Barry Manilow Page 4

  Problem solved, Barry and Maxine arrived, with Fred and Susan, at the ballroom where the contest was being held. What seemed a sure thing while the four teens practised in Susan’s living room seemed somewhat less certain as they observed the hundreds of young couples who had all turned out to try to win the jukebox. But the foursome had come to compete, and compete they did. Today Maxine can laugh at the inevitable outcome. “The funny part of the story is, after having practiced – it seems to me like we practised a year for this – I would say like in 30 seconds someone comes and taps us on the shoulder and eliminates us. And Barry was a great, great dancer. I thought we danced pretty well together, actually. But obviously the judges did not agree with us.” Fred and Susan fared no better. “Within seconds we were all eliminated from the contest,” says Maxine. “And we were just completely shocked that we had not won!” The dejected teens had to return to Brooklyn empty-handed.

  It was a happy interlude for the group, this relatively carefree period between true childhood and the onset of more adult problems. “I just remember [Barry] was always a very up person,” says Maxine. “We were always, always laughing. If you ask me what I remember, that’s it – always, always laughing, having a good time.”

  As he entered 10th grade at Brooklyn’s Eastern District High School, Barry’s laughter was covering up serious problems at home. By Manilow’s own account, Willie would meet Edna at her office after work and the two would head immediately for the bar. “By the time they arrived home,” Barry wrote, “they were always loaded. And they had begun to argue.”

  Their arguments ranged from what Barry considered “harmless” – lasting a few hours – to more serious, with Willie storming out of the apartment and staying out all night, which would put Edna through a night of agony. “Edna was crazy about him, and that’s sad,” says Annie Keliher, who had known both of them before they were married and who often saw Edna and Willie when they frequented neighbourhood bars in Williamsburg. “He tortured her.”

  It wasn’t only their drinking that caused problems. Willie’s philandering ways didn’t stop after marrying Edna. “I always said to my husband, what do the women see in this guy?” says Annie. “Arrogant, Conceited – the women would just go nuts for him. I had another personal friend, she would’ve committed suicide for this guy! And he was not good looking. He had something I didn’t see. It bothered me. But that was Edna. She fell in love with him, that son of a gun.”

  It seems likely that Edna felt the best way to keep tabs on “that son of a gun” was to keep pace with his drinking. More and more frequently Barry would get a phone call from his mother, obviously the worse for drink, telling him to “pop in a frozen” for his dinner as she wouldn’t be home to cook for him. “I lived on Swanson’s frozen dinners during my high school days,” Manilow has said. Today a teenager in Barry’s position could look to any number of support groups to help him cope with his parents’ alcoholism. In the late Fifties, all a teenager could do was throw another TV dinner in the oven and pray that the verbal fighting between his parents wouldn’t suddenly escalate into physical violence.

  Music provided a form of support for Barry during this time. He was often the first student to show up for school in the morning and the last to leave at night, though it wasn’t so much academics he was seeking as a safe harbour.

  Herb Bernstein was Barry’s gym teacher at Eastern District High School. Ironically Bernstein would leave EDHS in 1965 and make a id for himself in the music business as a singer, composer, arranger and manager. But he worked his way toward his eventual music career by teaching gym and coaching the high school basketball team, along with whatever other small school assignments came his way. “I used to be in charge of the auditorium early in the morning,” Bernstein recalls. “The kids who came into school early, it was cold out, so we’d let them into the auditorium, and I was kind of the watchdog.” Barry was usually among these early arrivers. “Barry used to come up to me all the time,” says Bernstein. “He’d say, ‘Would you mind if I played the piano?’ He was such a nice kid. I said, ‘Ah, sure, go ahead’ and he’d play. You know, nice, nothing sensational. I never knew he had any real talent. I never dreamed that someday this kid would be as gigantic as he became.” To be fair, Barry probably never imagined his high school gym teacher would become a force in the music world, either.

  Often the first to arrive in the morning to take advantage of auditorium piano privileges, Barry was just as likely to be the last to leave for the same reason. Iris Richman was another EDHS classmate. “Sometimes he’d play piano after school in the auditorium,” she recalls. “I was always in school late, so I used to sometimes walk in there and listen to some of his original stuff, which I liked. He was always writing and trying different things. He was very good.”

  Though Barry’s grades were nothing special, he was active in the life of the school. Still, he didn’t make friends easily, preferring to stay in the relative safety of his already established relationships with Fred and Larry. “Other than being a really nice person, he was shy,” Iris says. “He played in the orchestra and he worked in the main office, and I did also. There were a bunch of kids that used to work in the main office for their grade advisors and the guidance counsellors. I worked in the principal’s and vice principal’s office. We did a lot of stuff, and he did also. And we had classes together. He was just a nice person, never caused any trouble.”

  Another classmate remembers Barry’s stint as a hall monitor. “He used to get upset with me when he caught me cutting classes,” she says, then adds ruefully, “Maybe I should’ve listened to him – I never did graduate!” Iris also remembers Barry as being very mature for his age. “He wasn’t hip, hep. He wasn’t into games or gangs. He was respectful. Teachers seemed to like him. He was an all-around guy that was low-key, didn’t get in anybody’s way.”

  While his classmates seem to universally remember Barry in this way – “just a nice person” – Manilow’s own memory of himself during this period is considerably less flattering. The words he uses to describe himself as a teenager range from “skinny” to “geeky” to downright “ugly” (“I have pictures that would curl your hair,” he’s said). Barry would later speculate that everybody probably has a different impression of themselves than those around them remember. “I always thought I was the shy loner,” he said, “but when old friends call me they tell me that I wasn’t perceived that way at all.”

  By the time he entered his last year in high school, Barry had tried his hand at physical labour with a short-lived job at Schaefer Brewery where both his father and stepfather were long-time employees. Barry made beer deliveries with a series of drivers until a careless mistake on his part caused an accident that ended his employment. At one point Barry worked with his father.

  “Barry went with his father,” says Annie Keliher. “Not a job, they’d ‘shape the hall’. In other words, they weren’t official – my husband was an official worker, this had to go through the union. But when they’d ‘shape the hall’, [a non-union worker was assigned] a job for the day. I don’t know how or what, but Barry was with him. Kelly got the truck and Barry helped him, worked the day with him. But then Kelly used to laugh … All he said when he got home the first day is that Barry said, ‘Boy, I wouldn’t want to do this for the rest of my life!’” Annie insists that the circumstances of Barry’s brief sojourn at the Schaefer Brewery aren’t really important in the grand scheme of things. “Who the hell knows?” she says wearily when asked whether it was Harold or Willie who brought Barry to Schaefer. “The men all worked at the brewery. Willie, all his brothers, Kelly – they all grew up together, they all went to school together, they were all involved in each other’s lives, their marriages, who stood up for who. That was the neighbourhood.” Who did what for whom wasn’t as important as making sure the family was supported.

  Much seemed to happen for Barry during his last year of high school. He was voted “Best Musician” after campaigning fo
r the title by playing Manuel de Falla’s ‘Ritual Fire Dance’ on the piano, making Barry one of the “Senior Celebrities” of the class of 1961. More importantly, Barry also became part of his first professional band.

  Jack Wilkins, who was still living in his parents’ Brooklyn home at the time, doesn’t remember exactly how he met Barry Manilow, only that he joined his band. “He was a piano player and used to actually come to my place on occasion and we used to play a little bit. I asked him if he wanted to be in this band, and he said, ‘Sure.’”

  Jack’s band was called The Jazz Partners, and comprised Jack, Barry, Fred Clark, a bass player, and Billy Fagan, the drummer. “I played vibes in that band, and guitar,” says Wilkins. “We just did a lot of local gigs. We played at this place on the lower east side in Manhattan called the Vivere Lounge, I think – something like that – a little joint on the lower east side. And we played and we had a lot of people come by and sit in, very, very good players. And Barry was just the piano player in the band. He was not egocentric about anything. And he and I used to rehearse and work out arrangements.”

  The musical world that Willie had opened up for Barry when he was 13 was now eagerly expanded. “Barry was a big fan of that Barney Kessel record, called Music To Listen To Barney Kessel By,” Wilkins recalls. “He loved that record. We did arrangements of ‘Mountain Greenery’, which was on that record. And then we discovered this Cal Tjader record, Live At The Blackhawk. It was the same instrumentation – piano, vibes, bass drums. We got into it. It was pretty amazing.”

  “I remember one time I was at his house,” Wilkins continues, “and I said, ‘What do you listen to? What have you been listening to lately?’ And he said, ‘Well, I got these records, and I just put the headphones on and listened until the wee hours of the morning.’ He was a big jazz fan – a huge jazz hound.”

  During his senior year Barry began dating Susan Deixler, a pretty brunette a year younger than himself, in her junior year at Eastern District High School. Susan seemed the very antithesis of Barry. Where Barry tended to be shy, Susan was outgoing; while Barry tended to limit his friends to a select few, Susan knew and was liked by everyone. Next to Barry’s photo in his senior yearbook, the space available for a listing of his extracurricular activities is blank save for his address and future career and college plans (Advertising, CCNY). By contrast, Susan’s listing next to her senior photo in the 1962 yearbook reads like a catalogue of available school activities: “President of the G.O. [student government]; Chorus; Biology Squad; Chemistry Squad; Bowling Club; Swimming Club; Grade Advisor’s Monitor; Orientation Committee; City and Boro. Council.” Her college ambition was to study nursing at Miami University.

  “Oh, she was a doll!” remembers Iris Richman. “Susan was a bubbly person … Just a sweetheart, an absolute sweetheart. There wasn’t anybody that didn’t like Susan.”

  Susan was supportive of Barry’s love of music and, as a piano player and singer herself, she was able to participate in his enthusiasm if only to a limited extent. The two grew steadily closer and were considered an item – if a surprising one – by their classmates. “I was a little surprised,” says Iris Richman, though her surprise was tinged by concern for what she viewed as the imprudence of their plans for the future. “To get engaged [to be] married right after she graduated was a little premature, because I don’t believe anybody should get married at 18 or 19.” Iris wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Barry would later admit that even his closest friends thought he was rushing into something neither he nor Susan was ready to handle. “But they seemed to really care about each other,” Richman continues. “They seemed pretty solid.”

  So, after 18 turbulent years, Barry’s life seemed finally to be taking a traditional turn. He would go to college and get a steady job. “Then,” wrote Manilow, “I would marry Susan, get a house on Long Island with a white picket fence, and have kids, just like everyone else.” But, despite his best efforts over the years to simply blend in and be what he perceived to be “normal”, Barry had never been “like everyone else”; his life had never run a smooth course. Marriage was certainly not going to change that.

  PART II

  Picket Fences

  “I have to live for others and not for

  myself; that’s middle class morality.”

  –George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

  Chapter Five

  Barry’s adult life began with a bit of a whimper. He’d enrolled for evening classes at City College of New York majoring in advertising because, as he explained it, “The choices were listed alphabetically and advertising was first under A.” He got a menial job at an advertising agency and wasn’t sorry when the firm went bankrupt soon after, leaving him unemployed once again.

  Hindsight is one of those luxuries that allows us to look back over a lifetime and pinpoint events which, at the time they occur, seem inconsequential enough but, over time, prove to be pivotal. Barry’s next job was one of those pivotal moments.

  Through a friend of Willie’s who worked at CBS Television in Manhattan, Barry landed a job in the CBS mailroom. He had been warned that during his interview for the job he was not to mention that he had any interest in music, or anything else even remotely related to show business. Once Barry started working in the mail-room, however, he quickly realised that everyone there was trying to use this tenuous TV connection to further a career in some facet of the performing arts, either behind the scenes or in the spotlight. Among these fellow aspirants was Marty Panzer.

  Oddly enough, Marty’s life and Barry’s had been running parallel for many years. They were from the same neighbourhood, attended the same schools, knew the same people but, somehow, never actually met each other until they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and started working together in the mailroom at CBS.

  While Barry was shy, reluctant to draw attention to himself, Marty was flamboyant, emotional. He was also, like Barry, very musically talented, though the two had dissimilar but complementary tastes in music. While Barry had been drawn to cool jazz since he attended that first Gerry Mulligan concert with Willie, Marty loved show tunes and the larger-than-life performers who didn’t simply sing the songs, but breathed fire into them.

  “He was right,” Manilow wrote of the things he learned about music from Marty Panzer. “When you combine passion and hot emotion with music, the result is explosive. It was a lesson I would never forget.”

  When a co-worker called in sick one day, Barry took over his mail delivery route, which included the building where the CBS recording studios were located, across the street from the corporate headquarters where Barry worked. After delivering the mail to the offices upstairs, Barry decided to explore the rest of the building. It was another innocent action that would again change the course of Barry’s life.

  His inquisitive nature led him to one of the recording studios on the second floor of the building. The studio seemed deserted, so Barry decided to try out the Steinway concert grand piano that dominated the room. “From then on,” Barry wrote, “my mail runs included visits to the studios. Playing the piano in the studios became my first love and I’d reluctantly stop playing to deliver my mail.”

  Though he didn’t realise it at the time, this would be Barry’s first step away from the safe corporate world he’d always imagined would be his future. Other CBS workers would drop by to hear Barry play and, before long, Barry found himself doing arrangements for some of the other corporate drones who were, beneath it all, stars waiting to be born.

  Marty’s feel for passionate show-stoppers manifested itself in a talent to put words to the tunes Barry was constantly composing. It was the beginning of a collaboration that would eventually bring enormous success to both of them. But, for a while yet, they were still just two guys from the mailroom, trespassing in a world not yet theirs.

  The next step came almost immediately, when Barry made a spur of the moment decision to give up his pursuit of an advertising degree at CCNY and instead enrol at New Y
ork College of Music. Advertising had been only a convenient choice, while NYCM offered courses in the things Barry actually cared about, like orchestra arranging.

  Still, even though Barry was finally studying music seriously, he couldn’t really see it as a career. Those who are raised with very little find it difficult envisioning life outside of the security of a nine-to-five job. So, while Barry took classes in the evening, his day job became even more important to him. It was the job that paid for the classes, and the job that was the only means Barry could see of paying for whatever his future would bring.

  After two years in the mailroom, both Marty and Barry had moved into other, more responsible positions at CBS. Marty was in charge of On Air Operations, while Barry became a Log Clerk, keeping track, on four TV monitors, of what was being aired in each of the country’s four time zones from 8.00 a.m. until 4.00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Then Barry would attend classes until late evening, when he would meet Susan, who was working as a secretary in the city, and the two would commute home to Brooklyn.

  It had been two years since Susan had graduated from high school, and she and Barry had been dating steadily throughout that time. Things seemed to be sailing smoothly toward marriage until the couple decided it was time for their families to meet. While the first meeting went smoothly enough, the second meeting between Edna and Willie Murphy, and Al and Nettie Deixler ended in an argument over money. The Deixler’s wanted a big wedding for their daughter while the Murphys made it clear they were unable to afford an elaborate affair. The fighting between the families escalated from there. Names were called, feelings were hurt, and grudges were born. Finally, out of desperation, Barry, 21, and Susan, 20, decided to bypass their families and simply elope.