Streisand: Her Life (91 page)

Because this was coming from her brother, a sensible suburban family man, Barbra believed it, and she asked him to bring the psychic to his house. She and Sheldon joined the woman around a table and put their palms on the tabletop. Suddenly the table started to move, and Barbra felt suspicious; she figured that an electrical hookup must be causing the motion. Then “the table started to spell out letters with its legs.” One tap
was a, two taps b, and so on. “I started to get very scared. The table was pounding away. Bang, bang, ban
g! Spelling ‘M-a-n-n-y,’ and then ‘B-a-r-b-r-a.’ I got so frightened I ran away. Because I could feel the presence of my father in that room! I ran into the bathroom and locked the door.”

When Barbra got up the courage to come back, the medium asked the spirit of Emanuel Streisand, “What message do you have?” The table tapped out “S-o-r-r-y.” “What else do you want to tell her.” “S-i-n-g p-r-o-u-d” was the answer.

“It sounds crazy,” Barbra admitted, “but I know it was my father who was telling me to be brave, to have the courage of my convictions, to
sing proud
.”

“T
HIS HAS TO
be a musical!” Marilyn and Alan Bergman exclaimed in unison to Barbra when she showed them a script she had just finished working on. The lyricists had held that opinion for some time, but had kept it to themselves because they were sensitive to the fact that Streisand saw the film as an intimate non-musical drama. But finally they decided they had to try to change her mind. “We felt it was a wonderful story for a musical... because it is [about] a character with a secret,” Marilyn explained. “Throughout the picture, after her father dies, there is nobody to whom she can talk, to whom she can reveal her essential self. And this rich inner life becomes the [song] score.”

Aware that the studios would be more likely to back the film as a musical, and aware too that its chances of box-office success would be far greater if she sang, Barbra thought seriously about the Bergmans’ suggestion. It didn’t take her long to come around. Music, she now felt, would “elevate the piece to something magical, a fairy tale.”

There was never any question that the music should be lush, romantic, and rooted in the European tradition, which made Michel Legrand the clear choice to compose it. “The kind of music Michel writes is timeless,” Alan Bergman said. “It could be eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century.”

Marilyn added, “The challenge was to make the music exotic and colorful, but not so special that it doesn’t have universality. And Michel achieved that.”

Once she decided to make
Yentl
a musical, Barbra plunged into the process with her usual gusto. She and Legrand would meet at the Bergmans’ house in Beverly Hills and spend the entire day working in the upstairs music room. “Our housekeeper would bring us food trays and we’d eat up there,” Alan recalled. “Sometimes we’d go late into the night. It was like there was no outside world.... The greatest thing about working on the movie, was—where else in the world could you call your director and say, ‘Come over and sing this song for us’?”

As they worked, Legrand and the Bergmans confronted a realization that made Barbra uncomfortable: if the film’s music was meant to represent Yentl’s inner thoughts, no one else should sing in the movie. “That was a decision that was hard to arrive at,” Alan said. “Barbra was afraid that it might not be perceived properly, but it became more and more inevitable. She is the musical narrator of the piece. Nobod
y else is pa
rt of that inner music.”

According to Marilyn, “It was almost the same way when Barbra tried to create scenes in which Yentl didn’t appear, so she could stay behind the camera wearing only her director’s hat. But each time that was tried, we felt that the audience wouldn’t know how it was privy to that moment if Yentl wasn’t there. The picture is told through her perceptions, seen through her eyes.”

For one of the musical numbers she had conceived with Legrand and the Bergmans, “Tomorrow Night,” Barbra made a video. “The four of us were like children playing,” Marilyn said. “We videotaped the first musical performance in our living room.” Marilyn and Alan played two tailors trying to fit Anshel into a bridegroom outfit. “We laughed hysterically!” Marilyn recalled. “What a pair of tailors we made!”

W
ITH AN IMPRESSIVE
original song score to sweeten the project, Barbra once again sought studio backing late in 1979. After several rejections, her dream finally seemed about to come true. Eric Peskow and Mike Medavoy, partners in Orion Pictures, gave her the green light to direct, produce, and star, providing that she could guarantee the film would cost no more than $13 million to make. She hired Rusty Lemorande to help her produce the film, and asked him to come up with separate budget estimates for making the movie in Los Angeles and overseas.

Barbra’s biggest concern now was the script, which she felt was far from filmable. Medavoy, having already given her the okay to do practically everything else, suggested she write the movie too. “You seem to know so well what it is you want,” he told her.

“She wrote out of necessity,” Lemorande recalled. “I got a tremendous lesson in writing by being at the knee of this process—where she and I would do a draft and then I would find it being critiqued by the likes of Paddy Chayefsky, Elaine May, David Rayfiel, Bo Goldman.... A lot of people were constantly giving her opinions when she asked for them.”

To make sure she wrote the best possible script, Barbra immersed herself in Judaism, just as Yentl had. She pored over the Torah, attended Bible study classes, went to Hasidic weddings. She became involved in a small Orthodox synagogue in Venice, California, and helped Jason prepare for his bar mitzvah, a ceremony the boy likely would not have participated in had his mother not become so obsessed with Yentl’s world. Rabbi Daniel Lapin officiated at the mitzvah, and for months afterward Barbra studied under him. In appreciation, she bestowed a large gift on the rabbi’s Jewish day school, which was renamed the Emanuel Streisand School.

The work on the script consumed Barbra. As she wrote, she tried to address every objection she had heard. She raised Yentl’s age so that she could more convincingly play her. “I made her kind of amorphically ageless; I guessed she’d be around twenty-eight. A spinster of the time. A person who wasn’t married by that age [in Yentl’s time and place] was very, very odd.” She struggled with how to accurately re-create the world of passionate Talmudic scholars without making the movie too ethnic to have broad appeal.

She sought the help of anyone willing to give it. When the novelist and rabbi Chaim Potok told her that
Esquire
magazine wanted him to interview her for a cover story, she replied, “I don’t do interviews.” But she agreed to see him, just to get acquainted. During the meeting, she asked him if he would look over the script of
Yentl
,
and Potok sensed an unspoken negotiation: help me with this screenplay and I’ll give you an interview. Barbra later admitted as much to him: “Why am I doing this interview?... I want you to help me. I mean, I want to know what you know as a writer and as a rabbi.”

Potok found Barbra’s knowledge of the Jewish religion “confused and rudimentary. Yet she asks questions openly, unselfconsciously, with no hint of embarrassment, and takes notes with the assiduous concentration of one long committed to learning. I have no way of gauging her comprehension. Her mind leaps restlessly, impatiently, from one subject to another: she wishes to know everything, and quickly. At those moments when a good idea comes suddenly from one or another of us, I see on her lips an amazed smile, a near-sensuous delight, and her eyes flash.”

Researching
Yentl
left a strong mark on Barbra. “I felt more proud to be a Jew,” she said, and she had her eyes opened about a lot of philosophical issues. “I don’t believe God is a chauvinist. When you read the Bible there are two chapters of Genesis that have different interpretations of how woman was created.... I believe that woman was not created from a rib... but was created equally, like it says in one of the chapters: God created Adam and then split him in two so that each side has masculine and feminine qualities. They’re different but equal.”

Barbra also discovered that the Talmud does not prohibit women from studying, but says only that women are not
obliged
to study. “Where is it written that women have to be subservient?” Barbra asked. “You find that men have interpreted the law to serve themselves and society’s needs. In other words, it is
not
written!”

B
ARBRA WALKED THROUGH
the ancient cobblestoned streets of Prague, absorbing the somber ambience of the city, and felt herself transported to Yentl’s time and place. It was the fall of 1980, and she and Rusty Lemorande had traveled to Czechoslovakia, where Barbra had decided she must film
Yentl
to ensure authenticity, to scout locations. “I put on my Yentl costume and walked through the streets. I always wanted to try everything out, see what the black costume looked like against the color of the walls, against the textures, the cobblestones, the light of Czechoslovakia, the air. Every country has its own mists, its own light.”

She wanted the film to look, she said, “like a Dutch painting.... I love Rembrandt. When I was sixteen I paid ten dollars for a Rembrandt print of a woman bathing, and I had it hanging in my apartment when I moved away from home.” From Prague she went to Amsterdam, where the director Paul Verhoeven took her to the Rijks Museum. “I wanted to see the Rembrandts in person, not just in a book because [in reality] the color of the Rembrandt paint is very dark brown, not black, and the edges of the faces are soft, not hard.... It’s very interesting because the light source in the Rembrandt pai
nt
ings never shows. He had some of the light coming, in a sense, from within.”