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

She didn’t realize until she arrived that the Lion was a gay bar, but it seems fitting that she got her start there. As William J. Mann, author of the 2012 book “Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand” has written, many of her early friends and influences turned out to be gay men, and “gay audiences instinctively recognized something very familiar about her, a shared sensibility.” Streisand is routinely ranked as a gay icon alongside Judy Garland, Bette Midler and Lady Gaga, who, to varying degrees, embody a combination of glamour and suffering that can only be redeemed by love, requited or [[more often) not. “The Man That Got Away,” the 1954 torch song originated by Garland that later became a hit for Streisand, has been a queer anthem for decades.


Theater mavens and celebrities began making their way to the Lion for Streisand’s weekly performances, and after a month or so, she moved on to the more upscale Bon Soir nearby. One memorable night there, she met her future lifelong manager, Martin Erlichman; on another, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the lyricists who would later write many of her most enduring songs, including 1973’s “The Way We Were” [[written with Marvin Hamlisch) and, a decade later, the “Yentl” soundtrack [[with Michel Legrand). In 1962, Laurents hired her for “I Can Get It for You Wholesale.” In that play, the 19-year-old Streisand stopped the show with her solo “Miss Marmelstein,” a comic vocal masterpiece in which she complains that more attractive girls get called by their first names. Overnight, she became a Broadway star. [[In 1963, she married her “Wholesale” co-star, Elliott Gould, whom she divorced eight years later; they have a son, Jason.) Her next theatrical break came in 1964, with “Funny Girl.” Though the musical — about an early 20th-century Ziegfeld star who won and then lost her man — seems written for Streisand, the producers only settled on her after Anne Bancroft and Carol Burnett turned down the role.
Streisand’s mother was right that she wasn’t conventionally pretty, at least not in the aristocratic, Grace Kelly mold. She repeatedly rebuffed advice to have her nose cosmetically altered, and instead made it one of her signature features; she learned to deploy her Brooklyn accent for comic effect. Audiences couldn’t take their eyes off her. While doing seven Broadway performances a week, Streisand also taped her “My Name Is Barbra” TV special for CBS, a vocal tour de force that extended her fame nationwide. At 21, she landed on the cover of Time magazine: “She touches the heart with her awkwardness, her lunging humor and a bravery that is all the more winning because she seems so vulnerable,” the magazine’s reporter wrote.


Streisand’s performances in “Funny Girl,” and her televised rendition of its hit song “People,” were so indelible that the show has proved largely impervious to revival. “I’d never touch it,” says Sierra Boggess, who has starred in “The Phantom of the Opera” and “School of Rock” on Broadway. Streisand “is so ruthlessly herself and so unique. I wouldn’t know how to make it my own.” It’s hard to imagine anyone today replicating Streisand’s astonishing rise to stardom — discovered in an obscure gay nightclub and anointed by an elite group of powerful cultural gatekeepers. Yet, even as social media has spawned a new generation of pop stars, Streisand’s appeal endures, unaffected by shifting tastes. Her relevancy comes not from following musical trends but from refusing to do so.




TODAY, STREISAND CALLS herself an actor first. Though she never had music lessons, she studied with the renowned acting teacher Allan Miller while she was still a teenager and absorbed the Method approach taught at New York’s Actors Studio [[she was deemed too young to enroll but was later made an honorary life member). One of her unfulfilled dreams is to have performed in the classics, particularly in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and “Antony and Cleopatra.”


Acting is also what drew her to Sondheim’s songs. “He gives you so much to work with,” she says. “I love singing his songs because they’re written for characters in a play where there’s a beginning, a middle and an end — and then I try to relate that to parts of myself.” Both Streisand and Sondheim recall that while working on his song “Send in the Clowns” from the 1973 musical “A Little Night Music” for her 1985 album of Broadway show tunes, she struggled with what she considered an “emotional gap” between the last stanzas. The climactic line — “Quick, send in the clowns. / Don’t bother, they’re here.” — comes before the last stanza in the Broadway original, but Streisand called Sondheim and asked if she could move that line to the end. It’s hard to imagine any other performer who’d dare edit Sondheim’s work, but two hours later he called her back to say that “she was right and astute,” Sondheim recalls. In the stage version of the song, the last stanzas are separated by dialogue that makes explicit the predicament the former lovers face: that the aging actress Desiree is still in love with the man she once rejected, who is now married to a younger woman. So Sondheim wrote a musical bridge and additional lyrics for Streisand that became the version she sang on the album.




But Sondheim and Streisand quarreled some years ago over a new movie version of the musical “Gypsy,” in which Streisand would play Mama Rose, the role immortalized on Broadway by Ethel Merman in 1959. [[Rosalind Russell starred in the 1962 movie version.) Although the musical is loosely based on the story of Gypsy Rose Lee, the American burlesque star, the show is dominated by Gypsy’s mother, a frustrated performer who pours her ambitions into her daughter — an archetypal stage mom. Streisand’s fans have long clamored to see her in the part, which seems tailored to her voice.


As the lyricist for the Broadway original, Sondheim controls the rights along with the estates of Laurents, who wrote the book, and Jule Styne, the composer. They were amenable to the project, but Streisand wanted to direct and star in the film, which Sondheim and Laurents resisted. Then she started tinkering with the book. [[Streisand says she was only restoring the earlier movie version to the original book.) And now, a Barbra Streisand “Gypsy” — a possibility as recently as four years ago — is no longer on the table.


Still, attempting to rewrite one of the most celebrated books in Broadway history is entirely in character for Streisand, who tells me several times that artistic control has been far more important to her than money or critical acclaim. This has been true from the outset: She insisted upon — and won — contractual control over her first record album, even down to the cover design, which features a photograph of her performing at the Bon Soir.