Journale 15

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The History of ROCK - 1985
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The professional nice guys of rock March 1976: The ABC-TV network wins top ratings with 'John Denver And Friend', a show teaming the 'folkie' singer-songwriter with veteran crooner Frank Sinatra. March 1978: Top ratings again for ABC with Barry Manilow's third television spectacular. With his special guest John Denver, Manilow performs a medley of Everly Brothers hits from the Fifties. These two events reflected one of the most important trends in popular music during the mid Seventies: the emergence of a number of male singers all bidding for the title (first coined by rock critics Simon Frith) of 'MOR (middle-of-the-road) star of the rock generation'. The major US contenders were John Denver, Neil Diamond and Billy Joel; in Britain, Leo Sayer, David Essex and Gilbert O'Sullivan were among the front-runners. Spot the difference To some extent, these new MOR stars were updating something that had started in the Fifties when Pat Boone, Andy Williams and others took rock'n'roll material and adapted it to a smooth, crooning style owing much to singers of the pre-rock era such as Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. But there were two important ways in which the Seventies stars differed from their predecessors. Firstly, the distance between the music of the MOR performers and the artists generally considered to be 'authentic' rock musicians was often very slight. Neil Diamond and John Denver, for instance, were singer-songwriters in the same mould as dozens of rock artists, while much of Billy Joel's reportoire of the Seventies bore a strong resemblance to that of, say, Elton John. The difference between MOR and rock in these cases lay almost entirely in how and where a singer presented his material. Both rock and MOR performers appeared on record and gave concert performances. However, nearly all the MOR stars were willing to enter the traditional show-business territory of the night-club and the Las Vegas resideney. However the role played by television was more crucial in creating a distinction between rock MOR during the Seventies. In the US as in the UK, TV companies tended to restrict rock to a few specialised shows. The MOR stars filled the consequent popular music vacuum by being showcased in prime-time entertaiment spectaculars and variety shows. But whereas John Denver, Barry Manilow and Leo Sawyer featured TV series with guest stars and song-and-dance routines, rock stars like Elton John and Jackson Browne rarely did. The secound factor that distinguished the Seventies MOR stars from their predecessors was quite simply the scale of their success. Until the arrival of the Saturday Night Fever disco phenomenon, MOR provided the majority of the multi-million-selling superstars of the decade. John Denver, for instance, was estimated to have made some 10 million dollars in 1975 alone, while Billy Joel's companies had a similar income the previous year, The Stranger, was topped in American sales only by the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever (1977). Manilow sold over 27 million records during the Seventies. These massive sales figures were achieved mainly because of a generation gap that had emerged in the popular music audience in the early Seventies. For whatever reason, the bulk of the rock stars of that period - Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and the rest - held few charms for the generation that had grown up on the mainstream rock of the Beatles era. Instead, this now older age group (late twenties upwards) turned towards performers whose work the music industry swiftly dubbed 'AOR' or adult - oriented rock. At its best, this music could extend the thematic and the musical range of rock without sacrificing its incisiveness or critical edge. However, the terms AOR and MOR came increasingly to be used by rock critics as synonyms for a wholesale regression to the sentimentality of the pop ballads rock'n'roll had originally reacted against in the Fifties. Labours of Manilove The largest amount of critical scorn was reserved for crooning New Yorker Barry Manilow. Despite such phrases as 'peroxide puppet', 'stuffed dummy' and worse being coined by the press, Manilow inspired equally strong feelings of devotion among his mainly female fans, who evolved little rituals to carry out at his concerts such as the lighting of small candles during certain songs. Manilow's early career owed less to the rock world than to the general entertaiment business. He worked as an arranger for radio and television shows before turning his hand to the composing and performing of TV commercials; at a later stage in his career, he self-mockingly included a medley of his jingles for fast food, soft drinks and toilet cleaner in his live shows. Manilow next became an accompanist and then musical director for Bette Midler before launching his own solo recording career in 1973. His first big hit came in 1975 with the lush ballad 'Mandy', which reached Number 1 in the US and Number 11 in the UK. The bulk of the material on Barry Manilow's albums consisted of mid-tempo ballads in which his bright tenor was framed by a crowded accompaniment of piano, strings and horns.
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Notwithstanding the title of one his more effective hits - 'I Write The Songs', composed by former Beach Boy Bruce Johnston - most of Manilow's own compositions were co-authored with one of several lyricists. Stylistically, they belonged mainly in the tradition of 'standard' ballads - it was not difficult to imagine a rejuvenated Frank Sinatra performing them. The songs of stars like John Denver or Billy Joel, however, were rooted in the rock and folk of the Sixties, not Forties pop. Reviewing Joel's 1978 album 52nd Street, the influential Rolling Stone critic Stephen Holden hailed him as 'the quintessential post-rock entertainer: a vaude-villian piano man and mimic who, having come of age in the late Sixties, has the grasp of knowledge and the technical know - how to be able to caricature both Dylan and the Beatles as well as "do" an updated Anthony Newley.' Like Barry Manilow, Joel was a New Norker and an adroit pianist. However his material, which was entirely self-composed, had a much wider thematic range than the romantic scenarios that were Manilow's speciality. Joel's love songs, such as 'Just The Way You Are' and the Dylanesque 'She's Always A Woman', tended to combine pretty melodies with coy lyrics. Far less hackneyed were his songs of social observation, whether 'Scenes From An Italian Restaurant' or his 1982 US hit 'Allentown', in which the singer adopted the persona of a redundant steelworker. Occasionally his lyrics touched a deeper level, as in the title song of his biggest-selling album, The Stranger (1977). Look at the harlequins! As if to emphasise their allegiance to showbiz rather than rock, two of Manilow and Joel's British MOR equivalents first appeared in fancy dress. Gilbert O'Sullivan adopted short trousers and cloth cap in 1970 to sing his first hit 'Nothing Rhymed', while Leo Sayer donned a harlequin outfit for 'The Show Must Go On' in 1973. While O'Sullivan developed considerably as a songwriter, notably with the international hit 'Alone Again Naturally', before fading from view as the result of a lengthy lawsuit with his former manager, Sayer went on to become a major television star and a silkily efficient singer, particularly when teamed with West Coast producer Richard Perry for the 1976 album Endless Flight. As they approached their forties, the new MOR stars showed no signs of faltering in therms of success. Indeed, it seemed that they were poised to capture a large section of the 'post-rock' generation of the Eighties - those who were the rock fans of the mid Seventies - just as they had won the allegiance of the previous generation. If so, it seemed that 'authentic' rock for a post-teenage audience might soon be no more than a mere tributary of mainstream, 'post-rock', middle-of-the-road music. by DAVE LAING
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Night & Day 1998
BARRY MANILOW When the singer isn't writing the songs that make the whole world sing, he's likely to be in a bookstore, rifling through the self-help section. Why? Because he's a 'recovering celebrity' If ever there was a nose made for getting stuck into a book, it's Barry Manilow's. And that's precisely what he likes doing with it, wherever, whenever he can. Bookshops are his temple, books his spiritual salvation. He loves the size of American bookstores. 'They're huge,' says Barry. 'They have sofas and coffee stands and meeting places and they're really social; they're like a whole city of books, you can get lost in them.' His favourite bookstore is his local, the Bodhi Tree in Los Angeles, stuffed full of touchy-feely philosophies. I'm amazed that the master of middle-of-the-road mush, messiah of broken-hearted girls and grannies from Dunstable to Des Moines, could go anywhere as public as a bookstore without being mobbed. Perhaps his fans don't read, but more likely it's the unspoken etiquette that operates among the bookish. 'People are intent on browsing - if they notice me, they don't bother me.' Not that he advertises himself. You'll find him incognito, the bouffant as often as not flattened by a baseball cap, wearing jeans and sneakers ('As low-key as possible - I haven't worn anything spangly since 1978'). He gravitates towards the self-help section. 'Sometimes a book has just one idea spread out for 800 pages, but they can be great. I've got all John Bradshaw's stuff {Family Secrets is probably his best known}. He deals with breaking ties to family and digs deep into what stops you going further with your life. It's not all perfect but there are kernels of good ideas and they make you think.' 'I rate Deepak Chopra. Two of his books have really made me think about what I want to do with my life and helped me to get out of my own ego and try to find grander reasons for my music. He's made me ask questions like: "Are you doing this for enough people?"' It's not a question you'd expect to be posed by a guy who writes the songs that make the whole world sing, who in the past 20 years has sold more than 60 million records. That ought to be enough for anyone. Not for Barry. He isn't one to shut himself up in his California mansion, count his gold and feel smug. He gets out there - at least as far as the bookstore - and reads up on how to make himself a nicer kind of person. 'You can get very caught up with being a celebrity - I hate that word - and I like books which shake me up. Celebrity is as addictive and destructive as any drink and I'm a recovering celebrity - and that needs dealing with.' When Barry goes on tour, he always stocks up at the nearest bookstore. He doesn't just buy books, he reads them. Among those stacked on his bedside table is "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier ('You can taste the characters and the situations,' he says); the autobiography of the Indian philosopher Krishna Murti ('a beautiful-looking book but more than a coffee-table thing - his life story') and "Conversations with God" by Neale Walsch ('which has nothing to do with God'). 'Books are the only things I really collect,' he says. There are only two rules: they have to be new and they have to be hardbacks. 'I guess I'm just shallow but I don't have the same passion for old books. I like to crack open a new hard-covered book and make it mine,' he admits, a touch menacingly. having broken their spines, he scribbles comments in the margins, and highlights the good bits for future reference. 'Did you see that movie, 84 Charing Cross Road? What I loved was the way each book was a real friend. I've always wanted to make that story into a musical.' I suspect he'll be too busy reading to get round to it. To a certain extent, his passion for books is an effort to make up for lost time. 'I wasn't a real good student and studying didn't seem interesting then... I guess I'm catching up now. I read all this stuff and re-interpret it. I can't preach but I can write songs, sing and be a better person. If you can drop those inspiring seeds, you should.'  BY GEORGINA BROWN PHOTO BY MARTIN SIMON
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Life 1998
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What? There's two...? You can tell you're getting old when you start fancying Barry Manilow. Or is it that, at 51, he's at last grown into his nose? Whatever, he's still to blame for making the whole world sing You show your ticket to the usher ('Enjoy the concert!') and pause on the cusp of Washington. DC's, 13,000-seater MCI Centre, looking down over rows of scented ladies with big hair and Manilowmania badges, towards the teeny, tiny stage several miles away. It's a vast indoor arena, home to the Washington Wizards basketball team, with the same gaping, stomach-churning sense of space that you might find at the Aswan Dam. There is, it is immediately obvious, not a scrap of atmosphere, just a faint smell of excitement and Gold Spot, and some piped Aretha Franklin playing very distantly over the Tannoy. How can he possibly do it? How can he work Manilow Magic in a place like this, you wonder, picking your way down the steep steps, past Couples in Love and forty-something Washington matrons in camel-jersey-and-blazer combos, and entire families feasting on village-sized buckets of BBQ-ed ribs. Quite abruptly, the sterile overhead lights are switched off. The ladies start to twitter with anticipation. There's a pause, some familiar chords, and then the stage is bathed in a warm golden glow. And suddently there's a man fantastically long neck - held so precisely erect that he reminds you, inevitably, unfortunately, of a champion-ship ice skater or local hairdresser. It's Barry! Mr Manilow! The winner of Grammy's, Tonys and Emmys! Composer of Copacabana and 'Bermuda Triangle'! Singer of 'Mandy' and 'I Write The Songs'! The world's least likely sex symbol! Mr Manilow prances about the stage, making 'Eeek' faces, shading his eyes with his hand, peering out and pretending, chivalrously, to recognise people bobbing around in the human soup that is his audience. 'Hi!' he mimes, and 'How ya doing?', then plunges into 'Daybreak'. The gigantic crowd, for the most part, behaves rather like a devout church congregation. It listens, swaying, with a moony expression on its face; it sings along when invited to; it rises to its feet at the end of songs and claps in a heartfelt fashion. On the other hand, it does not rush towards the stage, throw undies or scream ceaselessly, as Barry's British audience does. No, here in Washington there is a sense of reverie, of contented appreciation, as Barry works expertly through his schmaltzy, tuneful, agreeable oeuvre, cranking out key changes as often as other artists change outfits. The only time the audience's serenity wavers is in the run-up to 'Can't Smile Without You', a song which Barry traditionally sings to a girl he has plucked from the crowd. At a certain moment, there's a great slow whoop of excitement and hundreds of cardboard posters are thrust aloft, some sprinkled with glitte, some audaciously bordered with winking fairy lights. Barry looks out on to a sea of shimmering begging notes: 'Pick Me, Barry!' or 'Choose My Mom!' In the end, he goes for a third-grader teacher called Linda in a red sweatshirt dusted with sequins, whose poster reads, simply, 'Please'. Linda swoons up there on stage, clenched safely between Barry's knees (he's sitting on the piano, singing to her). It's touching. In between songs, Barry, who's wearing a sharp charcoal three-piece with a navy satin shirt, segues neatly into his showman's patter. He's got divine comic timing. 'You know, I've made 29 albums in my life,' he says at one point,'which is incredible as I'm only 30 years old.' Barry Pincus was born 51 years ago, in Beth Moses Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Harold (who drove trucks for the Schaefer brewery) and Edna (who worked in a toy store), divorced when he was a baby. Barry grew up in a three-room apartment with his mother and maternal grandparents, and didn't meet his father again until the day before his 11th birthday, when a strange man approched him on the street and gave him a second-hand tape recorder as a present. He's had little contact with him since (though Harold showed up occasionally backstage when his son became famous). When Barry was barmitzvahed, at 13, he adopted his mother's maiden name, Manilow. Nowadays, Barry Manilow's 'home' is a ranch-style house in Los Angeles (recording studio, swimming pool) overlooking canyons and mountains. The inverted commas are important, though, because if one is being totally accurate, Barry lives, like Eloise, in hotels. After the gig at the MCI Centre, after an hour-long corporate flesh-press, he retired to the swanky Beaux Arts Willard hotel, and the Presidential Suite. And that is where I meet him the following morning. As he comes into the suite's sitting room (there's also a dining room, littered with taco crumbs, plus a four-postered bedroom and bathroom along the lines of Versailles), you are struck less by the lack of presence than by the elegant way he moves: it's the smoothly undulating, giraffe-like gait of the truly tall. He is wearing a silky black shirt, black jeans (which he says are from the Gap, but which have a big Iceberg label much in evidence) and Patrick Cox loafers. Naturally, his hair is bouffant - there's one line in his autobiography which says it all: 'The next week I landed a gig in Chicago, discovered a blow-dryer, and never looked back' - but he looks tired, and his voice is hoarse. He has been on the road since April 1997, and seems rather fed up with it. 'I'm in the ridiculous Presidential Suite here,' he begins, unfolding himself into a chair, gesturing at vases of lilies and oil paintings and curtains so plush and swagged that they look like ballgowns hung up around the windows. 'Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous? And it doesn't make any difference. You know, what you really miss is your bathroom and your own stuff and your dogs. And yesterday I had a shower with cold water. It's beautiful: they just didn't have it together. I can't tell you how many times I've shaved with cold water. It just kills me!' There's a real edge of exasperation in his voice, but he catches himself whingeing, and starts to camp it up, piling on the irony. .
'They scream for a combination of things: the lights look good, the suit cost me so much money that it makes me look better than I really do, and there's all this romantic music that they've given their own stories to...'
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'That's the life, the road life: late planes, bad room service, late cars meeting us, and it's either freezing cold or crazy warm so you're just dying, and the bugs...' And he breaks into a big, rasping, attractive laugh. Barry has, over the years, honed his self-deprecation as much as his stage act. The two are, in fact, inextricably linked. So many horrid things have been said about him throughout his caeer - that he's a geek, with the biggest conk in showbiz, and that he makes drippy music for menopausal women - that, like that other large - featured hero, Cyrano ge Bergerac, he has developed a strategy for coping which involves getting the dig in first. He does this less in person than on stage, but he does it all the same. As a comsequence, he gives the impression of being unusually self-aware, which is a very likeable trait, and not one you come across very often in the rarefied climate that accompanies world-famous celebrity. But then again, Barry's story is not the conventional showbiz legend of naked ambition and heartthrobbery and casting couches and Destiny. The way he tells it, and it sounds likely enough, he never meant to be a star, let alone one that sang. In his early twenties, when he'd worked out he wanted to do something musical, he dreamed about being a studio musican, or a songwriter, if he was really lucky. But performing on stage, in front of screaming woman? That was never part of the plan. Barry, a skinny kid with sticky-out ears, a long nose, buck teeth and a big Adam's apple, grew up on his stepfather's record collection: Count Basie, Sinatra, Rogers and Hammerstein. He spent all his free time tinkling away on a neighbour's piano, so his mother bought him an $800 Wurlitzer spinet. It took her five years to pay off the loan. But Barry never had much direction. After he left school, he went to work in the mailroom at CBS and took night classes in advertising. Even when he enrolled in the New York College of Music, on an Orchestra Arranging course, which he adored, he kept on the day job, creeping up the corporate ladder. He was offered the chance to play piano for an Off-Broadway musical, which didn't pay, but he accepted, and loved it. He started to arrange music and play piano in bars, flanking girl singers, and some-times, when he absolutely had to, he did the old duet. After a while, he screwed up his courage and resigned from CBS. Things started to speed up. He wrote jingles for Shasta Cola, Vicks, Kentucky Fried Chicken and pimple cream - a jingle medley still appears in his shows to this day - and produced Bette Midler's first album. He recorded his own demo, hoping to interest record companies in his songs (not his voice, which he didn't rate). It was, therefore, quite a shock when he was offered a singles contract. In the first week of 1975, he got to Number One in the US charts with 'Mandy', a song he hadn't even written. It was the decade that defined superstardom and Barry ('this little plaintive emotional guy') was up there with the best of 'em, wearing big collars and bigger sunglasses, 'trying to cover up the real me'. There was quite a lot of covering up to be done, actually, because Barry Manilow had just discovered some-thing rather inconvenient.  He had a horror of going on stage. Performing, he says, was 'this scary enemy'. 'I had to go out and do this... thing which I was so uncomfortable with. Really: go out there and do it right now. That's the way I felt. Can you imagine? Without any preparation, without ever wanting to, without ever thinking about it. That's what it always felt like. They were sending out the wrong guy.' He talks longingly of 'the greats', like Springsteen and Sinatra, performers who wait for the audience to come to them, rather than the other was around. 'If you look at the old video tapes - and I don't, I mean: who can? - I run around the stage very puppydog, talking, chattering, never standing still. I understand why that guy's doing that, and he's kinda loveable. But being that guy was a big burden.'  Even now, he'd rather not be up there, singing. He loves setting up the shows, arranging the lighting and the sound system, rehearsing with the band, but there always comes a point when he'd much rather sit back with a glass of wine and watch someone else step up to the mic. 'So the job for me is actually going out and doing this performance that you saw last night. And that's a job. It's not where I would chose to be, but I've learned how to do it and I'm not nervous about it.' This pragmatism has been hard-won. In the run-up to his first appearance on the Johnny Carson Show, Barry was so freaked that he couldn't sleep, sweated bullets, bit his nails to the quick, started smoking again and temporarily lost his sight. The show itself was fine, but the whole episode persuaded him that he had a problem, so he joined an acting class. The teacher encouraged him to analyse his song lyrics and work out how to deliver them: this would keep him occupied on stage. Instead of 'wearing a lampshade on my head and doing pyrotechnics', as he used to, he learned how to relax in front of an audience. 'I'm beginning to trust that I don't have says. I trust that [the audience] is here to see me. The more they come, the more natural I am, the less I have to work hard, the less I feel the need to please, the louder they get. So it has really been a very human experience.'  But does he also find it easier to believe that they fancy him? (The show is not with-out its bump-and-grind moments, and whenever there's a vaguely sexy lyric, a big squeal goes up.) 'I laugh at it with them,' says Barry, sitting poised and formal and just a little embarrassed in his chair. 'I can't imagine anybody could take anything like that seriously. I never think about this. I think about the music - that's all I really care about. I want to look decent, so I comb my hair real nice and do the best I can with what I've been given, and if they scream, I think they're screaming for a combination of things: the lights look good, it's glamorous up there, the suit cost me so much money that it makes me look better than I really do, and there's all this romantic music that they've given their own stories to.' Barry's own romantic background is not particularly remarkable. He got married at 21, to his high-school girlfriend, Susan, but it didn't work out. Towards the end of the 1960s, he fell in love with someone called Linda Allen, and they're still together, though they've never had children. There aren't many pictures of them together, but the ones I've seen show a nice, normal-looking woman with blond hair and neat little button nose. Theirs is one of those interesting relationships that seems to segue from passion to friendship, and back again. For instance, they were still living together in Bel Air when, in 1981, Barry was quoted as saying, 'Linda was a lover of mine, but we aren't lovers any more. It has gone on to be a beautiful friendship.' But now things appear to be back on track. Barry is not interesting when talking about her - quite deliberately, I'm sure. Linda is 'one of the great woman of the 20th century.' She is 'one of the great lights of my life.' Their relationship is 'very profound'. He has a deep-rooted suspicion of marriage, which is, he explains, why they never took that route. 'When I was growing up, I never saw couples relate to one another the way Linda and I do. Grandma and Grandpa were always fighting, it didn't seem like they really wanted to be with each other, and my mother divorced and married so many times, aunts and uncles were always together but it didn't seem as if they respected each other, as if they to hear what each other had to say.'
'If you look at the old video tapes - and I don't; I mean, who can? - I run around the stage very puppydog, never standing still. That guy's kind of loveable. But being him was a big burden'
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'So I was not raised around people who had the kind of relationship that Linda and I have. What can I tell you? It's deep. We never talk show business. We never dish, you know, grossip. The times we're together, I treasure every moment.' Linda is a film and television production designer. Currently, she's at home in LA, working on a series starring Ann-Margret. I ask what else she has worked on, and Barry can't immediately remember. 'Home Alone... or I think with the kid, to Jamie-Lee Curtis thing with the kid, to do with Macaulay Culkin? I don't know... millions, she's always working, they love her.' No, he has never written a song about her. 'Maybe someday I will,' he says, unconvincingly. 'It's just too personal, too private. I don't even like talking about our relationship... there's one area of my life I'd like to keep to myself.' The irony is, of course, that Barry is to Relationships what Bernard Matthews is to turkeys. He has carved out a whole career from doomed love, and men who cry, and the right people at the wrong time. People will always, always want to hold up his songs next to his life. 'right,' acknowledges Barry, briskly, 'but my relationship with Linda is much deeper than any of those songs, and much more private.' Which isn't the sort of comment you expect the world's top balladeer to come up with. In Lindthe weirdness of celebrity from the inside. 'Take a look at the elevator operator,' Barry says. 'He's trembling when I walk in yesterday. There's an image that comes before I get into the elevator. And I guess if I regret anything in this popular career, it's not that I can't go home, or that I havent't got a normal life: it's that I'm not able to connect with more people on a personal level. There are a lot of people out there that I would love to talk with, and it takes so long to break down that thing, that image. I know I've missed out on so many great friendships. There's something intangible that takes so long to finally disappear.' A thoughtful, shy man reluctantly isolated by fame and embarrassment: that's Barry, the accidental king of camp. You see the problem towards the end of the interview when he wants to check something with his British PR, Ciara. She's down the a's absence (and she never tours with Barry: 'what, should she hang around? No, she shouldn't. It's not respectful'), he surrounds himself with a tight-knit group of trusted friends. For instance, Marc is 41, clean-cut, looks a tiny bit like Peter Powell, and used to work for Andy Gibb. During the interview, he pops in and out of the suite, opening windows, delivering trays of tea and cookies. He's funny and easy-going, and the pair of them seem incredibly close. There's little evidence of the sort of breathless deference you often sense in these set-ups. For instance, during the shoot, there's one moment when Harry, the photographer, takes a Polaroid of Barry in a certain light, to give him a feel for the picture. Barry - who seems less relaxed in front of a camera than a Dictaphone - doesn't like it, but Marc does, and persuades him to give it a go anyway. At another time, when Barry is sitting down, studying a clutch of Polaroids on the table, Marc peers at them over his shoulder, and runs a comforting hand down his back, rather as if he's stroking a nervous animal. You get the feeling that Barry's keen on self-improvement: something simply not in the lexicon of most stars of his stature and longevity. He taught himself how to feel at ease on the stage, and he also make sure he didn't fall for his own publicity. He describes being blown off his feet when success hit and turning into a bit of a schmuck. 'I do know that I wound up alone too much of the time, and then I would get angry at everyone else for small silly things. And eventually I heard myself, and I looked around, and I saw unhappy people around me. And I began to think, maybe it's me. Maybe they're not really unhappy people. Maybe it's my impact on them. And I began to take responsibility for my actions. I caught it, this asshole period, within the first four to five years.' He was in his midtwenties when he made it big: he'd already had a career, he was making his own bed, writing his own cheques, shopping for his own groceries. His sense of self was established. 'When this happens to someone who is 15, 16, 18, 20 - well, I don't know how anyone gets through it. I really don't. I say a prayer for them. Good luck, baby, good luck.' He sees an analyst every so often, which, he says, helps enormously.  'Every few months I feel myself go into a crisis of some sort, so that if I didn't watch out, I would blame somebody or get into my self-pity pot. And before I go to that unpleasant place, I go to the phone: "I need an hour!" And nine times out of 10, I find that it's a matter of something that happened in my youth that is scaring me again.' I take it that he's referring to his mother, Edna, an alcoholic who attempted suicide on various occasions, leaving just enough clues so her son would find her in the nick of time. Barry says, and it may be bravado, that he finds growing older 'great'. He says he dreaded turning 35 most of all, but it turned out not to be so awful. He always expected to turn into his grandfather on his 50th birthday, but that didn't happen either. 'I thought I was going to act like him. And I don't at all. Not even heading that way.' He's on the Zone Diet, and works out three times a week with a trainer: 'I'm very fit.' He may feel an alien in Los Angeles, but he looks like a resident: he exudes that peculiarly highly-coloured, ageless physical presence so familiar from daytime soaps. The fact remains that he looks much better at 51 than he did at 31. He shies away from celebrity bashes at Spago's, preferring to stay at home with Linda, his black Labrador Casey and the local jazz radio station. 'I don't live a star's life,' he says, proudly. 'I live the life of a gentleman.' He describes in toe-curling detail the business of feeling like a spare part at star-spangled paties when he first made it big. 'It was very awkward for me. I never knew what to say to these people. And they never knew what to say to me because I didn't know what to say to them.' He tells me he lives a pretty normal life: 'I always have. That's why you'll never find me in the rag papers. There's nothing to talk about.' The more time you spend with Barry, the more likely this seems. A part from the length of his career, and the purblind loyalty of his fans, the most interesting thing about him is that he's a comparatively regular chap - as regular as you can be after three decades in the sequin - and stack-heel world of Las Vegas-style showmanship. He has a knack for pinpointing corridor in the Capitol Suite with the photographer, so I suggest calling her via the hotel switchboard. Barry picks up the telephone receiver but when a perky voice issues forth, he carefully replaces the handset without saying anything. He gets up and hovers in the hallway of his suite, looking rather helpless, not knowing quite how to proceed. Outside his door, out there in the corridor, guests are coming and going, maids are wheeling trolleys about, bellhops are arrying bags. He puts out a hand, tentatively pushes the door that leads into it for a few seconds, and then ducks back inside. 'I wonder where she is,' he says pensively. He's really unsure of what to do next, so I volunteer to go and find her, leaving Mr Manilow alone in the safety of the Presidential Suite, a happy prisoner after all. By Harriet Lane Photographs by Harry Borden
At the end of the 1960s, he fell in love with Linda Allen. The pictures of them together show a nice, normal-looking woman with blond hair and a neat little button nose
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New Idea 2003
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