The Streisand Effect

At home with the legend, talking music, movies, and her revealing new memoir, My Name Is Barbra

- By Radhika Jones. Photograph by Richard Avedon

“THIS IS THE opening of a film about Sarah Bernhardt, if I could get anyone to do it,” she says, drawing her hand through the air. “You start on a mirror, and the hand comes in the frame, and someone is trying to put on the eyeliner and it’s smudging. You have to erase it and start again. You don’t even know who it is.”

We’ve been talking about makeup. For most of her career— from her nightclub gigs when she was 18 right through to her major films—Barbra Streisand did her own. At first because there was no one else to do it, and then because no one could do it better. In her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, out November 7, she tells the story of her film test for Funny Girl. The makeup people came to attend to her, and she thought, “Great, they’re the experts. Let’s see what they can do.” But she didn’t love the result. “I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ ” Streisand writes, “but then I asked, ‘Would it be all right if we also did a test with just me making myself up?’ The studio said, ‘Fine.’ ”

The cinematographer picked Streisand’s.
Streisand is 81 now, and though her hands remain steady, she finds it harder to achieve that straight line across the eyelid. That’s the genesis of the Sarah Bernhardt idea—Bernhardt at an older age, still potent, still inimitable. “You know, she played Juliet when she was 74,” she says.