Recently I was reading the November edition of Vanity Fair magazine. Barbra Streisand is on the cover and inside is an interview that features her new book "My Name is Barbra" which was released November 7th, 2023 and an excerpt from her book on how the movie, "The Way We Were"was made.
I wanted to be Barbra. She fascinated me, then and now. There she was, oddly unusual looking yet still beautiful in a unique way, nasally voiced, ethnically Jewish, a Brooklyn born woman, who sang like she headed up Heaven's choir and on-screen had a presence that was powerful, clumsy, funny, feminine, entertaining and enthralling all at once.
In my mind Barbra had it all and I wanted it all. I wanted to sing like her. Play the roles she played. Wear the clothes she wore. Make the money she made and be her Katie to Robert Redford's Hubbell in "The Way We Were." I ended up marrying my own man in uniform who coincidentally is blond-haired and blue-eyed and to me, just as handsome as Bob himself. Subconscious or coinkydink...hmmmm?
I was only 11 years old when the movie "The Way We Were"was released. I was too young to watch it in theatres and had to wait years to be able to watch it at home and Barbra was almost as engaging to me in that movie as she was in "A Star is Born", which will always be my number one Streisand flick.
I enjoyed The Way We Were but more so, it was really Ms. Streisand that held me to the screen. Every movie or performance I've watched her in, to this day, has me captivated. I suppose in a way I saw myself as being a bit like Babs. I was awkward and funny, not ugly but not pretty, certainly by Hollywood standards. I was considered precocious, outspoken and maybe a bit of a pushy broad, which to me is someone's way of saying they dislike strong women with something to say.
"A man is forceful - a woman is pushy...He shows leadersip - she's controlling...If he acts, produces and directs, he's called a multitalented hyphenate. She's called vain and egotistical." -- Barbra Streisand, "My Name is Barbra"
I like to think that I, like Ms. Streisand, had a voice that needed to be heard and boy oh boy, was her voice heard! Loud and clear, soft and smooth, melodic and sweet, deep and delicious. The tones, the notes, the breath, the control, the emotion, the story of what she sang was nothing short of magical. That voice came out of the depths of her soul and was beyond what I, and most mere mortals, could do with our own.
I so appreciate the gifts of performers. I would never be considered fanatical in any definition of the word but, I do have a deep and somewhat covetous admiration for Barbra's incredible, unique talents and an immense fascination with her entire persona and person.
Reading about her life, her choices, her philosophies, her politics, her work as an actor, a singer, a writer, a producer, a director and a woman who fought her way to super-EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) stardom in a world that was over-lorded largely by mysoginistic males, leaves me unable to do anything but continue to admire her dogged determination, her chutzpah, her obsession, her relentless need for perfection and her innate ability to know when to exercise restraint, be it in a song or in a scene, where and when it's needed.
The Way We Were didn't win Ms. Streisand an Oscar. Peggy Lee sang the song at the awards the year the movie received it's nominations because Barbra said she was too nervous. Now she wished she had sung it herself but, as the saying goes, you can't go back...or can you?
Ms. Streisand won't be singing The Way We Were at the Oscars now or in the future but, she has done something she has dreamt of since 1973, and that is to restore two scenes in the original movie that were cut. Scenes she thought were so integral to the story that they should never have littered the cutting room floor to begin with. She has saved those clips, in her vault, for fifty years and when she learned the movie was going to be re-released for it's 50th Anniversary, she became relentless in the pursuit of having them returned to their rightful place in the movie. Streisand needed Sony Pictures approval and finally, it was confirmed, they would be adding them into the Blue-ray version and the orginal and they would be released in itunes as well. (You will have to read the book or the excert in Vanity Fair to learn which scenes they are.)
Barbra is eighty one years old now. It took her ten years to write her book "My Name is Barbra." It took her fifty years to take one of the most classic movies of all time and finally have it completed the way she says it was conceived to be. If that isn't an outstanding example of grit, tenacity and a fierce commitment to what you believe in, then slap my Fanny and call me crazy. (Fanny Brice, was an actual film actor and comedienne and Streisand played her in the movie "Funny Girl.") Barbra wasn't happy with the way things were and this year she realized a fifty year dream by turning "The Way We Were" into the way she believed it should always have been.
When I look back over fifty years I think about the way I was and all the aspirations and dreams I had as a young lady growing up under the umbrella of the feminist movement, the days of Woodstock when all we needed was love while, ironically, the Vietnam war was raging on. When the Cold War was frozen solid and LSD was experimental. When bell- bottom pants, micro-minis and tye-die t-shirts were far out. When "groovy" and "ya baby" were common phrases and afros and corduroy were "totally in man." When counter-culture and the civil rights movements created the most devisive decade in history. When Beatlemania was a British band not a global bug infestation. When Star Trek was beaming into North American homes while real astronauts were actually landing on the moon, for reals!
We had exited the first half of the 20th century that saw two world wars, the Great Depression, the Spanish Flu, the woman's suffrage movement, flying machines, electric ice boxes, the Holocaust, the Atomic Bomb, Mickey Mouse, penicillin, the Korean War and the obscene shaking of Elvis's hips, oh my, that heralded us into the latter half and whoa, we'd "Only Just Begun" (a nod to The Carpenters, another one of my favs from that era).
The words of the iconic song "The Way We Were" ask, "Can it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line? If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me would we? Could we?"
Barbra, did go back but, she didn't change the whole movie, just a little part of it. Were it myseIf, I wouldn't change my past either. Well, if I'm being totally honest, there are probably a couple of scenes from my life that should have hit the cutting room floor themselves. Just a little piece here and there, better tossed out with those old styrofoam cups holding the dregs of what was once a delicious cup of coffee and the stale, stinky butts of unsmoked cigarettes, burned down into ashes, erased like unpleaseant memories that are better off forgotten. However, as Frank Sinatra would say, "regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention."
Our past is where we come from. It is fundamentally konnected to who we are now and I rather like the way we were. We weren't perfect. There were a lot of tears but oh, there was so much laughter and that, "we will remember, whenever we remember, the way we were."
Love Kiki
xoxo
"I knew that with a mouth like mine, I just hadda be a star or something." -- Barbra Streisand
Vintage Photo of Barbra Streisand
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