I can't recall enjoying a television interview more than the one broadcast last night (Sunday, Dec. 26)  in which James Lipton of  Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio questioned Barbra Streisand.  He had thoroughly researched her life; she was open about some of her most private thoughts, and they both were spontaneous, charmingly so.

If there were a theme to the interview—other than the high points of her  Grammy-, Emmy- Oscar-winning career— it was Streisand's fascination with, and love for, her father, Emanuel "Manny" Streisand, whose death at age 35, came when she was just 15 months old. 

Later when she delved into his life, learning that he had taught literature, and that, like her, he loved the plays of Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen and William Shakespeare, she found a connection with him.   His doctoral thesis had dealt with teaching juvenile delinquents in jail about great works of drama. 

Streisand did not say so in so many words, but one understood that in her imagination, her father was her rescuer; the approving parent, who'd have understood her aspirations, the antithesis of her mother, Diana Ida Rosen, who suggested she get a career typing, and an antidote to her stepfather, Louis Kind, whom her mother married while anemic Barbra was a 6-year-old, away at the Hebrew Health Camp.

Her mother and stepfather divorced when she she was 13. One of her most vivid memories was of riding with a friend in the back seat of a car he was driving.  He urged her to be more like her friend—quiet.  Knowing he was color blind, she retaliated by describing the beauty of the red traffic light ahead of them.

The Diary of Anne Frank was a play that made her think about trying acting. After all, she thought, she also was Jewish, how hard can it be?  She enrolled in acting classes, was turned away by the Actors Studio, began to sing in clubs, and dropped the middle "a" in the name Barbara--becoming Barbra.  Her first major role on Broadway was as Miss Yetta Tessye Marmelstein in I Can Get It For You Wholesale, her character a Jewish secretary from Madagascar, of all places. In the interview, she told Lipton she was glad that Marmelstein was from Madagascar so people wouldn't think she had been typecast.  

Leonard Bernstein was among those in  the crowd of I Can Get It For You Wholesale who gave her a long standing ovation. Next she made her first album, which remained at the top of the record charts for 73 weeks.  But it was her movie, Funny Girl, in which she played another Jewish woman,  the vaudeville star Fanny Bryce, that made her an international star in everyone's eyes, except her mother's. "I don't want you to get a swelled head," mother cautioned.  Imagine what praise her play-loving father might have bestowed!

Lipton noted that in Funny Girl, Streisand portrayed an "Ugly Duckling" and asked if it had ever crossed her mind that if she had been born with traditional good looks, she never would have gotten the parts that she had played so magnificently. She responded that it is probably true that people who had difficult childhoods grew up to be more interesting.

After  the interview had progressed through various roles, Streisand asked Lipton, "you never get hungry doing this show?" explaining that she would like to have a Kit-Kat bar, or a cookie or a Ritz cracker—her spontaneity much appreciated by the audience, which cheered when a stagehand thereafter brought snacks for her.  "You need stamina for this," she quipped. "You are talking about stuff that happened a long time ago."

Among luminaries in the audience was Marvin Hamlisch, whose mantel may be as weighed down with awards as hers.  When they met, she revealed, he was the rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl and also played for her concerts. They collaborated on the movie, A Star is Born.

The discussion about a subsequent movie, Yentl, was perhaps the most revealing about  Streisand as a person. Besides starring in the film, Streisand made her debut as a director.  "I had a vision of it; I could see it in my head," she said. She solved the problem of how a girl pretending to be a boy could sing—and not be discovered as a girl—by having Yentl sing only in her head, or when she was alone.

To prepare for the filming, Streisand said she flew to Amsterdam to study the paintings of Rembrandt, whose lighting she wanted to emulate.  She explained that you can never see the light source in a Rembrandt painting, and she wanted the light to be from within—symbolic of Yentl's search for enlightenment. She dedicated Yentl "to my father and all our fathers."

Already in her 30s, Streisand up to that time had never visited the grave in Long Island  of her father—but now she did. She had a photo of herself taken with her arm around the tombstone. Her older brother, whom she described as a "meat and potato guy, totally opposite of Shirley MacLaine," told her of an experience in which he was able to talk to their father through a medium.

She described checking under and around a table, to make certain there were no strings or other devices, and then experiencing the table moving.  That scared her, she said, and she ran into the bathroom.  When she came out, the table was "spelling" by tapping its leg one time for A, twice for B, and so on.  The table spelled "M-A-N-N-Y," then "S-O-R-R-Y," and finally "S-I-N-G —P-R-O-U-D."

What was more amazing to her was when her brother gave her the photograph of her with her arm around her father's tombstone.  He told her to look at the first name of the person buried next to her father.  It was Anchel, the same name that Yentl takes as a pseudonym when she enrolls at the yeshiva disguised as a man. "When I came home from that experience with my father, I committed to making Yentl as a director," she said. 

Streisand paraphrased the writer-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as saying "at the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you."  At the end of Yentl, after she has come out as a woman, Streisand as Yentl  movingly sings, "Papa, Can You Hear Me?"

Following the formal interview—in which Lipton presented to her a membership in the Actors Studio, so long ago denied to her—students in the audience asked her questions.  In response to one, she commented that because she was "never really shaped by parents," she grew up not knowing the rules, and therefore did things that parents might have discouraged her from trying.  She said she decided to persevere in show business because she never liked to make her bed, and decided that she had to succeed if she were ever "to get someone else to make my bed."

A gay man said his card would be taken away if he, like many gays, didn't adore her. Did she have any feeling why she is so popular with the gay community?  She responded that perhaps it was because she was different and that she had made it. She succeeded notwithstanding being out of the mold. — Donald H. Harrison