Barry had no time for these tensions. He and Ron had worked out a co-producer arrangement for Barry’s first album, and Barry was splitting his time in the summer months before the start of Bette’s tour between recording his own album, co-producing, with Arif Mardin, Bette’s second album, creating and rehearsing a show for Bette and the new Harlettes, and hiring his own representation. Dick Fox, from the William Morris Agency, had worked with Barry and Jeanne in the early days, and now became Barry’s agent. Barry also made the decision to retain attorney Miles Lourie as his manager, a decision which caused Ron Dante some concern. “Barry came to me and said, ‘I’m going to make Miles Lourie my manager,’” Dante recalls. Ron pointed out to Barry that Miles had never managed anybody before, which could present a problem somewhere down the line. But Barry was adamant. “No, he’ll fight for me, he’ll be tough for me.” So, says Dante, “that was Barry’s decision. All I know is Miles is a tough customer to deal with.” But tough was what Barry needed. “Barry used to describe Miles as ‘my son-of-a-bitch’,” says Manilow’s friend, drummer Lee Gurst. “Barry could be a nice guy, and Miles was out there intercepting, the one who would say no, so that Barry could always just say yes. And that’s not unusual. Lots of managers do that. So Barry was always the nice, sweet guy and Miles was always the one to make demands.”
The tour started in August, and Barry quickly learned that he was going to have to struggle for his solo time on stage. The first venue they played, the Merriwether Post Pavilion near Washington DC, was packed to its 15,000 person capacity. The piano was so far back on the stage that Barry knew he would be out of the sight of most of the audience during his spot at the top of Bette’s second act, and he and Aaron Russo got into a heated argument in front of everyone over having the stagehands move the piano farther downstage during the intermission. In the end Russo grudgingly acquiesced, but, to Barry, it seemed a bad omen for the rest of the tour.
The ongoing tensions between Bette and Russo were taking a toll on Bette and affecting her behaviour with the rest of her group, making for a highly charged atmosphere. “There was constant fighting, frequent screaming matches,” wrote author James Spada in his book The Divine Bette Midler, “between Bette and Aaron, The Harlettes and Aaron, Barry and Bette, even Bette and The Harlettes.” Sometimes Bette would change the order of his carefully constructed show, onstage, in the middle of a performance, which made Barry squirm. “Oh, Mr Music,” she’d taunt him. “Let’s not do ‘Surabaya Johnny’ tonight, let’s do ‘Superstar’. On the spot, Barry would have no choice but to go along with Bette’s wishes. But after the show, writes Spada, “there would be a screaming match backstage, with ashtrays thrown and threats of strangulation from Barry.”
While the audience, too, sometimes became the victims of the constant stress Bette was feeling, the shows were, for the most part, smash hits. While in Los Angeles the group again visited The Tonight Show, during which Bette, Barry and The Harlettes performed a live version of ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ which brought the audience to their feet in a thunderous ovation. Comedian David Steinberg, scheduled to appear after Bette, reportedly turned to the person next to him and said, “She’s the worst thing that can happen to you in show business. It’s like following a moonwalk.”
Barry himself certainly found this to be true. If Bette had initially been afraid that Barry’s spot at the top of her second act would steal her audience, she needn’t have worried. “It’s like opening for the Statue of Liberty,” Barry told Ron Dante. Says Dante, “For anybody to try to get up and sing in the middle of her act was impossible. When Barry came on, people went to the restroom. But the quarter of the audience that stayed really enjoyed his three songs.”
In Denver that balance began to shift a bit. Bette and her group were playing at the Red Rocks Amphitheater, an outdoor venue carved into the side of natural red rock mountain. Visually the setting was beautiful. But it wasn’t the kind of venue that worked well for Bette. For one thing, the Denver audience was very mellow, sprawled out across the vast property, many sitting on blankets spread across the ground, some toting picnic baskets and drinking wine they’d brought with them. But the main problem was that it was difficult for Bette to gauge audience reaction to what she was doing onstage, as any sound the audience made was diluted by the open air setting. “It’s really hard to work to a crowd when you can’t hear their reaction,” Barry later wrote of that performance, “especially if you’re counting on laughs for your timing.” By the end of the first act, Bette was, as Barry characterised her, “a wreck”.
Though Barry had agreed with Bette early on in the tour that he should not sing the relatively long (nearly seven minutes) ‘Could It Be Magic’ during his performances, at Red Rocks he changed his mind. The decision had been made originally because it was felt the song took too long to build, and Bette’s typical audiences would probably not be held through the entire thing. But the Red Rocks audience seemed, to Barry, to be the perfect group to appreciate the song’s slow build, crashing climax, and gentle denouement. Though Barry hadn’t been performing the song during the tour, he had rehearsed it with the band and The Harlettes, so he knew they would be ready for it. He informed the stage manager that he would be changing his last song and instead performing ‘Could It Be Magic’.
“I sang it to the sky and to the mountains and to Brooklyn,” Barry later wrote of that performance, “and I was lost. Lost in the song.” When he finished, Barry took his bow and tried to start the music signalling Bette’s reappearance for the second act, but the crowd wouldn’t let him. They continued applauding and cheering, bringing a dazed Barry back to his feet for another bow. And then the audience started getting to their feet. “I figured that they were coming back from the restrooms,” Barry joked. But instead they were giving him his first standing ovation.
It was probably a good thing Barry had his Denver triumph to carry him through what was to come in San Francisco.
The San Francisco show had gone well, and the group was expecting to get a rave review in the paper the following morning. Instead, John Wasserman of the San Francisco Chronicle savaged both Bette and Barry, and even had some rather nasty things to say about their audience.
“Mass Mince-In for Midler – Every Gay Blade’s Fantasy,” was the headline that topped the truly devastating piece. “It was amazing,” wrote Wasserman. “The Divine swept from one end of the stage to the other, waving giant fans of pink feathers and hurtling along like a rag doll on speed, her various appendages sprawling in four directions simultaneously, her eyes rolling like marbles in a vacuum, her bountiful breasts, which resemble ostrich eggs dropped into a pair of panty-hose, springing up and down like yo-yos. ‘Oh,’ she cried in mock melodrama, throwing her hand to her forehead, ‘Gross us out, Miss M, gross us out!’ And so my children, gross us out she did for the ensuing two hours.”
Inexplicably, Manilow would later characterise Wasserman’s words as a “rave review” for Bette. One can only assume he meant in comparison to what Wasserman had to say about Barry’s set.
“And lastly,” wrote Wasserman, after he’d finished with Bette, “Barry Manilow has got to go, at least as a featured part of her performance. He is a fine musician, but somewhere along the line someone made the mistake of telling him he could sing. Toward this end, he had a new album out on Bell and treated us to four solo numbers to open the second half.”
Under the heading HALLUCINATION, Wasserman went on to deconstruct not only Barry’s act, but Barry himself, piece by piece.
“Manilow, who has his hair done at the Clip and Snip Poodle Salon, apparently thinks he is a potential star. To underscore this hallucination, he has a piano stand-in, like a movie star, has a lighting and blocking stand-in. This fellow comes out first and hits several notes on the piano to make sure it’s working. It was.
“To open the second half, Manilow swept out on the stage in an all-white Nehru jump-suit. ‘May name is Barry Manilow,’ he gurgled, ‘and I am the captai
n of your flight tonight.’
“Tell that to the Graf Zeppelin.
“His opening number guaranteed instant obscurity and he went down hill from there. The second tune was, incredibly, ‘Cloudburst,’ accompanied by the Harlettes. ‘Cloudburst’ is, of course, the Pointer Sisters hit. For a third-rate singer to come into the Berkeley Community Theater and render ‘Cloudburst’ is approximately equivalent to peddling near-beer in Munich. The third tune [‘Could It Be Magic’] was pathetic. The fourth was titled, apparently, ‘Mama, Can You Hear Me?’ Which needs no comment, save mama’s, which is, ‘Yes, son, and you should wash out your mouth with Black Flag.’”
Writer Bruce Vilanch had joined Bette’s entourage some months prior to the 1973 tour, and provided comic bits for her onstage act. When Ron and Barry had completed recording their first album, Barry had sent Bruce a demo pressing of it. Bruce loved the demo, and sent Barry a note in San Francisco to tell him so. Bruce’s note just happened to arrive on the same day Wasserman’s vicious remarks appeared in the Chronicle. A grateful Barry called Bruce and said, “Thanks, Bruce, your note was the only thing that kept me from the gas pipe.”
Unfortunately, Bruce’s feelings about Barry’s first album were not universal. “We thought we were cutting a Grammy award-winning album,” says Ron Dante. “We were just intent on doing the best album possible on a really average budget at the time.” Indeed, Ron brought to the project his years of experience and Barry brought unlimited talent and enthusiasm. But still, it didn’t seem to be enough. “I used all my expertise and my experience in how to make it sound good,” Dante says, “and Barry used all his wonderful arranging abilities to make it sound great, and of course he sang everything beautifully.” Barry was on the road with Bette, promoting the album to huge crowds around the country. But somehow, even with all the right pieces present, they simply weren’t falling into place.
“We got that album put out,” says Dante, “and it was a failure.” The album’s failure to take off was especially frustrating to Barry, who had taken on so many simultaneous roles – producer, arranger, performer, musical director – just to see the record created and still accommodate Bell’s desire for him to promote it and Bette’s desire for him to continue working with her. At one point Barry called Ron from the road and said, “I’m so disappointed this isn’t going well.” Says Dante, “We didn’t know what was going on.”
But the album was meeting with just enough critical review to keep Bell interested. As Ron had once pointed out, Bell’s Irv Biegel was a visionary, and Irv still saw great things in Barry’s future. His feelings were bolstered by the growing enthusiasm Bette’s audiences were showing for Barry’s 20-minute spots leading Bette’s second act. More attention was being turned on Barry, who now had his own press agent who was getting Barry more and more interviews. Irv Biegel flew out to see one of the shows during the tour and was impressed enough to offer to support Barry should he want to go out to do his own tour. “I began to feel important,” Barry later wrote, “which is dangerous.”
Bette’s tour was to conclude with a much anticipated run on Broadway at the Palace Theater beginning December 3. When tickets for the show went on sale in mid-October of 1973, Midler set a Broadway record for one-day ticket sales at $148,000. It was as if the previous four months of touring had merely been an extended rehearsal session for the real show at the Palace. “We set out to see America,” Bette told the opening night Palace audience, referring to the tour they were now concluding, “and it disintegrated before our very eyes!”
Barry wore a white tuxwith tailcoat for the occasion. The next day New York Times reviewer Ian Dove, a British jazz critic, wrote of Barry’s performance, “He showed, during his three songs, talent in his own right and was genuinely received by the audience. He has also been with Miss Midler since the very beginning and so, for him, too, it was a return to familiar ground.”
Familiar ground landmarked by familiar faces. Barry had invited his old high school friends, Larry and Fred, and their wives to attend. Edna and Willie were there as well, as were Barry’s grandparents, Esther and Joseph Manilow. In a 1976 article for Seventeen magazine, Barry told the interviewer, “Grandpa saw the whole thing, and he got [my] album. Opening night at the Palace, he gave me a standing ovation. My grandmother was sitting next to him and took his hat off when he stood up. I saw that. I was watching. He was a great cat.”
It was important for Barry that the article mentioned Joseph Manilow hearing his grandson’s album and seeing his performance at the Palace because, within two weeks of the December 3 opening, Grampa Joe died. To Barry, it was a devastating loss. “He was the most alive man I ever knew,” Barry later wrote. “He was funny and witty and kind. That’s my Gramps. That’s who I’ll always sing to. That’s who I’ll always remember.”
As Ron Dante had suggested that first day he’d visited Barry’s apartment to listen to his songs, the first cut on Barry’s first album is the scratchy recording of Joe Manilow trying to get Barry to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to his cousin Dennis. “Nobody was doing that on records at that time,” says Dante of his idea to include the recording on Barry’s first album. “I said, that would be unusual, something different. Start an album off with something very personal, from your childhood.” What turned out to be, as Dante characterised it, “just a goof” ended up standing as a loving tribute to the one steady male influence Barry had known through his life up to that time. Decades later, listeners can still pop in a CD and hear Joseph Manilow urging his grandson, “Sing it, Barry! Sing it!”
4 Gail Kantor and Merle Miller would also depart before the start of the tour, replaced by Sharon Redd and Robin Grean.
Chapter Eighteen
Barry’s parting with Bette Midler at the end of her 1973 tour was, in the end, an amicable one, though Bette would later say of Barry’s decision to leave her show, “I was mad as hell at him!”
“When Barry left,” Bruce Vilanch later told an interviewer, “[Bette] was very much at sea musically. He gave the ballads a texture that was missing after he quit. She’s had wonderful people who’ve worked with her, but she hasn’t had anybody who’s given her what Barry did – she has had to do it for herself.”
Even Don York, who took Barry’s place as Bette’s musical director, conceded that it was nearly impossible for anyone to really fill Barry’s shoes in Bette’s act. “It was difficult for Bette to lose Barry. They had a strong communication worked out. It was hard for her to accept someone else’s presence.”
Bette herself spoke wistfully at the time about Barry’s absence. “I really miss Barry,” she told an interviewer, “but I think his success is fabulous.” She did, however, still manage to work a barb or two into the tribute. “I was a little surprised … in fact I was very surprised because there were times when he was working for me – “ then she hastily corrected herself, “working with me – when he would bring me some of his songs that I didn’t like. I would say to him, ‘Why are you singing “Come to where the stallions meet the sun”?’ I can’t stand that! Don’t sing that! I must have thought, of course, that I was the final arbiter of taste. Obviously I wasn’t.”
While Barry was no longer fighting with Bette, he now had to fight with her memory. Bell had provided a generous advance for Barry to prepare and launch his solo tour. But the audiences for which he found himself playing were either completely inappropriate for his type of music, or they were expecting a show similar to Bette’s manic performances, something Barry couldn’t have managed even if he’d wanted to, which he certainly did not.
“He was playing joints where he was opening for jazz people,” says Ron Dante. “And the people would come and not like what he was doing, because he was doing a little jazz but a lot of pop music.” In fact the first show of Barry’s tour was opening for jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard at a small club called Paul’s Mall in Boston. The booking was a disaster, from top – a ceiling with holes in it that dripped rain on the performers – to bott
om – Freddie Hubbard refusing to go on if he had to follow someone who played commercial jingles. Barry persevered and eventually discovered that his shows seemed to work best at the times when he made an effort to step out of himself, to step out from behind the piano, and engage the audience directly. Still, Barry later wrote of that “depressing” first engagement, “I’ll never forget trying to hold the small audience’s attention during ‘I Am Your Child’ while fighting the noise of the bartender’s blender.”
Things were better in Philadelphia, where glowing reviews helped sell tickets. In turn, Barry used the increased revenues, along with his own savings, to hire a sound mixer and shore up the production with a better sound system and stage lighting. “I was still determined to put on a first-class show even though we were playing less than first-class places,” Barry has said. The efforts paid off as the tour continued, winding up back in New York City with a scrapbook’s worth of solid reviews to show for the effort. The final date of the tour in New York was the Bottom Line, where, on opening night, Barry had to appease the audience with some piano music as he found, when he tried to sing, that he’d lost his voice entirely. The problem was cleared up within a day, though, and he was able to complete the engagement to standing ovations.
Things were once again looking promising. Encouraged by Barry’s successes, Irv Biegel and Larry Utall gave the okay for Ron and Barry to begin recording a second album. Barry was excited about the project, and had been busily working with some of his favourite collaborators – Marty Panzer, Enoch Andersen – to create new songs. “I knew exactly what I wanted the album to sound like,” Barry said. “I wanted it to be smart, I wanted it to be musical and inventive. I wanted to say things that affected people.”
But, behind the scenes, there were other events taking place at that moment that were going to profoundly affect a great many people, including Barry and Ron.
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