Barry Manilow

by Patricia Butler

  “Some people,” says Lee Gurst, “really see it as like a personal connection that is so intensely intimate that it is real and deep, and they will go to great lengths to keep that connection. And they identify with Barry because he obviously knows them, so they assume they know him. And that’s just not the case. Performers are performers. They’re not necessarily telling the truth about themselves every time they get up and perform a piece of music.”

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  Barry and Jeanne Lucas once went to see Judy Garland making one of her final appearances in New York City, and after the show, they went backstage to meet the legendary singer. Both Barry and Jeanne expressed their admiration for Garland’s work and for her performance that night, and mentioned that they’d be catching the next show as well. “I wish you wouldn’t,” Garland replied. Jeanne and Barry were taken aback by the comment, and Jeanne, slightly hurt, asked Garland why she didn’t want them to return. Garland explained, “Because I work very hard at being Judy Garland, and everything that seems spontaneous to you won’t the second time around.” Respecting Garland’s wishes, Jeanne and Barry did not return for the second show.

  “She didn’t want people to know it was all the act,” Jeanne says, explaining that Barry would find himself in the same situation after his own success. “Barry works very hard at being Barry. And it’s the kind of thing we all do. It’s part of your show. Even the things you’re trying to make seem as if you just thought of it, it’s all part of the show. We’re entertaining – it’s an act. And his fans who see it night after night must know that.”

  But if they know it – and, as Jeanne points out, they must – they don’t care. Like the constant repetition of prayers on a string of rosary beads, Manilow’s truly faithful seem to find comfort in the constant repetition of the same material presented in the same way but at different venues, night after night. It can be a bone of contention, a dividing line between the Manilover elite and those the über-fans see as non-contenders.

  “Certainly in most cases it doesn’t get into anything pathological,” says Lee Gurst. “In some extreme cases it does, and you have stalkers and fans who follow you from town to town, and they show up front row for every show for three weeks in Las Vegas. I can just imagine the kind of money they’re laying out to get those seats.”

  Like drug addicts, there are fans who will go to any lengths to score one more ticket to one more show in one more town, just to be in the same concert hall or arena with Barry, one more time. A British housewife explains what she went through in order to see Barry again:

  “The first time I saw him was at Blenheim. And when I actually saw him I thought: He’s real, that’s him. Especially when he stood there after all these fantasies and looking at pictures and videos and things. He was actually there.

  “I could have burst into tears. In fact I did, but that was at the end when he’d gone. It was an emotion that made me want to cry – that he was there after all the waiting and fantasising and staring at his pictures. I mean, his pictures are plastered all over the bedroom walls. And it was just something that made my heart beat faster. I kept thinking: Oh God, when he goes – what’s it going to be like when he goes?

  “And at the end when he’d gone it was dreadful. I thought: I’ll never see him again. I felt: This is it. He’s gone. I was really, really upset. I kept saying over and over again: ‘I can’t stand it. When am I going to see him again?’ And my friend said: ‘ The Festival Hall.’ I said: ‘Ridiculous! What, at £50 – £100 a ticket?!’

  “That was awful. That really hit me more than anything – that money comes between me and Barry. ‘Cos I hate money anyway. It embarrasses me. I’m not interested in having it unless I want something.

  “So I got this job delivering coupons. I delivered 5,000 coupons to buy one concert ticket! I nearly dropped but I did it. I worked it out – it was 5,000 coupons to buy one concert ticket, and that was the cheapest one.”

  It’s an extreme the majority of fans would not be willing to go to, though there is intense peer pressure among Manilow fans to rack up attendance points. “I cannot afford to follow him around the entire country,” complains one fan. “I cannot afford a weekend in Las Vegas. I’ve never met Barry or Garry [Kief, Manilow’s manager] or Marc [Hulett, Manilow’s personal assistant]. I doubt I ever will. They’ve never heard of me. But I have followed Barry’s career for years and I adore him and his music. And that’s good enough for me.”

  But for those not willing to make such sacrifices – and some have even gone so far as to forfeit their marriages and spend their mortgage money – there is a strict caste system that can make those who’ve not actively devoted their lives to Mani-love (as some fans call it) feel like “untouchables”.

  “I tell you,” says Lynne, from Atlanta, “when I first got on the internet, I could not wait to meet and talk with other Barry fans. But I learned real quick, it’s a dog eat dog world with Barry fans. If you hadn’t been to over 100 concerts, then you weren’t a ‘real’ fan. I had so many girls try to make me feel ‘less than worthy’. I’ve only been to six …”

  Another fan agrees that the pettiness has gotten worse in recent years, and can often get out of control. “Everyone knows more, has seen him more, has more of his things … You have to understand, I’ve been a Manilow fan for 25 years and it’s never been about the crew, the background singers, the sexuality, the colour of his hair, jacket, tie, etc. For me it’s about the music …”

  But of all the songs in Barry’s repertoire, the one that fans have claimed as their own is a harmless little ditty called ‘Can’t Smile Without You’. For many music lovers who aren’t Manilow fans, the song can be like a piece of tin foil caught between the teeth.

  “Did I ever tell you that I tried to watch a Manilow special on cable?” rock biographer and former Rolling Stone editor Jerry Hopkins recently wrote. “This was about six months ago and I’d never seen him before, didn’t know what any of his songs sounded like, didn’t even know what he looked like. I was appalled. Trivial lyrics and melodies that all sounded like the same Hallmark valentine, and those fans! The way they giggled and swooned over a man who obviously has no interest in them – or any other females, for that matter – made me want to puke.”

  Ironically, ‘Can’t Smile Without You’, the song that makes fans giggle and swoon the most, actually got its genesis from a greeting card. David Martin, one of the song’s co-authors, says, “In 1975, my wife Debbie was working at a greeting card store. One evening she gave me a card. The card was completely plain except for a small blue badge on the front. On the badge was a face with the mouth drooping at the corners and a tear rolling down the cheek. Across the top of the card were simply the words, ‘Can’t Smile Without You. Thirty minutes later, the song was composed. Nearly 30 years later, it has become the centrepiece of all Manilow concerts.

  To an outside observer, the ritual of choosing the “CSWY girl” at each Barry Manilow concert looks like a cross between a Texas cattle auction and Let’s Make a Deal, with Manilow serving as combination herd boss and Monty Hall manque. By the time Manilow gets around to actually introducing the number, his words are all but drowned out by the shrieks of knowing fans, who’ve been to so many concerts they have the sequence memorised. Manilow is careful to specify that only women are eligible for the CSWY honour. In turn, scores of mostly middle-aged women leap to their feet, screaming and crying, jumping up and down and frantically waving giant, brightly decorated placards with legends like LET’S DO IT! and BARRY, MAKE ME SMILE! and LAST CHANCE THIS TOUR! A reporter from the British magazine Q was in the audience to witness the spectacle one night, and lived to tell the tale:

  “Tonight, Barry Manilow, the unlikely sex symbol who never quite completed the metamorphosis from frog to prince, is playing Liverpool. Halfway through the tinselly extravaganza-a slickly executed procession of bantamweight jazz numbers and high-cholesterol ballads-Barry enquires as to whether a member of the audience would care to join
him on stage for the jaunty duet ‘I Can’t Smile Without You’. The request is met by a mass unfurling of banners reading: Choose Me! I’m The One! Please Please Please Please! Etc. After much hammy deliberation, Barry opts for Anne, whom he instructs, a little patronisingly, to ‘sing into the top of the microphone’, holding her firmly by the elbow. During the second verse, Barry hops up on to his piano and cheekily positions Anne between his legs. She seizes the moment and places a shaking hand on his shin. ‘Hey!’ he leers. ‘Whoa! She gives great knee!’ As the nine-piece band bring the curiously joyous number to its high-kicking, spangly staircase-descending climax, Barry ceremoniously presents the trembling secretary with a freshly recorded videotape of their performance to take home and treasure forever. Chivalrously, he kisses her on the cheek and, with a smile like a suspension bridge, waves her back to the stalls. As she reaches the edge of the stage she turns to blow a final kiss but, alas, his smile has long since evaporated and he’s about-faced and sashaying back to his piano, mentally running through the words to his next densely sentimental scarf-waver. The following evening in Blackpool it happens all over again with the same Rolex-timed precision. Even when the girl bursts into tears, Barry – prepared for any eventuality – produces a man-sized tissue and dabs lovingly at the salty streams alternately murmuring words of solace and pulling amusing faces at the audience over her shoulder.”

  For the women who get chosen to be one of Barry’s nightly partners, it’s an event that ranks right up there with taking their wedding vows and having their first child – though one doesn’t dare enquire as to the order of importance of these events. “I’ve known my wife for about ten years,” writes one proud husband of his wife’s turn as a CSWY Girl. “We’ve been married for about seven, we have a cocker that she loves dearly, I cut the cord when Julie [presumably their daughter, not the cocker] was born, but I have never been happier for my wife than the day she got to sing with Barry Manilow.”

  It’s this sort of over-earnest devotion that makes Manilow fans a favourite target of cynics, comics, and the world at large. After all, it’s hard to take seriously a group who can engage in a protracted, heated argument in an online forum over the fact that a former CSWY Girl went back for seconds, a flagrant breach of concert etiquette. “Sure hope it pleased you to get up there and sing for the second time with Barry,” wrote one poster cattily, incensed at the injustice of it all. “… so many haven’t had the chance, and you go and do it again, and only a few months apart. And, the way you were all over him was not so very nice, it was disgusting.” Battle lines were quickly drawn, some defending the woman’s actions, others taking exception not only to the fact that the woman put herself forward twice for CSWY Girl honours, but that she also took advantage in other ways once onstage. “I never called her a slut,” said another poster, defending earlier statements she had made about the woman. “I said she behaved slutty. I’m sorry, but you can not tell me that Barry appreciates that sort of behaviour. I was embarrassed for the man.”

  Barry Manilow is a favourite target for humour columnist Dave Barry, who says he “hates to reveal” that he has spent some time surfing the net and has observed the behaviour on the online fan forums, much to his chagrin. His curiosity has taken him to the alt.fan.barry-manilow and alt.fan.hawaii-five-o newsgroups. “It’s fascinating,” he writes, “to see this week-long, thoughtful, careful, articulate, literate debate over whether Jack Lord did or did not wear a hairpiece in a certain episode.” On the Manilow newsgroup, he says, “Someone will come in and say bad things about Barry, and this will really upset his fans, and violent flame wars will break out – over Barry Manilow. Without the internet, this would not be possible.” He does not say this in praise of the internet.

  To those who have known Barry the best, the extreme devotion of his fans is simply a mystery. “It’s like they feel that Barry needs them desperately,” says Jeanne Lucas. “It’s not that they need him, he needs them. It’s like they’d feel safe with him, and all that stuff, and he’s this good guy. But also it’s like he’s this flawed, needy guy that they have to be there to support. That’s the sense that I get. It’s really interesting. But these are all people, I think, who need to feel that they belong somewhere. If they were different people they’d join Scientology. I really feel that this is, the whole gestalt of them being the fans and all that stuff, has really got more to do with their needs than it ever does Barry. It gives them a sense of belonging, of camaraderie, of that kind of thing, is what I think.”

  In her essay Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization,14 Jolie Jenson has what most scholars would probably deem the effrontery to cast Barry Manilow fans in the same mould as academicians pursuing a scholarly subject. She puts forth the proposition that the fan, cast as an object of alternate fear and ridicule, is all subject to perspective:

  The literature of fandom, celebrity and media influence tells us that: Fans suffer from psychological inadequacy, and are particularly vulnerable to media influence and crowd contagion. They seek contact with famous people in order to compensate for their own inadequate lives. Because modern life is alienated and atomized, fans develop loyalties to celebrities and sports teams to bask in reflected glory, and attend rock concerts and sports events to feel an illusory sense of community.

  But what happens if we change the objects of this description from fans to, say, professors? What if we describe the loyalties that scholars feel to academic disciplines rather than to team sports, and attendance at scholarly conferences, rather than Who concerts and soccer matches? What if we describe opera buffs and operas? Antique collectors and auctions? Trout fishermen and angling contests? Gardeners and horticulture shows? Do the assumptions about inadequacy, deviance and danger still apply?

  What is the basis for these differences between fans like ‘them’ and aficionados like ‘us’? … Apparently, if the object of desire is popular with the lower or middle class, relatively inexpensive and widely available, it is fandom (or a harmless hobby); if it is popular with the wealthy and well educated, expensive and rare, it is preference, interest, or expertise.

  Am I suggesting, then, that a Barry Manilow fan be compared with, for example, a Joyce scholar? The mind may reel at the comparison, but why? The Manilow fan knows intimately every recording (and every version) of Barry’s songs; the Joyce scholar knows intimately every volume (and every version) of Joyce’s oeuvre. The relationship between Manilow’s real life and his music is explored in detail in star biographies and fan magazines; the relationship between Dublin, Bloomsday and Joyce’s actual experiences are explored in detail in biographies and scholarly monographs.

  Yes, you may say, there are indeed these surface similarities. But what about the fans who are obsessed with Barry, who organize their life around him? Surely no Joyce scholar would become equally obsessive? But the uproar over the definitive edition of Ulysses suggests that the participant Joyceans are fully obsessed, and have indeed organized their life (even their ‘identity’ and ‘community’) around Joyce.

  But is a scholar, collector, aficionado ‘in love’ with the object of his or her desire? Is it the existence of passion that defines the distinction between fan and aficionado, between dangerous and benign, between deviance and normalcy?

  “I guess the core of it is you’ve gotta figure out what does Barry mean to these girls?” says Jeanne Lucas. “I mean what is it they fantasise about? If there’s some gorgeous singer out there or whatever, we know we’re all fantasising about maybe being with them or whatever because they’re sexy, etc. But Barry, he’s just the antithesis of that. What is it that he’s projecting? Safety? Would they feel safe with him? Is that what it is?”

  In fact it’s the sexual component of the fans’ adoration that most puzzles outsiders. One magazine described Manilow as “the unlikely sex symbol who never quite completed the metamorphosis from frog to prince”. But Manilow is a frog prince who has always been able to inspire the twin desires – maternal car
e-giving and drooling lust – in many of his followers. And, as Jolie Jenson points out, it is very often this duality of emotional and physical love felt for the object of obsession – in this case, Barry Manilow – that marks the difference between fan and aficionado.

  A case in point was illustrated with frightening clarity in Fred and Judy Vermorel’s 1985 book, Starlust: The Secret Fantasies of Fans. Far from being the fictionalised titillation typical of lurid “true confession” magazines, the stories found in Starlust were gathered by the authors from, according to the Vermorels, “typical pop star fans as we found them in over four years of research. For every story told here there were dozens of similar ones. There are fans like these in every classroom and every suburban street.”

  Among these stories was that of Rosie, a 43-year-old British housewife, who first found comfort in Barry Manilow’s songs, then found companionship through a shared love of the singer with others in her area. Barry Manilow once remarked that his fans acted “like I was the second coming”. For Rosie, that became more than just a turn of phrase.

  Rosie: Barry and God

  “Me and my husband only live together now as brother and sister.

  “Because – and this may seem rather silly and stupid – but I just feel unclean with any other man apart from Barry. If I can’t have sexual intercourse with Barry, I’ll go without. I’ll never be unfaithful to Barry.

  “My husband understands this. He realises my interests are different to his and he does try to understand.

  “Sometimes he does say: ‘You’ve got to make up your mind between me and Barry.’ But then he knows how much I love Barry and that if he got on to me too much I’d just go and live with one of my friends.