GLR May-June 2023

assured the gay men who went to see her at the Bon Soir that you didn’t have to be attractive in the usual way to be desired. We speak these days of “authenticity,” but that’s what Streisand had from the beginning. And, given the times, this was quite refreshing. “Back in the 1950s,” Hofler writes, “Jewish performers, like Jack Benny, Dinah Shore, and George Burns, were still celebrating Christ mas on their TV series. At the movies, a romance like Marjorie Morningstar featured Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly in Jewish roles. Even the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank cast the Irish American actress Millie Perkins as the lead, with her love interest being the perennial male ingénue Richard Beymer.” But by 1973, things had begun to change. In 1969, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus came to the screen (a Jewish boy obsessed with a Jewish girl—played by Ali McGraw), the same year that Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint , the epic story of a Jewish boy’s obsession with shiksas, to be followed by numerous Woody Allen movies on the same subject, culmi nating in the Oscar-winning AnnieHall . And now, in 1973, we had the story of a Jewish girl falling for a shegetz. Both Ray Stark and Laurents would have been happy with Ryan O’Neal (who played opposite Streisand in What’s Up, Doc? ). But Streisand and director Sydney Pollack ( Tootsie ) insisted that it be Robert Redford. Not only was Redford, the designated shegetz, could not have been less interested in all this; married with four kids, he was suspicious not only of Streisand’s reputation for having affairs with her leading men, but also of the movie itself. “She’s not going to sing, is she?” he asked. “I (don’t) want her to sing in the mid dle of the movie.” The role of Hubbell seemed to him little more than that of a blond bimbo. But Streisand was smart enough to see that there would be sexual chemistry between them the mo ment they appeared on screen. And she was right—even if Red ford, in an abundance of caution, was wearing two jockstraps during their scene in the sack. The real bone of contention, however, among Stark, Streisand, Redford, Pollack, and Laurents was the nature of the movie they were making. Ray Stark never quite got what Katie, the Streisand character, was supposed to be, and Redford wanted his role to be more active. Worse, there were two strains in the story—the political and the personal—and even when the movie came out, after many, many rewrites and last-minute cuts and additions, critics like Pauline Kael and Judith Crist felt the two never meshed. The romance was based on Laurents’ life long attraction to the shegetz. (“Arthur had a lot of Jewish friends,” said Laurents’ assistant, Ashley Feinstein. “He didn’t have Jewish boyfriends.”) The political part was based on his experience with the House Un-American Activities Commit Streisand “infatuated” with Redford, in Lau rent’s estimation, but, he told Pollack: “You’re going to build up Redford’s part be cause you’re in love with him. I don’t mean homosexually, but he’s the blond goy you wish you were.” But this was the pot calling the kettle black, Hofler maintains. Laurents was so deep into intersectional self-loathing here that he “worshipped good looks, be cause, as he put it, ‘I never liked what I looked like.’”

tee’s search for Communists in the movie industry. The romance seems to be all it’s remembered for. When members of the first preview audience walked out before the film was over, Pollack knew he had to cut some of the political scenes. At the next pre view, the audience remained in their seats sobbing. And sob bing is what the director, producer, and composer of the theme song (Marvin Hamlisch) wanted to hear. If The Way We Were was about the desire of a Jewish woman for the forbidden Other, another subject of The Way TheyWere is the way homosexual writers had to change the gender of their characters in order to succeed—which becomes clear toward the end of the book when we finally meet Tom Hatcher. It was Gore Vidal who one day told Laurents to go to Riley’s, a men’s clothing store in Los Angeles, and get a look at the new salesman. The salesman was Tom Hatcher: blond, good-looking, and very, very well built. (“How does Arthur get them?” asked William Inge.) Producer Howard Rosenman’s first impression when they met was: “I thought, typical shegetz.” He goes on to tell Hofler: “A ‘shegetz’ is taken from the Hebrew word ‘shikootz,’ which means ‘bug,’ which gives you an idea of what some Jews think of a ‘shegetz.’ ... The Jew is the dynamic one, and when you fall in love with a vapid ‘shegetz,’ it’s because he’s the one you want to be, the beauti ful one. That’s what attracts some Jews to Gentiles, the vapid ity. There’s no drama.” Laurents, this man of all theatrical trades. At this point the minutiae of moviemaking give way to reflections that one can only get when the film is in the can. (The movie did quite well; the title song was number one for six months; Streisand to this day would like to make a sequel; Redford considered it a one-off.) Laurents confessed in an interview that at some point in his life the Jewish chip on his shoulder gave way to the gay chip. When Laurents was in London directing a revival of Gypsy , Hatcher, back in New York, got involved in gay liberation by going to meetings at the Firehouse. (At one point he writes Arthur to ask if activists always sleep with each other.) But Hatcher, despite being a blond beauty, was subject to a form of discrimination that Laurents never experienced—as the boyfriend of a much more successful man whose friends tended to dismiss him. “For years,” Laurents said, “people were cruel to Tom as the less notable half of a couple. At least they lusted after him, so there was that.” But that was all they saw in Hatcher. “Arthur did not want to face anything but that Tom was God’s gift to the world,” said his assistant Ashley Feinstein. “I wouldn’t say anything bad about Tom because Arthur had put him on a pedestal, although Arthur started realizing that all of Arthur’s fancy friends treated Tom shabbily”—so shabbily that Laurents christened the Broadway community that he had once Laurents is the Darth Vader of this book: “his memory was a vast storehouse of unsettled grievances, complaints and re sentments.” Even Larry Kramer wouldn’t speak to him. (Kramer had his own expe rience with Streisand, who owned the movie rights to The Normal Heart .) The best chapter in The Way They Were is the epilogue (“The Reporter and His Sub jects”), when Hofler describes his visit to

The Way We Were was the fictionalized story of the relationship of the screen writer, Arthur Laurents, and a man named Tom Hatcher—the inspiration for the couple in the film.

TheG & LR

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