Jon Peters wouldn’t leave Barbra alone. The darkly good-looking, cocksure twenty-eight-year-old hairdresser, the millionaire owner of several salons, had met Streisand, now thirty-one, in the summer of 1973 when she asked him to design a hairdo for her to wear in her new film. He had found her “the most beautiful woman that I’ve ever seen in my life” and a “sexy little ball of fire.”

Barbra was taken aback by Jon. The day he came to her house on Carolwood to discuss the assignment, Barbra said, “Jon drove up in his red Ferrari. I was shocked by his appearance, because he was wearing a low-cut shirt with an Indian necklace and tight jeans. I thought, What is this person?”

She kept him waiting for forty-five minutes, and when she finally came down the stairs to greet him he told her, “Don’t you ever do that again. Nobody keeps me waiting.” Later, when she turned her back to him, he muttered, “You’ve got a great ass.”

Barbra liked that. “He made me feel like a woman, not like some famous thing.” She later said that meeting Jon was love at first sight, but she was leery. He seemed like the kind of wily hustler she had seen too many of in her business. When he asked her out, she declined.

He wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Jon doesn’t let up going after something he wants,” she said. “He wore me down. I would say to him, ‘Stop coming after me; you’re not my type. I like men who smoke pipes and are more distinguished. I want to be with a doctor or a lawyer.’” (According to Jon, Barbra had just returned from a visit with Pierre Trudeau when he first met her, which perhaps had prompted that description of her ideal man.)

The next day Jon pulled up to the house in a dark green Jaguar. When he got out of the car Barbra saw that he was wearing eyeglasses and a velvet smoking jacket over his jeans and T-shirt. Amused and touched, she accepted his invitation to dinner that night.

“THERE WERE AREAS that were sketchy about Jon’s background,” said Steve Jaffe, who would become Jon and Barbra’s personal publicist. “And Jon wanted them to remain a mystery.”

He was born John Pagano Peters on June 2, 1945, in a lower-class section of Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, the son of an Italian mother and a half-Cherokee father. When he was nearly eight, his father died in front of him. “My world fell apart,” he said. “I was angry, confused. My mother was working. I was alone.”

His mother remarried, and he despised his stepfather. “I started to get into trouble,” he told the British reporter Rosalie Shann. “They called it ‘being incorrigible.’” He was small-boned but strong and pugnacious; he strutted like a bantam rooster and got into so many fights with classmates that “I got thrown out of every school in the Los Angeles system.” He hung out with motorcycle gangs, and although he was intelligent he was put into “the retarded class” at school “because I’m an emotional guy.” He ran away a number of times and once stole a car.

A juvenile court judge sentenced him to a year in a reform school in the San Bernardino Mountains ninety miles northeast of Los Angeles—“a kind of kids’ jail,” he called it. Every day he did grueling work, often breaking up rocks, and at night he was chained to his bed. “I’ll never forget that. It sure toughened me up.” And, he added, “it gave me a healthy respect for what society could do to you if you crossed it.”

When John came home he told his mother he’d rather die than go back to eighth grade. Her family, the Paganos, owned a string of beauty parlors in Los Angeles, and she suggested he go to beauty school. “I was only twelve, but mature for my years,” Jon recalled. From the outset, he knew it was a life he wanted to pursue—especially when he saw all the beautiful girls who frequented the shop. “I loved playing with their hair.”

After two years his mother sent him to New York with $120 in his pocket. He worked the night shift in a Fifty-seventh Street salon, dyeing the hair of hookers to match their poodles. The following year, not yet fifteen, he married a girl named Marie Zambatelli, age fifteen and a half. “I was in a hurry to grow up.... My folks gave their consent. They were only too glad to get rid of me.”

The newlyweds lived in Philadelphia, where John worked as an apprentice hairdresser by day and moonlighted as a bouncer in a nightclub at night. When he was nineteen, in 1964, John and Marie divorced, and he returned to California. He smooth-talked a real estate agent friend into lending him $100,000 to open his own salon in Encino in the San Fernando Valley. His talent and his sex appeal made the shop an immediate hit; suburban housewives and movie starlets alike clamored for his professional—and sometimes his personal—attention. He took the h out of his first name, and by the early 1970s had three Jon Peters Salons, one of them in Beverly Hills. Along the way he became a millionaire.

In May 1967 Jon got married again, this time to Lesley Ann Warren, who had starred opposite Elliott Gould in Drat! The Cat! in 1965. Lesley Ann was a big Barbra Streisand fan. “I was totally fascinated with her,” she said. “I asked Elliott how she did her makeup. I vocalized to her albums.”

Two months after she married Jon, Lesley Ann “dragged” him to see Barbra at the Hollywood Bowl. “Jon had never heard of her,” she recalled. He found Streisand mesmerizing. “The moment I saw Barbra—wow! She blew my mind. She was fantastic, staggering... I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”

In the early seventies, Jon began to boast that Barbra was one of his clients. “I’ve done Streisand, everybody,” he told a reporter at the time. As a result, his business increased 40 percent. “All these women would come in and want Barbra’s hairstyle,” he said. Finally he decided that he must meet her, and he sent word via mutual friends, the Joe Laytons, that he would go anywhere in the world at any time to cut her hair—for free. Barbra ignored the offer.

Peters soon found himself distracted by marital problems. He and Lesley Ann had a son, five-year-old Christopher, but their marriage floundered. They separated, and Jon began a hedonistic whirl during which he saw a number of women including Sally Kellerman, Leigh Taylor-Young, and Jacqueline Bisset. “I had dozens of affairs,” Jon told Rosalie Shann. “I couldn’t relate to any one woman. I had to have several on the go at once. It wasn’t an enviable state to be in. It was a tragic one. I was kind of scared of becoming involved.”

Then, in August of 1973, while Jon was in London staying with a young actress, the telephone rang. It was Barbra. “I got your message,” she said. “When you get home, come and see me. I want a new look for my next film.” Barbra had seen a woman at a party with a short, boyish hairstyle that she liked. When she was told Jon Peters had designed it, she decided to call him.

If Jon’s mode of dress put Barbra off when she met him, he found himself pleasantly surprised by her. “I expected this big woman, and this little bitty girl came down the stairs. She was vulnerable and beautiful. Immediately the chemistry starting working between us.” It was mostly confrontational chemistry. After Jon dressed Barbra down for keeping him waiting, he balked when she told him she wanted him to style a wig, not her hair. “I don’t do wigs,” he snapped. “How insulting.”

Barbra wasn’t used to being called on her behavior like that, and she was intrigued. (Had Jon not been so attractive, however, one suspects she would have thrown him out.) She batted her eyelashes and pleaded with him until he relented.

“You’re the only person in the world I’d do this for,” he told her.

“Listen,” she said, “will you take a look at these clothes I’m gonna wear in the picture? Tell me what you think.” She pulled out some photographs and spread them out on her coffee table.

Jon frowned as he studied them. “I don’t like them,” he said.

“I hate them too,” Barbra exclaimed.

“Okay, then, let’s go shopping,” Jon replied. Two days later they spent an entire day scouring Beverly Hills boutiques. “He saw me as a young, hip chick,” Barbra said. “At the time, I wore Dior clothes; I appeared older than I was.... He just made me feel very young and beautiful, and he said, ‘The public should see this side of you—the sexy side, your legs, your ass, your breasts.’”

She was starting to like this guy, but not enough to give herself to him. “It was four months before we became lovers,” Jon said. “But it was already there—that intense feeling.” The relationship had to develop long distance, because in September Barbra flew to New York to begin location shooting for her new picture.

WHAT CAN ONE say about For Pete’s Sake? For years Barbra had talked about wanting to make “significant” films. She longed, she said, to play characters by Shakespeare and Euripedes, but by mid-1973 Barbra seemed more interested in remaining a strong box-office attraction than in becoming a classical actress. Deeply disappointed by the failure of Up the Sandbox, and unsure whether the public would support the as-yet-unreleased The Way We Were, she felt she couldn’t risk another arty flop.

What she needed to do, Marty Erlichman kept telling her, was another zany comedy, the kind that moviegoers flock to in the summer. There weren’t enough good scripts for Barbra, he felt, so he went to Stanley Shapiro, who had written several of those will-the-virgin-or-won’t-she? sex comedies for Doris Day and Rock Hudson in the late fifties and early sixties.

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.

BARBRA 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.

PETER 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.”

BARBRA 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.”

BARBRA AND Jon were falling in love. When she got back from New York, they spent most of their time together, and Jon has admitted he was attracted to Barbra’s show biz megawattage. “I didn’t fall in love with Barbra independent of her star trip,” he said. “I was fascinated by her and, of course, by Hollywood.” But what he found most appealing was her femininity and her vulnerability. “She’s a little baby underneath. The sweetest girl I’ve ever known in my life.”

He was surprised, as many other Streisand suitors had been, at how yielding she could be to his masculine prerogatives. “Jon has always had women cater to him like a king,” Barbra said. “He is a very, very strong personality, and he wasn’t the least bit intimidated by me. I used to say, ‘Hey, come on, be a little intimidated.’ He never was.... Jon likes me in the kitchen. But that’s okay. I enjoy cooking for him.”

The strength of Jon’s body appealed to Barbra, too. His friend Geraldo Rivera described him as “built like a barroom bouncer.... He had Popeye-like forearms... and a meticulously shag-cut head of hair.... Even with the pretty-boy locks, Jon came across as rough-and-tumble.”

The sexual kineticism between Streisand and Peters finally led them to consummate their attraction to each other, four months after they met, at Jon’s rustic ranch house on Valley Vista Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. “My house has a Jacuzzi,” he said at the time. “People take their clothes off.”

Barbra found that Jon expanded her sexual horizons. She told Playboy in 1977 that she had become a “sexually aggressive woman just in the past three years, in my relationship with Jon.” Asked how often she initiated sexual activity, she replied, “We’re equal, honey, we’re equal.” How innovative was she sexually? “Well, I do have some erotic art books,” she replied, laughing. She and Jon sometimes watched pornographic movies together, but they found Deep Throat boring and fell asleep in the middle of it. Nevertheless, Jon told Playboy in 1978 that “Good in bed means giving head.”

Before long, Jon said, “It just seemed to be the natural thing to do to start being together all the time.” Barbra liked Jon’s place, which he had largely built himself out of aged wood and stucco. What impressed her most about the house was its lace curtains. “When I first went to see his house on Valley Vista I thought, Wow, this man is so creative and so original. Here was this smallish house—two thousand square feet—with burnt wood walls, mirrors, lace, and chandeliers. This combination of masculine and feminine. That made me realize that Jon was secure enough in his masculinity to be comfortable with his feminine side.”

ON FEBRUARY 19, 1974, nominations for the forty-sixth annual Academy Awards were announced. The Way We Were garnered six, including Best Actress for Streisand. Jack Haley, the producer of the awards ceremony, asked Barbra to sing “The Way We Were,” which had been nominated as Best Song. Afraid to perform live in front of a worldwide audience of millions, she declined. Haley turned to Peggy Lee, who agreed to cut short a Canadian engagement to make the appearance. Shortly before the telecast, Barbra changed her mind, but Haley told her he wouldn’t cancel Peggy Lee at the last moment. Barbra was reportedly angry, and Lee’s performance during the April second telecast proved a disappointment. Her voice did little to enhance the melody line, and she reversed two stanzas. The song did win the award, as did Marvin Hamlisch’s score.

The Best Actress competition that year wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been in 1969. Also nominated were Joanne Woodward for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, Marsha Mason for Cinderella Liberty, Ellen Burstyn for The Exorcist, and Glenda Jackson for a light comedy role in A Touch of Class. Handicappers predicted either Streisand or Woodward would triumph, and Barbra thought her performance deserved the award: “I felt it was the best of those five for the year.” She declined to appear as a presenter, and she didn’t want to sit in the audience, where the camera could telecast her disappointment around the world if she lost. Instead she waited backstage with Jon, and when Glenda Jackson’s name was announced in an upset, Barbra picked herself up and went home.

Streisand’s bad reputation among Hollywood insiders undoubtedly cost her a second Best Actress Oscar, but Arthur Laurents feels that she was hurt as well by the fact that many of the scenes Sydney Pollack had cut from the film contained some of her best acting. In one, she catches Hubbell in flagrante delicto with his former girlfriend, and in another she drives past a student demonstration, stops, sees an ardent coed who is remarkably similar to her younger self, and starts to weep.

Laurents also felt that Barbra had blown her big dramatic opportunity in the scene where she telephones Hubbell in tears and begs him to come back to her. “She kept her hand in front of her face, and it looked like she was trying to hide [the fact] that she wasn’t acting very well,” Laurents said. “She was acting beautifully, but you couldn’t see it.” According to Laurents, he pleaded with Barbra to redo the scene and argued that her eyes were not red enough for a woman who had been weeping for hours. “She was surprised at my suggestion and said, ‘But I look so beautiful in that scene.’” Laurents felt that had the scene been reshot, Barbra would have won the Oscar.

Pollack countered Laurents’s assertions. “That scene was done in one take, and she was really crying.... Her eyes were plenty red. Maybe we didn’t have a pin light picking it up because it was a dark night scene.”

SHORTLY AFTER THE new year began, Jon and Barbra had decided to live together. First, though, Jon needed seven-year-old Jason’s approval. “I knew the big test would be when Jason met him,” Barbra recalled. “Finally I invited Jon over to the house, and he and Jason kind of stared at one another for a long time. Then Jason said, ‘Are you a good swimmer?’ and it was as if Jason just knew that Jon would be the kind of man he would like, for soon after, Jon and Jason were out in the pool. Jon was teaching Jason how to do the breaststroke. They’ve been friends ever since.”

In October 1973 Peters had purchased a small parcel of land in the secluded, heavily wooded Ramirez Canyon area of Malibu, and in March 1974 he and Barbra, buying separate lots, picked up three and a quarter additional acres at a cost of $250,000. Within two years they would buy up another sixteen acres for $600,000.

Over the next year, Jon expanded the small main house on the property with mellow wood salvaged from old barns in New York. Built almost entirely of wood and stone, the house took on the same eclectic, masculine-feminine look Barbra had admired in Jon’s Valley Vista home when she decorated the place with many of the antiques she had collected over the years. “Jon deals with the structure,” she said, “and I come along with the detail.” Tiffany lamps coexisted with Navajo rugs, lace was juxtaposed with macramé, distressed wooden sideboards held silver tea services, and Barbra’s treasured beaded bags hung from rusted hundred-year-old nails.

The stained-glass windows Barbra had commandeered from the set of On a Clear Day bounced splashes of multicolored sunlight around the loft bedroom, whose centerpiece was a huge four-poster bed handmade by Jon. The bathtub, set among river stones, resembled a mountain pool. Outside, a waterfall designed by Jon tinkled, an old wine vat housed the Jacuzzi, and a garden tended by Barbra sprouted tomatoes, corn, herbs, and sunflowers. Roaming the property were a Doberman, a stallion named Shot, and a mountain lion named Leo.

All of this outdoorsy living would have given the old Barbra an asthma attack, but she insisted that knowing Jon had changed her. “I love it here,” she said. “You are very much in touch with the earth, with the natural things that happen. I never used to walk or ride a bike. I never breathed deeply before. The pressures of this business can destroy you... The thing that keeps me sane is living here. It’s away from it all.”

LOVING JON PETERS, Barbra said, “has made me the happiest I’ve ever been.” She appreciated how much he had opened her up to new experiences, she adored his energy and his boyish rambunctiousness. “In the beginning he was really crazy, a nut,” she said. “He took me to a party once and said he wanted to go for a walk with me, then put me on his shoulders and wouldn’t let me down. He was so vital, so verbal, really terrific and alive.

“He’s the strongest person I’ve ever met,” Barbra went on. “I don’t mean physically; I mean in his presence, his sense of self, in his perceptions of other people, of other things, of his sensitivity, of his vitality, in his unconventional conventionalism. Like me. It’s fabulous to find somebody who’s like you. When I didn’t like myself as much as I do now, I was always drawn to people who were not like me.”

“Obviously I love Barbra,” Jon chimed in. “She’s powerful. She’s gentle. She’s beautiful. She’s fun to be with. She’s ten different people, and I love them all. On our good days we could fly over the universe. Our bad days are pretty low, too.”

On their bad days they fought, they scratched, they clawed. Jon had a temper forged on the mean streets, and when Barbra got angry she took no guff from anyone. “Our life together is fiery, really fiery,” Jon admitted. They found themselves arguing frequently about who was going to pay for what. “Money doesn’t really mean that much to me,” he said. “It means much more to Barbra.”

One night, Jon revealed, they had a terrible fight. “We were like wild animals. In the end, Barbra sat on my chest and spat at me. I spat back. Finally the resentment started to turn into something else, something sensual and sexual. It was very real, for it showed that on an emotional level people who love each other deeply occasionally really hate each other, too.”

That realization, Barbra said, “was a very liberating thing for me, because now I can say I hate without destroying love.”

Jon’s volatility sat less well with those who didn’t love him. When Elliott Gould visited the Malibu ranch, he and Jon got into an argument over Elliott’s visitation rights to Jason. As Steve Jaffe recalled it, “Elliott could be very vague. He would act dumb when he wasn’t hearing what he wanted to hear, like he didn’t understand English or something. It frustrated the hell out of Jon. This one time Elliott was acting particularly dense, and finally Jon lost it and he threw Elliott down on the hood of his car and yelled, ‘Listen, don’t give me that bullshit! We’re going to take good care of Jason!’ They came to blows, and suddenly Elliott was as alert as could be. They worked things out, and Jon said, ‘Now I’m ready to be friends with him.’ That was typical Jon.”

Jon’s divorce from Lesley Ann Warren was still pending. In June 1974 Lesley petitioned the Santa Monica court to issue a restraining order against Jon for “annoyance.” She won the order, which stated that “Peters is restrained from annoying, harassing, molesting and making disparaging, derogatory comments about the mother, and she about Peters, to or in front of the minor child.” The final divorce decree gave custody of Christopher to his mother, and ordered Jon to pay $400 a month in child support. The judge also ordered Jon to pay Lesley $1,000 a month in alimony until January 1, 1983. In petitioning for the alimony, she testified that she had only one hundred dollars on hand for living expenses. “My lifestyle is used to higher standards,” she told the court.

JON AND BARBRA loved together and lived together; to work together seemed a logical extension of their relationship. From the beginning Jon had been after Barbra to “get with what’s happening” musically. He had caught Bette Midler’s wild and woolly show in New York in the fall of 1973, and he told Barbra, “I don’t know anything about music, but Bette Midler was terrific and you’re better than she is, and if you could get involved with some young people and use that instrument in a contemporary way...”

Columbia wanted a new album from Streisand in time for Christmas, and Jon kept suggesting songs for Barbra to sing on it. One day she said to him, “Why don’t you design the album cover?”

“How about if I produce the whole thing?” Jon replied.

At the first recording sessions Barbra, braless and wearing a tight T-shirt, hung all over Jon, sat on his lap, and kissed him as her favorite photographer, Steve Schapiro, snapped away. Schapiro didn’t record the battles, however. “She’d get as tense as a prizefighter,” Jon recalled to Julia Orange of Woman’s Day. “We fought about it. I quit, she quit, I’d fire her, she’d fire me.”

Barbra and Jon had selected songs “no one was particularly thrilled about,” she later admitted. And when Columbia heard the cuts—which included Carole King’s “You Light Up My Life,” the sixties Drifters hit “On Broadway,” and an R&B song called “Turn Me On (It’s a Funky Type Thing)”—the label’s artists and repertoire director Charles Koppelman called in the producer Gary Klein and gave him the unenviable job of sitting down with Barbra and Jon to tell them the cuts just didn’t cut it. “Charles and I didn’t think it was up to Barbra’s standards,” Klein recalled, “and he wanted me to go out to California, sit down with them, and tell them why. It was very difficult to meet her for the first time to criticize an album that her boyfriend, who was sitting right there, had produced. But I went over the album cut by cut, and I was very specific about what I thought was wrong with it, and they knew I knew what I was talking about, so I gained their respect.”

The recording engineer Al Schmitt came in to remix the tracks, but he quit within three days when Jon refused to share the producing credit with him. The whole thing blew up into a barrage of bad publicity about “Barbra’s hairdresser boyfriend” when Schmitt gave an extended interview to Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times. “This album has a flat, one-dimensional sound,” Schmitt said. “Peters is a nice guy, but he’s not a record producer.... Essentially, Peters wanted all the money and I’d be doing all the work.... Streisand has this tremendous thing of knowing exactly what’s right for her. But now, it seems, that’s gone out the window. She’s never let anyone direct her career this way.”

The morning Haber’s column appeared, Barbra got the reporter on the phone, waking her, to defend Jon and the album. “Is Schmitt trying to imply that I’ve given up my career for Jon Peters?” she asked. “I don’t even know this Schmitt. The only thing he said that’s true is ‘Barbra has this thing of knowing exactly what’s right for her.’ This is possibly the best singing I’ve ever done. That’s what Al Schmitt told Jon.

“I’m an artist. Jon and I have to deal with ourselves on two levels—as creative people and as lovers. The reason we’re calling [the album] ButterFly is that when we first met he said I reminded him of a butterfly. He gave me this one-hundred-year-old Indian butterfly [brooch]. Both of us gravitate toward butterflies. Jon designed the album cover.... My attitude has changed toward people. I’m less afraid. That’s Jon. It kills me to have him put down more than to have me put down.”

Those comments provided fodder for ridicule. Jon, with no experience, had not only produced the album but designed the cover too? And what was all that about gravitating toward butterflies? Cynics snickered that Barbra Streisand appeared not only to have been blinded by love for a fledgling Svengali but to have become a spacey flower child in the bargain.

“Do they think I would let Jon produce a record if I wasn’t absolutely sure he could do it,” Barbra retorted. “I believe in instinct, I believe in imagination, I believe in taste. These are the important ingredients, and they’re all the things he has.”

Jon jumped to his own defense as well: “Barbra is far too much of a professional to get involved with me professionally just as a romantic gesture. And of course they’re going to think I hit the jackpot by being with Barbra.... What they forget is that I made a lot of money before I met Barbra.”

MOST CRITICS WERE lying in wait when ButterFly was released in October 1974. They mocked the album’s cover (a fly alighted on a stick of butter), its back cover (a rendering of Barbra’s face on a Maxfield Parrish-like field of butterflies), its inside photo spread of Barbra hanging all over Jon, and Barbra and Jon’s choice of material. Traditionalist critic Hugh Harrison admonished Streisand, writing that ButterFly was “not only your worst public exposure ever but may well be one of the worst albums ever made by a major talent” and that she should never have trusted Jon to produce the album.

Not all the reviews were negative, though. Shaun Considine, writing in The New York Times, said, “Beyond the fashionable cracks at Peters’s profession... his role as producer certainly has enhanced this album. ButterFly is one of Streisand’s finest albums in years. It is a revelation of what this performer can do when she leaves her legend outside the studio doors.... Love becomes the lady.”

The truth about the quality of ButterFly lies somewhere in the middle. The album, like all of Streisand’s pop-rock efforts, has high points and low. Barbra does the most soulful wailing she has ever done on the stirring “Grandma’s Hands,” and brings such steamy sensuality to “Love in the Afternoon” and “Guava Jelly” that one can imagine her needing to take a private break with Jon after laying down each track. But her mechanical rendering of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” is, as Bowie himself put it, “bloody awful,” and “I Won’t Last a Day without You” is just as saccharine and dull as it was when Karen Carpenter sang it.

ButterFly proved criticproof. It rose to number thirteen and received gold certification three months after its release. Commercially, at least, Jon had proved himself, but the Stereo Review critic Peter Reilly took the wind out of even those sails when he wrote, “saying that one ‘produced’ a Streisand album is like saying that one pumped up the tires for Henry Ford.”

Whatever the merits of ButterFly, Jon had had enough. “I’ve had it with producing records,” he said. “I made my mark. Barbra and I are now going on to bigger stuff, like doing big concerts and movies.”