Barry Manilow Read online

  Barry sent a tape of ‘Could It Be Magic’ to Adrienne, who responded enthusiastically, as did Tony Orlando when Barry played the tape for him. Tony wanted to record ‘Could It Be Magic’ along with another Adrienne/Barry tune called ‘Rosalie Rosie’. They discussed how the songs would be arranged and, according to Barry, he went away from their meeting thinking that they had come to an understanding on how ‘Could It Be Magic’ should be done.

  Barry’s vision of the song was a build-up of tension, as in The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, which culminates, as Barry describes it, in “a musical orgasm”. But when he came back to lay down the vocal track, the song Barry heard played back through the headphones sounded, he has said, “more like ‘Knock Three Times’ than ‘Hey Jude’.” Again unwilling to make waves, Barry let the song be released as Tony wanted it, complete with cow bells and a dance beat. A listing in the October 9, 1971 issue of Billboard magazine notes that with ‘Could It Be Magic’, by Featherbed, “Producer Tony Orlando of Dawn comes up with a swinging bubblegum group that has it to hit big via Top 40.”

  What drummer Lee Gurst calls “the pre-disco version of ‘Could It Be Magic’” died a mercifully quick death, with Featherbed snuffed out in its wake.

  Still, even with this initial disappointment, Barry was in no danger of having to return to his nine-to-five office grind. While it didn’t look as though being a recording artist was in the cards for him just yet, his coaching business was thriving to the point that he was turning clients away. So when his client, Sheilah Rae, asked him to be her accompanist for an upcoming audition, he initially declined. But she persisted, and he finally agreed to do one more audition for her. She was hoping to land a gig at a place on 44th Street called The Continental Baths.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Steve Ostrow, owner of the Continental Baths, was an unlikely hero in what would become the fight for gay rights in New York City in the Seventies. Gay bathhouses were certainly nothing new. But Ostrow was determined to make the Continental Baths a more mainstream and “respectable” place for gay men to come to relax and socialise without being made to feel like criminals though, technically, according to the State of New York, that’s exactly what they were. Ostrow himself seemed to represent a perfect fusion of both gay and straight worlds, considering the fact that he was a married man, deeply devoted to his wife, but who also had a male lover to whom he was equally devoted.

  Ostrow envisioned the Baths as “a full living cycle, a total environment” which, to him, naturally meant entertainment in addition to the other amenities offered. There was a pool, a steam room, a sun deck, a barber shop (which doubled as a dressing room for the acts that were booked), a massage parlour, a cafeteria and a dance floor. But for all the overt respectability, there were constant reminders that the Continental Baths was, above all, a place for men to meet and have sex with each other. In addition to the small private rooms available for just such activity, there was also a VD clinic on the premises, and the candy machines dispensed tubes of KY Jelly.

  If Barry admired what he saw as the elegant lifestyle of some of the prosperous gay men he’d encountered in the past, it must have been quite a revelation for him to walk in and have the shout-out-loud sexuality that permeated the Continental Baths seize him by the throat. Gay men, he’d told Jeanne, really knew how to dress. The first man Barry saw when he and Sheilah entered the Baths was stark naked. No one was ashamed; no one apologised. These men were quite comfortable with who they were, and, within these walls at least, they were free to be themselves, without pretence. To Barry, this was a completely foreign concept, but an intriguing one. “It was,” Barry later wrote, “decadent, sexual, and shocking – all the things I wasn’t.”

  Billy Cunningham was the musical director at the Baths, and, after Sheilah’s audition, Billy introduced them to Steve Ostrow. Sheilah got the job and, much to Barry’s surprise, he was offered a job as well. The upcoming weekend was to be Billy’s last playing piano at the Baths. Both Billy and Steve thought Barry would be perfect for the job. Barry hesitated, but the offer of $175 for only two days’ work per week – $125 to play one show Saturdays at midnight, and another $50 for a one-hour Thursday rehearsal – was too good to pass up.

  With drummer Joey Mitchell, Barry backed a variety of singers and comedians who played to the usually enthusiastic audience of mostly naked men (though they chivalrously donned towels if the act for the evening was female).

  The third week Barry worked at the Baths fell on New Year’s Eve, a Saturday that year. Barry was still playing for The Drunkard Saturdays, and left that evening’s performance nicely warmed up from the free beer that was regularly given out to the audience during the show, as well as from the alcohol he’d consumed at the cast party after the performance.

  At the Baths, the atmosphere was even more festive than usual. In honour of the occasion, Ostrow had lifted his “no women allowed” rule for the night, and now there was a good representation of naked female flesh scattered among the nude men in the pool and on the dance floor. Everyone, it seemed, was naked – except Barry, still dressed in his staid black suit, white shirt, and skinny tie. From the start of the midnight show, celebrating audience members had been passing drinks and joints to Barry and his drummer, and Barry hadn’t said no. Now, as he sat in his proper suit, his chemically lubricated inhibitions wearing party hats and dancing the merengue elsewhere, it all seemed a fine joke to Barry. Get naked in front of a roomful of strangers? Well, why the fuck not? So he doffed his suit and, for the first time in his life, Barry Manilow deliberately made waves.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Magic is in the air. Magic that removes the violence of the cold, dark streets. The insecurities, the hates, the fears, the prejudices outside vanish in a haze of camp. It’s Mary Martin asking if we believe in fairies. Yes. We Do. Clap harder. And the Jewish Tinker Bell is right there in front of you. Twinkling, glittering, making soft musical chimes of peace.”

  Columnist and critic Rex Reed’s ecstatic prose was describing, in terms of great magnitude, a small woman who had begun packing a wallop with her over-the-top performances at the Continental Baths.

  Bette Midler had originally come to New York from her family home in Hawaii. Named after movie star Bette Davis (her sisters were Susan and Judy, after Hayward and Garland, respectively), Bette described herself growing up as “an ugly, fat little Jewish girl with problems”. Where Barry’s father had been absent from the home when Barry was growing up, Bette’s father, by contrast, very much dominated the Midler household. “My father was a bellower,” she’s said. “To get a word in you had to bellow back.” It was something Bette became quite good at over the years. It’s doubtful anyone has ever had to ask Bette Midler to speak up.

  Like Barry, Bette began performing early on, finding a measure of love and acceptance through performing that somehow made up for her father’s lack of demonstrative affection at home.

  Her doting mother, Ruth, whom Bette adored, did her best to shelter her daughters from the more sordid side of life. “Consequently,” said Bette, “I was always fascinated by the seamier aspects of life.” When Bette got a bit part in the film of James Michener’s Hawaii, which was shot on location near the Midlers’ home, she was able to earn enough money to move to New York City in November 1965; she was not yet 20. In New York Bette got to see “the seamier aspects of life” up close and personal when she checked into The Broadway Central Hotel. There was a hole in her bed and the communal bathroom was a good hike away. There were, said Midler, “winos in the hall, whores in the next room, junkies outside”. Still, it was life in the big city, and Midler embraced the adventure. “I loved it,” she later told an interviewer. “My dear, it was my great adventure. So exciting …”

  Working around a series of the usual odd jobs to make ends meet, Bette worked her way up in the theatre world, eventually landing her dream – a spot in a Broadway play, portraying Tzeitel in Fiddler On The Roof. But, as often happens when one�
��s dreams come true, waking reality can be a bit of a shock. “What I thought it was going to be like – legitimate theatre – was nothing of the sort …” she’s said. “… It was cheap, dirty, full of politicking.”

  Still, Bette stuck with the show for three years, but ended up taking a year off when her sister Judy, recently living in New York and on her way to the theatre to see Bette perform, was struck by a car and killed. After her subsequent retreat, Bette came back on the scene and, with her friend Marta Heflin (who, as Bette’s Fiddler understudy, had filled in as Tzeitel for Bette during her year’s absence) began scoping out other performing possibilities. It was Marta who took Bette to a “new talent” night at a club called Hilly’s one evening, and it was there that Bette took the mike, tentatively at first, and then with total command.

  “As I was watching her sing,” Marta later told an interviewer, “I thought, Oh, my god. Something is happening here. This is really hot. Because the audience just was freaked. It was very heavy. I had no idea she could do that.” Neither had Bette. But, once she knew, she made the most of it.

  It was when Bette was performing at Budd Friedman’s Improv club on West 44th Street that she first met Barry Manilow, who, along with his many other gigs, was working as the Improv’s pianist once a week.

  After the curtain would come down on Fiddler each night, Bette would go over to Friedman’s club and sing. Friedman, in fact, became Midler’s first manager. Marta, in the meantime, had been performing in an Off-Broadway rock musical called Salvation. When Marta left New York to do a production of the show in California, she recommended that Bette audition for her part. Bette agreed. Paul Aaron was the show’s director, and the pianist for the audition was none other than Barry Manilow.

  “He used to do that,” recalled Aaron, “play auditions for four or five of the girls and make about 15 or 20 bucks.” When Barry saw that the next audition was going to be with the girl he’d seen perform at Budd Friedman’s Improvclub, Barry turned to Paul Aaron and said, “Wait ‘til you get a load of this girl. She’s not really what you’re looking for to replace Marta – it’d be kind of a strange shot – but give her a chance.” When Bette came into the room, Paul Aaron immediately found out what Barry had meant about Bette. “[She] walked down the aisle toward me,” said Aaron, “threw herself in my lap and said, ‘Well, you may have seen a lot of girls before me, but you ain’t never seen one the same.’” She got the job.

  The only problem as far as Paul Aaron was concerned, was that Midler was obviously not a team player. “It was very clear to me that Bette was never going to be an ensemble performer,” he later told an interviewer. “But whenever that spotlight was on that lady alone … she radiated.”

  Bette continued to make the rounds of New York clubs, and Budd Friedman got her some out-of-town gigs as well. Then one day Midler got an unexpected phone call from one of her former acting teachers, Bob Ellston. Ellston, a friend of Steve Ostrow’s, told Bette, “Listen, I know this guy who runs a steam bath. It’s a very popular place for homosexuals to go and gather, and he’s looking for entertainment. Would you like to work there?” It sounded like exactly the kind of place her mother would have wanted to shelter her from. Bette was definitely interested. Ostrow came to the Improvat Ellston’s suggestion to catch Bette’s act, and was duly impressed. He offered her $50 to do two shows a weekend. It was $50 more than Bette was making at the Improv. She accepted.

  Bette herself has admitted that her repertoire at the time was decidedly down. “I couldn’t get up for love or money,” she’s said. Ostrow would refer to Bette’s setlist at the Baths as a “dirge”. The audience certainly appreciated Bette’s talent, but she was depressing the hell out of them.

  Bill Hennessy had been Bette’s hairdresser for Fiddler On The Roof and he was a regular at the Continental Baths. It was obvious to him, as to everyone who watched her first tentative performances at the Baths, that Bette simply wasn’t communicating with her audience. But Hennessy encouraged her to simply be herself. The scantily dressed men in her audience at the Baths were clearly on her side. Their acceptance and encouragement of her early on helped her to let down her guard and truly let herself be fabulous. “Ironically, I was freed from fear by people who, at the time, were ruled by fear,” she’s said, referring to the bias against gays that was still so strong at the time. “Be insane,” Bill Hennessy encouraged her, and she took him up on it.

  She and Bill worked on her show, and soon she was dishing with the “girls”, calling them, “My dears!” and shooting out raunchy double entendres and self-deprecating one-liners at machine gun speed. Her combination of comedy, camp, and songs belted out with incredible depth of feeling compelled her audience to laugh, cry, and sing along, sometimes all within a single number. They were her dears, and she quickly became their Mother.

  James Spada in The Divine Bette Midler, wrote of Midler’s gay audiences, “They knew that she wasn’t entertaining them just to make money; that she thought of them genuinely as soulmates, understood them, didn’t snicker at them behind their backs. When she sang Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’ at the Baths, she performed it as though it were a liberation anthem for every oppressed homosexual, stepped-on woman and discriminated-against minority member who ever lived.” Midler’s appreciation of her audience was just as heartfelt. “As an audience, gay men are spectacular,” she told an interviewer. “They’re very warm, very responsive. They are the most marvellous audience I’ve ever had because they’re not ashamed to show how they feel about you. They applaud like hell, they scream and carry on, stamp their feet and laugh. I love it.” And they loved her right back.

  By the time Bette contacted Barry Manilow in September 1971 to schedule an extra rehearsal for a performance at the Baths, Bette had had several successes including two well-received runs at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago, and a very successful first appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. This would be her third engagement at the Continental Baths, while it was just Barry’s third weekend. So, if she seemed to Barry to be rather … pleased with herself, it wasn’t without reason.

  “It was hate at first sight,” Barry has said. “Two Jews hating each other. But we rehearsed anyway. Bette had shown up at Barry’s apartment for rehearsal late and hardly apologetic about it. “I had never experienced anything like her,” he later wrote. “She was demanding, her voice was grating, she didn’t try to be polite or social. She was downright rude at times.” By the end of their rehearsals, it was a relief for Barry to be rid of her. But she wanted two more rehearsals before she returned to the Baths on Saturday; neither meeting was any more pleasant for Barry than the first had been. “By the time Saturday night rolled around,” he wrote, “I was counting the minutes until I could say goodbye to this person.”

  As it turned out, it would be several years before he ended up saying his goodbyes.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In his usually earnest way, Barry Manilow set about trying to provide the discipline that Bette Midler’s frenetic act was lacking. It was just this interaction of Barry’s calm, controlled yin set against Bette’s fiery passionate yang that served the two of them so well professionally, and could make them so miserable personally.

  “We used to fight,” Bette later told an interviewer, after Barry himself had become a star. “It was two ambitious Jews in one room. Such bitchiness. We would bitch at each other all the time.” While Bette acknowledged that Barry was a better musician than she, it still irritated her that he was so consistently right, musically, at all times. “We would mostly bicker about which song should go where and how the show should be paced,” she’s said. It annoyed her that Barry wanted to wear white tails sometimes. His habit of sitting on phone books in the absence of the proper height bar stool when he played the piano got under her skin, as did the fact that he was constantly waving his head as he played.

  Of course the irritation worked both ways. Barry agreed that he was a better musician than Bette, but that o
ften seemed to be the extent of their accord. “I would lose every argument not because I was wrong,” he later wrote, “but because I didn’t know how to fight with her. She would try every which way to bully me into seeing musical things her way. But in that area, I was confident and strong.”

  While, by her own admission, Barry rarely did an arrangement Bette didn’t like, still, she would take his disagreement with her ideas personally, even if she knew he was right. “It’s true,” she’s said, “that he would insist on something that I would take to heart and get real spiteful about.”

  The constant tension was difficult for Barry to take. After all, he’d gone his whole life trying to avoid conflict, to not make waves. Bette’s histrionics reminded him, he’s said, of his mother, grandmother, and all of his female relatives rolled into one or, he summarised, “… every Jewish boy’s nightmare come to life”. After several weeks working, and fighting, together at the Baths, Barry had worked up eight new arrangements for Bette, and each made an enormous hit with the ever growing audiences, which now often included such luminaries as Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol. Bette’s bathhouse reputation had spread far and wide. She was a “happening”, and Steve Ostrow was now allowing anyone in to see her perform, though discreet signs asked that ladies please remove themselves from the premises after the show was over.