BARBRA DEAREST: HER NAME IS BARBRA, HIS NAME IS . . .
Quick, what do these names have in common: Jane Fonda, Ryan O’Neal, Harold Arlen, Nora Ephron, Marlene Dietrich, William Goldman, Sydney Pollack, Garson Kanin, Bella Abzug, Jimmy Van Heusen, Peter Bogdanovich, Ray Stark, Barry Gibb, Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Gloria Steinem?
They’re all lining up behind Barbra Streisand, who’s said to be “livid” about a new and very unauthorized bio-book, “Barbra Streisand: The Woman, the Myth, the Music” (Delacorte Press; $17.95).
According to longtime Streisand publicist Lee Solters, they’ve all sent in letters to him either denying that they spoke with author Shaun Considine at all or alleging that they were misquoted.
Reviewer Carolyn See wrote in The Times that Streisand comes across in the book as a woman with a “phenomenal” voice but with an off-stage personality like “something you’d see in a low-budget Japanese horror movie, flapping creakily around the sky, opening its jaws to gobble up whole towns. A really scary lady.”
The rumor is that an angry Streisand told Solters to send letters to many of the persons quoted. In an interview, Solters denied that Streisand ordered the letters sent. He said he acted on his own in mailing form letters that asked: Did you ever speak to the author? Were you quoted correctly? Do you recall making the statements in another interview?
The letter, including photocopied pages of the book with quotes highlighted in yellow, explained that Solters was trying to determine the author’s accuracy and “the extent of his using paste and scissors.”
Solters termed his inquisition-by-mail a “strictly routine” process that he has followed when books have been published about his other clients. What would he do with the information? “At some point I will do something about it.”
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