Bob Schulenberg died alone in a hospital near his home in Fresno, California about a year ago. He was 91. There was no funeral. There was no obituary. No announcement from any publicist, no statement from any foundation, no tribute from the woman whose face he literally invented. People found out the way you find out when the culture has moved on without someone: a comment in the comment section, word of mouth, a quiet mention months later in the New York Social Diary by a friend who hadn’t seen him in a couple of years.
I found out because I’d been wondering why I hadn’t heard from him in so long. And then I had this awful thought: what if he’s dead? How would I even know? So I went looking, and there it was in the comments. Bob was gone. Had been gone for months.
This isn’t the piece I originally published about Bob. That version, which I wrote in 2021 and posted on Medium, was an interview transcript with a polite introduction. Bob was alive then, and I wrote it with the awareness that he’d read it. I was respectful. I was careful. I kept certain things to myself because I loved the man and didn’t want to embarrass him or complicate his life.
Bob’s dead now. And the version of this story that exists in the public record is incomplete. Not because I lied, but because I was polite. And politeness, when it comes to the historical record, is just a nicer word for omission.
So here’s the fuller version.
The Day
When we were planning to meet, I offered to come to him in Fresno from Chicago. He said, “Oh, God, no.” I said I was sure it was nice and what is the problem. He said, “It’s not nice. You would not like it.” He could already tell, he said, that I liked nice things, and I wasn’t going to like Fresno. So we’d meet in West Hollywood. We’d meet in Beverly Hills. And that’s what we did.
So in 2012, I met Bob Schulenberg in Beverly Hills and it was set up through a friend’s husband, who’d known Bob at UCLA. The way he explained it, in straight guy terms, was that Bob used to make all the girls look pretty. Extra pretty like they were going to be on TV. He’d do their hair and makeup before dates. He was just really good at that. Which, if you think about it, is the whole story: Bob Schulenberg spent his life making people beautiful. He did it for sorority girls at UCLA, he did it for some guy’s date on a Friday night, and he did it for Barbra Streisand.
We were introduced because anyone who knows me knows I’m an obsessive Barbra Streisand person, and Bob was the man who created her signature look and my friend’s husband Don wanted to know if I knew Bob and of course I knew who he was although I’d never met him but I knew about the Egyptian eye he’d created, and the whole mythology of her face. He was also an incredible illustrator, a raconteur of the highest order, and the kind of man who made you feel like you were the most interesting person in the room even when you absolutely weren’t.
We started the day in West Hollywood and ended up at Mr. C’s, the Cipriani hotel in Beverly Hills. It’s called something else now. I’d told them ahead that Bob was a VIP and to pamper him. He didn’t know I said anything. So when we walked in, before either of us knew it was happening, we had flutes of Veuve Clicquot in our hands. Whatever Bob wanted, Bob got. We started drinking at noon and didn’t stop until probably two in the morning. Bloody Marys, champagne, ceviche from room service, more champagne, more snacks and then more booze. We had Eating Raoul on at one point because Bob worked on that film and it was my fave cult classic and he knew that. We were giggling. We were not sober, but we weren’t sloppy either. We were two kindred spirits who knew how to hold a conversation and a cocktail at the same time. I spent a small fortune on that day and I regret nothing because Bob deserved the red carpet I rolled out for him. He deserved Mr. C’s room service. He deserved all of it. It was one of the best days of my life and I told him so. He thought that was cute and possibly a little weird.
I have to be upfront about something: I was trying to get Bob hammered and I was paying dearly to get him there. I wanted those loose lips to start flapping. I wanted the unvarnished stories, the ones you only tell after your twentieth drink when your defenses are down and the truth comes stumbling out sideways. We probably had 20 drinks each over the course of that day. Twenty. Or thirty? It was an amount that should have put normal people under the table and into the care of medical professionals. But not us.
Bob was a steel trap.
He answered every question I asked. He was generous with his time and his memory. But he wasn’t going to be sloppy about it. Not one bad word about Barbra. Not one piece of gossip served on a silver platter. He was so well regulated emotionally that I could’ve hooked him up to a polygraph and gotten nothing but flatlines. And I could’ve asked him anything about his personal, close friend Barbra Streisand, and he was going to answer it. That was the deal. He wasn’t holding back. But there’s a difference between being forthcoming and being a gossip, and Bob understood that difference in his bones. He was, and I don’t use this word hyperbolically, a mensch.
The Abbey
We ended up at the Abbey, the iconic West Hollywood bar. And here’s something I think says everything about who Bob Schulenberg was. He was a gay man in his 80s sitting in one of the most famous gay bars in the world, and he could’ve had go-go boys wrapped around his finger if he’d dropped Barbra Streisand’s name. He never did. Not once. At least not in front of me.
He never used her as a tool. Never used the connection to lure anyone in, never brandished it for attention or status. Bob didn’t operate that way.
I’ll also say this, because I think honesty requires it and because Bob’s gone and can’t be embarrassed by it: part of me spent the day with a low grade anxiety about whether there’d be an expectation. I’ve been through enough in my life that this is always somewhere in the back of my head. Is something gross going to happen in the hotel room? It didn’t even come close to broaching the topic. There was no vibe. He was a gentleman in the fullest, most old fashioned, most dignified sense of that word. He wasn’t a pig. He was a class act.
And I know I wasn’t his type anyway. Bob definitely wanted a manly alpha man. So did I. But when you’re in your 80s, some people lower their standards. Bob didn’t. He had integrity and I realized that I never had to worry about anything cringe in the first place.
Bob also loved Morgan Fairchild. They’d been friendly back in the day, he said, and he spent part of our time together talking about what a great woman she was. And recently, after Bob died, I saw Morgan Fairchild on social media and told her that Bob had adored her and had always thought the world of her and that he’d passed. She liked the comment. She didn’t say anything though. She probably had no idea who he was. I felt terrible about that, because if she’d known him, she would’ve said something. That was the story of Bob’s life in a lot of ways: people who should’ve known him didn’t, and people who did know him didn’t say enough.
What Barbra Got Wrong
In Barbra’s memoir and in various interviews over the years, she’s described learning to do her own makeup by studying Bob’s sketches of her face. The implication is that she was such a quick study, such a natural, that she simply looked at his drawings and figured it out.
Bob told me that’s not what happened. At all.
What actually happened is that Bob would do half of her face, leave the other half blank, and Barbra would attempt to replicate what he had done on the other side. She would get it wrong. He would say no. She would wash it off and try again. She did this “dozens and dozens of times” before she got it right. It was hands on instruction, correction after correction, not some genius glancing at a sketch and intuiting the technique.
This is what Barbra does. She curates the past to make herself look better. She smooths the edges. She edits other people’s contributions down to a single line in a paragraph and inflates her own role until the origin story sounds like immaculate conception. Bob was gracious about it. When I asked him about her Toronto Star comments, where she mentioned him briefly and inaccurately, he said, “At least she remembered me, although just a little inexactly.”
That’s the most Bob Schulenberg sentence ever spoken. Generous, witty, and quietly devastating.
And while we’re being honest: Barry Dennen. I read his book before I ever met him, and even on the page I could tell it was hyperbolic and exaggeratory. He claims he took Barbra’s virginity. He positioned himself as this central, essential figure in her origin story. When I met him several years later, he was pleasant enough, but my impression didn’t change. Barry was probably mostly full of shit. Bob never contradicted Barry’s stories, but there was something in the way he didn’t contradict them. A diplomatic silence. The patience of a man who loved his friend and knew when to leave things alone. That is what I was picking up.
But here’s the thing: Barbra was also full of shit. She curated Barry’s role the same way she curated Bob’s. She saw both of them and rolled the limo window up. She didn’t tell Bob’s full story. She didn’t tell Barry’s real story either. Everyone got edited down to a convenient paragraph. I love Barbra, and I want that on the record. But I don’t owe her anything. I don’t owe any of these people anything. I owe Bob.
The Hollywood Bowl
Here’s where the blood goes on the page.
When Barbra performed at the Hollywood Bowl, I contacted her office to see about getting Bob a seat. Bob Schulenberg. The man who created the look. The man who taught her how to do her own face. The man who was one of the people who talked her out of a nose job that would’ve changed the course of American entertainment. The man who, by his own account and by Barbra’s own published words, was there at the very beginning, when she was 18 years old and singing in a gay club in Greenwich Village and wearing 1920s shoes and had no idea what she was about to become.
I reached out to Marty Erlichman’s office manager at the time, the person who handled these things. They were “checking on it,” I was told. They were not checking. I was blown off. Bob wasn’t coming. He didn’t cut the mustard. He wasn’t on the list.
I want to be measured about this because I don’t want to start a feud. But I also want to tell the truth. Barbra speaks of Bob kindly in print. She’s acknowledged him. But when it came time to actually do something, to give this 80 something year old man a seat at her concert so he could watch the woman whose face he built sing under the stars, the answer was no. The limo window went up.
What Bob Actually Did
Because the record matters, and because Bob isn’t here to tell it himself anymore, here’s what he told me that day in Beverly Hills, between the drinks and the room service.
Bob met Barbra about an hour and a half after he moved to New York in 1960. He’d just arrived from Los Angeles, where he graduated from UCLA, and was staying with Barry Dennen. They were going out for something to eat around two in the morning and Barbra came down the sidewalk and joined them, just finished her set at the Lion.
“I saw this girl wearing vintage clothing and 1920s shoes and a look that nobody had,” Bob said. “It was not necessarily successful, but it was so different. I had no idea she sang.”
He was fascinated by her as a person. And she was fascinated by him, by Los Angeles, by the idea that people had swimming pools and that his mother drove a Cadillac. She never stopped asking questions. She was 18 years old. Bob said to meet an 18 year old with that kind of curiosity and intelligence in questioning was remarkable.
He’d been reading Robert Graves’ The White Goddess and was obsessed with the idea that certain women could embody a mythic, goddess like quality: Dietrich, Garbo, something beyond ordinary beauty. When he met Barbra, it clicked. He had her put on a simple Geoffrey Beene dress, did a portrait drawing, and created a makeup look that extended her eyes like a 1930s movie star. He cut the false eyelashes short so they looked naturally thick, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, rather than obviously fake. Barbra couldn’t do the lashes herself, so she ended up drawing a line instead, and that became her signature.
He told her that a nose job was never going to work because Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, and Irving Penn would lose interest in her if she looked like every other woman in Beverly Hills who had been to a surgeon. And then he told her it would change her voice, which terrified her enough to end the conversation permanently.
Years later, Bob told me he was in a Hollywood bookstore and picked up a photography book about Barbra. There were photographs by Avedon. There were photographs by Beaton, who said two of the most beautiful women of the 20th century were Barbra Streisand and Greta Garbo. Bob read this and tears ran down his face and he hoped nobody saw him. “What kind of stupid fan would that be, crying in a bookstore?” But he knew what it meant. He had been right.
The Fans
One more thing about Bob, and this one is for the Streisand fans who came for him.
When I published the original interview, some of them attacked Bob for disloyalty. Because in the Streisand universe, even a slight correction of the official narrative is treated as treason. Bob didn’t say anything disloyal. He told the truth about his own life and his own contribution, gently and with love. And for that, people who never met him, never sat with him, never heard him play Cole Porter the way he imagined George Gershwin would’ve played it, decided he was the enemy.
To those people: you’re wrong. Bob Schulenberg loved Barbra Streisand. He was asked what he thought of when he heard her name and he said one word. Genius.
“She is the brightest person I have ever known,” he said. “An underdog who survived and conquered and prevailed, by willpower and by talent and intelligence. She is always trying for something more, something a little better, something a little different from what she has done. Like Picasso. And it’s quite something to compare her to Picasso. She does her homework.”
That’s not disloyalty. That’s devotion with clarity. And there’s nothing more valuable and nothing rarer.
The End
Bob Schulenberg died without a funeral. Without an obituary. Without a seat at the Hollywood Bowl. His family, by the end, were his cats.
I don’t want to make him sound like a loser, because he wasn’t one. He was a true artist in the sense that he was alone a lot of the time. Drawing, writing, sketching. Those are solitary acts. He lived a solitary life and he filled it with beautiful things.
He loved his mother. He absolutely adored her. She was stunning, looked like a movie star. I saw pictures of her. She sounded like a class act, and I think Bob got a lot of who he was from her. At least he had someone beautiful in his life for a time.
He was an artist, an illustrator, a pianist, a filmmaker, a writer, and the man who saw Barbra Streisand when she was 18 years old and recognized something that everyone else missed. He taught her how to see her own face. He convinced her to keep her nose. He helped build the architecture of one of the most iconic images in American entertainment, and he did it with Max Factor lashes from the Garden Pharmacy near the Winter Garden Theatre. He told me he was always so tempted when people complimented Barbra's lashes to say, "Oh you like those? Get down to the Garden Pharmacy, you can buy them for $1.99." But he never did. That's another window into who he was. He could've punctured the mystique with one sentence and he chose not to.
He never sold it out. And in the end, the woman whose face he made didn’t make sure he had a seat.
At the end of our boozy night together, I asked Bob to tell me more about how he knew Don, my friend’s husband, the one who’d introduced us. I was pressing him for details, hoping for some fun story I could bring back. Bob got quiet for a second and said, “Can I be honest with you? I have no idea who Don is. Not even a little bit.” We laughed so hard about that. He said, “Don’t tell him! Please don’t tell this Don person I don’t remember him.” And the delicious part is that by then, after just one day, Bob had me completely figured out. He could see me rubbing my hands together like a demon. He’d clocked the snark in me right away and he still told me. That’s trust. And I did keep my mouth shut. Until now. Sorry, Don.
That was Bob. He didn’t want even someone he couldn’t remember to feel bad. He was unintentionally funny in the way that only truly decent people are. They don’t make them like that anymore.
I spent a small fortune on Bob that day and I regret nothing. Bob, I told him years later, I think that was the best day of my life. He thought that was cute. I’m so lucky to have had even a piece of him in mine.
I hope he knows I meant all of it.
The Sahara. The Hollywood Bowl.
Going back through our original interview for this piece, I found a story I’d glossed over the first time. There was so much to cover that day, and I was looking at everything through the lens of a fan. I’m not looking through that lens anymore.
Sometime in the late sixties or early seventies, Bob had gone to Las Vegas with his friend, the illustrator Richard Amsel, to see Barbra perform at the Sahara Hotel. When Barbra found out Bob was in the audience, she saved them a table. She played the entire show to them. Then, in front of fifteen hundred people, she introduced Bob Schulenberg from the stage.
Afterwards, they went backstage. Fans were everywhere. One man told Barbra he had come all the way from Dallas, Texas to see her. Barbra stopped the entire room and said, “Wait a minute. I’m still processing the fact that he came all the way from Dallas, Texas to see me.”
That was the Sahara.
The Hollywood Bowl was decades later. Same Bob. Same Barbra. He couldn’t get a seat.
He couldn’t.