Streisand: Her Life (70 page)

“Just a minute, Barb,” Hemion called after her.

“What?!” she shouted angrily.

“Oh, forget it, Barbra,” Hemion said.

“I am tired. Either you’re gonna do this or you’re not,” she said as she swept off. “I want to go and change.”

She returned ten minutes later wearing a black velvet pantsuit. As she cooled herself with a battery-powered fan, Hemion called out, “Barb, I don’t like the dress.”

“What’s wrong with it.”

“It looks like a rehearsal costume.”

“Well, I like it.”

After Hemion told her to take a look at herself in the monitor, Barbra tramped back to her dressing room and changed into an off-white satin pantsuit left over from
What’s Up
,
Doc?

A disagreement about camera angles followed, and finally Barbra snapped, “Dwight,
you
are going to have to adjust to
me
. I am not going to adjust to you. I’m not going to screw up my whole performance over this.” Then she began to munch on a large chocolate cake, one of many brought to the set every day for her to choose from. In a balcony above the set, Jason licked a cone-shaped cream-filled pastry. “Isn’t that good, J.J.?” Barbra called up to him. “You sleepy, honey? We’re gonna go home soon.”

Several more hours and twelve takes elapsed before she and Hemion pronounced themselves happy with “Sweet Inspiration.” A relieved Ray Charles tinkled out a few bars of “Jingle Bells” on the piano. At nine o’clock Barbra’s limousine took her back to the house she had rented in central London. “I don’t know how she does it,” her maid, Gracie, said. “She’s worked the whole day, and when we get back I just close the door and say good night, but she’s on the telephone, phoning home for hours. She only gets five hours’ sleep.”

One of the “concepts” of
Barbra Streisand... and Other Musical Instruments
was “The World Is a Concerto,” in which Barbra would sing along with the “music” of a blender, a vacuum cleaner, a steam kettle, a sewing machine, a washer, an electric shaver, and other noisy household appliances. It was the last segment filmed, and when Barbra arrived on the set on the morning of July 28, she called out to Hemion, “I’m going to be nice to you today, Dwight.” But her mood soured after a series of mechanical failures and other problems. The washing machine didn’t spin, the toaster didn’t pop up on cue, and the tea kettle refused to whistle.

Eleven hours and twenty-three takes were required to get footage to everyone’s satisfaction. At lunchtime Barbra soothed her frazzled nerves with food. “She’s been very good today,” an employee of Elstree’s commissary said. “She’s supposed to be on a diet, you know. You should have seen her the other day. She fancied fish, so she had prawn cocktail, poached halibut, plaice [flounder] off the bone, Dover sole, and rice pudding. She eats like a horse.”

B
ARBRA STREISAND...
and Other Musical Instruments
was aired over CBS on Friday, November 2, 1973, and proved a very mixed bag creatively, as well as a ratings disappointment; it scored only a 30 share opposite a roast of Johnny Carson on the
Dean Martin Comedy Hour
, which in contrast won a 41 share. The reviewers weren’t kind. John J. O’Connor in
The New York Times
praised the Ray Charles segment but called the show “overproduced, over-orchestrated and overbearing to the point of aesthetic nausea.” Morton Moss in the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
felt that “all the dazzle and incessant cartwheels are a distraction.... The effects of
Instruments
might on occasion be accused of brilliance... but brilliance and unusual theatricality are irrelevant when they act as digression to the major interest.”

There are several magical moments in the show, and as usual they showcase Barbra without overblown production values. Her version of the Harold Arlen/Truman Capote ballad “I Never Has Seen Snow” is gorgeous, as is the closing song, “The Sweetest Sounds,” sung by a backlit Barbra as the credits roll.

Barbra Streisand... and Other Musical Instruments
was Barbra’s last special produced specifically for the home screen. Within two years of its telecast, her CBS contract expired. Released from that obligation, she was free to work for any other network. She opted to work for none. “It takes a lot of time to do a special,” she explained. “In the time it took me to do this special, you could do a whole movie.... I don’t like to work that hard. I don’t have the time or the interest.”

W
HILE SHE WAS
in London to make the special, Barbra’s attention to her work was often distracted by the presence of a new paramour, an Arizona businessman and entrepreneur named Sam Grossman. Attractive and strong-willed, Grossman wound Barbra around his finger. “I like to accompany him on his business travels,” she told a reporter. “I feel terribly guilty having to work. He doesn’t want to be around when I’m working, and I don’t want him to be because my concentration goes right out the window. The other day he came to rehearsal, for instance, and the musical director asked me if I wanted three bars or four in a certain spot. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. Yet if he hadn’t been there I would have known exactly. It’s a terrible thing, but I actually enjoy being subjugated to him. Not in a personal or physical sense—I still need to be respected in my own right—but in terms of our work. It’s far more important to a man’s ego to have a career than it is to a woman’s. I don’t need to work anymore to feed my ego. I get all the ego nourishment I need from him.”

In another interview she said, “I like to be taken care of, but I also like to take care of. I’d love to be a sex object to the right man. I’m old-fashioned.”

The relationship with Grossman ended within a few months, but before long Barbra met another man, one who would sweep her off her feet, turn her private and professional worlds upside down, make her feel like the sex object of all time, touch “a deeper place in my heart,” and become the love of her life.

J
on Peters wouldn’t leave Barbra alone. The darkly good-looking, cocksure twenty-eight-year-old hairdresser, the millionaire owner of several salons, had met Streisand, now thirty-one, in the summer of 1973 when she asked him to design a hairdo for her to wear in her new film. He had found her “the most beautiful woman that I’ve ever seen in my life” and a “sexy little ball of fire.”

Barbra was taken aback by Jon. The day he came to her house on Carolwood to discuss the assignment, Barbra said, “Jon drove up in his red Ferrari. I was shocked by his appearance, because he was wearing a low-cut shirt with an Indian necklace and tight jeans. I thought, What is this person?”

She kept him waiting for forty-five minutes, and when she finally came down the stairs to greet him he told her, “Don’t you ever do that again. Nobody keeps me waiting.” Later, when she turned her back to him, he muttered, “You’ve got a great ass.”

Barbra liked that. “He made me feel like a woman, not like some famous thing.” She later said that meeting Jon was love at first sight, but she was leery. He seemed like the kind of wily hustler she had seen too many of in her business. When he asked her out, she declined.

He wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Jon doesn’t let up going after something he wants,” she said. “He wore me down. I would say to him, ‘Stop coming after me; you’re not my type. I like men who smoke pipes and are more distinguished. I want to be with a doctor or a lawyer.
’”
(According to Jon, Barbra had just returned from a visit with Pierre Trudeau when he first met her, which perhaps had prompted that description of her ideal man.)

The next day Jon pulled up to the house in a dark green Jaguar. When he got out of the car Barbra saw that he was wearing eyeglasses and a velvet smoking jacket over his jeans and T-shirt. Amused and touched, she accepted his invitation to dinner that night.

“T
HERE WERE AREAS
that were sketchy about Jon’s background,” said Steve Jaffe, who would become Jon and Barbra’s personal publicist. “And Jon wanted them to remain a mystery.”

He was born John Pagano Peters on June 2, 1945, in a lower-class section of Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, the son of an Italian mother and a half-Cherokee father. When he was nearly eight, his father died in front of him. “My world fell apart,” he said. “I was angry, confused. My mother was working. I was alone.”

His mother remarried, and he despised his stepfather. “I started to get into trouble,” he told the British reporter Rosalie Shann. “They called it ‘being incorrigible.
’”
He was small-boned but strong and pugnacious; he strutted like a bantam rooster and got into so many fights with classmates that “I got thrown out of every school in the Los Angeles system.” He hung out with motorcycle gangs, and although he was intelligent he was put into “the retarded class” at school “because I’m an emotional guy.” He ran away a number of times and once stole a car.

A juvenile court judge sentenced him to a year in a reform school in the San Bernardino Mountains ninety miles northeast of Los Angeles—“a kind of kids’ jail,” he called it. Every day he did grueling work, often breaking up rocks, and at night he was chained to his bed. “I’ll never forget that. It sure toughened me up.” And, he added, “it gave me a healthy respect for what society could do to you if you crossed it.”

When John came home he told his mother he’d rather die than go back to eighth grade. Her family, the Paganos, owned a string of beauty parlors in Los Angeles, and she suggested he go to beauty school. “I was only twelve, but mature for my years,” Jon recalled. From the outset, he knew it was a life he wanted to pursue—especially when he saw all the beautiful girls who frequented the shop. “I loved playing with their hair.”

After two years his mother sent him to New York with $120 in his pocket. He worked the night shift in a Fifty-seventh Street salon, dyeing the hair of hookers to match their poodles. The following year, not yet fifteen, he married a girl named Marie Zambatelli, age fifteen and a half. “I was in a hurry to grow up.... My folks gave their consent. They were only too glad to get rid of me.”

The newlyweds lived in Philadelphia, where John worked as an apprentice hairdresser by day and moonlighted as a bouncer in a nightclub at night. When he was nineteen, in 1964, John and Marie divorced, and he returned to California. He smooth-talked a real estate agent friend into lending him $100,000 to open his own salon in Encino in the San Fernando Valley. His talent and his sex appeal made the shop an immediate hit; suburban housewives and movie starlets alike clamored for his professional—and sometimes his personal—attention. He took the h out of his first name, and by the early 1970s had three Jon Peters Salons, one of them in Beverly Hills. Along the way he became a millionaire.

In May 1967 Jon got married again, this time to Lesley Ann Warren, who had starred opposite Elliott Gould in
Drat! The Cat!
in 1965. Lesley Ann was a big Barbra Streisand fan. “I was totally fascinated with her,” she said. “I asked Elliott how she did her makeup. I vocalized to her albums.”

Two months after she married Jon, Lesley Ann “dragged” him to see Barbra at the Hollywood Bowl. “Jon had never heard of her,” she recalled. He found Streisand mesmerizing. “The moment I saw Barbra—wow! She blew my mind. She was fantastic, staggering... I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”

In the early seventies, Jon began to boast that Barbra was one of his clients. “I’ve done Streisand, everybody,” he told a reporter at the time. As a result, his business increased 40 percent. “All these women would come in and want Barbra’s hairstyle,” he said. Finally he decided that he must meet her, and he sent word via mutual friends, the Joe Laytons, that he would go anywhere in the world at any time to cut her hair—for free. Barbra ignored the offer.

Peters soon found himself distracted by marital problems. He and Lesley Ann had a son, five-year-old Christopher, but their marriage floundered. They separated, and Jon began a hedonistic whirl during which he saw a number of women including Sally Kellerman, Leigh Taylor-Young, and Jacqueline Bisset. “I had dozens of affairs,” Jon told Rosalie Shann. “I couldn’t relate to any one woman. I had to have several on the go at once. It wasn’t an enviable state to be in. It was a tragic one. I was kind of scared of becoming involved.”

Then, in August of 1973, while Jon was in London staying with a young actress, the telephone rang. It was Barbra. “I got your message,” she said. “When you get home, come and see me. I want a new look for my next film.” Barbra had seen a woman at a party with a short, boyish hairstyle that she liked. When she was told Jon Peters had designed it, she decided to call him.

If Jon’s mode of dress put Barbra off when she met him, he found himself pleasantly surprised by her. “I expected this big woman, and this little bitty girl came down the stairs. She was vulnerable and beautiful. Immediately the chemistry starting working between us.” It was mostly confrontational chemistry. After Jon dressed Barbra down for keeping him waiting, he balked when she told him she wanted him to style a wig, not her hair. “I don’t do
wigs
,” he snapped. “How insulting.”

Barbra wasn’t used to being called on her behavior like that, and she was intrigued. (Had Jon not been so attractive, however, one suspects she would have thrown him out.) She batted her eyelashes and pleaded with him until he relented.

“You’re the only person in the world I’d do this for,” he told her.

“Listen,” she said, “will you take a look at these clothes I’m gonna wear in the picture? Tell me what you think.” She pulled out some photographs and spread them out on her coffee table.

Jon frowned as he studied them. “I don’t like them,” he said.

“I hate them too,” Barbra exclaimed.

“Okay, then, let’s go shopping,” Jon replied. Two days later they spent an entire day scouring Beverly Hills boutiques. “He saw me as a young, hip chick,” Barbra said. “At the time, I wore Dior clothes; I appeared older than I was.... He just made me feel very young and beautiful, and he said, ‘The public should see this side of you—the sexy side, your legs, your ass, your breasts.
’”

She was starting to like this guy, but not enough to give herself to him. “It was four months before we became lovers,” Jon said. “But it was already there—that intense feeling.” The relationship had to develop long distance, because in September Barbra flew to New York to begin location shooting for her new picture.

W
HAT CAN ONE
say about
For Pete’s Sake?
For years Barbra had talked about wanting to make “significant” films. She longed, she said, to play characters by Shakespeare and Euripedes, but by mid-1973 Barbra seemed more interested in remaining a strong box-office attraction than in becoming a classical actress. Deeply disappointed by the failure of
Up the Sandbox
, and unsure whether the public would support the as-yet-unreleased
The Way We Were
, she felt she couldn’t risk another arty flop.

What she needed to do, Marty Erlichman kept telling her, was another zany comedy, the kind that moviegoers flock to in the summer. There weren’t enough good scripts for Barbra, he felt, so he went to Stanley Shapiro, who had written several of those will-the-virgin-or-won’t-she? sex comedies for Doris Day and Rock Hudson in the late fifties and early sixties.