Barbra [antikvár]

ONEThe face is familiar in five continents and is, triumphing over ail early prédictions, in part her fortune. The name is more than a household word. In an era where there is no studio system, no longer even a 'star' system, she has been described as alone constituting 'a complété reason for going to a movie'. The innumerable facts of her career, long since chronicled, require continuous moni-toring and up-dating as, like an eccentric moonshot, she courses erratically through a firmament she outshines. Rumours, myths, legends, suppositions, have been assi-duously documented. The slanders, too contentious to be repeated publicly, enjoy a seamy half-life at private dinner parties, trade réceptions and other familiar salt-licks where the smart-mouths barter second-, third-hand anecdotes. Living at the core of the most plastic com-munity we know today, she is not only charismatic in herself but the cause of fleeting charisma in others.To drop her name on however thin a pretext is to command attention and ambivalent respect. The name, of course, is Barbra Streisand.To isolate the truth behind the person enveloped by such a career and fronted by such legend is perhaps, finally, as impossible as it is fascinating. There is no single truth. Streisand is protean. By choice. Ferociously opposed to the cliché of having an 'image', she changes hers at will, defying the neutering of easy catégorisation. She is, in one respect at least, not Paul Newman but