#ClassicFilmReading: My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand

Hello Gorgeous!

I always like to close out my #classicfilmreading with an epic auto/biography and what better choice this year than the ultimate diva and boss, Barbra Streisand?

This is such a perfect autobiography. It's what every actress should aim to write about her life someday. My Name is Barbara is so thoroughly written in her own voice that you almost feel like you're sitting with her at dinner and she's pulling back the veil on her biggest triumphs and setbacks, her personal life and her career. I almost wish I had listened to the audiobook, which she narrated herself. Maybe in a few years if I want to re-read this, I'll take that route. 

What I loved most, I think, is how Barbra used a half-century of archival materials to round out her life story. It's not enough that we have her own remembrances of how things went, she consults with contemporary reviews to present the full context of how Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly!, The Owl and the Pussycat, What's Up Doc?, Yentl, The Prince of Tides, The Mirror Has Two Faces, etc., were received. 

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She also has remembrances from the actors, producers, directors, and composers she worked with as asides in italics to back up the points she makes. She might have been branded as difficult and bossy, but Barbra carefully shows how her artistic vision was always the priority and how the art mattered the most to her. It was worth it to take risks and swing for the fences, even if they didn't work out with the critics or the public, because she has always been an artist motivated by the art.

I loved reading about how she came to certain choices for her characters and how she hungered to know as much as she could from the directors, cinematographers, writers, composers, and so on and so on, that she worked with. She wasn't content to just read lines on a script, she had to crack each word open and understand its meaning before she could apply it to her characterization. Men do this and they're thorough, women do this and they're too much, which Barbra goes into in depth here. 

In the passages about directing Yentl and The Prince of Tides, she talks about how hard she had to fight to be taken seriously as a director, even though she had decades of expertise behind her. And they both turned out to be critically and commercially acclaimed films, and yet, when it came time for the Oscar nominations, she was nowhere to be found on the list of nominated Best Directors. 

I do enjoy that she didn't sugar coat any of it. It's awesome that she helped crack the glass ceiling, and she's suitably proud, but she does allow us to feel the sting in the moments. And her recollection of presenting the Oscar for Best Director to Kathryn Bigelow in 2010, and how deep down it did sting that it wasn't her being the first, is so utterly human. I'm glad she left it in.

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She talks a lot about how she got the inspiration for characters, for music, for everything she worked on. She shares the clothing that she bought at thrift stores that later inspired costumes, she talks about the fonts she used on album covers, the photos she chose for her albums, flying over landscapes and being inspired to use them when she was directing. It's simply fascinating to be inside her mind as she explains all this. 

I don't much listen to Barbra's albums, but it was fascinating (there's that word again) to learn how she helped rearrange the tunes and decided on the atmosphere she wanted for each recording. How she decided on a theme and picked the songs; and for the accompanying television specials, how she revolutionized the genre and did great thematic programs that weren't the same as other hosted specials of the time.

I could go on forever about Barbra's autobiography, so instead of rehashing everything, I'm just going to recommend that you read it. It's such a great read, and it really cements her status. 

I also love the little asides, the little strokes of self-confidence. She writes at one point that someone asked her how she knew to hold a note so long, and her thought was "Because I want to."

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In terms of her personal life, she lays bare the romances of her life. Her first marriage to Elliot Gould is shared in all the gory details (and what I find refreshing is that the two are still on speaking terms, and that there are several instances where she writes that she consulted Elliot on a point she was writing about and got his side of the story), as is the swoon-worthy love story that led to her second marriage to Jim Brolin (they're still married all these years later, she says, as though she herself doesn't perfectly remember the year 1998...). He sounds like an absolute gem of a man. 

Her relationship with Pierre Elliot Trudeau is shared, which, as a Canadian, I found fascinating. We don't really do politicians as celebrities here like other places do, but Trudeau, and later, his son, Justin, are really the exceptions. It was interesting to read about a side of his lionized man that I didn't know much about. There's also much about Barbra's personal politics and how politically motivated she's become, which is refreshing, and how socially conscious she continues to be.

Barbra's autobiography is utterly refreshing. What a life she's led, and she never loses sight of it. In a book filled with quips that you want to save, there's a line in the epilogue that gets me: "Fame is a hollow trophy. No matter who you are, you can only eat one pastrami sandwich at a time."

Oh! This was missing one thing: I wanted a detailed description of the mall in her basement, descriptions of all the stores, and what led her to creating it. Icon.

And because you all know how much I love to share the tea about actors in these books, here's everything that Barbra spilled: 

• Warren Beatty hit on her when she was 16 and she didn't realize it at the time.
• Dustin Hoffman was a classmate at the Theatre Studio and when he got cast in an off-Broadway play, it was big news that the janitor had hit it big. 
• When talking about how she had to make herself listen to her first album (TITLE) again as she was writing this, she says she's not someone who enjoys watching/listening to her work over again, "like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, or Ronald Reagan in real life." SHADE!
• At her show at the Cocoanut Grove (in 1963, I think?) she does all the songs and then announces she's out of them. Tony Curtis yells to her: "Just start at the top and do it all over again!" 
• On Judy Garland: "Legendary... soulful... divine."
• Judy again: she once told Barbra not to "let them do to you what they did to me." Barbra never asked her to clarify the statement, but we can all infer.
• Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton took her out to dinner after seeing her in Funny Girl, and in the bathroom, she met Natalie Wood. The trio of ladies then gossiped and Barbra got Natalie onto her lip gloss.
• Henry Fonda once wrote her a lovely letter praising her talent and said that he wanted his children, Jane and Peter, to see her perform and learn from her. Later in the book, Barbra writes down a bunch of films she turned down. Three went to Jane Fonda, and one won her the Oscar (Klute).
• Frank Sinatra also wrote her a lovely letter, thought she was a great performer, and once told her in person that if anyone ever bothered her to call him and he'd fix it.
• She and Omar Shariff, her co-star in the film version of Funny Girl, didn't hit it off well but grew closer during filming. It got to the point that Omar felt she was one of the ones that got away.
• Gregory Peck's house was for sale and she went to look around. She opened his audio closet and found all of her records up to that point, but her name was spelled wrong on the label. She crossed out the first 'a' in Barbara.
• Katharine Hepburn sent her a lovely telegram after their joint Oscar wins, in which she wrote that she wanted to absorb some of her talents through osmosis. Barbra wrote back that it was tough enough that she was acting alongside Katharine, did she have to start singing too? (Katharine was about to star on Broadway in 'Coco'.)
• Didn't care for Gene Kelly, who directed her in Hello, Dolly! because he didn't seem to care about the production or direction as much as she did.
• Walter Matthau was openly hostile to her on the set of Hello, Dolly! because he'd been in the business so long and who was she (a nobody) to question the director. Also, she treated his pal, Sydney Chaplin, poorly on the Broadway set of 'Funny Girl' according to Chaplin, so Matthau felt the need to (incorrectly) treat her like shit.
• Marlon Brando and Barbra shared mutual admiration. At one point, at a party, someone came up to her and said that Brando had told them that if they ever see Barbra, to "tell that bitch she's great." They had a strong friendship until the day he died.
• Sophia Loren sent her baby blue booties when she announced that her son Jason had been born.
• Jack Nicholson was in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever but Barbra didn't notice him, he didn't make an impression. Then she saw him in Easy Rider, which came out around the same time and couldn't believe it was the same guy. To be clear: she thought he was a great actor, just that he didn't get a chance to show it on the set of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
• Cary Grant's advice to Ryan O'Neal as they were starting to film What's Up, Doc? and O'Neal expressed nervousness over making a screwball comedy was to get a tan so he wouldn't have to spend any time in the makeup chair and to invest in silk underpants.
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis tried to persuade her to write her autobiography in the '80s when she was an editor at Doubleday, but Barbra turned her down. She was only in her 40s at the time and didn't feel she had enough to write about yet, but respected Jackie greatly.
• Clint Eastwood once told her she had great ears.