She wrote “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” on the same day and built
a theme park around herself. She has given memorable onscreen performances
as a wisecracking hairstylist and harassed secretary. She even helped
bring about the creation of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Now, Dolly Parton’s fans are crediting her with saving the world from the
coronavirus. It’s an exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek claim, to be sure. But
for legions of admirers, Ms. Parton’s donation this spring to Vanderbilt
University Medical Center, which worked with the drugmaker Moderna to
develop a coronavirus vaccine, was another example of how her generosity
and philanthropy have made her one of the world’s most beloved artists.
“Shakespeare may have written King Lear during the plague, but Dolly
Parton funded a Covid vaccine, dropped a Christmas album and a Christmas
special,” the author Lyz Lenz said on Twitter.
In April, Ms. Parton announced that she had donated $1 million to
Vanderbilt after her friend Dr. Naji Abumrad, a professor of surgery at
the university, in Nashville, told her about the work researchers were
doing to come up with a vaccine. (Dr. Abumrad’s son, Jad Abumrad, is the
creator of “Radiolab” and the host of the podcast “Dolly Parton’s
America.”)
Her contribution, which became known as the Dolly Parton Covid-19 Research
Fund, helped pay for the first part of the vaccine research, which was led
by Dr. Mark Denison, a professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology
at Vanderbilt. The federal government eventually invested $1 billion in
the creation and testing of the vaccine, but Dr. Denison said it was Ms.
Parton’s money that funded the “critical” early stages of the research.
“Her money helped us develop the test that we used to first show that the
Moderna vaccine was giving people a good immune response that might
protect them,” Dr. Denison said on Tuesday.
Ms. Parton told the BBC on Tuesday that she was excited to hear her
contribution provided a “little seed money that will hopefully grow into
something great and help to heal this world.”
“I’m a very proud girl today to know I had anything at all to do with
something that’s going to help us through this crazy pandemic,” she said
on “The One Show.”
On Monday, after Moderna announced that early trials of the vaccine showed
a 94.5 percent effectiveness rate, fans reacted rapturously.
“I want everyone to know that Dolly Parton gave us Buffy the TV series,
the song 9 to 5, Dollywood, and of course the Covid vaccine,” wrote one
fan on Twitter.
Ryan Cordell, an associate professor of English at Northeastern University
in Boston, filmed himself singing a song about the vaccine to the tune of
“Jolene.”
“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vacciiiiine, I’m begging of you please go in
my arm,” he sang, while playing guitar and describing the virus as “beyond
compare with spiky bursts of auburn hair that Covid, that corona emerald
green.”
The lyrics were written by the linguist Gretchen McCulloch, author of
“Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.”
She said she wrote the lyrics in part because the song “Jolene,” about one
woman begging another not to steal her man, has the “same desperate feel”
that the pandemic has instilled in so many people.
Now Ms. McCulloch is hoping Ms. Parton might release her own vaccine song,
she said.
“If Dolly Parton wants to record a vaccine P.S.A. to the tune of
‘Jolene,’” she said, “I think everyone would be very pleased.”
— Maria Cramer for The New York Times
“The United States vs. Billie Holiday” is a biopic that feels like it’s on a mission to correct the record about the famed jazz singer’s life — and her death. The film’s story is based on a chapter in the 2015 book “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs” by Johann Hari, which highlights the role of government agencies in persecuting the outspoken singer, played by Andra Day, an Oscar nominee for her performance.
For a member of Holiday’s extended family, it’s a portrayal that feels personal and long overdue.
“Lee Daniels’ film changes history,” says Holiday’s godson Bevan Dufty, his voice rising with emotion. ”Going forward forever, fans of Billie Holiday will know that she didn’t die from her addiction. She died because her government murdered her.”
The film centers Holiday’s famous anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” at the heart of the government’s aggression against the singer, as well as her civil rights advocacy. Her struggle with heroin addiction made her an easy target, and she was arrested multiple times on drug-related charges (including once in San Francisco.)
The record shows that there was a pattern of harassment against Holiday dating back to the 1930s, including situating an informant in Holiday’s circle, planting drugs on the singer and arresting her while she was hospitalized for cirrhosis in her final days. The book and film argue that the driver of this persecution was primarily the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under the order of commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, played by Garrett Hedlund. On July 17, 1959, Holiday was handcuffed in her hospital bed, where she died at age 44.
Creative forces help Andra Day transform into Billie Holiday in new Hulu film
Holiday’s death when Dufty was just 4½ years old became a defining moment in his family, says the BART director and former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Dufty’s father, William, was a journalist and friend of Holiday’s as well as the co-author of her memoir, “Lady Sings the Blues.”
Dufty’s mother, Maely, was a Jewish Czech immigrant who lost her family in World War II and had a strong bond with Holiday — perhaps one informed by their shared experiences of prejudice.
Both Duftys were well-known in the New York jazz world at the time, with Maely managing musician Charlie Parker for a period. Dufty says the trauma around Holiday’s death was a factor in his parents’ divorce: Maely would go on to work with addicts in Harlem and for civil rights causes. William Dufty was absent from his son’s life until Bevan’s adulthood: He later wrote the best-selling nutrition book “Sugar Blues” and remarried to actress Gloria Swanson.
Still, decades later like dropping a needle on vinyl, Dufty can summon the din of his parents’ 93rd Street apartment and Holiday’s legendary voice cooing to him.
“They would put me to bed, and then I’d go and I’d sneak under the big dining room table,” says Dufty. “There’s a Verve box set, and I think on the eighth CD is a jam session in our apartment, and I’m wearing red underwear. Holiday is making fun of my red drawers. And then she sings ‘My Yiddish Momme’ because my mom and I are Jewish.”
Dufty remembers things like the way his godmother could stretch words like “sugar” and the later rasp of that glorious, battle-worn vocal instrument. Holiday often sang to him, a lullaby experience that no doubt set impossibly high standards.
“Coming from her it was like coming from God,” says Dufty. “It was a voice that you heard nowhere else.”
When Dufty was born, Holiday was a constant presence in his family’s household. Although she never had children of her own, Dufty says Holiday was naturally warm and a second maternal figure to him. He was always trying to get a few extra minutes with his godmother, or one more song, before bedtime.
In 1972, “Lady Sings the Blues” was made into a film starring Diana Ross. While the book is colorfully, but inaccurately told, the hit movie took more significant liberties with the facts of Holiday’s life, especially in how it portrayed husband Louis McKay.
“The U.S. vs. Billie Holiday” centers Holiday’s addiction and legal troubles in the larger context of institutional violence against Black Americans.
“‘Lady Sings the Blues’ as a fictional film was fine,” says Dufty. “But the notion that Louis McKay, who my mother named ‘Decay,’ was (sympathetic) Billy Dee Williams was just ridiculous.”
The new film is more accurate in its presentation of Holiday’s relationships, including with women like actress Tallulah Bankhead. It also centers Holiday’s addiction and legal troubles in the larger context of institutional violence against Black Americans. He calls Day’s performance “transformative; she inhabits Holiday.”
While neither Holiday’s music nor her story have ever really gone away in culture (Dufty also praised Audra McDonald’s performance as Holiday in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill”) Daniels’ film feels timely following the societal reckonings of Black Lives Matter.
“Holiday is such a transformative figure,” Dufty says. “As we’ve fought to save American democracy this past year, we’ve relied on the indomitable spirit of Black women. And it’s important to me that Billie Holiday be seen in that context. Not simply that she was a strong Black woman, but that she was one of the earliest catalysts of the modern civil rights movement through ‘Strange Fruit.’”
THE DAY I arrive at Barbra Streisand’s property, she is on the phone with
the Christie’s auction house in London. Outside, it’s a brilliantly sunny
California afternoon in October, the skies clear of the ash cloud that
recently blanketed Los Angeles.
Collecting is one of Streisand’s passions. On the walls of her sprawling
Malibu home are early 19th-century American folk-art portraits, including
several by the master of the genre, Ammi Phillips, a New England artist
known for his spare, enigmatic, almost Modernist images. Streisand has
been buying them since the late 1980s and is especially drawn to paintings
of a mother with her child. She also owns two of George Washington, one
done by Charles Peale Polk in 1795 while Washington was still alive, which
Streisand has promised to Mount Vernon, the Virginia museum that was once
the president’s home. (The other is by Gilbert Stuart.) We could be in
Newport, R.I., or Colonial Williamsburg, except that Streisand’s husband
of 22 years, the actor James Brolin, a fit-looking 80, is working beside
the large pool just outside the living room windows, with the Pacific
Ocean his backdrop.
An assistant leads me to an annex Streisand calls the barn, where she and
her husband did most of their entertaining before the pandemic struck.
This “barn” is a vast structure with a spiral staircase in a silo, a
napping room, a frozen yogurt machine and more evidence of Streisand’s
wide-ranging tastes: There are meticulously recreated rooms in the
American colonial, Art Nouveau, Scottish Mackintosh and Arts and Crafts
styles. Streisand has rotated through these movements and others, going
through “periodic purges,” as she puts it, when her tastes in interior
decorating (and, she adds, hairstyles) have changed. By the end of her Art
Deco phase, circa 1974 to 1994, “I never wanted to look at Art Deco
again,” she wrote in her 2010 coffee-table book, “My Passion for Design.”
She put most of the pieces up for auction, an ordeal that inspired
Jonathan Tolins’s 2013 Off Broadway play, “Buyer & Cellar.”
I’ve been settled in a cavernous screening room, filled with overstuffed
sofas and chairs, when suddenly, Streisand appears. She’s wearing a black
top of her own design and a pair of $20 pants she bought online from a
company called Simplicitie, and has just had her shoulder-length hair
highlighted — which I know because she said the dye job distracted her
from that afternoon’s 600-point reversal in the Dow Jones industrial
average. The stock market is another of Streisand’s passions. She wakes up
most mornings at 6:30 a.m. to check the opening in New York. If she finds
the action “interesting,” she trades. Then she goes back to bed.
Coming face-to-face with Streisand, who is 78, is a shock. Nearly her
entire adult life has been chronicled in images — onscreen; in photographs
— and she’s the subject of scores of unauthorized biographies, none of
which she’s read. She’s won Oscars, a Tony, Emmys, even the Presidential
Medal of Freedom. For six years, she’s been working on an autobiography
that she says is nearing completion. She’s been a presence in my life
since I was a teenager and saw her in 1968’s “Funny Girl,” a heartbreaking
film about the devastated Broadway diva Fanny Brice that prompted my
sister to lock herself in her room for a half-hour sob.
Streisand is still a little breathless as she settles into a chair at a
safe distance. I ask if she won the auction. “Yes!” she exclaims. “It was
nerve-racking.” She extends her phone to show me an image of “Peasant
Woman With Child on her Lap,” an 1885 Vincent van Gogh painting rendered
in somber grays, blues and browns. (I later see on the Christie’s website
that the work sold for $4.47 million, well above its high estimate of $3.8
million. She’s loaning it to a museum.)
Streisand has always collected: In 1964, when she was starring in “Funny
Girl” on Broadway, she saved enough from her $2,500-a-week salary to buy a
small Matisse, her first major purchase. Art satisfies her urge both to
collect and invest — a Klimt she bought in 1969 for $17,000 sold years
later for $650,000. And, she says, “I love things that are beautiful. I
think I have a good eye — in some ways my entire life has been a quest for
beauty.”
But her love of things also fills a void. “Sometimes I think it’s all
connected to the loss of a parent,” Streisand writes in her design book.
Her father, Emanuel, a high school English teacher, died in 1943 at age
35, when Streisand was 15 months old. “Because you’d do anything to get
that mother or father back. But you can’t. … Yet with objects, there’s a
possibility.”
STREISAND SEEMS HAPPIER talking about art than music, but any story about
her life must begin with her singing voice: “one of the natural wonders of
the age, an instrument of infinite diversity and timbral resource,” as
Glenn Gould, the celebrated classical pianist, once put it. Only the great
20th-century soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf brought him comparable
listening pleasure.
In the weeks before we meet, I revisited many of Streisand’s recordings,
going back to her 1965 album “My Name Is Barbra.” Even now, her voice is
instantly recognizable; she is able to fuse musicality and drama to a
degree few singers — with the exception of Maria Callas — can. Equally
impressive is her sense of restraint; some of her most memorable songs
begin quietly, even haltingly. On the title track that opens “My Name Is
Barbra,” she starts off unaccompanied, relying solely on her voice, as if
to say, “Listen closely, you’ve never heard anything like this.” She often
employs a penetrating, somewhat nasal sound, a remnant of her childhood in
Brooklyn, but as she adds volume, her tone broadens and her voice soars
into its upper range. Finally, just when you think she has nowhere else to
go, she unleashes her full vibrato, holding the climactic note seemingly
forever — or, to be precise, a remarkable 18 seconds, as with the ending
of “A Piece of Sky,” one of the hits from her 1983 film, “Yentl.”
Streisand famously has had no serious musical education, yet I tell her
that I find it hard to believe that her formidable vocal technique — her
distinct phrasing, enormous range, expressive vibrato and skill at
sustaining dynamics from pianissimos to double fortes — hasn’t been the
result of countless hours of practice and training. “What’s a double
forte?” she asks.
She says her ability to hold a note can be largely attributed to one
quality: willpower. “Streisand was a prodigy,” says Michael Kosarin, the
music director, arranger and conductor. “About the only thing I can
compare it to is Luciano Pavarotti,” the operatic tenor, who, like
Streisand, didn’t read music. “Singers can be overtrained. The technique
can get in the way of the acting.” He pointed to her rendition of the song
“My Man” from “Funny Girl”— “In the first half she’s barely singing. Some
notes are a little off-pitch. She’s overcome by emotion. It’s perfect for
telling the story, not perfect in and of itself.”
Perhaps Streisand is so nonchalant about her vocal talent because it came
to her so easily. By the age of 5, she says, she was known in her
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood as the “girl with no father and a
good voice.” (Her father obviously still looms large: She proudly mentions
that he taught the classics to prison inmates in Elmira, N.Y.) Her mother,
Diana, had a natural operatic voice but never sang professionally: She
supported Barbra and Barbra’s older brother, Sheldon, by working as a
school secretary and a bookkeeper. She warned her daughter not to pursue a
career in show business, because, as Streisand recalls, “I didn’t look
like the movie stars I read about in magazines.” She now believes her
mother was jealous of her talent. “I didn’t really like my life as a
child,” she says. “I thought, ‘This can’t be it.’” Her mother remarried
and, at 16, Streisand graduated high school early and moved to Manhattan.
(Streisand has a half sister, Roslyn Kind, but rarely mentions her or
Sheldon, a Long Island real estate investor.)
At 18, Streisand heard about a talent contest at the Lion, a club in
Greenwich Village. She had recently been fired from her job as a clerk and
phone operator for a printing company and was being repeatedly rejected
for acting gigs. The prize was $50 and a free dinner of London broil, and
she needed both. Along with auditioning and interviewing, she also was
reinventing herself: She said she was from Smyrna, Turkey, using the
ancient Greek name for the city (“I pronounced it with an accent and a
rolled ‘R’ — ‘Smeerrna’!”), a vaguely plausible claim given her features.
“I didn’t want to be labeled as some girl from Brooklyn,” she says. After
she sang Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s 1954 song “A Sleepin’ Bee,”
there was a stunned silence — and then, thunderous applause. She followed
with the 1952 jazz hit “Lullaby of Birdland,” walking through the small,
packed room with her microphone. She won.
She didn’t realize until she arrived that the Lion was a gay bar, but it
seems fitting that she got her start there. As William J. Mann, author of
the 2012 book “Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand” has written,
many of her early friends and influences turned out to be gay men, and
“gay audiences instinctively recognized something very familiar about her,
a shared sensibility.” Streisand is routinely ranked as a gay icon
alongside Judy Garland, Bette Midler and Lady Gaga, who, to varying
degrees, embody a combination of glamour and suffering that can only be
redeemed by love, requited or (more often) not. “The Man That Got Away,”
the 1954 torch song originated by Garland that later became a hit for
Streisand, has been a queer anthem for decades.
Theater mavens and celebrities began making their way to the Lion for
Streisand’s weekly performances, and after a month or so, she moved on to
the more upscale Bon Soir nearby. One memorable night there, she met her
future lifelong manager, Martin Erlichman; on another, Alan and Marilyn
Bergman, the lyricists who would later write many of her most enduring
songs, including 1973’s “The Way We Were” (written with Marvin Hamlisch)
and, a decade later, the “Yentl” soundtrack (with Michel Legrand). In
1962, Laurents hired her for “I Can Get It for You Wholesale.” In that
play, the 19-year-old Streisand stopped the show with her solo “Miss
Marmelstein,” a comic vocal masterpiece in which she complains that more
attractive girls get called by their first names. Overnight, she became a
Broadway star. (In 1963, she married her “Wholesale” co-star, Elliott
Gould, whom she divorced eight years later; they have a son, Jason.) Her
next theatrical break came in 1964, with “Funny Girl.” Though the musical
— about an early 20th-century Ziegfeld star who won and then lost her man
— seems written for Streisand, the producers only settled on her after
Anne Bancroft and Carol Burnett turned down the role.
Streisand’s mother was right that she wasn’t conventionally pretty, at
least not in the aristocratic, Grace Kelly mold. She repeatedly rebuffed
advice to have her nose cosmetically altered, and instead made it one of
her signature features; she learned to deploy her Brooklyn accent for
comic effect. Audiences couldn’t take their eyes off her. While doing
seven Broadway performances a week, Streisand also taped her “My Name Is
Barbra” TV special for CBS, a vocal tour de force that extended her fame
nationwide. At 21, she landed on the cover of Time magazine: “She touches
the heart with her awkwardness, her lunging humor and a bravery that is
all the more winning because she seems so vulnerable,” the magazine’s
reporter wrote.
Streisand’s performances in “Funny Girl,” and her televised rendition of
its hit song “People,” were so indelible that the show has proved largely
impervious to revival. “I’d never touch it,” says Sierra Boggess, who has
starred in “The Phantom of the Opera” and “School of Rock” on Broadway.
Streisand “is so ruthlessly herself and so unique. I wouldn’t know how to
make it my own.” It’s hard to imagine anyone today replicating Streisand’s
astonishing rise to stardom — discovered in an obscure gay nightclub and
anointed by an elite group of powerful cultural gatekeepers. Yet, even as
social media has spawned a new generation of pop stars, Streisand’s appeal
endures, unaffected by shifting tastes. Her relevancy comes not from
following musical trends but from refusing to do so.
TODAY, STREISAND CALLS herself an actor first. Though she never had music
lessons, she studied with the renowned acting teacher Allan Miller while
she was still a teenager and absorbed the Method approach taught at New
York’s Actors Studio (she was deemed too young to enroll but was later
made an honorary life member). One of her unfulfilled dreams is to have
performed in the classics, particularly in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and
Juliet” and “Antony and Cleopatra.”
Acting is also what drew her to Sondheim’s songs. “He gives you so much to
work with,” she says. “I love singing his songs because they’re written
for characters in a play where there’s a beginning, a middle and an end —
and then I try to relate that to parts of myself.” Both Streisand and
Sondheim recall that while working on his song “Send in the Clowns” from
the 1973 musical “A Little Night Music” for her 1985 album of Broadway
show tunes, she struggled with what she considered an “emotional gap”
between the last stanzas. The climactic line — “Quick, send in the clowns.
/ Don’t bother, they’re here.” — comes before the last stanza in the
Broadway original, but Streisand called Sondheim and asked if she could
move that line to the end. It’s hard to imagine any other performer who’d
dare edit Sondheim’s work, but two hours later he called her back to say
that “she was right and astute,” Sondheim recalls. In the stage version of
the song, the last stanzas are separated by dialogue that makes explicit
the predicament the former lovers face: that the aging actress Desiree is
still in love with the man she once rejected, who is now married to a
younger woman. So Sondheim wrote a musical bridge and additional lyrics
for Streisand that became the version she sang on the album.
As the lyricist for the Broadway original, Sondheim controls the rights
along with the estates of Laurents, who wrote the book, and Jule Styne,
the composer. They were amenable to the project, but Streisand wanted to
direct and star in the film, which Sondheim and Laurents resisted. Then
she started tinkering with the book. (Streisand says she was only
restoring the earlier movie version to the original book.) And now, a
Barbra Streisand “Gypsy” — a possibility as recently as four years ago —
is no longer on the table.
Still, attempting to rewrite one of the most celebrated books in Broadway
history is entirely in character for Streisand, who tells me several times
that artistic control has been far more important to her than money or
critical acclaim. This has been true from the outset: She insisted upon —
and won — contractual control over her first record album, even down to
the cover design, which features a photograph of her performing at the Bon
Soir.
Hollywood was another, altogether tougher industry, where women had long
been at the mercy of powerful male studio heads and directors, and where
even Streisand, already a major star, struggled to make herself heard.
“Don’t let them do to you what they did to me,” Garland famously advised
Streisand in the 1960s. Women were typically paid less than their male
co-stars and strictly relegated to acting. “Actresses did not direct,”
Streisand recalls. But for “Funny Girl,” her first film, she watched the
dailies with its Oscar-winning director, William Wyler, offering her
opinions along the way and learning the craft from one of its masters.
Later, for “The Way We Were,” Streisand’s co-star, Robert Redford, got
$750,000 plus a share of the profits, while Streisand also got
profit-sharing but was paid $400,000 less. She wanted to star in and
direct a sequel, but requested a $400,000 director’s fee to make up the
pay difference. Her producer, Ray Stark, flatly refused. No sequel was
made. In those years, male stars negotiated for a percentage of a film’s
gross revenue, rather than the often nonexistent net profit. Streisand
joined their ranks with 1976’s “A Star Is Born,” and helped begin the
still-ongoing fight for gender pay equity in Hollywood. “It wasn’t easy,”
recalls Michael Ovitz, the former Hollywood agent who represented her
during the ’80s and ’90s. “The business didn’t value women as much as men.
Barbra could be tough as nails. She stood up for what she believed in,
with enormous integrity.”
Streisand in political fund-raising mode ‘is dazzling to behold,’ says
Nancy Pelosi. ‘It’s not just because she’s a celebrity. She knows the
issues. She’s studied. She can explain why she supports what she does.
That’s what’s persuasive.’ It wasn’t until 1983, with “Yentl,” that she
finally got the chance to direct. She’d bought the rights to the Isaac
Bashevis Singer short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” in 1970. Her original
vision was for a nonmusical, black-and-white art film, but “the only way I
could get ‘Yentl’ made was to sing in it,” she says. The movie eventually
emerged as a lavish full-color musical. Streisand starred as a young woman
in a Jewish shtetl who poses as a man to pursue an education. She also
directed, co-wrote the screenplay and produced it.
“Yentl” grossed over $40 million and won Streisand a Golden Globe for best
director, but not even a nomination from the male-dominated Directors
Guild of America. “Maybe in the next few years, with more women directing,
they’ll get used to us,” Streisand said at that year’s Globes ceremony.
Since then, only one woman has won the Oscar for best director — Kathryn
Bigelow in 2010 (and only five women have been nominated). “It’s a
disgrace more women haven’t,” Streisand says. She hasn’t directed a film
since 1996’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” a romantic comedy in which
Streisand — finally — wins and keeps her handsome leading man, played by
Jeff Bridges. It proved to be a case of life imitating art: The year the
movie was released, Streisand met Brolin.
STREISAND’S INSISTENCE on control and obsession with detail have been
criticized for much of her life: She is “difficult,” “demanding,” a
“perfectionist,” all of which she readily acknowledges. It’s hard to
imagine a comparable male star or director being subjected to the same
criticism. In any event, it’s impossible to fault the results. “So she’s a
perfectionist,” says Kosarin. “Most geniuses are perfectionists. Look at
Steve Jobs.”
While Streisand insists that money is secondary to her, financial security
is another form of control. She’s brought the same determination and
self-education to stocks as to art, antiques and real estate. Jim Cramer,
who discussed the market with her as a hedge fund manager before he became
a popular CNBC host, told me she knew more about initial public offerings
than most traders. “And she hated to lose,” he adds.
Streisand says she’s earned millions trading stocks — several million
between 1998 and 2000 alone. (“I’d be up at 6:30, light a fire, have a hot
chocolate and trade until 1 p.m.”) She admits she’s not the most
disciplined investor: She panicked during the crash in 1987 (“I lost a
fortune”), and again in March when the market plunged because of pandemic
fears. But her instincts have been sound: She bought Apple, Amazon,
Netflix and Google shares when her then-financial adviser said they were
too speculative. Her adviser steered her into Disney stock in 2011, and
she likes to give shares as presents to children in her life. She can get
the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, on the phone and recently asked him
to correct Siri’s pronunciation of her name from Strei-zand to Strei-sand.
He agreed. “People mispronounce my name no matter how famous I am,” she
laments.
Apple is now the biggest holding in her charity, the Streisand Foundation,
which funds various progressive causes — racial equality, women’s rights,
civil rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and voting rights — with a particular
focus on climate change and the environment. She helped endow the Barbra
Streisand Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, and
co-founded the Women’s Heart Alliance to support research on heart disease
in women.
She’s also raised money for political candidates, including every
Democratic presidential nominee since John F. Kennedy (she sang for
Kennedy at the 1963 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when she was barely
in her 20s). And while she has never been an activist in the mold of, say,
Jane Fonda, her influence may be more far-reaching. She befriended Nancy
Pelosi, the current speaker of the House, in 1986, when Streisand hosted a
Congressional fund-raiser at her own Malibu home. “It took real courage
back then to get involved because the entertainment industry believed
there’d be a backlash,” Pelosi says. “She tended to every detail,” the
politician recalls, even serving the black-and-white cookies popular in
Baltimore, Pelosi’s hometown. Streisand in fund-raising mode “is dazzling
to behold,” Pelosi tells me. “It’s not just because she’s a celebrity. She
knows the issues. She’s studied. She can explain why she supports what she
does. That’s what’s persuasive.”
Streisand’s early forays into politics faced criticism at the time: “When
I first directed a movie,” Streisand told the Los Angeles Times in 1993,
“it was as if I was being told how dare I attempt to infiltrate a man’s
domain. Now it’s: How dare I be interested in politics.” And yet, because
of her, Hollywood activism is now commonplace. “She doesn’t have to do
this,” Pelosi adds. “She does it out of patriotism. She loves our
country.”
The Trump presidency has summoned a new level of outrage in Streisand.
“What do I hate most about Trump? He lies every day,” she says. “He has
the compulsion to lie, even when the facts say something different. The
worst lie was about the pandemic. Why not face facts? Why not tell the
truth? People are stronger than you think — they can handle the truth. It
would have saved thousands of lives.” She wrote the song “Don’t Lie to Me”
for her most recent album, 2018’s “Walls,” to “express my despair and
anger”: “Why can’t you just tell me the truth? / Hard to believe the
things you say, / Why can’t you feel the tears I cried today, cried today,
cried today? / How do you win if we all lose?” (Of a Joe Biden presidency,
she says, “I’m exhilarated … [He] will bring back dignity, honesty,
intelligence and compassion to the Oval Office. I look forward to that.”)
Streisand gave an extended analysis of her politics in an address titled
“The Artist as Citizen” in 1995 at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
“I am also very proud to be a liberal,” she told the packed auditorium.
“Why is that so terrible these days? The liberals were liberators — they
fought slavery, fought for women to have the right to vote, fought against
Hitler, Stalin, fought to end segregation, fought to end apartheid.
Liberals put an end to child labor and they gave us the five-day workweek!
What’s to be ashamed of?”
— James B. Stewart for The New York Times