Barbra Streisand: Does truth matter?

Los Angeles, April 30 (Reuters): Christopher Anderson knows all the tricks of the celebrity biography trade having written on Jack and Jackie, Charles and Diana, Bill and Hillary, Hepburn and Tracy and even George and Laura.

He’s done one now on Barbra Streisand, called Barbra, and it seems to fulfil all the prerequisites of a successful celeb bio, including making the best-seller list and angering the subject.

It has juicy tales seemingly told out of school ? or at least out of old newspaper clips ? and it has that nugget of information that captures the headlines, like the biography of J. Edgar Hoover that declared the late FBI director liked to dress up in women’s clothing.

In Anderson’s case, he contends that among the many, many famous people Streisand supposedly had affairs with were both the husband and boyfriend of Britain’s Princess Diana ? Prince Charles and Dodi al Fayed.

The singer, who just turned 64 and is married to actor James Brolin, is too much of a lady to comment on her love life or other personal details but in recent weeks she has been using her website to attack Anderson’s book.

“Does the truth really matter these days,” asks Streisand on her website about a book that also recounts her alleged dalliances with Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, Jon Voight, Pierre Trudeau, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson, Don Johnson and hints of one with former President Bill Clinton.

“Who is the person described in this book? From what has been told to me, certainly not anyone I know. This stereotypic image bears little resemblance to me or anything about me..... Maybe it’s finally time for an authorised biography,” she declared.

Anderson, who spent two years researching and writing his book, says Charles and Streisand were alone together at the prince’s hotel suite when Charles visited Los Angeles in the early 1990s.

To promote his claim, he quotes Harold Brooks-Baker, the late US-born managing director of Burke’s Peerage, who was an Anderson source for his best-selling book The Day Diana Died and a man who loved to gossip about “The Royals.”

“The official explanation was that Charles and Barbra Streisand had a private tea. Well, Charles has had a private tea with quite a long procession of women over the years. From what I understand he was besotted with Barbra Streisand. Did anyone ever turn Charles down? Not to my knowledge,” Brooks-Baker said.