Barbra Streisand by Neal Gabler

Author:Neal Gabler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

7

Shaygetz

IT WAS about wish fulfillment—not only Barbra Streisand’s, but her fans’. That had always been the transaction between stars on the screen and the audience in their seats. It had been Streisand’s own transaction when she was a girl and watched Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. But the transaction between Streisand and her fans was different from that between most stars and their fans. Most other stars were likely to have dazzled in life as well as on-screen. Typically, they were attractive, confident, charismatic, doted on—which are among the reasons they could even think of themselves as becoming stars in the first place. Their fans might have projected dreams upon them, but those fans could not possibly or realistically have hoped to be them. Moreover, fans assumed that their favorite stars’ lives were as gilded and glamorous when those stars were offscreen as their personas were. They had everything one could possibly want—looks, fame, respect, power, money, ease, and, not least of all, love.

None of this was necessarily true for Streisand. Because she seemed as if she were one of their own, an ordinary-looking girl with extraordinary talent, fans couldn’t assume that her life was charmed. This applied to romance as well. Other stars dated and married beautiful or handsome fellow stars. That was in the Darwinian order of things, and it constituted a large part of the fans’ vicarious and voyeuristic pleasure, so much so that movie magazines like Photoplay largely existed to purvey that order. But Streisand? Her journey to stardom had been an anomaly, and the hurdles to becoming a star in life seemed equally daunting. That was all the more reason her fans had a stake in whether she could find romantic success as well as stardom—because her success would be their success, her proof, their proof. Streisand herself, of course, had a stake in making her life replicate the stage and screen. This was wish fulfillment of a much different order than usual. This was wish fulfillment that sought to overturn the old Darwinian state of affairs.

Streisand had always harbored doubts as large as her dreams, not least of which were doubts about her romantic future. “Will I ever get a guy? Do you think anyone could love this face?” she would ask her roommate Elaine Sobel when Streisand came to Manhattan.1 Another friend told Streisand biographer Anne Edwards, “Barbra’s greatest tragedy and her greatest blessing is that she was not born beautiful. That is something with which she may never come to terms.”2 When it came to sex, Streisand admitted she was conflicted because in her family, by which she meant her mother, “sex was taboo.” You didn’t even hold hands with a boy, which, she said, forced her to “develop a fantasy life.” And it forced her to think of sex and love as unitary.3 It took her a while to shed that idea. By one account, she had her sexual initiation with a fellow student at the Theatre Studio, a short, good-looking young man named Roy Scott who had a reputation as a womanizer.

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