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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"I heard her the first time on TV, on a talk show. She would come on the show because the host had seen her at the Bon Soir," a New York nightclub. "She sang 'A Sleepin' Bee' with a piano player, and you just went nuts. You went, 'Oh, my God.' "

Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who among their many other pop hits wrote the lyrics for "The Way We Were," recall hearing Streisand try out the song, alone in a room, and making some suggestions about the lyrics and music. "Which we took, because they were correct," Marilyn Bergman says.

"Always substance is ahead of style," Alan Bergman remarks. Marilyn adds: "She has to understand and identify with what she's singing. She had to get it at one level or another. If not, she would question it."

Still, no process engages Streisand quite like what happens when she's in the director's chair: "It just encompasses everything you are, everything you know, everything you've learned, all your instincts, feelings, psychoanalysis, dealing with actors, getting the best out of them." It's inspiring; you're filming something, then all of a sudden you see something, you can say, 'Turn the camera and get that, pick it up.' "

What she describes surely is an extension of what she's been doing on sets ever since she got out here, and in those early years she paid a price for daring to open her mouth: "When I first came to Hollywood, the fact that I had opinions?" she says, rolling her eyes. On "Funny Girl," she, director William Wyler and cinematographer Harry Stradling all "adored each other, but all of a sudden, you'd read about: She's telling the cinematographer what to do!"

"It's just that I had an opinion! 'What do you think if, you know, we did a shot from there, or we put this in the script?' . . . But I guess I was coming from an era when women didn't do that."

To those who've studied her work, the fact that directing would come to be the primary passion makes eminent sense. "Of course!" Santopietro says. "She's creating her own universe."

Which, in a way, is also what's occurring in her Malibu idyll. "I love Eastern architecture, Federal and Colonial architecture," Streisand says. "But I don't want to live in the East, so I brought the East to the West."

Strolling from room to room her assistant in the new house, you're on overload by the time you descend the circular staircase to the basement, which Streisand has turned into a period village streetscape, with little antiques and sweet shops. One "shop" is filled with female mannequins behind glasswearing Streisand's costumes from various movies. In the closets are more costumes, arranged by color.

To record it all, you'd need a full afternoon. "I don't know if she pointed these things out to you," Streisand says later, "but most of the doors are different on two sides. So when you're in a pine room, you're coming from pine wood, old pine floors, you know, doors and it's a honey color. You go into Mackintosh, the other side, the wood changes to oak from pine, the color of the stain gets darker, the hardware gets simpler and darker, not brass like on the pine -- see what I mean?"

Asked whether she'd like to design something like this for someone else, Streisand looks stricken.

"God, no," she says.

The Kennedy Center Honors should be a pleasant distraction. "It's nice, I like it, because I love America," she says of the recognition. "It's an American tradition. I loved President Kennedy. I sang for him." A photo on a desk in her study depicts the young Streisand gazing at JFK as he signs an autograph.

"And the White House is architecturally so amazing. I actually, in my New York apartment, copied the second-floor draperies. But I had a better color yellow on the walls."