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
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