Streisand: Her Life (92 page)

A month after their return from Europe, Barbra and Lemorande had prepared a budget that kept within the $13 million limit Orion had placed on them. On the day Barbra submitted the numbers to the studio—November 19, 1980—Michael Cimino’s film
Heaven’s Gate
opened in New York. Cimino, the heralded director of the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1978,
The Deer Hunter
, had been given carte blanche by United Artists on this new film, and his costs had ballooned from a projected $7 million to $38 million. Far worse, the picture was savaged by the critics as a plotless mess, an egregious example of self-indulgent auteurism. The studio pulled the three-and-a-half-hour picture from release and slashed seventy minutes from it, but it still flopped miserably and became one of the costliest film failures in history.

The fiasco created shock waves that rocketed through Hollywood—and scuttled Barbra’s deal with Orion.
Heaven’s Gate
,
she said, “changed the face of the motion picture industry. All of a sudden studios didn’t want to hear about any movies over $10 million.” Neither did Orion want to take a risk with a novice director working with esoteric material on foreign locations. They pulled the plug, and
Yentl
was back at square one.

After Barbra suffered a new series of humiliating rejections, including Sherry Lansing’s, Jon Peters came to the rescue. Barbra’s unflagging determination to make
Yentl
had impressed and touched him, and now that it was to be a musical, he felt it
just might work. He had formed PolyGram Pictures with Peter Guber, and the partners gave Barbra anot
her green light. “Boy friends sometimes come in handy,” Barbra said with a laugh.

But the marriage with PolyGram wouldn’t last. Barbra didn’t like many of the ideas Jon and his fellow executives had for the film. “We found ourselves butting heads,” he said, and that put renewed strain on their relationship.

“For personal reasons,” Barbra explained, “we decided not to work together on this film. It was a time in my life when I needed to be really independent, both personally and professionally.”

Finally
Yentl
seemed about
to settle at Un
ited Artists, which was, ironically, the studio that had produced
Heaven’s Gate
, but several executive shake-ups left the studio’s backing uncertain. “Every time somebody said they’d make the movie they got fired,” Barbra said. “You think that means something?” Finally David Begelman, Barbra’s former agent, was put in charge of UA.

Despite his joke about Barbra wanting to play a Jewish boy, Begelman threw his support behind the project in June of 1981—but with a great many conditions.

Before UA would approve a budget of $14 million, Barbra had to agree to take Directors Guild minimum, $80,000, for directing, and $3 million for acting, considerably less than she had received for
All Night Long
.
If she went over budget, she would have to give back half her salary and would have to give up almost all her control over the movie. The studio had approval of the script and approval of her co-stars. Mos
t galling to
Barbra, the studio executives insisted she give them the right to approve her final cut, and if they didn’t like it they could change it in any way they saw fit.

She had no choice but to agree to it all. “I had to eat shit, put it that way,” she said. “You want to do it, that’s the way you get to do it.... Nothing mattered to me except getting this movie made.”

M
INDFUL OF THE
possibility that another studio shake-up might leave her baby an orphan again, Barbra wasted no time putting the elements of
Yentl
together. She polished the script with the British writer Jack Rosenthal, who would share screenplay credit with her, and then turned her attention to one of the film’s most vital elements: her co-stars.

To play Avigdor, the handsome, brooding rabbinical student who befriends Anshel (Yentl in disguise) and with whom Yentl falls in love, Barbra had her heart set on Richard Gere, who had made such a strong impact on audiences in
Days of Heaven
and
American Gigolo
.
He met with Barbra and told her he was interested, but only if she didn’t wear so many hats. “He said he’d act in it if I didn’t direct,” Barbra recalled, “or he’d let me direct if I didn’t act in it.” That was unacceptable to her, of course, as was Gere’s reported asking price of $5 million, which she couldn’t afford.

She considered a range of actors from Michael Douglas to
John S
hea to Kevin Kline before choosing Mandy Patinkin, who had played Che Guevara in
Evita
on Broadway and had made an impression in the film
Ragtime
.
She liked Patinkin’s
“
pass
ion,” she said, and was impressed when he told her he didn’t think Avigdor as written was serious enough. “He didn’t have enough weight,” Patinkin recalled. “We went back and forth, but the bottom line is [that Barbra] was absolutely open to whatever feelings I had. Almost every single thing from that initial meeting that I had questions about was satisfactorily changed by the time we shot it. So I was quite taken by how approachable and how caring she was about the piece, and about the material, on every level.”

Barbra had her Avigdor, and soon she would have her Hadass, his beautiful, compliant fiancee. When Barbra’s first choice, Carol Kane, proved unavailable, she turned to Amy Irving, the bewitching star of
The Competition
.
Barbra had met Amy when her live-in lover, Steven Spielberg, brought her with him to visit Barbra in Malibu in 1979. “We spent the entire day at the ranch, and [Barbra] pitched
Yentl
to him,” Amy recalled in 1983. She was a little chagrined that day when Barbra couldn’t remember her name, but said later, “No
w I reali
ze that was evidence of Barbra’s tunnel vision. When she zeroes in on something, she can think of nothing else.”

When Barbra approached her about playing Hadass, Amy was less than thrilled. “My first reaction to
Yentl
was that it wouldn’t be a challenge to me. I just felt like graduating from the young-sweet-thing characters.” Irving sent word to Barbra that she wasn’t interested. “Then everyone was down on me,” she recalled. “My agent and everyone was saying at least [I shou
ld] me
et with Barbra Streisand because they loved the project.”

Amy agreed. “It was a very late-night meeting in her apartment in New York, and we sat and read the script together.... She described to me things that I didn’t read in it—the growing of Hadass’s character so that you could see she actually has a mind. Barbra took me through a journey that I eventually did in the film.... I just [hadn’t] read the script very well.”

Barbra then hired the veteran actor Nehemiah Persoff to play her father, a character who did not appear in the short story. “I have a father now—I created him,” she said with delig
ht. “Isn’t he
wonderful?”

W
ITH HER THREE
main co-stars in place and the cinematographer of
Chariots of Fire,
David Watkin, set to photograph her dream, Barbra prepared to leave for London and Prague to begin preproduction. As the day approached, she began to have palpitations. She sensed that if directing
Yentl
represented a crossroad in her career, it was also apt to change her personal life forever. She and Jon, their relationship already shaky, would be separated for almost a year, and Barbra intimated that one of the reasons she had chosen to make the film in Europe was to get away from Jon for a while. “I had to go away,” she said. “Obviously there were problems. I had to leave.”

“We reached a point in our lives,” Jon said, “where we both had to go in separate directions...
[Yentl]
was Barbra’s statement, and [it offered her the] ability to be completely autonomous and make her own decisions.”

The responsibility weighed heavily on Barbra. “I was so terrified for years,” she admitted. “Terrified of failure; I felt I could never do this thing.” But she
could
do it, she told herself again and again, and she
would
do it. “My mother always told me that my father died because he overworked. So I always felt if you worked too hard, you’d die. So it was like a test, a survival test, making
Yentl
.
Could I survive this experience? Emotionally? Physically?”

T
he first day we were rehearsing
Yentl
,” Barbra said, “I shook a prop man’s hand, and his hand was all sweaty. So I asked him if he was nervous. He said yes, and I said, ‘Well, feel mine—I’m more nervous than you. And we’re all going to make mistakes; me, I’m going to make most of them. So we’re in this together.
’”

She proved she meant that, too. “I was not afraid to say I didn’t know something. I’d say, ‘This is what I’d like to do, but I don’t know if it can be done. Can we try it?’ And everybody got behind me and wanted to support me because I never threw my so-called power in their face. I wanted it to feel like a family, like we were all working toward the same goal.” The cast and crew, Barbra said, “never treated me as a first-time director, or especially a
woman
first-time director.”

Amy Irving had her own opinion about why Barbra had few run-ins with members of the
Yentl
company: “I think as long as she’s directing, she’s not taking someone else’s job [by making suggestions]. The problem is that when she knows better than the director, it’s frustrating for her to keep her mouth shut, so she doesn’t, and it can bend people’s noses the wrong way. When she’s directing and producing her own films, she’s a complete joy to work with.”

Barbra confirmed Amy’s theory. “That power was very humbling,” she said. “I found myself being very soft-spoken, feeling even more feminine than I ever felt, more motherly, more nurturing, more loving. I had patience I never dreamed I would have.”

But to hear the London tabloids tell it, just the opposite was true. The Fleet Street press, who usually lie in wait for visiting American movie stars, jumped on Barbra from day one, criticizing her for arriving with fourteen pieces of luggage. What they didn’t say was that the baggage belonged to an entourage of seven. The press continued to beat up on Barbra during the first few months of filming, which began with interiors at Lee International Studios outside London on Apri
l 1
4. A
rticle after article painted the stereotypical portrait of Barbra as a tyrant who was hated by everyone.

Finally one of the crew, Bill Keenan, had had enough. “Every paper I picked up seemed to be having a pop at her,” he explained, “and I didn’t think it was fair because I knew it wasn’t true. Barbra wasn’t like that.” Keenan decided to write a letter to the papers. After it had been typed up, he took it around to the rest of the company and asked them to sign it. “There were over one hundred people on that set, and no one refused.”

“She has completely captivated us all,” the letter said in part. “Although undoubtedly a perfectionist... she has shared jokes, chats and pleasantries each and every day. She appears to have no temperament, her voice is scarcely heard on the set, her smile is seen constantly. We have all worked with directors and stars who are the antithesis of Barbra Streisand, but whose antics don’t reach the newspapers.”

Keenan sent the letter to every London newspaper, as well as to
The New York Times
,
Time
, and
Newsweek
.
The only publication that printed it was a British movie magazine,
Screen International
.

B
EFORE BARBRA DECIDED
to hire David Watkin as her cinematographer, she had sat down with him to discuss the look she wanted for the film. Once they agreed that Dutch paintings were a good inspiration, Barbra told Watkin that she wanted to be filmed only from her left side.

“Hold it, Barbra,” Watkin replied. “I think you’re wrong about that. You have to think about the scene and how the scene is going to look. If you go all the way through the movie applying a formula, what have you got? You’re walking through the film in a mask, and every scene looks the same. We don’t want that. Once we get the right atmosphere for the scene, if you don’t look good we’ll take a step back and we’ll do what we must to make you look good.”

Watkin’s ideas pleased Barbra. “If she hadn’t liked my attitude,” Watkin said, “then she would have used someone else. But because she was intelligent, sensible, and she saw what I was talking about, she took
me on.
”

Barbra, in fact, went a step further with Watkin’s advice: “I thought, What a perfect opportunity to use the right side of my face for Anshel, for me as a boy—to try to have a more masculine side, kind of a stronger side and a softer side.”

Barbra, Watkin, and his camera operator, Peter MacDonald, worked well together. “She accepted ninety-eight percent of my suggestions,” Watkin said. “She had strong ideas but didn’t interfere with my work.... She wanted magic for
Yentl
, and that’s what she got.”

“He really can light a whole set,” Barbra said of Watkin, “and the actors can walk anywhere in it and still everything looks right.” She admitted that he sometimes bristled at her suggestions. “I would say, ‘David, why don’t we raise the camera, put another light over here, let’s add a little smoke, or something like that.’ And the crew used to say to him, ‘David, she’s trying to get you an Academy Award. Don’t fight!
’”

One matter the forty-year-old Barbra was particularly sensitive about was her ability to look twenty-eight in the film. According to Watkin, that wasn’t much of a problem at all. “I have had a number of people who have been playing younger than they were, and I had to go to far greater lengths with them than I ever did with Barbra. If you light her carefully and sensibly, there’s no problem. She was fine.

“But it was difficult when Barbra was tired or stressed. That’s the worst thing. There were a couple of days where she was upset about something or pissed off about something, and it affected her appearance. She saw it in the video monitor, and she said to Peter MacDonald, ‘What can I do about this?’ And he replied, ‘Get in a better mood.’ Which, of course, helped get her in a better mood.”

Nehem
iah Persoff felt that Watkin was too cavalier about Barbra’s appearance in
Yentl
:
“His work was brilliant, but he was insensitive to those needs of Barbra’s created by her playing so much younger. That’s a problem for anybody because there are lines on the face that have to be camouflaged. And there were times when it was very painful to sit there and see that he was unaware of the problem. She was very
much
aware of it, and very often she would tell them to move certain lights in order to hide a certain line.”

B
ARBRA SAT AT
Amy Irving’s feet, out of camera range, as she directed her in
Yentl’s
wedding-night scene. Eleven years earlier, Barbra had been deeply impressed when she visited Elliott in Sweden while he was making
The Touch
with Ingmar Bergman. “The camera was on Elliott, and Ingmar was at his feet looking at him, talking to him,” she recalled. “And I thought, Oh, my God, I’d love [to do] that.... As an actress sometimes I wanted to give a little hint to the other actor about how it could be better. But I couldn’t do that. I had to wait until the director told the actor, and sometimes I would see the director settle for something.

“So here I was having the opportunity to make up for all those moments when I felt frustrated. I wanted Amy to be funny and her instinct is to play a little more serious, but I was at her feet making her laugh, telling her jokes because I wanted certain reactions.”

Amy and Barbra got along beautifully, and the reason surely must have been Amy’s attitude toward her position vis-a-vis Barbra. “I knew this was her film, this was her everything. In order for me to do it, I knew I had to leave my ego in America and go to England and do whatever she wanted. And we got along fine because of that. I think that’s what she deserves.”

She knew that her decision to trust Barbra was the right one, Amy said, when she realized how immersed in every aspect of the film Barbra was. “She has an amazing eye for detail. She had her hand in everything, to the point that I realized, when she picked out the color of my lipstick, that it usually matched whatever fruit was on the set, or the color of the wallpaper. She was just so meticulous about it all.... I was like a doll to her, and she made certain I looked my best absolutely all the time.”

As the day approached to film the moment when Hadass insists on kissing her husband, Anshel, who has done everything to avoid any physical contact with “his” bride for weeks into the marriage, Amy noticed that Barbra was nervous. “We rehearsed for a week before shooting,” Amy said. “It’s funny, during the romantic stuff, she was more nervous than I was. We’d go back to her dressing room to rehearse, but she’d never kiss, and when we finally did, that’s when she said it wasn’t so bad—it was like kissing an arm. Because it wasn’t real passionate or anything. But she cut it off a lot quicker than I would have.”

Streisand’s relationship with Mandy Patinkin, who was less inclined to put himself completely in Barbra’s hands, proved problematic. Patinkin was disappointed at not being able to sing in the film, and he had difficulty dealing with the many hats Barbra wore. “If I needed something from the producer,” he recalled, “I would talk to her in a different way than I would with the director about a scene. Sometimes I’d be talking to the director, but I’d really be talking to the actress. But I didn’t want to be talking to the actress, I wanted to talk to the director, and I certainly didn’t want the
producer
to hear. Then I’d want the writer in on the discussion, and wait—the writer is here. It was wild.”