In the fall of 1957, Barbara Streisand, a gawky 15-year-old junior at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, was a culturally starved sponge. Three evenings a week after school and on weekends, she took the subway to Greenwich Village to help out with a production of Sean O'Casey's Purple Dust at the Cherry Lane theater. She swept floors, scurried out to pick up food for the cast, and during lulls did her homework. Noel Behn, the writer, who managed the theater at that time, later remembered her as "a dirty little girl who was always running around humming."

Anita Miller, the wife of the acting coach Allan Miller, played Avril in the show, and though Barbara later said she understudied Avril, Anita recalled that the production didn't have understudies. Still, as the weeks wore on, Anita grew fascinated by this singularly ardent teenager. The offspring of a brilliant educator father who had died when she was 15 months old and an unsupportive mother who wanted her to become a secretary, Barbara had sought refuge wherever she could from her abusive stepfather. She was hungry for knowledge, for encouragement, for acceptance.

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Anita tried to interest her husband in taking this girl on as a student, but he refused even to meet her, because of her age. Finally Anita invited her home to dinner. Barbara chattered nonstop throughout the meal, asking Allan an avalanche of questions. At first he was aghast at this "creature" and thought, Oh, my God, if this were my kid I'd get her some good clothes to wear and cut down on her crazy eccentricities. He considered her "a misbegotten, misshapen, skinny little nudnick." And yet, as the evening progressed, Miller found himself agreeing with Anita's assessment of her as "valuable and dazzling and interesting": "There was no question that she had something special. She'd keep saying, 'Can I ask you something?' It was not simpleminded openness and hunger. She was intellectually keen and very alive."

After dinner Anita and Barbara did a scene they had prepared from N. Richard Nash's The Young and Fair. Barbara's reading, Miller thought, "was the worst I think I've ever seen in my life. I couldn't believe that anyone could be so ignorant of acting technique that her arms and body would contort and do things that had nothing to do with the emotional life she was trying to project. The vocal patterns were equally disconnected. Nothing linked together." Still, Barbara impressed Miller. "She was trying to achieve something but didn't have the tools to do it. I was dumbstruck by the ferocity of this young woman."

Early in 1958, Miller took Barbara into his workshop, a part of the Theater Studio of New York on West 48th Street, in exchange for baby-sitting the Millers' two sons.

In January 1959, shortly before her 17th birthday, Barbara graduated from Erasmus Hall. Three months later she met Barry Dennen on the stage of the Jan Hus Theatre on East 74th Street. They were part of a raggle-taggle group who called themselves the Actors' Coop, rehearsing their first and last show, a production of Karel and Josef Capek's The Insect Comedy. Barbara had been cast in three roles: Apatura Clythia, one of the main butterflies in Act I; the Messenger in Act III; and the Second Moth in the epilogue.

Dennen, a 22-year-old U.C.L.A. graduate from a wealthy Los Angeles family, played a cricket and a snail. Handsome in a gaunt, somber way, obsessive in his love for every aspect of show business, he would set his alarm clock for three A.M. in order to audiotape-record an old Mae West or Bette Davis movie from television. The shelves in his Village apartment groaned under thousands of vintage records he had collected since childhood—Ruth Etting, Al Jolson, Edith Piaf, Fred Astaire, Mabel Mercer.

Dennen considered the production they were in "unspeakable," but he found Barbara's performance "hysterically funny" as she chased after a boy butterfly crying, "Oh, you great, strong, handsome thing!" while her diaphanous pink wings fluttered and her wire antennae flopped wildly atop her head.

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The Insect Comedy lasted only three days, Sunday through Tuesday, but Barbara and Barry remained close. "We went everywhere together," he recalled. "She was very young, endearing, and exceptionally serious about becoming a great actress." Dennen owned an Ampex stereo tape recorder with two microphones, so when a prospective agent asked Barbara for a tape of her singing, she asked Barry to make it. "We spent the afternoon taping," he later recalled, "and the moment I heard the first playback I went insane—I knew here was something special, a voice the microphone loved." There was a bar across the street from Barry's apartment that had a talent contest on Monday nights, and he challenged Barbara to enter it. Although she was skeptical of singing for a living ("I'm an ecktress," she told Barry), Barbara agreed when she heard that the winner would get a $50-a-week gig and free meals.

On a hot Monday morning a few weeks later, Barbara, unsure and scared, walked into the Lion, the dark, slightly seedy neighborhood watering hole on the ground floor of a brownstone at 62 West Ninth Street. Hopefuls for the talent show had to audition for the club's manager, Burke McHugh, on the morning of the contest, and the best four were invited back for the competition. McHugh was used to dealing with some very questionable characters at these cattle calls, and when he saw Barbara he muttered to his pianist, "Oh, boy, here comes a winner."

With her hair unwashed, dressed in dungarees and a sweatshirt, she looked, McHugh said in 1992, like "a kid off the street who hadn't been home to change her clothes." He asked her if she had come to audition. Self-protectively, she feigned ignorance. "Audition for what?" McHugh explained about the talent contest, and Barbara said, "Well, I've never sung in public before, but I'll give it a try."

She was skeptical of singing for a living. "I'm an ecktress," she told Barry Denner.

She told him her name was Barbara Strinberg, and then she sang the Harold Arlen-Truman Capote ballad "A Sleepin' Bee" for him. McHugh and his piano player, a young man named Patty, felt goose bumps rise on their arms. When she finished, McHugh exclaimed, "Oh, my God, Barbara, that was really magnificent!" He told her to come back for the contest and asked how to spell Strinberg.

Now that she had been accepted, there was no reason to hide her identity, but she didn't want to admit she'd lied. "I've gotta change the name. I can't stand it. . . . It sounds too Jewish." According to McHugh, at that moment "Footsteps in the Sand" blared from a radio in the next room. "Sand, " Barbara said. "I like that, that's a good last syllable. I'll call myself Barbara Streisand!"

When she came back at eight that evening, Barbara looked around the dark, smoky room and wondered, Where are all the women? Barry had neglected to tell her that the Lion was a predominantly gay bar. With her liberal leanings, Barbara had no problem with homosexuals, but she had never seen them behave so openly before, and she watched them with fascination as she waited for the contest to begin. They were arguably the toughest audience Barbara could have faced. Like Barry Dennen, most of them were immersed in show-business history. They adored Judy Garland and Ethel Merman; they would trek miles to catch a performance by Julie Wilson or Hildegarde; they bought the original-cast album of every Broadway musical. For a young girl singer to excite these men, she'd have to be awfully good.

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Barbara's competitors were a comedian, a light-opera singer, and jazz singer Dawn Hampton, the niece of the vibist Lionel Hampton. Last on the bill, Barbara stepped timorously onto the parquet "stage" next to Patty's piano, the lusty applause for Dawn Hampton ringing in her ears. She took what looked like a briefcase from under her arm, put it on top of the piano, opened it, pulled out her sheet music, and gave it to Patty. "Tonight," she said softly, "I am going to sing 'A Sleepin' Bee.'"

If she heard the titters, she didn't let on. By now most of the audience suspected McHugh was having fun with them. They looked at this awkward, skinny girl with her distractingly large nose and crooked teeth and eyes that seemed to watch each other, and they didn't know whether to laugh or groan. Her getup hardly helped. On top of her head she had bobby-pinned a Dynel hairpiece that looked, in the words of a friend, "like a cheese Danish." From under it her real hair fell stringily to her shoulders. She wore a short purple sheath and a jacket festooned with purple ostrich feathers from a thrift shop.

"We fought all the time," Elliott Gould said. "I wasn't always sure about what. I was madly in love with her."

Then this eccentric, clearly misguided creature opened her mouth and sang, and the titters and the talking stopped. She began that languid ballad of young love softly, her voice youthful but as clear as a bell, her high notes enthrallingly pure. Then she gathered steam, took on more force as her voice built to "Broadway belter" proportions. Finally she took a breathtaking swoop up the scale, leaping a full octave in one word, "love," and her first song in front of a paying audience came to an end.

For a few moments the 70 or so men sat in stunned silence. Then they burst into wild applause and cheers, shouting "More! More!" as Barbara laughed nervously and looked around the room. She glanced at Burke McHugh and mouthed, "Should I do another one?" He nodded, and she went back to her briefcase and pulled out "When Sunny Gets Blue." Again the voice was mesmerizing. The "applause meter" gave Barbara the contest by a wide margin, and McHugh told her to come back on Saturday night.

When she returned, she sang the same two songs plus "Lullaby of Birdland" and again wowed the audience, many of whom had come expressly to see her after hearing the buzz about her Monday-night performance. The following Monday she defended her title, adding "Why Try to Change Me Now" and "Long Ago and Far Away" to her brief set. The gay comedian Michael Greer was one of the contestants that night. The falsetto singer Tiny Tim was another. Greer recalled that Barbara wore a tiny high-heeled shoe in her hair, because she liked the rhinestones in it.

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Barbara won again, and on the following three Mondays as well. By now word had spread throughout New York's hippest audiences, and lines of people trailed down Ninth Street to Sixth Avenue on Monday and Saturday nights. The second week, Barbara told McHugh she wanted three pictures of herself, not just one, on the signboard outside the club. And she wanted to change the spelling of her name. "Back to Strinberg?" McHugh asked.

"No," Barbara replied. "I wanna take an a out of 'Barbara.' Who needs it? The name's pronounced Bar-bra. So that's how I want you to spell it: B-A-R-B-R-A."

Boy, this one really is a nut, McHugh thought. But he did as he was asked, and Barbra Streisand was born. It was her answer to all those agents who had advised her to change her name to Barbara Sands because Streisand was too ethnic or too hard to pronounce. This way, she had changed her name and she hadn't. What she had done was become, among all the thousands and thousands of Barbaras in the world, the one and only Barbra.

After a month at the Lion, Barbra was forced to retire from the competition as an undefeated champion when McHugh and his partner, Sgroi Jr., told her they wanted to give somebody else a chance. Without the $50 a week and free meals she had grown used to, Barbra faced dire financial straits again, and she asked McHugh if there was something else she could do at the club. He said he needed a replacement coat-check girl for a couple of weeks, but she wouldn't want to do that, would she? "Sure I would," she replied. "Why not?"

Every night she arrived at the club at eight o'clock, sloppily dressed, went into the coatroom, closed the door, and reopened it a few moments later wearing a flashy cocktail dress. After a week of this, one of the regulars, a costume designer who called himself Peaches, noticed that she never cleaned the dress. "Hey, Barbra," he teased her, "don't you think you should send that dress to the dry cleaner's? It's gonna start to walk on its own pretty soon." As he and his friends giggled, Barbra snapped back, "Go ahead and laugh. When I'm a big star on Broadway, you'll still be just a bunch of drunken, cackling hens!"

On August 7, 1959, Barbra bounced down the steps into the popular Bon Soir Club at 40 West Eighth Street and auditioned for Ernie Sgroi Sr. Sgroi told her to come back that night and do her songs again in front of the regular customers. If they liked her, he would give her a two-week booking.

That night the emcee introduced her as "a little extra surprise, a young singer who's been causing quite a stir over at the Lion." She stepped onto the small stage and realized that she still had chewing gum in her mouth. She took it out, stuck it on the microphone, and sang "A Sleepin' Bee." By the time she came to the end of the song, she had entranced the entire room. Ernie Sgroi hired her for two weeks, two shows a night, $125 a week.

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On September 9, Barbra debuted at the Bon Soir third on a bill with the comic pantomimists Tony and Eddie and comedienne Phyllis Diller. Diller vividly recalled the moment when, as she patted on her makeup and prepared to go on, she first heard Barbra Streisand sing: "On her third note, every hair on my body stood up! I am basically a musician, and when I heard that voice—and that heart—I knew this is a star!"

By now Barbra had fallen in love with Barry Dennen and had moved into his apartment. The serious turn their relationship had taken surprised Bob Schulenberg, a friend of theirs. "One night I went over to their place," he said, "and they were on the floor, and Barbra was resting her head on Barry's lap, and it was very romantic. They had that kind of glow that says that two people have just been intimate. They started talking about getting married. I said, 'Are you serious?' And they said, 'Yeah, we're going to get married.' It was sort of a sacred, hallowed moment. It was very intense. Barbra was enthralled with Barry. He has a brilliant mind. He was the first man who would ever trade jokes from Mae West or Groucho Marx movies with her and in the next moment enlighten her on art, theater, music. His influence on Barbra was tremendous. And he was thrilled with his creation."

The Bon Soir gig brought Barbra her first manager, her first agent, and her first reviews. In the New York World Telegram and Sun, Perry Rebell wrote, "The Bon Soir has swung into the new nightclub season with the find of the year. She is Barbra Streisand, a Brooklynite whose voice and poise belie her scant eighteen years." She also received her first New York column mention, from Dorothy Kilgallen: "The pros are talking about a rising new star on the local scene—eighteen-year-old Barbra Streisand, currently at the Bon Soir. She's never had a singing lesson in her life, doesn't know how to walk, dress, or take a bow, but she projects well enough ... to bring the house down."

The Bon Soir engagement ended on June 6, 1960, and Barbra had no new job offers. By then she had broken up with Barry and had no place to live. She went home to Brooklyn for a few weeks, but she couldn't stand her mother's harping about how she should get a steady job, not this on-again, off-again nightclub nonsense.

She fled back to Manhattan and spent the nights wherever she could, most often in friends' apartments, where she usually slept on the couch. Sometimes, if someone else had beaten her to it, she slept on the floor or in the bathtub. Finally she paid $12.95 at a Whelan Drug Store for a cot, which she lugged around with her everywhere she went. For a time a friend let her sleep in his office, but she had to wait until the place was closed before she could go in, and had to be out again by eight in the morning.

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Elaine Sobel, a friend from Allan Miller's acting class, came to the rescue. Elaine had a one-bedroom walkup on 34th Street near Second Avenue, and she offered Barbra her couch in exchange for help with the rent. "It was a lot better than the street or bathtubs," Elaine said.

Living together created a deep intimacy between Barbra and Elaine. "We spent hours talking about our problems, until early in the morning," Elaine reminisced. "We were both trying to escape our past. We shared a core of pain that was nonpareil. I would cry, but Barbra wasn't a crier. Usually we talked about Barbra's problems. She never took much interest in mine."

They talked a lot about men. "She'd tell me about some guy she liked and she'd ask, 'Do you think he's cute?' It was always more 'Do you think he's cute?' than 'Do you think he's talented?' Barbra used to moan, 'Will I ever get a guy? Do you think anyone could ever love this face?'"

In 1961, for her audition for David Merrick's Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale, based on Jerome Weidman's novel about the garment industry, Barbra wore a mottled honey-colored 1920s caracul coat trimmed with thick fox fur at the knees and neck which she had bought for $10. Her feet were adorned by smudged tennis shoes; her unwashed hair spilled out in tangles from beneath her wool knit cap. She smacked vigorously on chewing gum.

"Can I do this sittin' on that chair over there?" she asked, pointing to a secretarial chair on wheels.

"Sure, whatever you want," Arthur Laurents, the director, replied.

"Great!" She plopped herself onto the chair, took off her shoes, pulled the wad of gum out of her mouth, and stuck it underneath the seat. Then she launched into a comic number called "Value" while she careened across the stage on casters. When she was done, Laurents, Weidman, and Harold Rome, the composer, burst into applause.

Then Laurents asked her, "Do you have a ballad?"

"Do I have a ballad!" By the time she finished the haunting, plaintive "(Have I Stayed) Too Long at the Fair," the I Can Get It for You Wholesale creative team's jaws were slack. Harold Rome leaned over to Arthur Laurents and whispered, "Isn't she something?"

"She's terrific," Laurents agreed. "But what can we do with her? She's not right for the ingenue, and Miss Marmelstein's 50 years old."

"Maybe Miss Marmelstein doesn't have to be 50 years old," Rome mused. "The way this girl looks, people would believe her as a spinster. She could be any age."

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Laurents thought a few moments. "Let's have her back for Merrick to take a look." He asked Barbra if she could return that afternoon.

"Gee, I don't know." She shielded her eyes and sought out Marty Erlichman, her new manager, in the empty theater. "Marty, what time's my hair appointment?"

"Two o'clock."

"Ya see, I gotta get my hair done because I'm opening tonight at the Blue Angel. I'm singing there. Maybe you'll come and see me."

She promised to be back at four, and after she left,

Arthur Laurents asked his assistant to check under Barbra's chair for the wad of gum. As he had suspected, there was none. "She had the gift of thinking something out and then, when she did it, making it look spontaneous," Laurents said.

When Barbra returned, the first thing she asked was how everyone liked her hair. All agreed it looked smashing.

This time David Merrick was in the audience, and Barbra sang five songs. Afterward she said to Marty, "I don't think they liked me." Everyone had liked her just fine, except Merrick. He thought she was ugly, he told Laurents, and "too weird."

Laurents, Rome, and Weidman did go to the Blue Angel that night, without Merrick, and they asked Barbra to audition four more times, all the while trying to convince Merrick that she was right for the part. Finally, the producer yielded, and they told her she would be their Miss Marmelstein. Barbra Streisand would make her Broadway debut in a topflight production at a salary of $150 a week. "Oh, goody!" she exclaimed. "Now I can get a telephone."

Cast in the leading role of Harry Bogen was 23-year-old Elliott Gould, whose previous career height had been kicks in the choruses of Rumple, Irma la Douce, and Say, Darling. Barbra didn't like Elliott initially, and he was too shy to ask her out at first. But he would sometimes walk Barbra to the subway after rehearsals. When he finally asked for a date, Barbra recalled, "I thought he was being funny, because he was always joking around and doing nutty things." Their evening out consisted of dinner and coffee in a diner after a late rehearsal. "I found myself always laughing when Elliott was close by," Barbra said. They talked until the small hours of the morning, and as they spent more and more time together, Elliott opened up his heart to her. She was amazed at how much alike they turned out to be, far beyond the surface similarities of their profession, their Jewish faith, and their Brooklyn upbringing.

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He had spent his childhood in a stifling two-and-a-half-room apartment he shared with his parents, Bernard and Lucille Goldstein, in the Bensonhurst section, where he had slept in the same room with them for 11 years, listening to their ever worsening battles. "That's the place where I was most vulnerable, where I began to withdraw and become self-conscious," he said. "I would have loved to have taken a bat and just destroyed every wall and every shelf and everything else in it."

He could have been talking about Barbra's life with her stepfather, Louis Kind. But as much as their commonalities captured Barbra's imagination, it was the one major difference between them that fascinated her the most: from the age of nine, Elliott Goldstein had sung and danced, pushed into lessons and auditions and recitals by his ambitious mother.

"Oh, that must have been wonderful," Barbra burbled.

"I hated everything I was doing," he replied.

When I Can Get It for You Wholesale opened, Barbra received rave reviews, and she was the only member of the cast or crew to win a nomination for a Tony Award. At the April 29 ceremonies in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, she vied for best featured or supporting actress in a musical with Elizabeth Allen in The Gay Life, Barbara Harris in the revue From the Second City, and Phyllis Newman in David Merrick's other new show that season, Subways Are for Sleeping. Merrick sat at Newman's table, and just before the winner was announced, he leaned over to her and said, "I voted for Streisand." Nevertheless, the award went to Newman.

After Barbra ended their affair, Sydney Chaplin took to whispering "nose" in her ear onstage.

Barbra did, however, collect Variety's New York Drama Critics Poll Award and the lion's share of that Broadway season's acclaim and publicity. She also won the leading man. Shortly after I Can Get It for You Wholesale opened, Elliott moved into Barbra's apartment above a seafood restaurant on Third Avenue.

It was a tiny one-bedroom cold-water flat. The only window in the living room looked out smack onto a brick wall. The bather tub sat in the middle of the kitchen, the floor was so uneven that visitors felt they were listing, and there were no closets. Barbra didn't mind. The rent was only $67.20 a month, and for the first time she had an apartment all her own.

Whenever she or Elliott bathed, they had to boil four large pots of water on the stove to keep the water hot. The rest of the time they covered the claw-footed tub with a piece of plywood and piled stacks of dirty dishes on top of it to free up counter space.

Working together and living together often put a strain on Barbra and Elliott's relationship. "We fought all the time," he said. "I wasn't always sure about what." After one disagreement, Barbra locked Elliott out of the apartment and refused to answer the door or pick up the phone to talk to him. He went home to Brooklyn. Another time he locked her out in the rain until four in the morning. When he finally opened the door, there was a wet, cold Barbra, her face awash with tears.

But always they would kiss and hug and make up, and later they'd laugh about it all. "I was madly in love with her," Elliott said. In September 1963, they were married.

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On the first day of rehearsals for her next Broadway musical, Funny Girl, on the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre on December 10, 1963, Barbra came perilously close to being fired. Milton Rosenstock, the show's musical director, recalled in 1990 that during the initial read-through with the cast earlier that month Barbra had sung Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's score so beautifully that "she broke everybody's heart." But now, as Barbra struggled with blocking and phrasing and breathing, Rosenstock was amazed at what he saw. Christ, he thought, she can't even walk across the stage properly. And when she sang, Rosenstock felt "it was like some kid out of high school. It was all gone. Something had happened."

The producer, Ray Stark, and several of his associates watched from a few rows back. Styne and Merrill took notes. The director, Garson Kanin, studied Barbra carefully from beneath a furrowed brow as his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, whispered comments into his ear. Barbra was supposed to end a line of a song with a dismissive "Ecch," but she was overdoing it. "It's too much," Kanin called out.

Barbra froze. "What do you want?" she asked. "Make it more natural." She tried again; again Ruth Gordon whispered to Garson Kanin; Kanin asked Barbra to do it once more.

"Just tell me what you want and I'll do it!" she pleaded.

"Well, Miss Streizund—"

"My name is Streisand!" Barbra snapped.

At that Ray Stark stood up and started toward the stage. Barbra seemed near tears. "I'm trying to do everything you say. I've lost my confidence. I don't know how to sing anymore, because I'm doing what you want!"

"You're doing fine," Ray Stark said soothingly. "You're doing good!"

"I didn't take this to be good!" Barbra exploded. "I have to be great or nothing! Either you tell me how to be great—not good, great— or don't tell me anything!"

Stark called off the rehearsal, and as everyone said perfunctory goodbyes, Milt Rosenstock feared the farewells might be final. "They had somebody already lined up to replace her," he recalled. The next morning at 11, everyone regathered "in dead silence," according to Rosenstock. "Kanin announced we'd pick up with 'Don't Rain on My Parade,' then looked at Barbra and said, 'Are you ready, Miss Streisand?"

Barbra began to sing, and as Kanin called out directions to her it became clear that nothing had changed. "If she was supposed to move, she stood still," Rosenstock recalled. "If she was supposed to face this way, she faced that way." Finally one of Stark's partners leapt from his seat and ran toward the stage. "He was going to stop her. Jule Styne sees the guy, runs after him, and jumps on him. He pushes the guy into a seat and tells him, 'Leave her alone!' Streisand's singing, she doesn't know any of this is going on. Styne whispers to me, 'She's on fire! She's on fire!' She was burning up the stage, hitting every note.

"When she got to the end of the song, there was a point where she had to take a breath or she wouldn't be able to hold the final note on that great big finish—'Nobody, no, nobody is gonna rain on my pa-a-arade!' She didn't take the breath, and when she got to the note she didn't make it. She stood there and started to cry. She said 'I'm sorry' and walked away. She thought for sure she was through.

"But the performance was so brilliant, and in a way not being able to make the final note added to the intensity of the emotion she was conveying. Everybody just burst into applause and cheers and bravos."

Funny Girl was the story of Fanny Brice, the great musical comedienne, and her tragic marriage to the gambler and con man Nick Arnstein. Ray Stark, the Hollywood agent, was Brice's son-in-law, and his original plan had been to turn her story into a movie, but he couldn't get financing from any of the Hollywood moguls, who were less impressed than Broadway veterans with Fanny Brice's long-ago stardom.

By early 1961 Stark had decided to tell the Brice-Arnstein story as a Broadway musical, as a sort of out-of-town tryout for the movie. Stark enlisted David Merrick as his co-producer and Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, hot off Gypsy, as composer and lyricist. He then sent the script to Mary Martin. The star indicated her interest, but Sondheim balked. "Mary Martin is going to play Fanny Brice?" he said to Stark. "You've gotta have a Jewish girl! And if she's not Jewish, she at least has to have a nose!"

"Oh, c'mon, Steve," Styne answered. "We're not going to find any girl with a nose."

Sondheim withdrew, largely because he didn't want to do another backstage musical after Gypsy. Mary Martin departed as well after reconsidering the wisdom of playing a famous ethnic comedienne. She also realized that it would be difficult for her, at nearly 50, to carry off the play's early scenes of Fanny as a teenager.

Three months went by without Styne's hearing a word from Ray Stark, and it was during this period, the spring of 1962, that Styne found the girl with a nose. When Marty Erlichman became aware that Funny Girl was in the works, he began to badger David Merrick to give Barbra the part. Merrick urged Styne to catch Barbra's act at the Bon Soir, and she excited the composer so much that he attended every night of the three-week engagement save one. Styne had seen Barbra in I Can Get It for You Wholesale but hadn't thought of her for Funny Girl: "She was very funny in that show, but it didn't look like she had the quality for a romantic story like the one Isobel Lennart had written." Seeing her at the Bon Soir changed his mind. Now he fantasized about this marvelous voice singing his songs, and he found himself writing new tunes with Barbra in mind, even though there was no guarantee she'd get the role. "I was writing the score for someone with that range, that dynamism, that sense of fun."

Styne conveyed his excitement about Barbra to Ray Stark, but Stark wanted to cast a name star who would guarantee the show a solid initial box-office take. While the producer sent out feelers to Carol Burnett, Eydie Gorme, Kaye Ballard, Shirley MacLaine, Anne Bancroft, and others, Styne began a public-relations campaign to win the role for Barbra.

At last, the following October, Ray and Fran Stark went down to the Village to see Barbra at the Bon Soir. Styne was sure that would do the trick. It didn't. Both Starks thought Barbra "too sloppy," "not chic." "That girl will never play my mother," Fran said. "My mother was something special."

But after Jerome Robbins, then the show's director, saw Barbra's act, he too began to argue for her, and he persuaded Stark to have Barbra come in for an audition. It did not go well. Still, Robbins found Barbra fascinating despite her apparent dramatic deficiencies, and he understood when she explained that she couldn't weep where he wanted her to because the words as written hadn't touched her. He called her back seven times. "As far as I'm concerned," he told her at last, "you are Fanny Brice." Ray Stark finally saw the inevitable, too.

By the time Funny Girl went into rehearsals, Barbra's meteoric rise to stardom as a singer on records, in nightclubs, and as a guest on television variety shows over the prior year had brought the public's interest in her to a keen pitch, and advance bookings were already in the millions of dollars. Casting had been completed with Sydney Chaplin, the handsome 38-year-old son of screen legend Charlie Chaplin, set to play Nick Arnstein, and Kay Medford cast as Fanny's mother, Rose. By then, too, the show had a new director in Garson Kanin—who had stepped in after Jerry Robbins quit over book problems and Bob Fosse had come and gone—and just one producer when David Merrick sold his share of the show to Ray Stark after a bitter disagreement between the two men.

Merrick's departure created a potentially disastrous problem because Barbra had signed her contract with him, not with Ray Stark. Without Merrick, Funny Girl had no Streisand, and Stark likely had no show. David Begelman and Freddie Fields, Barbra's agents, smelled an opportunity, and they upped the ante for her to re-sign with Stark on the theory that she was a far more valuable commodity now than she had been six months earlier when she signed her contract. They told Stark that Barbra wanted an increase in her weekly salary from $1,500 to $7,500, a chauffeured limousine, a personal hairdresser, and free daily meals for her and Elliott.

Stark finally agreed to raise Barbra's salary to $5,000, but he agreed to none of her other demands, and the sometimes acrimonious negotiations left each wary of the other. Stark resented what he saw as Barbra's agents' hardball tactics; Barbra thought him niggardly in light of how important she clearly could be to the success of his long-held dream to bring his mother-in-law's story to life. The volatile love-hate relationship between Barbra and Stark, which would extend from Broadway to Hollywood and cover more than 12 years and seven productions, had begun.

On January 13, 1964, Funny Girl had its first out-of-town tryout, at the Shubert Theatre in Boston. It was a disaster, partly because Barbra's performance was uneven and uninspired.

Erasmus Hall High School alumna Lainie Kazan, Barbra's understudy, confirmed that Ray Stark interviewed actresses to replace Streisand at this point. Kazan was privy to that, she said, "because I was one of the people they talked to." For Lainie, a Broadway novice, the experience of working on Funny Girl was an eye-opener. "It was like going to war. There were hirings and firings and accidents. There were a lot of power struggles. I was in shock. And it must have been overwhelming for Barbra. But she got through it because she was a strong-willed, feisty little thing."

Fearful of being dismissed, Barbra became more obsessive than ever about being "great." After one of the Boston matinees, Garson Kanin returned to the theater and was surprised to find Barbra kneeling on the apron of the stage, singing "Don't Rain on My Parade" at full throttle. He went down to the footlights and called out, "Barbra, wait a minute." She stopped, startled. "Barbra," Kanin said, "you've just played a whole tough, long matinee. And in about an hour and a half you'll have to be back here again starting to get ready. You should be in your hotel room, resting."

"Goddamnit!" Barbra shouted. "I gotta get this fucking thing right! Jesus Christ!"

Kanin backed off. "All right. It's your life and your career. Do what you want."

That evening, Kanin recalled, Barbra apologized for blowing up at him. "I didn't mean to do that," she said. "But that whole number was getting so fucked up. And the tempo! Jesus, I thought it was my fault. But it was that goddamned asshole in the pit. Jesus Christ!"

Kanin's not telling me what to do!" Barbra wailed to Marty Erlichman. "I need direction! All he ever tells me everyJm_thing's fine!"

Erlichman sat down for a drink with the director and relayed Barbra's concerns. "When are you going to tell her more—like what to do?"

"She doesn't need to be told what to do," Kanin replied. "She knows what to do. I'm only gonna tell her what not to do." Kanin's approach might have worked with a veteran such as Mary Martin or Ethel Merman, but it wasn't working with Barbra. Something had to be done, and Barbra knew what it was: she needed Allan Miller to coach her.

Ray Stark gulped when she told him this: "O.K.," he replied, "but you can't let Garson know. I don't want to offend him."

"But Allan will have to come to the theater and watch the performance," Barbra protested.

"Well, tell everyone he's your cousin or something."

Masquerading as Barbra's lawyer cousin from California, Miller watched a performance, and his heart sank. "She looked like a rank amateur," he recalled. "The scenes between her and Sydney Chaplin were awful. They stood onstage during these supposedly intimate moments and there was a chasm between them."

According to Miller, another major problem was that audiences weren't responding to Barbra's rendition of "People." There was a real risk that the song, which Jule Styne expected would top the pop charts, might be dropped from the show. "Barbra was singing it the same way all the way through, with no connection at all to the lyrics," Miller said. "And she was singing it out to the audience, rather than to Sydney. We worked on all that, and the next night—all of this exploration had to be done before live audiences in Boston—she sang the song very differently. Sydney Chaplin looked at her like 'What the hell's going on?' And Milton Rosenstock didn't know what she was going to do. She was so halting in the beginning—which was right for the song—that Rosenstock didn't know how to keep the orchestra in sync with her. He just had them stop playing and she sang a cappella.

"When she got to the phrase 'two people, two very special people,' she turned to Sydney and sang the rest of the song only to him. It was magical, touching, real. I could see Sydney smiling; he really got caught up in what this girl was doing. At the end of the number, the audience was on their feet. It stopped the show."

"Every age has its Super Lady ... Sarah Bernhardt, Gertrude Lawrence, Judy Garland. Well, we've got ours. Her name is Barbra."

By the time Funny Girl got to Philadelphia early in February, Barbra and Sydney Chaplin were enmeshed in an affair. Barbra had said to Elliott six months earlier, arguing against marriage, "I have to sow my oats," and Sydney Chaplin—handsome, dapper, charming, a ladies' man—proved too attractive for her to resist. With Chaplin's wife Noelle back in France and Elliott at home in New York a good deal of the time, Chaplin and Barbra began a discreet romance, dining alone after the show and having rendezvous in each other's hotel rooms.

Years later Elliott said that when he first heard of the affair he confronted Barbra, and she readily admitted that she and Chaplin were involved. Barbra's infidelity, needless to say, put a strain on the Goulds' barely five-month-old marriage.

By now, a buzz had come out of Funny Girl's Philadelphia tryout—that Barbra Streisand's performance had evolved into a stunner. It was at this time that Allan Miller saw Barbra give "the most surpassingly beautiful performance I've ever seen on a musical-comedy stage." He had been working with her daily, refining her interpretation of Fanny, developing the nuances that make a characterization memorable.

After this performance, Miller recalled, Ray Stark, Jule Styne, Bob Merrill, and Milton Rosenstock went to Barbra's dressing room. "They said to her, 'Barbra, if we ever had any doubts about you, please forgive us. You are golden. Anything you want is yours.' And they literally bowed down in front of this 21-year-old girl for this incredible performance."

The next night, as he watched Barbra's performance, Miller was even more stunned. "She tried to do everything the same from the night before, and it was a travesty. It was unhuman, unfeeling. Nothing worked. She was indicating, not feeling. Ray Stark stormed out of the theater in the middle of it."

The night after that, Miller felt Barbra had brought the performance about two-thirds of the way back, but that evidently wasn't enough for Ray Stark. According to Miller, "Stark came zooming back to her dressing room and flung open the door. He barreled in and barked at me, 'You get out of my way!' Then he screamed at Barbra. 'You bitch! You goddamned fucking little bitch! How did I trust you? You'll never work in the theater again! I want Monday night's performance back!'"

"What are you yelling at me about?" Barbra wailed.

"I'm yelling at you because it's my show. I own you."

"You don't own me! You get out of here. My throat is hurting, and I don't want to yell. Fuck you! Get out!"

Stark was shocked. "You can't say that to me!"

"This is my dressing room. And I'm saying it to you! Fuck you! Get out!" Stark stormed out, slamming the door behind him. Barbra looked at Miller wide-eyed. "Did you hear what I said to him?"

"Good!" Miller said.

Barbra giggled. "Do you think I should call the others in and say it to them, too?"

"No, you don't need to do that," Miller replied.

"Wow," Barbra whispered. "I really said 'Fuck you!' to Ray Stark!"

'When Barbra opened on BroadW way," Shana Alexander wrote in a Life-magazine profile, "the entire gorgeous, rattletrap show-business Establishment blew sky-high." Barbra's performance was electric, thrilling—due partly to Jerry Robbins, who had returned as director—and her audiences knew that they were witnessing an extraordinary melding of performer and role. As they cheered Fanny on through poverty to stardom and love and loss, they also cheered Barbra's incredible rise from a housing project in Brooklyn to the top of her profession. It was the start of the Streisand cult.

The fame and the adulation that Funny Girl brought Barbra staggered her. Two weeks after the show opened, an evocative portrait of her by the artist Henry Koerner graced the cover of Time magazine, placing her among a select group of entertainers so honored by a publication that then generally featured scientists and statesmen on its cover. The six-page article, complete with color photos, rare in that era, was headlined simply "The Girl."

And then there was Elliott. Barbra's phenomenal success had swept him up in its current, and often now he felt adrift. He could laugh, he professed, about being called "Mr. Streisand," but her total professional dominance over him was harder to accept. "To have a relationship with someone as successful as Barbra made it difficult for me to face or find myself," he said. Their world revolved around Barbra now. Everything seemed to be in her service, including Elliott. He waited for her in their car every night after the show, ready to drive her home.

He had a lot of time on his hands, time he often spent playing three-man pickup basketball games in Manhattan schoolyards. He also became deeply involved in gambling on sporting events. "I bet on every game on the boards, thousands on a game," he told Playboy in 1970. "I wasn't very successful." Eventually he would lose nearly $50,000 on one football season. And every night on Broadway his wife played a woman whose success overshadowed that of her husband, an inveterate gambler on a losing streak. Onstage, art was imitating Fanny and Nick's life, and offstage Barbra and Elliott's life was imitating art. Elliott told himself that his idleness was in service to his love, that he needed to attend to his marriage. "Possibly that gave me an excuse not to look for work," he admitted. "I was afraid I wouldn't get it, afraid to go out on my own."

As if to complete this sorry syndrome, Elliott's few efforts to strike out on his own failed. Less than a month after Barbra opened in Funny Girl, he flew to Jamaica to appear in a film, The Confession, along with Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland. The budget was low, his part as a deaf-mute who is miraculously cured at the end of the story was small, and the picture was shelved for seven years until it came and soon went under the title Quick, Let's Get Married. Later, Elliott did not list it among his credits.

In June 1964, Once upon a Mattress, a television version of the Princess and the Pea legend which Elliott had taped in March, was aired on CBS. It was a ratings success, but Elliott's role as the Prince was largely forgotten in the glow of Carol Burnett's hilarious comic performance as the Princess. While Barbra negotiated a $5 million deal with the same network for a series of specials of her own, Elliott received no other offers of television work.

One night during the opening bars of "People," Barbra's eyes fell on Sydney Chaplin's face and she lost her concentration, and very nearly her place in the song. Chaplin, his back to the audience, was grunting and mumbling obscenities at her, loudly enough so that she feared the audience could hear him. Shocked and disconcerted, she barely got through the song. "He would actually be talking to try to upstage her while she was singing 'People,'" cast member Linda Gerard recalled. "He would be doing things that were so ridiculous and so amateur-night-in-Dixie."

A few days earlier, Barbra had ended her affair with Chaplin, and he was highly displeased. "It was a scorned affair," Chaplin's understudy, George Reeder, recalled, "and they were at each other's throats."

Chaplin continued to vex Barbra, and in September Ray Stark called the two stars into a meeting. Barbra pleaded with Chaplin to tell her what she was doing wrong. All he would say was that the writing of the show was terrible.

During intimate scenes, George Reeder recalled, Chaplin took to whispering "nose" into Barbra's ear. At one intermission, she ran back to her dressing room in tears, and the stage manager, Tom Stone, had to use all his powers of persuasion to get her to return for the second act.

The battles escalated. Finally Barbra decided that she had no recourse but to bring Chaplin up on charges before Actors' Equity. There was a hearing, but no action was taken against him. According to Reeder, "Sydney could be such a charming and witty man that he just went in and charmed the pants off the Equity Committee. Barbra was angry, and she came off a little bit aggressive and abrasive, and here was this tall, handsome, ingratiating man giving his side of things. Barbra didn't have a chance."

But she got her revenge, Reeder recalled. At the end of the "You Are Woman, I Am Man" number, after Fanny falls back on a chaise longue and Nicky starts to kiss her, a blackout curtain would come down as the set moved upstage to make room for the next scene. "There was a heavy lead pipe sewn into the bottom of the curtain," Reeder recalled, "and Sydney and I were warned to keep our heads down, because if we lifted them up too soon we risked getting conked on the noggin with this pipe as the curtain fell.

"Well, this one performance, as Sydney was pretending to nuzzle and kiss Barbra's neck at the end of the scene, he said 'nose' to her again. She bit his neck really hard, and he reared his head up. The pipe hit him. Everybody was going 'Are you all right?' and he said, 'Yeah, I'm fine.' But then when he came down from his dressing room for his next scene, he stopped on the stairs and said, 'Oh, my God, I don't think I can do this.' He felt really dizzy, and it turned out he had a concussion. So I had to go on for him."

In June 1965, Chaplin left the production. Johnny Desmond, younger and better-looking, stepped into the Arnstein role.

Barbra's recording career kept pace with her Broadway stardom throughout 1964. It had taken Marty Erlichman more than a year to convince Columbia Records that Barbra wasn't "too special" to be commercial, and her first two albums made her the best-selling female vocalist in America. Barbra Streisand/The Third Album, released in February, rose to No. 5 on the pop charts and went gold a year later. The mostly classic songs highlighted the beauty of her voice as much as her second album had showcased its theatricality. Two months later the original-cast recording of the Funny Girl score hit the stores. The excitement the show had generated and Barbra's growing legion of fans propelled the album to No. 2. The sales of all four of Barbra's albums were bolstered considerably in May when The Barbra Streisand Album won the Grammy Award as album of the year and Barbra was chosen best female vocalist. She remains the youngest recipient of both awards.

Despite the stunning impact Barbra had made on Broadway, the Tony eluded her again when the best-actress-in-a-musical award went to Broadway veteran Carol Channing for her role as Dolly Levi in David Merrick's production of Hello, Dolly!

Barbra reached a new recording milestone in September when her fourth studio album, People, climbed to the No. 1 position on the Billboard "Top LP's" chart, helped along by the sales and airplay of Streisand's first bona fide hit single, a new recording of the title tune. It was a remarkable accomplishment in an era dominated by the Beatles—Barbra knocked A Hard Day's Night out of the top-album spot—but understandable both in terms of the excitement surrounding Streisand and the album's quality. Arguably her best recording to date, People featured songs of unusual musical and narrative depth which highlighted the richness her voice continued to acquire. Had there been any thought that Streisand might be a flash in the pan, People put it to rest. The record won Barbra her second consecutive Grammy as best female vocalist.

By the end of 1964, Barbra Streisand had become a very rich woman. Her Funny Girl salary tallied up to more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, and the annual royalties from her record sales amounted to at least that. On top of it all she had just signed a $5 million contract with CBS to star in five television specials.

In March 1965, Marty Erlichman, David Begelman, and CBS programming chief Michael Dann had a meeting at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. Dann had just screened My Name Is Barbra, in which Streisand turned the concept of television specials on its head with a one-woman tour de force of celestial singing and audacious comedy. As Marty slid onto the leather banquette, he wondered just how effusive Dann's praise would be.

"Let me get this out of the way," Dann began. "I just saw the special, and in one fell swoop you're gonna ruin this girl's career." Marty's eyes widened, and his astonished gaze went from Dann to Begelman and back again.

"That show is gonna do daytime ratings," Dann went on. "It's gonna be blasted by the critics. We've got a firm airdate that we can't move, so here's what I think you should do to save the show. I would re-arrange the three sections of it and put the second one first, where she does the comedy monologue. I mean, how dare you take this girl, with a name nobody's even gonna be able to pronounce, and allow her to open up a TV show by singing for 17 straight minutes before she even says hello to the audience?"

Marty couldn't believe that Dann, who must have been speaking for others at CBS as well, hadn't seen the quality of Barbra's show. He told Dann he was dead wrong and offered to void the entire CBS deal. "Daytime numbers? She'll double them. It will be the highest-rated variety special this year. And reviews? She'll win every award." Marty could afford to hold his ground, because Barbra had complete creative control over her special and was answerable only to the network censors. My Name Is Barbra would be shown as it was or not at all.

On April 25, three nights before the show aired, Barbra made a rare promotional appearance on the venerable quiz show What's My Line? As a mystery guest, Streisand signed in on a blackboard, and she immediately managed to plug her special by boldly scrawling "My Name Is Barbra." Before a blindfolded panel composed of the actors Tony Randall and Arlene Francis, the publisher Bennett Cerf, and the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Barbra attempted to obscure her voice by responding in Italian to questions designed to determine her identity. It didn't work; she was recognized quickly, thanks in part to continuous cheers from the studio audience.

The following Wednesday, April 28, Barbra and the entire Funny Girl cast crowded into her dressing room to watch the first 15 minutes of the special during their intermission. "Finally the big moment came—nine o'clock!" Barbra said. "But there was no singing, there was no picture. My first television special and the engineer had forgotten to push the button to start the show! I couldn't believe it!" Streisand the perfectionist recalled the moment as being more dramatic than it really was. Only the first second and a half of the show was missed, and it was barely noticed by anyone but Barbra.

After she completed that night's performance of Funny Girl, Barbra, accompanied by Elliott and Marty, swept into a cocktail party in her honor hosted by Bergdorf Goodman owner Andrew Goodman in his 22-room penthouse above the store. Sybil Burton, Bill Blass, and Arlene Francis joined most of Manhattan's high society in singing Streisand's praises. Wearing a jeweled evening gown in paisley voile, with long, silver-painted fingernails to match, Barbra accepted the compliments graciously, but soon repaired nervously to a bedroom, where early reviews of the show were read to her over the phone. The first one was an ecstatic rave, but Barbra's reaction to it surprised the guests. "They must be more specific," she fretted to no one in particular. "I want to know everything."

"Everything" turned out to be all that Barbra could have hoped for. The majority opinion was echoed by a review by Rick du Brow of United Press International that has become a milestone in the Streisand lore. The special, he felt, was "a pinnacle moment of American show business, in any form, in any period. She is so great, it is shocking, something like being in love. . . . She may well be the most supremely talented and complete popular entertainer that this country has ever produced. . . . She sang . . . but that is as complete as saying Tolstoy was a writer. . . . She touches you to your toes, and then she knocks you out."

For days afterward critical raves continued to pour into Marty Erlichman's office, but his favorite response came from Mike Dann, the man who weeks earlier had told him the show would ruin Barbra's career. Dann's phone call was the first one he got the morning after the show aired. "I apologize," Dann said simply. "I was wrong." By the end of the week it was clear Marty had been right about the viewership too. My Name Is Barbra got a terrific 35.6 percent share of the viewing audience.

The importance of My Name Is Barbra to the broadening appeal of Barbra Streisand can scarcely be overstated. She looked beautiful on the show, and within days of the airing, teenage girls in high schools across America proudly sported exaggerated eye makeup and blunt-cut pageboys while they struggled to grow their fingernails to "dragon lady" lengths. Barbra Streisand had truly become a national phenomenon.

To no one's surprise, My Name Is Barbra received six Emmy nominations, and at ceremonies held simultaneously in New York and Hollywood on September 12, 1965, the show won five of the awards, including outstanding program achievement in entertainment and outstanding individual achievement by an actor or performer. Looking a bit zaftig but tanned and glowing, Barbra accepted her Emmy with relaxed good cheer. "I think I have a run in my stocking," she quipped. "Of all nights!" She told the audience that she used to watch award shows as a little girl only "to see who showed up drunk." She then announced that she had figured out she would have to perform in Funny Girl for 58 years to be seen by as many people as had watched My Name Is Barbra.

Before Barbra went to Hollywood to J3make the film of Funny Girl with producer Ray Stark and director William Wyler, she gave birth to Jason Gould, on December 29, 1966. The filming of her Broadway triumph took a year, and in the course of that time history repeated itself. Once again she became involved with the handsome actor playing Nick Arnstein, in this case Omar Sharif. Once again, the affair did not last.

On September 18, 1968, Funny Girl had its world premiere at Manhattan's Criterion Theater. Barbra sat with Ray Stark and Marty Erlichman and fidgeted nervously. She had arrived with Elliott, looking every inch the movie star in a nude-colored net gown and cape designed by her favorite couturier, Arnold Scaasi, and a towering wig in the French Directoire style. Surrounded by a dozen burly bodyguards, she made her way regally up the red carpet leading to the theater entrance as fans cheered, flashbulbs popped, and reporters hurled questions.

In the weeks that followed, the public flocked to the picture. It grossed nearly $60 million, an enormous sum for that period, and Funny Girl remained among the top 20 all-time moneymaking movies for years.

"Every age has its Super Lady," Rex Reed wrote in Women's Wear Daily. "Other ages had Lillian Russell and Sarah Bernhardt and Gertrude Lawrence and Helen Morgan and Judy Garland. Well, we've got ours. Her name is Barbra and whether we like it or not, all those monstrous things she keeps doing to people out of fear and insecurity only make her more exciting on screen. When all that talent comes to a boiling, raging, ferocious head of fireball steam, as it does in Funny Girl, bad publicity pales in the glow of her extraordinary genius."

Funny Girl played for more than a year at exclusive-run theaters in the United States before going into wider general release—an unprecedented success. Barbra had achieved her greatest dream: now she was indeed a movie star. She had conquered every major realm of show business, and she might have been the happiest woman in the world. But in a sadly real Hollywood cliche, her marriage had come to an end.

The Goulds made a joint announcement of their separation on February 13, 1969. Barbra seemed to hope for an eventual reconciliation. "We are separating not to destroy our marriage, but to save it," she told a reporter. Conventional wisdom had it that the Gould marriage was destroyed by one partner's career's exploding while the other's languished. Certainly this was part of the problem. (Perhaps the separation freed Elliott to achieve success. The following year, he made the cover of Time after his huge success in Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H.)

Later, Elliott intimated that the failure of his marriage had more to do with Barbra's deep-seated psychological problems than with her success. "I don't think she knew how to love me back," he told a British reporter, Corinna Horan. "She was incapable of real love because she never had it from her father." He said he had once told her, "Your mother thinks affection is something people use to get something," and she had replied, "That's why I am the way I am."

Over the years, Barbra would be as silent on the reasons for the breakup as Elliott would be talkative. Her only comment was that she was "so deeply wounded" during her marriage that "I thought I would never give myself to any man again. . . . We did nothing but battle day and night."

Despite the breakup, Barbra asked Elliott to escort her to the 41st Annual Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 14, 1969. Funny Girl had been nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture and best actress. The other nominees in the last category were Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter, Patricia Neal for The Subject Was Roses, Joanne Woodward for Rachel, Rachel, and Vanessa Redgrave for Isadora.

When Ingrid Bergman began to read the best-actress nominees, Barbra stared numbly straight ahead. Bergman opened the envelope and gasped. "The winner is . . . It's a tie! The winners are Katharine Hepburn . . . and Barbra Streisand!" It was the first Oscar tie for acting since 1932. Barbra turned joyfully to Elliott and ran up to the stage, tripping briefly over the hem of her sequined see-through black net pantsuit.

Jack Brodsky, Columbia's head publicist, had suggested her opening line—one she had used in the film. "Hello, gorgeous!" she exclaimed as she held the gold-plated statuette aloft. "I'm very honored to be in such magnificent company as Katharine Hepburn. Gee whiz, it's some kind of wild feeling. Sitting there tonight I was thinking that the first script of Funny Girl was written when I was only 11 years old. Thank God it took so long to get it right, you know? I would like to thank my co-producer, Ray Stark, for waiting until I grew up."

Six weeks later Barbra opened at the concert theater of the spanking-new International Hotel in Las Vegas, Kirk Kerkorian's $60 million, 30-floor, 1,500-room hotel and casino, the largest in the world. Kerkorian wanted the country's biggest star to open this lavish playground in style, and he first approached Elvis Presley. Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, turned the offer down, unwilling to let his client take the risk of appearing at a brand-new facility before all the inevitable problems with sound, lighting, acoustics, and logistics had been ironed out. "Let somebody else stick his neck out," Parker said, then agreed that Elvis would follow whoever opened the hotel. When Kerkorian offered Barbra $100,000 a week and enough stock in the hotel to make her four-week engagement worth $1 million, she decided to stick her neck out.

Elvis Presley was scheduled to follow Barbra at the International—an engagement that would be a triumphant comeback—and he caught her next-to-last show. Barbra, looking ravishing in a flowing pink diaphanous gown and a curly blond wig, introduced him to the audience, and afterward he went backstage to meet her. One of Barbra's musicians, Don Lamond, passed him in the hallway and was impressed by how good the 34-year-old Presley, who had been out of the public eye for a while, looked. "I think he was the handsomest guy I ever saw. This was before he got bloated and all that stuff. My wife said she couldn't believe how fantastic he looked. He went into Barbra's dressing room, and they got together."

Years later Barbra's longtime lover, Jon Peters, revealed in an unpublished interview the extraordinary scene that followed, recounted to him by Barbra. She was alone, sitting at her dressing table. After Elvis closed the door behind him, he said simply, "Hi," and an awkward silence followed. Suddenly he reached over and picked up a bottle of red nail polish from the vanity table. Without a word, he fell to one knee, took Barbra's hand in his, and began, slowly and painstakingly, to apply bright-crimson polish to Barbra's tapering fingernails.

The intimacy of the gesture, the supplication of it, stunned Barbra, who stared in fascination as Elvis worked, and when he finished, she mumbled, "Thank you." An associate of Presley's, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, claimed that the intimacy between Barbra and the King of Rock 'n' Roll didn't end there. "Elvis told me that he spent the night with Streisand in her suite. I guess he was kind of bragging. Elvis didn't say how long he and Barbra stayed involved, and I made it a policy never to press him for details about anything. But I have the feeling it was a pretty fleeting thing. One of the books about him said that when he saw her show he said, 'She sucks,' but that's bull. He talked as though he worshiped her. I was absolutely amazed by what he told me. Barbra Streisand and the King! Wow."

That year Barbra Streisand turned 27.

Excerpted from Streisand Her Life, by James Spada, to be published next month by Crown; © 1995 by James Spada.