Barbra Streisand still remembers one of her earliest encounters with the stars, when the young singer met President John F. Kennedy at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 1963 — and broke a few rules of etiquette in the process.
Looking back on the unforgettable encounter in his new memoir, My name is BarbraStreisand explains that Kennedy asked her to sing at the prestigious event after he saw her at Dinah Shore Chevy Show just a few days earlier. “You probably know by now that I can be incredibly blasé about a lot of things, but this was exciting, even for me,” she writes.
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Wearing an outfit of her own design — a gray Empire-style dress with a split down the middle to reveal a cream cape underneath — Streisand, then 21, performed three songs. She closed with “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
“With JFK as our president, I felt that those words were actually true,” she says in the book, “and I sang them with joy.”
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John F. Kennedy signs an autograph for Barbra Streisand after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on May 24, 1963. National Archives/Newsmakers
After dinner, the performers lined up to meet Kennedy, and were reminded by the protocol team that they should say hello quickly and move on. “We shouldn’t have kept him asking for something as plebeian as an autograph,” Streisand recalls.
She continues, “When JFK came up to me, he told me I had a beautiful voice and asked me, ‘How long have you been singing?’ I said, ‘About as long as you’ve been president.’ He laughed, and then I did exactly what we were told not to do.”
Streisand took out a card from the dinner and asked JFK to sign it for her mother, which he did.
When he returned it to me, I told him: ‘You are a doll’. That’s a real Brooklyn expression,” Streisand writes. “I guess some people were a little surprised to hear me say that to the president. To be honest, it just slipped away.”
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My name is Barbra, Barbra Streisand.
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In retrospect, Streisand stands by her brief compliment to the president, explaining that in her eyes, he really was a puppet. “He was glowing. There was an aura around his head. He was like a rock star,” she writes. “I heard girls screaming outside, I swear.”
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