Streisand: Her Life by James Spada Read Free Book Online

and Barbara was certain the training would turn her into a star. Diana, eyeing that potential income, agreed, and the school accepted Barbara. She first took general classes, then graduated to more advanced instruction. She adored every minute of it, but after four months Diana abruptly pulled her out of the school, saying only that she had decided it was too far away from home. To the devastated Barbara this was just another betrayal by a mother who didn’t believe in her dreams.
     
What Diana didn’t tell her daughter was that she could no longer afford to pay the tuition because Louis Kind’s financial support of the family had become sporadic. During his increasingly long absences, which Diana explained to friends and family as “business trips,” he was in fact AWOL fro m his marriage: Diana had no idea where he was. “He had places to go where he enjoyed doing his own thing away from us,” she said with some delicacy.
     
Still, Barbara found ways to keep performing. During the summer of 1955, Diana took her and Roslyn for another vacation in upstate New York, this one a week at the Coronet Hotel in Glen Wild. Barbara, focused and competitive, won the Ping-Pong and rowing contests. She also won the talent contest, and afterward two different guests asked her if she would sing at weddings being held the following two weekends—and offered her a small fee to do so. After she exclaimed “Yes!” she whispered to her mother, “Y’ see, Ma, I can make money at this.” At one of the weddings, a piano player from Brooklyn came up to Barbara and Diana and told them that Barbara had such a good voice she should cut a demo record. He told them about a studio where they could make an acetate recording for a few dollars, and he offered to be the accompanist.
     
Barbara bubbled over with excitement, and Diana murmured some vague acquiescence. Once again, however, Mrs. Kind was preoccupied. Her week in the Catskills would soon be over. Then she would have to return to Brooklyn and face her husband.
     

 
T he late-summer air lay still, hot and heavy as Barbara slept restlessly on the small living room sofa. It was three in the morning, and the light still shone under the closed door of her mother’s bedroom: her stepfather hadn’t come home yet. More and more often now Lou Kind stayed out until the early-morning hours, and Diana later charged in court that he frequently didn’t come home for weeks at a time, leaving his family without a father and without income. Barbara dreaded what would happen when he walked through the door.
     
The court documents would paint a grim picture of life in apartment 4G. Whenever her husband finally returned home, Diana said, he would flaunt his associations with other women. He would savage her with obscene invective, threaten her, and assault her. Kind countercharged that Diana nagged him, lied about him, flew into unprovoked rages, threw things, and hit him. Their fights grew so loud that they disturbed the neighbors.
     
One can well imagine the impact all this had on the impressionable thirteen-year-old Barbara. “I had a miserable relationship with my stepfather,” she said. “I was abused.” Kind treated Barbara nearly as badly as he did her mother. When she asked him for fifteen cents for an ice-cream cone as the bell of the Good Humor truck tinkled outside, he replied, “No, you’re not pretty enough.” Whenever he compared Roslyn to Barbara, he called them Beauty and the Beast. As he watched the Friday night fights on television, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts and swigging beer, Barbara was so afraid to obstruct his line of vision that she would crawl along the floor.
     
Trapped in this cramped, dreary apartment with a man she hated, Barbara blamed no one so much as her mother. “I resented her terribly for letting it happen.” She retreated further and further into her fantasy world of glamour and fame, but reality proved inescapable. As she listened