Every Story Barbra Streisand Told About Other Celebrities In Her Memoir

Barbra Streisand and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had what appeared to be a fairy tale romance in the late-1960s, but as the singer-actress writes in her memoir, it was not meant to be — largely due to the 23-year age difference between the two.

“He was so elegant, yet totally unpretentious and perpetually curious … an adventurer who had backpacked through the Middle East and Asia as a young man,” Streisand wrote. “And he had real charisma, generating so much excitement before and after his election that the Canadian press gave it a name… Trudeaumania.” She added, “And it was nice to be with a man who had his own light shining on him, so I could stay in the shadows a bit.” While Streisand was admittedly in love with the politician’s intelligence, there was a disconnect that came with her attraction to Trudeau, writing, “But for me, there was something missing. My brain was in love, but not my body.” And though the love affair was short-lived, the pair would go on stay in touch throughout his life, even connecting to his son and current Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau following Pierre’s passing in 2000.

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Streisand reflected on how the late Princess Diana once literally had her back, helping her avoid a near wardrobe malfunction during a night out at the London premiere of ‘The Prince of Tides’ in 1992. “The zipper on my skirt had come down a bit as I was sitting, and she noticed and quickly started to zip it up for me as I got to my feet,” Streisand wrote.

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“When I finally sat down, Diana turned to me and asked, ‘Do you know how wonderful you are?'” she shared. Streisand said the comment came as a shock, as longtime songwriter Marilyn Bergman asked her the same thing at Bon Soir, the New York nightclub where she got her start, 30 years before. Streisand continued, “I certainly didn’t know it then. Did I know it now? I’m not sure…maybe a little. I thought Diana was wonderful. I wonder if she knew how wonderful she was.”

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One of Streisand’s earliest encounters with fame came when the young starlet met President John F. Kennedy at the 1963 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Reflecting on the memorable moment, Streisand said Kennedy asked for her to sing at the prestigious event after seeing her on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show just days prior. “You must know by now that I can be remarkably blasé about a lot of things, but this was exciting, even for me,” she writes. Streisand, then 21, performed three songs, finishing things off with, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” a song she felt encompassed the joy she felt over having JFK in the White House.

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Things got slightly awkward however, following her performance, when she asked JFK for an autograph. The faux pas came after strict instructions from the president’s protocol team that performers were to greet him quickly and move along without asking for autographs. “When JFK got to me, he told me that I had a beautiful voice and asked, ‘How long have you been singing?’ I said, ‘About as long as you’ve been president.’ He laughed, and then I did exactly what we were told not to do.” Streisand pulled out a card from the dinner and asked JFK to sign it for her mother, which he did, and when he returned it, she said, “You’re a doll.” She continued, “I guess some people were a little surprised to hear me saying it to the president. Frankly, it just slipped out.”

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Things between Streisand and her ‘Yentl’ co-star, Mandy Patinkin, quickly got complicated after Patinkin revealed her he wanted to have an affair with her while he was already married. “There was a moment, a week or so into the shoot, when Mandy and I were doing a scene in the yeshiva,” Streisand, wrote of the 1983 film. “I think he had two or three lines, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He just stared at my forehead.” When the “Funny Girl” actress ultimately confronted Patinkin about his behavior, she said she was startled to find that “The Princess Bride” star thought they were going to have a more intimate dynamic. “[He said,] ‘I thought we were going to have an affair.’ I looked at him as if he were crazy,” she continued. “1) I would never have an affair with an actor I was directing, 2) he was married, and 3) I wasn’t at all attracted to him.” The Broadway legend said she “didn’t want to hurt his feelings” so she simply told him, “I don’t operate that way.'”

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“I said, ‘Mandy, this kind of behavior can’t continue. I’m prepared to replace you. We’re only two weeks in. I can reshoot all your scenes if you can’t be more professional,” she wrote of the conversation with the actor, whose been married to Kathryn Grody since 1980. “I’ve waited 15 years to realize my dream and I will not let you destroy it,'” adding that her dynamic with Patinkin led to them scrapping the sex scene between the two main characters.

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Looking back on her relationship with friend and fellow actress, Judy Garland, Streisand shared the warning the ‘Wizard of Oz’ actress gave her about Hollywood as she began gaining fame. “Judy and I became friends. We spoke on the phone, and she came to one of the rare parties I gave at my New York apartment (four in thirty‑five years). I think she arrived late. She continued, “And I remember her saying something I never quite understood: ‘Don’t let them do to you what they did to me.’ I should have asked her what she meant, but I didn’t want to appear too nosy.”

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She also touched on the rumored rivalry between the pair, which Streisand said was very much manufactured by Hollywood. “People were looking for some sort of rivalry between us, and when they couldn’t find anything, they made it up,” Streisand wrote. “I found Judy to be completely generous. We sang a medley of songs, taking turns, and she wasn’t just focused on herself. She watched me and responded to me. She would reach out and brush back a strand of my hair, like a mother.”

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Looking back on her 25-year marriage to James Brolin, Streisand said she met the actor when she had basically “given up on finding someone.”
She wrote, “I had my son, I had great friends to keep me company, my work was fulfilling, and I loved my new house in Malibu overlooking the ocean,” adding, “Maybe you have to be happy with yourself before you can be happy with someone else.”

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“I think the real reason our relationship has endured is that we’re both willing to work at it,” Streisand wrote. “Jim and I are very different. As he’s said to me, ‘You’re an expert at looking for what’s wrong, while I’m just happy to wake up in the morning.’ (He’ll live much longer than me. He keeps saying he’s going to live to be 100, and recently upped it to 110. He probably will, with that attitude.)”

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Reflecting on her massive Broadway hit, ‘Funny Girl,’ Streisand explained why when it came to The Great White Way, she was a one hit wonder — her co-star, Sydney Chaplin. While both Streisand and Chaplin were married at the time, she said the pair enjoyed a brief flirtation while working on the show, which she ultimately ended out of respect for her marriage. But when she did, Chaplin began to retaliate. “It wounded [Chaplin’s] vanity and pride,” Streisand wrote, sharing that Chaplin would often curse her out under his breath during their live shows, just loud enough for her to hear. “He’d taunt me, calling me a b—h, or worse… the most vicious names,” she wrote. “While the audience assumed he was whispering sweet nothings in my ear, he would actually be jeering, ‘You really f—ed up that scene.'”

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Streisand said that she was devastated by the nightly interactions, calling them a “nightmare,” that would lead to anxiety so strong she’d sometimes throw up before performances. She ultimately developed stage fright and never helmed a Broadway production again. Streisand would later confront Chaplin, who was brought up on charges before Actors’ Equity in April 1965, though she said he “completely charmed” the all-male panel at his hearing and avoided getting fired. “I remember Sydney standing onstage, shouting, ‘I don’t need any of you! I’m Charlie Chaplin’s son and I have five hundred thousand dollars in the bank,'” she added. Looking back, I can’t believe that this horrible thing happened and I had to endure it for over a year. But I refused to let him destroy me.”

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When ‘Funny Girl’ hit the silver screen in 1968, Omar Sharif was cast in the starring role opposite Streisand. While she wrote that obliged a dinner invitation from Sharif ahead of filming, the timing was convenient for the actress who admitted she “felt lonely” in her marriage to Elliott Gould, adding that the pair were “leading separate lives.” Although she found Sharif to be “good company,” the relationship never got off the ground. Streisand did write, however, that Sharif was totally smitten with her, and continued to write her letters even after filming wrapped, saying he was “disappointed” when she turned down his request to meet for a rendezvous in Paris. “Our attraction to each other worked for the movie, but I couldn’t see a future with him.”

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Streisand’s marriage to Elliott Gould ultimately did not survive the ’60s, with the superstar writing that young love was to blame, with Streisand just 21 and Gould 25 when they tied the knot in 1963. “We succumbed to convention and got married, at an age that now seems ridiculously young,” she wrote. “I hadn’t really been ready for marriage in 1963, but I was very ready for a legal separation in 1969. I needed to be on my own and do the exploring I had never done. I wanted adventure. I wanted excitement.”

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Streisand had a lifelong crush on Gene Kelly and would go on to work with him when he directed her in the 1969 film ‘Hello, Dolly!,’ but to her disappointment, he wasn’t exactly how she’d imagined he’d be. “One day he was so rude to a female dancer that I asked him privately, ‘Why were you so mean to her?’ And he basically laughed it off and said, ‘Yeah, I was pretty tough on her, but that’s okay,'” Streisand recalled of his scathing attitude towards women. “‘I used to yell like that at another dancer, and she became my wife.'”

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While re-marking Judy Garland’s ‘A Star Is Born,’ producers were looking for leading men to star as Streisand’s love interest. Though Kris Kristofferson eventually starred opposite Streisand in the 1976 film, there was a brief moment where producer Jon Peters — Streisand’s then-boyfriend — pushed to hire Elvis Presley. She and and Peters even flew to Las Vegas to meet with the King, and caught one of his shows before heading backstage to see him and his manager, Colonel Parker. What ended up putting Streisand off, was Presley’s tardiness. The musician showed up late and explained his tardiness by telling Streisand that he’d had a girl backstage making him “crazy.” Presley was interested in the role of John Norman Howard, but it didn’t pan out, as Parker allegedly wanted more money than the team could afford. ” I do know that Elvis had gained a lot of weight and was no longer at the top of his game, although he was still drawing big audiences,” Streisand wrote. “Maybe the story was a little too close to his own life, and the Colonel talked him out of it,” adding, “In any event, I had no regrets about Elvis. Kris was it.”

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After the success of her 1973 film, ‘The Way We Were,’ in which she starred opposite Robert Redford, Streisand revealed that she tried create a sequel, eventually writing one herself. It was a losing battle, however, with Streisand well aware that Redford was not fond of them. While she did talk to Redford about a potential sequel and she even gave him a copy of the treatment for him to read, she shared he never called back about it. “I didn’t want to pressure Bob, so I never called him either. Frankly, I think age was a big concern for him,” Streisand wrote. “It didn’t bother me as much. After all, we were both too old to be in college in the original. When the acting is good, I think the audience suspends disbelief. But I had to face the fact that the moment had passed, and the sequel will live only in my mind.”

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Streisand carried a longtime friendship with actor Marlon Brando throughout his life, but the relationship didn’t exactly start off on the friendliest of feet. In the tell-all, Streisand claims that the ‘Godfather’ actor made several advances toward the actress, both before and after her marriage to Gould. She ultimately turned him down and the pair would go on to stay friends till Brando’s death in 2004. “Now, looking back, I can hardly believe my response,” Streisand wrote. “How stupid! Today I would be more adventurous, but I was too insecure sexually back then, still a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn with my mother’s admonitions echoing in my head. Free love was not my style.”

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While reflecting on the night of the Oscars when she won best actress for ‘Funny Girl, tying with Katharine Hepburn for ‘The Lion in Winter,’ Streisand shared the congratulatory note Hepburn wrote her afterward. “Dear Barbra, I think that you are really first rate and full of whatever it is and I am proud to share that perch with you for the next year,” Hepburn, who was not in attendance for the 1969 ceremony. “Incidentally I just hope that osmosis transfers a little of what you have to me. With warm regards, Kate Hepburn.”

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