Reflections from a singular voice: A review of My Name is Barbra
My Name is Barbra (Penguin Random House, 2023)
By Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand’s memoir has been in development for a decade.
In Barbra Streisand’s new memoir, the self-proclaimed” actress who sings” renowned for epicness scales things down to a remarkably intimate level. In 970 pages of text (buffeted by a trove of photos) she distills over 80 years of life and 60-years of her unprecedented career into a personable and highly readable account written in her singular style.
As a longtime Streisand fan, especially her music, I can relay that Streisand fandom invites obsession with both her art, and by extension, her mythology. Though Streisand makes it explicitly clear in her new memoir how much she detests intrusions of her privacy her concept of what is public and private are elastic. Otherwise, how could the public know about the profound impact of her father’s death on her, or how sparing her mother was with praise throughout her life, or her political beliefs on various issues?
Streisand has infused her art with select aspects of her life. Once you choose to do this trying to manage it becomes an exercise in futility. Streisand, who features “truth alerts” on her website to correct media distortions, probably hopes her memoir clears things up (finally!) and negate a the barrage of half-truths and situations long circulated by biographers, journalists, tabloids, and former collaborators. This seems unlikely, however, for as much as she claims to value her privacy—again, a slippery concept in her world—she continually dishes on everything from her food preferences, to her intimate affairs with some of the world’s most notable men, to her willingness to hold her tongue creatively to avoid conflict. If anything, these kinds of revelations will probably generate further speculation.
Modulating what to give and what to hold back is part of the tension and mystery of Streisand’s career, and the source of much controversy. For fans a person with her talent, drive, and versatility is entitled to a little excess including oversinging, overemoting, and oversharing, however one understands these terms. They see excess as integral to her personality. Sometimes this quality can inspire a kind of obsessiveness among her fans. They can’t get enough. There’s a reason for all those biographies, and, more recent reissues of unreleased material (2012’s Release Me, 2021’s Release Me 2, and 2023’s Live at the Bon Soir)—there’s an audience hungering for more. For her detractors she always has been, and always will be, too much. They view her art and personality as all shtick all the time; too mired in technique and too self-absorbed to convey genuine feeling or authenticity, however these concepts are understood.
The point is she usually inspires strong responses, rather than indifference, and you cannot ignore her. Popular music would sound and feel a lot different without her; she is the archetype for the notion of a “pop diva.” Her best film work continues to inspire new generations of aspiring actors. It doesn’t matter that the Hollywood that produced the musical Funny Girl and melodrama The Way We Were is nearly unrecognizable. Her choice to invest her time, primarily, in recorded mediums mean her work is recorded for posterity and ripe for constant rediscovery. In this regard newcomers can discover for themselves the last movie star of our age.
What Streisand makes clear about herself in the memoir is that she hews to the belief that some distance between the artist and the audience is essential to maintain the illusion of art. No fourth wall breaks for her; she wants you to buy whatever is being conveyed so the artist must commit. In the era of mega fandom, epitomized by Taylor Swift’s Swifties, BTS’s ARMY, and Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, this desire for space harks back to an earlier showbiz era curated through fan magazines and studio publicity, rather than the quasi-cinema verité of contemporary concert films, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and social media. Though these too are curated and offer an illusion of intimacy just as manufactured as fan magazines the perception of access and emotional generosity is integral to the brand of contemporary pop culture figures. Streisand is too old-school to admit her public persona and mythology mutually depend on both a projection of elusiveness and an unspoken social contract with her audience that they understand each other.
In some ways Streisand’s allegiance to old school showbiz has served her well. She is among the last generation of figures to begin her career on the urban nightclub circuit and cross over to recording, musical theatre, television, and film successfully. And by “successfully,” I mean she won four Grammys, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, an Emmy Award, and had sold millions of records, and expanded her audience via popular television specials, in the seven-year span between 1962-69.
Though she has always referred to herself as an “actress who sings” she was the ultimate multi-hyphenate by decade’s end and one of the few artists of her generation to evoke the aura of untouchability that had defined the stars she idolized on the widescreen in Technicolor. Though peers like Liza Minnelli and Bette Midler are highly accomplished they are far more rooted in live theatre than Streisand, their record sales more modest, and their film ambitions more confined. They are major talents, with Minnelli peaking in the early 1970s with the film Cabaret and television special Liza with a “Z,” and Midler riding the wave of inspiration at different times (e.g., her 1973 debut album The Divine Miss M, her star turn in 1980’s The Rose, and her “comeback” as sentimental interpreter on “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “From a Distance”), but inconsistent and slightly murkier than Streisand as “stars.”
Its worth noting that Streisand has always subordinated singing to acting because she was awed by the glamorous Hollywood actors of her childhood and in thrall to “serious” actresses like Sarah Bernhardt. She repeatedly expresses her wish to interpret great characters from Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekov. It’s never clear why she never pursued this seriously given her legendary tenacity. Regardless, this longing to radiate stardom by virtue of sheer personality and garner respect for the depth of her interpretive talent is an uneasy, possibly contradictory mix she has struggled to pull off. Streisand has sold the records, garnered the ratings, and won the awards but none of these plaudits fully explain who she is or what she does.
The memoir returns to the subject of motivation and intention continually. Streisand recounts how she aspired to join the Actor’s Studio but was rejected (too young) and settled for regular acting classes, and had to make her living doing something so she sang. Fundamentally, she perceives acting was something beyond naturalness that required formal training. Comparatively, she is blasé about singing as something needing training. She speaks of dissonances and minor chords in the memoir, and her chemistry with various musicians, but gleefully shares how she is untrained, does not read music, and rarely exercises her voice. Her tendency is to reduce her singing purely to an expression of will which conveniently separates it from the physical elements and technique required to produce it. This notion of acting as something she trained for that is also more “serious” when detached from music is odd coming from the most iconic voice in film musicals in the late 1960s-early 1970s. More to the point her view of her singing as merely a natural extension of speech strikes me as a mythological element intended to imbue a showbiz-like layer of “magic” that contradicts her self-professed perfectionism. No one sings with her confidence and finesse without some sense of discipline.
The tension between her dramatic aspirations and her musical gifts is one she has generated and never quite reconciled. Her deservedly acclaimed role as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl—a role she cultivated beforehand on Broadway—melded drama, pathos, and music seamlessly more than earning her the Oscar and other awards. As an actress she’s never returned to this apex. Her performances in Hello Dolly! and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, and later Funny Lady, are fine but neither of these performances is enough to compensate for the large-scale weaknesses of the films themselves.
Interestingly, her next best role after Fanny Brice is as Judy Maxwell the devious comic foil for Ryan O’Neal in director Peter Bogdonavich’s What’s Up Doc? (1972) an homage to screwball comedies that was well-reviewed, popular, and lucrative. Had she built on the strength of this role she could have become the comedic actress of her generation. But she didn’t want this mantle, apparently; it wasn’t weighty enough for her. So, she got serious expanding into production. Her first production Up the Sandbox was a somewhat experimental drama mixed with fantasy that failed with critics and audiences.
The more straightforward role of impassioned activist and lovable outsider Katie Morosky in The Way We Were was the key role where Streisand proved she could pull off a serious role without singing (at least not performing within the film) and get the guy, sort of (Robert Redford). In the memoir she devotes considerable time describing the unfortunate cutting and editing of key scenes that would have given the film more depth; this seems to have further informed her itch to direct. It began with a natural curiosity during the filming of Funny Girl where director William Wyler engaged with Streisand as a creative partner in many respects and continued in her other roles where she dared to ask questions and contribute creatively, sometimes to the chagrin of directors and other actors. In these instances, you root for her for being true to her instincts and breaking the mold for women.
Since The Way We Were her judgement about the best ways to showcase her acting talents has felt like an exercise in trial-and-error. Her discussion of A Star is Born co-produced with boyfriend Jon Peters, who she describes as a boorish dilettante, is highly corrective. She counters director Frank Pierson’s harsh public assessments about her and Peters’s efforts to control the film and attempts to restore its reputation by unpacking the logic behind various choices and the intricacy of certain scenes, some of which were cut.
Frankly, it’s a good example of a section in the nearly a thousand-page book that could use some editing. The film may have been a colossal hit and “Evergreen” (its Oscar-winning “love theme”) is a fine ballad but Streisand is too attached to admit that it is a deeply flawed film. Similarly, her effort to redeem the slight The Main Event as a quasi-feminist film and to rationalize her supporting role in the abysmal All Night Long (she did it as a favor to her agent and to help finance Yentl) are strained and frustrating. Reading these sections makes you wonder why she wasted her talent on such lower tier projects.
By the mid-to-late 1970s the “actress who sings” had transitioned (mostly) from Hollywood musicals to screwball comedy and drama, and producing, and had also remade herself musically. Her studio albums and television and film soundtracks of the 1960s made her one of the primary torch carriers for the canonical pre-rock pop repertoire largely disrupted by rock music. Yet she also voiced songs from newer musicals such as Sweet Charity. Neither a rocker nor a typically smooth crooner she was a phenomenon. After the leaden misstep on 1969’s What About Today? producer Richard Perry helped her embrace more modern singer-songwriter material on 1971’s Stoney End and Barbra Joan Streisand. By 1974’s The Way We Were and 1975’s Lazy Afternoon she found her stride weaving the old with new into something contemporary. The title track to The Way We Were was her first number one pop hit. Toward the end of the decade her film career was so consuming she seemed to approach recording more casually resulting in moderately popular but slight sets like Streisand Superman, Songbird, and Wet. The melding of movies and music tended to yield her biggest hits including “Way,” “Evergreen,” and “The Main Event.” Two anomalies were her chart-topping duets with Neil Diamond and Donna Summer, respectively. By then her momentum as an icon was such that she could resonate with both lovers of soft rock and disco without blinking. She began the decade with her most commercially successful pop album ever the Barry Gibb helmed Guilty. She ended the 1960s musically unsure and a decade later she had redefined the sound of pop.
During the late 1970s-early 1980s she was transitioning to the “wildy popular singer who directs and acts” due to her intense involvement developing Yentl her directorial debut. In two chapters she details how Isaac Bashevis Singer’s original story caught her eye in the late 1960s and stuck with her through a series of rewrites, bafflement from colleagues, budgeting concerns and studio rejections. Her passion and tenacity are both palpable and admirable. She pulls you in detailing the scouting of various locations, her deep dive into Talmudic study, her desire for certain visual resonances, and the collaborative process of developing the character Yentl/Anschel’s songs with Michel Legrand and lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Readers also learn of the director’s efforts to shape the performance (and mellow the sexual interests) of a then new Mandy Patinkin and to help Amy Irving, Oscar nominated for her supporting performance, access her sensuality. Its riveting stuff because Streisand transfers her unfulfilled passion for classical drama into a new realm where her drive and fastidiousness can be channeled effectively. She also recounts her frustrations at harsh reviews and snubs from industry bodies though she acknowledges the reviews were mostly positive, and the film was honored by several organizations.
After releasing the perfunctory album Emotion (1984) she dived more deeply into her theatrical origins on 1985’s The Broadway Album, an ambitious and popular album her record company was disinterested in but as always she persisted. She worked closely with arranger Peter Matz and developed a strong relationship with Stephen Sondheim who altered lyrics on a few songs to suit the interpreter. This might sound intrusive but he embraced the notion of art as a living thing, according to her recollection, and tended to agree with her instincts. And her instincts were correct. Improbably, amid the rise of MTV and synth-pop, it reached #1 on the albums chart, and garnered her an eighth Grammy. Her remaining albums of the decade performed well but she turned much of her attention to producing and acting in the courtroom drama Nuts which made only a moderate impact, and preparing to direct an adaptation of Pat Conroy’s novel The Prince of Tides which many would consider her crowning achievement as a film director and producer.
Her passion for Yentl and her tenacity adapting it to the big screen made it a successful and unique film. Prince was more conventional in genre and theme but required a delicate touch as well. Her recollection of the novel’s pull and the insights she gained getting to know Conroy place various choices she made in context. While many film reviewers criticized the screenplay’s omissions of some of the novel’s psychological and familial details in favor of the relationship between the film’s leads, played by Streisand and Nick Nolte, she did what directors do: recast the story in her language which entails visual lushness, dramatic scoring, and an emphasis on love. Her surefooted approached earned the film widespread recognition from critic’s groups and professional guilds including a nomination from the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and multiple Oscar nods for the film, screenplay, lead and supporting performers, art direction, cinematography, and score. Her omission from the Oscars inspired industry outrage reiterated her point about Hollywood keeping women in their place.
Between Yentl and her final directorial film effort The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), a conventional light-hearted romantic comedy, a new generation of women directors like Allison Anders, Jane Campion, Julie Dash, Nicole Holofcener, and Kasi Lemmons, were finding their voices in the independent film world which made more room for unconventional stories and approaches. Though Streisand’s mainstream oeuvre seems far removed from independent film its worth noting that in 1969 she co-founded the First Artists production company with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier so actors could exercise more creative control in their careers which was groundbreaking. In addition to the various real estate ventures and fine art she references throughout, she has invested her money into a range of creative, academic, and political projects. Beyond the film world, Streisand has co-produced television movies and documentaries focused on marginalized populations including the Emmy-winning Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story and Reel Models: The First Women of Film, created endowed research centers devoted to civil and human rights, and climate change, among other topics, and advocated for liberal political issues and candidates.
Though her most recent acting gigs (Meet the Fockers, Little Fockers, Guilt Trip) are far removed from her Shakespearean aspirations in her third act she has turned more inward while maintaining a public profile. She is clear about the ways her marriage (to James Brolin), political advocacy, and devotion to family, have shifted her priorities. Her 2016-17 tour The Music…The Mem’ries…The Magic (which garnered over $53 million in revenue, and generated an album and Netflix special) is presumably her final tour, and the abrupt end of the long gestating film revival of the musical Gypsy in 2019 suggests things are slowing down but an ebb is not the same as an end. 2018’s more politically charged album Walls, recorded when she was 76, documents her righteous anger toward the contemporary sociopolitical climate with impressive fervor, and the more recent reissues of unreleased music remind us of the timelessness of her talent. Despite her disdain for living in the past My Name is Barbra helps you appreciate her legacy and makes you curious about her next chapter.
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