Streisand: Her Life (58 page)

T
HE SCRIPT OF
The Owl and the Pussycat
provided Barbra with many firsts, not the least of which was a certain phrase she uttered in one memorable scene. While Doris and Felix take a walk, she shows him a dictionary she now totes around to consult when she hears an unfamiliar word. Proudly she manages to use “assimilated” and “impeccable” conversationally as proof of her newly expanded vocabulary. Impressed, Felix tells her to “remember that language is power.”

This is played against a barrage of catcalls to Doris from a car full of obnoxious young hoods on the make (“Hey, baby, wanna go for a
ride?
”). Finally fed up, Doris recalls that language is power and steps over to the curb. She stares the offenders down and says, “I beg your pardon, boys, but you are intruding on my privacy and I would appreciate it very much, if you don’t mind, if you would just
fuck off!”

The outburst leads the boys to chase Doris and Felix through the bowels of the Lincoln Center parking garage. Actor Tom Atkins, who played “Tough Guy #1,” recalled Barbra’s “cute, sassy face when she had to say ‘fuck off.’ Herb Ross had her do it again and again. It got to a point where it was funny and we were all cracking up—except for Ross! Then it got tense, and it went on and on. I don’t know if he ever got exactly what he wanted from Barbra, but he certainly got enough variations. She never complained; she did it as many times as he wanted. She was just as determined as he was.”

Barbra was the first major star to utter that expletive on film, and some theaters refused to book the picture unless it was removed. Thus some prints of
Pussycat
have Barbra saying, “Up yours!”

E
IGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER
her Happening in Central Park, Barbra went back to the Sheep Meadow to film
Pussycat’
s final scene, her most challenging dramatic moment in the film. It was a piercingly cold Tuesday, December 16, and just hours before the New York premiere of
Hello
,
Dolly!
scheduled for that evening. In the middle of still another loud argument, Doris and Felix notice several dogs around them, playing, fighting, and copulating. Felix becomes agitated and compares his and Doris’s behavior to that of the canines. He soon humiliates a confused but compliant Doris by forcing her to kneel in front of him and beg like a dog: “I assimilated impeccable,” she offers to him in a tearful, childlike defense. He realizes how cruel he is being, and after taking a well-deserved slap from Doris, he apologizes. The scene made many audiences uncomfortable, and Buck Henry would have preferred to delete it. “I wrote about ten [alternate] endings,” he says. “But Barbra really wanted to play the dog thing... because she’s an actress and it is really a playable moment for an actor to do. I was opposed to it because I think it made [Felix] so unsympathetic that no one can recover from it.”

With this tricky scene in the can, and with only three weeks of filming to go, Harry Stradling stunned the
Pussycat
company by quitting the production and returning to California. “I’ll never leave the [Los Angeles] soil to do another location film,” he announced. Although no one recalled hearing him complain of any specific malady on the set, the long hours of
Pussycat
production coupled with the frigid temperatures had apparently taken a toll on the sixty-eight-year-old cinematographer, who had suffered a coronary several years before.

Ray Stark hastily called Herb Ross and Barbra together over the Christmas weekend to view samples of other cinematographers’ work. They chose the forty-three-year-old Hungarian-born Andrew Laszlo, whose work on
You’re a Big Boy Now
and
The Night They Raided Minsky’s
had been well received.

The remaining days of filming on
The Owl and the Pussycat
went smoothly, with Laszlo ably matching his predecessor’s style, but Barbra was heartbroken when she learned that Harry Stradling had died suddenly on February 14, just two days before he received his fourteenth Oscar nomination for
Hello, Dolly!

A
LTHOUGH THE PROPERTY
had been knocking around for years,
The Owl and the Pussycat
could have been designed specifically to ease Barbra Streisand through a crucial career transition. While some conservative moviegoers who thought of Streisand as Brooklyn’s answer to Julie Andrews were offended by the film’s language and its frank view of sexuality, others—particularly young people—were captivated by what they perceived as not only the “new” Streisand but the real one as well.
Pussycat
helped Barbra regain a measure of the “hipness” that had been an integral element of her early nightclub career.

She was not hip enough, however, to allow her topless moment to remain in the finished print of
Pussycat.
“When she saw the scene,” Buck Henry recalled, “she said, ‘No, I can’t take my family looking at it. You have to fog the film.’ And she had the right to have that done.” Later Barbra said that her decision wasn’t based solely on modesty. She also felt the sight of her bare breasts would detract from the comedy of the fumbling lovemaking scene that followed, and she was probably right. Although she was assured that the film and negative of the only nude scene of her career would be destroyed, as so often happens they weren’t. Almost a decade later they would return to haunt her.

A
T FIVE IN
the afternoon on December 16, Barbra rushed home from filming to prepare for the world premiere of
Hello, Dolly!
at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway at eight o’clock that evening. A few minutes before the hour she emerged from her building, bundled up against the cold in an Arnold Scaasi—designed white leather midi-coat embroidered in burnt orange and edged with white fur, and a white-and-orange Turkistani pillbox hat, and hopped into a royal blue limousine with Marty Erlichman.

The picture had been ready for release since early summer, but because the show was still running on Broadway—it would go on to set the all-time longevity record with 2,844 performances—David Merrick had stuck to his contractual right not to allow the movie to open. He finally changed his mind when Twentieth Century-Fox, eager to capitalize on Barbra’s
Funny Girl
popularity as soon as possible, agreed to reimburse the producer for any decline in the show’s box-office revenues attributable to the movie’s release.

With this roadblock cleared, Fox gaudily launched the two-hour-and-twenty-eight-minute film as a road show production, with a $6.50 top ticket price and a souvenir program. The studio was convinced that they had a blockbuster with the potential to equal the staggering box-office success of
The Sound of Music.
“We were all working on the assumption that
Hello, Dolly!
could never be a failure,” Lehman said. “Everybody in the world wanted to see it. It had Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau and Louis Armstrong. How could it fail?”

T
HE PREMIERE INVIGORATED
everyone’s optimism and frightened Barbra to death. Close to one thousand fans mobbed Broadway outside the Rivoli. They had waited for hours in sub-freezing temperatures to catch a glimpse of Barbra, one of America’s few genuine superstars. When the crowd spotted her limousine two blocks away, pandemonium erupted. In a scene that could have been lifted from Nathanael West’s apocalyptic Hollywood novel
The Day of the Locust
, hundreds of fans broke through the police barricades and surrounded the car, screaming “Barbra! Barbra,” as they pounded on the hood and pressed their faces against the windows to catch a glimpse of La Streisand.

Barbra sat in the back seat and cringed as the mob got more and more out of control and the press of their numbers on either side began to rock the limo back and forth. Police on foot and horseback forced the crowd away from the car; still, it took the chauffeur fifteen minutes to drive the few feet to the red-carpeted Rivoli entrance.

One fan recalled that as soon as he spotted Barbra’s car, he began to run along with it, peering in at Streisand. “She looked gorgeous, but she had an expression on her face like a deer caught in headlights,” he said. “She kept pulling up her fur collar and sort of sinking into it. Every so often she’d put up her white-leather-gloved hand and make the V-shaped peace sign with her fingers next to the window. Maybe she thought that would help calm the crowd down. It got pretty hairy. One crazed fan jumped on the front hood of the limo and started pounding on the glass and screaming. At one point people behind me were pushing so hard my face was smashed against the window. I motioned to Barbra that she shouldn’t get out of the car.”