Wonder Kind

RCA record executives tell the story with a straight face. It's last April, and one of their veeps comes in with demo tapes of an unknown girl singer, name of Roslyn Kind. Yawns all around. But then the voice comes on, strong and hard-edged, like all the Barbra Streisands in the world rolled up in one. Cynics straighten up in their chairs; jaded old ears listen for the flawed cadence, the flattened phrase that never comes. Another listen, then unanimity: Sign her up. Only then does the guy who brought the tapes spring his surprise.

In real life, Roz Kind is Barbra Streisand's kid sister.*

People in the record business actually talk that kind of Stardust and get to believe it. Listen to Ted Brooks, once the live-wire manager of Barbra's music-publishing company, tell how he met Roz: "There was this sweet-faced kid who looked like a bouncing ball. I mean she weighed about 185 Ibs. She was hanging around the stage door at Funny Girl. I asked her if she was a fan and she said, 'No, I'm Barbra's sister.' So I said, 'Why don't you go inside instead of waiting out here with this mob?' And she answered quietly, 'I wasn't invited, and I don't want to impose on Barbra.'

"I felt that this kid was hurting, so I took her across the street for a Coke. 'When you go home,' I said, 'read your little Bible and the Man Upstairs will help you. He'll take care of you and find a place for you. Your sister will come back to being your sister just as soon as she settles down after all this adulation.' "

Missed Lollipops. Even Roz, who at 18 is no phony, talks romance. "My sister left home when I was in third grade. Mother and I always came into New York on Saturdays to visit her, and we brought lots of food to stuff her refrigerator. Even when Barbra was in Funny Girl we used to bring in chicken soup and brownies to her dressing room. I guess what I missed most about Barbra's not being home was the trips we used to take to the beach and the lollipops she always gave me when I stopped in to see her at the Chinese restaurant where she worked."

Where is the reality in all this? Brooks has quit Barbra to become Roz's full-time manager. Roz's first album, Give Me You, is now on the market, with another album and four singles to come under her $100,000 contract. After seeing her do two songs on an Ed Sullivan show last month, the management of the Plaza Hotel's Persian Room signed her up for a three-week stint next winter. One more appearance on the Sullivan show is scheduled this season, and Broadway Producer David Black called Brooks and said he wanted her for his modern musical version of Alice in Wonderland next fall. "Obviously," says Brooks, "the Man Upstairs wants all this for our Rozzie."

Pop-Rock. Can our Rozzie take it? Her first appearance with Sullivan was only her fifth in front of an audience, and it showed. She had whittled off 60 Ibs., but she wore a matronly gown and clenched her hands nervously. She was hardly more relaxed a week later in the nightclub atmosphere of San Francisco's hungry i. But there is that Streisand voice, strong and crystalline, making up in depth and force what it lacks in experience and subtlety.

"Our phrasing is similar because we feel a song the same way," Roz explains. "But she sings of love lost and I sing of first love." Further, she says, "I found my own style in a more contemporary bag--pop-rock." Roslyn belts out such non-Streisand pop-rock numbers as The Shape of Things to Come and John Lennon's and Paul McCartney's The Fool on the Hill with her voice well under control.

Rozzie's biggest problem will be to build confidence and shuck off her sister's shadow. It may be difficult. For her first public appearance, Brooks booked her at Bill Hahn's in Connecticut, the same spot where Barbra started out. One of the first tunes Rozzie sang was People. Brooks insists that the high-pressure rush has little to do with Barbra's fame. But every album-plugging newspaper interview somehow gets around to the Streisand kinship. Roz insists that "if I could just do a fourth of what my sister did, or maybe half, I'd be happy. So long as I've done it on my own." So far, the only person who seems content to see Roz make it on her own has been Barbra herself, who has limited her encouragement to one phone call and a telegram.

*Half sister, really. After Barbra's father died in 1943, her mother married Louis Kind, a Brooklyn tailor and Roslyn's father.

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