Color her Barbra.
Color me exhausted.
The legendary star’s doorstopper of an autobiography – a mere 966 pages – is simultaneously revelatory and walled-off. Streisand knows what she wants known about herself as well as what she wants you to know about the multitude of challenges and triumphs she’s encountered over six decades of stardom.
“My Name is Barbra” never minces words, about co-stars, star turns and, well, Mom. The book can be repetitive; cut out the number of tributes from everyone from Elvis to Nelson Mandela and it would probably be 100 pages shorter.
However, Streisand is most likely telling the truth. Whatever we think about the way she was and, most likely, always will be, there’s “The Voice.” And it is astounding.
Streisand shares it all, from her early days as the thrift-store kook to her ascension to “like buttah” mega-celebrity. She never knew her father who died when she was only 15 months old, but she did know her stepfather (the ironically named Louis Kind who was anything but) and her mother who could never completely acknowledge that her ugly-duckling daughter somehow turned into a singularly sensational swan. Her mother died in 2002.
The recently-released book is as obsessively detailed as its author’s approach to her work. Streisand is a self-admitted perfectionist (though she includes a familiar but still accurate list of the way gender often determines how one is seen, i.e., what’s powerful in men becomes “too aggressive” in women). She is also acutely self-aware – of her presence, of her talent, of her effect (onstage or off.)
There are plenty of juicy details. Mandy Patinkin, her co-star in “Yentl,” won’t be happy, but Nick Nolte (“The Prince of Tides”) should be. Ditto her “Funny Girl” co-star on Broadway, Sydney Chaplin, vs. Omar Sharif who replaced him in the movie. She had affairs with both, but Chaplin proved a sour spurned lover who took to whispering ugly things to her on stage (like “nose” when they were in the middle of a romantic scene). Her involvement with Sharif, fresh off his “Lawrence of Arabia” triumph, was less problematical. Except that Egypt refused to show their movie because she was Jewish.
Jewishness is a sub-theme. Especially Jewishness Brooklyn-style. So is “The Nose.” So are female movie reviewers (She thinks they/we have it in for her, but here’s my opening comment about “Yentl”: “The erstwhile Funny Girl proves she can be a Funny Boy and, more importantly, a fine director.”)
And, as I mentioned earlier, never forget Mom, who is a nightmare of withheld affection. Still, here’s a thought. Streisand always understood how to be an underdog more than a top dog. That apparently never changed in terms of her relationship with her mother. Perhaps that’s why she haunts so much of the book.
And perhaps that explains the aforementioned overload of tributes “Like a female Kubrick” one admirer says of her directorial debut in “Yentl.” “Don’t change a frame,” Steven Spielberg says about the same picture.
“I see my flaws more clearly than anyone else does, and I’m usually the first person to point them out,” Streisand writes. And that’s true (if you don’t count her mother).
“My Name is Barbra” isn’t a magnificent warts-and-all memoir. But it’s certainly not a slog either. Rather, it’s an exceptional look at an exceptional career, as unique in its way as its author.
“This book is dedicated to the father I never knew…and the mother I did,” she tells us.
She’s not kidding.
