Lovers, cruelty and clones: 15 spicy revelations about Barbra Streisand

In her memoir ‘My Name is Barbra,’ legendary singer and actress Barbra Streisand sets the record straight about her life and career. Over close to 1,000 pages, she doesn’t hold anything back when it comes to scintillating tales about her love life, personal quirks or Hollywood gossip. Here are some of her spiciest revelations….

Streisand explains how casting agents often asked her to change her name, but she said that all “felt phony.” So the farthest she would go was dropping the middle “a” from her first name, which was originally Barbara. “Now I’d be Barbra … that was different and unique,” she writes, “and deep down I would still be the same Barbara Joan Streisand.”

While shooting ‘Funny Girl’ in 1968, she got close to Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. She describes how he fell head over heels for her, and even shared some of the love letters he wrote with lines like: “The thing I want most in my life is to have you with me, to go everywhere together, to hold you in my arms, to put you to sleep and to wake you up.” She just wasn’t into him.

She has a full chapter about Marlon Brando, who made many advances on her but she always shut down. Once, she recalls him directly asking to make love. “That sounds awful,” she replied. However, in retrospect, this is one of her regrets: “How stupid! Today I would be more adventurous.”

Although she said she looked up to Gene Kelly, when she went to work with him in ‘Hello Dolly’ (1969), he was very disappointed. “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. I used to yell like that at another dancer, and she became my wife,’” Streisand wrote.

Babs reveals she first met the elder Trudeau in 1968 and had a bit of a crush on him. She thought he was intelligent and "had a great smile and cheekbones that could have been carved in marble." But he was 50 and she was 27, and the relationship was too intense.

Streisand describes how she almost got Elvis to star in the 1976 remake of the 1954 film starring Judy Garland ‘A Star Is Born.’ She flew to Vegas to try to convince him, but he ended up wanting too much money. Anyway, she was happy with Kris Kristofferson, who gave her “hickeys.”

She had a brief flirtation with Sydney Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin's son, who co-stared in the Broadway version of ‘Funny Girl.’ But after she rejected him, he was so cruel to her that she started having panic attacks and stage fright. “While the audience assumed he was whispering sweet nothings in my ear, he would actually be jeering, ‘You really effed up that scene.’”

Similarly, the actor Walter Matthau was also disrespectful. She described how he became enraged when she asked for a script change. “He looked at me with pure venom and said, ‘You may be the singer in this picture, but I’m the actor! I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body!’” she writes. “I was stunned. … I just stood there and was so humiliated that I ran off the set, crying.”

In the book, she recounts an unnerving encounter she had with a medium in New York. She said her dead grandma and father communicated with her via the taps of table legs. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. I know it sounds unbelievable, but it’s the eff ing truth. And I never wanted to repeat the experience,” she writes.

“Did I sleep with Warren? I kind of remember. I guess I did. Probably once. My life was a little strange in 1977,” she writes, clearing up a long-standing rumor about the two stars.

She wrote that for 20 years, she tried to make a sequel to the 1973 film in which she starred opposite Robert Redford. But he was never fond of sequels so it didn’t happen. Oh, and on that movie, she said she was devastated that two key scenes were cut from the film. But you can see them now, if you watch the recently released 50th Anniversary 4K Blue Ray.

Did you know the rock group’s biggest hit from the Armageddon era was inspired by Barbra? Yes, the writer of the song Diane Warren drew inspiration from pillow talk between James Brolin (her husband) and Barbra that they shared with Barbara Walters on ‘20/20.’

She explains how performing ‘Funny Girl’ night after night on Broadway was “like a prison sentence.” Instead, she loved the movie, which she only had to make once, and others could enjoy it as much as they wanted while she had a relaxing bubble bath.

She had long been friendly with Prince Charles (later king), and she found out that she was his “only pin-up” (apparently he had a poster of me in his room at Cambridge), and he described me as “devastatingly attractive” with “great s e x appeal Who knew?” she wrote.” She said luckily she didn’t know until later, and the friendship has lasted decades.

Her beloved dog Sammie died in 2017 but the singer “couldn’t stand the thought of losing her forever.” From the process, she got too clones of her dog, but she acknowledges that while they look the same “you can’t clone the soul.”

Image: @barbrastreisand/Instagram

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