Barbra Streisand Is, as Ever, Firmly in Control.
Since her breakout in the 1960s, she’s been able to convince the world around her to listen — not by chasing trends but by remaining always and fully herself.
'THE DAY I arrive at Barbra Streisand’s property, she is on the phone with the Christie’s auction house in London. Outside, it’s a brilliantly sunny California afternoon in October, the skies clear of the ash cloud that recently blanketed Los Angeles.
Collecting is one of Streisand’s passions. On the walls of her sprawling Malibu home are early 19th-century American folk-art portraits, including several by the master of the genre, Ammi Phillips, a New England artist known for his spare, enigmatic, almost Modernist images. Streisand has been buying them since the late 1980s and is especially drawn to paintings of a mother with her child. She also owns two of George Washington, one done by Charles Peale Polk in 1795 while Washington was still alive, which Streisand has promised to Mount Vernon, the Virginia museum that was once the president’s home. (The other is by Gilbert Stuart.) We could be in Newport, R.I., or Colonial Williamsburg, except that Streisand’s husband of 22 years, the actor James Brolin, a fit-looking 80, is working beside the large pool just outside the living room windows, with the Pacific Ocean his backdrop.
An assistant leads me to an annex Streisand calls the barn, where she and her husband did most of their entertaining before the pandemic struck. This “barn” is a vast structure with a spiral staircase in a silo, a napping room, a frozen yogurt machine and more evidence of Streisand’s wide-ranging tastes: There are meticulously recreated rooms in the American colonial, Art Nouveau, Scottish Mackintosh and Arts and Crafts styles. Streisand has rotated through these movements and others, going through “periodic purges,” as she puts it, when her tastes in interior decorating (and, she adds, hairstyles) have changed. By the end of her Art Deco phase, circa 1974 to 1994, “I never wanted to look at Art Deco again,” she wrote in her 2010 coffee-table book, “My Passion for Design.” She put most of the pieces up for auction, an ordeal that inspired Jonathan Tolins’s 2013 Off Broadway play, “Buyer & Cellar.”
I’ve been settled in a cavernous screening room, filled with overstuffed sofas and chairs, when suddenly, Streisand appears. She’s wearing a black top of her own design and a pair of $20 pants she bought online from a company called Simplicitie, and has just had her shoulder-length hair highlighted — which I know because she said the dye job distracted her from that afternoon’s 600-point reversal in the Dow Jones industrial average. The stock market is another of Streisand’s passions. She wakes up most mornings at 6:30 a.m. to check the opening in New York. If she finds the action “interesting,” she trades. Then she goes back to bed.
Coming face-to-face with Streisand, who is 78, is a shock. Nearly her entire adult life has been chronicled in images — onscreen; in photographs — and she’s the subject of scores of unauthorized biographies, none of which she’s read. She’s won Oscars, a Tony, Emmys, even the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For six years, she’s been working on an autobiography that she says is nearing completion. She’s been a presence in my life since I was a teenager and saw her in 1968’s “Funny Girl,” a heartbreaking film about the devastated Broadway diva Fanny Brice that prompted my sister to lock herself in her room for a half-hour sob.
Streisand is still a little breathless as she settles into a chair at a safe distance. I ask if she won the auction. “Yes!” she exclaims. “It was nerve-racking.” She extends her phone to show me an image of “Peasant Woman With Child on her Lap,” an 1885 Vincent van Gogh painting rendered in somber grays, blues and browns. (I later see on the Christie’s website that the work sold for $4.47 million, well above its high estimate of $3.8 million. She’s loaning it to a museum.)
Streisand has always collected: In 1964, when she was starring in “Funny Girl” on Broadway, she saved enough from her $2,500-a-week salary to buy a small Matisse, her first major purchase. Art satisfies her urge both to collect and invest — a Klimt she bought in 1969 for $17,000 sold years later for $650,000. And, she says, “I love things that are beautiful. I think I have a good eye — in some ways my entire life has been a quest for beauty.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/t-magazine/barbra-streisand.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
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