, he was immersed in what he described as “the nightmare” of trying to retool the script to his and Redford’s liking. “We were rewriting all the time,” Pollack said. “While we were shooting we were rewriting. We were getting so much pressure. Columbia was going under at the time; they hadn’t had a big hit in years, and the picture was going over budget. Bob didn’t get along with Ray Stark, and neither did I. We didn’t know how to mix the politics and the love story and make it work. There were just a lot of problems.”

Stark, who was being pressed by the studio, leaned hard on Pollack. “Hurry up, hurry up,” the director recalled Stark telling him. “You can’t do this! You can’t do that! Hurry up! Get it done! Cut this, cut that! Don’t do it with more than one car! Shoot up angles so you don’t have to fix the streets.”

“Truthfully, nobody had any faith in the picture,” Pollack said. For Redford, making the movie was like “doing overtime at Dachau.”

Finally Pollack swallowed hard and asked Arthur Laurents to come back. According to Laurents, eleven screenwriters had come and gone before he was asked to save the script and the movie. “They made a lot of silly mistakes,” Laurents said of the writers who had followed him. “None of those people knew anything about that period. I lived through it.... They just kept cutting the political stuff because Stark said to me that he had to make a choice between the romance and the politics. That’s balderdash. I think they’re constantly underestimating the public.”

If Sydney Pollack was too busy trying to solve his film’s script problems to concern himself with Barbra’s appearance in the picture, the cinematographer, Harry Stradling Jr., more than took up the slack. His main goal, the son of Barbra’s favorite cameraman said, “was to make Barbra Streisand look good.... whenever there was an outdoor scene we had to build a canopy to shade her because with direct sunlight on her nose, it looks terrible.... every now and again, Robert Redford would get a little grouchy because every shot was always lined up to suit Barbra.

“But she was the only person I had to please. If she was happy, that was all that mattered.”

O
NCE FILMING BEGAN
on September 18, 1972, at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Barbra began to fret. Redford’s subtly effective acting impressed her so much that she feared her performance would suffer in comparison. “Barbra was very intimidated,” said Bradford Dillman, who was cast as Hubbell’s best friend. “There was a lot of stuff that Bob and I did that was total improvisation. Barbra was very, very new to that, and I don’t know how comfortable she would have been.”

Her insecurity led her to want to discuss her scenes in even more detail than usual before she acted them. “She called me up—oh, my God—every night!” Pollack said. “She called out of compulsive worry—‘Should I do this?’ ‘Listen, I was reading back five drafts earlier and I found this line.’ It was all pushing and testing and trying to cover every base—worrying it, worrying it, worrying it.”

Before she would do a scene, Barbra wanted to talk it out so thoroughly that sometimes she seemed to be stalling. This drove Redford, who prefers to plunge into a scene and see what happens, to distraction. “There comes a time when you’re ready to go,” he said. “You learn too much in rehearsals. Things start to get pat, and film is a medium of behavior and spontaneity. Barbra would talk and talk and talk and drive me nuts. And the amusing thing was that after she’d talk and talk and talk, we’d get down to doing it and she’d do just what she was going to do from the beginning.”

Pollack found himself caught in the middle. “She’d get in there and want to talk, and Bob would want to do it. And Bob felt the more the talk went on, the staler he got. She would feel he was rushing her. The more rehearsing we did, she would begin to go uphill and he would peak and go downhill. So I was like a jockey trying to figure out when to roll the camera and get them to coincide.”

Regardless of how the two actors came around to their performances, each thought the other was doing a better job. “She would call me at night,” Pollack said, “and ask, ‘How does he do it?’ She would see the dailies and think he was wonderful and she stunk. But they’re very alike in that respect, because he would see them and think that she was wonderful and he stunk.... I had to calm both of them down.”

If Barbra’s infatuation with Redford practically trumpeted itself, it was clear that Redford found her intriguing as well; once again life imitated art. She made him laugh a lot, throwing Yiddish words at him and needling him for being such a WASP. Their interaction offscreen, Redford said, helped them “create an inner life of enjoyment between the two characters.”

“Whenever he would say anything Jewish,” Pollack recalled, “she would get hysterical. There’s one scene that’s almost all improvised in the beach house where he was trying to learn some Jewish words and she was breaking up. A lot of that we photographed and tried to keep in.”

W
HEN THE TIME
came to film the sex scene, it was clear to Harry Stradling that the chemistry between Streisand and Redford extended beyond their roles. “They were very close,” Stradling said. “During the scene where they were both in bed, it was very arousing... more so than just actors acting.”

It is unlikely that Streisand and Redford ever consummated their mutual attraction, but word filtered back to Lola Redford about the romantic sparks flying between her husband and his leading lady. One evening, after the two stars lost track of time during an impromptu rehearsal, Redford missed dinner with his family. Lola hit the roof. Their son Jamie went to school the next day, a columnist reported, and told his classmates, “Mommy threw a glass of milk at Daddy. They had a fight about Barbra Streisand.” When he was asked about the accuracy of the report, Redford replied, “That sounds about right.”

A
FTER A MONTH
on location in New York, the production moved to Hollywood on October 11 and filming wrapped on December 3. Everyone was worried: Barbra because if this film failed after the public’s rejection of
Up the Sandbox
she might never be able to establish herself as a straight dramatic actress; Redford because he wasn’t at all sure his characterization was compelling enough to hold its own against Streisand’s; and Pollack because he feared he hadn’t successfully mixed the politics and the love story.

Over the next nine months Pollack and Margaret Booth edited the film, and they took out most of the political scenes, almost all of which involved Barbra. At the first of two previews scheduled for a Friday and Saturday in September of 1973 in San Francisco, Pollack discovered he hadn’t cut enough. When the film began to unreel, a buzz rose among the audience as they realized they were going to see the new Streisand-Redford film. For two-thirds of the picture they seemed enraptured. Then the blacklisting scenes began to unfold and, Pollack recalled, “We lost the audience completely.” He grabbed Margaret Booth, went up to the projection room, took out a razor blade and snipped an entire sequence in which Katie was about to be named as a Communist, eleven minutes in all. “The politics just got too complicated for the audience,” he said. “They wanted us to stick with the love story.”

The following night the audience reaction to the shorter version was strongly positive. “All of a sudden everyone was ecstatic about it,” Pollack said, “and morale turned around.” Now all Barbra could do was wait to see whether this troubled production would result in a hit.

The Way We Were
opened around the country on October 16, 1973. The reviews were mixed; most critics praised the acting and chemistry of the two stars but faulted the film’s parboiled politics. “Pollack and Laurents are so busy working on the dubious proposition that politics can kill a good marriage,” Paul D. Zimmerman wrote in
Newsweek
, “that they barely have time to establish the political atmosphere that is meant as a catalyst to the connubial collapse, sketching it in hurriedly in bits of cocktail gossip and snippets of radio reports and newspaper headlines.”