Streisand: Her Life (71 page)

The story Shapiro and his writing partner, Maurice Richlin, came up with could make one’s teeth ache: Brooklyn housewife Henrietta Robbins—nicknamed Henry, which prompted Barbra’s desire for a boyish haircut—is so upset about her husband Pete’s financial worries that she borrows money from the Mafia to allow him to purchase pork belly futures on the stock exchange. When the porcine abdomens fall in value, the Mob threatens to feed her to the fishes. Frantic, she sells her debt to Mrs. Cherry, a homey Jewish mama who’s also a madam, and goes to work for her as an afternoon hooker. But when Pete comes home unexpectedly, she shoves a kinky judge into her closet and he almost dies of a heart attack.

Disappointed in Henry, Mrs. Cherry sells her contract to two “businessmen.” They tell Henry to disguise herself in a curly platinum-blond wig and sunglasses and deliver a package. She is interrupted by undercover cops and chased through the subway by a police dog, but she finally brings the package back to the men. All three manage to escape before it explodes. Next her debt is sold to cattle thieves, and Henry winds up rustling a herd of cows and riding a bull along the streets of Brooklyn, through a china shop, and finally into a movie theater where she crashes through the screen during a cattle stampede scene. Marty Erlichman is in the audience and turns to the camera to comment about the realism of the film he’s watching.

For Pete’s Sake
offered precious little realism, of course, but that’s expected of a slapstick comedy. What is far worse about the film, which Marty produced with Shapiro and which is very funny in spots, is its political incorrectness. Many of its situations and characters are objectionable, especially in a film starring Barbra Streisand, who is supposed to have higher sensibilities. Henrietta’s willingness to do anything, even prostitute herself, for her husband flew in the face of Barbra’s professed feminism. Henry’s household help is a droll but lazy black lady who calls herself “the colored woman.” Henry tells a flamboyant, lisping grocery clerk, “You keep the Froot Loops, you’ll love them.” Even in 1973 the film was a throwback to the bad old days of the 1950s, with enough insults to offend just about every minority. In the 1990s the film would never have been made as written.

But Barbra “liked the script,” and she wanted to help Marty break into producing. (Because he was a novice, Erlichman enlisted Ray Stark to oversee the production, which Stark agreed to do only on the condition that
For Pete’s Sake
not be considered the last of his four-picture deal with Streisand: Stark wanted her to do a sequel to
Funny Girl.
) The fact that the picture would be made in New York also appealed to Barbra because she “didn’t want to be in L.A. any longer.” Ironically, by the time production began in Brooklyn, Barbra wished she had stayed in California, near Jon Peters.

B
ARBRA HAD GOTTEN
into the habit of calling Jon every night to ask his advice, and their conversations sometimes stretched into hours. After they had discussed the day’s filming problems, they often opened up about their innermost feelings. “I can’t get over Barbra,” Jon told Steve Jaffe. “She’s such an amazing person. We talked all night.”

He told her about his background, and more and more she felt she had found a soul mate. She could understand Jon’s youthful alienation, his desire to grow up quickly, to “get out.” She felt his pain over the early death of his father; she related to his dislike of his stepfather. She even believed that his dropping the h from “John,” just as she had dropped an a from “Barbara,” proved that there was some kind of “cosmic connection” between them.

She wanted Jon close by, so she hired him as an uncredited wardrobe consultant on the film, and the production flew Peters to New York and put him up at the Plaza Hotel. Within a few days he went home angry. “I had feelings tor her, and she kept me waiting a lot. I decided I wasn’t talking to her ever again.”

Two weeks later Barbra telephoned him and pleaded, “I need you. I was taking a bath and my wig fell in the tub. You have to come.”

He went back. “It was always these silly things that would get us together,” he said.

P
ETER YATES,
RENOWNED
for his direction of
Bullitt
and
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
, found Barbra “absolutely delightful” to direct in
For Pete’s Sake
. “She was a strange, strange girl. She has a sort of unusual attraction about her. It’s not only her talent, which is enormous, but she has this extraordinary personality which comes through, even when you first meet her and talk to her. She’s far more friendly than her reputation would lead one to believe.”

Yates felt Barbra was “extremely generous” to her leading man, Michael Sarrazin. “If a star is selfish, he or she can do things to cut down on the time spent shooting the other person. But Barbra wasn’t selfish. If it was his scene, she would give it to him and help him with it.”

But the film’s third lead, Estelle Parsons, had less affectionate things to say about Barbra. Playing Henry’s nagging mother-in-law, the Oscar-winning actress called the filming “not the happiest experience. Miss Streisand is not a warm human being. Of course, our characters were at odds anyway, but she carried that over into real life... she’s a very inward-looking person. Perhaps that’s the nicest way I can put it. She doesn’t believe in sharing a picture, even a comedy, which has to be a team effort.”

B
ARBRA LOATHED BEING
back in Brooklyn, which held such unpleasant memories for her. During the scene in which Henry takes a subway train to escape the police dog, the film’s second assistant director, Stu Fleming, noticed that Barbra had a “faraway look” in her eyes. “Do you remember when you used to take the subway?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she replied. “I hated it.”

Every day, vociferous New York Streisand fans disrupted the production and drove Barbra to distraction. At each location they lined the streets behind police barricades, took pictures, shouted comments at her, and generally became obstreperous. The assistant director, Harry Kaplan, “got hoarse” yelling at the onlookers to keep quiet and not interrupt scenes. During one brief shot of Barbra coming out of a manhole, things got out of hand. Three camera-toting fans had dogged Streisand for days, taking pictures of her between takes, and calling things out to her. “Sing ‘On a Clear Day’ for us, Barbra,” one insisted.

“Yeah, right,” Barbra replied, “I’ll stop the picture and sing for you right here.”

Between shots of the manhole scene, one of the fans started taking flash pictures. The clicks and flashcube bursts broke Barbra’s concentration, and she asked the girl to stop. She didn’t, and the constant pops of light sent Barbra over the edge. She climbed out of the manhole shouting, “I told you to stop taking pictures, goddammit!” and lunged for the fan’s camera. The girl dodged Barbra’s grasp; a crew member calmed Streisand down and took her to her dressing room. (The fan has souvenir photos of a wild-eyed star on the attack.) The incident upset Barbra so much that she told Marty she could not continue to film in Brooklyn. The company returned to Los Angeles a week early, where the shoot was completed at the Burbank Studios on December 12, 1973.

When
For Pete’s Sake
opened the following June, with an ad campaign that trumpeted “Zany Barbra,” audiences responded well enough initially, but poor word of mouth kept the box-office receipts to $26.5 million, just over one-third of the grosses for
What’s Up, Doc?
The reviews were largely negative, although Vincent Canby of
The New York Times
liked the film. He called it “often a boisterously funny old-time farce.... The star barges through the movie with a self-assurance that is very funny, because it seems always on the edge of farce.” Of the film’s sometimes leering tone and the ill-tempered black maid, Canby said, “
For Pete’s Sake
courts disaster, but most of the time manages to sidestep it.”

More typical was
New York
magazine’s view: “Everyone involved in
For Pete’s Sake
owes not only the audience but also his colleagues an apology for perpetrating this piece of schlock, certainly the worst Barbra Streisand package yet.... Doris Day our Barbra isn’t, and we are not the setups we used to be.... Stale television frenzy does not a mad, mad comedy make.”

Barbra later called the picture “stupid,” but Peter Yates defended his movie. “People want me to say it’s the one film I regret making, but it isn’t. It was made to be frothy and light and charming and amusing, and I don’t think there was anything wrong with that. It’s wrong to call it stupid, because to call something that a lot of people have enjoyed ‘stupid’ is to criticize the taste of those people.... At the time, Barbra loved it. And she liked it even more, I’m sure, when the checks came in. She had a big piece of it.”