Streisand: Her Life (80 page)

Barbra seemed to Pierson not to hear. “Listen,” she said finally, “where are the close-ups? There are never any close-ups in this picture. When I worked with Willie Wyler, we had close-ups in every scene.” Pierson had vowed to himself not to discuss things like this with Barbra, but he nonetheless pointed out some recent close-ups they had shot. “Soon we are embroiled in exactly how close up a close-up has to be to be called a close-up.”

Three weeks before the scheduled shoot in Phoenix, Pierson claimed, he learned to his dismay that for all of Jon’s enthusiasm about the concert, he had done nothing to arrange it. “This is a disaster of such magnitude that I cannot think about it,” Pierson wrote. “All I can do is shoot whatever is there the day we arrive.”

This fatalism of Pierson’s irked Barbra most about him. Jon finally came through by hiring the rock promoter Bill Graham to organize the concert, which Graham accomplished in record time. Acts were signed, posters were printed, everything was set. Now all the
Star Is Born
crew had to worry about was that fifty thousand young rock fans wouldn’t turn into a raging mob while Pierson and Streisand bickered over setups.

Everyone was nervous, including Phil Ramone, who was there to record Kris’s performance live. “Christ, my ass is on the line,” he said at the time. “And to make matters worse, the film crew doesn’t really understand what I’m doing or how this is coming together. They’re used to having sound prerecorded so it usually doesn’t matter what the music sounds like during a shoot. But when Kris goes out on that stage, we’ll be filming it, sound and all. What you hear in that stadium is what you’ll hear in the film
. What we
don’t get we’ll never get. It’s like driving on slick pavement!”

“I just want to tap-dance and fart my way through.” Kris joked, but he was worried, edgy, and angry at Barbra. After first opposing the use of Kristofferson’s own band, Barbra had changed her mind. “I have
always
relied on my band to make me look good when I didn’t on my own,” Kris would explain, “an’ I figured for this movie, I’d need them in the
worst
way.”

But the moment Kris’s boys got off the plane at Phoenix, Barbra commandeered them to audition for her. “They’re stuffed in this little room playing stuff they’ve never heard before,” Kris told
Rambler
magazine. “Barbra listened and instantly said we gotta get studio musicians, the kind who read charts, like in Vegas shows.”

Kris wanted to kill somebody. “I ain’t trusting my career to no Vegas singer and her hairdresser!” he bellowed before storming out to the parking lot and into his publicist’s car to take a ride and cool off.

Barbra agreed to keep Kris’s band in the movie, then monopolized so much of their rehearsal time practicing her own numbers that Kris had virtually no rehearsals of his own. His concert loomed a day away. Kris slammed his trailer door and refused to come out. “Goddammit!” he screamed. “I’ve been trying to make this stuff sound like music. I’ve got to go out and play in front of thousands of people, but she doesn’t give a damn!”

He later said, “She just assumed, since I’d worked with my boys forever, that I didn’t need ’em. And it was my fault I never said to her, ‘Hey, Barbra, goddammit, I’m in this movie too. You’re working with the band on stuff you shoot next week. I gotta shoot tomorrow.
I need my boys!
’”

Pierson was more tired than he had been “since World War Two,” and on the most important day of filming, he overslept. This infuriated Barbra, who had risen at 4:00
A.M.
She saw this as another example of Pierson’s lackadaisical attitude toward the film. Everyone was uptight. Would enough people show up to fill the huge stadium? Would they remain civilized? Would Phil Ramone get the sound quality he needed? Would Robert Surtees get enough usable film footage?

The fans, most of them students at Arizona State University, began to file into the stadium at three in the morning. By nine o’clock, fifty thousand of them were writhing under the hot sun, smoking pot, making out, discarding more and more clothing. They cheered as various acts came out to perform, but there were long delays between sets. Pierson’s skin prickled when the crowd began to chant, “No more filming! No more filming!” before he had shot a thing. Finally he got ready to shoot, but a series of technical problems caused more delays. “The noise, the pandemonium, the incipient panic are all but overwhelming,” he wrote.

Against the advice of just about everybody, Barbra appeared onstage to try to calm the crowd. “We’re gonna do
rock and roll
today!” she shouted above the din. “And we’re gonna be in a
movie!
In our movie we’re
real
.
We fight, scream, y
ell,
we talk dirty, we smoke
grass
.” Now she had the crowd. “So, listen, what we’re gonna do now is meet my co-star, Kris Kristofferson. A great performer. So when he comes on, I know you all love him anyway, but you have to love him even
more
, you know, so we won’t have any problems. So, in the lingo of the movie, I say, all you motherfuckers
have a great time
.”

Some observers found Barbra’s comments patronizing, but the kids loved it, and they “performed” their ecstatic reaction to John Norman Howard’s act—and their horror over his motorcycle accident—flawlessly. Then there were more delays. Barbra and Pierson quarreled over a shot, more time elapsed, the crowd began to chant anew. Graham couldn’t believe it. “Don’t you know what you’re doing?” he screeched at both of them. “They’re going to
kill
us.”

Barbra took the stage again, this time to perform. She was “petrified,” half convinced she’d be booed off the stage. She wasn’t. Her movie star magic wove its spell as she sang “People” and “The Way We Were” to prerecorded accompaniment (“I didn’t bring any strings with me”). The crowd—the women especially—cheered the film’s feminist anthem “Woman in the Moon,” and then Barbra announced that she would sing a song she’d written for the movie. “I hope you like it. If you don’t
I’ll
be
crushed
.
” She sang “Evergreen,” and even on first hearing it was clearly a classic. The crowd stomped, yelled, applauded. Barbra didn’t seem able to accept the adulation. “Do you
really
like it?” she pleaded. More roars. “I’m really glad you like it, because that’s the first time I ever sang that song in front of people.”

More acts, more filming, more delays. Then the day was over. The crowd hadn’t stampeded the stage, no one had been killed, and Pierson had gotten most of the shots he wanted. But the dailies turned out to be disjointed, unrepresentative. “You’ve ruined it,” Barbra exploded. “How could you do that? We can never do it again!” Pierson explained that the basics were there, the film just needed to be judiciously edited. Barbra remained unconvinced.

Pierson then realized that Barbra was frightened not only for the success of the movie but for her relationship with Jon. “If this film goes down the drain,” she told him in a moment of candor, “it’s all over for Jon and me. We’ll never work again.”

Pierson reminded her that even if the film flopped all she had to do was agree to sing again “and they’ll fall all over you to do another picture.”

“I know,” she replied. “But what would happen to Jon?”

M
ANY OF THE
crew members had had their fill of Barbra and Jon. He later admitted that his behavior was sometimes intentionally provocative: “I was terrified, but I couldn’t show them that, could I? I had to get things done... so I walked through people.”

As Kristofferson later put it, “Barbra was like a general who can’t trust any of his officers to do their job.” By now Kris was “narrowing my peripheral vision with more tequila and laughin’ tobacco than’s even usual.” Pierson, he thought, looked “like a sunstroke victim, and if you’d said to the crew, ‘Shove this movie, we’re all going to Mexico,’ they’da yelled, ‘
When?
”

The company moved to Tucson, where Barbra sang soaringly for two Esther Hoffman concert sequences, then on to the outskirts of town for scenes at John and Esther’s desert adobe, which Barbra had had constructed to resemble the Malibu ranch, complete with a loft bedroom like Jason’s. When she told Pierson she wanted John and Esther to wrestle in the mud, he thought it would look like a “bad comedy routine... like whores wrestling in a mud bath.”

Barbra, as usual, got her way, but someone in the crew decided to play a practical joke on her. As Kris remembered it, “Barbra’s wearing this white pantsuit, an’ she’s supposed to be covered with mud. The prop man smears this brown stuff all over her, an’ Barbra calls to me, ‘Come over here, smell this stuff.’ I did.
Whew!
I went over to Frank and said, ‘They’re puttin’ crap on Barbra.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ Well, the crew said the smell was from some preservative they’d put in the mud to keep it moist, but, man, by then they hated Barbra so much I
know
what it was they smeared on her—and so did Barbra! But we both broke up laughin’—an’ Barbra’s laughing harder than me! I mean, she coulda thrown a whole tantrum.”

O
N MARCH
29, Pierson won an Academy Award for writing
Dog Day Afternoon
.
A few days later Jon returned from a trip back to Los Angeles and confronted the director about his continued disagreements with Barbra. “You don’t listen,” Jon yelled. “You’ve never listened. You just go ahead and do it your way. You’ve never doubted, never asked a question.” He continued with a litany of complaints, and Pierson thought that Jon was either trying to force him to quit or had been sent by Barbra to fire him. Frustrated by Pierson’s lack of response, Jon stalked out, yelling, “I’m not afraid of your Oscar!”

To Pierson it was a nightmare that didn’t end, even when it was over. The day after filming wrapped, he received a note telling him that his director’s cut of the film was due in four weeks. His lawyer got the deadline extended to six weeks. Barbra, who had final approval of the cut, asked to be included in the initial process; in exchange she offered to consult Pierson throughout her own editing. He refused.

Pierson and Peter Zinner labored over the film “feverishly” to produce what Pierson considered a “rough but serviceable cut.” He showed it to Barbra and Jon and a few others at a special screening. Barbra seemed pleased, but the next day Pierson got word that she had commandeered the film and would re-edit it.