Journale 5

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Who Loves Barry? / We Love Barry! Donna, Susie, Anna, Mary Jo, Wendy, Barb, Donna and Noell from Pittsburgh all love Barry and never travel anywhere without their essential Barrykit. This is a tiny fraction of the Barrybilia they keep at home
Barry Manilove! This week Barry Manilow returns to Britain and a new outbreak of Manimania will sweep the land. Lynn Barber attended the First Great Barry Manilow Fan Club Convention in Chicago to witness the manic manifestations of Manilove Nineteen-year-old Noell Jagielski of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, arrived at the convention in Chicago clutching a very large sheet of ordinary brown cardboard. O sacred cardboard: it hath touched the bottom of Barry Manilow. It happened on 12 November 1982. Noell had driven 200 miles to Barry's concert at Charleston, West Virginia, wearing, as usual, her Barryshirt, Barrynecklace, Barrybaseball-jacked, with her white jeans and white Adidas tennis shoes (which she wears because He wears them) and clutching the 700-dollar Minolta 35mm camera with zoom lens that she bought to get better close-ups of Barry at concerts.
("You can always tell the real fans from the amateurs by their cameras," she told me.) She also carried the large photograph of Barry that she takes with her everywhere, and a banner proclaiming PITTSBURGH WANTS TO DO IT WITH BARRY. And it worked! After the concert, a man came and said Barry wanted to meet her backstage. He shook her hand and autographed her photo, and then he put his arm round her, and she put her arm around him, and the cardboard that she had been using to keep her photograph flat was in her hand, and so it came to rest against Barry's bottom. So that is why Noell's cardboard is sacred, and why all the other fans queued up to touch it. The convention was held at a brand-new motel on a motorway 40 miles out of Chicago. When the fan club first tried to book the hotel back in January, the manager told them he had 400 rooms and how could they possibly fill them? Ha! In the event, 1,500 fans came - including 120 British fans who had paid 750 to get there - and overspilled every hotel for miles. The average age of the fans was about 30, though there were children and grandmothers to; the average weight of the fans was about 13 stone. (Odd that the world's thinnest singer has the world's fattest fans.) Most of them had begged, borrowed or stolen in order to get to the convention. Sue Richardson, a secretary from Caterham, said that she had sold all her jewellery; Linda Camphell from High Wycombe had starved for six months; and Noell, the cardboard-carrier, said she had spend all the money she had saved to go to nursing school so now she wouldn't be able to fulfill her ambition to become Barry's private nurse. The convention was billed to start on Friday, but many fans arried early to catch his Thursday night concert. Nineteen-year-old Lynette Pascal from Iowa arrived with a strategy. There is a moment in every Manilow concert (Manilovers know it well) when he asks for a volunteer from the audience to sing Can't Sing Without You with him. Naturally, Lynette fought and clawed her way to the front, as any self-respecting fan would. But Barry chose someone else. Then Lynette held up the T-shirt she had had specially printed. It said, "I was SUPPOSED to sing with Barry Manilow." Barry saw it, laughed, and invited her to sing with him too. When she got back to the hotel, all the other fans were waiting for her report: "Oh," she said, "he has the most gorgeous crowsfeet I've ever seen. His hair is a tiny bit coarse, but he has the softest skin. I slipped my hand inside his shirt-incredible!" The other fans all cried and sighed and said they were glad for her. That is the nice thing about Manilovers: they rejoice in one another's successes. On Friday morning all the fans stood in line to collect their convention kits. These cost 65 dollars and contained a Barrybadge, Barryhat and Barrypic, together with a flashlight for waving at concerts and - most important - a ticket for the Saturday-night concert. Opening the tickets was a real nailbiter. Some fans burst into tears when they found they were back in rows 13 or 14. Michelle Lanier from New Orleans found herself in row 4 and when she wanted to enrage her friends ( who had all drawn row 14) she just held up four fingers and wiggled them gleefully. When the fans had finished queueing for their convention kits, they went and queued at the fan club shop to buy everything from Barryshoelaces at three dollars to gold Barrynecklaces at 150 dollars. All the Barryproducts have the Barrylogo which is a line drawing of him in profile with wavy hair looking surprisingly like a Greek god, or at least watersprite. I felt it would be in poor taste to tell anyone my Manilow joke, viz: Q: How do you make Barry Manilow's nose four miles long? A: Fold it in half. The official activity for Friday was the Barryexhibition in the main hall of the hotel, when all the individual local fan clubs put up tables displaying their Barrynewsletters and Barryartefacts. The mewsletters all had poems, such as this from Pittsburgh's Cloudburst: "Where are you my beloved? Are you in the garden Amongst the flowers Who quiver in your gentle hands? Or are you amongst the books Seeking human knowledge?" The Pittsburgh Fan Club publishes 24 pages of this stuff every month; multiply that by about 100 for the number of local fan clubs and add in another 24 pages of the quarterly Barrygram, the official organ of the BMIFC, and that adds up to quuite a hearp of Maniliterature every year. In addition, there are all the Barry objets-statues and models and dolls and blankets and embroideries. Sallie Papp from Denver was wearing her Barryshirt - a huge denim jacket covered with exquisite embroidery detailing all Barry's concerts, and Diane Steed from St Louis, Missouri, was wearing her clown suit with cross-stitch titles af all Barry's 104 songs. And everywhere, of course, there were Barrypix. Barrylovers collect and swop photographs of Barry with the eagerness of schoolboys traiding postage stamps, and they have a special way of looking at Barrypix. They flick through several dozen fairly quickly and then find one which captures "their" Barry and they gaze at it for about an hour and go into a trance. Most of them own more than 500 Barrypix; several of them own more than 5,000. Bottom shots are always in demand. There was one whole wall of pictures of Barry's bottom at the exhibition captioned, "Behind every great man... there's a cute tush." Offically, Barrylovers like his eyes best, but when you ask them to describle his eyes they just burst into tears. They burst into tears all the time anyway. In one of the hotel lounges they showed 24-hour-a-day videos of all Barry's concerts, and the only sound you could hear in there, apart from the Barrymusic, was a gentle continuous sobbing. I leatned to carry a box of Kleenex round with me throughout the convention so that whenever I asked a fan some searching question like "What does Barry mean to you?" I could start doling out tissues. A lot of fan speech consists of quotes from Barry's songs, but it was only when the tenth woman had told me that she "made it through the rain" that I recognised this. The song they quote the most is called "All the Time" and it sums up everything that Barryloving is all about. The gist is: I thought I was crazy, a freak, the only person in the world who felt this way... till I met you. The fans ambition is to be "Lonely together" which is also a quote. As Friday wore on, a rumour rustled and buzzed round the halls of the hotel - "Barry is coming here. Tonight!" The organisers said definitely not: Barry was not coming and had never said he would. The English fan club organisers, 43-year-old Mollie Baldwin and 37-year-old Lynn Killick from Epsom, said they sincerely hoped he wouldn't come. "He'll be eaten alive, torn to pieces," they said. They were shocked by the goings-on and overt sexuality of the American fans. "The difference is," Mollie said, "that the American girls think they own him, whereas we think Barry owns us. They're so demanding. At the concert last night, a girl practically dragged him offstage - my heart was in my mouth." Lynn said: "It would worry me to death if he came here." But all the other fans said they were hoping, longing, praying for Barry to come, and all day long they eagerly recited signs and portents. "Barry has no concert tonight. There's a banquet planned for us with a suprise. They're unloading tons of audio equipment in the ballroom. And Barry wouldn't - couldn't - let us down," said 22-year-old Beth Lyster from Windsor, Canada. I asked her friend, Joan Fries from Michigan, what she thought. "I believe he has already come. He is in the hotel now. But in disgupse." In disuise!!! It was several seconds before I could winch my jaw back into position to say, "But look, mmm, Barry has quite a distinctive sort of face. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, his nose is kind of unmistakable. And there are so few men here, any man is bound to attract attention." "What makes you so sure he'll disquise himself as a man?" she replied, unanswerably. Naturally I spent the rest of the day looking out for a six-foot rakethinwoman with a nose the size of a cucumber, but by 7 pm it was obvious that Barry, in some form, was coming anyway.
The hotel was knee-deep in security men and the fans were all shooed out to wait in a one-mile-long queue round the carpark. When they finally filed into the ballroom they groaned at the realisation that many of them would have to stand, but they were sweet about letting people in wheelchairs (there were at least two dozen at the convention) through to the front. Then Rosie Cowan from Michigan and Faye Klapman from New York, the co-organisers, made lots of speeches, and then a grizzle-haired heavyset woman called Roberta came onstage and the fans all secreamed in delight. Roberta Kent is Barry's "creative consultant": some say she is his girlfriend, though size and age-wise it looks improbable. She said Barry had told her to tell them he wished he could be with them tonight, and a heart-wrenching sob rolled round the room. "But," she said, "it was Barry's birthday last week and I knew you'd all like to wish him a Happy Birthday" - and at that point ten burly security men staggered in under a giant birthday cake. I hoped Barry would erupt through the icing, but he didn't. Instead, when Roberta said, "So let's all blow out the candies," a voice suddenly boomed, "I'll blow my own candles out, thank you," and there he was. Barry Manilow. In person. While I was registering his orange skin, candyfloss hair and startling resemblance to Pinocchio, all the fans were screaming and fainting in coils all around me. It was at least ten minutes before Barry could make himself heard, but when he could, he explained that he proposed to answer some questions from his fans. The big news was that his current favourite video game (he is keen on video games) is Dnkey Kong. The big tragedy was that his beagle, Bagel, had gone blind. "Ohhhhh!" went 1.500 fans, breaking out into sobs. "But you know," Barry went on, shushing them," it's true Bagel is now blind and that's awful. I thought I'd never get over it. But, you know," and here his voice sank to a hypnotic whisper, "she survived. She is carrying on. So if you ever hear me do a song about carrying on, you'll know it's for Bagel. It's kinda inspirational." One of the questions was whether Barry had any special rituals he went through before a concert and he said. "Yeah, I whirl a chicken round my head." Whereupon Anne Carole Butler of the Detroit Beagle-Bagels threw a rubber chicken onstage. (Afterwards, when I asked her why she happened to have a rubber chicken with her, she said, "For the same reason I have these," and clapped a set of Mickey Mouse ears on her head.) After about an hour, Barry said he had time for only one more question and he read it out from his list. "What do your fans mean to you?" As he opened his mouth to deliver a sincere and moving reply, someone to the right of the audience shouted out, "Money in the bank." Well! The soppy smilies vanished in a moment, and a tornado of boos swelled and rumbled round the room. Realising a lynching was about to begin, Barry moved fast. "I want you to know," he said chokingly, "that I would not exist if it weren't for you. I feel like I am blessed because I have all of you. You are the kind of supporters that artistes dream of." And then the loudspeakers blared out One Voice, Singing in the Darkness and a choir of fans came onstage and Barry disappeared. The fans filed out so quietly I assumed they hab been disappointed. It had been a fairly boring evening, I thought, despite all the riveting news about Bagel. But next day, they told me unanimously that they had been numbed, overcome, with emotion. "I wouldn't have missed last night for anything," said 36-year-old Denise Robinson from High Wycombe. "The tears were falling down my face. I just couldn't believe he was there in front of me." Most of the fans spent Saturday going over their memories of what Barry had said, and writing it down in notebooks. By the end of the day, they could all recite his monologue word for word. When they got home, they would copy it all out send to those of their unfortunate Barry-friends who had not been able to make it to the convention. Most Barryfans write at least three Barryletters a week - some write three a day - to their Barrypals around the world. After all the emotional dramas of Friday night, there seemed a danger that the Saturday night open-air concert at Poplar Creek would come as an anticlimax. But no. Although Barry's voice, as Jean Rock once memorably said, sounds like a bluebottle caught in the curtains, his show is pure magic. And it is the fans that make it so. At poplar Creek they put on at least as good a performance as Barry himself. Applauding the intros, humming the harmonies, clapping and leaping for the hot numbers, sobbing quiently in the slow numbers, and finally waving their flashlights in unison for the anthem "One Voice," they could not have done it better if they had rehearsed it for months. On the way back, the coach I was in got lost and when I finally trudged into the hotel, a fan from one of the earlier coaches asked me what happened. "the driver got lost" I said, and then I heard myself saying, "but we made it through the rain." It was not raining in Chicago and never had been. I had simply succumbed. What is it about Barry Manilow? Apart from hype and gross sentimentality and general rubbish, what else is it that makes it different from any other hysterical crowd scene? It is not Barry Manilow himself, that is for sure. He is a bad singer of banal songs. It is his following, not him, that is special. Sue Robinson, a Caterham secretary who helps organise the London Marathon, defined it best: "I think we're nice people, gentle sensitive people-not in an arty-crafty sort of way, but our emotions are closer to the surface than most. We're very much into sharing." This was borne out by 20-year-old Tina Pryke, who told me what being a fan had meant to her. Tina has been blind since the age of five. Many times she has been to Moorfields Hospital for various operations. But last time she went it was different. She had just joined the Barry Manilow Fan Club. When she arrived at Moorfields, her room was already full of flowers and letters and photographs, and her new Barryfriends visited and wrote to her every day. The operation worked for two weeks: for two weeks she could see. And then her eye rejected the grafted cornea and she was blind again. "If I ever do get my sight back, the first thing I'll do," she told me," is get on a plane and come and see Barry." But at least she has been to Chicago, her first flight in an aeroplane, helped and escorted throughout by her new Barryfriends: "It's been wonderful, the whole thing." The promise Manilow puts out in his songs is that if you love him, your life will change. From being lonely, unappreciated, a misfit in society, you will find a kindred soul and achieve that Manilowapotheosis of being "lonely together". The old thing is that, in a way, the promise is fulfilled. I talked to dozens of woman who had been stuck at home, depressed, friendless, prospectless, when they first heard Manilow's music. They dreamt that Barry would come through the door and make everything all right. He didn't. But what happened instead was that they joined their local fan club, met likeminded sentimentalists, shared their problems, attended Barry-bashes, set off to conventions, concerts and places they never would have believed they could reach: in short, their lives were changed, and for the better. They made it through the rain, all thanks to one voice, singing in the darkness. Manilow magic indeed.
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