Streisand: Her Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

runs.”
     
When Barbara returned home at the end of August, she hadn’t plumped up much. “The food was so awful at this camp that was supposed to make me healthy that I used to throw it under the table just to get it off my plate.”
     

     
B ARBRA HAS RECALLED that her desire to be an actress took form when she was about five, just around the time that she began to watch television every afternoon with Irving Borokow. She adored the flickery images dancing from that tiny set through the magnifying screen, loved the laughter and the emotion—the escape—provided by old Hollywood B movies, a staple of the afternoon television schedule in the late 1940s. But the respite they provided from her drab, love-starved family life lasted only the few hours a week she spent with the Borokows. To a little girl who felt ugly and unwanted, that wasn’t enough. She would have to create her own fantasy world, and she did. As her mother put it, “Once she saw television, that was the end of it. She wanted to become those people on the screen.”
     
She loved to sing—“Barbara started to sing as early as she could talk,” Diana said—and the confines of the Philip Arms became her stage. “I used to sing in the hallways on Pulaski Street. The building had great halls with these brass railings, and the ceilings were very high and there was this echo.” She would sit on the stairway steps inside the building and sing songs she’d heard on the radio. Some of the neighbors were annoyed, others delighted.
     
But Barbara soon got a taste of a real audience’s approval. In the spring of 1949, having just turned seven, she made “my first public singing appearance” in the yeshiva’s PTA assembly program. “She was awfully excited about it,” her mother recalled, “and she practiced like a demon. But when the day came, she came down with a bad cold. I put her to bed and told her to forget about the PTA, but she got angry and wouldn’t hear of it. She leaped out of bed, put on her new dress, which hung on her like a rag because she was so skinny, and went to the meeting. Cold or no cold, she sang. She always had that kind of determination. I had to put her back to bed when we got home, but she’d had her moment of glory and was satisfied.”
     
A photograph of the event shows, as Barbra put it, a “weird-looking kid standing pigeon-toed and very skinny with bows in her hair.” But she looks pleased at the delighted applause being led by the school principal, Miss Weisselburg.
     
When Barbara ran off the stage, she asked breathlessly, “Ma, what did you think?”
     
“Your arms are too thin,” Diana replied.
     
“I think I started to eat then,” Barbra recalled—but still not enough to suitably fill her out. That summer of 1949 her mother sent her to a Hebrew health camp, and Barbara hated it as much as she had the one before. But she would h a rbor a particularly bad memory of this one, for it was here that she first met her future stepfather, Louis Kind.
     
Diana was now forty, and she wanted to marry again before it was too late. Still pretty, pert, and pliant, if increasingly plump, she had had no trouble finding dates when she emerged from her prolonged period of mourning. Barbara hated every one of these men. One was a butcher, and she recalled seeing him kiss Diana. “I thought he was killing her. Except that she was laughing.” Barbara would scream and cry whenever a suitor came to pick Diana up for an evening out, certain that her mother would never come back. Always, eventually, the men stopped coming around. Louis Kind continued.
     
Tall, good-looking, a sharp dresser, and sixteen years older than Diana, Kind was separated from his wife, Ida, and his three children. Born in 1893, he had come to America from Russia in 1898 with his Orthodox Jewish parents, a brother, and a sister. His father bought a pants factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and Kind learned men’s tailoring at a young age.