She flirted with Brando and even Prince Charles. She has been romantically linked with a succession of Hollywood hunks — think Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal.
But there are no steamy boudoir scenes in “My Name Is Barbra,” Barbra Streisand’s exhaustively detailed doorstop of a memoir. Instead, the multi-hyphenate star — singer actress, producer, director, philanthropist — lavishes attention on her wardrobe, which she documents, page after page, down to each sparkly paillette.
Growing up, this self-proclaimed “skinny marink” from Brooklyn cherished her burgundy sweater with wooden buttons that “set her apart from the other kids on her first day at camp.”
Her near-fetishistic recall propels her into her teens, when every dollar she earned babysitting or working as a cashier in a Chinese restaurant went toward clothes. There was, in particular, a lace-trimmed skirt and top printed with tiny pink-and-white checks with shoes to match — “low cut pink flats that showed a bit of my toes.”
Long before the advent of the celebrity stylist, Ms. Streisand, 81, learned to fashion her image seemingly on the premise that if she couldn’t trade on her features to project glamour and obvious sex appeal, she could count on her special brew of off-center panache.
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