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My
Front-row Seat: Barbra Streisand Tells All At The NYC Book
Expo: Zionists
03 June 2010 By Jane Stillwater
At the 2010 Book Expo in New York City recently, the
keynote speaker was Barbra Streisand. “No videos, no
photographs and no taping during the event please,”
they told us beforehand – so I just took notes like
crazy. If I didn’t get Streisand’s words exactly right
or get all of the words down, it’s my fault. But I
really tried. I even sat in the very front row.
“How many people do you think are at this talk?” I
asked a woman sitting next to me, but she didn’t know.
So I started counting all the people myself. I was up
to 75 when an usher asked me what the freak I was
doing. “Counting the house.”
“2,700 people.” Oh.
Streisand was here at the Expo in order to plug her
new book, “My Passion for Design,” all about her
experiences in building her dream house. And on the
cover of the book, there’s a photo of her and her
little white dog. Then, just before the lights went
down, a man came out of the wings, carrying that very
same little white dog. How totally cool! I just saw
Streisand’s dog in the audience!
Then someone introduced Streisand. “She has spent the
last ten years obsessing about getting her home just
the way she wanted it,” said the person doing the
introduction. “We went to her home recently and were
supposed to only interview her for half an hour but we
ended up staying for four and a half hours, fascinated
with the craftsmanship and attention to detail that
she put into her home. And all the care that she has
put into her house, she has also put into her book.”
Then Gayle King came out on stage. She’s an editor and
collaborator for Oprah Winfrey and was going to
conduct the interview. Then Streisand walked out and
got a 2,700-person standing ovation.
“Everybody knows that Barbra doesn’t like orange,”
said King, “so I changed the color of my toenail
polish color just for this event.” And if King is
gonna call her Barbra, then so am I. “You seem to be a
very private person, so why did you decide to let
everyone into your home?”
“When I was directing 'Prince of Tides,’ the script
called for an old southern mansion and I needed to
design that house – so I did. I did everything,
including the closets. We live in our closets, don’t
we? I visualized a two-story closet even, but never
got to actually build that house. And then I wanted to
do a movie, ‘The Normal Heart,’ and this project fell
apart too. So instead of making the movie, I built a
house.
“I have kept journals over the years and wanted to
write an autobiography but that was hard so I wrote a
book about design instead. It was easier.”
One subject that keeps coming up in the book,
apparently, is the play between opposing forces. “The
tension of opposites intrigues me – such as masculine
wood combined with feminine roses. And also the soft
complimenting the hard.”
“You had a hard childhood growing up?”
“We never had a couch. For me, couches were special.
We sat on the dining room chairs. A1940s reproduction
of European furniture. My brother slept on a roll-away
cot. Then my mother remarried and we moved to a
housing project and we finally got a couch. It was an
ugly couch but I loved it.”
“So. What’s the matter with orange?” And Gayle also
gently needled Barbra about not liking yellow either.
“I don’t know why I don’t like it.” Barbra doesn’t
even have orange fish. They are mostly black and
white. “Other people like orange. That’s fine with me.
I personally just don’t like orange. It must be
psychological, left over from our childhoods. When I
was young, I went to a health camp because I was
anemic. And we all had to dress the same – except that
I had a burgundy sweater that the woman who watched me
during the day knit for me. A burgundy sweater. With
wooden buttons."
Barbra really cares about detail. “I feel that the
exterior of a house should match its interior.“ Good
grief. She even matches the flowers in her garden with
her couch.
“There’s a chapter the book called ‘The Elegant
Barn’.” Then a photo of the elegant barn flashed onto
a big screen on the stage. And the barn really was
elegant. It had a waterwheel and everything. No, wait,
that was the Mill House that had the waterwheel. There
are four or five structures on the property.
Streisand’s place is huge. It has a whole bunch of
buildings, not just the house.
“I like photography and I also like the process of
building. I took most of the photos in the book
myself.”
And Barbra herself apparently had collected a lot of
the furnishings found inside her home. “What is
people’s reaction when you show up when you’re
antiquing?”
“I don’t even notice. I’m too tied up in the search.”
Then Gayle changed the subject to Barbra’s recordings
and movies. “You don’t like to look at your records or
movies after you’ve done them?”
“Because there is so much work going into them. I’m so
sick of a record by the time I’m through with it that
I never want to hear it again!”
“If you had to pick a favorite song...”
“That’s a terrible question. Don’t ask me that. I
don’t want to offend any of my songs!"
Then they got back to talking about the house. “Here’s
a photo of the Mill House. The beams inside are 200
years old. It’s both a curse and a blessing to see
things the way I do.” Streisand tends to be a
perfectionist and to want things to be perfect – which
has its good and bad aspects. “I see symmetry and
that’s sometimes a curse because you can always see
what is wrong. Like in that photo of the mirror – it’s
3/8 of an inch off. There are things that you have to
compromise on and accept what the universe is
presenting -- so you have to accept what is here. But
sometimes I don’t like to take no for an answer.” But
she is also aware that sometimes you have to.
“One time a stone mason ripped out a little hill and
replaced it with concrete blocks. But I had just
returned from the north of England where there were no
concrete blocks -- so I had to say no.”
“She let another contractor go,” said Gayle, “because
he made a storm cellar too large because he thought he
was bound by the building code.”
“I have two men who work for me and if I need
something done, then they do it. They have no patience
with waiting. I’ve worked with these men for years.
But professionals promise everything and don’t
deliver.”
She is also sometimes taken advantage of. “There is
that factor; it’s a reality. They will charge me more
because I am Barbara Streisand.”
“But you like what you create.”
“When I was growing up, I had a hot water bottle
instead of a doll and my caregiver knit her a little
pink sweater. But it made me use my imagination. And I
don’t regret it. It added to my success.”
And Barbra, who was raised in Brooklyn, has a fondness
for the architecture of the northeast. “Architects in
the western United States use Douglas fir because they
work in the west. I was disappointed with western
architects because they don’t know about eastern
architecture.” I think she was talking about the use
of mortar and bricks.
“Does your home remind you of your childhood house?”
“No. My childhood home was a $40-a-month apartment.”
Barbra also had something to say about the color red.
“I do appreciate a good red -- I’m not that crazy --
but I prefer red in a lipstick.”
While Barbra doesn’t miss or regret anything that she
has given away, she hates it when she loses things.
“There was this pin that you wanted,” said Gayle, “and
you tracked it down and paid four times too much for
it -- but don’t wear it.”
“It’s the hunt that I like. I never had a father. You
can’t get a person back -- but you can always get an
object back.”
“Do your regret being called a perfectionist?”
“I search for excellence. And I also understand that
nothing is perfect.” I thought that the interviewer
was being a bit hard on poor Barbra and had a sort of
pushy tone of voice, but Barbra didn’t seem to mind
and talked openly and candidly about whatever subject
the interviewer brought up. Listening to Barbra
talking onstage before 2,700 people was less like
listening to a performance and more like eavesdropping
on two people conversing in private.
“When I worked with one contractor, he had his vision
and I had mine. People called me difficult because a
contractor said to me, ‘Can’t you just leave the plans
with me and leave?'”
She had a draftsman or two on site most of the time.
“Who is going to notice if a beam is off? I will. And
if it’s off, it’s off. They say that men are
commanding but women are demanding. I make no
apologies. They say that a man is a perfectionist,
while a woman is just a pain in the ass.”
She also thought that a king-sized bed is too big for
two people and that a queen-sized bed is too small.
“So I built a bed that was in between. And I used
king-sized sheets and pulled them tighter with a
string.”
“But wouldn’t that be tacky?”
“Hey, sometimes I can be tacky.”
“You? Not you!”
Then Barbra and Gayle talked about cars. “I never
drive. My husband drives. I found myself going up a
down-ramp on a freeway one day and realized that my
mind was too occupied with other things to drive.”
“Does your husband accept that you do everything at
the house?”
“But I don’t. He designed his part of the house, and I
like that about him. He has a life of his own.”
“Where does your fascination with details come from?”
“Perhaps from my dad. He died when he was 35 and I was
15 months old. But he was a scholar. He taught English
at a reform school. His thesis was about Shakespeare
and Ibsen. So what is the DNA? I didn’t find that out
until I was doing Yentl, when I discovered some of his
old books.” And it surprised her that she too loves
Shakespeare and Ibsen.
“I don’t like TV. My husband has a TV on his damn
wall, but I hide them. And for a while I hid my awards
too, thought it was too egotistical.”
And during the time that she worked on her house, for
five of those years she was hoarse from shouting above
the whine of power equipment. “And the house took so
long to do that I just recently had to redo the den --
based on a room that I saw 20 years ago. And it was a
challenge to do that in just three weeks.”
“Do you have a junk drawer in your house?”
“I have several.”
Then as the interview ended and Barbra left the stage,
she laughingly asked Gayle, “Can I take the flowers
home?”
Since no one was allowed to take photographs, I
didn't. But almost EVERYONE in the room was snapping
away surreptitiously. You could hear the cameras click
and whir everywhere. So I figured I'd at least video
part of the interview. My bad. So here's my YouTube
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVQdnclhn0E But
only the sound part came out. I hope that I don't get
sued.
PS: As you may or may not remember, I had a choice
of going to NYC to see Barbra or going on that
ill-fated humanitarian aid flotilla to break the
illegal siege of Gaza. And, due to financial
constraints, I chose going to New York. But boy did I
miss a hecka good story in the Mediterranean! The boat
I would have sailed on got hijacked! You can't get a
better story than that.
According to an article in Global Research entitled
"Terror on Aid Ship: Plan Was to Kill Activists and
Deter Future Convoys," all hell broke loose when the
Israeli navy illegally seized the flotilla ships.
"An Arab member of the Israeli parliament who was on
board the international flotilla that was attacked on
Monday as it tried to take humanitarian aid to Gaza
accused Israel yesterday of intending to kill peace
activists as a way to deter future convoys. Haneen
Zoubi said Israeli naval vessels had surrounded the
flotilla’s flagship, the Mavi Marmara, and fired on it
a few minutes before commandos abseiled from a
helicopter directly above them."
Global Research's article also stated that, "Terrified
passengers had been forced off the deck when water was
sprayed at them. She said she was not aware of any
provocation or resistance by the passengers, who were
all unarmed. [The Knesset member also] added that
within minutes of the raid beginning, three bodies had
been brought to the main room on the upper deck in
which she and most other passengers were confined. Two
had gunshot wounds to the head, in what she suggested
had been executions. Two other passengers slowly bled
to death in the room after Israeli soldiers ignored
messages in Hebrew she had held up at the window
calling for medical help to save them. She said she
saw seven other passengers seriously wounded."
One of the dead was a United States citizen.
The article then quotes the Knesset member further:
“'Israel had days to plan this military operation,'
she told a press conference in Nazareth. 'They wanted
many deaths to terrorize us and to send a message that
no future aid convoys should try to break the siege of
Gaza.'”
So. I missed getting terrorized and executed? Wow.
Wonder what happened to the eight ships and the 10,000
tons of humanitarian cargo? It went on to Gaza? Yeah
right. I'll bet you anything that somebody somewhere
scored a big bunch of booty on that one!
PPS: Here's my report on the experiences of my
friend Paul Larudee, who was also on board the
flotilla:
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