Barbra sat beneath the hot lights of the 60 Minutes set, answering questions from Mike Wallace. The conversation turned to the subject of Barbra’s stepfather, and her carefully controlled public mask shattered. She broke down on camera, and a frightened, insecure, and unhappy child emerged. “You like this... that forty million people have to see me do this,” she sniffed to Wallace. For a glaring public moment, Streisand fact and fiction had merged: Barbra looked remarkably like another abused child—Claudia Draper, her character in Nuts.

Nuts, an acid-etched portrait of soured family values, would be Barbra’s symbolic indictment of the abuse she suffered as a child from Louis Kind. And the angry tone of the film laid bare her lingering bitter feelings toward her mother. “My stepfather did not physically abuse me,” Barbra said. “Mentally he did, and my mother allowed it to happen.”

Tom Topor’s caustic play about Claudia Draper and her downward spiral into prostitution, murder, and possible madness centered on dark family secrets, repressed hatred, social hypocrisy, and an important question: what is normal? “I responded very strongly to the character in this movie,” Barbra said. “People are not always what they seem to be. Claudia isn’t insane; she’s just shockingly honest.”

It is clear why Streisand was captivated by the multilayered heroine of Topor’s acclaimed play. Claudia is a fascinating melange of traits: a flawed, heroic, insecure, vain, frightened, and obstreperous high-priced call girl who rejects an insanity plea after murdering a violent john and demands the right to stand trial for the crime. She will not victimize herself further by saying she’s “nuts,” even though her parents have used all their considerable influence to make that happen. She wants her day in court.

Playing Claudia, Barbra later admitted, allowed her to “let all my rage out.... I don’t have to worry [in this movie] about being nice, sweet and polite.”

AS EARLY AS December 1981, word had leaked out that Barbra was already planning a follow-up to Yentl. The project that had caught her attention was Nuts, which Mark Rydell was preparing to direct. Streisand’s interest in playing Claudia Draper intrigued Rydell, but he turned her down. “She wanted me to delay the project until she finished Yentl,” he explained at the time, “and that won’t be for way over a year. I intend to be shooting Nuts this summer.”

Rydell, who had directed Bette Midler’s stunning film debut in The Rose and guided Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn to Oscars in On Golden Pond, had already decided to cast Debra Winger, whose performance in Urban Cowboy had catapulted her into the front ranks of Hollywood’s leading ladies.

With Winger, Rydell planned a relatively low-budget production rife with raw language, rough situations, and a battery of highly combustible themes, including Claudia’s darkest secret: the incestuous relationship she had been forced into—and paid for—by her stepfather when she was a child. But delays caused by script, budget, and location problems saw to it that Rydell’s projected spring 1982 start date was not to be.

“I did draft after draft after draft [of the screenplay],” Tom Topor remembered. “Next thing I know, I was off the picture. In a way, Mark was right. What I didn’t understand viscerally, though I did intellectually, is that it’s the director who makes the picture. Mark’s emphasis was far more on incest. My emphasis was far more on power (as between the institution and the individual).”

A bogged-down Rydell temporarily left the project to direct The River in 1984, and Winger—successful, in demand, and at the time a “turbulent” woman, as her Terms of Endearment co-star Shirley MacLaine said at the 1984 Oscars—bowed out of the film. Determined to save the project, Rydell remembered Barbra’s interest and sent the Nuts screenplay to her. Streisand was again intrigued, and both felt the next step would be to hire a new writer to fine-tune the script yet again.

By the fall of 1985, Universal had officially placed the beleaguered project in turnaround. “Someone over there thought it was too hot to handle,” Rydell confessed. “It’s very raw, and I guess they got scared.” Unwilling to relinquish his dream of making Nuts, Rydell took the property to Warner Brothers, with whom Barbra had long been associated. Barbra agreed to star, but like so many of her screen projects, Nuts would end up waiting for her. Until, and even after, Barbra became firmly involved, the picture would be, as the columnist Army Archerd put it, “a hard film to crack.”

In his desire to please Streisand, and to entice Warners into buying the property for her, Rydell committed a major faux pas. After asking Cinderella Liberty screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan to do a rewrite, he made the same request of Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People). After promising both men a deal when he returned, Rydell flew to Hawaii for a vacation. As Rydell basked in the sun, Sargent and Ponicsan, who were friends, compared notes. Understandably angry, they quit the project—but not before Ponicsan dialed Rydell’s answering machine and left a message: “After Hawaii, go directly to hell.”

When Barbra discovered the Rydell-Sargent-Ponicsan imbroglio, she played mediator. She spoke with the two disgruntled writers and suggested that they team up. After Rydell apologized to them, the screenwriters agreed. But the studio felt that their rewrite still wasn’t quite acceptable, and after two more writers had come and gone, Streisand herself participated in the script’s evolution. According to Barbra, Rydell “gave me one week to sit down and write out the script as I saw fit.” The end result pleased all concerned, and on September 30, 1985, Warner Brothers gave the green light to Nuts for a January 1986 start. Barbra’s acting salary would be $5 million. She would also produce through Barwood, for a fee of half a million dollars.

ALTHOUGH WITH RYDELL at the helm Nuts appeared to be in good hands, rumors soon began to fly around the Burbank lot that the director was being “difficult.” Well-placed sources said that he refused to control the ballooning budget, tone down the controversial incest angle, or compromise his overall artistic vision of the film.

Streisand attempted to rectify the situation, but couldn’t. In a typically worded puff piece of a press statement, the studio announced on March 18, 1986, “We greatly regret that a number of factors concerning this picture have come together to create a separation between Warner Brothers and Rydell Productions. We have nothing but respect for Mark’s talent and success as a filmmaker. We wish him every success in the future.”

Rydell also played the smiling diplomat. The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Citing schedule, budgetary, and creative differences, Rydell said: ‘It is with absolutely no animosity to any of the parties concerned that I take leave of this project. If I have any regrets, it is that I will not be able to work with Barbra Streisand, an immense talent with whom I have enjoyed an excellent working relationship.’”

Such genteel hypocrisy has always angered Barbra. She felt Rydell’s exit reflected badly on her, and she tried once again to reunite the warring forces. “She tried to become the mediator between Mark and Warner Brothers,” said Marty Erlichman. “When Barbra found that there was no way she was going to convince Warners to take him back... then she said that she would like [another] actor’s director. And they selected Marty Ritt.”

But the process, according to studio insiders, wasn’t quite as simple as that. After Rydell’s departure, a number of names were bandied about. Warners asked Barbra to direct the film herself, but she wasn’t prepared to take on that responsibility so soon after Yentl, nor did she want to prompt gossip that she had orchestrated Rydell’s removal in order to take over the project herself.

Warners approached Alan Pakula about directing without telling Barbra that his customary fee was $2 million, and she was furious. As the producer of Nuts, Barbra certainly should have been consulted about this type of offer, and she refused to pay that much for a director. Barbra was further angered when she learned that Warners was keeping a crew on standby at a daily expense of tens of thousands of dollars even though the film was far from ready to go before the cameras.

Stressed, disillusioned, and watching the budget rise precariously, Streisand worried over every aspect of the production, including her role. Was it too confrontational? Too bitter? Too one-dimensional? Until she could find a director she could trust to talk to about these issues, she worried alone. “I feel so scared and insecure,” she told a friend. “I want so much to be liked and understood. But I have to be in control, because so much of the world is so stupid.”

At first Barbra thought Martin Ritt might be the kind of director with whom she could feel secure and from whom she could learn. With a string of classic dramas to his credit including Hud and Norma Rae, Ritt was renowned for his ability to juxtapose intimate personal issues with grand social themes. By April 2, Streisand had spoken with Ritt about the job. Publicly he said he thought Barbra was “terrific.” Privately he told her he wasn’t sure she had the acting ability to play Claudia well. Challenged by Ritt’s blunt assessment, Barbra decided she had found her director. “He got my hair up,” she explained, “and I said, ‘Good. You’re the one. It’s a match.’”

Barbra felt she knew Claudia Draper inside and out. “This is a girl who says exactly what she feels, and I identify with her because ever since I was a little kid, I couldn’t learn the rules about conduct,” she said. Then she added a read-between-the-lines comment about her mother: “You know, I wasn’t taught things, like I used to sit at the table with my feet up. I didn’t know you’re supposed to put a napkin in your lap. My mother ate from a pot standing up at the kitchen stove. We never had set times for dinner, like all the other kids, you know.”

In her quest to uncover every facet of and reason for Claudia’s erratic behavior, Streisand interviewed doctors, lawyers, and mental patients, and hired a legal-aid attorney as a consultant for the film. She visited several state hospitals in New York and Los Angeles during the spring. “I went to see schizophrenics,” she said. “I felt totally comfortable with them, with their lack of social etiquette, you know, a kind of honesty that was just so engaging, refreshing. I do like to say what I think and you get crucified for that, like [Claudia] does in this picture.”

BARBRA CONSIDERED ACTORS from Richard Gere to Robert Duvall for the important, but substantially smaller, part of Claudia’s public defender, Aaron Levinsky. By April 14, she and Ritt had settled on Richard Dreyfuss, whose performance in the Los Angeles stage production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart had electrified Barbra. Dreyfuss, an Oscar winner for The Goodbye Girl, had struggled with substance abuse, but he was now clean and sober and willing to work. A week later, though, he left the contract negotiations to star in Tin Men for Barry Levinson. “We have to start the search for an actor all over again,” said a frustrated Ritt, acknowledging that Dreyfuss’s departure would delay the film’s start date even further.

Barbra turned to her old friend Dustin Hoffman, who loved the cinematic quality Sargent and Ponicsan had brought to Topor’s rather static stage production. According to the columnist Marilyn Beck, “Hoffman’s interest in Nuts was strong but not great enough for him to compromise on his financial demands. The deal being negotiated called for him and Streisand to profit equally from the picture, and when push came to shove, Hoffman insisted on so much that Warners decided it would end up with a budget that would be too big a nut to crack.” So, after two months of haggling, Hoffman exited.

Although Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and Marlon Brando reportedly were interested in the role, on June 16 Dreyfuss once again entered the picture. After Ritt and Streisand agreed to delay filming until October, Dreyfuss was cast with a salary of $1.5 million, far below the king’s ransom Hoffman had demanded. Dreyfuss, despite rumors to the contrary, was unconcerned about Barbra’s penchant for taking over her films. “No, I never worried about that at all,” he said. “I knew going in that that was going to be the case. Don’t we know this? She knew it. I knew it.”

WHILE SHE STRUGGLED to put Nuts together, Streisand had given her One Voice concert, and Martin Ritt bitterly questioned the time and attention it took away from Nuts. He apparently felt that Streisand the conglomerate was getting in the way of Streisand the serious actress. Later, after Nuts began production and Streisand divided her time between the film and her HBO One Voice special, the situation between director and star grew even more tense.

With the glittering cast Ritt and Streisand had settled on—Maureen Stapleton and Karl Malden were signed to play Claudia’s parents, and Leslie Nielson and Eli Wallach would play secondary roles—the Nuts budget mushroomed to nearly $30 million, more money than seven of Barbra’s thirteen films had grossed. The technical crew was equally impressive: Andrzej Bartkowiak was hired as cinematographer while Jeremy Lubbock would serve as music arranger-conductor. As for the music itself, Streisand decided she would score the film: “After all, who else would hire me... or fire me?”

Barbra flew to New York to begin location work on October 1. After brief exterior scenes of a liberated Claudia walking the streets of New York, the Nuts company returned to Los Angeles, where filming continued at the Burbank Studios.

ALMOST FROM THE beginning, sources close to Streisand say she suspected she had erred in hiring Martin Ritt. Although he was a respected Hollywood old-timer, he was set in his ways and unwilling to alter his personal schedule to suit Barbra’s chaotic calendar. While many of her other directors had been willing to deal with Barbra’s barrage of late-night phone calls, Ritt—sixty-eight and not in the best of health—made it clear to her from the outset that he was not. As filming progressed, and frustration mounted on both sides, Ritt reportedly ended up referring to his star as a “pain in the ass.”

Still, reports filtered out of the closed set that Barbra was giving a tour-de-force performance as Claudia Draper, that the movie would be a box-office winner, and that Streisand could well garner a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Karl Malden was wildly enthusiastic about the film and its leading lady. “There has never been a better group of character actors put together to appear in one film than in this one,” he said. “Every performance, and I mean every performance, could well be called brilliant. Barbra,” he felt, was “a fascinating, energetic woman, aside from being one of the best singers we’ve got in the country. She’s got an awful lot of vitality.”

Nuts wrapped on February 3, 1987, and then the real work began. After several weeks of relaxation, Ritt began the arduous process of assembling his director’s cut for Barbra. He finished the job shortly before May 22, when he screened the film for her. Barbra wanted to make changes and began to edit the film herself on June 1. Ritt was not pleased. As the director explained, “I don’t know what she’s doing to the picture. I did my cut; we previewed it, and now she’s doing whatever it is she’s doing.” Still, Ritt tried to be fair, adding that since he had not been given final cut on the film, Barbra, as producer, “has the right to come in and do some editing.”

As usual, Barbra remained incommunicado during the postproduction process, but she later claimed that “some of the arguments that Marty and I had even over the final cut were where I would say: ‘Take out that close-up of me.’ But then he would say: ‘That’s a good close-up of you.’ Nobody would know [about] those arguments. They would think an actress wants close-ups of herself. And it’s ridiculous. I have a lot of rage about a lot of things that are misinterpreted,” she said.

While she edited Nuts, Barbra was also busy composing the film’s score. “As a courtroom drama, Nuts required very little music, so I decided to give it a shot,” she remembered. “The end title music was written to convey a sense of freedom and personal triumph. Later, Alan and Marilyn Bergman added lyrics to it, and the song became ‘Two People,’ [which I] recorded for the Till I Loved You album.” In a barroom sequence Streisand also used “Here We Are at Last,” a song she wrote for The Main Event and discarded until it showed up on Emotion.

WHEN NUTS WAS previewed in the late summer and early fall of 1987, Warner Brothers executives were ecstatic with the audience polling results. Despite Hollywood cynics who felt that Streisand could never get away with portraying a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour hooker, no such protestations of disbelief came from the mesmerized audience members. They realized that most prostitutes do not resemble Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8. Tom Topor was pleased. “I think Nuts is a good movie, a very good movie. It’s not the movie I would have made. It’s Barbra Streisand and Marty Ritt’s movie.”

Nuts was released to great fanfare on November 20, 1987. After turning down over three hundred interview requests from worldwide media representatives, Barbra agreed to a rare three-part discussion with Today movie reviewer Gene Shalit, who raved about the film. Dressed in black, a radiant and relaxed Streisand pulled out all the stops with a flustered Shalit, even offering at the end of the first segment to adjust his famous bow tie. “Come here,” she teased. The starstruck reviewer looked as if he might faint at any moment.

On the final day, Richard Dreyfuss joined the interview and waxed philosophic about Streisand’s much-dissected personality. “Barbra is a case,” he said. “She’s very specific. I think if there is one thing that you can say is a common denominator to all movie stars, especially female movie stars, from the time of the beginning of the motion picture business, [it’s] that they are—as opposed to the other actresses—they are definite. You can see a clear line around Katharine Hepburn’s personality and Bette Davis’s personality and Joan Crawford and Jean Arthur and Barbra Streisand. That is what sets them apart and makes them compelling for us to watch.... People might argue with facets of Barbra’s personality, but what Barbra is is definite.

“And because she’s a woman, we take issue with that to a greater degree than if she were a man. If she were a producer, star, director of the male gender, we would accept all of her eccentricities in a much more forgiving, normal, unquestioning way. The fact that she is a woman brings all of those things out in very sharp relief, and that’s why we’re here in a sense discussing Barbra’s personality. That doesn’t mean that I forgive her eccentricities, by the way, it just means that’s the phenomenon we’re discussing, okay?”

Despite the film’s positive preview responses, reviews were mixed. Many critics felt Barbra had created a surprisingly hard-edged, gritty character who was light-years away from Yentl, and had finally proved her dramatic mettle. Others accused her of chewing up the scenery, of performing rather than acting. People magazine’s reviewer wrote, “Her wicked zest keeps you riveted. Whether she’s punching out the family lawyer or shocking the court with her sex-for-sale rates, Streisand shows a robust comic toughness... with disarming candor and wit, she has actually made a hymn to herself as a pain in the butt.” Still others felt the film was a pain, period. Newsweek’s David Ansen called Nuts “a classic example of A-list liberal Hollywood turning out what it thinks is Important Entertainment.”

Warner Brothers, encouraged by opening-day research figures stating that Nuts had a 96 percent chance of being enjoyed, believed that excellent word of mouth could override the critical objections. But a series of problems hurt the film’s box-office receipts, beginning with the pulse of the country. In recessionary times, few wanted to see what they perceived to be a depressing story about a crazy prostitute, especially during the holidays. Although the film had a huge opening ten-day take of nearly $12 million on a mere 536 screens, the abysmal ad campaign, featuring a photo of a sour-faced Streisand that called to mind the beast in television’s Beauty and the Beast, proved to be a turnoff to many potential moviegoers. None of the film’s humor, or its ultimate happiness and hope, was explored in the marketing, and Nuts suffered because of it.

The box office on Nuts dwindled rapidly, and it ended up grossing only $35 million domestically—barely enough to cover its production budget, not to mention the millions spent on promotion. The film was a washout in the year-end New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Awards. It was nominated for Golden Globe Awards in two categories, but it failed to win either Best Picture or Best Actress. The only hope left for its resuscitation revolved around the Oscar nominations. Would the Academy members finally give Streisand some recognition? Most observers agreed that her performance deserved a nomination.

Indeed, for months Nuts had been touted by many Hollywood insiders as a front-runner in the Oscar sweepstakes, and some articles even predicted that Streisand would win her third statuette. But when the nominations were announced, Nuts was ignored in every category. Cher went on to win the Best Actress Award, for an accomplished but less multilayered performance.

THE CATHARSIS OF Nuts brought Barbra only marginally closer to her mother. “I love her more now than I ever have in my life,” she said. “I think she also loves me. I understand even her jealousy. Why shouldn’t she be jealous? Here’s a woman who wanted a career for herself, but she was too frightened, too shy.”

Diana has defended herself against the charge that she never gave Barbra any encouragement as a little girl. Speaking of all three of her children she said, “Whatever they tried to do, I tried to support, and I was being supportive.” But she admitted, “They might not have thought I was totally supportive.”

Barbra and her mother were rarely in contact. “I don’t hear from her very often,” Mrs. Kind said. “There’s no rift, I love my daughter very much, but Barbra’s a very busy girl and I’m a busy mother taking care of myself and trying to do the best I can with my life.” On special occasions Barbra will take Diana out to dinner “if it’s convenient,” Mrs. Kind said; on Mother’s Day and her birthday Barbra’s secretary usually would send Diana flowers, but some years she didn’t remember to.

But, Diana freely admitted, “My daughter sure looks after me.” In the early eighties Barbra bought her a $1 million, two-bedroom Beverly Hills condominium, which Diana often shares with Roslyn, who married the producer Randy Stone, then a casting agent, briefly in 1983 but has been single ever since. Barbra also paid all her mother’s bills and sent her $1,000 a month, and for a simple woman in her eighties this was virtually the lap of luxury. Her biggest problem, Diana said, was a lack of privacy because of her daughter’s fame: “I never knew that being the mother of someone like this would be such hard work.”