MEMOIR
My Name is Barbra
Barbra Streisand
Century, $75
George Bernard Shaw never wrote “thought transcends matter”, as Barbra Streisand always believed. Nor did anyone else she could find as she researched her appropriately huge and fearless autobiography. Turns out even the inspirational aphorism that bolstered her anxious childhood was wishful thinking. Talk about writing your own script.
Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl.Credit:
It’s not so much the matter of her life and work that dazzles here. Spanning a relentless six-plus decades, the sheer weight of stage and TV shows, albums, films and awards; crusades fought and ceilings smashed sealed her legend long ago. The intensity of thought, though, that she brings to each in turn over her thousand-page story underscores a depth of artistry that boggles the mind all over again.
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“I’m a person who gets involved in every detail,” she writes in the midst of a three-chapter deconstruction of Yentl, the first movie she directed (also co-wrote, produced and starred in). The evidence is in her retelling, which begins the night she read Isaac Bashevis-Singer’s short story and ends, 15 years and 100 pages later, with five Oscar nominations, a profound philosophical education and hard-won convictions about women’s equality.
This particular detail she refers to is one minuscule aspect of set design, one of countless meticulously considered ideas she unravels before our eyes. Casting, music, lighting, photography, editing, publicity, budgeting, theology, politics, misogyny, infantile collaborators, seasick extras, acceptable catering … Her learning curve is so intimately observed it becomes our own. But the vision, courage and passion against systemic, sometimes vicious opposition? That’s just Barbra.
With Omar Sharif in 1968’s Funny Girl.Credit:
Her exterior life, by comparison, is recounted in episodes that almost feel rushed in her haste to get to the work. Her father died when she was a baby. Her mother withheld love and stewed in jealousy as her daughter’s divine voice fast-tracked her dreams.
Singing was only a means to Streisand’s acting ambitions, which unfurled fast after her first Broadway musical at 19. Her trip from “interesting-looking” wannabe writing unsent letters to Lee Strasberg on the Brooklyn subway to darling of a smitten Hollywood A-list is a fait accompli years before Funny Girl makes her a movie star at 26.
“She may well be the most supremely talented and complete popular entertainer that this country has ever produced,” one critic gushed after her first TV special — one of many breakout accolades she includes here like affirmations against her enduring self-doubt: a swooning note from Kate Hepburn, Liz Taylor, William Wyler or Tennessee Williams; a gobsmacked review from Dave Brubeck, Stephen Sondheim or Pauline Kael.
Barbra Streisand’s new album includes 10 previously unreleased songs.Credit: Ryan Pfluger/New York Times
By admission, she’s more apt to remember the negative, and the downright mean. “The album is bad and you are mostly to blame,” one bullying associate wrote to her after her Columbia debut. “I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body!” Walter Matthau bellowed as the cast and crew of Hello Dolly! watched her flee in tears. Her crime was to make a suggestion to director Gene Kelly, who didn’t intervene.
Love is a tricky business in Hollywood. Streisand married Elliott Gould very young, and had a son, Jason, but affairs with leading men — consummated or otherwise — were all but expected, either for dramatic authenticity or more base reasons. A misjudged tryst with early co-star Sydney Chaplin sent her into lifelong therapy. Relations with Omar Sharif, Nick Nolte and especially Yentl co-star Mandy Patinkin were … complicated.
‘She may well be the most supremely talented and complete popular entertainer that this country has ever produced’
Romantic or otherwise, intense liaisons with Marlon Brando, Tony Newley, Pierre Trudeau, Robert Redford, Don Johnson and more come under the scalpel of unflinching truth that is Streisand’s creed, as stated on page one. She traces that to the deceptions of her mother and her search for her true love, of course, to her missing father. Spoiler: Jim Brolin is so the guy, despite her very Barbra opening line: “Who f---ed up your hair?”
It’s our business, she tacitly accepts, because art and life inform each other. There’s no coy diva here, in fact little ego. To her core, Streisand is an aesthete. She describes what she wore, what she ate, designed and imagined; her cherished Klimts and Modiglianis and dogs and antiques and houses and lovers with the same microscopic obsession she brings to every phrase of a song and shot of a film. Truth, beauty and meaning are inseparable.
In the last few chapters, her transcendental thinking naturally leads to politics, and the many philanthropic foundations she hopes define her no less than her 19 movies and 51 albums. At Harvard in 1995, she connects her vocation and humanity in a speech titled The Artist As Citizen.
Artists, she says, “have to walk in other people’s shoes and other people’s skins. This does tend to make us more sympathetic to politics that are more tolerant. In our work, in our preparation … we are continuously trying to educate ourselves. With learning comes compassion. Education is the enemy of bigotry and hate. It’s hard to hate someone you truly understand.”
Whatever your taste in music, movies and even politics, at the end of these thousand pages, it’s hard not to love this incredible woman.
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