During this time, Bette was invited to do a two-week gig at Downstairs at the Upstairs. For Barry, it was “been there, done that”, as he and Jeanne had performed there for two seasons with Joan Rivers. Even though he considered a return to the club “a step backwards”, in his words, he agreed to stay with Bette through the gig. After an unfortunate incident in Chicago during which the venue’s house band had nearly ruined her act with their incompetence, Bette had put together her own trio of musicians to prevent the same thing from happening again. She’d met Michael Federal during the same Chicago trip. He would remain with her during that stay in Chicago, then return to New York with her as her lover, and her bass player. Kevin Ellman was the drummer, and, of course, Barry Manilow was at the keyboard, and now acted as Bette’s official musical director, doing all her arrangements and keeping the show musically on track.
Opening night at the Downstairs was a disaster – literally. In addition to a hurricane which had hit the east coast, wreaking havoc on people and property, it was also Rosh Hashana. There were eight people in the audience. Bette, trying to cover her distress at the situation, opened by saying, “I want to thank all eight of you for braving the wrath of God to come out and see the dirty Jewish girl from Honolulu.”
The next few nights the turnout was only marginally better. So Bette decided to take things into her own hands. She knew that if the gig were to be salvaged, she needed to reach her own people, the kind of people who’d shown her such magnificent support during her performances at the Baths. So, with her own money, Bette took out a full page ad in Screw magazine saying simply, Bette from the Baths – at the Downstairs! under her picture. By the sixth night, the place was packed and Bette was getting standing ovations. Barry’s friend, drummer Lee Gurst, was among the appreciative audience members to see Bette perform at the Downstairs. “I remember,” says Gurst, “she was doing ‘Friends’, and I got up in the middle of the song and went back to the maître d’ and made a reservation for that weekend to bring my girlfriend in. I mean I was just blown away! I’d never heard anybody like her, and I’d never seen anybody like her.” It was only later Lee realised that this ball of fire was the same actress he’d seen give such a subtle and moving performance on Broadway as Tzeitel in Fiddler On The Roof years before. Gurst would go on to do occasional percussion work for Bette during Barry and Bette’s remaining performances at the Baths.
Just as at the Baths, word spread and soon the standing room only crowds at the Downstairs contained such celebrities as Truman Capote and Johnny Carson and, perhaps most importantly, Ahmet Ertegun, President of Atlantic Records. The two-week gig turned into ten.
With the success of Bette’s run at the Downstairs apparent, the club’s owner offered her trio, Barry, Michael and Kevin, an extra $50 if they would play a few songs to open Bette’s shows. With Bette’s approval, they agreed, and worked up a four-song act with Barry singing, sometimes joined by Michael.
When Bette had finally performed the last of what had become her nearly weekly “farewell performances” at the Continental Baths, a trio of backup singers was added to the trio of instrumentalists because, as Bette observed after all the offers she was receiving from every conceivable venue, “Oh my God, I better get a show together!” Now Bette’s show consisted of herself, Michael Federal, Kevin Ellman, Barry Manilow, and The “Harlettes”: Melissa Manchester, Gail Kantor and Merle Miller. In addition, Bill Hennessy was still working with Bette, helping her develop the seemingly spontaneous chatter that was often painstakingly devised and rehearsed.
Barry had become more to Bette than just her piano player, more than a musical director. He was also a trusted friend and a respected colleague, not to mention a frequent sparring partner. She had become a regular at his 27th Street apartment. “We’d fight, we’d laugh, we’d gossip,” Barry later wrote of those afternoon practice sessions. But between the fighting and the laughing and the gossiping, Barry was helping Bette to evolve her style into something not only unique, but cohesive and professional in that seemingly random, non-professional way that only constant work over a long period of time can produce.
Her performances ever more polished, thanks to her own explosive talent, but tempered by Barry’s knowledge and discipline, Bette and her troupe of musicians had made personal and television appearances all over the country. She’d become a pet of Johnny Carson’s, not only appearing on the Tonight Show again, but also opening his act in the 500 seat Congo Room at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas in April 1972. The surprisingly staid Vegas audiences found Bette’s raunchy humour a bit shocking for their tastes (“The ladies in the room opened their eyes wide and swallowed hard,” wrote a reporter from Oui magazine. “ ‘Tits? Did she say … tits?’”) but the reviews were good. They got even better when Bette and her band returned to home turf for venues like Manhattan’s Bitter End, where they sold out every show. The mainstream media weren’t quite sure what to make of this Midler, a paradox who was at once a throwback to the torch singers of the Thirties and Forties, but at the same time something completely new. It was unlike anything they’d ever seen before, “Yet,” declared Newsweek magazine, “somehow it all comes together to make her one of the freshest, most captivating of the new girl singers.” The piece went on to proclaim, “Bette Midler is – to use one of her favorite expressions – ‘hot’.”
In fact, Bette and Barry decided that their act had been getting such an overwhelmingly positive response across the country that they were ready for the big time. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Why, you rent it, of course.
Barry and Bette reserved the main stage at Carnegie Hall for June 23, 1972. The Isaac Stern Auditorium seats over 2,800. After playing the Continental Baths and small clubs, renting a venue the size of Carnegie Hall seemed the ultimate show of chutzpah. “Can you dig it?” Bette said to columnist Rex Reed. “From the steam baths straight to Carnegie Hall.” Despite Bette’s professed fears that no one would come, tickets for the show were sold out within days.
While Barry was busy hiring an orchestra and preparing arrangements for the Carnegie Hall concert, Bette was in the studio recording her first album. Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, had been so impressed by the reaction of the crowd to Bette the night he’d seen her Downstairs at the Upstairs that he’d immediately signed her to his Atlantic label. Roberta Flack’s producer, Joel Dorn, had agreed to produce the first album, a choice Barry felt was a mistake. “I was confused,” he later wrote. “Roberta Flack’s records were sooo tasteful … Delicate as crystal, cool as a cucumber, controlled, serious – everything Bette wasn’t. It made no sense to me that she’d picked him.” Barry was even more troubled when Dorn, introduced to Barry after a show at the Downstairs, asked Barry if his arrangements were written out. “I could see that I was going to have very little to say in this project,” said Barry.
Barry Alan Pincus, Edna’s beautiful baby boy, born June 17, 1943. (Anna Keliher Collection)
Barry’s paternal grandmother, the former Anna Sheehan. “A real Irish beauty.” (Anna Keliher Collection)
Harold Lawrence Pincus, Barry’s father, with his mother Anna. He would later adopt the surname Keliher, the name of his mother’s second husband. (Anna Keliher Collection)
Harold in army uniform during the early Forties. (Anna Keliher Collection)
Barry, aged around 18 months, with his father Harold on the streets of Brooklyn.(Anna Keliher Collection)
Barry and his mother Edna, pictured after her performance at the Lincoln Center, New York, in Jerry Herman’s musical Tune The Grand Up, December 19, 1978. (Michael Ochs Archives/Redferns)
Harold with the former Anna Price, who would become his second wife, pictured together before their marriage. (Anna Keliher Collection)
Barry aged 12. (Anna Keliher Collection)
At the Eastern District High School in Brooklyn: Barry (top left), Maxine Horn (top right), Susan Deixler (bottom left), who would become Barry’s wife, and Larry Rosenthal(bottom right)
. “We were always, always laughing,” says Maxine. “If you ask me what I remember, that’s it-always, always laughing, having a good time.” Inset: the school as it was in 1961.
Barry and Susan with three friends at Susan’s ‘Sweet Sixteen’ party, in 1960.
Mrs Delise’s class at High School, with Barry (centre, back).
The Jazz Partners in 1962, left to right: Jack Wilkins, Fred Clark Billy Fagan and Barry. (Photo courtesy of Jack Wilkins)
Barry in the studio with singer Jeanne Lucas, his first serious musical partner. “He is the most gifted arranger I have ever known on the planet,” says Lucas. “And every body knew it and people really wanted him to arrange their material.” (Lee Gurst)
Barry and Bagel in 1967 at the upstate New York home of Bob Danz and Pamela Pentony, with Linda Allen (above) and swimming with their friend Fred Norring (below). (Courtesy Pamela Pentony)
He was right. Dorn called Barry to ask him to bring his arrangements of ‘Superstar’, ‘Do You Wanna Dance’, and ‘Friends’, three of Bette’s most popular songs, to the studio. When Barry inquired about some of the other songs he’d so carefully arranged for Bette during their time together, he was told that those numbers had all been rearranged by someone else. “I was very disappointed,” said Barry. “I had worked on perfecting those charts for Bette for months.” Any further pleas by Barry to be allowed to finish his own arrangements were met with a dismissive smile. “Joel considered me a lightweight,” Barry later wrote, “and he made sure I knew it.”
It’s curious to note at this point that, when writing of Bette’s Carnegie Hall debut in his 1987 autobiography, Sweet Life: Adventures on the Way to Paradise, Manilow inexplicably fails to mention that this night would also mark his own Carnegie Hall debut, not just as Bette’s pianist, arranger, and conductor, but as a solo performer, opening Bette’s second act. While some have suggested Bette was coerced into letting Barry open the second act of her Carnegie Hall debut, Barry has always insisted that his performance during the Carnegie Hall concert was merely a natural offshoot of the trio’s opening numbers for Bette when she was working Downstairs at the Upstairs. “She generously allowed us to do our four-song set after the intermission,” he’s said. Of course he does say that she allowed, not that she offered. For those who knew Bette best, the thought of her happily sharing the stage with anyone on this night of all nights was rather doubtful.
Even wisecracking Bette Midler was awestruck by the enthusiastic reception she received when she first walked out onto the Carnegie Hall stage and faced the sold-out crowd. “Oh, my dears,” she said to the audience in a tremulous voice, “your mother is freaking out!”
Everything she did was greeted with roaring approval from her fans. Everyone who had loved her at the Continental Baths or Downstairs at the Upstairs or the Bitter End was there, and this time the venue was large enough that they could bring all their friends, too. On this night the music was the star; Bette’s usual rambling comedy bits, while still present, had been cut back to a comfortable minimum. It was typical Bette, but not. It was Bette, but grown up.
“And it was [Barry],” says Pamela Pentony, who was in the audience that night. “It was his brain that pulled that together. He was a great accompanist and a great orchestrator and a great arranger. He did all of her arrangements, all the vocal arrangements, got everybody to be in that show.” And, as Pentony puts it, “He put on a real good show.”
Barry had rented a suit for the evening and was, he has said, so nervous about his featured spot at the top of the second act that he threw up backstage. “I was convinced the audience was going to kill me the moment I walked on stage,” he later told an interviewer. “I thought they’d throw tomatoes or drift out for drinks.” But he shouldn’t have worried because the audience was packed with friends and family members, assuring him an enthusiastic response. If Ahmet Ertegun could sign Bette Midler to a record contract based on the audience reaction he’d seen at the Downstairs, what might an enthusiastic response to Barry’s spot at Carnegie Hall do for him? Barry didn’t want to miss the opportunity to find out.
In addition to his neighbours from the 27th Street apartment, Barry had invited his high school friend, Fred Katz and his wife, who sat with Edna Manilow and Willie Murphy, along with Barry’s grandparents. Of course a good portion of the audience also knew Barry from seeing him perform with Bette at various venues for the past year, as was evidenced by the enthusiastic greeting they gave him at the beginning of the second act.
Barry acknowledged the applause, explaining, “Miss M. has given us this part of the evening to do some original stuff. And so we have Melissa Manchester, Merle Miller, and Gale Kantor on vocals – that’s good,” he added, acknowledging the applause for The Harlettes, “– as well as Kevin Ellman, Dick Frank and Michael Federal. So we’ll just get to it. Thank you.”
They then launched into Barry’s song ‘Sweet Life’, Barry taking the lead, with Michael taking a solo in the second verse. Barry’s vocal sounded strong, confident, and pleasing. The difference between his voice and Michael Federal’s was marked when Michael came in to take over the second verse. While Federal’s voice was pleasant enough, still his brief solo after Barry’s strong start seemed nothing more than the space of time one had to wait before hearing Barry take over the lead once again.
The response to the number was electric. The audience, clapped, cheered, whistled, and calls of “Bravo!” came drifting up to the stage from all corners. Michael Federal also did a solo of Barry’s song ‘Buried In The Ruins of Love’. But it was probably Barry’s presentation of ‘Could It Be Magic’ that brought the house down. It was a reaction, some said, that had Midler livid.
“He brought a claque down there of people,” said a friend. “And when he sang, they all screamed and yelled and clapped and got on their chairs, so much so that in the reviews the next day, they were talking about how Bette was great and everything, but how the audience had reacted to Barry. She was fit to be tied.”
If so, she gave no evidence of it when, clad in a sarong, she reclaimed the show from Barry, who reintroduced her as “The Pearl of the Pacific”. Obviously it was still Bette the audience loved. The show ended with a curtain call and two standing ovations.
Luckily Barry had had the foresight to pay Carnegie Hall’s sound engineer to make an illicit recording of the show using the Hall’s own sound system. Barry played the tape for Bette a week later when, depressed over the continuing arduous creation of her first album, she called him to commiserate. “I listened to the tape and couldn’t believe it,” Bette said later. “It wasn’t the people, it was the big. It was just so huge …”
While the show was big, in many ways, it seemed it would turn out to be little more than a personal milestone for Midler. It certainly didn’t seem to do anything to help the dismal state of Bette’s first album, which was still struggling to be born. Ahmet Ertegun had heard Joel Dorn’s efforts with Bette, and he wasn’t happy. Drummer Lee Gurst had first known Joel Dorn as the brother of a childhood friend. “Joel is probably one of the finest jazz producers in the world,” says Gurst. “But Joel was probably coming from an Aretha Franklin model, and that wasn’t right for Bette.”
As Barry had feared, Dorn had wrung the life out of Bette’s performance, leaving behind a perfectly pleasant but completely bland shadow of the Bette Midler whose frenetic power attracted audiences. It was the Bette Midler who’d gotten two standing ovations at Carnegie Hall those people knew and loved. What Dorn was proposing to present to them was, as Manilow later put it, “delicate as china, cool as a cucumber, boring as shit”.
Taking the Carnegie Hall tape to Ahmet Ertegun’s office, Barry watched Ertegun’s reaction as he listened to most of the tape. Finally, according to Manilow, Ertegun said, “That’s what Bette Midler should sound like! That’s the performer I signed.”
Ertegun wanted a record that reflected the Bette Midler who’d had audiences howling and standing on their chairs that night
at the Downstairs. Hadn’t Barry been instrumental in creating that frenzy? Barry could feel it: once again, a golden opportunity had walked up to him and taken him by the hand. All he had to do was follow. It didn’t matter what he had – or hadn’t – done before. All that mattered was what he knew he could do. And he knew he could do this. So, casting aside any personal doubts he might have had, he told Ertegun, “I can produce the album for her.”
Though Barry had been upset when Bette hadn’t fought for his inclusion in the beginning of her album’s creation, being handed the project now seemed even more sweet. “The fact was,” says Lee Gurst, “it wasn’t going well and they finally said, All right, get Manilow. And it was not an act of desperation, but driven by need. Nobody knew what to do the way Barry did. So he went in.”
Indeed, Barry had worked with Bette long enough to know that nothing turned her on like performing in front of a live audience. Unlike her stage performances, recording a song in a studio can be a lonely experience. Often all the instrumental tracks have already been laid down by musicians, sometimes days before the singer comes in to add the vocal. Then the vocalist, standing in a small booth and wearing headphones to hear the instrumental tracks, sings the song to a lone microphone rather than performing it for a reactive human audience. Given the process, it’s no wonder that Midler, whose energy was derived from the response of her audiences, came off sounding, in Dorn’s production (and in Barry’s words), “boring as shit”.
To remedy this, Barry did all he could to recreate in the studio the feel of a live performance stage. He hung theatrical lighting and invited an audience of friends into the studio. Perhaps more importantly, he got rid of the dozens of outside instrumentalists and vocalists Joel Dorn had used on ‘Do You Want to Dance?’,3 ‘Hello In There’, ‘Am I Blue’, ‘Friends’ and ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ and replaced them with Bette’s own troupe of musicians – Barry on piano, Michael Federal on bass, and Kevin Ellman on drums (with the sole addition of Dickie Frank on guitar), along with The Harlettes – Melissa Manchester, Merle Miller, and Gail Kantor. With this assemblage of old friends, Bette performed ‘Chapel Of Love’, ‘Superstar’, ‘Daytime Hustler’, ‘Leader Of The Pack’, ‘Delta Dawn’ and ‘Friends’.
Barry Manilow Page 10