"My Name Is Barbra" by Barbra Streisand (2023)

 

Streisand vibrates on her own frequency and to read her own life story as told in her own words comes  still as surprise (even though I followed her for decades and enjoyed her work forever) - for the start, her attention to details is so obsessive that it often comes as exasperating. This might work well on creating album covers or movie scenes and such, but when it comes to storytelling, it leaves you as a reader in a bit of confusion - does it really matter was the price for the cinema ticket back in the day $ 1.89 or $ 1.98? She is describing her teenage years and zooms into such odd little informations that it eventually distracts from the big picture. But than you come at the chapter where she describes how "Funny Girl" was created and you simply have to stop in awe and say to yourself "This is Streisand herself describing how Funny Girl was made". 

The book itself is huge - my hard cover counts almost 1 000 pages and at the moment I am on page 443 so there is still a lot to go - but my initial impression is that this is strictly for fans: it is too detailed for casual readers who might not be interested in every little technical detail of camera, lightning and concert settings from 1968. The sheer size of the story is occasionally exhausting and I find myself wandering away and losing focus (than again, it might be because I am terribly sick with cold) but it feels as this might be book to return later and perhaps enjoy reading simply a random chapter. 

Some observations:

We all know that people were not nice to her in the beginning, in fact, it is stuff of the legends now. But Streisand herself did not forget and she names every agent, every producer, every director who rejected, abused or laughed at her. You would think that after all that success she would simply leave it behind, but she is not that kind of person - although she does not linger too much on it, she wants you to know that she never forgot. 

When success finally came, it was not given: she worked hard for it. I just realised that her legendary TV specials were filmed at the same time when she performed 8 shows a week in "Funny Girl" and than would go to TV studio and film TV shows after midnight. And made it look so sensational like she is enjoying herself and every minute of it. 

Streisand might be a strong personality and she was certainly always aware that her movies were built around her but she also needed a strong collaborators. She describes filming of "On a clear day you can see forever" and how it distracted her to see the fear in the eyes of one of her co-actors. 

For all her talk about acting, Lee Strasberg and "the method", she is still first and foremost a musical comedienne who happened to break into movies. I don't have impression that she takes her music talent seriously as much as she thinks of herself as Sarah Bernhardt reincarnated. 

I am not even halfway yet, so there is more to come. 

25/01

I have finished the book last night. It started very exciting but at 966 pages its definitely too long & detailed and I could not help but think that a proper editor would probably cut this brick in half and simply eliminate all the maddening details. My impression is that publishers were too excited to get a book out of her and would not dare to edit anything in case she changes her mind. But this is essentially who Streisand is - an extremely fussy, fastidious artist who needs the excitement of constantly pushing herself and her collaborators into over-thinking, over-analysing and second-guessing until some agreement is finalised. It is strange why she functions like this, since she has constantly been mega-successful trough decades, its almost as she don't understand that work can be done spontaneously and joyously. I found an article where Frank Pierson (the director of "A Star Is Born") actually tells her: "All you have to do is offer to sing and they'll fall all over you to do a picture. Why are you trying to panic yourself this way?"

Even though I am a lifelong fan of her music, her movies were too sporadic to take her seriously as an actress. After reading this book its obvious that she did her best movie work while she was under legal obligations to producer Ray Stark who twisted her arm into doing "Funny Girl", "The Owl and the Pussycat", "The Way We Were" and "Funny Lady" - once she was free from the contract, her movies became more laboured and extremely rare. And what really strikes me interesting again and again is how little she thinks of her music talent (it comes too easily to her so she does not analyse it at all) but goes on and on about her movies to the point of coming across as overbearing: she writes not one but three chapters about "Yentl" and at the end I just had to skip this part. But that is essentially who she is. 

There was one interesting moment when I had the feeling that she really opened her heart. She mentions a passionate love affair with one of her collaborators and admits that it eventually fizzled away. "Although there were moments, especially when the jacaranda trees were in bloom again, when I would be reminded of Peter and that singular summer." 

Another eye-opening thought was that even someone so enormously successful as Streisand can be blocked and prevented when it comes to creating a new work. There were enormous obstacles thrown at her almost each time she wanted to do another movie or album project, to the point where one can almost see her crying out in frustration: "I had been with Columbia for twenty-three years. I had made twenty-three albums (and ten soundtrack or compilation albums) for them. And now, after five number 1 albums and seven Grammy awards and millions of dollars in record sales, I basically had to sell myself again. It was actually kind of humiliating."  Towards the end of the book you get the impression that she is too exhausted and heartbroken over so many cancelled projects, that she probably won't work in the movies again. It would really be sad if the new generations will know her only from something as "Meet the Fockers".