BARBRA WITH AN "S"
STREISAND'S NEW MEMOIR IS IS OUT THIS WEEK, COMING IN AT JUST UNDER ONE THOUZAND PAGES
(Above: The opening spread of my Vanity Fair cover story on Streisand)
I was in Daunt Books yesterday on Marylebone High Street and flipped through the massive My Name is Barbra memoir written by Streisand which anchored its new books table. There are lots of pages about Pat Conroy and The Prince of Tides. It made me smile remembering my time with her when she was promoting the film which I also remembered seeing all by myself in a rough cut in a screening room at Columbia Studios out in LA when I went out there to spend those several long-ago days with her at the studio and at her home in Beverly Hills. A day after that screening, I was ensconced with her in an editing room - it opens the cover story - when she was overlaying the music and doing some more sound editing as if she were at a podium conducting an inner orchestra only she could hear but longed for others to experience as well the beauty and artistry embedded within her. She still longs for that and this book seems to be her letting us inside her head to hear it all, the glorious jumble of herself and her artistic and directorial impulses to impose order on it - her Jewish childhood, the trauma of fatherlessness and a mother who was both present and absent at the same fucking time, the resultant audacity it took to survive that and which did not doom her but delivered her through the diva mode that others deemed as her role so she could arrive at her own self-definition as a film director, the sturdy stature of her stardom, her late-life love of her husband James Brolin, the bravery that limned her fear with the bravura of the talent, her owning still at 81 the sobriquet her grandmother first gave her as a little girl: farbrent, which is Yiddish for “on fire.”
It is that fiery longing that is the key to her. She is an artist who has always longed to put a musical sound to and furnish diverse narratives for the longings within her millions of fans. She has often been criticized for her narcissism - all artists are narcissists to some degree or the other - but I think she acknowledges her own and utilizes it as an act of service. She is more than self-aware; she is aware as well - and grateful - for her art and her talents being of service to others and helping them past their longings to a sense of healing if not healing itself. That is her gift - she hears what its like to heal even if she can’t quite know what it feels like herself. She shares the sound of it and leaves it up to us to feel it.
When I wrote about her concert several years ago which I’d seen outside San Francisco, I was quite moved by her final encore. It was Rodgers and Hart's “I Didn't Know What Time It Was” from the musical Too Many Girls. It was the highlight of the whole show. The voice took on a timbre of intimacy and transported us not only back to a small night club on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village in New York City where she first got her start, but also Streisand herself back to her younger self, yet one steeped in all the life she had lived since. It was in that moment that the woman onstage melded with the girl who longed long ago to be who she had become before our adoring eyes during the last six decades. The genius of Streisand is that she is, yes, still longing and still evolving and still becoming newer versions of herself before our eyes - even now as a writer and memoirist. "Once I was young, but never was naive. I thought I had a trick or two up my imaginary sleeve ..." she sang that night outside San Francisco, then left us with this last sung line: "I'm wise, and I know what time it is now." She knew it was time to write this book.
As I put it back down at Daunt Books and headed to a lunch up the street at Fischer’s in Marylebone to talk to The New York Times media correspondent, Michael Grynbaum, who is on leave to write his own big book about Conde Nast, I couldn’t help but remember how heightened my life was back during a chapter of it when I could spend time with Barbra Streisand. I used the word “compelling” a lot when people would ask me back then what she was really like since she wouldn’t let up with the phone calls - she sort of invaded my life - as she kept trying to guide me in my writing of the piece until I told her she had to stop calling me.
She did call me one last time though when she got an early issue of the magazine to read my cover story. It was 2 a.m. in NYC. She said she was sorry for waking me but didn’t offer to call back. We went through the story almost line by line. She had some issues with some of the things I said but mostly liked the story. She was the only person who brought her own tape recorder to our sessions and recorded them too - which proved to her that I never misquoted her in the entire article. I later was told by my friend Pat Newcomb, who handled her PR at the time and was instrumental in getting me the story, that Marty Erlichman, Barbra’s longtime manager, said it was the best profile ever written about her.
After about half an hour on the phone, I thought we were finished and I could go back to bed, but she had one last question for me: Why didn’t I say she was sexier? I was sort of shocked by that aspect of her longing to be perceived still as such. I told her that I had Jon Peters in the story talking about that and what a great ass she had. “I know,” she said. “But you - as the writer - should have said I was sexier.”
“Barbra,” I told her. “When people ask me what Barbra Streisand is really like …” I began, sleepily pronouncing her last name as if it were spelled with a “z” like Liza.
She interrupted me. “It’s Streisand, Kevin,” she said. “I have corrected you about that before. It’s spelled with an ‘s’ not a ‘z.’ Streisand.”
“ … what Barbra Streisand is really like,” I repeated, “I tell them one word: fuckable.”
“I love that,” she said and giggled with a girlish gratitude. “Why didn’t your write that?” she asked, the giggle turning into a pitch-perfect laugh. It was in that moment I finally fell completely in love with her.
And then she said this, the last thing she ever said to me: “I’ve enjoyed our time together. Thank you for the story. And … well … have a great life, Kevin.”
Thank you, Barbra. Here’s to both of us continuing to have our versions of a great one.
Below is the Vanity Fair story.
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