My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand, review: A diva? Not according to her defiant memoir

When Barbra Streisand was a young girl – she had yet to drop the “a” from her first name in a quest to become “different and unique” – she stood in the hallway of her tiny third floor apartment one day and thought to herself: “I have to become famous just so I can get somebody else to make my bed”.

She probably didn’t count on becoming so famous that, at 81 and after six decades at the top of the entertainment world – Streisand has sold more than 150 million albums and has won five Emmys, 10 Golden Globes, two Oscars and one Tony award (the coveted clean sweep EGOT) – she’d release a whopping, much-anticipated 992-page memoir around 25 years in the making.

It is probably far too long for the casually interested, but the book’s friendly, warm tone – written like a morning coffee catch-up, full of Jewish-Brooklyn vernacular Streisand-speak and relatable asides (Streisand loves food) – makes for an entertaining if painstakingly recounted record-setting tome.

Much of Streisand’s story will be familiar: how she grew up impoverished amid the fallout from the death of her father when she was 15 months old, and how her relationship with her unreliable, cold, unforgiving, uncaring, jealous mother, always ready with a stinging put-down, was a constant bane of her life.

So too the glory: her big break at Bon Soir, the Greenwich Village nightclub; how her star turn in Funny Girl on Broadway at 21 led to an Oscar-winning adaptation and Hollywood career (Hello, Dolly!, What’s Up, Doc?; The Way We Were, A Star Is Born); how her music career began with her 1963 Grammy-winning debut album; her groundbreaking directorial success with 1983’s award-winning Yentl.

But there are plenty of disclosures that will satisfy fans. As comes with the sort of stratospheric fame Streisand enjoys – which she eventually came to regard as “a hollow trophy” – there is high-level celebrity tittle-tattle: back massages for Robert De Niro; bonhomie with the Clintons; a funny meeting with President John F Kennedy (“I told him, ‘You’re a doll’, it just kinda slipped out”) and a rather flirty relationship with King Charles.

And then there are revelations about the men in her life, the would-be suitors – love letters from a smitten Omar Sharif; the many advances of her friend Marlon Brando, all of which she turned down (“how stupid!”) – as well as her significant relationships.

She wasn’t attracted to first husband Elliott Gould until she saw the back of his neck; on the 23-year age gap between her and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, she writes “my brain was in love, but not my body”; her relationship with Miami Vice’s Don Johnson was “fun while it lasted.”

She’d also never heard of tennis star Andre Agassi before the pair were set up in the 90s (“emotionally wise beyond his years”). But did she, as legend has it, ever sleep with Warren Beatty? “I kind of remember. I guess I did. Probably once.”

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But elsewhere male attention is more problematic. Strength in the face of patriarchy is a constant theme: on Broadway, in Hollywood, from the press. She wasn’t demanding, unreasonable or diva-ish: she just had high standards and clear artistic visions that were only a problem because she was a woman daring to challenge male-dominated arenas.

On the set of Hello, Dolly!, Walter Matthau screamed at her, “I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body!’”; Mandy Patinkin cried and was difficult when she refused to have an affair during the making of Yentl; on 60 Minutes, interviewer Mike Wallace was so sexist he made her cry; worst of all was her treatment from Sydney Chaplin, son of Charlie, who undermined and threatened her on stage during her star-making Broadway run in Funny Girl. “Sydney made me physically ill. But I refused to let him destroy me.”

The incident left her afflicted with life-long stage fright, though it’s not just on the boards she’s unkeen to perform: fans who ask her to sing when they meet her “might as well ask me to jump off a bridge”.

In fact, to Streisand work is just that, work: “I don’t sing at home,” she writes, “I don’t sing in the shower, and I don’t sing at parties”. It is all part of the narrative of a fight for control in the face of those trying to tell her what to do and how to do it: the book goes to great lengths to emphasise she succeeded on her own terms.

It is perhaps why she feels the need to include endless gushing testimonies and quoting of praise from critics and peers alike, a needless indulgence for one so decorated (though it does serve to exacerbate the point she was starved of validation from her mother). And it’s clear throughout that, for all her fortitude, criticism stung. “Even after all these years, I’m still hurt by the insults and can’t quite believe the praise.”

The book is lightly peppered with passages about her distinctive nose; the cruel barbs, and how she resisted all advice to do something about it. It feels like a metaphor for her entire career. “I thought, isn’t my talent enough?” she wondered. It was.

Published by Century, £35