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      in Movies

      Angelina Jolie and the Ghosts of New York Past

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      Her new store, Atelier Jolie, occupies an unassuming building on Great Jones Street with an illustrious history.When Angelina Jolie opened her first fashion boutique in a squat, two-story building at 57 Great Jones Street in Lower Manhattan this month, she joined a long line of notable New Yorkers, including gangsters and artists, who lived or worked at that unassuming address.Atelier Jolie, which has an appointment-only fitting room on the second floor, sells clothes made from vintage and deadstock materials and offers Turkish coffee and Syrian mini pies in its chic cafe. “I hope to see you there, and to be one of the many creating with you within our new creative collective,” Ms. Jolie wrote in a founding statement. “Bear with me. I hope to grow this with you.”Atelier Jolie’s branding is tied to the artistic heritage of 57 Great Jones Street. Andy Warhol bought the building in the 1970s. Everyone from Keith Haring to Madonna dropped by. Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and painted in the upstairs studio loft, producing some of his most significant works, before he died there of a heroin overdose at 27 in 1988.Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, artists with ties to 57 Great Jones Street, at a 1984 benefit in Manhattan.Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesIf you dust off more of the structure’s past, you find the bones of New York. The brick building once housed mobsters and bare-knuckle boxers.It was built in the 1860s, architect unknown, and its first known use was as a stable, according to Village Preservation, an advocacy group. Great Jones Street, a two-block lane in NoHo named after the lawyer and politician Samuel Jones, was a home for the city’s affluent merchant class that counted the mayor and diarist Philip Hone among its early residents. During the Civil War, the 69th Regiment gathered on the street to march toward a steamer on the Hudson. Crowds looked on as the young men headed off to battle.As Manhattan grew and wealthy residents moved uptown, the neighborhood began its slump into a skid row. At the east end of Great Jones Street lay the Bowery, a once-reputable boulevard that had become a notorious thoroughfare lined with brothels, beer gardens, flophouses and pawn shops.An 1897 map of Great Jones Street, which was named after Samuel Jones, a New York lawyer and politician.Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public LibraryThe Bowery of old.The building became a saloon and dance hall, the Brighton, which The New York Times called a “notorious dive.” The place was nearly blown to smithereens in 1901 after some men making a beer delivery disturbed a gas jet in the cellar. When the establishment’s owner, Charles Deveniude, went to investigate, he lit a candle. The explosion was heard “several blocks away,” The Times reported, and Mr. Deveniude suffered burns to his face, hands and shoulders.The Brighton was sold a few years later to Paul Kelly, whom The Times described in a 1912 article as “perhaps the most successful and the most influential gangster in New York history.” In a nod to his Italian heritage, Mr. Kelly, a onetime pugilist born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, renamed the saloon Little Naples.Mr. Kelly ran the Five Points Gang, one of the most feared street gangs of its day, and Little Naples served as his association’s headquarters and as a gathering place for the city’s political elite. He was an enforcer for the corrupt Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall, and his henchmen helped provide paid voters, known as “floaters,” to cast ballots for Tammany candidates. The gang’s members included future underworld leaders like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone.A 1905 article in The Times recounted a “desperate fight” at Little Naples in which a man was killed and several others were wounded. “Scores of shots were fired, but as far as is known to the police, only one man went to his death,” the paper reported, adding: “His body was found in the saloon nearly half an hour after the smoke of the battle had cleared away. There was a bullet wound in his left breast.” The man was discovered with his legs protruding from a swinging bathroom door. His dog, a spaniel, was whimpering beside him.The Times further reported that one of Mr. Kelly’s lieutenants, John Ratta, was wounded in another shootout at the saloon that same week. He refused to cooperate with the police, saying only that he “slipped and fell so hard on a bullet on the floor that it entered his flesh.” The Times noted: “Ratta will live to carry a revolver, and he says he will settle the difficulty in his own way.”The June 9, 1912, edition of The New York Times included a detailed report on the murderous goings-on at Little Naples, a night spot that once occupied the Atelier Jolie building.The New York TimesIn later decades, the building housed metalwork and kitchen equipment supply businesses. Don DeLillo wrote Great Jones Street into the annals of American literature in 1973, when he named his third novel after the street. The book’s narrator-protagonist, a disillusioned rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, slums it in an apartment there: “I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble.”Mr. Warhol purchased 57 Great Jones Street in 1970 under the corporation name Factory Films Inc., according to a report by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. In 1983, as he became a mentor to Mr. Basquiat, who was then a fast-rising art world star, Mr. Warhol rented the upstairs loft to him. In the next few years Mr. Basquiat produced works including “King Zulu” and “Riding With Death.”“Jean-Michel called,” Mr. Warhol wrote in his diary on Sept. 5, 1983. “He’s afraid he’s just going to be a flash in the pan. And I told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t be. But then I got scared because he’s rented our building on Great Jones and what if he is a flash in the pan and doesn’t have the money to pay his rent?”After Mr. Basquiat’s death, the building’s exterior became a mecca for street artists to leave tributes to him, and the site has been marked with renditions of his crown motif and “SAMO” graffiti tag ever since.The Warhol estate sold the building in the early 1990s. After that, as the gentrification of the neighborhood accelerated, and nightlife hot spots like B Bar and the Bowery Hotel thrived, a referral-only Japanese restaurant with no listed phone number, Bohemian, occupied the address. It was concealed, speakeasy-style, behind a butcher shop.In 2022, the building was put on the rental market by Meridian Capital Group for $60,000 a month. Its landlord, according to property records, is the noted real estate appraiser Robert Von Ancken, whose services have been used by New York real estate families including the Trumps, the Helmsleys and the Zeckendorfs. Reached by phone, Mr. Von Ancken clarified that he had bought the building with his business partner, Leslie Garfield, who died last year, and that he now owns the property with Mr. Garfield’s family.“When we first occupied the space, we didn’t really know much about the artist who’d been living there, because he wasn’t as well known then,” Mr. Von Ancken recalled. “There were all these drawings on the walls. We rented it as it was. A tenant painted all over it. That was all lost.”He added: “The building has been getting graffitied over for years. I’ve tried repainting the front, but I eventually gave up. It’s clearly still very important for young artists, even today, to put their mark on that facade.”About a year ago, Ms. Jolie and her teenage daughter Zahara started scouting for a downtown retail space, and their wanderings brought them to 57 Great Jones. They felt an immediate communion with the building, Ms. Jolie said in an interview with Vogue, so she quickly rented it. As the store approached its opening date, one of her sons, Pax, helped spray-paint the Atelier Jolie logo onto a canvas draping the doorway.Angelina Jolie, the latest tenant of 57 Great Jones Street, outside the building in August.Mega/GC Images, via Getty ImagesOne recent night, a security guard manned Atelier Jolie’s entranceway while two young employees explained the shop’s mission of promoting sustainable fashion to a visitor. Upstairs, in the same space that the Five Points Gang used as a meeting place, another employee worked on a laptop in the fitting room.Outside, a couple stopped to read the plaque that memorialized Mr. Basquiat’s residence at the address and noted its early use as a stable. Then they reminded each other that they were running late for a hard-to-get dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant. More

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      in Music

      boygenius Is Having All the Fun

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      There’s a scene in the movie “Help!” where the Beatles roll up to a row of terraced houses and approach their adjacent front doors — four separate entrances, one for each Beatle. Then the camera cuts inside, and we see that all four doors lead into one immense mid-1960s playhouse, where the Beatles live together. This was and is the fantasy of a rock band: boys, together, reveling in a world of their own making. Beastie Boys. Beach Boys. Backstreet Boys. They are cute. They are straight. They are inseparable and nearly indistinguishable, like sitcom characters. They seem to travel with their own center of gravity. All for one and one for all. “The boys” is how the three members of the band boygenius refer to themselves. Over the past year, they have emerged as a fresh incarnation of that classic fantasy: the right band with the right synergy at exactly the right moment, with the most exhilarating record and the most emotional shows and the most exultant fans. Each boy even inhabits a classic boy-band archetype. Lucy Dacus, 28, is the thoughtful dreamy poet boy; Julien Baker, 28, the tattooed rocker heartthrob boy; and Phoebe Bridgers, 29, the wry, preternaturally charismatic boy. The music press often calls them a supergroup — which is technically correct, because all three are successful indie solo artists with fan bases of their own. But “supergroup” conjures images of ego-mad 1970s dudes in their cocaine phase, capturing a little magic on record before discovering that they hate one another. And this particular supergroup is made up of women who actually like one another, and who get off on reimagining what a rock band looks like and what it feels like to be in one. “There’s a very specific framework of the history of dudes and rock,” Dacus says. “People just know it, so it’s easy to play with.” I first met the boys at the conclusion of a stuff-of-dreams tour, the day before a final Halloween concert at the Hollywood Bowl. They had spent nearly a year crisscrossing the United States and Europe, selling out Madison Square Garden, headlining festivals, racking up critical acclaim. It had just been announced that in less than two weeks boygenius would be the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live,” with Timothée Chalamet hosting; they would be in New York, trying on clothes for the show, when they learned that their debut LP, “The Record,” had been nominated for seven Grammy Awards, including album of the year. Over oak-milk lattes and breakfast tacos in Studio City, Baker joked that the end-of-tour energy felt like “the Macy’s one-day sale” — an event that, despite its name, seems to exist in perpetuity.The boys were discussing Bridgers’s Halloween party, which went down over the weekend. Baker dressed as the pop star Ariana Grande, based on a much-memed paparazzi photo from when Grande was dating Pete Davidson: Disney-princess ponytail, a thigh-skimming sweatshirt worn as a dress, winged eyeliner, signature lollipop. Dacus, who is tall and ethereally elegant, went as Davidson, in a giant flannel hoodie. Just that morning, she had posted pictures on Instagram — she and Baker in their costumes, side by side with the original — driving fans crazy with even a mock suggestion that these two might be dating. (The boys’ potential romantic involvement is something they seem to enjoy neither confirming nor denying.) “This has completely obliterated an entire dimension of my mind,” one comment read.The band’s fans, a passionate and highly amped population, love it when the boys do stuff together: play guitar, make out onstage, dress up. Then the fans do those things, too. There’s “a lot of gay kissing” at boygenius shows, Dacus noted happily. The band identifies, individually and collectively, as queer, and they’re proud of the freedom fans feel to use boygenius as an avenue for exploring gender and sexual identity. “Safety and sexuality can inhabit the same space,” Bridgers said. “It’s tight that it’s both — it’s tight that there are friends just hooking up for fun and also people who actually [expletive] each other.” She paused and smiled. “It is hot and also safe.” The others laughed. “The hottest safest band of all time!” Dacus joked.Even when it’s not Halloween, fans like to come to boygenius shows dressed as highly specific iterations of the boys. The three of them in suits on the cover of Rolling Stone (itself a nod to Nirvana in suits on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1994) or Bridgers, in boxers, standing in the middle of a monster-truck arena, in the Kristen Stewart-directed music video for the dreamy, twisted “Emily I’m Sorry.” “When I see the crowd dressing up like boygenius, I think it is so wonderful that these kids have people in rock music to dress ‘like’ instead of people to dress ‘for,’” says Haley Dahl, frontwoman of the avant-pop band Sloppy Jane and a friend of Bridgers’s from high school. One fan recently dressed as a teenage Baker in 1990s skater regalia, based on a photo of the guitarist as a pouty Tennessee high schooler. “The ‘Rocky Horror’ element of it was never — like, we can’t make that happen,” Bridgers said. “Yeah, I didn’t anticipate that,” Baker added. “I thought kids would just come in their normal clothes.”This year’s boygenius shows have felt like art-school prom: sincere, theatrical, joyfully subversive. As decidedly rock as the group’s sound is — full of loud-quiet-loud guitar jams — it’s also welcoming and interior, the songs little pockets of sometimes-soft, sometimes-hard beauty that offer fans a place to land in an often bereft-feeling world. The intimacy boygenius projects tempts fans to imitate them, to try to replicate the aspects of their friendship that seem rare and magical. It’s a sensation the band members can relate to, because they feel the magic, too. As Bridgers once put it, “I like myself better around them.”This is what sits at the core of what the boys sometimes call the “project” that is boygenius: creating a container for self-expression and exploration, a permission structure for identity, and then watching in wonder as that very private process winds up introducing you to your best friends, as well as to yourself. “In this band I get a license to live into parts of myself I’m curious about,” Baker said, as Dacus and Bridgers nodded in agreement. “We choose our most ideal versions of ourselves. And then the kids are dressing up as the persona that we’ve constructed — because they recognize something of their own in that.”The band performing at the Hollywood Bowl on Halloween.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIf the boygenius boys come across like old friends who know deep secrets about one another, that’s because they are. Dacus and Baker first met in 2016, when both were 22. Baker was doing a small club tour in support of her debut album, “Sprained Ankle.” Dacus was an opening act. “I met Lucy in the greenroom of a venue called DC9,” Baker says. “Lucy was reading ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ maybe? Henry James.” Both were very green, very young musicians raised in religious homes in small Southern towns — Dacus outside Richmond, Va., in a neighborhood she proudly describes as “across from a cornfield and next to a goat farm,” and Baker in Bartlett, Tenn., a suburb of Memphis. They bonded.Bridgers was another opener on Baker’s tour. They met before a show at the Eagle Rock Recreation Center in Los Angeles. Because Bridgers was from the area, and because the songs she had put out at that point struck Baker as “less amateur” and “more developed” than Baker’s own, Baker was expecting someone sophisticated, someone “more cultured.” But Bridgers “was a little bit of a hesher — in a leather jacket and a NASCAR T-shirt.” Bridgers was savvy and urbane, yes, but what mostly came across was her “sweetness,” Baker says. “I was just like, Do you want to go get some pizza and doughnuts? And so we went and got late-night pizza and doughnuts and stayed up talking about bands. It was very pure.”There are friends you meet in your early 20s — a fragile, formative stage — who become foundational. They are the people who know you on the edge of adulthood but before you’ve decided on a grown-up persona. They are the people who know who you are before anyone else cares who you are, an especially precious perspective if you later become famous. The boys were with one another at the beginning of careers in a business that is uncertain at best, cutthroat at worst and full of shady, dubious people. “Especially at that time, when everything feels like it’s happening really quickly around you, to have somebody that just had time for you,” Baker says — somebody who gives you her number and says she wants to hang out the next time you’re in the same city, and she means it — that, Baker says, was kind of everything. “I was just like, OK, I really trust these guys.” Before boygenius officially became a band, they were a text group, talking often about what they were reading, inaugurating what still feels like one long book-club meeting from which they occasionally break to play music. (Current selection: Leslie Jamison’s addiction memoir, “The Recovering.”) In the two years after they first met, all three of their careers took off. Bridgers released her debut solo album, “Stranger in the Alps,” while Baker and Dacus each released their second (“Turn Out the Lights” and “Historian”). All three were touring like crazy, while keeping in touch throughout. In the fall of 2018, the boys found themselves booked on a short tour together and decided that they might as well record some music to promote it. Four days after they began, they had recorded the six songs that became the “boygenius” EP. On tour together, they would do a mix of solo songs and songs they’d written together. They had their share of fans, but nothing like the level of interest or personal fascination that boygenius inspires now.The arrival of that personal fascination has been predictably disorienting. Over coffee in Studio City, for instance, there was a moment when a scowl washed over Bridgers’s face. “Were we just being filmed?” Dacus asked, following her bandmate’s gaze to a young woman who was sitting stiffly, staring intensely into her coffee, her phone face up on the table. “Don’t like it, don’t like it,” Bridgers fumed. Dacus was recently followed while shopping at Target. Baker discovered someone filming her through a display of Halloween candy at a CVS. “It was like a comedy,” she said, chuckling, “because they were filming through a gap in the candy and then it all fell down and they went like, [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive].” Bridgers smiled tightly but did not laugh. She leaned into the recorder: “And I just want to say to that person: ‘Die. Die!’” Bridgers is particularly sensitive to being watched because she, more than the other boys, has experienced the grosser side of notoriety. In the years between the “boygenius” EP and “The Record,” Bridgers got pretty famous. There were many reasons for this, including her relationship with the Irish actor Paul Mescal, her association with Taylor Swift — she was one of the Eras Tour’s opening acts and a guest on Swift’s single “Nothing New” — and her general ubiquity as an in-demand collaborator for artists including the National, Lorde and Paul McCartney. But mostly it’s because Bridgers made an astonishing second record, “Punisher,” that came out early in 2020, when people were stuck home feeling anxious and dislocated and thus perfectly primed to receive Bridgers’s distinctive mix of austere beauty and rage. She played “S.N.L.” solo in 2021 and was criticized for smashing her guitar onstage. (David Crosby called the move “pathetic” on Twitter; Bridgers tartly replied, “little bitch.”) When the boys walk the Grammy red carpet in February, Bridgers will have been there before; “Punisher” earned her four nominations. The boys were with one another at the beginning of careers in a business that is uncertain at best and cutthroat at worst.Hobbes Ginsberg for The New York TimesSo it’s notable that it was Bridgers who sent the text that got the boys back into the studio in 2020, and that she sent that text the same week “Punisher” came out. “Can we be a band again?” she wrote.As in so many great romances, everybody involved wanted to return to one another, but each was afraid the others might not feel the same way. What Bridgers understood was the difference between carrying success on your own and getting by with a little help from your friends. “The boys are really good at community,” she says. “I’m more insular. I mean, I have community for sure. But the boys have had, like, more roommates in their lives. So I learned a lot from them. Like how to come into the front lounge of the bus and be like, ‘[expletive], I got this really stressful text last night!’ And just talk it out. It’s the best.” The boys see a band therapist. They have only ever had, as Bridgers puts it, one “for-no-reason bitchy” day on the road. It was in England, while they were touring the Brontës’ house; perhaps, she says, it had to do with the repressed “ghost of Charlotte and Emily Brontë within us, the shared trauma.” Now, whenever the boys are spinning out, they call it Brontitis. Dacus declared, “We could never make music again, and boygenius is just the title of this friendship that we had.”The thing about catching lightning in a bottle is that the glow lasts only so long. Before the Halloween show at the Hollywood Bowl, the boys were backstage, getting ready to play in front of nearly 18,000 people. The energy in the dressing rooms had the frenzied excitement of an extremely well-funded high school theater production, but also an underlying anticipatory mournfulness: This was the big end-of-year performance before everyone graduates and is sucked into the what-do-we-do-now abyss. “I’m OK — sad!” Dacus said outside the makeup room when her manager asked how she was doing. “Every song is going to be like, Oh, that’s the last time.”The band had been secretive about what they would wear for this final show of the tour. What could boygenius dress up as that would satisfy their and their fans’ taste for cheeky visual statements? Three rolling racks of clothes, neatly labeled with handmade signs, made plain the plan: They would be the Holy Trinity — Father (Dacus), Son (Baker) and Holy Ghost (Bridgers). A friend asked Baker, who was raised in a deeply Christian family, how her mother was going to feel about her dressing up as Jesus for Halloween. “I told her,” Baker said, amused — though Baker did wonder, “What if I get to heaven and they’re like, ‘We were cool with you being gay and all the lying, but why did you have to come for me so hard at the Hollywood Bowl?’”‘To sum it up, we love you very much, and the fact that you love us is not lost on us.’Baker’s costume was simple, just a white robe, sandals and a crown of thorns, so she was able to dress quickly and wander the hallways, marveling at the comfort of Jesus’ footwear (“You’ve got to walk far in the desert!”) while her bandmates were still doing makeup (Dacus, in an Elvisesque bejeweled white suit) and hair (Bridgers, whose spectral halo and veil had to be carefully secured in her ice-blond mane). Then there was the matter of Dave Grohl’s neckwear. “Can you string up this cross?” Lindsey Hartman, the band’s costumer, asked her assistant. Grohl was the night’s special guest. “I’m putting the drummer of Nirvana in a priest costume,” Hartman said, grinning and shaking her head. “This is it.”Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus backstage before the band performed at the Halloween show where they dressed up as the Holy Trinity.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesPhoebe Bridgers backstage before the same performance at the Hollywood Bowl.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesThe 2017 “Wonder Woman” movie regularly brought female audience members to tears with scenes familiar from dozens of other action films — except that everyone onscreen was a woman. The tableau at the Hollywood Bowl stirred similar emotions in me. Boygenius has an all-female backing band (they were dressed as angels, in white Dickies jumpsuits and halos), and there were a lot of women around. It felt as if there were almost no men. When Bridgers’s boyfriend, the comedian and musician Bo Burnham, showed up with his plus-one — the actor Andrew Garfield, in a Cobra Kai karate uniform he sweetly described as “comfy” — you could feel the energy shift. “You do your thing, don’t worry about me,” Burnham said to Bridgers, ducking out just as Grohl appeared with two of his daughters. “I’ll text you when Mom gets here,” he told them, disappearing into his dressing room to change.A few minutes later, the band took the stage, to their standard walk-on music: Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” Like everyone else, Grohl was there to serve the boygenius experience. He wanted to play drums on the propulsive “Satanist,” which meant coming on just a few songs into the show. The group sounded insane with Grohl behind them: big and bold, like a band that understood its power and was relaxed enough to fully enjoy it — but then it sounds that way without him too. “OK,” Bridgers said, shaking her body out and grinning. “I feel like the show is happening now. I feel like I just came online.” For the rest of the nearly two-hour performance, there was a sense of easy pleasure in the air, both onstage and in the crowd. Kristen Stewart could be seen in her box with her fiancée, Dylan Meyer, and a pack of fellow willowy motorcycle-jacket-clad Angelenos drinking Modelo with their feet up, singing along. “I’ve seen them twice now, and I tell myself every time to be cool, but I lose it,” Stewart says. “I don’t know why it’s so emotional. I think what it is, they are a real [expletive] band. There is something in the way they don’t negotiate. It’s embedded in a bond that feels like if you ‘get it,’ you’re allowed in. And allowed.” A few seats away, a lesbian couple in schoolgirl outfits smiled goofily amid bouts of making out. In between songs, Bridgers brought out Maxine, her famous-to-fans pug, dressed as a tiny sheep, and intoned, “Behold the lamb of God!” Just before the final encore, Dacus grabbed her microphone. “I have found it hard to figure out what to say to you this whole night,” she said, her voice full. “But to sum it up, we love you very much, and the fact that you love us is not lost on us. This is an absurd dream. Thank you.”Backstage after the show, Grohl and Billie Eilish and other assorted band insiders mingled in the greenroom. Elsewhere on the grounds, at the official after-party, Bridgers’s mother was milling around, beaming: “We have some friends from high school we need to check on, to make sure they’re not freaking out because they can’t get a drink.” (There’s no alcohol backstage on boygenius tours.) Bridgers eventually appeared with Burnham, a black hoodie pulled tight over her head, on guard once again.The night was still young, with lots of goodbyes to say, and then “S.N.L.” two weeks later, and then the Grammys early in 2024. What would come after that, however, was an open question. It’s unclear whether boygenius will make new music together anytime soon.The first thing the boys told me, on the first day we met, was that they were looking forward to their own obsolescence — a day, sometime in the future, when people would still be listening to their music, but without knowing or really caring about its makers.The boys said they were looking forward to their own obsolescence, when people would be listening to their music but not caring about its makers.Hobbes Ginsberg for The New York Times“People will be like, Oh, yeah, I liked this song — a couple of years ago,” Baker imagined. “We talk about this all the time, because. …” Here she turned and asked Dacus: “Didn’t Louise Glück just die?”Dacus nodded, affirming the recent death of the Nobel-laureate poet.“OK,” Baker said, “but when she died, weren’t we like, Wasn’t she already dead?”Dacus smiled and nodded again.“That’s the dream,” Baker said.“That is my goal,” Dacus concurred. “I want, basically, for everyone to be so satisfied with what I could offer that they already think I’m dead.”Lizzy Goodman is a journalist and the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” an oral history of music in New York City from 2001-2011. Hobbes Ginsberg is a lesbian photographer based in Madrid, making vulnerable, hyper-saturated work exploring queer domesticity and the evolution of self. More

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      in Theater

      The Artists We Lost in 2023, in Their Words

      by

      The many creative people who died this year built their wisdom over lives generously long or much too short, through times of peace and periods of conflict. Their ideas, perspectives and humanity helped shape our own: in language spoken, written or left unsaid; in notes hit, lines delivered, boundaries pushed. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their voices.“I never considered giving up on my dreams. You could say I had an invincible optimism.”— Tina Turner, musician, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)“Hang on to your fantasies, whatever they are and however dimly you may hear them, because that’s what you’re worth.”— David Del Tredici, composer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Ever since I can remember, I have danced for the sheer joy of moving.”— Rena Gluck, dancer and choreographer, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“The stage is not magic for me. It never was. I always felt the audience was waiting to see that first drop of blood.”— Lynn Seymour, dancer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Paul Reubens.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Most questions that are asked of me about Pee-wee Herman I don’t have a clue on. I’ve always been very careful not to dissect it too much for myself.”— Paul Reubens, actor, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“If you know your voice really well, if you’ve become friends with your vocal apparatus, you know which roles you can sing and which you shouldn’t even touch.”— Grace Bumbry, opera singer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Actors should approach an audition (and indeed, their careers) with the firm belief that they have something to offer that is unique. Treasure who you are and what you bring to the audition.”— Joanna Merlin, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Glenda Jackson.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady. I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”— Glenda Jackson, actress and politician, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t see myself as a pioneer. I see myself as a working guy and that’s all, and that is enough.”— William Friedkin, filmmaker, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“Some people, every day you get up and chop wood, and some people write songs.”— Robbie Robertson, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I wasn’t brought up in Hollywood. I was brought up in a kibbutz.”— Topol, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jimmy Buffett.Michael Putland/Getty Images“I don’t play at my audience. I play for my audience.”— Jimmy Buffett, musician, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)“I’m still not a natural in front of people. I’m shy. I’m a hermit. But I’m learning a little more.”— Andre Braugher, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)“Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”— Louise Glück, poet, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I paint because I believe it’s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being. I paint for myself. I paint for my wife. And I paint for anybody that’s willing to look at it.”— Brice Marden, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“Writing is about generosity, passing on to other people what you’ve had the misfortune of having to find out for yourself.”— Fay Weldon, author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Ryuichi Sakamoto.Ian Dickson/Redferns, via Getty Images“I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima, and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, ‘Nature tuned it.’”— Ryuichi Sakamoto, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“I hate everything that is natural, and I love the artificial.”— Vera Molnar, artist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“A roof could be a roof, but it also could be a little garden.”— Rafael Viñoly, architect, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“True architecture is life.”— Balkrishna Doshi, architect, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)Sinead O’Connor.Duane Braley/Star Tribune, via Getty Images“Words are dreadfully powerful, and words uttered are 10 times more powerful. The spoken word is the science on which the entire universe is built.”— Sinead O’Connor, musician, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)“Before I can put anything in the world, I have to wait at least a couple of years and edit them. Nothing is going out that hasn’t been edited a dozen times.”— Robert Irwin, artist, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“An editor is a reader who edits.”— Robert Gottlieb, editor and author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Matthew Perry.Reisig & Taylor/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“Sometimes I think I went through the addiction, alcoholism and fame all to be doing what I’m doing right now, which is helping people.”— Matthew Perry, actor, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)“It was the period of apartheid. You know, it was very hard, very difficult and very painful — and many a time I felt, ‘Shall I continue with this life or shall I go on?’ But I continued. I wanted to dance.”— Johaar Mosaval, dancer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“God would like us to be joyful / Even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.” (“Fiddler on the Roof”)— Sheldon Harnick, lyricist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“I remember back in the day, saying it’s so cool that the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie are still played. That’s what we wanted hip-hop to be.”— David Jolicoeur, musician, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)“Civilization cannot last or advance without culture.”— Ahmad Jamal, musician, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Harry Belafonte. Phil Burchman/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die.”— Harry Belafonte, singer and actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“Some people say to artists that they should change. Change what? It’s like saying, ‘Why don’t you walk differently or talk differently?’ I can’t change my voice. That’s the way I am.”— Fernando Botero, artist, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”— André Watts, pianist, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)Renata Scotto.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Singing isn’t my whole life.”— Renata Scotto, opera singer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate.”— Frances Sternhagen, actress, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)David Crosby.Mick Gold/Redferns, via Getty Images“I don’t know if I’ve found my way, but I do know I feel happy.”— David Crosby, musician, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“I’m very abstract. Once it becomes narrative, it’s all over. Let the audience decide what it’s about.”— Rudy Perez, choreographer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t have a driven desire actually to be in the act of writing. But my response to any form of excitement about reading is to want to write.”— A.S. Byatt, author, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t think I ever wrote music to react to other music — I really had a very strong need to express myself.”— Kaija Saariaho, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Richard Roundtree.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“Narrow-mindedness is alien to me.”— Richard Roundtree, actor, born 1942, though some sources say 1937 (Read the obituary.)“The reason I’ve been able to dance for so long is absolute willpower.”— Gus Solomons Jr., dancer and choreographer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“My practice is a resistance to the glamorous art object.”— Phyllida Barlow, artist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”— Milan Kundera, author, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Mary Quant.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“The most extreme fashion should be very, very cheap. First, because only the young are daring enough to wear it; second, because the young look better in it; and third, because if it’s extreme enough, it shouldn’t last.”— Mary Quant, fashion designer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)“I spontaneously enter the unknown.”— Vivan Sundaram, artist, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark.”— Richard Hunt, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Angus Cloud.Pat Martin for The New York Times“Style is how you hold yourself.”— Angus Cloud, actor, born 1998 (Read the obituary.)“I have an aura.”— Barry Humphries, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“Intensity is not something I try to do. It’s just kind of the way that I am.”— Lance Reddick, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)Alan Arkin.Jerry Mosey/Associated Press“There was a time when I had so little sense of myself that getting out of my skin and being anybody else was a sigh of relief. But I kind of like myself now, a lot of the times.”— Alan Arkin, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“I have always thought of myself as a kind of vessel through which the work might flow.”— Valda Setterfield, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”— Cormac McCarthy, author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Elliott Erwitt.Steven Siewert/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“In general, I don’t think too much. I certainly don’t use those funny words museum people and art critics like.”— Elliott Erwitt, photographer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its humorless own arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.” (“The Information”)— Martin Amis, author, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)Magda Saleh.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“I did not do it on my own.”— Magda Saleh, ballerina, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means, ‘I dare you.’”— Wayne Shorter, musician, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“What is a jazz singer? Somebody who improvises? But I don’t: I prefer simplicity.”— Astrud Gilberto, singer, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)“It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”— Anne Perry, author, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“When I think about my daughter and the day that I move on — there is a piece of me that will remain with her.”— Ron Cephas Jones, actor, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)“Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future.”— Norman Lear, television writer and producer, born 1922 (Read the obituary.)Tony Bennett.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough.”— Tony Bennett, musician, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via Getty Images. More

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      Bad Blood: A Timeline of the Taylor Swift-Kanye West-Kim Kardashian Feud

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      After 14 years, a new interview suggests this dispute may keep giving us new chapters.Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Optimus Prime and Megatron.And Taylor Swift and Kanye West.Feuds don’t get more colossal than the one between two of the biggest stars in music. (And the reality TV star Kim Kardashian, who was married to West for a time, has been involved too.) There has been a leaked tape, diss tracks and videos, and a naked wax figure. The latest salvo came in Swift’s interview with Time magazine after the publication chose her as Person of the Year.The story has bubbled up even more as fans await the expected rerelease of Swift’s album “Reputation,” which was particularly focused on the dispute.Here’s the decade-long story of how the feud has progressed.Sept. 13, 2009West interrupts Swift.West interrupts Swift as she accepts the award for best female video at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009.Jason Decrow/Associated PressThe incident that started it all. Swift, 19, goes onstage at Radio City Music Hall to accept the MTV Video Music Award for best female video for “You Belong With Me,” after defeating Beyoncé, among others.She has barely said thank you when West, 32, bum rushes the stage, takes her microphone and declares: “I’m really happy for you; I’m going to let you finish. But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Winona Ryder Fans Celebrate New Photo Book of the ‘Eternal Cool Girl’

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      Fans of Winona Ryder lined up outside Dover Street Market in Manhattan on a recent chilly evening to attend a launch party for “Winona,” a book of Polaroids and cellphone shots of the Gen X cultural idol.“She’s so famously private that any peek into her interior life is delicious,” Daniela Tijerina, a writer and editorial assistant for Vanity Fair, said. “I’ve molded so much about my own style after a woman I know so little about, and that makes her as cool as a person can possibly be.”The shots in the book were taken by Robert Rich, who started photographing Ms. Ryder soon after becoming friends with her more than 20 years ago. His images capture her in unguarded moments: eating pizza during a sleepover at his Hell’s Kitchen apartment; and smoking a cigarette in a bathroom, while the model Daria Werbowy quoted lines from “Reality Bites” to her.Robert Rich, whose candid shots fill “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesPortraits of the Gen X star from the book “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Mr. Rich, 57, signed copies of his book, as guests mobbed a merch table selling T-shirts, caps and tote bags, all of which read: “Winona.”“What we love about Winona is that you know nothing about her,” Mr. Rich said. “We love that she’s a mysterious woman. I used to never recognize her when I’d meet her. She’d always be wearing a visor or a pageboy cap. I’d walk through the city with her, and no one even knew who I was with.”He befriended Ms. Ryder when he was a manager of the Marc Jacobs store on Mercer Street in SoHo in 1999. The shop was a hangout for Selma Blair, Sofia Coppola, Parker Posey and Kate Moss, and Mr. Rich often took Polaroids of celebrity clients in his basement office.He got to know Ms. Ryder during fittings at the store and later helped dress her in Marc Jacobs pieces for parties, premieres and magazine photo shoots. After Ms. Ryder’s shoplifting trial in 2002, he became a confidante during a period when she retreated from public view.Joe Jonas, left, looks through “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesA shot from the new book.Robert RichA year ago, Mr. Rich found himself thinking about all the Polaroids he had amassed in several shoeboxes in his closet, and he texted Ms. Ryder about the idea of collecting them in a book. After she said yes, the London-based book dealer and publisher, Idea, took on the project. Marc Jacobs wrote the foreword.As the party guests sipped champagne and flipped through the book, Mr. Jacobs made an appearance.“She was our young Garbo,” he said. “A Winona sighting was always a big deal back then. She came to one of my shows at the time, and I still remember she was a little like a deer in the headlights. She’s not snobbish. She’s not the red carpet girl. And that has always added to her cachet and cool.”Francesca Sorrenti, who designed and edited the book, reflected on Ms. Ryder’s enduring appeal.“To understand Winona, you have to understand the youth movement of the 1990s,” she said. “There are only a few personalities quite like hers out there at any given time, and in her era, it was Kate Moss and Winona. You’d just see them and you’d want to know, Who is that?”Another of Mr. Rich’s shots from “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Marc Jacobs likened Ms. Ryder to the reclusive Greta Garbo.Robert RichMs. Sorrenti said that Ms. Ryder’s shyness added to her mystique.Robert Rich“I’ve hung out with Winona,” Ms. Sorrenti added. “And yes, she’s shy, and that shyness also projected itself into what her fans consider her mystique.”Hanging out by a rack of Comme des Garçons jackets was Inna Blavatnik, a creative director. “I’m of the Generation X era that Winona represented,” she said. “It was all about having a moody cool and not giving a you-know-what, and she became my role model as a teenager.”As the night progressed, the fashion designer Zac Posen and the musician Joe Jonas stopped by — and a question loomed: Would Ms. Ryder show?“I texted her about the party,” Mr. Rich said, “but I haven’t heard anything back yet.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes offered: “I’ve known Winona for a long time, and when you get to know her, she’s extremely present and generous, but she’s also good at disappearing into the ether.” She concluded: “If she were coming, she wouldn’t tell anyone she was.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes said Ms. Ryder was “good at disappearing into the ether.”Robert RichGuests at the “Winona” party.Ye Fan for The New York TimesMs. Ryder ultimately never materialized, but Jayna Maleri, a fashion editorial director, said she preferred it that way. “I almost never want to see Winona Ryder in person,” she said. “Not because I think she’d disappoint me, but because she occupies a place in my brain so rooted in my nostalgia that it would be jarring.”“She’s an icon of my youth, the eternal cool girl who embodied the authenticity of the ’90s,” she continued. “And I want to hold onto my illusions of her.”A Robert Rich collage.Robert Rich More

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      Barbra Streisand Is Ready to Tell All. Pull Up a Seat.

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      Maybe it’s her grandkids, maybe it’s being 81, but Barbra Streisand is open to new stuff. Take sharing. Well, take sharing herself. “My Name Is Barbra,” her first memoir, is upon us. It’s 970 pages and billows with doubt, anger, ardor, hurt, pride, persuasion, glory and Yiddish. I don’t know that any artist has done more sharing.And yet, last month, after lunch at her home in Malibu, Calif., Streisand shared something else, a treasure she guards almost as much she’s guarded the details of her life. And that’s dessert. There’s a lot in this book — tales of film and television shoots, clashes and bonds with collaborators, a whole chapter on Don Johnson (it’s short) and another called “Politics,” her unwavering preference for big blends of the masculine and the feminine. But food is so ubiquitous that it’s practically a love of Streisand’s life, especially ice cream.So when it’s time for dessert at Streisand’s, despite any choice you’re offered, there’s truly only one option. And that’s McConnell’s Brazilian Coffee ice cream. She writes about it with an orgasmic zeal comparable only, perhaps, to her stated zests for Modigliani and Sondheim. How much does Streisand love Brazilian Coffee? In the book, she’s in the middle of a sad story about a dinner with her buddy Marlon Brando at Quincy Jones’s place, when she interrupts herself to rhapsodize over its flavor and reminisce on the lengths she has gone to get some. So I wanted to have what she’s having.“Okaaayyyy,” Streisand said. She gave her longtime assistant, Renata Buser, a deep, knowing look.“We’ll trade. You give a good review.”Panic, panic, panic. Stammer, stammer, stammer.She was grinning. Buser was smiling.“I love to laugh right now,” said Streisand, who said she’s been in a funk over the state of the planet.Buser agreed: “You really needed a laugh.”But Streisand wasn’t entirely kidding — well, about the good review she was. But not about the ice cream.See, sometimes, they explained, like two girls talking about an ornate but dire piece of cafeteria gossip, there’s a situation with how available it is. (Basically, McConnell’s sometimes takes Brazilian Coffee off the market, leaving Turkish Coffee and sometimes just … “Coffee.”) When she gets her hands on some, she all but password-protects it. “My husband happens to like Turkish Coffee. Thank God,” Streisand says of the actor James Brolin, her spouse of 25 years. “So he doesn’t take my stash.”To be clear: They’re not the same?“Noooo,” Streisand and Buser said together. Streisand was shrugging that “are you serious right now?” shrug: “Turkey is not Brazil.”It goes on like this for another minute until something crucial suddenly occurs to Streisand.“Are you a fan of coffee ice cream?”Crickets …She didn’t have time for this. “We have vanilla.” More kidding. “I’ll give you a scoop — well, how about half a scoop? He’ll have half a scoop. I’ll take the other half.”Eventually, Buser arrives with a bowl, and I get it.If Loro Piana made dessert, this is how it would taste, like money. Buser had lodged Streisand’s demiscoop inside a wafer cone just the way she likes. Mine was gone in about 90 seconds. Streisand, though — she made the eating of this ounce of ice cream a discreet aria of bliss. Little nibbles of cone, then one spin around her mouth. Nibble, nibble, spin. I’ve seen one other person make love to a dessert this way, and she gave birth to me. Otherwise, no one will ever quite have what they’re having.THIS MEMOIR OF STREISAND’S encompasses her girlhood in working-class Brooklyn in the 1940s, her big break on Broadway in “Funny Girl” in 1964, a movie career that made her the biggest actress of the 1970s, her popular albums and top-rated TV specials, the awards, the snubs, her hangups, terrors and passions, her close girlfriends, the men she’s loved and, yes, the foods she might adore more. “My Name Is Barbra” is explanatory and ruminative and enlightening. It’s shake-your-head funny and hand-to-mouth surprising. The lady who wrote it is in touch with herself, loves being herself. Yet she disliked memoir-writing’s ostensible point. “I’ve been through therapy many, many years ago, trying to figure these things out,” she told me. “And I got bored with that. Trying to get things out. I really didn’t want to relive my life.”Streisand in her dressing room when she starred in the 1964 Broadway musical “Funny Girl.”John Orris/The New York TimesWriting the book forced Streisand not only to relive it, but to do the synthesizing between the present and the past. For instance, she frequently reckons with how losing her father at a young age and living for decades with her mother’s glass-half-empty approach to maternity set her up for a journey of approval.Those 970 pages also turn the book into a piece of exercise equipment. Streisand doesn’t like the heft. “I wanted two volumes,” she said. “Who wants to hold a heavy book like that in their hands?”Rick Kot, an executive editor at Viking who oversaw production on the book, told me, “Publishing books in two volumes is difficult just as a commercial venture. And nobody seems to have any issue with how long” Streisand’s is.The bigness of it makes literal the career it contains. Streisand is poring over, pouring out, her life. She’s feeling her way through it, remembering, sometimes Googling as she types. It’s not a book you inhale, per se. (Unless, of course, you’ve got a pressing lunch date with the author.) Nor does it inspire the “five takeaways” treatment that juicy new memoirs by Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith have. Not that there weren’t requests for spicier material. Streisand said that Christine Pittel, her editor, told her “that I had to leave some blood on the page.” So feelings are more deeply plumbed; names are named.And she did do some hemming and hawing. “I was very late in delivering the book,” she said. “I think I was supposed to deliver it in two years.” It took her 10. And as she went, she thought about her legacy. “If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words. These are my thoughts.” She also considered those other Streisand titles, the ones by other people. “Hopefully, you don’t have to look at too many books written about me. You know, whenever I was told about what they said, certain things, I thought, like, who are they talking about?”There are takeaways. But they’re too chronic to qualify as “current.” Mostly, they involve Streisand’s hunger for work and her endless quest to maintain control over it. Singing and acting made her famous. This insistence on perfection made her notorious. Sexism and chauvinism are on display throughout the book. But what becomes apparent is that the woman who has a “directed by” credit on just three films (“Yentl,” “The Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces”) had been a director from the very start of her career. Here is the book’s grand revelation — for a reader but for the author, too. “I didn’t know about it,” she said, of this proclivity for management, planning, vision, authority and obeying her instincts. “But writing the book, I discovered it. Basically, I was doing that, you know, when I was 19 years old — or even showing my mother how to smoke.”Streisand is unsparing about the treachery she faced at work, collaborating with men. Sydney Chaplin (one of Charlie’s kids) played the original Nick Arnstein during her “Funny Girl” Broadway run; they shared a flirtation that Chaplin wanted to consummate and that Streisand wanted to keep professional. (For one thing, she was married to Elliott Gould.) So, she writes, Chaplin did a number on her. In front of live audiences, he’d lean in to whisper put-downs and profanity. When it came time to shoot “Hello, Dolly!,” Streisand couldn’t understand why her co-star Walter Matthau and their director, Gene Kelly (yes, the Gene Kelly) were so hostile toward her. She confronts Matthau, and he confesses: “You hurt my friend,” meaning Chaplin, his poker buddy. Throughout her career, she’s up against what one surly camera operator, on the set of “The Prince of Tides,” boasts is a boys’ club.That’s the sort of blood that gives this book its power — not the prospect of a bluntly louche Brando and a doting Pierre Trudeau being honest-to-God soul mates, not whatever her byzantine thing with Jon Peters was about. It’s that Barbra Streisand endured a parade of harsh workplaces yet never stopped trying to make the best work. That experience with Chaplin left her with lifelong stage fright. But what if it also helped sharpen her volition to get things — in the studio, on a film set, before a show — exactly, possibly obsessively, right?“When I was younger, I think they had a preconception, you know, because maybe I was aloof or something, because I was a singer but I wanted to be an actress. And then as an actress, I wanted to be a director,” she said to me. “In other words, take another step. Be the actress as well as the singer. To me, it was so much easier to look at the whole. But even when I was an actress, I would care about the whole.” Like that scene in Sydney Pollack’s “The Way We Were,” from 1973, where Streisand touches Robert Redford’s hair while he’s sleeping, a personal choice she made by instinct.Over and over again — with TV specials, live concerts, musical arrangements — she was executing ideas. The execution earned her a permanent reputation. And she knows it. In the book, she tells a story about making some staging suggestions for her 1980 Grammys performance with Neil Diamond and muses, “This kind of incident may be why I’m called ‘difficult.’”Streisand directed and starred in “Yentl” (1983) with Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“Difficult” is in the work. Streisand’s characters constitute this cocktail of “mercurial” and “determined” with a couple squirts of “feral.” They’re multitaskers, consumed with both busyness and learning how to do something. She was perfect for romantic comedies during second-wave feminism: Her drive drove men nuts. My favorite performance from this ’70s run of hers is in “The Main Event,” a frothy, filthy, solidly funny screwball hit from 1979. She’s in high expressive form and at peak curls, playing Hillary Kramer, a fragrance mogul forced to sell her company after her accountant runs off with all her money. But she discovers a surprise asset: a terrible boxer, Eddie “Kid Natural” Scanlon (Ryan O’Neal), whose career she tries to turn around. The movie, which Howard Zieff directed, sums up the Streisand experience: her tenacity; her outrageous comfort as both a comedic actor and as a version of herself; her exasperation with men who exploit her and count her out.Eddie doesn’t want to work with Hillary and bets that the sight of his battered face will disgust her right out of boxing management. The violence of boxing does send Hillary vomiting during the drive home from one of his fights. What it doesn’t do is deter her. “I hope this taught you a lesson,” says Whitman Mayo, who plays Eddie’s pal and trainer, Percy. “It has,” Streisand says. “Get him in shape.”The two men share a sinking feeling, seemingly typical when it comes to Streisand. “She’s not giving up, Percy,” Eddie says to his trainer, who must concur: “That’s a problem.” People who’ve negotiated with her probably recognize the look of worry and fatigued resignation on O’Neal’s face. He’s going to lose.It’s reasonable to suspect that Tom Rothman, the head of Sony Pictures, knows the feeling. When the company was planning to release an anniversary edition of “The Way We Were” this year, Streisand argued for him to include two scenes that, she was pained to discover, had been omitted from the original. For Rothman, the trouble with granting Streisand her wish was that, as “a filmmaker’s executive,” as he put it in an interview, he didn’t want to change anything without Pollack’s input. But Pollack’s been dead for 15 years. They agreed to release two versions: Pollack’s and, essentially, Streisand’s extended cut.This, she writes, is a triumph of her relentlessness. “The word she uses in the book, that’s 100 percent accurate,” Rothman told me. “She’s relentless.” Her being right about the scenes didn’t matter to his bottom line, which required him to do justice to Pollack’s memory while assuaging Streisand’s worries over creative injustice. “She would say: ‘This is better, this is better! This is why it’s good!’ And I would say: ‘But Sydney Pollack didn’t want it!’”The reason Rothman wanted to land at a happy solution was because of the person he was negotiating with. “Barbra broke a lot of not just artistic boundaries but boundaries for female artists in the movie business, in Hollywood, in terms of taking control of her career,” he said. “I have boundless respect for her.”“If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words,” Streisand said. “These are my thoughts.”Harry Benson/Express, via Getty Images)Streisand’s boundlessness, her capaciousness — the lack of precedent for her whole-enchilada ambitions, the daffiness, the sexiness, the talent, orchestration, passion, originality; her persistence and indefatigability; the outfits; the hair — were a watershed. She was always adapting, if not to what was cool or “current,” per se, then certainly to whom she felt she was at a given moment. “You know me,” she writes, late in the book. “I’m the version queen.”The line is straight from Streisand to Madonna, Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Queen Latifah, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift — version queens of different kingdoms. That’s just a list of the obvious people who followed her into showbiz and makes no mention of the less famous folks whom Streisand inspired into a thousand other achievements. She’s “to thine own self be true” in neon. This might be the real Streisand Effect. And now she can take a step back and appreciate it.“That gives me real joy, that I affected some people into doing what they wanted to do,” Streisand said. “That I gave them some sort of courage. Or if they felt different, you know, I was somebody who felt different. That’s a reward for me. That makes me feel great.”THIS HOME OF STREISAND’S has been called a compound. But even with the ocean overlook, it’s too rustic, cozy and deceptively modest for the geologic or ego-logical footprint that “compound” connotes. There’s an active farm and enough rose varieties to hijack a flower show. It’s neither Xanadu nor Neverland Ranch. There’s some reality to Streisand’s place, some soul.This is to say that paintings are everywhere, outside the bathroom, up the main staircase, in the bathroom. There are oils by John Singer Sargent and Thomas Hart Benton, portraits by Ammi Phillips and Mary Cassatt. A wall holds one of Gilbert Stuart’s George Washingtons. She loves Klimt and adores Tamara de Lempicka and Modigliani, adores them with an awe the world reserves for her. Some of the paintings are by Streisand, including a portrait of Sammie, her late Coton de Tulear, whose fur is affixed to the canvas. One, her son, Jason Gould, did.Streisand’s fans know what’s on her property and the labor she personally devoted to realizing it — that there’s a mill with a functioning waterwheel, that she’s dedicated a room to her collection of dolls and that another’s maintained for the display and storage of her stage and screen costumes. They’d know because, in 2010, Streisand put it all in a book called “My Passion for Design.” Nevertheless, people have concluded that Streisand lives at her own personal Grove. They’ll ask: Are you going to see the mall? But there is no mall to see. Nothing’s for sale, nothing is open to the public.Streisand at home in 2018.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLess known is how it might feel to stand here, in a living room at Streisand’s house, to gaze over her shoulder at the ocean and stop yourself from saying out loud, “On a clear day you really can see forever.” It’s strange to move from the bulk of her book to the lightness of the woman who wrote it, to the one-of-a-kind incandescence that’s kept her a star. No memoir can quite contain that. An odd effect of that stardom is how that person can start to seem an uncanny sort of familiar. One of the mightiest, most Olympic performers we Americans have ever experienced, is, on a Tuesday at lunchtime — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — just some lady. The one behind you at a Gelson’s, maybe, who might notice the cottage cheese in your cart and get moony over how creamy it is. (“I love going to the supermarket,” she told me.)After lunch, Streisand was ready to relax and needed to stretch her back, which lately has been acting up. Relaxing meant letting loose her three Cotons de Tulear, dogs as white as snowflakes, whiter in fact, like bleached teeth. It meant retreating to the family room. So off I went down a wallpapered hallway paneled with more framed art and into another section of the house that felt different from the airs of presentation and preservation that typify the rest of the home. The kitchen was here, for one thing. For another, hunched over a round table was James Brolin. Streisand calls him Jim, and Jim was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, cross-referencing information on an iPad with what he was writing on a sheet of paper. He was jotting down film titles to watch later for movie night. They had just had a Scorsese marathon.There’s life all over the property. But here in the family room is where everybody lives, including that portrait of Sammie, which, at the moment, was propped up on the floor because “I don’t have any places to hang anything anymore,” she said. This way she can see it from the sofa while she watches TV. This part of the house seems like the only place where anything gets strewn. “It’s not that orderly,” she told me. “Meaning, I have the things I need around me.” Like her pets, like Jim. “It’s a playroom. We watch TV, we have the dogs on our laps. It’s more disordered.”It felt, in many ways, like a secret, the comfy chaos of this zone feeling preferable to the control on display everywhere else. Streisand seemed at home here because she was. She took a seat and proceeded to ply the dogs, Fanny and Sammie’s lab-bred clones, Scarlet and Violet, with a treat. They looked up at her with expectant patience. I’ve seen scores of dogs anticipate a treat. It’s as if Streisand’s had heard about the bonkers approach of those other dogs and zigged, sitting patiently as Streisand doled a morsel or two to each. Even she seemed impressed. Here is another of stardom’s odd effects. Without us, it’s Tuesday. More

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      A Britney Spears Book Tour: No TV, No Podcasts, Lots of Instagram

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      The singer, who has not given a face-to-face interview since 2018, has avoided traditional public appearances for “The Woman in Me,” which is still finding audiences.In the run-up to the release of his blockbuster autobiography earlier this year, Prince Harry sat down with “60 Minutes” — and “CBS Mornings,” “ABC News Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and others. Paris Hilton did “The View” and spoke with the BBC. Kerry Washington appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “Good Morning America.” Arnold Schwarzenegger opted for Kelly Clarkson and Howard Stern.But for Britney Spears, the endlessly sought after and speculated about pop star who released her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” this week, there was mostly Instagram.To gin up excitement about one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the year, there were prerelease excerpts in People magazine, but no face-to-face interviews, which Spears has avoided since 2018, when she was still in the conservatorship that strictly controlled her life and career. (In the book, Spears writes of mentioning the arrangement in a 2016 interview, only to have it edited out.)Now legally cleared to do and say what she pleases, however, Spears has held back, essentially throwing out the playbook for promoting a celebrity tell-all. The singer and her team are instead letting the book do the talking, with its gossipy nuggets and condemnations of the 13-year conservatorship feeding a steady churn of press coverage and social media chatter.Her reluctance to be interviewed, stemming in part from a distrust sowed by decades of insensitive coverage, does not seem to have affected early sales: The book reached No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list; complete sales data will not be available until next week. But the lack of any significant promotional or public appearances by Spears, 41, has been obvious to professionals in the worlds of publishing and public relations.In seeking a less public life, Spears has spoken about the constant attention of the paparazzi. Bauer-Griffin/GC Images, via Getty Images“This is completely out of the ordinary,” said Eleanor McManus, a former booking producer for CNN’s “Larry King Live” who now works as a crisis manager. McManus said she was watching TV on Monday morning to find out which shows would be teasing a conversation with Spears. “I was thinking, ‘Who got the first interview?’” she said, before realizing that the answer was “no one.”“The only time you recommend not doing interviews is if you can’t control what the subject would say, or if what he or she would say would damage their brand,” she added.But some experts suggest Spears’s robust social media following may be all she needs for a successful book launch. At a time when celebrity memoirs are booming, subjects may not need to engage with traditional media as they once did if they have a substantial audience of their own, said Madeleine Morel, an independent literary agent who represents ghostwriters.“The whole thing is about the size of your platform,” Morel said. “Can you bring an audience to a book?”Spears is indeed known for communicating these days almost exclusively through her free-associative and often cryptic social media posts. Her most significant commentary on “The Woman in Me” has come not in Vogue, with Oprah or even a cheeky appearance on “Saturday Night Live” but via social media, where she has shared messages about the book that were alternately grateful, scarred and conflicted to her more than 100 million followers across platforms.It’s not like the traditional media was not interested. Spears said in a since-deleted voice message posted to Instagram last year that after her conservatorship was terminated in late 2021, she had been approached by all manner of outlets.“I have offers to interviews with Oprah and so many people, lots and lots of money, but it’s insane,” she said. “I don’t want any of it.”A representative for Spears declined to comment and the memoir’s publisher, Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, did not respond to requests for comment about their nontraditional strategy to secure promotion.So far, Spears’s traditional media engagement has been limited to the excerpts in People magazine — including the bombshell that Spears had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake — accompanied by emailed quotes attributed to the singer and a cover photo, which captured Spears smiling on a beach in Tahiti, sourced to “Britney Brands” rather than a photographer for the magazine.The publisher also helped to organize an international rerelease of the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears. That rollout has featured interviews by its director, Tamra Davis, who has generated her own wave of news tidbits about Spears.A scene from the 2002 movie “Crossroads,” starring Spears.In Spears’s own recent comments on the book, she has chided the media for focusing on her past, though the memoir is essentially a retelling of her life story.“I don’t like the headlines I am reading … that’s exactly why I quit the business 4 years ago !!!,” she wrote on Instagram. “My motive for this book was not to harp on my past experiences which is what the press is doing and it’s dumb and silly !!! I have moved on since then !!!”She went on to briefly deactivate her account, only to return soon after with a picture of a cake that said “See you in hell.” On the book’s release day, she shared a single promotional post reading: “My story. On my terms. At last.” (She later deleted the post from Instagram.)Most celebrities with books to sell still combine more old-fashioned media appearances, like the “Today” show and the late-night circuit, with a dedicated social media strategy and newer, friendly outlets like the podcasts Armchair Expert and On Purpose With Jay Shetty, the lifecoach and influencer.The actress Jada Pinkett Smith, who released a memoir this month, did all of the above, plus more. Her deluge of media appearances even became the subject of a joke on “S.N.L.”“Sorry if I seem a little tired,” said the comedian Ego Nwodim, who played Pinkett Smith. “I’ve been on the ‘Today’ show 14 times in three days.”The writer Neil Strauss, who has worked on books with Mötley Crüe, Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson, said that celebrities could run the risk of making themselves bigger than the book with overexposure. “Sometimes by talking about it, you can only hurt it,” he said, adding that Spears “seems like she has a lot of trauma around the media.”In her memoir, Spears describes the press as having been unfairly focused on her body as a rising pop sensation and on her fitness as a mother during a series of public struggles in 2007 and 2008 that ultimately led to her father, James P. Spears, being granted control of her personal life and finances.She wrote that she felt exploited in 2003, when her father and her management organized an interview with Diane Sawyer following her breakup with Timberlake. “It was completely humiliating,” Spears writes. “I wasn’t told what the questions would be ahead of time, and it turned out they were 100 percent embarrassing.”Spears, left, in an interview with Diane Sawyer. The singer writes in her memoir that the conversation, which focused on her breakup with Justin Timberlake, was “humiliating.”ABCStrauss, the celebrity collaborator, said, “She’s just analyzed and scrutinized beyond the level that any human should have to be.” Still, he acknowledged, echoing others in the industry, it was “highly unusual” for someone of Spears’s stature to do no interviews. Even Bob Dylan, a notorious media antagonist for most of his career, promoted his memoir in 2004.Paul Bogaards, a veteran book publicist who has led campaigns for best-selling memoirs by Bill Clinton and Andre Agassi, said that the power of a celebrity speaking publicly about their book tends to be greater than the media mining it for a news story.“Once they’re out there in the world talking about their book, it becomes a 24-7 coverage-palooza,” Bogaards said, adding that most publishers required contractual agreements about promotion. “You want them to be visible in a significant way,” he added. “It’s hard to defend taking on a multimillion dollar advance in the absence of those kinds of agreements.” (Published figures put the price tag for Spears’s memoir, which was announced last year, between $12.5 million and $15 million.)Another major selling point for celebrity memoirs tends to be the subject’s own voice on the audiobook edition, but in this case, Spears has largely opted out as well. In a short introduction to the audiobook version of “The Woman in Me,” Spears said she had chosen to read only a short snippet of her 275-page book because the process of reliving its contents had been “heart-wrenching.” Apart from a minute and a half, the rest of the book’s five-plus hours is read by the actress Michelle Williams.Spears’s most loyal fans see no issue in her letting the work speak for itself. For years, the mantra for many supporters has been “leave Britney alone,” especially after the singer upbraided fans earlier this year for calling the police with concerns about her well-being when she temporarily deactivated her Instagram account. She voiced her objections again last month when another emergency call was made in response to a video of her dancing with what appeared to be kitchen knives. (Spears said they were props.)“A lot of the sentiment in the book are these instances where she was forced to do things against her will,” said Jordan Miller, the founder of the Spears fan site BreatheHeavy.com, which helped start the “Free Britney” campaign that brought more public attention to conservatorship.“It’s cool that she’s going in the opposite direction of what the status quo is in terms of conventional promotion,” he added. “It’s like, ‘Here are my words, you can read these. Here are the photos that I want you to see. I’m going to have approval of all of this.’ In the context of everything that’s gone on, that is super refreshing.”But a celebrity memoir with an eye-popping purchase price may need to reach more than just superfans in order to be seen as a phenomenon worth its investment, experts said.“It’s going to be a major release, but I think that they could be doing more to make it a real moment that sticks around,” said Anthony Bozza, an author who has written books with Slash, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange.If not, he added, “You’re just going to be a blip in the cycle.” More

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      Rock Brynner, 76, Son of Hollywood Royalty Who Cut His Own Path, Dies

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      The only male child of the actor Yul Brynner, he built a peripatetic career as a writer, historian, novelist, playwright — and roadie for the Band.Rock Brynner, whose life as a road manager for the Band, bodyguard for Muhammad Ali, farmer, pilot, street performer, novelist and professor of constitutional history overshadowed what, for a lesser mortal, might be a more than sufficient laurel on which to rest — he was the son of the actor Yul Brynner — died on Oct. 13 in Salisbury, Conn. He was 76.Maria Cuomo Cole, a close friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was complications of multiple myeloma.Like many children of the rich and famous, Mr. Brynner led a charmed life. His father, a Russian émigré, was best known for his starring role in both the stage and screen versions of the musical “The King and I,” and later played lead Hollywood roles as a gunfighter, a Russian general and, in “The Ten Commandments,” Pharaoh Rameses II. A-list glamour encircled the son: Liza Minnelli was a lifelong friend from childhood; Elizabeth Taylor came to all his parties. The French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau was his godfather.But Rock Brynner did more with his silver spoon than most. A gifted student, he attended Yale, Trinity College Dublin and Columbia, where he received a doctorate in American history in 1993 before teaching for over a decade at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.In between his stints on campus, he shifted in and out of various milieus and demimondes. He wrote a one-man play based on Cocteau’s addiction memoir, “Opium,” which he performed briefly on Broadway in 1970. Afterward he traveled around Europe as a mime, a period in which he struggled with his own drug and alcohol problems — a theme that fueled his first novel, “The Ballad of Habit and Accident” (1981).Mr. Brynner, left, with his father, the actor Yul Brynner, and the entrepreneur Isaac Tigrett at the opening of the Hard Rock Cafe in Manhattan in March 1984. When Mr. Tigrett opened the restaurant, he hired the younger Mr. Brynner to be the manager.Mitchell Tapper/Associated PressMr. Brynner had a penchant for falling into celebrity orbits. While still in Europe he joined the entourage of Muhammad Ali, who was on something of a world tour after being stripped of his heavyweight championship title over his antiwar stance. Ali called him his “bodyguard,” even though Mr. Brynner was much shorter and slighter than the deposed champ.“Who’d ever have thunk,” Mr. Brynner recalled Ali joking, “that the son of the pharaoh of Egypt would be protecting a little Black boy from Louisville?”Mr. Brynner was no mere hanger-on: He worked as Ali’s press liaison, and it was in part thanks to him, and his connections in Dublin, that Ali was able to fight a high-profile bout against Al “Blue” Lewis in that city in 1972.After returning to the United States and largely sobering up, Mr. Brynner made friends with Robbie Robertson, the guitarist and chief songwriter for the Band, and for a time drove the group’s tour bus.When Mr. Robertson expressed interest in making a rock documentary, Mr. Brynner, by his account, put him in touch with another friend, the director Martin Scorsese. The result, in 1978, was “The Last Waltz,” widely considered one of the best concert documentaries ever made.Mr. Brynner rarely stayed in a single role for long. One day in the early 1970s he was hanging out at a London hotel bar when he met an entrepreneur named Isaac Tigrett, who had an idea for a rock ’n’ roll-themed restaurant.The two became close friends, and Mr. Brynner and his father became early investors in the Hard Rock Cafe, founded by Mr. Tigrett and Peter Morton, whose father had started the Morton’s steakhouse chain. When Mr. Tigrett expanded to New York in 1984, he hired Mr. Brynner as manager. The restaurant was, for a time, the place to see and be seen in Manhattan, and Mr. Brynner proved more than capable of handling all the boldfaced names angling for a table.“He grew up with celebrities, traveled with celebrities,” Mr. Tigrett said in a phone interview. “He knew this scene well.”Mr. Brynner with Liza Minnelli during a party at a Manhattan restaurant in 1981. They had been friends since childhood.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Brynner managed to stay at the Hard Rock Cafe for a year before becoming restless once more. He had always wanted to own a plane, he told Mr. Tigrett. He and his father used their profits from the restaurant to open a charter air service, based at a small airport in Danbury, Conn., not far from the Westchester farm where Rock was now living in a guesthouse, free of charge in exchange for working its small field of vegetables.By the mid-1980s, with his wild days behind him, Mr. Brynner returned to his intellectual pursuits. He wrote a biography of his father, “Yul: The Man Who Would Be King” (1989), while completing his doctorate in American history at Columbia, with a specialty in constitutional history.The biography, which appeared four years after Yul Brynner’s death at 65, exploded certain myths that his father had told about himself (he did not, as he claimed, descend from Roma stock). But it also painted a portrait of a complicated man, whose immense ego sometimes got in the way of his genuine love for his only son — and of how that son struggled under the weight.“It is a study of how a son models himself on his father,” Rock Brynner said in a 1991 radio interview, “and then must distance himself later in life.”Yul Brynner Jr. was born on Dec. 23, 1946, in Manhattan. His father, still a struggling actor, was away in California looking for stage work, while his mother, Virginia Gilmore — who would also achieve cinematic fame — kept house in a small apartment on East 38th Street, above a dry cleaner’s.There was no question what the boy’s first name would be: “In our family,” Yul Brynner Sr. said, “Yul is not just a name. It is a title.” But he also gave his son the nickname Rock, after the boxer Rocky Graziano, in a bid to toughen him up for the rough streets of New York.Rock lived a wandering childhood, following his father’s career from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles and, finally, to Switzerland, where he attended the International School of Geneva, a famed boarding school.He enrolled at Yale, but after a year transferred to Trinity College Dublin — in part because, he later said, he was enthralled with the work of Samuel Beckett, whom he had met, and that of James Joyce, who might be one of the few 20th-century notables whom he did not.He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1969 and received a master’s in the same subject, also from Trinity, in 1972.Mr. Brynner’s marriage to Linda Ridgway, in 1973, ended in divorce. He married Elisabeth Coleman in 1978; they also later divorced. He is survived by his sisters, Victoria, Mia and Melody Brynner and Lark Bryner, who uses the original spelling of the family name.Mr. Brynner explored his family’s Eastern Russian roots in a 2006 book.via Distinct PressAfter receiving his doctorate, Mr. Brynner taught at Marist and at Western Connecticut State University. He also continued to write. Along with another novel, “The Doomsday Report” (1998), a prophetic satire about climate change, he wrote about the controversial drug thalidomide (“Dark Remedy: The Impact of Thalidomide and Its Revival as a Vital Medicine,” 2001); his family’s roots in eastern Russia (“Empire and Odyssey: The Brynners in Far East Russia and Beyond,” 2006); and, with Andrew Cuomo, the brother of Maria Cuomo Cole, who was governor of New York at the time, state water policy (“Natural Power: The New York Power Authority’s Origins and Path to Clean Energy,” 2016).Thanks to his research on eastern Russia, the State Department sent Mr. Brynner on several lecture tours in the region. There he paid tribute to his family by helping open a Brynner museum and unveil a statue of his father in Vladivostok, where the elder Mr. Brynner was born.“Yes, it’s difficult for the children of iconic figures to establish independent identities,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “But with all the suffering in this world, I wouldn’t shed too many tears for those who had privileged youths.” More