Barbra Streisand, at a Gala and in Memory

Charles Sykes/Invision, via Charles Sykes/Invision/AP Barbra Streisand at the gala in her honor.

“What am I doing here?” a smiling former President Bill Clinton asked the plush, volubly appreciative crowd packed into Avery Fisher Hall on Monday evening. He may have been the effective warm-up act for his friend, Barbra Streisand, whom he was about to present the 40th annual Chaplin Award. Yet when Mr. Clinton sauntered in, taking over host duties with the silky ease of a man accustomed to working the biggest stage in the world, there was no doubt who the biggest star in the room was. For almost anyone else, he would have been a tough act to follow.

But this was her night and soon after Ms. Streisand took the stage, this very special FOB (friend of Barbra) slipped into the shadows behind her, perched on a seat like a sideman waiting for his next cue. That came when a little later Mr. Clinton introduced Tony Bennett, whose warmly embracing rendition of “Smile” turned the hall into an intimate club, capping an evening that included Wynton Marsalis‘s playing “Hello, Dolly!,” the very tune Louis Armstrong crooned with Streisand in the 1969 movie of the same title. Mr. Marsalis brought the cool, Mr. Bennett brought the warmth. But it was Alan Bergman, who with his wife, Marilyn, wrote some of Ms. Streisand’s signature songs, who brought the tears with his gently personalized rendition of “The Way We Were.”

Ms. Streisand didn’t sing, though really the faithful in attendance were just happy to see and hear her when she finally took the stage for a diverting, fairly brief ramble down memory lane, one she ornamented with career highs and lows (she said the studio insisted she couldn’t make “Yentl” unless she sang in it) and interspersed with blown kisses to friends like Liza Minnelli. (Ms. Minnelli powered through a couple of songs, seemingly with little more than heart and ferocious show-business drive.) Ms. Streisand even joked about her reputation for being difficult, picking up a motif that had been teasingly threaded by other guests, like Kris Kristofferson, who starred with her in “A Star Is Born,” and Pierce Brosnan, who was in “The Mirror Has Two Faces”

The mix of banter and old stories gave the sold-out theater an intimate, we’re-all-just-old-friends vibe, which is crucial for glittering affairs like this. One of the tricks to producing successful galas is making attendees so happy, so pleased and even grateful to be there, that they forget (or simply don’t mind) just how much money they paid to be there in what is, effectively, a fund-raiser. (Most tickets for the gala ran from $200 to $500, while a seat at the after-show dinner ran from $1,500 a ticket to $100,000 a table.) The Film Society of Lincoln Center created the award in 1972 and since then it has honored several dozen directors and performers, two thirds of them men, an imbalance reflecting the movie industry’s pervasive sexism.

In her 20 or so onstage minutes, Ms. Streisand drew attention to her hyphenate status - her Web site calls her an “actress/singer/director/writer/composer/producer/designer/author/photographer/activist” - though not her status as a feminist role model. But she was, and is. Like a lot of women, I suspect, I fell in love with her while watching “The Way We Were,” the 1973 Sydney Pollack romance about two college students - she plays a fiery leftist and Robert Redford is her coolly apolitical goy-toy, i.e., “gorgeous goyisher guy” - who meet in the 1930s, fall in love but are driven apart by their differences. Their misty reunion years later in front of the Plaza Hotel, during which she tenderly brushes his hair across his forehead, exquisitely captures the enduring heartache of loving the wrong man.

“The Way We Were” has a lot to recommend it, including its weaving of the political and the personal. Watching it for the first time as a 12-year-old, though, I didn’t pay any mind to the politics. Rather, I was wholly mesmerized by her, by that famous nose, yes, a signifier of so much, but also her voice and mouth and especially her mouthy-ness, a tremendous inspiration for smart girls, like me, who liked to talk, and were sometimes told, even protectively, to shut up. In a mostly sympathetic her review of the film, Pauline Kael got at that quality when she wrote about how the role was tricky for Ms. Streisand because it showed the world “that element in her own persona which repelled some people initially: her fast sass is defensive and aggressive in the same breath.”

What Ms. Streisand also did, indelibly, historically, was turn a Jewish woman into a sex symbol. The judiciously chosen clips that played during the tribute illustrated that metamorphosis, though they only suggested the larger story of what it meant in 1968 - the year after Dustin Hoffman ran away with Katharine Ross in “The Graduate” - for a film star to look like Ms. Streisand. That year she appeared in her first film, “Funny Girl,” playing the young Fanny Brice, who, when she’s told that she doesn’t “look like the other girls,” belts out “I’m the Greatest Star” (“I’m the greatest star/I am by far/but no one knows it”) with a heavy New York accent and a hint of Yiddish. Before long, she’s dolled up in fur and popsicle orange and warning the world “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”

It didn’t, at least for a couple of decades, as the clips continued to play on Monday and highlights from effervescent delights like Peter Bogdanovich’s neo-screwball comedy, “What’s Up, Doc?,” lighted up the tribute. The images were carefully chosen, and if they tended to emphasize the earlier work over Ms. Streisand’s later movies, including the three features she directed - “Yentl,” “The Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces” - that was to be expected. This was a celebration, not a roast, despite the occasional, very gently delivered tweaking, and everyone onstage and off was there to cheer rather than jeer. For Ms. Streisand, who turns 70 on Wednesday, it was a night to be gloriously Barbra. As she said, with a voice that rose for all to hear: “Here’s to bossy women!”