By James B. Stewart
Photographs by Collier Schorr
Styled by Mel Ottenberg


Streisand is still a little breathless as she settles into a chair at a safe distance. I ask if she won the auction. “Yes!” she exclaims. “It was nerve-racking.” She extends her phone to show me an image of “Peasant Woman With Child on her Lap,” an 1885 Vincent van Gogh painting rendered in somber grays, blues and browns. [[I later see on the Christie’s website that the work sold for $4.47 million, well above its high estimate of $3.8 million. She’s loaning it to a museum.)


Streisand has always collected: In 1964, when she was starring in “Funny Girl” on Broadway, she saved enough from her $2,500-a-week salary to buy a small Matisse, her first major purchase. Art satisfies her urge both to collect and invest — a Klimt she bought in 1969 for $17,000 sold years later for $650,000. And, she says, “I love things that are beautiful. I think I have a good eye — in some ways my entire life has been a quest for beauty.”


But her love of things also fills a void. “Sometimes I think it’s all connected to the loss of a parent,” Streisand writes in her design book. Her father, Emanuel, a high school English teacher, died in 1943 at age 35, when Streisand was 15 months old. “Because you’d do anything to get that mother or father back. But you can’t. … Yet with objects, there’s a possibility.”

STREISAND SEEMS HAPPIER talking about art than music, but any story about her life must begin with her singing voice: “one of the natural wonders of the age, an instrument of infinite diversity and timbral resource,” as Glenn Gould, the celebrated classical pianist, once put it. Only the great 20th-century soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf brought him comparable listening pleasure.

In the weeks before we meet, I revisited many of Streisand’s recordings, going back to her 1965 album “My Name Is Barbra.” Even now, her voice is instantly recognizable; she is able to fuse musicality and drama to a degree few singers — with the exception of Maria Callas — can. Equally impressive is her sense of restraint; some of her most memorable songs begin quietly, even haltingly. On the title track that opens “My Name Is Barbra,” she starts off unaccompanied, relying solely on her voice, as if to say, “Listen closely, you’ve never heard anything like this.” She often employs a penetrating, somewhat nasal sound, a remnant of her childhood in Brooklyn, but as she adds volume, her tone broadens and her voice soars into its upper range. Finally, just when you think she has nowhere else to go, she unleashes her full vibrato, holding the climactic note seemingly forever — or, to be precise, a remarkable 18 seconds, as with the ending of “A Piece of Sky,” one of the hits from her 1983 film, “Yentl.”
Streisand famously has had no serious musical education, yet I tell her that I find it hard to believe that her formidable vocal technique — her distinct phrasing, enormous range, expressive vibrato and skill at sustaining dynamics from pianissimos to double fortes — hasn’t been the result of countless hours of practice and training. “What’s a double forte?” she asks.

She says her ability to hold a note can be largely attributed to one quality: willpower. “Streisand was a prodigy,” says Michael Kosarin, the music director, arranger and conductor. “About the only thing I can compare it to is Luciano Pavarotti,” the operatic tenor, who, like Streisand, didn’t read music. “Singers can be overtrained. The technique can get in the way of the acting.” He pointed to her rendition of the song “My Man” from “Funny Girl”— “In the first half she’s barely singing. Some notes are a little off-pitch. She’s overcome by emotion. It’s perfect for telling the story, not perfect in and of itself."

Streisand says her vocal stylings came to her naturally. She sings like she speaks, and when she does, she often inhabits a character. She’s playing a part, and acting is what she always wanted to do. Her legendary voice, it seems, has mainly been a means to other ends: She’ll only do a concert these days, she says, so she can “buy a painting or give the money away to charity.” But singing has paid for her cliffside Malibu compound and the objects within. It has financed the causes and political candidates she believes in. It has fueled her investing. “She sees herself as much bigger than a singer or actor,” says the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, 90, who has known Streisand since she was 19; they played card games together during rehearsals for Streisand’s run in her Broadway debut, 1962’s “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” directed by Sondheim’s friend Arthur Laurents. “She’s a political figure who affects things that go well beyond entertainment.”

Perhaps Streisand is so nonchalant about her vocal talent because it came to her so easily. By the age of 5, she says, she was known in her Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood as the “girl with no father and a good voice.” [[Her father obviously still looms large: She proudly mentions that he taught the classics to prison inmates in Elmira, N.Y.) Her mother, Diana, had a natural operatic voice but never sang professionally: She supported Barbra and Barbra’s older brother, Sheldon, by working as a school secretary and a bookkeeper. She warned her daughter not to pursue a career in show business, because, as Streisand recalls, “I didn’t look like the movie stars I read about in magazines.” She now believes her mother was jealous of her talent. “I didn’t really like my life as a child,” she says. “I thought, ‘This can’t be it.’” Her mother remarried and, at 16, Streisand graduated high school early and moved to Manhattan. [[Streisand has a half sister, Roslyn Kind, but rarely mentions her or Sheldon, a Long Island real estate investor.)

At 18, Streisand heard about a talent contest at the Lion, a club in Greenwich Village. She had recently been fired from her job as a clerk and phone operator for a printing company and was being repeatedly rejected for acting gigs. The prize was $50 and a free dinner of London broil, and she needed both. Along with auditioning and interviewing, she also was reinventing herself: She said she was from Smyrna, Turkey, using the ancient Greek name for the city [[“I pronounced it with an accent and a rolled ‘R’ — ‘Smeerrna’!”), a vaguely plausible claim given her features. “I didn’t want to be labeled as some girl from Brooklyn,” she says. After she sang Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s 1954 song “A Sleepin’ Bee,” there was a stunned silence — and then, thunderous applause. She followed with the 1952 jazz hit “Lullaby of Birdland,” walking through the small, packed room with her microphone. She won.