Breakfast w/Greg: Early Streisand performances being auctioned; Landmark birthday for Loretta Devine

Happy Friday everyone!

I’m not sure if it’s such a happy day for the legendary Barbra Streisand who can’t be too happy about her former boyfriend, actor Barry Dennen, is auctioning off tapes made of some of her earliest performances.

Dennen, featured in a Greg In Hollywood profile back in June, tells PAGE SIX that he’s “a little trepidatious. I don’t know what the fallout will be. I don’t like upsetting Barbra, and I don’t want her fans angry at me.”

Dennen is accompanying Streisand on the guitar in his apartment as she sings A Taste of Honey and Two Brothers in one of the tapes. Another is a Sept. 17, 1960, rehearsal at the Bon Soir nightclub, where Streisand sang Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now, A Sleepin’ Bee, I Want To Be Bad, When Sunny Gets Blue, Lover Come Back to Me, Nobody’s Heart and Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

In the mid-60s, Streisand did ask Dennen for the tapes back. His response: “I said ‘No. They are the only thing I have left of our collaboration,’ ” he relates.

I spoke with Barry when he was performing in The Fantasticks as part of the Reprise! series and we talked about his relationship with the future superstar.

“We were living together and worked together about three years and at one point, were going to get married but it didn’t work out,” said Barry, who in 1997 wrote the memoir My Life With Barbra: A Love Story. “She and I met when we were kids, she was 17, I was 20. It was a wonderful adventure, it was very exciting – the first young years of our lives.”

So what happened?

“I was gay,” he explained. “But I really do believe I fell in love with her. I was very emotionally involved with her but there wasn’t the glue.”

DEVINE MILESTONE: You would not know it by looking at her but the wonderfully talented Loretta Devine turns 60 years old today!

One of Broadway’s original Dreamgirls, Loretta is coming off of two seasons on ABC’s Eli Stone which really gave her a chance to shine – and to sing!  Although the show has been canceled, Loretta never stays out of work for very long. That’s because she can do it all: movies, television or stage.

If you had to pick some of Loretta’s work to sample, I recommend watching Eli Stone as well as the films Waiting to Exhale, This Christmas and Dirty Laundry.

She is one of showbiz’s class acts.

When Loretta and I spoke at an event last year, I told her I just assumed she has this big pile of scripts waiting for her at home since she works so often.

“Oh no! I still have to audition, I audition for almost everything,” she said. “I auditioned for Eli Stone and lucked out and got it. When the new people come in, they’ve seen your work but they have to see if they can work with you. Sometimes I’m lucky, sometimes I’m not. I go see all the stuff I didn’t get and pretend and say, ‘Oooh! I’m so glad I didn’t get that!’ (laughs) But in your heart you’re thinking, ‘I could have made that movie great! I could have nailed that part!'”