Streisand: Her Life (8 page)

She astonished herself. “I wondered, Who was that? Where did that come from? It was like the Exorcist, you know?... I guess you could call that inspiration. It’s a nice feeling when that happens. If you’re in the moment, you’re free to just let the music go through you and do what it wants.”

Now she was armed with a professionally recorded disc of her voice, and when she auditioned for Mr. DePietto a third time she played it for him. Perhaps impressed by her enterprise, perhaps worn down, he accepted her into the Choral Club, but not exactly with open arms. A fellow student, Adele Lowinson, recalled that “Barbara had to stand in the very back row where she would not be seen or missed.”

To Barbara’s dismay, DePietto never allowed her to sing a solo. Another Choral Club member, Barry Tantleff, recalled that DePietto “didn’t seem to get along with Barbara very well. He much preferred a girl named Trudy Wallace. She was the one who sang all of the solos at our school functions. That may be why Barbara dropped out of Choral Club after the second year. Maybe she was frustrated because she wasn’t being recognized.”

“I don’t think Barbara ever considered me a rival,” said Trudy Wallace, who now occasionally serves as a cantor at a temple in Manhattan. “We were friends. We’d walk to the bus every day after school, things like that. I think Barbara understood that Mr. DePietto preferred me only because I had a light operatic voice. That was all there was to it.”

Barbara’s friend from P.S. 89, Carolyn Bernstein, remembered watching her during Choral Club performances. “There was always an expression on her face like she was dreaming that someday she would be alone, doing it all by herself.”

O
N APRIL
22, 1956, as her daughter’s fourteenth birthday present, Diana allowed Barbara to go into Manhattan with a friend, Anita Sussman, to see a Sunday matinee performance of
The Diary of Anne Frank,
the true story of a young Jewish girl’s struggle to survive and become her own person in the midst of Nazi terrorism during World War II. Directed by Garson Kanin, the Broadway hit featured Susan Strasberg, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Actors Studio head Lee Strasberg, in the title role.

Barbara had wanted to see
My Fair Lady,
which had just opened to tremendous acclaim, but Diana thought the ticket prices too high. A matinee seat to
The Diary of Anne Frank
, in the last row of the balcony, cost just $1. 89. Besides, Diana reasoned, this play was a serious work. It had won the Pulitzer Prize, and it represented an important piece of Jewish history.

The play left Barbara with deeply conf
l
icted emotions. Although she was thrilled by the drama of the piece, she found the “dreary setting” of the Frank family’s attic hideaway depressing. Her own life was bleak enough; she would have much preferred the fantasy and glamour of a glittery, colorful musical. On the other hand, the similarities between Anne Frank and herself nearly overwhelmed her. “We both loved the show,” Anita Sussman recalled. “We cried when it was over. There were a lot of personal things in the play for Barbara.”
I
ndeed, certain passages resonated for her. Had the author sat down expressly to write a play that would touch Barbara Streisand at fourteen, he could scarcely have come up with anything better than
The Diary of Anne Frank.

Anne is thirteen when the play opens. She is a bright, precocious youngster fascinated by the world outside her family’s suffocating hiding place. She dreams of living a glamorous life; she cuts movie star photos out of magazines and pins them to the wall next to her bed. She tells her father that he’s the only person she loves. When he insists that she must love her mother as well, she replies, “We have nothing in common. She doesn’t understand me. Whenever I try to explain my views on life to her, she asks me if I’m constipated.”

Mrs. Van Daan, whose family is hiding out with the Franks, admonishes Anne, “
W
hy do you have to show off all the time?” She adds that men don’t like girls like Anne; they prefer “domestic girls” who cook and sew. “I’d cut my throat first!” Anne exclaims. “I’d open
m
y veins! I’m going to be remarkable.... I’m going to be a famous dancer or singer... something wonderful.”

Barbara could have been watching herself on that stage, and she knew in her heart that she could have played Anne Frank at least as well as Susan Strasberg.

Back home, she fairly burst with excitement as she described the play to her mother. “I could do that, Mama!” she exclaimed.

“Do what, dear?”

“Play that part—I could play Anne Frank. I
knew
what she was feeling!”

“Yes, dear.”

Barbara quieted down. Just as Mrs. Frank hadn’t understood Anne, Diana didn’t seem to have a clue as to what was important to her. If she was going to make it, she’d have to make it entirely on her own. Barbara went over every detail of the play, mulled over each nuance of the young star’s performance in her mind, as her resolve to become an actress hardened within her. “I want to do so much,” Anne Frank had said near the end of her life. “I want to go on living even after my death. Another birthday has gone by, so now I’m fifteen. Already I know what I want. I have a goal.”

A
FEW DAYS
later Barbara could barely believe her eyes when she saw a notice in the newspaper that the film director Otto Preminger was holding open auditions to select an unknown teenager to play Joan of Are in his forthcoming film of George Bernard Shaw’s play
Saint Joan.
There were parallels between Anne Frank and Joan, the seventeen-year-old French peasant girl who attempted to reclaim the French throne for its rightful heir, Charles VII, in 1429 by disguising herself as a man and leading the Dauphin’s troops to a series of victories over the English. Both Anne and Joan were persecuted because of their religious beliefs, both were still teenagers when they were put to death by their enemies, and both had been elevated to sainthood—Anne’s figurative, Joan’s literal.

Oblivious to the fact that she was far too slight and skinny to be believable as someone who could lead men into battle, Barbara excitedly told her mother about the auditions, to be held the next Saturday at a hotel in Manhattan, and persuaded the skeptical Diana to take her. To prepare she read Shaw’s play, checked biographies of Joan out of the library, and practiced day and night.

When mother and daughter arrived at the appointed time and place, both were shocked: hundreds of girls were milling about, hoping for a chance at movie stardom. A seeming eternity later Barbara read briefly for a panel of three Preminger assistants. Her reading was “excellent,” one of them told her, and he added that she would hear from Mr. Preminger’s representatives within a few weeks if she had been chosen.

Day after day Barbara waited for the call that would tell her she had won the role. It never came. A few weeks later she read in Walter Winchell’s gossip column that Preminger had chosen a conventionally pretty, fair-haired seventeen-year-old Iowa farm girl named Jean Seberg for the part. Heartbroken, Barbara moped around the house like a
farbissener
—a sullen, depressed person—for weeks.

Diana looked upon Seberg’s selection as proof of her fear that Barbara was too much of a
mieskeit
ever to have the career she so craved. The MGM audition had been unsuccessful, and now this. She was afraid that Barbara would be continually rejected and that her spirit would surely be broken. It was now that Diana began actively to discourage Barbara’s theatrical ambitions. Without hope of success, what kind of future would her daughter have? Constant disappointment? Failure? Financial insecurity? The thought made her heart heavy. Maybe Preminger’s rejection would open Barbara’s eyes to the truth. Maybe her daughter would come to her senses.

B
ARBARA COMPLETED THE
second half of her freshman year much as she had the first. She again had an excellent average (92. 5), and her 98 average in Spanish won her an award for the highest freshman average in the language. She didn’t participate in any extracurricular activities, although she did help collect money for the Choral Club’s spring concert. Still, few of her classmates were willing to try to penetrate her insular, inner-directed world. She had some close friends—Susan Dwaorkowitz, Anita Sussman, Barbara Sankel—but it took a long time for her to make new ones. Her second term evaluation by her homeroom teacher neatly summed it up: Barbara, he noted, was “self-centered.”

O
N MAY
14, 1956, Louis Kind removed his belongings—including the television set—from apartment 4G, took a $20-per-week single room at the Saint George Hotel on Clark Street in Brooklyn, and never returned to the Vanderveer Estates. “I thought it was my fault,” Barbra later said. “And so did my mother.” The following September, Diana took Kind to court to win a legal separation and alimony payments, and accused him of abandonment and failure to support her or Roslyn. She was unable to work full-time while caring for Roslyn, she told the court, and she had so little money that the telephone had been disconnected. Oddly, Barbara’s name appears nowhere in the lengthy court documents, although presumably Diana’s need to support two underage children would have bolstered her case for alimony.