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was spelled the ordinary way) on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, to Emanuel Streisand, a grammar school teacher who died when she was just fifteen-months old, and Diana, a school secretary. Her mother discouraged young Barbara from going into show business because she did not think her little girl was pretty enough to cut it, and suggested that she learn to type instead. Where have I heard this story before? Right. It sounds like a treatment for the 1968 movie Funny Girl . In it, Barbra, as she came to be known, starred as a plain but talented, Jewish gal (it’s based on the life of showgirl Fanny Brice) with skinny legs and a big nose who transforms into a swan after she falls in love with wicked Nicky Arnstein, played by a swarthy Omar Sharif. It’s a pretty fantasy, for which Barbra, appearing in her first movie, split a best actress Oscar with Katharine Hepburn.
    In real life, Barbara dropped the second “A” in her first name shortly after moving to Manhattan after graduating from high school. She was unconventional-looking enough, with a powerful enough singing voice, to pull off the transformation from ugly duckling to American beauty. Despite her mother’s nagging, she never attended a day of college. Why should she? Barbra Streisand learned from an early age never to let her natural deficiencies hold her back.
    Barbra is a singer, that much is not in dispute except, perhaps, in her own brain. She started singing professionally in a gay bar and quickly signed a record deal. Along the way she has won Emmys, Grammys and a pair of Academy Awards—one for acting, the other for Best Song—and became one of the top selling female solo acts of all time, before coming full circle and tying Liza Minnelli as the most popular diva parodied in gay karaoke bars. But Barbra didn’t want to be known as a singer. She badly wanted to be an actress, and therein lies the tension. She did have success on Broadway and in the movies, starting with Funny Girl , but it was her voice the people tuned in to. Eventually, she started producing and directing her own films, including the horrifically embarrassing 1983 movie Yentl , in which Barbra at age forty-one, plays a teenage yeshiva student. Eight years later she put out Prince of Tides , a romance in which her self-conscious and immobile face, trained to tilt toward its good side, appears as if it’s filmed through gauze. Mercifully, she refrained from making films for a while after that.
    Streisand married actor Elliot Gould in 1963, shortly before turning twenty-one, and divorced him eight years later. The union produced a son, Jason. The list of men she is said to have dated is long and varied, from Ryan O’Neal, Tom Smothers, Warren Beatty (who hasn’t?), to Jon Voight, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, producer Jon Peters, Omar Sharif, Don Johnson, Steve McQueen, Kris Kristofferson, Peter Jennings and, at age fifty, a twenty-two year-old Andre Agassi. That pairing evidently could not survive the day an out-to-lunch Barbra gushed about her “Zen master” on live TV during the 1992 U.S. Tennis Open in New York. In 1998, twenty-seven years after divorcing Elliot Gould, she walked down the aisle with James Brolin, a quiet (compared to Barbra) actor who in recent years appeared on TV in commercials as the Midas man.
    I have to conclude that Streisand feels unfulfilled by a career that made her an international superstar, worth an estimated $300 million. She wanted to be an actress. Instead, she’s settled on being a singer who sometimes acts, moving into mature (thank God), charicaturish roles such as that of Roz Focker in 2004’s Meet the Fockers with Dustin Hoffman. At least she kept on her shirt. (She took it off, to her regret and that of millions of movie-goers, in 1970’s The Owl and the Pussycat .)
    Streisand raised a ton of cash for Bill Clinton before the 1992 presidential election, and performed at his inaugural gala. In fact, Barbra has raised more