Streisand: Her Life (6 page)

Barbara took it upon herself to see a doctor about the sensation in her chest. It took her a week to muster up the courage to climb the steps to his office and ring the bell. Then she realized he didn’t have office hours that day, and suddenly she felt the pressure dissipate. “That was my first psychosomatic illness.” Throughout her life, Barbra’s emotional stresses would invariably take a physical toll on her.

T
HE MARRIAGE OF
Diana and Louis Kind, off on the wrong foot from the outset, soured quickly. Kind often stayed away from the apartment for days at a time, and when he got home, he and Diana fell into terrible rows. He verbally abused her, Sheldon, and Barbara. After Sheldon grew up and left the house, Kind more and more frequently physically abused Diana. Apartment 4G became a place of fear and loathing.

Two years after she had first heard the clicks in her ears, Barbara woke up after a night of shouting and violence with a high-pitched ringing inside her head. It was as though her soul were trying to block out all the unpleasantness, to hear nothing but white noise. This condition, known as tinnitus, can be brought on by one’s emotions, and for Barbara it has never gone away. “I never hear the silence,” she has said. “There were periods in my life when I was very unhappy, and [the sound] would drive me nuts.” She never told anyone about it, but wore scarves wrapped around her head in a misguided attempt to purge the noise from her brain. “The scarf only made the sound louder. I felt totally abnormal. I had this secret.”

Another secret in her secret life. But there was nothing hidden about her show business ambitions. If Louis Kind had added anything to Barbara’s life, it was the television set he brought with him, and she parked herself in front of it whenever she could. The medium had advanced tremendously since the late 1940s. Now Barbara could watch Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, Perry Como, Lucille Ball, and especially Ed Sullivan, who presented the finest singers and comedians of the day, as well as veterans of vaudeville like the sublime Sophie Tucker and scenes from Broadway shows, the first Barbara had ever seen.

She loved it all, even the commercials. When she was alone in the apartment she’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror—the only one in the house—and imitate them. She’d brush her teeth while smiling dazzlingly or smoke
a
cigarette with utter sophistication. “I smoked between the ages of ten and twelve,” she recalled. “I’d go into the bathroom and blow the smoke out of the window. My mother smoked too, but she held her cigarette awkwardly and I’d say, ‘No, Ma, you have to hold it like
this!’
and show her how.”

She experimented with makeup, just as she had clumsily tried to do when she was two and a half, and usually made a mess in the process. “I would make funny lipstick. My brother was an artist, so he had pencils—blue pencils—and there was this white medicine for your skin called zinc oxide, and my mother wore purple lipstick—you know, from the fifties. So I would make concoctions, mixtures, like a chemist, of purple lipstick and white cream and make fuchsia lips and blue eyes from my brother’s paint kit. Then I’d do a smoking commercial. I was always trying to be an actress, I suppose.”

Sheldon Streisand remembered that “she was always mischievous, experimental, and curious. I’ll never forget the time she squeezed the paints out of my oil paint set. And I had saved up a dollar seventy-five for that set.” Sheldon was sixteen when Barbara was nine, and he considered his little sister a pain in the neck. “I had to baby-sit for her, and then she was always tagging after me and my friends. But we had a lot of fun together too. One of our biggest kicks was watching TV while eating sliced raw onion on white bread that had been spread with chicken fat.”

Barbara could be painfully shy in one-on-one interactions at this age, but she appears not to have been inhibited when it came to performing. To her, that was the best way to express her feelings and to win the attention she craved. She would sit on the low stoop of her building and sing with the other kids, imitating Joni James’s hit “Have You Heard.” Louis Kind described the scene: “I can see her now, singing songs she had heard on the radio in her little-girl voice, which even then was remarkably true and delivered with great feeling. The neighbors would stick their heads out of the window, clap loudly and yell, ‘More, Barbara, give us more!’ She was only too happy to oblige. Then, as a final encore—double-jointed as she was—she would lie down on the pavement, take both of her feet, wrap them around her neck, and roll like a human ball.”

“B
ARBARA WAS EXTREMELY
apprehensive about going to a public school,” Maxine Eddleson recalled. “She was nervous about the kind of people she’d meet; her stomach got unsettled. She had been kind of cloistered at the yeshiva academy. And when she entered P.S. 89 in the fourth grade, I was her only friend for a while.” Barbara kept so much to herself that classmates mistook her shyness for a sense of superiority. “I never liked Barbara,” one of her classmates, now Mrs. Phyllis Zack, said. “I thought she was a snob.” The school’s principal, Mrs. Dorothy Sultan, recalled that Barbara was “a quiet child who liked to sing and did sing in assembly. I knew she had a sense of humor, but she never really displayed it—she didn’t project herself. At the time I thought she was an average child, one who really didn’t make her presence felt.”

But eventually Barbara began to make more friends, and her performing talents became well known throughout the school. Phyllis Zack recalled that Barbara “wanted to be an actress even then, and she was good, too. I remember once some of the kids wanted to set up a surprise for a teacher they
l
iked, so Barbara pretended to faint while she was in another room. The teacher ran to her side, and while he was out of the room the kids put this present on his desk. Barbara had him convinced all the time, too.”

After a few years at P.S. 89, Barbara met the personable dark-haired twins Marilyn and Carolyn Bernstein. “We took it upon ourselves to befriend her,” Carolyn said. “We had a lot of friends, and we kind of felt sorry for her because she always looked so alone. I don’t think she was very secure about the way she looked. I remember her in the sixth grade with the white man-tailored shirts that she used to wear, long-sleeved always, and a skirt and saddle shoes—conservative, like we all dressed in those days.”

Barbara and the twins became fast friends. Nearly every day after school she would go to their house, where they would gather around the piano and sing while Mrs. Bernstein played. They’d eat snacks, then scramble onto the top bunk of the twins’ bunk beds with a pile of movie magazines. They would cut out pictures of their favorite stars and tape them to the walls. Barbara always seemed reluctant to leave, and after a while it became clear to the twins that she didn’t plan to return the favor and invite them over to her house. The girls didn’t press the issue. “When a young person doesn’t welcome you to their home over and over again,” Carolyn reflected, “you begin to think that they’re not very happy there. It’s an assumption that people made about Barbara.”

Barbara and the twins stayed fast friends, and before long they formed a singing group they called Bobbie and the Bernsteins. “Barbara, of course, was Bobbie, and we were her backup girls,” Carolyn said. “We’d sing the popular songs of the day around the gymnasium and the playground. It wasn’t something that amounted to very much. Barbara had that voice even then. Of course, it became stronger, but she certainly had the same quality, absolutely.”

Carolyn recalled that Barbara often expressed an interest in becoming a singer at this time. “She would talk to us about her dreams, and she always stressed singing. She was very intense about it.” According to William Corride, another classmate, Barbara sang a little too much for some kids. “Her voice wasn’t so great at that time—it was immature. We used to tell her, ‘Barbara, please, don’t sing anymore.
’”

B
EGINNING WHEN SHE
was around ten, Barbara constantly badgered Diana to let her take ballet and singing lessons, to let her audition for the movies, to let her perform in public. Mrs. Kind was reluctant for two reasons. She didn’t think her daughter had the looks to be a successful child performer. “She was not a good-looking girl,” Diana has said. “In show business at that time, there were very pretty girls around.” She also worried about the expense of lessons.

But Barbara wouldn’t accept no as an answer. “She was a demon as a little girl,” Diana said. “I never could stop her from doing what she wanted to do, because she was always ready to jump into something and carry it out on her own.” When Diana relented and allowed Barbara to take ballet lessons at Miss Marsh’s School, she worried constantly. “She kept practicing, and I thought it might hurt her, because it’s not very nice when you’re on your toes.”

Barbara took ballet lessons for six months. “She wanted everything [that went with the lessons],” Diana recalled. “She had a high hat, a stick. I couldn’t believe this kid!” But after six months Miss Marsh moved away, and Barbara’s interest in ballet went with her. “Was I happy!” Diana exclaimed.

Still, there was no holding Barbara back. When she was ten, the family spent two weeks in August at the Barbary Hotel in South Fallsburg, New York. The hotel had a casino and a twice-weekly talent show for youngsters. Barbara sang and danced in the shows, delighting once again in the audience’s friendly applause.

When she was eleven she heard about singing auditions being held locally by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio, which was looking for kiddie talent. Diana reluctantly agreed to let Barbara try out when she pointed out that if she was accepted she’d be put under contract and paid quite well.

On the way to the Steve Allen Studio for the audition Barbara, wearing a blue dress from Abraham & Straus with a white collar and cuffs, fantasized about how it would go. “I thought I’d wear a beautiful gown and dance under a huge sparkling chandelier.” But when she arrived, her illusions evaporated. “Instead, there was a microphone in a glass-enclosed cagelike cell and a man in a booth who said, ‘All right, kid, sing!’ I sang ‘Have You Heard’ behind a glass booth. You couldn’t hear anything outside—they had to press a button to talk to you.” When she finished her song she was confident they would hire her. “But they just said thank you, and that was that.” In fact, Barbara had impressed the talent scouts enough that they wanted her to join their training classes, but Diana nixed the idea. “When they said ‘No pay,’ I said ‘No child.
’”