Streisand: Her Life (12 page)

“I tried to touch every part of his body with every part of my body, without ever touching the same part twice.”

“And she did, too,” Miller recalled. “She used the spaces between her fingers, her armpits, her neck, her eyelids, her feet. It was quite startling, believe me.”

According to Elaine Sobel, this intensity and unpredictability made the other students nervous about doing scenes with Barbara. “People didn’t like to work with her in class. Especially the guys. They were intimidated by her. She was relentless in her desire to learn. She would focus so completely that it was like ‘All of you can just float away.
’”

Before long, the girl who had performed the worst audition Miller had ever seen had become his star pupil—and his surrogate daughter. “She started meeting me after class and going home with me on the bus. I literally began coaching her every day.” She began to sleep over at the Millers’ whenever she baby-sat for them, rather than take the subway back to Brooklyn; she immersed herself in their impressive collection of books on theater, art, culture. “She liked the way we lived,” Allan Miller said.

None of this sat well with Diana, Miller recalled. “Her mother would call me on the phone and scream at me. She’d say, ‘You’re ruining my daughter’s life. You have no right to do this! She’s only sixteen years old!’ At one point she accused me of putting Barbara into white slavery! She was really something, the mother.”

“Her mother disapproved of everything Barbara did, especially the theater or any of the arts,” Anita said. “Sometimes I would give Barbara clothes I was no longer wearing because she didn’t have the money to buy her own. Her mother threw them out. I guess she was jealous of the role we were playing in Barbara’s life.”

I
F MRS. KIND
only
knew
. Barbara bunking with the Millers was the least of it. For with the help of Roy Scott, a lack of sexual experience was no longer a hindrance to Barbara’s range as an actress. As Simon Gribben related it, “Barbara was just one of the girls on tap for Roy. She was just someone he did, so to speak. I mean, she was much more hung up on him that he was on her.”

Scott holds far more romantic memories. “We had very, very deep feelings for each other. I was probably the first man she ever loved. I gave her her first kiss. Everything was just exquisite.” Sexually, Scott found Barbara unadventuresome but “inquisitive.” He thought of her as “a beautiful, budding rose. She was growing up, dawning, learning to be a woman.”

How thrilling it must have been for Barbara, convinced she was unappealing, unsure that any man would ever desire her, to have the best-looking man in her acting class become her lover. “She thought she was ugly, with her nose and all,” Scott recollected. “I would tell her no, that she was a very pretty and attractive girl.”

Now Barbara would spend many of her nights at Scott’s tiny eight-dollar-a-week apartment in the Park Savoy, a residence hotel for performers on Fifty-eighth Street. “We would talk until all hours of the night,” Scott recalled. “We would talk about acting, singing. We’d talk about life, what it was all about. She was very much into politics and very much caring about the children of the world and the people of the world. Everything affected her.”

Barbara began to go to the New York Public Library’s main branch at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street and listen to old recordings of popular music. “She’d say, ‘Roy, I listen to all these great singers for hours and try to learn their techniques.’ She’d listen to the jazz singers: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday—all of them. I don’t think Barbara cared really whether she was an actress or a singer. She just wanted to be in show business.”

S
OMEHOW, BARBARA’S MOTHER
found out about her romance with Roy Scott. She badgered Barbara to end it, but she refused. Diana accosted Davey Marlin Jones outside Miller’s class one day and pleaded with him to intercede and persuade Roy to stop seeing Barbara. Jones ignored the request.

Then Diana took a new approach.

One evening, as Roy and Barbara practiced a scene from a play, Roy’s mother and aunt paid him a surprise visit. “It turned into a beautiful evening,” Roy recalled. “They cooked us a great dinner, and we sat around for three or four hours talking and singing and having a hell of a good time.”

Then the phone rang, and Roy’s mother answered it. Diana, nearly hysterical, demanded that Barbara come home immediately and yelled, “I don’t want her with that man!” Mrs. Scott explained who she was and that they were in the middle of an innocent evening. “I don’t care,” Diana shrieked. “My daughter’s too young to be involved with your son! Put her on the phone!”

“Your mother wants to talk to you, Barb,” Mrs. Scott gently informed her.

When Barbara came back into the dining room, she was crying profusely. “I’ve got to go,” she told Scott.

“I walked her to the subway and she was just inconsolable about everything,” he recalled. “She said, ‘Your mother doesn’t like me. My mother doesn’t want me to be with you. What am I going to do?’ It was a mess, just dreadful. I did my best to calm her down. Her mother tried to control her too much, to protect her too much. And yes, it hurt our relationship.”

D
ESPITE THE WORLDLINESS
Barbara had attained in the sophisticated milieu of the New York theater set, back in Brooklyn she remained a high school student. But by the end of her junior year, there had been such a marked change in her that her classmates barely recognized her. Cynthia Roth recalled that just about every day now Barbara wore “a black sweater and a black skirt, black stockings, black shoes, and a black leather bag. It was enough to be scary to some young people!”

“She
was
strange,” Mike Lubell thought. “She wore odd-colored nail polish and lipstick—like purple, things that girls at that time simply didn’t wear. And when I say purple, it ran toward a shade of hot pink. It drew people’s attention to her.”

Barbara had purposely set herself apart. “I dressed the way I did to show everybody that I didn’t care what they thought of me. I didn’t know then that I really did. I always felt alone, a person apart from others.” Her closest friend at school now was Susan Dwaorkowitz, perhaps the only girl at Erasmus who was odder than Barbara. Susan “used to wear pasty white makeup,” Barbra recalled. “Pasty-face, I used to call her.... She used to wear spaghetti shoes and black stockings, and had a black pixie haircut. So we gravitated toward each other. We were both pretty weird. But I liked the way we dressed. I thought everybody else looked terrible!”

It was around this time that Barbara set Erasmus abuzz with her choice of a boyfriend. A classmate, Ron Girsch, recalled that “she was going out with a black guy and was one of the first girls to do so, and I thought that fit her. His name was Teddy, and they used to walk around together hand in hand. That was pretty shocking in those days, believe me.”

Many of Barbara’s classmates considered her arrogant. “My memories of Barbara are not pleasant,” Henya Novick said. “She was inaccessible, disinterested in us and in school. She had one goal—to make it—and this she pursued with a frenzy. She was constantly reading
Variety
and going to auditions. She was a cold, aloof individual, not the stuff that friendships are made from.”

Other students, like Roberta Johnson, understood Barbara. “She really wasn’t a teenager. She had her mind on something else. I don’t think she was arrogant or felt superior. She was simply occupied with something other than the usual teenage concerns.”

Barbara took only one acting class at Erasmus, an Honors English course called Radio Dramatics during the spring semester of her junior year. “Whenever she got up,” Harry Myers recalled, “no matter what she did, whether she was going for a funny shtick or something serious, we would all sit there spellbound. We always looked forward to her readings.”

Jane Soifer’s strongest recollection of Barbara in the class is of her performance as the nurse in
Romeo and Juliet.
“It was a comedy monologue, and she was
fabulous.
She was so good, this feeling washed over me:
Wow,
this girl’s really talented. She could
do
something with this.”

Barbara also played the terrorized wife in a scene from
Dial M for Murder
,
a role made famous on the screen by Grace Kelly. According to Roberta Johnson, her performance was “astonishing. I was so impressed with how well she communicated the woman’s fear.” Her Radio Dramatics teacher, Mrs. Thrall, noted on Barbara’s permanent record that she evinced “real dramatic talent” and was a “fine, cooperative person,” although she needed “frequent encouragement.”

Still, “silly student productions” did little to fulfill Barbara. She couldn’t wait to get back into the heady theatrical world she had known with Allan Miller. Toward the end of her junior year she made it clear to her grade adviser, Mrs. Cameron, that she had no intention of going on to college. The woman called Barbara and her mother to her office for a meeting. “Your child has
got
to go to college,” she told Mrs. Kind. “She has a ninety-one average. It would be such a waste.”

When her mother agreed, Barbara stood up without a word and walked out of the room. By now, Mrs. Kind knew better than to press Barbara, and on March 18, she wrote to Mrs. Cameron granting her permission for Barbara to double up on her subjects so that she could graduate six months early. This, Mrs. Kind wrote, would free Barbara up so that she could attain “further [acting] experience in the city.”