Streisand: Her Life Read Online Free PDF

He worked most of his life as a piece sewer in the garment industry, and later owned several rooming houses, first in Manhattan and then in Brooklyn, the rents from which provided his primary source of income.
     
He was all charm while he courted the widow Streisand. She recalled that “he came with nice ideas and little gifts,” and he seemed well-nigh perfect as a suitor; with his Old World manners and background in the garment trade, he got along well with Diana’s father. Most importantly, he told Diana he liked children. Indeed, his son, Merwyn, remembered his father as a man who was “very gentle with children. Family was of primary importance to him. He wasn’t nearly the disciplinarian my mother was.” When Diana told him she planned to visit Barbara at camp, Kind asked if he could come along. Diana was delighted.
     
Barbara wasn’t. She knew that for this man to accompany her mother on a visit meant that things were serious between them, and the thought of her mother remarrying horrified her. No man could take the place of her father! She barely looked at Kind when her mother introduced him, and she remained sullen during the entire visit. When the couple rose to leave, Barbara became hysterical and screamed, “ You’re not leaving here without me! I’m not staying here any longer!” Diana tried to soothe her, but finally she had no choice but to pack her daughter’s things and bundle her into the car. On the trip back to Brooklyn, the three of them sat in grim, torpid silence. According to Barbra, Louis Kind “hated me ever since. I must have been pretty obnoxious.”
     
Whenever Kind called for Diana at Pulaski Street, he recalled, “I would wait for her in the living room, and then when she was ready to go out with me, I would take her arm and lead her to the door. Barbara, sensing that her life was to undergo some terrifying change, would hold on to her mother’s skirts, pulling her back, fearful that this strange man was taking her mother away from her. ‘Don’t go, Mommy, stay with m e,’ she would plead.”
     
Kind tried to win Barbara over by bringing her a doll, the first real one she had ever had. “It was the kind that peed in its pants,” she recollected. “You had to feed it with a little bottle and then just watch it—go.” Perhaps portentously, Barbara played with the doll for only a short time before its head fell off.
     
Barbara’s vague hopes that somehow Lou Kind would go away faded as he continued his courtship of her mother. But when Diana made clear that she wanted him to marry her, Kind resisted. He’d already had one failed marriage—his divorce had just recently become final—and he didn’t relish taking on the responsibility of a wife and two youngsters at age fifty-six.
     
Even when Diana told him late in April of 1950 that she was expecting his baby, he wouldn’t marry her, and she clearly faced a mortifying predicament. She kept her condition secret as long as she could, but when that was no longer possible, her worst fear came to pass: her deeply religious father demanded that she leave his house.
     
In June, with Louis Kind’s refusal to marry her ringing in her ears, Diana moved herself and the children to a one-bedroom apartment at 3102 Newkirk Avenue, on the corner of Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush. The building was part of the Vanderveer Estates, a recently built complex of monolithic six-story cinder-block-and-steel structures in a middle-class neighborhood. The buildings had scant charm, but they were new and clean and the rents were affordable. Diana’s apartment cost her $105 a month.
     
Barbara, frightened of change and devastated at having to leave the Borokows, awoke after the first night in the new apartment with a clicking in her ears. When she told her mother about the noise, Diana told her, “Well, sleep on a hot-water bottle,” and never asked her about it again. “From that day,” Barbra recalled, “I led a whole secret life.