Barbra Streisand has written her autobiography, which means that for legions of fans, their bible will finally arrive on November 7. Clocking in at 992 pages (what, Babs, you couldn’t eke out another eight to make it 1,000?), My Name is Barbra covers everything — Marlon Brando’s pick up line to her, her pick up line to James Brolin, the fight to getting Yentl made, her signature eyeliner — and plenty more. Naturally, the woman who has an entire mall furnished in her basement has also lined up the very best press promotion for her book. Vanity Fair has made her the November cover story, and Editor in Chief Radhika Jones went to Malibu herself to interview Barbra. There is a lot to digest in the cover story, here are but a few highlights:

A heightened experience: Being with Barbra Streisand is a heightened experience. She comes prepared, carrying a folder with my name on it. She looks chic and comfortable wearing black pants and a gauzy top. We sit in her living room, the Pacific Ocean over her shoulder, and share a three-tiered tray of tea sandwiches and drink enormous cups of tea. Throughout our conversation she exhorts me to please eat, because she is eating, which she claims makes it easier to talk about herself. So we eat. At one point her three dogs come by for a visit. Two of them, Violet and Scarlet, are biological clones of Streisand’s beloved Sammie, a Coton de Tulear who died in 2017. Violet, despite allegedly being the well-mannered one, steals an egg sandwich.

A rose by any other name: To the extent that Streisand values fame, it’s not about a desire to be recognized or fulfilled by an audience. “I don’t think of myself as a movie star,” she says. Fame for her is a means to an end. Often, those ends are highly relatable. In the book, she recalls a moment in her third-floor walk-up on West 48th Street, at a time when she was earning $55 a week working for a press firm and eating at the Automat. She loved clean sheets and a freshly made bed but couldn’t get the knack of hospital corners. “I have a vivid memory of standing in the doorway of the bedroom,” she writes, “looking at the rumpled sheets, and thinking, I have to become famous just so I can get somebody else to make my bed.” The only time she brings up her own celebrity in our conversation — brings it up as a source of unalloyed joy, I mean — is when I ask her how she came to have a rose named after her. “Because I’m famous!” she exclaims.

The Streisand Effect: There are also moments that are highly Streisand-specific. For example, you may be curious to know her take on the Streisand Effect: “When I first heard the term, I naively thought, Is that about the effect of my music? Little did I know.” She writes that she didn’t intend to try to remove the picture of her house, she just didn’t want her name to be publicized with it, for security reasons.

You can’t clone a soul: On cloning, a topic on which precious few people can offer testimonials, she notes, “You can clone the look of a dog but you can’t clone the soul.” To clarify, she doesn’t regard that as a bad thing. (I can confirm that the dogs are their own individual doggy selves and also adorable.)

She tried for 20 years to make a sequel to The Way We Were: I venture, cautiously — aware I might be committing blasphemy — that these days the way to get this sequel made with Redford would be to de-age him. Streisand lights up. “Oh! That’s funny,” she says. “It’s actually a good idea.” It occurs to me that a director who cloned her dog would not hesitate to embrace all available technologies. Plus, she’d seen the first 10 minutes of the new Indiana Jones movie and thought they did a great job with Harrison Ford. We move on to other topics, and I even get to see the Barbra Streisand rose in the garden, but as we say our goodbyes, she circles back to the subject of the sequel. She’s going to call Redford and see what he thinks.

[From Vanity Fair]

Yeah, I highly doubt Robert Redford will say yes to a sequel now, but prove me wrong, Hubbell! As for Barbra’s wanting to be famous so someone could make her bed, I was gearing myself up for a takedown on how out of touch she sounds, but really I’m just jealous. My hospital corners are lousy, too.

The real news item here for our site, though, is the confirmation that Barbra Streisand reads Celebitchy. No, she does not say that outright. But in 2018 when we covered her cloned pups Violet and Scarlet, Kaiser said “I believe animals have souls and each one has their own personality, and that’s part of the joy of being mom to a fur-baby.” And now, five years later, Barbra is saying “You can clone the look of a dog but you can’t clone the soul.” She totally reads us, you guys. That’s enough proof for me! I also feel like her subtext in this instance is “no, I will not spend a kabillion dollars again to have my dog cloned.”

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