5 Clive Davis has always remained exciting and controversial – and successful – as evidenced by this Fox News item which ran on December 14, 2000: “Here in the real world, [Clive] Davis was ousted from his post as founder and grand poobah of Arista Records on June 30th after nine months of public wrangling. He started J Records on September 1st, and now he’s got a No. 1 single. The two executives who forced him out were themselves forced out of parent company Bertelsmann Music Group last month. And you know, with Clive, this is only the beginning.”
6 He was right. The show was A Chorus Line which opened on Broadway in 1975 and closed 6,137 performances later, in 1990.
Chapter Twenty
By the mid-Seventies, American culture was ready to roll over and play placid, if not dead. And why not? The country had travelled over a rocky road of late, and the nation as a whole was weary of the bumpy ride.
While the Sixties had given the country “free love”, “free love”, in turn, had given the country a nasty case of venereal disease, with Federal health officials reporting some 2.3 million new cases of gonorrhea in 1972, as well as 100,000 new cases of infectious syphilis, the biggest increase for either disease since the introduction of antibiotics. Free love, it seemed, wasn’t quite so free after all. And, as though confirming the price that must be paid for all pleasure, Jim Morrison, the last of a rock and roll trinity rounded out by Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, tanked in a Paris bathtub in 1971, the victim of a good time which had proven itself just a bit too good.
Nineteen seventy-three saw the official end of the Vietnam war, and what looked to be the beginning of the end of President Richard Nixon. Nixon’s insistence that “I am not a crook” would ultimately prove to be somewhat less than truthful after the Supreme Court forced release of tapes and transcripts of Oval Office conversations which revealed a cover-up first broken by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post. Five days after release of the tapes, Nixon resigned in disgrace, replaced by Vice President Gerald Ford, a man so bland and non-threatening as to make Mickey Mouse look like Mack the Knife. Nonetheless, Ford boldly, though unconvincingly, declared, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”
Comedian Chevy Chase, on the new late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live, made an immediate hit with the show’s audience by skewering the clumsy new president, who had an unfortunate habit of often tripping over his own feet. “I didn’t need to do much to make him look silly,” says Chase. “But he was also not a helluva lot brighter than a bundt cake.”
Proving Clive Davis’s admonition to Barry Manilow that a hit album needed only a hit single to make it sell, there were 35 different number one pop singles in 1974, the most ever for a single year. Reflecting the difficult transition from the “you say you want a revolution” attitude of the Sixties to the “please, god, just let it stop” surrender of the Seventies, the singles being sold were all over the spectrum, from teeny-bop pop tunes like the musical soap opera ‘Billy, Don’t Be A Hero’ by Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods, to Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s polished hard rock ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’, to John Denver’s nearly comatose ‘Sunshine On My Shoulders’. With so many hit singles to choose from, it’s no wonder that the most popular albums being snapped up by the American record buying public were “greatest hit” type collections, such as Elton John’s Greatest Hits, the top selling album of 1974.
While the Vietnam war had ended on paper in 1973, the true end for Americans came when US helicopters evacuated 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese from Saigon, ending a “conflict” that had cost 1.3 million Vietnamese and 56,000 American lives, leaving Cambodia and South Vietnam to Communist forces. For the first time in its history of marching confidently off to war and marching home again, unfailingly victorious, Americans this time couldn’t really answer the question, What were we fighting for? Asked of Vietnam, the only answer seemed to be, For about fourteen years.7
“Nineteen seventy-five was probably the tipping point,” says Rolling Stone writer P.J. Rourke. “We’re finally realizsing the Sixties didn’t work out, and that we have given up previous beliefs but haven’t acquired new ones that are worth anything.”
Even the Jefferson Airplane, who, in the Sixties, had admonished the world to “Go ask Alice” in their psychedelic heyday had now decided to flow with the more mellow times, dubbing themselves the Jefferson Starship and finding a hit with their laid-back ballad ‘Miracles’. Band member Paul Kantner is defensive about the group’s decision to roll over and play dead rather than actually being dead, a victim of changing times. “I’m a musician,” Kantner told VH1, “and I get to play whatever the fuck I want. And if you don’t like it, well, fuck you.”
“People were tired of the bad thoughts, the depressing thoughts, the cynical thoughts,” says Toni Tennille. Tennille, with her husband Daryl Dragon, formed the successful duo Captain & Tennille, whose sugary song ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ was the single biggest hit of 1975. “I still think that in a lot of people’s hearts they wanted to feel good, one more time.”
“It was so contrived!” protests author Legs McNeil, co-editor of the chronicle Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, of the fizzy Seventies sound that was rapidly rising from the ruins of the Sixties. “It was crap! There wasn’t an authentic emotion in any of that.”
But the people of America were surrounded by harsh reality, and the last thing they needed in the mid-Seventies was more “authentic emotion”. They had just limped through a disastrous war; one out of every ten Americans was unemployed; inflation was increasing by 12% a year, the fastest rise since the Great Depression. Gas stations were running out of fuel; the price of meat had rendered the Sunday pot roast a luxury item.
“The American people are turning sullen,” said Diane Christensen, Faye Dunaway’s character in Paddy Chayefsky’s movie Network. “They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the Inflation, the Depression; they’ve turned off, shot up and fucked themselves limp and nothing helps …” It’s little wonder, then, that a weary nation, clutching their Pet Rocks, frequently consulting their mood rings, and desperately begging each other to “Have a Nice Day!”, was ready for the reassuring placidity of Barry Manilow.
Barry’s act now consisted of Alan Axelrod, who augmented Barry’s keyboard work, Sid McGinnis on guitar, Steve Donaghey on bass, and Lee Gurst on drums and percussion. Bette’s Harlettes had been replaced by Barry’s own singers, Debra Byrd, Ramona Brooks, and Lee Gurst’s favourite, Reparata, a.k.a. Lorraine Mazzola. “The Flashy Ladies”, as they were first dubbed, hadn’t been born without a bit of drama.
“Sharon, Robin and I went out with Barry while Bette was in Europe,” says Harlette Charlotte Crossley. It was no secret that Barry had taken advantage of The Harlettes’ down time during Bette’s vacation to use the backup trio for his own show. But after Bette’s return and the group’s final tour with Barry as pianist/musical director, Barry needed to put together his own group of backup singers and musicians. “So,” Barry told an interviewer, “I figured as long as I had decided on that type of group for Bette, I decided on that type of group for me because they sounded best behind me.” So Barry approached Harlette Charlotte Crossley. “Later on,” Crossley told an interviewer, “Barry was putting together another backup group of his own and he wanted me to join it. Bette was putting together her new show, and she wanted me, too.”
Apparently Barry wasn’t one for the hard sell. Recalls Crossley, Barry said to her, “ ‘I really want you, but I know that [Bette’s] gonna offer you a lot more money. I respect that – and I know that you love her.’” Charlotte promised Barry she’d get back to him that day.
After her discussion with Barry, Charlotte arrived home to find that Bette had been frantically trying to reach her. “I sensed that as soon as she found out Barry wanted me, her attitude was, ‘I’m not gonna let her go!’” says Crossley. Charlotte got Bette on the phone and told the desperate diva to
calm down, Charlotte would be right over to talk with her. “Why can’t you tell me over the phone?” said Bette. Charlotte said, “I’ll see you in a little while.” When she arrived it was a difficult confrontation but Crossley’s commitment remained solid. She went on to perform with Bette on Broadway in Midler’s hit Bette Midler’s Clams On The Half Shell Revue.
Despite his efforts to woo at least one of The Harlettes into his act, even as ‘Mandy’ hit the number one spot on record charts nationwide, Barry was still struggling to gain recognition as Barry Manilow, solo performer, rather than as an appendage to Bette Midler. In the fall of 1975, when an interviewer asked Barry if there was any possibility of Barry and Bette working together again in any capacity, Barry’s immediate answer was a blunt, “No.” Then he softened his answer by citing his lack of time since ‘Mandy’s success, then added, “It’s too soon for me to go out with Bette as a duet. There’s not enough people who know what I do and she still wants to do it by herself. Maybe. I don’t know, in a couple of years we’ll wind up with Bette and Barry.” Then, alluding to his often rocky relationship with Bette, Barry outlined the shape of a heart in the air with his finger and added, “In a little heart, they get in the middle of a boxing ring …”
There’s no doubt it was difficult for Barry to let go of Bette. There might have been some residual feeling of unworthiness on Barry’s part to carry an act on his own, but, by his own admission, he’d gotten more comfortable with performing and interacting with the audience as the success of his second album had made it necessary. “I was thrown out from behind the piano!” he laughingly told an interviewer. But his strength, he still felt, was in being a strong arranger, someone who could put together such a solid show that, as he put it, “if I fainted on the stage nobody should know it. The act would be so good, so strong, that nobody would realise that I was just dying up there if it happened.”
For all Barry’s self-deprecation, co-producer and friend Ron Dante never doubted Barry’s ability to carry a show. “He’s a consummate stager,” says Dante. “Every time you see him perform, he’s designing the way it looks, the way you’re being exposed to it. He’ll bring in people that do the dances and do this and that, but basically he’s controlling most of it.” In fact, early on in their collaboration Barry said to Ron, “I have a third eye; I can see what I look like on stage, and I will design it so I look like the star.” Says Dante, “I thought it was very interesting that he could actually step outside of himself and look at what he was doing. I said, that is a great quality. If you can do that and be talented and fixit and make it better, that’s a quality that’ll take you far.”
Barry’s vision for staging his show didn’t end with himself. He was involved in every aspect of what went on both onstage and off, right down to his backup singers’ make-up and dress. “Barry wanted glamour in his show,” says Lady Flash member Debra Byrd. “When he would get ready to do shows, he would say, ‘Debra, your makeup is too tasteful. You have the look of a secretary.’” Barry himself had been using stage makeup since he worked the smallest dives with Jeanne Lucas in the mid-Sixties, and he showed his girls how to apply the proper amount of colour to their faces. “We were in the dressing room having this tug of war,” says Byrd. “ ‘More red!’ ‘No!’ ‘YES! You need MORE RED!’”
But his backup singers soon learned to trust Barry’s instincts about such things as make-up and clothing. “Barry knows how to anticipate trends,” Reparata has said. “We saw it when he would say to us, ‘Those shoes with the spike heels that you don’t want to wear, everybody’s going to be wearing them soon.’ And sure enough, the next thing you know. He did that with music, he did that with his whole, entire act.” As though confirming what Barry told Ron about his “third eye”, Reparata went on to say, “He’s also the first person I’ve seen, as far as live production, who can see a song on stage, as well as how it’s going to sound.”
“So we put it together,” Barry explained, of his early stage show, “and it came out real strong, and it gave me a foundation to be able to make mistakes as a performer, because the basis was so strong, the music and the girls singing and the band, even if I did get lost in it, the act would still look powerful. I didn’t want to give the whole burden to me, because I’d never done it before, and yet here I was headlining in Philadelphia, and headlining all over the place. I had never done that before. Little by little, I got into it. Now I really enjoy it; I really enjoy performing. I like the music, and I like making the music, and I like the audience reacting; because I’m doing it for them. So it’s a nice trip.”
At this stage of the game, it was a nice road trip. Arista wanted to make the most of the success of ‘Mandy’ and, by association, the success of Barry Manilow II, as the second album had been cleverly dubbed. So the record company sent Barry and his group out on the road. The show was received enthusiastically in 1975 as it made its way from the midwest to the west coast. The tour’s success had Barry flying high. But the return to New York and an appearance at the Westbury Music Fair would quickly bring him back to earth again, with a thud.
Thanks to the corrosive effects of time and the vagaries of perception, there are differing accounts of exactly what happened at West-bury in May of 1975, but all agree on the main fact: Harold Keliher, the father Barry hadn’t seen in over 15 years, arrived backstage wanting to see his son.
Friend and drummer Lee Gurst tells his version of the incident: “It was very awkward. Not openly angry, but very, very strained. The road manager came to the dressing room after the show – it was on Long Island – and said, ‘Your dad’s here and wants to say hello.’ I was going to excuse myself. I thought, this isn’t something he’d want anybody around for. And he said, ‘No, no, no, stay put.’ Not in the sense of, ‘You don’t need to bother,’ but ‘It’s not going to get intimate and personal and I have no reason for you not to be here; I want somebody around.’ And they met at the door for maybe a minute. His father said, ‘Congratulations. You did a good job.’ And Barry said, ‘Thanks.’ And ‘Well, take care.’ ‘Yeah, you too.’ And that was it. Barry would often, if there was a meeting or a talk or something, and that person would leave the room, then Barry would make a comment under his breath, like, ‘what an asshole’ or something like that. And as I recall he said some kind of remark about his father. It was ‘what a something or other’ – I don’t remember the word; it was certainly dismissive and perhaps even very … Barry was being tough. And he could make the statement this wasn’t going to get to him, and that’s how it went. As briefly and quietly as all of that, and then it was over. I mean I don’t think it lasted sixty seconds. There was no tearful reunion.”
Manilow’s account of the incident was quite a bit different. While Lee Gurst remembers several people being present during Barry’s meeting with his father, Barry has said that it was only himself and Linda Allen who were in the dressing room at the time.
Barry had met Linda Allen many years previously, when he was working as musical director for Callback! at CBS, and Linda was working as production assistant for the same show. Though frequently identified as Barry’s romantic interest (“Linda was very enamoured in the beginning,” says Jeanne Lucas), in truth the two had developed a trusting, platonic friendship over the years, often living together. According to friends, the arrangement provided not only stability and companionship for Barry, but also a convenient cover story for those who would insist on questioning his sexual orientation. “Linda was a good friend who I think was supportive in the extreme, who didn’t want anything in terms of his work,” says Lee Gurst. “Linda didn’t want to go on the road, Linda didn’t want to be a musician or a writer or be in the spotlight. You know, she was just there to be supportive and not looking to get anything in terms of a career. She had her own work and she did very well with that. She was occasionally around on the road, though not very often. You know, a big concert, a special event, something like that. Nice, bright lady.” Ron Dante concurs. “They were rea
lly close. She was a hoot. A very funny lady, a pleasure to be around. One of those people you meet when you go, ‘Loved her, hated him.’ You loved her. She was one of those girls. I thought she was the best thing for Barry. Great sense of humour, very comical, very sensitive to him. He adored her.”
According to Barry, he and Linda were alone in his dressing room after the show, Barry in the middle of undressing, when an older man opened the door and stuck his head in and announced he was Barry’s father. (“That wasn’t likely to happen at a Barry Manilow concert,” says Lee Gurst, in response to this part of Barry’s account. “Security was very tight.”)
“I just wanted to see ya one more time. You did a good job out there,” Harold said, according to Barry’s account of the incident. Then, Barry says, he thanked his father and invited him in, an invitation Harold declined. “Nope. Don’t wanna bother you.” In his autobiography, Barry wrote, “We stood and stared at each other like that for a long minute. Then, ‘Gotta go. Bye.’ And he was gone.”
“No, no, no, no!” says Harold’s widow, Annie Keliher, when she hears Barry’s version of the incident. “Barry threw my husband out that night. He did not welcome him. I’ll swear on a bible. His attitude was Who needs you? You’re never around! Get out! And that’s when I understand Linda, the way my husband put it, she was saying, ‘Please, Barry, talk to him,’ and Barry more or less said to her, ‘Keep out of it.’”
Both seem to agree on that fact that the encounter upset Linda. (Lee Gurst doesn’t remember Linda being in the room at all.) “Watching Linda cry made me want to get emotional, too,” Manilow wrote of the incident, “but I couldn’t. I didn’t feel anything for this man.”
This much Annie Keliher doesn’t doubt. “Of course. That I can understand. Absolutely,” she says. In all the years since Barry was 16 and he and his father had briefly worked together at Schaeffer Brewery, Harold Keliher had never made any attempt to contact his son, nor had Barry made any attempt to contact his father. As Barry pointed out, to do so would have upset the family and he “didn’t want to make waves”, the exact same phrase Annie Keliher uses to explain Harold’s reasons for not pursuing his son. Barry’s grandmother, says Annie, was so violently opposed to Harold’s presence in Barry’s life, that Harold eventually caved in to her pressure. “When Kelly would bring up Barry,” Annie says, “he would always say he had to get away from Edna, they had to drop it because of her mother. The friction was terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible.” Instead Harold had simply resigned himself to the loss of his first son, pouring everything he had into loving Tim, the son he and Annie had together, as well as fathering Annie’s son and daughter from her previous marriage. “I often wondered how Barry must have felt,” says Annie Keliher. “Here my father is leaning toward three children and he neglected me.”
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