Barbra Streisand was not a songwriter. In 1976 she was the biggest female star in American entertainment — a singer who interpreted other people’s songs better than anyone alive, an Oscar-winning actress, a perfectionist who controlled every inch of her records and films — but the melodies on her albums came from professional composers. Then, preparing to play a singer in a film, she took guitar lessons. And the melody she worked out on an instrument she was still learning to play became Evergreen: a No. 1 single, the best-selling record of her career to that point, and the song that made her the first woman in history to win an Academy Award as a composer. Evergreen was the love theme from A Star Is Born, and it was written, improbably, by the star herself — with words by a lyricist who nearly left it too late.
The song’s famous first line promises a love “soft as an easy chair.” Nothing about its creation was soft or easy. It came out of a chaotic, much-mocked, enormously successful film production in which Streisand was star, executive producer and, in the end, composer — and it outlasted every argument about the movie itself.
A Star Is Born, Again
The story had already been filmed twice: in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, and in 1954 as a musical with Judy Garland, whose version had become a legend of a career-best performance in a troubled production. For the 1976 remake, the setting was moved from Hollywood to the rock business. Streisand played Esther Hoffman, an unknown singer on the way up; Kris Kristofferson, at her insistence, played John Norman Howard, a rock star drinking his way down. Frank Pierson directed; Streisand’s partner Jon Peters produced; Streisand herself executive-produced and fought, famously, over nearly every creative decision on the picture. The battles became Hollywood folklore, the reviews were often savage — and the film, made for around six million dollars, went on to take in more than eighty million at the box office, one of the biggest hits of its year.
A film built around two singers needed songs that could carry the whole arc — his decline, her rise, and the love between them. Paul Williams, one of the defining songwriters of the decade, was brought in to write the film’s music with Kenny Ascher, and together they built Esther’s repertoire: Lost Inside of You, The Woman in the Moon, With One More Look at You, Queen Bee. Williams knew his assignment’s centre of gravity: a big love song for Esther, the one the audience would carry out of the cinema. He just did not expect where the tune would come from. Nor was his the only unlikely chapter in the casting of the music: the role of John Norman Howard had first been offered to Elvis Presley, and slipped away in a dispute with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, over billing and money — which is how the part, and the duet, passed to Kris Kristofferson, a genuine songwriter in his own right and the ideal foil for Streisand’s unknown.
Lessons for Esther
Because Esther was a performing singer-songwriter, Streisand had to look convincing with a guitar in her hands, so she took lessons and practised seriously for the role. What nobody had budgeted for was that the lessons would start producing music. In Williams’ retelling, the turning point came when Streisand simply played him something. “She sat down and played on a guitar, the melody for ‘Evergreen’ that she’d written,” Williams recalled, telling the story decades later. “It was just such a beautiful melody. I said, ‘There’s your love song. There’s the big love song.’” She recorded the melody onto a tape for him, and he took it home to write the words. The film’s structure quietly honours how the tune arrived: in the story, the melody is Esther’s own, a private thing she picks out on her guitar long before it swells into the full orchestral theme — the fiction and the fact matching almost exactly.
Consider the position Williams was in. The film’s professional songwriters — himself included — had been hired to produce exactly this: the love theme. And the theme had arrived, complete, from the leading lady’s practice sessions. Williams was gracious about it then and has remained so since, calling the melody beautiful without qualification. But the words, which were his job, came anything but easily.
The Lyric That Came Last
Williams wrote the film’s other material first, and Evergreen sat waiting for its lyric while the production rolled on — a delay he cheerfully admits did not delight his composer. “I actually wrote that as the last thing, which I think bothered her,” he said. When the words finally came, they came in a single elegant conceit: a love described through the fresh, ordinary comforts of a day — “Love, soft as an easy chair / Love, fresh as the morning air” — two lives, in the song’s closing image, wrapped inside a single spirit. The lyric matched the melody’s simplicity exactly, and arranger Ian Freebairn-Smith dressed the recording in the strings and soft glow of a classic film theme.
In the finished movie, Esther sings Evergreen intertwined with John Norman — the song as the couple’s shared creation, his guitar and her voice. But the hit record was Streisand alone, her voice unaccompanied by anything but the arrangement and the melody she had written. The soundtrack album, released in November 1976, went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and stayed there for six weeks, eventually selling more than four million copies in the United States alone. The film, savaged by many critics, became one of the biggest box-office hits of its year. And its love theme was only beginning.
Three Weeks at Number One, and a Triple Crown
Released as a single at the end of 1976, Evergreen climbed steadily and reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on 5 March 1977, holding the top for three weeks before Hall & Oates’ Rich Girl displaced it; it also topped the Adult Contemporary chart, reached No. 3 in Britain, and earned Streisand a gold single. Then the trophies arrived in a procession. At the Golden Globes that winter she had a double triumph: Best Actress in a comedy or musical for the film, and Best Original Song for Evergreen. At the 49th Academy Awards on 28 March 1977, Evergreen won the Oscar for Best Original Song — and because the music was credited to Streisand, she became the first woman ever to win an Academy Award as a composer, adding a composer’s Oscar to the acting one she had won for Funny Girl nearly a decade earlier; it was also Williams’ first Academy Award, after years of nominations. Finally, at the Grammy Awards of 1978, Evergreen was named Song of the Year, in a rare tie with You Light Up My Life. Williams has a name for the sweep: the song, he says, won “the triple crown” — Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy.
Streisand went on to write songs occasionally across the rest of her career, but she never again needed to prove the point. Evergreen remained her biggest-selling single until Woman in Love overtook it in 1980, and it settled into the standard repertoire — sung at weddings for nearly fifty years now, by people most of whom have never seen the film and have no idea its melody was an accident of casting preparation. Evergreen stands as the moment the greatest interpreter of her generation picked up an instrument she had barely learned, in the middle of the most argumentative production of her life, and produced the one melody nobody else could have given her. The professional songwriters wrote the film. The amateur — if the word can be used of Barbra Streisand at all — wrote the theme the world remembers. Some lessons, it turns out, are worth taking.
Leave a Reply