Streisand: Her Life (97 page)

Barbra felt she knew Claudia Draper inside and out. “This is a girl who says exactly what she feels, and I identify with her because ever since I was a little kid, I couldn’t learn the rules about conduct,” she said. Then she added a read-between-the-lines comment about her mother: “You know, I wasn’t taught things, like I used to sit at the table with my feet up. I didn’t know you’re supposed to put a napkin in your lap. My mother ate from a pot standing up at the kitchen stove. We never had set times for dinner, like all the other kids, you know.”

In her quest to uncover every facet of and reason for Claudia’s erratic behavior, Streisand interviewed doctors, lawyers, and mental patients, and hired a legal-aid attorney as a consultant for the film. She visited several state hospitals in New York and Los Angeles during the spring. “I went to see schizophrenics,” she said. “I felt totally comfortable with them, with their lack of social etiquette, you know, a kind of honesty that was just so engaging, refreshing. I do like to say what I think and you get crucified for that, like [Claudia] does in this picture.”

B
ARBRA CONSIDERED ACTORS
from Richard Gere to Robert Duvall for the important, but substantially smaller, part of Claudia’s public defender, Aaron Levinsky. By April 14, she and Ritt had settled on Richard Dreyfuss, whose performance in the Los Angeles stage production of Larry Kramer’s
The Normal Heart
had electrified Barbra. Dreyfuss, an Oscar winner for
The Goodbye Girl
, had struggled with substance abuse, but he was now clean and sober and willing to work. A week later, though, he left the contract negotiations to star in
Tin Men
for Barry Levinson. “We have to start the search for an actor all over again,” said a frustrated Ritt, acknowledging that Dreyfuss’s departure would delay the film’s start date even further.

Barbra turned to her old friend Dustin Hoffman, who loved the cinematic quality Sargent and Ponicsan had brought to Topor’s rather static stage production. According to the columnist Marilyn Beck, “Hoffman’s interest in
Nuts
was strong but not great enough for him to compromise on his financial demands. The deal being negotiated called for him and Streisand to profit equally from the picture, and when push came to shove, Hoffman insisted on so much that Warners decided it would end up with a budget that would be too big a nut to crack.” So, after two months of haggling, Hoffman exited.

Although Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and Marlon Brando reportedly were interested in the role, on June 16 Dreyfuss once again entered the picture. After Ritt and Streisand agreed to delay filming until October, Dreyfuss was cast with a salary of $1.5 million, far below the king’s ransom Hoffman had demanded. Dreyfuss, despite rumors to the contrary, was unconcerned about Barbra’s penchant for taking over her films. “No, I never worried about that at all,” he said. “I knew going in that that was going to be the case. Don’t we know this? She knew it. I knew it.”

W
HILE SHE STRUGGLED
to put
Nuts
together, Streisand had given her
One Voice
concert, and Martin Ritt bitterly questioned the time and attention it took away from
Nuts.
He apparently felt that Streisand the conglomerate was getting in the way of Streisand the serious actress. Later, after
Nuts
began production and Streisand divided her time between the film and her HBO
One Voice
special, the situation between director and star grew even more tense.

With the glittering cast Ritt and Streisand had settled on—Maureen Stapleton and Karl Malden were signed to play Claudia’s parents, and Leslie Nielson and Eli Wallach would play secondary roles—the
Nuts
budget mushroomed to nearly $30 million, more money than seven of Barbra’s thirteen films had
grossed
.
The technical crew was equally impressive: Andrzej Bartkowiak was hired as cinematographer while Jeremy Lubbock would serve as music arranger-conductor. As for the music itself, Streisand decided she would score the film: “After all, who else would hire me... or fire me?”

Barbra flew to New York to begin location work on October 1. After brief exterior scenes of a liberated Claudia walking the streets of New York, the
Nuts
company returned to Los Angeles, where filming continued at the Burbank Studios.

A
LMOST FROM THE
beginning, sources close to Streisand say she suspected she had erred in hiring Martin Ritt. Although he was a respected Hollywood old-timer, he was set in his ways and unwilling to alter his personal schedule to suit Barbra’s chaotic calendar. While many of her other directors had been willing to deal with Barbra’s barrage of late-night phone calls, Ritt—sixty-eight and not in the best of health—made it clear to her from the outset that he was not. As filming progressed, and frustration mounted on both sides, Ritt reportedly ended up referring to his star as a “pain in the ass.”

Still, reports filtered out of the closed set that Barbra was giving a tour-de-force performance as Claudia Draper, that the movie would be a box-office winner, and that Streisand could well garner a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Karl Malden was wildly enthusiastic about the film and its leading lady. “There has never been a better group of character actors put together to appear in one film than in this one,” he said. “Every performance, and I mean every performance, could well be called brilliant. Barbra,” he felt, was “a fascinating, energetic woman, aside from being one of the best singers we’ve got in the country. She’s got an awful lot of vitality.”

Nuts
wrapped on February 3, 1987, and then the real work began. After several weeks of relaxation, Ritt began the arduous process of assembling his director’s cut for Barbra. He finished the job shortly before May 22, when he screened the film for her. Barbra wanted to make changes and began to edit the film herself on June 1. Ritt was not pleased. As the director explained, “I don’t know what she’s doing to the picture. I did my cut; we previewed it, and now she’s doing whatever it is she’s doing.” Still, Ritt tried to be fair, adding that since he had not been given final cut on the film, Barbra, as producer, “has the right to come in and do some editing.”

As usual, Barbra remained incommunicado during the postproduction process, but she later claimed that “some of the arguments that Marty and I had even over the final cut were where I would say: ‘Take out that close-up of me.’ But then he would say: ‘That’s a good close-up of you.’ Nobody would know [about] those arguments. They would think an actress wants close-ups of herself. And it’s ridiculous. I have a lot of rage about a lot of things that are misinterpreted,” she said.

While she edited
Nuts,
Barbra was also busy composing the film’s score. “As a courtroom drama,
Nuts
required very little music, so I decided to give it a shot,” she remembered. “The end title music was written to convey a sense of freedom and personal triumph. Later, Alan and Marilyn Bergman added lyrics to it, and the song became ‘Two People,’ [which I] recorded for the
Till I Loved You
album.” In a barroom sequence Streisand also used “Here We Are at Last,” a song she wrote for
The Main Event
and discarded until it showed up on
Emotion.

W
HEN
NUTS
WAS
previewed in the late summer and early fall of 1987, Warner Brothers executives were ecstatic with the audience polling results. Despite Hollywood cynics who felt that Streisand could never get away with portraying a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour hooker, no such protestations of disbelief came from the mesmerized audience members. They realized that most prostitutes do not resemble Elizabeth Taylor in
Butterfield 8
.
Tom Topor was pleased. “I think
Nuts
is a good movie, a
very
good movie. It’s not the movie I would have made. It’s Barbra Streisand and Marty Ritt’s movie.”

Nuts
was released to great fanfare on November 20, 1987. After turning down over three hundred interview requests from worldwide media representatives, Barbra agreed to a rare three-part discussion with
Today
movie reviewer Gene Shalit, who raved about the film. Dressed in black, a radiant and relaxed Streisand pulled out all the stops with a flustered Shalit, even offering at the end of the first segment to adjust his famous bow tie. “Come here,” she teased. The starstruck reviewer looked as if he might faint at any moment.