Streisand

by Anne Edwards

  Her stepfather was a man better able to communicate and charm outsiders than the members of his close family. ‘He never talked to me except to order me around,’ Streisand remembers bitterly. ‘The only thing I can recall him saying to me was when I was riding in a car with my girlfriend. I was talking, and he said, “Why can’t you be more like her? Quiet.”’ Kind was in deep financial problems almost from the start of his marriage to Diana. His gambling debts had mounted and he remained responsible for the support of his ex-wife. He was forced to take a job for the steady income it provided in a garment company as a cutter, work he had done in the past but felt was beneath him. The atmosphere in the Kind household grew very dark. Kind was moody, hostile. Diana’s dream that he would be a father to her children was quickly crushed. Kind had no patience with either Shelley or Barbara. Uncomfortable around a teenage boy whom his wife expected him to counsel and befriend, he had even less tolerance for a difficult, resentful child who did not like him any better than he liked her. Diana expected him to take Barbara to the park or pony rides on his Sundays off. Kind had places of his own to go to when he had free time, women who did not care if a man was married.

  In the beginning, Diana maintained, Kind tried to be nice to Barbara. He bought her gifts; colouring books and crayons, a jump rope, and on her eighth birthday a proper doll with eyes that opened and closed to replace the homemade water-bottle doll she slept with at nights. Barbara pushed the new doll aside. She had wanted roller skates she claimed. She found fault with every offering, it was never right or chosen just for her. Cold and antagonistic toward Kind from the outset, she never warmed to him or allowed herself to see any good in him. He had taken her father’s place, scuttled her fantasy that he would one day return to his family. She would never forgive Kind for this, or her mother for marrying him. Yet, down deep, she desperately wanted and needed his approval but nothing she ever did pleased him.

  The first night in their Flatbush apartment she had cried bitterly until, over Kind’s strong verbal objections, she was allowed to sleep in her mother’s bed as she had on Pulaski Street. Kind refused to share the bed with them and stormed from the apartment. The following morning Barbara awoke complaining of a clicking and buzzing in her ears. Diana, obviously under stress and suspicious that her daughter’s complaint was a bid for attention, had her hold a hot-water bottle to her ear and as Barbara had neither fever nor pain, dismissed it. These distressing noises in her head continued without medical consultation throughout her pre-adolescence. She would wrap her head in a woollen scarf in the humid heat of the Brooklyn summer and press her fingers to her ears at other times. The sounds continued, never to disappear and many years later would be diagnosed as tinnitus aurium, a distressing chronic condition of the inner ear.

  At turns she was all dreamer or all realist. She viewed her stepfather with a keen, cold eye surprising in one so young. ‘Why do you take his side?’ she quizzed Diana after a confrontation with Kind. ‘He doesn’t need you. I do. He doesn’t even love you. If he did, he’d be nicer.’ She could move her mother to injured tears, while she controlled her own emotions.

  Her defence was to retreat further into a private world where Kind did not exist. Movies played a large role in her life. When she was very young, Diana or Shelley would take her to the neighbourhood movie house on a Saturday afternoon. Shelley liked Westerns and Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials; Diana comedies and romantic dramas. Barbara preferred going with her mother. Shelley was never too pleased to have his little sister tag along, but that was not entirely her reason. Barbara liked not having to share Diana and she was drawn to the images and the women she watched on the large screen in the darkened theatre when she was with her mother. The gamut of her imagination ran from being glamorous like Lana Turner to being glamorous like Rita Hayworth. She equated being loved with being beautiful and decided that one day she would be a movie star – and beautiful. That dream was her touchstone throughout childhood.

  Around Kind, she remained sullen. It didn’t help that Shelley kept telling her how wonderful their real father had been, or that her brother had known him where she had been denied any conscious memory of him. When not day-dreaming she was moody or unco-operative, always the rebel, refusing to do what was being asked of her. One time when Diana had lost her temper and slapped Barbara a glancing blow on the ear, she pretended for the rest of the day that she had been struck deaf and carried it off so well that her mother grew hysterical and was about to rush her to the hospital. Seeing Diana in honest turmoil Barbara finally confessed the truth.

  ‘Barbara was a very complex child,’ Diana has said. ‘She bottled up everything inside her. Perhaps if she could have voiced to me how she was feeling things might have been easier, but she didn’t. She had her own ideas, her own way of looking at life and that was the way she liked things to be. Barbara always saw everything depending on how it affected her, but it was not easy for her as a child.

  ‘I knew that she resented not having a father, especially because Roslyn [Rosalind] had one, but she wouldn’t talk about it to me,’ Diana recalled. ‘From the age of seven she wanted to be in films. I couldn’t fathom why she wanted to be famous, but she did. I was worried that she wouldn’t succeed and that she would be hurt, so I tried not to encourage her. But I couldn’t break up her ideas and her thinking.’

  The ‘grand’ apartment in Flatbush allowed little space for anyone. The new baby first slept in a crib in her parents’ room. The dinette was turned into a small second bedroom for Shelley and Barbara slept on the couch in the front room. The fact that they now had a sofa did not make her feel ‘rich’ as she once thought it would. ‘Ever sleep on a couch night after night?’ she asked an interviewer. ‘All you think about is, “How can I get a room of my own?” You get to the point where you have to make good!’ There was at least one benefit. The couch was in the room with the new television set. Barbara quickly became addicted to it and all the early variety programmes: Arthur Godfrey, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle – the various daytime and weekly soap operas and dramas. She especially loved the commercials and committed many of them to memory and then would go into the bathroom and lock the door so that she could act them out in front of the medicine-chest mirror without interruption. She would pretend she was a sophisticated young woman smoking a cigarette, Betty Furness, the spokeswoman for Westinghouse, looking glamorous as she opened a refrigerator door, the exotic South Sea Island girl who wore Tabu perfume and undulated seductively.

  One day she would be beautiful and famous. She kept telling herself this over and over again and finally she came to believe it. Her attitude changed. She held her head up, her back straight. She seemed suddenly not just defiant, but a bit arrogant. It did not sit well with her stepfather, but Barbara had discovered that she had a fierce desire for survival, that she could make her dreams her reality, and that if she had to she could fight the world alone.

  5

  BOXED IN BY his responsibilities, highly resentful at having to provide for a stepdaughter who was, in his opinion, ungrateful, Kind’s hostile nature erupted frequently into a growing violence. Verbally abusive, bullying and threatening on occasion to Diana, his anger reached out to Barbara. There is no evidence that he ever beat her. He shouted a lot; Barbara would shout back and manage to get out of his way at the times when he seemed poised to take a swipe at her. Barbara’s strident voice rose shrilly in defiance and Diana was mortified that the neighbours could hear what was going on in her home. She swore the older children to silence, never to discuss Kind’s tyrannising abuse. Once he told Barbara that she could not have ice cream because she was so ugly. ‘He was really mean to Barbara,’ Shelley confirmed. ‘He taunted her continually, telling her how plain she was compared to Rosalind.’ With cruelty to Barbara, he referred to the half-sisters as ‘beauty and the beast’.

  ‘You’re different, that’s all, different and you’re smarter than most kids your age,’ Shelley would tell her to help build her ego. ‘And
being smart is what counts.’ He defended her against Kind when he could. He felt protective of Barbara, but he was having his own difficulties in this unhappy home. His main objective was to leave there, go to college, make something of himself. He was a good artist (a talent his stepfather had very little regard for), and thought he might go into advertising. A winsome youngster, Shelley had grown into an attractive and popular young man of medium stature, but broad-shouldered and possessing an easy manner and a winning smile. Barbara was greatly possessive of him, jealous when girlfriends called and dreaded the day when he would no longer be her protector in the house.

  At ten, after seeing the leggy, statuesque Cyd Charisse dance with Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, Barbara made up her mind that she had to have ballet lessons and badgered her mother for weeks until finally Diana gave in, although it meant a sacrifice on her part. Money was scarce and she did not dare to ask Kind for help to finance what even she thought was a frivolous enterprise. Her hope was that the lessons would prove to Barbara how much she cared about her and would make her less difficult. To buy a pair of toe shoes and a leotard and to pay for ballet instruction at a small, local dancing school, she scraped together the money by economising on the table, using cheaper cuts of meat and fewer desserts, walking instead of taking public transport.

  Barbara could not wait to attend her weekly class. Shorter and younger than most of the girls in her group, she applied herself with manic dedication to be just that much better prepared. She showed surprising ability for a youngster who was always considered to be awkward. ‘When she came home [from dance class] she would practise and practise,’ Diana recalled. ‘She spent hours getting up on her toes and walking around the apartment. I was afraid it might hurt her feet – you never know what damage it could do to a child’s toes.’ Barbara pressed for private instruction, which was more costly. Kind was already complaining vodferously that Diana was wasting money on Barbara that should have been spent on the household. Diana found herself in the middle of a dysfunctional family, wanting to appease Kind and at the same time eager to make Barbara happier, less sulky and more outgoing. Her problem was solved when Miss Marsh, the ballet instructor, moved out of the neighbourhood. Barbara continued to bounce around the apartment, doing leaps and turns on her own, but her dream of becoming another Cyd Charisse was squashed. Not, however, her determination to be recognised, famous. In her mind, her vision of her future set her apart from her Flatbush peers.

  There were children of all ages in Vandemeer Estates, in the backyards and on the streets it commanded. In good weather mothers would wheel baby carriages up and down the block, stop and talk with one another. Boys played stickball in the street and drivers would watch out for them and park their vehicles in places where they wouldn’t block the game. Toddlers ran around on the small patches of lawn, an older family member watching from the viewpoint of a folding chair or stretched out on the grass beneath the warm fingers of the sun. Games of hide and seek were played where the kids would conceal themselves in the narrow crevices between the buildings, or in the labyrinth of alleys behind them. Girls played house with their dolls. Sometimes the neighbourhood youngsters put on talent shows. Believing these neighbourhood productions beneath her, Barbara preferred not to be included.

  Newkirk Street had trees and in summer the pavements were dappled with shade. An ice-cream truck came by in the afternoon. A white uniformed driver sold dixie cups with pictures of movie stars on the inside cover. Kids collected and traded them and they would lick the ice cream off to see who they got – Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Tyrone Power, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable. Barbara bought pink, sweet-flavoured bubble gum for a penny at the corner market, chewed it and stored it nightly in a glass of cold water until its elasticity was gone. Chewing gum relaxed her, made her feel less tense.

  Despite all the young people in the building and in the neighbourhood, she had trouble making friends. Louis Kind had told her she was ugly so often that she felt ugly deep inside. She had the habit of trying to outstare kids when they turned to look at her, or she would make faces. ‘When I was nine years old, sometimes the girls would gang up on me in my neighbourhood, make a circle around me, make fun of me, and I’d start to cry,’ she remembers. They called her ‘Crazy Barbara’ and ‘Big Beak’. Barbara attributed these attacks to the shape and length of her nose. However in Flatbush with such a high percentage of Jewish, Italian, Polish and other ethnic groups who often inherited prominent noses, Barbara’s was not that unique or oversized. The popular nose-bobbing operation that shortened, de-humped and remoulded an ethnic nose into the pert, snub, all-American profile of movie star Doris Day, was seldom performed before a girl was sixteen. In her pre-teens, Barbara’s nose was in the ethnic majority and should not have incited the ugly epithets she claims, but she had a commanding, defiant look, too solemn an expression for a child and she was stand-offish. Because her astonishing blue eyes were set close together, her forehead high, and her mouth wide, greater attention was drawn to her nose, perhaps prompting the ridicule she received from the kids on her block.

  The ridicule she suffered cut deeply and, added to Kind’s cruel comments, would mark her for life. Kind – his very name a bitter reminder of his converse nature – became the enemy within her home, the children on the street and in school the enemy outside. She was constantly on guard and adapted an aloof attitude. Her peers at P.S. 89, where she attended grammar school, thought she was conceited and resented her natural intelligence which she could not refrain from displaying. She used words she had learned from the movies or television, corrected other children’s grammar, stopped them if they had a fact wrong, gloated if they did not know an answer to a question. Much more daunting, she perceived herself as ugly, a meeskite, and transferred this impression to others.

  Louis Kind had undermined her self-esteem and Diana had done very little to counter his effect on Barbara. ‘She was critical of me and never believed in me,’ Streisand says of her mother. ‘She used to say, “I never want you to get a swelled head.”’ The youngster was riddled with self-doubt. It did not help that her straight hair was allowed to hang in an unflattering style. Being so thin, her head and hands looked too large for her small frame, a fact that was emphasised by the poor fit of her dresses, which Diana chose to buy large enough for her to grow into and then kept her in until she had outgrown them.

  Barbara’s fear became reality when, in the autumn of 1952, Shelley went off to City College of New York, lived with cousins in the East End and supported himself with the help of a scholarship and a part-time job. She envied his escape from Brooklyn and their unhappy home, but her anger at him grew for ‘deserting’ her. Rosalind, a chubby round-faced child with a happy disposition, commanded most of Diana’s attention. Barbara bitterly resented her half-sister for having a father when she did not. The truth is, she would have welcomed Kind’s paternal interest. A large part of her wanting to succeed had to do with proving to Kind how worthy she was of his admiration. In many families, where there is a frustrated and abusive parent, one child is singled out to be on the receiving end of this abuse. Barbara, with her airs and her trying disposition, was a ready victim for Kind.

  Coinciding with Shelley’s absence, the violent scenes between Louis Kind and Diana accelerated. He had a vicious temper, a cruel tongue and spoke demeaningly to Diana in front of the girls. She was stupid, a leech, unattractive, a nag. His face contorted, his voice threatened. Doors slammed. He would leave the house and not return until early the next morning or, sometimes, several days or a week later. life at the Streisand-Kinds was painful, crushing. To break out, at the age of ten, Barbara would sneak a forbidden cigarette from Kind’s bedside hoard and go up to the rooftop of their building to smoke. There, she slipped into fantasy and became the glamorous star of her dreams.

  Vandemeer Estates was within walking distance of Loew’s King Theater on Flatbush Avenue and on Saturday afternoons her world was brightened. Diana gave her twenty
-five cents for a movie ticket and a Mello-Roll, a vanilla ice-cream confection of which she was fond. Entering Loew’s King was like walking through a celluloid screen into an MGM spectacular. Built during the days of opulent movie palaces, it had a vaulted French Baroque grand lobby with brightly painted murals of exotic foreign vistas, mystical castles and lushly costumed men and women. There were mock gas lamps attached to the walls, a magnificent crystal chandelier and brightly polished brass railings on the sides of the massive, curved marble staircase, a deep red carpet down its centre.

  At the back of the lobby was the refreshment stand with its tempting smell of buttered popcorn and spicy frankfurters impaled on a revolving grill and which, as they were trayf (non-kosher), she was forbidden to eat. The auditorium seated close to 3,800, within was a gigantic four-manual pipe organ referred to as the ‘Wonder Morton’ after its creator that filled the house with heavenly music when the lights were up. Barbara’s refuge was the balcony nearest the starlit ceiling. She fell in love with Marlon Brando when at thirteen she saw him woo Jean Simmons in Guys and Dolls. As soon as The End flashed on the screen, she rushed to the bathroom so that she would not be told to leave. When she knew the film was being shown again, she left the rest room and made her way in the dark to an available empty seat to see her idol again, imagining herself in Jean Simmons’s place as the recipient of his affection.