Streisand: Her Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

Something was wrong with me—I had these clicks in my ears.”
     
The stress of her situation threatened to undo Diana. She dreaded the embarrassment of having a baby out of wedlock. Her job didn’t pay very well, and she couldn’t afford to furnish the apartment with anything but the barest necessities. She didn’t have the money to send Barbara to yeshiva any longer, but Public School 89 was directly across the street from the new apartment, so Barbara could enroll there as a fourth grader in September. But what on earth would Diana do when the baby came in January and all those expenses began?
     
Finally, on Saturday, December 23, 1950, Louis Kind did the right thing and married Diana Streisand. They drove to New Jersey, where they were pronounced husband and wife by a justice of the peace. Two and a half weeks later, on January 9, 1951, their daughter Rosalind (later Roslyn) was born.
     
Now Barbara’s unhappiness, her sense of alienation, worsened. There was a baby in the house to take up all of her mother’s attention and absorb all of her stepfather’s love. Kind doted on his infant daughter. According to his son Merwyn, “he thought Rozzie was the beginning and the end of all baby girls. Perhaps because she was born when he was at a later age, he lavished all his attention on her. His feelings for her were huge. He thought she was the most beautiful, the brightest, the smartest baby in the world.” Still, he was quite happy to let his wife do all the parenting. According to Diana, “He was a strange man who didn’t know too much about children. He didn’t know how to play with them.”
     
If Diana had imagined that marrying Louis Kind would improve her family’s living conditions, she soon learned she’d been wrong. Kind professed not to have enough money for them to move to a larger apartment, and the sleeping arrangements settled pretty much the way they had on Pulaski Street, with B a rbara on the living room couch and Sheldon on a cot in the dining room.
     
Louis Kind came to abhor Barbara. He found her braying, bratty, maddening, and unpleasant to look at. Years later she would bitterly recall that “I don’t think I had a conversation with this man. I don’t think this man asked me how I was in the seven years we lived together.” That, as it turned out, was the least of it.
     
Maxine Eddleson, a neighbor Barbara’s age who befriended her shortly after she moved to Newkirk Avenue, recalled that Lou Kind “was very nasty to Barbara. She seemed to try so hard to please him. He was so loving, kind, and sweet to everyone else, but he was verbally abusive to Barbara. He would yell at her and say mean things to her and criticize her clothes in front of her friends.”
     
Despite Kind’s mistreatment of her, and her resentment at what she saw as his usurpation of her real father’s memory (she refused to change her last name to his), Barbara so desperately wanted to be seen as “normal” that she pretended Kind was her real father. “When I asked her why he had a different last name she replied, ‘Oh, he uses that name for business, ’” Maxine recalled. “She tried to hide that he was her stepfather. It wasn’t until we were teenagers that she said anything about her real father.”
     

     
S HE FELT LIKE a victim. Why did her father have to die? “I always felt there was a gaping hole somewhere,” she said, “something missing.” She would lie awake at night and imagine that she was an alien from the planet Mars. She thought of herself as chosen, somehow special: “I could feel people’s minds. I could see the truth.”
     
She became totally self-absorbed. As her mother put it, “Barbara was a very complex child. She always saw everything depending on how it affected her. She bottled up everything inside her. Perhaps if she could have voiced to me how she was feeling, things might have been easier, but she didn’t.”
     
But whenever Barbara tried to do that, it seemed