Streisand: Her Life (73 page)

That realization, Barbra said, “was a very liberating thing for me, because now I can say I hate without destroying love.”

Jon’s volatility sat less well with those who didn’t love him. When Elliott Gould visited the Malibu ranch, he and Jon got into an argument over Elliott’s visitation rights to Jason. As Steve Jaffe recalled it, “Elliott could be very vague. He would act dumb when he wasn’t hearing what he wanted to hear, like he didn’t understand English or something. It frustrated the hell out of Jon. This one time Elliott was acting particularly dense, and finally Jon lost it and he threw Elliott down on the hood of his car and yelled, ‘Listen, don’t give me that bullshit! We’re going to take good care of Jason!’ They came to blows, and suddenly Elliott was as alert as could be. They worked things out, and Jon said, ‘Now I’m ready to be friends with him.’ That was typical Jon.”

Jon’s divorce from Lesley Ann Warren was still pending. In June 1974 Lesley petitioned the Santa Monica court to issue a restraining order against Jon for “annoyance.” She won the order, which stated that “Peters is restrained from annoying, harassing, molesting and making disparaging, derogatory comments about the mother, and she about Peters, to or in front of the minor child.” The final divorce decree gave custody of Christopher to his mother, and ordered Jon to pay $400 a month in child support. The judge also ordered Jon to pay Lesley $1,000 a month in alimony until January 1, 1983. In petitioning for the alimony, she testified that she had only one hundred dollars on hand for living expenses. “My lifestyle is used to higher standards,” she told the court.

J
ON AND BARBRA
loved together and lived together; to work together seemed a logical extension of their relationship. From the beginning Jon had been after Barbra to “get with what’s happening” musically. He had caught Bette Midler’s wild and woolly show in New York in the fall of 1973, and he told Barbra, “I don’t know anything about music, but Bette Midler was terrific and you’re better than she is, and if you could get involved with some young people and use that instrument in a contemporary way...”

Columbia wanted a new album from Streisand in time for Christmas, and Jon kept suggesting songs for Barbra to sing on it. One day she said to him, “Why don’t you design the album cover?”

“How about if I produce the whole thing?” Jon replied.

At the first recording sessions Barbra, braless and wearing a tight T-shirt, hung all over Jon, sat on his lap, and kissed him as her favorite photographer, Steve Schapiro, snapped away. Schapiro didn’t record the battles, however. “She’d get as tense as a prizefighter,” Jon recalled to Julia Orange of
Woman’s Day
. “We fought about it. I quit, she quit, I’d fire her, she’d fire me.”

Barbra and Jon had selected songs “no one was particularly thrilled about,” she later admitted. And when Columbia heard the cuts—which included Carole King’s “You Light Up My Life,” the sixties Drifters hit “On Broadway,” and an R&B song called “Turn Me On (It’s a Funky Type Thing)”—the label’s artists and repertoire director Charles Koppelman called in the producer Gary Klein and gave him the unenviable job of sitting down with Barbra and Jon to tell them the cuts just didn’t cut it. “Charles and I didn’t think it was up to Barbra’s standards,” Klein recalled, “and he wanted me to go out to California, sit down with them, and tell them why. It was very difficult to meet her for the first time to criticize an album that her boyfriend, who was sitting right there, had produced. But I went over the album cut by cut, and I was very specific about what I thought was wrong with it, and they knew I knew what I was talking about, so I gained their respect.”

The recording engineer Al Schmitt came in to remix the tracks, but he quit within three days when Jon refused to share the producing credit with him. The whole thing blew up into a barrage of bad publicity about “Barbra’s hairdresser boyfriend” when Schmitt gave an extended interview to Joyce Haber of the
Los Angeles Times
. “This album has a flat, one-dimensional sound,” Schmitt said. “Peters is a nice guy, but he’s not a record producer.... Essentially, Peters wanted all the money and I’d be doing all the work.... Streisand has this tremendous thing of knowing exactly what’s right for her. But now, it seems, that’s gone out the window. She’s never let anyone direct her career this way.”

The morning Haber’s column appeared, Barbra got the reporter on the phone, waking her, to defend Jon and the album. “Is Schmitt trying to imply that I’ve given up my career for Jon Peters?” she asked. “I don’t even know this Schmitt. The only thing he said that’s true is ‘Barbra has this thing of knowing exactly what’s right for her.’ This is possibly the best singing I’ve ever done. That’s what Al Schmitt told Jon.

“I’m an artist. Jon and I have to deal with ourselves on two levels—as creative people and as lovers. The reason we’re calling [the album]
ButterFly
is that when we first met he said I reminded him of a butterfly. He gave me this one-hundred-year-old Indian butterfly [brooch]. Both of us gravitate toward butterflies. Jon designed the album cover.... My attitude has changed toward people. I’m less afraid. That’s Jon. It kills me to have him put down more than to have me put down.”

Those comments provided fodder for ridicule. Jon, with no experience, had not only produced the album but designed the cover too? And what was all that about gravitating toward butterflies? Cynics snickered that Barbra Streisand appeared not only to have been blinded by love for a fledgling Svengali but to have become a spacey flower child in the bargain.

“Do they think I would let Jon produce a record if I wasn’t absolutely sure he could do it,” Barbra retorted. “I believe in instinct, I believe in imagination, I believe in taste. These are the important ingredients, and they’re all the things he has.”

Jon jumped to his own defense as well: “Barbra is far too much of a professional to get involved with me professionally just as a romantic gesture. And of course they’re going to think I hit the jackpot by being with Barbra.... What they forget is that I made a lot of money before I met Barbra.”

M
OST CRITICS WERE
lying in wait when
ButterFly
was released in October 1974. They mocked the album’s cover (a fly alighted on a stick of butter), its back cover (a rendering of Barbra’s face on a Maxfield Parrish-like field of butterflies), its inside photo spread of Barbra hanging all over Jon, and Barbra and Jon’s choice of material. Traditionalist critic Hugh Harrison admonished Streisand, writing that
ButterFly
was “not only your worst public exposure ever but may well be one of the worst albums ever made by a major talent” and that she should never have trusted Jon to produce the album.

Not all the reviews were negative, though. Shaun Considine, writing in
The New York Times
, said, “Beyond the fashionable cracks at Peters’s profession... his role as producer certainly has enhanced this album.
ButterFly
is one of Streisand’s finest albums in years. It is a revelation of what this performer can do when she leaves her legend outside the studio doors.... Love becomes the lady.”

The truth about the quality of
ButterFly
lies somewhere in the middle. The album, like all of Streisand’s pop-rock efforts, has high points and low. Barbra does the most soulful wailing she has ever done on the stirring “Grandma’s Hands,” and brings such steamy sensuality to “Love in the Afternoon” and “Guava Jelly” that one can imagine her needing to take a private break with Jon after laying down each track. But her mechanical rendering of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” is, as Bowie himself put it, “bloody awful,” and “I Won’t Last a Day without You” is just as saccharine and dull as it was when Karen Carpenter sang it.

ButterFly
proved criticproof. It rose to number thirteen and received gold certification three months after its release. Commercially, at least, Jon had proved himself, but the
Stereo Review
critic Peter Reilly took the wind out of even those sails when he wrote, “saying that one ‘produced’ a Streisand album is like saying that one pumped up the tires for Henry Ford.”

Whatever the merits of
ButterFly
, Jon had had enough. “I’ve had it with producing records,” he said. “I made my mark. Barbra and I are now going on to bigger stuff, like doing big concerts and movies.”

T
hat’s the most disgusting idea I’ve ever heard!” Barbra shouted at Ray Stark. “You can’t capitalize on something that has worked before. You’ll have to drag me into court to do that picture!”

The picture Barbra refused to do was
Funny Lady
, a sequel to
Funny Girl
, which would take Fanny Brice from just before her divorce from Nick Arnstein through a second marriage and into the 1940s. Many observers joined Streisand in the opinion that Stark would be foolish to attempt to re-create her greatest film triumph, but Stark saw the sequel as a guaranteed box-office blockbuster. Still, Barbra hadn’t appeared in a musical in five years, and many moviegoers hungered to see her sing onscreen again. She would be returning to her Oscar-winning Fanny Brice characterization, under the aegis of a producer who would spare no expense to package the film with the most lavish production values. How could it lose?

Barbra kept telling Stark “There is no way I will do this movie”—until she read a witty, insightful script rewrite by Jay Presson Allen, the scenarist of
Cabaret
. “There was wonderful material available,” Allen said. “Fanny Brice did an oral history two years before she died that was just a mine, an embarrassment of riches.” Allen also admitted he had tailored some of the dialogue to fit Barbra’s “powerful personality and singular pattern of speech and pace.” Allen’s partly fictionalized account began in the early days of the Depression and focused on Fanny’s life following her painful divorce and on her second marriage to producer-hustler-songwriter Billy Rose. Though Brice and Rose start off as bickering antagonists, they eventually marry after developing an affection for each other that is rooted in companionship, a shared sense of humor, and mutual business interests rather than in romantic passion.

The marriage runs smoothly until their careers impose a lengthy separation. On the road with an aquacade, Billy takes up with his star swimmer Eleanor Holm while Fanny, in Hollywood to begin her stint as radio’s Baby Snooks, unexpectedly encounters Nick Arnstein. Ultimately, Brice and Rose part, leaving Fanny sadder but free of romantic illusions about men.

Barbra felt an empathy for the older Fanny Brice. “I understand her whole thing with Billy Rose,” Barbra said, “and what it means to fall in love with somebody who is like you. You can only do that when you accept yourself and feel yourself worthy of being loved.... Otherwise it’s always your fantasies—like hers with Nicky Arnstein.... In the second part of Fanny’s life, I feel she starts to discover herself... and finally lets go of her illusions and fantasies about men. She grows up.” Barbra could, of course, have been describing herself since she met Jon Peters.

Along with her admiration for the script, Barbra agreed to make
Funny Lady
mainly to put an end to her obligation to Ray Stark, to whom she owed one final film on the contract they had drawn up nearly a decade earlier. She also saw the project as an opportunity to play a grown-up Fanny who was tougher, wiser, and truer to the original than the one portrayed in the first film. “The Fanny Brice of
Funny Lady
is a marvelous character that I didn’t play in
Funny Girl
,” she admitted. “That Fanny Brice was more like me. Even the numbers were written for me. Now I’m more of an actress and less of an ego. It’s more of a real acting job for me in this picture.”

V
INTAGE PHOTOGRAPHS SHOW
that Fanny Brice, even in low heels, towered over the four-foot-eleven-inch Billy Rose. With this height discrepancy in mind, the first actor to read for the part was short, stocky, pugnacious Robert Blake, who had played a television gumshoe in
Baretta
. Invited to read a scene with Barbra at Carolwood, Blake asked instead if they could run through the entire script. Barbra complied, and she was impressed with his reading. But contrary to press reports, Blake was not offered the role on the spot. Al Pacino’s name surfaced briefly in some columns as a likely candidate, but it was his
The Godfather
co-star, James Caan, who was signed to play Billy at the end of 1973. Tall, athletic, and ruggedly handsome, Caan seemed the polar opposite of Rose. With an eye to the box-office potential of a Caan-Streisand teaming, Ray Stark went on the defensive about the casting. “If Arnstein could be played by an Arab,” he offered, “then Billy Rose didn’t have to be short.”

Barbra rationalized the choice from another angle. “It comes down to whom the audience wants me to kiss. Robert Blake, no. James Caan, yes.”

Omar Sharif, whose box-office appeal had slipped considerably since
Funny Girl
with missteps like
Che!, The Tamarind Seed
, and
The Mysterious Island of Captain Nemo,
agreed to return as Nick Arnstein in three brief but pivotal scenes.

To no one’s surprise, Herb Ross was signed to direct
Funny Lady
, and his suggestion of Vilmos Zsigmond
(McCabe and Mrs. Miller)
for cinematographer met with everyone’s approval. Bob Mackie, highly publicized for the glitzy, sometimes outlandish designs he whipped up for Cher’s and Carol Burnett’s television shows, was engaged to create the film’s costumes in tandem with his partner Ray Aghayan.
Funny Lady’s
musical score would consist of old standards, some penned by Billy Rose, and new songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, who were at the peak of their careers following the success of their razor-sharp score for
Cabaret
.

Ray Stark budgeted
Funny Lady
at $7.5 million (less than the original). In an unusual move, all fourteen of the film’s musical numbers were rehearsed one after the other and filmed in sixteen days in the early spring of 1974 at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s theater soundstage, which featured a fully rendered proscenium, theater seats, and backstage space equal to that of a typical Broadway theater. The first number shot, “Great Day,” was given an elaborate design that placed a sequin-draped Barbra at the top of a stylized altar, where she belted out the Song, gospel-like, as black dancers writhed below her.

When Ray Stark viewed the footage of the number the next day, he was shocked at Vilmos Zsigmond’s approach to the cinematography. Zsigmond had opted for a dark, realistic, almost gritty look to a scene that cried out for glossy Hollywood glamour. According to the film’s assistant director, Jack Roe, “Vilmos did a terrible job. When I saw the rushes, all I could see was the one dancer right in front of the camera. Vilmos blamed it on the lab, but it was a joke. I don’t know why they hired him anyway. He wasn’t the right person for the movie.”

Sensing disaster, Stark fired Zsigmond, to the surprise of his star. Gossips claimed that the firing was instigated by Streisand because she didn’t feel Zsigmond’s photography had flattered her looks, but Barbra was apparently not told of Zsigmond’s dismissal until after the fact. Zsigmond, who went on to win an Oscar for
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, later defended himself: “I wanted the movie to look less like
Funny Girl
and more like
Cabaret
.... They wanted the old concept of musicals. They were not interested in art, but in making it safe.”

Stark then begged the two-time Oscar-winner James Wong Howe, seventy-six and five years into retirement, to take over the photography of
Funny Lady
. Intrigued by the idea of shooting his first musical since
Yankee Doodle Dandy
in 1941, Howe agreed to the job, even as he learned that he would have to begin the following morning at seven-thirty without any preparation. “I’m sure if I hadn’t had fifty-seven years of experience in the film industry, I wouldn’t have been able to jump into such a big project on twenty-four hours’ notice,” he said.

Funny Lady
production progressed smoothly except for one incident that might have proved tragic. “The second day of filming,” remembered the second assistant director Stu Fleming, “a sandbag fell from up high and missed Jason by that much. It was
so
close. Barbra didn’t know about it. We’ve never talked about it. I doubt she knows about it today. Nothing was ever said, because that would have freaked her out. She would have been gone.”

After several weeks at MGM the company moved on to the Columbia soundstages in Burbank for the majority of the interior shots. It was soon obvious to bystanders that James Caan and Barbra were developing a pleasant, even playful, working relationship. Their first important scene together proved to be tough sledding only because the two stars couldn’t keep from breaking up.

Wayne Warga, on the set for the
Los Angeles Times,
observed, “Everything on [the sixth take] is going perfectly. Streisand, disdainfully smoking while Caan promotes [his song], is solidly in character and remains so as a piece of tobacco gets stuck on the tip of her tongue. She carefully reaches up to pick it off just as Caan, in the passion of promotion, grabs her hand to emphasize his point—and shoves her hand into his mouth. The entire company—several dozen extras in the club, the crew and various supporting people—explodes in laughter, and from then on, neither Caan nor Streisand can look at one another without giggling. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll get it right this time,’ she says.

“
‘Time is money, time is money—and no, you won’t,’ Caan replies.”

“From that day on,” Caan later said, “I was yelling at her, putting her down, and calling her a spoiled rotten thing, and she would call me [names] and we’d carry on and we’d laugh.... I just remember giggling quite a bit.” In a later scene, Fanny, looking flawless in an elegant shimmering gown topped with cock feathers, has words with Billy in her dressing room. As the argument escalates, Rose picks up a full carton of loose dusting powder and threatens to throw it in Fanny’s face. Barbra told Herb Ross, “I don’t think that Jimmy should hit me... with this powder; [it’s] toxic, you know, and I’ll get it in my lungs.”

Caan winked at Ross and said, “I think you’re right.... I’ll go to hit you with it and then I won’t.” Of course he ended up hitting Barbra full in the face with the chalky powder, and she was stunned. “I really felt bad for a minute because she was so shocked,” Caan said. “She called me names. She said, ‘You lied to me!’ I was hysterical. And then she laughed too.” As good a sport as Barbra turned out to be about the incident, she would not agree to a second take.