Streisand: Her Life (65 page)

B
ARBRA RETURNED TO
the Las Vegas Hilton between December 24, 1971, and January 13, 1972, at a salary of $125,000 a week. It was the last time she would perform in Vegas for twenty-two years. She put on essentially the same show as she had the prior holiday season, adding a few songs from the
Barbra Joan Streisand
album.

The reviews were excellent. Barbra seemed finally to have learned the knack of
seeming
to enjoy performing in front of a Las Vegas crowd. But she was determined never to do it again. Robert Klein was her opening act, and he remembers her telling him that she found the engagement “a drag.”

Barbra offered Klein her friendship and moral support, and he provided her with companionship. “She was lonely,” he recalled. “The nanny had taken Jason to New York to see Elliott, and Barbra was all alone in this nine-room suite at the Hilton. We were good company for each other. She would invite me to her dressing room after the show, and sometimes we’d smoke a little grass.” That may have helped Barbra get through the three weeks, which she couldn’t wait to be over. “I was in the dressing room when Al Shoofey, the president of the Hilton, came in and
begged
her to extend her three-week engagement,” Klein said. “She was of no mind to.” Shoofey did everything he could to woo her into giving the hotel another week, including a $6,000 watch and six complete tennis outfits with her name on each piece. Barbra wouldn’t budge. She had had her fill of Las Vegas.

A
FEW WEEKS
after Barbra closed in Vegas, she attended a small private screening of
What’s Up, Doc?
with Ryan, Marty Erlichman, Peter Bogdanovich, John Calley, and various Hollywood insiders. As the movie unreeled, there were pockets of sporadic laughter, but for the most part the reaction was deadly, even allowing for the notorious taciturnity of industry audiences. Barbra muttered to anyone who would listen, “I
told
you this wasn’t funny,” and she offered to bet John Calley $10,000 that the movie wouldn’t even gross $5 million. Calley refused the bet because he knew Barbra wasn’t likely to pay, but he did accept her offer to sell back to him the 10 percent share of the profits her contract guaranteed her.

This turned out to be one of Barbra’s worst business missteps, because for one of the few times in her career she was dead wrong. When the movie was shown to a general audience at a preview, the laughter was so loud and so continuous that many of the lines got lost and most of the audience said they wanted to see it again to get all the jokes. When the film opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York on March 9, it won mostly rave reviews, and it went on to draw over $70 million in box-office receipts to become Barbra’s biggest grosser to that date. The film’s huge success propelled Streisand to her first designation as Box Office Champ of the Year.

In many ways
What’s Up
,
Doc?
is a watershed film for Barbra. Despite all the departures from Streisand’s movie past
The Owl and the Pussycat
had provided, Doris Wilgus was yet another loud-mouthed, aggressive fantasy woman with little relationship to reality. Judy Maxwell, for all her eccentricities, is someone audiences can imagine having as an acquaintance, a girl whose pushiness as she pursues Howard Bannister is swathed in a softly appealing contemporary femininity. Tanned and slim as she is, Barbra looks prettier than ever, and she exudes a healthy California Golden Girl vitality that seems light-years away from her origins in the concrete canyons of New York.

Two major critics had diverse opinions about this new Streisand approach. “Not the least of Bogdanovich’s triumphs is his success in scaling down Miss Streisand’s superstar personality to fit the dimensions of farce,” Vincent Canby wrote in
The New York Times
. “Although she never lets us forget the power that always seems to be held in uncertain check, she is surprisingly appealing, more truly comic than she’s ever been on film.”

Pauline Kael disagreed: “Streisand sings a sizzling ‘You’re the Top’ behind the titles, and there’s a moment in the movie when the audience cheers as she starts to sing ‘As Time Goes By,’ but it’s just a teaser, and it has to last for the whole movie. Why? Nothing that happens in the movie—none of the chases or comic confusions—has the excitement of her singing. When a tiger pretends to be a pussycat, that’s practically a form of Uncle Tomism.”

Most critics and audiences sided with Canby. What is most fascinating about Streisand in
What’s Up, Doc?
is that even scaled down, she is still the most compelling performer amid a company of comic geniuses. While the others have wildly hilarious moments, Barbra saunters through the film, funny in some scenes, sexy in others, but always captivating, the kind of movie star that audiences cannot take their eyes off. This film proved once and for all that Barbra didn’t have to rely on lavish production numbers, glittery costumes, or larger-than-life characters to capture an audience’s attention. There could be no doubt now that Barbra Streisand was a movie natural.

W
hile Barbra was in San Francisco filming the final scenes of
What’s Up, Doc?
, she was already poring over the script of her next picture,
Up the Sandbox
, which she envisioned as exactly the kind of movie she had hoped
A Glimpse of Tiger
would evolve into: a gentle comedy with social and political overtones that addressed the confusion many modern women felt about their place in a rapidly changing but still male-dominated society.

In 1970 Anne Richardson Roiphe’s second novel,
Up the Sandbox
, was published to good reviews and national press attention. At a time when radical groups advocated abandonment of traditional family-oriented roles for women, Roiphe said, “These days I feel a cultural pressure
not
to be absorbed in my child. I am made to feel my curiosity about the growth of my babies is somehow counter-revolutionary.”

Roiphe’s
Sandbox
heroine, Margaret Reynolds, is a young Manhattan housewife who is outwardly content as the loving mother of two young children and the supportive mate of her husband, a well-regarded professor at Columbia University. But when Margaret learns she is pregnant again, and before she reveals her condition to her husband, she begins to question whether she wants another child. She wonders what she might be missing in the world outside her cluttered Riverside Drive apartment. As a result of this soul-searching, she pictures herself in elaborate, outlandish fantasy scenarios that Roiphe contrasts with Margaret’s mundane everyday world.

In the movie version of the story, Margaret’s fantasies include unmasking Fidel Castro as a woman, blowing up the Statue of Liberty with a group of black revolutionaries, shoving her domineering mother’s face into a cake at an obnoxious family reunion, having her husband rescue her from a sinister abortion clinic, and being menaced by a tribe of spear-toting female African natives. Finally Margaret decides to have the baby after her husband reassures her that her role as a nurturing mother is of the utmost importance. “Our children will be a credit to the world,” he tells her. “They’ll make it less crazy.”

Robert Altman competed for the movie rights to
Sandbox
with producer Irvin Winkler who, with partner Robert Chartoff, had produced
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
and
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
. At a ceiling of $60,000 Altman dropped out of the bidding, and the rights went to Winkler, who later said wryly, “It wasn’t a best-seller, but I thought it would be. If I had waited, I could have gotten it for a lot less.” Prior to engaging a screenwriter, Winkler and Chartoff sent a copy of the novel to Barbra, whose first reaction was ambivalent. “I liked it well enough, but I’d just finished working and I wasn’t so crazy to start again. But then you’re pulled together and you want to do something and it becomes
ahhhh
.”

One of the reasons Barbra wanted a break from filmmaking was to spend more time with her adored Jason. She implied as much when discussing her attraction to
Sandbox:
“I feel for Margaret. Part of me wants to be a mother and a wife, and I feel for women who have this kind of predicament. I wanted to have them heard. There is something in between the radicals and the women who go around proselytizing for women staying at home.”

To shape
Sandbox
into a screenplay, Chartoff and Winkler hired Paul Zindel, a novice screenwriter, but a recent Pulitzer Prize winner for his play
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
. Zindel’s first challenge was to distinguish Margaret’s fantasy scenes from those in her real life. (In the novel, the fantasies had been set off as separate chapters.) Zindel was loath to depend on cinematic cliches such as a wavy screen or corny musical motifs to tip off the audience that a fantasy was about to commence.

Irvin Kershner, who knew Barbra socially, was chosen to direct the film primarily because she admired his handling of the 1970 George Segal-Eva Marie Saint vehicle
Loving
, which explored the emotional complications of a romantic triangle.
Loving
had been photographed beautifully by Gordon Willis, and Barbra approved Kershner’s suggestion that Willis shoot
Sandbox
.

David Selby, a young actor who had made an impact on
Dark Shadows
, a gothic-horror TV soap opera, and had earned strong notices in
Sticks and Bones
on Broadway, was chosen to make his film debut as Margaret’s husband, Paul. Though pleasantly attractive, with tousled dark hair and striking blue eyes, Selby was no glamour boy. “I didn’t want a big, beautiful, handsome man,” Kershner said, “who’d make [the audience say] ‘Oh, man, he’s great, what is her problem?’ I wanted just a guy who looks like the guy next door. He’s nothing special. Love is not about special people; it’s about ordinary people who feel special because they’re in love.”

Selby felt anything but ordinary about the prospect of starring opposite America’s top female box-office attraction. “Until we were introduced at the rehearsals in Hollywood,” he said, “I had to content myself with a symbol of a sort of queenliness that her voice timbre reflected to me.” Barbra laughed off Selby’s iconic image of her, and by all accounts was helpful to him, but Irvin Kershner felt that even after filming began, Selby remained in awe of his leading lady. “You can’t blame him,” Kershner said. “To suddenly play opposite Barbra Streisand and be new to the screen is pretty overwhelming. It affected his work, in fact; in places he had to try very hard to just be there on the screen with her. It was tough on him.”

U
P THE SANDBOX
provided an opportunity for Barbra to officially wield power behind the scenes for the first time. In June 1969, Barbra, Paul Newman, and Sidney Poitier had joined forces to establish a film production company, First Artists, in order to “create a new enterprise, distinct from both major film studios and independent production companies, for the development and production of theatrical motion pictures.”

The new company, which owned no production facilities, had an arrangement under which the distributor, usually a major studio, advanced a substantial portion of each film’s production costs upon delivery of the film and shared a portion of its distribution fee with the company. The process afforded the three stars the opportunity to exercise complete creative control over their productions. Streisand, Newman, and Poitier agreed to star in three films each by June 1976 with a per-film budget not to exceed $3 million, or $5 million for a Streisand musical. They would not take an up-front salary but would be paid between 25 and 33 percent of each picture’s gross. In 1971 Steve McQueen joined the company; he was followed a year later by Dustin Hoffman.

Barbra’s company, Barwood Films, produced
Sandbox
through First Artists, in conjunction with Chartoff and Winkler. Perhaps to ease her transition into the business end of the film industry, Barbra surrounded herself with trusted colleagues. Marty Erlichman, who was on the First Artists board as a vice president and director, was named associate producer, and Barbra’s close friend Cis Corman launched her career as a casting director. Even Jason wound up playing a small part in the picture.

F
UNDAMENTAL STORY FLAWS
in
Up the Sandbox
surfaced early in preproduction. “I liked it as a book,” recalled Kershner, “but it wasn’t the kind of material I would choose for a film. There wasn’t enough drama in the main story. All the drama was in the fantasies, which didn’t work because you knew it wasn’t really happening. I was unhappy going with it, but I had been warned by Barbra’s agents not to tell her that I was unhappy with the story because she would just walk off the picture.

“Now, once we were working and we got to know each other in a professional capacity, I revealed to her one day that the reason we were struggling every day and every night was because we never made the story work as well as it should. She said, ‘Did you know this before we started?’ I said, ‘Of course, I did.’ ‘Well, then, why did you start?’ ‘Because I was being pushed, and I was told that if I didn’t start, and made you aware of my doubts about the material, I’d lose you.’ She said, ‘That’s ridiculous. We just would have kept working until we got it right.
’”

Although it’s not clear how much input Barbra had in the final
Sandbox
script, she seems to have worked intensely enough with Paul Zindel for him to have strong memories of the experience. “I really should have hauled off and socked her a few times,” he said in 1982. “A good uppercut would have done her wonders, I think.”