Streisand: Her Life (9 page)

The legal papers reveal bitter domestic discord. Mrs. Kind estimated that her problems with her husband had begun in January 1953 and continued thereafter “throughout their married life.” Louis Kind, she charged, had “engaged upon a general course of cruel and inhuman treatment” of her, “consisting of many acts of persecution, abuse and neglect arising out of his unkind, harsh, unreasonable, capricious, inconsiderate, niggardly, nagging and vicious treatment.”

Further, Diana alleged, her husband stayed away from their home “most of the day and night without proper excuse or purpose, either business or personal,” and returned home “in the late hours of the night or the early hours of the morning,” leaving her “at home alone, against her protests, and on some occasions staying away from the home... for weeks at a time.”

According to Diana, Kind associated “openly with numerous women,” and his “open and scandalous flaunting of his affairs with them” caused her great embarrassment. He used “vile, obscene and scurrilous language,” and both threatened to and did physically assault her.

Kind denied all of Diana’s allegations and threw a few of his own back at her. He accused her of “constantly resorting to the use of vile and obscene language [and] nagging and embarrassing [him] both at home and in the presence of friends and relatives; failing to prepare meals for him when he returned from work and to provide for his welfare; flying into fits of rage without provocation and hurling objects at him and striking him on repeated occasions; and accusing [him] of consorting with other women, all of which accusations were malicious and untrue and known to [her] to be false when made.”

His absences, Kind explained, were caused by his need to work nights and weekends in order to meet Diana’s “ever increasing demands for money.” He concluded that he was unable to work because of illness and had only a small income from Social Security and rents from the rooming houses he owned. He was also responsible for $25 a week in child support from his previous marriage, he said, and could not afford to pay Diana alimony.

His health, Kind claimed, began to deteriorate in April 1956 when he “became ill, suffered severe and rapid loss of weight, pain, dizziness, nausea and sleeplessness.” Justice Louis L. Friedman, after hearing the in-person testimony of both combatants in the stately oak-paneled Brooklyn Court House, granted Diana a decree of separation on May 2, 1957, and he was harsh in his assessment of Louis Kind. Barbara’s stepfather, the judge believed, was “a pathological liar. I think he testifies in any manner which he thinks will best fit his needs on the particular occasion, and that he would say anything if he felt that it would aid his cause.”

Friedman doubted Kind’s claims of illness: “I think a great deal of it was put on. I think he is a malingerer... and I think [he] gave up his employment deliberately for the purpose of stopping his wife from getting any support. I think that [he] has other sources of income which are not disclosed, and apparently he is engaged in several different undertakings.” The judge ordered Kind to pay Diana $50 a week in alimony, but he also gave him the opportunity to be examined by a court-appointed doctor. When the doctor confirmed that Kind’s health was indeed poor, Justice Friedman reduced the alimony award to $37 a week.

That wasn’t very much, and once again Diana found herself a single mother struggling to make ends meet. Several of her neighbors were struck by just how careful she had to be with money now. Marvin Stein, a young man who worked in a produce store across the street, recalled that Mrs. Kind “used to come in with Barbara and her baby sister. Barbara was very thin, and the sister was very chubby. Barbara’s mother was an
extremely
careful shopper. She would look at the prices, and if an item went up two or three cents she’d stay away from it. Sometimes she would stand there for what seemed like an eternity before deciding to buy one or two items. I can’t tell you how cautious she was.”

Esther Waxman, who lived in the building adjacent to Diana’s in the Vanderveer complex, recalled that “Diana used to come into the laundry room in my building and try to sell undergarments—girdles and stockings and things like that—to supplement her income. She’d buy them at a wholesale house and try to resell them and make a little profit. I never bought anything from her, and I don’t think many other people did either.”

Sometimes things got so bad that Diana told Barbara to go out into the lobby of their building and steal the bottles of milk left by the milkman outside their neighbors’ doors.

I
F LOUIS KIND’S
permanent departure left Diana alone to struggle over a price increase of a few cents at the supermarket, at the same time it lifted a great weight from Barbara. No longer did she have to cower in fear as her stepfather hit her sobbing mother; no longer was he there to disparage her. Still, the financial problems hit Barbara hard too. The family had never had much money for anything but the barest necessities; now there was even less. Again they were left out of the country’s economic boom that saw a television in nearly every home and a huge tail-finned car in many garages. “I was so jealous of the rich Jewish girls in my school.” Barbra said, “who always wore the latest clothes and had money to spend on whatever they wanted.”

With Diana working, Barbara would pick Roslyn up from school and baby-sit for her until her mother got home. She would rather have baby-sat for the Choys and made some money at it, but she loved caring for her baby sister. She had a strong maternal instinct, and the chubby, bubbly little girl who shared the living room sofa with her at night brought some real joy into her life. Barbara played with her, sang to her, tickled her back with her long red fingernails, and bribed her to stay quiet with coffee ice cream.

Whenever Barbara sang, Roslyn wanted to sing, too. Whenever Barbara danced, she wanted to dance. “She taught me how to harmonize on ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat,
’”
Roslyn recalled, “and she taught me how to do the cha-cha, mambo, and lindy.” After she saw Barbara imitate a commercial in front of the bathroom mirror, she would race her into the bathroom every day and do a few of her own. But Roslyn found there was also something about
her
that fascinated Barbara: her face. “She would take pictures of my profile. I was the fat but pretty one.... Mama made me eat to compensate for Barbara’s skinniness.”

With no father figure in her life, and with her mother out working, Barbara had far more freedom than most children her age. “I didn’t have any boundaries. I didn’t have much discipline. We never ate together as a family; we never had time for a meal. I was a child of the streets. We played in the gutter, and when a car came, we moved out of the street. It was a tough childhood.... I was kind of wild.” Once Diana ordered Barbara, stricken with chicken pox, to stay in bed. “When she left, I just climbed out the window and went to play with my friends.” A younger neighbor, Cee Cee Cohen, recalled that Barbara’s fire escape came in handy at other times, too. “After school Barbara would have sock hops in her apartment. Kids would come over and listen to records and dance. They would time it so they’d be gone before Barbara’s mother got home. But sometimes they had to scramble out the window and down the fire escape so she wouldn’t catch them.”

T
HE FAMILY’S TIGHT
finances left Barbara with few playthings. While the other kids in the neighborhood spent hours on their bicycles, Barbara had to use whatever she could for outdoor amusement. “Someone gave me a pair of wooden shoes,” she recalled, “and I schlepped all over East Flatbush in them. I ended up with blisters on the backs of my feet and bunions on my toes.”

Indoors, while her girlfriends served tea to their doll families, Barbara contented herself with games of her own devising. Several times a week she would go over to a friend’s house after school to play “Crack the Safe”: Barbara would pick a number from the telephone book, dial it, and pretend she was the operator announcing a long-distance call. Then she would put on a different voice and say that she was calling from a radio program in Chicago.

“You have been selected to play ‘Crack the Safe
’
!” she’d proclaim. “All you have to do is identify this tune, and you’ll win one hundred dollars! But first, we have to break for a commercial.”

She would then affect a third voice to do an entire commercial for laundry detergent. Returning to the “program,” her friend would place a record on the Victrola, and Barbara would give the “contestant” thirty seconds to identify the song. “Congratulations!” she’d chirp when the answer was correct. “You’re one hundred dollars richer.” She would then put her friend on the phone to get the address of the “winner.” Finally the two conspirators, laughing merrily, would mail their unsuspecting victim one hundred dollars in Monopoly money.

On the weekends, with her mother home from work, Barbara had a less carefree time o
f
it. Cee Cee Cohen felt that “if there was any one person who could get to Barbara, it was her mother. Everything else could roll off her back. But Mrs. Kind would embarrass Barbara in front of the other kids. She’d come down to where we were singing on the stoop and yell at her for not doing things around the house she was supposed to have done, that sort of thing. Barbara and her mother were always fighting with each other.”

For escape now, more and more, Barbara would go to the movies. Next door to Erasmus Hall there was a theater that usually played Italian films. “I’d come out of school and go directly to this theater,” Barbra said. “I never knew much about the films or who made them, and I didn’t understand the language, but Italian films enchanted me. As a matter of fact, one of my most significant experiences was when I saw Eleonora Duse in an Italian film made in 19
1
6. On every level it was extraordinary.”

She liked American movies too. On Saturday she’d attend matinees at the Loews’ Kings Theater on Flatbush Avenue, a cavernous picture palace built in 1928 in a grand melange of Baroque, Art Deco, and Italianate styles dominated by a huge curving stairway with elaborate rococo banisters. “I used to go there because they had the greatest ice cream,” Barbra said. “They had these cones filled with ice cream that was
inside
the cone—there was nothing sticking out on top. Very unusual, I thought, and great. I didn’t care what the movies were, it’s just the ice cream was sensational.”

But the movies, whatever they were, usually enthralled her. That summer she saw
Guys and Dolls
and fell in love with Marlon Brando. “I thought, What a
gorgeous
man!” On film, everything seemed perfect—even Damon Runyan’s world of Broadway low-lifes. The clothes were colorful, the hairdos and makeup flawless, the streets pristine. “Life was so beautiful in the movies,” she recalled. “Handsome men, beautiful women falling in love, and music playing when they’d kiss.” She longed to be Jean Simmons and kiss Marlon Brando.