Streisand: Her Life (78 page)

W
ITH KRIS KRISTOFFERSON’S
participation still uncertain, Barbra and Jon turned their attention to finding an alternative co-star. They considered Mick Jagger, but the studio bigwigs felt that he’d had his shot at movie stardom and blown it. They considered Bob Dylan, but the word came down from studio executives that Dylan wasn’t “aesthetically pleasing” enough to co-star opposite Barbra. (Kristofferson heard about this and assumed they meant Dylan “looks too Jewish.”) Barbra, as always, wanted the most attractive leading man possible; most of her biggest movie successes had paired her with “gorgeous
goyisher
guys.”

Barbra’s thoughts turned to Elvis Presley. Jon loved the idea: “The man’s been an idol of mine since I was nine! Imagine Barbra Streisand opposite the King of Rock ’n’ Roll!” But Elvis had changed dramatically since Barbra’s affair with him in Las Vegas in 1969. He was over the hill, she worried, and he had gained an alarming amount of weight.

“Perfect!” Jon exclaimed. “He’ll really understand the part.”

Presley agreed to meet with the couple in Las Vegas. When he entered their hotel room, both Barbra and Jon were shocked. Elvis looked far worse than either had expected. “He was so fat he looked almost pregnant,” Jon recalled. He also seemed lethargic, unfocused, out of it. “He was dying, really.” They spent two hours sitting on the floor, talking, drinking wine. Jon suspected it would be difficult for Elvis to get back up.

At one point a boozy Presley looked at Barbra and said, “You know, you’re the only woman who has ever intimidated me.”

On the flight back to Los Angeles, Barbra and Jon remained quiet, dispirited. “He was John Norman Howard,” Jon said.

“And that’s why he wouldn’t be able to play him,” Barbra responded. Elvis was out of the running.

A
T AN IMPASSE
with co-star possibilities, Jon and Barbra looked again for a writer and a director. Both came in the person of Frank Pierson, whom Warner Brothers had asked to do a “fast rewrite” of the
Star Is Born
script. Pierson—tall, snowy-bearded, fifty—was a hot screenwriting commodity in Hollywood; his script for
Dog Day Afternoon
would win an Academy Award the following year. “In a moment of mad ambition,” Pierson said, he accepted the assignment.

“He was going to be only the writer,” Barbra recalled, “and then at the last minute he said he wouldn’t write it unless he could direct it. I said, ‘Well, I’ll let you direct it if you let me collaborate with you.
’”
According to Barbra, Pierson agreed.

Although Pierson’s directing experience was limited to television and one unsuccessful feature film—
The Looking Glass War
, in 1969—Barbra warmed to the idea of his directing
Star
when he seemed to agree with her primary goal for the film: to update the story and bring the male-female relationship more in tune with the various social revolutions that had taken place since the last version in 1954.

As they discussed casting at the ranch, Pierson recalled in a memoir of the experience, Barbra asked, “What about Brando? I’ve always wanted to work with Brando. Why does it have to be a musical?”

“Brando was here!” Jon shouted, jumping up. “He was cute! The son of a bitch, he wanted to screw Barbra—I was ready to kill him! I take him off [her], and I kiss him. He’s beautiful! I love him, the bastard! They’d make a great pair. Imagine. Streisand and Brando.”

Pierson reminded Barbra that the studio’s forbearance all this time had been based on her
singing
in this picture, and he gently added that the idea of remaking
A Star Is Born
without music was absurd. The Brando idea evaporated.

Barbra told Pierson she agreed with Jon that the public wanted to see their love story. “People are curious,” she said. “They want to know about us. That’s what they come to see.” She and Jon then confided to Pierson the most intimate details of their life, their lovemaking, their fights. But when Barbra read those details in Pierson’s first draft script, she got cold feet. The movie, she said now, “was not our life. You don’t want to make it too real. I don’t want to use too much... because someday they’ll want to do my life story, and I don’t want to use it up.”

Because Barbra felt strongly that for the sake of realism the music for
A Star Is Born
should be filmed live, Pierson would not consider anyone but Mick Jagger or Kris Kristofferson as her costar. Finally forced into a decision, Barbra chose Kristofferson. “He’s an actor. He’s beautiful to look at. He can sing and play the guitar. And he’s a Gentile, which seems to work with me—the Jew and the Gentile.”

What Pierson didn’t know was that Barbra and Kristofferson had enjoyed a brief affair in 1970, before he met his future wife, Rita Coolidge, and while Barbra was separated from Elliott, so Barbra knew the chemistry between them would likely be special. Kristofferson later told a reporter that during their affair “she was being a superstar and I was being a country shitkicker, both playing games.”

Kris met with Barbra at the Malibu ranch to discuss the role, and he liked her ideas, but he wasn’t told that she considered herself the film’s co-director. “I knew Barbra was writing the script and the picture’s big songs and had total control of everything,” he said, “but Frank was
called
the director, an’ I figured I’d just do my usual tap dance between two haystacks, tryin’ to keep both star and director happy. I’d never been in no movie where they were the same person.”

At one point in the meeting, Barbra asked Kristofferson, a former Rhodes scholar, if he was willing to stretch himself as an actor. Kris replied, “Are you willing to get down? I’ll stretch as far as you get down.”

T
HE TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD
singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes stood in the middle of Barbra’s music room at Carolwood for the first time, while his debut album,
Widescreen
, played in the background. As Barbra walked in to greet him, she casually sang along with the album. “She knew the words to all the songs,” Holmes later marveled. Barbra was working on her new album, and she had tracked Holmes down in his New York studio. When they met, Barbra told Holmes that she was particularly impressed with his album’s dramatic title tune, with its imagery of movie-fueled fantasies that were so much like her own when she was a girl in Brooklyn.

By April 1975, Streisand and Holmes were in the studio laying down tracks for what would become Barbra’s thirtieth album,
Lazy Afternoon
. They established such an easy working rapport that both sides of the disc were recorded in just three six-hour days. Holmes treasures the experience. “She took the risk [of hiring a relative neophyte], and she never once doubted or lost confidence in me. Barbra gave me many gifts besides giving the gift of her talent and voice to my songs.”

When
Lazy Afternoon
was released in October 1975, it emerged as one of Streisand’s most consistent and satisfying pop albums. Holmes’s imaginative musical settings complemented Barbra’s kaleidoscopic vocals beautifully. “Shake Me, Wake Me” marked her first foray into the effervescent disco sound, and a lengthened version of the song, with a funkier arrangement, proved popular in dance clubs.

The majority of critics, many of whom had loathed
ButterFly
, welcomed
Lazy Afternoon
as a first-rate effort. “In restoring her to the pop mainstream,” said Robert Hilburn in the
Los Angeles Times
, “Holmes ironically has given Streisand her most authentic connection yet with contemporary pop influences.... The steady drum emphasis and closing guitar shading on her version of ‘My Father’s Song’ is an example.”

Lazy Afternoon
peaked at number twelve on
Billboard’s
album chart, and went gold in April 1976. By then, however, Rupert Holmes had been practically flattened by the volatile
Star Is Born
juggernaut.

B
Y OCTOBER
1975, scant months before the February start date Warner Brothers had insisted upon so that
A
Star Is Born
could be released by Christmas 1976, this musical had no music. Rupert Holmes had come aboard the prior March as musical supervisor and had written a dozen songs for the film, but he found the experience frustrating. “I read about twelve different scripts before I tried to write the score,” he complained, and thus his tunes had little dramatic cohesion. Barbra wasn’t satisfied with most of them, and during a meeting to discuss alterations, Jon lost his temper with the composer. According to Pierson, Holmes grew frightened of Jon’s fury and took the first plane back to New York. He never again communicated with anyone about the movie and didn’t work with Barbra again until 1988.

As part of her preparation to play Esther Hoffman, Barbra immersed herself in the rock milieu, attending every concert within a hundred-mile radius of Los Angeles. Jon installed a $20,000 sound system at the ranch and bought an entire catalog of the latest rock albums. Barbra took guitar lessons; since Esther Hoffman was a musician and songwriter, Barbra wanted her strumming to look realistic. Night after night, Jon said, she sat “alone in our living room until one, two, three o’clock in the morning, plucking away on her guitar.”