Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity and Power
By Neal Gabler
Yale University Press, £16.99
Don't tell me not to live/ Just sit and putter/ Life's candy and the sun's/ A ball of butter/ Don't bring around a cloud/ To rain on my parade."
These lyrics from Funny Girl, giving Barbra Streisand her most famous and career-defining role as Fanny Brice, could be a metaphor both for her career and the woman herself. Or so author Neal Gabler would have it.
Gabler claims Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity and Power is not a biography of Barbra Streisand. "There are already plenty of those," he says. "Instead it is a book-length biographical essay." Indeed, although it charts Streisand's life from childhood, it is in many ways a study of the connection between Jewishness and success, looking at how Streisand's Jewishness both propelled her forward and held her back.
Gabler's position is that Streisand was always very aware of her Jewishness. It was not only her heritage but also her identity - something that she was reminded of every time she (or her critics) looked in a mirror. "They always write about me as the girl with the Fu Manchu finger-nails and the nose as long as an anteater's. That hurts far more than if anyone wrote that I was a terrible singer - which they never did."
Most of the book focuses on her early years: her rise to fame while battling with her unsupportive family; her intense belief in her own talent and her desire to be more than "just" a singer; her critics and their focus on her "otherness".
She was never going to allow any rain on her parade. As Gabler quotes her saying: "I always knew I hadda be famous and rich. I knew I couldn't live just being medium."
But it wasn't easy. Being a Jew in Hollywood in the 1960s was by no means unheard of, but the presence of a Yiddish-sounding, Semitic-looking girl with a big nose tended to put the metaphorical noses of the local, assimilated Jews out of joint.
The thing about Streisand - as Gabler repeatedly emphasises - is that she has great appeal.
Her talent overwhelms all other aspects good, bad or indifferent - Jewishness, ambition, the fact that, whatever the character, she always seems to be playing herself.
Towards the end of the book, after her star has ascended, we see a slightly more negative side of Streisand, with less attention to her talent and ambition and more about her reputation as a "diva", alongside ongoing assaults from film critics, South Park send-ups and her troubled romantic life.
Being a biographical essay (in Yale's Jewish Lives series), complete with references to other biographies - it is marked by a certain amount of repetition. There were many times when I felt like I was re-reading a previous paragraph, and Gabler's focus on the size of Streisand's nose did get a bit wearing after a while.
But Gabler's enthusiasm is so infectious and Barbra Streisand's star quality so magnificent that I found myself singing the songs, even in the book's less interesting moments.
