Streisand: Her Life (88 page)

T
HE SUCCESS OF
“The Main Event/Fight” led its composers, Paul Jabara and Bruce Roberts, to submit another song to Barbra after they received word that she was planning an album called
Wet
,
built around a theme: all the songs had to relate in some way to water. Charles Koppelman, who had left Columbia to form the Entertainment Company and had acted as executive producer for Barbra’s recent albums, didn’t like “Enough Is Enough,” a new disco number Jabara and Roberts had come up with for the album, because the lyrics weren’t “wet.” Undeterred, the team turned it into a medley with another composition of theirs, “No More Tears.”

When Koppelman still seemed reluctant to suggest the song to Barbra, Jabara took matters into his own hands and approached Streisand directly. He wrangled an invitation to Malibu to pitch “Enough Is Enough/No More Tears.” He took along Donna Summer, with whom he hoped Barbra would agree to record the song as a duet. “That would be the ultimate,” Jabara said, “having the two divas meet and record together.” Through sheer chutzpah, Jabara managed to get Barbra, Donna, and Jason—a big Summer fan—into a small room at the ranch, and while Jon listened outside the door, Jabara “sang the song to them, performing both parts. Then I got on my knees and begged them to do it together, to try the song just once.”

Barbra agreed to record with Summer in part because of Jason’s enthusiasm for the idea. “My son likes Donna,” Barbra said. “He never plays my stuff.”

Streisand and Summer, Jabara said, “were like two high school girls, not like two great artists. When they were home alone rehearsing at the piano, they were wonderful. As soon as there were twenty people around, though, the vibes changed.”

Rumors of tension between the “dueling divas” were rife, but Donna Summer denied them all. “It was fun,” she said. “She’s a funny girl. There was a lot of comedy going back and forth between us.... We were holding the high note of ‘Enough Is Enough,’ and I didn’t breathe right. I just held the note too long and fell off my stool. Barbra kept holding her note, and then at the end of the note, she said, ‘Are you all right?’ It was hysterical, because by the time she asked me, I
was coming to. I hit the floor and it jolted me. She didn’t stop holding her note. It was the he
ight of professionalism. She thought I was playing around.”

Still, there couldn’t help but be a touch of competition between two superstars, and Jabara admitted that although Streisand and Summer recorded the song face to face, each woman came back into the studio separately to redo some notes. Barbra recognized Donna as the premier disco singer and turned to her for advice. Summer was stunned.
“You’r
e Barbra Streisand!” she replied. “You’re asking
me
how to sing?” John Arrias, Barbra’s recording engineer, understood her discomfort. “She doesn’t [ordinarily] sing on the beat,” he said. “She sings after the downbeat. But for disco you have to be on top of the beat, and that’s what Donna was trying to impress upon her.”

“Enough Is Enough/No More Tears” was released in October from Columbia in a standard single format that ran four and a half minutes and from Donna’s Casablanca label in an eleven-and-a-half-minute dance-club re-mix in the twelve-inch format. Eagerly anticipated, the driving duet with its wailing vocals hit number one on the singles chart within weeks. Both versions of the song sold over a million copies and topped charts in England, Spain, and Australia.

The album
Wet,
released two weeks after “Enough Is Enough,” proved only partially successful. The exciting duet with Summer is surrounded by dreamy romantic ballads, while “Splish Splash” is delivered tongue-in-cheek with Barbra backed by members of the group Toto. Standout cuts include “Niagara” and “Kiss Me in the Rain,” two beautifully crafted and p
owerfully
sung new ballads. But overall the water motif provided only a strained cohesion to the package.

Wet
climbed to number seven on the album chart, and even critics who didn’t care for some of the material Streisand was singing had to admit that she was now a powerful force in pop music, a full decade after
What About Today?
had seemed to indicate that she would never be comfortable with contemporary mate
rial. Since 1971 Barbra had not had a studio album—as opposed to a sound-track or a live album
—chart at less than number thirteen. Even more remarkably, after failing to sell singles during her meteoric rise to success in the sixties, she had had
four
number one singles in the seventies, the same number as Donna Summer and more than any other Columbia artist.

Nearly twenty years after her start in show business, Barbra Streisand had eclipsed all of her early contemporaries and continued at the peak of success even in the midst of the sea change in popular music represented by the disco craze. It was an unprecedented record of success and longevity. In the wake of “Enough Is Enough/No More Tears,”
US
magazine voted Streisand and Summer the top female vocalists of the seventies.

A
T
HOME AFTER
she completed
The Main Event
, Barbra often found herself acting out real, debilitating battles—with Jon. They had always fought with abandon, and early in their relationship they had found the skirmishes emotionally and sexually arousing. “I don’t think we’ve ever stopped battling,” Barbra said. “And the more we fight, the closer together we seem to be. We’re not phony with each other. We don’t lie to each other, and that’s something that turns us both on.”

“We fight and war and battle,” Jon confirmed to Jerry Parker of
Newsday.
“Sometimes she’s totally crazy. But Barbra is a very gentle, understanding, giving human being who has helped me through a lot of difficult times.... Barbra is the first person I ever respected totally—on all levels. In some ways she’s almost like a man. She’s strong. She’s successful. She takes responsibility.”

Jon has said that living with Barbra became difficult because after her initial delight at being in the kitchen for him, she rarely capitulated to his male prerogatives. “She gives what she feels, as opposed to what’s demanded of her. For instance, if I say, ‘I’m tired, will you rub my head?’ she says, ‘Why don’t you rub
my
head? I’m tired, too.
’”

One method they used to settle these disagreements, Jon said, was to compare notes about their youth. “We are always arguing about who had the worst life. The one who is the more convincing gets a head massage.”

But as the seventies drew to a close, the battles grew worse and placed a tremendous strain on their relationship. Usually after a particularly bad row, Jon told Rosalie Shann, “One of us—usually me—will say: ‘Let’s sit down and talk. Do we want to split? Don’t we want to be together any more?’ That’s the bottom line, the worst. We agree we do want to stick together.... So we sit down and talk.

“The worst fights by far are the quiet ones. Because then I feel sick, really physically sick. We’re not communicating and [we’re] angry about something, but what we’re angry about isn’t the real cause. It’s something deeper, and we’re not getting to it. Those times we go to our therapist and he helps us sort things out.”

The couple went to see “a truly wonderful psychiatrist” at least once a week at $100 an hour. “It really does help,” Jon said. “Our two sons go, too.” Jason had sessions with Dr. Stan Ziegler, a renowned expert in adolescent emotional problems.

The therapy couldn’t keep Barbra and Jon from the decision to break up. For Barbra, Jon’s unpredictable temper was bad enough; she loathed the times he made her fear him, just as she and her mother had feared Louis Kind. But there were also rumors that Jon was seeing other women, and that would have been enough to give Barbra serious second thoughts about staying with him.

What Jon had called “the bottom line, the worst” happened late in 1979—he and Barbra split. Jon moved back into a house he still owned in Encino, and after thirteen-year-old Jason’s bar mitzvah on January 5, which Jon did not attend, Barbra retreated to Manhattan and her Central Park West penthouse. Within a few days of her arrival the columnist Liz Smith reported that Barbra was in the midst of “a little away-from-California romance” with a man Smith couldn’t identify. “A male visitor with a handful of flowers went yesterday evening to her twenty-first floor apartment... and after more than three hours the superstar and Mr. X left together.”

“Mr. X” was Arnon Milchan, a forty-something Israeli millionaire who was about to embark on a career as a Hollywood producer that would lead to his producing
Pretty Woman
and
JFK
,
among other hits. He escorted Barbra around Manhattan, took her to the theater nearly every night, and kept Liz Smith in a tizzy.

Barbra denied that Milchan was anything more than a friend, and it is likely that her conversations with the man concerned the financing of
Yentl
, a difficult project which she wanted to direct and for which she was having trouble raising money. In any event, Barbra’s rendezvous with Milchan ended before very long and resulted in neither romance nor financing.

The news of Barbra’s dates with Milchan frightened Jon. He harbored hope that he and Barbra might smooth out their problems, and the thought of her with another man made him face the awful possibility that he might lose Barbra forever. He pleaded with her to take him back, and finally she did. She loved him after all, in spite of their problems, and as Jon had said, on their good days they could still “fly over the universe.”

In 1976 Barbara Walters asked Barbra and Jon whether they could envision themselves growing old together. “Yes,” Jon replied quickly.

“No one else would have us,” Barbra added.

O
n May 13, 1980, eyebrows shot up around Hollywood with the announcement from Universal Studios that Barbra would replace Lisa Eichhorn as Gene Hackman’s co-star in the low-profile romantic comedy
All Night Long
,
which was already three weeks into principal photography. Even more surprising were the details: Streisand had agreed to play an essentially supporting role and had accepted second billing to Hackman as well.

Word had it that tension between Eichhorn and the film’s director, Jean-Claude Tramont, had led to the actress’s dismissal. But cynics doubted the “artistic differences” cliche and instead focused on Barbra’s longtime agent-confidante, Sue Mengers, who was married to Tramont. Many sensed that the powerful Mengers, in a masterfully orchestrated campaign to save her husband’s problem-plagued film, had talked Streisand into doing the picture as a personal favor. Why else, observers wondered, would a star of her stature make such a seemingly unfathomable decision?

As details of the arrangement emerged over the next few weeks, the answer became clearer: Barbra’s salary for what was expected to be twenty-four-days’ work would be a stunning $4 million, plus 15 percent of the gross profits.

T
HE LONG AND
troubled saga of
All Night Long
had begun in 1978, when Jean-Claude Tramont, whose 1977 directorial debut,
Focal Point
, had fizzled at the box office, approached Alan Ladd Jr. at Twentieth Century-Fox about doing a film based on “food and immortality.” Given a tentative okay, Tramont asked the screenwriter W. D. Richter to craft a sophisticated romantic comedy that explored, in an offbeat way, one man’s midlife crisis and the events that spring from it.

Tramont had Gene Hackman in mind as the film’s star from the outset, because he felt Hackman needed to soften his tough-guy image. Hackman, who had taken a three-year hiatus from the screen, liked Richter’s quirky script. “I didn’t have to shoot anybody,” he explained. “I didn’t have to get beaten up or beat somebody up. It’s just a lighter piece. And it works.”

Hackman was so enthusiastic, in fact, that he o
ffered to lower his usual acting fee for a percentage of the film’s profits. But Twentieth Century-Fox executives didn’t share the actor’s excitement, and the project was dropped from the studio’s production schedule. Eventually it was picked up by Universal.

Richter’s script told the story of George Dupler, a family man who throws a chair through his insufferable boss’s office window and is demoted to the neon-lit lunacy of an all-night drugstore. In the process, he falls in love with Cheryl Gibbons, his muscle-bound son’s older girlfriend, who, to further complicate matters, is married to a male chauvinist San Fernando Valley fireman. Cheryl’s soft-spoken, sexy, submissive persona seems modeled after Marilyn Monroe, and this ultrafeminine fantasy character has visions of country-western singing stardom dancing
in her bleached-blond, lavender-kerchiefed head. Eventually, Dupler confronts a series of obstacles, ends his worn-out marriage, quits his job to become an inventor, and winds up with the giddy Gibbons. This “realistic fairy tale,” as Tramont called it, would depend on strong casting to work, and Sue Mengers thought she had just the right actress to step into Cheryl’s suburban slippers: her number one client, Barbra Streisand.

When Barbra read
All Night Long
she reportedly “laughed her ass off.” Clearly Cheryl Gibbons, a character so unlike anything she had ever attempted on screen, offered her a rare acting challenge. She almost said yes, but she was deeply immersed in preproduction work on
Yentl
, and she wasn’t thrilled by Cheryl’s subordinate position in the story. Barbra had never been anything but the cente
rpiece
of her films; other actors revolved around her, not she around them. So, with a tinge of regret, she turned the role down, went back to work on
Yentl
, and expected to hear
little m
ore about Tramont’s film until its release.

After Barbra’s pass, Tramont and casting director Anita Dann assembled the company quickly. Lisa Eichhorn, who had co-starred to splendid effect with Richard Gere in
Yanks
, was cast as Cheryl, Diane Ladd as George’s put-upon wife, Dennis Quaid as his blockhead son, and Kevin Dobson as Cheryl’s unsupportive husband.

The film, budgeted at $7 million, went into production in the San Fernando Valley on April 14. A week later Lisa Eichhorn arrived on the set, reportedly armed with vision, energy, and an attitude. After seven days of filming, Tramont decreed that Eichhorn was unsuitable. According to Tramont, “The part was too much of a stretch for Lisa,” but he added gallantly, “It’s no reflection on her acting ability.”

Although the
Los Angeles Times
reported that “observers on the set indicated that tension between the actress and both Hackman and Tramont contributed to her departure,” Hackman refused to join the public fray. “[Lisa’s] got enough pro
blems
,” h
e said, “and I’ve been fired myself. I know how it hurts.” A source close to the production concurred with the Eichhorn-as-diva scenario, saying she “was very difficult on the set, objecting to things like camera angles as if she were... a star like Streisand.”

According to Eichhorn, “What happened to me
on All Night Long
came as such a shock. I’d already done three and a half weeks’ work on the film when, out of the blue, the director called and said, ‘I don’t think it’s working. You’re just not funny. We’ve got someone else.
’”

That someone else, of course, was Barbra. As soon as Sue Mengers heard that her husband was unhappy with Eichhorn, she approached Barbra again. This time the stakes were much higher. In a flurry of backstage negotiations, Streisand accepted the role after she was offered the $4 million fee, a salary that set a new high for female stars. The press pounced on the money angle and dubbed Cheryl Gibbons the most expensive supporting role in film history.

Still, Mengers’s dollar-drenched deal wasn’t the only reason Streisand finally said yes. Still smarting from the criticism of her uneven performance in
The Main Event,
Barbra was eager to prove herself to an increasingly doubtful acting community.
All Night Long
,
with its satirical look at life, love, and lust, fascinated her. So did dizzy, daffy, d
electable
Cheryl, abused and low on self-esteem, in so many ways Barbra’s antithesis.

In the days that followed the Streisand casting bombshell, the whispers grew to a crescendo: Hackman couldn’t handle the film alone, Tramont’s direction was lackluster, the script needed further rewrites, Eichhorn had been a scapegoat, Streisand was valiantly trying to save a friend’s sinking ship. But the subject of most of the tongue-wagging wasn’t around to hear the latest theories: Barbra had checked into the Ashram in Calabasas, California, a health spa where she dropped fifteen pounds through a rigorous regimen of exercise and Spartan cuisine. To portray Cheryl the temptress, Streisand wanted her figure to look as tempting as possible.

T
HE ADDITION OF
Streisand to
All Night Long
inflated Universal’s opinion of the project immediately. “The sales force loves it,” the screen writer William Goldman observed in his book
Adventures in the Screen Trade
,
“the advertising people are in ecstasy
, fabulous
Barbra Streisand is something very special.”

Robert Brown, the film’s unit production manager, was equally excited, even though Streisand’s signing had doubled the film’s budget from $7 million to $14 million. “It wasn’t all her [salary
],
” he said. “It was her entourage, the people that come with her, and the things you have to do to accommodate a star of her stature.” Although Brown had heard the rumors that Eichhorn was pushed out of the film only after Streisand decided she wanted to do it, he remains uncertain about the actual sequence of events.

“I did hear a little bit in the beginning,” Brown recalled, “that there was a move afoot to replace Lisa Eichhorn, and the next thing I was told was that it had been done, that Barbra Streisand had replaced her, and I needed to come up with a new budget.” The ballooned ledger, Brown recalled, included “a special motor home [for Streisand] and a driver assigned to her, renting a limousine, and her own makeup, hair, and wardrobe people. Often you end up paying for a personal secretary or assistant of some sort that’s with her all the time. There’s just
a lot o
f extra care that goes into supporting somebody like her.”

None of this seemed to trouble Gene Hackman. “Sure, the script is being rewritten for her,” he confided. “The way the part was written, it wasn’t that big and would be a waste of her time and talents. But I’m not afraid she’s going to take over the picture. Yes, she can be difficult. So can I. Show me an actor who’s not difficult and I’ll show you a mediocre actor.... I’m sure everything will be fine.” Hackman downplayed rumors that Barbra, whether she wanted to or not, would steal the picture from under his nose. “It’s mostly my film. She has five or six good scenes, and that’s it... it’s about my character, not hers.”