Streisand: Her Life (81 page)

According to Jon, “Warners panicked” when they saw Pierson’s cut because they didn’t think Kristofferson’s performance was strong enough. Pierson claimed that Barbra’s version favored her over Kris at many key moments and that only after he wrote her a detailed letter about the slights did she restore Kristofferson’s establishing scenes and many of his reaction shots.

Barbra bristled at Pierson’s charge. “Many times I cut my own shots out if Kris was better in his,” she said.

Ralph Sa
ndler
was one of Peter Zinner’s assistant editors with whom Streisand worked on the film. She spent eighteen-hour days at the Todd-AO studios in Hollywood tinkering with every frame as it passed on a huge screen. As they worked, Sandler noticed that Barbra was indeed, as Pierson had said, removing many of Kristofferson’s reaction shots.

Some of the other changes she wanted were minuscule; occasionally she would want to change her pronunciation of a single word. “I don’t like the way I said ‘careful,
’”
she would tell Sandler, and it would be his job to snip enough of the rolled r to clean the word up without the cut showing. Sandler came to realize that Barbra didn’t trust him—or anyone else, for that matter. “She would watch everything I did. She’d tell me what to do, and I’d do it, but she was always looking to see, did I
really
do it.”

Jon was frequently present at the editing, but he said little. “He had pretty much learned by then that she was the boss,” Sandler said. One night Sandler saw them cuddling on a folding chair. “Oh, Jon, you’re the greatest,” Barbra cooed. Later that night Sandler saw a national tabloid with a headline about Barbra and Jon breaking up.

Sandler found himself amazed by some of Barbra’s foibles. Whenever doughnuts were delivered to the studio for the crew, Barbra would rush over to them and break a piece off a chocolate one, a cream-filled one, a sugar-coated one, until few were left untouched. The crew was not amused. “They didn’t want to eat a doughnut that her hands had been all over,” Sandler said.

Barbra worked such long hours on the film that Jason had to be driven to the studio to see her by one of her maids; they were usually accompanied by a friend of Jason’s, a pretty girl of about his age. One day as they came into the editing room the maid said, “Jason, go kiss your mother.” He refused and rushed back out to the car. After a few similar visits, several members of the editing crew took Sandler aside to tell him that whenever they saw Jason in the car with his young friend he invariably had his hand up her dress. “We didn’t dare say anything to Barbra,” Sandler said, “because we were sure we’d be fired.”

Soon thereafter, Jon caught Jason in the act. He came into the editing room and told Barbra with a laugh, “Jason’s got his hand up that girl’s dress.”

“What?!”
Barbra exploded.
“What!
I’ll
kill
him!”

Very late one night, Barbra called a break, and everyone left the editing bay. When Sandler went back to get something he needed, he saw Barbra sitting alone at the console, fiddling with the dials. “This was a major infraction of union rules,” he said, “but she figured she could do whatever she wanted.”

Barbra hadn’t heard Sandler come in. She was intently watching herself, as Esther Hoffman, sing “Evergreen,” her face ten feet wide on the screen. As Esther hit a high note, Barbra let out a cry: “Sing it, bitch!
Sing it!
”

I
T WAS NOVEMBER
, the film was set to open in a matter of weeks, and still Barbra fiddled. Eventually she screened a “final” cut of the picture for all involved, but she was ready to tinker some more with it if necessary. This was the first time Kristofferson had seen the film, and he was deeply moved. He found the movie “beautiful,” and he even liked his own music in it.
“It’s a
sad love story, but a real one,” he said. “All you heard in the screening room was the blowin’ of noses.”

But no sooner did the lights come up than Barbra accosted Kris. “Are you happy with it?” she implored. “What
didn’t
you like?”

“Barbra,”
Kris replied, “would you relax for crissake? It’s a great picture, a two-person picture. You gave me
more
than equal time.”

She wasn’t listening; she was scribbling notes. “When did you start to cry?” she asked. “I mean, in which
frame
did you start?”

It was all too nerve-racking for Barbra. “Every time I go to see a screening of it I think I’m going to die of palpitations,” she said. When Warner Brothers informed her she could make no more changes, she said, “It was the most horrible experience to let it go.”

Barbra soon learned that Frank Pierson was circulating among major magazines a forty-three-page article about his experiences directing
A Star Is Born.
She finagled a copy and was stunned. The piece was a startlingly intimate expose that painted her as megalomaniacal, frightened, indecisive, rude, disruptive, and monstrously self-absorbed. Jon emerged as a brash hot dog, jumping up and down, threatening violence, full of “mad sche
mes,”
and incompetent.

Barbra couldn’t believe her eyes: she considered the article a staggering betrayal of the implied confidentiality between an actress and her director. She called Pierson to beg him not to put “a black cloud over the film” before it opened. According to Barbra he assured her he had no intention of publishing the piece, that he had written it only for the amusement of his friends, and accused her of stealing a copy from his office. A few weeks later a shortened but still quite lengthy version of the article appeared simultaneously on both coasts, in
New York
and
New West
magazines.

When she saw “My Battles with Barbra and Jon” splashed across the full cover of
New West,
Barbra collapsed into tears. The article was the second major journalistic strike against the film before its premiere, and Barbra was terrified that it would so prejudice the public that
A Star Is Born
would never get a fair hearing. Barbra wrote a letter to Pierson, telling him that he had portrayed her and Jon as “idiots” and had “distorted” the facts. He couldn’t face his own limitations, she went on, and that was why he had done so “destructive” a thing to all concerned. She concluded that he was a “sick, vicious” person with “no scruples.”

Later, on national television, she was no less blunt. She told Geraldo Rivera, “Pierson’s article was so immoral, so unethical, so unprofessional, so undignified, with no integrity, totally dishonest, injurious. If anyone believed it, without examining who that person was, to try to put a black cloud over a piece of work before it’s even released...”

N
OW THERE WAS
nothing left to do but wait. Barbra was jittery, coiled, short-tempered. Pierson’s article had her terrified that the film would be a colossal flop, that she and Jon would come out of it looking like fools. They fought more and more frequently; they came perilously close to breaking up.

The first reviews, from the West Coast, were disarming.
Daily Variety
raved that the film was “a superlative remake. Barbra Streisand’s performance... is her finest screen work to date, while Kris Kristofferson’s magnificent portrayal of her failing benefactor realizes all the promise first shown five years ago in
Cisco Pike
. Jon Peters’s pro
duction
is outstanding, and Frank Pierson’s direction is brilliant. Selznick himself would be proud of this film.”

But with the reviews from the East Coast and most national magazines, the roof caved in. Rex Reed’s notice bordered on vicious but wasn’t atypical: “If there’s anything worse than the noise and stench that rises from [the sound-track] album, it’s the movie itself. It’s an unsalvageable disaster. This is why Hollywood is in the toilet. What the hell does Barbra Streisand know about directing and editing a movie? So many people have disowned this film that I don’t even know who to blame. But I do blame a studio for giving $5.5 million to an actress and her boyfriend to finance their own ego trip... the result is a junkheap of boring ineptitude... every aspect of the classic story has been trashed along with the dialogue.... Kristofferson—paunchy, dissipated, stoned and looking
like the
Werewolf of London—sounds like a pregnant buffalo in labor pains. To hear Streisand at thirty-four trying desperately to sound like Grace Slick... is laughable and sad and ultimately infuriating. She is wrecking her image, talent, and femininity, and I cannot stand around applauding while she does.”

John Simon, writing for
New York
,
was more vicious still. “O, for the gift of Rostand’s Cyrano to evoke the vastness of that nose alone as it cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning, it towers likes a juggernaut made of meat. The hair is now something like the wig of the fop in a Restoration comedy; the speaking voice continues to sound like Rice Krispies if they could talk.... Kris tells Barbra, ‘When you hook into an incredible marlin, that’s what it felt like hearing you sing.’ Funny, it feels like that to me when I see her face.... And then I realize with a gasp that this Barbra Streisand is in fact beloved above all other female stars by our moviegoing audiences; that this hypertrophic ego and bloated countenance are things people shell out money for as for no other actress; that this progressively more belligerent caterwauling can sell anything—concerts, records, movies. And I feel as if our entire society were ready to flush itself down in something even worse than a collective death wish—a collective will to live in ugliness and self-debasement.”

Barbra burst into tears when she read these reviews, her fear of failure threatening to undo her. “I couldn’t even control myself. It was
so
devastating to me... it hurt me deeply that the reviews were so personal.” Jon tried to console her, but he too was scared. His dreams
of Hollyw
ood success and power—and his relationship with Barbra—had suddenly begun to feel looser in his grip.

But as he later put it, “We planned on breaking up, and then the movie was a hit.” Despite the harsh reviews, audiences—young people, especially—flocked
to A Star Is Born
when it opened nationally on Christmas day; reports came back to Warners of people standing in line for hours in snowstorms to see it. The film grossed $10 million in its first ten days of release, an enormous take in 1976, and it ultimately grossed over $92 million domestically and another $66 million internationally. It became Barbra’s most profitable movie to date.