“From the outset, we knew it was going to work,” Barry later wrote of the session. “As soon as Bette could feel and react and play to a live audience, the previously missing energy was there. Ahmet, who was in the control booth, kept giving me the thumbs-up sign. Even Bette was having a good time.”
Barry would later go back and add horns and strings to ‘Superstar’. Hearing his arrangement of the song, with the additional instrumentation, played back to him, complete, for the first time, was the moment, Manilow has said, “that got me into the record business for real.”
“I knew then and there,” he wrote, “that I wanted to feel that kind of thrill again and again, and that I would do everything I could to make a career for myself in records.”
3 It’s notable that background vocals on ‘Do You Want To Dance?’ were provided by Tender Loving Care (Renelle Broxton, Deirdre Tuck and Beverly McKenzie) fronted by Cissy Houston, Whitney Houston’s mother.
Chapter Sixteen
The Divine Miss M was released in November 1972 and, that same month, Bette gave her final final performance at the Continental Baths. Midler was upset because she felt that Continental Bath’s owner Steve Ostrow had taken advantage of her recent celebrity by overcrowding the venue. “When I looked out and saw how many people that bastard Ostrow had packed into that place, I was sick,” Midler was quoted as saying in a February 1973 article in Rolling Stone. “It must have been a hundred degrees the way he packed those boys in. At first we couldn’t even get through the crowd to get back to the dressing room.”
Ostrow insisted that it was Bette who came to him and asked for the date at the Baths, not the other way around, and that she would have been even more upset if the place hadn’t been packed for the occasion. But Midler’s new manager – and lover – Aaron Russo, stated quite plainly that Ostrow’s motivations had nothing to do with any consideration for Bette. “[Bette] needs the Baths like a hole in the head, right?” he told the Rolling Stone reporter. “But we agreed to do one last show as a favour. So what does Ostrow do? He decides to make a killing. He throws us to the lions.”
Midler’s new association with Russo was not a happy one for anyone, including the two at the centre of the storm. Russo had set his sights on Bette when he’d first seen her on The Tonight Show in 1970, but it wasn’t until he – and his wife – saw Bette in person at The Bitter End that he was able to meet her. He was, from that moment on, said Bill Hennessy, “conspicuous by his presence”. Looking back on their meeting later, Bette would recall, “Aaron was very forceful. And at that point in time, I just wanted to be looked after.” Russo proceeded to look after Bette to the extent that he nearly suffocated her, and certainly alienated all those around them.
In October 1972, just before the release of The Divine Miss M, Barry was asked to provide some music for a Shasta Cola commercial, on which he would also sing. Melissa Manchester, still one of Bette’s Harlettes, and Valerie Simpson, later of Ashford and Simpson fame, also provided vocals for the commercial, as did seasoned singer/musician Ron Dante.
“I was a jingle singer in New York City at the time,” recalls Dante, of his first meeting with Barry Manilow. “I’d had a bunch of hit records before that, and I was basically doing a lot of jingle singing, a lot of oohs and aahs. I was booked on a session for the company called Gavin and Wallershcein, and Barry was working for them; I’d not met him.”
In fact, Dante’s career at that point, beyond mere jingle singing, had included dozens of singles and albums, among which was the smash hit ‘Sugar, Sugar’, a song which had ridden the crest of the Top 40 charts for weeks and had been voted Song of the Year in 1969. While the song was credited to the cartoon group The Archies, it was actually Ron’s voice providing every vocal part for the record.
“It was great!” says Dante, of the Shasta recording session with Barry. “We sang the commercial; it was a really good spot as I remember it. Barry’s arrangement was terrific. He was a really good arranger, and a super nice guy – just a really nice musician, friendly, talented.” Barry mentioned to Ron that he was working with Bette Midler, whom Ron hadn’t yet heard, but had certainly heard of. But Barry made it clear to Ron that he had ambitions beyond Bette’s purview. “He knew me from my previous work,” says Dante, “so at the end of the session he said, ‘I want to be a recording artist. Would you come over and listen to some of my songs?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’”
A couple of days later Ron gave Barry a call and arranged to meet at Barry’s West 27th Street apartment. With the recent addition to his household of his first grand piano, Barry had outgrown the studio apartment with the shared gardens, and had moved instead into a larger, two-bedroom apartment directly across the street. “It was very nice,” Dante recalls. “It was a nice building, nice apartment, he had his piano there, and he seemed to be ensconced. He seemed very happy there at the time.”
Barry’s poise in the studio during their first meeting had made a deep impression on Ron. “I was impressed with him as a person. I thought he was a terrific guy, and he was just bursting with talent, there was no doubt about it,” Ron says. “He had something. I had come across lots of piano players and arrangers and singers in my career who said, I’m great! Listen to me!, and most of them are okay. But Barry definitely stood out.”
During that first visit to Barry’s apartment, Barry played and sang for Ron ‘I Am Your Child’, ‘Could It Be Magic’ and ‘Sweetwater Jones’. Already an experienced producer, Ron immediately started envisioning what they could do with the songs in a recording session. “I said, these are great!” Dante recalls. “I loved ‘I Am Your Child’, I loved ‘Could It Be Magic’. I said, ‘This could win a Grammy.’”
For fun, Barry also played for Ron a recording that his Grampa Joe had made for a quarter at a Broadway Record-It booth when Barry was four or five years old. “It was just a goof,” says Ron, of Barry’s motivation for playing him the old acetate recording. “He said, ‘First record I ever made as a kid!’ He thought it was very funny.” Ron could hear Joe Manilow, with his Yiddish accent, trying to persuade the uncooperative child to “Sing, Barry, sing!” His constant pleas for Barry to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to his cousin Dennis were met alternately with stubborn silences and squeaky refusals – “No! No!” Finally, his recording time running out, Joe had been forced to sing the song on his own. “[Barry] said, ‘Yeah, my grandfather’s quarter was running out and I would not sing,’” says Dante. “I thought it was hysterical. And I said to him, ‘The first record we do with you, we should use that. If we ever do an album, we should start it off with that cut.’”
Barry asked Ron, “Do you think I could be a recording artist?” Dante had no doubt at all. “After listening to him sing, I said, ‘Of course you could.’” So Barry said, “Let’s go in and make records together.” Within two weeks they were in the studio.
While Ron Dante does agree that Barry had not originally envisioned himself as a singer, by the time Barry and Ron booked a recording studio to make some demos, there was absolutely no doubt in Ron’s mind who the star of the sessions would be. “Barry’s often said that in interviews, that there was a toss-up between him singing and me singing,” says Dante. “But I was never in doubt that these were his songs, his tracks and his career, and he was going to sing it. I not for a second thought that I would sing ‘Sweet Life’ or ‘I Am Your Child’ or ‘Could It Be Magic’. It never entered my mind, and he never mentioned it to me. I always felt that, right from the beginning, he was going to be the artist.” Dante’s career as a vocalist had often kept him quite anonymous, either singing jingles, uncredited, or providing vocals for fictitious groups, like The Archies. Even so, he’d been quite successful at these endeavours. But what Barry was after was something else. “This was a different type of career,” says Dante, of Barry’s aspirations at that point. “This was something different. I knew Barry was something very special in what he was going to be doing.”
When it came time to shop t
he completed demos to record companies, it seemed a toss-up between going first to Bette’s label, Atlantic, or to Barry’s former label, Bell. Barry and Ron both knew Irv Biegel, vice president of Bell Records – Barry from his experience with Featherbed, and Ron from his previous dealings with the music business in general, which had brought him in contact with Biegel many times. But Barry had worked most recently with Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records when Barry had stepped in to finish producing The Divine Miss M. It was for this very reason, however, that Ron recommended against approaching Ertegun with their demos. “I thought Barry’s career would be squashed for the sake of Bette Midler’s career,” says Dante. “I said let’s go somewhere where you’re the king of the record company, where if you succeed, they’re looking to build you. I like Bell Records, and they like you.”
So the two went to see Bell president Larry Utall, and Biegel, both of whom loved what they had done. “He could see the future,” says Dante, of Biegel’s reaction to their demos. “And he saw that Barry had talent. He said, ‘Let’s go cut some singles, let’s go put out some of these things you’re cutting.’”
Barry was understandably excited to be offered a singles deal, this time more on his own terms. Explains Dante, “He was finally on his way with a legitimate producer who was not forcing him into a role he didn’t want to be in, like Featherbed, or doing pop confections.”
After ending 1972 with a rollicking New Year’s Eve performance at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall, during which Bette had risen to the stage, via elevator platform, wearing nothing but a diaper and a strategically placed sash proclaiming the new year, Aaron Russo had taken Bette away for a much needed vacation. Barry took advantage of this down time to put together an exhibition for himself to promote the singles he and Ron were doing with Bell, with the end goal of convincing Bell that, in Barry’s words, “I could put on an entertaining show of my own.” The venue Barry chose was one that had worked so well for Bette in the past – The Continental Baths.
Barry put everything he had into producing the showcase. He hired studio musicians to back him, paid for a sound system, and again took advantage of Bette’s absence by hiring the temporarily idle Harlettes to back him. He prepared six songs, including the newly arranged ‘Could It Be Magic’ and a slightly altered version of ‘Friends’, as a nod to Bette. Ron would do an updated version of his Archies hit, ‘Sugar, Sugar’, and they put together a medley of some of the commercial jingles both Ron and Barry had either written or performed. “I reasoned that the music would be so strong and solid that the executives at Bell would never even know that I had no idea what I was doing as a performer,” Manilow later wrote.
“We invited the fans, of course, and the music community to come down,” says Ron Dante, “especially the heads of Bell Records, at the time, Larry Utall and IrvBiegel. I think Ahmet Ertegun was also in the audience that night. Barry did basically what he was going to turn into his first album of material. And it was a smash show.”
Over 700 people packed the Baths to see Barry’s showcase, which the crowd greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm. “The show was so successful that night,” Dante recalls. “There were lot of people, and they were all having a great time. It was a wonderful musical set. I remember thinking, this is magical how good this came out, and how well Barry came off. He was really prepared to come out as a solo artist that night. And he did. And the people recognised it.”
Proof of that recognition was soon made evident. Attorney Miles Lourie called Barry the next day to let him know that Bell was offering Barry the album deal he’d been hoping for. And even though this was, indeed, the goal he’d been set on achieving, now, when it was within his reach, Barry hesitated.
Manilow has stated that he initially decided to turn the offer down, feeling that, soon to be 30, he was “too old to begin another career”. Indeed, there’s a big difference between being part of a larger act – Jeanne and Barry, Bette and Barry – and being the centre of attention. It’s an enormous responsibility to know that the livelihood of dozens, sometimes scores of people rest upon what you alone do, and whether or not you succeed in doing it. But what had Barry been working toward all these years, if not this? In retrospect, it seems hard to imagine it was a chance Barry would let pass by. “They predicted such huge success for me,” wrote Manilow, “that even I began to become a little excited about performing and singing … How could I turn this opportunity down?”
Manilow also dealt with the problem of feeling “too old” for a new career by simply turning back the chronological odometer a bit. “When all of this started,” explains Lee Gurst, “and it began to look like Barry was actually going to have a career and some visibility, it didn’t seem appropriate to be into his thirties, he decided. And so he picked 1946 and he knocked three years off his age.” Journalists began faithfully reporting the amended birthdate, which is to this day often listed in official publications as Manilow’s actual birth year. “Year after year these things get reported as gospel because they all go back to the same one or two sources,” laughs Gurst. “Every June 17 on television I hear, Today’s birthdays – Barry Manilow is such and such, and I go, No, he’s not!”
Everything seemed set to move forward. And then Bette returned from vacation, ready to take her troupe of musicians out on tour.
Chapter Seventeen
It wasn’t just his anticipation of Bette’s angry reaction that made Barry dread giving her the news that he was going to be unable to go with her on tour. Barry had now been working with Bette for nearly three years and felt – quite justifiably – largely responsible for the success of her show. It was, of course, Bette’s talent and raw energy that drew in the crowds. But it was Barry who had worked so hard to channel that talent and energy into a smooth, professional stage act. Now that the act was hot, Barry was torn between wanting and needing to strike out on his own, but also feeling the need and desire to stay with the sure thing that Bette, with his help, had become. “It was important to me that she be presented perfectly,” Barry later wrote about what would be Bette’s first major national tour. “I wanted the music, the arrangements, the band, the background singers, the whole show to reflect all the effort I had put in for three years.”
As he’d feared, Bette’s response to what should have been seen as good news for Barry, was less than enthusiastic. “But you can’t sing,” she reportedly said to him when he told her he was planning to do an album for Bell Records. “They’ll laugh at you, Barry. Take my advice, just play the piano.” Bette had also asked Barry to co-produce her second album, as his first effort for her had been such a huge success. It was another powerful inducement to stay in Bette’s orbit rather than striking out on his own.
But Barry was obligated to Bell Records to not only make an album but travel to promote it as well. Bette was doing all she could to persuade Barry to tour with her instead, something that Barry actually wanted to do. Unfortunately, he’d yet to master the art of being in two places at once. Failing a major revision of the basic laws of physics, something had to give.
Barry told Ron Dante that Bette was offering him larger and larger sums of money to go out on the road with her. Ron suggested that Barry counter-offer a compromise. “I suggested to him that he should actually take less money, but try to do something in the middle of her act,” says Dante. Ron said to Barry, “She’s very hot; this would be very good for you to get on the road.”
As with his Carnegie Hall debut, Bette was not thrilled at the thought of sharing her stage with Barry. “She didn’t like it,” says Ron Dante, “but she wanted to keep him. She really loved the way he played piano and did arrangements. He was really crucial to her musical success in the beginning.” Once again, Bette didn’t seem to have much choice. She needed Barry as her music director, and Barry needed the audiences Bette could provide to help him promote his own work, as he’d promised Bell Records he would do. So it was agreed that, on this tour, Barry would open Bette’s second act with a fe
w of his own numbers. “I think she did it begrudgingly,” says Dante. “She didn’t do it with an open heart.”
Melissa Manchester had left The Harlettes rather abruptly some months before.4 Charlotte Crossley replaced Melissa and was immediately struck by the tension of the situation she had stepped into, tension which seemed to be caused mainly, as far as Charlotte could see, by the highly charged relationship between Bette and the incredibly demanding and possessive Russo. “It was nutty,” Crossley told an interviewer, of Russo and Midler’s relationship. “Continuous drama. We would be rehearsing at Barry’s house, and if Aaron knew she was there, he’d keep calling again and again and they’d be screaming and yelling over the phone. I don’t know how we ever got anything done.”
Prior to Russo’s appearance on the scene, Bette and her group had gotten into the habit of gathering in Bette’s dressing room before performances, just to make sure all were ready and in a good frame of mind to go out and give a fabulous show. Russo put an end to the practice. “He started locking her door,” said Crossley, “because he was jealous of that, he couldn’t have that – he wasn’t part of it, he couldn’t contribute to that the way we could. He felt very competitive with us.”
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