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

and painted them Dragon Lady red. She also came to love Chinese food, so much more delicious, so much more exciting than the bland kosher food her mother prepared. She thrilled to egg rolls and chow mein and moo shu pork, enjoying every chomp of that verboten meat as much as she had enjoyed yelling out “Christmas!” at yeshiva. Ironically, though, the strongest gastronomic memory Barbra holds of Mrs. Choy was that she made the best spaghetti sauce she ever tasted. It was probably Muriel Choy who turned Barbara into the voracious food addict that she would become: if Barbara had to accept food in place of love, it might as well be delicious.
     
Every day she grew closer to her surrogate parents, and as she entered puberty, it was Muriel Choy to whom Barbara went with questions about the facts of life. She couldn’t even broach such things to her mother. “In my family, sex was taboo,” she said. “You don’t screw anybody until you get married, you don’t hold hands, you don’t kiss, because you’ll get a disease. It was all so awful.”
     
But Muriel Choy “used to tell me about things. About love, and life, and sex.” One of the questions Barbara asked was whether, during intercourse, the man was always on top. “Not necessarily,” Muriel replied.
     
“ W hat!” Barbara yelped in amazement. But Mrs. Choy would say no more.
     
She worked at Choy’s Chinese for four years, and she continually spoke of her desire to be an actress. “ W e all knew of her ambitions,” Muriel recalled. Coincidentally it was the Choys who put Barbara Streisand’s image on celluloid for the first time. At a birthday party for one of his daughters in 1956, Jimmy Choy tried out his new 8mm movie camera. The film shows laughing kids in party hats, a birthday cake festooned with candles—and fourteen-year-old Barbara, dressed in a blue sweater with white fur trim and a dark skirt, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. Every time the camera turns her way, Barbara ducks her head and puts her hands in front of her face.
     

     
B ARBARA STOOD NERVOUSLY in front of the music department chairman, Cosimo DePietto, and sang with all her heart. She was auditioning in the hope of winning a spot in the Erasmus Choral Club, the elite group of student singers that each year put on memorable Christmas and Easter concerts in the school’s chapel. But Barbara wanted to win DePietto’s approval for another reason as well. Like many of the girls at Erasmus, she had a crush on the dark, handsome Italian with the wavy salt-and-pepper hair. She dreamed of being taken under his personal tutelage; surely he would recognize her talent and help her become a world-class singer.
     
But when she finished her performance, DePietto seemed unimpressed. Tears burned in her eyes as she left the room, and a few days later he told her what she already knew: that she hadn’t been accepted. DePietto’s official reason was that she couldn’t read music, but years later he recalled that “I never knew her to have any particular or outstanding talent.”
     
As she would for the rest of her life when faced with rejection, Barbara dug in her heels and persisted. She auditioned again a few months later, with the same disappointing results. Then she came up with a plan. I f she couldn’t win DePietto over directly, she reasoned, maybe she could do it in a roundabout way. She reminded her mother of that Catskill pianist who had told them about the studio where she could make a record, and she begged Diana to take her there, using the argument that to cut a record would impress her music teacher and get her into the Choral Club.
     
Diana finally agreed, Barbra later said, “because she wanted to be a singer.” Over Christmas recess, mother and daughter met their pianist friend at the Nola Recording Studio in Manhattan. Diana went first, singing “One Kiss” and an operetta piece in the Jeanette MacDonald style she had loved as a girl. But Barbara was