The curtains parted, and Barbra stepped tentatively out onto the balcony of her elegant white tearoom set in front of fifteen thousand standing, screaming fans in the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas. At the long stair rail in front of her she hesitated and drew in a deep breath. The crowd quieted to utter silence, and with one hand clutching the rail so tightly her knuckles visibly whitened, Barbra began to sing “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from Sunset Boulevard in a tremulous, unsure voice: “I don’t know why I’m frightened.... I know my way around here.”

The audience roared anew, cheering Barbra’s acknowledgment of her fear of performing before such a large audience for the first time in twenty-two years. She seemed to gain confidence as she ambled down the staircase, her full-length black off-the-shoulder gown flowing behind her. By the time she finished her next number, a personalized reworking of Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” (“I kept my nose to spite my face”), everyone in that cavernous hall had relaxed into the certainty that Barbra Streisand’s long-awaited return to the concert stage would be, just as they had anticipated, an unforgettable event.

STREISAND FANS HAD begun to surge into Las Vegas early in the morning of December 31, 1993, clutching their oversized green photo tickets to that night’s performance, the next night’s, or both. They came from all fifty states and from Canada, England, France, Holland, Japan, Argentina, and other countries. They streamed through the eighty-eight-foot-high stucco lion’s head entrance to the brand-new $1 billion MGM Grand Hotel. They stood in long lines to have their pictures taken beside a huge poster advertising the Streisand shows, with Barbra’s image smiling coyly out at them. They rushed to the merchandise stands to buy $20 posters, $25 programs, $25 photo T-shirts, $75 sweatshirts, $100 gold key rings, $75 commemorative Streisand postage stamps issued by St. Vincent, West Indies, $85 champagne glasses, and $400 suede-and-wool jackets. Ruth Davidson, a fan from England, spent nearly $5,000 on the concert tickets, airfare to America, and every conceivable piece of Barbra memorabilia. “I would have paid practically anything to come,” she said. “What if Barbra decides she doesn’t like it and never performs live again?”

The same thought propelled thousands of fans to spend more than they could afford to attend the concert. “There hasn’t been an event with this type of demand in years, including the championship fights,” said Thomas Wilier, vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Hilton, where Streisand had last performed for pay early in 1972.

Tickets went on sale at eight in the morning of November 7 at prices ranging from $100 to $1,000. Within twenty-four hours over a million calls had been logged by the telephone company. Only a fraction got through; most fans had to call repeatedly for hours. “My phone was literally hot from pressing redial,” one said. Another “carried the portable phone with me everywhere—even the bathtub.”

When the dust settled, the Streisand concerts had grossed over $13 million in ticket sales—double the previous record box-office take for two shows. Streisand’s net personal earnings, minus production costs, were estimated at nearly $8 million, with another $5 million to $10 million possible from concession sales and projected television, record, and video revenues.

EARLIER IN THE year the entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian had worked feverishly to open his MGM Grand Hotel, the largest in the world, by December 18. He knew he needed a blockbuster attraction to draw worldwide publicity to the hotel and enough patrons to fill its 5,005 rooms and its 15,000-seat Grand Garden. He never seriously considered anyone but Streisand, who had opened his International Hotel (now the Las Vegas Hilton) in 1969. But would she do it? He knew that she had turned down millions of dollars in offers for live performing for two decades, but he had also heard rumors that she was considering a concert tour. He thought he could convince her; he would just have to make it worth her while.

He did. First he informed her, without mentioning that he wanted her to perform at the hotel, that his Lincy Foundation would make a $3 million donation to the charities of her choice. “There were no strings attached,” recalled Marty Erlichman, “but Kirk’s generosity made us look very carefully at the MGM Grand proposal when it came in.” (Barbra asked that $2 million of the money be earmarked for various AIDS causes.)

Then the money Kerkorian offered her—90 percent of a take he estimated would be $10 million—took Barbra’s breath away. “Really?” she gasped. “You’d pay me that much?” It seemed folly at first to pay any performer that kind of money for two nights’ work, but Kerkorian knew that the publicity and prestige a Streisand appearance would bring the new hotel would be priceless and would guarantee not only full room bookings but millions of dollars in gambling income as well.

Kerkorian’s largesse, so timely in light of Barbra’s cash flow problems, was only part of the reason she accepted the offer to sing at the MGM Grand. She had vowed never again to perform in a Vegas showroom, where she’d had to fight everything from cigar smoke to clattering cutlery. But the Grand Garden was an arena, not a glorified lounge. Even more important was her desire to fight the demons of fear that had kept her off the concert stage except for sporadic charity and political events.

One step along the way was a birthday party a friend, the clothing designer Donna Karan, threw for her in 1991. “Liza Minnelli got up to sing,” Barbra recalled, “and I’m sitting there thinking, How does she do this? How does anyone get up in front of people and sing? I could never get myself to sing at parties... with people looking at me. I can sing onstage because it is a black curtain out there. I can see just a few people and even that disturbs me.... I didn’t like accepting that fright. I am frightened by a lot of things, but what I hope is good about me is that I go through the fear.”

She had been working at that for twenty-five years, undergoing intensive therapy in an attempt to understand herself and grow as a person and as a performer. She had made great strides in a number of areas. She had tackled her fear of directing, become less suspicious of her fans, grown less rigid in her opinions. The major hurdle remained her overwhelming anxiety at facing a crowd. Kerkorian’s offer—to sing in front of 30,000 people over two days—offered her an unprecedented and lucrative opportunity to get over it.

Still, she remained unsure to the very last minute. The day before the MGM Grand staff needed to make the announcement in order to have the necessary time to work out all the logistics, Barbra still hadn’t signed the contract. When a copy with her signature finally came by fax machine, “There were high fives and hugs all over the place,” said Thomas A. Bruny, the hotel’s director of advertising and public relations.

Once she had made the commitment, Streisand flew into action. She asked an assistant to compile a list of every song she had ever sung, over five hundred of them. Characteristically, she relied on her friends to put the show together with her. She designed two outfits in collaboration with Donna Karan. She asked production designers Marc Brickman and David George to re-create the tearoom from Thomas Jefferson’s magnificent Monticello home, which had so impressed her during her visit to Washington and Virginia earlier in the year. She brought together a sixty-four-piece orchestra to back her up and asked Marvin Hamlisch, the composer of “The Way We Were,” to arrange and conduct.

For three weeks she rehearsed in New York, choosing this song, discarding that one. Marilyn and Alan Bergman wrote the show as a meander through Barbra’s life, weaving her signature songs into a tapestry that included her childhood, her years of therapy, her love affairs, her family, and her political activism.

In the middle of December, rehearsals moved to Los Angeles, at Sound-stage 24 of the Sony Studios on the former MGM lot. A few days before she left for Las Vegas, Barbra invited two hundred people to hear her perform Act One. Robert Osborne, in the next day’s Hollywood Reporter, proclaimed the show “nothing short of spectacular.”

But a few days later, on the plane to Las Vegas, Barbra’s nerve started to give out. What have I done? she asked herself. What am I doing?

JULIE EDLER, A forty-one-year-old army production assistant from Salt Lake City, arrived at the Grand Garden at three in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve for that night’s eight-o’clock show. As she had hoped, she stood first in line. “Never in my whole life did I think I’d ever see her live,” she said. “I had to be here.”

Six hours later, an hour after the show’s scheduled start time, hordes of fans were still piling past nine metal detectors set up outside the main doors by hotel security. These extraordinary measures were augmented by a crack Israeli unit trained in counterterrorism and by explosive-sniffing dogs supplied by Streisand’s own security force. Reportedly, concession stands were forbidden to provide straws (they might be used to launch projectiles), and a uniformed guard escorting President Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, was denied admission.

Inside, the impatient crowd burst into rhythmic clapping several times, and amused themselves by gawking at and cheering for the Who’s Who of celebrities filing into front-row seats over the two nights: Michael Jackson, Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin, Gregory Peck, Coretta Scott King, Prince, Michael Crawford, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, Jay Leno, Steven Spielberg, Kathie Lee Gifford, Michael Douglas, Andre Agassi, Jon Peters, and Elliott Gould, among others.

As the overture began to swell, the crowd roared and the excitement peaked. It was finally about to happen—Barbra Streisand live in concert! For the vast majority of the people in the audience, this was the first time—and, they knew, probably the last time—they would see Streisand perform in person.

The first thing the audience noticed as Barbra emerged from the wings was how lovely she looked. Slim, glowing, her blond hair falling softly about her shoulders, she looked closer to thirty-five than fifty-one.

As her breathy nervousness gave way to growing confidence, Streisand’s voice grew stronger. By the second act she was in voice nearly as pure and as powerful as she had ever been. Ten times, the audience leaped to their feet for standing ovations. At one point during a prolonged ovation fans in the back rows began to stomp their feet, rock-concert style. As the rest of the audience picked up the cue, a palpable wave of noise and reverberation swept from the periphery of the arena down to the stage. The cacophony startled Barbra. “Wow! You’re incredible,” she called out above the din.

Although she adhered faithfully to the script—all of the lines, including “ad-libs” and most of her reactions, were flashed on TelePrompTers in front of her—Barbra the actress left her audience convinced that each word had just sprung to mind and popped out. And the autobiographical elements of the show were tailor-made to appeal to Streisand fans, many of whom cared about her every triumph and trial nearly as much as their own.

Pictures of Barbra as a baby and as a young girl flashed on a huge screen above the set as she spoke of her early dreams of acting. Seeing The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway, she said, changed her life. She had adored Ava Gardner in Show Boat, the first movie musical she had ever seen. And when, at thirteen, she saw Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls, she fell in love. “This man was beautiful! I imagined myself up there on the screen with him.” At that a clip from the film of Brando singing “I’ll Know” appeared on the screen—and Barbra sang a “duet” with him. When the scene widened to include Jean Simmons, a photo of the teenage Barbra was superimposed over Brando’s co-star. “What a mieskeit!” Barbra said of her young self. The audience laughed, cheered, applauded. Now, unquestionably, Barbra had them.

No matter how successful, rich, and powerful she has become, Barbra has always had a genius for casting herself in the role of underdog. During the show she reminded the audience of her early struggle for success despite her narrow-minded mother and an unremitting procession of naysayers, and she sang spirited renditions of “Everybody Says Don’t” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Then she moved on to wistful early love (“Will He Like Me?” and “He Touched Me”) and, later, lost romance (“The Way We Were,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”).

After clips from two films in which she played a psychiatric patient (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and Nuts) and one in which she played a therapist (The Prince of Tides), Barbra telescoped her own three decades of psychoanalysis into a running exchange with two doctors, both of whom mispronounced her name “Streizund.” “It’s Streisand,” Barbra wailed. “Like sand on a beach!” (One of her pet peeves, the frequent mispronunciation of her name has led Barbra to exclaim, “How famous do you have to be?!”)

After all this therapy, Barbra announced, she finally felt she could sing “On a Clear Day” with authority. And she did, her voice every bit as strong as it was in the 1970 movie, to end Act One on a rousing high note.

For the second act, Barbra changed into a white suit top with a long skirt slit up the side, a variation on the outfit she had worn at Clinton’s inaugural gala. She reminded the audience of the criticism the outfit had elicited from Anne Taylor Fleming. As Streisand began to sputter her disagreement, a voice rose from the audience. “Don’t listen to that woman, Barbra! You look sensational! You’re like buttah.”

The comedian Mike Myers, dressed as Linda Richman, ran up to the stage. “I can’t believe I’m here with Barbra,” Myers-as-Richman exclaimed. “I’m fahrklempt.”

“You’re fahrklempt? I’ve got shpilkes in my genecktegezoink,” Barbra responded, continuing to mimic Myers’s regular Saturday Night Live shtick as she turned to the audience: “I need a moment. Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: The Prince of Tides was neither about tides nor princes. Discuss.”

The audience loved it.

As the concert wound to a close, Barbra drew close the cloak of family and friends. She dedicated a medley of Disney songs to her five-year-old goddaughter, Caleigh, who was sitting on the lap of her father, Jon Peters. As she began to sing “Evergreen” she looked down at Peters and asked, “Remember, Jon?” Then she added, “And there’s Elliott, sitting right behind him.” When she returned to the song, she repeated the first verse rather than picking up the second. “I forgot the words to my own song,” she exclaimed. She recovered immediately, but it was the fear of precisely that kind of miscue that had most worried her about performing live. To the audience it was a touching slipup amid seemingly superhuman perfection, and it brought them closer to her. Finally she dedicated a rendition of “Not While I’m Around” to Jason.

Before she sang “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the final song of the second act, she introduced Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and President Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley. The second night, she also introduced her own mother. As Mrs. Kind, eighty-four and sitting in a wheelchair, rose in response to the crowd’s cheers, Barbra told her, “I love you, Mama.” It was the most intimate moment of the two evenings.

To introduce “Happy Days,” images of the Great Depression flashed across the video screen, followed by a review of President Clinton’s successes in his first year in office. Barbra sang the song not as a dirge, as she had for thirty years, but in the more traditional up-tempo version: for the first time since Lyndon Johnson in 1965, there was a Democrat in the White House whom Barbra could support.

Standing, stomping ovations brought Barbra back for two encores, a thrilling “My Man” and a touching “For All We Know.” As she drank in the crowd’s adulation, the most exciting concert comeback since Judy Garland’s 1961 triumph at Carnegie Hall behind her, she turned to Marvin Hamlisch and exclaimed, “I did it! I did it! I did it!”

The fans chattered with excitement and awe as they left the Grand Garden. For them the evening had lived up to the most inflated hype and expectations. But would the critics agree? Robert Hilburn, the rock reviewer for the Los Angeles Times who had dogged Barbra with testy reviews for a quarter of a century, was won over. “Streisand combined in these two hours all that she has learned as an artist,” Hilburn wrote. “Drawing upon her experience in movies and music, Streisand injected the production with a director’s sense of atmosphere and occasion, an actress’s feel for character and intimacy, and a singer’s vocal beauty and command.”

Streisand’s New Year’s concerts crystallized her long metamorphosis from gawky Brooklyn urchin through kooky nightclub act to international trendsetter and movie superstar, through comedienne to sex symbol to controversial auteur, from traditional balladeer to disco queen and back again, from the butt of journalistic jokes to Hollywood powerhouse and White House intimate.

Now she was more than ever the diva. A pop diva, a movie diva, even a political diva. Now only one question remained: would she keep her act together and take it on the road?

ON JANUARY 17, 1994 the early-morning calm of Greater Los Angeles was shattered by a 6.7 earthquake. The temblor, which killed fifty-seven people, injured 8,700, and caused $2.8 billion in damage, “freaked Barbra out,” an associate recalled. Her first thought after the deafening rumble and terrifying shaking had subsided was for the new puppy she had purchased two days earlier. She rushed down to the Carolwood kitchen, carrying a flashlight because the electricity had gone out, and found the puppy unhurt.

When the sun rose, the full extent of the damage to Barbra’s house became clear. Three of her chimneys had collapsed, and large surface cracks ran through the ceilings and walls. There was no major structural damage, but one of her Grammys and many of her treasured tchotchkes had shattered, including ten rare pottery jugs that smashed to the floor when a mirror above them came crashing down.

Within weeks of the earthquake a memorabilia shop in Hollywood was offering for sale small plastic bags full of Barbra’s rubble that they had collected from her trash. Bits of plaster sold for $10, while an 1870s tintype photograph scratched by its broken glass commanded $500. Business in the items was apparently brisk.

STREISAND’S UNDAMAGED COLLECTIBLES moved even more briskly at Christie’s New York auction house in March, when she put up for sale 535 magnificent artworks, furniture pieces, cars, clothing items, and tchotchkes. Among the treasures were Tiffany lamps, Gustav Stickley sideboards, a Jacques Lipchitz sculpture, leaded glass casement windows by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Lalique crystal pieces. “It’s so hard to let go of these beautiful things that I have loved for so many years,” she said, “but I want to simplify my life.... Sometimes when it’s been hard to relate to people, I could relate to inanimate objects. They didn’t give me an argument, they didn’t think I was crazy. And therefore we had a good relationship.... The earthquake put things in proper perspective... while I love to be surrounded by beautiful things, they’re still things.”

Prior to the March 3-4 auction, three previews were held, in Tokyo, Paris, and West Hollywood. On February 17, Barbra appeared at the Art Deco-inspired St. James’s Club on Sunset Boulevard, where twenty-five of the choicest items were on display for anyone willing to spend $250 to see them. (The event doubled as a fund-raiser for the UCLA Breast Cancer Center.)

Streisand seemed uncomfortable at the event. “All this for my furniture?” she said with a laugh when she arrived with Richard Baskin to see three hundred people craning their necks to study everything on display in an anteroom off the club’s dining room. But as she entered the main room to introduce Dr. Susan Love of UCLA, Barbra stared straight ahead, unsmiling, and acknowledged no one in the crowd. Atop a few steps that led from the dining room to the lounge, she read a brief tribute to Dr. Love and her work entirely from cue cards, never once raising her gaze to make eye contact with the people watching her. In contrast, Dr. Love spoke entirely off the cuff, exuding a sincerity that Barbra must have felt but did not convey.

As she left, a fan asked her for an autograph. She reluctantly obliged, never looked at the young man, and signed her name without breaking her stride as she moved toward a waiting limousine. Many of the people at the event shook their heads in amazement that Barbra Streisand, after more than thirty years of stardom, still found it so difficult to be gracious to strangers.

THE AUCTION PROVED a sensational success. Barbra’s “furniture” brought $5.3 million, including a record price of $2 million for the Tamara de Lempicka painting Adam and Eve, which had been featured along with Streisand on the cover of Architectural Digest in December of 1993 and had been expected to bring a high bid of $800,000. (The anonymous buyer was Madonna.) Another bidder paid a record $717,500 for a Tiffany cobweb lamp that Barbra had bought in the sixties for $55,000.

Barbra listened to the auction by phone from Carolwood, saying that she was “thrilled,” especially since all these items had been saved from damage only because she had shipped them to Christie’s before the earthquake. A few days later, Marty Erlichman brought her a surprise. She had expressed regret at letting an Art Nouveau music stand go, so Marty bid $6,900 for it and returned it to her as a gift.

Three months later, A. N. Abell’s Auction Company in Commerce, California, conducted a bargain-basement version of the Christie’s auction. Hundreds of Streisand fans attended the event and bought dozens of practical items like Barbra’s toaster ($90), her waffle iron ($35), her hot-fudge warmer ($99), and her chrome-and-wood coffee set ($100). Tom Colwell bought the coffee set and waffle iron. “I figured,” Colwell explained, “that now when I make breakfast, I will think of her.”