One of the big stories in the musical world is that Barbra Streisand’s third album of duets, The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two, will hit streaming platforms on June 27, with Streisand teaming up with other legends, including Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Sting.
It’s been a dozen years since her last duet album, Partners, which featured Streisand singing duets with an all-male cast, including Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Michael Bublé, John Legend, and Lionel Richie, and even included an earlier recording she made with Elvis Presley, who died in 1977, as well as a duet with her now-58-year-old son, Jason Gould.
This one also includes Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande, who team up with Barbra to sing “One Heart, One Voice.” To hype the new album—if that is ever necessary with Barbra—her McCartney duet, “My Valentine,” was released May 16.
Though she has lived in Southern California for many decades now, Streisand will always be a creature of New York. She grew up in Brooklyn, made her debut in Village clubs, and then hit Broadway: first in I Can Get It For You Wholesale, where she met her future husband, Elliott Gould. And then, of course, as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. She famously did a live concert —”A Happening in Central Park”—in 1967.
For years, she kept a penthouse in the tower of the Ardsley on the Upper West Side. Other tenants still recall looking out their window one day and seeing a grand piano being raised up by ropes to her floor. “She was everywhere in the city,” recalls David Rothenberg, longtime culture critic and author of the recent book Manhattan Mayhem.
I’ve always been a Barbra fan, since seeing her on Broadway when I was a little girl. I bought her records, watched her TV specials, saw The Way We Were 500 times, and, yes, read her 1,000-page memoir.
Did I mention we have ocean-view houses near each other?
I never met her in person, though I did manage to get a quote from her for an article I was writing on actors directing themselves. Her publicist said she never responds to press, but somehow, when she heard that I had Paul Newman and Warren Beatty, she said yes. She pored over a proper quote for days, at one point discarding pages she did not think were good enough. It gave me insight into that famously perfectionist persona.
Did I mention we shared politics?
I was a young volunteer for the 1972 McGovern campaign when postcards started coming to the office from people who agreed to be listed as supporters. And there was one, handwritten, from Barbra Streisand. But she made it very clear to (the aforementioned) Warren Beatty, one of the heads of the campaign, “just don’t ask me to sing.”
Eventually, the campaign was in dire straits, and Streisand got a call from Beatty. She picked up the phone and said, “You want me to sing.” He did, and she did. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. Preceded on stage by James Taylor and Carole King, it was Barbra everyone talked about.
Did I mention we were both married by the same rabbi?
He claimed my husband and I were his first interfaith couple. The only time I ever got top billing over Barbra Streisand.
As great as she is solo, Streisand in duets is as good as it gets: If you don’t get goosebumps listening to her and Josh Groban (he’s also on the new one) do “Somewhere,” you are stronger than me. I still go on YouTube and watch her and Neil Diamond make that surprise appearance at a Grammy ceremony, bringing down the house with “You Don’t Send Me Flowers.”
The idea of teaming up with, for example, Bob Dylan, seems almost ludicrously courageous, But courage—or chutzpah—is the one thing Barbra Streisand has never lacked.
Did I mention I already ordered the album?
Michele Willens is the author of From Mouseketeers to Menopause.
“You want me to sing.” — Barbra Streisand to Warren Beatty during the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign. (She did.)