Journale 21

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So large is Manilow's spread that he uses a motor bike to pick up the paper at the end of his driveway.

photo: "I feel after 10 years I'm starting again," exults Barry. He launched his year-long tour in Salt Lake City (left).

. Deep in a recording studio on the fringe of West Hollywood a debate is taking place - an earnest argument among master craftsmen. Gerry Mulligan, the superb saxman who has played with such giants as Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck, feels that a note in the passage he and a small group of jazz elders have just played should be an E flat. No, says the session's leader: just an E. Mulligan is adamant. The leader, a thin, nervous man with watery eyes and a slight paunch under his baggy sweater, picks at the piano, screws up his face and has the group repeat the smoky, jazz-tinged phrase Mulligan's way. Then: "I like it," says Barry Manilow. "Let's change it. Thank you, Gerry." Wait a second. Run back that tape. Barry Manilow? Talking trade with Gerry Mulligan? The Barry Manilow who gave us "State Farm is There?" "Join the Pepsi People?" "I Write the Songs?" The very one. Only this time, Manilow's sound is not the Muzak-plus-one that once prompted a critic to call him "a Las Vegas middle-of-the-road shlock entertainer"; it is vintage '30s and '40s torch. Following in the footsteps of Joe Jackson and Linda Ronstadt, Manilow has made an album, "2:00 A.M. Paradise Cafe," full of the wistful sounds of another era, and gathered around to perform them are Mulligan and guitarist Mundell Lowe, plus fellow vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Mel Tormè. Unlike Ronstadt and Jackson, who picked their favorites from the vast trove of past hits, Manilow, who has written songs the whole world sings, has written the music for his own "standards" as well. And they sound good. An hour later, Manilow is playing back a tape of today's session. Mulligan's sax sounds gorgeous, perfect: sinew wrapped in tweed. Manilow looks up from the control panel. "This is why I've done it," he says. "To spend a week like this, with these musicians. What a thrill. It makes some of the junk I've recorded worthwhile." Barry Manilow has spent 10 years at the top of the heap, no matter where the critics would wish him. With 26 straight Top 40 hits, 10 platinum albums and countless industry awards, the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn who once talked of "shlepping up the ladder of success" would seem to have reached that he sees Paradise Cafe, in support of which he has just launched a 90-city tour, as more than a playful experiment of his musical maturity. It is, rather, a long-delayed affirmation of identity - an escape, after a highly atypical "composer's block," from the suddenly joyless process of hitmaking. "This album is not as commercial as my others," he admits. "But there comes a point where you can't live or die by whether you make the Top 40 or not. I'm trying to keep doing what I think I'm supposed to do. This one's for me." There was always an obsessive aspect to Manilow's music making. The son of divorced working-class parents who was brought up largely by his grand-parents, he quickly transformed his musical genius ("I could always sit at a piano and play anything") into his refuge from a host of insecurities. Of an early stint in a Kankakee, III. piano bar, he remembers, "It was the first time I ever felt attractive. Girls stated coming on to me and guys started buying me drinks. Every time I played, I didn't feel too bad. Then, when I'd get off, I'd turn into this little shlep." As Manilow passed the now well-know phases of his climb - the CBS mail room, his discovery as Bette Midler's arranger-accompanist; Mandy and 25 other hits in fevered succession - he carried his own pressures with him. "I'm more negative than I am positive," he admits. "All the things they say -'marshmallow,' 'syrupy,' 'ugly,' 'talentless,' 'can't sing,' 'wimp,' 'fag' - hurt so badly because I call myself all those names before they do." In response he has worked even harder. This winter Manilow stopped. Exhausted after an international tour on behalf of his "Greatest Hits II" album, he discovered he no longer got any joy from his two major forms of amusement, the piano ("I almost never played for pleasure") and the radio. "Every time I'd listen, it was competition: 'oh, why didn't I think of that drum lick?' I was always trying to catch up. You can go nuts doing that." Instead, Manilow went to seed. After singing the national anthem at Super Bowl XVIII, he ceased performing. He canceled his subscriptions to the trade papers and stayed away from TV and radio. Behind the 10-foot electric gate and three-quarter-mile driveway of his mountaintop Bel Air home, he pretended he was on vacation. "I chained myself to the chaise longue, greased myself up like a tuna and tried to relax," he says, and all the while he fought the feeling that "it was like the end of the movie. I didn't know what to do. I felt the credits should roll: 'The End.'" It was actually a strange sort of beginning. One night after a month of idleness, Manilow strolled up to the piano while entertaining guests and began playing, he says. "Here's That Rainy Day. When..." (see below)

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US - 1983

When it comes to Barry Manilow, there's no such thing as straddling the fence: Either you think he's a wonderful guy who writes beautiful music, or you dismiss him as a nerd whose syrupy songs have the emotional depth of a Hallmark card. Love him or loathe him, one fact remains - Manilow, at 36, is one of the most powerful performers around. And even though he writes the songs that make the young girls cry, he's hipper than he lets on. So hip, and such a meticulous craftsman, that Boston's Berklee College of Music recently honored him. Good-natured and gangly in jeans and a sweater, Manilow accepts his award and conducts an informal seminar for Berklee's pop songwriting students. They ask him to play "Mandy," the 1974 hit that launched his solo career.

photos: A fan gets into the act (r). "They really love me," says Manilow. Aboard his plane, the "Barry" (below), with creative concultant Roberta Kent (l) and assistant Roger Wall.

. The tall, skinny guy with the funny nose walks to the piano. As the ballad's familiar strains fill the packed auditorium, he begans to sing about crying in the night and longing for the girl he left behind. Effortlessly, shamelessly, he milks every drop of emotion from each note. Critics may say his music is slick and superfical, but on this bare stage, with no Las Vegas glitter, no fancy strings or synthesizers, the song and the voice stand on their own - simple and lovely. Just give Barry Manilow a microphone and a piano and he'll get you where you live. "I've never thought I had a good voice, but I'm getting better," he laughs. "I'm not kidding myself into thinking I'm another Sinatra. I go for the high notes-sometimes I make them, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I fool you so well that you think I sound good. There are others who have better voices," he concedes, "but these days I perceive myself as an actor. I try to do to the audience what I'm affected by," explains Manilow. "I've always preferred music that hits me in the gut, the heart, music that makes me feel."

photo: Riding high on success, Manilow relies on "friends who can call me names to bring me back to earth."

. Admittedly, Manilow celebrates the sentimental. His hits, from "Could It Be Magic" to his latest Single "Memory," ooze with the joy of finding love and the pain of losing it. His lush, flawlessly produced arrangements, incorporating layer upon layer of sound, represent make-out music of the first order. Through the sheer force of his music and stage presence, Manilow establishes a personal connection with each members of his audience. On tour promoting his new album, "Here Comes the Night," he transforms a 20,000-seat arena into an intimate cabaret. Perched behind his high-gloss white piano, he surveys the sell-out crowd and winks. Two chubbettes with Farrah flips and acne look at each other and giggle: They know he's winking at them. While the bulk of Manilow's audience is hefty high school girls smitten with his boyish charm, his show - complete with lavish stage sets and glitzy production numbers - attracts their parents and kid brothers as well. His naughty-but-nice shtick is almost as clean as Pat Boone's white bucks: It'll make grandma swoon, but it won't offend her. "Not many people know this," he reveals, flashing the crowd a bashful smile, "but I play the clarinet. When people come over for dinner, inevitably someone will say, 'Barry, why don't you whip it out?' " He grins mischievously as the audience hoots. Later, introducing his heartwrenching "No Other Love," he teases, "You never forget your first love, your first kiss... or your first hickey." The crowd is his. Like the endearing crack in his voice when he reaches for high notes, and the sneakers he wears with his ruffled, rhinestoned "Big Bird" costume, Manilow's self-effacing style makes him human. Like his fans. When he talks about growing up in a Brooklyn slum - a scrawny kid whose dreamgirl brushed him off with, "Beat it, creep!" - his fans understand. His life sounds like theirs. When a star who's sold 50 million records recalls "the times we all wanted to die in Algebra II" and encourages, "Don't give up!" he becomes their champion. Manilow proves nice guys can finish first, that the frog can become a prince.

photo: "I'm in another world onstage," says Manilow, at work on three Broadway shows.

. "We love you, Barry!" the young girls cry, bearing flowers and stuffed animals for their hero. "These people really love me," he says, "not just my work, but me. They like what I represent. It's awesome - I can't figure it out." Perhaps by acknowledging their perception of his vulnerability, they unconsciously pay homage to their own. Manilow, a perfectionist, pays homage to professionalism, and he has the credentials to back it up. He studied music at New York's Juilliard School and segued into writing, singing and producing commercial jingles. In 1972, at 26, he became Bette Midler's musical director, producing her first two albums. Ready to cut a record of his own, Manilow postponed it to tour with her, performing three original songs and gaining a following. "I learned music technically, yet I can't be just a technician," he says. "I don't listen to pop music anymore, except with a business ear. I can't get away from the competition. But some records knock me out, like Billy Joel's 'Goodnight Saigon.'" "I'd love to put out an album with stuff like that on it, but I don't. I put out pop AM music, and I'm proud of that, too." Since he went solo in 1974, Manilow has put out 11 albums (nine platinum) and has won Grammy, Emmy and Tony awards. His 1981 tour was outdone at the box office only by the Rolling Stones. But success isn't always sweet. "As soon as the sold-out signs went up, I started getting bad press," says Manilow. "When I was hardly filling nightclubs, they said, 'You gotta come hear this guy.' When I was with Bette, they were discovering me. As soon as I started to sell records, it became a natural thing to say, 'What's so big about Manilow?' " His fans could tell the critics what's so big about Manilow, but he finds their admiration a "doubleedged sword. I love it, yet I feel they're missing out on things I've worked 30 years to learn when they scream because I've got tight pants on. But if they're having a good time, that's what I'm there for. I know there're enough people out there who are affected by what I do." Manilow himself is trying not to be affected by fame. His acting teacher of three years, Nina Foch, is not only teaching him a new skill, but helping him cope with stardom. "People open doors and kiss my ass all day long," he says. "the cushiness is fun, but it doesn't sustain. It's like a waterbed - fun for about an hour, then it's enough." "I'm comfortable living in L.A. now - people don't stare as much. The most private moment of my day is when I'm in my car by myself, listening to music, driving real slow. It's the one time I feel I'm really in control of my life." Manilow's privacy may be at a premium, but Edna Manilow has adjusted to her son's success in the style you'd expect from a proud Jewish mother. Asked if Mom still wears the trademark T-shirt that says, "I'm Barry Manilow's Mother," he replies with a chuckle, "No, now she wears mink coats that say, 'I'm Barry Manilow's Mother.' "

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People - 1987

photos: After a Chicago book signing (above), a more confident Barry relaxes in a jet chartered to visit his ailing mom.

. Most celebrities know how to have a mid-life crises: They collapse on stage, OD on a plane or just wrap the Porsche around the nearest tree. Not Barry Manilow. Now in his 40s, he had to have a sensible and productive mid-life-crisis. And when it was over, he had to have something to show for it. Like an autobiography, "Sweet Life: Adventures on the Way to Paradise," a new album, "Swing Street," and a CBS special coming up in January. Oh, yes, and an im-proved physique. Manilow had a few chances to go the conventional route, but flamboyant self-destruction, as Jackie Mason would say, "ain't his line o' woik." He missed a shot back in 1980 when he discovered that desoite selling 40 million albums and filling concert halls for years he was nearly broke: He had $11,000 in the bank. "I had taken financial advice from people who came highly recommended," he says now, "but they made mistakes." What did he do? He just dived into his pool - didn't even let the water out first - swam a few laps and then touled for the next five years to regain solvency. "If there was a celebrity car wash," he says, "I was there." Manilow passed up another prime opportunity in 1985 when, after 10 years with Arista Records, he decided, "I wanted to see the world." Arista's president, Clive Davis, had been the Svengali of Manilow's career, picking the songs (sometimes by others) that became his monster hits. Moving to RCA, the composer-singer made an album he liked. Manilow bombed. "RCA," he maintains, "was going through changes."

photos: In his book, Manilow relates his mother's suicide attempts. In Atlantic City in 1985, they teamed for "Can't Smile Without You." "She was everything I wasn't - impulsive, outrageous, dangerous," says Manilow of Bette Midler (at a 1973 Maryland concert).

. "Before I knew it I was dealing with people who didn't sign me and didn't care about me." Furthermore, "The radio was pulling very far away from what I am known for - white - boy pop ballads." Did Manilow chop down all the trees on his property? Not at all. He swallowed his pride and went back to Arista, which is about to issue his new album, "Swing Street." Manilow was finally ready for what would prove to be "a horrible mid-life crisis. "Having quizzed everybody" to make sure he could afford not to work for two years, he returned to his hilltop home in Bel Air in 1985 exhausted after a long tour. Once, having listened to Manilow tell anecdotes, some friends had suggested that he write a book. So every morning at around 6:30 he would roll out bed and, in his underwear, ride his motorcycle down the driveway half a mile to the front gate to fetch the morning paper. Then he would spend the day, and often the evening, at the keyboard - word processor, not piano. "I started examining my life," he says, "and heard all these clichès in my mind, like: Who am I? What am I doing? Do I like myself? I was the most alone that I've ever been. I was angry, I wept, I was frustrated. But I never hit rock bottom." Looking back was not all sweet. "I always thought of myself as a geek - a skinny guy with buck teeth and a big Adam's apple, someone girls never wanted to date," he says. "I was really at sea for so long, bumbling around the stage, mumbling to myself, walking like a maniac. I was never really confident until I started taking acting lessons [in 1980]. I look at my old tapes and cringe. I can see why the critics were absolutely vile to me." He owned up to some vileness himself. In the mid-'70s, "When this hurricane of success hit," he admits, "I became quite a brat for a while. I still have to watch my ego, stop myself from always bringing the conversation back to me." Under the tutelage of exercise coach John Barnett, Manilow began pumping iron. "I've got a body!" he boasts. The book was taking shape, too, but at the piano, "I was dry. I'd bleed when I'd look at an empty page and not feel any music." Eight months ago, an old friend who had liked Manilow's 1984 album, "2:00 A.M. - Paradise Cafe," asked him, "Why don't you stick with jazz?" Why not, indeed? Manilow thought. Soon he was in the studio with guest artists, including Phyllis Hyman, Stan Getz and Kid Creole. It many be fortunate that Manilow got his mid-life crisis out of the way when he did. Otherwise he might not have been able to cope with the tough times he's facing now. Last month, as he was about to embark on a tour to promote his autobiography, "Sweet Life," his mother, Edna, told him that she had lung cancer. "She had been keeping it to herself for three weeks," Manilow says of Edna, 63, who works as a hospital volunteer with children who have AIDS. "When they told her she had to go into the hospital for an operation, she had to say something. I could have killed her for not telling me."

"I'm one of those high-energy people who doesn't know how to slow down," Manilow says (at his mother's New York apartment).

. A malignant growth in Mrs. Manilow's lung was successfully removed at a hospital in Manhattan, where she lives in the co-op apartment Barry left her when he moved to L.A. in 1978. Her prognosis was deemed good. At that point Edna proved she is still a worldclass Jewish mother. "She told me to go on with the book tour and forget about her," Manilow says. "That's all it took. I couldn't stay away from her." As a reading of "Sweet Life" makes clear, Manilow has always had a gift for compromise, for getting what he wants while pleasing his elders. At Arista he fleshed out his albums with his own material, while letting Clive Davis pick the hit singles. In 1973 he found himself forced to choose between serving as musical director for Bette Midler's first big national tour and pleasing his record company by doing his own tour to promote his debut album, which he was not sure would succeed. He went with Bette, but persuaded her people to let him do a brief solo set leading off the second act of her show. With his mother hospitalized during the same week that he was due to sign books in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Chicago recently, Manilow faced a similar dilemma. His response was to charter a Learjet for the week and fly back to New York each night to "sit by her bed and hold her hand." Still, the situation was delicate. After Barry's father, a truck driver named Harold Kelliher, and his mother divorced when Barry was a baby, Edna and her parents had raised Barry in a three-room apartment in Brooklyn. Though the adults fought with each other, he was the apple of their eye. As for Barry, "I was crazy about the blackhaired beauty who was my mother," he writes in "Sweet Life." "She wasn't really beautiful - she was skinny and gawky and had buck teeth and a long nose. But she was beautiful to me..." "Into our apartment she'd stride after her day's work [as a travel agency secretary], wearing spiky high heels and a tight-fitting dress, smoking, smiling, shouting 'Hiya, Babe!' to me." As he also describes Edna attempted suicide three times - after 21-year-old Barry eloped with his high school sweetheart, Susan (the marriage lasted a little over a year), and twice after Edna and her second husband, Willie Murphy, moved into an apartment directly above Barry's bachelor pad in Brooklyn. "I thought it was somehow my fault," Manilow says of the suicide attempts. "I felt helpless and terribly sad." Going public about the incidents is fine, though. "I wouldn't have published anything without her approval and input," he explains. "She looked at the book and said, 'It's not gonna be a best-seller because it doesn't have enough trash in it. You're a nice boy. It's a nice book.' Then she put it down and picked up Patty Duke's book." Being nice has always been Barry's bugaboo. Having written his book and made his jazzy new album, he says he's feeling stronger now. "It became clear to me I should do what I love doing rather than looking for the approval of others," he says. Manilow does admit to "one regret - not having a kid." A few years ago he called up his ex-wife. "Her son answered, and my heart sank to my knees," Manilow says. "I thought, 'He could have been mine.' I don't know if I'll ever have a blond-haired, blue-eyed kid and a white picket fence. Maybe my legacy will be elevator music. Who knows?" Written by Eric Levin, reported by Jane Sims Podesta