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“This is the opening of a film about Sarah Bernhardt, if I could get anyone to do it,” she says, drawing her hand through the air. “You start on a mirror, and the hand comes in the frame, and someone is trying to put on the eyeliner and it’s smudging. You have to erase it and start again. You don’t even know who it is.”
We’ve been talking about makeup. For most of her career—from her nightclub gigs when she was 18 right through to her major films—Barbra Streisand did her own. At first because there was no one else to do it, and then because no one could do it better. In her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, out November 7, she tells the story of her film test for Funny Girl. The makeup people came to attend to her, and she thought, “Great, they’re the experts. Let’s see what they can do.” But she didn’t love the result. “I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ ” Streisand writes, “but then I asked, ‘Would it be all right if we also did a test with just me making myself up?’ The studio said, ‘Fine.’ ”
A previously unpublished photograph of Barbra Streisand, by Richard Avedon, photographed on April 1, 1970. Hair by Anna Gallant; styled by Polly Mellen. With special thanks to the Richard Avedon Foundation.© COPYRIGHT RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION.
The cinematographer picked Streisand’s.
Streisand is 81 now, and though her hands remain steady, she finds it harder to achieve that straight line across the eyelid. That’s the genesis of the Sarah Bernhardt idea—Bernhardt at an older age, still potent, still inimitable. “You know, she played Juliet when she was 74,” she says.
I am at Streisand’s house in Malibu in July, two days before the Screen Actors Guild declares a strike, to talk to her about her book. I’m one of only a handful of people who’ve read it at this point.
My Name Is Barbra is 992 pages of startling honesty and self-reflection, deadpan parenthetical asides (including a running bit about how much she loves going to the dentist), encyclopedic recall of onstage outfits, and rigorous analyses of her films, many of which she rewatched for the first time in decades. There’s the chilling story, which she’s never told before, of the origins of her legendary stage fright. There’s her hilarious opening line to James Brolin, who she’s been with for 27 years. There’s a page and a half correcting the record on the Streisand Effect, a term that refers to the way efforts to minimize a story can backfire, generating exponentially more press; it derives from legal action she took against a person who publicized the location of her home. (More on all this later.) There’s no index, so would-be browsers can’t cheat. A genius move—was it her choice? She laughs. Absolutely. If she could plug away for 10 years writing this exhaustive, exhilarating account of her life—leaving blood on the page, per her editor’s request—then we can do her the courtesy of reading it from start to finish.
In 1984, Jackie Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, invited Streisand to write a memoir. She turned the offer down: “Frankly, I thought at 42 I was too young, with much more work still to come.” (She wasn’t wrong, but for those keeping score, she had already won an honorary Tony, two Oscars, one Emmy, and seven Grammys.) Still, she started making notes, and in 1999 began keeping a journal, longhand. “I never learned to type,” she says, an act of defiance against her mother, who wanted her to pursue a career in school administration so that she’d have summers off. Instead, Streisand grew out her nails, precluding secretarial work, and—just to put a point on it—became a supernova.
Mind you, it was all relevant to our larger conversation about her life and work, and to My Name Is Barbra, which is at once a vital account of an American icon and a deeply personal and dishy stream of consciousness. Even when we are back in Flatbush with young Streisand, narrator Barbra doesn’t hesitate to jump in, just as she would in person, ad-libbing, digressing, finessing. It’s singularly entertaining, energetic, and, best of all, it sounds just like her.
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