On just the second page of her 45-ton memoir – take care not to drop it on your foot – Barbra Streisand winces at the suggestion she is “impossible to work with”. By way of dispelling this scurrilous rumour, the author has scattered stand-alone encomiums throughout the text. The great and the good find more to praise. “Barbra Streisand has one of the two or three best voices in the world,” Stephen Sondheim notes. Jerome Robbins is quoted on her “talent and radiance, glamour, uniqueness, passion and wit”. Few volumes since the Old Testament have groaned with so much undiluted celebration of their protagonist.
Long the subject of sexist resentment, Streisand can, however, be forgiven for feeling the need to fight her own cause. “What is so offensive about a woman taking control?” she writes, going on to note that Warren Beatty and Robert Redford rarely get attacked for pulling all the levers on their projects. Would Walter Matthau, her costar in Hello, Dolly!, have bellowed “Why don’t you shut up and let the director direct?” at the young Beatty or Redford? “This hit me like a ton of bricks,” she notes when describing that incident.
And yet. Barely a page goes past without some evidence of her need to control. Noting that Siri, the automated voice on the iPhone, pronounces her surname wrongly, she calls Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, and gets him to correct it. Watching her 1991 film The Prince of Tides on television, she feels the commercials are too loud and phones the sound engineer at the network. The levels are duly lowered. “I guess this is what people mean when they call me a perfectionist,” she says with some self-awareness.
The sheer size of My Name is Barbra confirms an inability to walk away from long-distilled obsessions. Allowing herself more than 950 pages, the author spends longer outlining her adventures than David Copperfield did. We get an extensive record of her efforts to restore two scenes cut from Sidney Pollack’s 1973 weepie The Way We Were. “I have to be more in control of my films. I have to direct,” [her italics], she eventually decides. We find space for Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio, to conclude, after watching scenes from Shakespeare, that she had delivered “the best Juliet I’ve ever seen”. And so on through the decades.
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Still, no reasonable person would deny this is an incredible story. Born in Brooklyn 81 years ago, Streisand was raised by a harried mother and, after the early death of her dad, an unsympathetic stepfather. “I didn’t have time,” Mom later explains when asked why she rarely hugged the young Barbra.
In the early sections, Streisand repeatedly explains she saw herself as an actor rather than a singer, but proper fame first came crooning in the night clubs of Manhattan. She is cast alongside Elliot Gould, later father to her only son, in I Can Get it For You Wholesale and, as the book admits, is already talking back to the choreographer. A hit album follows. Then, still in her early 20s, she encounters superstardom as Fanny Brice in the Broadway smash Funny Girl.
Streisand notes she is much the same age as the Beatles (whom she admires), but she was always looking back to an earlier, more measured popular music. The audience for that style never went away and Streisand has remained an enormous draw ever since. If you want to know why, the book will provide you with ample testimonials. “She has a voice as true as a plumb line and pure as the soap that floats,” Jerome Weidman ventures.
In 1969, she won the best actress Oscar – in a famous tie with Katharine Hepburn – for the film version of Funny Girl and went on to consolidate in the durable What’s Up, Doc? and The Way We Were. She adjusted to score a disco hit with Donna Summer and a sleek AOR smash with Barry Gibb, but essentially remained true to her roots in the Great American Songbook.
Written in plain chatty language much at home to parentheses and exclamation points, My Name is Barbra is exhaustive (not to say exhausting) in its treatment of struggles directing Yentl and The Prince of Tides. Later on, it addresses her dedication to Hillary and Bill Clinton – she was particularly close to the former president’s mother – and her wider political interests during the current century.
Her undeniable affection for current husband James Brolin is enormously touching. Elsewhere, she is largely discreet about sexual matters, but allows one withering (accidental?) swipe at the age’s busiest Lothario. Streisand is surprised when Warren Beatty says they were once together. “Did I sleep with Warren?” she asks herself. “I kind of remember. I guess I did. Probably once.”
Ouch!
