Rolling Stone Magazine - Part 1

ROLLING STONE, NOVEMBER 1st, 1990


"WHEN YOUR NAME IS A PUNCH LINE, YOU LIVE IN HELL.
BARRY MANILOW LIVES IN HELL."


There are worse hells than his. He gets to park wherever he wants, for instance
also, he can shop recklessly and overtip in restaurants without concern.

Perdition, however, must have more dire consequences. And, as such, being Barry Manilow is no frolicsome lot.

Rather, it can be an existential nightmare. Example: Sincerity is his commerce.
Only he never knows when to trust it. He suspects compliments. He sifts them for snide subtext. Conditioning has taught him this.

Bob Dylan stopped him at a party, embraced him warmly, told him:
"Don't stop doing what you're doing, man. We're all inspired by you."
This actually occurred. He knew not what to make of the encounter.

Nearly two years hence, it haunts him still. "Who knows?" he says, shrugging the shrug of one who has shrugged much.

"It seems so odd that Bob Dylan would tell me this. I wasn't exactly sure what he meant. He may have been laughing out of the other side of his mouth while he said it, but it didn't seem like it. I mean, he looked me dead in the eye. But maybe he says that to everybody who walks by. He may have had one drink too many. You know, people give me jabs all the time - but not to my face... I sort of left the party for a minute because I wasn't sure. I thought, 'Well, maybe, maybe...'"

When Barry Manilow tells a Barry Manilow joke, he usually tells this one:

Record mogul announces to Ethiopian embassy that a collective of music stars is making a single to benefit the blighted country's starving masses. "Think of it!"
says mogul. "Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow" - Ethiopians cut him off. "Barry Manilow?" they say. "Hey, we're not that hungry!"

"It's my favorite joke." he says, a tad giddily. "But every time I tell it, people go, 'Aw, I'm sorry.' It makes me look kind of pathetic, I guess."

Japes, like barnacles, cling to his career, impervious vessel that it is. He
epitomizes grace under mockery.

"I feel bad for Dan Quayle, let me tell you," he says, all largess. "You want to
talk about being the butt of jokes..."

Nevertheless, he has stopped his share: nose jokes, clothes jokes, geek jokes,
masculinity jokes (Barely ManEnough, alas).

Not only does he know all the barbs, he actually archives them. In his home, he
has festooned a prominent corridor with cartoon-strip razzings - from Bloom County to Andy Capp to Popeye. Simply, he curates a personal hall of shame, displays it in game defiance. He even has the artists sign the originals.

"I know they hate doing this," he says, giggling mischievously, as is his wont.

He wore yellow. His coat, in this way, was like plumage. So there he sat, a canary icon, in a room full of peers - a little aloof, a little ignored. Around him
a large celebration swirled. His record company had taken over a ballroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel to showcase its most promising new acts.

Onstage much jamming took place. He watched this from a distance, applauding generously whenever appropriate. His presence was meant to confer support, he understood this. He sipped wine and softly rapped on the table to the staccato beat of the music - music that did not at all resemble his own. A fat diamond shimmered on his finger.

Because he was asked, he took one bow. This was requisite: No one in the room
was more famous than he. Nor was there anyone on hand who had sold, or would likely ever sell, more records: so far, 50 million plus, worldwide.

Still, he rose from his seat warily - or, at least, with some embarrassment - as
though he almost expected to be pelted. He got a nice hand. He looked relieved
and slipped back onto his chair, his curious yellow aura handsomely aglow.

He has grown into his nose. So say his friends, and by this they mean two things: First, and few would quibble here, he looks better than he used to. He used to look, well, dorkier. Maturity has obliged him.

Second, and some will quibble here although they oughtn't, Barry Manilow has
become formidable, extremely large, a legend even, in the show-business sense.
At age forty-four, after fifteen years of Top Forty toil and adult-contemporary
lionization, he is a giant among entertainers. He endures. He adapts. He persists. There is always a new album (twenty-two with the recent release of Because It's Christmas;the ninety-minute videocassette of his twenty-first, Barry Manilow Live on Broadway, reached Number One on the Billboard chart this summer). There is always a world tour.

Most probably, he is the showman of Our Generation. He lives for production
values, for rich staging, for catchy hooks and big finishes. He wants your goose
flesh. Musically, he is a populist nonpareil.

Sinatra, it is said, once jabbed a finger at Manilow and portentously announced,
"He's next." Even so, he is beset with insecurity. He is an outcast and has
resigned himself to it.

As his favorite joke suggests, he did not participate in the pop congress of "We
Are the World"; he was not asked. And this was fine with him.

"I'm not in that clique," he reasons. "I've never really been a group person. I've
always been a loner."

He realizes he has no other choice. He cannot fathom his place in the culture.
He feels uncategorizable, adrift, a freak.

"I am a musical misfit," he readily admits. "I've never been able to put myself into a musical slot. I don't consider myself a cohort of Billy Joel - he's more rock & roll. Kenny Rogers is more country. Barbra is a little older, more theatrical, actresslike.

"Neil Diamond is guitar oriented, gruff. I don't know where I fit in. I think a lot of critics have always been uncomfortable with my life as a pop star; there was just nothing that they could grab onto. Nobody, including me, could figure out why my records were making it. I've got my one little slice of this pie. It's very small, but it's mine."

Some random Barry Manilow findings, gleaned from months of scrutiny:

He has recurring nightmares about concentration camps. He does not know why but surmises that "it probably all has to do with my feeling undeserving of any success, even though I work my ass off for it."

If he could be anyone else, he would be Sting. "He's on his own path," he says, admiringly "I wish that I could be as brave as he has been with his career and his life." Next choice: Tom Waits. "He sings from his kishkes."

"Lite" radio stations, the kind that broadcast his own work, bore him.

"I'm grateful that they play me, don't get me wrong;" he says, "but I just can't get behind them. Pop radio has never challenged me." Mostly, he tunes in rock or jazz.

If told tomorrow to forsake singing "Copacabana" (his biggest hit) and "Can't Smile Without You" in concert, he would not sulk. Also, the lyrics of his signature anthem, "I Write the Songs," have always embarrassed him, at least in theory. Especially since somebody else wrote the song.

He laments: "It will follow me for the rest of my life, I guess."

He feels his best work is unreleasable: an album of would-be standards he
composed for lyrics bequeathed him by the widow of the legendary songwriter
Johnny Mercer ("Moon River," "Skylark").

"These are old-fashioned pop melodies completely out of place in 1990," he says, grieving. "Maybe when I'm dead, they'll all come out."

He barely eats. And he would rather die than eat Parmesan cheese. He tends to
brush his teeth every couple of hours. Touch his newspapers before he does and risk death. Same goes for magazines.

He hates surprises and spiders. He loves Roger Rabbit and white gardenias.
The mention of outdoor activities makes him apoplectic.

"Jews don't camp," he will insist. Or, "Jews don't ski."

And so on. He drives a red Range Rover; large dice hang from the rearview mirror.

He yearns to grow a beard, but would only do so in seclusion.
He is almost never in seclusion.

This man has a driveway. It is a long driveway. It is a driveway that could be
seventy or eighty driveways, arranged end to end, that snake and slope toward a pristine Bel Air aerie.

There, at the tip of his quarter-mile driveway, he meets me one afternoon. He
wears stubble and enormous European eyeglasses and a baseball cap and a gray T-shirt and jeans and sandals.

On him, scruffiness of this sort looks like an effort. Certainly, it seems incongruous - as do reports that he likes to motor-scooter down to the front gate for newspapers at dawn, clad only in his underwear.

Barry Manilow at home is not much like Barry Manilow in concert. Wardrobe considerations aside, the lighting is all wrong. And if the soaring driveway is paved with expectation, Manilow Manor itself is kind of anticlimactic: a cozy ranch-style affair, busy with crystal, art and fabulous views of Los Angeles below.

Here he dwells quietly, if not solitary. "This is where Linda and I live," he announces, referring to Linda Allen, the woman with whom he has been most often linked throughout his celebrity.

Linda is not home; she decorates movie sets, usually in remote locations, and is therefore not home much at all. For that matter, neither is he, what with touring. Basically, then, this is a home where no one is home very much.

"Is it gonna be a campy thing?" he asks me, meaning this article, leery as always.

He is simultaneously grateful for attention and incredulous that he would get any. Although his demeanor is unfailingly earnest, he does not know how to be taken seriously.

He yearns for respect. Yet he frets that his demographic appeal may be askew.
For this reason, whenever in my presence, he wryly implores friends and associates: "Be hip. Please, just be hip."

He wanted to see Jody Watley in concert. So we went to the Universal Amphi-theater and saw her. For three songs we stood at our seats, and like most of the audience, he danced and bopped to the music.After the third song, he nudged me and said, "Wanna go get some coffee?"

We left the building. Outside in the parking lot, he said, with a tinge of exasperation:

"I get it, I get it. Lots of bass drums. Big voice. Big ear-rings. Lots of energy. I
mean, it's loud. I'm too old for this."

Later, over coffee at a nearby restaurant, he added: "It looked like a bad Vegas act, but she meant it. So you've got to give her credit. But she looked like Ann-Margret or something."

Billy Idol, it turned out, was sitting in the same restaurant with a group of people. Once he realized Barry Manilow was in his midst, he began to stare. Then he began making goofy mocking faces, in the manner of Harpo Marx. In this way, he amused himself thoroughly.
Eventually, someone informed Manilow, who had seen none of this, that Billy Idol was on the premises.

"Oh, God." Manilow said, his sigh full of dread.

Here is how he once alienated Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel:

Because life makes no sense, they sat together, the three of them, at a small table in a Philadelphia diner, circa 1974.

Somehow, all three happened to be in town. So they convened, in casual assembly, at the behest of a local DJ named Ed Sciaky, who, with his wife, was also present.

Bruce drank water, acted detached. Billy drank black Russians, acted surly. Barry drank coffee and, to be friendly, made conversation. Much too much conversation, it seems.

"Sciaky reminds me that I made an asshole of myself then," Manilow says.
"Apparently, at one point I said, 'Out of all three of us, just watch, I'm going to be the biggest star at this table.'

"Ed says he winced, and his wife began to gag. I don't remember this, but if I said it at all, it was because, of the three of us, I was making the most blatantly commercial music. I respected their music more than my own and said (cynically), 'Hah! Just watch!' But it just came out wrong, and they never forgot it. To this day, Billy Joel gets pissed off when people mention my name - and I have always been such an incredible fan of his."


(to be continued)...