Barbra tried to hide her nervousness as she walked into Sherry Lansing’s office on the Twentieth Century-Fox lot, carrying a reel of super 8 film and an audiocassette. She had just lost financial backing from United Artists for Yentl, the project that she had struggled for years to bring to the screen as star, director, co-writer, and producer, the project that had obsessed her, had become her “life,” her “passion,” her “dream.”

Every studio in Hollywood had turned the idea down at least once, including Fox, but Barbra was sure that Lansing, newly installed as the first female president of a major studio, would agree to finance this story of a Jewish woman in 1904 Poland who is forced to masquerade as a man in order to fulfill her young dream of pursuing religious and philosophical study forbidden to women. Barbra had shot film of herself walking through the streets of Prague dressed in her masculine guise, and she had made a tape of many of the songs that Michel Legrand and the Bergmans had written for her to sing in the picture.

“It was like being eighteen again and auditioning for a Broadway show,” Barbra recalled. She showed Lansing the film to prove that she could look convincing enough as a man. She played the tape to impress on her that this would be a Streisand musical. She excitedly told the story, often playing two or three parts in order to act out a scene.

Lansing listened politely, then turned Barbra down, echoing every other executive in Hollywood as she listed her reasons: “The story’s too ethnic, too esoteric. We just don’t see Middle America paying to see this movie. We don’t think audiences will buy you as a boy, Barbra. You’re fantastic; you’re the number one box-office star. Why risk all that? [When] you have an idea for a comedy, we’ll talk!”

“I left the office in tears,” Barbra said. “I couldn’t believe that a woman wouldn’t understand how universal this story was. I always thought of it as a very contemporary story, a love story that would appeal to people around the world.” Devastated, she went back to Malibu and took to her bed. But not for long. The more rejections she got on this picture, the more firmly resolved she became to prove everyone wrong. “When you tell Barbra something’s not possible,” Marilyn Bergman said, “all you’re doing is firing her up.”

BARBRA’S ONETIME ROOMMATE Elaine Sobel said that she told Streisand about Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” in the early 1960s, but Barbra recalls that she read it for the first time in 1969 when the producer Valentine Sherry sent it to her after her then-agent David Begelman had turned it down without consulting her. “They were smart enough to send it directly to my house,” Barbra recalled, “and it was [only] twenty-five pages long and the print was big so I thought, Well, I’ll read it in one afternoon.”

When she finished it, she called Begelman and flatly announced, “I just found my next movie—‘Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy.’”

“Oh, no,” Begelman replied. “We just said you weren’t interested.”

“What do you mean? I am interested.”

“Barbra,” Begelman said, “for a year you’ve been telling us that you want to change your image onscreen, that you’re tired of playing Jewish girls from Brooklyn. So now you want to play a Jewish boy?!”

Yes, she did, even though Begelman advised her strongly that the move could damage her burgeoning career. The story had moved her deeply, from its first four words: “After her father’s death...” She thought of the piece as “a poem” to Emanuel Streisand. “He was a teacher and a scholar just like Yentl’s father,” she explained. “It was my way of saying to my father that I was proud to have him as my papa, that I was proud to bear his name—Streisand.”

She also felt a spiritual kinship with Yentl, the ever-questioning teenager whose make-believe world is turned upside down when she falls in love with a fellow rabbinical student who thinks she’s a man. “I related to this story on many levels,” Barbra said. “Yentl wants to learn; Barbra always wanted to learn. I was always curious. I wanted to learn Japanese writing when I was sixteen. I read Zen Buddhism and Russian novels. I love knowledge. I was struck by the many similarities between myself and Yentl. And I would have done the same thing she does. I would have dressed up in my father’s clothes and gone out as a boy to pursue my dream.”

Barbra optioned the screen rights to the story in 1969, intending only to star in the film, which she saw as a non-musical. Two years later Barbra’s company, First Artists, announced that the picture, to be called Masquerade, would be produced by Valentine Sherry, directed by the Czechoslovakian Ivan Passer, and written by Passer and Isaac Singer. The budget, in keeping with First Artists’ strict requirements, was set at a mere $2 million. As soon as the announcement was made, the jokes began. The New York Times headlined its story, “A new movie for Barbra: ‘Funny Boy.’”

The package soon fell apart, mainly because Barbra wasn’t satisfied with any of the three drafts Passer had produced, first with Singer and then with Jerome Kass. She spoke to another Czech director, Milos Forman, about the movie—clearly she wanted someone who understood Mitteleuropa—but he wasn’t interested. Even then, he said, he could tell that Barbra “was thinking about directing. I don’t think anybody could have satisfied her when it came to that project because it was her love affair. It may have been subconscious, but I think she didn’t let things happen [to bring the project to fruition at that time] because she had her own vision of it and nobody could even come close.”

She wouldn’t let go. During the first weekend they spent together in 1973 Barbra read Jon Peters the short story. After A Star Is Born, she decided that in order to make the film exactly as she envisioned it, she would have to direct it. “I was frightened to direct. I didn’t know if I could do it. But I was nearing forty years old and thinking that I must take more risks as an artist and as a person.... I had this vision of becoming this old lady and talking about this movie I should have made.”

She shopped the idea around to every major studio in Hollywood, but now executives had another reason to turn it down: they didn’t feel they could trust a novice director, and a woman at that. Female directors had been few and far between in Hollywood, and the male chauvinist attitude in the industry was that women couldn’t be trusted with multimillion-dollar budgets. Warner Brothers, for which Barbra’s films had grossed $162 million, said no. Columbia, for which her films had grossed $226 million, said no. Fox, MGM, United Artists, all turned her down. The one hope the bigwigs gave Barbra was that if she turned it into a musical, they might be interested. But at this point she didn’t see it as anything but a small drama.

She filed the idea away again, but during the spring of 1979, in the midst of doing The Main Event, she finally made up her mind to do whatever was necessary to make Yentl a reality. Nearly everyone in her inner circle, including Sue Mengers and Jon Peters, had advised her not to pursue the project; and now that Barbra was in her late thirties, the likelihood that she could pull off a masquerade as a rabbinical student in his twenties seemed all the more remote.

Jon recalled that the moment of crystallization for Barbra occurred during a Main Event location shoot in the San Bernardino Mountains. “We were standing there in the snow, and she said, ‘I hate this movie! I’m going to do Yentl!’ I said, ‘You’re not going to do it!’ I had offers for her to go to Vegas, to do shows, for twenty million, thirty million dollars. She turned them all down. I said, ‘You’re not going to ruin your life and mine! You can’t play a boy! We’re gonna do something else together.’... I was a little domineering, I guess, and I remember her looking at me and saying, ‘Just because you said that, I’m going to do the movie, no matter what!’”

BARBRA AND HER brother, Sheldon, stood by their father’s grave at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens in the fall of 1979. Barbra had not visited her father’s resting place since she was seven, when she had insisted her mother take her there. “My mother never talked about my father because she said she didn’t want me to miss him,” Barbra said. “I never had a picture of myself with my father. I thought I was born of an immaculate conception, you know, since I never knew him.”

She asked Sheldon to take her picture standing next to her father’s headstone, because “at least that shows that he existed.” Sheldon reminisced for Barbra about the man he remembered, and recollected the sad ritual of his funeral. When she saw the photograph, Barbra noticed that the man buried next to her father was named Anshel. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “That’s a very unusual name. I mean, it’s not like Irving. And right there next to my father’s grave was a man named Anshel, who was Yentl’s dead brother whose name she takes when she disguises herself as a boy. To me it was a sign, you know, a sign from my father that I should make this movie.”

Another sign from Emanuel Streisand came later that night, according to Barbra. Sheldon, who was now forty-four and a real estate executive, told his sister that he had gone to see a medium, “a nice Jewish lady with blond hair” who had been visited by a spirit when she was thirteen years old and had had extrasensory powers ever since. “I can’t tell you the experience I had last night,” Sheldon said. “I talked to Daddy. We put our hands on this table, and the table moved its legs and started to spell out Daddy’s name. Then the table followed me around the room.”

Because this was coming from her brother, a sensible suburban family man, Barbra believed it, and she asked him to bring the psychic to his house. She and Sheldon joined the woman around a table and put their palms on the tabletop. Suddenly the table started to move, and Barbra felt suspicious; she figured that an electrical hookup must be causing the motion. Then “the table started to spell out letters with its legs.” One tap was a, two taps b, and so on. “I started to get very scared. The table was pounding away. Bang, bang, bang! Spelling ‘M-a-n-n-y,’ and then ‘B-a-r-b-r-a.’ I got so frightened I ran away. Because I could feel the presence of my father in that room! I ran into the bathroom and locked the door.”

When Barbra got up the courage to come back, the medium asked the spirit of Emanuel Streisand, “What message do you have?” The table tapped out “S-o-r-r-y.” “What else do you want to tell her.” “S-i-n-g p-r-o-u-d” was the answer.

“It sounds crazy,” Barbra admitted, “but I know it was my father who was telling me to be brave, to have the courage of my convictions, to sing proud.”

“THIS HAS TO be a musical!” Marilyn and Alan Bergman exclaimed in unison to Barbra when she showed them a script she had just finished working on. The lyricists had held that opinion for some time, but had kept it to themselves because they were sensitive to the fact that Streisand saw the film as an intimate non-musical drama. But finally they decided they had to try to change her mind. “We felt it was a wonderful story for a musical... because it is [about] a character with a secret,” Marilyn explained. “Throughout the picture, after her father dies, there is nobody to whom she can talk, to whom she can reveal her essential self. And this rich inner life becomes the [song] score.”

Aware that the studios would be more likely to back the film as a musical, and aware too that its chances of box-office success would be far greater if she sang, Barbra thought seriously about the Bergmans’ suggestion. It didn’t take her long to come around. Music, she now felt, would “elevate the piece to something magical, a fairy tale.”

There was never any question that the music should be lush, romantic, and rooted in the European tradition, which made Michel Legrand the clear choice to compose it. “The kind of music Michel writes is timeless,” Alan Bergman said. “It could be eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century.”

Marilyn added, “The challenge was to make the music exotic and colorful, but not so special that it doesn’t have universality. And Michel achieved that.”

Once she decided to make Yentl a musical, Barbra plunged into the process with her usual gusto. She and Legrand would meet at the Bergmans’ house in Beverly Hills and spend the entire day working in the upstairs music room. “Our housekeeper would bring us food trays and we’d eat up there,” Alan recalled. “Sometimes we’d go late into the night. It was like there was no outside world.... The greatest thing about working on the movie, was—where else in the world could you call your director and say, ‘Come over and sing this song for us’?”

As they worked, Legrand and the Bergmans confronted a realization that made Barbra uncomfortable: if the film’s music was meant to represent Yentl’s inner thoughts, no one else should sing in the movie. “That was a decision that was hard to arrive at,” Alan said. “Barbra was afraid that it might not be perceived properly, but it became more and more inevitable. She is the musical narrator of the piece. Nobody else is part of that inner music.”

According to Marilyn, “It was almost the same way when Barbra tried to create scenes in which Yentl didn’t appear, so she could stay behind the camera wearing only her director’s hat. But each time that was tried, we felt that the audience wouldn’t know how it was privy to that moment if Yentl wasn’t there. The picture is told through her perceptions, seen through her eyes.”

For one of the musical numbers she had conceived with Legrand and the Bergmans, “Tomorrow Night,” Barbra made a video. “The four of us were like children playing,” Marilyn said. “We videotaped the first musical performance in our living room.” Marilyn and Alan played two tailors trying to fit Anshel into a bridegroom outfit. “We laughed hysterically!” Marilyn recalled. “What a pair of tailors we made!”

WITH AN IMPRESSIVE original song score to sweeten the project, Barbra once again sought studio backing late in 1979. After several rejections, her dream finally seemed about to come true. Eric Peskow and Mike Medavoy, partners in Orion Pictures, gave her the green light to direct, produce, and star, providing that she could guarantee the film would cost no more than $13 million to make. She hired Rusty Lemorande to help her produce the film, and asked him to come up with separate budget estimates for making the movie in Los Angeles and overseas.

Barbra’s biggest concern now was the script, which she felt was far from filmable. Medavoy, having already given her the okay to do practically everything else, suggested she write the movie too. “You seem to know so well what it is you want,” he told her.

“She wrote out of necessity,” Lemorande recalled. “I got a tremendous lesson in writing by being at the knee of this process—where she and I would do a draft and then I would find it being critiqued by the likes of Paddy Chayefsky, Elaine May, David Rayfiel, Bo Goldman.... A lot of people were constantly giving her opinions when she asked for them.”

To make sure she wrote the best possible script, Barbra immersed herself in Judaism, just as Yentl had. She pored over the Torah, attended Bible study classes, went to Hasidic weddings. She became involved in a small Orthodox synagogue in Venice, California, and helped Jason prepare for his bar mitzvah, a ceremony the boy likely would not have participated in had his mother not become so obsessed with Yentl’s world. Rabbi Daniel Lapin officiated at the mitzvah, and for months afterward Barbra studied under him. In appreciation, she bestowed a large gift on the rabbi’s Jewish day school, which was renamed the Emanuel Streisand School.

The work on the script consumed Barbra. As she wrote, she tried to address every objection she had heard. She raised Yentl’s age so that she could more convincingly play her. “I made her kind of amorphically ageless; I guessed she’d be around twenty-eight. A spinster of the time. A person who wasn’t married by that age [in Yentl’s time and place] was very, very odd.” She struggled with how to accurately re-create the world of passionate Talmudic scholars without making the movie too ethnic to have broad appeal.

She sought the help of anyone willing to give it. When the novelist and rabbi Chaim Potok told her that Esquire magazine wanted him to interview her for a cover story, she replied, “I don’t do interviews.” But she agreed to see him, just to get acquainted. During the meeting, she asked him if he would look over the script of Yentl, and Potok sensed an unspoken negotiation: help me with this screenplay and I’ll give you an interview. Barbra later admitted as much to him: “Why am I doing this interview?... I want you to help me. I mean, I want to know what you know as a writer and as a rabbi.”

Potok found Barbra’s knowledge of the Jewish religion “confused and rudimentary. Yet she asks questions openly, unselfconsciously, with no hint of embarrassment, and takes notes with the assiduous concentration of one long committed to learning. I have no way of gauging her comprehension. Her mind leaps restlessly, impatiently, from one subject to another: she wishes to know everything, and quickly. At those moments when a good idea comes suddenly from one or another of us, I see on her lips an amazed smile, a near-sensuous delight, and her eyes flash.”

Researching Yentl left a strong mark on Barbra. “I felt more proud to be a Jew,” she said, and she had her eyes opened about a lot of philosophical issues. “I don’t believe God is a chauvinist. When you read the Bible there are two chapters of Genesis that have different interpretations of how woman was created.... I believe that woman was not created from a rib... but was created equally, like it says in one of the chapters: God created Adam and then split him in two so that each side has masculine and feminine qualities. They’re different but equal.”

Barbra also discovered that the Talmud does not prohibit women from studying, but says only that women are not obliged to study. “Where is it written that women have to be subservient?” Barbra asked. “You find that men have interpreted the law to serve themselves and society’s needs. In other words, it is not written!”

BARBRA WALKED THROUGH the ancient cobblestoned streets of Prague, absorbing the somber ambience of the city, and felt herself transported to Yentl’s time and place. It was the fall of 1980, and she and Rusty Lemorande had traveled to Czechoslovakia, where Barbra had decided she must film Yentl to ensure authenticity, to scout locations. “I put on my Yentl costume and walked through the streets. I always wanted to try everything out, see what the black costume looked like against the color of the walls, against the textures, the cobblestones, the light of Czechoslovakia, the air. Every country has its own mists, its own light.”

She wanted the film to look, she said, “like a Dutch painting.... I love Rembrandt. When I was sixteen I paid ten dollars for a Rembrandt print of a woman bathing, and I had it hanging in my apartment when I moved away from home.” From Prague she went to Amsterdam, where the director Paul Verhoeven took her to the Rijks Museum. “I wanted to see the Rembrandts in person, not just in a book because [in reality] the color of the Rembrandt paint is very dark brown, not black, and the edges of the faces are soft, not hard.... It’s very interesting because the light source in the Rembrandt paintings never shows. He had some of the light coming, in a sense, from within.”

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 another 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 United 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. Most 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.”

MINDFUL 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 Shea 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 “passion,” 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, “Now I realize 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 should] meet 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 delight. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

WITH 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?”