Streisand: Her Life (63 page)

B
ARBRA HAD MET
the blond, boyishly handsome twenty-nine-year-old O’Neal at a dinner party in Hollywood a year earlier, and sparks had flown between them immediately. She found herself attracted to Ryan’s healthy physicality and surfer-boy looks, which fit right in with her new image as a slim, tanned, long-haired, blond-streaked California girl. An ex-boxer, O’Neal made her feel physically safe when they went out together. And he had quite a reputation as a sexual swordsman. “He’s an incredible lover, totally devoted to giving a woman pleasure,” vouched his first wife, the actress Joanna Moore.

O’Neal had gained a strong fan following in the mid-sixties by appearing in over five hundred episodes of television’s popular nighttime soap opera
Peyton Place
as stud-louse Rodney Harrington. In 1970 he got his big break in movies and made the most of it: his role in the wildly popular tearjerker
Love Story
won him a Best Actor nomination.

Because O’Neal had not yet divorced his second wife, the lovely actress Leigh Taylor-Young, Barbra and Ryan attempted to keep their relationship under wraps. They were successful for a while, but when they showed up together at a party, then attended a James Taylor concert together in Los Angeles, a buzz began. On January 10, 1971, they went to a private dinner party, then to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for a Mama Cass Elliot concert. Ryan’s younger brother, Kevin, went along as a beard: he was supposed to be Barbra’s date, and Ryan their chaperon.

Peter Borsari, one of the Hollywood paparazzi, tried to take a picture of Barbra and Ryan together as they left the party, but they refused and ran to their car. Borsari followed them to the concert, waited until they came out, and tried again. Kevin O’Neal grabbed Borsari’s camera.

“Don’t fight me. I can sue,” the photographer yelled.

“You can sue me for as much as you want,” Kevin shouted back, throwing a punch. “I don’t have any money anyway.”

Borsari’s camera was damaged, and Barbra and Ryan wound up splashed across the front pages of the national tabloids. The more cynical Hollywood gossips tittered that Barbra Streisand had found herself a toy boy, a cute hunk with a hard body and not much upstairs, and that Ryan O’Neal had linked himself up with the most powerful actress in Hollywood to further his career.

The cynics had it wrong. “Barbra’s far too bright to ever be with somebody just because he’s a hunk,” said Steve Jaffe, Ryan’s public relations man at the time. “And Barbra had a lot of choices of men she could have dated. I’d be at her house and the phone calls that would come in! Extraordinary men would be on the line. But she wanted Ryan, and it wasn’t just for his body.”

Although Jaffe saw “a wonderful physicality between the two of them, like two fighters sparring,” he felt that Ryan’s attractiveness to Barbra was based on “his wit, his charm, his mind, and
then
his good looks. Ryan has an incredibly quick wit, and the mental sparring between him and Barbra was fantastic because she’s incredibly responsive to quick-witted people. Ryan made her laugh a lot, which she loved, particularly because most people were afraid to be themselves around her, and that deprived her of a lot of humor.” Barbra loved the fact that Ryan rarely used her real name; instead he’d call her Ceil or Hilda or Sadie.

According to Jaffe, Ryan had a lot to teach Barbra. “Ryan O’Neal is a philosopher by nature. He liked to expound on things, and his opinions sounded like they’d been tested. He knew where the bodies were buried and how you could get into trouble in Hollywood. Barbra would soak it all up like a sponge.”

“Ryan and I had an argument on our first date,” Barbra said. “He won. I never felt better losing.... Ryan isn’t afraid of my image; he respects my talent, but he’s not in awe of my career. I guess that’s what made me like him at first.”

The romance blossomed through the early months of 1971. The couple held hands at parties, went shopping together, and played on the beach in Malibu with Jason. On June 14, Barbra performed five songs and her marijuana routine at a Los Angeles fund-raiser to benefit the Motion Picture and TV Relief Fund. For most of the show she and Ryan sat in the front row, holding hands and watching performances by Jimmy Durante, Bob Hope, Pearl Bailey, the Fifth Dimension, and other acts. After Barbra’s performance, the next-to-last of the evening, she rejoined Ryan to watch Frank Sinatra give what was billed as his farewell performance. (He later un-retired.)

Four nights later Ryan escorted Barbra to the opening of his latest film,
The Wild Rovers.
This time the couple let themselves be photographed, and newspapers across the country ran the pictures under headlines like “A New Love Story.” By now neither Barbra nor Ryan cared who knew about their relationship. They were young, in love—and about to start a movie together.

“W
HATS UP, DOC
?!”
Barbra exclaimed when Peter Bogdanovich told her the title he’d come up with for their film. “I’m not going to be in a picture called
What’s Up, Doc?!
” In the ensuing weeks Barbra’s conviction that she had made a mistake in agreeing to do a slapstick comedy hardened. She didn’t think the movie Bogdanovich was fashioning was funny, and she didn’t think the classic comedies the director wanted to model it after were very funny, either.

The screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton, friends of Bogdanovich’s since the mid-sixties, whipped up the script of
What’s Up, Doc?
in a week and a half that February. Newman recalled, “Peter said he needed it fast because he had a ‘pay or play’ deal with Streisand and O’Neal. If he didn’t have a script ready to shoot by July, they were gone. So we flew out to Los Angeles and went into these intensive sessions with Peter where we hashed out the story. Peter would talk to Howard Hawks every night, and he’d come in the next day and say, ‘Howard thinks we should try such-and-such.
’”

Barbra had a lot of influence on the script as well. “Peter talked to her every night,” Newman recalled. “He’d tell her the story so far, then the next morning he’d say, ‘Barbra loved this, she didn’t like that, she thinks it would be funny if she got to do that.
’”

Bogdanovich arranged for Barbra and Ryan to see a steady stream of his favorite screwball comedies, and Newman recalled the night he, Benton, Bogdanovich, Barbra, and Ryan watched Preston Sturges’s
The Lady Eve
, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, in Barbra’s basement screening room at Carolwood. “Peter, Benton, and I
loved
this movie. We knew it frame by frame. It’s a hilarious, classic, fall-down slapstick comedy.”

Newman had never met Barbra or Ryan before, but when he did, he felt they’d be great together in the movie. “There was a lot of funny bantering between them,” he recalled. “They kidded each other a lot. There was a
Thin Man
, Nick and Nora Charles feel about them.”

When
The Lady Eve
unreeled, Peter, Barbra, and Ryan sat behind Newman and Benton. The two writers started laughing right away, and every so often Bogdanovich would guffaw. Soon Newman realized that he hadn’t heard so much as a giggle from either Barbra or Ryan. “Then I heard Barbra say, ‘That’s four for her and only two for him.’ I turned around and asked, ‘What?’ It turned out she was counting the close-ups. And Ryan said, ‘Oh, there’s another one for him; that makes it four to three.
’”

A short time later Barbra stood up and said, “Okay, that’s enough, I know what you mean,” and halted the screening. Newman felt that the essence of her reaction was “I hope we can do better than
this
.” He walked out of the film “feeling stunned because we had just seen one of our favorite movies and Barbra didn’t think it was any good. And when Peter screened
Bringing Up Baby
for her, she thought that was awful, too.”

Undeterred, Bogdanovich and his writers began to work on a second draft of
What’s Up, Doc?
They came up with the story of Judy Maxwell, a free-spirited girl with a near-genius IQ, who has been thrown out of innumerable universities for things like accidentally blowing up the chemistry lab, and the tumultuous effect she has on the life of Howard Bannister, a staid young musicologist from Iowa. Howard and his fiancee, Eunice, have come to San Francisco, where Howard hopes to win the $20,000 Frederick Larrabee Grant for a theory he has formulated about early man’s musical relationship to igneous rocks. His chief competitor is Hugh Simon, a villainous, pompous Hungarian inspired by the vitriolic New York film and theater critic John Simon, who had recently given both Bogdanovich and Barbra scathing notices.

As Judy barrels her way into Bannister’s life, calling him Steve and pretending to be Eunice at a welcoming luncheon, four identical plaid overnight bags supply sublime slapstick humor. Judy’s contains her clothes, Howard’s his igneous rock formations and his tuning fork. A third carries the very rich Mrs. Van Hoskins’s collection of jewels, and the fourth hides top-secret documents stolen by a government reformer. The hotel’s security chief and desk clerk want the jewels, and a secret agent wants the papers back. No one very much wants Judy’s undies or Howard’s rocks, but their cases add much to the confusion and mayhem, which includes a fire in Howard’s hotel room.

A lengthy chase takes car after car through the streets of San Francisco, through a huge pane of glass, down hundreds of stone steps, into a Chinese dragon, past a frantic cement layer, and finally into the bay. When all is said and done, Howard regains the Larrabee Grant, which he had forfeited to Hugh Simon because of all the trouble Judy caused, when she reveals that Simon is a plagiarist. Eunice ends up with Frederick Larrabee, and Howard winds up with Judy, who just happens to be seated in the row behind him on the plane back to Ames, Iowa.

Bogdanovich wasn’t entirely happy with the Newman-Benton script, so he called in Buck Henry for a rewrite. “There was just six weeks before we were supposed to begin filming,” Henry said. “I didn’t think I could do it in six weeks, but Barbra was going to walk off and so was Ryan, and they were right. The script was in no condition to shoot. Peter asked me, ‘Can you do something about Barbra’s part?’

“Well, I couldn’t rewrite Barbra without rewriting Ryan, and I changed so much of Ryan that I caught her up a little short. And when Barbra saw the script, like most actors she counted the pages. There’s a very long period in there where she doesn’t say anything—the whole chase scene and the court scene, and all the stuff between Howard and Eunice. She, understandably as a movie star, thought, Where am I? How did I get lost?”

Whenever Barbra expressed her growing misgivings about this project, Bogdanovich would invariably tell her, “Trust me.” And, dazzled as she was by
The Last Picture Show
, she did. “I gave up script approval, costume approval, everything, to him,” she said. Once Bogdanovich was happy with the script, he showed it to Barbra. “This doesn’t seem very funny to me,” she told him.

“It’ll play funny, Barbra, you’ll see,” he assured her.
“Trust me.”