A Letter…lost and found!
I have verification. Barbra Streisand was a patient of my father’s. His dual practice In cardiology and internal medicine in Beverly Hills included a number of Hollywood types. Steve McQueen – a story for a different day - Groucho Marx and company – again for another day – and Richard Crenna. Remember The Real McCoys? Someone once referred to my Dad as , “doctor to the stars.” But my father was very understated. He wasn’t in awe of those who often had such troubled and unhappy personal lives. We, my siblings and I, were hardly aware of those he ministered to.
Back to Barbra. There was a framed photograph of Barbra and my father featured on a shelf in his home study. It was taken many years ago. She has beautiful hands with long fingernails. She is holding his and they are both smiling. She looks grateful and warmth emanates from the picture. Over the years since my father died in 1990, I had fantasized meeting her. I loved her music when I was in high school and pledged that I would remarry just as she did before I turned 60, which I did.
Some years ago I finally decided to write her a letter. To introduce myself and to share that we were both married by the same rabbi, which we were. I was sure she would respond, having adored, in a way, my father. When he died she sent a beautiful wreath of white flowers to the cemetery where we had gathered. Jews prefer small stones to flowers when it comes to a gravesite. In Prague, I went to a centuries old cemetery with leaning gravestones, crumbling and crowded. It was said there were coffins riding piggy back and I am sure the Nazis had tried to obliterate this small, overgrown and poignant piece of history.
So at the service Barbra’s wreath stood near the podium from which we paid tribute to my father. At some point over the years my mother had shared her own Barbra story. This famous woman would call my father at home, such a phone call to a doctor’s house certainly dates me, and say,” Hi Bernice, this is Barbra. Is Morley there?” And Mom would hand the phone to my father as if such a call was most casual and commonplace. Sometime during those years we all went to New York and saw Funny Girl with Barbra in the lead. I still have, and play, the vinyl recording from the musical.
After such a storied history, I did write a letter to Barbra. Our rabbi gave me her address and I sent it off to Malibu a few years after she and I had each married successfully for the second time. Of course, she never got the letter and I can only imagine how much mail arrived that she never saw. A few years later, through a medical connection at the hospital where my father had worked, I was able to contact one of Barbra’s assistants who emailed me to say he was sorry she had never seen the letter, but if I resent it, she would get it. I did and she did.
A few weeks later, I received a letter, not electronic, but on paper with her name embossed. She apologized for not getting the first letter and thanked me for my thoughts. She said I was lucky to have Leonard (the rabbi) as my friend and Morley as my father. I framed the letter and it sits among the bits and pieces of my parents’ lives that adorn the top shelf of the bookcase I brought to my house in San Francisco after my mother died, now too many years ago. My son was recently surprised when I said I had no intention of reading the 950-page tome that Barbra has just written. I said it was because I have so many other books I would rather read. The recent review in the New York Times was enough and it provided a very gracious glimpse into the book and her life. I think it is crazy that she cloned her dog and I am disappointed she never invited me to tea and for a walk on her piece of Malibu coastline. But the fact that she loved my father is enough for me. I don’t need to read the book. I saw the movie!