Barry Manilow Read online

  Copyright © 2002 Omnibus Press

  This edition © 2009 Omnibus Press

  (A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London, W1T 3LJ)

  ISBN: 978-0-85712-101-1

  The Author hereby asserts his/her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Contents

  Information Page

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part I – Childhood

  Part II – Picket Fences

  Part III – The Divine Mr M

  Part IV – In Clive We Trust

  Part V – One Man In The Spotlight

  Epilogue – Ultimate Manilow

  Shadows Of A Book

  Sources

  For My Father

  Author’s Note

  In late 1999, when my editor at Omnibus Press first brought up the idea of doing a biography of Barry Manilow, I laughed. Then I told him I’d think about it. I then started poking around the internet and was surprised to find just how active Barry Manilow is, and how many loyal fans he has. The last – and first – time I saw Barry Manilow was in 1982, when he was performing in Orem, Utah. I was a student at Brigham Young University at the time, and my boyfriend had flown in from Michigan to help me celebrate my 21st birthday. His surprise gift to me was tickets to Manilow’s concert. I have to admit that my main memory of that event is whiteness – white piano, white clothing, white teeth and, yes, a snowy white audience.

  Eighteen years later I was amazed that Manilow was still trotting the globe, playing mainly the same songs to mainly the same audience. Nothing had changed much, it seemed, except Manilow’s clothes and piano, both now a mature black rather than the optimistic white of the early days. The audience, however, while older and wider, remained largely unchanged, and no less enthusiastic than when I’d attended that first concert. I was intrigued.

  Armed with Manilow-related press clippings, internet printouts, and material sent to me by my editor, I flew to San Francisco and drove up the coast to Arcata, a favourite place to relax and put life in perspective. Here, I felt I would be able to spend some time reading and discussing the idea with my friends in order to come to an intelligent, informed decision.

  When I told my friends I was thinking of doing a biography of Barry Manilow, they, too, laughed. In fact, it was beginning to seem that the surest way to lighten any moment was to throw out Manilow’s name. “Oh, my god! Is he still alive?” was a common response. Thanks to my short course of research I was able to state, with some degree of authority, that yes, Manilow was indeed alive and, in fact, was thriving. There are active fan clubs all over the world devoted to him, I’d discovered, and his concerts, which I now knew were frequent as he seemed to be perpetually on tour, were routinely sold out. Yet still they chuckled, and still I found myself apologising, just a little bit, every time I admitted I was thinking of pursuing the project.

  It was, in the end, this very dichotomy that made up my mind for me. What was it, I had to know, that could cause someone who has been as continually successful as Manilow has, and for as long as he has – nearly three decades! – to still be treated with a knee-jerk derision by the critics and the public at large? That, I decided, would be the subtext of my research.

  A year later, I can’t offer a definitive answer to this question. But the search for the answer brought to light facets to Manilow’s story that showed him to be a far more complex and interesting individual than I’d ever imagined. After you’ve read this book, you won’t know exactly why Barry Manilow can’t seem to get any respect, though hopefully you’ll be able to put his life and work into a more sensible perspective for knowing some of what the man had to go through to achieve all he has. You will also not know what Barry had for breakfast three years ago last Wednesday, nor what his favourite colour is or the brand of toothpaste he uses. But you may just understand why it is that people still hunger to know these things about this seemingly simple and unassuming Brooklyn boy.

  Now, over a year and a half since I first discussed the idea of a Barry Manilow biography with my editor, I no longer laugh when I hear Manilow’s name mentioned, nor do I apologise for my involvement in this project. I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to learn more about the performer who so dazzled me that night in Orem back in 1982, and even more pleased to be able to give his fans a clearer picture of the real man behind the performer.

  Prologue

  Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!

  –Luke 6:26

  It was 1993, and singer Kyle Vincent was thrilled to have been asked to spend the summer touring with Barry Manilow as the legendary entertainer’s opening act. Vincent, who describes himself as “kind of a solo male sensitive singer songwriter”, had been a long-time Manilow fan, and had patterned much of his own work after Manilow’s style.

  The July 14th performance at Pittsburgh’s Star Lake Amphitheater seemed to have gone well. The place was packed with nearly 10,000 loyal and loudly enthusiastic Manilow fans. Kyle was warmly received by the Manilow faithful, who then went on to raise the rafters when their idol appeared. All in all, a very satisfying experience for everyone. Or, rather, almost everyone.

  Writing about the show the next day in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, reviewer Ed Masley paid tribute to Manilow’s ability to still enthrall fans after so many years. In fact, the review verged on a rave, until nearly the end.

  Of course Manilow, like any great performer, is entitled to an occasional lapse of taste. Hence, his ill-fated decision to dress up ‘Could It Be Magic’ as a dance number in response to some pathetic remake that’s all the rage in England. Fortunately, it was the only real misstep of the evening – unless you count the opening act.

  Kyle, it seems, had not escaped notice. Unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons.

  MCA recording artist Kyle Vincent was joined by members of Manilow’s band for an overly long set of lightweight, generic pop rock. It sounded like the sort of stuff the token long-haired guy on any given soap opera sings until he falls off a cliff, loses his memory and opens a drive-through laundry. With any luck, Vincent will have a bad experience on Star Search and go back to working at Chess King.

  Kyle was devastated. It was his first experience with the often viciously personal attacks that could be meted out by the press, and it left the singer hurt and puzzled, doubting his career choice and his place on the Manilow tour.

  The following night in Massachusetts, as show time approached, Kyle sat in his dressing room at Boston’s Great Woods Performing Arts Center, re-reading the Masley review for the hundredth time. The thought of going back out on stage again seemed impossible; Kyle didn’t think he’d be able to do it.

  Finally, Manilow came to Kyle’s dressing room. “What’s the problem?” Barry asked.

  “I’m just really bummed,” Kyle said. “I work so hard, I do all
this crap – I’m doing a little opening slot, three songs! – and this guy has to take half the review to not talk about you, but me, and about how awful I am!”

  Barry Manilow looked at the young singer for a moment before responding. “You know,” he finally said, “you have nerve. You want to see bad reviews? I’ll show you bad reviews. Now go out there and kick ass.” And he did.

  In a career that has now touched on four decades and crossed a millennium, Barry Manilow has taken more abuse from more sources than most people could begin to imagine. And yet, as he told Kyle Vincent, “I still go out there every night.”

  For the entire span of his career, Barry Manilow has weathered the slings and arrows not of fortune, which has usually smiled upon him, but of the critics and comics and sceptics and overall nay-sayers who seem to find Manilow an irresistible target. What is it that makes an otherwise successful performer the butt end of so many jokes? The target of so much professional and, most of all, personal criticism? And, perhaps most importantly, what is it that makes this person keep going in the face of such often cruel criticism? What drives Barry Manilow to take these continual beatings and still walk tall?

  As the song says, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” If Barry Manilow has earned a certain freedom from the constraints his critics would place upon him, perhaps it’s only because he first had to fight so hard to free himself from the constraints of his own past, a past filled with poverty and loss and perpetual disappointment, just as his father’s had been. For Barry Manilow comes from a long line of people with nothing left to lose.

  PART I

  Childhood

  “Shall he, grown grey among his peers,

  Through the thick curtain of his tears

  Catch glimpses of his earlier years.

  And hear the sounds he knew of yore,

  Old shufflings on the sanded floor,

  Old knuckles tapping at the door?”

  –Lewis Carroll, Phantasmagoria

  Chapter One

  When you’re young and poor, Brooklyn is nothing but a place to escape. And, if he was nothing else of note, Harold Lawrence Pincus was certainly young and poor.

  Harold was a Brooklyn boy by birth. Like many of those born in Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th century, Harold’s ancestors were among the teeming millions who arrived in New York during what was known as The Great Migration. Some of those who arrived by ship stayed in New York, and some moved on, heading west to face unknown dangers. The most intrepid would make it all the way to the Pacific coast; others would settle in various locations between the two shores, eventually populating the entire country.

  Rising from the Hudson River at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, the Statue of Liberty came to symbolise America’s welcome to immigrants from all over Europe. Many came from the Emerald Isle where the Great Famine of 1845–49 set in motion a pattern of migration that would establish large Irish communities in every English speaking nation in the world. The famine caused a quarter of Eire’s population of four million to seek a better life in the United States and England and, although the food-chain eventually recovered, migration continued apace throughout the 19th century and beyond. From 1850 to 1870, at least another one million people would leave the country behind in favour of other English-speaking nations, notably the United States. Still more came later as Irish men and women sought to escape British rule, to build a new life for themselves in a land whose constitution recognised no hereditary privileges, only the freedom of the individual to prosper according to their talent and diligence.

  Among the millions of people from all over the world seeking a better life in America, it has been estimated that from 1820 to 1900 about four million Irish would eventually migrate to the United States. Among these was the family of Harold Pincus’ mother, the former Anna Sheehan. Only one generation away from the old country, Anna was a striking “Black Irish” beauty with raven hair, intense, mesmerising eyes, and a strong will.

  Like Anna Sheehan, Harry Pincus, Harold’s father, was also a first generation American, though it’s unclear from which part of Europe his family had come, or when. What is known, however, is that by the age of 18, the Jewish Harry Pincus had met and married Catholic Anna Sheehan who gave birth to their only child, Harold, on November 26, 1920 in Brooklyn.

  But just as the tremendous prosperity of the “Roaring Twenties” gave way to the crippling economic reversals of what became known in America as The Great Depression, any happiness and stability young Harold Pincus might have known at home with his parents gave way to insecurity and crushing poverty when Harry Pincus left his family for parts unknown. Harry’s departure left Anna and young Harold to fend for themselves in a cramped three-room apartment on South 4th Street in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, an area which, at the time, suffered the highest population densities and infant mortality rates in all of Greater New York.

  The teenaged Harold had inherited not only his father’s thin face, beakish nose, and piercing blue eyes, but also his wanderlust, a desperate, constant longing for escape from the circumstances that trapped him. It was this yearning for freedom that led him, along with some neighbourhood friends, to hop a freight train out of town. None of the boys cared where the train was going, as long as it was going away. “Anywhere but here” was the order of the day. It was an innocent, hopeful joyride that would mark Harold for life.

  As the train travelled farther and farther away from New York, Harold and his friends amused themselves by manoeuvring between the train’s cars. The timing couldn’t have been worse. While Harold was suspended dangerously between two cars, the train made a turn, catching Harold unprepared and crushing his foot between the massive steel links connecting the cars to each other. The train was stopped and Harold was extricated from the machinery. It looked to all present as though his entire leg would need to be amputated. By now the train was many miles from New York. While the country doctor in the farming community nearest to where the train had come to a stop did his best to piece together Harold’s crushed bones and torn flesh, what remained was barely more than a mangled stump, half a human foot at best, with little or no resemblance to what the appendage had once been.

  For the rest of his life, in order to stand and walk as normally as possible, Harold Pincus would have to wear one shoe specially weighted in the front to make up for the missing part of his foot. It was a bitter price to pay for his small bid for freedom, and it wouldn’t be the last such toll he would pay.

  Ever resourceful, Anna Sheehan Pincus had remarried a Mr Keliher, whose first name seems to have been forgotten over time. The difference between Anna’s Catholic upbringing and her first husband’s Jewishness may well have been one of the factors leading to the end of their marriage. Regardless of any wishes Harry may have expressed on the matter, Anna made sure that Harold, her only child, was raised a Catholic. Taking on another husband who could not only provide for Anna and her son but also reinforce Harold’s Irish Catholic heritage must have seemed to Anna a perfect plan. Unfortunately, Mr Keliher didn’t stay with Anna any longer than Harry Pincus had and, at the age of 16, Harold found himself looking for work to help support himself and his mother.

  Nothing remarkable occurred in Harold’s life over the next few years that anyone has noted for posterity. Like many young men in similar circumstances, he dropped out of high school after the 10th grade in order to work and help support himself and his mother. He landed a job as a chauffeur, his mangled foot evidently not a handicap to driving. It was during this quiet interval that Harold Pincus met Edna Manilow.

  Edna was also the child of immigrants, Russian Jews who had come to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by way of Baltimore, Maryland, where Edna was born on May 27, 1923. Her father, Joseph Manilow, was born in Russia, the son of Louis Manilow and the former Anna Meltzer. He was a quiet, unassuming man who seemed no match for his domineering wife, Esther. Five years younger than her husband, Esther Manilow was also Ru
ssian by birth, the daughter of Abraham Yanoff and Bertha Valinsky. Though, by an odd coincidence, Esther and Joseph shared a September 9 birthday, an outsider would be hard pressed to see just what else this seemingly odd couple had in common beyond their marriage vows and their two children, Rose, the elder, and Edna.

  One thing the Manilows did share was a solid work ethic. For her part, Edna went to work at age 17 as a stenographer for Siegal and Karpel at 130 West 30th Street. In addition, both Esther and Joseph worked outside the home to make ends meet. Joseph worked at the garment factory of Goldstein & Spiegelman in Brooklyn, while Esther made her way each day to the basement of 69 Wooster Street where she toiled for the Moon & Herman Hat Box Company.

  Esther’s workday didn’t end when she left Moon & Herman. Though their small apartment on Broadway was humble, it was also spotless – Esther saw to that. She also cooked the meals and sewed the clothes; her hand stitching was legendary. Life in Williamsburg was a far cry from her privileged upbringing in Russia, which had lasted only until her father’s death when she was eight years old. But eight years had been enough to cement Esther’s sense of entitlement. And every minute of every day that she toiled in the hatbox factory, every floor she scrubbed in her family’s tiny apartment, every meal she cooked, every garment she sewed was but another reminder of the privilege that had been so briefly hers, and so cruelly taken.

  It was perhaps this memory of lost glory, either real or perceived, that accounted for the steely bitterness Esther carried about her always, a fierce rigidity which would later lead her grandson to refer to her as “a ballbuster”. While she had been powerless in the face of the events that had shaped her own destiny as a child in Russia, as an adult she was determined to control every aspect of her life, which ultimately meant exercising complete authority over her household and every person within it.