This Singing Thing

There’s​ an old joke. ‘A man was choking to death in a restaurant and Barbra Streisand was sitting at the next table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre and saved his life. Next day the headline read: Barbra Streisand Takes the Food Right Out of a Person’s Mouth.’ Streisand repeats the joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a ‘certain kinship’ with Bill Clinton during his presidency. ‘People can take an ounce of truth and turn it into a gallon of lies,’ she says. ‘I’m a truth-teller, and I’ve been crucified for it many times.’ Like Jesus, Streisand exists mostly as the subject of other people’s stories; she has refused to be interviewed for any of the biographies written about her. In this book, which she claims she has been meaning to write ever since Jackie Onassis suggested it in 1984, she wants to set the record straight about ‘the diva myth that has followed me all my life’.

She was born Barbara Joan Streisand in 1942 in Brooklyn. Her mother, Diana Rosen, was a gifted singer; Streisand never shook the feeling that her mother was jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the Catskills, and Streisand, her mother and nine-year-old brother moved first to her maternal grandparents’ house in Bed-Stuy and later to a housing project in Flatbush with Diana’s second husband, Lou Kind.

The loss of her father and the experience of living with Kind (who was ‘anything but’) taught Streisand independence. No one was going to tell her what to do; her family called her ‘fabrent, which means “on fire” in Yiddish’. She liked sitting under the table and listening to the adults’ conversations. She developed an unexplainable clicking in her ear and refused to eat. Eventually the clicks developed into tinnitus, which went unacknowledged until Streisand was an adult. ‘The ear noises were this terrible secret that I held inside and tried to manage on my own. I didn’t expect any help from my mother anymore.’

In her early teens, Streisand decided she had to become an actress. She felt she would be good at it. She began travelling into Manhattan to see plays in the $1.89 seats on Broadway, starting with The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956. ‘I remember thinking … Why couldn’t I play the part? I felt I could do it just as well as Susan Strasberg.’ Her talent, especially at the beginning, was a product of her ambition rather than the other way around; when she played a Roman slave pining after a centurion, ‘I wasn’t particularly attracted to the actor. So … I put a piece of chocolate cake in the wings. I could look over his shoulder … and at least be attracted to that!’ She was so set on her career that when an orthodontist told her at fourteen that she had to have braces, she refused unless he could hide the wires behind her teeth. ‘How could I go onstage with braces and two large gaps in my mouth?’

There may also have been a desire to adopt a different persona: confident, sexy, untroubled by mysterious ailments or an overbearing mother. She ‘didn’t like reality’; acting ‘was a way to escape myself and live in someone else’s world’. At fifteen, she went upstate to join a summer repertory company (‘The competition wasn’t stiff, because if you had $150, you got in’). Her greatest enthusiasm was reserved for the ‘delicious Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches’ they got while pulling the sets down. (Almost every page of My Name Is Barbra contains a detailed description of a meal.) In the fifth play of the season, she got a bit part as a flirtatious office worker. She was surprised to see the following day that she was the subject of a horny review in the local paper. ‘“Down boys!” Was he kidding? Did this reviewer really think I was sexy? I was amazed … and proud.’ For Streisand, who had always thought that theatre would be more her thing than film because ‘the audience can’t get so close,’ it was a revelation.

By the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’). She worked backstage at a theatre in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ‘off-off-off-Broadway’.

The work was slow at first; she had boring office jobs and went on the dole. She tried doing the rounds of casting agents, but ‘lasted two days’ because she couldn’t understand why she had to jump through hoops to do what she was born to do. ‘How can you see my work if I can’t get work because people like you won’t hire me until they see my work?’ You can hear the volley of Brooklyn backchat that became her trademark in Hollywood, just as you can imagine the shock of the casting agents who looked at her ‘as if I had just poured a glass of water on the floor’.

Streisand barely mentions her prodigious singing voice until fifty pages in, when she decides to audition for a talent contest at a nearby gay bar. She sang Harold Arlen’s ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’; when she had finished, ‘for a minute the whole room was silent. Then everyone burst into applause.’ She won the competition. Soon she was taken to the Bon Soir nightclub on Eighth Street for an audition. ‘It was the first time I felt a spotlight on my face, and it was warm and comforting.’ When she stepped off the stage the club manager ‘grabbed me by the arm and said: “Kid, you’re gonna be a star!” Like in the movies!’

There’s something exciting about the carelessness with which she describes ‘this singing thing’: the tears ‘running down the cheeks’ of her astonished friends, the vocal coach she abandoned after one lesson (‘I knew I had to do it my way’), the opportunities that crowded in every time she opened her mouth and let a Broadway standard fall out. Acting always came first; she could only get interested in singing if she thought of each song as a ‘miniature three-act play with a beginning, a middle and an end’. But everyone else just wanted the voice. After the Bon Soir there were gigs in nightclubs in Detroit, St Louis and New York, as well as her first television appearance. She dropped the middle ‘a’ from ‘Barbara’.

The praise was endless. Marty Erlichman, who would become her agent, saw her perform at the Bon Soir and came to see her backstage. ‘I have the feeling you’re going to win every award in this business, first time out of the box,’ he said, ‘the Grammy, the Emmy, the Tony, the Oscar.’ Tennessee Williams wrote that ‘a giddy God … endowed her with an instrument that even she does not fully understand,’ and Pauline Kael took every opportunity to lionise her ‘protean, volatile talent’. At the end of her first gig in Los Angeles, at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Tony Curtis shouted out: ‘Just start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her she had a beautiful voice. Glenn Gould was a self-proclaimed ‘Streisand freak’. Streisand shrugged off the accolades: ‘I just thought it was bashert, as they say in Yiddish, which means “meant to be”. It felt as if I were simply fulfilling the vision that I had as a child.’

In 1962, Barbra the actress got her break – a scene-stealing role as a ‘lovelorn secretary’ in the Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale. It was there that she met her first husband, Elliott Gould. They married in 1963. Gould had been raised in vaudeville, performing in the Catskills from the age of ten, and would go on to star in M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye. But in the early 1960s, he was a Broadway actor trying to break into Hollywood, and Streisand soon overtook him. After surprise rave reviews for I Can Get It for You Wholesale, she was offered the part that would shoot her to fame: portraying the comedian Fanny Brice – a celebrity of the 1920s – in the new Broadway show Funny Girl.

On I Can Get It for You Wholesale, Streisand had rubbed the director up the wrong way by arguing about the staging of her big number. During rehearsals for Funny Girl things were no different. She had already decided that she needed ‘a certain amount of freedom to create’, and was unhappy with the director, Garson Kanin. ‘He was … rigid and contained,’ Streisand remembers. ‘Wasn’t a director supposed to talk to his leading lady?’ The main bone of contention – from this point until the end of Streisand’s acting career – was her feeling that true performance was improvisation. She couldn’t stand it when anyone suggested that she move to the same spot on the stage or make the same face every time she said a certain line. Later, she had no patience for the multiple takes required in filmmaking. ‘To freeze something is to kill it, in my opinion,’ she says, and she never understood why the director got the final say. She got round her problems with Kanin by bringing her acting coach to rehearsals, saying he was her cousin from Philadelphia. Kanin left the production. On 26 March 1964, Funny Girl opened on Broadway, to 23 curtain calls. (In a flourish that becomes familiar after the first eight hundred or so pages, Streisand claims not to remember this and calls it ‘an exaggeration’, but mentions it anyway.)

Streisand became synonymous with Fanny Brice, which was a blessing and a curse. ‘I was playing a woman who was awkward and unattractive at the beginning of her career … And evidently it was such a successful portrayal that people confused the character with me.’ After the runaway success of the show, she began to feature on magazine covers and in the celebrity press. Journalists found a lot of inventive ways to make insinuations about her ‘pharaonic profile’: she was Nefertiti, or a Babylonian, or an ‘amiable anteater’. One cover story called her expression ‘the essence of hound’. No one had encountered anyone quite like her before: a proudly Jewish New Yorker, refusing plastic surgery (‘I’ve kept my nose to spite my face,’ she would sing in 1993), telling the press she was ‘born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon’. At the beginning of 1963 she was making $125 a week at the Bon Soir; by the end of it she was making $2500, and earning tens of thousands for every live singing engagement. ‘It was all like play money to me.’ Streisand has plenty of misty-eyed musings on the torments of fame: ‘you become public property. You’re an object to be examined, photographed, analysed, dissected’; ‘the reporters twisted my words or misinterpreted them’; ‘people didn’t see us any more. They just saw the myths.’ She assures us that she hated the limelight. But as the press cuttings that frequently interrupt the narrative show, she had far more admirers than detractors.

She had a worse problem than press attention. Carried away by the intensity of the rehearsals for Funny Girl, she had begun an affair (emotional or sexual, it isn’t clear) with her co-star, Sydney Chaplin, who played Brice’s feckless husband, Nicky Arnstein. After she told him that she loved Gould and couldn’t continue, he made each performance hell, whispering obscenities under his breath when he was supposed to be romancing her. She became so distressed that she regularly threw up before performances; it was the beginning of a lifelong struggle with stage fright.

Streisand played Fanny on Broadway for two and a half years. By the time she was 24 she had made seven albums, two of which won at least one Grammy. She was nominated for her second Tony in 1964, and took Funny Girl to the West End in the spring of 1966 while pregnant with her son. In 1967 she performed live in Central Park in front of 150,000 people. But her experience with Chaplin, as well as the horror of forgetting her words at the Central Park concert, put her off the stage for the next 27 years. It was time for Hollywood.

Ray Stark​ , the producer of Funny Girl, formed a production company to make it into a movie. After some wrangling, he signed Streisand on a non-exclusive four-picture deal, agreeing to pay her $200,000 per film. She arrived in Hollywood having never done a screen test, ready to step onto a film set for the first time as the star. Shortly after the Six-Day War, the press got wind of the fact that Omar Sharif would be her co-star; when a story about them ran in an Egyptian paper a group of protesters tried to get his citizenship revoked. Streisand wasn’t fazed: ‘My response was: “Egypt angry! You should hear what my aunt Anna said!”’ Working with the director William Wyler was right up her street; he was ‘totally open to my ideas … He understood the way I worked, and my need to feel free enough to invent something new on the spur of the moment.’ Wyler, another famous perfectionist, said that Streisand ‘trusted me, and I trusted her’. Stark, the son-in-law of the real Fanny Brice, wasn’t so smitten. At the end of the shoot he wrote her a note: ‘OK, Barbra – fix your own make-up – do your own hair – check the lighting – rewrite the screenplay – design the clothes – select the furniture – check the publicity – but, just keep singing!’

Funny Girl came out in 1968. It’s long and sentimental, but Streisand is mesmerising from the first moments, when we see her from behind as an older Fanny Brice, entering the stage door of the Ziegfeld Follies with her hips swinging beneath her leopard-print coat and cloche. Wyler withholds the first glimpse of her face for more than a minute, and when she first confronts the camera it is through a mirror. Archly, to herself but also to the audience, she speaks the line that became her catchphrase: ‘Hello, gorgeous.’ (When she won the Best Actress Oscar she said it to the statuette.) Then the smile disappears and the tears shine in her eyes as the weight of her memories descends. In the silence of the dressing room or in the midst of a huge ensemble number, Streisand has complete control; she is the focal point of every shot, whether or not she’s supposed to be; the eye can’t help but be drawn back to her. The rapidness of her delivery and the dynamism of her expression sweep us along. Is she an artist or a technician? Who cares when the technique is this good?

Streisand starred in three pictures released in consecutive years: Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly! and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. All three were lavish period musicals, but Hello, Dolly! was a box-office flop and On a Clear Day a failure with the critics. Streisand hated Walter Matthau, her co-star in Hello, Dolly!, and was disappointed by the director, Gene Kelly, who had no interest in her many ideas. She went around him and asked the producer to shoot her first-act closing song the way she wanted. ‘Gene admitted that my way was better when he saw the dailies. So that’s what’s in the film.’ He said later that he regretted not working more closely with Streisand. One day, Matthau exploded at her on set: ‘Who the hell does she think she is? I’ve been in this business thirty years … and now she’s directing? Why don’t you shut up and let the director direct!’ Streisand found out the reason for his animus: he played poker with Sydney Chaplin. My Name Is Barbra is full of these little vindications. Every time someone crossed her, there was an explanation – alcoholism, misogyny, sublimated attraction – even if it only came to light decades after the fact.

There was another reason Streisand wasn’t enjoying her first years in LA: her marriage was falling apart. Gould was jealous of her success and addicted to gambling. Both had affairs. ‘The parallels to Fanny Brice and Nicky Arnstein were not lost on me,’ Streisand says. ‘I didn’t know how to deal with it any more than she did.’ They divorced in 1971; she was already heading in a new direction. Away with the crinolines and hairpieces, the creaky numbers with hundreds of extras; in The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Up the Sandbox (1972), Streisand embodied the sexually liberated 1970s woman – and she didn’t sing.

Surprisingly, her left turn paid off. The Owl and the Pussycat, a ‘hip’ sex comedy, is notable mainly for making Streisand the first female star to say ‘fuck’ on screen, but What’s Up, Doc? may be her best work. Streisand plays a kooky tearaway from a stuffy family in the vein of Katharine Hepburn’s character in Bringing Up Baby; the picture wears its screwball influences heavily, but is no less inventive than its predecessors. Ryan O’Neal, the wooden straight man to Streisand’s agent of chaos, lets her drag him all over San Francisco, shedding clothes as he goes. The baroque plot involves a hotel, diamonds and four identical tartan suitcases – Streisand confessed she ‘couldn’t follow’ it – but it is the perfect peg on which to hang her one-liners and pratfalls. I would exchange the whole of Funny Girl for Streisand’s wordless entrance into the film, pursuing a pizza nose-first like a cartoon wolf while motorbikes crash in her wake.

What’s Up, Doc? was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, fresh from the success of The Last Picture Show. For the first time Streisand was in the hands of a director her own age and a denizen of New Hollywood. Bogdanovich, ever the auteur, had worked out every beat to his own exact specifications. In fact he ‘was aching to play my part … not to mention all the other parts as well!’ He would respond to all of Streisand’s suggestions with a laconic ‘Nope’. For once she decided to take nope for an answer. Perhaps her lack of affinity for the material worked in her favour: her comic timing is at its best, and she seems looser and more relaxed. It was the third-highest grossing film of 1972. ‘If you stood on the street outside the theatre, the laughter inside was so loud that you could hear it through the walls.’

Meanwhile, Streisand was rich, single and living it up. She dated O’Neal before What’s Up, Doc?, introducing him to Bogdanovich, and made friends with Marlon Brando (he asked to fuck her; she asked if he had got his teeth capped). She may have slept with Warren Beatty – ‘I guess I did. Probably once.’ She met the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau at a London premiere and nearly married him after a whirlwind romance, though she says less about him than about his preferred midnight snack, ‘a glass of milk and a few Mallomars. He offered the cookies to me, and I took one, but I pulled off the chocolate-covered marshmallow top because I only wanted the graham cracker bottom.’ She had a dalliance with Kris Kristofferson: ‘He gave me hickeys on my neck. Thank God I had a two-piece bathing suit by Rudi Gernreich with a turtleneck top to hide them!’

The chapter where Streisand meets Jon Peters, who would become her partner and wannabe Svengali, is called ‘What Was I Thinking?’ Peters was a half-Italian, half-Cherokee professional pubic hair dyer who had moved to LA and rebranded as a celebrity hairdresser, marrying the actress Lesley Ann Warren and sleeping his way around Beverly Hills. He had been telling people for years that he cut Streisand’s hair, but they met for the first time when she wanted a short wig in For Pete’s Sake (1974). Streisand, forever running late, kept him waiting at her house for 45 minutes.

Finally my assistant rang up and told me: ‘He’s leaving.’

‘Don’t let him leave,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right down.’

Jon was already revving up his red Ferrari when my assistant led him back into the house. And when I came over to greet him, he was clearly pissed. I was in the midst of apologising when he said: ‘Don’t ever do that to me again.’ That got my attention.

Following Streisand up the stairs, Peters said: ‘You’ve got a great ass.’ He told her off for dressing ‘like someone twice your age’ and began to pursue her. When she said he wasn’t her type – ‘I see myself with a doctor or a lawyer’ – he ditched the Ferrari and showed up at her house in a velvet smoking jacket with a pipe and horn-rimmed glasses. Streisand, adrift and lonely with a young son, was won over despite her misgivings about his temper and his flakiness. ‘I think the main reason I stayed with Jon,’ she reflects, ‘was that he knew what to do on Sundays.’ Soon they were living together in a 24-acre Malibu ‘ranch’ (paid for by Streisand) and he was producing her album Butterfly, encouraging her to ditch the showtunes for covers of Bill Withers and David Bowie. He wanted to bring out Streisand’s ‘sexy side’: he told a journalist she had been playing ‘Ray Stark’s mother-in-law’ for too long.

Streisand and Peters stayed together for eight years. He sold his salon and made a move on Hollywood, using Streisand for access. He freely admitted that she did most of the work producing Butterfly ‘because, like, at two in the morning I was tired and I would go to sleep’. Streisand’s last hit had been The Way We Were (1973), a dragging piece of sentiment set during the Red Scare that earned her a second Best Actress Oscar nomination. Now she wanted to get behind the camera herself; the trouble was that Peters did too.

In the autumn of 1973, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had approached Warner Bros offering to write a new version of A Star Is Born. The original film from 1937 and its 1954 remake with Judy Garland had been set in Hollywood, but Didion and Dunne wanted to explore the music industry. Several directors were hired and fired and several stars considered – including Diana Ross and Carly Simon – before the script landed on Streisand’s desk. In 1969, she, Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier had formed the production company First Artists, exchanging lower pay for more creative control. Streisand had final cut approval for the films she produced with First Artists. Peters was enthusiastic about A Star Is Born and offered to direct it. Streisand, who had been hoping to direct it herself, vetoed this plan – ‘My first reaction was: are you kidding?’ – but settled for giving Peters sole producer credit and calling herself executive producer.

It was a nightmare from beginning to end. Frank Pierson, the screenwriter for Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke, was brought in to rewrite Didion and Dunne’s script seven months before shooting began, but agreed only on condition that he could direct. Streisand was unhappy, but accepted because time was getting short. Pierson, Peters and Streisand’s old hickey-donor Kris Kristofferson, who had been cast as the male lead, constantly threatened to derail the production with their fighting – and Streisand’s backseat driving didn’t help. In November 1976, shortly before the film opened, Pierson wrote a tell-all article entitled ‘My Battles with Barbra and Jon’. It was clear to him from the beginning, he says, that the movie was a vanity project: Streisand and Peters saw it as ‘their own story gloriously told in song and dance and colour, a $6 million home movie’. (Since Kristofferson’s character ends the film dead in a car crash, this seems like a bad omen.) Streisand provided her own costumes and much of the set dressing for the desert retreat that she and Kristofferson build halfway through the movie; Peters’s ‘great ass’ pickup line was inserted into the script. She wouldn’t stop haranguing Pierson about her lighting, which had to be from the back, with plentiful close-ups. Peters argued with Kristofferson about his ‘shit’ music, with Pierson about his creative choices, and with Streisand about anything he could think of. She was having lunch in her trailer one day when he burst in and threw a glass of water at her, hitting a plate of spaghetti and ruining the clothes and make-up for the afternoon’s shooting. Kristofferson took to drinking ‘tequila washed down with cold beer’ every day in his trailer. One night, after a row with Peters, Streisand ran out from behind a bush in front of Pierson’s car, and begged him to take her home. ‘He gets so furious. I don’t know what to do.’ The climax was a massive outdoor concert in Arizona which would provide footage for two scenes in the movie. Peters and Streisand decided to turn it into a real event, with a $3.50 entry fee, and a promoter brought in Peter Frampton as the headliner. The audience got restless and began heckling around the one-hour mark. Streisand and Kristofferson had a shouting match backstage while miked up; it was all over the news.

Luckily for her, the studio didn’t like Pierson’s cut of the movie, so she was allowed to edit it herself. A team of editors worked round the clock while Streisand spent seventeen weeks mixing the sound. The result is a bloated mess of a movie which tries to be cool and manages only to be vapid. Streisand’s powers are on full beam, but even she is diluted by her lack of chemistry with Kristofferson and the interminable soft-focus montages of them nuzzling each other in front of their adobe hideaway. Although it was Streisand’s biggest film at the box office, it was the worst reviewed of her career. Streisand, furious, blamed Pierson. She would never let an unvetted director manipulate her again.

In 1978, she returned to a project that she had been interested in for ten years: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story ‘Yentl the Yeshiva Boy’. After the success of Funny Girl, Streisand had told her agent she was interested in playing Singer’s Polish girl who disguises herself as a man in order to study the Talmud. He was unimpressed: ‘You’ve just played a Jewish girl and now you tell me that you want to play a Jewish boy?’ When Streisand, now in possession of the movie rights, returned to the story with an eye to screenwriting and directing, studio executives’ eyes glazed over. Peters said the idea was ‘ridiculous’ until she came into the house one night in drag and he almost pulled a gun on her. Streisand’s resolve was strengthened when she visited a Jewish medium who passed on a message from her dead father. The parallels between her and Yentl, whose father’s death leaves her alone in the world, were obvious. When she visited Emanuel Streisand’s grave in New York, she noticed that the plot next to his belonged to a man called Anshel: the male name Yentl adopts. ‘This was the sign I was looking for, telling me that I was meant to make this movie.’

Streisand managed to sell Yentl by promising that she would sing in it. She didn’t want to look like she was trying to emulate the success of 1971’s Fiddler on the Roof, another musical about European Jewish life at the turn of the century, so decided against pastiching traditional Jewish music and hired Michel Legrand, who had shot to international fame in the 1960s after scoring the Jacques Demy musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. It was decided that all the songs would be sung by Streisand, either onscreen or in voiceovers representing Yentl’s internal monologue. ‘I didn’t want to be accused of being on some ego trip,’ she notes wisely, but her lyricists, Marilyn and Alan Bergman, persuaded her that it was the most organic way to make the film a musical. It was easier on the purse-strings too: no ‘happy villagers burst[ing] into song’.

Yentl was shot in England and Czechoslovakia in the spring and summer of 1982. Streisand chose the Jewish Broadway star Mandy Patinkin to play her love interest, Avigdor, and Amy Irving as Hadass, Avigdor’s fiancée, who ends up married to Yentl. The trouble with Patinkin began less than two weeks into filming. He lost his temper and refused to look her in the eye. She took him aside.

‘Why are you so angry?’

His face crumpled and he said: ‘I thought we were going to have a more personal relationship.’

‘What?’ I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘I thought we were going to have an affair.’

I couldn’t tell him he was not exactly fascinating to me. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I simply said: ‘I don’t operate that way.’

Tears rolled down his cheeks.

Nor was Amy Irving immune to her charms:

As the shoot progressed … I noticed that Amy began relating to me as if I were a guy. She’d take my hand as we were walking together or talking about a scene and my first reaction was: why is she holding my hand? But then I thought: better let her. If it helps her to be in character, why not? … But when she wanted to rehearse the kissing scene, I basically said: no way. See you on the set.

It is fitting that Streisand, a gay icon ever since her talent contest days, chose a gender-bending story for her first directorial outing, and she has fun with the reversal of roles created by Yentl’s deception. Following the demure Hadass around the room with her eyes, Yentl bursts into song in her head: ‘No wonder he loves her/What else could he do?/If I were a man, I would too.’ The camera rests lovingly on Hadass’s halo of red hair; meanwhile Avigdor horses around with the boy-Barbra, pushing her to the ground and straddling her, and she spies on him swimming naked in a river. But given all this, it’s surprising how straight the film feels. Yentl’s reaction to seeing the naked Avigdor is to rush home and get naked herself, as if to remind us that she still has breasts. Her discomfort with her new wife’s advances seems unfeigned, and when Avigdor finds out Anshel’s identity at the film’s climax, he murmurs into her neck: ‘I thought there was something wrong with me.’

In​ the 1980s Streisand became a donor to LGBTQ causes, and her production company, Barwood Films, made TV movies about the treatment of gays in the military and the ‘unfair laws concerning gay adoption’. She became good friends with the Clintons during the 1992 election campaign, calling up Bill after his Monica Lewinsky press conference to give him notes on acting contrite. She is keen to impress her political engagement on us. Every issue and current event in My Name Is Barbra elicits a Streisandism. Barbra on satellite: ‘If only our hearts could expand as much as technology, we’d be in a very good place.’ Barbra on the nuclear arms race: ‘We should be filling grain silos, not missile silos.’ Barbra on communism: ‘It was not a great time in the history of Czechoslovakia … I was shocked to see how little there was to buy in the stores.’ Barbra on Aids: ‘I said, “Homophobia is another disease that has to be cured.”’ Barbra on visiting the White House: ‘I was so proud to be an American, and so inspired, that I began to collect 18th-century American furniture, and ended up redoing my New York apartment.’ Barbra on Shimon Peres: ‘I’ll never forget his response when I asked, “How can you help the Palestinian situation?” He said, “By making their lives better.”’

Streisand directed two films in the 1990s: The Prince of Tides (1991) and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). If Yentl was her film about the obstacles ambitious women face, The Prince of Tides, a tearjerker starring Nick Nolte as a traumatised redneck, is about the burdens of masculinity. The Mirror Has Two Faces is a different beast: a strange combination of romantic comedy, critique of the beauty industry and a working-through of Streisand’s own relationship with her mother. The plot is preposterous (hunky but clueless maths professor lovelessly marries dowdy English professor for reasons not elucidated; English prof has a full body makeover and they fall into each other’s arms to swelling Puccini); the relationship at the film’s emotional centre is between Streisand’s character, the awkward Rose, and her dazzling, unsupportive mother. To play the mother she chose Lauren Bacall, the anti-Streisand: a Jewish star from a generation earlier who had left Brooklyn behind and changed her voice on her first day in Hollywood. Streisand’s mother told an interviewer that her daughter ‘wasn’t good-looking enough’ to be an actor. When Jeff Bridges’s Greg proposes to Rose, her mother scoffs: ‘I don’t trust him. I mean, where’s the attraction?’ In a chapter of reflections on her mother, Streisand describes the jealous rages Diana would fly into when Streisand won an award or got too much attention. ‘Why can’t you be happy for me?’ Rose asks. In one scene she looks at a photograph of her parents: Bacall is in her own mother’s place next to Emanuel Streisand.

The ‘turning point of the movie’, Streisand says, is when she and Bacall have it out at the breakfast table. ‘I guess I am jealous,’ the on-screen mother says. She hands Rose an angelic baby photo. ‘I was pretty?’ Barbra says. ‘You were very pretty,’ Bacall affirms. Freed from her mother’s disdain, Rose can hit the gym and get a perm – transforming from a mousy nobody into the Streisand the world recognises.

Diana died in 2002, and Streisand has only appeared in three films since then, each time playing mothers – in Meet the Fockers (2004); its sequel, Little Fockers (2010); and the Seth Rogen comedy The Guilt Trip (2012). Apart from touring, which she picked up again in the 1990s after a three-decade hiatus, she seems to spend most of her time on philanthropy and re-editing her old films. (A Star Is Born and The Way We Were have both received this treatment for digital re-releases.) There was also the autobiography project, of course. She had turned down Jackie Onassis’s suggestion in 1984 – ‘I was way too busy’ – but began to jot down notes. In the 1990s she looked at the project more seriously, writing a chapter with an erasable pen before losing it and having to start again. She wrote it herself, without a ghostwriter, and you can tell: her lengthy tangents on diner food and haute couture, peppered with ellipses, don’t preserve her mystique very well. Having revelled in every minute detail – do we need to know the contents of the snack table she lays out in the studio for the musicians? – she sits back, sated. ‘At this point in my life,’ she says towards the end of the book, ‘I want to step out of the spotlight.’

It is ironic that her moment of greatest notoriety this century came from the attempt to do just that. A photographer set up a website in 2002 documenting coastal erosion in southern California. Streisand was named as the owner of a Malibu clifftop ‘barn’; in attempting to suppress the photograph, her lawyers inadvertently drew attention to it, prompting almost half a million visits to the webpage in the next month. But the record-straightener in her can’t be stifled: she recently attempted to ‘correct’ the Wikipedia page for the ‘Streisand effect’ (the phenomenon where the effort to ‘hide, remove or censor information’ increases its exposure), believing it showed her in a bad light, but was blocked from editing it. ‘Why?’ she wonders. ‘Isn’t the truth enough?’