Barry Manilow Read online

  Just as Barry had inherited his love of music from his parents, Harold’s own love of music had come to him from his mother, who had an Irish brogue and a beautiful singing voice. When Barry was seven, Edna had given him an accordion and arranged for him to start taking lessons. “Barry used to come with his accordion,” Annie Keliher recalls. “And Anna had a voice! See, it runs in the family. This is how she used to entertain Barry. The two of them, him with his accordion and her singing with him.” Harold, who was living with his mother since his estrangement from his wife and son, would make himself scarce during these visits. It wasn’t that Harold didn’t want to see his son, but his mother’s ongoing insistence that Harold and Edna reconcile was too painful an ordeal to endure, especially in front of little Barry.

  Though Harold and Edna had physically separated almost immediately after Harold’s return from the Army, they remained legally married until 1950, when Barry was seven years old, divorcing only when Harold decided to remarry. At that time it was not possible to file for divorce on the basis of the now popular “irreconcilable differences” or any other such vague notion that essentially meant a couple had simply made an error of choice. For those wishing to divorce, the choice of grounds was “beat, cheat, or retreat” – physical violence, adultery, or desertion. If none of these applied, but both parties wanted to divorce, couples often simply admitted to nonexistent grounds, just for the sake of expediency. It was for this reason that Harold and Edna agreed that, although Harold had never cheated on Edna, she would file for divorce on the grounds of adultery, which Harold would not contest.

  Even the finalisation of their divorce on January 10, 1951, couldn’t stop Anna Keliher from urging a reconciliation between her son and Edna. “When Edna would come over, [Harold] would disappear,” recalls Annie Keliher. “Because his mother would stick her two cents in, she’d try to get them together.” It was a determination that Anna Keliher maintained throughout her life and even took to her deathbed. In her later years she suffered from uremic poisoning and was often hospitalised. By the time of her death, Harold and Annie were married, and were raising Annie’s son and daughter from her first marriage. “We get the call she’s dying,” recounts Annie Keliher, recalling her mother-in-law’s last hours. “We have to run to the hospital. My husband was on the job at Schaefer Brewery, and they got hold of him and told him that he has to go to the hospital, his mother is dying. But I got there first. I’ll never forget it!” Annie laughs ruefully at the memory of her mother-in-law’s stubborn persistence. “She’s laying in that bed, I’ll never forget it, and she says, ‘Harold and Edna are going to get together. Why don’t you leave Harold alone?’” Annie, Harold’s wife of several years by that time, was stunned. “You know, I looked at her in that bed, I could’ve hit her! I’ll never forget that! I told my husband, ‘Get me outta here! Your mother hates me!’”

  Yet, in retrospect, Annie has come to appreciate Anna’s feelings. “In her heart, it must’ve hurt her that [Harold] was neglecting Barry and raising my children.” It was a feeling that really hit home when, several years after their marriage, Annie gave birth to her only child with Harold, a boy. “I gave birth to Tim and [Harold] drove everyone nuts,” she recalls. “He was a father who stood on his head with joy. ‘I have a son!’ And I’d think, my god, you already have a son.” But that was only technically true. In reality, Tim was the first son Harold could really call his own, and he revelled in fatherhood in a way he was never allowed to with Barry.

  Even without a father in the home, compared to many of the other children in the surrounding Williamsburg tenement buildings, Barry’s upbringing was relatively privileged. Not only did he receive unlimited supplies of unconditional love at home, but his mother had a good job at which she earned more money than many of his schoolmates’ fathers at a time when women were routinely paid a small fraction of the salary of their male counterparts. Their divorce agreement had set out a schedule of child support in which Harold would pay Edna “the sum of $10.00 per week for the support and maintenance of the infant issue of this marriage, to wit, Barry Pincus, aged 7 years”. The agreement further stipulated that “such payments to be made at the residence of the plaintiff, or at other places she may designate in writing”. This arrangement may well have been suggested by Edna’s parents, because Edna subsequently told Harold that she thought it would be best if he simply kept his money and stayed away from Barry. Harold agreed.

  Williamsburg in the Forties and Fifties was a small, tightly knit neighbourhood; everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew everyone else’s business, too. Since Harold had adopted the surname “Keliher” for good, he’d taken to answering to the nickname “Kelly”. Since Kelly and Edna knew many of the same people in the microcosm that was Williamsburg, it was inevitable that their paths would often cross. This was fine with Kelly, who never really stopped caring for Edna. Just as Edna had seen to it that Barry maintained a relationship with Kelly’s mother, Edna used the opportunities when they ran into each other to update Kelly on Barry’s progress. During one of these meetings Edna and Kelly discussed Barry’s upcoming birthday.

  Edna told Kelly that Barry would love to have a tape recorder. Adds Kelly’s widow, Annie, “That came from Edna, then [Kelly] went out and got it. I don’t know how he expected to give it to him, but it just so happened Barry was walking down the street, so Kelly gave it to him.”

  The handing over of the tape recorder was an event that Barry would never forget. Indeed, he has said it was the only meeting he recalled having with his father during his entire childhood. In his autobiography, Manilow recalls that there was only one photo of his father left in all their family photo albums, because Esther had taken a pair of scissors and meticulously cut Harold’s face from every photo he appeared in alongside Edna or Barry. Even so, it would have been hard for Barry not to recognise his father, as their faces so closely resembled each other’s.

  As Manilow recalls the incident, there was a rather stilted exchange between father and son, during which Kelly made reference to Esther’s dislike of him, and expressed a fear that if she saw him talking to Barry she might call the police. After giving his son the reel-to-reel recorder, Kelly asked for a kiss and a hug, asked after Edna, then advised Barry not to tell anyone about the encounter. “Tell ‘em you found the tape recorder or something, okay?”

  Up to that time, Barry’s image of his father was drawn exclusively from Esther’s bitter tirades against him. Writes Manilow, “I stood there with my new tape recorder, bursting with excitement, but feeling funny, too. For as long as I could remember, I had thought of Harold as this monster person who had been mean to Mom and was uncaring and ugly. Now, here was this nice-looking, gentle guy, treating me affectionately, remembering my birthday, and giving me a great gift. That was my father? He wasn’t so bad after all.”

  Unfortunately Barry wasn’t much of a liar, and Esther discovered the truth about the tape recorder’s origin within minutes of Barry’s arrival home with his gift. “When Mom came home and heard about my visitor, she was upset, too,” writes Manilow. It had seemed a good idea to Edna when she and Kelly had discussed the plan at the bar. But all it had really done was cause more turmoil in the household. As Edna had been instrumental in orchestrating the encounter, it is natural to assume that Edna passed the results on to Kelly and asked him not to attempt such an exchange again. Kelly would never again try to contact Barry while Esther was alive.

  “Kelly, now, I realise how wrong he was,” says Annie Keliher of her husband’s decision not to make trouble for Edna with her mother. “He was always afraid of upsetting Edna or Barry or something. And truthfully, now I would say to him, you’re 100% wrong! Your instincts were wrong. You should’ve pushed your way in.”

  But Kelly wasn’t the type to push his way into any situation. He was a kind, gentle man who disliked trouble and certainly didn’t want to be the cause of it. Ironically, Barry unwittingly echoed his father’s sentiments when he summed up t
his encounter with his father in this way: “I never felt the need to go searching for my father, and so I never did. I got so much love and I felt so secure with my family and my friends that finding my real father never became an issue. Besides, the family would have gotten really upset and I was never one to make waves.”

  When Barry Alan Pincus was bar mitzvahed in 1956, at age 13, the family agreed that Edna would have her son’s name legally changed to Barry Manilow. “There was no Pincus in our family,” Barry later wrote, by way of explanation. “Here I was, about to enter manhood with a id that didn’t mean anything to anyone.” Barry didn’t realise that Pincus was his father’s birth name; he always assumed his father’s real name was Keliher. Just as Harold had gone from being Harold Pincus to Harold “Kelly” Keliher to ease his way into the brewery, his son went from being Barry Pincus to Barry Manilow in order to eradicate an unpleasant memory for his mother and grandmother. It was the last tie binding Barry to his paternal past, and it was neatly severed with little consideration to what fell away.

  Barry Manilow never knew his father yet, in a number of ways, he was like his father. And therein lies the tragic twist at the end of a fractured fairy tale.

  Chapter Four

  Along with a new name and the traditional Jewish entree into manhood, Barry Manilow’s thirteenth birthday also brought him a new stepfather when Edna married Willie Murphy.

  In retrospect, it’s rather puzzling that Esther Manilow so easily accepted Willie Murphy as Edna’s husband after having so violently rejected Harold Pincus. The two men had much in common. Both were Irish, both Catholic, both loved music. In fact, Harold and Willie were friends who had known each other for years and who worked together at the Schaefer Brewery. But where Harold was reserved by nature, Willie, a divorced father of two, was a drinker, a street brawler and had a reputation as a womaniser. Edna, it seemed, was prepared to overlook these faults. By all accounts, she was crazy about him.

  Harold, too, had finally moved on. Anna Ceglowska Price – Annie – was a Long Island born, divorced mother of two and had for years moved in the same Williamsburg social circles as Harold, Edna and Willie. “We lived in a neighbourhood in Brooklyn – middle class, some of us lower,” she remembers. “Our entertainment would be getting dressed on a Saturday night, going to the local bar, which was harmless. You knew everyone, and that’s where you went to dance all night; Edna, sing all night. And the more drinks you had, the more you thought you had a voice.” That’s how Annie met Harold Keliher.

  Harold had grown more handsome as he matured. He was a sharp dresser and, despite his deformed foot, a good dancer. He was also funny and affectionate, a combination Annie couldn’t resist. “I just fell in love with him,” she says. “His sense of humour. He was very, very kind to me.” Both had been through painful divorces, though, so they bided their time before actually marrying again. But, for Annie, there was never any doubt in her mind, from the moment she met Harold, that her future would be with him. “He was going to be mine, and that was it.” And so he was.

  When Edna and Willie Murphy married, Barry was given the choice of moving with his mother and her new husband to the fourth-floor walk-up they’d rented on nearby Keap Street, or remaining with his grandparents. As much as Barry loved his grandparents, wriggling out from under his grandmother’s heavy thumb must have seemed an attractive prospect. Living with his grandparents had been safe; living with his mother and Willie would be an adventure. Of course the new apartment had only one bedroom, but that bedroom had a closet with a door that opened onto the outside hallway; in Brooklyn’s grander days, when the building had been constructed, it had been, perhaps, the servant’s quarters. It would be a tight fit, but there was sufficient space in the tiny room for a bed, a desk, and a chest of drawers. What more did a teenage boy need? Two weeks after Edna and Willie married, Barry moved into the Keap Street apartment. Yet another family unit was formed.

  To Barry, Willie seemed a revelation. While Barry adored his grandfather, his only previous male role model, Joe Manilow was little more than a benign presence in the home dominated by Esther Manilow. Willie, on the other hand, was young and vital and introduced Barry to an exciting new world. “He brought home books I had never heard of and read magazines I had only glanced at,” Manilow later wrote. “His taste in everything was way above what I’d been exposed to. But most of all it was his music that changed my life.”

  The first thing Willie did for his stepson was to take him to a Gerry Mulligan concert. “I’ll never forget it,” Barry told an interviewer years later. “It was the biggest thing in my life.” That was only the beginning of Barry’s conversion. Willie also brought to the new home a small stereo and a large record collection. Barry’s previous experience with music had been limited to his repertoire on the accordion, standards of the day sung by crooners and a smattering of jazz.

  This was an era when popular culture in America was approaching a dramatic crossroads, the stifling conservatism of the Eisenhower years cracking under the strain of progressive attitudes in all the arts, not least music. By the mid-Fifties, Elvis Presley, a former Memphis truck driver with no formal musical training whatsoever, was dominating the American music charts, spreading the gospel according to rock’n’roll with songs like ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ (1956), ‘Hound Dog’ (1956) and ‘All Shook Up’ (1957), all three of which topped the Billboard charts. While Barry’s classmates at Brooklyn’s Junior High School 50 were bopping to Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, or swaying to the sweeter, softer sounds of Doris Day singing ‘Que Será, Será’, Barry remained unimpressed by the changes on the popular music scene. Instead, he was hooked on the sounds of Frank Sinatra or Count Basie or Gerry Mulligan coming through the tinny speakers of Willie’s stereo.

  For his fourteenth birthday, Barry received yet another lifechanging gift from his new stepfather: a transistor radio. Before long the discovery of the five-hour nightly midnight jazz show hosted by “Symphony Sid” on radio station WEVD had the teenager staying up nights and sleepwalking through his days. His burgeoning musical knowledge was now stretched to include such jazz greats as trumpeter Miles Davis, clarinet and horn player John Coltrane, and smooth-sounding drummer and vibraphone player Cal Tjader. “I wallowed in Sarah Vaughan, Carmen Macrae, Nina Simone, Joe Williams, Mel Torme,” says Manilow. “I couldn’t get enough.” Nevertheless, trying to reproduce these sublime sounds on the Bakelite keys of his clunky accordion proved somewhat less than satisfying.

  The years of accordion lessons paid off in an unexpected way, however, when their downstairs neighbour allowed Barry to play her grand piano. Barry’s agility on the 45 keys of the accordion translated nicely to the 88 keys of the grand, and a lifetime love was born. Every day after that, Barry would stop by his neighbour’s apartment and practise on her piano until finally Willie and Edna – perhaps at the neighbour’s request – decided to buy Barry a piano of his own, an $800 Wurlitzer spinet. Manilow credits his mother with paying for the piano, but told Songwriter Magazine that it was Willie’s dislike of the accordion that really prompted its purchase. “Get rid of it!” Willie reportedly said of the outdated instrument. “Get him a piano!”

  By the age of 15, Barry’s life revolved completely around music. He now belonged to a small group of friends who shared his enthusiasm, if not quite to the same extent. Larry Rosenthal and Fred Katz were his two closest friends, and the three would spend much of their time together harmonising on the songs Barry heard on Symphony Sid and learning to play them on the piano. Maxine Horn, whom Barry would later characterise as his “steady girl”, was also part of this circle of junior high school friends.

  “I think it was more a platonic relationship, a group of friends,” recalls Maxine. “I wouldn’t say that I dated him. We just went out as a group. I don’t remember going anywhere alone with him on a date.” Even the 9th grade prom was a group experience, though Barry would later recall that he excitedly called Fred to tell him that he had kissed
Maxine good night after the dance and “her leg went up in back, just like in the movies,” a detail Maxine characterises today as “a little bit embarrassing”.

  Along with Fred’s girlfriend, Susan, the five friends spent most of their free time together. “We were just a nice group,” says Maxine. “We hung out together, we had lots and lots of fun. Barry would invite us to his place; he would play the piano. We’d hang out there. We all practised dancing.”

  The group would watch Dick Clark’s American Bandstand after school and pick up the latest dances by watching the show’s über-teens perform the steps on camera between commercials for soda pop and acne medications. When popular and controversial New York disc jockey Alan Freed announced he’d be holding a dance contest in Manhattan, Fred and Susan, and Barry and Maxine made up their minds to compete – and win.

  “Every day after school we would practise, mostly at Susan’s house, for hours and hours,” says Maxine. “We thought we would win. I remember the prize was a jukebox. And we practised for months. I remember that all of our energies [were] concentrated on practising, because we were really determined we would win.”

  Finally the big day arrived. “We took the subway into Manhattan, to compete,” says Horn. But there was a problem that Maxine and Barry, after days of debate, were still having difficulty working out. “Barry and I, we knew for sure we were going to win this jukebox. But of course we both lived in small apartments in Williamsburg, and we were trying to decide how we would share the jukebox. There was only one jukebox, and we lived in different apartments.” So sure were the pair of winning that resolving this dilemma before they arrived at the contest seemed of paramount importance. “I remember we decided one of us would have it for six months, and the other one would have it the other six months,” says Horn.