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Babs From Brooklyn

Perhaps it’s time for an intervention. After a lifetime of feelings ranging from indifference to outright loathing, I’ve decided that I was all wrong about Barbra Streisand. I have, at this late stage of life, become a fan.

This troubles friends and family. Has a space alien sucked my brain from my head? What has happened to change my feelings about this singer and actor I professed to despise? And if I’ve changed about Barbra Streisand, can a switcheroo on Neil Diamond be far behind?

My friends are so worried, but before they call the white coats to take me away, let us ponder the sitch.

Why those earlier feelings, I now wonder.

Barbra Streisand at 24 (her lucky number)

I always admired the Voice. Good Lord, she has a gift. That I always acknowledged.

And I had liked some of her films. The Way We Were set me sniffling in the darkness of the theater. And I thought she did a beautiful job directing and acting in Yentl and The Prince of Tides.

So again — why did I tell everyone I couldn’t stand her?

Maybe it was the song choices she made and the over-the-top show-biz posturing whenever I saw her perform.

Again I wonder: why those feelings?

I was raised on musical comedy. As a kid, my parents took me to the theater every two weeks during summers. We saw all of the summer-stock / road-company shows that the theater scene — such as it was in Fort Worth, Texas — could offer.

So I grew up well versed in the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lowe, as well as other Broadway gods. Though I no longer care for musical comedy, that aspect of my upbringing still reverberates through me.

Whenever I would sing around the house, Ex-Wife No. 2 would chime, “Showtunes!”

No matter what I would sing — even “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” or “Masters of War” — it always came out sounding like a show tune.

But after Cream and Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath hit my adolescent turntable, I put away those original-Broadway-cast albums and never looked back.

Streisand came to represent that unsubtle over-the-top stage belting to me.

There was another reason I grew to dislike her. It was that Monster Diva vibe I’d pick up now and then. I’ve always liked my artists humble, falsely or not.

Ex-Wife No. 1 and I had gone to see A Star is Born — which we quickly renamed A Star is Boring — when it hit theaters back in 1976.

I hated the movie as I hated most movies that portrayed the rock’n’roll business. I can’t think of a rock’n’roll movie that got it right until Almost Famous in 2000. Seeing Barbra and Kris Kristofferson as rock stars just didn’t do it for me. Despite the fact that the film was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, I still thought the movie was a festering gob of whale vomit.

The clincher came during the credits. As we watched them roll, Ex-Wife No. 1 seized on the wardrobe credit: “Miss Streisand’s clothes … from her closet.”

My Ex scoffed loud enough to turn the heads of departing theater-goers. Thereafter, whenever we saw Barbra’s picture in the paper or saw her on TV, My Ex would snarl, “Miss Streisand’s clothes … from her closet.”

So why, considering these feelings, did my mind seize on the idea of reading Barbra Streisand’s autobiography.?

When it was published two years ago, I was filled with the sudden and unexplained desire to read it — but for some reason didn’t actually pick it up until two weeks ago. 

Once in my presence I gorged on it — all 970 pages.

I was a glutton for the book, like Henry the Eighth gnawing on a greasy turkey leg.

Streisand’s a great storyteller who propels readers through the narrative … all 970 pages, as I say.

Thousand-page bios or memoirs are more appropriate terrain for books about Josef Stalin or other historic characters.

Click on the cover to order

But Streisand never hits a dull patch in her storytelling. If Plato was right about the unexamined life not being worth living, then Streisand has certainly lived a worthwhile existence.

My Name is Barbra (Viking, $50) examines nearly everything about her life and has successfully turned me around. I am now a fan.

I’ve begun hitting eBay hard for old Streisand vinyl. I’ve rewatched Yentl and am searching my streaming services for the films I’ve missed along the way. (I have no plans to see A Star is Boring again, however.) I need to find The Mirror Has Two Faces. She directed that one too, and co-stars with Jeff Bridges, who has moved into the top position as my favorite actor. (Following the death of the great Gene Hackman.)

Here are some random thoughts about the book:

  • What is it with her mother? No matter what she did, Streisand could not please her mother. To say Ma was stingy with praise is to understate a critical problem in her daughter’s life. I can’t recall her mother ever saying, “Barbra, you got a good voice.” Nothing! Mother might’ve been resentful of her daughter’s extreme talent.
  • The book serves many functions. It’s not just an autobiography, it’s also a manual on Yiddish terms and phrases. I love learning something new.
  • She’s modest. If it’s false modesty, so what? If I could sing like her, it’d be harder than hell to keep my ego in check. In my view, she does.
  • She brings up the “Miss Streisand’s clothes … from her closet” credit. It was the truth, but critics slammed her for the ego-centric feel of it. It hurt her. So now I feel guilty.
  • Fellow dudes: No matter how nice we are to our Beloveds, we will always pale next to James Brolin. Brolin, Streisand Husband No. 2, is one thoughtful and romantic motherfucker. I plan to keep this book handy to scan for romantic ideas.
  • Once, Jim Brolin was in bed with Streisand and in no hurry to sleep. He told her sleep was a waste because he didn’t want to miss a thing. Streisand told her songwriter friend Diane Warren about that and she used Brolin’s line to write “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” a hit for Aerosmith. Brolin deserved a writer’s credit.
  • She loves dogs. She even cloned one.
  • Speaking of Brolins, James’s son Josh Brolin, that wonderful actor (see No Country for Old Men) also writes poetry Who knew? Seems like an interesting guy.
  • We learn a lot about her first marriage, to Elliott Gould (speaking of wonderful actors). It reminds me of Gould’s charisma. If you’ve never seen The Long Goodbye, go watch it right now. Then watch every other movie Elliott Gould has ever made.
  • She and Gould sound like great parents. Jason Gould is a lucky dude.
  • I love her rants about Donald Trump. She’s more eloquent in her disdain than most MSNBC pundits.
  • If she believes in a cause, she generously supports it.
  • Despite her talent and her perceived power, studios sometimes still say no to Streisand projects. She doesn’t always get what she wants, which is a shame because when she does get what she wants — see Yentl, The Prince of Tides, etc. — what she wants is spectacular. Do we need further proof that Hollywood is a sexist town?
  • She loves to eat and loves to talk about food. Reading this book made me hungry.
  • She is a national treasure.

Okay, so maybe that last one is a little corny. Bob Dylan means so much to me and I think of him the same way. We’re lucky to be around when great artists stalk the earth.

And speaking of lucky: I feel blessed that I have lived long enough for these two artists in their mid-eighties to finally record a duet. (To hear Streisand and Dylan sing “The Very Thought of You,” click here.)

I have no problem admitting my errors. I’ve done a 180 on Barbra Streisand and I’m so happy I didn’t take my indifference to the grave. So what if it ain’t rock’n’roll? I have room in my heart for all kinds of music, as long as it’s good.

As my Late Sainted Mother always said, “If we all liked the same thing, it’d be a pretty dull world.”

I can like the Ramones and Perry Como. And I can like Barbara Streisand and Daddy Longlegs.

In fact, Streisand takes us so deep into her world and her artistic choices and her hopes and dreams that I can no longer call her Miss Streisand. Henceforth, she’s my pal.

Meet my buddy, Babs from Brooklyn.

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Be All You Can Be. Read.

Will you look at this beautiful thing? 

I’ve had this poster, framed, in my house for more than a half century. Before the United States Army co-opted the slogan “Be All You Can Be” for its recruiting efforts, that was the slogan of National Library Week, with that one crucial addition — “Be All You Can Be: Read.”

I’ve always taken that saying to heart. When I think of my father, who died when I was 20, I think of him with a book in his hand. He was never without. There was a book on the arm of his chair and one at the breakfast table and one in the formal living room. He always had one on the front seat in case he got stuck waiting in a parking lot or at a long stoplight.

And now: I have become him.

Dear Old Dad, as a young man with a pooch. I’d bet good money that there’s one of those wartime paperbacks in his back pocket.

As the saying goes, “Children learn what they live.” I’m rarely without a book. I start my day with coffee, newspapers (one on paper, two digital), then push back in my tattered leather chair for an hour of quiet, alone and lost inside a book.

This poster by Peter Max was published to celebrate library week in 1969. Max’s work was ubiquitous then. Collectors were paying enormous amounts for his work, but I’m proud to report that I got this beautiful thing for free.

I was a mid-teen that year, transitioning to high school, though it was on familiar turf. I was a student at Indiana University High School in Bloomington, part of a kindergarten- through-Grade- 12 school that had been an experiment managed by the university’s School of Education. Super-secret and newfangled teaching techniques were loosed upon students at the school. In fact, the original team name of the school’s mascot was the Guinea Pigs.

But then, in the early 1960s, the school moved from the heart of the university campus to the fringe. The new school was built with shiny metal roofs and was split into a series of buildings. It always made me think of what a small liberal arts college on Mars would look like.

We also became the Univees. I have no idea what a Univee is,

The University School campus. This picture does not do justice to the striking look of the place, but it was a swell joint to go to school.

Soon, we were no longer so experimental and the university passed us off to the local school system and what we called U-School was phased out.

I was in the last class to graduate, the class of 1972.

The building in the heart of our Martian campus was the library. 

Let us now praise wonderful librarians. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from archivists and librarians over the course of this life. Because of my work, I’m often in the lovely hives of a library.

Whether it’s a towering university library (Indiana boasted for a time of the largest university library west of the Hudson) or a cozy small-town ediface (I thanked the staff of the Cohasset library in Massachusetts in my book Everybody Had an Ocean), I find some of the finest people I’ve known behind the desk, ready to help.

At University High School, we were blessed with two great librarians: Norma Miller was in charge and was assisted by Pamela Brown.

Keep in mind. I was a kid with my hormones on a full, rolling boil. There was a reason I rarely ate in the Commons, but instead spent lunch hour in the library.

I was in love. I ached to be older, to be someone with whom Pamela Brown wanted to spend time, perhaps over a cup of coffee, discussing great literature. Too bad I had not yet learned to tolerate coffee. Too bad — as her courtesy title made clear — that she was already married.

There was a reason all of the boys in my class enjoyed trips to the library.

Norma Miller and Pamela Brown

Mrs Brown was beautiful but also kind and encouraging. (Can’t seem to refer to her coldly as Brown or Pamela Brown. She was Mrs Brown then and always will be.)

One day, not long after the spring semester resumed, I came into the library and she was standing behind the counter, and for once something other than Mrs Brown drew my attention.

“That just came in this morning,” she said, nodding at the poster. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I was speechless, a rare thing for me. We both silently beheld the poster for a while, loving the psychedelic artwork, the image of the Youth following a path set by the Seer. 

The Youth and the Seer … or Master and Grasshopper.

And that slogan. It expressed to me the beauty and splendor of reading, of passing on our legends and tales and knowledge, of learning what it was like to be another.

Not that I was much of a reader then. I’d read a few serious books — let’s say “grown-up books,” since “adult books” has a different meaning —and was pleased with myself for moving past my Hardy Boys obsession from a few years earlier.

Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had affected me deeply, as did A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I read A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Those works of poetry have always stayed with me.

Kurt Vonnegut in the 1940 yearbook from Shortridge High in Indianapolis.

Mrs Brown encouraged me to read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. “He’s from Indiana,” she told me, as a special inducement. I was always on the lookout for great Hoosiers. (I later learned that my great Aunt Inez had known Vonnegut since he was a little boy.)

Slaughterhouse-Five was followed by other suggestions. Somehow Mrs Brown sensed, without us really talking much, that I was on my way to being a reader. From that point, I was gone.

(We didn’t talk much because I was pathologically shy. I was often nervous and tongue-tied in her presence. Still, she spoke to me a lot. Her eyes told me she was aware of my infatuation.)

Mrs Brown at work. Photo by Skip Augustine.

What was important: Mrs Brown recognized the reader gene in me and made sure it was watered and manured to maturity.

I spent most lunches in the library, usually plopping down in an easy chair to read magazines. ’Twas there, in that library, when I read Joan Didion for the first time.

Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, shared a biweekly column called “Points West” in the Saturday Evening Post.

This particular Didion column was about a young woman so desperate to be a movie star that she used her savings to buy a full-page ad in Variety, announcing that she was going to be famous.

Didion drove to the young woman’s house and took her for a ride, then recounted their conversation in her column.

I saw this as a tragedy in the making and a couple years ago, curious about what happened after Didion’s article, looked up the young woman’s screen credits. She had two: Shattered if Your Kid’s on Drugs and Blood Orgy of the She Devils. No idea what happened to her after that.

For once, I turned the tables on Mrs Brown. At the end of lunch hour that day, I took her the copy of the Post with Didion’s article on the wannabe movie star. “You should read this,” I said. “It’s good.”

When I came in the next day, she said, “You were right. That was a great piece.”

Joan Didion

A few years later, I worked at the Saturday Evening Post and loved to steal afternoons in the archive, reading every column (I’m pretty sure) that Didion wrote for the magazine. 

I owe so much to that library — to Mrs Miller and Mrs Brown. A word of encouragement and a simple act of kindness can mean so much to a kid that age. As a teacher, I always wanted to be like Mrs Brown. She set the bar high.

I was one of the last days of the school year and everyone was getting restless to get the crank rolling for summer.

I came into the library and before I was much inside the door, Mrs Brown was standing in front of me.

“We’re getting ready to close up for the summer,” she said. “I thought you’d want to have this.”

What she handed me was folded into a neat rectangle. I didn’t need to open it to know what it was.

My face must’ve flushed. She smiled indulgently. 

She’s probably in her eighties now. I hope she’s still with us — that she’s out there somewhere, still having a good life. I hope she’s still reading, still helping people.

I want her to know that her gift has been hanging on the walls of every one of my homes over the last half century, and that every time I look at it, I’m reminded of her kindness and encouragement.

Thank you, Mrs Brown. You made such a difference in my life.