Streisand: Her Life (7 page)

The following year, Barbara pleaded with her mother to let her audition for Star Time, a school for child performers on Brooklyn’s Church Avenue. Graduates got a chance to appear, with pay, on the television show of the same name, and Barbara was certain the training would turn her into a star. Diana, eyeing that potential income, agreed, and the school accepted Barbara. She first took general classes, then graduated to more advanced instruction. She adored every minute of it, but after four months Diana abruptly pulled her out of the school, saying only that she had decided it was too far away from home. To the devastated Barbara this was just another betrayal by a mother who didn’t believe in her dreams.

What Diana didn’t tell her daughter was that she could no longer afford to pay the tuition because Louis Kind’s financial support of the family had become sporadic. During his increasingly long absences, which Diana explained to friends and family as “business trips,” he was in fact AWOL fro
m
his marriage: Diana had no idea where he was. “He had places to go where he enjoyed doing his own thing away from us,” she said with some delicacy.

Still, Barbara found ways to keep performing. During the summer of 1955, Diana took her and Roslyn for another vacation in upstate New York, this one a week at the Coronet Hotel in Glen Wild. Barbara, focused and competitive, won the Ping-Pong and rowing contests. She also won the talent contest, and afterward two different guests asked her if she would sing at weddings being held the following two weekends—and offered her a small fee to do so. After she exclaimed “Yes!” she whispered to her mother, “Y’ see, Ma, I can make money at this.” At one of the weddings, a piano player from Brooklyn came up to Barbara and Diana and told them that Barbara had such a good voice she should cut a demo record. He told them about a studio where they could make an acetate recording for a few dollars, and he offered to be the accompanist.

Barbara bubbled over with excitement, and Diana murmured some vague acquiescence. Once again, however, Mrs. Kind was preoccupied. Her week in the Catskills would soon be over. Then she would have to return to Brooklyn and face her husband.

T
he late-summer air lay still, hot and heavy as Barbara slept restlessly on the small living room sofa. It was three in the morning, and the light still shone under the closed door of her mother’s bedroom: her stepfather hadn’t come home yet. More and more often now Lou Kind stayed out until the early-morning hours, and Diana later charged in court that he frequently didn’t come home for weeks at a time, leaving his family without a father and without income. Barbara dreaded what would happen when he walked through the door.

The court documents would paint a grim picture of life in apartment 4G. Whenever her husband finally returned home, Diana said, he would flaunt his associations with other women. He would savage her with obscene invective, threaten her, and assault her. Kind countercharged that Diana nagged him, lied about him, flew into unprovoked rages, threw things, and hit him. Their fights grew so loud that they disturbed the neighbors.

One can well imagine the impact all this had on the impressionable thirteen-year-old Barbara. “I had a miserable relationship with my stepfather,” she said. “I was abused.” Kind treated Barbara nearly as badly as he did her mother. When she asked him for fifteen cents for an ice-cream cone as the bell of the Good Humor truck tinkled outside, he replied, “No, you’re not pretty enough.” Whenever he compared Roslyn to Barbara, he called them Beauty and the Beast. As he watched the Friday night fights on television, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts and swigging beer, Barbara was so afraid to obstruct his line of vision that she would crawl along the floor.

Trapped in this cramped, dreary apartment with a man she hated, Barbara blamed no one so much as her mother. “I resented her terribly for letting it happen.” She retreated further and further into her fantasy world of glamour and fame, but reality proved inescapable. As she listened helplessly to the terrible rows between her mother and stepfather, thoughts of her real father would flood her mind, and she found herself gripped with anger at him. “It was like ‘Why did you die and leave me?
’”
she said.
“
‘What did I do wrong? Was I a bad girl or something? Or didn’t you like me?
’”

B
ARBARA’S FIRST DAY
of high school—Monday, September 12, 1955—afforded respite, but Erasmus Hall High School held terrors of its own. She didn’t know what to expect when she boarded the Nostrand Avenue bus outside her building for the ride to the school at Flatbush and Church Avenues, dressed in gingham and lace to project a frilly femininity. When she got there the sheer size of the place overwhelmed her. At P.S. 89 Barbara had been part of a class of 136; at Erasmus the freshman class numbered over 1,300. The sprawling Erasmus Hall campus resembled a university more than a high school, and surely must have inspired awe and trepidation in its wide-eyed freshmen.

Still, the educational standards at Erasmus were top-flight, and from the start Barbara ranked among the school’s academic elite. Her IQ, found to be 124, had made her a part of the Intellectually Gifted Opportunity (IG-OP) program at P.S. 89, and that automatically put her in honors classes in high school. During her first term she applied herself so diligently to her studies that her grade adviser described her as
“
hard-driving.” She scored 92 in English, 90 in Modern History, 98 in Spanish, 90 in General Science, 96 in Elementary Algebra, and 95 in Freshman Chorus. Her 93. 5 average put her in the top 3 percent of the class.

She might have become “Miss Erasmus,” but she wasn’t a joiner; most of her classmates thought of her as “a loner, aloof.” One classmate, Diane Hirschfeld, recalled that after lunch “everyone wou
l
d stand around in groups and kind of chat until the bell rang for us to go back in, and Barbara was always standing off to one side, alone. The strongest memory I have of her is her standing and waiting by herself, holding her books.”

“I wouldn’t know who to talk to,” Barbra has said. “I was smart, but the smart kids wearing oxfords and glasses wouldn’t look at me, and the dumb kids I wouldn’t want to associate with. So I was a real outsider.” She made no effort to fit in. While most of the “cool” kids rushed over to Garfield’s Cafeteria across the street for lunch (twenty-five cents minimum), Barbara usually ate in the school lunchroom. While many students joined clubs and stayed after school for extracurricular activities, Barbara worked in Choy’s Chinese restaurant.

Jimmy and Muriel Choy lived one flight up from Barbara, and the moment she first saw them in 1953, they seemed marvelously exotic to the inquisitive eleven-year-old, who asked unending questions about their Chinese heritage and their strange customs and culture. Before long, their warmth and openness had captivated her, and they became, just as the Borokows had been before them, a second family to her. “I loved them,” Barbra said.

She baby-sat for the Choys’ two daughters, five-year-old Debbie and two-year-old Pam, for thirty-five cents an hour. Barbara’s maturity and reliability so impressed Jimmy and Muriel that the following year they asked her to help out on Sundays in their restaurant, Choy’s Chinese on Nostrand Avenue across the street from their building, even though she was only twelve. Barbara had no trouble getting her mother’s permission. Diana, faced with her husband’s financial irresponsibility, figured the sixty-cents an hour Barbara would earn would come in handy.

“Barbara was anxious to learn Chinese words,” Jimmy Choy recalled, “and she learned how to order in Chinese.” Everything about the culture fascinated her. She wore silk kimonos. She put her hair up into a bun and crisscrossed darning needles through it. She let her nails grow an inch long and painted them Dragon Lady red. She also came to love Chinese food, so much more delicious, so much more exciting than the bland kosher food her mother prepared. She thrilled to egg rolls and chow mein and moo shu pork, enjoying every chomp of that verboten meat as much as she had enjoyed yelling out “Christmas!” at yeshiva. Ironically, though, the strongest gastronomic memory Barbra holds of Mrs. Choy was that she made the best spaghetti sauce she ever tasted. It was probably Muriel Choy who turned Barbara into the voracious food addict that she would become: if Barbara had to accept food in place of love, it might as well be delicious.

Every day she grew closer to her surrogate parents, and as she entered puberty, it was Muriel Choy to whom Barbara went with questions about the facts of life. She couldn’t even broach such things to her mother. “In my family, sex was taboo,” she said. “You don’t screw anybody until you get married, you don’t hold hands, you don’t kiss, because you’ll get a disease. It was all so awful.”

But Muriel Choy “used to tell me about things. About love, and life, and sex.” One of the questions Barbara asked was whether, during intercourse, the man was always on top. “Not necessarily,” Muriel replied.

“
W
hat!” Barbara yelped in amazement. But Mrs. Choy would say no more.

She worked at Choy’s Chinese for four years, and she continually spoke of her desire to be an actress. “
W
e all knew of her ambitions,” Muriel recalled. Coincidentally it was the Choys who put Barbara Streisand’s image on celluloid for the first time. At a birthday party for one of his daughters in 1956, Jimmy Choy tried out his new 8mm movie camera. The film shows laughing kids in party hats, a birthday cake festooned with candles—and fourteen-year-old Barbara, dressed in a blue sweater with white fur trim and a dark skirt, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. Every time the camera turns her way, Barbara ducks her head and puts her hands in front of her face.

B
ARBARA STOOD NERVOUSLY
in front of the music department chairman, Cosimo DePietto, and sang with all her heart. She was auditioning in the hope of winning a spot in the Erasmus Choral Club, the elite group of student singers that each year put on memorable Christmas and Easter concerts in the school’s chapel. But Barbara wanted to win DePietto’s approval for another reason as well. Like many of the girls at Erasmus, she had a crush on the dark, handsome Italian with the wavy salt-and-pepper hair. She dreamed of being taken under his personal tutelage; surely he would recognize her talent and help her become a world-class singer.

But when she finished her performance, DePietto seemed unimpressed. Tears burned in her eyes as she left the room, and a few days later he told her what she already knew: that she hadn’t been accepted. DePietto’s official reason was that she couldn’t read music, but years later he recalled that “I never knew her to have any particular or outstanding talent.”

As she would for the rest of her life when faced with rejection, Barbara dug in her heels and persisted. She auditioned again a few months later, with the same disappointing results. Then she came up with a plan.
I
f she couldn’t win DePietto over directly, she reasoned, maybe she could do it in a roundabout way. She reminded her mother of that Catskill pianist who had told them about the studio where she could make a record, and she begged Diana to take her there, using the argument that to cut a record would impress her music teacher and get her into the Choral Club.

Diana finally agreed, Barbra later said, “because
she
wanted to be a singer.” Over Christmas recess, mother and daughter met their pianist friend at the Nola Recording Studio in Manhattan. Diana went first, singing “One Kiss” and an operetta piece in the Jeanette MacDonald style she had loved as a girl. But Barbara was bothered by the fact that after Diana’s first stanza, “the pianist went off and played two minutes of his own thing” before she had a chance to finish the song, and the discs were only three minutes long.

As she got ready to record her songs, Barbara said to the man, “Can you cut down on the part you do? I wanna sing the whole song.”

Barbara first sang “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” then “You’ll Never Know.” She had planned to perform the latter song exactly as written, but on the last few notes she found herself warbling, “You’ll never know if you don’t know... oh... oh... now.”