The Books: Vamps & Tramps; “Brooklyn Nefertiti: Barbra Streisand,” by Camille Paglia

NEXT BOOK on the essays shelf:

Vamps & Tramps: New Essays, by Camille Paglia.

Mitchell and I talk about Barbra Streisand all the time. Mitchell has this whole thing called “The Tao of Barbra,” and literally, if there is anything about Barbra Streisand that Mitchell doesn’t know, it’s probably not worth knowing. It was so much fun watching clips of her TV special where she performed with Ray Charles. She’s an icon, right? But the danger with icons is that they can be taken for granted. Or just merely admired, as though they are a beautiful statue in a garden. (This is one of the problems with a lot of biopics, too. Either: The person is treated like a statue. Or: The statue is shattered. Neither are interesting or comprehensive … and neither contribute to our understanding of why the artist became an icon in the first place. This was one of the reasons why I so appreciated Spike Lee’s most recent documentary about Michael Jackson, which everyone NEEDS to see! It focused on the work in such a single-minded way that it actually started feeling radical. As it is. To do a purely celebratory documentary about Michael Jackson’s genius, leaving out all of the personal foibles/tabloid stuff/criminal stuff, was deliberate on Spike Lee’s part. The documentary is an act of redress. Everyone on the planet knows how “weird” Michael Jackson was. But it is important to remember: Who could understand what it was like to be Michael Jackson? Except Michael Jackson? Elvis might have understood it. Hell, for a moment, there, dead Elvis was Michael’s father-in-law. Michael Jackson’s life WAS weird, on every level, and on top of that, he was a bona-fide genius. So I don’t know, YOU try to be “normal” with a life like that. He had ZERO time on this planet where his life was “normal.” He didn’t become famous at 18, so at least he would have a childhood of NOT being famous to remember and, maybe, cherish. The problem with a conversation like this is that then you are accused of trying to excuse or explain the bad behavior. But of course that’s not what I’m doing at all. It’s a HIGHER LEVEL conversation than most people are comfortable having. It’s easier to just snicker about the complexion, or shriek with outrage about his parenting or the various criminal charges against him (and they may be valid, who knows), or how weird he was, how unlike the rest of us. The thing is: Two opposite things can be true at the same time. I know. Crazy, right? It is beyond my power to stop the world from wanting their entertainers to be role models, but I will stay my own course and refuse to need that from them. It’s just a better way to live. You can see things more clearly then. But the outraged don’t see it that way. I’M the one with blinders on. They hear praise of Michael Jackson as “apologia” for all of his faults. It’s all a little bit too much Puritan, Salem-witch-trials, for my taste. No thanks. In Molly Haskell’s seminal book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, she talks about Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford – these power-house icons that somehow rise above gender – and how the movies they were in often treated them … as weirdos, outlaws, something to be tamed – and Haskell says: “It is mediocrity’s revenge on the extraordinary.” Pretty brutal, but I think that’s what’s behind all of our celebrity-bashing, all of our disgusting glee when an icon falls. It’s the mediocre of the world reassuring themselves that the extraordinary are no better than the rest of us. Or maybe, they’re even worse.

Sure, sure. Maybe true. Whatever. But it’s not an interesting truth, a revelatory truth, or a truth that leads anywhere but small-mindedness. It is the ART that is extraordinary. And it is the ART that cannot be done by the mediocre, no matter how hard they may try. Some people have pipe-dreams. Some people “wish” they were such-and-such. But the extraordinary, through sheer force of will-power, self-belief, and talent, BECOME their own dreams. Screw “wishing” for anything. MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Which brings me back to Babs. Now, Babs has not had a tabloid-ridden life. Her romances got press-time, but there hasn’t been much scandal.

But her story is iconic in the way that Judy Garland’s was iconic, or Elvis’ was iconic, or Michael Jackson’s was iconic.

In a great interview with Mike Wallace, he asked her (needling her, almost: they know each other well, he gets away with it): “Why was it so important to you to be famous? Why was this the only thing you wanted?” (In his way, pushing her to explain herself.) Her response (and Mitchell will remember the exact words) was along the lines of, “It needed to happen.”

That’s all she said.

And in that simple sentence is Barbra Streisand’s iconic stature. A lot of people think they “need” to be famous. Hell, acting teachers putting advertisements in Backstage COUNT on that. But those who have that dream and who make it happen – and not only make it happen but make it happen on such a stratospheric insane level – are INDEED “weirdos.” And because they are weird – and no, they are NOT just like the rest of us – they have MUCH to teach us, if we would just stop sneering and looking for chinks in the armor and all the rest. They can teach us about self-belief, about determination, about WILLING yourself into the spot where you want to be.

There are too many now-famous stories about Barbra Streisand’s early years to even re-count. The auditions, the lies she told (in her Playbill bios, during her auditions), the personae she adopted in order to not only get through the door but make an impression … So smart because here’s the deal, and here’s the thing with Barbra that is important to remember (and that Paglia addresses in the excerpt below): Barbra, of course, knew she could sing. She knew she could sing better than almost anyone. She knew this before she was famous. But because of her ethnicity and her ethnic looks, she knew she needed somehow to “warm up” her audience, so that once she started singing, they would be blown back in their seats. She understood that her looks were a barrier. It’s hard to even realize this now, because Barbra Streisand is an icon, and she eventually became an A-List Leading Lady (and she STILL is. You can count the 70-year-old actresses who could open a movie purely on the power of their own name on one hand.) She was photographed by all the famous photographers who thrilled to her beauty, her profile. But all of that came about because of Barbra. She was in unchartered waters. In the 30s, 40s, 50s, she would have been relegated to playing awkward ugly-ducking sidekicks (if she got cast at all, because, of course, Jewish people didn’t exist in America before 1960. Uh-huh). It wouldn’t have mattered how gorgeously she sang. Nobody wanted to look at the Jewish-ness of her features. It’s easy to forget all this, because the world has changed so much, but the world has changed BECAUSE of Barbra Streisand, and her pure untouchable self-belief, her knowledge deep in her heart that she deserved to be center stage. SHE changed the world. (And the world was changing anyway in the 60s and 70s. Suddenly people like Woody Allen and Dustin Hoffman were movie stars. The doors opened up a little bit to Jewish leads, to Jewish leading men, leading ladies, Jewish stories, Jewish humor, and all the rest). And so Barbra Streisand, the so-called ugly duckling, changed – forever – our conception of what beauty was, what a leading lady was, what she should sound like, what she should look like … SHE did that, almost single-handedly. And she certainly was the only one who did it at that level. It was a seismic shift.

It’s incorrect to assign all of this to Barbra’s famous insecurity about her looks. She looked around, assessed the world correctly, and then created all of these hoops to jump through just so she could get in the door to audition for lead roles. She chewed imaginary gum, she played up her New-York-ese accent, she wore a fur coat and mis-matched shoes, she would arrive late to an audition and then bombard the people behind the desk with long-drawn-out comic stories about what had happened to make her late. It was a SYMPHONY of behavior, a bravura performance in and of itself. Nobody knew what to make of her. It’s almost like she over-did her New York Jewish-ness, so that when she settled down and started singing, the contrast would be that much more acute, people would fall into stunned silence. She had set them up from the beginning. And that’s exactly how it went down. People were like, “Who is this creature, smacking gum, and babbling some long story at us … and then stunning us with the most beautiful voice we have ever heard in our lives?” Michael Shurtleff tells a great story about one of Streisand’s auditions in his indispensable book Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part.

Barbra Streisand literally made it IMPOSSIBLE for people not to cast her. Even the nay-sayers (who thought she was ugly – they were so brain-washed into a WASP-only conception of beauty) finally had to cave and go, “Well, I’d like to be the person who helped make that voice famous.” Her talent was THAT overpowering. You literally had to get on board or be left in the dust. Very very few people are that talented. Even talented people are interchangeable, to some degree. If you need a pretty blonde leading lady, there are numerous well-qualified talented people you can call on. But nobody but Barbra Streisand could have played Funny Girl. It is impossible to imagine anyone else but Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. Or What’s Up, Doc? I mean who else on EARTH could have pulled that off? Carole Lombard could have done it back in the day, but come on, that was 40 years before … that tells you how RARE a talent Streisand had.

It is when someone becomes indispensable, irreplaceable, that you know you’re in Icon Land. And I STILL get excited when I hear she’s “working on” something. And how hilarious was she with Dustin Hoffman in the Fokkers movie? How much FUN were they having? How freeing is it to see Barbra Streisand let loose?

If you listen to Barbra Streisand’s first albums, you get a glimpse, an echo, of what the hell it must have been like to go see her perform in those tiny nightclubs when she was still a teenager. You honestly can’t believe what you’re hearing. She did everything. Not just gorgeous ballads. But swinging gigantic numbers, re-arranged songs that suddenly seemed definitive once she sang them (“Happy Days Are Here Again” is the best example, in my opinion), joke-songs, the whole nine yards. She could do anything. And she wore sailor-middy blouses. And you could not take your eyes off of her.

I mean, come ON.

Now to Camille. This is from a 1993 article in the Sunday Times. If you’re familiar with Paglia’s work, you know her obsession with Nefertiti. The first chapter in her gigantic manifesto Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is on Nefertiti. If you want to keep up with Camille, you need to bone up on your Nefertiti. It practically becomes a shorthand in Camille’s hands. Nefertiti comes up again in Paglia’s latest, an art survey course, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. To Camille, Nefertiti is THE androgynous figure of the ages (and “androgyny” is the only thing that all Icons have in common – according to Camille: they are powerful “sexual personae”, those who don’t “present” as all-female or all-male, but create within them a disturbing and pleasing blend, that transcends limitations, almost creating its own fluidity. Hence: the staying power of the images.)

When Paglia wrote this, Bill Clinton had just been elected, and, of course, Babs had sung at his inauguration. It seemed to be that event that prompted Paglia to write this essay.

Here’s an excerpt.

Excerpt from Vamps & Tramps: New Essays, by Camille Paglia. From “Brooklyn Nefertiti: Barbra Streisand.”

When she first exploded upon the world in the early 1960s in Funny Girl, what Streisand represented was an electrifying new individualism that looked forward to the Sixties counterculture. The nonconformism of her sexual persona was so radical compared to what we had been raised with for the prior fifteen years, with all those cheerful, sanitized blondes, such as Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. There was a whole series of blonde nymphettes, such as Carol Lynley and Sandra Dee, prefiguring the Barbie doll. They were sweet, docile, winsome, harmless, very attentive and deferential to men.

What was so amazing about Streisand was her aggressive ethnicity. The Nose, which she refused to have changed, was so defiantly ethnic. It was a truly revolutionary persona. She was a brilliant new icon of modern womanhood. She was the first public figure to wear retro clothes from the 1930s. This “thrift-shop look” became a hippie style later adopted by Janis Joplin. Streisand made the cover of Time magazine as a game waifs outsider and then was treated mythologically by Life magazine; she posed as a haughty Nefertiti and as a Regency siren in Greek dress.

While in high school, I went through a rabid Streisand period, when I slept on giant rollers to get my hair like hers and had long nails with plum polish. Early Streisand remains for me the best Streisand. She visibly seethed with emotion. When drag queens imitate her, it’s always from that period, with that smooth, sleek helmet hair, when she was still singing in cabarets.

There has always been a conflict in Barbra Streisand, as in Oscar Wilde, between her populist politics and her aristocratic and tyrannical persona. In early pictures, with her hair swept back, she looks so grand, like a Russian duchess. This is what gay guys liked about her – the arrogant, monarchical diva hood, which is definitely not democratic. Streisand has always been a kind of drag queen herself. That’s true of Sandra Bernhard too, and it’s true of me and of a lot of women who didn’t feel particularly feminine when they were growing up. For women like that, by the time you figure out what femininity is, you’ve become a female impersonator.

I’ve written in Sexual Personae that all the great stars imitated by gay men – Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Diana Ross, Joan Collins, and Barbra Streisand – are androgynous. That’s why their romantic relationships are so bad, because they are autocratic and autonomous. As artists, they need no one else.