Barbra was beside herself. She and Frank Pierson had worked out the camera setups for the first day’s filming—a scene in which the audience would be introduced to Esther Hoffman performing in a small club—and Pierson had changed most of them without telling her. The changes disconcerted her and made her angry. What on earth did Pierson think he was doing? They were supposed to be collaborators!

She found even more troubling Pierson’s seeming inability to help her with her characterization. When she asked him his opinion of two interpretations, he replied, “I’m neutral.”

“Frank,” she told him, “if you ever want to be a director, you can never be neutral—lie, make it up, explore your feelings, anything—because the actor has to have some feedback, some mirror, some opinion, even if it’s wrong.”

That night Barbra and Jon sat up in bed until the early-morning hours and agonized over what to do. Pierson, Jon felt, had gone from director in name only to tyrant. Barbra was frightened, worried sick that the movie would be a disaster. Finally Jon decided that there was only one reasonable course of action: he would fire Pierson.

Later that morning he told the Warner Brothers executive John Calley what he planned to do. Calley talked him out of it. “This movie has already had such bad publicity, Jon,” he said. “This could be devastating. You and Barbra can work something out with him. These things happen on movies all the time. It’ll be okay, you’ll see.”

Stuck with Pierson, Barbra decided to work around him. The next day she attached a video camera to Robert Surtees’s main rig so that she could instantly review a scene’s lighting, composition, and pace, and scrutinize the performances. Pierson found the move “meddlesome,” and Kris Kristofferson was caught firmly in the middle.

“Pick up the phone and look at her,” Pierson would tell him.

“Don’t pick up the phone and look away,” Barbra would counter. As Kristofferson readied himself for one take, his every move already blocked out, Barbra told him, “You’re supposed to be over there.”

By now Kris had learned simply to stand and wait until Pierson and Streisand stopped arguing. But this seemed to be happening with every take, and finally Kris lost his temper. “You two have got to get your shit together,” he barked. “I don’t care which of you wins, but this way, with two commanders, one sayin’ retreat, the other advance... it’s demoralizing the crew and puttin’ me into catatonia!”

This last condition was helped along by Kris’s prodigious intake of tequila with beer chasers, which usually began at midmorning, continued throughout the day, and was buffered, in his words, by “massive quantities of laughin’ tobacco.”

Concerned, Pierson took him aside. “The booze, Kris, I got to talk to you about it.”

“What?” Kris replied. “Is it making me sloppy?”

Later he would admit, “I was so drunk at times, if I’d been Barbra and Jon I’d’ve fired me.” Instead, Pierson noticed, Barbra had become “watchful, judgmental” of Kris’s performance, just as she had of Pierson’s work and of the entire film. She began to push herself close to exhaustion; she often didn’t get to sleep until three or four in the morning, then woke up at six or seven.

Pierson looked on the project as a job, not a mission, and went home every evening at a reasonable hour. To Barbra, this was tantamount to betrayal; by now she had convinced herself that her career was on the line with this film. She grew constantly tense, quick to anger; her mistrust of Pierson made her confrontational with him. One day she arrived on the set and saw a group of extras on one side rather than the other. She didn’t understand, Pierson later said, that they would be moving.

“Why are they here?” she shrieked. “They should be over there,” Pierson tried to explain, but Barbra wasn’t listening. “I want it!” she cried, in a wail that to Pierson “had the power of primitive will, deep and full of loneliness.” He ignored her.

At first Kristofferson had directed his resentment at Barbra, thinking the “endless changes” she demanded were the result of her whims or a lack of attention. Later he realized that many of the problems resulted from the fact that Pierson hadn’t, as he put it, “listened or remembered. He was out to lunch from the first day.”

Barbra’s obsession with the film, and with herself in it, became clear to all during screenings of the daily rushes. Her mood would swing violently from joy if she liked something to despair if she didn’t. Her rage when she saw something that displeased her shocked Pierson, he wrote, because it was “vomited back in savage attack: ‘I told you not to do that. Why did you do it? It’s wrong!’ Everything is seen in terms of right and wrong; there is no personal preference, nuance, or shading.” After a while, fewer and fewer of the company attended the dailies. Finally even Robert Surtees dropped out, and only Barbra and Pierson remained. Then he stopped going, preferring to work in the morning with the film’s editor, Peter Zinner.

JON WAS OFFERING some suggestions before a scene when Frank Pierson demanded, “Jon, be silent or leave!”

“How dare you!” Jon yelled back. “I’m the producer on this movie.”

“Jon, get out of here,” Barbra hissed, and Peters stalked off.

Later Pierson explained to him that input from a producer can only interrupt the flow of an actor’s creativity.

“It’s all right,” Jon replied. “It’s not you I’m pissed off with. It’s her.”

Pierson soon realized that Barbra was in physical fear of Jon. Quick to lose his temper, quick to resort to fisticuffs, Jon had injured a hand punching a door during one fight with Barbra, and he regaled Pierson with stories of a scene at Madison Square Garden when he and Barbra went to see the Muhammad Ali fight. A man heckled Barbra, Jon related excitedly. “Pow! I let him have it! He made a motion like he’s gonna touch, maybe he’s gonna hit Barbra: he’s gonna hit my woman! I go crazy! Bam! Pow! They’re pullin’ me off him. The cops come take him away. You can’t go anywhere with her! That’s the meaning of ‘star’! We gotta get that in the picture.”

As Pierson walked to his car at the end of filming one evening, he saw Barbra scurry out from behind a hedge, crouched low, and run along behind some cars. “For God’s sake, take me home,” she pleaded. In the car, she cowered in a corner, trembling. “He gets so furious,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” Pierson suggested Barbra spend the night at his house, but since Jon wasn’t at Carolwood when they arrived, she went in. Pierson watched her as she walked to the front door. She seemed to him “small and tired and scared.”

“YOU THINK IT’S easy, some dude making love to your woman?” Jon asked Pierson. Barbra and Kris had already shot the film’s first sex scene, in which Barbra made a point of being on top and taking off her belt first, “like a man would.” Now they were ready to film a love scene in which Esther and John Norman share a candlelit bath and, in another reversal of sex roles, Esther paints his face with makeup and glitter and tells him how pretty he is. “We took that from real life,” Jon said. “Barbra and I have an enormous stone tub at home with a big broad rim on which we put lighted candles when we bathe together.”

Barbra and Jon both worried that Kris might take a Method approach to the scene and wear nothing. “I insisted on Kris wearing a little pair of flesh-colored underpants,” Jon recalled. “He yelled ‘What!’ but I told him to put them on.”

“For God’s sake,” Barbra told Pierson as she got ready for the scene, “find out if he’s going to wear something. If Jon finds out he’s in there with nothing on...” As a precaution, Pierson barred Jon from the set for the duration of the scene.

Wearing a short half-slip and nude from the waist up, Barbra climbed into the tub, where Kris was waiting for her. Feeling mischievous, Kristofferson wrapped his legs around her, and she soon realized he indeed was not wearing a thing. Furious, Barbra pulled away from him and screamed at Pierson to “make him put something on.” The director fetched the flesh-colored shorts, Kristofferson wriggled into them, and the scene came off without any further hitches.

PIERSON WORRIED DEEPLY about the upcoming rock concert in Phoenix, the film’s centerpiece. The plan was to fill Sun Devil Stadium with fifty thousand rock fans who everyone hoped would remain orderly through hours of tedious filming of a John Norman Howard performance in order to see acts such as Peter Frampton, Montrose, and Santana. Jon was excited about the concert, hopping around the office and talking about hiring Evel Knievel to do a stunt where John Norman Howard drives a motorcycle off the stage. “This is the heart of the picture,” he burbled. “This is the action part for people like me!”

Barbra seemed to Pierson not to hear. “Listen,” she said finally, “where are the close-ups? There are never any close-ups in this picture. When I worked with Willie Wyler, we had close-ups in every scene.” Pierson had vowed to himself not to discuss things like this with Barbra, but he nonetheless pointed out some recent close-ups they had shot. “Soon we are embroiled in exactly how close up a close-up has to be to be called a close-up.”

Three weeks before the scheduled shoot in Phoenix, Pierson claimed, he learned to his dismay that for all of Jon’s enthusiasm about the concert, he had done nothing to arrange it. “This is a disaster of such magnitude that I cannot think about it,” Pierson wrote. “All I can do is shoot whatever is there the day we arrive.”

This fatalism of Pierson’s irked Barbra most about him. Jon finally came through by hiring the rock promoter Bill Graham to organize the concert, which Graham accomplished in record time. Acts were signed, posters were printed, everything was set. Now all the Star Is Born crew had to worry about was that fifty thousand young rock fans wouldn’t turn into a raging mob while Pierson and Streisand bickered over setups.

Everyone was nervous, including Phil Ramone, who was there to record Kris’s performance live. “Christ, my ass is on the line,” he said at the time. “And to make matters worse, the film crew doesn’t really understand what I’m doing or how this is coming together. They’re used to having sound prerecorded so it usually doesn’t matter what the music sounds like during a shoot. But when Kris goes out on that stage, we’ll be filming it, sound and all. What you hear in that stadium is what you’ll hear in the film. What we don’t get we’ll never get. It’s like driving on slick pavement!”

“I just want to tap-dance and fart my way through.” Kris joked, but he was worried, edgy, and angry at Barbra. After first opposing the use of Kristofferson’s own band, Barbra had changed her mind. “I have always relied on my band to make me look good when I didn’t on my own,” Kris would explain, “an’ I figured for this movie, I’d need them in the worst way.”

But the moment Kris’s boys got off the plane at Phoenix, Barbra commandeered them to audition for her. “They’re stuffed in this little room playing stuff they’ve never heard before,” Kris told Rambler magazine. “Barbra listened and instantly said we gotta get studio musicians, the kind who read charts, like in Vegas shows.”

Kris wanted to kill somebody. “I ain’t trusting my career to no Vegas singer and her hairdresser!” he bellowed before storming out to the parking lot and into his publicist’s car to take a ride and cool off.

Barbra agreed to keep Kris’s band in the movie, then monopolized so much of their rehearsal time practicing her own numbers that Kris had virtually no rehearsals of his own. His concert loomed a day away. Kris slammed his trailer door and refused to come out. “Goddammit!” he screamed. “I’ve been trying to make this stuff sound like music. I’ve got to go out and play in front of thousands of people, but she doesn’t give a damn!”

He later said, “She just assumed, since I’d worked with my boys forever, that I didn’t need ’em. And it was my fault I never said to her, ‘Hey, Barbra, goddammit, I’m in this movie too. You’re working with the band on stuff you shoot next week. I gotta shoot tomorrow. I need my boys!’”

Pierson was more tired than he had been “since World War Two,” and on the most important day of filming, he overslept. This infuriated Barbra, who had risen at 4:00 A.M. She saw this as another example of Pierson’s lackadaisical attitude toward the film. Everyone was uptight. Would enough people show up to fill the huge stadium? Would they remain civilized? Would Phil Ramone get the sound quality he needed? Would Robert Surtees get enough usable film footage?

The fans, most of them students at Arizona State University, began to file into the stadium at three in the morning. By nine o’clock, fifty thousand of them were writhing under the hot sun, smoking pot, making out, discarding more and more clothing. They cheered as various acts came out to perform, but there were long delays between sets. Pierson’s skin prickled when the crowd began to chant, “No more filming! No more filming!” before he had shot a thing. Finally he got ready to shoot, but a series of technical problems caused more delays. “The noise, the pandemonium, the incipient panic are all but overwhelming,” he wrote.

Against the advice of just about everybody, Barbra appeared onstage to try to calm the crowd. “We’re gonna do rock and roll today!” she shouted above the din. “And we’re gonna be in a movie! In our movie we’re real. We fight, scream, yell, we talk dirty, we smoke grass.” Now she had the crowd. “So, listen, what we’re gonna do now is meet my co-star, Kris Kristofferson. A great performer. So when he comes on, I know you all love him anyway, but you have to love him even more, you know, so we won’t have any problems. So, in the lingo of the movie, I say, all you motherfuckers have a great time.”

Some observers found Barbra’s comments patronizing, but the kids loved it, and they “performed” their ecstatic reaction to John Norman Howard’s act—and their horror over his motorcycle accident—flawlessly. Then there were more delays. Barbra and Pierson quarreled over a shot, more time elapsed, the crowd began to chant anew. Graham couldn’t believe it. “Don’t you know what you’re doing?” he screeched at both of them. “They’re going to kill us.”

Barbra took the stage again, this time to perform. She was “petrified,” half convinced she’d be booed off the stage. She wasn’t. Her movie star magic wove its spell as she sang “People” and “The Way We Were” to prerecorded accompaniment (“I didn’t bring any strings with me”). The crowd—the women especially—cheered the film’s feminist anthem “Woman in the Moon,” and then Barbra announced that she would sing a song she’d written for the movie. “I hope you like it. If you don’t I’ll be crushed.” She sang “Evergreen,” and even on first hearing it was clearly a classic. The crowd stomped, yelled, applauded. Barbra didn’t seem able to accept the adulation. “Do you really like it?” she pleaded. More roars. “I’m really glad you like it, because that’s the first time I ever sang that song in front of people.”

More acts, more filming, more delays. Then the day was over. The crowd hadn’t stampeded the stage, no one had been killed, and Pierson had gotten most of the shots he wanted. But the dailies turned out to be disjointed, unrepresentative. “You’ve ruined it,” Barbra exploded. “How could you do that? We can never do it again!” Pierson explained that the basics were there, the film just needed to be judiciously edited. Barbra remained unconvinced.

Pierson then realized that Barbra was frightened not only for the success of the movie but for her relationship with Jon. “If this film goes down the drain,” she told him in a moment of candor, “it’s all over for Jon and me. We’ll never work again.”

Pierson reminded her that even if the film flopped all she had to do was agree to sing again “and they’ll fall all over you to do another picture.”

“I know,” she replied. “But what would happen to Jon?”

MANY OF THE crew members had had their fill of Barbra and Jon. He later admitted that his behavior was sometimes intentionally provocative: “I was terrified, but I couldn’t show them that, could I? I had to get things done... so I walked through people.”

As Kristofferson later put it, “Barbra was like a general who can’t trust any of his officers to do their job.” By now Kris was “narrowing my peripheral vision with more tequila and laughin’ tobacco than’s even usual.” Pierson, he thought, looked “like a sunstroke victim, and if you’d said to the crew, ‘Shove this movie, we’re all going to Mexico,’ they’da yelled, ‘When?”

The company moved to Tucson, where Barbra sang soaringly for two Esther Hoffman concert sequences, then on to the outskirts of town for scenes at John and Esther’s desert adobe, which Barbra had had constructed to resemble the Malibu ranch, complete with a loft bedroom like Jason’s. When she told Pierson she wanted John and Esther to wrestle in the mud, he thought it would look like a “bad comedy routine... like whores wrestling in a mud bath.”

Barbra, as usual, got her way, but someone in the crew decided to play a practical joke on her. As Kris remembered it, “Barbra’s wearing this white pantsuit, an’ she’s supposed to be covered with mud. The prop man smears this brown stuff all over her, an’ Barbra calls to me, ‘Come over here, smell this stuff.’ I did. Whew! I went over to Frank and said, ‘They’re puttin’ crap on Barbra.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ Well, the crew said the smell was from some preservative they’d put in the mud to keep it moist, but, man, by then they hated Barbra so much I know what it was they smeared on her—and so did Barbra! But we both broke up laughin’—an’ Barbra’s laughing harder than me! I mean, she coulda thrown a whole tantrum.”

ON MARCH 29, Pierson won an Academy Award for writing Dog Day Afternoon. A few days later Jon returned from a trip back to Los Angeles and confronted the director about his continued disagreements with Barbra. “You don’t listen,” Jon yelled. “You’ve never listened. You just go ahead and do it your way. You’ve never doubted, never asked a question.” He continued with a litany of complaints, and Pierson thought that Jon was either trying to force him to quit or had been sent by Barbra to fire him. Frustrated by Pierson’s lack of response, Jon stalked out, yelling, “I’m not afraid of your Oscar!”

To Pierson it was a nightmare that didn’t end, even when it was over. The day after filming wrapped, he received a note telling him that his director’s cut of the film was due in four weeks. His lawyer got the deadline extended to six weeks. Barbra, who had final approval of the cut, asked to be included in the initial process; in exchange she offered to consult Pierson throughout her own editing. He refused.

Pierson and Peter Zinner labored over the film “feverishly” to produce what Pierson considered a “rough but serviceable cut.” He showed it to Barbra and Jon and a few others at a special screening. Barbra seemed pleased, but the next day Pierson got word that she had commandeered the film and would re-edit it.

According to Jon, “Warners panicked” when they saw Pierson’s cut because they didn’t think Kristofferson’s performance was strong enough. Pierson claimed that Barbra’s version favored her over Kris at many key moments and that only after he wrote her a detailed letter about the slights did she restore Kristofferson’s establishing scenes and many of his reaction shots.

Barbra bristled at Pierson’s charge. “Many times I cut my own shots out if Kris was better in his,” she said.

Ralph Sandler was one of Peter Zinner’s assistant editors with whom Streisand worked on the film. She spent eighteen-hour days at the Todd-AO studios in Hollywood tinkering with every frame as it passed on a huge screen. As they worked, Sandler noticed that Barbra was indeed, as Pierson had said, removing many of Kristofferson’s reaction shots.

Some of the other changes she wanted were minuscule; occasionally she would want to change her pronunciation of a single word. “I don’t like the way I said ‘careful,’” she would tell Sandler, and it would be his job to snip enough of the rolled r to clean the word up without the cut showing. Sandler came to realize that Barbra didn’t trust him—or anyone else, for that matter. “She would watch everything I did. She’d tell me what to do, and I’d do it, but she was always looking to see, did I really do it.”

Jon was frequently present at the editing, but he said little. “He had pretty much learned by then that she was the boss,” Sandler said. One night Sandler saw them cuddling on a folding chair. “Oh, Jon, you’re the greatest,” Barbra cooed. Later that night Sandler saw a national tabloid with a headline about Barbra and Jon breaking up.

Sandler found himself amazed by some of Barbra’s foibles. Whenever doughnuts were delivered to the studio for the crew, Barbra would rush over to them and break a piece off a chocolate one, a cream-filled one, a sugar-coated one, until few were left untouched. The crew was not amused. “They didn’t want to eat a doughnut that her hands had been all over,” Sandler said.

Barbra worked such long hours on the film that Jason had to be driven to the studio to see her by one of her maids; they were usually accompanied by a friend of Jason’s, a pretty girl of about his age. One day as they came into the editing room the maid said, “Jason, go kiss your mother.” He refused and rushed back out to the car. After a few similar visits, several members of the editing crew took Sandler aside to tell him that whenever they saw Jason in the car with his young friend he invariably had his hand up her dress. “We didn’t dare say anything to Barbra,” Sandler said, “because we were sure we’d be fired.”

Soon thereafter, Jon caught Jason in the act. He came into the editing room and told Barbra with a laugh, “Jason’s got his hand up that girl’s dress.”

“What?!” Barbra exploded. “What! I’ll kill him!”

Very late one night, Barbra called a break, and everyone left the editing bay. When Sandler went back to get something he needed, he saw Barbra sitting alone at the console, fiddling with the dials. “This was a major infraction of union rules,” he said, “but she figured she could do whatever she wanted.”

Barbra hadn’t heard Sandler come in. She was intently watching herself, as Esther Hoffman, sing “Evergreen,” her face ten feet wide on the screen. As Esther hit a high note, Barbra let out a cry: “Sing it, bitch! Sing it!”

IT WAS NOVEMBER, the film was set to open in a matter of weeks, and still Barbra fiddled. Eventually she screened a “final” cut of the picture for all involved, but she was ready to tinker some more with it if necessary. This was the first time Kristofferson had seen the film, and he was deeply moved. He found the movie “beautiful,” and he even liked his own music in it. “It’s a sad love story, but a real one,” he said. “All you heard in the screening room was the blowin’ of noses.”

But no sooner did the lights come up than Barbra accosted Kris. “Are you happy with it?” she implored. “What didn’t you like?”

“Barbra,” Kris replied, “would you relax for crissake? It’s a great picture, a two-person picture. You gave me more than equal time.”

She wasn’t listening; she was scribbling notes. “When did you start to cry?” she asked. “I mean, in which frame did you start?”

It was all too nerve-racking for Barbra. “Every time I go to see a screening of it I think I’m going to die of palpitations,” she said. When Warner Brothers informed her she could make no more changes, she said, “It was the most horrible experience to let it go.”

Barbra soon learned that Frank Pierson was circulating among major magazines a forty-three-page article about his experiences directing A Star Is Born. She finagled a copy and was stunned. The piece was a startlingly intimate expose that painted her as megalomaniacal, frightened, indecisive, rude, disruptive, and monstrously self-absorbed. Jon emerged as a brash hot dog, jumping up and down, threatening violence, full of “mad schemes,” and incompetent.

Barbra couldn’t believe her eyes: she considered the article a staggering betrayal of the implied confidentiality between an actress and her director. She called Pierson to beg him not to put “a black cloud over the film” before it opened. According to Barbra he assured her he had no intention of publishing the piece, that he had written it only for the amusement of his friends, and accused her of stealing a copy from his office. A few weeks later a shortened but still quite lengthy version of the article appeared simultaneously on both coasts, in New York and New West magazines.

When she saw “My Battles with Barbra and Jon” splashed across the full cover of New West, Barbra collapsed into tears. The article was the second major journalistic strike against the film before its premiere, and Barbra was terrified that it would so prejudice the public that A Star Is Born would never get a fair hearing. Barbra wrote a letter to Pierson, telling him that he had portrayed her and Jon as “idiots” and had “distorted” the facts. He couldn’t face his own limitations, she went on, and that was why he had done so “destructive” a thing to all concerned. She concluded that he was a “sick, vicious” person with “no scruples.”

Later, on national television, she was no less blunt. She told Geraldo Rivera, “Pierson’s article was so immoral, so unethical, so unprofessional, so undignified, with no integrity, totally dishonest, injurious. If anyone believed it, without examining who that person was, to try to put a black cloud over a piece of work before it’s even released...”

NOW THERE WAS nothing left to do but wait. Barbra was jittery, coiled, short-tempered. Pierson’s article had her terrified that the film would be a colossal flop, that she and Jon would come out of it looking like fools. They fought more and more frequently; they came perilously close to breaking up.

The first reviews, from the West Coast, were disarming. Daily Variety raved that the film was “a superlative remake. Barbra Streisand’s performance... is her finest screen work to date, while Kris Kristofferson’s magnificent portrayal of her failing benefactor realizes all the promise first shown five years ago in Cisco Pike. Jon Peters’s production is outstanding, and Frank Pierson’s direction is brilliant. Selznick himself would be proud of this film.”

But with the reviews from the East Coast and most national magazines, the roof caved in. Rex Reed’s notice bordered on vicious but wasn’t atypical: “If there’s anything worse than the noise and stench that rises from [the sound-track] album, it’s the movie itself. It’s an unsalvageable disaster. This is why Hollywood is in the toilet. What the hell does Barbra Streisand know about directing and editing a movie? So many people have disowned this film that I don’t even know who to blame. But I do blame a studio for giving $5.5 million to an actress and her boyfriend to finance their own ego trip... the result is a junkheap of boring ineptitude... every aspect of the classic story has been trashed along with the dialogue.... Kristofferson—paunchy, dissipated, stoned and looking like the Werewolf of London—sounds like a pregnant buffalo in labor pains. To hear Streisand at thirty-four trying desperately to sound like Grace Slick... is laughable and sad and ultimately infuriating. She is wrecking her image, talent, and femininity, and I cannot stand around applauding while she does.”

John Simon, writing for New York, was more vicious still. “O, for the gift of Rostand’s Cyrano to evoke the vastness of that nose alone as it cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning, it towers likes a juggernaut made of meat. The hair is now something like the wig of the fop in a Restoration comedy; the speaking voice continues to sound like Rice Krispies if they could talk.... Kris tells Barbra, ‘When you hook into an incredible marlin, that’s what it felt like hearing you sing.’ Funny, it feels like that to me when I see her face.... And then I realize with a gasp that this Barbra Streisand is in fact beloved above all other female stars by our moviegoing audiences; that this hypertrophic ego and bloated countenance are things people shell out money for as for no other actress; that this progressively more belligerent caterwauling can sell anything—concerts, records, movies. And I feel as if our entire society were ready to flush itself down in something even worse than a collective death wish—a collective will to live in ugliness and self-debasement.”

Barbra burst into tears when she read these reviews, her fear of failure threatening to undo her. “I couldn’t even control myself. It was so devastating to me... it hurt me deeply that the reviews were so personal.” Jon tried to console her, but he too was scared. His dreams of Hollywood success and power—and his relationship with Barbra—had suddenly begun to feel looser in his grip.

But as he later put it, “We planned on breaking up, and then the movie was a hit.” Despite the harsh reviews, audiences—young people, especially—flocked to A Star Is Born when it opened nationally on Christmas day; reports came back to Warners of people standing in line for hours in snowstorms to see it. The film grossed $10 million in its first ten days of release, an enormous take in 1976, and it ultimately grossed over $92 million domestically and another $66 million internationally. It became Barbra’s most profitable movie to date.

The sound-track album of the film’s troubled and controversial musical score, which Rex Reed hated so much, surged to number one, sold four million copies, and became the largest-selling movie sound track to that date. The single release of “Evergreen” also rocketed to the top of the charts and sold over one million copies.

In February, A Star Is Born won five Golden Globes in the Musical or Comedy category: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Song, and Best Score. Accepting his award, Kris Kristofferson thanked “the lady.”

AFTER ALL THE bad press and all the critical vitriol, Barbra had been vindicated, and so had the executive who told Pierson, “Shoot her singing six numbers and we’ll make $60 million.” But why the stunning chasm between the way so many critics and journalists saw the film and the way the moviegoing public embraced it? The reasons are complex, and Barbra had her own opinion: “The media loves to build you up when you’re new on the scene, but after you become a star they’re always trying to tear you down.” There was, of course, an element of that in the press’s reaction to Barbra and Jon, but the couple undoubtedly played into the hands of the cynics with their grandiose, often ill-advised statements about the film, Jon’s abilities, and the public’s desire to see their story on the big screen.

A remake of a beloved classic is always a risky proposition. No matter how excellent it may be, it can never totally please fans of the original. There was no way that Rex Reed, an unreconstructed fan of Judy Garland and of traditional music, would ever have liked a rock version of A Star Is Born.

The quality of the film is uneven. It careers from scenes of soaring music and touching drama to passages of embarrassingly inane dialogue, unbelievable situations, and mawkish sentimentality. Barbra’s characterization of Esther Hoffman wobbles badly in the film’s early reels: she’s self-possessed enough in her first scene to approach John Norman Howard during one of her songs and tell him angrily, “You’re blowing my act,” but moments later, alone in a car with him, she acts like a nervous schoolgirl. At the end of the film, when Esther hears a tape of John Norman that has accidentally been turned on, she believes for a few moments that he might still be alive. It is a scene that makes the suspension of disbelief difficult.

But the film works well as a musical love story. Streisand’s singing is breathtaking at times, especially with the rousing “Woman in the Moon,” the lyrical “Evergreen,” and the at first heartbreaking, then raucous seven-minute one-shot finale, “With One More Look at You/Watch Closely Now.” Kristofferson’s performance is layered and touching; he rarely hits a false note as a man in self-destruct mode who fights, does drugs, and cheats on his wife. It is a tribute to his attractiveness and his ability to move us that he never loses our sympathy despite all that. The chemistry between Barbra and Kris clearly worked; most viewers found them both sexy, attractive people.

The overriding reason for the film’s popularity, however, must have been the contemporary nature of the love story. Barbra was correct to feel that for her character to be as submissive and docile as the previous incarnations would have been fatal to the film in 1976. Young people grappling with the issue of sex roles could relate to Esther’s taking the dominant role during sex and making John Norman up with glitter and rouge in a bathtub. This was what was happening in the front lines of the sexual revolution, and if the Reeds and Simons of the world didn’t get it, the young moviegoing public did.

WHEN KRIS KRISTOFFERSON saw his lifeless body lying on the ground at the end of the movie, he gave up drinking. “I realized it was my own life I was seein’ on the screen. It was like seeing myself through [his wife] Rita’s eyes—when I saw the corpse at the end, I had a weird feeling of sadness, like a character in The Twilight Zone who sees a coffin with his name on it. I feel so goddamn lucky to have found out in time—I’d been drinking for twenty years.”

His lyrics to “Evergreen” won Paul Williams an Academy Award when the song was chosen the best of 1976. Accepting her trophy, Barbra said, “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined winning an Academy Award for writing a song.” Williams thanked Barbra for writing “a beautiful melody” and Dr. Jack Wallstader for giving him “the Valium that got me through the whole experience.”

The months of wrenching work on A Star Is Born left Barbra exhausted but exhilarated. She had put her artistic vision on the line, and while the results were mixed, she had proved to herself that she could do it. Her head had long been aswim with cinematic visions of light and color and composition, but “I had always been afraid before,” she said. She had put many of those visions on film in A Star Is Born. Some had worked, some had not. But the film left Barbra certain she could someday be a director.

“A Star Is Born was the beginning of Barbra’s examining her own power,” Jon Peters told the author Karen Swenson in 1984. “It was the discovery period for her. And she started to realize that she could do it, she could take control of her life. I was the tool, in a way. The halfback. I was the one who ran interference for her—because there were a lot of changes she wanted to make, but she couldn’t always articulate it.... I remember Jane Fonda calling her up after she saw the film and saying, ‘Congratulations. Not only for the movie, but for leading the way for all of us.’

“In retrospect,” Jon concluded, “I have to say that the most creative experience I’ve had in my life to date was A Star Is Born. I’ve never worked with a more compelling, imaginative person.”