Lee fought for the musician to get the same bonus as everyone else, with Barry refusing. Then, in an ironic echo of Bette Midler’s refusal to pay Barry for extra rehearsals back at the Baths because, she said, “He got a salary, so I figured, well, that’s enough,” Barry now informed Lee that he, too, would only get a one-week bonus because Barry felt Lee already earned too much money. Lee responded by saying, “Well, I earned a lot of money because I did a lot of the jobs. It wasn’t like I was overpaid for anything.” But Barry still couldn’t see it. “Yeah,” he told Lee, “I’m just not going to give you that kind of money.”
During the tour, the musicians had also performed for several television appearances, for all of which union regulations required them to be paid. Again, there were problems getting the money. As union leader, it was Lee’s unenviable job to report the situation to the musician’s union. Though this was proper procedure for the situation, Barry saw his friend’s actions as a personal attack rather than a professional remedy for a business situation.
Barry and Lee had spent the New Year’s holiday together. “When we came back to LA that night,” says Gurst, “he found a letter I guess from Miles that the union was after him again. And he called me up and he was very angry. He felt like I’d betrayed him.” Lee defended his actions, explaining that it was his job to look out for the interests of the musicians in his charge. “If you needed money, you should’ve come to me,” Barry told him. What they were asking for, Lee pointed out, wasn’t a handout or a loan, nor was it a matter of simple need. The musicians had signed contracts and were made certain promises. All Lee was trying to do, he told Barry, was see that those promises were kept. The hell of it was, Lee knew very well that if he had come to Barry, as a friend, in need of anything, Barry would have happily provided it for him, no matter what the cost. At one point in the late Sixties, when times were lean, Lee announced that he was too broke to even send out Christmas cards. Shortly thereafter he received a $100 cheque in the mail from Barry with a note that said, “I don’t want to hear another word about it. You’d do the same for me some day. Send me a Christmas card.” But to Barry, Lee’s actions now, while motivated by business concerns, constituted a personal betrayal, pure and simple. He said to Lee, “Call me when you’ve got a job and don’t need me any more.”
Another close personal and professional relationship was about to come to an end as well. Even Now had been followed up by two double platinum albums – Greatest Hits in 1978 and One Voice in 1979. The 1980 release Barry, though it eventually went platinum, was memorable mostly for the hit single ‘I Made It Through The Rain’, which was more than could be said for Barry’s collaboration with Ron Dante.
Just as he had done with Lee Gurst and the others in his band at the height of their touring success, Barry informed Ron that their collaboration was coming to an end. “I was kind of blind-sided,” says Dante, adding, “It was no big deal. Basically he wanted to try new styles and new producers, and go different directions. We quit at the zenith of our success. It was okay.”
“Okay” may have been a bit of an understatement. The Manilow/ Dante combination had produced eighteen top ten records in a row and numerous triple platinum albums. At the time Barry called an end to their partnership, says Dante, “we were still riding the crest of wonderful hits with ‘Ships That Pass In The Night’ [from the One Voice album], and ‘I Made It Through The Rain’.” But, he adds with a laugh, “Sometimes you go through a midlife crisis. I think [Barry] did. He changed everything. He moved to Beverly Hills, he got a new manager, got a new agent, he changed his lifestyle.”
As had happened only recently with Lee Gurst, when Ron Dante made moves to protect his legal interests after the dissolution of the partnership, Barry took personal offence. “The legal problems were nothing important, actually,” says Dante. “It’s just I had to protect my interest, because we had many albums to do together, and he was walking, wanted to go somewhere else. So I had to protect myself at the time, legally, with papers. It wasn’t a suit so much, it was an official thing you had to do at the time. But it’s been blown out of proportion over the years that I actually sued him. It was not true. We had to have some papers that said this is what each of us gets. We had a long-term partnership going. We couldn’t just end it. We couldn’t just walk away. There was too much at stake. I’d put many, many years of my life and my career on hold almost to make these records, to guide the ship. I wasn’t just going to let it walk away. But that ended it.”
For Barry, it was impossible to separate his professional life from his personal life because, as he’d pointed out many times, there was simply no difference between the two. To separate them, says Dante, “would be very difficult. His career is his life, his life is his career.” Further proof of that could be seen in Barry’s choice to change his management from attorney Miles Lourie, to Garry Kief, a former ABC Entertainment employee who Barry had begun seeing socially in the spring of 1978. To Ron Dante, Garry was an even less appropriate management choice for Barry to make than Miles Lourie had been. “He was like from ABC Entertainment Center in Century City, I think he booked real estate space or something for them,” says Dante of Kief. “He had no background in music whatsoever, so that was a strange choice, I thought, on Barry’s part to get a manager who really doesn’t know much about managing. But he did it, you know. Garry’s another tough businessman. He’s the pit bull protecting Barry, so to speak. That’s what I hear. That’s what he thinks he’s doing. That’s fine.”
Dante felt that it was Barry’s new management in Los Angeles that may have been acting as a catalyst for much of the upheaval in Barry’s life at the time. “I couldn’t stay in that relationship with the power I had at the time,” says Dante. “For other people, it was too much influence. And I think other people wanted to influence him more. So they kind of like painted it black. It could not have been just an official paper, it had to be an insult.” But Dante has been in show business for a lot of years, and he knows how things work. It’s this experience that allows him to be philosophical about the sudden severing of his relationship with Barry. “That’s the way it goes, that’s the way the business works,” he says. “I’m not surprised. We had run a very good road together. I was involved in almost every one of his huge hits. So we had a very good run.”
Yes, it had been a very good run. For five years the boy from Brooklyn had ruled the world, with a little help from his friends. But as the Seventies turned into the Eighties, his reign, along with many of the old friendships, seemed to be running out along with the decade. Barry Manilow would go on to have many other triumphs in the years ahead, but none of his successes would ever reach the frenzied heights of those he’d achieved during those last few years of the Seventies. It had all begun so simply, just like a Barry Manilow song – a slow start, a dramatic build, and then the slow release. As he told Keyboard magazine in 1983, “Endings are one of my specialities.”
11 The article did not, in fact, reveal any information that would help anyone trying to locate Barry.
PART V
One Man In The Spotlight
“There must be something good in a
thing that pleases so many; even if it
cannot be explained, it is certainly
enjoyed.”
–Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
(1647)
Chapter Twenty-five
“When I make love with my husband I imagine it’s Barry Manilow. All the time. And after, when my husband and I have made love and I realise it’s not him, I cry to myself. It’s usually dark when the tears flow and somehow I manage to conceal them. It happens to an awful lot of people, too. I didn’t realise how many until I got involved with Barry fans. A lot of them are married and around my age and they feel the same way and they do the same thing. It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one.”
Far from being the only one, Joanne, a 42-year-old housewife, is among a legion of sometimes frightening
ly loyal fans Barry Manilow has amassed worldwide over his long career. These followers, comprised largely of middle-aged females, range from those who simply enjoy a Manilow tune when they hear one on the radio, to those who will actually spend their mortgage money to follow Barry to yet another concert date.
Barry’s former singing partner, Jeanne Lucas, witnessed some of the fan devotion run amuck when she visited Barry at his mansion in Bel Air in the mid-Eighties. Barry had called Jeanne because he was gathering material for the autobiography he was writing, and he was interviewing a number of his friends to help bolster his memory of past events. It had been a long time since Jeanne had seen Barry, and his opulent surroundings seemed a far cry from the Brooklyn apartment Barry and Jeanne had shared so many years before. But for all the pretensions of his surroundings, Jeanne had to laugh when Barry’s houseboy served lunch – bologna sandwiches on white bread. “His tastes in food are very simple,” says Lucas, “very white bread America. And I thought, ‘oh, god, he hasn’t changed!’”12
Among the many things they discussed that day, Barry talked about the lengths his fans would sometimes go to just to get a glimpse of him. “One night a bunch of them found out where he lived and they camped out on his front lawn,” Jeanne remembers. “That’s pretty scary, you know. He said, ‘Oh, they’re just nuts, these people.’”
Even Barry’s father, Harold Keliher, and his wife Annie became targets of Barry’s fans, who saw the Kelihers as conduits to their idol. Annie Keliher recalls an incident when she and Harold were living in California. “Don’t ask me how, but they found out Kelly was Barry’s father. We were living in an apartment, and the groupies – they had me nuts! I was scared of them. I got up one morning, I thought I heard something; I found a bouquet of flowers on my doorknob from one of the groupies.” A card attached to the bouquet said, To the stepmother of Barry.
Even after Harold and Anna moved to Las Vegas, intrepid fans would still manage to track them down, trying to forge some kind of connection with Barry, no matter how tenuous. “Oh, it was terrible with them!” says Anna Keliher. “If I had submitted myself, my husband and I, to these groupies, I would be god to them. That’s how crazy they were for Barry.” But the operative word for Anna was “crazy”.
“I used to be afraid,” she says. “I said, ‘Kelly, one of them could turn angry, you never know if they’ve got a gun.’ He used to think I was crazy, but I said no way do I want these people around me.”
Though Barry worked for years in various aspects of show business, when his “star exploded”, as he has characterised it, it seemed to happen instantaneously. Almost overnight Barry Manilow went from being a private citizen to being a public commodity who was constantly on the lookout for those trying to gain access to him.
“I’m a very private person,” Manilow, in 1977, told a People magazine interviewer who went on to note that Barry’s success “has made him a virtual recluse, terrified that fans will discover his address or phone number.”
It hadn’t started out that way. When a reporter with Oui magazine came to visit Barry at his 27th Street apartment in New York in 1976, Barry said of his surroundings, “It’s the same apartment I lived in for years before I had a hit record and became the number one artist in the country. I was perfectly comfortable here when I was singing commercials and when I was Bette Midler’s musical director, so why should I move just because I became a star overnight? I mean, being famous is fun, but it hasn’t affected my lifestyle one iota.”
Unfortunately, that wasn’t true for long. By the time Barry spoke with Ladies’ Home Journal in early 1979, he’d been forced to move from the 27th Street apartment when Who’s Who printed his home address, “without my permission, I might add,” Barry told the journalist. “First the letters started coming,” Manilow explained. “I had no idea how. Then they started piling up in front of the door. Until then I had had a wonderfully private life there. My records were number one yet I was able to lead a normal existence. Then suddenly this Who’s Who thing came out and fans started to camp outside the door. It was hellish, just hellish, so I had to move.”
The Who’s Who incident would mark the end of Barry’s dual life of public star and private citizen. “I live in this building under a pseudonym,” Manilow warned the visitor from Ladies’ Home Journal. “Today the doormen were told you’d be asking for me, but if you come here tomorrow and ask for Barry Manilow, they will shoot you in the nose.” Later, when he’d made the permanent move to California, he told another journalist that his Bel Air mansion had been equipped with security devices that would “blow your brains out if things go off “.
“I thought he liked it,” says producer Ron Dante, of the adulation Barry received from his fans. “I thought he was very happy about all that. He was a little scared. He was afraid they’d get overly zealous and hurt him in some way. But I think anybody who’s got a crowd of people around him pushing and shoving would feel the same way.”
Barry’s former assistant, Paul Brownstein, concurs. “Have you ever been in a limo that people are pushing and shoving on and you’re trapped in your own exit traffic? With people pushing and shoving and you feel the car may go over? And he lived on Central Park West and I was working for him the week John Lennon was shot. He’s got a very high pressure job. It’s not easy to be a star.”
In the beginning of his career, the waves of adulation coming from total strangers just seemed to confuse Manilow, who was already going through an identity crisis as his life began changing with his success. “I was getting an acceptance that I’d never dreamed of,” he later wrote of the mounds of fan mail that quickly began accumulating from his fans. “They gave me credit for all of their triumphs and gratitude for helping them through hard times. It was as if I was a light in the darkness for them.” Barry, from his point of view, was merely doing a job, the same job he’d been doing more or less constantly for years. But suddenly he was doing that job in a blinding public spotlight. “Why were the fans acting so fanatically?” he wrote. “People were acting like I was the second coming and it was impossible to deal with. They felt as if they really knew me. Hell, I was just a musician trying my best to learn how to sing and perform.”
It’s this ability to make a connection with his audience that is the key to the steadfast loyalty of Manilow’s followers. “He has an extraordinary touch for touching people,” says Manilow’s friend, rock icon Dick Clark. “He knows exactly what they want to hear.”
It’s this ability to sing to the world, one person at a time, that makes many fans feel that they have a window into Manilow’s soul. Having toured with Barry for years, Lee Gurst was a constant witness to Barry’s interactions with his fans and the ways in which they invest Barry with their own projected longings. “People create in their minds a relationship,” says Gurst. “He’s singing to me, he knows about me. I know everybody else is hearing this, but he really knows about me. That’s so much my story, my struggle. I know who he is because he sings about me. And that’s not so. But people make of it what it means to them, and then they live with that as if it’s real. And then to feel that seen and that understood when a lot of people don’t – I mean, wouldn’t you gravitate towards someone who just seems to get you, that personally, that deeply, that intimately?”
But to make that kind of connection with an audience can put a performer in an extremely awkward situation. More often than not the person the audience sees on the stage is not the same person offstage. “I have to make myself bigger,” Manilow told a Playgirl editor who was witnessing Barry’s pre-show ritual. I pump myself up like I’m pumpin’ air into a tyre. I couldn’t go out there otherwise, I don’t think anyone would notice me.” The problem is, where does a performer draw the line between person and persona?
“Most fans of mine would be very disappointed if they realised I don’t walk around in my rhinestone top all the time and do not sing all day long,” Manilow complained to a journalist in 1979. “Sometimes I don’t even want
to meet fans because I’m afraid I’ll disappoint them.” To illustrate his point, he cited the example of his idol, respected singer-composer Laura Nyro. “Her music changed my life,” he said. “I fantasised about her for so long. Then I kept hearing reports about what it was like to work with her, to be with her, what she was really like. And it wasn’t anything like I wanted her to be. After I heard all that, I didn’t want to meet her.”13
Former Eastern District High School teacher Herb Bernstein, after leaving teaching and embarking on his successful music career, saw enough examples of this dichotomy to make him completely sympathetic to Barry’s feelings on the matter. He cites one example of a couple he and his wife knew who used to like to attend concerts and stage shows, for which Herb could often get them backstage passes to meet the stars. One day Herb’s friend said, “You know, Herb, do me a favour and don’t introduce me to any of these people.” Herb, nonplussed, asked why. “I love their talent, I love to hear them,” his friend explained, “and then I meet them and they’re such jerks that I lose it. I can’t appreciate their talent.”
Herb recalls his own wife’s excitement one night when they were able to go backstage to meet a well-known jazz singer, who Ann Bernstein, daughter of Italian singer Jimmy Roselli, greatly admired. Ann breathlessly expressed her admiration to the singer, saying, “I love your singing, I have all your tapes!” to which her idol replied, “Fuck off!”
“So,” says Herb Bernstein, “I see what Barry means. Unfortunately a lot of these performers you meet are so disappointing as people.”
But Barry Manilow’s stage persona seemed so personable, so affable, so open, that fans would never suspect it was a well-rehearsed facade, simply that pumped up version of the offstage man. To these devoted followers there could be no distinction between – as Manilow once characterised it – Barry Manilow and Barry Manilow. This person singing to all their hopes and dreams and fears obviously knew and understood them so intimately, it was simply inconceivable that they, in turn, didn’t know him equally well.
Barry Manilow Page 19