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By Root 2366 0

activist, and Hubbell Gardiner (Robert Redford), an apolitical WASP with a talent for writing. The two meet in the 1930s at Columbia University, where Katie is deeply involved in the student Communist Party and takes everything she does seriously—too seriously. Despite her humorlessness, her dedication and intellectual spark attract Hubbell, who, in classic WASP tradition, lives his life trying not to offend anyone. The two commence a love affair a few years after leaving Columbia, and they eventually marry. When Hubbell is offered a screenwriting contract with a major Hollywood studio, they head west, and it is there that their marriage slowly comes apart in the climate of the Communist witch hunts. The film ended with a touching coda in the early ’50s, back in New York: Katie, her political fervor undiminished, is handing out leaflets on a street corner, and Hubbell, also unchanged except for a new girlfriend, bumps into her for one last conversation. Both now see that their marriage was doomed, but their affection for each other is intact.

The Way We Were was launched on choppy waters. Redford had been reluctant to take the part of Hubbell, because he thought—correctly—that the story was really Katie’s story and he would wind up playing second fiddle to Barbra Streisand. Once Redford was on board, Laurents got the word that he was fired. The director, Sydney Pollack, blamed it on the producer, Ray Stark, and Stark blamed it on Pollack. According to Laurents’s memoir, eleven writers were brought in, including Alvin Sargent and Dalton Trumbo, the latter an original member of the Hollywood Ten. None of them reworked the script to Stark’s satisfaction, and soon enough, he had rehired Laurents. But there were further travails ahead: The political content made the studio nervous, because they feared it might dwarf the love story.

With Streisand on Laurents’s side, some of the crucial lines about the blacklist stayed in the film. But Laurents lost one important scene, one in which Hubbell tells Katie that someone has informed on her. The studio that employs him has told him that unless Katie clears herself by naming names before HUAC, he will lose his studio contract. Katie responds, painfully, “It’s amazing how decisions are forced upon us willy-nilly.” The scene was excised, and Pollack later said, rather defensively, that all of the cuts made were justified—that “it’s hardly the definitive film about McCarthyism. It was never intended to be.” To Laurents, the loss was heartbreaking. To those in the audience who pondered the scene’s meaning at all, it now appeared that Hubbell and Katie were breaking up because he had slept with his old flame (Lois Chiles).

The Way We Were was hardly a first-class film, but Pauline responded to it, albeit with qualification—likening it to “a torpedoed ship full of gaping holes which comes snugly into port.” She found that the sentimental sequences, story holes, Marvin Hamlisch’s heavy-handed score, and the “bewildering” time chronology were all outweighed by “the chemistry of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.” She thought that Streisand had “miraculous audience empathy” and that she “caught the spirit of the hysterical Stalinist workhorses of the thirties and forties—both the ghastly desperation of their self-righteousness and the warmth of their enthusiasm.” She considered that playing Katie was a risk for Streisand, because it required her to be “defensive and aggressive in the same breath”—exactly the qualities that many moviegoers (men, in particular) had always objected to in her persona. But Pauline believed Streisand to have made a “gradual conquest of the movie public” and thought she and Redford made The Way We Were “hit entertainment and maybe even memorable entertainment”—a line that was quoted in large type at the top of the movie’s print ads.

In the end, however, Pauline seriously overestimated Streisand’s acting ability. In Katie’s big telephone scene, in which she sobs her heart out to Redford because she isn’t attractive enough for him, Streisand was poorly directed,