Barry Manilow
When your name is a punch line, you live in hell. Barry Manilow lives in hell.
There are worse hells than his. He gets to park wherever he wants, for instance. Also, he can shop recklessly and overtip in restaurants without concern. Perdition, however, must have more dire consequences. And, as such, being Barry Manilow is no frolicsome lot. Rather, it can be an existential nightmare. Example: Sincerity is his commerce. Only he never knows when to trust it. He suspects compliments. He sifts them for snide subtext. Conditioning has taught him this. Bob Dylan stopped him at a party, embraced him warmly, told him: “Don’t stop doing what you’re doing, man. We’re all inspired by you.” This actually occurred. He knew not what to make of the encounter. Nearly two years hence, it haunts him still.
“Who knows?” he says, shrugging the shrug of one who has shrugged much. “It seems so odd that Bob Dylan would tell me this. I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. He may have been laughing out of the other side of his mouth while he said it, but it didn’t seem like it. I mean, he looked me dead in the eye. But maybe he says that to everybody who walks by. He may have had one drink too many. You know, people give me jabs all the time — but not to my face….I sort of left the party for a minute because I wasn’t sure. I thought, ‘Well, maybe, maybe…’ ”
When Barry Manilow tells a Barry Manilow Joke, he usually tells this one: Record mogul announces to Ethiopian embassy that a collective of music stars is making a single to benefit the blighted country’s starving masses. “Think of it!” says mogul. “Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow — ” Ethiopians cut him off. “Barry Manilow?” they say. “Hey, we’re not that hungry!”
“It’s my favorite joke,” he says, a tad giddily. “But every time I tell it, people go, ‘Aw, I’m sorry.’ It makes me look kind of pathetic, I guess.”
Japes, like barnacles, cling to his career, impervious vessel that it is. He epitomizes grace under mockery. “I feel bad for Dan Quayle, let me tell you,” he says, all largess. “You want to talk about being the butt of jokes…” Nevertheless, he has stopped his share: nose jokes, clothes jokes, geek jokes, masculinity jokes (Barely ManEnough, alas). Not only does he know all the barbs, he actually archives them. In his home, he has festooned a prominent corridor with cartoon-strip razzings — from Bloom County to Andy Capp to Popeye. Simply, he curates a personal hall of shame, displays it in game defiance. He even has the artists sign the originals. “I know they hate doing this,” he says, giggling mischievously, as is his wont.
He wore yellow. His coat, in this way, was like plumage. So there he sat, a canary icon, in a room full of peers — a little aloof, a little ignored. Around him a large celebration swirled. His record company had taken over a ballroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel to showcase its most promising new acts. Onstage much jamming took place. He watched this from a distance, applauding generously whenever appropriate. His presence was meant to confer support; he understood this. He sipped wine and softly rapped on the table to the staccato beat of the music — music that did not at all resemble his own. A fat diamond shimmered on his finger.
Because he was asked, he took one bow. This was requisite: No one in the room was more famous than he. Nor was there anyone on hand who had sold, or would likely ever sell, more records: so far, 50 million plus, worldwide. Still, he rose from his seat warily — or, at least, with some embarrassment — as though he almost expected to be pelted. He got a nice hand. He looked relieved and slipped back onto his chair, his curious yellow aura handsomely aglow.
He has grown into his nose. So say his friends, and by this they mean two things: First, and few would quibble here, he looks better than he used to. He used to look, well, dorkier. Maturity has obliged him. Second, and some will quibble here although they oughtn’t, Barry Manilow has become formidable, extremely large, a legend even, in the show-business sense. At age forty-four, after fifteen years of Top Forty toil and adult-contemporary lionization, he is a giant among entertainers. He endures. He adapts. He persists. There is always a new album (twenty-two with the recent release of Because It’s Christmas; the ninety-minute videocassette of his twenty-first, Barry Manilow Live on Broadway, reached Number One on the Billboard chart this summer). There is always a world tour.
Most probably, he is the showman of Our Generation. He lives for production values, for rich staging, for catchy hooks and big finishes. He wants your goose flesh. Musically, he is a populist nonpareil. Sinatra, it is said, once jabbed a finger at Manilow and portentously announced, “He’s next.” Even so, he is beset with insecurity. He is an outcast and has resigned himself to it. As his favorite joke suggests, he did not participate in the pop congress of “We Are the World”; he was not asked. And this was fine with him. “I’m not in that clique,” he reasons. “I’ve never really been a group person. I’ve always been a loner.” He realizes he has no other choice. He cannot fathom his place in the culture. He feels uncategorizable, adrift, a freak.
“I am a musical misfit,” he readily admits. “I’ve never been able to put myself into a musical slot. I don’t consider myself a cohort of Billy Joel — he’s more rock & roll. Kenny Rogers is more country. Barbra is a little older, more theatrical, actresslike. Neil Diamond is guitar oriented, gruff. I don’t know where I fit in. I think a lot of critics have always been uncomfortable with my life as a pop star; there was just nothing that they could grab on to. Nobody, including me, could figure out why my records were making it. I’ve got my one little slice of this pie. It’s very small, but it’s mine.”
Some random Barry Manilow findings, gleaned from months of scrutiny:
He has recurring nightmares about concentration camps. He does not know why but surmises that “it probably all has to do with my feeling undeserving of any success, even though I work my ass off for it.”
Barry Manilow, Page 1 of 5