![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Funny Girl
Nov. 14th, 2010 04:28 pmWell, I have labored through Anne Edwards' bio of Streisand, who has sold more records than anybody but Elvis.
The city made her. She could not have become Barbra without being able to escape her mother's apartment in Brooklyn via the fire escape and take the subway into the village. Where she hung around a cabaret until they gave her a job; picked up acting teachers, at whose home she stayed, babysitting in exchange for acting lessons, and commuted back to finish high school in Brooklyn; got a job as cashier in a Chinese restaurant to finance all this and her beautiful second hand clothes. She would not have become a singer but for a gay boy she picked up in the Village who became her first boyfriend and coached her and dressed her and recorded her practice and reviewed it with her til she got a gig.
That said, Hollywood sounds like a urinal. Edwards has given the respectful version of Ray Stark and the development of Funny Girl -- which literally was made for Barbra -- and Arthur Laurents I think gives the real version in his fascinating H'wood memoir. Who Laurents didn't sleep with, Barbra did. Jon Peters, the hairdresser she made into a mogul started his career as a teenager dying hoes' snatch to match in the back room of a 24-hour hairdressing salon.
Babs' long psychoanalytic struggle with her childhood and vengeful fury to get it all on screen is just megalo.
What is mind-boggling is that she did not start out to be a singer. And Barry Dennen turned her into one.
I love New York.
The city made her. She could not have become Barbra without being able to escape her mother's apartment in Brooklyn via the fire escape and take the subway into the village. Where she hung around a cabaret until they gave her a job; picked up acting teachers, at whose home she stayed, babysitting in exchange for acting lessons, and commuted back to finish high school in Brooklyn; got a job as cashier in a Chinese restaurant to finance all this and her beautiful second hand clothes. She would not have become a singer but for a gay boy she picked up in the Village who became her first boyfriend and coached her and dressed her and recorded her practice and reviewed it with her til she got a gig.
That said, Hollywood sounds like a urinal. Edwards has given the respectful version of Ray Stark and the development of Funny Girl -- which literally was made for Barbra -- and Arthur Laurents I think gives the real version in his fascinating H'wood memoir. Who Laurents didn't sleep with, Barbra did. Jon Peters, the hairdresser she made into a mogul started his career as a teenager dying hoes' snatch to match in the back room of a 24-hour hairdressing salon.
Babs' long psychoanalytic struggle with her childhood and vengeful fury to get it all on screen is just megalo.
What is mind-boggling is that she did not start out to be a singer. And Barry Dennen turned her into one.
I love New York.
