I’m very tired,” Barbra said early in 1977. “This film has taken up two and a half years of my life. I can’t even look at it anymore. I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to know about it.”

The filming and the eighteen-hour days she had spent getting the picture ready for release took a toll on Barbra physically; the steady barrage of negative press she and Jon had endured almost since they met had left her emotionally drained. “I wish I could say that I’ve risen above it,” she said, “but that would be a lie. I cry a lot, I can tell you that. I get so wiped out sometimes that I think, It’s not worth it. And then all of a sudden, someone will see me in the street, you know, and grab my hand and say, ‘I love your work’ or ‘I love you, Barbra.’ The people bring me back to a kind of reality, because the people’s reaction is so different than what I read.”

The Malibu ranch provided rest and relaxation for Barbra for most of the next two years; she wouldn’t start work on a new film until the fall of 1978. She certainly didn’t need to make another movie to keep the bills paid; her and Jon’s share of the Star Is Born box-office bonanza amounted to over $15 million, and Barbra’s royalties on the sound-track album brought in over $5 million more.

Barbra spent a good deal of the money to buy up additional land in Malibu and construct houses in order to create a lavish compound of five separate residences, each decorated in a distinct style. The eclectic and rustic main house, known as “the barn,” contrasted sharply with the “Deco house,” a cool, streamlined example of 1930s Moderne with chrome-and-glass fixtures, gray and red lacquer, and geometric patterns. A third house might have been lifted right out of America’s Colonial era, and the “peach house” contained guest quarters, a projection room, and a gym.

Jon worked mostly on the grounds because when he and Barbra had tried to renovate one of the houses together they fought constantly. He planted trees, built stone waterfalls, and landscaped the property in order to “help get rid of his hostility,” Barbra said. To the dismay of the neighbors, Jon redirected Ramirez Creek so that it would babble closer to the house. Bulldozers moved earth, stonemasons created a new riverbed, and nature’s will was thwarted. The downstream neighbors complained that the creek now swelled more dangerously during rainstorms, but Jon wasn’t about to undo the change.

When all of the rustic comfort and luxury of Ramirez Canyon wasn’t enough, Barbra still had her house on Carolwood and a cottage on the Pacific Ocean in Malibu Colony that she had bought for $564,000 cash in May of 1978. “On the beach we have a little shack,” Barbra said. “I mean, a real tiny little beach house. Which I like in contrast to the space of this place. It reminds me of my past.... I always lived in apartments until I was really grown up. And it’s like a little apartment. I’m doing it like a Victorian dollhouse. [All these houses] are the dollhouses I never had. We spend different parts of the year in different places. Because there’s so many different environments that I like.”

Despite all this excess, Barbra professed to want a simple life. She had proven herself more than ever the most popular actress in the world; in 1977 she was second only to Sylvester Stallone in the Quigley Poll of top box-office attractions. Now, she insisted, she wanted merely to live, to enjoy her new family and her lavish new compound, to be as normal a person as she could be.

“I don’t go to openings and premieres and wear beaded gowns,” she said. “I don’t live that way. I go home and I cook dinner. I wash dishes and do the laundry. I haven’t done that in years. This is my new kind of life.... I really like that kind of small, basic responsibility—taking care of people that you love.”

A Malibu neighbor, Joe Kern, recalled that Barbra “was very charming, very retiring, and very shy” whenever she visited him. “She walked the canyon a lot and she didn’t like it when people approached her. It wasn’t that she was snobby or anything, just scared. When she’d pass a group of us she’d be relieved if no one said anything to her or tried to stop her. She would just say hi and go on.”

“In the mornings,” Jon recalled, “she works in the yard—she raises begonias, orchids, and the best vegetables in Malibu.” More accurately, she supervised the gardener’s efforts: “I have a very weak back, so any time I’ve done it, I’m paralyzed for a week afterward, but I really like to plan gardens, you know. I spent the summer just going to nurseries finding the most exotic varieties of perennial plants.”

In the afternoons Barbra might play tennis or walk along the beach and the mountainside. On weekends a number of neighbors would meet at her house at ten in the morning, cook breakfast, then embark on a five-mile hike. “The other day we were walking back,” Barbra recalled, “and this big white limousine with blackened windows went past. We were all looking in, wondering who the movie star might have been in the car.” When the same thing happens to her, she admitted, she hates it. “I always wonder what people are staring at. Then I realize, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m what’s-her-name.’”

That realization came rudely to Barbra one day when a man began to stalk her. Another neighbor, Ruth White, recalled that “there was a stalker at one point. I worked very closely with the police on that. I gave them information, and I spoke to Barbra’s office as well. This is a very closely knit neighborhood; whenever there’s a situation we kind of close ranks. I was in charge of dealing with the police about this stalker. Barbra wasn’t the only celebrity in the area [Don Henley, Geraldo Rivera, and Mick Fleetwood also lived in the canyon], and the others sometimes had stalker problems, too.”

The threat made Barbra nervous and Jon wary. They erected a No Trespassing sign at the entrance to their property, punctuated by another: “Danger! Beware: Guard Dogs Trained to Attack.” They meant it, too. Geraldo Rivera, who became close buddies with Jon after he purchased a house nearby, recalled in his autobiography that Jon’s Doberman pinscher, Big Red, was “the scariest dog in captivity. This Doberman was always pissed off. Once, he tried to rip the fender off my 1954 Jaguar.” Big Red also attacked a woman who had come to the ranch for a meeting, resulting in a lawsuit, and he “tore up” Joe Kern’s schnauzer. “Jon paid all the vet bills,” Kern said, “but he didn’t really apologize.”

Barbra went to the dog trainer Michael Kramer to learn how to control Big Red and two German shepherds. “At first she was a little nervous,” Kramer said, “but once she became familiar with the dogs she was very relaxed and applied herself diligently. Now she is able to have the dogs attack whenever she needs to, using her own special commands.” Kramer recalled vividly how upset Barbra could become when recognized by strangers. One time she was sitting in Kramer’s waiting room with some of his other clients. “All of a sudden there was a pounding on the door and Miss Streisand was yelling at me to let her in. She was shaking. When I asked her what was wrong, she said she had to get out of the waiting room because the other clients had recognized her. The funny thing was that no one had actually approached her.”

Jon and Geraldo acted like fraternity brothers when they were together. “We’d work out, talk about women, and get drunk together,” Rivera wrote. “We were each involved with very dominant ladies, and we commiserated and compared notes. We dreamt of our younger days, when we were free to roam and plunder and raise hell.” Whenever they could, they tried to relive those wilder days. They drag-raced their powerful motorcycles through the winding hills of Malibu until they nearly went over a fifty-foot cliff. “I had to sort of lay the bike down to keep it from going over,” Geraldo said. It came to a stop with one wheel hanging over the edge of the cliff. “Jon missed going over by about half a foot.... We never rode those bikes again.”

According to Geraldo, “Jon was wild in those days.... I watched him deck a crazed fan who was stalking Barbra on the ranch. Jon wasted him with a rising left hook. I bailed him out of that one when I told sheriff’s deputies that he had merely acted in self-defense.”

Jon’s hair-trigger temper sometimes got him into legal trouble. In 1977 he gave a deposition in a lawsuit filed against him by Philip Mariott, an automobile salesman, charging him with assault and battery after an incident at the Terry York Chevrolet lot in Encino on December 1, 1974. According to Jon, he and Barbra were shopping for a car when Mariott approached them, asked if he could be of assistance, and “stated to my companion [Barbra] that she looked like Barbra Streisand. My companion stated that others had told her the same. The salesman then became persistent in talking with us although we asked to look at autos ourselves.

“He insisted on telling us about his personal dislike for Barbra Streisand movies and records, and he became more and more abusive in his comments until we finally had to leave. He became hostile and aggressive to Barbra Streisand, stating that he hated her movies and records and in general disliked her and found her unattractive, and her singing was terrible.” Finally, Jon alleged, Mariott placed himself next to Barbra “in a space of an amount that he knew would annoy her.”

At that point, Mariott alleged, Jon attacked him, injuring him so badly he could no longer work. The matter was settled out of court on December 12, 1977.

On March 5, 1978, Barbra had to bail Jon out of jail after he was arrested for reckless driving and resisting arrest. The incident and what led up to it, Jon told a reporter, “was a nightmare from beginning to end.” Southern California had been battered by torrential rains for days, and Jon, Barbra, Jason, Jon’s son Christopher, and a group of their neighbors had worked around the clock to build sandbag barriers against the swelling of that redirected creek, which now threatened to flood their homes. When Jon and Christopher drove off to pick up additional sandbags from the fire department, Jon said, he informed patrolman Patrick Meister, who was standing guard, and Meister gave him permission to return.

When he got back, Jon alleged, Officer Meister “started hassling me, saying I had to have proof of identification and proof I lived in the area. Hell, who had identification? I was wearing the same muddy, rain-soaked clothes I’d had on for days. I told him I had to get back to my home, to Barbra and Jason. When he wouldn’t let me, I drove through the roadblock, and when he caught up with me, he dragged me out of my car, slammed me against the hood, put a gun to my head, and started hitting me with his club, while I kept screaming, ‘Why are you hurting me?’ Then he took me away in handcuffs.”

Meister’s supervisor, Sergeant Rodney Yates, said that Meister pursued Jon for three miles before he was able to stop him and that the officer was justified in hitting Jon: “He hit him on the legs with his baton after Peters came at him in an aggressive manner.” Barbra paid $500 to spring Jon from jail, and he made noises about suing Meister for assault and false arrest. He never followed through on the threat, however, and the charges against him were ultimately dropped.

On Barbra’s birthday in 1977 her cook, Bing Fong, prepared a cake, but by the time of her party the icing had become too hard for Jon’s taste. He told Fong to replace the icing, but the chef protested that to attempt such a thing would ruin the cake. According to Fong’s attorney, Leonard Kohn, Jon then pushed Fong against the sink so violently that the cook seriously injured his lower back. “They settled for $5,000, but with the doctor reports and testimony I think we could have gotten a lot more,” Kohn said. “But Bing Fong wanted to just settle it and take the money and not have it drawn out in court. He was very afraid of Peters.”

In Aspen a few years later Geraldo Rivera came to his friend’s aid again when Jon faced “possible felony charges for sticking his antique Colt revolver in the ear of his gardener, who had become abusive over an unpaid bill,” Geraldo wrote.

Failure to pay their bills in a timely fashion was apparently a habit with Barbra and Jon, who were slapped with numerous mechanic’s liens over the years, according to court documents. Among the complainants were a pool contractor, a masonry supply company, and a general contractor hired to do work at the Malibu ranch. In all cases either Barbra or Jon contended that the work hadn’t been done to their liking; the unpaid amounts ranged from $4,500 to $50,000. The liens were removed from the properties once the bills were paid.

JASON GOULD, ELEVEN in 1978, and Christopher Peters, two years younger, had been leery of each other at first, but soon became fast friends. They went tearing through the canyons during Chris’s weekend visits, first on bicycles, then on motorbikes, and finally on motorcycles as they got older. Their neighbor Trude Coleman recalled that Jason was “a sweet kid, but Christopher was a real pistol. He took after his father. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was a troublemaker, although he certainly was loud around the canyon, which was a perfect place to go motorbiking. It’s a great place for boys to grow up, a fun place. There are lots of trails and woods and places to play and build forts, and that’s what the Streisand and Peters boys did together. They’d go up into the trails for hours.”

Both Lesley Ann Warren and Elliott Gould fretted about the influence Barbra and Jon’s sumptuous Shangri-la would have on their sons. “I worry that Christopher’s not going to want to come back home to me after he’s spent time there,” Lesley Ann said. Elliott groused that “Barbra lives in a fantasy world. That’s one of the reasons I want to take Jason back to live with me. I just don’t want to take chances with his head.... I don’t want him to grow up in a world of fantasy. I find that when he’s with me he’s very natural. I want to keep him that way.” Barbra, however, might have argued that her life in Malibu provided a more stable environment for Jason than his father’s with Jenny Bogart, who had borne him a child out of wedlock, then left him, had come back, borne another child, and finally married him in December 1973.

Why didn’t Barbra and Jon get married? “I’ve asked her about three times, but she turned me down,” Jon said. “Now I’m waiting for her to ask me.”

To Barbra, marriage represented not an institution but “a final commitment, a beautiful, romantic gesture.... But there is also a kind of excitement in not being married—you can never take each other for granted.” Neither felt any pressure to legitimize their love affair for the sake of the boys. “The children look to see what you feel about each other,” Barbra said. “They don’t check to see if you’ve got a piece of paper.”

Steve Jaffe, whom Jon had fired as his publicist late in 1975 after Jaffe declined to fly from New York to Los Angeles on a few hours’ notice to attend a meeting, recalled that Barbra and Jon would talk about marriage “almost as if it was a running joke, because neither of them needed the ceremony, and neither one was going to be changed by it. They were both pretty savvy individuals and knew that there was a good chance that the relationship wouldn’t last.”

“I hope I’ll be with her for the rest of my life,” Jon said. “Most mornings I wake up here with her and I laugh, it’s so good.”

IN JULY 1977 Roslyn Kind returned to the club circuit with engagements at the Grand Finale in New York and the Backlot at Studio One in West Hollywood. She had given up her singing career in the early 1970s; in 1976 she had gone to work as a purchasing agent for Hollywood General Pictures. After losing that job and collecting unemployment, she decided to take another stab at performing, helped along by an encouraging friend, Richard Gordon, a Streisand fan who had befriended Diana Kind. “I got Roslyn the Grand Finale booking,” Gordon recalled, “and she was a hit, got a lot of attention, television shows, that kind of thing. She was the toast of the town for two or three weeks.”

At the Backlot, Elliott Gould introduced his former sister-in-law with the words, “Now we’re going to hear somebody who can really sing.” Barbra arrived late and alone, wrapped in an ivory-colored shawl and looking like a fragile porcelain doll. During intermission, when a woman mentioned to Barbra that her husband was out of town, Streisand replied, “So is mine.”

At the end of Roslyn’s act, the audience applauded heartily, but no one stood up. After about thirty seconds, a man rose to make room for someone to get out of his seat. Barbra took this as a cue and jumped to her feet. Everyone followed suit, and Roslyn got a standing ovation.

She also got excellent reviews, but nothing came of the comeback. Over the next few years Roslyn made sporadic club appearances, but she still had the same problem with comparisons to Barbra, something she seemed to invite by wearing the same hairdo and singing similar songs. As Richard Gordon put it, “When Barbra was blond, Roslyn got a blond wig. When Barbra’s hair was red, she got a red wig.” Roslyn still protested that she didn’t want to be compared to Barbra, but her actions spoke louder than her words.

Gordon felt that Roslyn’s inability to forge a singing career was largely her own doing. “Barbra could have helped Roslyn more, but the fact of the matter is Roslyn’s lazy,” he said. “She doesn’t have the ambition that Barbra had at her age. Never did. She also expected things to happen to her because of who she is. She thought her relationship to Barbra would open doors. Then she saw that it didn’t.”

By the early 1980s Roslyn had gone to work in a bakery in Westwood owned by her manager and his wife, with whom she was living. She worked mostly behind the scenes, reportedly because she considered serving customers beneath her. The name of the bakery was “Butterfly.”

BARBRA ALLOWED WORK to intrude on her Malibu idyll when she returned to the recording studio to give Columbia its annual Streisand album, which the company wanted as soon as possible to capitalize on the enormous success of the Star Is Born sound track. Gary Klein produced the package, entitled Streisand Superman; apparently his trial-by-fire introduction to Barbra when he criticized the ButterFly album wasn’t held against him. “The concept was to keep Barbra Streisand on the pop charts,” Klein said, “not have people think of her as just an MOR [middle-of-the-road] artist.”