Streisand at 23

The location is not to be believed: the ground floor of Manhattan's Bergdorf Goodman at 2 a.m. But outside stands her manager liveried like a footman; so naturally, after she comes whirling in through the door, she plays a newsboy -- in white mink knickers. And then she's grabbing all those crazy hats, or vamping around the showcases like Mata Hari, or suddenly taking a Spanish caprice to dance all over Bergdorf's minks. It sounds like Breakfast at Bergdorf's but its real title is My Name Is Barbra, an hourlong, one-girl, CBS-TV special this week. The taped show is also Barbra Streisand's way of saluting her first year in Broadway's smash hit, Funny Girl, and her own 23rd birthday. It is the most enchanting, tingling TV hour of the season.

Better with Grips. It all began with the most frightful jitters. "Sure, she's a skyrocket on Broadway," said her manager. "But if 50 million people watch the show, 30 million will be watching someone they've never seen before." Such gloom about a girl whose five record albums all shot over the magic $1,000,000 mark in the past year -- but it was catching. "The men in suspenders will never watch it," Barbra predicted, which led her to worry about "this family called Nielsen. Everyone asks, 'What are the Nielsens watching?' They think the whole country is watching what this one family is watching. I mean, nobody ever asked me what I'm watching." But after her two-show Saturday grind, she showed up at Bergdorf's for taping at noon Sunday and, even while the grips were adjusting the lights, she started singing and just kept it up until the early morning hours. "I've switched my opinions," she announced. "It's better without an audience. You have technicians. They're jaded; so if they like it, you know it works."

And Barbra made everything work, from a reprise of her Funny Girl hits to a Baby Snooks number evoking how it all began -- the gawky gosling from Brooklyn who didn't see Manhattan until she was 14, and when she walked into Bergdorfs in her trench coat, "everyone looked funny at me." Then she came out to show off two other Streisands, one a gamine in slacks and sweater and short hairdo ("like Nureyev"), the other a coolly elegant woman in a simple black sheath that displays the sophistication of 22 going on 23.

Shooting Stick & Hot Dogs. Funny what a year of Funny Girl can do. Among other things, there's a TV contract that could bring her $5,000,000 in the next ten years. And there are some 300 concert bids that she has had to turn down -- including one offer of $75,000. But eight performances a week of Funny Girl have been taxing enough. "It's painful, not boring, painful! It's everything I hated about school. It's become nine-to-five." And sobering. She used to grab last-minute cabs to the theater. "It made for its own excitement," recalls Barbra, especially when she couldn't find a taxi. Once she arrived in a police car; another time she commandeered a truck. "Then I thought, 'What am I going through all this agony for?' All the other stars drive up in cars, and I get out of a truck."

Now Barbra and her husband Elliott Gould, a fast-rising performer and TV producer in his own right, have bought a secondhand Bentley. It is a cream-colored marvel with a leather shooting stick stowed under the seat, side pockets with a sewing kit, pullout tables, and a back-seat bar occasionally stocked with celery soda. So after the show she and Elliott cruise the Bentley down to the Snacktime on 34th Street to pick up Nathan's Famous hot dogs and corn on the cob, and then they snuggle down together in the back seat for a feast.

Ballet & Bernstein. So far, Barbra has fought off installing a car phone, though her penthouse duplex is rigged with an intercom system and a tie line to her management office on Lexington Avenue. ("I used to just holler," she says, "but that's not couth.") And the line is hot. Working for her full time now are her manager, his assistant, a secretary, a housekeeper and a dresser. A letter-answering service handles the mail, and Barbra sees herself as something of a homebody, "staying at home, shopping, and taking my lessons." Which is a lot more strenuous than it sounds. First of all, she has redecorated the apartment with lots of Louis Seize pieces and hung chandeliers even in the bathrooms. She liked the opulent Paisley fabric of a dress so much that she had a love seat upholstered in it. She also designs her own clothes, including many of those for her TV show, and has now worked up six different reversible linings for her mink poncho to go with as many suits and dresses.

And then there are her lessons. She has given up Italian temporarily, but still hammers at the piano with a teacher recommended by Leonard Bernstein. And now that spring is here, she thinks she will take up ballet and tennis. "I've got the clothes," she says. And even with her annual take pushing seven figures, she believes in economy. For a while she had her weekly allowance upped to $50. "But it's back down to $25 again," she admits. "I couldn't spend it all. I don't even spend the $25. I save it up. But I don't tell anybody."

After her Broadway contract expires in December, she says, "I want to take a long vacation and have a baby." In any case she will try to cut her work year to six months, though she is fired up to go on to Hollywood, perhaps for the film Funny Girl, and then on to even bigger things. She would love to play Ophelia, Saint Joan and Cleopatra. And most of all, she wants to sing opera. Last week at the Met, tracking her latest enthusiasms, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev (she met them at the presidential Inauguration), Barbra suddenly stopped short in the orchestra pit, mounted the podium and arched her arms with a maestro's majesty. "I've found," she said, not with braggadocio but with endearing candor, "that I can do whatever I really want to do." Certainly, after her first 23 years there is no evidence to the contrary.

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