“Because I’ve been to lots and lots of concerts but I’ve never felt that kind of atmosphere and that kind of closeness. Complete strangers catch hold of your hands. And you are all united, united as one.
“And to think that one man can do that to so many people. I mean, he must be special to be able to do that, to create this atmosphere and this special feeling. He can’t just be ordinary, can he? So many people can’t be wrong.
“I rarely dream about him. And when I do it’s not what I’d like. I rarely dream romantic dreams. They’re usually troubled dreams. I often dream I have this concert ticket and I can’t get there. There’s always something stopping me and by the time I get there it’s all over.
“When he was due to come on TV the other day and I was planning to tape it, I had this dream where it had been on the day before and I’d missed it, completely. I was glad to wake up and find it was only a dream. That is a thing I dread anyway. I always make a point of buying two tapes and I have my friend make a copy in case something goes wrong with mine. I’m a neurotic when he comes on TV. I never enjoy it, not the first time I see it. Not until I play it back and know I’ve got it.
“Last Christmas Eve my husband was away and I was alone and when midnight came I thought: It’s Christmas Day, I’m going to spend it with Barry. I’m going to open my presents now and I’m going to have Barry for company. So I sat here all on my own and I opened my presents and played Barry on the video. He was like my friend that was with me, because I was alone. Him being there on television is like he’s in the room with me. I don’t go as far as thinking he’s actually here. But his spirit’s here with me.
“When I watch him I sit right up close – I’ve always got to sit up close. I get a pouffe and sit right up a few inches away from him. The closer I am the better. I get frustrated if I’m not close. Because I feel otherwise I’m going to miss something …
“I often wonder whether I would actually give up my life that I’m leading now to go with Barry. It’s difficult. I don’t really know. You see, I can’t hurt people. I find it very difficult to hurt anyone. I tend to put other people before the way I feel myself. I don’t think if he came in here now and said: ‘Come on’, that I would go. Even though I love him so much, I couldn’t leave my husband to go with him.
“But I often think that I would give up my life for him. If it was just me, if it was just me to think about, I would give up my whole life for him. I would die.
“I always say: ‘If I could spend one night with Barry I would happily die tomorrow.’ That’s how much I love him. I just know I would be quite happy to give up everything for him. Just to know what he was like, what he was really like.
“I suppose it does sound overdramatic really, but it’s not something I’ve just thought up on the spur of the moment. I’ve thought about it a lot of times, many times. That’s how deep I love him.
“I don’t know whether it is love. It feels like love. But then I’ve never met him. So how can you love someone you’ve never met? It’s incredible really. It’s something I don’t really understand.
“But then I wonder if we ever know what love really is. I mean, there’s so many different kinds of love. There’s the love I have for Barry, the love I have for my husband, the love I have for my children.
“But this, what I feel for Barry, feels like the biggest love affair ever. I don’t know whether it is or whether it isn’t but it certainly feels like this is what love should be. It’s quite hard to cope with sometimes, this passionate feeling, this ultimate of love.
“Some people might say they fall in love, but I wonder if they really feel what I feel. Do they feel the type of love that I feel? I don’t know. I think there’s different degrees of love in different people. I don’t think many people would say that they’d give up their life and die to spend one night with one man.
“They might be very passionate about a man but I don’t think they’d be prepared to die for him.”
Are Rosie and Joanne examples of the extreme? Absolutely. But for Barry Manilow fans, the extreme is not all that far off centre. Karin, a fan in the United States, recently struggled to sum up Manilow’s attraction:
“He touches us; he always has a song to remedy any situation. He pulls us through life along with him. Together we started out uncertain, hesitant, geeky, and we’ve matured, gained confidence, and threw away polyester! We emerged as adults, with passions, with dreams, with chutzpah and we all give a lot of credit for whom and what we’ve become to our leader: Barry Manilow. No one can explain it … it’s an undefinable mystery of how he captivates us and we can’t and won’t get off this journey. It’s in our blood, in our guts, in our hearts … I once took a ‘virgin’ to a Manilow show in New York City and she, to this day, only talks about the unity of the fans, the way he treats his fans, the way he reaches out and touches us. She became hooked after one matinee ten years ago. But remember, there are different levels of ‘hooked’. There are those who relate to his nerdy side, those to his ‘up yours’ side, those to the simplicity of his words. Some would sell their souls to sleep with him, eat with him, know him intimately, and some follow him around the world. There are total opposite ends of the Manilow spectrum: I like to think of myself as a normal, married woman. I’ve raised two incredible daughters who are in fields of ‘giving back’; they took piano lessons and have been to many Manilow shows. My husband, who has been to his share of shows, doesn’t ‘get it’ and therefore this is my canasta game, or my sewing day, or whatever the women do these days. I’ve earned the right to do what I want, when I want.”
It is an incredible burden of adoration and expectations to place on the rather narrow shoulders of one fragile human being. So what did Manilow make of all this attention being beamed his way?
” I don’t remember him ever expressing to me any problems with his fans,” says Ron Dante, of Barry’s earliest success. “He was very happy to have them, at least when we were working together. And he would read all the fan magazines to see what they were saying about him, he was very interested in everything. It was a great trip.”
But as soon as the novelty wore off and the public adoration began affecting his personal life, Manilow started feeling quite differently about some of his fans, though most clearly meant him no harm.
“It’s not about meaning no harm,” says Paul Brownstein, Manilow’s former assistant. “It’s about how much time do you have in the day? He had fans that he was personally pen pals with since his first tour, who he wrote to all the time. I assume he’s still in touch with them. There are only a handful. They were VIPs as far as he was concerned. They were just normal, ordinary people, various cities.”
But it wasn’t the “normal, ordinary” people Manilow came to fear.
“As I began to become more and more recognised,” he wrote in his 1987 biography Sweet Life, “the public became frightening to me. I’d walk down the street and before I knew it there was a mob of people wanting things from me. I’d get on a plane and soon there’d be people kneeling beside me asking for things. They’d stare and point and take my picture as I tried to have a meal in a restaurant. Little by little I began to become very wary of the public … The last straw came when I discovered a few ‘fans’ had been going through my garbage and publishing their findings in a local newsletter. It turned me off so much that I stopped reading fan mail and had a different view of people who approached me from then on.”
Lee Gurst confirms that Barry would do all he could to avoid even brief encounters with fans before and after concerts. “I think there are performers who genuinely like their fans,” says Gurst. “I think there are performers who endure their fans. I don’t think that Barry respected his fans. Kind of like the old Groucho Marx thing, ‘I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member.’ In reality it speaks more about Barry than about the fans. Barry didn’t like having to see people, he was uncomfortable. He’s very private, he was very shy. It was awkward, he was
awkward with it. I don’t think he enjoyed having to play that part of the game. So generally the rule was he would try not to see people after a show. He certainly didn’t set himself up and make himself available easily and comfortably to sign autographs or to do that kind of thing. It was arranged when it had to be.”
Barry would refuse to see VIPs after the show. There were always more fans than he liked milling around backstage, so often tunnels of sheets would be erected so he could pass without the scrutiny of prying eyes or, failing that, everyone would be required to turn their backs so Barry could pass by, unwatched. Writes Manilow, “I began to understand why celebrities get a reputation for being creeps. I found myself being rude to strangers all the time and I always wanted to run after them and apologise.”
Lee Gurst felt that a part of Barry’s refusal to deal with his fans any more than absolutely necessary stemmed from Manilow’s own unhappiness with the work he was producing, an admitted compromise from the kind of work he’d started out to produce, and the slicked-back, over-produced music largely suggested by Clive Davis that had made Barry a star. “If you did not really love the music you were making, you wouldn’t have the best feelings about the people who do,” says Gurst. “First of all you have to resent them because you’re doing it for them. If someone likes something you do that you love and believe in, you have a connection with them. If you’re pandering to them, then you have to resent them for forcing you to give yourself up. They’re the ones who call the tunes. They’re the ones who put him through hoops to get their approval; it’s not the other way around. And the connection between the audience and the artist is not going to be truly a connection through the work. The artist isn’t expressing himself and then connecting with the people who received that communication.”
Manilow credits Roberta Kent with helping him to get over his need to isolate himself from his fans and interact more freely with them. Kent was the friend of Barry’s assistant at the time, Paul Brownstein, who brought Kent to a Christmas party at Barry’s house one year. Barry and Roberta immediately hit it off, and she began working with him on writing his stage show, often travelling with him on tours. It was Kent, says Manilow, who began reading his fan mail and bringing some of the more funny, touching, and compelling letters to his attention. “For the first time,” Manilow later wrote, “there was a channel of communication opened between me and the public and it was a revelation.”
To this day Manilow shares a connection with his fans unparalleled by other artists. His fan base remains greatly unchanged since his early days; the teenagers who bought his music on eight-track tapes are now 21st-century mothers and grandmothers (and, yes, fathers and grandfathers) who collect his work on compact discs, DVDs, and CD-ROM. When Manilow sings ‘I Made It Through The Rain’, there is a collective consciousness that sings with him, grateful that they’ve all weathered the same storms together.
Are Barry Manilow fans just a tad more fanatic than aficionado? Perhaps. But, once again, it’s all in your perspective. The New Jersey Star-Ledger recently ran a piece on fan clubs in which one female fan expressed her exasperation that her devotion was somehow seen as abnormal. “I’ve had big burly men laugh at me,” she says. “These are men who wear large foam fingers and paint themselves green every Sunday afternoon (for football games) – and they call me crazy?”
It’s all in your perspective.
12 Nor, apparently, will he ever. In an internet news blurb dated May 10, 2001, writer Dan Croft had this to report: “Official celebrity sighting, 2001: Today, on a side trip to Palm Springs, a fast two-hour spin from downtown Los Angeles, we watched the Man Who Writes the Songs That Make the People Sing, Barry Manilow, enter a corner convenience store and emerge minutes later wielding what looked to be a package of Hostess Cupcakes. Moral of this sighting: Man, or Manilow, does not live by music alone.”
13 Laura Nyro’s cousin, Dan Nigro, has this memory of Barry Manilow: “I met him at one of Laura’s Bottom Line shows in ‘88 – he was with Melissa Manchester. I told him how much I liked his live show I’d attended when I was 13 – he had put on a very good show. He was very standoffish when I talked to him – didn’t say one word. Laura could get away without speaking and not seeming rude – Manilow couldn’t.”
14 Contained in the book The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, Routledge, 1992.
Chapter Twenty-six
It was the mid-Seventies, and Lee Gurst and Barry Manilow were driving from New York to Philadelphia for a concert date; Lee was at the wheel. On the radio, a Carpenters song began playing. The poignant sound of Karen Carpenter’s exquisite alto was perfectly offset by her brother’s rich and intricate orchestration. As the lush melody began to build, Lee reached over to turn up the volume. In the seat next to him, Barry groaned, “Come on! How can you!”
“But he’s very, very commercial …”
For years Barry Manilow has been inspiring similar expressions of agonised disbelief from critics, comics, journalists, and the public at large. “I don’t want to defend him because he doesn’t need any defence; he’s very successful,” says rock and roll patriarch Dick Clark, when asked why he thought Manilow has been such a popular object of derision since even before his solo career began. When Manilow made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s ubiquitous American Bandstand, it had not yet been two years since John Wasserman of the San Francisco Chronicle had sneered, “Manilow, who has his hair done at the Clip and Snip Poodle Salon, apparently thinks he is a potential star.” At that point Barry had simply been opening the second act of Bette Midler’s show. By the time he played ‘Mandy’ and ‘It’s A Miracle’ for a studio full of screaming and dancing teenagers on American Bandstand, Barry actually was a star, though some folks were still stumped as to precisely why.
“I thought he had a great touch,” says Clark, of his first impressions of Manilow, “but I could not envision him ever captivating audiences the way he subsequently did years later. I mean, he’s a tall, skinny, not particularly handsome man. And they loved him. Just immediately, there was a warmth and an attraction – great smile, wonderful touch with a song. You listen to his voice, and it’s not the best voice you ever heard – nor is Ray Charles’ or Jimmy Durante’s. But there’s a sound and a feel to it. I mean Billie Holiday had like a five or six note range and became one of the most popular jazz singers of all time. If you look at the surface, or you look at the sort of statistics and stuff, it’s unlikely. But if you suddenly realise that beneath all that there’s a helluva lot of talent and knowledge – Barry knows everything there is to know about the music business and arranging and putting songs together that touch people.”
And that, in itself, could be a large part of the problem. There is often a perceived sense of manipulation in Barry Manilow’s work that seems to work magic with audiences, but often disgusts critics and other professional musicians. Says Clark, “Barry has an amazing commercial touch, which is a double-edged sword. I think musically he has the common touch; he knows exactly what people want. He produces, he writes, he sings, he performs, he does it all magnificently. But he’s very, very commercial.”
“Commercial” is a tricky concept in any venture that could be even remotely construed to be artistic. While artists of all types are encouraged to produce good works and explore the boundaries of their creativity, somehow they often seem to be expected to do so without the perceived taint of turning that art into a moneymaking endeavour. Given that attitude, it seems odd that so many of the musicians and writers who look down upon the “commercial” seem to be doing so from the comfort of nice homes and opulent surroundings paid for by the commercialisation of their own artistic endeavours. So why, then, should some artists, like Barry Manilow, be held to a higher standard than others?
“When you become that popular and that successful,” says Dick Clark, who’s been actively involved in the popular music business since before Elvis had sideburns, “you become the modern day p
unchline like Lawrence Welk used to be years ago. And that’s not fair. Totally unfair.” The mere fact that Dick Clark remembers the time when kids even knew who Lawrence Welk was is a testament to Clark’s longevity in the business. “In the early days of rock and roll when kids would make jokes about Lawrence Welk,” Clark continues, “I’d say, ‘Now let me point out something to you. If you can ever pursue your dreams, and do it for 30 or 40 years, and amass a fortune and become as wealthy as he has, and have a legion of fans who adore you, then you’ve got to think about that before you make jokes. Because your career may be 20 minutes.’ That shut ‘em up pretty good.”
While Clark’s words may have put a lid on the teenaged Welk bashers, such logic seems lost on the professional critics, so many of whom seem to see their main job to be not actually giving anything or anyone a serious, thoughtful review, but rather trying to see how clever they themselves can be, often at the very personal expense of their subject. Again, witness San Francisco Chronicle writer John Wasserman’s review of Bette Midler and Barry Manilow at San Francisco’s Community Theater in September 1973. Bette is described as “like a rag doll on speed”. Wasserman notes that Bette wore a large orchid in her cleavage “which, in Bette’s case, is in the vicinity of her knees”. In case folks didn’t quite get that image, a few paragraphs later Wasserman writes that Bette’s “bountiful breasts … resemble ostrich eggs dropped into a pair of panty-hose, springing up and down like yo-yos”. Of the five column piece, perhaps two paragraphs were actually devoted to discussing Bette’s work. The rest made fun of her appearance, made fun of her audience and, beyond all professional reason, made fun of Barry Manilow who, said Wasserman, “has got to go”.
“Oh, it’s an easy joke for god’s sake,” says Clark. “It happened to me in my life. I was synonymous with rock and roll, and I was a comedian’s punchline for a while. It didn’t bother me particularly because it didn’t have anything to do with my abilities, I was just synonymous with this freaky thing that was happening, rock and roll. So they could either end the line with ‘rock and roll’ or ‘Dick Clark’ and it was a little more funny if you ended it with a person. Barry has, unfortunately, suffered the same problem because over the years people began to make fun of his work, and it’s a cheap shot.”
Barry Manilow Page 22