Barbra’s Beginnings (part two)
(Part One >>)
By Matt Howe / Barbra-Archives.com
Dreams of Acting...
Even before Barbra Streisand graduated from High School in 1958, she was sneaking off to New York City to study acting. “I was fifteen when I met Anita and Alan Miller—the two people who changed my life,” Barbra said. “I had a job at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village moving sets and painting scenery. Anita was featured in the play; her husband, Alan, was an acting teacher.”
Streisand worked out an exchange with the couple. “I baby-sat for the Millers. In return, Alan gave me a scholarship to his school. Thus I spent even more time with them. I'd browse through their library, discovering that the world of literature is larger than Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe — the authors assigned at high school.”
Streisand was young, but determined. “I went to two acting classes but I didn't want one to know about the other, so I had a pseudonym in one of them: 'Angelina Scarangella',” Barbra confessed. “I remember doing relaxation exercises a lot. I remember observing a lot; observing other actors. On the train ride home to Brooklyn I would write letters to Lee Strasberg.”
Lee Strasberg was the head of the venerable Actors Studio: “I had written letters to Lee Strasberg while I was riding on the IRT subway ever since I was fourteen or fifteen years old and never mailed them to him.”
Streisand auditioned for Strasberg with a friend as a partner in a scene. Barbra received a letter from the Actors Studio telling her they liked her work and would she audition on her own. Barbra performed a scene from The Young and Fair*. "I cried all through it. I was only fifteen so they said come back another time. But I never did."
* The Young and Fair by N. Richard Nash, opened on Broadway in November, 1948. Directed by Harold Clurman and starring a young Julie Harris, it was set in a New England boarding school for girls. The play was about compromising one's principles and featured a subplot of a Jewish girl, who had kept her religion secret, being forced to reveal it.
Sixteen Going on Seventeen...
After Barbra graduated from High School, she moved to Manhattan to pursue her dream of becoming an actress.
"I graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1958 when I was sixteen," Barbra said. "As soon as I did, I moved into Manhattan to live by myself. I was all set to be an actress. I got a job as a clerk in a business firm and I took dramatics lessons at night so I was often late to work. I used to hum and my boss would say, 'Stop humming around here, what do you think you're in, a show?' Now when I see him, he asks me if I remember when he used to bawl me out for humming."
Streisand also auditioned. "I went up to Rodgers and Hammerstein once to audition for the office manager," she said. "He got a big kick out of me. Whenever I'd come back they'd get someone at the piano, and I'd sing."
Barbra, studying the craft of acting, attended workshops in Manhattan at Herbert Berghof, and Curt Conway ("acting is reacting").
“I did Medea when I was fifteen in acting class in New York," Streisand said, "and I still think it is my best work. I'll always remember one of her lines: 'I have this hole in the middle of myself.' "
Cis Corman, who remains a close friend of Streisand's today, recalled when she first met Barbra: "I didn't know she could sing for two years. I met her when she was fifteen or sixteen at our acting class at the Curt Conway Studio. She was my maid-in-waiting in a play we did at the studio, Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning."
(Photos, above left): Early headshots of Streisand, contributed to Barbra Archives exclusively by Streisand fan Darrick — thank you.
1960, Age 18 ...
"When I was eighteen I worked as a clerk at the Michael Press printing company," Barbra stated. "I used to rehearse The Rose Tattoo for acting class in between answering the telephone. Every week I took my paycheck home to the apartment I shared with my girlfriend Susan Dwaorkowitz, and I put it in my little set of envelopes. I'd set aside $5 for the phone and $10 for laundry and $20 for food and $25 for rent, and I still had $5 left over for Miscellaneous. Sometimes Miscellaneous went for a taxi, which was a big thrill."
But Barbra was fired from that job, and started collecting unemployment. "To get the money, you had to look for a job," she explained. "I was looking for a job, but as an actress, not a switchboard operator. They checked up and cut off my checks. So there I was, out of money and out of work. And then I entered this talent contest in a bar in Greenwich Village. Not as an actress though. As a singer—even though I'd never had a lesson."
Streisand met Dustin Hoffman around 1960 at Theatre Studios (10th Avenue) in New York, where they both studied.
Bob Schulenberg, a young artist and illustrator, met Streisand on July 1, 1960. "I turned around," he wrote, "and there was this very exotic looking creature wearing a kind of lurex-y jacket of red and silver metallic threads and huge Elizabethan sleeves that puffed out, and underneath she had on a mulberry velvet short skirt about an inch and a half above the knee (minis didn’t come in to fashion for about another five years). She was carrying shopping bags stuffed with clothing – feathers, a beautiful lavender feather coat."
End.
