Now here was Harold, showing up after all these years, trying to horn in on his son’s success. At least, that’s how Barry viewed Harold’s sudden reappearance. “I think he had great bitterness toward his father,” says Ron Dante, of Barry’s feelings about the Westbury incident. “He was insulted by his father showing up, I think. I just got it second hand, but I was there that night, and I know his face was ashen and he was like in shock that this person had showed up, now that he’s a big success, he’s on TV and radio and all that stuff.”
The timing was, indeed, unfortunate, but for entirely different reasons than Barry imagined.
Esther Manilow, the formidable force that had both kept the Manilow family together and torn the Pincus family apart, died from a heart attack in January 1975. “When she died I knew I had lost something very profound,” Barry later wrote. Harold, on the other hand, saw Esther’s death as his first opportunity to reclaim his son, something that had never seemed possible as long as Esther was alive. But by the time Harold got word of Esther’s death, Barry was on the road promoting his second album, a tour that continued into the spring. The first opportunity Harold had to approach his son was after Barry’s return to New York, to perform at the Westbury Music Fair. By then Barry’s success seemed firmly established, and, for that reason, Harold’s motives for wanting to see his son were questioned.
“I didn’t blame Barry,” says Annie Keliher, of Barry’s doubts about Harold’s motives. “In other words, Here you are when I’m rich; why weren’t you there when I needed you? But my husband used to say, ‘It isn’t that; I want to wish him luck.’ I’d say, Kelly, it’s too late, love. It’s too late.”
What Annie does take exception to, though, is the self-pitying tone Barry seems to take over his lack of information about his father. “There are still dozens of questions unanswered,” Manilow wrote of his father in his 1987 autobiography. “So he should ask them!” is Annie Keliher’s immediate response. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I don’t want these damn excuses. He’s a man. No reason he couldn’t pick up the phone.”
Barry had, in fact, kept in contact with Annie over the years, rather pointedly excluding his father from the communication. Annie fondly recalls, after she and Kelly had moved away from New York, getting a call at their Las Vegas home from Barry’s assistant, at the height of Barry’s success, inviting Annie – and only Annie – to attend Barry’s concert at the Sahara Hotel and Casino.
“My husband picked up the phone,” Annie recalls, “and Kelly said, ‘It’s for you.’ It was Barry’s secretary – very nice young man – saying that Barry would like me to attend the show.” Annie was reluctant at first, but Barry’s assistant was persuasive. “Please, come, Barry will be very, very disappointed. Just say you are Anna Keliher when you come up to the door.”
Though undoubtedly hurt at not being included in the invitation, Harold Keliher encouraged his wife to attend. “My husband told me to go and enjoy myself,” she says. “He always talked that way.”
Annie’s name at the door did, indeed, get her VIP treatment. She and her guests (she doesn’t now recall exactly who she ended up taking in lieu of her husband) were escorted to one of the reserved booths at the front of the room, near the stage. Edna was seated at a nearby booth just behind them, with three men, one of whom Annie recognised from their old neighbourhood in Brooklyn. “Edna is making signs she wants you to turn around,” one of Annie’s guests said to her, which rather confused Annie. “What the hell does she want from me?” she responded. When she did turn, Edna gestured for her to come over to their booth. “Stupid, stupid me,” says Annie, rather chagrined now by her response then. “I said to [my guests], ‘I’m not getting up, let her come to me.’” By the time the show ended, Annie had changed her mind but, when she turned, Edna’s booth was already vacant.
As Annie and her guests waited for the crowd to diminish so they could leave, Annie felt a tap on her shoulder. It was Barry’s assistant who said, “Anna, Barry would like to see you backstage.” Annie said no. “I said, ‘I’m not going – I don’t like this,’” Annie explains. “And I meant that this is too much celebrity, I wanna go home.” But the assistant again persevered. “Please, Barry insists that you come backstage.” But Annie was just as adamant. “Look, give my love to Barry and tell him no thank you, but I appreciate the show.”
The assistant retreated, only to return moments later. “We’re still sitting because the place was packed with people,” Annie recalls. “Barry was just starting to get famous. [The assistant] comes back again. He says, ‘Please, please, don’t disappoint Barry.’” This time Annie agreed, leaving her guests and following Barry’s assistant backstage.
“Ever go backstage?” she asks. “It’s eerie. It’s actually eerie, the curtain, the things. And we’re walking and walking, and we hit a certain area, big security guard comes. I guess that was his job. And I’m with Barry’s assistant who tells the guard, ‘This is Barry’s mother.’” Either the guard didn’t know Edna or he didn’t see it as his place to question Barry’s assistant. Either way, he let Barry’s assistant and Barry’s “mother” pass.
“And Barry came out,” Annie recalls. “And he ran to me and he picked me up, kissed me.” Barry had changed quite a bit from the time he was a boy in Brooklyn, playing the accordion with Harold’s grandmother in their one-bedroom flat on Sundays. Now his hair was bleached blond, and, at the moment he kissed Annie, his face was covered in stage make-up. “I said Barry, you look like somebody put your head in cement!” laughs Annie. “Brick colour. Everything was orange!” And he was barefoot, which Annie couldn’t help commenting on in light of Barry’s newfound riches. “I said, ‘Oh, Barry, can’t you afford a pair of slippers? I’m going to get you some.’ And he laughed, ‘Oh, Annie!’”
Annie was invited into the dressing room where she was introduced to the others there. Barry and Annie exchanged pleasantries for a while, then they said their goodbyes. “And that was the last time I spoke to him,” says Annie. He never inquired about his father during their visit.
In his autobiography, Barry writes: “I hear my friends calling their fathers Dad, and I wonder how that word would sound on my tongue. Sometimes I say it to myself and it feels funny. Hi Dad. Hey Pop, I’m home. Happy Father’s Day, Daddy. I wonder sometimes what it would have been like to play ball with him in the park. I wonder what ails him. Does he have the same kind of sensitive stomach I do?”
“No,” says Annie, in answer to the question. Then she goes on to answer all the other questions Barry poses to the general public, though never to the one man who could have answered them the best.
“Does he tan well the way I do?”
“Yes.”
“Is he moody like me?”
“No, my husband was funny as hell.”
“How musical is he?”
“Very! My husband had a voice … if we were out, like at a wedding, and he got up and sang, he’d get a standing ovation. And so was his grandma, Harold’s mother, Anna. Music, music, music – it had to come out on Barry.”
“I stood looking at the empty hallway and trying to think of what I needed from him. I needed him to have been there when I was growing up. And he couldn’t give me that back.”
No, he couldn’t. But he tried, efforts Annie discouraged, knowing them to be futile. When, some time later, Harold decided to attend another of Barry’s appearances at the Las Vegas Hilton, security somehow became alerted to his presence on the ticket line, and guards approached him and told him that Barry had asked for him to leave. “My husband was always with his mouth bragging,” says Annie, “and I just would want to hide in a closet because it was embarrassing, and partly not true. You wouldn’t be standing on line if you were a guest of Barry’s. And something must have gone through security or back to Barry, and security came over and said – this is my husband telling me, like as if he’s sitting here – says, ‘Mr Keliher, please leave, you’re making Barry very, very nervous.’ Politely,
they escorted him, but they actually threw him out.” One look at her husband’s face when he came home that day, and Annie instantly knew what had happened. “I used to say, boy, Kelly, you’re a glutton for punishment.”
Then Annie stresses a point that she has stressed before. “I am not siding with my husband,” she says, though she adds in his defence, “You make mistakes in life, and boy, did he make mistakes, where his son was concerned anyway.” They were mistakes that he couldn’t alter, nor could he let go. “I went through hell with this baloney with Barry and him,” says Annie. “It was ugly, ugly, a lot of times.”
Annie Keliher similarly cautioned her son, Tim, the few times he expressed interest in kindling some sort of relationship with Barry. “I always hollered at my Timmy – stay out of it! Barry will never acknowledge you as a half-brother. Stop making a fool out of yourself.” But Tim’s curiosity about his half-brother was too strong. “He met Barry going backstage somewhere,” Annie recalls, “and that was it, it was very casual. I had warned him, I said, ‘Timmy, why are you starting with Barry? If he was interested in you and it was meant to be, on given occasions you would have met him. But this is stupid. What do you want Barry to do?’ And he went against my wishes. Barry, I understand, was very polite. But it didn’t mean anything.”
But for all his outward indifference toward his father, obviously Barry’s feelings for Harold ran deeper than he wanted to admit. When Harold, already ailing with cancer, was admitted to the hospital in the mid-Eighties for brain surgery, somehow Barry found out.
“I don’t know how Barry found out,” says Annie Keliher, still puzzled. “My husband had tumours removed from the brain. And he was still in intensive care, and the family – my sons and daughter – were in. I remember standing around the bed, and I just happened to turn, and I saw somebody carrying a big vase of flowers. And it was like a – how would you say it? How do you mean when you have a couple of senses?” Somehow, despite the long silence from Barry, Annie instantly knew who had sent the flowers. “I had that card for years,” she says, “and it just said, ‘Kelly’ – it didn’t say dad – ‘Best wishes, Barry.’ That’s when I turned to my daughter and I said, ‘Look at this. How are you supposed to answer to this?’ And it was sad.”
It was a gesture that would have meant the world to Harold Keliher who, as fate would have it, never recovered from his operation, though he lived for several years after. “He never came out of it,” says Annie. “He never knew those flowers were there.”
Harold Keliher died on June 11, 1993. Barry was performing at the Teatro Fundidora in Monterey, Mexico at the time. If he knew of his father’s passing, he never acknowledged it either publicly or to Annie Keliher and her children. In the obituary that ran in the Las Vegas Review-Journal two days after his death, Harold Keliher’s survivors were listed as his widow, Anna, his son, Tim, his stepson, Walter, and his daughter (actually, stepdaughter) Carol. Barry Manilow’s name was not mentioned.
7 Manilow himself was drafted in August, 1964. According to his Selective Service records, he was given a 1-Y classification, which essentially declared him basically fit for service, but in some way undesirable. It was a popular classification for homosexuals and others the government considered undesirable yet difficult to categorise in an accurate yet acceptable way. The 1-Y classification was abolished in December, 1971, due in part to pressure from gay rights groups. After that time, those who were previously classified as 1-Y were switched to a classification of 1-H: “Registrant not currently subject to processing for induction or alternate service.”
Chapter Twenty-one
With ‘Mandy’ going gold just weeks after its release, Arista quickly released another single from the Barry Manilow II album. Barry’s long-time collaborator Marty Panzer co-wrote the song with Barry, and likes to tell this story of the song’s impetus:
Barry called from somewhere on the road and said, “I have an idea for a song, but I stole the title from you.”
“Oh, really?” I said.
“Well, every time I call you and tell you about some incredible thing that’s happened, you say the same thing. EVERY time,” he said. “So I’d like to use it as the title.”
“You wrote a song called ‘HOLY SHIT!’?”
Actually, the song was ‘It’s A Miracle’, and its up-tempo optimism was the perfect counterpoint to the slower, more poignant ‘Mandy’. While it didn’t do as well as ‘Mandy’, ‘It’s A Miracle’ still did well, quickly landing in the top ten. It was enough to make Barry start rethinking his first album, which hadn’t done at all well when first released. Now, fuelled by the success of the second album, perhaps the first album could be reworked and re-released with more success.
Toward this end, Ron and Barry went back into the studio in April 1975 and concentrated on four songs from the original album. With new versions of ‘One Of These Days’, ‘Oh, My Lady’, ‘Sweet Life’ and ‘Could It Be Magic’, Arista released the slightly altered version of Barry Manilow as Barry Manilow I. ‘Could It Be Magic’ was selected as the magic single to make the album move. While Barry had loved the song since it had first presented itself to him in his studio apartment on 27th Street so many years before, he felt it was a long shot for single success. Again, though, he relied on Clive Davis’s infallible instincts.
“We sold like 35,000 copies of my first album,” Barry told an interviewer in 1975, “and it was sold on the basis of ‘Could It Be Magic’ Everybody kept showing it to their friends on the basis of ‘Could It Be Magic’ and then the second album came out, and ‘Mandy’ and ‘Miracle’ [were released], and Clive heard ‘Magic’ and said, ‘You know, you should have done something with that.’” But, as Barry pointed out to Clive, what were the chances of radio stations playing a seven-minute cut, let alone one based on a Chopin prelude? But Barry and Ron were busy working on Barry’s third album so, he reasoned, if ‘Could It Be Magic’ tanked, people would be too busy paying attention to the third album to notice another single from Barry Manilow I. “I think it’s time to try it now,” Clive told Barry. “You can’t lose anything.”
As always, Clive’s reasoning was sound. By the time the third album, Tryin’ To Get The Feeling was released in October, the single ‘Could It Be Magic’ had already achieved gold status and was well on its way to platinum, as was Barry Manilow I.
Even though Barry had come to rely on Clive’s instincts, still, Clive’s suggestions regarding use of outside material wreaked havoc on Barry’s already sometimes shaky self-esteem. “My strength as a songwriter was continually challenged,” Barry later wrote. “Clive and I played the game of his hit songs versus my hit songs after ‘Mandy’ became number one.” As a result, Barry had vowed that ‘Mandy’ would be the last outside song he recorded. Clive, however, had other ideas.
Just as he had plucked ‘Mandy’ from obscurity to serve as Barry’s vehicle to the number one spot on Billboard charts, for Tryin’ To Get The Feeling Clive presented Barry with another unlikely number he was sure would be a hit.
‘I Write The Songs’ was written by Bruce Johnston who was best known for having taken over from Brian Wilson as The Beach Boys “touring” bass player. But Johnston was more than just a mere session man, he was a songwriter too and had contributed to The Beach Boys’ song catalogue over the years, most notably with the evocative ‘Disney Girls’ on their Surfs Up album in 1971. By the time he wrote ‘I Write The Songs’, he’d officially left The Beach Boys, though his services would be called upon again from time to time, but the song had done nothing for the three acts who had already recorded it.
Clive sent all three versions to Barry’s apartment. Barry listened as the song’s creator, Bruce Johnston, sang the song. He then heard pop idol David Cassidy’s version, and, finally, he listened to Captain & Tennille’s take on it. Barry felt he could sympathise with the song’s lyric, “I am music, and I write the songs.” It was, he understood, a tribute to the power of music to manifest itself through the songwrite
r, who became simply the tool of the music itself. Barry understood the concept because he lived with it on a daily basis. “Sometimes when I’d listened to my own work, I’d been surprised at what I’d been able to do,” he explained. “Sometimes it had felt that I really had nothing to do with the writing.” But the average record buyer would not have had such an experience to draw upon. Without it, the song could come off as an egotistical paean by a songwriter praising himself for his own magnificence. Barry still often felt as though he had one hell of a nerve expecting people to pay good money to see him pretend to be a singer. He certainly didn’t relish the thought of thousands of people thinking that he felt he was, as Bette used to call him, “Mr Music”. Barry told Clive he didn’t want to do the song.
Clive didn’t make suggestions lightly, nor countenance opposition to his proven wisdom. “You’re being foolish and childish,” he told Barry, who was taken aback at the vehemence of his response. “You’re a terrific arranger and producer. With the right elements, this could be a number one record for you. They don’t come along easily, Barry. You really shouldn’t turn this down.”
Barry Manilow Page 15