Streisand: Her Life (86 page)

W
hy am I not working?” Barbra had asked Sydney Pollack early in 1978. “What am I saving myself for? This is stupid. I should be out there. So every picture won’t be great. I just sit and wait and wait—for what? For Chekhov to com
e along?
For Shakespeare?”

The French director François Truffaut had once told Barbra, “You do your work, and at the end [of your career] you have a body of work. Some of it is good and some of it is not good, but the stuff that’s good will override what isn’t good—that’s what a body of work is. You can’t just sit and wait for the perfect thing to come along.” Perhaps Truffaut’s words rang in Barbra’s ears as she chose a very imperfect vehicle for her return to the screen after two and a half years, a screenplay that was about as far from Shakespeare as it could get.

The Main Event
began as an idea of Renee Missel, who became the executive producer of the film with her partner, Howard Rosenman. The story evolved into a script by Gail Parent and Andrew Smith entitled
Knockout,
about Hillary Kramer, the owner of a perfume company whose business manager absconds with all her money. The only asset she has left is Eddie “Kid Natural” Scanlon, a former boxer and now a driving instructor, whose contract Hillary’s business manager had purchased as a tax write-off. By threatening legal action against him, Hillary persuades a reluctant Scanlon to return to the ring and start making her some money. After several skirmishes, romantic as well as pugilistic, they fall in love. Barbra saw the property as a likely candidate for her and Jon to produce in order to fulfill her final commitment to First Artists.

“The Main Event
was my fault,” Jon admitted. “I pushed her into that one. It was time to do a movie. I wanted her to do a comedy, and it was material that she really didn’t like. It was the last time I think Barbra will be pushed into anything.”

Barbra hoped the script could be fashioned into a contemporary version of the rollicking battle-of-the-sexes romantic comedies that had been a H
ollywood staple since the silent era. She also felt the story’s premise could allow an
exploration of a confusing contemporary issue that fascinated her: the changing societal roles of men and women. How, for instance, would the supermacho boxer react to a female boss?

Typically, she was full of ideas and wasn’t shy about passing them on to the screenwriters, who were glad for the input. “Barbra wasn’t just lounging around like some old-time movie star, saying, ‘Write something clever,
’”
said Gail Parent. “She was
there
with us, improvising and suggesting lines.”

Barbra had only one actor in mind to play “Kid” Scanlon. In an offer she made over the phone she told him,
“Ry
an, if you don’t want the part, I don’t want to make the picture.” Ryan O’Neal, a former amateur boxer, had had a string of disappointing films, had just lost the leads in two other boxing movies,
Flesh and Blood
and a remake of
The Champ
,
and had fallen into such a funk that he was close to quitting the business.

Barbra wheedled and cajoled, begged and pleaded with him to come aboard. Finally he replied, “If you’re in it, I’ll do it.” No doubt his acquiescence was helped along by Barbra’s offer
of a $1
million salary.

The showman in Jon Peters agreed that Ryan was the perfect co-star for
The Main Event
;
audiences would likely be eager to see the
What’s Up, Doc?
co-stars together again. But he was wary of putting Barbra into such close proximity with one of her former lovers. Steve Jaffe was surprised when he heard that Jon had agreed to O’
Neal’s c
asting. “There was a time,” Jaffe said, “when Jon didn’t want to hear Ryan’s name mentioned. It was very hard on me because at the time I represented both of them. I’d be in Jon’s office, and Ryan would call me and Jon would say, ‘You’re not taking that call
here.’
In the maximum sense of machismo, right or wrong, Jon and Ryan were rivals. I could see them flexing. Barbra probably had the last laugh every day on
The Main Event
,
because here were two guys who were in love with her, and in her shadow.”

According to Andrew Smith, Ryan enjoyed baiting Jon whenever he had a romantic scene with Barbra. “Ryan would always put a little extra something in the scene if he knew Jon was watching,” Smith said. “He’d tweak her ass or bite her earlobe. It drove Jon crazy. He stopped coming around when they did love scenes. He told Ryan that when the movie was over, he was going to get into the ring and beat the hell out of him.”

O
NCE THE STAR
packaging was completed in early 1978, final contract negotiations with the producers began. “At the meeting,” Howard Rosenman told the author Shaun Considine, “Jon Peters began to renege on the deal [that had been] set up through Sue Mengers. He and Barbra decided they would only give us half of what had been originally promised.” When Rosenman heard this, he told his agent to relay a message to Jon: “You tell Mr. Jon Peters to take his new deal and shove it up his ass.”

“I knew I owned the material,” Rosenman said. “I also knew that Jon had put a million and a half of his own money into the project, signing Ryan and other expenses. He got on the phone. ‘You self-destructive cocksucker!’ he began. ‘I’m offering you the chance of a lifetime. Your whole career is gonna be made with a Streisand credit. She made Ray Stark; she can do the same for you. You’re fucking insane; you belong in Camarillo [a California mental hospital].’ And I replied, very calmly, ‘Jon, when you can pronounce “Camarillo” I will have a conversation with you.... Now, here are the
new
terms I’m giving you and your greedy girlfriend.’ And I added another fifty thousand and another percentage point, and I said, ‘At the close of business today, if the check isn’t in my lawyer’s hands, then we will go to Diane Keaton, to Jill Clayburgh, and to Diana Ross, because I own this piece of material and you, Jon, have made it
hot!
’”

Jon swallowed hard and gave the man what he demanded, but Sue Mengers told Rosenman that he was to stay away from the set and do virtually nothing except show up for the premiere. “And when you see Barbra and she forgets your name,
smile
.”

D
URING THE FILM’S
preproduction phase, Barbra told the assistant director, Patrick Kehoe, that she might direct the picture. She later decided against it, Kehoe believed, because “she felt she couldn’t prepare as an actress and also as a director in the time that was available.” Still smarting from the debacle with Frank Pierson, Barbra wanted a director who would be willing to accept her as a full-time, hands-on, often pain-in-the-ass collaborator.

After he met with Barbra and Jon, the thirty-six-year-old director Howard Zieff, who had won attention for the quirky
Hearts of the West
in
1975
and
House Calls
in 1978, agreed to the terms and came aboard. One of the conditions of his contract forbade him to write or speak negatively of Barbra and Jon for the rest of his life.

Cast in supporting roles were Patti D’Arbanville as the Kid’s sleazy girlfriend, Whitman Mayo as his trainer, and James Gregory as a gruff fight manager. Howard Zieff suggested Allan Miller, Barbra’s former acting coach, to play Hillary’s ex-husband. But, Miller said, “I was kept out of the movie because of Barbra.”

It was only after he had read successfully for Zieff that Miller discovered this was a Streisand picture. “She’ll never let me in the movie,” he told Zieff.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, I won’t tell you the whole story,” Miller replied, “but just by being there I would bring up memories of things she does not want to recall at this point in her life. She might still think of me as a teacher or director, judging her work.”

Zieff laughed off Miller’s prediction, but after broaching the idea to Barbra, he admitted to Miller that he had been right. “Oh, he’s a very good actor,” Barbra told Zieff, “but I can’t have him be my husband.” The dour-faced comic actor Paul Sand, who reminded some observers of Elliott Gould, won the role.

With a budget close to $7 million,
The Main Event
went into production for First Artists/Warner Brothers during the first week of October 1978. Barbra and Zieff agreed that the film’s energetic comedy would be enhanced by location filming, but boisterous onlookers at every site often made Zieff wish they were on a closed studio set. One brief scene between Barbra and Ryan, set at a sidewalk hot-dog stand on the busy corner of Beverly and La Cienega in West Hollywood, had to be halted when two young women in a passing car shrieked, “Oh, my
God!
It’s
Barbra Streisand!!”
Three hours later, after two fender benders at the intersection, the shoot was scrapped. “You realize what a big star she is,” Howard Zieff said, “when you go out for a hamburger with her. Fans mob her like they used to mob Valentino or Garbo, she’s that popular.”