by Anne Edwards
‘It was a thrilling experience,’ she said of that time, ‘sitting in the last seat of the balcony – I think the ticket was $2.85 in those days. There was something wonderful about not being able to afford to sit very close because when you sit far away you see the whole stage, you know. You don’t see the reality of the actor’s pores, you don’t see the make-up. You get swept along with the illusion, with the make-believe truth.’
When she returned home late that day she told her mother about her disappointing interview with Preminger’s assistant and her excitement when she saw Anne Frank. ‘I’ve decided that no matter what, I’m going to be an actress,’ she announced. Diana tried again to discourage her. ‘I was so sure Barbara would be a fiasco,’ she said later, adding that she wanted to ‘save her from utter humiliation’.
Certain that Barbara would fail, that she was not pretty enough, talented enough to make a success of it, Diana did everything she could to discourage her. She was placing herself in her daughter’s shoes. She had been too terrified, too insecure to compete in the world, to fight for anything. She thought it was love that guided her in discouraging what she saw as her daughter’s futile dreams. Barbara was sure it was the opposite. She would always doubt the depth of Diana’s love, resent her mother’s stultifying attitude towards anything she set out to accomplish. It would form the basis of her life-long struggle to come to terms with her past.
Right now she had too much she wanted to accomplish in what she thought would be a very short time – her last high school years – to let her mother’s negativism place obstacles in her path.
Footnote
1 Nearly thirty years later, Streisand visited Amsterdam and the tiny attic where Anne Frank had lived before being discovered by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp where she later died. Streisand was overcome with emotion, shaking with sobs when she came back outside. It took several minutes for her to control herself.
6
BARBARA WAS DETERMINED, possessed. No one had ever been able to stop her from doing what she wanted to do, but with Louis Kind’s departure, when she was fourteen, she became a free spirit. At school she began to make friends, to laugh more easily and to wise-crack. She was outspoken in class, never shy about asking questions. She wanted reasons for everything.
In a high school noted for its allegiance to propriety, she stood out. ‘I was this absolute misfit,’ she confesses. Believed to have been the first girl in Erasmus Hall ever to wear mascara to class, she also accented her eyes with blue shadow, bleached blonde streaks into her hair, painted her dagger-long nails blood red, gold or black and remained razor thin. Yet, the overall effect was not cheap, it was theatrical. Many of the girls in her class admired her individuality and thought she was attractive. Classmates remember her beautiful eyes, expressive hands and the bravura way in which she carried herself. ‘If only looks mattered, she could have been cast as Cleopatra,’ one friend commented.
Cleverly, she played up these attributes. Her intense interest in offbeat fashion was not simply teenage rebellion. It was a means to personal expression, of setting herself apart from the rest of the girls at Erasmus. She liked the idea of being exotic, foreign, different, but it never gained her popularity with the boys in her school. She had a crush on Bobby Fischer, who was in the class below her and already an international chess champion. They would have lunch every day and ‘he would sit there, laughing hysterically, reading Mad magazine. Right? And he wore these earflaps on his ears. He was always alone and very peculiar. But I found him sexy,’ she recalled. However, this never flowered into a romance because Fischer seemed to regard her as little more than a lunchtime buddy.
Holidays and school dances threw her into a state of agitation. There were no invitations. Teenage boys found her too threatening. They were more comfortable with girls who fitted into neat categories; she was smarter than most of the boys and not afraid to let them know it. She fought disdain with disdain and developed what would one day become the famous Streisand shrug, left shoulder raised and angled forward, head turned sideways, chin up, eyebrow arched. Thought to be arrogant by her male peers, she was merely being defensive. If she encountered a boy in the hallways or rooms of Erasmus who seemed to be smirking at her, or whom she had heard pass a rude remark, she would slow down as she neared him, then give him an exaggerated shrug. She developed various expressions – boredom, happiness, sophistication – in front of the bathroom mirror or while aping cigarette commercials. One expression that she captured and used as a protective mask for her true feelings, was a cool, detached smile that she would adopt whenever she was in a public situation – at school gatherings or when she had to wait in line. She had the uncomfortable feeling at such times that everyone was looking at her critically.
Saturday afternoon movies remained a ritual. She would return home grumpy for the rest of the weekend because after the glamorous settings and sophisticated clothes she had seen in the films the Newkirk Street apartment and her limited wardrobe depressed her. She would read the New York Times apartment ads in the hopes of convincing Diana to move to Manhattan. ‘Ma, look, one bedroom and it’s only $105, why can’t we afford that?’ she would ask her mother, who was having trouble making ends meet at half that rent on the small income from the office job she held in a New York City public high school. Rosalind was now attending school and Barbara was expected to look after her when she got home from Erasmus, but there was always someone in the building who would help out. Louis Kind remained perpetually late with his support payments, often missing one. Diana had no money for extras. Barbara was only given what was essential. Small luxuries were supplied by her deftly performed shoplifting. ‘I wouldn’t take just stuff,’ she once said, laughing in a high trill as she revealed her petty adventures in crime. ‘I would walk around the store until I found a receipt on the floor and then go get that item – a compact, a lipstick, books, and candy – cinnamon hots, jujubes – they were my favourites, and even salt shakers. I love salt shakers, especially those fancy ones ... whatever – and return most of what I took for the money.’ She never got caught and Diana was unaware of her daughter’s transgressions.
A small inheritance came her way in the late spring of 1957. Her grandfather Streisand had died and left her $150, a stroke of good fortune of which her mother did not immediately inform her. To Diana, her daughter’s windfall was a mitzvah, a godsend. Two of Barbara’s bicuspids became abscessed about the time of the funeral and the dentist insisted they must be pulled and replaced. Diana had not known how she was going to pay for the work. The two infected teeth were pulled before Barbara heard about her small legacy and she had quite a different idea on how she would have spent it.
An older girl who lived in the neighbourhood had spent the previous summer with a stock company in Malden Bridge, New York, a small town in the Adirondacks, twenty miles east of Albany, the state capital. Barbara questioned her endlessly about the experience. It sounded the most exciting place in the world to be if you were looking forward to a career in the theatre. Not only were stagecraft and acting taught, the students performed in well-known plays before a paying audience. Intrigued, she planned to do anything so that she could attend the following summer. She would wash dishes, wait on tables, anything to pay her tuition. A battle of wills between mother and daughter was fought. Barbara refused to part with what remained of her $150 to have the missing teeth replaced. ‘You can’t go around with gaps in your teeth!’ Diana shouted. ‘You’ll look ridiculous!’
‘I’ll do something so that I won’t have gaps!’ Barbara hollered back. She bought some Aspergum (because the colour was close to that of tooth enamel), chewed it to make it pliable, moulded two teeth from it and pressed them into the empty spaces in her mouth. Diana finally gave in, as she usually did, and up Barbara went to the Malden Bridge Playhouse, with a supply of gum for false-teeth replacements.
Conditions were primitive. The playhouse was reached by a dirt road. Roughhewn cabins offered bare e
ssentials, nothing more. Water ran icy from the taps. Except for the main building, toilets were housed in outside structures. The scenery was, however, picturesque with a stream to one side of the heavily wooded property. The theatre was a converted farm building, but the enthusiasm of the group made up for what else might have been lacking. Barbara pitched in without complaint doing the most menial of tasks, sweeping the stage, helping to build and paint sets, even cleaning toilets.
Two of the plays staged that summer were John Patrick’s Teahouse of the August Moon (based on a book by Vern J. Sneider) and William Marchant’s The Desk Set. Streisand has been quoted as saying her first stage role was riding a goat in the John Patrick play, a tremendous Broadway success which had been recently transferred into a popular film. ‘Incidentally,’ John Patrick (whom everyone knows as ‘Pat’) confided to this author, ‘the report that Streisand rode a goat in Teahouse must be wrong. You can’t ride a goat. I know this as when I had a farm I had a hundred and fifty milk goats. In the play, however, I did have three goats riding in the back of a jeep and this is where the kids [the young characters in the play] rode. Perhaps this is where Streisand fitted in.’
The stage at Malden Bridge Playhouse was not large enough to accommodate a jeep. Patrick suggests that a cart loaded with two or three young performers and pulled by a defiant goat across the creaking boards of the stage marked the theatre debut of Barbara Streisand. Next she had a small role as a man-crazy receptionist in The Desk Set. ‘Can’t you just see me at fifteen coming on the stage, sitting down on a desk, swinging my legs and playing sexy?’ she asked an interviewer once. The weekly local newspaper obviously had not found this difficult. ‘The girl who plays the office vamp is very sexy, and her name is Barbara Streisand. Down boys,’ its reviewer wrote.
The years of studying the walk and posture, the come-on looks and seductive smiles of sexy movie stars had contributed to a facile ability to project sexuality on stage. When she was acting she could be anyone she wanted to be. She liked the idea of being the vamp, of being desirable to men. Sex was a subject never discussed by Diana except in the form of a warning: a nice Jewish girl doesn’t even think about such things. Barbara, and most of the girls she knew, thought constantly about it despite such admonishments. On stage she could live out her fantasy: she was beautiful and sexy enough to win Marlon Brando, her favourite actor. She had, in fact, developed a sensuality that she incorporated into her personality even at this young age, a flirtatious way of crossing her legs, holding her head, of pulling back her shoulders and thrusting her small but well-formed bosoms forward. She has said that a young man in the stock company took an interest in her. He was eighteen, Christian, with blond good looks and a glib tongue. They remained after rehearsals sitting in the empty theatre talking. He was off to university in the fall. But after college he claimed to be Hollywood bound. He told her he thought she had real talent, all she needed was the experience. They went for private walks along the wooded path of the narrow river that ran along one side of Malden Bridge. She claims Diana’s warnings were heeded, but attraction to and for the young man was obvious to her colleagues.
The summer sped by. She had found what she was certain would be her life’s work – acting. Determined to pay to get her teeth fixed – and to go back to Malden Bridge the following summer – on her return to Brooklyn she took a job evenings at the New China Restaurant, managed by her neighbours, Muriel and Jimmie Choy. Good at computing change, she became a cashier. Her nails were now Fu Manchu long and vividly lacquered, but she developed a way of punching the cash register keys without harming them. She also had acquired a working Chinese vocabulary and, she says, Muriel gave her a textbook explanation of the art of having sex along with her introduction to another culture. ‘I loved the idea of belonging to a small minority group,’ she professed. ‘It was the world against us in the Chinese restaurant.’ Diana was constantly lecturing her not to eat the trayf served at the New China. Barbara brought home shopping bags of day-old vegetables but at work she ate forbidden mooshoo-pork.
Diana could not control her daughter’s dietary habits once she had gained her first taste of independence, nor could she keep her at home. On the nights that she was not at school or working at the New China, she would take the IRT subway (which cost 15 cents) at the corner of Nostrand Avenue and go into Greenwich Village to hang out at the Cherry Lane Theater, where an acquaintance from Malden Bridge was working. Finally, the manager let her help backstage. One of the young performers, Anita Miller, who was married to Allan Miller, a drama teacher and member of the Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio where Marlon Branda had once studied, took an interest in her. Barbara went to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and immersed herself in the plays of Ibsen, O’Neill, Williams and Inge. She would discuss a character with Anita and when the stage was not in use, try out a speech or two, always by memory, never with playscript in hand, and often – because she said it made things seem more real – with footlights or a spot. ‘There’s something about her,’ Anita told her husband. ‘You should talk to her. You should teach her.’
Anita Miller recognised that Barbara’s was a charismatic personality that projected extremely well on stage. Rough and as untutored as she was, she seized one’s attention with her inimitable speaking voice, natural, low and rushing, but not in any way stagy. She had a special way of suddenly stopping to stress key words that gave fresh insight into the lines she delivered, an eye-catching grace in the way she moved her exotic, elongated hands with their amazing fingernail extensions, and an uncanny instinct in how to stand in the stage lights to create the proper mood.
Allan Miller had her read for him. He agreed with his wife that she had potential but he did not like the idea of encouraging a fifteen-year-old offbeat-looking girl to go into the theatre where there were so few roles for anyone of her age and appearance. He told his wife to forget it. Anita persisted. One night, following a matine performance, she brought Barbara back to their apartment for dinner. After they had eaten, Barbara did a scene for him. ’It was the single worst audition I think I’ve ever seen in my life,’ he recalled, although unable to remember what scene she did. But he was struck by something raw and compelling in her. ‘She didn’t even try to imitate other actors. There was something striving in her to be really genuinely available to herself, but she didn’t know how to put it together ... She was so full of this young, raw eagerness that I finally said, “OK, listen. I’ll give you a scholarship to one of my classes. And she said, “I’ll take them all.”’
She managed as many classes with Miller as she could fit into her difficult schedule which included daily attendance at Erasmus, homework and cramming for mid-term finals. Battles ensued almost every time she left the house. Diana felt that she was going wild (Greenwich Village was filled with free-spirited youths and depraved elders in her mother’s view), and would get a bad reputation. Neither her mother’s pleas nor her tears could keep Barbara at home. She refused to be a babysitter for Rosalind. Her resentment of her little half-sister had not diminished with Louis Kind’s departure. Rather it had grown as Rosalind occupied more and more of Diana’s time and attention.
‘I never meant to neglect Barbara,’ Diana mused later in life. ‘She was very independent and when she was in her teens Rosalind was a little girl, half her age. I thought I could do for her what I had failed to do with Barbara – be more involved in her life. The truth was, Barbara never let me be that. She never wanted advice, only approval. She frightened me a little. She was so smart, had an answer for most things. And what questions she did have I never knew how to answer.’
Like her father before her, Barbara was living a dual life, scuttling back and forth on the subway between Brooklyn and Manhattan as he had once done and, with his inherited energy, coping with everything. Always a top student, her grades were in the 90s. She excelled in Spanish. She had a natural talent for language and liked to experiment, speaking with a French, Spanish, German or Russian accent w
ith much overkill. Her regard for the all-girl Choral Club held despite her inability to win the director’s favour and her difficulty in singing Christian carols containing the word Jesus. The sound of female voices in harmony attracted her. She still preferred to sing popular to semi-classical music and she never asked to move from the alto to the soprano section. There was a good reason for this. Better clarity of diction could be achieved in the lower voice register and the words of a song meant almost more to her than the music. Unless she could convey the meaning of the words she sang, it seemed an empty exercise and one that did not interest her.
Occasionally she would see Erasmus Hall friends after classes but she wasn’t like the other girls who hung out at Garfield’s Cafeteria to meet their girlfriends and mingle with the neighbourhood boys. Her years at Erasmus Hall could not end too soon for her. She was to graduate the following year, June 1959, but she had accrued enough credits to allow her to do so six months earlier. Being an actress and going on the stage was all she could think about. She barraged Allan Miller with questions about what she was doing wrong or right and had he seen this actress or that and what did he remember most about their performance. She was working hard to get rid of her Brooklyn accent but was intent on keeping her own personality. Her years as a movie fan had taught her one thing: the actresses who became stars were unique and memorable characters. She told Miller she wanted to play all the great women’s roles – Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia – but she thought if she did she should come up with a new approach.
