Streisand: Her Life (72 page)

B
ARBRA AND
Jon were falling in love. When she got back from New York, they spent most of their time together, and Jon has admitted he was attracted to Barbra’s show biz megawattage. “I didn’t fall in love with Barbra independent of her star trip,” he said. “I was fascinated by her and, of course, by Hollywood.” But what he found most appealing was her femininity and her vulnerability. “She’s a little baby underneath. The sweetest girl I’ve ever known in my life.”

He was surprised, as many other Streisand suitors had been, at how yielding she could be to his masculine prerogatives. “Jon has always had women cater to him like a king,” Barbra said. “He is a very, very strong personality, and he wasn’t the least bit intimidated by me. I used to say, ‘Hey, come on, be a little intimidated.’ He never was.... Jon likes me in the kitchen. But that’s okay. I enjoy cooking for him.”

The strength of Jon’s body appealed to Barbra, too. His friend Geraldo Rivera described him as “built like a barroom bouncer.... He had Popeye-like forearms... and a meticulously shag-cut head of hair.... Even with the pretty-boy locks, Jon came across as rough-and-tumble.”

The sexual kineticism between Streisand and Peters finally led them to consummate their attraction to each other, four months after they met, at Jon’s rustic ranch house on Valley Vista Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. “My house has a Jacuzzi,” he said at the time. “People take their clothes off.”

Barbra found that Jon expanded her sexual horizons. She told
Playboy
in 1977 that she had become a “sexually aggressive woman just in the past three years, in my relationship with Jon.” Asked how often she initiated sexual activity, she replied, “We’re equal, honey, we’re equal.” How innovative was she sexually? “Well, I do have some erotic art books,” she replied, laughing. She and Jon sometimes watched pornographic movies together, but they found
Deep Throat
boring and fell asleep in the middle of it. Nevertheless, Jon told
Playboy
in 1978 that “Good in bed means giving head.”

Before long, Jon said, “It just seemed to be the natural thing to do to start being together all the time.” Barbra liked Jon’s place, which he had largely built himself out of aged wood and stucco. What impressed her most about the house was its lace curtains. “When I first went to see his house on Valley Vista I thought, Wow, this man is so creative and so original. Here was this smallish house—two thousand square feet—with burnt wood walls, mirrors, lace, and chandeliers. This combination of masculine and feminine. That made me realize that Jon was secure enough in his masculinity to be comfortable with his feminine side.”

O
N FEBRUARY
19, 1974, nominations for the forty-sixth annual Academy Awards were announced.
The Way We Were
garnered six, including Best Actress for Streisand. Jack Haley, the producer of the awards ceremony, asked Barbra to sing “The Way We Were,” which had been nominated as Best Song. Afraid to perform live in front of a worldwide audience of millions, she declined. Haley turned to Peggy Lee, who agreed to cut short a Canadian engagement to make the appearance. Shortly before the telecast, Barbra changed her mind, but Haley told her he wouldn’t cancel Peggy Lee at the last moment. Barbra was reportedly angry, and Lee’s performance during the April second telecast proved a disappointment. Her voice did little to enhance the melody line, and she reversed two stanzas. The song did win the award, as did Marvin Hamlisch’s score.

The Best Actress competition that year wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been in 1969. Also nominated were Joanne Woodward for
Summer Wishes
,
Winter Dreams
, Marsha Mason for
Cinderella Liberty,
Ellen Burstyn for
The Exorcist
, and Glenda Jackson for a light comedy role in
A Touch of Class
. Handicappers predicted either Streisand or Woodward would triumph, and Barbra thought her performance deserved the award: “I felt it was the best of those five for the year.” She declined to appear as a presenter, and she didn’t want to sit in the audience, where the camera could telecast her disappointment around the world if she lost. Instead she waited backstage with Jon, and when Glenda Jackson’s name was announced in an upset, Barbra picked herself up and went home.

Streisand’s bad reputation among Hollywood insiders undoubtedly cost her a second Best Actress Oscar, but Arthur Laurents feels that she was hurt as well by the fact that many of the scenes Sydney Pollack had cut from the film contained some of her best acting. In one, she catches Hubbell in flagrante delicto with his former girlfriend, and in another she drives past a student demonstration, stops, sees an ardent coed who is remarkably similar to her younger self, and starts to weep.

Laurents also felt that Barbra had blown her big dramatic opportunity in the scene where she telephones Hubbell in tears and begs him to come back to her. “She kept her hand in front of her face, and it looked like she was trying to hide [the fact] that she wasn’t acting very well,” Laurents said. “She
was
acting beautifully, but you couldn’t see it.” According to Laurents, he pleaded with Barbra to redo the scene and argued that her eyes were not red enough for a woman who had been weeping for hours. “She was surprised at my suggestion and said, ‘But I look so beautiful in that scene.
’”
Laurents felt that had the scene been reshot, Barbra would have won the Oscar.

Pollack countered Laurents’s assertions. “That scene was done in one take, and she was really crying.... Her eyes were plenty red. Maybe we didn’t have a pin light picking it up because it was a dark night scene.”

S
HORTLY AFTER THE
new year began, Jon and Barbra had decided to live together. First, though, Jon needed seven-year-old Jason’s approval. “I knew the big test would be when Jason met him,” Barbra recalled. “Finally I invited Jon over to the house, and he and Jason kind of stared at one another for a long time. Then Jason said, ‘Are you a good swimmer?’ and it was as if Jason just knew that Jon would be the kind of man he would like, for soon after, Jon and Jason were out in the pool. Jon was teaching Jason how to do the breaststroke. They’ve been friends ever since.”

In October 1973 Peters had purchased a small parcel of land in the secluded, heavily wooded Ramirez Canyon area of Malibu, and in March 1974 he and Barbra, buying separate lots, picked up three and a quarter additional acres at a cost of $250,000. Within two years they would buy up another sixteen acres for $600,000.

Over the next year, Jon expanded the small main house on the property with mellow wood salvaged from old barns in New York. Built almost entirely of wood and stone, the house took on the same eclectic, masculine-feminine look Barbra had admired in Jon’s Valley Vista home when she decorated the place with many of the antiques she had collected over the years. “Jon deals with the structure,” she said, “and I come along with the detail.” Tiffany lamps coexisted with Navajo rugs, lace was juxtaposed with macramé, distressed wooden sideboards held silver tea services, and Barbra’s treasured beaded bags hung from rusted hundred-year-old nails.

The stained-glass windows Barbra had commandeered from the set of
On a Clear Day
bounced splashes of multicolored sunlight around the loft bedroom, whose centerpiece was a huge four-poster bed handmade by Jon. The bathtub, set among river stones, resembled a mountain pool. Outside, a waterfall designed by Jon tinkled, an old wine vat housed the Jacuzzi, and a garden tended by Barbra sprouted tomatoes, corn, herbs, and sunflowers. Roaming the property were a Doberman, a stallion named Shot, and a mountain lion named Leo.

All of this outdoorsy living would have given the old Barbra an asthma attack, but she insisted that knowing Jon had changed her. “I love it here,” she said. “You are very much in touch with the earth, with the natural things that happen. I never used to walk or ride a bike. I never breathed deeply before. The pressures of this business can destroy you... The thing that keeps me sane is living here. It’s away from it all.”

L
OVING JON PETERS,
Barbra said, “has made me the happiest I’ve ever been.” She appreciated how much he had opened her up to new experiences, she adored his energy and his boyish rambunctiousness. “In the beginning he was really crazy, a nut,” she said. “He took me to a party once and said he wanted to go for a walk with me, then put me on his shoulders and wouldn’t let me down. He was so vital, so verbal, really terrific and alive.

“He’s the strongest person I’ve ever met,” Barbra went on. “I don’t mean physically; I mean in his presence, his sense of self, in his perceptions of other people, of other things, of his sensitivity, of his vitality, in his unconventional conventionalism. Like me. It’s fabulous to find somebody who’s like you. When I didn’t like myself as much as I do now, I was always drawn to people who were not like me.”

“Obviously I love Barbra,” Jon chimed in. “She’s powerful. She’s gentle. She’s beautiful. She’s fun to be with. She’s ten different people, and I love them all. On our good days we could fly over the universe. Our bad days are pretty low, too.”

On their bad days they fought, they scratched, they clawed. Jon had a temper forged on the mean streets, and when Barbra got angry she took no guff from anyone. “Our life together is fiery, really fiery,” Jon admitted. They found themselves arguing frequently about who was going to pay for what. “Money doesn’t really mean that much to me,” he said. “It means much more to Barbra.”

One night, Jon revealed, they had a terrible fight. “We were like wild animals. In the end, Barbra sat on my chest and spat at me. I spat back. Finally the resentment started to turn into something else, something sensual and sexual. It was very real, for it showed that on an emotional level people who love each other deeply occasionally really hate each other, too.”