Streisand: Her Life (5 page)

B
ARBRA HAS RECALLED
that her desire to be an actress took form when she was about five, just around the time that she began to watch television every afternoon with Irving Borokow. She adored the flickery images dancing from that tiny set through the magnifying screen, loved the laughter and the emotion—the escape—provided by old Hollywood B movies, a staple of the afternoon television schedule in the late 1940s. But the respite they provided from her drab, love-starved family life lasted only the few hours a week she spent with the Borokows. To a little girl who felt ugly and unwanted, that wasn’t enough. She would have to create her own fantasy world, and she did. As her mother put it, “Once she saw television, that was the end of it. She wanted to become those people on the screen.”

She loved to sing—“Barbara started to sing as early as she could talk,” Diana said—and the confines of the Philip Arms became her stage. “I used to sing in the hallways on Pulaski Street. The building had great halls with these brass railings, and the ceilings were very high and there was this echo.” She would sit on the stairway steps inside the building and sing songs she’d heard on the radio. Some of the neighbors were annoyed, others delighted.

But Barbara soon got a taste of a real audience’s approval. In the spring of 1949, having just turned seven, she made “my first public singing appearance” in the yeshiva’s PTA assembly program. “She was awfully excited about it,” her mother recalled, “and she practiced like a demon. But when the day came, she came down with a bad cold. I put her to bed and told her to forget about the PTA, but she got angry and wouldn’t hear of it. She leaped out of bed, put on her new dress, which hung on her like a rag because she was so skinny, and went to the meeting. Cold or no cold, she sang. She always had that kind of determination. I had to put her back to bed when we got home, but she’d had her moment of glory and was satisfied.”

A photograph of the event shows, as Barbra put it, a “weird-looking kid standing pigeon-toed and very skinny with bows in her hair.” But she looks pleased at the delighted applause being led by the school principal, Miss Weisselburg.

When Barbara ran off the stage, she asked breathlessly, “Ma, what did you think?”

“Your arms are too thin,” Diana replied.

“I think I started to eat then,” Barbra recalled—but still not enough to suitably fill her out. That summer of 1949 her mother sent her to a Hebrew health camp, and Barbara hated it as much as she had the one before. But she would h
a
rbor a particularly bad memory of this one, for it was here that she first met her future stepfather, Louis Kind.

Diana was now forty, and she wanted to marry again before it was too late. Still pretty, pert, and pliant, if increasingly plump, she had had no trouble finding dates when she emerged from her prolonged period of mourning. Barbara hated every one of these men. One was a butcher, and she recalled seeing him kiss Diana. “I thought he was killing her. Except that she was laughing.” Barbara would scream and cry whenever a suitor came to pick Diana up for an evening out, certain that her mother would never come back. Always, eventually, the men stopped coming around. Louis Kind continued.

Tall, good-looking, a sharp dresser, and sixteen years older than Diana, Kind was separated from his wife, Ida, and his three children. Born in 1893, he had come to America from Russia in 1898 with his Orthodox Jewish parents, a brother, and a sister. His father bought a pants factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and Kind learned men’s tailoring at a young age. He worked most of his life as a piece sewer in the garment industry, and later owned several rooming houses, first in Manhattan and then in Brooklyn, the rents from which provided his primary source of income.

He was all charm while he courted the widow Streisand. She recalled that “he came with nice ideas and little gifts,” and he seemed well-nigh perfect as a suitor; with his Old World manners and background in the garment trade, he got along well with Diana’s father. Most importantly, he told Diana he liked children. Indeed, his son, Merwyn, remembered his father as a man who was “very gentle with children. Family was of primary importance to him. He wasn’t nearly the disciplinarian my mother was.” When Diana told him she planned to visit Barbara at camp, Kind asked if he could come along. Diana was delighted.

Barbara wasn’t. She knew that for this man to accompany her mother on a visit meant that things were serious between them, and the thought of her mother remarrying horrified her. No man could take the place of her father! She barely looked at Kind when her mother introduced him, and she remained sullen during the entire visit. When the couple rose to leave, Barbara became hysterical and screamed,
“
You’re not leaving here without me! I’m not staying here any longer!” Diana tried to soothe her, but finally she had no choice but to pack her daughter’s things and bundle her into the car. On the trip back to Brooklyn, the three of them sat in grim, torpid silence. According to Barbra, Louis Kind “hated me ever since. I must have been pretty obnoxious.”

Whenever Kind called for Diana at Pulaski Street, he recalled, “I would wait for her in the living room, and then when she was ready to go out with me, I would take her arm and lead her to the door. Barbara, sensing that her life was to undergo some terrifying change, would hold on to her mother’s skirts, pulling her back, fearful that this strange man was taking her mother away from her. ‘Don’t go, Mommy, stay with
m
e,’ she would plead.”

Kind tried to win Barbara over by bringing her a doll, the first real one she had ever had. “It was the kind that peed in its pants,” she recollected. “You had to feed it with a little bottle and then just watch it—go.” Perhaps portentously, Barbara played with the doll for only a short time before its head fell off.

Barbara’s vague hopes that somehow Lou Kind would go away faded as he continued his courtship of her mother. But when Diana made clear that she wanted him to marry her, Kind resisted. He’d already had one failed marriage—his divorce had just recently become final—and he didn’t relish taking on the responsibility of a wife and two youngsters at age fifty-six.

Even when Diana told him late in April of 1950 that she was expecting his baby, he wouldn’t marry her, and she clearly faced a mortifying predicament. She kept her condition secret as long as she could, but when that was no longer possible, her worst fear came to pass: her deeply religious father demanded that she leave his house.

In June, with Louis Kind’s refusal to marry her ringing in her ears, Diana moved herself and the children to a one-bedroom apartment at 3102 Newkirk Avenue, on the corner of Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush. The building was part of the Vanderveer Estates, a recently built complex of monolithic six-story cinder-block-and-steel structures in a middle-class neighborhood. The buildings had scant charm, but they were new and clean and the rents were affordable. Diana’s apartment cost her $105 a month.

Barbara, frightened of change and devastated at having to leave the Borokows, awoke after the first night in the new apartment with a clicking in her ears. When she told her mother about the noise, Diana told her, “Well, sleep on a hot-water bottle,” and never asked her about it again. “From that day,” Barbra recalled, “I led a whole secret life. Something was wrong with me—I had these clicks in my ears.”

The stress of her situation threatened to undo Diana. She dreaded the embarrassment of having a baby out of wedlock. Her job didn’t pay very well, and she couldn’t afford to furnish the apartment with anything but the barest necessities. She didn’t have the money to send Barbara to yeshiva any longer, but Public School 89 was directly across the street from the new apartment, so Barbara could enroll there as a fourth grader in September. But what on earth would Diana do when the baby came in January and all
those
expenses began?

Finally, on Saturday, December 23, 1950, Louis Kind did the right thing and married Diana Streisand. They drove to New Jersey, where they were pronounced husband and wife by a justice of the peace. Two and a half weeks later, on January 9, 1951, their daughter Rosalind (later Roslyn) was born.

Now Barbara’s unhappiness, her sense of alienation, worsened. There was a baby in the house to take up all of her mother’s attention and absorb all of her stepfather’s love. Kind doted on his infant daughter. According to his son Merwyn, “he thought Rozzie was the beginning and the end of all baby girls. Perhaps because she was born when he was at a later age, he lavished all his attention on her. His feelings for her were
huge.
He thought she was the most beautiful, the brightest, the smartest baby in the world.” Still, he was quite happy to let his wife do all the parenting. According to Diana, “He was a strange man who didn’t know too much about children. He didn’t know how to play with them.”

If Diana had imagined that marrying Louis Kind would improve her family’s living conditions, she soon learned she’d been wrong. Kind professed not to have enough money for them to move to a larger apartment, and the sleeping arrangements settled pretty much the way they had on Pulaski Street, with B
a
rbara on the living room couch and Sheldon on a cot in the dining room.

Louis Kind came to abhor Barbara. He found her braying, bratty, maddening, and unpleasant to look at. Years later she would bitterly recall that “I don’t think I had a conversation with this man. I don’t think this man asked me how I was in the seven years we lived together.” That, as it turned out, was the least of it.

Maxine Eddleson, a neighbor Barbara’s age who befriended her shortly after she moved to Newkirk Avenue, recalled that Lou Kind “was very nasty to Barbara. She seemed to try so hard to please him. He was so loving, kind, and sweet to everyone else, but he was verbally abusive to Barbara. He would yell at her and say mean things to her and criticize her clothes in front of her friends.”

Despite Kind’s mistreatment of her, and her resentment at what she saw as his usurpation of her real father’s memory (she refused to change her last name to his), Barbara so desperately wanted to be seen as “normal” that she pretended Kind was her real father. “When I asked her why he had a different last name she replied, ‘Oh, he uses that name for business,
’”
Maxine recalled. “She tried to hide that he was her stepfather. It wasn’t until we were teenagers that she said anything about her real father.”

S
HE FELT LIKE
a victim. Why did her father have to die? “I always felt there was a gaping hole somewhere,” she said, “something missing.” She would lie awake at night and imagine that she was an alien from the planet Mars. She thought of herself as chosen, somehow special: “I could feel people’s minds. I could see the truth.”

She became totally self-absorbed. As her mother put it, “Barbara was a very complex child. She always saw everything depending on how it affected her. She bottled up everything inside her. Perhaps if she could have voiced to me how she was feeling, things might have been easier, but she didn’t.”

But whenever Barbara tried to do that, it seemed to her, Diana gave her short shrift, perhaps because by age nine Barbara had become something of a hypochondriac. When she read a booklet about cancer, she convinced herself that she had all the symptoms and had only six months to live. Another time she suddenly felt an enormous pressure on her chest and told her mother about it. Although Diana always admonished her to bundle up and be careful and eat properly, “if anything ever happened to me, she’d say, ‘I told you so. Now you take care of it.
’”