A voice like Barbra Streisand’s is a mystery, even to its owner: two bits of gristle in the throat resonantly swell in her head and chest to produce a storm of sound that Streisand first heard when vocalising in the stairwell of a Brooklyn tenement. Taken to a recording studio by her mother at the age of 14, she gratuitously riffed on a melody and, as she recalls, “something came out of my mouth that completely surprised me”. A decade later in Funny Girl, that finely tuned and amped-up “something” stunned the world. At the prow of a tug boat in New York harbour, triumphantly brandishing a bouquet to upstage the Statue of Liberty’s torch, Streisand turns the sky into an echo chamber as she orders the overcast weather not to rain on her parade.
Her autobiography matches the commanding noise she makes. Almost 1,000 pages long, it lacks an index because Streisand – who always demanded what she calls through clenched teeth “creative control” – insists on directing the way we read and debars us from looking up titbits about her adolescent exploits as a shoplifter, a night spent playing footsie with Ralph Fiennes, or a romp with Pierre Trudeau that involves the Canadian prime minister swimming naked in an icy lake. Exhaustive and exhausting, the book relitigates Streisand’s life by revisiting the rare occasions on which her will was not done. She re-edits the films she directed, kvetches because 50 years ago Sydney Pollack cut a close-up of her from The Way We Were, and manoeuvres Stephen Sondheim into altering his song lyrics to accommodate her. Watching Yentl on television, she objects to the volume of the commercial breaks, phones the network and bullies the sound engineer into turning the knob down two decibels. Invited out to dinner, she redesigns the table lighting before she sits down and advises her hostess to find taller candles that will place the flames at eye level.
