![]() She could sing, naturally and effortlessly, with a broad, sunny tone and cataract force. But, despite these challenges, Streisand also knew that she was in possession of something rare. She developed chronic tinnitus, possibly because of stress, and kept the ringing in her ears a secret for years. “There was no routine and no rules.” She shoplifted and stole Kind’s cigarettes, which she smoked on the roof. “I was like a wild child, a kind of animal,” Streisand writes. Her mother, Diana, could be cruel and strangely absent, particularly after she married Louis Kind, a man who seemed to resent Streisand’s existence. Her father, a gentle academic named Emanuel, died from seizure complications when she was a year old. I guess that’s when I began to believe in the power of the will.” “One: Whew, that was lucky! And two: There is a God, and I just got Him to do what I wanted by praying. “I had two thoughts at that moment,” Streisand writes in her hulking new memoir, “ My Name Is Barbra” (Viking). She pointed at a man on the street and said that, if she prayed hard enough, he would step off the curb. One day, Streisand told Arenstein that she was going to prove the existence of God. When Streisand was growing up in Brooklyn, in the nineteen-forties, she used to crawl onto the fire escape of her shabby apartment building and conduct philosophical debates with her best friend, Rosyln Arenstein, who was a staunch atheist. ![]() Seventy years ago, before she was galactically famous, before she dropped an “a” from her first name, before she was a Broadway ingénue, before her nose bump was aspirational, before she changed the way people hear the word “butter,” before she was a macher or a mogul or a decorated matron of the arts, Barbra Streisand was, by her own admission, “very annoying to be around.” She was born impatient and convinced of her potential-the basic ingredients of celebrity, and of an exquisitely obnoxious child. ![]()
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