Journale 17

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Hello - 1994

Inside Story Barry Manilow Talk to us on his World Tour For someone who was raised as an only child in a run-down neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, Barry Manilow, 48, has come a long way. With 25 hit songs and international record sales of more than 65 million, he has an adoring army of fans from all over the globe. But he says: "It never dawned on me when I was growing up that I would become a singer." There has been just one very dark shadow on his life recently. He had to cancel two sell-out concerts in Cleveland during his American tour to attend the funeral of his mother Edna, 70, with whom he shared an emotional telephone conversation shortly before she died after batting against lung cancer. Barry was born on june 17, 1946, and a year later his father, Harold Pincus, left home. He then lived with his mother and grandmother in a one-bedroom flat. He married his high-school sweetheart Susan when he was still in his teens, but the marriage ended within a year, and today he shares his Bel Air refuge with set decorator Linda Allen, who he has been with for the last 20 years. Surprisingly, singing is not passion as he reveals in this interview, given recently in L.A. prior to the European leg of this worldwide tour. This began two years ago in the Philippines - where 46,000 people attended each in Britain on November 12 this year. "I never wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be a musican - a jazz musican," he reveals. "I wanted to be an arranger, a producer, a songwriter - but never a singer. I never really thought about it. I do enjoy it but I never sing in private, never in the shower and if my career died tomorrow, I don't think I would revive it. Before I started singing, I used to conduct and produce for Bette Midler. I was her piano player. I worked with her for about four years - they were the most exciting years of my career." "I never even stood on a stage before I was 30 and then when my second album came out, which had Mandy on it, my career exploded. Since then I have sold 65 million records." Do you find it easy being a star? "I have never found it difficult. It's nice because people smile at you all the time, but I have never taken it seriously. I take the music seriously, of course, but I've never been one to go out to restaurants where you can be seen, or to opening night parties. It's not my thing."  What is it like being applauded by your thousends of adoring fans? "It's like floating. It's a beautiful feeling, and I am very grateful for it. I enjoy it. My audiences are always very enthusiastic and it's always a lot of fun but you can't take it too seriously." How do you protect your private life? "I live in a beautiful place on the top of a mountain in Bel Air with a huge gate that nobody can see over and nobody can enter without permission - so I don't have any problems whit that." Who are your real friends? "The people I hang around with, my real friends, are not celebrities, but people I have known for many years." What do you like and dislike about yourself? "I think I am a kind and encouraging person. I believe in myself and I basically think the human race is good. People can be wonderful. As far as weaknesses go - I don't have any! (He jokes). Well I suppose I would like to build my body up. I always look so skinny and no matter how hard I try I can't build myself up. Maybe I am too much of a perfectionist. I am working all the time and I don't give myself time to relax. I am so driven and committed to my music that sometimes I look up and realise that I have not stopped in years. But I have such a passion for music that it never seems like work to me."  Is there a secret to your success? "I just do what feels good from the heart. That's it. That's my criteria for making music. If it doesn't come from the heart, it never works. The few times I tried to force it out, it never worked. Maybe the audience can sense that." Will you be doing any more shows to follow Copacabana, which is presently on at The Prince of Wales Theatre in London? "Yes I'm working on two right now - but only as a composer. I am not in the story. I am planning to write a Broadway show with Bruce Sussman next year." And in a few years time, he might just discover he's got a few more accolades ti his credit. Photos: Ena Press Interview: Michael Wolf

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TV Times 1990

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Sunday Telegraph Magazine - 2000

Can't smile without you Frank Sinatra loved him, Bob Dylan respects him, his fans adore him - and everyone else mocks him. So it's just as well that Barry Manilow thinks being Barry Manilow is pretty funny too. As the Manilow Millenium Tour reaches Britain, Giles Smith meets an unusally humble megastar At 53, Barry Manilow - singer, pianist, showman, romantic - continues to divide people. On one side are the fan, who are predominantly, but by no means entirely, female and, famously, unyieldingly loyal. On the other side is the press. With regard to Manilow, the press has developed what one might call a critical consensus - the consensus being that the singer of such plangent and tearful ballads as 'I Write the Songs' and 'I Made it Through the Rain' is some kind of dizzyingly kitsch joke. This verdict has tended to irritate Manilow - who once used to fire back letters to offending publications, but eventually gave up doing so - and it has also irritated his fans. 'They get more upset than I do sometimes,' Manilow said recently. In truth, the fans have frequently found themselves dragged into the argument. The terms 'housewives' and 'hairspray' figure frequently in reviews of Manilow's shows and are not always intended neutrally or generously. Yet, undiminished by this debate - perhaps even emboldened by it - the Manilow phenomenon rages on. The albums continue to come (30 at the last count), the tours continue to roll out. The Manilow Millennium Tour, which reaches Britain tonight, calls only at arenas which can accommodate fans in their thousands. Anyone who believes bad reviews cost livelihoods should note the career of Barry Manilow. He is a oneman argument against the might of the pen. Sources for Manilow jokes have included his looks, his hair, his clothes, his music, his masculinity. Deepening his voice, Terry Wogan used to refer to him on the radio as 'Manly Barrylow'. To know such adulation and, simultaneously, such satire - it is easy to see how this could confuse a man. It has tended to make Manilow guarded or, in happier moods, gamely pre-emptive. His autobiography, "Sweet Life: Adventures on the Way to Paradise," which he published in 1987 and which is, for the genre, uncommonly crisp and funny, gets in the first nose joke as early as page three of the introduction. More generally, though, the nature of his fame has installed in Manilow a wariness which is unusual even in the paranoid realm of showbusiness, an alert anxiety about what people might say and what they might mean by it. Sometimes what people say is straight - forwardly complimentary Frank Sinatra was no great fan of the pop era but he thought Manilow was good. 'He's next,' Sinatra once said, pointing at Manilow on one of a couple of occasions on which their paths crossed - a potentially troubling declaration given Sinatra's often-rumoured underground connections, but intended, it seems, as a thrilling, if daunting, endorsement of Manilow's place in the ascendancy.

Barry Manilow in Birmingham, where his British tour begins tonight

Bob Dylan, too, once approached Manilow at a party. This was in 1988. Dylan, who has no reputation for showbiz niceties, embraced Manilow, looked him in the eye and said, 'Don't stop doing what you're doing, man. We're all inspired by you.' Manilow was deeply confused - confused enough to leave the party briefly. Was this some kind of wind-up? The exchange preyed on his mind. For a long time, he did not know what to think about it. 'I didn't even think he knew what I did,' Manilow told me. 'And he said a beautiful thing. I was stunned. To this day I'm stunned. But I do now believe it was sincere. I spoke to a girl that he was once with and she said, "Yeah, it was sincere." '  Still, as he goes about his business, Manilow must bind himself about with protective layers. So, too, his fans. Like any contemporary international singing star, Manilow forms a capacious presence on the World Wide Web. He is the subject of numerous cyber way-stations where the faithful can gather to chat and refuel: the Barrynet, for instance, and the Maniweb, and the Barry Manilow Superhighway. In a message posted not long ago on the last of these, a fan who signs herself Dianne and who became interested only recently in Manilow, commends him for his music, his warmth, his ability to make a cavernous venue appear intimate. 'He's a true entertainer with a big heart and tremendous talent,' she writes. Then she adds, 'It's nice that he has a fabulous sense of humour about being Barry Manilow, too.' Then again, how much choice did he have? Whatever, here is Barry Manilow's favourite Barry Manilow joke, as reported by Bill Zehme in a profile for 'Rolling Stone magazine': record company boss approaches Ethiopians with exciting idea for multi-star famine relief record. 'Michael Jackson's on board. Bruce Springsteen, Barry Manilow...' Ethiopians say, 'Barry Manilow? Hey, we're not that hungry.' One Monday afternoon a few weeks ago, Manilow stood upstage at the Hippodrome Theatre in Birmingham and prepared to rehearse his act for the Royal Variety Performance. He had been chosen to headline the show and had agreed to make a big entrance and then offer a small selection from his quarter-century of hits, including 'Can't Smile Without You' and 'Could It Be Magic'. Backlit and seen from the auditorium, Manilow was a tall, wafer-thin silhouette in a cloud of dry ice and a black frock-coat which served to emphasise, when the smoke cleared, the extraordinarily youthful slightness of his hips. As the orchestra played an unrestrained fanfare, Manilow walked swiftly to the microphone at the front of the stage, angled his head so that the lights would fire up his eyes and spread his large hands wide at his sides. 'Come!' he sang. 'Come! Come into my arms! Let me know the wonder of all of you.' The drums then crashed in, and Manilow snatched the microphone from its stand and began to ease himself smoothly around the stage. The performance he gave in this near-empty hall, before a small number of curious catering staff and off-duty dancers with their feet up on the seatbacks, was remarkable for differing in no discernible detail from the performance he would later deliver to a full house including the Queen and Prince Philip. He was somewhere deep inside the songs and the absence of an audience seemed to present no hindrance to him. Maybe the opposite. 'I love rehearsals,' Manilow had told me earlier, at his hotel during a fairly downbeat appraisal of his duties as a popular entertainer, 'but then in a world I would go home. The performing part is the job.' Fabulous sense of humour asside, how much Barry Manilow enjoys being Barry Manilow is a difficult question. Off-stage he wore a black shirt over a white T-shirt and black jeans. He was casual yet uncreased, thoroughly groomed. Similarly, his manner was easy without being entirely relaxed. The surprise was how East Coast he was, which his presentation does not necessarily lead you to expect. Manilow may live (quietly, unstarrily, with his friend Linda Allen, a set-designer) at the end of a three-quarter-mile drive in Bel Air, Los Angeles, but he was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn sits tight in his speaking voice, as well as in his singing voice. 'You can't bullshit people from the East Coast,' he told me, 'me included, though I'm not like one of those tough guys. But people from New Jersey New York, we have this built-in bullshit detector that is intolerant of phoniness.' Sincerity and phoniness are big issues with Manilow, as is being 'comfortable.' And clearly one of the areas that makes him feel least comfortable is the world in which, as Barry Manilow, he is obliged to move. Of the people he had been rehearsing with in Birmingham, he said, 'All these musicians that are under the stage there, I feel so comfortable with them. We could probably all go out for coffee and my stardom persona would crumble around these people. I'm just Barry to them. And then when I walk backstage and bump into one of the stars, I don't know what to say. I have no idea. I am so awkward around these people. It's just not my world.' Originally his world was a three-room apartment in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where he was brought up by his mother, Edna, his step-father, Willie Murphy, and his grandparents, Esther and Joseph Manilow, who were Russian immigrants. His father, who drove a brewery truck, left home when Manilow was a baby. Manilow did not meet him until he was 11 and has only seen him a few times since. At 19, Manilow married his long-term date, Susan, who was a secretary at a toy company, and they moved to Manhattan. But after a year he ran from the demands of marriage to become a musician. (This apparently exploded Manilow's faith in marriage, which is why he has never married Linda Allen. Between songs in his shows, he will remark on the ironic absence of conventional romance in his own life. The audience seems to warm to him for this.) He worked in advertising for a while and wrote some jingles. Later he did musical arrangement for television and found work as a pianist and accompanist. The sign in the hotel lobby would say 'Barry Manilow at the keyboard.' He also did restaurants and clubs. At the Continental Baths, a gay sauna in New York, it was his privilege to play Broadway showstoppers to an audience of men in towelling robes. It was there, at the beginning of the Seventies, that he first accompanied Bette Midler. He became her record producer, her musical arranger and, on tour, her support act. In 1974 Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records, who is also responsible for the careers of Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin, found Manilow a sentimental ballad and insisted that Manilow sing it. 'I would never have chosen the song he chose for me,' Manilow said. 'I would never have noticed me.' The song was 'Brandy' and concerned a dog. Manilow changed the title to 'Mandy' and had his first colossal hit. Manilow, who still claims not to like the sound of his own voice, had never con- sidered performing. When he listened to the Beatles, he was more interested in what George Martin, their producer, was up to than in what Lennon and McCartney were doing. 'I would put on the headphones, smoke a joint and listen to the background... Performing never entered my mind,' he said. 'The first time I performed I had never felt so uncomfortable. It was not a place for me. When I met performers when I accompanied them, they seemed to be wacky people, throwing tantrums and being terribly over-emotional. I didn't feel a connection with them. I always felt more connection with musicians and arrangers.' But ambition pushed him forward. As he wrote in "Sweet Life", 'The next week I landed a gig in Chicago, discovered a hair-dryer and never looked back.' The attempted critical incineration promptly began. 'They were beating me up right and left. When my star exploded and I became a popular recording artist, it was the best of times and the worst. Certainly I couldn't have been more ecstatic with the success. But I was being lambasted. They were telling me that I was totally wrong. It was the most confusing time of my life. The audiences were loving it, and these people that I kind of respected hated it.' His voice rises an entire octave on 'hated'. 'Plus I didn't even know what I was doing out there singing, so I was not the most secure person in the world'. 'In the era we're talking about, it was such a shock that I wasn't the hippest man on the planet, because I always thought I was. It was such a shock that I wasn't creating product that people would throw their hats in the air for, because I thought I was. If it had been one or two reviews in the midst of otherwise glorious reviews... But it was consistent negative press. It was brutal. So I couldn't ignore it. Plus I was so shocked that I could be perceived in the manner I was being perceived in. If they had been around the recording studio with the musicians and producers and record executives, it was like a different reality. I mean, these people were over the moon about the work I was doing. And then to get these persistently brutal reviews... And it didn't seem to want to go away. It was year after year of them pummelling me to the ground, saying, "Get out of the business."' After a pause, Manilow said, 'And they seemed to make sense, that was the hard part.' Meanwhile, he was clocking up hit singles and platinum albums, selling out Broadway seasons, accumulating Emmy and Grammy Awards. Yet the niggling continued. 'I would wince, I would get angry, I would go into self-pity for a little while, I would react like a human being would react, but ultimately I would come out of it and I would go on and do what felt good to me. And what was encouraging about the whole thing was that the public seemed to make up their own mind.' And given this massive public endorsement, why would dissentient newspaper articles continue to bother him? 'Just put your own name in there,' Manilow said, and left it at that. Our Times Have Specialised In The Knowing Or "IRONIC" reappraisal of Seventies entertainment icons. In this period of cultural glasnost, former lapses with regard to sideburns and trousers can now be openly celebrated in the spirit of nostalgia, and many is the middle-aged hero who has emerged, grinning, from fashion's dust-bin and remade himself for a cross-generational public. It is only asked of a performer that he appear to be laughing about something that he once did in deadly earnest. Thus has Tom Jones made himself throbbingly viable all over again. Barry Manilow has not pursued this course of action. On the contrary, his albums have grown defiantly, unapologetically, more earnest over time, as if to prove a point. In 1984 he made "2:00 AM Paradise Cafe," a jazz album which included performances by Sarah Vaughan and Gerry Mulligan. (This is the album he says he would most like to be remembered for.) In 1987 he released an anatomically precise swing album, "Swing Street." In 1994 came "Singin' with the Big Bands," a collection of big band hits from the Thirties and Forties, played with, among others, the orchestras of Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey and based in a scholarly fashion on historical arrangements. And last year, in the wake of Sinatra's death, Manilow put out an album called "Manilow Sings Sinatra" - his take on 12 songs made famous by Sinatra ('You Make Me Feel So Young', 'All the Way', 'My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)' etc). As an act of self-assimilation, this last seemend particularly incautious. Manilow says he intended the record simply enough as 'my thank you and goodbye to this man. When he passed away I got the blues. His was the music that was in the air when I was growing up.' At the same time, the sound of Manilow singing 'doo-be doo-be doo' in the fadeout to 'Strangers in the Night' was, for many, an act of hommage too far. This was sacred ground. Who did he think he was? Manilow confesses now, 'If I had used my head, I might not have done that album. I got into trouble with a lot of critics. I don't think they got past the audacity. If I had actually thought about it, I guess, I probably would have said, "This might not be the smartest thing to do."' Still, it led him to a discovery. 'I feel more comfortable singing those 12 songs than any songs - even my own written songs - I've ever performed,' he said. 'If it were up to me, this is what I would do - hours of this kind of music. I feel so comfortable as a performer in this kind of world. The world I feel least comfortable in is pop music.' But wasn't it up to him? Hadn't he reached the point where he could put on what-ever kind of show he wished, and to hell with the consequences? 'I've done that kind of thing once or twice and the audience indulge me for the first couple of minutes. And then they get antsy. And they want to hear the stuff that they've come to hear me sing. And the difference between the response when they indulge me and when I do 'Copacabana' is so huge... Am I here for me, or am I here for them? How self-indulgent can you be?' Anyway, he would not want to be thought entirely casual about the music that has made him famous. The studio at his house in Los Angeles profits, he told me, from 'a ridiculous view of canyons and mountains, sky and trees. It's very inspiring. I'm a morning guy. I like getting up at six in the morning and watching the sun come up with a hot cup of coffee. And then I do my phone calls and then I turn everything off and go to work.' And he would defend the work he did there. 'They are well-written songs, they stand up. My whole catalogue - whether I've written it or not - is really well-written. I've kind of created my own little thing - my own little slice of the pie that I've had ever since 1975. It's not very big but it's mine and I've figured out a way of sneaking into the pop world with this catalogue of music that really shouldn't fit on the radio and somehow does.' To him, then, the last laugh. .

1978

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50 inside facts about Barry Manilow 1. Barry was born on a June 17 in the 40's. That makes him a Gemini. 2. His "hometown" is the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn which Barry calls "a slum." He's far from a poor boy now. 3. At seven years old Barry began his musical education learning the accordian. Later he studied piano. 4. Barry remembers his mom singing along with the Andrews Sisters records. 5. There's no memory of his dad, who deserted Barry and his Mom when Barry was only 2 years old. 6. Barry left home - Brooklyn - at 25 to move across the bridge to Manhatten, but he still considers it his longest trip, even after his much-travelled concert tour! 7. Some fans gave no rest to Barry last year when they found out where he lived, so he's moved to another New York City location. 8. Barry's six feet tall and weighs 160 pounds, but his wirey frame makes him look even taller. 9. Barry's Grampa Joe used to take the boy to Coney Island to make records in a little booth where you deposited a coin, the light came on, you did your thing, waited a few minutes, and the record came out. "Sing, Barry, sing," Grampa Joe used to urge. No one needs to urge him now. 10. Barry's hair is blond - blonder than ever, Barry admits, which he thinks is "fun." 11. His eyes are the bluest blue-blue, especially under stage lights. 12. Barry's best at entertaining an audience because he puts out all his energy and really gives a show. 13. Barry's worst at penmanship - an old problem that never got better. 14. Though he doesn't get much time for TV watching, he loves catching "STAR TREK." 15. To relax, Barry works mind games that help him unwind. 16. Backgammon, one of the world's oldest board games, is Barry favorite. It's immensely popular all over just now. 17. Barry's favorite recording group is The Spinners. 18. He loves fruit and vegetable gardening - in city gardens, on terraces, porches, or in living rooms. 19. Grampa Joe is Barry's favorite all time relative - and sometimes his eyes mist when he talks of him. 20. Barry's favorite entertainer is Bette Midler. They really helped each other's careers along. 21. Barry's favorite dog is the beagle - and his favorite beagle is HIS beagle, Bagel. 22. He likes silver jewelry and doesn't always like wearing his glasses. 23. One thing Barry hates is phonies. He's a very sincere guy and expects others to mean what they say, too. 24. Barry loves wearing jeans "around" but glamorous clothes on stage so he doesn't look like just a member of the audience. He's showman! 25. He's a loyal, kind friend and has friends from way, way back. 26. He drinks ginger ale when he's thirsty doing interviews. 27. He's got gold records and platinum records, but his latest achievements are being the number one male pop singer and an Emmy nomination for his TV special. Good news - he's signed to do six more. 28. Barry says he attracts, "Little old ladies, their husbands, babies, 12 year olds, screaming 29 year old housewives, gays and blacks." 29. He's happy that he doesn't attract drug addicts. 30. Barry tries to "contribute something through lyrics." He wants to communicate directly to listeners. 31. He feels he needs his "friends and that one person to fill the void." 32. Barry doesn't want "to be doing my 40th concert tour 20 years from now." 33. Barry always thought "music was playtime." Now he's paid to play. 34. He can't believe he's getting a steady paycheck as a singer. 35. As for love, much as he wants someone special he laments, "Who has time?" 36. Barry says it's hard to "come home to nobody." 37. Doing nothing is the biggest problem for Barry, he can't relax. 38. He loves reading the Sunday New York Times. 39. Barry can't take long vacations. On a supposed month's stay in Florida, he broke up the vacation with a trip to Vegas and another to Puerto Rico. 40. Barry's best attributes are his honesty, self-reliance & self-sufficiency. 41. His weaknesses are "Helplessness and need for other people. I need stroking like everyone else." 42. He hates being teased about his work, it's serious to him. 43. Barry thinks his records sell because "my records are more personal than the other guys." 44. Being "credited" with the MacDonald's jingle annoys him - he sang it, but didn't write it. 45. Of his success he says, "A lovely accident. I didn't think I could sing." 46. He says, "I don't believe in this astrology crap - but I am a Gemini and Geminis are supposed to be one day hot, one day cold." 47. The first show score Barry wrote was for "The Drunkard." 48. Barry's considering making a movie - maybe. 49. He keeps telling himself, "I'm doing this for real, for a living." 50. Barry was once married, and divorce was painful, but he feels his life is "exactly what I always wanted." .

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Barry Manilow is so crazy about his beagles that they've practically become his trademark! No wonder that when it came time to pick out a gift for Marie Osmond's 18th birthday, Barry chose a tiny beagle puppy. Marie was thrilled over the small bundle of fur that Barry presented her. Without much hesitation, she decided to name her new sadfaced, floppy - eared friend "Bagel."

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Barry Manilow: WHY I'LL NEVER MARRY AGAIN Mr. Romance tells of heartbreak over first wife SINGING superstar Barry Manilow, whose love songs make millions of woman's hearts flutter, has told for the first time why his own heart was broken - by a secret shattered marriage. And as he sings his romantic ballads, he knows that the sound of wedding bells will never again ring out for him. The hurt inside him is so great that he has instructed his aides never to reveal his ex-wife's full name or her whereabouts, and he has made it a rule never to talk about her. In a recent interview, however, he broke the rule to reveal that her name is Susan, she is now in her mid-thirties, and she was his childhood sweatheart. "I try to block out of my mind the day I walked out on my wife. Sometimes I think that if I had not married Susan, we might still be together," said Manilow. The 37-year-old singer painfully recalled how he had dated Susan through high school and how in 1967, when he was 21, they married. Ironically, it was his music, which was to take him to fame and riches, that caused their breakup. "Marriage conflicted with my music, and in the end music won. I guess Susan and I just married too young," said the heartthrob. "At the time I could see a career in music opening up for me, and I badly wanted to go for it. "I felt tied down and believed there must be more to life than coming home and watching television in the evening. "Unfortunately, I took it out on the person nearest me - my wife," he added sadly. "I left her and went home to live with my mother and stepfather." The marriage, he added, lasted just one year, and left him permanently scarred mentally. "I tried marriage once, and it didn't work. I doubt if I'd try it again. Besides, I'm married to my work," he explained. He did fall in love again, however, with TV producer Linda Allen. They dated for 10 years before splitting up. Now Manilow lives alone with his two beagle dogs, who share his house in California and also his Manhatten apartment. But if his music has cost him his marriage, it has brought him millions of dollars and millions of adoring female fans. 'Only my work can make me happy anymore' He can understand why they like his music, but he can't understand why they are so turned on to him personally. "My music is very romantic, and that moves my audience," he said. "But the fact that they idolize me I find baffling. I was the ugliest kid in school. None of the girls would give me a date. I had buck teeth, big ears, a very long nose and I was very skinny. Come to think of it, I haven't changed much. It still amazes me that girls find me attractive," he said.

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