Hybrid Work is here to Stay, Bass Reeves, Hollywood Sign Turns 100

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I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. The pandemic was a time of terrible loss. But we've come to learn things might have been even worse had it struck just a few years earlier, before we had new ways to rapidly develop vaccines. And before new technology allowed millions of us to stay safe by working from home. Remote work, of course, is still very much with us, usually loved by employees and predictably resisted by many employers. David Pogue's been hard at work searching for the home office balance in our future. We've traditionally gone to work at a place of work. The mentoring, the training that you get, the network building you get, all of that's critical. But the pandemic taught us that a lot of work can be done anywhere.

I don't think we're going back to 2019 ever. So we've kind of stabilized it, maybe a quarter of work days done remotely. Ahead on Sunday morning, the new normal of the hybrid work week. Legend that she is, countless words have been written about the great Barbra Streisand. Now she's written some words of her own. Her new memoir is out this week. This morning, she takes stock in a conversation with Gayle King.

Barbra Streisand has performed at arenas around the world, but that's where she draws the line. Do you sing around the house? What? I don't know. Do you? Never.

Never? I don't sing in the shower. Why would I sing in the shower? I can get paid for singing.

Public and private with the legendary Barbra Streisand, coming up this Sunday morning. Lee Cowan has the true story of a man who laid down the law in the Old West, a trailblazer in every sense of the word. Westerns are having a bit of a comeback of late, and with them arrive some long overdue corrections to frontier history. I am by no means the first actor, producer, writer, director to try and get this story told.

Many have tried. You think you can handle the weight of the badge? The resurrection of a man with a badge named Bass. Ahead on Sunday morning. Want to wager on that? Robert Costa previews what we'll be doing 12 months from now, voting in the 2024 presidential election. Plus, Luke Burbank with a sign of the times, the Hollywood sign at 100, and more, on this Sunday morning for the 5th of November, 2023.

We'll be right back. Almost a century ago, a murder-suicide rocked a quiet London neighborhood, but there's a lot more to this story, and I'm documenting my investigation in the new podcast, Ghost Story. Ghosts aren't real.

At least, that's what I've always believed. Sure, odd things happen in my childhood bedroom, but ultimately, I shrugged it all off. That is, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered that every subsequent occupant of that house is convinced they've experienced something inexplicable too, including the most recent inhabitant who says she was visited at night by the ghost of a faceless woman. It just so happens that the alleged ghost haunted my childhood room might just be my wife's great grandmother, who was murdered in the house next door, by two gunshots, to the face. Ghost Story, a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming coincidence, and the things that come back to haunt us. Follow Ghost Story on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. It may be Sunday morning, but Monday will be here all too soon. For millions of us, that used to mean heading to the office until the pandemic hit, forcing those who could to work from home. As David Pogue shows us, it's an option many workers continue to embrace, even demand. Until the pandemic, most office workers went into the office five days a week. During the pandemic, they mostly worked from home. So as the pandemic eased, you might have expected that they'd go back to the office five days a week. That's certainly what Jamie Dimon expected.

He's the CEO of America's largest bank. We want people back at work, and my view is sometimes September, October, it'll look just like it did before. As it turns out, the workers rushed back to the office full time, never happened. What they really like most people is working from home two or three days a week, because that saves on the commute time. It gives them more time with kids and family. It gives them more personal autonomy and how they organize their day.

Even things as small as I can have the temperature at the temperature I like. Stephen Davis is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He and his co-authors surveyed 30,000 Americans about work. And what they said is, hybrid hits the sweet spot. Most people really, really like it.

So that kind of broke the norm. Of course, not all kinds of workers can work remotely. Even so, at this point, about a third of Americans are working on a hybrid schedule, and that number is expected to grow as more employers go hybrid. We believe that the future of work is hybrid, for sure. That's going to be the modern work style. Kelly Steckelberg is the chief financial officer of Zoom.

Yes, that Zoom. The company whose video chat software helped make remote working a thing in the first place. The company now expects its own local workers to come into the office two days a week. So we have product and engineering, for example, comes on Mondays and Wednesdays. Sales and marketing come on Tuesdays and Thursdays because we don't have enough space any longer to host everyone at the same time. Oh, so you are, in effect, saving money on office space. We are saving money. We have actually downsized our space during the pandemic. We closed some of our offices. Bringing the company's workers back after the pandemic, even two days a week, was an adjustment at first.

We're all human, right? We don't like change. Once they've been doing it for a few weeks, they remember how great it is to see their friends and colleagues in the office, and they like it more.

Of course, less time in the office means less time for new hires to learn the company culture and less time to mentor younger workers. You have to be a little bit more deliberate about that, and that's what we had to do during the pandemic. I would just schedule a 15-minute, like, catch-up. Hey, how are you?

How is your life going? Those I make sure that I continue to schedule those video check-ins on a regular basis. So if hybrid work is so great, how come we weren't using it before? One big reason, technology.

Video programs like Zoom, messaging programs like Slack, and collaboration tools like Google Docs. If the pandemic had struck 20 years earlier, it would have been infeasible to have the same kind of shift to work from home. Wow.

I mean, there aren't many things to be grateful for with the pandemic, but that it waited until 2020. That's one of them. That's one of them. Before the pandemic, there was also a stigma about working from home. How could bosses know that their workers weren't just goofing off? The boss can't observe what the workers are doing. To what degree are managers installing monitoring software on their remote workers' machines? Most workers dislike the intrusive quality that every keystroke and where I'm looking on my computer screen and how often I'm sitting down is being monitored. They dislike that, do they?

They dislike that, yes. So what works better is evaluating people on their performance rather than trying to watch exactly what they do. So this was something that we developed over the last two years. At Zoom headquarters, workspace executive Alana Collins showed me some of Zoom's new products for hybrid work. There's an off-site receptionist who can cover multiple floors or even buildings. Are you the building-wide receptionist? I am.

How can I help you? Oh, I'm expecting a huge crate of Skittles. Can you arrange to have that delivered to my desk? I absolutely can. Thank you.

Love your work. And there's a system for reserving a desk on the days you come to work. Or a conference room. Yeah, that's my kind of meeting.

Two people. You can select the time right here. Oh, okay. Oh yeah, oh no, I believe in long meetings.

And this will immediately change to red, letting everybody know that I have that meeting room all day. But hybrid doesn't always mean two days a week. There are many flavors of hybrid work. We identify 22 weeks a year, and we say we would like folks to try to be in person those weeks. It's three days a week, but only every other week, kind of?

Generally, we would like them to be in person a minimum of about 25 percent. At the Ohio headquarters of Smuckers, the company famous for jams and jellies, CEO Mark Smucker has developed a hybrid version of hybrid. Our attrition is down, and our productivity has improved, and folks really seem to like it. We have been able to retract new talent from multiple geographies.

Geographies like San Francisco. I have my dream job. It's based in Ohio, working with people that I really like working with, but I have my dream life and my family in California. Smucker's marketing executive, Nicole Massey, works from her West Coast home most days, but spends six days a month in Ohio. You have to really think about what am I going to do this week when I'm in the office, versus what am I going to do when I'm remote, because in order to get the best of both, you have to be intentional about it.

So, let's see. The hybrid employer gets improved morale, better productivity, lower real estate costs, and the ability to hire from beyond the local area. The hybrid employee gets more time of family and community, less time commuting, and the ability to control the thermostat. And the planet gets cleaner air, because less time commuting means less polluting. This is starting to sound like a win-win for all parties.

I mean, who loses in the hybrid arrangement? Oh, there's some losers. If you go to downtown San Francisco, you'll see the losers.

That's true. In the top 10 U.S. cities, office attendance is about half what it was before the pandemic. With so few people coming downtown, everything is collapsing.

The price of real estate, tax revenues, and transit ridership. And think about all the restaurants, bars, and hotels. Many have shifted schedules or even closed. The last time America's work life shifted so dramatically was during the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt signed the 40-hour work week into law. Now, after the upheaval of the pandemic, Stanford's Stephen Davis is confident that the five-day in-person work week is history. I think we're close to the new normal. There's more choice for people now. And that's why I think it's a good thing.

People have more flexibility, more personal autonomy in how they want to organize their lives. Something really big just happened to something really big in the hills over Hollywood. Luke Burbank tells us all about it. No one thought things would turn out the way they did. It was just that back in 1923, real estate developers S.H. Woodruff and Tracy Schultz had a problem. So most people were living in downtown L.A. south of Wilshire, and they came up with this gimmick of how do we attract people from downtown L.A. into the Hollywood Hills to buy land.

Sales for their new housing development nestled at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains were sluggish. So businessman Jeff Zerenim says they had an idea. They came up with this gigantic sign that said Hollywoodland. It was only supposed to last about 18 months.

That 18 months has stretched out to 100 years. A story only Hollywood could write. A temporary real estate ad that's become one of the most iconic images on planet Earth. Here we go.

And it's still here, thanks to Zerenim and his fellow members of the Hollywood Sign Trust. Some people ask me, you know, how do you get this job? It's not really a job.

It's a project. How do you get this job? It's not really a job.

It's a volunteer position. There's no pay in maintaining the Hollywood sign. I do this for the love of Hollywood and for the sheer joy of doing it. Part of why the sign is so iconic?

The sheer number of times it's shown up in movies and TV over the years. And a perfect spot for the starting line of the amazing race. The Hollywood sign has also drawn countless dreamers to Los Angeles over the years, looking for their moment in the spotlight.

Which is where Adam Berkman is. Hollywoodland was really about putting LA on the map as being one of the creative capitals of the world. So it was really designed to become what it really has become, which is a global marquee for not just LA but for the film and television industry. Berk runs the LA Tourism and Convention Board and thinks this might be the most valuable sign in the world. Last year alone, visitors to the broader LA area generated $34.5 billion of business sales to our local community. Some of which ends up in Chris Nye's pocket. I have a first aid kit and will deal with anything.

There are no bathrooms on the hike. Nye is a tour guide who leads groups of excited tourists up to a spot near the sign on most days. He says those tourists are excited because seeing the sign is like seeing a celebrity. They need something sort of a cliche to say, you know, live from Los Angeles or from Hollywood, so they keep taking the same picture of these nine stupid letters on the side of Mt.

Lee over and over and over again. And that's why it's become so iconic. Now you say nine stupid letters, but you're leading tourists up there, so you must think it's pretty cool. Well, what I enjoy is the enthusiasm that people have of seeing the sign for the first time and sharing that with people. Is this the only way down to the letters? This is it, man.

We were enthusiastic as well, and thanks to Jeff Zarinim, our CBS crew was allowed to go... Side step. Right down to the sign. I assume this is how Clark Gable used to do it.

Yeah, I never saw him do it, though. This is where it really sinks in to see how large these letters are. Wow.

Amazing. There you have it. From down below, you think that all the letters are in the same plane, but you can see that they're all offset from one another. In fact, it's that undulation, determined by the hillside, that allows the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to trademark the sign.

Otherwise, it would just be a word. You can really see from this angle that they're not in the same plane. They're all kind of facing in different directions. The first version of the sign was made of wood and sheet metal, and covered in thousands of lights. But by 1944, high winds and weather had taken their toll. Some of the letters had fallen over, the H had fallen down, it said Hollywoodland for a long time.

By the late 1970s, the letters L-A-N-D were long gone, and the sign was in grave disrepair. So the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce went looking for $250,000 to replace it, and got the money from some unlikely benefactors. First person who actually stepped up to the plate was Alice Cooper. The rock star. The up-and-coming rock star. Alice Cooper is the first one to donate $27,777. As did Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, Andy Williams, the singer, actor, and cowboy Gene Autry, and the guy who invented that car price guide, the Kelley Blue Book. This is the entire crew of the guys that worked on the Hollywood sign in 1978.

So all of their names are welded into the I beam of the O. Of course, this is Hollywood, home of the facelift, and the Hollywood sign has had its share over the years. Do you think it's going to be here a hundred years from now? One hundred percent. The audaciousness of the project to me is really still symbolic of the way L-A approaches anything.

We don't do things halfway. It's really go big or go home. As it turns 100, the Hollywood sign is, as they say around here, ready for its next close-up. We all could use an escape these days, and what better way than immersing yourself in a good old-fashioned western. Lee Cowan has wrangled up the true story of a lawman of the Old West who's finally getting his due. In the lore of the American West, where heroes are made of both lawmen and the lawless, there's a story of a man as tough as Billy the Kid, as good with a gun as Wild Bill Hickok, and as fast as a horse on the Pony Express. He was like the Michael Jordan of Frontier Lawman. He could whip any two men with his bare hands. At six foot two, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves was as imposing as his mustache.

So strong, it was said if he spit on a brick, it would shatter. He roamed the heart of the Indian and Oklahoma territories, almost with impunity, a nightmare for any outlaw. Says author and African American studies expert Art Burton. When I was doing the research, I was shaking my head all the time and saying, people are not going to believe this.

You'd think a wild, wild west tale like that would almost tell itself. But when Burton began rustling up some research for a book on Reeves, he kept hitting dead ends. Like when he tried to trace the Bass Reeves family tree. A lady answered the phone and she said she had never heard of him. I said, well, he's an African American who was a Deputy U.S. Marshal.

And she was very kind about it. She said, sir, I'm sorry we did not keep black people's history here. Before he was a lawman, Reeves was a fugitive, a runaway slave from Texas. Imagine that, a former slave who eventually made a name for himself by arresting white people, no less. And yet his extraordinary story has largely been as forgotten as a ghost town.

And Oklahomans say his time has come. He's a black man. I mean, he's a stuff of legend. I cannot imagine him being white and having the kind of career he had. And it not be a major motion picture already, you know, maybe several times over. It sort of feels intentional almost, the fact that we don't know more about him.

Reset and action. Actor David Oyelowo, the tale of Bass Reeves, has all the same ingredients as the Lone Ranger, only better. The Lone Ranger. It's one thing to be a white guy with a mask riding a pretty damn wonderful horse. It's another thing to be doing that with limited resources.

You're a black man coming out of enslavement and you do it for 30 plus years and no one is paying you any attention. When we talked with him this past spring, he was trying to correct history's omission by acting in and executive producing an eight-part series for Paramount Plus, our sister network, called Law Men. Bass Reeves. How about I return that part in exchange for information? That would just kill you instead. Could try. But you be going after a deputy U.S. marshal and there's a half a dozen more I sign.

It's a massive production, shot mostly on a ranch in Texas with veteran actors like Donald Sutherland. You up for the task? I wouldn't be sitting here with my son the best if I wasn't. And Dennis Quaid.

You are the most earnest man I have ever met. It's great to do a Western man. It's like being 12 years old again.

It really is. Quaid was equally impressed with Bass Reeves' real-life loyalty to the law. The thing was is that Bass Reeves really was the real deal. He really was that. Who's your master? George Reeves.

He a major in 11 Texas cavalry. Oyelowo says he studied recordings of slave narratives found in the Library of Congress to get his speech patterns just right. I'm speaking in my own English accent with you guys today. Normally that's not how we roll. He also learned to roll and ride.

I'm always looking for opportunities to scare myself and that really did it. He certainly had a share of insights into the man Bass Reeves must have been. Gotta admit certain likeness.

Wouldn't you agree? But the role was also a reminder that no matter how long it takes, light always illuminates greatness. A tenet I live my life by is that excellence is the best weapon against prejudice. He was excellent. It was difficult to just say, oh that's a black man who is unworthy, who should be subjugated.

You couldn't dismiss him in that way and that's also the reason why to not celebrate him is wrong. Bass Reeves lived to be 71, spending his final years in the frontier town of Muskogee. If you ever find yourself out here, take a walk through the Three Rivers Museum where Reeves is still remembered.

The fearless and dedicated law. And he celebrated every year at the Bass Reeves Western History Conference. Yes sir, Bass Reeves was as good as they came and when he died, he was an American hero. Is the mustache real? If the mustache is real, I give pulls for ten dollars. No one knows where the real Bass Reeves is buried and maybe that only adds to the mystique.

For author Art Burton, that doesn't matter. The child in him wants to thank Bass Reeves for giving him and other black Americans a tip of the hat to a legend all their own. I used to always wonder, where were we?

So it was like God answered my prayers by giving me somebody before I passed away that said, well we were part of the scene too. In a few minutes, we'll hear from Barbra Streisand, the legend. But before there was that Barbra, before Broadway and TV, the albums and the movies, there was a young performer, still in her teens and early 20s, who started out in clubs and cabarets in New York City. Mo Rocca on becoming Barbra.

Everybody's got to start somewhere. For 19-year-old Barbra Streisand. Ladies and gentlemen. That somewhere was New York's Bonsoir nightclub.

May I introduce very proudly Miss Barbra Streisand. Bonsoir was a typical Greenwich Village nightclub. Small, dark, and you had to walk down a flight of stairs to get in. Here you were in this exclusive setting that you had to kind of be in the know in order to find your way to. James Gavin wrote the book about the 1960s cabaret scene in New York City. Everybody there was joining in a shared experience of discovery. I said, oh my goodness, it almost feels experimental. That was part of the thrill of seeing the likes of Barbra Streisand in one of these clubs because you knew that you were in on something fabulous that was unfolding before your eyes.

I feel like saying I'll pick up all your checks, but I won't. These clubs were indeed like little laboratories, where some of the most influential figures in American popular culture first found their voices. Those places were havens for misfits.

People who did not fit in anywhere else. Eartha Kitt, Phyllis Diller, Johnny Mathis, Woody Allen. Carol Burnett is another example of somebody who found an adoring audience and then very quickly went on to huge things.

But the ultimate example of that kind of performer is Barbra Streisand. Here was a volcano of talent beguiling. Life is just a bowl of cherry. Offbeat. I'm not going to sing that. I don't know if you don't like it too much. Explosive.

Lover, lover, lover, lover, get yourself here to me now. It's Technicolor. It's Kaleidoscopes.

It's the Fourth of July. The clarity of the voice. The kind of borched belt comic timing. There's just so much happening in that singing.

Wesley Morris, New York Times critic at large, wrote about the 1962 live album Streisand recorded at the Bonsoir and released only last year. This sounds like somebody who's been around for years and years. Can you imagine, because you'd have to, going to those shows in the early 60s? I think there's something about being in a small space. See how the leaves go streaming by. And you are basically watching this one person magnetize a tiny room.

So the energy that we're talking about concentrated in that space is wild. And then to just end the show and shoot everybody back out into the world. Soon it's gonna rain.

What are we gonna do? But for millions of Americans, the first exposure to the full Streisand experience came with her five CBS television specials. On these specials, she did things her way. They're kind of like music videos, right? I mean, they're part concert, they're part video.

I'm wearing secondhand shoes. In the first special, she traipses through the Bergdorf Goodman department store. That whole passage in the first special where she's running through Bergdorf's, I mean, that's something Cyndi Lauper would have done, right? Gaga would have done a whole bit in a Bergdorf's, right?

Trying on hats, the fur coat bit. These specials bucked convention. And not just because in one of them, Streisand soft shoes with penguins.

To be 23 years old and have an hour-long special on network television in those days and to not have any guests, no one to kind of buffer you. She could have called in, I don't know, Bob Hope or somebody to come in there, someone she could lean on, but she didn't do that. No, she didn't. She just knew how powerful she was.

Stephen Holden is a retired New York Times music and film critic who wrote about Streisand for decades. There was no one else like her and there isn't anyone else like her now. In those early performances, it doesn't seem like she's asking for the audience's approval.

No, she's demanding it. The specials were ratings hits. An Emmy Award is presented to Barbara Streisand.

Her first won five Emmys. I couldn't believe the amount of people that watch you in one given amount of time. Let's say an hour, which was my special.

And I figured it out. I'd have to work in the theater in Funny Girl 58 years to reach the same amount of people. Streisand's stardom was all the more surprising considering when it happened. This first special airs in April 1965 after the Beatles have changed pop culture. She's singing songs primarily in this special from the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

This is an important point. The Beatles are happening and here is one of the most popular acts in America. Is this chick from Brooklyn singing Tin Pan Alley and Great American Songbook tunes. Of course, it was what Streisand was doing with these songs that made them seem brand new. She is so good at that, taking you on a journey that is obviously emotional.

And obviously musical. Behold her rendition of Cry Me A River during her Central Park Concert TV special. In this song, Streisand channels the jilted lover whose ex has come crawling back.

Because we've all been there, right? Like, we've all been, you know, whether she starts up here and goes down here or starts down here and goes up. It's the peaks and valleys of the great singers who are able to go up and go down.

The EKG of it. It's your spirit responding to somebody else's spirit. And that's what in those early days when people were walking into that club, where they like... Yes. I mean, exactly.

Clear. That was the experience of watching her. The word icon is thrown around these days, but Barbra Streisand is an icon. Star. Ah! Lovers are very special people.

They're the luckiest people in the world. My name is Barbra. The name of Barbra Streisand's first television special back in 1965. An early beloved album and now one of the most anticipated memoirs of the year. Her new book is out Tuesday.

But this morning, this music and movie legend is talking with Gayle King. Barbra, no one else has this at their home. You're aware of that, right?

Well, I hope not. Most people build gyms or media rooms. Descend to the basement of Barbra Streisand's Malibu home and you'll be transported to her own private mall.

Yes, a mall. I love to collect. I'm a collector.

Yeah. So I love antiques. I didn't have a doll, so I put hot water into a hot water bottle, which felt like a real person.

Wow, Barbra. I think that you've made up for not having a doll when you were a child. That's right. I did.

Wow. Bee's Doll Shop is a poor girl's fantasy. Yeah, she blows bubbles.

Do you believe that? Brought to life Streisand style. Come on in. Another reveal at Barbra's. This is my antique clothes room. Of course it is.

Yes. Further down the mall, the wardrobe of her extraordinary life. I wore it to meet President John Kennedy. This year I had embroidered to meet the Queen of England. Along with clothes for a secondhand rose. You know, these are things I bought in the thrift shop.

Look at this. Feel that velvet. Feel the velvet.

This was ten bucks. I feel right in something that had a life in it. In other words, something from the past that I felt like I was once there. In her new memoir, My Name is Barbra, Streisand takes us there. My name is Barbra. Giving us a front row seat to her singular six decade career as a singer.

As time goes by. Actor. Your girl is lovely, Hubble.

Why don't you bring her for a drink when you come? And director. Along the way, dishing about past loves and regrets. And setting the record straight. What do you want people to get out of this book? What do you want them to know about you? I want them to know the truth. I love truth. One of the reasons I wrote the book is to talk about the myths about me. And now for my next trick.

Down with love with flowers and rice and shoes. The singer praised for her peerless voice is also known as an exacting perfectionist. And she makes no apologies. A man is forceful. A woman is pushy. He shows leadership. She's controlling.

If he acts, produces, and directs, he's called a multi-talented hyphenate. She's called vain and egotistical. I don't think of myself as a famous person. I just don't. I'm the same Barbara Jones Streisand as I was in high school.

Where has the time gone to? Growing up in Brooklyn, Streisand was a confident kid and a good student. But I had a D in conduct because if they didn't call on me and I had the answer, I would just blurt it out. She says the death of her dad Emmanuel, when she was just 15 months old, left a hole in her life. I was angry that I didn't have a father. I remember saying to my mother, why didn't you ever tell me about my father? And she said, I didn't want you to miss him. Streisand's mom, Diana, widowed at 34 with two young children, is described in the book as cold and unsupportive. She didn't seem very affectionate to you.

Well, she didn't believe in it. I said, Mom, how come you don't ever, like, hug me or say the words, I love you? And she said, you know, my mother and father, they never hugged me, but I knew they loved me. Now I said, well, I didn't know you loved me.

Her talent would rescue her. I knew I had a good voice at five years old. We kids used to gather on the stoop and we would harmonize, and I was the girl with no father and a good voice.

You'll never know just how much I miss you. At 13, Streisand's mother paid to make Barbara's first record. Before long, she met her longtime manager, Marty Ehrlichman, while singing at a Greenwich Village nightclub. Marty found me at 19 at the Bonsoir, right, and he wanted to get me a record contract. Columbia Records will sign me, but I said, I don't care what they pay me. I just need creative control. Now he said to me, creative control? You're 19. You're nobody. You know, I don't know if I can get that for you.

Not too many 19-year-olds, by the way, are asking for creative control, just saying. Probably not, but to me, they saw me at the Bonsoir. They said, she's singing these cockamamie songs like Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf one minute. Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf. The next one is Sleeping Bee. When a bee lies sleeping I was being in the moment. I wanted to be an actress. I did not want to be a singer. I had to pay the rent, so I entered a talent contest and won. But I was able to use the techniques I learned in acting classes to make it interesting for me to sing a song.

Take that snappy standard, happy days are here again. Streisand slowed it down and made it her own. As she writes in her book, that would lead to a memorable duet with Judy Garland. I fell in love with her, and her voice is spectacular. But when I sang with her, I was noticing her fragility. And she held my hand through our duet. I wondered why she was nervous. Only later we became friends.

I remember her coming to my apartment. And I thought, now I know what she's frightened about. That's what happens when you have a long career. It doesn't get easier.

It gets harder. When you have no fear, when you know you're going to be famous, you're not going to be famous. You don't have fear today, no?

I don't have fear today? I'm asking. Of course, I don't want to sing anymore in public. You don't?

No. Cause I'm the greatest star. The perilous fame Streisand dreamed of came with a starring role on Broadway, playing the role of Fanny Brice. You get Funny Girl, and it's a huge hit. And so when you look back on that time in your life, what does that mean to you after Funny Girl? It meant the world to me.

It was everything I imagined wanting a play to be for me. To have serious relationships, to have comedy, to sing great songs. But as she writes, Funny Girl's success came at a steep price. She had a contract to fulfill. Now I would have to be on stage doing the same thing every night for 18 months? This was like a prison sentence to me. But it's hard to do the same thing over and over, sing the same song over and over? God, yeah, you just... Bore yourself. It's very boring. Barbara, for the audience that's sitting there, for some of them, it's the first time they've seen it. So they're not bored.

I'm not them. And that was part of Streisand's appeal. There had never been anyone quite like her, right down to her distinctive nose. The reason why I think this is so interesting is because you write in the book that, you know, many years people said you should do something with your nose, you should fix your nose, you should do your teeth. And I thought, why would I take off my bump?

It makes me look more unique. Don't tell me not to live just sitting putter. Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter.

Her performance in the film version of the play won her an Oscar and launched her movie career. What's up, Doc? Playing comedy in What's Up, Doc? I believe you dropped something. And capturing the magic of an opposites attract romance in The Way We Were. Katie, you expect so much.

Oh, but look what I've got. That film, along with a remake of A Star Is Born, cemented her status as a major box office draw. Papa, can you hear me?

Papa, can you see me? With Yentl, Streisand took on the first of three films that she would direct. I love directing. Tell us why. Well, because it's a complete vision.

It just calls on every aspect of yourself, decorating, visualizing, helping actors achieve a performance that I have in my mind for them. I've got to find me a nice Jewish boy. You guys are killing me. After an early marriage to actor Elliot Gould, with whom she had a son, Jason, the cast of Streisand's real-life romances included a politician, actors, and even a tennis star. You have a very impressive dating roster, if I may say. I'm bowing down to you. There's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, there's Don Johnson, there's Ryan O'Neill, there's Andre Agassi.

I know, I'd laugh too if I had all those guys. So I would like to know. Listen, I didn't want to write about any of them. But you did. I just said, you have to leave some blood on the page. Listen, I like knowing that Barbara had a very nice dating roster.

I like that myself. Did you have a good time? With the men in my life, yes. Streisand was in her 50s when she was set up with actor James Brolin at a dinner party. She had quite an opening line. I walked by him, touched his hair, and said, who the **** up your hair?

Because that was the truth. What else was I going to say? Hello. Hello.

My name is Barbara. I mean, what? Jim, some people could have been turned off by that kind of directness. You were not. That was attractive to you, right? Very. It was. Why? No, it was instant.

It was like a wand went bing, uh-oh, you're screwed. They have been married for 25 years. Jim, you know her very well. What do you think is the biggest misperception or misconception people have about her? Well, there's a lot of little girl in there.

A lot. And therefore, it was covered up with a lot of firmness about how she'd like life to be and how she'd like to have things done. I'll watch my bed now. Woo! I'll be my... At 81, Barbara Streisand can look back on quite a life and legacy. What would make you happy for us to think about you? I love when people write me and they say, I played you at my wedding. That song helped me get through cancer.

When I help people through my music or film, that's what makes me feel good, that I've earned my right to be born, that I earned my right to be here and to reap the success that has been lathered on me. You bet your ass, Papa! Today, November 5th, marks exactly one year until Election Day 2024. We've asked our Robert Costa to weigh the issues and assess the stakes as America decides.

The Dubliner is a different sort of Washington monument, an Irish pub on Capitol Hill. Here, legendary Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill keeps a watchful eye over the bar, and small talk often strays into politics. The election's a year away. What's at stake? Everything is at stake, which is a cliché and is always true, but it seems even more true. We invited longtime journalist James Fallows and Washington Post congressional reporter Mariana Sotomayor for coffee and conversation about how to cover and consider the coming marathon for American democracy. Most of them turn on big fundamentals of economics and people's sense of the world, and I think those fundamentals are looming large again.

What are the fundamentals? I would say that this is going to be a bit of a repeat to a lot of people of 2020 in terms of what are the issues that matter most. The economy, number one. But I think the biggest difference that we didn't see in 2020 is the issue of abortion.

That has completely changed the conversation. Even when you talk to Democrats from this last 2022 cycle, they say, wait, now we're the party that's saying we don't want government infringing on your rights. That was the Republican line for so long. The GOP line on abortion, taxes and climate change is now being pulled further right.

I want to thank you all for the trust that you have instilled in me. With Republicans' unanimous selection of a deeply conservative Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who worked with former President Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election. There's now an election denier as the new Speaker of the House.

What does that mean for 2024? Well, Democrats are trying to basically inform the public, look, this is who this man is. And there are concerns even from those vulnerable Republicans who live in those swing districts who will be faced with all of these attacks about extremism, election denialism. Now, it's just an extra hurdle for those vulnerable Republicans. 77-year-old former President Trump's legal troubles, including two prosecutions for attempting to block the certification of the 2020 election, have so far done little to hurt his standing. But their impact on critical swing voters remains to be seen.

Folks, stick with it. President Joe Biden will be running on low unemployment and his policy wins on climate and infrastructure. Biden also receives strong marks from most Democrats and even some Republicans on Ukraine and the Middle East. But voter frustration with lingering inflation and concern about age, Biden turns 81 in two weeks, remain. It's interesting to see just which parties are talking about age. Republicans don't talk about it that much. They know that Trump is older, but it's not something that you even hear Republican lawmakers, Republican voters talking about too much. It is an issue among Democrats because Democrats are talking about it. Democrats have made age an issue and that is now being reflected on Biden.

And it is a fair question. The president has said it himself. They just need to find a good defense to explain that he can still be able to do this because it is a legitimate fear and question that voters have. As the one literal grandfather at the table, I think that the way Biden can properly position himself is in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower or Harry Truman to relatively un-colorful, relatively non-rhetorically gifted presidents whose selling point became that they were steady hands at the controls.

And so I think that Biden could do worse than thinking of Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. Steadiness is certainly in short supply these days. Another possible federal shutdown is just 12 days away.

Republican Speaker Johnson has tied aid to Israel to cuts in the IRS budget, even though the Congressional Budget Office says that could balloon the deficit. Meanwhile, further aid for Ukraine is being called a no-go by many Trump allies in Congress. Amid this drumbeat of difficult headlines, Pew Research finds fewer Americans are closely following the news than seven years ago. That led us to a final question about what's ahead for our own profession. Washington, especially the press corps, we often just seem to be burdened by assumptions and conventional wisdom about how these elections are going to play out. Given the unknowability of elections, we're always surprised, maybe it means that we collectively should spend less time trying to predict what's going to turn out because we're bad at it. You know, bookies in the sports world, they have to pay off, and we don't really have to pay off that often. This is basically an impossible task of predicting exactly how people are going to vote.

And maybe this means we recognize its impossibility and spend more time on other things than forecasting. And after covering this next election, I hope you can both join me here at this table. We won't order coffee. We'll engage in a pint of something stronger.

Survive another election. It's a deal. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. Hey, Prime members! You can listen to CBS Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.