Streisand: Her Life (76 page)

“As you Americans say,” the doctor replied, “she has zee gas.”

Marty and Jon shifted their feet uncomfortably. Steve Jaffe put his head in his hands. “The limo will be here at seven,” Stark said softly as he left. “The screening starts at eight. She should be there by seven-thirty.”

Barbra never did go to the gala. “She found out the French president had canceled his own appearance due to pressing business,” Jaffe said, “and she figured that let her off the hook. But there were hundreds of people from the highest levels of French society who were disappointed. They expected to see Barbra Streisand, and all they got was Jimmy Caan, Ray Stark, and David Begelman.

“Stark never stopped steaming, and Barbra decided she was never going to talk to Ray again. He felt she had let him down. She resented being forced to go on this grueling tour to promote a movie she didn’t even have any profit participation in. As we were at the airport getting ready to leave, there was ice-cold silence between Barbra and Ray. But finally he went over to her. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it was obviously some sort of apology. Barbra seemed to be saying, ‘I wasn’t so easy to deal with myself.’ It was like the end of a movie.

“A cynic might say that Stark didn’t want to burn his bridges with the biggest box-office star in the country,” Jaffe concluded. “And Barbra knew that Stark had all the financing power in the world. If she wanted to make a deal with Columbia, it was Ray who was in charge. She’s really smart when it comes to money. So she patched things up.”

B
ARBRA WOULD NEVER
be able to patch things up with Johnny Carson, though. The host of
Tonight
had been after her for years to appear on the program; her last stint had been in March of 1963. Finally, when Ray Stark, Jon, and Steve Jaffe all told her she should do it, Barbra agreed.

“Barbra was afraid to do live television interviews,” Steve Jaffe said. “She never wanted to put herself in a position where she wasn’t in control. She was afraid of losing the public’s admiration by saying something she couldn’t cut out later. And she wanted to control how she looked. She kept trying to redesign the show, do the lights herself. She kept changing the musical arrangements, and here you’re dealing with some of the finest musicians in the country. They just aren’t used to putting up with someone making tremendous demands on them because it’s a very well produced show.”

Still, Carson’s producer Fred deCordova was so eager to have Streisand that he capitulated to all her demands, and the appearance was scheduled for Wednesday evening, July 9. On Monday the show began a publicity blitz to promote the appearance, even though no one could reach Barbra to make last-minute preparations. On Tuesday Marty Erlichman called the show to say that Barbra had changed her mind and would not appear. Ray Stark called deCordova to apologize: “You know what she’s like. There’s nothing I can do.”

Johnny Carson was livid. During the Tuesday night show, he told his millions of viewers, “I was informed prior to going on the air that we’ll have a cancellation tomorrow night. Barbra Streisand will not be with us. We don’t know why. Nobody has been able to reach her.... Although she doesn’t owe the show anything in particular, we thought it only fair to tell you, so when you tune in, you don’t get mad at us. I would rather you get mad at her. Streisand will not be here Wednesday night, nor will she be here in the future.”

The next night Carson’s audience was surprised to hear him introduce Barbra. “I got Madlyn Rhue,” Carson later recalled, “and we dressed her up in a Streisand getup, and she started to do ‘People.’ For a moment you couldn’t tell if it was Streisand or not because she was lip-synching. I walked over and said, ‘Thank you, but we don’t need you.’ And she walked back to the curtain and it was wonderful.”

Twelve years earlier, Johnny had said to Barbra, “I suppose when you get to be a big star we’ll never see you again.”

“No,” Barbra had replied. “Never.”

“You know, she probably means it, too!” Johnny had exclaimed. Apparently she did.

J
ON WAS STILL
after Barbra to create a more youthful public image. “You can’t spend the rest of your life playing Ray Stark’s mother-in-law,” he had told her in exasperation. He had seen a script he liked, a rock remake of the classic Hollywood romantic tearjerker
A Star Is Born
.

Barbra laughed when he told her about it. “You idiot! That’s been made three times already.”

But this will be different, Jon argued. “You’ll play a sexy young girl, an aspiring singer. It’s exactly the kind of thing you should be doing in movies.”

“Well, maybe,” Barbra replied. Her decision to go ahead with the project would nearly destroy her relationship with Jon and nearly break her, body and soul. It would also make her a more popular star than she had ever been before.

“Now I want to take the
responsibility for my own choices and
my own visions. I’ve grown up.”

—Barbra in 1976

B
arbra’s eyes narrowed to slits as she contemplated the question. She sat surrounded by dozens of reporters at a large round white table on the twenty-yard line of Arizona State University’s Sun Devil Stadium. It was late morning, and the temperature had already soared into the mid-nineties as a harsh sun glinted off the tiny beads of sweat on Barbra’s forehead. She wore white slacks, a floral silk tunic top, a tightly curled new hairdo, and an unhappy expression.

Warner Brothers had flown one hundred fifty journalists to Tempe on a publicity junket to promote Streisand’s new movie,
A Star Is Born
, currently filming on location. She and Jon, her co-star Kris Kristofferson, and Frank Pierson, the film’s director, had made themselves available to the media by hopping from one table to the next. It was a risky, perhaps even foolhardy, promotional ploy. For not only were the cast and crew in the middle of a logistical nightmare—preparations to film a live rock concert sequence in front of fifty thousand young people—but rumors of discord and ego battles on the film had been rampant for months, prompted by a
New Times
magazine cover story that ridiculed Barbra’s personal and professional relationship with Jon and dubbed the picture, which Peters was producing and Barbra unofficially co-directing, “Hollywood’s Biggest Joke.”

Malicious glee prompted one reporter to ask, “What do you think of your co-star, Barbra?”

She began to answer, but Kristofferson, who had overheard the question while he sat at an adjacent table, interrupted her. “She said I was an asshole,” he called out.

The not-easily-shocked newspeople gasped. Barbra Streisand had called her leading man, a music superstar, an
asshole?
This was juicier than they could have hoped.

“Why did you call him an asshole?” the reporter pressed.

“I don’t know,” Barbra said, embarrassed. “I forget. He’s a beautiful man, let’s just stay with that.”

“Shit,” Kristofferson mumbled. He was wearing a brown cotton shirt open to the waist, and his rumored heavy daily intake of tequila with beer chasers already seemed to have taken effect.

Barbra glared at him as she mentioned that Bruce Springsteen’s music had served as the inspiration for that of Kris’s character.

“You should have hired him for the part,” Kristofferson sniped.

The reporters’ taste for blood was soon satisfied again as Kris and Barbra filmed a scene on the huge stage that had been erected for the concert. Kristofferson’s head had been swimming for weeks as he wondered to whom he should listen: Pierson, whom Barbra wanted to fire on the second day of filming; Streisand, who seemed to see the film as a way to experiment with every other idea that popped into her head; or Peters, who had never made a movie before but was on hand for just about every take.

“Nobody seemed to know what they were doing,” Kris reflected later. “Barbra was a pain in the ass. Jon and I were like a couple of dogs growling at each other. I wish she had told me up front who was in charge so I wouldn’t have had to go through the crap of wondering why she kept opening her mouth. We’d spend four hours setting up a scene, go out there, and have her say, ‘No, man, it’s all wrong.
’”

That’s just what Barbra told Kris this afternoon, and to the reporters’ delight, an open microphone broadcast their exchange throughout the stadium. “You’re not doing what I tell you to!” she told him.

“Shit!” he shot back. “I got Frank telling me one thing and you tellin’ me another. Who’s the director? Get your shit together!”

He turned his back to her, and she exploded. “Listen to me! I’m talking to you, goddamm it.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Kris responded.

Barbra stalked away, and Jon Peters moved toward Kris. “You owe my lady an apology.”

“Listen,” Kristofferson growled before he stormed off, “if I want any shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head.”

“If we didn’t have a movie to make I’d beat the shit out of you!” Peters bellowed after him.

And all the while the scribes scribbled furiously. Maybe this movie wasn’t Hollywood’s biggest joke. Maybe it was Hollywood’s biggest brawl.

A
STAR IS BORN
had taken a tortuous three-year path to production that began on July 1, 1973, in a car on a Hawaiian roadway when screenwriter John Gregory Dunne said to his wife and writing partner, Joan Didion, “James Taylor and Carly Simon in a rock remake of
A Star Is Born
.” The Dunnes took the idea to Dick Shepard, their former agent, now head of production at Warner Brothers. Warners had owned the rights to the story of a young actress on the ascent and her alcoholic actor husband on the way down since the last remake in 1954, starring Judy Garland and James Mason.

Shepard loved the idea. The tale had proven audience appeal, the rock elements would update it nicely, and the sound-track possibilities were so strong that the box-office take of the movie, as one music bigwig told Dunne, might just be “gravy.” The Dunnes were hired to write the screenplay, and there then ensued, in Dunne’s words, “three drafts, an arbitration, a threatened breach-of-contract suit, and a sizable legal (read ‘cash’) settlement.... As closely as I can figure, we were followed by, officially and unofficially, fourteen writers.”

John Foreman, a “hot” producer after the success of
Serpico
in 1973, signed on as producer of the project. It soon became clear that the music people at Warners were less excited about James Taylor, whose film and music careers were in the doldrums, than they were about his wife, Carly Simon, who had never made a film but whose records were flying out of the stores. “Don’t worry about James if you don’t use him,” one executive told Dunne. “We can always find something for him to do, maybe a house in Malibu.” That line wound up in one of the Dunnes’ subsequent drafts.

As worries built that hiring Carly Simon would result in a “multimillion-dollar screen test,” word came that she and Taylor weren’t interested in the project, reportedly because its plot hit a little too close to home. The script then settled on the ICM desk of Sue Mengers, who had replaced David Begelman and Freddie Fields as Barbra’s agent. Mengers immediately sent it to Streisand, her top client. “I don’t want to do a remake,” Barbra told her, and passed.

With Streisand and the Taylors out as potential stars, just about every musical name in Hollywood was bandied about to play the film’s main characters, John Norman Howard and Esther Hoffman: Elvis Presley and Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross and Alan Price, Cher and her husband, Gregg Allman.

The director Mark Rydell joined the project, then left after three months of work without pay. Foreman called Jerry Schatzberg, whose
Scarecrow
had won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and asked him to direct. Schatzberg signed a development deal with Warner Brothers, and Foreman told Schatzberg that Kris Kristofferson had agreed to play the male lead. But still there was no female star.

Soon thereafter, Jon called Schatzberg to see if he would be interested in directing Barbra in
Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nelly,
a Ray Stark project that she had turned down in 1968 but was now reconsidering. Schatzberg replied that he was committed to
A Star Is Born.
“What’s that?” Jon asked. When Schatzberg told him, Jon said, “It sounds interesting. Can we read it?”

J
ON STOOD IN
front of a full-length mirror, checking himself out and waxing enthusiastic about
A Star Is Born
to the reporter Marie Brenner. “
I
discovered this project.
I
was the one who found it for Barbra and convinced her to do it. She’d just done
Funny Lady
, and I thought, Why should a young girl be playing an old lady? She’s a young, hot, sexy woman.”

Barbra remained resistant to the idea for some time, but as Jon talked the project up, she liked it more and more. When she read the Dunnes’ script, she became convinced that her and Jon’s involvement in the project must have been preordained, because “the male character was named John, he drove a red Ferrari and had a red Jeep, which my Jon does, and he was a Gemini, which Jon is. It was kind of a mystical thing—it was destined to be.”

John Foreman called a meeting with Jon and Barbra, Kris Kristofferson—who hadn’t yet signed a contract—Jerry Schatzberg, and the Dunnes, who had wanted out of their contract but reconsidered when Streisand entered the picture, because with her involved, they said, “we knew we weren’t going to get poor.” But as discussions progressed, the writers grew uneasy. Barbra didn’t feel the love story was strong enough, and she worried that the male part was the better one. As Jon and Barbra expressed their ideas about how to punch up the love angle, the Dunnes realized that what the couple wanted to put on screen was
their
love story. “The world is waiting to see Barbra’s and my story!” Jon exclaimed, jumping up and waving his arms as he often did in moments of epiphany.

The Dunnes flinched, and before long they were pushed out of the project with a deal guaranteeing them $125,000 and 10 percent of the gross. Schatzberg, however, seemed to be on the same wavelength with Streisand and Peters. By now Barbra had persuaded Warner Brothers to allow First Artists and Barwood to produce
A Star Is Born,
making her the film’s executive producer. She would take no salary either for producing or starring, but stood to make a great deal of money with a 25 percent cut of the film’s box-office net. Then she hit the moneymen with a bombshell: she wanted Jon to produce the picture.