NEW YORK —
In the early ‘70s, writer Arthur Laurents was on his way to Barbra Streisand’s New York apartment to pitch the star on a idea for a film.
In the script he’d write for her, she would be teaching disabled children to sing in Brooklyn Heights: “The Sound of Music” meets “The Miracle Worker.” But while talking to Streisand, whom he had directed in the 1963 Broadway musical “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” Laurents came up with a different idea. As Streisand gabbed on, he was suddenly reminded of a young woman he knew from his days as an undergraduate at Cornell University.
“Frizzy hair and sensible shoes, a brown skirt and blouse, a red scarf, handing out leaflets in 1937 on the Arts campus. ‘Stop Franco!’ ‘Stop the war in Spain!’ ” writes Laurents in his “Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood,” which will hit stores March 28. “Her name--the coincidence was surely an omen--was Fanny Price.”
Fanny Brice, of course, was the character Streisand played in “Funny Girl.” Fanny Price would be the inspiration for Laurents’ brassy heroine in the 1973 film “The Way We Were.” And the evolution of this original story--from scenes scratched out on yellow legal pads to a glossy Hollywood film starring Streisand and Robert Redford--is just one of the creative journeys traced in the book by Laurents, best known for his books for the classic musicals “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” and his screenplay of the 1977 film “The Turning Point.”
Those journeys often left Laurents enraged and frustrated. No more so than during “The Way We Were,” when the usual indignities suffered by writers in Hollywood were compounded by the fact that the movie was his most autobiographical work.
Hubbell Gardner, the tormented WASP, is a composite drawn from friends, including some of Laurents’ male lovers. The Jewish firebrand, Katie Morosky, stems as much from the writer as from Fanny Price. Her clarifying rage at injustice and hypocrisy, which galvanizes the film, runs like a rich lode throughout Laurents’ caustic and gossipy book as it ricochets from his early years as a screenwriter in Hollywood (“Snakepit,” “Rope,” “Anastasia”) to his blacklisting in the ‘50s, to his heady, if turbulent, forays in theater (“The Time of the Cuckoo,” “La Cage aux Folles”).
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Looking at the film today, Laurents says that it displays some fine chemistry between Streisand and Redford. But he also thinks the original story was seriously damaged by superstar personas and Hollywood hokum.
“Anyone who becomes a movie star must be superhuman to remain human. Superhuman, Barbra was not,” he writes, nor for that matter was Redford. Too often, according to Laurents, the movie became, in Redford’s case, about hair and teeth and white turtleneck sweaters to set off baby blues. For Streisand, he says, it was about grand accents and fingernails, and for director Sydney Pollack, outdoor cafes in a college town that would never have had one.
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