_{(ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.)}

I’ll never forget the first time I met Barbra Streisand. It was more than 30 years ago. She was editing A Star is Born (1976), a remake of a remake, with Kris Kristofferson as her costar (she wanted Elvis Presley, but the King wouldn’t meet with her alone; he brought his entourage, and Streisand didn’t think he was ready for her). She was also mixing the songs for her Superman album. She was, by far, the primo diva at the time.

My phone rang one afternoon with one of her assistants on the other end. “Barbra Streisand would like you to come to Todd-A-O Studios on Wednesday at 11 o’clock.”

She wanted me.

“Would this be business or just social?” I asked, wanting to know whether I should prepare questions and bring my tape recorder.

“Just be there,” was the response. Crisp, curt, bossy.

I had been trying to get to Streisand for nearly a year, first for Newsday’s Sunday magazine, then for Playboy, and finally for both. But getting to meet with the Funny Girl turned Funny Lady had proven to be as difficult as getting to see the pope or the Queen of England. I called her publicist, tried her agent, spoke to her manager, asked her ex-husband, wrote to her directly, but all to no avail. And then the call came. Out of the blue. The woman whose melancholy songs I used to listen to in my dorm room—songs about the man she loved, about crying a river, about people who loved people—wanted to meet me. It sounded urgent. Like she had made up her mind about something. And it involved me...

Read the entire story in Aug/Sept's Autograph Collector. Click here to buy this issue of AC, on sale in bookstores and newsstands now. Special Offer: Subscribe to AC now and receive the Aug/Sept Barbra Issue for FREE! Click here for this limited-time offer, or call 1-800-395-1359 or 714-263-3560.

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Lawrence Grobel is a freelance writer and a contributing editor at Playboy and at Movieland's Hollywood Life. He has written nine books, including Conversations with Capote, Conversations with Brando, The Hustons, and The Art of the Interview, a subject he teaches at UCLA. He cowrote with Montel William's Climbing Higher. His latest book is Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel. Pacino's forward to that book can be read at www.lawrencegrobel.com.