Streisand: Her Life (77 page)

When word of this leaked out, most Hollywood observers chuckled. Streisand wants her boyfriend, a hairdresser, to produce a $6 million musical? Surely Warner Brothers would laugh at the suggestion. When the studio agreed, the amusement turned to chagrin. The Warner executives’ reasoning, word had it, was that a Streisand musical was foolproof box-office gold. “It doesn’t matter if the picture is good,” one executive said. “Shoot her singing six numbers and we’ll make $60 million.” But underlying the agreement was Warners’ assumption that Jon would be a figurehead producer, someone who would defer to the experience of Foreman and Schatzberg.

The assumption proved wrong as Jon began to speak about
“my
concept,
my
picture.” Every night he and Barbra sat up until the early morning hours discussing what approach the film should take, how to make the screenplay right for Barbra, how to update the plot to the seventies. They screened the Judy Garland-James Mason version, and both were impressed. But something about the picture bothered Barbra. Later she would verbalize her misgivings: “The female character was so passive in the earlier versions. All she did was love him and watch him come apart. But this is the seventies. I don’t believe it. She shouldn’t stand around and watch him disintegrate. I want her to say, ‘Fight for me, goddammit. Protect yourself or
I’ll
kill you!
’”

These private tête-à-têtes between Barbra and Jon disturbed Jerry Schatzberg. “His influence over her was very strong,” he said. “We’d talk about one thing, and then I’d come in the next day and everything would be changed, and I wasn’t privy to their conversations. He was like Rasputin or Svengali with her. She ogled him, aahed over him. She was a woman in love. He would come up with something, and she would say, ‘I think that’s a great idea,’ and she’d come back to me.”

K
RIS KRISTOFFERSON’S AGENT
was holding out for equal billing With Streisand, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to give it to him. Barbra called Schatzberg and asked, “What do you think of Jon playing opposite me?” She explained that Jon had told her, “Hey, I can do this part. I got the looks and the energy!”

“You can do anything, Jon,” Barbra had replied.

Schatzberg assumed she was kidding, but she persisted. He told her he would think about it, in the hope that she wouldn’t bring the subject up again. But the next day she pressed him on it. This is completely ludicrous, Schatzberg thought as he asked for a meeting with Barbra and Jon at the Malibu ranch.

“I don’t want to shoot a documentary about you two,” he told them. He also reminded them that Kristofferson, although he still hadn’t signed a contract, was considered part of the package.

“You mean Warners would rather have
him
than
me
,” Barbra demanded. Schatzberg then cut to the core question: “Can Jon sing?”

“No,” Jon admitted. Then he leaped up. “But you could shoot around me, just like you were going to do with Kristofferson.”

“Look,” Schatzberg replied, “you can do that with a singer to make it look like his acting has more energy. You can’t do it with an actor to make it look like he’s a singer.”

The wind whistled out of Jon’s sails, and the idea was dropped. Later he and Barbra would claim the notion was little more than a joke, but Schatzberg isn’t sure. He remains astonished that Barbra ever supported the idea. “If you think of Barbra Streisand, that’s not normally what she would do, because she’s much too clever for that. But that was at the height of their affair, and her judgment was clouded.”

Kristofferson had heard about Jon’s desire to replace him, and when John Foreman called him to say, “Disregard everything you’ve heard about Jon Peters playing your part.” Kris replied, “Is Barbra’s still up for grabs? I’ll try for
that
one.”

Now Jon felt that what the film needed was a young, hip new writer, and Sue Mengers suggested one of her clients who was barely into his twenties: Jonathan Axelrod, the stepson of the screenwriter George Axelrod. He hit it off well with both Jon and Barbra. “I found them fantastic, very gentle and sensitive to my feelings and to my age,” he said. He was in awe of both of them, and attracted to Barbra: “I thought she was very sexy, and I had a big crush on her.” The three of them spent hours in story conferences at the ranch; Jon considered Axelrod “my interpreter.”

Jerry Schatzberg turned crimson when he heard about this. “They were having meetings with this writer without my knowledge,” he said. “Now, maybe that’s a Hollywood thing to do, but in New York we have respect for the director and his input.”

Shortly after Axelrod appeared, Schatzberg quit the film. “When I told Barbra my decision, she genuinely didn’t understand it. But I didn’t think, under the circumstances, that I could perform the way I should have. Jon was a little immature as a producer, and he tried to fake his way through in certain ways. I thought I had enough experience to help him along, but in the end I just felt I couldn’t direct Barbra properly under the circumstances.”

Jon continued to work closely with Axelrod—so closely that when the writer presented a script after four months, Jon told his associates, “I wrote it.” But he and Barbra still weren’t satisfied. The movie, they felt, needed “meatier dialogue” and “a real writer.” After nine months Axelrod was off the project, but he feels no bitterness because he himself wasn’t satisfied with the script he had produced. Rather, he’s grateful to Barbra for helping him stretch his talent. “Don’t limit yourself,” she had told him. “Be an artist.”

J
ON AND BARBRA
forgot about finding another writer for a while and interviewed a string of potential directors, including Arthur Hiller and Hal Ashby. None seemed to understand their vision for the film; most, Jon said, “bored” him. During one dead-of-night discussion in bed, Jon turned to Barbra and said he should direct the film. “Nobody understands this better than I do.”

“You’re
right
!” Barbra exclaimed.

This time Warner executives resisted, and negotiations dragged on for three months before they gave in to this notion, too. By then a new problem had popped up: bad press. The
Los Angeles Times
columnist Joyce Haber wrote a series of articles ridiculing the film, Barbra, and Jon’s pretensions to being producer, star, and director of a major movie musical. This put considerable added pressure on the studio, and on Barbra and Jon, who were shocked by the criticism.

Still, they remained adamant. “Directing is a thing I’ve done all my life!” Jon exclaimed to Marie Brenner, who was doing a piece on the peregrinations of the project for
New Times
magazine. He and Brenner were dining with some studio people and Steve Jaffe at the Warner commissary. “It’s getting people to do what I want them to do.” He got too excited to eat as he told Brenner, “This is a young movie, young ideas, young talent. People in this town have it in for me because I’m young, you know what I mean? And I’m a bit uptight about directing this film. This is a big project, you know?”

Jaffe piped up that with a good editor, script, and cameraman, Jon would be as competent as half the directors in Hollywood, even with no experience.

“That’s what I think,” Jon responded. “That’s why my editor is Dede Allen!”

Marie Brenner was impressed: Allen was renowned as the best editor in Hollywood. But Brenner later learned that Jon had never spoken to Allen, and when he did so later in the day, she turned down his offer to edit the picture. But she suggested her young former assistant for the job, and Jon loved the idea. “Great! This is a
young
movie. We need young ideas, we need young talent.”

W
HEN BRENNER’S
New Times
article appeared in March 1975, it stunned Barbra and Jon. Barbra had declined to be interviewed, but Jon had given Brenner his full cooperation. He and Barbra both felt that Brenner had betrayed them. The cover of the magazine featured a rendering of a bald Barbra with the headline “A Star Is Shorn.” The article portrayed her and Peters as egomaniacal children with an expensive new plaything, and called the movie “Hollywood’s biggest joke.” Barbra was shattered. This project was difficult enough without being made a laughingstock. According to Steve Jaffe, Brenner “snowed me like you can’t believe. She made it seem as though she would not write a bad word. She said all the right things to persuade Jon to cooperate. I consider it the classic journalistic deception of my career.”

The bad publicity soured the notion of Jon directing
A Star Is Born
, and later Barbra insisted that it was merely a fleeting thought, like his playing John Norman, that had been blown out of proportion by the press. And yet during an interview by Barbara Walters on
Today
in February 1975, Barbra had stated unequivocally, “He’s going to direct it.”