Kennedy Center Honors: Barbra Streisand

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The Kennedy Center Honors: Barbra Streisand

A look at the career of the celebrated singer, actress and director, a recipient of the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors.

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The only time she chafes is when a visitor mispronounces her name, making the common mistake of articulating the middle "s" in Streisand as a "z."

"Strei-sssssand! Soft 's'!" she admonishes, interrupting a question. "Like sand on a beach. Why do people call me 'Strei-zand'? How can I be famous? They don't say 'Judy Gar-LAND'! "

The trials of renown! For a woman who still inspires a frenetic variety of fan worship, particularly among older women and gay men, Streisand has a queasy relationship with wealth and fame. About the kinds of public triumphs others happily relive, she draws blanks. "Quincy Jones, my dear friend, said, 'Don't you remember . . . our first [Grammys] together in [1964]?' I said, 'Nope.' He sent me a picture."

Did that jog her memory? "Not really," she says. "I remember the dress, but I wore that dress a lot for singing -- a plain black dress from the thrift shop."

Streisand was 19 when she opened in her first Broadway show, "I Can Get It for You Wholesale," for which she earned a Tony nomination. Maybe when you are both famous and put up for prizes your entire adult life, image maintenance becomes a bore. Asked whether her outspoken politics might have touched any raw public nerves over the years, she replies: "I don't think about that stuff. Did people stop buying my records? Maybe. But that doesn't matter to me. I don't care."

She turns down a lot of awards, especially when they require her to speak. A 1995 address at Harvard, where she was invited to talk about the artist as citizen, made her a complete wreck: "I was rewriting as I was walking up to the podium." Years ago, she declined an offer for that flashbulb-popping emblem of Tinseltown, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

"I refused it because I thought it was so hokey. . . . It's like to me, always the work should speak for itself. And nobody agrees, they have to force me. And guess what? You know when I got the star? When my husband got it!"

Her husband is actor James Brolin, whom she married a decade ago, and who at this moment is sprawled on a couch in a family room down the hall, watching a video. A picture of her son, Jason Gould, who acted with her in "The Prince of Tides," sits on a living room table. And somewhere else in the house, Streisand's little white dog, Sammie, a 5-year-old coton de Tulear, a breed from Madagascar, can be heard padding about.

Brolin figures, to some degree, in the issue of why her movie career has all but ceased. She says she does want to direct another film, citing "The Normal Heart," the prescient AIDS play by Larry Kramer that has been on and off her To Do list for something like 15 years. But she wonders how the all-consuming task of making a movie would affect her relationship with Brolin.

"I've never really been, you know, married during a directorial time in my life," she observes. "How do you, you know, balance the personal?"

Of all those aforementioned career hyphens it is directing that she loves best, though some of her fans might want her to say it's the voice that matters to her most. In 40-plus years of recordings, she has sold 71 million albums; she has just started work on a new one, with the singer Diana Krall. No theme, she avers, "just songs that I like." (A DVD of the 1983 "Yentl" is also due for release early next year, she says.)

"The voice is the best present God gave her and the world," says Hamlisch, who wrote the music for one of her greatest hits, "The Way We Were."