Barbra Streisand is telling all in her new memoir, My Name Is Barbra, including the story of how she once broke protocol during a meeting with President John F. Kennedy Jr.
In the book, Streisand, 81, recaps her performance at the 1963 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner where she was invited to sing three songs, including her showstopping rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
Streisand, who was just 21 at the time, said Kennedy invited her to sing after seeing her perform on The Dinah Shore Show just days before the event.
“You must know by now that I can be remarkably blasé about a lot of things, but this was exciting, even for me,” she writes in the book, released on Nov. 7.
After singing, Streisand and the other performers waited in a line to meet the president which is where she said her not-so-presidential interaction with the Commander-in-Chief occurred.
“When JFK got to me, he told me that I had a beautiful voice and asked, ‘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,” she writes.
After exchanging a joke with Kennedy, Streisand pulled out a card from the dinner and asked the president to sign it for her mother. He happily obliged, she said, prompting her to respond: “You’re a doll.”
The interaction caught others by surprise and made the singer instantly wonder if she should have referred to Kennedy as “a doll.”
“I guess some people were a little surprised to hear me saying it to the president,” Streisand writes. “Frankly, it just slipped out.
In a 2018 post on Instagram, Streisand joked about the encounter while sharing a picture of herself and the president.
“I never ask for autographs… but I made an exception when I met President John F. Kennedy in 1963,” the actress wrote.
Sadly, Streisand never got the chance to take another photo with Kennedy as he was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas just six months later.
The singer’s recount of her meeting with Kennedy is just one of the revelations from her new memoir, My Name Is Barbra, which hit shelves on Tuesday.
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