Barry Manilow Page 7

  During this time he also kept in constant touch with Jeanne, even though she had a little trouble communicating by phone in the days immediately following her surgery. “He would call me on the phone,” laughs Lucas, “and I couldn’t talk so I would shake a tambourine – one shake for “yes”, two for “no”, a maraca for “what are you talking about” – I had this whole percussion system worked out, so that’s how we would carry on a conversation.”

  Several weeks passed before Jeanne, her voice fully recovered after her tonsillectomy, returned to New York where she and Barry continued working on the act they had begun developing in Detroit. The agent who had booked Jeanne and Barry into the Indiana gig was a woman named Gladys Gross, who was still representing Jeanne and, by extension, Barry. “We used to call her Goldie Groove,” says Lucas. “She meant well, but she wasn’t the best connected around.” But she was connected enough to get Jeanne an audition for a part in the road company of Sweet Charity, which had ended its Broadway run in July 1967 after 608 performances. Jeanne would be auditioning for the role that comic actress Ruth Buzzi had originated on Broadway or, as Goldie Groove told Jeanne, “The Ruth Buzzi part”.

  The audition for Sweet Charity turned out to be a comedy of errors. “I didn’t know who Ruth Buzzi was, and I didn’t know anything about Sweet Charity,” says Jeanne, “and I thought the name of the character was Ruth Buzzipart. So I went in and I said, ‘I’m here to audition for Ruth Buzzipart.’” Beyond that, Jeanne didn’t belong to the proper actors union – or any union for that matter – nor did she have a résumé or professional headshots; she instead gave them a snapshot of herself she happened to have handy.

  The situation turned to farce when Jeanne finally took the stage. As she walked across the bare stage to deliver a selection from Once Upon A Mattress for the producers, Jeanne tripped on a nail that had been left sticking up from the floor after the last set change. “While I was singing,” says Jeanne, “I kept patting my foot around the floor trying to find the nail – god forbid I should fall over.” She continued to sing and feel the stage with her foot until she completed her number and the producers thanked her for coming. So much for Sweet Charity.

  On her own, Jeanne had found a job singing backup at a resort in the Catskills. “Now they had a switchboard there that was sort of on when they felt like it and off when they didn’t feel like having it on,” Jeanne recalls. “What I didn’t know was that everybody was trying to call me from New York, including Barry, to tell me that Sweet Charity wanted to see me back again. They wanted me to do a callback for the role.”

  It turns out that those watching Jeanne’s odd movements on the stage as she performed her song didn’t realise that Jeanne had simply been trying to check her exit path for further obstacles. “They thought I was doing a bit!” she laughs. “And they thought it was the funniest thing they ever saw. I mean they were just rolling with laughter. And I got the job on the spot.”

  Once again, though, this blessing was delivered with a built-in curse. “Barry was happy,” says Jeanne, “but he wasn’t thrilled because now I was leaving, and who was he going to work with?” Sweet Charity would end its tour in Chicago, several months hence. Jeanne and Barry agreed that they would meet there and Barry would try to find a short-term job while Jeanne finished out the play’s run. That way they could continue working on their act between her performances. A booking agent recommended to Barry by a friend found Barry a job working at The Little Corporal Lounge located in the Meadowview Shopping Center in Kankakee, Illinois, about 50 miles south of Chicago. It was no Richmond, Indiana, but it would do.

  Besides putting Barry in close enough proximity to Jeanne for the two to continue to perfect their act together, his two-week stint at the Little Corporal Lounge was yet another turning point in Barry’s life. Up to this point, he had only performed publicly as part of a larger act. More often than not he’d been the anonymous piano player providing accompaniment to the headliner. In fact, up until his arrival in Kankakee, his act with Jeanne was the closest Barry had come to being centre stage, and even then Jeanne was still the headliner. But at the Little Corporal Lounge, the sign outside the doors said Barry Manilow AT THE KEYBOARD. For the first time ever, it was Barry Manilow, and Barry Manilow alone sitting in the spotlight. Sure, it was a foot-operated spotlight he had to turn on and off himself. And sure his dressing room was the seedy motel across the street from the shopping mall where the Little Corporal’s management was putting Barry up during his stay in Kankakee. But when Barry donned his tuxedo and took his place on the bar stool behind the piano each night, he was a star.

  “At the end of my first week there,” wrote Manilow in his autobiography, “I would walk into the place feeling dull and plain. But I’d climb up to the piano, click on the spotlight with my foot, and I would become attractive, worldly, witty.”

  It’s a magical place, Kankakee, Illinois. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.1

  1 After more than 35 years in business, the Little Corporal Lounge in Kankakee, Illinois, closed briefly, reopening in October 1996 under new management. Though the name of the establishment has changed – it’s now America’s Bistro – the piano at which Barry Manilow first felt himself a star remains, bearing a plaque that says simply Barry Manilow.

  Chapter Ten

  After his two weeks in Kankakee, Barry started working in downtown Chicago at a restaurant called Henrici’s, where he continued to explore the advantages of being a solo act, a position in which he felt increasingly at ease. Though he still wasn’t completely comfortable with what he felt were his limitations as a singer, the audiences seemed to like him, as did Henrici’s management. The downtown Chicago location also made it easier for him and Jeanne to see each other.

  “I would do a matinee, then we would work on the songs, then I’d go do the evening show,” says Lucas. “Then after I was done with the show we would go to the really cool places in town and we would get up and sing. And it was really great because at that time, there were people there like Len Cariou, and people who became huge Broadway stars. And we were all in there, just kind of getting up, and it was just wonderful.”

  In the same way Barry tended to fill every waking minute of his life with frantic activity when at home in New York, life in Chicago quickly became just as frenetic. He worked from four o’clock to eight o’clock in the evening at Henrici’s, practised with Jeanne, then hit the local clubs until all hours. While Jeanne was sometimes free during the day as well, Barry still had a lot of daylight to fill, so he decided to continue his musical education by taking orchestration classes at Chicago’s DePaul University.

  They’d made themselves at home in Chicago, and life there had become very comfortable, very quickly. But they’d always known their stay would be temporary and, as soon as Sweet Charity ended its run, Jeanne and Barry said their goodbyes and headed for home.

  Back in New York, the two landed a job at the upscale Downstairs at the Upstairs, which led a dual life as Upstairs at the Downstairs. Upstairs at the Downstairs was, as the name suggested, the nightclub’s upper floor, which could seat several hundred. Downstairs at the Upstairs, the club’s first floor, was more intimate. While Upstairs could present larger stage revues, Downstairs was reserved for small acts – singers, comedians. Barry and Jeanne had auditioned in front of the club’s owner, Irving Haber, Joan Rivers, whose act Jeanne and Barry would end up opening for two seasons, Joan’s husband, Edgar Rosenberg, and an agent from the William Morris Agency. Jeanne sang for the group, solo, with Barry accompanying her, then Jeanne and Barry performed a duet or two from the act they’d worked so hard to perfect. The response was yes, and no: Yes to Jeanne, no to Barry. Just as she had told the owner of Charlie Baits’ Saloon that hiring her must also mean hiring Barry, Jeanne explained to Irving Haber that the act was strictly a twosome. “Well, here’s the deal,” Haber told Jeanne. “I pay $125 a week and if you want to share it with him, fine, that’s all there’s going to be.” Jean
ne agreed. Joan Rivers had herself an opening act, at a bargain two-for-one rate.

  A series of mis-communications and just plain bad luck followed the William Morris agent’s subsequent offer to sign Jeanne and Barry as an act. The William Morris offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles operated independently of each other. There was talk of a record deal, but then the New York agent died and the deal fell through. Then, with a new William Morris representative, there was talk of a TV show, but a pre-emptive move by the West Coast William Morris office ended that deal, even as the contracts were being negotiated in the New York William Morris office. The final straw came when Jeanne and Barry were offered a two-week stint at the Playboy Club in Chicago. As time went by, and still no contracts for the Playboy job arrived, Jeanne grew frustrated. She finally called the manager of the Playboy Club, whom she knew, and inquired why they hadn’t yet received a contract when the job was less than two weeks away. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “The William Morris office here in Chicago is telling us you can only work a split week, you can’t work two weeks, and I don’t want that. Do you want to come or don’t you want to come? If you’re going to come you’re going to come for two weeks.” And that was the end of the William Morris Agency as far as Jeanne was concerned.

  Despite these frustrations, the contracts were finally negotiated, and Barry and Jeanne did head back to Chicago to play the two-week gig at the Playboy Club. “The Playboy Club was really funny,” Jeanne recalls. “Because whoever is the manager for the evening, the maître d’ or whoever he is, gives you points for how well you perform. And it’s based on how much the audience claps. And you’re looking at these guys, working at the Playboy Club, as waiters who then became managers, giving points for your performance! We couldn’t believe it! I guess we did okay because we got asked back again.”

  During this busy period in their professional lives, Jeanne started seeing an actor named Howard Honig. It was this relationship, more than anything, that would spell the end of Jeanne and Barry as a performing team.

  “Barry was very possessive of people,” says Jeanne. “You were either possessed by him in his life and loyal, fiercely loyal to him, or you were out. But I didn’t realise that until way later. Because we were so close then, it didn’t matter, it was all happening that way anyway.”

  Where previously Jeanne’s entire world had revolved around her work, most of which involved Barry in one way or another, suddenly Jeanne had a new interest that was diverting her attention from work, and from Barry. “Every time I was with a guy for any period of time,” Jeanne recalls, “Barry would say, ‘Ethel, Ethel, is this the one you’re going to marry?’ And usually I’d say, ‘Nah, you kidding?’” But Howard was something special. So this time when Barry asked Jeanne if she’d found the man she wanted to marry, her response was, “Yeah, you know, I think so.”

  By this time Jeanne and Barry had been together for so long, it was almost as if they themselves were already a married couple. They worked together, played together, travelled together and had, on a couple of occasions, lived together. In fact, early on in their relationship, Jeanne had even found herself falling for Barry.

  “This was in the very, very beginning,” Jeanne says now, “and I really couldn’t understand why he wasn’t reciprocating.” Jeanne was attractive and intelligent, with a lively personality, a quick laugh, and the same kind of talent and drive to make it in show business that Barry himself possessed. It was only natural for her to assume, with all they shared in common, that any spark she felt between them would be mutual. The fact that this didn’t seem to be the case was causing Jeanne much pain and confusion.

  “When we were working at Charlie Baits’,” says Jeanne, “there was this wonderful woman, she was English, I just loved her to pieces. I think she was the manager there. And I confided in her, because I was just miserable because Barry just wasn’t picking up on my vibes I was sending out.” At this point Jeanne was not long out of the midwest, where she’d led a reasonably sheltered existence. So the restaurant manager’s response to Jeanne at first only puzzled the girl even more. Explains Lucas, “She said, ‘Darling, don’t you understand? Don’t you know?’ And I said, ‘What? Know what?’ And she sat me down and she said, ‘He’s not for girls.’”

  Chapter Eleven

  Even after the manager at Charlie Baits’ had clued Jeanne in about the reason Barry wasn’t returning her romantic feelings toward him, it still took a while for the truth of the situation to make itself manifest to Jeanne.

  “Let me tell you something, I was very naive coming from Michigan. It was like you had to hit me over the head with it,” Jeanne explains. “I wasn’t getting it, because I never thought that. Even when she told me I really found it hard to believe.” Homosexuality was hardly the accepted way of life that it is, for the most part, today. In 1964 if someone had talked about an alternative lifestyle, they were probably referring to someone who chose to live in the suburbs rather than the city. For anyone trying to build a career for himself at that time, to be openly gay would most likely mean you were also openly unemployed, and even openly shunned by society, friends, and family. And it was hardly a subject likely to pop up over the dinner table in a nice middle-class home in suburban America.

  Later in his career, after he’d become a household name, Barry would do all he could to avoid questions about his personal life, insisting it was simply too boring to talk about. Though rumours about his sexuality have always run rampant, at the height of Manilow’s fame, few would dare turn the whispers into a direct question. When one Canadian interviewer did manage to stammer out, “I don’t know, I never really thought about it” – a sure sign the interviewer had been thinking about nothing else but this subject since he knew he’d netted the assignment – “but … I was wondering if … you are gay?” Manilow’s reply was emphatic: “Well, I’m not. No, no, I’m not.” Then, as though to offer proof positive, he added, “I’ve been married.”

  Indeed, Barry had told everyone that he was divorced, but in truth the marriage between Barry and Susan had been voided via annulment. Susan’s cousin, Marshall Deixler says that the story within the family was that “the marriage was annulled for not being consummated, and presumably it wasn’t consummated because he was homosexual.” It’s important to note, though, that Deixler prefaces his remarks by admitting that the conclusion is based on little more than speculation within the family. Susan herself denies there’s any truth to the story, and declines to offer any alternative explanation for her actions at the time. And, amid all the speculation and guesswork regarding the dissolution of the brief marriage, the one clear certainty is whatever really happened between Barry and Susan, only Barry and Susan know for sure.

  Having worked so closely making music with Barry for so long, Jeanne Lucas can understand the bond that once existed between Susan and Barry, a bond that went far beyond the physical. “When they were in high school,” she says, “as I understood it from Barry, Susan was always there with him musically, with everything that he did. Now I can tell you, and I’m sure any other person who’s had this kind of relationship could say the same, it’s very seductive when you’re working musically with somebody that closely. A bond forms on some other plane, a real spiritual bond, a real loving bond, and it’s as if you really become connected at the soul. And just like I mistook that in the beginning for being in love with him, I’m sure that he and Susan had that kind of bond.”

  Unfortunately, it was a bond that even four wedding ceremonies couldn’t cement. After Barry left her, Susan, bitterly upset, filed for an annulment which would mean, in essence, that the marriage never existed. According to the laws of New York, an annulment is granted if one or both of the parties can prove that the union was invalid from the start. A situation that would constitute a valid reason for an annulment would include one or both of the parties being already married, the two parties being siblings or close relatives, one or both of the parties being underage, one
or both of the parties being mentally retarded or mentally ill, or that the marriage was never consummated, or was based on fraud. When filing her complaint, Susan chose the last option.

  Barry was served with a summons on September 10, 1965, advising him that a hearing on the matter would be held on November 12. Like his father before him, when Edna had filed for divorce, Barry chose not to respond to the summons. So, without Barry present, Susan gave testimony on the matter in open court on December 3, 1965, “sustaining the allegations set forth in the complaint.” The Interlocutory Judgment goes on to state that the Court, “having thereupon fully heard and considered the proofs offered and having made a decision in writing, separately stating the findings of fact and conclusions of law, deciding that plaintiff is entitled to judgment against defendant annulling the marriage between the parties hereto pursuant to law because of the fraud of the defendant.” In the eyes of the law, Barry and Susan had never been married.

  Outside the courthouse and across the country, news-stands were carrying the December issue of Playboy magazine, containing the letter Barry had written in which he’d expressed his desire to sow his “musical wild oats”. Playboy had granted him permission to take a chance. Now he was legally free to do so, unencumbered. And certainly no one questioned the process that brought Barry to that point. In fact, most were simply happy to see him available again.

  “Barry was very charming, and women went nuts for him – let me just tell you that,” says Jeanne Lucas. “He could charm the pants off of any lady. They would just, oh Barry, Barry, Barry. All these women.” But of all the women vying for Barry’s attention, at that time it was Jeanne who had it, more often than not. “I always felt like I was the chosen one,” she says, “because I was the one he chose to really be with and work with and live with and whatever. And I had a cache among other women because of Barry, of all things.”