She Knows What She Means

When Barbra Streisand talks, she gets lost in the trackless deserts of her burgeoning vocabulary. "Creativity is like a part of perversion," she will begin, "like a thing that goes inward for emotion, not responsively, because intellect is bad for what I do." Such thoughts always bring her to a helpless "Know what I mean?" And no one ever does. But when she sings, everyone knows exactly what she means; even with a banal song, she can hush a room as if she really had something worth saying.

Last week at Manhattan's Blue Angel, she cast timid eyes at the ceiling as if Major Bowes's cane were about to rip down from the attic. She squirmed onto a stool and let her coltish legs dangle, ankles napping. She twisted bony fingers through her hair and blessed her audience with a tired smile. Then she sang--and at the first note, her voice erased all the gawkiness of her presence onstage.

Only 20 and a singer for barely three years, Barbra seldom hits a note on pitch, but she slides into tune with such grace that her quavers often sound intended. Much as she denies learning from other singers, her style is unmistakably Lena Home's, and she makes superb use of it. She closes her show with a slow version of Happy Days Are Here Again that lends the song an ambivalent sorrow only a very wise girl could dream up.

Born in Brooklyn, she did not make her first trip to Manhattan until she was 14. She had only a few hours of nightclub singing behind her when she was cast in a part on Broadway in last year's I Can Get It for You Wholesale. She stole the show with a number called Miss Marmelstein, and has been intent on musical comedy ever since. "I don't think about space and the nuclear thing," she says, starting off on another trip into the unknown. "I don't want to cut off the emotion because I just know the sensory things. I deal in the senses--know what I mean?"

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