Streisand: Her Life (100 page)
Read Streisand: Her Life Online
Authors: James Spada
Tags: #Another Evening with Harry Stoones, #Bon Soir Club, #My Passion for Design, #Ted Rozar, #I Can Get it for You Wholesale and Streisand, #Marilyn and Alan Bergman, #Streisand Spada, #Mike Douglas and Streisand, #A Star is Born, #Stoney End, #George Segal and Streisand, #Marvin Hamlisch, #Dustin Hoffman and Streisand, #The Prince of Tides, #Barbara Joan Streisand, #Evergreen, #Bill Clinton Streisand, #Ray Stark, #Ryan O’Neal, #Barwood Films, #Diana Streisand Kind, #Sinatra and Streisand, #Streisand Her Life, #Omar Sharif and Streisand, #Roslyn Kind, #Nuts and Barbra Streisand, #Barbara Streisand, #Barbra Joan Streisand, #Barbra Streisand, #Fanny Brice and Steisand, #Streisand, #Richard Dreyfuss and Streisand, #Amy Irving, #MGM Grand, #Emanuel Streisand, #Brooklyn and Streisand, #Yentl, #Streisand Concert, #Miss Marmelstein, #Arthur Laurents, #Columbia Records, #Happening in Central Park, #Don Johnson and Streisand, #Marty Erlichman, #Judy Garland Streisand, #Jason Emanuel Gould, #by James Spada, #One Voice, #Barry Dennen, #James Brolin and Barbra, #Theater Studio of New York
B
Y THE END
of 1988 Don Johnson had rekindled his relationship with Melanie Griffith, following steamy love scenes they played when Melanie appeared on
Miami Vice
.
Johnson and Griffith soon announced plans to remarry, and press reports claimed that Barbra had urged the couple to reconcile even as her own romance with Johnson ebbed. “It was at the time that Barbra and I were seeing less of each other,” Johnson told the New York
Daily News
.
“During one conversation I told Barbra about the affection I still held for Melanie. Barbra said to me, ‘Don, in spite of your reputation, you’re a family man at heart. You need a base and a family life. It may be that you’ve never stopped loving Melanie.
’”
Following the couple’s remarriage on June 26, 1989, Barbra continued to stay in touch with Johnson. “She’s really sweet,” Griffith told
Life
magazine. “She sent Alexander [Griffith’s son by the actor Steven Bauer] and Jesse the cutest Valentine’s Day cards.”
“Barbra is part of the family,” Johnson added.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Streisand-Johnson romance was Barbra’s discovery of
The Prince of Tides
.
A friend in the music business had first raved to Barbra about Pat Conroy’s lyrical story of the deeply buried secrets of a dysfunctional southern family, but it was Johnson who urged her to read the book. Don hoped that he and Barbra might co-star in a film version of the powerfully emotional drama. But after their romance ended and Robert Redford acquired the book’s movie rights, Johnson was never seriously in the running to play the lead in what would become Barbra’s second directorial effort.
T
he American South is a land of secrets, a place where laughter masks pain, good manners overrule anger, and appearances matter most. The South is also a region prone to denial—of its past, its present, and its inability to transform
its futur
e. Behind its locked wrought-iron gates, its ivy-wreathed walls, and its stately, silent mansions, the South revels in its impenetrable mystery and in the defiant eccentricity of its people. The region provides a perfect setting for
The Prince of Tides
, an epic story about one man’s fight to save his future by finally coming to terms with his past.
Barbra, although she is the antithesis of a rural southerner, immediately identified with Pat Conroy’s melodramatic novel, for despite its South Carolina low-country setting,
The Prince of Tides
raises a host of universal issues: the damage done to people by their families, the frustration caused by unfulfilled dreams, and the extraordinary freedom and self-discovery one can experience after confronting the psychological demons that lurk within. Like
Yentl
and
Nuts
,
The Prince of Tides
explored the ramifications of familial separation, social injustice, and the transformative power of forgiveness. Unlike the two earlier films, however,
The Prince of Tides
examined these topics from a male perspective. Its message was clear to Barbra—men can be everything: not only can they be “physical, strong, male... [they] also can be nurturing, soft, not afraid to feel,” she said. Whereas Yentl discovered the facets of masculinity that lay within her, Conroy’s protagonist, Tom Wingo, is forced to face his own femininity and, ultimately, to appreciate it.
“The southern way” and its “juxtaposition of appearances,” Barbra later explained, was another theme she wanted to explore. In bringing
The Prince of Tides
to the screen, she worked diligently to reduce the lengthy work to its “essence... its purest, simplest point.” Like most creative odysseys, it was a journey rife with the kind of drama and passion that distinguished the book, a journey that few artists other than the single-minded Streisand would have attempted with as much determination, energy, and vision.
Barbra had listened raptly as Don Johnson read entire passages of the book aloud to her early in their relationship, passages she later memorized in her quest to capture the soul of the novel. “I was just so intrigued by... the poetry of it, the beauty of the writing,” she said, “so I got the novel and read it and thought, I
have
to make this movie.”
T
HE PRINCE OF TIDES
, published in 1986, tells the story of Henry Wingo, a crusty, often abusive shrimper; his wife, Lila; and their three children: Tom, his twin sister Savannah, and their older brother, Luke. Presented in a series of flashbacks, the children’s eccentric, violent, and classically dysfunctional southern childhood illuminates Conroy’s main narrative: Tom’s present-day fight to save the suicidal Savannah, a poet who is living in exile in New York.
At the urging of Lila, his insufferably manipulative, so
cial-cli
mber mother, Tom flies to New York to be near Savannah. There he meets and eventually falls in love with his sister’s therapist, Dr. Susan Lowenstein. Through a series of painful and ever more revealing discussions, Lowenstein attempts to unlock the buried secrets of Tom’s past—secrets that hold the key to Savannah’s recovery and, as the book makes increasingly clear, Tom’s survival as well.
Suffering from a crumbling marriage, a guilt-ridden past, and a less-than-promising future as a football coach, Tom is trapped in a life with little meaning. So too is Lowenstein, whose lacquered, comely exterior masks an unhappy woman who feels alienated from her famous violinist husband and her spoiled son, Bernard. She and Tom learn to help each other in myriad ways; Tom coaches Bernard, helping him to become a decent high-school football player, while Lowenstein helps Tom to admit and accept the horrific truth about his past: as a child he was violently sodomized by one of three escaped convicts while the other two raped Savannah and Lila. With the help of their pet Bengal tiger, Tom and Luke kill the intruders, bury their bodies, and are sworn to secrecy by their devastated mother. As Lila says in the book, “This didn’t happen. Your father would never touch me again if he thought I had sexual intercourse with another man. No fine young man would ever marry Savannah once the word got out that she wasn’t a virgin.”
In the denouement, Savannah recovers, Lowenstein and Tom end their passionate relationship, and he returns to his wife and family in the South—the land of marshes and tides, tradition and timelessness, magic and memories, and the place where Tom Wingo’s soul resides.
Although
The Prince of Tides
seemed to be a tale that begged to be filmed, Pat Conroy doubted that his semiautobiographical labor of love would ever make it to the big screen. “I don’t know how Barbra got the rights to
The Prince of Tides
,” he said. “But I’m sure fate played some part in it. I listen to music when I write. And Barbra was the performer I listened to while writing
The Prince of Tides
.”
Prior to Streisand’s involvement in the film, Robert Redford had been attached to the MGM/UA-based project. With Andrew Karsch, a business associate of Conroy’s, set to produce the film, Redford hoped to step into the multi-textured role of Tom Wingo as his follow-up to the disappointing
Legal Eagles,
released in 1986. But the script needed work.
By the fall of
1
988, a
s rumors circulated that Streisand and Redford had met with Sydney Pollack to discuss a sequel to
The Way We Were
,
Barbra had become actively involved in
The Prince of Tides
.
When it became clear to Redford that she was passionate about making the film, only one question remained: would Redford agree to star in a film that Streisand wanted to direct?
On April 9, 1989, it was official: Streisand would not only direct
The Prince of Tides
for MGM/UA but would also star as Susan Lowenstein. “I couldn’t have gotten the picture made if I wasn’t in it,” she later revealed. “I certainly wouldn’t have gotten to direct.” Andrew Karsch would produce along with Streisand, and principal photography was tentatively scheduled to commence in the late summer of 1989. But Robert Redford would no longer play Tom Wingo. Apparently unwilling to be directed by Barbra, he had chosen to star instead in Sydney Pollack’s
Havana
,
which turned out to be a major career miscalculation.
B
ARBRA COULDN’T GET
Pat Conroy to return her calls. “I had heard rumors,” Conroy explained, “that Barbra Streisand [would direct the film], but I did not know for sure. I started getting telephone messages to call her, but I thought that was just a joke. Friends had played similar tricks on me. So I just didn’t return her calls.”
Barbra was not amused. “I wasn’t ever offended, but I was disturbed, hurt,” she admitted. “I thought, What? Why isn’t he returning my calls.” Her passion for the project grew with each passing day, and she longed to talk to Conroy about the novel. “When I read the book I saw the movie. I felt the movie. I felt what would be the important themes: how everyone’s relationship has changed through compassion and through love.”
Undeterred by Conroy’s seeming snub, Barbra sat down with the screenwriter Becky Johnston during the summer and rewrote the script in a furious rush of creative energy. “The first draft of the screenplay only took three weeks,” Barbra said, “but then there was six months of discussing things with therapists and doctors, and another two and a half months of discussing another version of the script. Then the roof fell in. The studio [ran] out of money.”
The news that MGM/UA had dropped
The Prince of Tides
due to its own financial difficulties crushed Barbra. She instructed her agents to shop the floundering project around even as she continued to work on the script. Just as she had with
Yentl
, she refused to give up.
B
ARBRA’S SEARCH FOR
her perfect “prince” began the moment Redford bowed out. Very few actors, she realized, would be capable of fully realizing the multifaceted depth of Tom Wingo, and casting that role became her top priority. (Despite protests from purist fans of the book who felt Streisand wasn’t beautiful enough to portray the lioness Lowenstein, Barbra felt no trepidation. “When I first read the book, I thought, Jesus, I’m perfect for this part. I identify with this woman completely, even to a line in the book that says she is in the middle of aging extraordinarily well,” she said with a laugh.)