Streisand: Her Life by James Spada Read Free Book Online Page A

helplessly to the terrible rows between her mother and stepfather, thoughts of her real father would flood her mind, and she found herself gripped with anger at him. “It was like ‘Why did you die and leave me? ’” she said. “ ‘What did I do wrong? Was I a bad girl or something? Or didn’t you like me? ’”
     

     
B ARBARA’S FIRST DAY of high school—Monday, September 12, 1955—afforded respite, but Erasmus Hall High School held terrors of its own. She didn’t know what to expect when she boarded the Nostrand Avenue bus outside her building for the ride to the school at Flatbush and Church Avenues, dressed in gingham and lace to project a frilly femininity. When she got there the sheer size of the place overwhelmed her. At P.S. 89 Barbara had been part of a class of 136; at Erasmus the freshman class numbered over 1,300. The sprawling Erasmus Hall campus resembled a university more than a high school, and surely must have inspired awe and trepidation in its wide-eyed freshmen.
     
Still, the educational standards at Erasmus were top-flight, and from the start Barbara ranked among the school’s academic elite. Her IQ, found to be 124, had made her a part of the Intellectually Gifted Opportunity (IG-OP) program at P.S. 89, and that automatically put her in honors classes in high school. During her first term she applied herself so diligently to her studies that her grade adviser described her as “ hard-driving.” She scored 92 in English, 90 in Modern History, 98 in Spanish, 90 in General Science, 96 in Elementary Algebra, and 95 in Freshman Chorus. Her 93. 5 average put her in the top 3 percent of the class.
     
She might have become “Miss Erasmus,” but she wasn’t a joiner; most of her classmates thought of her as “a loner, aloof.” One classmate, Diane Hirschfeld, recalled that after lunch “everyone wou l d stand around in groups and kind of chat until the bell rang for us to go back in, and Barbara was always standing off to one side, alone. The strongest memory I have of her is her standing and waiting by herself, holding her books.”
     
“I wouldn’t know who to talk to,” Barbra has said. “I was smart, but the smart kids wearing oxfords and glasses wouldn’t look at me, and the dumb kids I wouldn’t want to associate with. So I was a real outsider.” She made no effort to fit in. While most of the “cool” kids rushed over to Garfield’s Cafeteria across the street for lunch (twenty-five cents minimum), Barbara usually ate in the school lunchroom. While many students joined clubs and stayed after school for extracurricular activities, Barbara worked in Choy’s Chinese restaurant.
     
Jimmy and Muriel Choy lived one flight up from Barbara, and the moment she first saw them in 1953, they seemed marvelously exotic to the inquisitive eleven-year-old, who asked unending questions about their Chinese heritage and their strange customs and culture. Before long, their warmth and openness had captivated her, and they became, just as the Borokows had been before them, a second family to her. “I loved them,” Barbra said.
     
She baby-sat for the Choys’ two daughters, five-year-old Debbie and two-year-old Pam, for thirty-five cents an hour. Barbara’s maturity and reliability so impressed Jimmy and Muriel that the following year they asked her to help out on Sundays in their restaurant, Choy’s Chinese on Nostrand Avenue across the street from their building, even though she was only twelve. Barbara had no trouble getting her mother’s permission. Diana, faced with her husband’s financial irresponsibility, figured the sixty-cents an hour Barbara would earn would come in handy.
     
“Barbara was anxious to learn Chinese words,” Jimmy Choy recalled, “and she learned how to order in Chinese.” Everything about the culture fascinated her. She wore silk kimonos. She put her hair up into a bun and crisscrossed darning needles through it. She let her nails grow an inch long