Read Streisand: Her Life for Free Online

to her, Diana gave her short shrift, perhaps because by age nine Barbara had become something of a hypochondriac. When she read a booklet about cancer, she convinced herself that she had all the symptoms and had only six months to live. Another time she suddenly felt an enormous pressure on her chest and told her mother about it. Although Diana always admonished her to bundle up and be careful and eat properly, “if anything ever happened to me, she’d say, ‘I told you so. Now you take care of it. ’”
     
Barbara took it upon herself to see a doctor about the sensation in her chest. It took her a week to muster up the courage to climb the steps to his office and ring the bell. Then she realized he didn’t have office hours that day, and suddenly she felt the pressure dissipate. “That was my first psychosomatic illness.” Throughout her life, Barbra’s emotional stresses would invariably take a physical toll on her.
     

     
T HE MARRIAGE OF Diana and Louis Kind, off on the wrong foot from the outset, soured quickly. Kind often stayed away from the apartment for days at a time, and when he got home, he and Diana fell into terrible rows. He verbally abused her, Sheldon, and Barbara. After Sheldon grew up and left the house, Kind more and more frequently physically abused Diana. Apartment 4G became a place of fear and loathing.
     
Two years after she had first heard the clicks in her ears, Barbara woke up after a night of shouting and violence with a high-pitched ringing inside her head. It was as though her soul were trying to block out all the unpleasantness, to hear nothing but white noise. This condition, known as tinnitus, can be brought on by one’s emotions, and for Barbara it has never gone away. “I never hear the silence,” she has said. “There were periods in my life when I was very unhappy, and [the sound] would drive me nuts.” She never told anyone about it, but wore scarves wrapped around her head in a misguided attempt to purge the noise from her brain. “The scarf only made the sound louder. I felt totally abnormal. I had this secret.”
     
Another secret in her secret life. But there was nothing hidden about her show business ambitions. If Louis Kind had added anything to Barbara’s life, it was the television set he brought with him, and she parked herself in front of it whenever she could. The medium had advanced tremendously since the late 1940s. Now Barbara could watch Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, Perry Como, Lucille Ball, and especially Ed Sullivan, who presented the finest singers and comedians of the day, as well as veterans of vaudeville like the sublime Sophie Tucker and scenes from Broadway shows, the first Barbara had ever seen.
     
She loved it all, even the commercials. When she was alone in the apartment she’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror—the only one in the house—and imitate them. She’d brush her teeth while smiling dazzlingly or smoke a cigarette with utter sophistication. “I smoked between the ages of ten and twelve,” she recalled. “I’d go into the bathroom and blow the smoke out of the window. My mother smoked too, but she held her cigarette awkwardly and I’d say, ‘No, Ma, you have to hold it like this!’ and show her how.”
     
She experimented with makeup, just as she had clumsily tried to do when she was two and a half, and usually made a mess in the process. “I would make funny lipstick. My brother was an artist, so he had pencils—blue pencils—and there was this white medicine for your skin called zinc oxide, and my mother wore purple lipstick—you know, from the fifties. So I would make concoctions, mixtures, like a chemist, of purple lipstick and white cream and make fuchsia lips and blue eyes from my brother’s paint kit. Then I’d do a smoking commercial. I was always trying to be an actress, I suppose.”
     
Sheldon Streisand remembered that “she was always mischievous, experimental, and curious. I’ll never