Streisand: Her Life (79 page)

When Barbra heard that her guitar teacher wrote her own songs, she grew “very emotional and very insecure and very upset.” She thought, God, I only sing these songs that other people write; I’ve got to try to do something like that. Bored during one lesson, she began to “fool around with chords,” and eventually a brief melody emerged. It would evolve into “Evergreen,” the film’s love theme.

Barbra put in a call to Paul Williams, co-writer of “I Won’t Last a Day without You,” which she had recorded for
ButterFly.
She wanted Williams to write the film’s final song, which she saw as an anthem much like Williams’s “You and Me against the World.” He came on board as musical supervisor, and Pierson later recalled that when Williams began to supply his lyrics, along with melodies composed by his collaborator Kenny Ascher, Barbra “reshape[d] them, attacking lyrics with a logician’s mind. She insist[ed] on precision and simplicity, on lyrics meaning exactly what they say and saying what they mean. It [was] an education.”

Barbra’s obsessiveness proved an ordeal for Williams. She would call him at all hours of the night to ask, “How’s it coming? When will you have the new lyrics?” When he stopped taking the calls, Pierson confronted him. Williams shouted back, “How can I write when I have to talk to her all the time and nothing ever gets finished because before I finish the damn song she’s already asking for changes?!”

Williams flinched when Barbra told him she wanted him to write lyrics to a melody she’d written. But when he heard the tune, he adored it and exclaimed,
“This
is the love melody.” When he didn’t deliver the lyrics over the next few weeks, Barbra began to press him. He stalled her. “I know what I want to do with it,” he explained. “I’m gonna call it ‘Evergreen’ because when I listened to it I went, ‘Love, ageless and ever, ever green.
’”
But that was as far as he would go, he told the frustrated Barbra; he wanted to concentrate on the rest of the score.
“
‘Evergreen’ was the last thing I wrote, and that totally pissed her off.”

Williams would come to think of working with Streisand and Peters as “having a picnic at the end of an airport runway.” When he again became incommunicado, Barbra panicked. Was he still working or had he quit? When he re-emerged, he had the score completed. Barbra told him she liked most of it, but then she hired Phil Ramone to produce all the film’s music, a move that incensed Williams. He disappeared again.

Throughout all this musical
meshugass
, the one person who wasn’t consulted was Kris Kristofferson. Although he was the most successful singer-songwriter of the entire ensemble, Barbra felt that his country-flavored music wasn’t right for the film; she had envisioned John Norman Howard in the Bruce Springsteen mold since the publicity blitz that had put Springsteen on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
simultaneously the previous March.

An angry Kristofferson asked for a meeting, which included Williams and took place in an empty rehearsal stage on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. It quickly became clear that Kris hated Williams’s music and wanted to use his own. When Jon attempted to talk him out of that, Kris jumped up and yelled at him, face flushed, arms flailing. “Who shall I say says my music isn’t rock—Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser?”

“It’s crap! I don’t care who says it,” Jon scream
ed back
. Barbra and Pierson shouted at Jon to ease up, but Kris stormed off. Williams then confronted Jon with what he saw as a betrayal: Jon, he felt, hadn’t stood up for Pa
ul’s mu
sic. Jon thought he had, and he lashed back: “Where were
you?
You didn’t say a goddamn word!” Furious, the diminutive Williams leaped up, knocked over a music stand and some chairs, then took an upward swipe at Peters. Jon grabbed his arm; a guard called for help. Paul stalked out before the reinforcements arrived and sent the rest of his rewrites by messenger.

Shooting was just a few weeks away, and already everyone was exhausted. Barbra and Jon went to New York, where they caught a Muhammad Ali fight at Madison Square Garden. Pierson wrote in his journal that their absence was “a blessed relief. Without the endless questioning and explaining, we are able to set schedules and locations. Sets are designed, casting is locked in.”

To photograph the film, Pierson chose the sixty-nine-year-old veteran Robert Surtees, a three-time Academy Award winner, most recently for
Ben-Hur
.
Jon and Barbra thought he was too old, and Pierson was amazed to realize that neither of them knew who he was—“What does he know about backlight?” Barbra wanted to know. But their objections came too late; Surtees had already been signed.

P
RINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY WAS
to begin the next day at a Pasadena nightclub. The scene was Barbra’s first musical number, and precious rehearsal time had been eaten up in the effort to get the music right. To his concern, Pierson noticed that Barbra’s weight was down and she had broken out in a rash. It seemed to him that her “driving angry force” had faded. “She is resigned to fate,” he recalled thinking. “Tomorrow the options to change stop; everything will be frozen on film.”

B
arbra was beside herself. She and Frank Pierson had worked out the camera setups for the first day’s filming—a scene in which the audience would be introduced to Esther Hoffman performing in a small club—and Pierson had changed most of them without telling her. The changes disconcerted her and made her angry. What on earth did Pierson think he was doing? They were supposed to be collaborators!

She found even more troubling Pierson’s seeming inability to help her with her characterization. When she asked him his opinion of two interpretations, he replied, “I’m neutral.”

“Frank,” she told him, “if you ever want to be a director, you can never be neutral—lie, make it up, explore your feelings, anything—because the actor has to have some feedback, some mirror, some opinion, even if it’s wrong.”

That night Barbra and Jon sat up in bed until the early-morning hours and agonized over what to do. Pierson, Jon felt, had gone from director in name only to tyrant. Barbra was frightened, worried sick that the movie would be a disaster. Finally Jon decided that there was only one reasonable course of action: he would fire Pierson.

Later that morning he told the Warner Brothers executive John Calley what he planned to do. Calley talked him out of it. “This movie has already had such bad publicity, Jon,” he said. “This could be devastating. You and Barbra can work something out with him. These things happen on movies all the time. It’ll be okay, you’ll see.”

Stuck with Pierson, Barbra decided to work around him. The next day she attached a video camera to Robert Surtees’s main rig so that she could instantly review a scene’s lighting, composition, and pace, and scrutinize the performances. Pierson found the move “meddlesome,” and Kris Kristofferson was caught firmly in the middle.

“Pick up the phone and look at her,” Pierson would tell him.

“Don’t pick up the phone and look away,” Barbra would counter. As Kristofferson readied himself for one take, his every move already blocked out, Barbra told him, “You’re supposed to be over
there
.”

By now Kris had learned simply to stand and wait until Pierson and Streisand stopped arguing. But this seemed to be happening with every take, and finally Kris lost his temper. “You two have got to get your shit together,” he barked. “I don’t care which of you wins, but this way, with two commanders, one sayin’ retreat, the other advance... it’s demoralizing the crew and puttin’ me into
catatonia!
”

This last condition was helped along by Kris’s prodigious intake of tequila with beer chasers, which usually began at midmorning, continued throughout the day, and was buffered, in his words, by “massive quantities of laughin’ tobacco.”

Concerned, Pierson took him aside. “The booze, Kris, I got to talk to you about it.”

“What?” Kris replied. “Is it making me sloppy?”

Later he would admit, “I was so drunk at times, if I’d been Barbra and Jon I’d’ve fired me.” Instead, Pierson noticed, Barbra had become “watchful, judgmental” of Kris’s performance, just as she had of Pierson’s work and of the entire film. She began to push herself close to exhaustion; she often didn’t get to sleep until three or four in the morning, then woke up at six or seven.

Pierson looked on the project as a job, not a mission, and went home every evening at a reasonable hour. To Barbra, this was tantamount to betrayal; by now she had convinced herself that her career was on the line with this film. She grew constantly tense, quick to anger; her mistrust of Pierson made her confrontational with him. One day she arrived on the set and saw a group of extras on one side rather than the other. She didn’t understand, Pierson later said, that they would be moving.

“Why are they here?” she shrieked. “They should be over
there
,” Pierson tried to explain, but Barbra wasn’t listening. “I
want
it!” she cried, in a wail that to Pierson “had the power of primitive will, deep and full of loneliness.” He ignored her.

At first Kristofferson had directed his resentment at Barbra, thinking the “endless changes” she demanded were the result of her whims or a lack of attention. Later he realized that many of the problems resulted from the fact that Pierson hadn’t, as he put it, “listened or remembered. He was out to lunch from the first day.”

Barbra’s obsession with the film, and with herself in it, became clear to all during screenings of the daily rushes. Her mood would swing violently from joy if she liked something to despair if she didn’t. Her rage when she saw something that displeased her shocked Pierson, he wrote, because it was “vomited back in savage attack: ‘I told you not to do that.
Why
did you do it? It’s
wrong!’
Everything is seen in terms of right and wrong; there is no personal preference, nuance, or shading.” After a while, fewer and fewer of the company attended the dailies. Finally even Robert Surtees dropped out, and only Barbra and Pierson remained. Then he stopped going, preferring to work in the morning with the film’s editor, Peter Zinner.

J
ON WAS OFFERING
some suggestions before a scene when Frank Pierson demanded, “Jon, be silent or leave!”

“How dare you!” Jon yelled back. “I’m the producer on this movie.”

“Jon, get out of here,” Barbra hissed, and Peters stalked off.

Later Pierson explained to him that input from a producer can only interrupt the flow of an actor’s creativity.

“It’s all right,” Jon replied. “It’s not you I’m pissed off with. It’s her.”

Pierson soon realized that Barbra was in physical fear of Jon. Quick to lose his temper, quick to resort to fisticuffs, Jon had injured a hand punching a door during one fight with Barbra, and he regaled Pierson with stories of a scene at Madison Square Garden when he and Barbra went to see the Muhammad Ali fight. A man heckled Barbra, Jon related excitedly. “Pow! I let him have it! He made a motion like he’s gonna touch, maybe he’s gonna hit Barbra: he’s gonna hit my woman! I go crazy!
Bam! Pow!
They’re pullin’ me off him. The cops come take him away. You can’t go anywhere with her! That’s the meaning of ‘star’! We gotta get that in the picture.”

As Pierson walked to his car at the end of filming one evening, he saw Barbra scurry out from behind a hedge, crouched low, and run along behind some cars. “For God’s sake, take me home,” she pleaded. In the car, she cowered in a corner, trembling. “He gets so furious,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” Pierson suggested Barbra spend the night at his house, but since Jon wasn’t at Ca
rolwoo
d when they arrived, she went in. Pierson watched her as she walked to the front door. She seemed to him “small and tired and scared.”

“Y
OU THINK IT’S
easy, some dude making love to your woman?” Jon asked Pierson. Barbra and Kris had already shot the film’s first sex scene, in which Barbra made a point of being on top and taking off
her
belt first, “like a man would.” Now they were ready to film a love scene in which Esther and John Norman share a candlelit bath and, in another reversal of sex roles, Esther paints his face with makeup and glitter and tells him how pretty he is. “We took that from real life,” Jon said. “Barbra and I have an enormous stone tub at home with a big broad rim on which we put lighted candles when we bathe together.”

Barbra and Jon both worried that Kris might take a Method approach to the scene and wear nothing. “I insisted on Kris wearing a little pair of flesh-colored underpants,” Jon recalled. “He yelled
‘What!’
but I told him to put them on.”

“For God’s sake,” Barbra told Pierson as she got ready for the scene, “find out if he’s going to
wear
something. If Jon finds out he’s in there with nothing on...” As a precaution, Pierson barred Jon from the set for the duration of the scene.

Wearing a short half-slip and nude from the waist up, Barbra climbed into the tub, where Kris was waiting for her. Feeling mischievous, Kristofferson wrapped his legs around her, and she soon realized he indeed was not wearing a thing. Furious, Barbra pulled away from him and screamed at Pierson to “make him put something on.” The director fetched the flesh-colored shorts, Kristofferson wriggled into them, and the scene came off without any further hitches.

P
IERSON WORRIED DEEPLY
about the upcoming rock concert in Phoenix, the film’s centerpiece. The plan was to fill Sun Devil Stadium with fifty thousand rock fans who everyone hoped would remain orderly through hours of tedious filming of a John Norman Howard performance in order to see acts such as Peter Frampton, Montrose, and Santana. Jon was excited about the concert, hopping around the office and talking about hiring Evel Knievel to do a stunt where John Norman Howard drives a motorcycle off the stage. “This is the heart of the picture,” he burbled. “This is the action part for people like me!”