Barbra Streisand's heartbreaking admission about sad relationship with mum
Her songs have reduced even the most steely-hearted to sobs but, away from stage and screen, Barbra Streisand had plenty of reasons for tears in her personal life, too.
And while the ups and downs of her friendships and relationships have been the subject of hours of screen time and hundreds of inches of newsprint, a tragedy in her early years shaped the real Barbra. It began when she was only 15 months old with the sudden death of her father Emanuel at the age of only 35.
“I never knew my father,” she writes in her new memoir, My Name Is Barbra, published today. "There are no photographs of him holding me as a baby. That was very disappointing. I always wondered, How could that be? Why didn’t my mother ever take a picture of the two of us? And when I was older and asked her why she had never talked to me about my father, she said, ‘I didn’t want you to miss him’. I never understood my mother’s logic.”
Barbra Streisand and James Brolin (Getty Images)An accomplished teacher, he’d had a seizure after developing a headche at work and the next morning an ambulance took him to hospital where he was given morphine and stopped breathing. As the 81-year-old reveals, it’s a moment that impacted her even at such a tender age. “Years later, my mother told me that for months after my father died, I would still climb up on the window ledge to wait for him to come home. In some ways, I’m still waiting.”
Widowed at just 34, mum Diana was left with two small children - Barbra and older brother Shelly, then nine - to look after and money soon became an issue. The three moved into Barbra’s grandparents’ one-bedroom apartment where she and her mother shared the bedroom, with Shelly on a pull-out cot and her grandparents moved into the living room. But even then sound would have an early influence as, with no TV in the house, the family would gather around the radio.
King Charles in the words of his celebrity pals from Lionel Richie to Fergie
Marlon Brando (Getty Images)
Barbra Streisand holds her Oscar for Best Actress won for the performance as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (Getty Images)After leaving home Barbra worked as a cabaret singer in New York before her Broadway debut in I Can Get it For You Wholesale in 1962 saw her win a host of awards and a record deal. Many albums soon followed before she began a film and TV career, including hits The Way We Were, Yentl, A Star Is Born, Funny Girl and Meet The Fockers.
Off screen she married M*A*S*H and Friends actor Elliot Gould in 1963 and had a son, Jason, before splitting after eight years. She married actor James Brolin in 1998 and the couple have been together ever since. However, as she grew, Barbra’s relationship with her mother became more complex and even at the height of her fame she found herself feeling let down by Diana, which would become a theme of her life. In her book she recounts a moment when she was aged around seven and had been going to the cinema with her mother before she stopped in the middle of the street, changed her mind and went home.
“It’s a moment I’ve remembered all my life,” Brbra recalls. “I couldn’t trust that she would keep her word. She would say something and then not follow through, which left me feeling deeply disappointed and utterly helpless, because I had no control. It’s very unsettling, not to be able to count on your own mother.”
Barbra Streisand singing in scene from the 1968 movie Funny Girl (Getty Images)
Barbra's mother, Diana Rosen (Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)One of the biggest nights of her career, a concert opening the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve 1993, she had invited her mother for opening night but she didn’t turn up.
“Where was my mother?” she writes. “For a moment I was plunged back to the same feeling I had as a six-year-old, waking up from a tonsillectomy in a strange hospital room, and my mother wasn’t there.
“When I looked out at the audience on the opening night of Funny Girl, my mother wasn’t there either. Her excuse, on both occasions, was that she was too nervous and had to get up and walk around. And now, on this night when I could have used all the support I could get, once again she wasn’t there.”
It is only recently that she discovered what had happened that night when a friend confessed she had bumped into her mother being wheeled out of the hotel with two friends. As people lined the streets as far as the eye could see to watch her daughter, and many more hoping there might be a cancellation ticket suddenly available, Diana was clearly going somewhere else.
When asked if she wasn’t going to see her daughter perform Barbra reveals Diana replied: “Well, it’s New Year’s Eve, and my friends and I really want to go out.” Her incredulous friend protested but Diana would not be moved. “We want to go out on the town and have fun”, before adding, “Could you tell Barbra for me?”
And while her mother did turn up to another of her Las Vegas shows, Barbra laments: “The fact that she couldn’t be bothered to be there on one of the most important nights of my life was like a slap in the face. It was as if she was sending me a message: Maybe other people think you’re so great, but I don’t. But here’s the funny thing. I never thought I was great. That’s what she never understood.”
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
