Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

by William J. Mann

  Barbara protested; she had no money. She was barely making her rent with the pittance she took home from ushering at the Lunt-Fontanne. But Terry told her not to worry about that. Where he was taking her, he explained, you could get treasures for pennies.

  As they emerged from the Fifty-ninth Street subway, Terry explained to Barbara all about the thrift shops that lined Third Avenue. Here was the source of his fabulous finds. The rich people of the Upper East Side, he explained, were forever tossing out such treasures as original Lalique jewelry and Pauline Trigère jackets. They just boxed them up and sent them over to the little boutiques on Third Avenue that sold used goods to benefit charity. An alert shopper could snatch up these precious items for a fraction of their original prices. Terry was astonished that so few people had caught on to this, but he was loath to let the secret out. Then every fashion acolyte from Jersey and the boroughs would be arriving via bridge and tunnel to plunder all this bounty.

  Barbara and Terry headed into Stuart’s, just south of Sixty-second Street. In the window, tall white ceramic obelisks of uncertain function stood beside a cluster of delicate porcelain tulips. Inside, one wall was covered in panels of gold, emerald, and tangerine felt—an attention to color that was carried throughout the shop, where all the accessories were arranged by hue. This way, the discerning shopper could ensure instantly that her earrings complemented her belt. Barbara was enchanted.

  From Stuart’s, it was onward to other places such as Lots for Little, at Seventy-seventh Street, which benefited Catholic missionaries, and Bargains Unlimited, at Eighty-second Street, where proceeds went to Bellevue Hospital. On one of their shopping ventures, either this one or one very much like it, Terry discovered a Fabiani dress hanging on the rack and breathlessly insisted Barbara get it. When she admitted, a little shamefacedly, that she didn’t know who all these designers were, Terry sat her down and patiently explained that she needed to learn such things. If Barbara was going to stand out among all the other hopefuls looking for parts, she needed to develop her own particular style, Terry declared. Barbara latched on to his advice with conviction.

  She was a fast learner. Even if she didn’t know the names of designers, Barbara had an instinctive understanding of what worked for her. She could pick up a skirt and know, without even trying it on, whether the color and the fit would suit her. Terry had been right to take her under his wing. He might need to help her decide which choker was best, but it was Barbara who knew, in her gut, that a choker would be the perfect finishing touch for the outfit they were putting together.

  That day, strolling in and out of the boutiques on Third Avenue, Barbara was a happy girl, laughing and joking, trying on funny sunglasses and hats. The determination that frequently kept her face tight, hard, and unsmiling was missing. To see Barbara and Terry together, giggling, rummaging through a table of beaded blouses from the 1900s, was to spy something very special between them. They were like a brother and sister with “secrets, and codes, and a language of shared experience,” as one observer described it. And yet there was never a thought of romance.

  Surely, at some point, Barbara must have wondered why. It was obvious that Terry, like no other man in her life, found her beautiful, even exquisite. He rhapsodized about her swan neck and long, graceful fingers. He adored the way fabric draped over her lithe, elegant, slender body. Yet standing next to him never produced the kind of charge she felt when standing that close to another man. It wasn’t because Terry was Chinese. Barbara had worked in a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn where she’d become close with the family who ran the place. Muriel Choy, the proprietor, had been like a surrogate mother, teaching her “about love and life and sex.” So Barbara never had hang-ups about race. At Erasmus Hall, she’d even dated a black boy—nothing serious, mostly just hanging out and talking, but she’d liked him in the way a girl likes a boy. Not so with Terry. This was different.

  Eventually Terry told Barbara that he was gay. She accepted the news with nonchalance. This was why she loved Manhattan, after all. Here was every kind of person, coming and going. She was glad she’d been born in Brooklyn, she said, because it gave her a certain character. But she was also very glad she no longer lived there. “You know, once you cross the bridge, everything changes,” she’d say—and for the better, she believed.

  5.

  The best thing about Cis’s house was the refrigerator. It was always full. And since Barbara was always hungry, the combination worked out perfectly.

  On this day, Barbara arrived at her friend’s stately townhouse on West Seventy-eighth Street near Riverside Drive with some big news. She’d won the part of a butterfly named Clythia in The Insect Comedy. The strange little play had been produced on Broadway in 1948 starring José Ferrer. It was a piece about human survival as seen through the lives of “double-dealing, marauding” insects. While she was also playing a few other small parts, Barbara believed it would be Clythia, with her fragile, flirtatious hold on life, that would get her noticed. After all, Rita Gam, who’d played Clythia in 1948, went on to a long acting career on stage and screen—not to mention serving as a bridesmaid at the wedding of Princess Grace.

  No doubt Cis encouraged Barbara in this latest endeavor. Cis always encouraged her. Cis Corman—born Eleanor Cohen—was sixteen years Barbara’s senior. All of Barbara’s friends were older than she was, but Cis, at thirty-three, was one of the oldest. Cis was also married, to a psychiatrist, Harvey H. Corman, and they had four children, the eldest of whom was only a few years younger than Barbara. Cis, far too creative and intelligent to be content with just playing mother and wife, had signed up for classes at the Theatre Studio and had encountered the young waif from Brooklyn soon thereafter. Yet she’d found nothing even “remotely adolescent” about Barbara. She’d been deeply impressed that the teenager already knew her own mind so well. Ten people might tell Barbara they didn’t like the dress she was wearing, but she stuck to her guns and insisted that she did. After Barbara played Cis’s lady-in-waiting in a Theatre Studio production of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, the unlikely friendship took off.

  The Cormans were now Barbara’s proxy family. It wasn’t just that their refrigerator was full of food. They also had “roots,” as Cis put it. Barbara believed that her father would have felt equally at home in the Cormans’ house as she did. Both Cis and Harvey were people who valued ideas and learning. Harvey was proud of the fact that he’d been one of the first to teach at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the new graduate school of Yeshiva University, located in the Bronx. His brother Sidney, known as Cid, was a highly esteemed poet who had founded the influential poetry magazine Origin and was currently teaching literature in Japan.

  Most friends of Barbara’s knew that discussions of her family, especially her mother, were off limits. But here, in the safe, book-lined cocoon of Cis’s house, Barbara could open up. Sitting on Cis’s comfortable couch, Barbara may well have thought about how, growing up, she had lacked such a piece of furniture in her own living room. For that matter, she had lacked a living room.

  After Barbara’s father died, Diana Streisand, overwhelmed with debt, had taken her children and moved into her parents’ small apartment in Williamsburg. For the next eight years, Barbara’s grandparents’ living room was her bedroom. Barbara and her mother shared a bed while her brother slept on a rollaway cot next to them. To Barbara, an actual living-room couch was “an amazing thing” —a symbol of real life, normal life, a life she knew very little about.

  Except for the time she spent with the Cormans, who were simpatico with her in so many ways. For starters, the Cormans were Jews, but not very religious, the same as Barbara. On Harvey’s daily walks to his office, he was often asked by the rabbi of a small synagogue at Seventy-third Street if he’d help form a minyan, the quorum of ten males needed for prayers, but Harvey always politely declined. Likewise, Barbara’s mother rarely lit candles or kept kosher. Although Barbara believed in God—as a young girl, sh
e’d tried earnestly to argue one friend out of her atheism —she didn’t take her religion all that seriously. “I am deeply Jewish,” she’d say, “but in a place where I don’t even know where it is.” She had attended yeshiva on her grandparents’ insistence and had learned to read Hebrew, even though she didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. What stayed in her memory most was one teacher’s insistence that good Jewish children should never utter the word “Christmas.” To a girl as rebellious as Barbara, that was too good to resist. “Christmas, Christmas, Christmas,” she had chanted as soon as the teacher left the room. When nothing bad happened to her, she figured she knew better than her teachers.

  Barbara made jokes about a lot of things. But if anybody made a dent in that armor of sarcasm and indifference, it was Cis Corman. To others Barbara might remain tight-lipped about her childhood: “I don’t remember it. I was born at six. Came out, a full set of teeth.” But Cis knew that Barbara remembered her childhood all too well. Every step she took, every word she uttered, reflected the facts of Barbara’s short life, and all of it could ultimately be traced back to that day in August 1943 when Emanuel Streisand—scholar, poet, professor—had died of respiratory failure brought on by a morphine injection intended to alleviate an epileptic seizure.

  It was a source of both pride and comfort for Barbara that she had inherited her father’s ambition and intellectual curiosity. Emanuel had received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and education from City College in upper Manhattan, and at the time of his death, he had been working on his doctorate. He’d taught elementary and junior high school English, then got a job tutoring juvenile offenders at a Brooklyn trade school. During the summers, he counseled kids at upstate camps. He was a good, decent man who wanted to make a difference in the world while also making something of himself. A pedestrian existence in Brooklyn would never have been enough for Emanuel Streisand, Barbara was certain. All of their lives would have been different if only her father had lived. It was clear she was her father’s child. Her mother had simply borne her.

  And while Barbara hadn’t gone on to college like her father, she could have. She’d done well in school, even though she’d hated it. She would lie on the floor on Sunday nights, watching What’s My Line?, and feel it was her “last chance of freedom before going to school the next day.” Still, she’d graduated with a ninety-four average. When her guidance counselors saw her grades they called her mother in to ask, “Why isn’t this kid going to college?” But if they had bothered to pay attention, they would have known the answer. Barbara’s senior book reports had all been on Stanislavski and acting. She had only one ambition, and that was to go to Manhattan and act. Her mother had finally given in to her demands, allowing her to accelerate her classes and graduate early so she could, as Diana explained to Barbara’s teachers, obtain “further experience in the city.”

  Barbara had never fit into the routine of school. She’d been a loner at Erasmus Hall, and even when the girls stopped ganging up on her, she still kept largely to herself. She was an odd duck who, to alleviate boredom one day, dyed her hair platinum blond. Sometimes she wore purple lipstick to boot. She fit into no clique. The other smart kids shunned her because she looked like a beatnik while the “actual beatniks” avoided her because she had “brains.”

  Barbara’s mother despaired over such antics. Diana simply didn’t understand her. What her sophisticated father had seen in her pedestrian mother Barbara could not understand. Her mother wanted her to be just another cog in the wheel. She told Barbara she should be a school secretary, just like she was. “You’ll get paid vacations and summers off,” she argued. “It’s a steady job.”

  If Allan Miller had filled some of the emotional space left by her father, then Cis Corman stepped in where Barbara’s mother had never ventured. Never had her mother said, “You’re smart, you’re pretty, you’re anything, you can do what you want.” To outsiders, it might seem as if Barbara’s mother coddled her: “Don’t go out in the rain, don’t do this, you’ll get a cold, don’t do that.” But when Barbara did come down with a cold, she felt as if her mother’s response was always, “I told you so. Now you take care of it.” Emotionally, Barbara believed, her mother had left her at the same time her father had. Barbara felt that her mother had gone into shock after her father’s death, a shock that had now lasted seventeen years.

  Affection wasn’t forthcoming from her grandparents either. Barbara’s maternal grandfather, with whom she lived during the first years of her life, was a strict taskmaster who resented the intrusion of his daughter’s family into his household. Her paternal grandmother, blaming Emanuel’s widow for not taking good care of him, would actually look the other way when she saw Barbara on the street, dressed all in black and wearing purple lipstick. From nearly every adult in Barbara’s early life had come the same message. She wasn’t any good. She did not matter.

  Instinctive actress that she was, Barbara had learned to play up the melodrama of it all, probably even to Cis. If she wasn’t going to give people real emotional details, she seemed only too glad to provide some sentimental theatrics. Much hay would be made over a hot- water bottle Barbara had used as a doll, supposedly the only doll she ever owned. She’d swear its warm “rubber tummy” felt more real than any doll bought from a store. Many times she told the story of her babysitter, a kindly lady from downstairs named Tobey Borokow, knitting a pink sweater for the hot-water-bottle doll.

  Barbara liked to foster an image of herself as a sort of street kid, and, in fact, for much of her childhood she was on the street, singing on stoops with other girls from the neighborhood while people looked down from their tenements. Unlike the other kids, however, Barbara was never called in for meals. Instead, she came and went as she pleased, often eating from pots her mother left simmering on the stove—which was why the Cormans’ dining-room table, with actual meals being shared around it, fascinated her. When Barbara was a little older, she started smoking. Nightly she’d litter the rooftop of her building with the butts of her Pall Malls. Her mother didn’t object. In fact, at ten, Barbara taught her mother how to smoke.

  If that seemed rather lenient for the usually strict Diana, it was almost certainly because she, like her daughter, needed a break from the man downstairs, her new husband, who had come into their lives when Barbara was eight—the same year, not coincidentally, that her tinnitus began. Louis Kind was a coarse man, nothing like the image Barbara carried around of her noble father. Kind, already divorced and the father of three, moved with his new family into a cramped apartment on Newkirk Avenue, where he could usually be found hunkered down in front of the television set watching pro wrestling with a beer and a bag of pretzels. Her mother warned her that Kind was “allergic to kids,” and no doubt especially to “obnoxious” ones, as Barbara admitted she could be. With her flair for melodrama, she’d tell of slithering on her belly under the TV instead of walking in front of it and risk getting yelled at by her stepfather.

  Yet no melodramatic tricks were needed to elicit sympathy for the worst of Kind’s behavior. More than once he had called Barbara ugly to her face. He was truly cruel enough to call an adolescent girl ugly. And though friends insisted that Barbara’s mother had tried to shield her from her stepfather’s foul moods, Barbara could never remember her mother defending her.

  For the teenager, such hell seemed as if it would go on forever. “I tried to imagine my future, like other kids,” Barbara said, “but I couldn’t, it just stopped. There was a big blank screen, no husband, no children, nothing. I decided that meant I was going to die. I would think, ‘That’s too bad, because I really could have done things.’”

  To Cis, she could admit such fears. There was no one else she trusted enough to share such private thoughts. Cis was what Barbara’s mother could have been. Both Cis and Diana were daughters of working-class Russian Jews. Cis’s father had sold hardware in Boston; Barbara’s grandfather had labored as a tailor in Brooklyn. The Cormans m
ight have been financially well-off by the time Barbara met them, but Cis knew what it was like to struggle. The critical difference between her and Barbara’s mother was that Cis had always tempered her struggle with an appreciation for style, knowledge, and talent. Like Muriel Choy before her, Cis Corman made Barbara feel valuable in a way her own mother seemed incapable of doing.

  Louis Kind was gone by the time Barbara was thirteen, but his stink remained. Barbara found she could no longer stand being in that small apartment with her mother and her meager view of the world, or with the little girl who had been born of her mother’s union with Kind. Pudgy Rosalind had a round, pretty face and was the apple of her mother’s eye. Rather than watch her mother dote over this angelic little child, who seemed so different from her, Barbara spent even more time away from home, living for herself and only herself—“kind of a wild child,” she’d tell people.

  Yet she believed all that wildness—the fact that she’d never had parents who taught her the “rules” of proper behavior—had helped her. She never learned that “you weren’t supposed to do certain things or say certain things.” Convictions were meant to be acted upon: “You feel it, you make it happen,” she said. “Imagination and belief manifest reality.”

  This was her current mantra. Several months earlier, she’d found— either at the Cormans’ or in Allan Miller’s library—George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Surely it was a work her father must have known and studied; surely he must have been as struck as Barbara was by the words “Thought transcends matter.” The idea that she could make things happen simply by believing in them was staggering. By the time Barbara was seventeen, she had become convinced she could manifest greatness for herself simply by believing in it strongly enough.