Streisand: Her Life (90 page)

T
HREE MONTHS AFTER
it began, the actors’ strike was resolved, and Barbra returned from a trip to Paris to resume filming one of
All Night Long’s
final scenes: a jubilant, if secretly terrified, Cheryl slides down a firehouse pole into the arms of George Dupler. Designed as the symbolic ending of Cheryl’s marriage to her sexist fireman husband, Cheryl’s fall to liberty proved a nerve-racking experience for Barbra, who had gained back fifteen pounds during her hiatus. The moment was captured without incident, though, and
All Night Long
finally wrapped.

Yet just when Jean-Claude Tramont and Sue Mengers thought the long ordeal was over, another more personal controversy arose as the film wa
s bein
g edited: Barbra and Sue Mengers severed their longtime personal and professional relationship. Talk surfaced that Barbra had refused to pay Mengers and ICM their customary 10 percent commission because she had stepped into the film as a favor. Barbra may have felt that way, but of course Mengers was paid. Barbra had a contract with ICM, a
nd all of h
er salary checks went directly to the agency, which deducted its commission and sent the remainder to Barbra’s business managers. A more likely reason for the falling-out was that Mengers did not feel she could get behind Barbra’s obsessive drive to make
Yentl.
Whatever the reason, the days of Barbra recording a one-of-a-kind collection of French love songs for Tramont and Mengers as a wedding gift were definitely over.

After a number of disgruntled audience members walked out of several screenings of the picture, Universal took the film away from Tramont and re-edited it to feature Streisand more prominently. The strategy didn’t work;
All Night Long
still felt as if it actually did last all night long. Dennis Quaid complained, “I don’t think the film worked on a lot of different levels—in the timing of it, in the relationships. It seemed long to me. It only ran an hour and a half, but it seemed like two hours and ten minutes.”

Worried about the film now, Universal’s promotion department decided to tout it as a zany comedy in the vein of
What’s Up, Doc?
and
For Pete’s Sake
.
The ads featured a smarmy sketch of Streisand sliding down a large phallic fire pole, her skirt blowing up a la Marilyn Monroe to reveal her panties, as Hackman, Quaid, and Dobson leer at her from below. “She has a way with men,” the copy read, “and she’s getting away with it—
All Night Long
.”

For the film’s official opening on March 6, 1981, Barbra, swathed in white mink, attended a private screening party hosted by Tramont and Mengers in New York. Described by
People
magazine as “cool” to everyone but Hackman and Tramont, Barbra never spoke to Mengers, fueling further rumors that whatever had occurred between them was unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon.

A majority of American critics rebuffed
All Night Long,
although the film did win a small but vociferous group of devotees, including
The New Yorker’s
Pauline Kael, who raved over Tramont’s “idiosyncratic fairy-tale comedy about people giving up the phony obligations they have accumulated and trying to find a way to do what they enjoy.” While a number of critics praised Barbra’s toned-down performance, Kael found fault with the characterization, saying that “we don’t know who Streisand is. She doesn’t use her rapid-fire New York vocal rhythms in this movie, and a subdued Streisand doesn’t seem quite Streisand.... She’s a thin-faced, waif-like question mark walking through the movie.”

Unfortunately there was no question about the box office. Despite the ad campaign that promised moviegoers the kind of Streisand comedy they had loved in the past, even the opening weekend receipts were dismal. Eventually the film grossed only $10 million, equalling
Up the Sandbox
as Barbra’s least successful film. Among those who had seen the picture, word of mouth was so poor that
The New York Times
wrote an artic
le ab
out it: “Most pictures that fail commercially do so because of audience indifference.
All Night Long
, a comedy starring Gene Hackman and Barbra Streisand, has joined the select group of movies that audiences actively despise... the film is obviously a disappointment to Miss Streisand’s fans, and the audience for an askew French-style comedy has never been tempted to sample the movie.”

In 1985 Gene Hackman remembered the failure of
All Night Long
with regret. “Universal was advertising [the picture] in the theater section of
The New York Times
in a tiny little box... obviously they had no faith in the film... they didn’t know how to sell it. It didn’t fall into any kind of particular category that they had any expertise in.”

Barbra’s opinion of
All Night Long
can be surmised from a comment she made to Lisa Eichhorn in a telephone conversation shortly after the film opened: “You were well out of it, kid.”

B
arbra tried to hide her nervousness as she walked into Sherry Lansing’s office on the Twentieth Century-Fox lot, carrying a reel of super 8 film and an audiocassette. She had just lost financial backing from United Artists for
Yentl
, the project that she had struggled for years to bring to the screen as star, director, co-writer, and producer, the project that had obsessed her, had become her “life,” her “passion,” her “dream.”

Every studio in Hollywood had turned the idea down at least once, including Fox, but Barbra was sure that Lansing, newly installed as the first female president of a major studio, would agree to finance this story of a Jewish woman in 1904 Poland who is forced to masquerade as a man in order to fulfill her young dream of pursuing religious and philosophical study forbidden to women. Barbra had shot film of herself walking through the streets of Prague dressed in her masculine guise, and she had made a tape of many of the songs that Michel Legrand and the Bergmans had written for her to sing in the picture.

“It was like being eighteen again and auditioning for a Broadway show,” Barbra recalled. She showed Lansing the film to prove that she could look convincing enough as a man. She played the tape to impress on her that this would be
a Streisand musical
. S
he excitedly told the story, often playing two or three parts in order to act out a scene.

Lansing listened politely, then turned Barbra down, echoing every other executive in Hollywood as she listed her reasons: “The story’s too ethnic, too esoteric. We just don’t see Middle America paying to see this movie. We don’t think audiences will buy you as a boy, Barbra. You’re fantastic; you’re the number one box-office star. Why risk all that? [When] you have an idea for a comedy, we’ll talk!”

“I left the office in tears,” Barbra said. “I couldn’t believe that a woman wouldn’t understand how universal this story was. I always thought of it as a very contemporary story, a love story that would appeal to people around the world.” Devastated, she went back to Malibu and took to her bed. But not for long. The more rejections she got on this picture, the more firmly resolved she became to prove everyone wrong. “When you tell Barbra something’s not possible,” Marilyn Bergman said, “all you’re doing is firing her up.”

B
ARBRA’S ONETIME ROOMMATE
Elaine Sobel said that she told Streisand about Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short sto
ry “Yentl,
the Yeshiva Boy” in the early 1960s, but Barbra recalls that she read it for the first time in 1969 when the producer Valentine Sherry sent it to her after her then-agent David Begelman had turned it down without consulting her. “They were smart enough to send it directly to my house,” Barbra recalled, “and it was [only] twenty-five pages long and the print was big so I thought, Well, I’ll read it in one afternoon.”

When she finished it, she called Begelman and flatly announced, “I just found my next movie—‘Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy.
’”

“Oh, no,” Begelman replied. “We just said you weren’t interested.”

“What do you mean? I
am
interested.”

“Barbra,” Begelman said, “for a year you’ve been telling us that you want to change your image onscreen, that you’re tired of playing Jewish girls from Brooklyn. So now you want to play a Jewish
boy
?!”

Yes, she did, even though Begelman advised her strongly that the move could damage her burgeoning career. The story had moved her deeply, from its first four words: “After her father’s death...” She thought of the piece as “a poem” to Emanuel Streisand. “He was a teacher and a scholar just like Yentl’s father,” she explained. “It was my way of saying to my father that I was proud to have him as my papa, that I was proud to bear his name—Streisand.”

She also felt a spiritual kinship with Yentl, the ever-questioning teenager whose make-believe world is turned upside down when she falls in love with a fellow rabbinical student who thinks she’s a man. “I related to this story on many levels,” Barbra said. “Yentl wants to learn; Barbra always wanted to learn. I was always curious. I wanted to learn Japanese writing when I was sixteen. I read Zen Buddhism and Russian novels. I love knowledge. I was struck by the many similarities between myself and Yentl. And I would have done the same thing she does. I would have dressed up in my father’s clothes and gone out as a boy to pursue my dream.”

Barbra optioned the screen rights to the story in 1969, intending only to star in the film, which she saw as a non-musical. Two years later Barbra’s company, First Artists, announced that the picture, to be called
Masquerade
, would be produced by Valentine Sherry, directed by the Czechoslovakian Ivan Passer, and written by Passer and Isaac Singer. The budget, in keeping with First Artists’ strict requirements, was set at a mere $2 million. As soon as the announcement was made, the jokes began.
The New York Times
headlined its story, “A new movie for Barbra: ‘Funny Boy.
’”

The package soon fell apart, mainly because Barbra wasn’t satisfied with any of the three drafts Passer had produced, first with Singer and then with Jerome Kass. She spoke to another Czech director, Milos Forman, about the movie—clearly she wanted someone who understood Mitteleuropa—but he wasn’t interested. Even then, he said, he could tell that Barbra “was thinking about directing. I don’t think anybody could have satisfied her when it came to that project because it was her love affair. It may have been subconscious, but I think she didn’t let things happen [to bring the project to fruition at that time] because she had her own vision of it and nobody could even come close.”

She wouldn’t let go. During the first weekend they spent together in 1973 Barbra read Jon Peters the short story. After
A Star Is Born
,
she decided that in order to make the film exactly as she envisioned it, she would have to direct it. “I was frightened to direct. I didn’t know if I could do it. But I was nearing forty years old and thinking that I must take more risks as an artist and as a person.... I had this vision of becoming this old lady and talking about this movie I should have made.”

She shopped the idea around to every major studio in Hollywood, but now executives had another reason to turn it down: they didn’t feel they could trust a novice director, and a woman at that. Female directors had been few and far between in Hollywood, and the male chauvinist attitude in the industry was that women couldn’t be trusted with multimillion-dollar budgets. Warner Brothers, for which Barbra’s films had grossed $162 million, said no. Columbia, for which her films had grossed $226 million, said no. Fox, MGM, United Artists, all turned her down. The one hope the bigwigs gave Barbra was that if she turned it into a musical, they
might
be interested. But at this point she didn’t see it as anything but a small drama.

She filed the idea away again, but during the spring of 1979, in the midst of doing
The Main Event
,
she finally made up her mind to do whatever was necessary to make
Yentl
a reality. Nearly everyone in her inner circle, including Sue Mengers and Jon Peters, had advised her not to pursue the project; and now that Barbra was in her late thirties, the likelihood that she could pull off a masquerade as a rabbinical student in his twenties seemed all the more remote.

Jon recalled that the moment of crystallization for Barbra occurred during a
Main Event
location shoot in the San Bernardino Mountains. “We were standing there in the snow, and she said, ‘I
hate
this movie! I’m going to do
Yentl!’
I said, ‘You’re not going to do it!’ I had offers for her to go to Vegas, to do shows, for twenty million, thirty million dollars. She turned them all down. I said, ‘You’re not going to ruin your life and mine! You can’t play a
boy!
We’re gonna do something else together.’... I was a little domineering, I guess, and I remember her looking at me and saying, ‘Just because you said that, I’m going to do the movie,
no matter what!
’”

B
ARBRA AND HER
brother, Sheldon, stood by their father’s grave at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens in the fall of 1979. Barbra had not visited her father’s resting place since she was seven, when she had insisted her mother take her there. “My mother never talked about my father because she said she didn’t want me to miss him,” Barbra said. “I never had a picture of myself with my father. I thought I was born of an immaculate conception, you know, since I never knew him.”

She asked Sheldon to take her picture standing next to her father’s headstone, because “at least that shows that he existed.” Sheldon reminisced for Barbra about the man he remembered, and recollected the sad ritual of his funeral. When she saw the photograph, Barbra noticed that the man buried next to her father was named Anshel. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “That’s a very unusual name. I mean, it’s not like Irving. And right there next to my father’s grave was a man named Anshel, who was Yentl’s dead brother whose name she takes when she disguises herself as a boy. To me it was a sign, you know, a sign from my father that I should make this movie.”

Another sign from Emanuel Streisand came later that night, according to Barbra. Sheldon, who was now forty-four and a real estate executive, told his sister that he had gone to see a medium, “a nice Jewish lady with blond hair” who had been visited by a spirit when she was thirteen years old and had had extrasensory powers ever since. “I can’t tell you the experience I had last night,” Sheldon said. “I talked to Daddy. We put our hands on this table, and the table moved its legs and started to spell out Daddy’s name. Then the table followed me around the room.”