Streisand: Her Life (96 page)

For many years Barbra had kept her political interests to herself. She had not performed at any fund-raising concerts for Jimmy Carter, who was elected president in the post-Watergate climate of 1976, because she found him too conservative. But neither did she publicly support Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge to Carter in 1980 or Walter Mondale’s 1984 run against President Ronald Reagan.

But her horror at the disastrous near-meltdown of a reactor core at the nuclear generating plant in Chernobyl in the Russian Ukraine on April 26, 1986, which sent a huge cloud of radioactive material into the atmosphere, shocked a new outspokenness out of her. Her belief that the pro-armament Reagan administration was partly to blame for the proliferation of nuclear plants and warheads around the world pushed Barbra to exploit her most sought-after asset—her fabled voice, live in concert—to raise money to help get as many liberal Democrats as possible elected to the Senate and recapture its control from the Republicans.

On the balmy evening of Saturday, September 6, busloads of celebrities who had parked their cars at the foot of Ramirez Canyon were ushered past no-nonsense security guards to a small amphitheater Streisand had had constructed on her Malibu backyard. Robin Williams delivered a typically wacky opening monologue that poked fun at the price of the tickets. Then, after a short intermission, Barbra appeared from the wings like a vision, dressed in a long white gown with a slit skirt, a sprinkling of rhinestones on each shoulder, singing “Somewhere.” She was greeted with a standing ovation from an audience that included Whoopi Goldberg, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, Whitney Houston, Jack Nicholson, Walter Matthau, Bette Midler, Hugh Hefner, Bruce Willis, Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, and Kurt Russell. Jason, Chris Peters, and the Bergmans were in the crowd as well.

With just a handful of musicians on electronic instruments behind her, Barbra delivered vocally unchallenging versions of her standards and sang “Guilty” and “What Kind of Fool” with Barry Gibb. Because of the relative intimacy of the venue and the lack of a full orchestra behind her, Barbra never reached back to deliver her patented soaring crescendos. Instead, the highlights of the program were exquisitely sung quiet ballads: “Send in the Clowns,” “It’s a New World,” “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” and, in a touching tribute to Judy Garland, “Over the Rainbow.”

Between songs Barbra expressed her pro-environment, pro-peace sentiments: “We must find new ways to communicate with each other, to understand each other, to be compassionate toward each other. We inhabit this tiny planet together, and if we are to survive, it will be together, or not at all.” Coming as they did from a superstar who had seemed so aloof from the problems of the real world for so many years, Barbra’s remarks struck some as naive and others as pretentiously preachy.

But the goal of Barbra’s “One Voice” concert had been accomplished. The event raised $1.5 m
illion
—a good deal more, the press pointed out, than a Reagan fund-raiser held the same night in Beverly Hills. Barbra utilized proceeds from the evening to establish the Streisand Foundation, a nonprofit organization to support “qualified charitable organizations committed to antinuclear activities and the preservation of our environment, civil liberties and human rights.” Four out of the five candidates Barbra supported through the concert were elected in November, which helped turn the Senate back over to the Democrats.

The foundation realized further profits from the event when HBO aired the concert as a television special at the end of the year. Even critics who chided Streisand for her political remarks were lavish in their praise of her performance. “Streisand’s voice is still the best there is,” said the
Los Angeles
Herald Examiner.
“Her stage presence, her supremely confident air, her hold on an audience, remain a thing of masterful beauty.”

N
OW THAT SHE
had returned to live singing after six years, Barbra was prepared to return to the screen after four. The project she chose provided her with the grittiest acting challenge she had ever had on
film. And
it dealt, among other things, with an issue that had gnawed at Barbra since the days of her mother’s marriage to Louis Kind: child abuse.

“Don’t worry, Mama, I’ll dedicate my next film to you,” Barbra had said in 1983. She didn’t dedicate
Nuts
to Diana, but she might as well have.

B
arbra sat beneath the hot lights of the
60 Minutes
set, answering questions from Mike Wallace. The conversation turned to the subject of Barbra’s stepfather, and her carefully controlled public mask shattered. She broke down on camera, and a frightened, insecure, and unhappy child emerged. “You like this... that forty million people have to see me do this,” she sniffed to Wallace. For a glaring public moment, Streisand fact and fiction had merged: Barbra looked remarkably like another abused child—Claudia Draper, her character in
Nuts
.

Nuts
,
an acid-etched portrait of soured family values, would be Barbra’s symbolic indictment of the abuse she suffered as a child from Louis Kind. And the angry tone of the film laid bare her lingering bitter feelings toward her mother. “My stepfather did not physically abuse me,” Barbra said. “Mentally he did, and my mother allowed it to happen.”

Tom Topor’s caustic play about Claudia Draper and her downward spiral into prostitution, murder, and possible madness centered on dark family secrets, repressed hatred, social hypocrisy, and an important question: what is normal? “I responded very strongly to the character in this movie,” Barbra said. “People are not always what they seem to be. Claudia isn’t insane; she’s just shockingly honest.”

It is clear why Streisand was captivated by the multilayered heroine of Topor’s acclaimed play. Claudia is a fascinating melange of traits: a flawed, heroic, insecure, vain, frightened, and obstreperous high-priced call girl who rejects an insanity plea after murdering a violent john and demands the right to stand trial for the crime. She will not victimize herself further by saying sh
e’s “nuts
,” even though her parents have used all their considerable influence to make that happen. She wants her day in court.

Playing Claudia, Barbra later admitted, allowed her to “let all my rage out.... I don’t have to worry [in this movie] about being nice, sweet and polite.”

A
S EARLY AS
December 1981, word had leaked out that Barbra was already planning a follow-up to
Yentl
.
The project that had caught her attention was
Nuts
,
which Mark Rydell was preparing to direct. Streisand’s interest in playing Claudia Draper intrigued Rydell, but he turned her down. “She wanted me to delay the project until she finished
Yentl
,” he explained at the time, “and that won’t be for way over a year. I intend to be shooting
Nuts
this summer.”

Rydell, who had directed Bette Midler’s stunning film debut in
The Rose
and guided Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn to Oscars in
On Golden Pond
,
had already decided to cast Debra Winger, whose performance in
Urban Cowboy
had catapulted her into the front ranks of Hollywood’s leading ladies.

With Winger, Rydell planned a relatively low-budget production rife with raw language, rough situations, and a battery of highly combustible themes, including Claudia’s darkest secret: the incestuous relationship she had been forced into—and paid for—by her stepfather when she was a child. But delays caused by script, budget, and location problems saw to it that Rydell’s projected spring 1982 start date was not to be.

“I did draft after draft after draft [of the screenpla
y],” Tom
Topor remembered. “Next thing I know, I was off the picture. In a way, Mark was right. What I didn’t understand viscerally, though I did intellectually, is that it’s the director who makes the picture. Mark’s emphasis was far more on incest. My emphasis was far more on power (as between the institution and the individual).”

A bogged-down Rydell temporarily left the project to direct
The River
in 1984, and Winger—successful, in demand, and at the time a “turbulent” woman, as her
Terms of Endearment
co-star Shirley MacLaine said at the 1984 Oscars—bowed out of the film. Determined to save the project, Rydell remembered Barbra’s interest and sent the
Nuts
screenplay to her. Streisand was again intrigued, and both felt the next step would be to hire a new writer to fine-tune the script yet again.

By the fall of 1985, Universal had officially placed the beleaguered project in turnaround. “Someone over there thought it was too hot to handle,” Rydell confessed. “It’s very raw, and I guess they got scared.” Unwilling to relinquish his dream of making
Nuts
,
Rydell took the property to Warner Brothers, with whom Barbra had long been associated. Barbra agreed to star, but like so many of her screen projects,
Nuts
would end up waiting for her. Until, and even after, Barbra became firmly involved, the picture would be, as the columnist Army Archerd put it, “a hard film to crack.”

In his desire to please Streisand, and to entice Warners into buying the property for her, Rydell committed a major faux pas. After asking
Cinderella Liberty
screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan to do a rewrite, he made the same request of Alvin Sargent
(Ordinary People)
.
After promising both men a deal when he returned, Rydell flew to Hawaii for a vacation. As Rydell basked in the sun, Sargent and Ponicsan, who were friends, compared notes. Understandably angry, they quit the project—but not before Ponicsan dialed Rydell’s answerin
g m
achine and left a message: “After Hawaii, go directly to hell.”

When Barbra discovered the Rydell-Sargent-Ponicsan imbroglio, she played mediator. She spoke with the two disgruntled writers and suggested that they team up. After Rydell apologized to them, the screenwriters agreed. But the studio felt that their rewrite still wasn’t quite acceptable, and after two more writers had come and gone, Streisand herself participated in the script’s evolution. According to Barbra, Rydell “gave me one week to sit down and write out the script as I saw fit.” The end result pleased all concerned, and on September 30, 1985, Warner Brothers gave the green light to
Nuts
for a January 1986 start. Barbra’s acting salary would be $5 million. She would also produce through Barwood, for a fee of half a million dollars.

A
LTHOUGH WITH RYDELL
at the helm
Nuts
appeared to be in good hands, rumors soon began to fly around the Burbank lot that the director was being “difficult.” Well-placed sources said that he refused to control the ballooning budget, tone down the controversial incest angle, or compromise his overall artistic vision of the film.

Streisand attempted to rectify the situation, but couldn’t. In a typically worded puff piece of a press statement, the studio announced on March 18, 1986, “We greatly regret that a number of factors concerning this picture have come together to create a separation between Warner Brothers and Rydell Productions. We have nothing but respect for Mark’s talent and success as a filmmaker. We wish him every success in the future.”

Rydell also played the smiling diplomat. The
Hollywood Reporter
wrote, “Citing schedule, budgetary, and creative differences, Rydell said: ‘It is with absolutely no animosity to any of the parties concerned that I take leave of this project. If I have any regrets, it is that I will not be able to work with Barbra Streisand, an immense talent with whom I have enjoyed an excellent working relationship.
’”

Such gente
el hypo
crisy has always angered Barbra. She felt Rydell’s exit reflected badly on her, and she tried once again to reunite the warring forces. “She tried to become the mediator between Mark and Warner Brothers,” said Marty Erlichman. “When Barbra found that there was no way she was going to convince Warners to take him back... then she said that she would like [another] actor’s director. And they selected Marty Ritt.”

But the process, according to studio insiders, wasn’t quite as simple as that. After Rydell’s departure, a number of names were bandied about. Warners asked Barbra to direct the film herself, but she wasn’t prepared to take on that responsibility so soon after
Yentl,
nor did she want to prompt gossip that she had orchestrated Rydell’s removal in order to take over the project herself.

Warners approached Alan Pakula about directing without telling Barbra that his customary fee was $2 million, and she was furious. As the producer of
Nuts,
Barbra certainly should have been consulted about this type of offer, and she refused to pay that much for a director. Barbra was further angered when she learned that Warners was keeping a crew on standby at a daily expense of tens of thousands of dollars even though the film was far from ready to go before the cameras.

Stressed, disillusioned, and watching the budget rise precariously, Streisand worried over every aspect of the production, including her role. Was it too confrontational? Too bitter? Too one-dimensional? Until she could find a director she could trust to talk to about these issues, she worried alone. “I feel so scared and insecure,” she told a friend. “I want so much to be liked and understood. But I have to be in control, because so much of the world is so stupid.”

At first Barbra thought Martin Ritt might be the kind of director with whom she could feel secure and from whom she could learn. With a string of classic dramas to his credit including
Hud
and
Norma Rae
,
Ritt was renowned for his ability to juxtapose intimate personal issues with grand social themes. By April 2, Streisand had spoken with Ritt about the job. Publicly he said he thought Barbra was “terrific.” Privately he told her he wasn’t sure she had the acting ability to play Claudia well. Challenged by Ritt’s blunt assessment, Barbra decided she had found her director. “He got my hair up,” she explained, “and I said, ‘Good. You’re the one. It’s a match.
’”