Barbara Streisand

A Question

In Fall of 2006, I was haunted. My husband had died suddenly a few years earlier and I remained in a frozen state of grief, masked by ongoingness, busy on both coasts. Bored with grief, but in its unrelenting grip. Then out of nowhere, a stranger asked me a question.

That odd question, like a joke – had a punch-line. Which was: I didn’t “get” my own grief. Like a joke I heard in my childhood, about being “dead and too dumb to fall over.” I was indeed mourning the loss of my husband, but I was mourning something else as well. I was a missing person in my own life. And my ongoing grief was somehow connected to my hiding this truth.

That Fall an artist friend invited me to accompany her to a party at a producer’s estate in East Hampton. The producer, Sandy Gallin, famously “managed” mega-stars. My friend’s husband was out of the country, and I was tagging along as a plus-one to a party for Barbra Streisand, who was about to begin a world concert tour. The party was both a bon voyage! and a “welcome back!” (Barbra Streisand, my friend said, had been away from touring a long time.)

At the party, on the rolling lawn, guests milled around in the semi-dark, sipping cocktails. My friend waved hello to someone – and vanished. I stood alone (just me & my wineglass!) looking up at the stars., then became aware of someone beside me. The someone moved into half-light and spoke: “Hi, I’m Barbra Streisand”. (As if I wouldn’t have recognized that Nefertiti profile, like an image stamped on a coin.) She asked my name. She asked what I did. I was a poet and a midlist author – in other words: nobody. I assumed she’d turn away when I responded with what I considered the least interesting fact about me: I was a professor at USC.

         But I was wrong. Her expression turned fierce.

         “I hate USC” she said.

         I felt a little giddy at her declaration, its ferocity. Simply by mentioning my job, I had triggered the wrath of this supernova, about to dazzle audiences worldwide.  Was she for real? She cared about – what?  She seemed obsessed with a question that apparently had been on her mind for a while. She wanted answers from USC. As it happened, so did I.

         Barbra Streisand was disappointed, to put it mildly, about her experience with SC’s Women Studies department (now Gender & Sexuality Studies) where she had endowed a chair. The research she had expected had not materialized. I offered a disclaimer: I was a professor of English & creative writing – each SC department ran up its own flag. I couldn’t answer for another department. This copout she waved aside.

So I bit the bullet. Why, I asked, had the money she had donated failed to produce the kind of “research” she expected?

Her answer: “I want to know why men become impotent (she used a slang term) “while in bed with successful women.”

I started to laugh – then stopped at the expression on her face. She looked serious.

“You’re serious”, I repeated.

Though it was kind of a joke, it also was a revelation. Setting aside the funding factor and a huge sense of entitlement, it seemed to me a touchingly naïve request, from a person who, despite her mega-influence and experience, apparently still believed in the university as a bastion of higher learning – that old traditional idea of the university, as a center of free thought and free-ranging scholarship. (I recalled reading somewhere that her father had been a scholar. I thought about “Yentl’s” gender-fluid passion to learn, as Streisand had played her in the film, a girl who “becomes” a boy --without hormones or top surgery! --  to study the Talmud in a faraway yeshiva.)

In another time, in an open-minded university, where open-minded scholarship in the humanities was the norm, what seemed like a joke research topic would have probably been pursued as a (feminist) question of human sexuality and intimacy. What happens when the traditional power relationship in the sex act is reversed?

But there was the (ha ha) knee-jerk assumption of: ball breaker, controlling bitch – therefore: bigtime turn-off in bed.! Since humor is generally off-limits in the academy, there would be no ready line of inquiry on this: why is a woman with a modicum of power such a threat in the sack?

But the sadly real laugh, I knew, was that this line of inquiry stood little chance of being taken seriously in contemporary academia.

 She was staring at me expectantly.

“The thing is” (I felt as if I were signaling, on an active airport runway to a huge jet, as it tried to land.) “the discourse tends to be theoretical now. Almost exclusively.”

 Still I suggested that she reach out to Women’s Studies and tell them what concerned her. But I now felt her gaze intensifying: she seemed “on to” me, as if something about me had piqued her interest beyond my unhelpful professor-ness.

“You’re an attractive woman.” (Other party-goers were now edging closer, silent, curious, impatient.)

“When you are in bed with a man, what do you do if he can’t get it up?”

 Again, I almost laughed out loud – and sensed what I thought was a sympathetic rustle of response among the onlookers.  So was she joking? Trying to shock me? Punking a prof?

 Instead I had the odd feeling that she was zero’ing in on something, something hidden and vulnerable in me. Or had she picked up on how I was outspoken about justice in the world around me, but never opened up about myself.

Whether she had intended to or not – her question about being “turned away from” in bed – landed hard on a truth about my own life, my “marriage bed” – that of my late husband and me.

But rather than talk about my marriage, open a chink in the armor,  I took a “safe” detour, confiding that since my husband’s death there was a guy I very occasionally slept with – who never had problems getting it up, though that was pretty much the most memorable thing about him.

 So I was the obvious cliché -  in that I needed to be touched occasionally to reassure myself that I was flesh, etc.  I confirmed that my “recent partner” could hold up his end, as it were. I think I said something pointless, like, Maybe we are all actors in bed? Or – maybe I wasn’t “successful enough” to make him lose it? Not that funny.

I felt she had pitched me a hard ball – I caught it – and choked.

But what if I told her how my husband had turned away from me in bed? How my husband left bruise-colored fingerprints on my throat, how when he drank, he became violent, very violent. Most frightening - when he returned from film locations where he played a murderous villain - how he remained “in character”. Rapist, murderer--or the world’s nicest guy? Who was that coming through the door? I never knew.

I had never told anyone, or rather, just one friend, a woman, about this, my secret. Which made me feel, now in a moment of fuzzy sisterhood, that I might reveal all to this celebrated stranger. But of course I did not.

There are limits to the imagination. There are limits to the imagination’s power of empathy, though I believe absolutely in that power. Barbara Streisand had limits, I knew she wouldn’t want my dark revelations. I was shaken, but only for a second. Had she sensed that I had been hiding this darkness for years? Of course not.

We stood under the stars and the fairy lights strung among the trees, twinkled in their Neverland coyness. The vastness of her fame and her soulful scholarship, her seeker-energy blew past me - though she remained for a moment, talking to me.

Maybe I told her how my husband and I met, as in a fairy tale, in Italy - I don’t remember. We went on talking, as other guests crept closer and I glimpsed the concerned face of my friend: Why was I monopolizing the guest of honor?

One afternoon, months later, after I’d returned to L.A. and USC, I walked past a classroom and overheard a couple students in the doorway exclaiming that Barbra Streisand was inside - where the (newly-re-christened) “Gender and Sexuality” program was hosting her.

I risked a quick look. There she was: surrounded by a phalanx of administrators, a watchful protectorate, committed to Donor Mollification.

I kept on walking. I felt certain that she wouldn’t remember me – even if I managed to elude her security detail and present myself.

“Theory”, I remembered cautioning her.

But Streisand had apparently managed to import her hypothetical two lonely people in bed into academic discourse like a polite grenade. Some time after I passed by the classroom where she’d been surrounded by faculty and fans and those admin-bots, I noticed that the re-titled Gender & Sexuality Studies program announced a few lectures that appeared to zero in on “personal” sexual issues. Someone gave a talk about Marilyn Monroe’s boudoir passions and another offered insights on “sexual intimacy”. And, at last: Barbra Streisand (a program newsletter proclaimed) had attended one of these lectures with her actor-husband, and everyone was “thrilled” that they also “came to dinner” that evening.

She’d successfully created a ripple in predictable discourse, with reference to the profound “intersection” of two people - what I’d found impossible to address in the obvious doomed irrelevancy of our dark garden chat, under stars, before one of us went off to sing to the whole world.

Of course her great fame caused that ripple in academia - on a tide of generous funding. I wondered later, thinking back to how odd our encounter was, how much of that whimsical pre-dinner conversation was performance, the obvious illusion of intimacy.

Barbra Streisand was proving a point about the power of celebrity, of course. But if she could change the discourse, then the discourse was indeed subject to change.

I remembered later that I’d read somewhere that Streisand had never learned to read music, rather she relied solely on her instincts, which were obviously un-erring. No problem finding perfect pitch, not with that zero-at-the-bone radar.

Only recently, I discovered that she has established a new research institute in her name. She founded this new center at UCLA, not USC. Why did she move on from USC and its Gender Studies? Maybe she left an academic center with no ultimate interest in her questions? I have no answer.

Barbra Streisand posed a question to me once – and though I had a lot to tell her, I couldn’t give it up. So now I write about it.

Why had I stayed with him? He was gone so often from our home in L.A. - on film locations or months on Broadway. Our little daughter cried when he left but he turned down TV jobs that would have kept him closer to home. He turned away from the idea of home. I pitied him the abuse he’d suffered as a child. His ex-Marine cop father beat him mercilessly with a strap. He was damaged - I thought I could save him. When he wasn’t his disturbed self in a threatening role – he was sweet and considerate.

And everyone believed he was wonderful. And, oh yes, I might add: I loved him.

I lived a double life. I called myself a feminist, it was my identity, facing outward. But my marriage made this a lie. And I shared nothing with friends or family, and certainly not with the English Dept., especially my sister academics, all of whom were childless and mostly unmarried at that time. The ones who met him were very taken by my husband. One admonished me to “be nicer to him. You’re so mean.”

Yes, I was mean. And he - he was so handsome, and an amazing actor. I was the unsympathetic critical wife. I let people believe the acting, his impersonation of a man married to a woman whom he was forced to reject to preserve his dignity. And though I lifted the phone more than once to call the police, I always hung up – I knew that this information in the press would have meant the end of his career. I hung up the phone.

Why do men fail successful women in bed?

Also: why would a Women’s Study or Gender & Sexuality Studies – not publicly react to the mega-shocker scandals on its campus? In just one example, a gynecologist at the student health center had been sexually abusing female student patients for years? Why was a student health nurse, a whistle-blower, not believed when she reported this abuse to a university Title IX office? Why did the head of that office remark to the L.A. Times that there was “No there there” – before the Rape Crisis Center reported the scandal in full – and the university paid out a billion dollars (!) in settlement with victims, to avoid going to trial?

Where were the voices raised on campus, including from Gender Studies, speaking out about this and the other scandals.  Or how about the leak of a document from the Supreme Court that will end choice?

I managed to speak out about sexual violence on campus - but kept my own counsel on my own. But the intersection of private life, especially the private life of women – is the re-claiming of history.

In a 2020 article in New Discourses, written under pseudonym, the author writes: “I have a PhD in Women’s Studies, but I’m not woke anymore. I write under a pseudonym because, if my colleagues were to find out about my criticisms of this field, I would be unable to find any employment in academia. That someone who critiques the axioms of a field of study feels compelled to write under an assumed name tells you everything you need to know about the authoritarianism underpinning this ideology. I no longer believe …”

Further, she states: “One of the most galling forms of hypocrisy I’ve experienced is that leftist professors claim a commitment to “social justice’ yet the academic departments they run employ large numbers of underpaid adjunct instructors.”

Right now we have the leaked SCOTUS draft of a decision that will erase fifty years of Roe v. Wade and its constitutional protection of a woman’s right to privacy, her right to make decisions about her own body? Now, with this coming disaster - women of color and indigenous women and poor women will be targeted. Will this be on course syllabi?

          Here’s to reading the full text, the story, the humanities. We need to read everything – and this means reading history along with literature.  Reading Black history – the first Portuguese ship carrying human beings, the narratives of enslaved humans and the shameful Supreme Court decisions: Plessy v. Ferguson, Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Amendments., the three-fifths.

We need to debate and think and read the original texts – before we rely only on secondary thought. I remember years ago, a colleague and I brought our two undergraduate classes together to talk about Freud. My class was made up of poetry students and we had been reading Sigmund and discussing his analysis of the poet, “H.D.” But my colleague’s class had apparently taken a different approach. One of her students interrupted my student, who was discussing the “talking cure”. This student shouted that Freud was a monster, a fascist, an anti-Semite. I assumed she knew that he was a Jew – and I asked her what specifically he had written that she found so

 offensive, (thinking of Dora or the seduction drive theory.)

The student glared at me. “Are you kidding? I have never read Freud! I don’t have to read him – to know I hate him. I’ve heard all I need to know.”

Surely any of the alarming “calls from inside the house” demand the intellectual and moral rigor that difficult texts by Gayartri Spivak, Monique Wittig or Judith Butler elicit? So in the attempt to answer urgent questions like: Are gender and sexuality social constructs or biological facts – perhaps there’d be room for confronting the statistics of sexual violence on campus or the enormous challenge to reproductive rights or the injustice of adjunct employment – or narrowing the focus, room for Barbra’s query: What is the origin of loneliness in the sex act? Is there a pronoun for the dual  (or multiple) selves we inhabit in gender “performance”? And what about domestic violence?

What about my daughter – all our daughters – and the force of codified repression, the lasting blows of a brutal male-privileged high court?

I still grieve for David. I failed, along with him, to confront what was wrong with us. Once, on Broadway, onstage in the Arthur Miller play, “Broken Glass”, he played a doctor caring for a woman literally paralyzed by the rejection of her husband, who would not touch her in bed. From where, deep in his actor’s psyche, did he call up the range of emotions he always displayed onstage, rarely in life? He touched the actress playing the paralyzed woman, with the tenderness and protectiveness his character, the good doctor, credibly felt?

As I watched from the audience, how I longed to be that woman – or failing that, longed to change my life.

I didn’t tell Barbra Streisand about my novel, the one in which the protagonist’s husband dies of a heart attack playing tennis – exactly the way my real life husband died. How I dropped the novel manuscript, copy-edited, completed, into a Fed Ex box – on its way to my waiting publisher – on the very evening my husband (on a film location) collapsed on a tennis court.

But I can only go so far at this point. I can only partially interrogate the past. I need a little time to confront my off-key life, maybe in conversation with someone who can sing a song about a little bit of the truth: someone who possesses perfect pitch.