I opted to listen to Barbra Streisand’s 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra, rather than reading it in hard copy so that I could hear her inimitable phrasing – the quality that made me a diehard fan of her albums when I started collecting them in 1964, at the age of thirteen. (The first one I owned, a gift from my aunt and uncle, was the original cast album of Funny Girl, which had recently opened on Broadway; I played “Don’t Rain on My Parade” through so many times that it’s a miracle I didn’t wear down the vinyl.) I was lucky: Streisand’s movie career began the week I started university, when she opened in the film version of Funny Girl, and I saw each of those great early performances – in Hello, Dolly!, The Owl and the Pussycat, Up the Sandbox and The Way We Were – as they came out, on the big screen. What I mostly desired from the memoir was information about, and her personal response to, her early triumphs on stage (her scene-stealing supporting performance in I Can Get It for You Wholesale led to Funny Girl), television (where she, Joe Layton and Dwight Hemion reconceived the variety special with the explosively inventive My Name Is Barbra in 1965), LP and film. My usual experience with the memoirs of performers I love is that they’re fun as long as they chronicle the origins of a career but run out of steam once the writer has made the leap into stardom. And this one comes in at a shade under a thousand pages! Plus I haven’t cared much for Streisand’s pop albums and found only a few of her later pictures interesting – though, notably, I’ve never missed one. (Her film career had pretty much faded by the early nineties.)
What I didn’t expect was that the book would make me fall in love with Streisand all over again. It’s (obviously) overlong, and it takes almost as much patience to slog through her romantic adventures as it does to listen to her starry anecdotes about her friendships with Prince Charles and Virginia Clinton and Justin Trudeau; sometimes the prose begins to sound like a series of letters of recommendation. And though one admires her inclusiveness, occasionally the book turns fatuous, as when she recounts her visit to Justin’s dad Pierre in Ottawa during their fling, where she lies around learning lines while he’s writing important political speeches. Still, wide swatches of the book are charming, and she’s remarkably generous about most of the artists with whom she has collaborated. Her tribute to William Wyler, who helmed the Funny Girl movie and, she avers, taught her everything she knows about directing, is truly moving, and she writes sweetly about Harry Stradling (who shot her first five films), Irvin Kershner, George Segal, Amy Irving, the arranger Peter Matz and many others. And who the hell would have guessed that she had a close friendship with Marlon Brando? At first this revelation comes as a total surprise, but the more she writes about him the more sense it makes. When Streisand came into American movies in the late sixties, at the beginning of their Renaissance period, she seemed like a glorious throwback to the big studio days; the critic Pauline Kael, who adored her, once wrote that she was a complete reason to see a film, as Garbo had been. All around her were the third-generation Method actors, like Pacino and De Niro and Hackman, Diane Keaton and Blythe Danner. But Streisand was striving for dramatic truth just as passionately as they were. Her best performances, both as an actress and as a singer, occupy the same existential space but we glimpse them through a different mirror.
What My Name Is Barbra focuses on more than anything else is Streisand’s process – as a director as well as a performer. She analyzes it in complex detail, and for a reader like me, who has spent his life, as a student and then as a teacher and critic, fascinated by process, her book is sheerest catnip. I was particularly held by her chapters on Funny Girl (play and movie), The Way We Were and Yentl, the first film she directed as well as starring in and surely one of the most startling directorial debuts in the history of American movies – though she went through hell getting it made and it received a decidedly mixed reception from both critics and the Hollywood establishment. (That it was one of the first important American pictures made by a woman and yet the press wouldn’t stop treating it as an expression of an overreaching female star’s egotism – even claiming that she had directed it under the guidance of Steven Spielberg – still seems, more than four decades later, an outrage.) In Yentl Streisand built on everything she’d learned from Willie Wyler – narrative control, a subtle but profound immersion in historical detail, how to put the camera and especially the deep focus lens in the service of unmasking character complexity, how to turn your actors (or fellow actors, in this case) into collaborators. What a pity he never got to see it; this work of his most inspired pupil would have filled him with pride.
By chance I happened to watch The Way We Were for the first time in many years just a few days before Streisand’s co-star, Robert Redford, died. (He’s another collaborator she praises in the book.) It’s always been my favorite of his performances. When it came out in 1973, she was thirty-one and he was thirty-seven, and they were an unforgettable romantic match, like Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca or Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun or – later – Jeff Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. All four of these movies are romantic melodramas, and the best examples, I believe, of their genre. Sydney Pollack directed the screenplay by Arthur Laurents, which proceeds from an irresistible premise. Katie Morosky and Hubbell Gardiner are classmates at Union College in Schenectady. She’s a working-class Jewish Communist who leads rallies for the Republican cause in Spain; he’s a natural aristocrat, a WASP jock – a rower – who dates debutantes. What he also has, she learns in a writing class, is a gift. When their teacher reads aloud one of his stories, her first reaction is to rip up her own, in tears, but her reflex disdain for him turns into admiration, and when they run into each other in Manhattan during the war, when he’s in the Navy, it turns into love. Their first wartime encounter is tinged with masochism: she brings him to her apartment, bombed, and he passes out in her bed; she slips under the covers with him and he makes love to her, but in an unconscious haze, and the next morning he doesn’t remember a thing. The next time they meet they initiate an actual relationship; eventually they marry and move to Hollywood so he can launch a screenwriting career. But Hollywood blunts the edge of his talent and the specter of McCarthyism hovers over their lives; she is as outspoken as she was when she was an undergraduate. They never fall out of love but finally, shortly after she becomes pregnant, their marriage dissolves.
The basis for any conventional romantic comedy is that two people who seem to dislike each other – but who, we see, should be perfect together – begin to fall for each other, despite their resistance to the idea, and compromise and change in order to deserve a shared happy ending. Romantic melodrama doesn’t necessarily derive its tension from the fact that the hero and heroine are opposites, but from any number of insuperable obstacles. The Way We Were is a romantic melodrama with a romantic-comedy set-up. The fact that Hubbell and Katie come from different worlds and possess such wildly different temperaments would seem to make their relationship improbable, but those distinctions draw each out in the other one’s mind. Each turns out to be exactly what the other one wants and needs – his floating Protestant Prince Charming elegance, her Jewish pragmatism, passion and drive. But at the same time we can see that ultimately, as much as they love each other, it can’t work between them. The elements in the two stars’ personalities that imbue their roles both make them a magical match and make it clear to us that they can’t stay together. Laurents’ script inserts a plot reason for their break-up, but we can sense that they’re doomed to hit the rocks much earlier just by watching Streisand and Redford’s scenes together – though since they’re so convincing as lovers, we can barely stand it as they head for those rocks. (This is one of those romantic melodramas that can send you to bed in inconsolable tears.)
Weirdly, though, Pollack took out the scene that explained exactly why they end up coming apart. In My Name Is Barbra, Streisand quotes Kael’s complaint that the audience never finds out what dissolves the marriage and expresses her frustration that Pollack (whom she loved working with) opted to omit the explanatory scene because, he insisted, it was slowing down the picture. When Sony put out a fiftieth-anniversary Blu-ray she convinced the company to add an extended edition that contained it. I ordered it after reading the memoir, and that’s the version I watched shortly before Redford’s death. It’s an excellent scene, and it finally makes sense out of the last section of the plot; I was delighted that it had been restored. What it doesn’t solve, however, is the clumsiness and flat-footedness of the Hollywood section, which is as superficial and unsatisfying as every other Hollywood dramatization of the blacklist except for George Clooney’s Goodnight, and Good Luck.
For all its flaws, though (there are others), The Way We Were is a deeply lovable film. The supporting cast includes Bradford Dillman, Viveca Lindfors, James Woods, Patrick O’Neal and Lois Chiles, but nobody makes much of an impression and some of the actors are pretty bad. It doesn’t matter much, because you don’t pay attention to anyone but the two stars. Redford illuminates the restlessness simmering under Hubbell’s complacent calm, and his kindness and the depth of his sadness. There are moments in his performance you can’t shake, like the way he tells her, close to the end of their marriage, that she’s always be a good Jewish girl and the way he turns down, when they meet on the street years later, her invitation to bring his second wife around for a drink. And this is one of Streisand’s two or three greatest performances – she throws out one sensational scene after another, in a way that does indeed recall Garbo. Her Katie is too much for Hubbell; she knows she should cut him some slack, but she can’t help herself – she isn’t capable of being happy without the fugitive parts of him that he instinctively keeps to himself. We see it most vividly in the scene where, after a screening of a movie he’s written that he knows compromises all of his best ideas, she lists all the things she hates about Hollywood but finally can’t articulate what is making her so miserable: “I want, I want,” she murmurs, incapable of finishing her tormented wishes. Streisand’s acting here has an emotional voluptuousness. Watching it has always been a joy; watching it again after reading her analysis of the character is joy doubled.
– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.
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