• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2173 0

of sexual candor with her revealing performances in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl and had in recent years turned out a number of startlingly perceptive articles on film. She had corresponded with Pauline for a number of years, ever since Pauline had tried to get Brooks to fly from her home in Rochester, New York, to speak before a showing of Pandora’s Box at the Berkeley Cinema Guild. Brooks thought her “the best film critic since Agee.” Pauline had sent her a copy of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, to which Brooks responded, “You could have knocked me over with Audrey Hepburn.” She mentioned several parts of the book that she had pored over with fascination: “Going through the index I have sampled some of your views on my loves and hates. And I don’t care what you write about anyone as long as I have found you love Garbo.” She closed with the kind of shrewd observation she was known for: “Your picture on the dust cover made me think of Dorothy Parker when she was young in a moment of happiness.”

One thing that Pauline most lamented about the movies of the 1960s was the absence of genuine stars. For her this had always been one of the elemental pleasures of going to the movies: being bowled over by an astonishing talent who genuinely belonged on the screen. Realism was always welcome, but Pauline craved the charge of something more. “In life,” she wrote, “fantastically gifted people, people who are driven, can be too much to handle; they can be a pain. In plays, in opera, they’re divine, and on the screen, where they can be seen in their perfection, and where we’re even safer from them, they’re more divine.”

In the fall of 1968 she found the star she’d been waiting for in Barbra Streisand. When Pauline resumed her duties at The New Yorker that September, her first review was of Streisand’s debut film, Funny Girl. It was titled simply, “Bravo!” and the word was aimed at Streisand alone—certainly not at her costar, the almost preternaturally passive Omar Sharif, and not at the director, William Wyler. Pauline’s review nearly vibrated with the thrill of discovery.

“It has been commonly said,” Pauline wrote, “that the musical Funny Girl was a comfort to people because it carried the message that you do not need to be pretty to succeed. That is nonsense; the ‘message’ of Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl is that talent is beauty.” She went on:

Most Broadway musicals are dead before they reach the movies—the routines are so worked out they’re stiff, and the jokes are embalmed in old applause. But Streisand has the gift of making old written dialogue sound like inspired improvisation; almost every line she says seems to have just sprung to mind and out. Her inflections are witty and surprising, and more surprisingly, delicate; she can probably do more for a line than any screen comedienne since Jean Arthur, in the thirties.

Streisand posed a formidable challenge to audiences, even those who had rushed out to buy her records but weren’t yet at ease with her as a screen presence. She conveyed the idea that she was exactly what she appeared to be—a kooky, unvarnished, undiluted Jewish girl from Brooklyn. Her looks were perhaps more charismatically mercurial than those of any movie actress since Bette Davis: She could be crude and horsey-looking one minute, ravishingly beautiful and glowingly expressive the next—just as her singing voice could go from powerful to exquisitely tender and vulnerable in a split second. Many of the men in the audience didn’t know quite what to make of her, and neither did some of the male critics. In a stunningly misguided review in The New York Morning Telegraph, Leo Mishkin wrote of Streisand’s spectacular star turn, “She is not quite up to the task as yet of carrying a whole motion picture by herself,” adding, “The one thing you cannot fault her with is that she is unique. But it takes time to get used to her.”

Pauline found that Streisand was more than just a naturally adept funny girl—she was a beguiling actress as well. In the picture’s second half, when Fanny Brice’s story got