Streisand: Her Life (113 page)

I
N
1986
STREISAND
had optioned
The Normal Heart
,
Larry Kramer’s searing off-Broadway play about the AIDS epidemic and the government’s shocking indifference to it. Nine years later, after a series of delays and difficulties, she appeared ready to produce, direct, and costar in the film. “I have written twenty drafts of a screenplay over the years,” Kramer said, “five for her. I told her I wanted it to be perfect, and she said there is no such thing.... [then she added], ‘I’m trying not to do that to myself anymore.
’”

Barbra spent hours with Kramer, himself ill with AIDS, both at Carolwood and in his Greenwich Village apartment, working on the script. “I’m loving it,” Kramer said. “It’s keeping me going.... She’ll challenge you on every word; she’ll act out the words.... She’ll recall draft four when you’ve forgotten every previous draft.”

A disagreement between Barbra and Kramer arose out of a line in the play when the gay protagonist tells his straight brother, “I’m the same as you. Just say it.”

Barbra didn’t believe that the two brothers were the same. As she put it during her concert tour, “Just imagine how boring life would be if we were all the same. My idea of a perfect world is one in which we really appreciate each other’s differences—short, tall, Democrat, Republican, black, white, gay, straight. A world in which all of us are equal, but definitely not the same!”

Kramer tried to change Barbra’s mind, but he found her intractable. “I can’t put that in my movie,” she said, “because I don’t believe it.”

Barbra appeared ready to begin production on
The Normal Heart
in the spring of 1995, but she has had difficulty raising “enough money” to make it, she said, and the actor she wanted for the film’s lead, Ralph Fiennes, proved unavailable due to a commitment to play Hamlet on the London and New York stages. Barbra put the project on hold, and it appears very unlikely that she will ever do it. Over the years Kramer has complained that Barbra’s involvement sabotaged the production; Barbra has countered that Kramer had been intractable about too many things to make the project feasible. The film might still get made, but it won’t be by Barbra.

A
FTER QUESTIONS FROM
the Harvard students about AIDS, about how Barbra can be so mainstream and yet fight against the mainstream mentality (“I don’t think of myself as mainstream”), about what international problems she’s interested in (“I don’t know that much about Bosnia”), and about how her religion informs her work, the question and answer session came to a close. Albert Carnesale, acknowledging the success of Barbra’s talk amid the lusty cheers of the students, joked that since she wasn’t interested in running for the Senate, she should accept the open job of Dean of the Kennedy Center.

As Barbra laughed and waved good-bye to the cheering crowd, two students stood up and held aloft a banner that read: “Babs in ’96.”

I
N MAY
1995 Barbra received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Brandeis University. As she accepted the degree, Barbra told the cheering graduating class, “My father would be very proud.” Indeed, Emanuel Streisand’s daughter had become one of the most accomplished, one of the wealthiest and most charitable, and one of the most influential women of her day, a close friend of the president of the United States, a performer who brings joy to millions and who stands up defiantly to the sniping of others who recite a litany of complaints against her. “She’s a Streisand,” Manny might have boasted.

On June 6, Barbra sat for an hour-long television interview with Larry King. The CNN talk show host had been after her for nearly a year to appear on his program, but she resisted until he assured her that most of the hour would be devoted to her views on social and political issues.

Dressed all in white, Barbra frequently donned eyeglasses in order to refer to notes she had made for the appearance. A few days later, King revealed in his
USA Today
column several things Barbra had written in her notes but hadn’t had time to say on the air. About Senator Bob Dole’s criticism that Hollywood executives had “sold [their] souls... for the sake of corporate profits,” Barbra planned to ask him, “Isn’t the Republican Congress selling its soul for corporate profits when it
come
s to the tobacco industry, the chemical companies, and corporate polluters?”

Barbra also planned to say, “Rap music may make your flesh crawl, but the message of hopelessness should not be ignored.”

The hour was most enlightening when it came to Barbra’s personal life, about which she spoke frankly. Of her lack of a romantic relationship, she said, “I have had love and passion. I want a partner. I want the masculine to my feminine and the feminine to my masculine.... I’m also a little girl, a weak child. I’m many things. If somebody wants many women in his life, then I’m the person.”

King asked Streisand what her remaining goals are. “To be a better person,” she replied. “After many years of therapy, I still don’t understand myself in many areas.... I wish I could have more peace in my life. I wish I could get less angry. I wish I could transcend certain feelings.”

W
hen Richard LaGravenese, the screenwriter of
The Fisher King
, saw the 1958 film
Le Miroir a Deux Faces
, about the problems that arise when a homely woman turns herself into a beauty, he decided to write a script for a New York-based version of the film. He ultimately used just the barest framework of the French drama’s plot, which involved plastic surgery, spousal abuse and murder, and wrote a comedy-drama about the tension between a woman’s outer and inner selves.

That theme has infused many of Barbra Streisand’s films, and, in some respects her entire life. After she decided to make LaGravenese’s script into her sixteenth film and third directorial effort, Barbra wondered, “Did he think of me at all?” as he wrote the script. “I’ve never asked him that question.”

Barbra is a great believer in signs, in the kind of karma she felt when she saw that the tombstone next to her father’s read “Anshel” just as she was deciding whether to make
Yentl
. When she first read LaGravenese’s script, she was struck not just by the story outline’s similarity to her own life, but by smaller things as well. “Like Rose always wore black,” Barbra said. “I like black, I always wear black. And, she teaches at Columbia University. My father went to Columbia. My father was a teacher. So, one gravitates to roles like that because there is a personal affiliation with that story, that character.”

Once Barbra had secured a commitment and funding for the project from TriStar (a $42 million budget), she set out to hire the actors to play the characters in the life of wallflower Rose Morgan, an English Literature professor at Columbia University. To play Gregory Larkin, her partner in a sexless marriage, she chose Jeff Bridges, whom she had first seen and admired in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film
The Last Picture Show
, and who had parlayed his talent, good looks and charm into a top-notch career as a leading man. “He’s a wonderful actor,” Barbra said, explaining her choice, “and I think he’s very sexy. You can just feel his love for women.” Barbra was fearful Bridges wouldn’t accept the role, but when she heard that his mother Dorothy—a poet who had been married to Jeff’s late father Lloyd for sixty years—liked the script, she sighed in relief. “Okay we’ve got him!” Barbra later added, “He has a great mom—a strong, opinionated, funny mom
.
... When you’re gonna go out on a date with someone, the first question is, ‘What was your relationship with your mother?’ That will tell you a lot about his behavior toward women.”

The role of Rose’s mother, Hannah, was a pivotal one for Streisand to cast. Their relationship in the script had brought to Barbra’s mind her own with her mother Diana: Hannah, a vain, haughty former beauty, disparages Rose’s appearance and her lack of concern about it. Barbra thought of 72-year-old cinema legend Lauren Bacall, a former cover girl who had made a memorable screen debut at twenty opposite her future husband Humphrey Bogart in
To Have and Have Not
in 1944. Bacall, known for her sardonic, cutting wit and slight air of disdain, would be the perfect actress to play her mother, Barbra felt.

Rounding out the cast would be Mimi Rogers as Rose’s more attractive sister Claire, Pierce Brosnan as Claire’s handsome fiancé, Dudley Moore as Gregory’s friend Henry Fine and—in smaller roles—Austin Pendleton and Brenda Vaccaro.

Filming began in New York City in October 1995. Almost immediately the whispered reports started: Streisand was being “impossible,” “manic,” a “meddler.” Crew members groused that she wasn’t letting them do their jobs, but interfered constantly. “She dissects everything too much,” said an agent who represented someone let go from the film. “She’ll decide what she wants, think about it overnight and change her mind the next day. And it’ll just go on and on.”

Rumors that this was a troubled production weren’t eased with the replacement of Dudley Moore by George Segal one month into production. This wasn’t caprice on Barbra’s part, however: Moore was unable to remember his lines. Less than three years later, Moore announced that he had been diagnosed with the terminal brain disorder progressive supranuclear palsy, the early symptoms of which are similar to intoxication. His difficulty with lines was likely an early manifestation of the illness. As saddened as Barbra was to have to let Moore go, she was happy to work again with her
The Owl and the Pussycat
costar.

The following month, there seemed to be a wholesale exodus from the film. The director of photography Dante Spinotti, the editor Alan Heim, most of the members of Spinotti’s crew, and several lighting technicians and production assistants quit or were fired. Entertainment News Service writer Jeffrey Wells described a “wall of crosses” put up by the remaining crew in a production office. More than twenty crucifixes were hung, each with the name of a crew member no longer on the production, whether because of dismissal or unhappiness.

As had happened so many times before, those operating on a plane approaching Barbra’s came to her defense. Richard LaGravenese attributed the personnel changes to the fact that “she was rushed. She wanted to begin in January, but [TriStar] said no, go in October.” Thus Barbra was forced to make hurried decisions about who would help her make this film, and not everyone proved up to snuff. “She had to get the team she needed,” LaGravenese said, “I don’t know why people gang up on Barbra. She gets such a bad rap. I’ve gotten to work with this woman, and I think she’s great.” Pierce Brosnan also came to Barbra’s defense. “I’ve watched male directors throw tantrums on set and nobody says a peep.”

“I used to be embarrassed and defensive about it,” Barbra said of her need for total control over a project. “Now I say, are you kidding? Of course I want utter and complete control of every product I do. The audience buys my work because I do control it, because I am a perfectionist, because I care deeply.” She ascribed the flack she gets for that to “a sexist attitude, definitely... It still hurts after all these years. I’m always kind of shocked by it. But that’s the way it has to be for a while until it changes.”

Barbra and her actors got along famously. She greatly respected Lauren Bacall, like Barbra Jewish and from New York, who contributed insights into Rose’s mother—such as that she should still be working, as a cosmetician. She and “Betty” were in many ways kindred spirits. “She’s very clear about what she wants,” Bacall told Charlie Rose, “and then she pursues it. She is totally dedicated to her work and she expects anyone who works with her to be as dedicated—which I understand because I’m dedicated. We’re both fighters and we’ve both been maligned [by the press]. They’re very unfair to her.”

Barbra found she loved Jeff Bridges’s spontaneity as an actor. “[I would think] I got what I needed, and then he’d say, ‘Well, let’s play.’ We always used to do that. We’d get it in the can and then throw everything to the wind. I never like to put a performance in stone, because it’s in the moment to me that you’re free and truthful.

“I never once felt like I was acting with the director,” Bridges added. “She was totally Rose each time the camera rolled. She has this uncanny ability to view the entire scene and all the characters, but you’re never aware of it during the scene. Then, immediately after we cut, she knows everything that’s happened and what was perfect and what needed to be changed. It is astounding.”

After an unusually long six-month shoot (it had been disrupted by blizzards and frigid weather),
The Mirror Has Two Faces
wrapped in April 1996. Upon its release on November 15, the film met with a nearly evenly split critical reaction (52% on Rotten Tomatoes). Edward Guthmann’s review in the
San Francisco Chronicle
neatly summed up both sides: “Hasn’t [Streisand] returned to the theme of Homely Girl Redeemed, and crowned herself the victor, countless times?... In its first half
The Mirror
is a romantic-comedy delight; nicely directed [and] well acted by a terrific cast and peppered with great one-liners... [By] the second half,…the movie has disintegrated into a humorless, drawn-out plea for reassurance.”

A number of critics (and Streisand fans) felt that Barbra often looked lovely as the “ugly duckling” Rose and so seemed merely tarted up after her transformation. “If one were to take it all seriously,” wrote Todd McCarthy in
Variety
, “one would have to point out that there just isn’t much difference in Rose Before and After, that Streisand hasn’t allowed herself to look unappealing enough to justify the big change.” It was a criticism Barbra had faced before: that she was too vain (or insecure) to allow herself to look truly bad onscreen. The closest she had come was in
Nuts
, but even there she could have looked much worse after the trauma of the attack and murder and Claudia’s arrest.

The Mirror Has Two Faces
proved to be a modest hit. It came in third for its opening weekend with 12.2 million at the box office, and went on to gross $73 million worldwide. On November 12, Sony had released the soundtrack album, which featured two dozen tracks, mostly instrumentals written by Marvin Hamlisch with occasional help from Barbra. The two vocals were “All My Life,” written by Barbra, Marvin, and the Bergmans, and the film’s love theme, a duet with Bryan Adams, “I Finally Found Someone,” written by Barbra, Marvin, Robert John Lange and Bryan Adams.

The single release of “I Finally Found Someone” rose to Number 8 on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart, the first Streisand single to break the Top Ten since 1981. The song began as a melody from Barbra, and had a long genesis. The Bergmans were having some difficulty connecting their lyrics to the song’s bridge. “It was very difficult,” Barbra explained, “because when you play something orchestrally, you can do all sorts of wonderful keys, but when the voice has to sing it, it changes that pattern.” She asked producer-songwriter David Foster to help, and he brought her together with “five of my favorite musicians… we kind of had a jam session and made this track. I was humming the words, because we only had some of the words.” Foster then recommended that Barbra consider singing the song with Bryan Adams, the Canadian singer-songwriter, whose muscular vocal style he felt would serve the song well. “So I sent him the track, and he fell in love with my little theme and wrote this counter melody…around this theme. He’s a doll! Talk about a perfectionist!”

At Oscar time, “I Finally Found Someone” was nominated as best song, and Lauren Bacall was recognized with a best supporting actress nod (her first in her fifty-year career), continuing Barbra’s string of directing actors to Oscar nominations. Bacall had won the Golden Globe and the SAG award, and was the favorite to win the Oscar, but she lost to Juliette Binoche in
The English Patient
.

Overall,
The Mirror Has Two Faces
had been a positive experience for Barbra. Few could have guessed at this point that she would not appear on the big screen again for another eight years. She had, as they say, other fish to fry.