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forget the time she squeezed the paints out of my oil paint set. And I had saved up a dollar seventy-five for that set.” Sheldon was sixteen when Barbara was nine, and he considered his little sister a pain in the neck. “I had to baby-sit for her, and then she was always tagging after me and my friends. But we had a lot of fun together too. One of our biggest kicks was watching TV while eating sliced raw onion on white bread that had been spread with chicken fat.”
     
Barbara could be painfully shy in one-on-one interactions at this age, but she appears not to have been inhibited when it came to performing. To her, that was the best way to express her feelings and to win the attention she craved. She would sit on the low stoop of her building and sing with the other kids, imitating Joni James’s hit “Have You Heard.” Louis Kind described the scene: “I can see her now, singing songs she had heard on the radio in her little-girl voice, which even then was remarkably true and delivered with great feeling. The neighbors would stick their heads out of the window, clap loudly and yell, ‘More, Barbara, give us more!’ She was only too happy to oblige. Then, as a final encore—double-jointed as she was—she would lie down on the pavement, take both of her feet, wrap them around her neck, and roll like a human ball.”
     

     
“B ARBARA WAS EXTREMELY apprehensive about going to a public school,” Maxine Eddleson recalled. “She was nervous about the kind of people she’d meet; her stomach got unsettled. She had been kind of cloistered at the yeshiva academy. And when she entered P.S. 89 in the fourth grade, I was her only friend for a while.” Barbara kept so much to herself that classmates mistook her shyness for a sense of superiority. “I never liked Barbara,” one of her classmates, now Mrs. Phyllis Zack, said. “I thought she was a snob.” The school’s principal, Mrs. Dorothy Sultan, recalled that Barbara was “a quiet child who liked to sing and did sing in assembly. I knew she had a sense of humor, but she never really displayed it—she didn’t project herself. At the time I thought she was an average child, one who really didn’t make her presence felt.”
     
But eventually Barbara began to make more friends, and her performing talents became well known throughout the school. Phyllis Zack recalled that Barbara “wanted to be an actress even then, and she was good, too. I remember once some of the kids wanted to set up a surprise for a teacher they l iked, so Barbara pretended to faint while she was in another room. The teacher ran to her side, and while he was out of the room the kids put this present on his desk. Barbara had him convinced all the time, too.”
     
After a few years at P.S. 89, Barbara met the personable dark-haired twins Marilyn and Carolyn Bernstein. “We took it upon ourselves to befriend her,” Carolyn said. “We had a lot of friends, and we kind of felt sorry for her because she always looked so alone. I don’t think she was very secure about the way she looked. I remember her in the sixth grade with the white man-tailored shirts that she used to wear, long-sleeved always, and a skirt and saddle shoes—conservative, like we all dressed in those days.”
     
Barbara and the twins became fast friends. Nearly every day after school she would go to their house, where they would gather around the piano and sing while Mrs. Bernstein played. They’d eat snacks, then scramble onto the top bunk of the twins’ bunk beds with a pile of movie magazines. They would cut out pictures of their favorite stars and tape them to the walls. Barbara always seemed reluctant to leave, and after a while it became clear to the twins that she didn’t plan to return the favor and invite them over to her house. The girls didn’t press the issue. “When a young person doesn’t welcome you to their home over and over again,” Carolyn reflected, “you begin to think that they’re not